Anna Jeffrey's Blog: I'm Just Saying..., page 8

Every Girl Needs a Fantasy…

…And it would be hard to find a better one than (drum roll)…HUGH JACKMAN!

HUGH JACKMAN

I thought"Australia" was not the greatest movie I ever saw (although it could have been), but being fascinated by Australia, I liked it.  …  And I could watch it once a week just to see Hugh Jackman as Drover.

I work at my real job until 10:00 p.m, so I don't get home until between 10:30 and 11:00 o'clock. My own dear hero always waits up for me and if football isn't on, he's usually watching Jay Leno when I arrive.

One night this past week, I got home just in time to catch the hunky Hugh  on Leno's show.  What a cool guy! Tall, good-looking charming, funny, talented and many other things that appeal to me. Compared to many Hollywood types, he comes across as being down-to-earth and easygoing. I couldn't be a fan if I thought he was otherwise.

WOLVERINE

The first movie I can recall seeing him in was the romantic comedy, "Someone Like You," with Ashley Judd. I didn't know his name at that time, but he caught my eye immediately and I've been a fan ever since. I liked that movie enough to go out and hunt down the book it was adapted from. That movie is one instance where I think the movie turned out better than the book. I don't mean to imply that the book, which is a chick-lit story, is bad; I just liked the movie better.

On Leno's show, Hugh talked about his new movie, "Real Steele" and his one-man Broadway show. He performed a short skit of the railroad song from "Music Man," at which he was very good. Need I say I would love to see this show.

In my imagination, Hugh Jackman a character right out of a romance novel. In fact he IS the character I sort of loosely based the hero's appearance on in my upcoming February release from Entangled Publishing. I have to have an image in my mind when I write about the hero, so my book hero, Drake Lockhart, in "TEXAS TYCOON," looks like Hugh Jackman. Hugh's a little older than Drake, but that's okay.

I have to say that every hero in every book I've written (except the Dixie Cash books) is some version of Hugh. The picture to the right is Hugh all right, but it's also Dalton Parker in "SWEET RETURN."

HUGH JACKMAN, also Dalton Parker

I guess the way he looks and behaves just appears both "alpha" and "heroic" to me. As any of you who have read my books knows, my heroes are always alphas. I also like Clive Owen and David Craig as "alpha heroes."

An editor told me once that all romance novels are fantasies, no matter if they're contemporaries, historicals, paranaormals, etc., which is why they're so popular. We all have to latch on to a little escapism to keep us sane, especially these days. So I guess if we're fantasizing, we can certainly fantasize about Hugh Jackman. In the name of therapy, of course.

And it just dawned on me as I write this, where are the American men? Why are all of the alpha "heroic" types from outside the country? There hasn't been a good American alpha hero in the movies since Tom Selleck got old. If you can think of one, let me know.

 

 

 

Photo of Hugh Jackman from Creative Commons via Wikipedia

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Revisiting Hemingway

The latest non-fiction book I've read is "Write like Hemingway" by R. Andrew Wilson, PhD. I had a hard time getting into it because I found it  dull at first and it wasn't telling me anything new. However, I stuck with it (which I usually don't do these days) and found the last half much more interesting than the first. I found quite a few precious little kernels to cling to in my own writing.

Hamingway Stamp

Years ago, I read many books both about and by Ernest Hemingway. His real life was as interesting as his fiction. He was indeed a storybook character. He was a restless adventurer and according to his various biographers, a consummate liar, which, I suppose, is a good thing for a fiction writer.

Reading about him again caused me to think of the fact that his stories were the very first adult stories I read in my life. When I was a little kid in West Texas, we had no TV, had radio reception only occasionally and telephone service hit or miss. But plenty of books were around and Ernest Hemingway's and John Steinbeck's books were among them.

Over time, I've forgotten many of the books I read years ago, so after I finished "Write like Hemingway, I set off on a new mission. I dug out an old book of Hemingway's stories and started re-reading. I began with "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," which only reminded me of how I, and most other authors who are writing these days, fall short. I had forgotten what a distinctive writer he was.

If you haven't read "Kilimanjaro," you've missed a sterling example of "less is more," for which Ernest Hemingway is famous. In fact, his "iceberg theory" of storytelling is what revolutionized fiction into what we know today. He expanded Mark Twain's writing advice from "Write what you know" to "Write what you know, but not all that you know."

