Lisa Bilbrey's Blog, page 87
May 15, 2012
Ali Live
Last night I had the chance to sit down with Ali from Ali's Bookshelf during one of her Ali Live events. If you didn't get a chance to come visit with us, you can listen to us by clicking the recording down below. Make sure you give her blog a look at and follow her for great recs!
March 18, 2012
Elizabeth Lawrence stops by to chat!
Hello, and welcome to stop number 19 on the Read2Review Easter Egg Blog Hunt! If you have missed all the fun, don't fret. You can hit the link under the egg to go back and find the rest of the eggs.
Read2Review Letter is: U
Today, I am honored to bring you a guest post from Elizabeth Lawrence. She is getting ready to release her first novel and has been gracious enough to let us into the story of how The Truth Seekers came to be.
The Story behind the Truth Seekers
On May 29th, my novel The Truth Seekers will be released by Renaissance Romance Publishing, and I couldn't be prouder. Or more completely freaked out.
It's a little nerve-wracking to let other people read this book, partially because it marks the first time my work is being read by anyone who doesn't feel some sort of social pressure to be nice to me, and partially because of the kind of novel this is. I am a writer of snark, a speaker of snark, a blogger of snark… as a general rule, just very snarky. And yet, here I am, cranking out a debut novel that is not only snark-free, but also quite serious. As anyone can tell you, our serious, deep emotions are the ones we keep hidden from the rest of the world, lest our poor little hearts are broken by mockery and malice. It takes a special kind of bravery to put those kinds of feelings on display, particularly in front of strangers, as any man who has proposed in public can tell you. You suspect that you look completely barmy, but you don't want to draw attention to it in case no one else has noticed yet. At any rate, publishing this particular novel feels somewhat like a group of strangers just caught me singing "Dancing Queen" in front of my mirror into my hairbrush/microphone. Not that I've ever done that.
So why write it in the first place? It all started with some words: words that would not get out of my head. They rolled around and around in my brain like the prose was full-on stalking me. At last, desperate to get my own brain back, I sat down at the computer and started to type what I "heard" in my head. It began, "I may miss you, but I will not canonize you. You were a sinner, your soul was a fire, and I backed away to save myself even as my eyes were snared by the wild beauty of your burning."
It turned out to be a letter from a heartbroken woman to a man she desperately loved. It was elaborate, it was elegant, and it was passionate. And yet I had absolutely no clue what the back-story behind it was. Who was this woman? To whom was she writing? What had happened to separate them? No answers appeared to be forthcoming, so I closed the document and turned my attention to other things, just chalking it up as one of those weird writing phenomenon that make the rational world convinced that all novelists are slightly mad.
Then the next night it happened again, only this time, it was the gentleman's response that was bouncing around in my brain. Surrendering to the inevitable, I pulled up the document and more or less took dictation from my imagination. It flowed onto the page almost effortlessly, but when he'd said his piece, the tap shut off abruptly. I still had no idea what their story was, only this time I was really eager to find out.
All this happened not too long before November, which is a significant month to novelists the world over. For the uninitiated, November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. A wonderful non-profit organization called The Office of Letters and Light organizes a month-long novel writing challenge: write 50,000 words in thirty days. There's no real prize for "winning;" you just get the ego boost of knowing you crossed the finish line. Not everyone does. I had never attempted NaNo before, but I decided to take my two letters with no story and build a novel around them.
I won the challenge that year by the skin of my teeth. The nature of the NaNo beast is that you are so focused on your word count that you are forced to ignore your inner editor entirely if you want to have any hope of victory. There simply isn't time to second-guess yourself, so you find yourself tossing everything but the kitchen sink into your book. You write down every random, crazy idea that pops into your head because, even though you may have to edit it out down the road, right now it's another five hundred words that you didn't have before. Because of this "anything goes" feeling, I postponed reviewing the manuscript for several months after NaNo ended – I was attempting to psych myself up to face the catastrophic mess I just knew I'd made.
