My Shiny New Toy

Here is is.  The shiny new toy I have been waiting weeks to play with.  It is nothing more then a stack of blank paper clipped together, but it has been calling to me for weeks, begging me to scribble on it.  

With all my current WIP's in their requisite places,  I can now pull out that empty, white sheet of paper and start tossing out dialogue, themes, character names, everything I will need to create my next YA contemporary.

It has been over a year since I started on a fresh YA contemporary idea, and I am freakishly excited to start churning out a new one, to tap back into all those wondrously horrid teenage emotions. So here's to plain white paper, a fresh idea, and raging teenage hormones!

 

Cave Dwelling

Welcome to my cave.  It's that zone I go into when I am so consumed with a manuscript that I can't seem to function.  It's dark and kind of small, not a lot of room for external things like TV, or grocery shopping, or laundry, or even dinner on the occasional obsessive nights.   As small as it is, I assure you it is well stocked with ideas, coffee, and an ungodly amount of candy hearts.  Before you ask, yes I do quite frequently spell out cryptic messages with those hearts, and YES most, if not all, of those messages are wholly inappropriate!

I exited said cave briefly today to blog and to restock my coffee supplies.  That required a trip to the store and cursing at an insane amount of incompetent drivers.  Fully caffeinated and having reached my profanity quota for the day, I am heading back in.  I will make room for those of you who also encamped in writing/editing mode.  I will supply the coffee, a vast array of flavored cream, even the occasional left-over box of valentines candy.  I will even edit and critique for you. But you must, absolutely must bring me a bag of candy hearts.  They are fresh out of them at the store. I just ate the last one that said "1-on-1" and I need to finish my latest candy message.

Words with Friends

I have been absent from this blog for a week or so.  But fear not, I come armed with an excuses, or three of them to be exact.

     ~ New WIP -- nearly done with a new WIP that I can't seem to get my head out of.  I think about it in the shower, while buying milk at the store, and according to my husband, I woke him up two nights ago jabbering on about my MC Dee and the buckle end of a belt.

     ~ School vacation -- Need I say more? My food and gas bill have gone up and my spare time has gone down.  Got to love those kids :)

     ~Words with Friends.  Yes I know; I am behind the eight-ball when it comes to discovering this amazing app.  I now have seven active games going and  a newly acquired and quite astounding vocabulary particularly in the areas of X, Z, and Q related words.

That said, I promise to return to my normally snarky and utterly asinine programming in a few days time.  What topic is up next?  Why I complete loath the indiscriminate villain.

The Girl I let Heist my Blog -- Julie Ann Lindsay

So I have never, in all of my blogs lonely existence, done an interview for an author.  I reference them, I congratulate them and talk about them, but never have I let one completely heist my blog.  Until today.  That says something about how sweet and amazing I think this girl is!  Meet Julie Ann Lindsay.

Hi Trisha! Thank you so much for having me over to blog for you today. This is my very first blog tour and I am giddy with excitement. While YA is my genre of choice for reading, I landed a series writing sweet romances novella style. I thought I’d tell you how that happened!

How My Love of YA Led Me to Write Sweet Romance

I read YA at an alarming rate. All my favorite authors at this point in time are YA writers. I got started and can’t seem to stop. After a hundred or so YA novels I realized what it was that had me hooked. The romance. I discovered this when I started a book that had an incredible heroine but by page 30, there was no hero in sight. I flipped some more and still no hero. No man to make her heart flutter. No guy messing with her concentration. I put the book down.

I started another and yummed it up fast. Then another then another. But. Then I came across another no romance YA and was dumbfounded. It took a long time for the light bulb to come on. Maybe it wasn’t the teens or the high school drama or the limitations provided by parents (another level of complication I love). I loved the romance!

With this in mind, I set out to write a killer romance. I wanted to capture the stress and anxiety of first love and wrap it into a story readers would swoon over. While YA isn’t my strongest genre to write (enormous understatement of a lifetime) I wanted to deliver a tale of epic romance. I wanted to write a story that made people to stop reading, put the book down on the table and kiss a stranger. So, when I came across the call for authors on the Turquoise Morning Press website, I was ready. They were open to sweet romances and look at that! I wanted to write sweet romances! We are a match made in heaven LOL.

In the year since I found that call for submissions, I’ve finished a series of sweet romance novellas called the Seeds of Love series and went on to write a novel length sweet as well. I can’t seem to get out of Honey Creek. I love the setting and the characters too much to leave anyone unhappy or in need of a little romance. I just keep going back!

I hope you’ll visit Honey Creek. It’s a beautiful place where anything can happen. Kick off your shoes, relax into that porch swing and cuddle up to a steamy mug of cider. Taking a trip to Honey Creek is as easy as Amazon : ) See you there!