"Kilimanjaro" is a short story, which is what Hemingway wrote mostly. He authored a few novels, but his  common venue was magazines, thus he produced short stories or what they used to call "serials" for longer stories that lasted over several issues. Perhaps that circumstance helped him paint vivid pictures in the simplest and fewest words.

Simplicity and not many words is what pacing in a novel is all about. Pacing is what he mastered. And pacing is the bane of my existence as an author.

He also mastered the use of the most profoundly descriptive nouns, used few adjectives and almost no adverbs. William Faulkner once said of Hemingway's writing that he didn't know any words that had more than four letters (and he didn't mean swear words).

Hemingway's ability to say volumes with few words is a technique few other authors have been able to emulate. I've tried to think of modern writers who can do characterization, description of settings and narrative as succinctly as Ernest Hemingway did. I read a lot, but I can think of no one, certainly not me. So I have a new perspective on my own writing.

This is why I try to read books about the craft of writing constantly, so that I will either learn new things or recall old things I've forgotten. Good books on the craft usually inspire me. I can now apply what I've re-learned from my revisit to Hemingway to my own work-in-progress. Maybe it will be better. And better is always better. By the time I finish reading this book of Hemingway's short stories, my writing might be fantastic.   Not that I would ever compare myself to Ernest Hemingway, mind you.

Meanwhile, I've started to think about the movies that were adapted from his stories.

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro," with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner; "For Whom the Bell Tolls" with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman; possibly his greatest, "The Sun Also Rises" with Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power; "A Farewell to Arms," first with Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper, then later with Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones; "The Killers" with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner.

Those are all great old movies with great stars and I've seen all of them, I think, but now I'd like to see them again. Have you seen these movies? And if so, do you remember if you perceived Ernest Hemingway's genius?

In today's chaotic publishing market, I wonder if he could even get published. Some teeny-bopper editor might think his work is too "gritty" or "outside the market," or "not a good fit for their line-up." Or, God forbid, there are no vampires or werewolves.

Anna

The Art of Procrastination…And "WHY?"

I wonder if anyone has taken procrastination to the art I have.

And I don't understand it. Because writing is something I love to do.

This is how I feel right now.

Sometimes it takes me all day long to drive myself into the mode and mood, though I'm always eager to get started on it. I pace around my house saying things like, "I've got to get going on my book" or "I'm running out of time", even as I continue thumbing through a magazine or watching something on TV or baking a loaf of banana bread. If I have time, I even take a nap.

I often  try to figure out why I'm like this. Why I don't spring out of bed and get things done. The fact that I sometimes do spring out of bed and get things done makes figuring it out even harder.

My conclusion is this. For me, writing is a daunting task. The right words to tell a story don't always immediately manifest themselves to be blithely plucked from the ether. I have sometimes spent an entire afternoon looking for just the right word or phrase to reveal what I want revealed.

Even when you know in your head what you want to say, that perfect three-letter word that will clarify WHY John Doe pushed his grandma in her wheelchair down the basement stairs, then walked outside and set the house on fire, stole her truck, drove to town and robbed the only bank. You just know the one three-letter word that explain all of that is out there if you can just put your finger on it.

And that brings me to the three-letter word "WHY." An evil monster if there ever was one. He torments relentlessly, evades capture, darts in and out of thought, consumes mental energy. Wrestling the bastard is like trying to cure a toothache.

So why do it? Why torture myself even chasing this "WHY?"

Because without the "WHY" there is no story, especially in character-driven stories. Without the why, what you have is a report, not a plot, not a story. And that's what causes the procrastination. You don't quite have the "WHY" settled in your mind and thus, haven't figured out how to put it on paper in a succinct way so that perfect strangers reading your words will know what you've said and that you meant to say it.

Even after you find that word and settle on why John Doe embarked on a life of crime, you have to decide HOW (another three-letter word) to tell the "WHY" so that readers will either sympathize or empathize with John. After all, just like in real life, no story character can be all bad. Should it be done in narrative? In dialogue? Or action?

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

The "WHY" is giving me fits right now and keeping me from moving forward. I'm starting to think I'm on the wrong track. Maybe I need to find a new "WHY." Thus, I procrastinate.

