Conventions, Epiphanies and a Sale!

 I just got back from When Words Collide, a fabulous writer/reader convention in Calgary, where I was a Special Guest. (Because this was the Final Chapter under current management they had not only a slate of Guests of Honor but a second slate of Special Guests, including some like me who would have been Guests of Honor during the Covid years.) I had a lovely time. I gave two readings, taught two workshops, participated in two panels and signed autographs. I met lots of writers, both published and unpublished, at all stages of their writing journey.

The highlight for me was getting to meet and talk to Tanya Huff, whose books I have been a fan of for years. She is funny, wise and an entertaining speaker. I bought her new fantasy book Into the Broken Lands and am halfway through rereading it already.  It's terrific! Buy it. Seriously.

I also had an Aha! moment about one of my own projects. Ironically, it came about because of the workshop I was teaching. I told the participants that during revision it was important to look critically at every scene to see if it advanced plot and character or if it could be cut. "Sometimes," I said, "when we're writing the first draft, we write the next thing that the character does, instead of the next thing that is relevant to the book's plot." I even had a little example that I showed.

Hours later, in my hotel room, it hit me that I had done this EXACT THING in one of my works in progress. The novel has gone through five rounds of revision and every time when I hit this scene I thought, "There's something wrong here," and I added more action, more dialogue in an attempt to make it work INSTEAD OF JUST CUTTING THE DARN THING. This particular novel is currently running about 25 k too long, so now I'm going to be looking to see if there are other chapters I can cut as well. I'm betting there will be.

So that's what I'm working on this week. I hope everyone else who was at the convention is feeling similarly energized and ready to dive into writing!

Oh, and before I go... My publisher, Great Plains, has done a 25% price drop on the the ebook version of my teen werewolf novel, Feral.  If you like Girl Alphas, try it!

17-year-old Chloe fears she's a Dud, a child born to two werewolves who can't change into a wolf. If she's still a Dud by the time she reaches adulthood, she'll be exiled. In the meantime, she's at the bottom of the pack hierarchy and the other teens in her small town make her life miserable.

Then she encounters a feral werewolf with the opposite problem: he's trapped in wolf form. Chloe suspects the feral is her old classmate, Marcus, who everyone believes died along with the rest of his family in a mysterious plane crash. Chloe vows to help Marcus regain his human self because giving up on him would mean admitting possible failure for herself, too. But she must act quickly. Pack law mandates killing ferals.

Buy on Amazon   Kobo   

Creating Tension

This weekend I’m attending When Words Collide, a wonderful writer and reader’s convention in Calgary.  I can’t  wait! I go every year and always learn a lot. In addition I’m going to be on a panel called Creating Tension. Here’s a preview of what I’m going to say:

1.  Hooks and cliffhangers. Everyone knows that your novel should  start with a hook, but it’s even better if every chapter and every scene begins with a mini-hook and ends with a mini-cliffhanger. I grew up reading Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. The chapters always ended with Nancy in trouble of some kind. 

2. Conflict. I know this seems obvious, but, yes, there should be conflict in every scene. Even a quiet scene between two friends can have conflict, provided they both want something different. I once wrote a book where I deliberately gave the heroine a conflict with every other character she encountered.

3.  High stakes, both public and personal stakes. What’s the difference? The public stakes in a thriller might be a madman threatening to blow up a building. The private stakes may be that the heroine’s grandmother is trapped in that very building. Your novel should have both kinds. When revising, try to raise the stakes.

4.  Use the Scene Question (sometimes also called Dramatic question) and Scene Answer to add punch to your scenes. During revision, I hunt for what the scene question is and move it up in the text so that the reader naturally poses this question to themselves.  Sometimes the scene question is quite simple. In a fight scene, it’s Will the protagonist successfully repel this attack? In a different scene it might be something more subtle like: Will the princess persuade her handmaid to spy for her? 

The scene answer should either be No, AND or Yes, BUT therefore complicating matters for the hero even more. For example, in the aforementioned fight scene, the protagonist could lose the fight and wake to find themselves a prisoner. Or the protagonist could win the fight but kill their opponent therefore losing the opportunity to question them about the villain’s plans. Either way, their situation is worse off than at the start of the scene.

If you have any tips, post them in the comments! 

Here Be News

NEW RELEASES

Jeffe Kennedy's erotic, contemporary retelling of The Phantom of the Opera, the MASTER OF THE OPERA serial novel, is now available bundled in print!

An aria for lost souls

Fresh out of college, Christine Davis is thrilled to begin a summer internship at the prestigious Santa Fe Opera House. But on her first day, she discovers that her dream job has a dark side. Beneath the theater, ghostly music echoes through a sprawling maze of passageways. At first, Christy thinks she’s hearing things. But when a tall masked man steps out of the shadows—and into her arms—she knows he’s not a phantom of her imagination. What she can’t deny is that he is the master of her desire. But when her predecessor—a missing intern—is found dead, Christy wonders if she’s playing with fire…

Exclusively from Books A Million

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Now Available as an Audio Book!

YOUR HEART, MY HOME
Sensuous Urban Fantasy Romance
Co-Narrated by Guy Veryzer and Linda Mooney
Length: 6 hrs, 4 min.

They were deadly enemies, until a greater threat made them unwilling allies...and lovers.
Sherandar is the most cunning adversary Quazar has ever faced. He never knows when or where his worst nightmare will strike, but when she does, it's with the single-minded purpose to taunt him. Ridicule him. And to make his life a living hell. Regular cuffs and jail cells can't hold her, yet somehow, someway, Quazar has to bring her reign to a screeching halt.


But when a new enemy makes himself known, and tries to kill both Quazar and Sherandar, the two combatants realize the only way to defeat this deadly threat is to call a temporary truce and join forces.

It isn't until she lies broken, bloodied, and dying in his arms that Quazar realizes she has become more to him than his temporary ally. He has fallen in love with her.

Excerpt and buy links.

OTHER MEMBER NEWS

Nicole Luiken will be attending When Words Collide, the writer/readercon in Calgary, Alberta on August 14-16. She will be doing two panels Genres for YA? and Romance for Teens as well as a Blue-pencil Cafe and will participate in the Mass Autograph Session.