Stephanie Wardrop's Blog, page 6

Imagine Jane Austen Twerking or Top Ten Reasons I Love the UK

My amazing publisher just gave me the news that Charm and Consequence, the second installment in the Swoon e-novella series Snark and Circumstance, is an Amazon Kindle bestseller in the UK in two categories.

So this is me right now: 

And in honor of my most esteemed Brit readers, I present, with humble gratitude, my TOP TEN REASONS WHY I LOVE THE UK

10. The Slang

I love that this

 is called a “loo” or a “bog.” And that subways are the “tubes” and elevators “lifts”, which I realize isn’t slang, exactly. To paraphrase Steve Martin, it’s like the Brits have another word for everything. And yet the speak English!

9.  Terriers

Whether Scottish, Irish, Wheaton, Cairn, Norwich, Norfolk, Skye, or Jack Russell (or any one I’ve missed), terriers are feisty and fun and smart. In my next life, I would like to come back as a beloved family terrier.  

8. Candy bars

I have relatives in Hershey, PA so I know from chocolate. But UK candy bars are way better and have great names, like Wispa, Twister, Yorkie, Aero, Star Bar, Timeout. Don’t make yourself crazy trying to choose.  Just pick one. They’re all good.

7.  A stubborn independent streak

I know we fought a revolution to gain independence from the UK (or, Great Britain, which I realize is not the same thing), but folks in the British Isles can be pretty stubbornly independent as well. They insist on driving on the wrong side of the road and maintaining all sorts of coins as currency (some quite oddly and wonderfully shaped), which I am convinced is just so shop clerks can laugh at foreigners who try to figure out how much the pointy hexagon is worth. Plus, they’ve eschewed the Euro and cling to the pound -because that L-with-a-squiggle-through-it is such a cool symbol?

6. Sheep in the streets!

Okay, not the streets of London or York or Glasgow or Edinburgh (the only major cities I can speak to as yet) but everywhere else, they have the right of way and they know it. Trust me, when you are driving on a one-lane road in the mist and you are confronted with this face

you will yield. Even if you are on foot. Because it’s his road and not yours.

5.  Accents

Any of them. Irish, Welsh, posh Brit, Scottish, East Londoner – they’re all good. I had an Irish friend in grad school and it was no use going out with her because the second she opened her mouth, no boy would listen to me or any other Yank any more. It was annoying, but I get it. As I tweeted to a similarly-minded friend the other day, if I could, I would arrange to have the delightfully-accented Tom Hiddleston call me on the phone everyday and menace me in his Loki voice until I explode.

4.  Glens, Dingles, Moors, and all that Wuthering

It rains a lot in Scotland and Northern England, but it is a beautiful misty rain that makes you feel like you’re getting a facial and having a Catherine Earnshaw moment at the same time. Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands is probably the most eerily beautiful place I have been and Thomas Hardy was quite sensible to write rhapsodically about Derbyshire.  You have some pretty country, there, you Brits, and I hope to see all of it one day.

3.  Music

Perhaps even more so than American rock music, British bands and singers have provided the soundtrack for my life since I was about twelve years old. The Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, David Bowie, the Clash, the Jam, Elvis Costello . . . I could go on forever. It’s not an exaggeration to say these sounds colored (and at times saved) my life.

2. Literature 

Aphra Behn. Emily and Ann and Charlotte Bronte. Elizabeth Gaskell.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Christina Rossetti.  Virginia Woolf.  And that’s just the women – and just a few of them, from before the mid-twentieth century, even.

 I’m a Janeite – and you?

and, finally,

10.  THE BEST, MOST DISCERNING READERS AND AMAZON SHOPPERS LIVE THERE!

Thank you to everyone, on any shore, who bought Charm and Consequence and plan to buy the rest in the Snark series. You have made a dream come true that I have had since I was a little girl, and I am truly, humbly grateful.

This is me on the moors outside Haworth, home of the Brontes, in 1996.