So what's the answer? I can tell you from experience that spending three months without writing a word while searching for the "WHY" in your mind is not the answer. What I'm going to try next is to just whip myself to put my butt in that chair in front of the computer and put words on paper…or on the monitor screen. And maybe stream of consciousness writing will bring me the elusive"WHY"

Here's hoping….

Anna J

WILDFIRE!…AND PRIORITIES….

This morning, when I turned on TV news, the first thing I heard was that 100,000 acres and 1,000 homes have been burned in the Bastrop, Texas, area, which is not far from Austin. As I write this blog, more than 50 fires are blazing across various parts of Texas.

Central Texas Burns!

As any of you who live in Texas or have watched the news might know, Texas is suffering the worst drought in many, many years. And temperatures have been in the triple digits, without let-up, for more than two months. To put it succinctly, damn near everything in the great outdoors is cooked.

A few horrifying statistics. In the past year, more than 20,900 wild fires have burned 3.6 million acres of the Texas landscape. I've lost count of the total number of homes that have been lost to fire. And I've never had the count of the numbers of cattle, horses, and other animals that have been incinerated.

The fires in the Texas Panhandle just a year ago burned cattle alive in the pastures, not to mention the immolaton of huge fields of wheat. Besides being heartbreaking, it was an economic disaster for that part of the state.

Watch the video below of somewhere in Texas. It's a tiny taste of the evil of wild fire.

I live in a rural area twelve miles from town. My home is located in a sub-division, but the sub-division itself is surrounded by pastureland and trees. ….. And right now, The grass is drier than un-buttered popcorn. It looks likes it would crunch under your feet if you walked out into it. The tree leaves have already turned brown and are starting to drop.

Nothing in the immediate vicinity is on fire at this moment, but you never know. All it takes is a careless smoker, a backfiring vehicle, some thoughtless fool defying the burn ban and getting rid of trash. Or an arsonist. Or just someone who's insane. Or who knows what else?

Our backyard is only about 30 feet deep. That's how close we are to a tinderbox.

So while watching this terrible news on TV this morning, I turned to my husband and said, "Given that we would have only minutes, not hours to escape, do you think we should make a list of things we should grab first if we have to run?"

To my total surprise, he said, "Maybe we should."

The answer I expected from him was, "Nah, we'll be okay. Don't worry about it."

The point is, if he's that concerned, it's time for me to be concerned, too. Since I'm away from the house a good part of the time at my real job, he would have to deal with it alone, so a list would be even more important.

In my head, I'm thinking, My God, where do I start?

So I said, "Well, I suppose my first priority would be to grab my computer and some of the stuff out of my office."

Then I thought, "What stuff? How the hell do I prioritize 15 years of researching and writing and reading and trophies and prizes won and boxes of books? It's all made of something a hungry fire loves–PAPER!

Then I started trying to think of what to take next that wouldn't have to be packed and thought about and discussed, etc., etc. The proposition was so overwhelming, my feeble brain didn't want to deal with it. I drew a blank.

He said, "We should think about some clothes to take," which re-focused my attention. He was right, of course. In the event of a loss, someone like the Red Cross would feed us, because Texans and Americans are like that. But clothing us would be a different matter.

That's the mode we're in today. I'm off work from my real job, so I'm trying to figure out how to survive, if we had to, a situation that is 100% out of our control.

Thank God for our bravest.

My husband and I already know about wildfires. A couple of years ago, one swept through dry pastures very near our home. Our whole area had to be evacuated and I spent a good part of one evening in a country church up the road eating pizza brought in by the Red Cross for everyone's supper.

That fire totally destroyed 26 mobile homes in a sub-division not far from us. We were very lucky in that our house was not touched. I will never forget the grief and reactions of the people who lived in or owned those mobile homes when the firefighters came in and told them of their losses.

When we choose to live in a rural area to enjoy some privacy and the natural surroundings and all that country living offers us, and to escape the hubbub of town life, we often find ourselves faced with tradeoffs. And fire protection is one of them.

So all of the above brings me to my point today. How about you? If you were in the path of a moving inferno, after your kids and pets, what would you grab first to save?

It's something to think about, isn't it?

Anna J

Meet Brooke Moss…

And take a look at her debut book, THE "WHAT IF" GUY.

