Thursday, March 2, 2023

My Time Writing Down the Bones with Natalie Goldberg, Part 2, by Diane Bator

 

Book 2, Dead Man's Doll

Since starting the virtual Writing Down the Bones course with Natalie Goldberg, I find myself slowing down. Feeling the snow on my face as I did with my kids when they were young. Laughing when I find fluffy, white turkey feathers that have made their way from the costume hanging in the upper lobby at work on my desk a floor below.

I find myself taking 10 minutes to myself a couple times a day to write. My topics? The walk I took to the coffee shop one day in the wind and finding a clean, crisp twenty dollar bill that hadn't blown away yet on the sidewalk. The taste of the Americano I bought and how I loathed that taste for years even though I'd always loved the comforting scent. To write about the puffy flakes of snow falling or the icy pellets tapping on the glass to be let in.

I find that I'm focusing on details more lately where before I mostly focused on the dialogue in my books. Even while editing my latest work in progress, All That Shimmers, I've added more details than in any of my previous books.

So far, I've finished the first three out of four sections in the course. I've also read three of Natalie's writing books and was able to join in a Zoom call with my mentor herself! I swear I barely listened to the first few minutes, I was just in awe by the experience. She was gracious enough to answer questions from the group for the entire hour.

Which of her books have I read so far?
  • Writing Down the Bones
  • Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life
  • Thunder & Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer's Craft
If you're looking for a little inspiration to improve your own writing, I'd highly recommend any of them. Just as they helped with my upcoming book, All That Shimmers, Glitter Bay Book 3 that comes out in May. Watch for the new cover next month!

You can find my work at https://bwlpublishing.ca/bator-diane/

Happy Reading. Happy Writing!
Diane

Polished prose: Why copyediting matters by donalee Moulton


Visit my BWL Author Page.

                                                        
When you’ve finished the first draft of a book, a weight is lifted. Some writers do a dance of joy. But even as we celebrate an important milestone, we remind ourselves that there is more work to be done. The book needs to be read – line by line – for consistency, conciseness, and clarity. That is the heart of copyediting.

Copyediting is like minor surgery, but the impact can be significant. At this stage, structural changes and in-depth revisions are not necessary. They have already been done. This next step in the editing process brings us from 30,000 feet into the weeds. It’s about polishing prose.

Editors Canada offers the following overview for stylistic editing, or line editing. Many consider this copyediting. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what we call it as long as we do it.

Stylistic Editing

Editing to clarify meaning, ensure coherence and flow, and refine the language. It includes:

  • eliminating jargon, clichés, and euphemisms
  • establishing or maintaining the language level appropriate for the intended audience, medium, and purpose
  • adjusting the length and structure of sentences and paragraphs
  • establishing or maintaining tone, mood, style, and authorial voice or level of formality

What’s a Copyeditor to do

Here are six areas of focus to help ensure our writing resonates with our audience and achieves our purpose.

Check for:

Clarity
  • Long sentences
  • Big words
  • Uncommon words
  • Meaning can’t be misunderstood
  • Tone
  • Readability

Transitions
  • Between sentences
  • Between paragraphs
  • Movement in time, place, subject
  • Usually short transition words like however, so, then

Concreteness
  • Facts and figures
  • Specific language
  • Action verbs
  • Active voice

Repetitiveness
  • Ideas
  • Words
  • Summaries

Completeness
  • 5Ws and How
  • Emphasis on why
  • Unanswered questions

Flow
  • Logical
  • Smooth
  • Read out loud

I’ll give the last word to fantasy writer Patricia Fuller:

Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

New Releases for April 2023 by BWL Publishing Inc.

 TO PURCHASE ONE (OR ALL) OF OUR APRIL RELEASES VISIT OUR WEBSITE

https://bookswelove.net


Click the link below to download BWL's free novel for April 2023 



Mending Jodie's Heart by Sheila Claydon

Click this link https://bookswelove.net/claydon-sheila/


When Laken Miller moves into the apartment above Vintage Sage, it seems all of Glitter Bay goes crazy, especially when Laken suspects her new home is haunted. Just when she thinks she’s the victim of mass hysteria, she finds her ex-husband’s body in the courtyard.


Can Laken prove her innocence before the local police cuff her with a different kind of glittering bracelet?