I love that place. Thanks again, readers!

WIP it, WIP it Good: Works in Progress

INTRODUCING WIP-IT WEDNESDAYS (Works in Progress)

I’m supposed to be working on the sequel to Snark and Circumstance, and I am, mostly. I’m revising and I have the first six chapters out to the most generous beta reader in Christendom. But since going to Scotland with my family, another story has been nagging at me, one that’s been poking me in the ribs, from the inside, so to speak, for years. I’d start it and it wouldn’t gel but it wouldn’t go away.

And then two weeks ago, I took a hike in the mist on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula of Scotland’s west coast, and saw this:

Walked right up to it, in fact. It’s Tioram (pronounced “Cheerum”) or Dorlin Castle, or the remains of it. Around the time of the ill-fated invasion of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the owner of the castle, realizing imminent defeat, decided to burn the whole thing down rather than have it fall in the hands of his enemies. Which is a cool story, to be sure, but not what my WIP is about. Still, I knew this what my heroine’s childhood home looks like now, and four hundred twenty-five years ago, when she left it to escape a witch hunt, it was still in its glory.

I had to get home and write about it.

On Monday, I wrote about how I develop characters by “listening” to them speak to me, and that’s how most of my stories start, as told by the voices within them. But this one was different. This came from an image in a dream: a girl kissing a boy through a chain link fence. I wasn’t sure who he was at the time, but I knew she was a four-hundred-year-old witch trapped in a seventeen-year-old’s body.

KInd of weird, right? And not at all like Snark, which is probably why I’ve been a little afraid of it, of being able to pull it off. But now I’ve got a title – A Time of Shadows – and a determination to see it through.

I’ll keep you posted, as I work on the WIP, offer writing tips on Mondays, and, come September, provide plot teasers as we count down to the release of Snark #3 Pride and Prep School in October. Thanks for coming along for the ride!

Let them talk: Using the voices in your head

Monday Morning Writing Tip

I just read a very good post about getting to know your characters. This writer advocated, as many writers do, imagining what they look like and answering a checklist of questions about them to get to know your characters. I’ve done this and found it somewhat helpful but a little mechanical for me, somehow. Still, checklists/questionnaires like this one can be kind of fun, like taking a Cosmo quiz as your character.

And as for writing down what the character looks like, for me, appearance often comes to me later. I hear my characters first. They’re the voices in my head that I start to recognize as distinct from my own. They’re the ones saying less mundane things than “Did you actually turn on the dryer before you came up from the basement or have there been wet clothes sitting in the machine for the last three hours?” And I know there’s a character developing in my head if the voice becomes more distinct or persistent, like its trying to be heard. Or get out.  

And yeah, I know this makes me sound at least a little crazy. Maybe the difference between the mad person and the writer is transcription. Because for me, the best way to get to know my characters is to listen to them, and to write down what they say.

It kind of is like transcription. When I’m stuck, especially in a first draft, I’ll just let them talk to each other and try to catch up on typing what they say. (Maybe my brief tenure as a court reporter prepared me for this method.) I kick back and let them talk and write down what they say. That’s the simple part.

The “writing” comes in when I go back and look at what they said and see what I can use. And most of it is pretty useless. I may get a character announcing, for example, “I don’t like eggs” and even the other character I am listening to doesn’t know how to respond to that because it’s not that interesting. Or unless it sparks something like a great plot point (Dr. X discovers that the deadly pandemic is being spread by unearthed pterodactyl eggs!) or great dialogue (You don’t like eggs? You don’t like anything! Including your wife! I’m leaving you, Bill.) Okay, that’s not great dialogue, but I can work with that. And I’ll take it from there.

But please keep in mind that while you, their creator, may be fascinated by everything they say, these creatures you are channelling from another dimension, your reader isn’t going to. Remember that these overheard conversations are for you, to spark your imagination.  They are not in and of themselves a novel or short story.