 

Bloom by Julie Anne Lindsey

In a town filled with her past, she never expected to find her future…

Seven years ago Cynthia left Honey Creek with a broken heart. Three years ago Mitchell arrived with one.  Now Cynthia’s come home, and these two hardened hearts can’t stop arguing. If they’d only take a break long enough to find some common ground, they might be surprised to find love can grow anywhere.

If they’ll let it, love will find a way to Bloom.

*Bloom is book one in my new Seeds of Love series.  I’ll be planting those seeds all year.

About Julie:

I am a mother of three, wife to a sane person and Ring Master at the Lindsey Circus. Most days you'll find me online, amped up on caffeine & wielding a book.

You can find my blogging about the writer life at Musings from the Slush Pile

Tweeting my crazy at @JulieALindsey

Reading to soothe my obsession on GoodReads

BLOOM Buy Link on Amazon

And other books by me on Amazon

Critiquing Pet Peeves

It's been a couple of weeks since I have posted on my blog.   I really have no excuse except that I am currently in between YA contemporary projects and haven’t pulled the trigger on my next idea yet.  So to purposefully distract myself, I have been doing a lot of critiquing – some long standing writing friends, most new first-three-chapters type of beta reads.  So at the risk of sounding brash and a bit snarky, let me tell you a bit about my critiquing pet peeves.

            ~Please, please, PLEASE I beg you to give you manuscripts a quick read before you send it off to your critique partners, especially new ones that haven’t read for you before. There is nothing like a myriad of spelling, punctuation, and formatting errors to pull me right out of the story and irritate the crap out of me.

            ~Think creatively.  There are a thousand and one better ways to emotionally tag dialogue then a simple “he said.”  Now don’t get me wrong, the simplistic nature of that tag is highly appreciated, just not twenty seven times on the same page.

            ~Make sure the person you ask to critique actually reads your genre. You send me the first three chapters of your erotica story, and I will read it, correct your grammar and formatting, even toss in a comment or two.  But because I am not familiar with nor do I ever read that genre for fun, my comments, thoughts, and opinions probably aren’t worth much.  

            ~Lastly, (and I am throwing this one in for you Lindsay)  Description!  I love it when it pertains to word building and drives the story forward.  Wield it too heavily or inappropriately and I get peeved. For example “I sat down on my mother’s pink and green floral pattern couch, the small flower buds hanging delicately off the green vines.”  Okay, unless those flowers are going to come alive and strangle me then I don’t give a crap if the couch is floral, paisley or just plain butt-ass ugly.  I don’t need that bit of description.  I know what a couch is, no need to describe it.  

So that is it, my usually snarky self is back to blogging.  But before you go, I would love to hear some of your critiquing pet peeves.

How Revising is Like a Dyson

I got this new vacuum for Christmas.  And before you ask, no my husband did not buy it for me.  I bought it for myself.  He made the mistake of buying me a cleaning apparatus for me once. Suffice it to say, he will NEVER do that again.

 I crack open the box, assemble it (which for those of you who have one -- am I supposed to have spare parts?) and I start cleaning. Enthralled doesn't even begin to explain my reaction.  The fact that I can actually see the dirt in the canister is like instant gratification to me.  I empty it and start again.  That was on Christmas.  I have vacuumed my house literally three times a day, every day since then -- still enthralled, still amazed at the physical reminder of my accomplishment. (aka dirt in the canister)

My husband makes some snide comment about how I should "put that much enthusiasm and effort into everything I do."  I tell him he's a genius. He scowls, probably unsure of why he got a kiss instead of  a tongue lashing worthy of an R rating.  But he is right, the physical evidence of my progress is what I am obsessed with.  It is like a drug. 

So I run to my computer and hit the print button on the WIP I have been revising, re-revising, stalling on submitting for what . . . like three weeks now.  I am a constant reviser, always trying to make my WIP's better, the characters stronger.  But I always do it electronically.  Track changes are my best friend.  I read aloud, re-arrange scenes, grammar sweep, but all on my computer.  And although I know the exact word count of my WIP, the chapter layout, and the rise and fall of events, it is hard to visualize your revision progress without something to look at.

So now I have a freshly printed copy of my manuscript divided into two piles -- pages completed and those I  have yet to get to.  I can see the progress, watch the completed pile increase by ten, twenty, fifty pages a day until boom -- I am done.  Not a page overlooked, not a comma misplaced. 

So thank you Dyson, for getting my rugs clean and my revising back on track.

A New Year of Writing Adventures

Wishing all my amazing writing friends a fantastic 2012.  

Without your encouragement and support, my 2011 would not have been so much damn fun.  Here's to a whole new year of writing adventures!