Imagine my shock when I finally read it and found I actually liked it. Oh, it wasn't publication-ready by a long shot, but it had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and they all happened in the correct order. There were only a few continuity howlers instead of the great hairy beasts lurking behind every corner that I had expected to find. Eventually, the lovely people at Renaissance Romance Publishing got a look at it and threatened to cut off my caffeine supply if I didn't let them publish it, and the rest is history. Or it will be, once I finish the final edits.
The story itself is a product of a place from which I have pulled quite a lot of inspiration over the years: Chautauqua Institution in New York State. Chautauqua has served as a hub of creativity, philosophy, art, religion, music, and dance for over two hundred years, and I can't imagine anyone with a soul not responding to it on some level. My parents began taking me there for a week each summer when I was a little girl. I swam in Lake Chautauqua in my Wonder Woman bathing suit. I met my pen-pal there. I took a puppet-making class. I saw the Temptations perform live. I walked across a miniaturized version of the Holy Land. It was wonderful.
And it was there that I had one of those Life Moments that you remember forever. Madeleine L'Engle, author of the astoundingly wonderful Wrinkle in Time trilogy and many other equally amazing books, came one year as a guest lecturer. It was there in the Amphitheater that she gave me the first advice on writing I ever received. I met her afterwards and was completely seduced by her charm and wit. This encounter marked a huge shift in my life; I stopped mucking around with little snippets about rock stars and really started to focus on writing an actual book. Madeleine L'Engle essentially had shown me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I think the experience fundamentally changed my hardwiring for life.
When it came time for me to create a novel about two passionate, star-crossed lovers from the past, it was almost ridiculously easy to place them in this wonderful world. Since the buildings are protected and maintained zealously, it takes no effort to imagine that you've been transported back to 1900. It was walking in the Hall of Philosophy where my protagonists first meet that I found the title for the novel. Along the floor are a series of mosaics, one for each "class" year. The mosaic for the Class of 1896 was titled "The Truth Seekers," and this struck me as a perfect description of my young lovers.
Many of the other locations mentioned are actual places in Chautauqua, like the hotel across the street from my hero's lodgings. The real St. Elmo Hotel (demolished in the late 1980s and rebuilt as condominiums) was also the inspiration for the screenplay for St. Elmo's Fire, which was written by a lovesick bellboy one summer. The governor's mansion is based on the Packard Manor, and even the assorted benches and paths have real life equivalents.
Of course, I was not in the same position once my hero absconded to Italy. However, thanks to my art history studies (I was something of a Renaissance junkie in college) and the terrifyingly heavy textbooks I'd held onto, I was able to at least send my imagination on the journey while a crew of men tore off and replaced the roof on my house. I'd love to travel to Florence, but I'm far keener on keeping my home in one piece. For the time being, I'm content to just live vicariously through my imaginary friends.
This is a novel I didn't see coming, but it is also one that ties into many different important areas of my life. Because of this, it is intensely personal on many levels – as is all good fiction, I think. My characters were certainly insistent that this story be told, and I hope that Geoffrey and Miranda capture my readers' hearts and imaginations as much as they've captured mine.Enter below for your chance to win a Candy Hearts t-shirt!!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
<a href="http://rafl.es/enable-js">... need javascript enabled to see this giveaway</a>.
Read2Review Letter is: UToday, I am honored to bring you a guest post from Elizabeth Lawrence. She is getting ready to release her first novel and has been gracious enough to let us into the story of how The Truth Seekers came to be.
The Story behind the Truth Seekers
On May 29th, my novel The Truth Seekers will be released by Renaissance Romance Publishing, and I couldn't be prouder. Or more completely freaked out.