I just read a self-published novel that was mostly this sort of dialogue, two characters that the writer obviously cared deeply about, chatting away for page after page about Chardonnay and pop music and Shakespeare, but there conversations didn’t take them anywhere.  It didn’t drive any discernible plot, or, to be honest, make me care about the characters much, any more than I would care about people I overheard talking about this stuff at the food court at the mall.  I wouldn’t wistfully watch them pick up their shopping bags and move on, wishing I could follow them and hear what happens to them next. Instead, I was wishing the writer had taken these dialogues and figured out the heart of what they reveal about the characters and what it means for the plot and then use the conversations s/he “overheard” to craft the story arc, to function as the invisible scaffolding that supports these characters and what they do.

The reader doesn’t have to know everything about your characters. S/he is going to fill in the blanks themselves – that’s how fan fiction works, right? And you don’t have to know everything about them either. When you take time for these little conversations, when you let them talk to you, you find out stuff about them that surprises you and you can use this to make the plot and characterization richer.

So sit down with a copy of tea and a keyboard or notepad and let your characters talk to you. Just try to keep up, because sometimes they have a lot to say. It won’t all be golden, but there will usually be a nugget there you can use.

Writing Romance Guest Post on Indie Ignites

below is a copy of my guest post over at INdie Ignites’ blog.  This is one blog you should follow: lots of great writers, giveaways, and info for indie and small press peeps.
Don’t Want Your Bad, Bad Romance: Five Writing Don’ts with Apologies to Lady Gaga



Writers read a lot. And we read differently from when we were “civilian” readers, even when we’re reading for pleasure. No, we don’t sit there with red pens and mark every typo or infelicitous word choice (though as a writing instructor at a New England college, I often have to fight the urge to do that. It’s an occupational hazard, even though I don’t enjoy doing that with my students’ papers, and don’t know any instructor who does. And for the record, I don’t use a red pen.)

I wouldn’t say we’re necessarily harder on the books we read either, though maybe now and then we read something that seems less than polished to us and remember our bazillion rejection letters and think “THIS got published? Someone chose THIS over my magnum opus?” Maybe the difference is that when I was a “reader”, if I didn’t like a book – if, for whatever reason, it wasn’t working for me – I’d move on to the next one. Now, as a writer, I try to figure out why I don’t like it. I keep going and do a post mortem as I’m reading, trying to discover what went wrong.

Call it the CSI Approach to Disappointing Novels.

 
Because there’s a lot to learn, I’ve discovered, from what you don’t like, to learn what doesn’t work for you as a writer by examining what doesn’t work for you as a reader. I’ll slip into teacher mode for a second again and ask you: How much did you learn from the good essays you wrote in school that earned you an A or a check-plus or a vague “Very good!”? I have to admit I tended to learn more from the ones that didn’t get such high marks because I didn’t always know why the essays that did earned those marks. And when I couldn’t tell what worked, I was always afraid that I had succeeded by accident and that the next thing I handed in would make the teacher/reader cringe in horror and reassess my worth as a writer and a human being.

I had issues.

And still do, I’m sure, but this post is about learning to write a better romance novel from reading ones that don’t quite work. I’m going to give you a list of what I’ve learned that doesn’t work and, in some cases, provide tips to avoid these pitfalls. In other cases, I will beg you to send in some suggestions on how you avoid them, so I can, too (and share them with you, my lovely readers, without whom I am not a writer, after all).

So, here goes: 
MY TOP FIVE NOT-QUITE-EPIC ROMANCE FAILS
 
(But first, I’m going to sneak one in here without a number because everyone has heard of it but it bears mentioning.) No INSTALOVE, a misstep so heinous it has its own name. Readers do not want to be told that somehow, magically, your two characters have fallen in love somewhere between the pages they’ve turned while waiting to see it happen. Because that’s the point of a romance novel: We know these two are going to get together but we don’t know how and we want to see it happen. The pleasure is in the happening, not in having had it happen. )

On to the list.