Brooke is a new writing friend I've only recently met. Her debut book, a chick-lit/romance has been just recently released and she has graciously agreed to come here and talk to us about it. It's a feel-good story about a courageous heroine starting over and lost love recaptured in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. Brooke's writing sparkles with humor and warmth and you'll find yourself chuckling more than once. You'll probably want to put her on your keeper shelf.

As a new author, she has been asked about a million questions and one of them is why she chose a small town setting. Following are her comments.

Why Write About Small Towns?

By Brooke Moss

            When I set out to write what turned out to be my debut novel, The What If Guy, I considered a handful of settings.

I thought about having it set in a big city. I am a fan of big city romances, but alas…my knowledge of the big city (any one of them) is limited. I know the city of Seattle, and that is the setting for my trilogy coming out next summer. I needed some place fresh! Some place that nobody has heard of before.

And then I had it….my own hometown of Fairfield, Washington. Population five hundred residents. A place not reached by any freeways. A town with not one stoplight. It was the perfect setting for my new book. Who in the world would expect to run into their long lost love in a town the size of half a postage stamp?

Autumn Cole certainly never expected to.

One of the great bonuses that I discovered when I decided to write about the town of Fairfield was the amazing cast of characters that I'd tapped into. People that I hadn't appreciated as a kid. Town gossips, quirky people who—in any other town—would seem peculiar, and of course, the misunderstood townies whose roots are so deeply woven in the town's history that one without the other makes no sense. These are the types of people I wanted to write about.

Another reason why I wanted to base The What If Guy in Fairfield, Washington, is because of its stunning beauty that is often overlooked. When most people hear the words "Washington state", they picture lush green trees, rain, fog, and miles and miles of Pacific rainforest. However, the great thing about Washington state is, it offers desertland and the rolling, golden plains of the Palouse as well. I wanted to paint a picture of the beauty that is found in eastern Washington, and make it as desirable as the Twilight saga made the lush western side of the state for so many visitors.

I love my home in the city. I love the convenience it provides, and the sound of horns honking and trains blowing their horns in the distance. But every once in a while I watch my children playing in their fenced yard, or in their city playgrounds, and feel a tug in my heart.

They will never experience the joy of running and running for miles, barefoot and without limits. They will never hear me calling them inside for dinner from our front porch clear across town. They will never be lulled to sleep by the lullaby of frogs an crickets. These are details about my childhood that a treasure, and mourn the fact that my own kids will never experience the same things.

A book with a small town setting provides an additional character: the town itself. And I, for one, am charmed by all that comes with its presence in a love story.

My name is Brooke Moss, and my debut novel, The What If Guy, is now available from Entangled Publishing. It tells the story of single mother, Autumn Cole, who is returning to the miniscule hometown of her youth, to reluctantly reclaim her role as daughter of the town drunk. Things become even more complicated when she discovers that her son's history teacher, Henry Tobler, is none other than the college sweetheart she left behind, but never stopped loving.

The What If Guy is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Diesel Books, Books on Board, and at your local bookseller. Grab a copy today, and tell me what you think. Reader feedback is priceless, and I am anxious to hear who YOUR what if guy is.

Find me elsewhere on the web, at my website, blog, Twitter, Goodreads, and Facebook.

 

 

 

 

Fondly,

Brooke Moss

This is a taste of what's in store for you when you read THE "WHAT IF" GUY. And now for the best treat of all, we have some excerpts!

 

Here's what happened in the prologue:

Seattle, Washington

"Why are you doing this?"

The desperate, sad look in Henry's eyes made my heart ache. His brown hair fell

across his forehead in rain-soaked waves, and his eyelashes gathered in dampened

clumps. Henry's eyes, the same shade of gray as the weeping clouds above us, searched

my face for answers I was too ashamed to give.

"What we have is real, Autumn." He pulled me against his chest. I felt his heart

pounding through the wet fabric of his soft, flannel shirt, and we trembled in unison,

standing on the front steps of Henry's apartment building. "Why do you want to break

up? Don't you love me?"

"Don't do this," I said weakly. My eyes filled with hot tears that threatened to

undermine my brave façade. When he grazed his fingers across my cheekbone, swiping

away a tear, I instinctively turned my face into his hand, breathing in the warm,

outdoorsy aroma of Henry.

My Henry.

He kissed my cheeks, my temples, my shivering lips. My resolve started to

crumble. Strength. I needed to show strength. I needed to walk away before I ruined his

life, before I hurt him any more than I already had.