It's a little nerve-wracking to let other people read this book, partially because it marks the first time my work is being read by anyone who doesn't feel some sort of social pressure to be nice to me, and partially because of the kind of novel this is. I am a writer of snark, a speaker of snark, a blogger of snark… as a general rule, just very snarky. And yet, here I am, cranking out a debut novel that is not only snark-free, but also quite serious. As anyone can tell you, our serious, deep emotions are the ones we keep hidden from the rest of the world, lest our poor little hearts are broken by mockery and malice. It takes a special kind of bravery to put those kinds of feelings on display, particularly in front of strangers, as any man who has proposed in public can tell you. You suspect that you look completely barmy, but you don't want to draw attention to it in case no one else has noticed yet. At any rate, publishing this particular novel feels somewhat like a group of strangers just caught me singing "Dancing Queen" in front of my mirror into my hairbrush/microphone. Not that I've ever done that.
So why write it in the first place? It all started with some words: words that would not get out of my head. They rolled around and around in my brain like the prose was full-on stalking me. At last, desperate to get my own brain back, I sat down at the computer and started to type what I "heard" in my head. It began, "I may miss you, but I will not canonize you. You were a sinner, your soul was a fire, and I backed away to save myself even as my eyes were snared by the wild beauty of your burning."
It turned out to be a letter from a heartbroken woman to a man she desperately loved. It was elaborate, it was elegant, and it was passionate. And yet I had absolutely no clue what the back-story behind it was. Who was this woman? To whom was she writing? What had happened to separate them? No answers appeared to be forthcoming, so I closed the document and turned my attention to other things, just chalking it up as one of those weird writing phenomenon that make the rational world convinced that all novelists are slightly mad.
Then the next night it happened again, only this time, it was the gentleman's response that was bouncing around in my brain. Surrendering to the inevitable, I pulled up the document and more or less took dictation from my imagination. It flowed onto the page almost effortlessly, but when he'd said his piece, the tap shut off abruptly. I still had no idea what their story was, only this time I was really eager to find out.
All this happened not too long before November, which is a significant month to novelists the world over. For the uninitiated, November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. A wonderful non-profit organization called The Office of Letters and Light organizes a month-long novel writing challenge: write 50,000 words in thirty days. There's no real prize for "winning;" you just get the ego boost of knowing you crossed the finish line. Not everyone does. I had never attempted NaNo before, but I decided to take my two letters with no story and build a novel around them.
I won the challenge that year by the skin of my teeth. The nature of the NaNo beast is that you are so focused on your word count that you are forced to ignore your inner editor entirely if you want to have any hope of victory. There simply isn't time to second-guess yourself, so you find yourself tossing everything but the kitchen sink into your book. You write down every random, crazy idea that pops into your head because, even though you may have to edit it out down the road, right now it's another five hundred words that you didn't have before. Because of this "anything goes" feeling, I postponed reviewing the manuscript for several months after NaNo ended – I was attempting to psych myself up to face the catastrophic mess I just knew I'd made.
Imagine my shock when I finally read it and found I actually liked it. Oh, it wasn't publication-ready by a long shot, but it had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and they all happened in the correct order. There were only a few continuity howlers instead of the great hairy beasts lurking behind every corner that I had expected to find. Eventually, the lovely people at Renaissance Romance Publishing got a look at it and threatened to cut off my caffeine supply if I didn't let them publish it, and the rest is history. Or it will be, once I finish the final edits.
The story itself is a product of a place from which I have pulled quite a lot of inspiration over the years: Chautauqua Institution in New York State. Chautauqua has served as a hub of creativity, philosophy, art, religion, music, and dance for over two hundred years, and I can't imagine anyone with a soul not responding to it on some level. My parents began taking me there for a week each summer when I was a little girl. I swam in Lake Chautauqua in my Wonder Woman bathing suit. I met my pen-pal there. I took a puppet-making class. I saw the Temptations perform live. I walked across a miniaturized version of the Holy Land. It was wonderful.
And it was there that I had one of those Life Moments that you remember forever. Madeleine L'Engle, author of the astoundingly wonderful Wrinkle in Time trilogy and many other equally amazing books, came one year as a guest lecturer. It was there in the Amphitheater that she gave me the first advice on writing I ever received. I met her afterwards and was completely seduced by her charm and wit. This encounter marked a huge shift in my life; I stopped mucking around with little snippets about rock stars and really started to focus on writing an actual book. Madeleine L'Engle essentially had shown me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I think the experience fundamentally changed my hardwiring for life.