1.     If your characters fall in love with each other in part because of their witty repartee, then there had better be some witty repartee on those pages. This is hard to do. Witty dialogue is the Holy Grail for me, I’ll admit it, and you never know if what amuses you is going to amuse anyone else. It takes time and lots of revisions to hone it right. (But the advantage to writing over speaking is you get lots and lots of tries to make the stinging comeback or hilarious offhand remark that most of us drive home IRL wishing we had made). Please don’t end every line of dialogue with “she giggled” to show me that your heroine finds the hero amusing. Make me giggle. Which is hard. Believe me, I know. All through Snark I knew I was walking a fine line between making Georgia and Michael clever, teasing combatants and a pair of angry malcontents, and I am not sure I succeeded in all scenes.





2.     Misunderstandings between would-be lovers are the lynch pin of most romance plots, but they have to be motivated and believable. If your heroine simply sees the man she’s growing to love talking to another woman and instantly assumes, based solely on this incident, that he is either wildly in love with this woman, sleeping with her, or both, I am going to think that your heroine has some trust issues, and not interesting ones. But give her a reason to be suspicious and I will be right in her corner. A man talking to a woman is not a smoking gun. Now, if he’s talking to her and laughing and she’s sitting in his lap, you’ve aroused my suspicions too, especially if there is a history between these two. (Though I don’t know if I would recommend using this particular scenario. I wrote this into the sequel to Snark that I am working on and it took me quite awhile to invent a plausible reason for the girl in question to be in the boy’s lap in public.) Your misunderstanding  has to be believable or it announces itself for what it is: A plot device. An obstacle to keep the two apart for a few more pages. And we should never be able to identify a plot device too easily.



3.     Weave in hints of a character’s troubled or tragic past throughout the story. Backstory is hard. I think everyone struggles with this, so if you have any suggestions to make this easier, please leave a comment, or better yet, email and share it just with me and together we will rule the publishing world.  This is where, again, revision comes in, finding the right moment to mention, plausibly, a little something about the past. All I know is that it is jarring and unpleasant to be a hundred pages into a book and hear one character say to another, “But oh! After all you have been through!” and I have no idea what they mean. Obviously you don’t want to dump it all right out there on the first page. I heard Vince Gilligan, the show runner for Breaking Bad, speak the other day about how plot points (especially endings) have to seem both surprising and inevitable. He’s right. And if we all figure out how to do that then we can retire to the south of France with Vince Gilligan.



4.     Backstory is hard. So is providing physical descriptions of your first-person narrator. Personally, I am perfectly okay without knowing exactly what your character looks like. I am going to invent her in my own head anyway, and when I see an actor in a movie who does not resemble either the author’s or my conception of a character, I’m okay with that, too. Shalene Woodley, for example, does not look like Tris in Divergent to me, but I have no doubt she will be awesome in the role. (The “whitening” of all mixed-race characters in other films is, however, problematic for me, but I won’t get into that here). Suffice to say I do not enjoy reading passages like “I brushed my long brown hair and gazed in the mirror at my rounded, exuberantly lashed wide blue eyes.” I have never found myself brushing my hair and looking in a mirror and thinking, “Oh, I am brushing my chin-length brown bob.” Such descriptions are as jarring to me as a misplaced bit of backstory and pull me out of the narrative that I want to remain wrapped up in like a blanket on a cold night. Please don’t do that to me.





5.     Help me come up with new, relatable, scintillating words for passionate physical contact. Please. How do you describe really great kisses without using words like “electric”, “heat”, “mind-blowing”, “earth-shaking”, fill in your own cliché? I am really bad at this, a deficiency that may keep me squarely in the “sweet” romance category because I think any attempt I make to describe full-blown lovemaking will either sound as absurd as 1980s romance descriptions of  penises as “pulsing pillars” and “throbbing manhoods”,  or as freakishly clinical as an old medical text.  How do you avoid purple prose or the Kinsey Report? Revision, revision, inspiration, revision?




