Chicks-n-Scratching

Archive for the ‘writing’ Category

Most of you know that I have recently made my first sale (ever!) to Carina Press. While this is exciting, it in no way puts me in the league of big, best selling romance writers (yet!).  So, I admit to feeling a little starstruck when I actually get to meet anyone who makes a decent living writing books.

This weekend, we attended the Tucson Festival of Books.  The festival is a weekend event that overruns a college campus with tents full of a geek girl’s dreams – publishers, authors and workshops galore! There are hundreds of authors over the festival’s two days that either speak, sign or offer free workshops. This is the first year I’ve been and it was AMAZING!

J.A. Jance was there, Vicki Lewis Thompson (squee!) was there, Julia Quinn (squee!) was there, among lots of others. Both Vicki Lewis Thompson and Julia Quinn taught free workshops – Vicki on writing comedy that sells and Julia on correct dialogue formatting. I took both of these workshops.

Both women were warm, funny, informative and yep, I was a little starstruck. Did you know that Vicki has written over a HUNDRED books? Wow. Just wow. And Julia Quinn is perky, adorable and swears in her workshops (after making sure it’s not being taped – lol!)

I had a blast even though I was too chicken to get either Vicki or Julia to sign any of my books, and apologies for not having pictures!

You can check out festival details here – http://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/

Or at least reconnecting.

There are times when I’m so submerged in my writing that I don’t stick my head up long enough to take a look around me. That’s fine. I’m not saying it’s bad or I need to feel like I’m an awful person. It just means that I’m working really hard and trying to make some money in this gig we call writing.

However, I like to re-energize by picking up a book by my favorite author and just falling into the pages of their worlds for a while. And I miss them.

That’s right. I feel like I’ve had a long absence from my favs. It’s not that I don’t want to read, I just haven’t had the time. The worst part is that I have a lot of new authors (not new in the sense that they are newly published but in that I haven’t read them before) that I want to try, and just haven’t found the time.

I’m very careful when writing certain sub-genres that I don’t read anything in that particular area that might influence me. Sometimes I pick up books that aren’t even romance just to cleanse my brainpan and start fresh. It’s funny how when I do that, though, I always seem to pick up books that have strong romantic sub-plots – it’s almost like I can’t get away from it or something.

But I digress.

What I really love to do – and what I plan to indulge in today before the bad weather hits my area again – is to go to the library and puruse the shelves. So much fun. I could spend all afternoon in the library just looking at books and deciding which ones I’m going to check out and which I’ll leave for next time.

Sometimes I’m going through the shelves and I’ll find a new release from a favorite author that I didn’t know was coming. That’s soooo cool. Or I can find new favorites that I might not be sure about spending money on at this stage.

Anyhoo, I better get going. The library is set to open in about 30 minutes and I want to get there and back before the bulk of my day begins.

-Kate

Little known fact about Inez:

I have a degree in Creative Advertising. Most people despise commercials but I love them, or at least, I like the good ones.  A good advertising jingle or slogan can catapult a product into an American Icon. I mean, think about it. Had you ever even heard of Aflac Supplemental Insurance BEFORE that damn duck? Probably not.

Some of the most memorable slogans have lasted longer then the products themselves or evolved into the common language of society. Put that slogan to music and it becomes a jingle, an earworm that works for you and gets stuck in people’s heads. Here are just a few examples

“Breakfast of champions” -Wheaties

“Ring around the collar”- WISK detergent

“Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman”  -Secret Deodorant

So when I was thinking of today’s list of 13, I wondered what famous advertising slogans could be used for romance titles. Some may be geared to erotic romances, others toward …okay, most of these lean toward erotic but work with me.

Let’s see what I found:

13- “M’m! M’m! Good!” – Campbell’s Soup or a naughty little cooking story?

12- “Does she or doesn’t she?” – Clairol or a Question about whether she puts out?

11- “The quick picker upper.” – Bounty or a Romantic Comedy

10- “Reach out and touch someone.” – AT&T or erotic?

9- “Finger lickin’ good.” -  KFC or  a pianist with magic fingers?

8- “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.” M&Ms or .. yeah, don’t go there

7- “Just do it.”- Nike or advice from the best friend?

6- “Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.”- Peter Paul Mounds or is it Butterfly Tattoo all over again?

5- “Where’s the beef?” – Wendy’s or what the heroine says about her first lover, the one BEFORE the hero?

4- “Let your fingers do the walking.”- Yellow Pages or a masseuse love story?

3- “We’re Looking For a Few Good Men” – U. S. Marine Corps or prostitute heroine?

