Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Don't Write What You Know by Victoria Chatham
Monday, July 17, 2023
The Characters in the Stories by Janet Lane Walters #BWLAuthor #MFRWAuthor #writing #characters
Once the Idea is in order and the Plot is decided upon, the characters must be found for your stories. There are a number of ways characters have ventured into my stories. The oddest one happened about a month ago. As I was falling asleep, a voice spoke in my head. "Hi. I'm Valentina Heartly. With a name like that I should write a romance novel." I haven't found a story for her as yet but the ideas are slowly forming.
Often when developing characters, I use Astrology. Now I don't cast their entire charts but I look at the Sun sign, the Moon sign and the Rising sign and combine these to make a person come to life. Then I use one of the many baby name books to find the right name.
Sometimes the characters are well established and are part of a series. At present I'm working on Murder and Iced tea staring Katherine Miller, now married. Along with Robespierre, he Maine Coon cat, I know her almost as well as I know myself. This time I am using many of the characters from the other stories in the series. There are also new ones. There's the Mayor, his wife, his two children and his "yes" man.
I once found a character in a research book on Egypt from a single sentence. "Mermeshu was his name." Amazingly he took form and set forth on a time travel story.
How do you find and name your characters? Sometimes, for me, this takes the msot time but I love Plots and they come fairly easy.
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Tuesday, January 31, 2023
Butterflies from my window by Priscilla Brown
The window next to my desk overlooks a veronica (hebe) bush in the garden border. This flowers almost year-round, and is popular with bees. However, today there are no bees, but there is a pretty butterfly I haven't seen before hovering around the blossom. Interested in the newcomer, I switch from the document I'm working on, and check the internet hoping to discover its name.
I am disappointed to learn that it is a common brown. Apparently it is 'common' in south-east Australia, which is roughly where I live, though my area might be too far north for its usual habitat.. Perhaps it is looking for new digs. I do feel that whoever names these attractive creatures might show more imagination.
For a couple of my contemporary romance novels, I needed to research butterflies. I always enjoy research, but sometimes I have to make myself stop. There's a need to compromise, perhaps to be less precise, making sure the information I'm using is essential to the narrative. In Where the Heart is, Cristina describes the butterflies in Cameron’s sub-tropical Caribbean garden as ‘neon-clothed’. For Silver Linings, I found out far more than the story needed about butterflies in the Amazon area, fascinating but I am not writing a guidebook!
And now, my garden butterfly has moved on, two bees are circling the veronica bush, and I must temporarily give up watching nature and get some work done!
Enjoy your reading, and best wishes from contemporary romance author Priscilla.
https://bwlpublishing.ca
Saturday, June 19, 2021
Storm Chaser? Not Me? by Helen Henderson
Windmaster Legend by Helen Henderson |
For many years at every conference, lecture, and workshop I attended, the most often preached guidance was "Tell a good story." With "Write what you know," so close a second that it was just as often in first place as second.
While I have written tales based in the past and say I like to fly with dragons or hang with mages, I'm sorry to admit that in reality I don't. Research helps as does my imagination. But that isn't really knowing. So add "experienced" to part of the definition of knowing and it is easier to follow the rule.
One setting (or event) that both myself and my characters have experienced is a storm.
Blizzards from my childhood and later years provided the inspiration for the sandstorm that trapped a character in a cave in Windmaster Golem.
Winds howled outside the cave. Just beyond the entrance, columns of sand wheeled and pirouetted. Relliq watched the otherworldly dance. Anger mingled with dread. Desert storms were known to last for days. Some lasted season after season until the dunes swallowed up entire cities.
The characters in my current work in progress have to survive a different type of storm -- a tornado. When I started writing the scene my personal experience was primarily with blizzards, thunderstorms, and hurricanes. Superstorm Sandy was front and center in my memory as I didn't live that far from where she made landfall and had just finished archiving the photographs of its aftermath.
Although I now live in what is called the Dixie Tornado Alley, my experience with tornados was limited to local news coverage of the Christmas Eve tornado in Mississippi and our town warning sirens going off whenever the national weather service issues a tornado alert for our county. After the first alert and two hours of "wall to wall" non-stop reporting with the storms going farther south, not much thought was given them on later alerts. Then came Mother Day 2021.
The local news broke into regular programming with details of a tornado
sighted in our town and the warning to immediately go to our safe room.
My husband got out a map and started tracking the tornadoes path by the
roads announced. After I put my mother in an inside room, I alternated
between a sky watch and the news with its minute by minute radar
reports. Luckily the tornado didn't zig right towards my side of town and dissipated
before reaching an apartment complex and the three nearby schools.
Considering the weather events experienced in the world of Windmaster will I become a storm chaser in my real life? After the excitement of what could have been a close encounter with a tornado, my answer is an emphatic "No."