And there you have my top five fails.  How do you remedy them? What are your own readerly-writerly romance pet peeves? Share and I’ll send you a coy of my Swoon Romance Snark and Circumstance enovella series so far so you can see how many of these pitfalls I avoided (and how many of them swallowed me whole).


Stephanie Wardrop is the author of the Snark and Circumstance series of enovellas from Swoon Romance, based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and available on Amazon.com and BN.com. She’s also a proud member of Indie Ignites!

Thanks, UK! Vegan Scones for All of You!

For making the Snark and Circumstance series #1 for Swoon Romance in July. Is it because you sensed Michael’s hair looked like Harry’s? His has a lot of secrets, too, which you’ll find out in October in PRIDE AND PREP SCHOOL. Thank you!!

A Jones for Scones: Vegan Travel and the Return of the Native

I just got back from an amazing family trip to the Ardnamurchan peninsula of Scotland, a place so remote the roads were one-lane and even if I had had a million dollars to spend on souvenirs, I would have been hard pressed to spend it (unless I stocked up on sheep and Highland cows, or Hi’lan’ coos, like this guy)

Which is pretty good moneywise, especially since I am a thrifty Scot myself. All I brought back were midge bites, memories, and about a million story ideas (more posts on that later.) Oh, and a powerful jones for scones.

Like my main character in the Snark and Circumstance series, Georgia Barrett,I am a vegan. Fortunately for my travel companions, I am not as militant about it as Georgia or I would have been bludgeoned by my family and had a burning caber tossed at me by the locals.  (By the way, I saw a visiting Pole break the local record for caber tossing at the Arisaigh Highland Games last week). While I know Scotland has some pretty tasty vegan victuals and a vegan cheddar that I could not track down (but wanted to sooo much, because it’s $10 a block here locally) I was, again, in a region other-wordly in its beauty but so remote that gas has to be rationed because the truck only comes in on Thursdays. So even if I had wanted to stick to the veganized Virgin Diet that cleaned out my system before leaving, I could not. As a traveller, you have to be flexible and adaptable. So I ate some amazing Red Leicester Double Gloucester cheeses and some poached salmon, when my digestive system could not take any more cheese, and a whole lot of sweet tasty gluten in the form of breads and scones and some delicious chocolate fudge/brownie thing called tiffin.

I hope I do not lose my vegan cred or any vegan Twitter followers with this admission.  But if I have, maybe I can win you back with this:

I do not miss the cheese or the fish at all.  Not even a little bit. But I woke up this morning in dire need of a scone. So as I write this, there are gluten-free vegan currant scones in the oven that smell pretty delicious and I plan to eat one after I finish my Virgin breakfast shake. You can find the recipe I adapted this morning and others on my Pinterest board Georgia’s Vegan Eats. While Georgia may never forgive me for falling off the wagon, you bakers can reap the benefits of my truancy. There are also recipes for vegan clotted cream, but I was not that ambitious this morning. I plead jet lag.

Please share any vegan (or non-vegan) travel tips and stories in the comments below. I love to hear from you guys! And look out for the third installment of the Snark series, PRIDE AND PREP SCHOOL, coming later this month. Georgia becomes a vegan baker to the local punk rock scene, a mystery is solved, and a proposal is made. Surprises abound!

Pinterest for Writers

 I discovered Pinterest a little over a year ago, and already I don’t know how I lived without it. Really. I have been rescued from all the little piles of recipes and brilliant ideas I clipped out of magazines and left in strategic (?) parts of the house, only to forget about them and never try them. Sure, half of the brilliant ideas I now cull from Pinterest I am never going to try (like the do-it-yourself garden fountain, or anything else that requires a power drill) but at least now all of these potentially genius projects are neatly stored in one place – and almost invisibly. And I do try out at least one of my many recipe pins every week. I love to cook and I hate being bored, so Pinterest is a great way to gather new recipes to try every single day, all in one place.