"Tell me that you don't love me," he whispered into my drenched hair, tangling

his fingers in my curls. "Tell me, and I'll let you go."

I choked on a sob. I did love Henry. The past two months had been the best

months of my life. Not once had I dreamt of meeting someone who made me feel safe,

peaceful, beautiful, and deliriously happy, the way Henry Tobler made me feel. I wanted

to be with him—and no one else—forever.

"Of course I love you," I said.

"Then why are you doing this?" His voice cracked.

I shivered in Henry's arms, not only from the cold, but also from the burden I

bore. Pulling back, I raised my eyes to meet his. "I….I'm pregnant." My words were

barely audible over the sound of the pounding rain and passing traffic.

His face morphed from shock to anger, then settled on absolute sadness. We

hadn't slept together yet.

"It was from before," I explained lamely, feeling dirty as the words came out my

mouth. Henry's shoulders drooped. He released me and a shadow fell across his eyes.

That said it all. His girlfriend was pregnant with someone else's child.

Henry deserved better than me.

I had to get out of here. I backed away, down the cement steps and onto the

sidewalk. I rubbed my chest, my heart breaking just beneath the surface.

"I'm sorry," I said, words quavering. "I'm so sorry."

I turned and ran. Away from love.

 

And this is what happened after that:

I knocked on the door of room five. Elliott briefly slipped his hand into mine and

whispered, "Love you, Mom."

I squeezed his hand. "Love you, too, buddy."

"Come on in," a male voice called.

The classroom looked and felt exactly the same way it had when I was a kid,

including the judgmental stares from the students. With his back to the class, the teacher

scribbled a makeshift map on the whiteboard at the front of the room. All of the students'

eyes shifted to Elliott. Some looked at him with interest, but others already glared with

disapproval. I wished that El hadn't been wearing his yellow and black checkered vest

and a bow tie when I'd thundered down the stairs to find him waiting at the front door,

tapping his foot. What had been stylish in his funky Seattle school was a blinking neon

sign declaring I'm an oddball at a small country school like this.

"Um, hi?" Elliott's voice cracked. "I'm Elliott Cole, and I'm, uh, new."

Pride swelled in my chest, and I beamed at my son. I leaned down and whispered

in his ear. "You're awesome, El. I love you."

He gave me a stiff nod. "Thanks."

"Welcome, Elliott, it's good to have you." The teacher spoke in a low, gravelly

voice.

I straightened and smiled at the teacher. "Thanks…"

All the oxygen left my lungs, and I stood paralyzed. The class became silent.

Elliott's teacher and I stared at each other, dumbfounded—mouths open, hands half-

extended, eyes round and wide like headlights set on bright. My insides vibrated like the

engine of an idling grain truck. All in response to the teacher, who gawked at me with

what appeared to be the same mixture of shock and disbelief.

Elliott's teacher was Henry Tobler.

"What are you doing here?" I whispered.

I regretted my words the moment they came out. I should have said something

eloquent or profound. Something that would have made seeing each other for the first

time in over a decade less awkward. As if that were remotely possible.

Henry's eyes, that rainy-day shade of gray, narrowed, and a line formed between

his eyebrows. "I work here."

I couldn't help staring. Henry looked like a teacher, but no teacher I'd ever had at

Palouse Plains. He wore a grayish-blue button-down shirt, untucked, and a worn, olive-

colored sport coat. His wavy, brown hair was cut shorter than I remembered. Even at ten

o'clock in the morning, he sported a sexy five o'clock shadow that made my stomach

twist. I remembered those whiskers well.

He still resembled the young man I'd made eyes at across the lecture hall during

college, so long ago—his face chiseled and rugged-looking. Back then, a perpetual smile

had teased at one side of his mouth. Now, I saw no hint of that smile. But his eyes still

revealed his emotions, no matter how hard he tried to hide them. I wish he'd outgrown

that, because his eyes screamed, I'm not happy to see you.

"Y-you're a teacher now?" I stammered.

"I've always been a teacher."

"Right, but…"

<><><><><>

See? I told you you'd like it. And if you want to know what happened after that, you'll have to read the book.

Thanks for stopping by and please leave us a comment.

Anna J

A word about cowboys (not the football team)….

