Category: Writing (Page 18 of 72)

Cheating On My Novels With Picture Books

January 23, 2018 / Katie L. Carroll

I’ve so not been in the mood to blog lately. I have lots of things I could write about (both on the blog and in my own writing) but nothing that’s really sparking for me. So I’d rather spend my limited words on my actual writing than here.

So I’m just popping in to say that the one aspect of writing that I’m excited about is picture books. I think the short form is fitting with my attention span right now. Plus, I’ve been reading so many picture books with the boys, it’s hard not to get inspired in that area.

Writing picture books is a fun break from novel writing, which has felt like so much work lately. I’m slogging trough the long sentences and paragraphs in the novels. But my picture book is coming to me in fun little spurts. The scenes are snapshots that I have to interpret into words. Then I have to piece those snapshots together for a whole…but a short whole!

Not to say that shorter = easier. That is certainly not the case. But picture books are different than novels, and a change must be what I need. It’s almost like I’m cheating on the longer form with the shorter stuff. For me, there is less baggage when it comes to picture books. I feel a lot of pressure to get things right with this novel I’m working on, but there’s none of that with my picture books.

So I’m going with it…riding this burst of picture book creativity for now.

December #InkRipples: The Pressure of End of Year Goals

December 13, 2017 / Katie L. Carroll

December is a stressful and busy time of year. For me, it’s not a great month for setting up goals. I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s Resolutions because it feels too contrived and arbitrary. Sure, it’s a new year, but that doesn’t mean I’m in the right place to set up new goals. Maybe I’m still working on my current goals. Maybe I’m swamped and just focusing on the daily task of getting through the days. I certainly don’t need the pressure and stress of forcing myself to declare a goal simply because of the time of year.

So I’m afraid I can’t offer up any great insights into my goals for 2018. I certainly have goals for next year, but most of them on ongoing ones, not ones I’m just starting to think about now. But I’d love to hear about your goals…drop me a comment!

Here’s where I usually do my spiel on how #InkRipples is a monthly meme and December all about goals. However, it looks like fellow #InkRipples founders Kai Strand and Mary Waibel are moving on from the meme. I’ve loved doing #InkRipples for the past three years with Mary, Kai, and all the other bloggers who dropped a ripple in the inkwell, but maybe it’s time for me to move on as well. I do have a new idea for a monthly meme I’ve been thinking about for 2018. I haven’t made any set decisions yet. What would you all like to see on the blog next year?

Brewing up the Research from LA Dragoni Author of AGAIN, FOR LOVE

November 27, 2017 / Katie L. Carroll

LA Dragoni is here to celebrate the release of her time travel romance AGAIN, FOR LOVE. Speaking of love, I love the Matrixy look of this cover. Let’s give LA a big welcome!

Even a fiction author has to do her research. And for my newest book, Again, For Love, a time travel romance, I’ve been doing years of research. And no, I haven’t been time travelling.

I originally got this idea for a book about twenty years ago! I thought it would be cool for a guy who has a crush on a co-worker to save her by time traveling to avoid her death. I started to write it, but I just didn’t get that far. It was stale and boring and I wasn’t an experienced author who could figure out what was missing.

Fast forward to 2016. I read The Troublemaker Next Door by Marie Harte and suddenly I knew what was missing. Her characters are full of sass and snark and chemistry. Honestly, I hadn’t thought about Again, For Love in years, but as soon as I finished reading her book I knew I needed to pull that manuscript out of the cobwebs.

I had originally put the co-workers in an office environment. Yawn. Clearly, to obtain sass and snark, I had to take them out of the office and put them…where? That’s when my years of research came in handy.

I live in a craft beer mecca. Bend, Oregon holds a lot of “best of” titles and many of them have to do with the sheer number of breweries we have, and their success. I’ve been visiting these breweries and enjoying their beers and developing a discerning palette for years. Yet I’ve never actually worked in a brewery. But I’ve toured them. I learned about the beer making process. Different ingredients, methods of aging, bottling…all sorts of things. Then I toured them again. This time I ignored the knowledgeable tour guide and stalked the workers. Watching them move about, interact with each other, heft, direct, etc. When I developed what I hoped was a passible knowledge of what it’s like to work in a brewery I had to do a little (read a lot) more research on the beer itself.

Luckily, here in Bend, Oregon, we have the largest ale trail in the west. My husband and I frequently host friends and family who come to Bend simply to experience the ale trail. I’ve tasted so much beer, I have a trophy! My favorite beer is a winter ale on nitro. I know I don’t like pilsners, I’m always willing to try a new red ale or a stout. It was so much fun being able to weave this knowledge into my story. I hope I’ve represented the craft brewing world well.

Book Blurb:

A life must be lost. Who will make the ultimate sacrifice?

Lawson lives a simple life: a job at a brewery, and his basketball and hockey leagues. Even his eccentric lifelong friend and roommate—who is intent on discovering time travel—doesn’t complicate things. Then Jory appears. Lawson feels an immediate attraction to her, yet their attempts at dating end with him thinking it just isn’t meant to be. But Jory refuses to give up.

When one date ends tragically, Lawson turns to his best friend and the experimental time travel program he’s invented. But, no matter what he does, each time the reset ends with a loss.

It’s clear…a life must be lost, and Lawson is prepared to give his for Jory. But he isn’t the only one playing with time.

Will he spare Jory by forfeiting his own life? Or will someone else make the ultimate sacrifice?

