What's Cooking Wednesday - Tomato-Spinach Soup

What I'm reading: Contest entry #3 of 8

Thanks to Mike for his great post yesterday. Remember, there's still plenty of time to comment on both my Monday post and his Tuesday's post to enter to win books. And another reminder about my POV workshop at Savvy Authors. I'll be giving books away there, too. If you know someone who might benefit from a basic craft workshop, point them that way. I'm blogging about it today at their site. Please pop over.

And, I'm still open to more easy gluten-free desserts for our neighbors. I live in the boonies, so fancy ingredients, like gluten-free flours, are hard to come by.  Likewise, baking at 9100 feet presents its own challenges, so I try to steer away from cakes.

My books always include food. Sometimes, however, the scene doesn't end up on the page of the final product, as is the case with Sadie's Tomato-Spinach Soup. In my Pine Hills series, Sarah often eats at Sadie's. One of her favorite things for lunch is their Tomato-Spinach Soup. I'll be making this one for our monthly dinner pot luck on Friday. (In truth, the original recipe, which I've varied, came not from "Sadie" but from Sandra McDonald, my first writing mentor.)

"Sadie's" Tomato-Spinach Soup

Ingredients
Vegetable cooking spray
1 ½ teaspoons olive oil
¾ c chopped onion
1 garlic clove, minced
1 ½ cups salsa
1 c fresh tomato, chopped
2 14.5 oz cans diced tomatoes
1 10-3/4 oz can condensed tomato soup, undiluted
1 10 oz package frozen chopped spinach, thawed

Directions
Coat a Dutch oven with cooking spray; add olive oil, and place over medium-high heat until hot.
Add the onion and garlic, saute for 2 minutes.
Add remaining ingredients; bring to a boil.
Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 10 minutes or until thoroughly heated. Yield: 4 servings (serving size: 1 cup)

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Using Multiple POV Characters

I hope you're having a safe and happy Labor Day weekend. A reminder: Today's the last day to take advantage of my e-book giveaway.

And another reminder that I'm hosting a month-long discussion of characters at Coffee Time Romance. It's free, and you can drop in any time. And thinking about characters leads me to today's post.

When authors put a character on the page, they've made a decision as to whether or not it will be a POV character. In my opinion, if you're going to make a character a POV character, there needs to be a good reason for it.

If the only reason you're adding a POV character is to show his thoughts, then you should probably re-think it and see if there's another way to get that information to the reader. We live in a single POV world. A POV character has to be critical for plot advancement, not author convenience.

In romance, it's a 'given' that there will be two POV protagonists: hero and heroine. There might be more, but there are always at least two.

Mysteries are another genre. Most mysteries I read feature some kind of crime-solving detective, and often, they're part of a series where the same character heads up the entire series.

And then there's suspense, which by nature, requires more than one POV character, because the reader needs to know more than the protagonist—hence, the suspense.

A recent read falls into the suspense category (the back cover calls it a thriller, but I disagree with the recent overuse of the term). As someone who definitely prefers to connect with characters, I tried to step back and examine why the book works for me.

7 Considerations When Writing Descriptions

Thanks to Jenyfer for her post yesterday. Most of us haven't had to pick up stakes without notice, especially not knowing if or when we can get back to what we considered "normal." And don't forget, she's got a prize for one commenter, and you have until Friday to enter. Scroll down and leave a comment under her post if you haven't already.

On Monday, I talked about how descriptions are tied into the depth of POV you're using for your story. I write deep POV, generally 3rd person. I prefer it, so this post is geared toward descriptions using that viewpoint.

Seven things to consider when writing descriptions.

1. What's happening in the story? Is it an action scene? If so, would your character really be noticing what you've spent three paragraphs describing? If bullets are flying, or the bad guys are on the way, or even if they think the bad guys might be on the way, where's their attention going to be focused? They're likely to be listening and watching—but for things 'bad guy' related, not that the sounds of the surf reminds them of that delightful vacation they took five years ago to Hawaii—and, this is definitely not the place to stop and have them remember what they did on that vacation.

2. Who is your character? Would a guy who's idea of a good time is sitting on the couch, thumb on remote, flipping between 3 football games actually notice (or even know) that the woman entering the room at a banquet is wearing a specific designer label? Would he recognize the music playing in the room as Vivaldi? Would he know the painting on the wall is an original (or copy) of a Degas? Would he describe the color of the walls as mauve, taupe or ecru? Does he know what those colors are?

3. Where is your character? Often, you'll see a character mentioning that the character entering the room is wearing a "grey wool suit" or a "red silk blouse" or something to that effect. I don't know about you, but I can't recognize fabrics from a distance—heck, I probably wouldn't recognize them if I touched them. Can you spot the difference between 'silk' and 'silky'? These sorts of observations, while adding to description, can slow the pace if it's not something that would be logical for the character to recognize. Those sorts of details put the author on the page.

Scenes, Descriptions and POV

What I'm reading: Snake Skin by C.J. Lyons, Wicked Becomes You, by Meredith Duran

Want to win 21 mystery books? Check the Deals and Steals tab.

One of the "perks" to getting the rights back to a previously published book, especially one you wrote years ago—and ever more especially, your very first published book—is that you can make changes. I've already talked—at length—about updating the book to make it more current. But what about just making a better book?

So, as I await getting the rights back to my first book, I'm working on improving it. I've gone back and looked at some early drafts, and parts I cut before submitting. The first draft of the book was 143,000 words long. The published version: just under 90,000. So there were a LOT of cuts.

I went back to some very early drafts. One scene showed my hero and heroine in a restaurant. In my efforts to paint clear pictures for readers, I'd spent several paragraphs on the waiter coming to the table, taking orders, and the usual "mundane" stuff that accompanies eating out.

I was tempted to include some of that scene. After all, aren't we supposed to include descriptions, involve the senses, and make things realistic for the reader? And I thought I'd done a halfway decent job, trying to Show, not Tell.

This was what I had (and I've not edited it at all—it's here for content only; this was written in 2003, so be kind with your thoughts.)

Vague is OK

Since I'm writing this post on Sunday I can't report on our Cripple Creek anniversary getaway. Yet. I know Hubster is looking forward to riding the narrow-gauge train. And thanks to Autumn for covering things yesterday.

Back to my non-plotting. One of my crit partners is aghast that I don't nail more specific details before I write.

For my WIP, I am more or less locked into another plot point. The heroine's husband's abuse escalated big time after his father died. Again, that's in my May 2011 release, so I can't change it. (Of course, that's being optimistic that this WIP will see publication, but I have to write it as if it will.) About the only other things we know about the husband is that he's very possessive, and social status is number one on his priority list.

Thus, I needed a good reason to explain why everything went south after the father died. My reasoning said it was because the father was involved in something shady, and somehow, the heroine's husband was now involved.

My questions: Why would he let himself be dragged in, especially since his father was dead? Given his established character, it might be something that if he doesn't do it, his standing in the community will plummet. A chat with Detective Hussey (if you're new here and don't know who he is, he's a very real homicide detective, and that's his real name--scroll through the archives for "Homicide Hussey" posts) assured me this was a reasonable motivation.