Nothing. I’m sitting here at almost 9 am in my nightgown, sipping Diet Mountain Dew, staring out my home office window and the 20 mile an hour winds with the drifting snow flying off the trees.
And I’m trying to write…something…anything!
Ahhh…the life of a solitary writer.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,700 times in 2015. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.
At the beginning of every year I write out a bunch of goals I want to accomplish during the year. The perpetual ones are lose 50 pounds ( or at least 5!), re-read all my favorite books, exercise 5 times per week, drink more water, drink less soda.
Usually, I get 2-3 going good for a few months and then fall by the wayside.
2015 had a different set of goals. I knew I was retiring, so goal number 1 was to write every day. I fulfilled that goal. Number 2 was to get a novel published by a traditional publisher. That goal got met in spades: I had 3 books go live in 2015. Yippie for me. Number 3 was to write at least twice a week on this blog. Again, met in spades since I average 3-4 times per week for the year. Yippie, squared!
Looking ahead to 2016 I have some new goals to go along with the old standards. Here’s my list:
We’ll see how well I do!
Christmas is this week and, as usual, I am in a moody funk. Growing up, most of my Christmas days were spent being shuffled from one parent to another and then on to my Irish grandmother’s house for what came to be known to me as the twelfth circle of hell. My mother was the middle of three girls, the oldest had died when I was a baby and the youngest was grandma’s absolute favorite. As was her daughter, my cousin. My mother and I were barely tolerated. We were only invited to her home simply because Irish Catholic guilt won over my grandmother each year and she didn’t want to be seen by the neighbors and those who knew her as “neglectful” of her family.
So dumb.
The yearly torture would start on Christmas Eve when we would trek to my stepfather’s large Italian family for La Vigil. As the baby in his family, my stepfather was warmly welcomed and much loved. Not so much my mother and I. We were the ultimate interlopers, despised by his mother who never spoke in English when we were around so we wouldn’t know what she was saying about us. After taking 7 years of Italian in middle school and high, she stopped doing that when I translated then repeated everything she’d just said about my mother’s outfit to the dinner table.
Score one for the fat Irish kid.
We’d sit through the seven courses of various fish prepared by my stepfather’s sister and mother and then we’d open gifts. My mother and I were routinely forgotten even though we’d brought presents for all of them – the dozens of children included. As a child I’d watch kid after kid open a cool toy or get a great outfit to wear while I just sat there ignored, jealous, sad, presentless.
They were not the nicest people on the planet. Not even close.
On Christmas day I’d wake up and after a morning shipped off to my father and stepmother,( who by the way was a lovely person – my father so did not deserve her) I was brought back to my mother and stepfather and then – because neither one of them drove a car, we’d run to the bus stop so we wouldn’t miss it ( buses only ran every hour on the holiday), get to the ferry and wait to take that ( ferries also only ran every hour and somehow they were never timed with buses.) Off the ferry and then two long subway rides and a half mile walk to grandma’s fourth-floor walkup apartment. And when I say walk up, I mean it. No elevator.
By now it would be about three-thirty and the drinking would be in full swing, having started at the noon hour. Something would always cause an argument between my mother and hers, which many times ensued in the three of us leaving before dinner was served, or in the police being summoned by a neighbor who’d heard the shouting. Sometimes, we’d actually make it to dinner and presents before a blow-up would start.
I’m telling you this because I’m trying to explain why the holiday season has never been fun for me and why, when I write about families now, I always depict them as being loving, accepting, and actually liking one another.
It was the opposite way I grew up, you see. Every year I asked Santa for siblings to share with, parents who loved me, grandparents who spoiled me and a socio-economic situation that did not include the cops knowing our phone number by sight when it was dialed into the police station. When these things didn’t materialize under the tree – or in my life – I imagined them. The families in my imagination were warm, funny, sweet and sober. Tables didn’t get flipped in anger, food didn’t get tossed at a crying child and the police dealt with real criminals.
These families lingered in my mind until I started committing them to paper and into my novels, where they bring me joy.
So.
My grandmothers – Irish and Step-Italian – are long dead, and I have no contact with their families any longer. It was a mutual divorce on both our counts. I have my own wonderful family to spend the holiday with now, and am finally able to spend Christmas the way I’ve always wanted: with a happy, warm, loving and accepting group of people.