Okay, I have to do it. This is the obligatory post from me about cowboys. With our governor running for president, all of a sudden, the word "cowboy" has become a bigger part of the national dialogue in a derogatory way. Now before you panic and run, this isn't a post about politics. Rather, its about cowboys.

To those of you who know me and who have read my books, do I need to say I love cowboys? I grew up among them. I write books about them. I'm married to one and I even consider myself to be one, though I don't own a horse or a cow.

Everey man needs a pet.

Here's the simple definition from the dictionary: "A hired man, especially in the western United States, who tends cattle and performs many of his duties on horseback."

To give that some background in a nutshell, in the beginning, cowboys were "boys who took care of cows." Because most of the original cowboys were young men, even kids. They and their families came to Texas after the South had been devastated by the Civil War. Most of them were farmers. They brought nothing but their Southern manners, a willingness to work hard and a hope to find a new life. Or maybe they just wanted to be able to eat.

In Texas they met vaqueros, Mexican men who were the original "cowboys." The vaqueros were skilled with a rope and tools of the range and excelled in horsemanship. It didn't take the newcomers long to learn from the vaqueros.

Millions of longhorn cattle descended from the livestock the Spaniards had abandoned centuries earlier roamed the Texas plains. At about the same time the newcomers arrived in Texas, the East discovered a love for beef. Thus the cattle business and the need for cowboys were born.

These days, there is more than one kind of cowboy. There are cowboys who know a lot about cows, but not much about horses. And vice-versa. There are big ranchers with thousands of cows and hundreds of horses. Small ranchers. with a few hundred cows and maybe a few horses. Horse ranches with no cows.

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There are cowboys who are really farmers, but keep a few horses around for pleasure and a steer or two around for beef. There are city dwellers who dress up like cowboys and secretly long to be one. They might own a horse they ride once a month, that lives in a rented stable and is taken care of by someone else. Yet that person won't hesitate to call himself a cowboy.

Some of the folks who compete in the various horse sports are called cowboys, but they might not know one end of a cow from the other. Then there are rodeo cowboys, a breed unto themselves.

These are just a few examples, but you can see the genre has evolved into a diverse group.

Bottom line, being a "cowboy" is an attitude. You don't have to own a cow or a horse, or even know how to ride one, to live by the cowboy code. The Code of the West was best defined by an investment consultant named James Owen who suggested that all of us might to well to return to cowboy ethics. Following is what he wrote:

1. Live each day with courage.   2. Take pride in your work.   3. Always finish what you start.   4. Do what has to be done.   5. Be tough, but fair.   6. When you make a promise, keep it.   7. Ride for the brand.    8. Talk less and say more.   9. Remember that some things aren't for sale.  10. Know where to draw the line.

Don't you agree we could all benefit from this philosophy?

Anna

photos from istockphoto.com and You Tube

What's in a cover?…

New cover, old book.…I have to share my new cover with you because the unrequited artist in me loves it. The awesome Kim Killion designed it. I used to think my former print publisher had the best cover designers around, but IMHO, the cover they originally designed for this book isn't as good as the one Kim did. It is such a luxury to be able to have some influence on the final product! Kim did her best to make it look the way I wanted it to.

"The Love of a Stranger" was originally released in 2004. If you want to see the original cover, just follow the link to Amazon.

I got the copyright  back from the print publisher. I've been diligently working on formatting it for Kindle, Nook and other digital readers. I'm almost finished. Hopefully, I'll be uploading it within the next two weeks. I'll keep you posted.

Here's what my little pea brain sees when I look at this. The masculine hands scream "alpha hero." The woman's hair says gorgeous blonde. The pose itself suggests a sexy relationship. And the isolated house on a bluff spells intrigue. What do you think?

Some of you might have already read this book, but if you haven't, does this new cover make you want to? Let me know. To me, your opinion is important.

Cover design is the front line of marketing a book. In New York publishing, a lot goes into it. Books are, more often than not, impulse buys. The goal of an alluring cover is to make a customer/reader strolling down the aisle think, "Oh, wow, I have to read that book," and thus, buy it.

But things have changed in book marketing. Nowadays,  e-books hold a larger share of the market. E-book covers have to be even more attractive and more sensational. Smaller picture, different shopper.