When it came time for me to create a novel about two passionate, star-crossed lovers from the past, it was almost ridiculously easy to place them in this wonderful world. Since the buildings are protected and maintained zealously, it takes no effort to imagine that you've been transported back to 1900. It was walking in the Hall of Philosophy where my protagonists first meet that I found the title for the novel. Along the floor are a series of mosaics, one for each "class" year. The mosaic for the Class of 1896 was titled "The Truth Seekers," and this struck me as a perfect description of my young lovers.
Many of the other locations mentioned are actual places in Chautauqua, like the hotel across the street from my hero's lodgings. The real St. Elmo Hotel (demolished in the late 1980s and rebuilt as condominiums) was also the inspiration for the screenplay for St. Elmo's Fire, which was written by a lovesick bellboy one summer. The governor's mansion is based on the Packard Manor, and even the assorted benches and paths have real life equivalents.
Of course, I was not in the same position once my hero absconded to Italy. However, thanks to my art history studies (I was something of a Renaissance junkie in college) and the terrifyingly heavy textbooks I'd held onto, I was able to at least send my imagination on the journey while a crew of men tore off and replaced the roof on my house. I'd love to travel to Florence, but I'm far keener on keeping my home in one piece. For the time being, I'm content to just live vicariously through my imaginary friends.
This is a novel I didn't see coming, but it is also one that ties into many different important areas of my life. Because of this, it is intensely personal on many levels – as is all good fiction, I think. My characters were certainly insistent that this story be told, and I hope that Geoffrey and Miranda capture my readers' hearts and imaginations as much as they've captured mine.Enter below for your chance to win a Candy Hearts t-shirt!!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
<a href="http://rafl.es/enable-js">... need javascript enabled to see this giveaway</a>.
March 17, 2012
Time
I always thought that as time went by that the novelty of being a published author would lesson. That maybe I'd get used to seeing my name on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, the paperback copy of the actual book...but I haven't.
And I don't think I will. EVER.
In reality, I hope I never do. Each word I write, each character I create, is a part of me: my heart, my soul, my tears. So, no, I hope the joyful feeling of putting my work in the hands of readers never gets old, because then, I wouldn't have a reason to write anymore.
And I don't think I will. EVER.
In reality, I hope I never do. Each word I write, each character I create, is a part of me: my heart, my soul, my tears. So, no, I hope the joyful feeling of putting my work in the hands of readers never gets old, because then, I wouldn't have a reason to write anymore.
February 6, 2012
Surreal
It's been almost a week since the release of our first book, Life is More Than Candy Hearts, and I still don't think it's sunk in yet. Seeing my name on the cover, or under the link to Amazon, Smashwords, Goodreads, brings tears to my eyes and a smile to my lips.
For so long, I'd been working toward this moment, pushing myself to get past the fears and doubts that held me back. I've worked on becoming not just a better writer, but a storyteller as well. Though I know I still have a lot to learn, all of us do, I will get there. Writing is who I am, the air that I breathe and the food for my soul.
I'm Lisa, an author.
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Candy-Hear...
For so long, I'd been working toward this moment, pushing myself to get past the fears and doubts that held me back. I've worked on becoming not just a better writer, but a storyteller as well. Though I know I still have a lot to learn, all of us do, I will get there. Writing is who I am, the air that I breathe and the food for my soul.
I'm Lisa, an author.
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Candy-Hear...
January 31, 2012
After months of hard work, my new Valentine's Day An...
After months of hard work, my new Valentine's Day Anthology with @Laura_Braley @M_A_Richard #LifeisMoreThanCandyHearts is now available #ebook!
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0073OTP16
WIthout Laura and Michele, none of this would be possible!!
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0073OTP16
WIthout Laura and Michele, none of this would be possible!!
January 30, 2012
At A Crossroads
When you're a kid, you're told you can be anything you want when you grow up. You dreamed of being an astronaut exploring space or doctor finding the cure cancer. Maybe you wanted to explore the jungles of the Amazon. You can be a professional football player throwing the game winning pass just seconds before the clock runs out.