* * * * *



Adam Norcross has recently returned from a foreign assignment. Bent on settling his mother’s estate, Norcross is interrupted by his boss for a new task. Find RCMP Sergeant Bethany Leith. He also wants to know how her career has gone so wrong she is suspended.

When Adam tracks Beth to her parent’s farm in Saskatchewan they are drawn into a suspicious death investigation on her family’s land. Norcross knows it’s murder. The victim is someone Nick Leith, Beth’s father, has a troubled history with. What about the archaeologist team digging on the same property, are they involved?

 


Norcross will use every tool at his disposal to solve the murder and help Bethany Leith. Including navigating his way through the political intrigue surrounding the case against her.

* * * * * 

Helen Castrel has just arrived in Victoria, British Columbia, from England and she hires Baxter Davenport of the Davenport & Son Detective Agency to go with her to Dawson City and help find her second oldest brother, David, whom she hasn’t seen since she was eleven years old.

David had been trouble to the family since he was young and was sent to Canada as a remittance man ten years ago. The last communication her father, Charles Castrel, received from David was late last summer when he sent a telegram from Victoria, British Columbia, saying he was on his way to the Klondike gold rush at Dawson City. Since then Charles Gastrel has heard nothing from his son, not even a letter stating where his remittance money was to be sent. Helen needs to find David to make sure he’s alive and to deliver a message from their father.

 


Baxter Davenport isn’t sure about travelling north with two women. He will have a job to do and doesn’t need to be looking after them. Plus, he doesn’t like the idea that Helen Castrel is excited about being a sleuth along with him. He soon finds out that both women can look after themselves.

Mattie Lewis, Helen Castrel’s lady’s maid, insisted on accompanying Helen, not only to look after her but because she has worked for the family for years and remembers David better than Helen does. She also has her own motive for wanting to find David.

The three head north armed with an old photograph and a recent description they obtained from David’s former landlady. They arrive in Dawson City where the gold rush is in full swing. There they are challenged by deceit, fraud, and danger in their quest to find David.


* * * * *

Mortal Magic (Beyond the Magic Book 2)

THEO EGAN has been sent through the portal to investigate an illegal use of magic.  And—since it’s forbidden to cross to the mortal world without permission from the Council of Master Witches—this might be Theo’s only chance to find his missing brother.


LACEY DENT, a mortal journalist, has discovered a mysterious commune. When she meets Theo, she knows he can help her get her big story.

She also knows that, in her own way, she can help him. When she suggests an alliance Theo is reluctant. He’s always relied on his natural magic and believed that mortals had none. Besides, he can’t let Lacey find out who he really is.


(Waiting on cover from Pandora)

Can Lacey—with her imagination, courage and resilience—convince him that her

special brand of “mortal” magic is the key to their survival?

March New Releases for BWL Publishing Inc.

 





Click to purchase Nokota® Voices 

What do you do when you want to contribute to something so much bigger than yourself? How do you discover something you know is inside you, but it sits deep and unreachable? How do you get this special part of you to the surface so you can offer it to others?

You strike out on your own with your faithful dog and beloved horses and drive across the stretches of North Dakota to find the true meaning of family in a place that’s been waiting for you – a humble horse farm where Nokota® horses fly across the prairie. And then, you let the horses show you.

Come ride the Nokota® wave with this story of self-discovery, inner magic, and heritage as seventeen-year-old Paisley Noon discovers her eclectic extended family living in a forgotten little town in North Dakota. On these open plains pound the hoofbeats of a rare and magnificent horse breed. The Nokota®. Narrowly escaping extinction twice, these descendants of Sitting Bull’s war ponies relentlessly call for their families – their people. When the Lakota neighbor sweeps into Paisley’s life like the prairie winds through the manes of his small herd of preservation-bred Nokota® horses, Paisley soon discovers her purpose lies with them. The enchanting voices these horses carry have whispered to her for some time. She hears their call. She just needs to know what they’re saying.

 


 

Click to purchase Hung Out to Die

Meet Riel Brava. Attractive. Razor-sharp. Ambitious. And something much more.

Riel, raised in Santa Barbara, California, has been transplanted to Nova Scotia where he is CEO of the Canadian Cannabis Corporation. It’s business as usual until Riel finds his world hanging by a thread. Actually, several threads. It doesn’t take the police long to determine all is not as it appears – and that includes Riel himself.