2- “His master’s voice” – Victor Talking Machine Co. or M/M BDSM??

1- “You’ve come a long way, baby!”-   Virginia Slims Cigarettes or the Romance industry as a whole?
**I’m sorry, Louisa, Lilli, Deidre, Eden and Claire. I loved the books and it is late, and these struck me as funny

I’m kind of cheating. Because I, too, have a release this week.

Trusting Destiny released yesterday – you can get it here. It’s a contemporary novella:

Maggie Cassavetti is searching for answers, and Dr. Eric Larsen is the man to help her find them.  Her mother believed that the heirloom pendant helped its wearer find true love, but Maggie doesn’t buy it.  What interests her is the history – the topaz is supposed to be a Biblical artifact, and the antique family Bible hints at extreme age.  But meeting Eric changes things.  The attraction that flares between them is hotter, faster, more intense than she could possibly anticipate.  Was it simple chemistry?  Or was it something more?  As Maggie and Eric work together to uncover the history behind the family lore, Maggie begins to believe that there may be something to the power of the stone:  something that she won’t soon let go.

Now for the WTF part. No, really, I may have cheated a smidge, but not that much.

Last week I told you about my horrible klutziness recently. This week I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I’m having trouble finishing the WIP.

I like the WIP. I like it a lot. I love the heroine, I love the heroes (yes, plural – it’s a menage). I like the story.

I have two scenes to finish. Two. Both are…sexy. So here’s the problem: snow days. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to write hot, steamy menage sexxoring when your 5yo Munchkin is home?

Between the Spongebob computer games going on at the next computer, the threat of her coming to read over my shoulder, the demands for getting this thing or that thing, my being on crutches, and her requiring some level of interaction for the day…. well, let’s just say it makes it hard to get in the mood.

As an added complication (and here’s really where the WTF comes in – I mean aside from the school board canceling school on Monday, when it was beautifully clear and the roads were dry and clean, but waiting until the very last second (seriously – after 8am) to cancel today when there’s 2 inches of snow on the ground and you can’t see 100 feet – i mean, WTF?) is that my friends think this is hysterical. They have suggested I incorporate Spongebob into the menage. Or write Patrick/Spongebob slash (is writing it that way redundant?). If anything is guaranteed to throw me out of the mood for writing sexy, it’s the visual of Patrick/Spongebob. I know – I’m sure – there is already Patrick/Spongebob slash. There has to be – it’s the internet, after all. But … W.T.F. *shudder*

So… how do I cleanse my brain of Spongebob? Argh!

Well, technically it’s tomorrow, but since I post on Mondays, I’m putting it up now. Very sneaky of me, eh?

This is the first in my dimensional traveler series. More like a highly skilled group of military specialists who kick ass in two dimensions.

Here’s some blurbage:

Two hearts are never more than one dimension apart.

A routine fuel run through one of the planet’s dimensional portals explodes in violence when Major Geneieve Lockhart’s Jumper team is hammered with an unprovoked attack. With her ship disabled and contact to mission control limited, Genie faces her worst nightmare—losing her crew on the blood-soaked floor of a foreign desert.

Help comes from an unlicensed freelance mercenary ship, piloted by a man she never thought she’d see again. Her AWOL ex-lover, Lt. Col. Dante Bowen.

Bowen knows answering Genie’s distress call puts his undercover mission to expose a governmental conspiracy at risk. But after faking his death six years ago, he owes her something. Ending up chained in her cargo hold for transport to his own court martial wasn’t the thanks-for-the-rescue he expected.

The bridges between them may be in ashes, but their desire burns as hot as ever. Even as Genie wonders what happened to Bowen’s code of honor, her body betrays her heart at every turn. The hostile race that attacked her ship, though, is coming back to finish them off. The only way to ensure freedom—on both sides of the dimensional divide—is to put her trust in the one man who betrayed it…

High Octane by Kathleen Scott, Samhain Publishing, 2010

*is this a kick ass heroine or what?*

Well, my post won’t be as exciting as Inez’s, but then that is the fate we all suffer, I guess.  Though judging from the size of the mess she had to clean, it’s probably a good thing since something like that would have put me completely over the damn edge and beyond.

My post is going to be about actually clearing my desk of some things.  Can I get an AMEN.

I sent off the requested full of Private Negotiations to Liquid Silver Books. Hurray!!! I finished the rough draft on Vermillion. Yay!!! Now, I only have to write the sucknopsis and then go back through and edit – all this before the Jan. 31st deadline. But that’s all right. I’m on target for it. It will happen. Then I have to break to finish the full I promised LI, and work on the sequel to my February Samhain release. Yay!!!! Here it is the end of January and I’m already seeing progress. That’s good. I’m on track so far. Please, just let me stay there.