I hope your holidays are spent this way as well.
Peace. Love. Joy, and A Very Merry Christmas from me to you.
And here’s a little sumthin’ sumthin’ coming on the next major holiday : VALENTINE’S DAY: The CandyHearts Series. Click and see all the covers starting on January 4, 2016. And here’s a little hint – mine is releasing on 2/8/16. Enjoy.
Filed under Author, Contemporary Romance, Family Saga, Life challenges, Strong Women
If it’s Wednesday, it’s MFRWBook Hooks day! Click on this link to discover your next favorite author and take a blog tour through their listed websites. You’ll be glad you did!
Starting in January 2016, my publisher, The Wild Rose Press, is beginning a two-month series titled CANDY HEARTS to celebrate Valentine’s Day, the lover in all of us, and those little delicious candies we never can seem to eat enough of.
My Candy Hearts title is 3 Wishes, releases on 2/8/16, and here’s a little sumthin’ sumthin’ about it.
Blurb:
Valentine’s Day is chocolatier Chloe San Valentino’s favorite day of the year. Not only is it the busiest day in her candy shop, Caramelle de Chloe, but it’s also her birthday. Chloe’s got a birthday wish list for the perfect man she pulls out every year: he’d fall in love with her in a heartbeat, he’d be someone who cares about people, and he’d have one blue eye and one green eye, just like her. So far, Chloe’s fantasy man hasn’t materialized, despite the matchmaking efforts of her big, close-knit Italian family. But this year for her big 3-0 birthday, she just might get her three wishes.
Excerpt:
At about five minutes of ten I was almost ready to turn the Closed sign on the door when it opened. I heard Janie’s breath hitch and turned from where I was sweeping up. Staying open late is always a risk, with the thought thieves will invade at the end of the day.
If the guy standing at the door glancing around the shop was a thief, then Dio mio, I wanted to be robbed.
About six foot, his hair was the color of a deer’s pelt, with autumnal golds and browns shot together in a glorious patchwork that grazed the collar of his jacket and curled a little at the ends. He wore a faded brown bomber jacket over a shirt I couldn’t see, but he had shoulders almost as wide as my doorway. A pair of well-worn jeans covered his mile long legs, and the fabric on the stress points at his knees was practically white.
“We’re about to close,” I heard myself say. “Can I help you?”
It was at that moment he looked over at me.
His face could have been sculpted by Da Vinci or Michelangelo. A broad, smooth, forehead housed naturally arched eyebrows I knew some of my gay guy friends would have paid a fortune to have on their own faces. His cheeks were carved from marble, high, smooth and deep. And his mouth, mother-of-God, his mouth. Full, thick beautiful lips sat perfectly over a chin with a dent you could shove a button into and have it stay put.
“Sorry,” he said, those fabulous lips pulling up a little shyly at the corners. “I got stuck at work and couldn’t get here until now. I’ll be quick. Promise.”
So here’s the thing: the guy was gorgeous. But even if he’d looked like a frog with raw antipasto smothering his face, I would have dropped to my knees when he opened his mouth. Warm honey, a shot of raw whiskey, and a little hot puff of smoke wafted from his mouth like a fine and rare brandy being decanted.
Buylinks: Coming soon! Check back OFTEN!!
It’s official: another November has come and gone and along with it NaNoWriMo.
By midnight tonite hundreds of thousands of writers around the globe who have been participating in what is charmingly called “NaNo Word Wars” will stop typing, lay down their pens, surrender their pencils and hit Save, then Submit and verify into the NaNo site to confirm they have at least written 50,000 words of a work in progress.
So, if you participated where did you wind up today? 50,000 words? More? Less? Were you able to write every day, at least a few words, or did you fall into plot holes, POV problems, or just plain writing inertia somewhere along the way? Or did your everyday life and the responsibilities and obligations that go along with it get in the way of your writing? Don’t be upset if you didn’t make the mark for whatever reason. The fact you tried and got something down makes you a winner in my book.
50,000 words is a lot. A. Lot. Figuring that most romance novels fall between 65,000 and 90,000, 50 K could be considered almost done with your next novel. And novellas can top off between 25 and 35,000.
