Broke Characters

One of my favorite things about writing and reading books is the infinite amount of character personalities I get to explore. I love the possibility a person or creature can represent, so it’s disturbing to me to see the growing trend of protagonists who are likeable and not much else. I don’t know if this is a carryover from the young adult or some romance genres, or if people are plain afraid to branch out a little with their leading men and ladies. I don’t know if we’re reaching a stage where readers don’t respond well to flawed characters or if authors are afraid to distance readers, but I personally find it annoying.
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Woe is Me

One of the highest points of a writer’s, and if not a writer’s then definitely my life, is the day they go from aspiring author to…wait for it… Author. Finally sharing the stories of the characters who’ve bothered you while driving, nattered while you grocery shopped, pestered you during dinner and maybe even intruded when you were in the bathroom, is Read More »

Is it Wrong to Want to Be Right?

Okay, pop quiz!

Which of the following terms is incorrect?

Naval Base
Army Base
Marine Base
Air Force Base
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Fading Away by Maz Marik

The bungalow was always filled with a welcoming aroma: a pleasant place to spend the evening. Grandma would be fretting about something in the kitchen, while Grandad watched the football or rugby in the cosy lounge. The smell of cooking lingered in the hallway, teasing and tempting, whetting the appetite before the feast finally arrived.
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I often live in the past. I think we all do. Our past is who we are—maybe not exactly—but it makes us who we are. Doesn’t it? If we have a great past, we live it today. If our past is not what we wished, we can change it. Either way, our past is like history—it is our roots, like it or not. Read More »

Book Reviews

A couple times this week I’ve opened my Facebook to see discussions among my fellow authors and reviewers regarding reviews and review etiquette.

One of my FB friends had reviewed a movie and got blasted for it. He was told he had no right to state his opinions in his review. The commenter was so nasty to him personally it made the reviewer nervous.
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Dying and Murder are overrated. Writing about them is not.

That’s what I used to think anyway. Until my first publishing contract with Midnight Ink last year. Then, holy-crap on a popsicle stick, I got a lesson in being an author!

See, it started with Dying to Know, my fourth book and first to be published. Dying to Know is a murder mystery with a paranormal twist—the story about Oliver Tucker, a fun-loving, wife-loving, take-the-world-by-the-horns homicide cop in my small home town of Virginia. Tuck is murdered in his own home and his world turns, well, weird. He returns to solve his own murder—Detective solve thyself! His biggest challenges are learning to be back Read More »

Am I eccentric, or is the rest of the world going mad?

I’ve recently begun to think of myself as an eccentric. Not in a ‘Look how non-mainstream I am’ kind of way, just in the sense that my tastes seem to be rapidly becoming outdated. You see, I like printed books. I don’t like people getting their phones out during social occasions. I’m never going to buy Google Glass.
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In this day and age, a lot of bestseller books are increasingly being made into films. Some of these do really well in the box office while others completely flop. This could be as a result of a number of things including poor marketing or not enough marketing, casting a poor choice of actors who are unfit for that particular characters’ role regardless if they are good actors or not, leaving out a majority of the elements which were Read More »

Let’s get one thing straight – I want my heroes flawed. Look at the human race. Strong. Adaptable. Flawed. So why shouldn’t our characters be nicked with bad breath, bed head and nasty sinus coughs? Call them quirks, oddities, habits, whatever. I call it good writing. And with good writing, comes lots of readers.
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Thank you, Bitten by Books, for inviting me to blog, I look forward to chatting with everyone.

Today, I’m going to discuss, Animal Abuse and Storytelling, something that is close to my heart.

A friend invited me to visit her horse stabled at a place not far from where I lived in Yorktown. As a child we had horses and I’ve missed them during my adult years, so I jumped at the chance to see a smart four-legged ride. Read More »

I’ve talked and written about fear often on blogs for writers, but never to fans of reading, mostly because readers don’t think about fear as being a motivating factor in whether they like a book or not. But for me, fear is all about writing and reading and becoming enthralled with a story.

Normally, joy and fear don’t go together except for roller coaster rides and scary movies with buttered popcorn and cold colas. The movies and food, not the roller coaster and food. That would just be really messy. We’d never get the popcorn butter out of our hair.
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Because Romance is Healthy

Vampire and werewolf bites are not the only way to transform a romance reader’s life! My life was literally transformed by reading romance at a young age. I saw heroes in the pages of books I wasn’t seeing in real life, but it gave me a set of standards for my own hero down the road that helped me to end up with my very own wonderful “alpha at the end of a book.” Read More »

What if we had the power to bring back the dead? I’m not talking about zapping someone with defibrillators and restarting his or her heart. I mean really raise a corpse from the ground and give it a second chance at life.
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Censored? What the ***k!

Most authors will tell you, that nothing is more exciting than the release of a new novel. There’s that moment, when you wonder how well the rest of the world will receive your work, but, in general excitement is in the air. One can almost associate a writer with a parent, wondering about their child at such a time. Almost…
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So the hot topic around the web the last few days has been e-piracy. That’s a term that breaks every author’s heart. I thought about how I wanted to approach this post for a while. I took it to the web and had some amazing responses from authors and reviewers. The one thing that stood out to me was the complete sadness in everyone’s response.
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First off I would like to thank Bitten by Books for having me today.

Everyone has a dream in life, some want to be a doctor while others want to be a famous rock star. I never really knew what I wanted to be. I spent over thirty years going through the motions of life. I got married had a baby, got divorced, waitressed, met the man of my dreams, went back to school, Read More »

Imagine this: You are a character in an urban fantasy novel (my sympathies!) and you meet someone new and interesting. They’re sexy, assertive, and best of all, they’re into you. Things progress they way they naturally do so you invite them back to your place where, in the privacy of your bedroom, they cut your throat and kill you.
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I’m coming a bit late to this particular topic-it raged around the blogosphere about a year ago, when Justine Larbalestier’s LIAR, a book about a young black female lead, was set to be published with a young white female on its cover. You can go read all about that http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2009/07/23/aint-that-a-shame/ over here if you like, but I’m going to talk a bit about my own experience with the same scenario here today.

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