Buy now:

Amazon| Barnes & Noble| iTunes| add on Goodreads

About the Author:

LA Dragoni isn’t too particular about who fallsin love or where they fall in love. She simply considers it her job to capture the story about their love. Whether it’s paranormal, mythical, or time travel, LA will be there to divine their story for you. She lives in Central Oregon with her husband and children, but haunts ghost towns and cemeteries up and down the west, in search of the next adventure to sift through her storytelling brain. Learn more about LA and her work at www.ladragoni.com

November #InkRipples: Finishing That Book (Or Not!)

November 13, 2017 / Katie L. Carroll

It’s no secret here on the Observation Desk that I’m a notoriously slow writer. I’ve expressed how I feel about prolific authors (see Confessions of an Author: Prolific Writers). More recently, I blogged about Why Is It Taking Me So Long To Write The Second Elixir Book. It took almost ten years from when I first started writing ELIXIR BOUND for it to become a published book. I’m not exactly winning any speed awards over here!

via GIPHY

So I am afraid I have no business offering any kind of advice on the November #InkRipples topic of Finishing that Book! I’ve tried NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, where many writers try to write a complete book, i.e. 50,000 words, in the month of November). Last year I tried a modified version of it (see Gearing up for National Novel Writing Month 2016) and fell short. One year I actually won NaNoWriMo and wrote 50,000 words of a story, but that story has since become a drawer manuscript that will probably never be published.

But you’ll tell me that no words are wasted, even the unpublished ones. Or that the words will come and to take whatever time I need writing them. This is what I tell myself (and those things are both true). But that doesn’t mean it isn’t frustrating to be a slow writer. Couple that with the fact that I never feel like I have adequate time to write, and that makes for a very frustrated writer.

Nevertheless, I’m still plugging along over here at my achingly slow snail’s pace. How about you all–what do you do to get that book finished?

#InkRipples is a monthly meme created by Katie L. Carroll, Mary Waibel, and Kai Strand. We pick a topic (November is all about Finishing that Book!), drop a ripple in the inkwell (i.e. write about it on our blogs), and see where the conversation goes. We’d love to have you join in the conversation on your own blogs or on your social media page. Full details and each month’s topic can be found on my #InkRipples page.

What’s Your Real Story? from Juliana Spink Mills Author of NIGHT BLADE

November 8, 2017 / Katie L. Carroll

It’s always fun when a writing friend has a new story out and I get to share it on the Observation Desk. Let’s give a big welcome to Juliana Spink Mills as she celebrates the release of her latest book, the YA urban fantasy NIGHT BLADE.

What’s Your Real Story?

by Juliana Spink Mills

So you’ve written a novel, or novella, or short story. Well done! Now you get to the fun bit, where everyone asks you “what’s your story about?” Maybe you’ve memorized your blurb, or have a terrific ‘elevator pitch’. Hopefully you’re not like me, and don’t go red and stammer out, “uh, vampires and demons and sword stuff…?”

But what’s your story really about?

Every work of fiction has underlying themes – on purpose or accidentally – and these, to me, are the real story. Perhaps it’s tenacity, or courage, or the power of love. For instance, Harry Potter, for me, is a tale of belief. Believing in yourself, believing in your friends, trusting in the belief that your instincts are leading you in the right direction, no matter what other people say.

On the surface, my new YA urban fantasy novel Night Blade (book 2 of the Blade Hunt Chronicles) is a story of robbery and trickery, of ball gowns and politics. It has sword fights! Magic! A prophecy! Here’s the blurb:

In the aftermath of the Heart Blade’s return, Del and Rose have different roads to follow. One leads forward, the other to the distant past. Rose is on a mission to infiltrate and double-cross the ultimate heist, and retrieve a game-changing prize. Meanwhile, as the Court of the Covenant prepares to meet, Del has a quest of her own. She must untangle her lost identity or risk her entire future.

With the Blade Hunt prophecy in motion, darkness threatens to rise, and a new sword emerges from the shadows.

But halfway through writing Night Blade, I realized something. Both this book and the one before, Heart Blade, are actually about choices. Choosing your own path in life, rather than following the one you were set upon. Choosing right from wrong. Choosing your family, choosing your friends. Hard choices. Easy choices. And things that, at the end of the day, end up being no choice at all.

I didn’t set out to write a book series about choices. I wanted exciting fight scenes, some romance, cool supernatural elements, and maybe a car chase or two. But now that I’ve noticed it, I can see that the theme has been there from the start. Realizing this has given me a whole new perspective on my writing, and when my next project is done, before I begin revising, I plan to have a good hard look at it and figure out what my underlying theme is. That way, I can reinforce it when I get to the editing stage.

A writer might set out with something they want to push from the very beginning. Or, like me, that theme may emerge in a more organic way. However these themes come to permeate a work of fiction, they’re the backbone that the story builds upon.

What’s behind your stories? The ones you read or write? Why not try taking apart some of your personal favorites to figure out what’s beneath the words?

Buy HEART BLADE: http://hyperurl.co/HeartBlade

Buy NIGHT BLADE: http://hyperurl.co/NightBlade

Find NIGHT BLADE on Goodreads

About the Author:

Juliana Spink Mills was born in England, but grew up in Brazil. Now she lives in Connecticut, and writes science fiction and fantasy. She is the author of Heart Blade and Night Blade, the first two books in the young adult Blade Hunt Chronicles urban fantasy series. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies and online publications. Besides writing, Juliana works as a Portuguese/English translator, and as a teen library assistant. She watches way too many TV shows, and loves to get lost in a good book. Her dream is to move to Narnia when she grows up. Or possibly Middle Earth, if she’s allowed a very small dragon of her own. Find her on her website or Twitter @JSpinkMills.