I made my goal during the third week because I was on a role and have no other life but writing. No kids home to disturb me, and a husband who works 90+ hours per week, leaves me with a great deal of time to do this. And luckily, the book I was working on is the fifth in a series so I knew my characters and where I wanted to take them fairly well. Plus, I’m a plotter. Enough said.
Congratulations on the effort, the success, and the blood, sweat and tears for this year’s challenge. Onward to 2016. It’s only 365 days away!
I had fun talking about character mannerisms the other day, so today I’m going to go a little more in-depth into the differences in mannerisms ( which has a sort of positive connotation) and ticks, quirks and traits ( which lean more to the negative side of the mannerism scale.)
We’ve all known someone who had an annoying habit – like chewing gum incessantly while talking, eating, etc – or has a little quirky laugh after every sentence. I personally know someone who purses their lips at the end of every sentence. I always want to ask, “Did you want a kiss for saying that?” But luckily have refrained from doing so. And every one of us has at least one person ( usually a teen or 20-something) in our lives who use the words “like, um, ya know” without end.
These little individual ticks quirks, traits and habits make the people in our world three dimensional and real, because, lets face it, they are! When you read a character like this, you believe them more because you can actually see their behavior coming to life on the page. Where this gets frustrating and absolutely annoying for the reader, is when the habit is mentioned every time the character is on stage.
I read a book recently that everyone who read it said was great. Good characters, great plot, sound ending. I hated it. Why? The main character was so flat and one dimensional I couldn’t get passed it. Plus, she had two character ticks that were mentioned every single time she was on scene – and that was almost in every scene of the book. She bit her bottom lip and opened her eyes wide when she was nervous ( which was the whole damn book!) Mentioning it once or even twice seemed more than enough, but every frickin’ scene? The part that really tans my hide is that this book got published by a major house.
Crazy.
So, enough ranting. The way to make your characters as believable and likable as possible is to make them seem real to the reader. We all agree on that, yes? It’s up to us, the writers, to decide whether to give the characters positive quirks or negative ones.
Examples always work best for me, so here goes: ( and these are just some that I thought of. You could fill a book with all of them, truly.)
Negative habits, ticks, quirks: nail biting, lip pursing, sighing, leg shaking, toe tapping, finger snapping, gum chewing or snapping, frequent eye rolls, smirking, twittering laugh, nervous laugh, whining, poor use of language, frequent cursing, profanity in place of proper English and word use, interrupting others while they are speaking, hair twirling . You get the picture…think up some more of your own.
Positive habits, ticks, quirks: frequent head nodding, intense smiling, frequent touching of the other person ( not in a sexual way), overly compassionate, cries at the drop of a pin, laughs at everything. Again, fill in your own here.
My point with this post was to get writers to recognize the things their characters do while on the page and to find that simple yet oh-so-hard balance of making them come to life for the reader. There is nothing that turns me off a book faster than one-dimensional characters, or those that are so over the top I can’t get vested in them because they are unbelievable to me as actual people.
It’s a fine line we ride as writers to make our characters as real as possible. Adding in individual mannerisms, etc, is a wonderful way to make the character pop to life. Too much of it though, is a reader turn off.
So ( you saw this coming, I know!), what are some positive and negative traits you’ve used for characters that worked, and which ones didn’t. Let’s discuss…..
One of the great things about being an Ameican ( and the list really is endless!) is the holiday we celebrate that is uniquley ours: Thanksgiving.
We all have individual reasons to be thankful, and if each person in America were asked, I’m sure each answer would be different. My Wild Rose Press sistah Angela Hayes is celebrating the month by having authors tell why they are thankful. I was one of the lucky ones asked to share my thoughts and I’d like to expound on those here, today.
First and foremost I am thankful to be loved by a remarkable family. I have been in love with the same man since the day I met him thirty-two years ago and that love has only grown stronger and richer every day. I am proud and blessed to have a daughter who is the total embodiment of all that is good in the world. The fact that these two remarkable people love me warms my heart daily.
