Does the Date Matter?

It's almost Valentine's Day. What will we do? Probably not go out to a special romantic dinner. Restaurants are overbooked, many choose a "special" (translation—limited) menu, and service is likely to be under par. Normally, if we're going to celebrate with a restaurant meal, we'll go out the day after.

Does the day itself matter? We'll acknowledge the holiday with cards and hubby might provide some chocolate (unlike the year he gave me an electronic tire pressure gauge), but we feel no obligation to celebrate on the 14th. Maybe this got started early on, when his travels almost always had him out of town on my birthday, so we'd choose another day to celebrate. (And to my reckoning, since I only count birthdays when he was home to celebrate on the official day, I'm at least 10-15 years younger than my passport says.)

Between workshop presentations and conferences, my schedule would be full enough without including packing and moving, much less adding holiday celebrations. Hubby and I are thinking we ought to find time to choose at least one special thing and have one special dinner. We can consider it a 'going-away' dinner and have the official Valentine's Day and birthday dinner another time, when things are less crazy and stressful.

You Know What They Say About Assumptions

What I'm reading: Sleepless in Scotland, by Karen Hawkins

Thanks, Marvin for holding down the fort while I was running around all day yesterday.

In prep for moving, we've been getting estimates on moving our worldly goods from Florida to Colorado – eventually. Since we need the money from the sale of the house before we can buy, we don't have anywhere to live out there (aside from some imposition on the kidlets). Movers are happy to store your stuff until you're ready for it.


Since we don't know where we'll live, we don't really know which furniture will fit in a new place. Plus, the décor aspects of Florida vs. Colorado have to be considered. That which works here isn't going to look right in a mountain home. Our prospective buyers want to keep a lot of our existing furniture, which is fine with us.

But movers charge by the pound. While we're happy to ditch the bedroom set, dining room, wall units, and lots of kitchen accoutrements, parting with books is much harder. And books are heavy. I checked the USPS website, looking to see what the options were. I discovered that you can send books and other media, as long as that's all that's in the box, at a price of about 1/3 of what the movers charge per pound. Our daughter and son-in-law in Colorado said they'd be willing to store boxes of books until we find a place.

The Inside the Actor’s Head Studio

My guest today is author Marvin D Wilson, known by his A.K.A in the blogging world as "The Old Silly". Marvin has written an entertaining spoof on the TV show, "Inside the Actor's Studio" where the host interviews one of his characters.

Host Thames Lipton gets up close and personal with the new smash sensation Hollywood movie star, Louis Seiffer.

Lipton: Welcome to Inside the Actor’s Studio, Louis. I know our audience is thrilled that you would honor us with your appearance today. Thank you for being here.

Seiffer: Thanks. You’re welcome. And please, call me Lou.

Lipton: Very well, Lou. (pause) Lou, if you don’t mind me stating the obvious, you are an enormous man! Even bigger than you seem in your fantastically successful movie, Fiddler’s Follies. We even had to search the studio for a chair large enough to accommodate you. Just how tall are you? What is your weight?

Seiffer: (broad proud smile, a shift of weight from side to side, producing sounds of seating boards in pain) Seven foot six, three fifty, give or take, it depends.

Lipton: Depends? Depends on what?

Plotting a Workshop on Plotting- Phase 3

Welcome Home! I hope everyone enjoyed their sojourn to the Giant's Causeway. Thanks again, Jessica.

Carrying on from last Thursday.

As I mentioned, the group I'm addressing is a Romance Writers of America chapter, so using my plotting board for my mystery didn't seem as appropriate as using one of my romantic suspenses. And since I'm using Hidden Fire, which is a romantic suspense, not a mystery, the book is actually much more complex. Why?

Because a romance, by "convention" must include two protagonists, often almost equal in weight. Readers want to connect with both characters, so there are two character arcs to deal with. Then, there's (of course) the romance plot. And in romantic suspense, there's the suspense (or in my books, the mystery) plot.

What I discovered was that the plots were tightly interwoven, so most scenes covered more than one of the basic sub-plots, which is the way it should be. However, I really have no recollection of doing this consciously as I wrote the book.

For example, the book opens with a scene in a restaurant. Randy and Sarah are having dinner after 6 weeks apart. They finish eating, decide to continue the evening at Sarah's apartment. Before they get there, Randy gets a call, and he goes to work.

A simple relationship scene, right? Mainly, but it goes deeper than that.

Friday Field Trip - Northern Ireland

What I'm reading: Kisser, by Stuart Woods

Today it's my pleasure to turn the Friday Field Trip over to Jessica Odell, who now resides in Northern Ireland. She's giving us a peek at the Giant's Causeway. Take it away, Jess....