But as you grew older, the dreams started to fade and reality came crashing down on you. Maybe you have bad eyes or you find that being a doctor just isn't want you want to do anymore. Perhaps, you find yourself in a crossroads where you don't know what you want from life.
Just when you're unsure what the future holds, you find yourself falling in love again with the idea of pursuing your dreams. It's in moments like those that you have to make the toughest decision in your life. Do you follow your dreams and put your heart on the line?
Four years ago, I opened my laptop and made that choice, even if at the time I never expected them to lead me to where I am now. A story idea began to blossom inside my head, screaming at me to write it. So I did. And it bad, really bad, but it sparked a fire inside of me and suddenly I found myself diving headfirst.
I love writing. I love creating a whole new world with endless possibilities, to see my characters develop and take on a personality of their own.
Today, I smile because I've taken the chance and made my dreams come true. Plus, I get to start this journey with my best friends, Michele and Laura. God blessed me when he brought you two into my life, giving me the courage to let go of a lot and to keep trying.
January 25, 2012
The Home Stretch
Now that we're in the home stretch of getting our first book released, the nerves start up. In my heart, I know that the road will be bumpy. Not everyone is going to want to buy it, or even if they do, they won't love it. However, it's a part of me, written my soul.
January 14, 2012
Thoughts from a Lonely Heart
Standing in the dark with no reason to fight,
Pleading for someone to show me the light,
Falling to my knees, I grovel and plea,
Why won't anyone save me?
Crawling on the floor in search of somewhere safe,
My tears shimmer and shake, I scream and rage,
Slamming my fist against the harsh concrete,
My heart withers and aches, begging for love.
Only the darkness finds me, sucking me into its wake,
Dead and alone, scared and afraid.
Pleading for someone to show me the light,
Falling to my knees, I grovel and plea,
Why won't anyone save me?
Crawling on the floor in search of somewhere safe,
My tears shimmer and shake, I scream and rage,
Slamming my fist against the harsh concrete,
My heart withers and aches, begging for love.
Only the darkness finds me, sucking me into its wake,
Dead and alone, scared and afraid.
January 12, 2012
Thick Skin
Over the last handful of weeks, I've had to reevaluate a lot about myself. I'd always considered myself to be a strong woman, and I am, but having faced one of the most difficult tasks I'd ever been asked to do--place my baby into the hands of people eager to rip it shreds.
No, I don't mean one of my children. I'm referring to my manuscript, the first Original Fiction that I've managed to complete. I'll admit that when I wrote my final word and sat back, cherishing in the small world I'd completed, I cried. I poured my heart and soul into my characters. To pass it over to those who were ready to tear it apart was hard.
But I did it.
While I had to take several deep breaths and blink back the tears, I got through them. Maybe it will be okay after all.....just maybe.
No, I don't mean one of my children. I'm referring to my manuscript, the first Original Fiction that I've managed to complete. I'll admit that when I wrote my final word and sat back, cherishing in the small world I'd completed, I cried. I poured my heart and soul into my characters. To pass it over to those who were ready to tear it apart was hard.
But I did it.
While I had to take several deep breaths and blink back the tears, I got through them. Maybe it will be okay after all.....just maybe.
December 5, 2011
Dianniversary
Today's our Dianniversary (Diabetes anniversary). One year ago, we confirmed that everything in our lives was going to change. What a year it's been.
A year full of finger pricks. A year full of insulin shots, or site changes now. A year full of counting every bite that goes into her mouth, fighting fat spikes and miscalculations. A year full of midnight tears and demands on why her! Grieving for what could have been and celebrating the small victories that to the average Joe are silly.
A year full of surviving.
A year full of finger pricks. A year full of insulin shots, or site changes now. A year full of counting every bite that goes into her mouth, fighting fat spikes and miscalculations. A year full of midnight tears and demands on why her! Grieving for what could have been and celebrating the small victories that to the average Joe are silly.
A year full of surviving.
