Showing posts with label Western Romance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Western Romance. Show all posts

Saturday, April 2, 2016

JO-JO THE CLOWN - AN UNLIKELY HERO - MARGARET TANNER


 
BUY FROM AMAZON




HEROES COME IN ALL SHAPES AND SIZES – Margaret Tanner



            Jo-Jo looked into the mirror and his eyes brimmed with tears.  His heart was shattered into a thousand fragments, and the bitterness of his loss was overwhelming. He was afraid.  The same sickening sensation of fear he had always felt even as a child, but the crowds were waiting for him to put on a show.

            A clown could not be sad or frightened.  He must laugh, joke and bounce around as if life was one big happy party. No one bothered to look beyond the large red nose or painted face.  If they did so, they would see a man overcome with fear, and slowly dying of grief because Maisie was no longer with him.

            A partnership of thirty years dissolved in a few cruel moments, under the wheels of a hit-run driver’s car. Poor Maisie didn’t stand a chance, not with some drunken maniac skidding around the corner with smoke belching from his wheels.  Lightening fast on his feet as always, he nimbly jumped out of the way, but Maisie, with her varicose veins and hip replacements, was ponderously slow.

            Jo-Jo once aspired to become a jockey.  He was small and wiry enough, but the grotesque lump growing out of his spine like a giant football, and his fear of failure, put paid to those ambitions. His early years were spent in a misery of fear and ridicule.  Children laughed and taunted him, but he was too afraid to stand up for himself. Finally, he decided if he was going to be the butt of jokes and taunts he might as well get paid for it.

            The bitter years of suffering took their toll, and his mind became almost as twisted as the body he so despised.  He longed for, prayed and pleaded with doctors and with God to make him normal, but they never listened.  The older he got the uglier and more fearful he became.

            One day he met Maisie.  She was a plump, darling woman who looked beyond the ugliness of the body and found the real man. She bolstered his confidence and allayed his fears. 

His savior had golden curls, baby blue eyes and fat rosy cheeks that wobbled when she laughed. She possessed melon like breasts, huge backside and fat stumpy legs, but there was not a mean bone in Maisie’s ample body.  Her smile was angelic, her soul that of a saint.  She was a guiding star of goodness, leading him out of the black tunnel of fear and self-loathing into the sunlight. Two fat tears dribbling down his painted cheeks, plopped on to his ruffled collar.

“Never let your audience down,” Maisie always said.

They were a class act, the skinny, sad sack clown and his chubby, pink haired fairy Godmother assistant. Stars of the circus, but how could he face the crowd without her strength and support?  He was terrified. The old cowardice had returned with a vengeance.

            Everyone thought them an odd couple, both on and off the stage. Maisie knew that beneath the clown suit, beat the heart of a sensitive man, and only he knew, the layers of tulle and flab hid a beautiful woman.

            He could hear the crowd chanting.  “We want Jo-Jo. We want Jo-Jo.”

            He scrubbed the tears away with the back of one hand and slapped some more powder over his makeup to hide the smears. With his heart weighed down with grief, he gritted his teeth, mounted his mini bicycle and with a large colorful beach ball balanced on his head, peddled out from behind the curtains.

            “Where’s the old fat fairy?” yelled a kid in the front row.  Jo-Jo felt like ramming the candy stick the boy was devouring down his throat.  He did nothing of the kind, just tossed the ball up in the air and somersaulted off his bike.

“Do it again, Jo-Jo, do it again.” The littlies squealed with delight, while the rest of the audience clapped and stamped their feet.  Jo-Jo continued his routine and his heavy heart lifted with the excitement of the crowd, as he gave the performance of his life.

“I’m doing this for you, Maisie love,” he whispered.  “I’m doing this for you.”

The laughter suddenly changed into shrieks of horror, as a lioness turned on the ringmaster and knocked him to the ground with one powerful leap.  The big cat’s ugly fangs were bared into a snarl as she prepared to attack.

It had been sheer stupidity separating her from her cubs and expecting her to perform so soon after their birth.  The trainers pleaded with the circus owners, but to no avail, they had no compassion for either man or beast working for them.  Money and profit was all they cared about.

Jo-Jo jumped on to his mini bike and rode between the lioness and the fallen ringmaster. The enraged animal turned her ferocity on to him.  He peddled furiously. This was the most important ride of his life and any mistake would cost him dearly. From the corner of one eye he saw the ringmaster crawling to safety, and even as the beast charged towards him, Jo-Jo somersaulted out of the way.

A net dropping down from the roof of the big-top imprisoned the lion, and the trainers dragged her away.  There was silence for a moment, then the crowds began cheering. 

Jo-Jo the frightened clown was a hero.


Margaret Tanner writes historical romance and western historical romance.
Her latest novel from Books We Love - Adam's Frontier Bride, is a Western.