The problem was, Pinterest, like most internet destinations, can become a dangerous timesuck, a vortex you enter with the best of intentions to spend just five minutes there and then get to writing, only to emerge hours later with a hundred new recipes, style tips, Grumpy Cat memes, and a word count of zero. I had to find a way to make my Pinterest habit compatible with my writing time.

So I did what many other writers have done before me: I set up a Pinterest account for my writing self and began pinning things related to my books, of interest to other writers, and a few other topics I liked that might interest someone else who had read or wanted to read my books. Some of it is posted in the interest of book marketing and some of it is more an extension of my author platform/social media presence. Within a few hours (literally) of creating my first boards, I had hundreds of repins and within a week a surprising number of followers, and it grows every time I do it. Bonus: it’s a lot of fun.

I started with boards related to my e-novellas series Snark and Circumstance. I posted on the Snark and Circumstance boards some bits of inspiration, like clothing I thought a character would wear; images of people who look like my characters; locations similar to those in the book; teasers about the plot in books to come; and a link to buy the book. Since the main character, Georgia, is a lone vegan in a town and family of carnivorous types, I also created Georgia’s Vegan Eats to collect and share some great vegan recipes — that board took off right away. Most popular right now is my board Writing on which I pin great quotes and inspiration from writers. I swear I pin anything to that board and it gets about 100 repins right away. I also have boards about works in progress, music I listen to when I write, writers with their pets, and Cool People Read, which features everyone from Malala Yousafrai to Betty White to Kurt Cobain (and proves even Johnny Depp looks smexier with his face in a book).  You can follow all or one of them to see new pins. I try to keep them updated all the time, especially Georgia’s Vegan Eats and Writing. Once you have followers, you need to provide continual content and Pinterest is a bottomless treasure chest of content waiting to be plucked and repinned.

Have the boards sold a lot of books? Honestly, I doubt it. But it has connected me to more readers and writers and librarians (especially through boards like Writing or Great YA Novels or Settings for YA Novels). And I know that looking at other writers’ boards has made me really curious about their upcoming books. So many of the pins on the Indie Ignites board, for example, make me so  eager to read their books when they come out, and generating interest in your work is what it’s all about.

Other writers, designers, and publicists agree. Alicia Kat Vancil of Kat_Girl Studios hosted a great Twitter chat about author pages that urged us all to provide links to our pinterest pages right on our blogs. As you can see, I did.

Swoon Romance and Month 9 Books encourage all of their writers to have Pinterest pages, so I asked Jolene, our pinner extraordinaire, to offer a little advice to writers who are Pinterest newbies:

As for advice for writers trying to market their work using Pinterest, Pinterest is an awesome tool to use! There are a myriad of ways to use it to your advantage.

1. Published authors: Make a board solely for your published works. This way people can check out all of your titles. Don’t forget to “edit” the image so that when people click on it, it takes them straight to either your site, the book on Goodreads, or where they can buy it (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.)

2. Published or soon to be published authors: Make a board with a specific theme like new adult 2013 releases or YA Romance (whatever your book genre is). Include big name books in that genre and don’t forget yours. It will definitely help you gain exposure. Don’t forget to link your book there too via the “edit image” button and include an accurate description with keywords that will ensure people will find it.

3. Interactive: Start a Pinterest board for each WIP or book. Include your dream casting of your characters, setting, love interest, clothes your MC would wear, etc. Readers will love the extra insight to your book and it will help you get focused on your book if you’re stuck or blocked. This is also a place where you should make sure you  use the accurate keywords and hashtags for your book to be searchable and make sure you link each picture to the appropriate site (ie picture of your book cover linked to your book’s Amazon page for purchase OR picture of an actress who you would love to play your MC linked to your dream cast blog post).

So if you’re not pinning, it’s time to get started. And if you are, take Dorie’s advice: JUST KEEP PINNING.