The next most important element of marketing a book is the blurb on the back cover. When and if that potential reader is captured by the cover design and stops and picks up the book, turns it over and reads the back, the blurb has to be intriguing, too.  In e-books, since there's no back cover, the blurb becomes the book description on the listing page. If you've checked out the book descriptions on "Sweet Water" and "Salvation, Texas," you'll see that the descriptions are now longer and more detailed.

I'll be revising this book's description before I upload it. In a print book, space is limited, but online, there's a little more room.

Aside from the way the book looks, in the course of formatting it, I've run across some funny things. I hadn't read it since I originally wrote it in 2002 and 2003. Back then, every person in the whole wide world didn't have a cell phone. But I gave one to these story characters, trying to make them look hip and sophisticated and a little ahead of the curve. How hip could they have looked if they'd had iPads?

At the time this story was penned, communication by email was limited, so the story people had to use a fax machine. Twitter and Facebook didn't exist, so social media weren't a part of the story. Not too many blogs existed either. How time flies. And how things change in 7 or 8 years.

I had to decide if I wanted to update the book to take in all of the changes in our society or just leave it as I wrote it. I finally decided to leave it alone. I've made a few revisions to tighten here and there, have corrected some flaws that existed and have changed some dialogue to something I thought might be more effective. Otherwise, the book remains as I wrote it.

More to come…

Anna

Back to School, and Then Some…

It's here again. Back to school. I work in retail in my real job, so daily I'm seeing the gamut of back-to-school shopping. I can't keep from thinking how it used to be when parents prepared their kiddies to return to school for a new year. We set out with a notebook and a few pencils. If something else was needed, the teacher would send a note home saying, "Little Jeffery needs a workbook. Please send 50-cents."

And when we moved up to high school, we had to have a pen as well as pencils. Do you remember those days when in the middle of an English paper, your fountain pen decided to deposit a big un-erasable blue or black blob in the middle of your paper? Or the nib split and the thing refused to write at all anymore? I realize I'm dating myself here. No one even knows what a fountain pen is nowadays. However, I did see a feature on TV about someone who collects fountain pens. Some of them are worth tens of thousands as collector's items.

Going through some boxes of things to discard the other day, I ran across two papers I had written with a fountain pen in high school. They were character studies of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth I wrote in an English class. I had written both papers with blue fountain pen ink and the teacher had written a comment that the writing was very good. Not the words, but writing in ink with no errors or cross-outs. She did mention the characterizations, too, but she appeared to be more impressed that I had struggled through that many pages without one of those big blue blobs. LOL

I'm trying to remember when schools started handing out lists to stores of things the kids were required to bring. It's almost robotic. The parents enter the store, pluck a list from a kiosk designed especially for the lists for the different schools or classes, and go buy what's on it. They don't seem to question or argue about the need.

And what a list it is. I might be wrong, but I think the cheapest one kid can get off is around $50. I can visualize someone spending hundreds of dollars if they have more than one kid.

Good grief, school supplies could cost as much as an iPhone! ….. And that brings me to another question. Is there a teenager anywhere, or even a pre-teen, who doesn't have an iPhone? Or something like it? And what's up with two kids who are standing beside each other texting each other? Why can't they simply look at each other and talk?

I don't know at what point the world left me so far behind. But I do know this. I'm not sure the world is that much better off.

Anna

Starting a New One…

I've been thinking about Book #2 of the Texas Royalty series for about two months now, sort of trying to get into the heads of the characters. So this week, I sat down and started to put a few words on paper.

In many ways, creating people  is a fun part of writing a book. Since my books are character-driven stories, I give the story people a lot of thought. My heroes are all alpha men who have to be heroic, even if they sometimes aren't that likeable at first blush. Luke McRae in THE LOVE OF A COWBOY, for instance. My heroines have to have the strength of character to be worthy of the heroic hero, which is sometimes more challenging than creating the hero.

I usually start by building the hero's family tree. I try to take it back two or three generations. In that span of time, a lot can happen to alter and re-make the lives of family members. My books are contemporaries, so I have to address in my mind the different historical and political events that influenced my hero's ancestors as well as current events. Because indirectly, those things would influence how he was raised and the environment in which he lives in the present.

For example, hero Bob might have a grandfather who could have been at Pearl Harbor, or might have been a soldier in WWII. Or he might have been a casualty of WWII. If so, this occurrence might have left Bob's grandfather's widow less well off and she became a penny-pincher. Thus, it might influence how she raised Bob's  mother or father, which would then influence Bob in some small way.