I am thankful to live in a country where I can be anything or anyone I want to be, say anything I want to say without the threat of prosecution, and worship the God I desire without the fear or threat of persecution. Believe me, if you lived in other countries, you would know these freedoms do not exist.
Lastly, I am thankful God put the dream in me to be a writer. Writing brings joy and gladness to my heart on a daily basis, and again, if I didn’t live in America, I might be ale to write the kinds of stories I do and have them be seen by the populous.
So eat some turkey, have some pie, and visit with friends and families. And always remember to be thankful. It doesn’t have to be only on this day every year. You can and should be thankful every day of your life….just don’t eat pumpkin pie every day!
This past weekend I was in Las Vegas with my husband and our daughter. They were both registered to run 13.1 miles ( 1/2 marathon) of the Las Vegas Marathon. To anyone who has every attempted even a 5k race, you know the most important part of the marathon is the preparation for it.
My husband is a lifelong runner, my daughter relatively new to the sport, so they prepared in different ways. Both finished exceptionally well, especially for the horrendous weather conditions at the start and end of the race, and both were fine the following day – a little tired, a tad stiff, but no major problems. Their dedication to finishing the race upright and in a certain time frame made me very proud as a wife and mother, and it re-instilled in me my own dedication to writing.
Why writing, you ask? What’s one got to do with the other? Well, I’ll tell you.
Training for the race required a daily commitment to running. A training schedule of increasing miles per day, and then a rest day thrown in, helped with the endurance needed for the long haul. Eating well, at certain times, and foods high in protein and nourishment, allowed their bodies to be at peak performance to withstand the grueling conditions and the long time length the run required. This was no sprint. Muscle training with weights strengthened them to endure the pounding their bodies would take with each stride and sprint. All of this took time, dedication, commitment, and mental focus.
Much the same way writing a novel takes.
You don’t sit down at the laptop and write 75,000 words in one day. Even NaNoWriMo allows you 30 days to write 50,000. No, you write a certain number of words every day, all adding to the gist of the storyline. I once heard Nora Roberts describe why she writes every single day ( like I do.) She said, and I’m paraphrasing, writing is like using a muscle. When you don’t exercise it, it atrophies or weakens and it takes much longer to get it back in shape. To write every day keeps the brain fresh and the storyline clear. Setting out to write a novel takes focus and dedication even when you fall into a plot hole or don’t know where you’re going next. You keep moving forward toward the end. Your brain needs to be nourished and healthy just as your body does, to be able to form coherent sentences and remember where you’re going with the plot.
So marathon running and novel writing are more alike than you’d think. And in the end, one will earn you a medal, and both with give you the satisfaction of a job well done.
Filed under Author, Contemporary Romance, Family Saga, Life challenges, NaNoWriMo, Strong Women
and I’m still plugging away.
By the halfway mark, many writers fall into a plot hole abyss, wrestle with a character who wants to take over the story, or they come to the realization the story line isn’t really keeping their attention. And just for clarity’s sake, this happens to all writers whether they are doing the NaNo challenge or not. The difference in November is that you only have two weeks left in the challenge to fulfill that 50,000-word minimum and declare a win.
Pressure, much? Stress, maybe?
No worries.
The best thing about the NaNoWriMo challenge is the only person you are competing against is YOU. Now is not the time to start editing or switching POV, or changing the rudimentary goals, motivations and conflicts of your hero and heroine. Now is the time to freestyle and just write it all out. December ( and the rest of the new year )is for editing and refining. Tweaking and changing.
Now, the goal is to write – albeit you want it to be good writing, that goes without saying. But as long as you are pounding forward, getting those fingers on the laptop keys, or writing out long hand, you are winning.
The tagline for my website is Writing is my Oxygen, because I need to write in order to exist, just like I need to breathe in order to live. A day without writing something, anything, to me, is a wasted day. I approach NaNo the same way. As long as I am pushing forward on the story, I am in the positive column. And even if I get to 11:30 pm November 30 and still need 500 more words to get over the finish line, at least I know I got that far.
To me, partaking in the NaNoWriMo challenge IS the win. The 50k words are just the cherries on top.
Filed under Author, Contemporary Romance, Life challenges, NaNoWriMo, NHRWA, Romance, Strong Women
Peggy Jaeger, Author 