To purchase the Windmaster Novels: BWL
Find out more about me and my novels at Journey to Worlds of Imagination.
Follow me online at Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter or Website.
Helen Henderson lives in western Tennessee with her husband. While she doesn’t have any pets in residence at the moment, she often visits a husky who has adopted her as one the pack.
Saturday, November 14, 2020
To Russia with Love! by Sheila Claydon
Golden Girl, the first book I wrote, featured in my previous blog when I demonstrated how book covers have changed over the years. This time I am talking about my second book, Empty Hearts, a story set in Russia. This book's covers have metamorphosed even more.
I was still writing under the pseudonym Anne Beverley at the time so you can imagine my chagrin when the book was published with an incorrect spelling. For those of you who know the story of Anne of Green Gables, I am very much in agreement with her insistence that it should always be 'Anne with an E."
From there Empty Hearts followed the same path as my previous book and was published as a Retro romance under the name of Sheila Claydon writing as Anne Beverley (fortunately with the correct spelling!) And it was given an altogether more attractive cover.
Then things became even more interesting because now, in its final form, published as a Vintage Romance by BWL Publishing, Empty Hearts has two covers, and I'm not sure how this happened. Not that it matters at all because the story is the same in each one, but my favourite image is the first one because it is closer to one of the best things that happens in the book. The little boy, Peter, is an important part of the story, and if you would like to read about him and the image the cover portrays, then click on Book Snippets under the blog heading on my Website. As you can see, ice and skating feature a lot in cold and wintry Moscow!
I am ashamed to say I wrote this book without having ever visited Russia! Instead I used information and a map from an article in National Geographic Magazine! Foolhardy, arrogant or just plain naive? I'm not sure. It's certainly not something I would do now. Every book I've written since then is set in a place I've visited so I can be sure to get most of my facts right. Having said that, I have spent time in Russia since I wrote Empty Hearts, and while I was there I decided I didn't need to be too embarrassed about my writing behaviour after all as my research (or rather the information in the National Geographic article) was pretty solid!
Empty Hearts...the story
By trying to make a new start, Holly just may find a family of her own.
Holly is struggling to pick up the pieces of her shattered life when she is offered the chance to travel to Moscow to research a new book. That she will also have to look after diplomat Dirk Van Allen’s five-year-old son, Peter, seems a small price to pay...until she meets them both.
Determined to find a way into Peter’s stony little heart, Holly thinks that softening his father’s attitude towards her might help. When Dirk sees through her ploy and starts to play her at her own game, she realizes she is way out of her depth with this mysterious, intriguing man.
Monday, August 31, 2020
Writing the Weather by Priscilla Brown
The weather may be the most widespread topic of conversation in areas where the weather is changeable. On a chilly wet day, we may exchange comments with strangers under umbrellas at the bus stop; or start a conversation about the heat as we drop onto a shared seat after jogging around the park.
One of my personal writing-related files contains sections in which I jot down words or phrases which interest me. I use the three hand-written pages of weather-associated words for ideas, to edit and re-write as necessary for the weather to fit or augment the plot and the characters, and to help me avoid cliches such as lashing rain, howling gale.
Those weather conditions in which we situate our people are usually there for a crucial reason: have them enjoy, or struggle against, to stop them from doing something, to put them in danger, to act as a source of tension between them, and ultimately to move the story along. Such circumstances create atmosphere, physical and/or emotional, affecting characters' moods, influencing the plot. For several of the weather episodes in my novels, I've needed to do considerable research, which for me is always an enjoyable task. I do some on line from weather and news reports, and from reading and viewing local information, and where possible from visiting the area.
During a trip some years ago to the Eastern Caribbean, I had no thought of setting a novel in a location entirely exotic for me; the contemporary romance Where the Heart Is emerged later. While I gave Cristina a dreamy Caribbean beach (plus a dreamy man) in gorgeous weather, I also involved her in a hurricane with a perilous wet and windy mountain rescue by motorbike. I didn't experience the extreme weather event I put her and the motorbike rider through, but I did gain background knowledge valuable for future use. And in this story, the sub-tropical climate contrasts with the temperate spring of her rural Australian home.
As I sign off on this post, the wind is still strong enough to blow a dog off a chain, and tonight will be a two or three dog night. Maybe these are Australian expressions? The number of dogs theoretically (perhaps practically!) to keep you warm in bed.
Hoping your weather is kind to you, Priscilla
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Why I love research—Part 2—Tricia McGill
Find links to all my books on my BWL author page |
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
Why I love research—Tricia McGill
That last sentence later became famous as the "founding charter" of Melbourne.
Visit my web page |
Thursday, March 7, 2019
Solo Writing Retreat by Eileen O'Finlan
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