Or Bob might have a father who's an embittered Viet Nam vet addicted to drugs and alcohol, which would bring yet another set of challenges  into Bob's life and influence his attitude. …..  Or someone in his family might have a lingering or fatal disease, which would bring something different to his life.  Or maybe one of his relatives won the lottery!  There are also natural disasters to consider. You get the idea.

Unfortunately, I'm not one of those storytellers who can just pluck an idea out of the air and build a story. All of my stories are rooted in characterization. From there, the synergy, where one ingredient evolves from another, GMC (goal, motivation, conflict) and plot all come together  organically. My story people are grounded in realism. I feel it makes them more interesting and gives them more depth. It also supports the premise from which I write. I wish I could write fantasy, which is so popular now, but it just doesn't come to me.

So there you have it. My book skeleton. And hopefully, by the time I'm finished with all of this fussing, I'll have the makeup of the story people fixed in my head and can move forward. Hopefully, those pesky characters won't jump up and surprise me on page 300 and cause me to have to re-write the whole book.

If you're still reading this, I know most of your are probably groaning and rolling your eyes by now, and thinking I'm crazy. In fact, as I write about this, I'm starting to think I'm crazy. But this process isn't as convoluted and confusing as you might think and it doesn't require as much detail as it seems to when describing it.

I should add that I don't consider myself an expert and am not trying to tell anyone else this is the way to approach beginning a book, but after sixteen books, I've sort of accidentally developed an almost system that works most of the time.

Wow. And that sentence falls into the same category as a "definite maybe." LOL

Anna

Quick, give me air…

Last night when I got into my car at 11:07 p.m. after grocery shopping, the temperature was 97 degrees. I literally exhaled a gasp.

In North Central Texas, we're over 25 days and counting of triple-digit temperatures. Everything outside is crispy and starting to turn brown. The whole outside looks like it could catch fire any minute. And as those of you who have been receiving my newsletter know, we had a range fire near our home a few years ago.

My husband is struggling to save the plants with targeted watering three times a day, but we aren't even making an effort on the grass. With no end to the heat in sight, we fear it's a battle we couldn't win. Not even considering the waste of water, I can't imagine what it would do to our water bill. What's happening with the electric bill is bad enough.

I'm starting to feel like I live in Arizona. Or southern Nevada.  There, many homeowners don't even have grass. They have gravel and stone in their yards instead. That's starting to look pretty good to me.

But I digress. This post really isn't about the weather. It's about air conditioning, which all of us take for granted nowadays.

When I was growing up in West Texas, we had no "refrigerated air conditioning." (That's what we used to call it.)  …..  Daytime temperatures were blazing hot, but nighttime temps usually cooled down. Still, we had a swamp cooler mounted in one of the windows and sometimes it was effective and sometimes not. For those who aren't familiar with swamp coolers, what it amounts to is a big metal box insulated with straw or some other product that water will pass through, surrounding a big fan. This works pretty well in dry climates, but would be miserable in humid climates, such as North Central Texas.

What I recall is it usually made so much noise we couldn't hold a conversation in the same room and sometimes if the thing wasn't working right, it threw drops of water out into the room, making everything wet.

The concept of a swamp cooler is centuries old, going all the way back to ancient Romans and Persians. Even that long ago, those who lived in desert climes figured out how to stay cool, even without electricity.

I visited Scotty's Castle in Death Valley once. That building was cooled by water passing over a rock wall, which made the room almost cold. Again, no electricity. I even wrote about that concept, sort of, in SALVATION, TEXAS.

Air conditioning as we know it first began to transform movie theaters in the thirties. Frequently, attending a movie was the only opportunity some folks had for just cooling off on a hot summer day. And in transforming movie theaters, you could say cool air also transformed movies, period. Increased and regular movie attendance spurred the making of more movies. Eventually employers discovered workers were more productive if they were more comfortable.

I lived in the Pacific Northwest for many years. One of the many things I enjoyed there was life without air conditioning. There, it rarely got hot enough, long enough to suffer much. I got used to living without that blowing air, which was nice. My contacts didn't dry out and my nose wasn't stuffy.

How about you? Do you live with or without air conditioning?

Anna