Leigh T Moore’s UNDERTOW Release and a Giveaway

Undertow, the shocking sequel to Dragonfly, is OUT NOW!

 

Early Readers are saying…

“An incredibly powerful sequel to Dragonfly. I found myself riveted to the last page by the depth of feeling, loss, tragedy, and  love   in this gorgeously woven story.  A definite must-read. “ –Jolene Perry, author of Out of Play

 

“As far as a second book for a series goes, Undertow  knocked it out of the park. “  –Jessica, Bend in the Binding reviews

 

“My God I am so emotional! I have to give a  huge KUDOS to Leigh   because she knows how to write a story like no one’s business!” –Tee, Diary of a Book Addict reviews

 

“Undertow  pulled me under and left me gasping for air   and wanting so much more. I couldn’t stop thinking about these characters, and now I’ll never be able to get a shirtless Bill Kyser out of my head.” –Magan Vernon, bestselling author of The Only Exception

 

“ Amazing!   The characters are lovely, but they’re also flawed–that sort of ‘realness’ and honesty breathes life into them and is truly refreshing to come across as a reader.  A fantastic story with a unique execution. “ –Kristin, Goodreads reviewer

 

Undertow

Book 2 in the Dragonfly series

by Leigh Talbert Moore

 

 

On Amazon

Falling in love will pull you under…  

 

-Bill Kyser has a plan to take the sandy farms of his hometown and turn them into a world-class tourist destination–and become a billionaire in the process. 

-Alexandra “Lexy” LaSalle has a plan to change her life by becoming a world-famous artist. 

-Meg Weaver has a plan to hold onto Bill no matter what she has to do.

 

Three friends, three dreams.

One fatal decision will change all their lives forever.

 

In Dragonfly, Bill Kyser gave Anna the three journals that held the story behind the powerful developer’s seclusion and the damaged lives of his family members. 

 

Anna hopes to find a way for Julian to know the truth, but as she digs deeper into the tragic events of the past, she realizes silence could be the only option. 

 

Now she’s in an alliance with the man she formerly feared. And if Julian finds out what she knows, she could lose for good the boy she’s starting to love.

 

Get Undertow TODAY! 

 

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | Kobo

(Print copies available on Amazon | Createspace)

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Missed Dragonfly? Get it TODAY for only 99 cents (limited time)!

 

“The characters were intriguing, the mystery and story were interesting, and definitely have ME WANTING MORE!!!!!!!” –Mandy, The Romance Bookie

 

“Great book to dive into poolside, but I will warn you may get so swept up in it you may end up with some sun burn so I STRONGLY suggest you invest in some sunscreen as well as a copy of Dragonfly.” –Nichole, Book Addicts Not So Anonymous

“Gossip Girl meets VC Andrews in this contemporary family saga. Love, lies, and betrayal become the new normal when Anna enters the world of Jack and Lucy Kyser.” –Magan Vernon, international bestselling author of The Only Exception

 

 

On Amazon

Dragonfly

by Leigh Talbert Moore

 

Three bad things I learned this year:

-People you trust lie, even parents. 

-That hot guy, the one who’s totally into you, he might not be the one. 

-Things are not always how they appear.

 

Three good things I learned this year:

-Best friends are always there for you, even when they’re far away. 

-That other hot guy, the one who remembers your birthday, he just might be the one. 

-Oh, and things are not always how they appear.

 

Anna Sanders expected an anonymous (and uneventful) senior year until she crossed paths with rich-and-sexy Jack Kyser and his twin sister Lucy.

 

Pulling Anna into their extravagant lifestyle on the Gulf Coast, Lucy pushed Anna outside her comfort zone, and Jack showed her feelings she’d never experienced… Until he mysteriously withdrew.

 

Anna turned to her internship at the city paper and to her old attraction for Julian, a handsome local artist and rising star, for distraction. But both led to her discovery of a decades-old secret closely guarded by the twins’ distant, single father. 