 

Pulled into a world not of his making, Riel resists the hunt to catch a killer. Resistance is futile. Detective Lin Raynes draws the reluctant CEO into the investigation, and the seeds of an unexpected and unusual friendship are sown. Raynes and Riel concoct a scheme to draw a confession out of the killer, but that plan is never put into place. Instead, Riel finds himself on the butt end of a rifle in the ribs and a long drive to the middle of Nowhere, Nova Scotia.

 

Why would someone want Norm dead, innocuous Norman Bedwell? A motive for murder is buried somewhere, and self-professed psychopath and cannabis production manager, Riel Brava, works with Detective Lin Raynes, aided by endless exotic coffee blends, to find it. As the noose tightens on an increasingly smaller number of suspects, who knew finding a murderer would be so simple? In the end, of course, it isn’t. It is a chunderfuck. Oh, and, Riel has one helluva wife.

Pour yourself a cup of Ethiopian yirgacheffe and savor this often humorous, fast-paced whodunit. – Rand Gaynor, author of New Old Stories

  


Click to purchase Potatoes and Pink Vodka

 

Ever since their first writing class together, Diane Dew has been Mindy’s literary nemesis. Try as she might, Mindy’s successes could never surpass those of the prissy, perfect rich girl.

 

Mindy isn’t shocked when Diane’s latest novel squeezes out a good review from a notoriously tough critic. However, she is shocked to receive a message from Diane out of the blue. Her life, it turns out, is far from perfect; her success has resulted in the online attention of a hateful, anonymous stalker.

 

When danger seeps from computer screen to reality, Mindy finds herself aiding Diane in her search for the truth. Mindy also faces unending resentment from family due to ghosts from the past. Eventually, she learns that the villain of a story depends on who reads it, and love stories often come out of the blue. 


 

Click to purchase Rum Bullets and Cod Fish 

The story takes place in 1924 during Prohibition. It follows the undercover investigation officer, Jerome Conway, as he seeks to find out the ringleaders behind the illegal importation of liquor from St. Pierre and Miquolon and the Caribbean for distribution to the US mob.

The year is 1924 and Prohibition is spawning a new breed of criminal. Rum runners. Jerome Conway is the undercover investigation officer whose job it is to uncover the ringleaders behind the illegal importation of liquor from St. Pierre, Miquolon, and the Caribbean destined for distribution to the US based mob. His task is a complicated and dangerous one which leads him into the dark corners of illegal activities and the underbelly of society. If he is to be successful in his quest and emerge unscathed, Conway will need to be smarter and quicker than the felons he is chasing.

 

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Why Does Writing a Novel Remind Me of Pizza? By Connie Vines #BWLAuthorBlog,

My creation!
Like most writers, I get excited about beginning a new project.

I select my favorite pens, a fresh college line notebook, 3 x 5 lined cards, and my 'new favorite coffee mug. I even set up my playlist for the main characters (music he/she like listening to).  I might even have a rough draft of my book trailer in place.

Then I sit down at my laptop (yes, I'm still a hardcore PC person), however, my laptop has a dictation feature which seems to work well for free-flow thought.

Why do I think about pizza 🍕?

You begin with a blank computer screen white piece of paper. And as I stated in my opening paragraph I have everything in order.




To begin your pizza dough you arrange your ingredients: Yeast, Water, Flour, Oil, Sugar, Salt, and Cornmeal (for dusting the bottom of the crust). You may even wish to add garlic or Italian seasoning to the flour.

You will have your favorite bowl handy. 

Like a novel, pizza dough will require kneading, resting, and kneading again.

Your pizza dough should be shaggy and lumpy, to begin with, but if you've kneaded it for a while it should be slightly tacky to the touch. If your dough doesn't ooze or sag when you hold it up, it's another sign it is well kneaded.

It's not unusual for my plot and opening scene to be a little lumpy at the beginning. However, with work, an unending supply of hot coffee, and pacing, my story takes shape. 

I may take a day or two off to let the ideas rise to the surface. Then I'm back at the computer again.

A couple of chapters later I realized my story may need a bit of extra seasoning, and several new toppings or I may need to toss out the pie and start again.

But hopefully, like the glutamate in pizza toppings, my stories cause my readers' brains to get excited--and crave more of my novels!


Happy Reading and "gustare la pizza",

Connie




https://bookswelove.net/vines-connie/

My books are on SALE until March 3rd (at Smashwords) click the link above :-)






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