However, there is a wrinkle in the fabric that is my schedule – namely the shade of sequels to come. Yes, I’m a sequel whore. So, as I finished up the damn book Private Negotiations, I had two more books set in that world swirling about my head like busted satellites on acid trips. I’ll need to tuck those in there somewhere as I finish up a couple more books.

Thing is, I hate having so many projects left undone on my hard drive. I really am going to get some of them out the door this year. There are some that are almost complete, or at least at the halway point. Come on, that’s good. It’s not going to be that hard to finish, right? Then why am I so far behind on them? Jeez.

Raise your hand if you want to switch to 30 hour days. Six more hours might actually see me getting something more accomplished.

So far, so good.

-Kate

Why, when I have so many projects I need to work on, does my muse decide it’s time to bus da’ move? You’d think she sat around for ages storing up ideas and threw them at me all at once. That would be a lie. Actually, I think my muse might be a trickster male that delights in watching me multi-task. Guys just seem to fall back in awe as they watch the female persuasion juggle apples and spin plates. I don’t know why that is. Anyhoo – I’ve had a slew of new ideas hit me lately. The bounty of my fertile imagination is overflowing.

That doesn’t mean I’m changing the order I’m going to write things in for the next few months, just that I have more ideas to pool from now. As if I needed that, right?

I just wish I could stay awake for any length of time on my days off. It’s horrible. I seem to want to sleep the entire day away. Not productive.

I’m thinking I must be very far behind by now on my work. However, I’m looking for a netbook to take to work with me so I can write on my breaks. I find writing in spiral notebooks not so helpful anymore for some reason. Though I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because I tend to go so far afield when I finally do put the scenes into the computer I figure what good does it do to pre-write them?

Aww, but then I digress as I so often do.

-Kate

Lacksadaisical. That’s one of the words best used to describe me when it comes to blogging. It’s not that I mean to be, but it just kinda happens during my daily juggle of the hydra-esque ”To Be Written” folder. I don’t think I’ve added onto my personal blog since probably 2008. Yes, I’m just that behind. But honestly, why keep it up to date if no one reads it anyhow? I really don’t have much traffic there. It might have started out good, but it had gotten less and less as time wore on. 

Anyhoo, that’s not the thrust of my post today. As a matter of fact, I really don’t have any one thrust. I just wanted to make some small post to let Inez and Neith know that I have not abandon them to Blogland and that the Sisterhood of the Traveling Muse is still strong in me. (Much like the force in young Skywalker.)

I’ve been working on many projects lately. My head is full and spinning with ideas and characters and things I need to accomplish. I’m working hard on several projects that have completion dates for the next month and a half, so I’m feeling the pressure. However, it’s a good kind of pressure. I’m pretty much going to stick to my guns and stay on-track to submit between one and two subs a month. Hopefully finish off a long one and then sub a short one as well. So, a novel and a novella a month. (believe me, I have enough in various states of almost-done to make that work for me for the first quarter of the year anyhow.)

Updates on Submissions – Nothing to report thus far. There is no news from Kensington or Silhouette Nocturne. I’ve heard nothing but silence from Harlequin on my partial requested at Nationals. I am reported to be in the queue at LSB with Private Negotiations, and Loose-ID wants to see the full on Bad Religion. So, not a totally bad news situation. And as the old saw goes – no news is good news.

Current Projects – I’m finishing up on Water Mark, my sequel to High Octane. Trans-dimensional travel meets, military action, meets hot romances.

I’m writing something for the EC art submission call. Vermillion is set in a fantasy world based on Western Europe during the Spanish Inquistion. It’s a very dark tale that is rather emotionally draining to write. I only hope I do the plot justice. That the one I see in my head is going onto the page.

Also in the sequel column is the second book in my Ruins and Relics series. Carved in Stone revolves around ancient carved stones found in Florida during a ground breaking for a hospital build. Is the this a case of a miraculous discovery or a very clever hoax? Only the Section knows for sure.

It seems I have a bad case of sequel fever. I really want to start on the next book in the world I created in the Private Negotiations world. The second book, Intimate Weapons, returns to the country of Vanden and features nanites and wormholes. Just say, Yes! to erotic sci-fi romances with cool gadgets.

That’s really it for this first installment of “What’s Kate up to?” Thanks for tuning in. See you next week.

-Kate

This Fire (half of the Hearts Afire December release at Liquid Silver Books) was published this week at Liquid Silver Books. It’s my first collaboration with Emily Ryan-Davis, and it went shockingly well.