Fear almost crushes Tommy Lindsay when she arrives in South Dakota to live on her uncle’s isolated ranch.  She will need all her courage and daring to survive the hard times ahead.
 Adam Munro is a wealthy rancher who thought he only wanted a presentable wife who would give him heirs.   When he meets Tommy, he is smitten. Can he ever hope to capture the heart of this beautiful English rose?

 
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AHTA5GM/ref=pe_385040_118058080_TE_M1T1DP


Wednesday, September 23, 2015

From Pantser to Plotter by Victoria Chatham





Every writer falls into one of these categories, some writers may be comprised of a little of both. When I started writing I was definitely a pantser, the type of writer who sits in front of a computer and goes with the flow. As long as I had my characters, the rest would take care of itself, right? Well, not exactly.
My first book held marked similarities to raising my first child. Regardless of what I thought, I hadn’t got a clue what I was doing. To say I struggled with that first book is putting it mildly. At one point I had followed every lead my heroine gave me and finished up writing about her grandmother in pre-war Montreal
and how, pregnant and alone, she ended up in war-torn France fighting with the resistance forces. Great stuff, even though I’m blowing my own trumpet here.
However, that was not the story I was writing. I was writing a contemporary western romance.and badly at that. Had I taken the time to consider more than just my characters I would have saved myself a great deal of time. I’m not a fast writer, and when I realized how much time I’d wasted, I went back to the drawing board as it were.
Yes, I had my characters. They usually present themselves to me fully formed. I know their names and what they look like. Next is to fill in their character questionnaire, even complete a character interview. I know my characters well by this stage but throwing them on the page and expecting things to happen just didn’t work. I found writing historical romance or fiction easier in that I simply looked up the year (god bless Google), to see what major events were taking place world-wide and went from there for my background but it still wasn’t exactly a plot, more of an idea.
When I started writing my soon-to-be-released contemporary western romance, Loving That Cowboy, I soon ran into a brick wall. I’m sure many of you will know what that feels like. The words were just not there. It wasn’t writer’s block per se, more like this writer’s ineptitude. After one very frustrating day when I wanted to File 13 all ten pages I’d managed to produce, I was ready to give up. That was when I became a plotter.
I sat down and started from scratch, looking at my two leading characters and figuring out how to get them together and listed dozens of ‘what ifs?’. All that took time, but as I reached each plot point I noted it on a pink post-it and stuck it on my white board. Very pretty it looked too. Not only that, there was great satisfaction in removing the post-its as I reached each plot point. Now I really felt that I was getting somewhere. Sure there was a fair amount of rewriting on the way, but that is inevitable.
I also went back to several of my craft books, especially Deborah Dixon's Goal, Motivation & Conflict. She recommends watching six specific movies to illustrate her lessons. Great. I love movies. I spent a week watching some of those she recommended and some I chose to work with to determine how much I'd learned. I wrote notes, I went back to the book Save the Cat for more on plotting within the three act structure and finished up that week revisiting Techniques of the Selling Writer. Thank goodness I held on to those books when I packed for my last move.
Having tried both methods, I think from now on I’ll be doing much more plotting instead of relying on my characters to take me somewhere. How about you? Are you a plotter or a pantser, or maybe a bit of each?


For more information about Victoria go to:

www.victoriachatham.webs.com





Sunday, February 10, 2013

COWBOY KISSES

I discovered there is a restaurant in Mahattan, New York (around Third Ave. and 27th Street), named the Rodeo Bar and Grill. . .Honky Tonk.

Oh, so perfect!  What more could a western contemporary romance novelist desire in a dining experience?

Now that I've set you up with a lovely teaser, it would be darn right unfair of me to keep all those Cowboy Kisses for myself.  Wouldn't it?

Make at home version:


16 jumbo shrimp, peeled and deveined

16 pickled jalapenos, seeded, washed and sliced in half

16 slicces of bacon (Oscar Mayer Turkey Bacon is a good choice, too).
 
Toothpicks Chipotle Dipping Sauce:
1 cup mayonnaise (I favor low-fat)1-2 chipotle in adobo, seeded and minced
1/2 lime, squeezed

Preheat oven to 425F.
Place a shript inside the jalapeno and then wrap woth bacon.  Insert 1 or 2 toothpicks to secure.  Do the same with all the shrimp.

Place in a baking pan.  Bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes. Then broil for 2-3 minutes until crispy.

Serve hot or room temperature with chipotle dipping sauce.

For the finished dipping sauce:
Place all ingredients in food processor (I use my blender) and pulse until combined.  You will still have small pieces of chipotle but dipping sauce will turn pink.

Serve with shrimp and beverage of choice.

I will be blogging at Books We Love again in an hour or so.
In the mean time, feel free to follow me on Twitter!  http://twitter.com/connie_vines
or read my culinary blog: www.naughtynibbles4your.wordpress.com
I am also at Pinterest: under novelsbyconniev

Remember Lynx Maddox will be dropping by in a bit for an exclusive interview.
I will also be telling my own personal  'western stories' and shaing photos.

"Courage is fear that has said its prayers." ~ Karl Barth.

Connie

 

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