 

A secret that could permanently change all their lives.

 

Get Dragonfly for just 99 cents (limited time):

 

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | Kobo

 

(Print copies available on Amazon | Createspace)

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Twitter chats: why I’m a believer

Thanks to #Indiechat on Twitter and the advice of Alicia Kat Vancil of Kat Girl Studio. If you haven’t checked out any of the YA and NA writing chats on Twitter, you should! Here are some highlights from this week alone:

On Tuesday, @KatGirl_Studio hosted #indiechat and discussed the best features and look for your author blog, an essential part of your “brand” and author platform. 
On Wednesday, #YAlitchat, hosted by @GeorgiaMcBride, talked about all kinds of relevant and interesting stuff, like what to Tweet as a writer to build your fan base (hints: don’t just push your book, know your readers, and tweet fun stuff about yourself. I need to do more of the latter, as soon as I get some fun stuff to Tweet ) 
And tonight, #K8chat, hosted by Kate Tilton will be talking book boyfriends!

There are usually so many excited and informative participants that it’s sometimes hard to keep up with the feed but it is so worth it. On Tuesday I learned how to add a link to follow me on Pinterest and about Feedly last night. If you don’t get into the mix in the allotted chat hour, most hosts stick around for awhile after to take questions when it’s less frantic. And if you don’t want to tweet a comment or a question, just lurk and you’ll learn something. But if you do participate, you’ll find yourself with new friends and followers among your present (or future) colleagues.

Chats are usually scheduled for 9:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. You can see the “transcript” a record of what was said, any time by searching for the term as a hashtag (ie #YAlitchat). And if you do tweet a comment or question, don’t forget to hashtag after the comment or it will get lost in the general conversation on Twitter.

I was a reluctant Tweep myself. I couldn’t imagine tweeting my mundane daily activities. “Made a cup of tea.” Who the frack cares? Unless I “made a cup of tea and fed it to Johnny Depp”, maybe. But aside from the aforementioned awesomeness of the chats, Twitter has also connected me with other writers, now friends, that I would never have met otherwise. We review and promote each other’s books, commiserate, and cheer each other on. And on an isolated day of writing, check in for a moment’s break with the hashtag #amwriting and you will know you’re not alone.

So check out #k8chat tonight and chat with me at @s_wardrop. As my Twitter profile says, I retweet like a boss! Got to go. There are 68 new tweets to check since I started this post.

Get Your Gargoyle On: A Review of LOUISE GORNALL’S IN STONE

 I’ve always liked gargoyles, so when I heard that there was a YA romance out there about a human(ish) gargoyle, I knew I had to read it. (In fact, I had the main characters from IN STONE meet Georgia and Michael from SNARK, which you can read here). And if you read that post, you’ll know that Jack is a pretty sweet gargoyle boy. Blond, silver-eyed, charming – I’m pretty sure my daughter would see all kinds of Niall Horan in him.  But what makes Jack more intriguing than Niall Horan, with all apologies to my daughter, is that he has a sad and mysterious past that I look forward to hearing about in sequels. (I’ll just say here that it involves Purgatory. And a way out). Plus he’s a GARGOYLE, which means he can fly and scale buildings like a gecko and he has a tail. Oh, and he’s about to save the world from destruction, with the help of human(ish) Beau Bailey. Beau’s a trickier character and Gornall does a nice job with her. She’s snarky and not entirely likable, but there’s a reason for that, which I won’t even tell you because you have to find out for yourself.  Let’s just say that the last three chapters are almost too hectic in their emotional switches and revelations. You won’t want to miss them.

There’s suspense throughout as they team up in small town America, and then Bulgaria, and then . . .Wait. I don’t want to spoil it.  But there’s fighting and tension and narrow escapes enough for anyone who can’t wait for the release of the third installment of the DIVERGENT series.

So check out IN STONE from Entranced at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Goodreads. It’s a great summer read.