What I want to talk about here is how we came to do this project.  Tina at LSB mentioned on Twitter that she was hunting for a good firefighter story and she wanted it ASAP. Well, I thought. I have a manuscript I started years ago (literally. It was one of the first manuscripts I started), and it has a firefighter. But it’s only about one-third plus one scene done and needs major revision on what is done. And Tina wants it in less than two weeks. Can I make that work?

Now, I have to be honest here. I didn’t think I could salvage Eden and Seth in that amount of time, so I put it up on google documents and shared with my critique partner, Emily.  She read what I had and thought it was not only worth salvaging, but she was really excited about it.

I told Tina I’d finish it up and get it to her.

Two days in, I realized I was over my head. So I poked Emily to ask her if she was interested in helping me finish it. She was (thank heavens).

I laid out the bones of the story as I’d envisioned it, and she tweaked the story (for the better). While I started going through and yanking the weeds from the part that was already done, Em started working on moving the story forward. When she hit a block, we switched off. I started writing, she went back and edited behind me. Then we both started working different parts of the story. Once we had all the pieces, we went through and wove them together, putting in scene transitions and seaming together the dialogue.

What’s interesting is that people who know us both – and who have read us both individually- have commented that they can’t see the seams. That’s a good thing. The goal, of course, was make sure the seams didn’t show.

It was fun writing with Emily. Her brain works differently than mine, so we see different things in the story. Our writing styles are very different – I tend to embellish more, she tends to pare things down. She has an amazing turn of phrase in emotionally tense situations, and that helped a lot. She tends to throw monkey wrenches into my carefully planned plot, but those monkey wrenches usually make things much better – once I figure out how to use the wrench. So, all around, the collaboration worked pretty well.

Another thing that interested me about this particular story was how it resurrected an old story from my dead files.  I love the characters, but when I first started writing the story, I was trying to make it a category length. This story did NOT want to be category length. It’s happy where it is. So, part of making it work was recognizing that the story needed to be shorter. Another part was Emily bringing fresh eyes to the project and helping me see where things needed to move along. The value of a safety net, a sounding board, a second set of shoulders to carry the load cannot be overestimated. When I hit a dead zone for writing, Em picked up. When she hit dead zones, I picked up.

I still love Eden and Seth. But now I love their story, too. And that’s different this time. I hope you love their story, too.

BLACK DIAMOND RWA CLASS

CLASS DESCRIPTIONS AND REGISTRATION:

October 5-11, 2009

Running in the Dark: Organic Structure for Character-driven Stories

By Jodi Henley

“Character-driven” and “organic” are the new buzzwords, but do you really know what they mean and how they can help your writing? Build characters from the inside out, and write an emotional story that will land your book on the keeper shelf in this hands-on workshop that uses “your” story to get you unstuck and back into the flow.

Highly sought after for her plain-English approach to problem solving, Jodi spends her time dissecting the craft of writing. Her obsessive Myer-Briggs INTJ personality drives her to explain her findings, and she considers herself lucky to have a receptive audience. A long-time blogger, her blog, “Will Work for Noodles”, is a popular writer’s reference for people in fields from play-writing to Christian magazines and newspaper journalism.

Praise for Jodi Henley:

“I’m so glad this story is FINALLY going somewhere! I’ve been working on this thing for like 4-5 years and then Jodi came along with her organic structure and BOOM! I always felt like this story could be something special but I just never felt I was ready to work on it. Jodi is a wealth of information”–Lauren Murphy, author of Cara’s Christmas Fantasy

Jodi excels at simplifying overwhelming situations, breaking them down and providing a logical pathway. She leaves the student with a sense of accomplishment and focus, not just gratitude.–Inez Kelley, author of Jinxed and Myla by Moonlight

Day One:

· What do the terms “character-driven” and “organic” mean?

· Use psychology, environment, and core events to create the people you need and understand what they’ll do. A brief overview of transformational and static character arcs.

· The hero and heroine, two side-by-side arcs.

Day Two:

· Open discussion of your work in progress.

· Trouble-shooting your people.

· Talk about character arcs.

Day Three:

· If you don’t have a firm grip on your characters, we finish hammering out the details.

· Finalize your character arc.

Day Four:

· How organic writing grows your story: a discussion of logical progression, emotion, and plot.

· A discussion of structure and how it works for you. An overview of various forms.

Day Five:

· We explore character’s affect on plot, and discuss individual works in progress. We also explore structure for your story.

Day Six and Seven:

· Putting it all together using your work in progress