The Giant's Causeway is on the north coast of Ireland, in County Antrim. The hexagonal columns were formed by volcanic activity about 60 million years ago.



Local folklore links the Causeway to Finn McCool, a giant who lived on the North Coast. One day he entered into an argument with another giant, Fingal, on the Scottish coast. Insults were fired back, and then Finn began throwing clods of earth into the sea, as to build a causeway. Finn went back home and awaited Fingal. With the help of his wife, Finn conned Fingal and scared him off. Fingal tore up the causeway on his way back to Scotland. Similar volcanic columns can be seen at Fingal's Cave in Scotland.





Now it is a great tourist destination and I picked a good weather day and drove up to the coast with my camera. There are tons of hiking paths along the coast, with lots of great views. Maybe this spring I'll make it the 12 miles from the Causeway to the Carrik-a-rede Rope Bridge!

Non-Plotting Workshop, Phase 2

First, The winner of a download of Wynter Daniels' upcoming ebook is Wendy Marcus. Please email Wynter using the contact page on her website - http://WynterDaniels.com

Now, back to planning my workshop presentation.

From yesterday's post: this is my basic starting point for writing a romantic suspense, but it's not much different for any commercial fiction genre.

H/H trying to get on with their lives
They meet/interface/at cross purposes
Bad stuff happens
They fix it and have a HEA.

And then there's the character sketch GMC. (Goal, Motivation, Conflict) Their goals:

Randy wants to be a good cop.
Sarah wants to have a successful business.
Randy and Sarah want each other.

Continuing on: My next step will elaborate (very slightly) on some of the conflict potential in the book. Since this book is a sequel, most of the character back story was established, which cuts back on how much time I had to spend figuring out their basic personality traits.

It's Award Time Again

First, congrats to Mason Canyon, who won my impromptu drawing. I fed all the correct entries (had to mention WDH) into a random number generator and Mason's name came up.Mason, email me with your mailing address and I'll get your souvenir totebag from a multi-author book signing in the mail.

Since awards have been in the spotlight, with the Grammys (I didn't watch),Miss America (didn't watch that either), and the nominations for Oscars, I realized I've been remiss in thanking those who have given Terry's Place awards recently. Thanks to all And yes, I'll get to some writing "meat" later in this post.

First, from Maryann Miller of "It's Not All Gravy", the Circle of Friends Award.



From Lorel Clayton of "I'm Blogging Drowning Here":



And from Patricia Stoltey



From Marianne Evans, "A Minute With Maryann"

A Giveaway from Wynter

Quick update from Dara/Wynter. She's giving away a copy of her newest release, "Can't Stand The Heat" to one commenter in her post, "An Alter Ego Takes Over" below.

An Alter Ego Takes Over

Today I'm welcoming Dara Edmondson--or is it Wynter Daniels--to Terry's Place. Wynter Daniels is the naughty cousin of romance writer Dara Edmondson. Wynter was such a bad girl that her parents were forced to punish her by locking her away in her room for hours on end. She spent those hours thinking up wicked stories for her future career as an erotic romance author. Just kidding, but Wynter is Dara’s alter ego.

First – thank you, Terry for inviting me to join you here today. I’m a big fan of your blog, which is such a wealth of great information for fiction writers at all stages of the journey.

I’d like to talk about using a pen name today. Specifically, why I use one. When I looked around at authors who have written under pseudonyms, I was struck by the number who write under more than one name and by those who have chosen to forgo their given name in their work. The simplest of reasons is a forgettable or difficult name. Some famous authors wrote under a pen name to protect their identity from government persecution, like Voltaire. Others, like George Eliot, did it to hide their gender. You see, George Eliot was actually Mary Ann Evans, who feared a woman’s writings would not be taken seriously.

Eleanor Marie Robertson assumed all writers took pen names, so she changed hers to Nora Roberts. Now she uses more than one pseudonym to differentiate the various genres in which she writes: Nora Roberts for romance and J. D. Robb for crime/mystery books. She has also penned books under the name Jill March.

Titles - and a secret

What I'm reading: Master of Craving, by Karin Tabke

Names. By now, everyone (me included) is saturated with discussions of the new iPad (there were clearly no women on the team that came up with THAT name). This was an old spoof on the iPod, but it's just as appropriate now.


Naming things can be a headache. I hate coming up with titles for my books. When I started learning the business, everyone said not to worry about it because the publishers would change it. That was fine with me. Only my publishers never have, so what you see represent my struggles to find those perfect words.

Titles are the last things I come up with. WHAT'S IN A NAME? got its title the day I wanted to enter the manuscript in a contest and I had to write something on that "Title" line. Since the book dealt with people pretending to be someone else (or is it someone elses?), the title seemed appropriate. Even though that wasn't really what I had in mind when I wrote it, as long as it worked, I was happy.