Tag: author

Write me.

Book

I’m pretty sure I have enough adventures for London Hart in my head to write another murder mystery … but this book made me question whether I had it in me to complete the second in the series.

I’m a great one for procrastination and aside from my own talent for that, Covid reared its ugly head and brought the world to its knees. I think a large portion of us fell into a depression and are still trying to pull ourselves out of it. You name it, the universe threw it at us. It’s been so outrageous that when they announced that UFO’s are probably real, we didn’t even blink.

Trying to find a space in my head that wasn’t full of doom and gloom was an uphill battle. I didn’t want it to take me twenty years to finish KISS ME AND DIE, so I closed the doors to my studio, put on headphones, and dropped in for visits with London, Ryder, CC and Brenda. They’ve turned into a refuge from the storm and I’m so grateful to have them.

At long last, this part of their story is in print. A copy of the book sits beside me in its pretty orange and yellow cover and I’m not sure I’ve even begun to process the fact that it’s truly done. I think that has a lot to do with the trauma of formatting everything correctly for KDP publishing. The experience almost put me off writing the third novel, but I found that, like it or not, I have a “never say die” attitude. Unless of course it’s in the title of the book and that I’m ok with.

As a side note, the book cover comes with the orange cover…the original design still appears in some cases as you can see on the side bar, but the book doesn’t come with that cover. Seriously…it’s trying to make me crazy.

DO THEY FEEL LIKE REAL PEOPLE TO YOU?..

Book, Photography

all rights reserved.
all rights reserved.

Yep…the image is all blurry. But it doesn’t have to be in focus…it’s that way to give me inspiration. I’m almost finished with the first draft of my first novel. Ooooooooooooohh…exciting times.

I like the image because you can see that they’re real people, but they’re not easy to see…you have to stare at the image and decide for yourself just what it is you’re looking at. I’m not going to keep you hanging and you’ve probably already figured it out, but the woman in white is a bride. A bride on the bow of a boat…the imagination takes flight! This is my round about way of getting to the subject of this post. Not too long after I started writing, someone asked me if the characters in the book felt real to me. They didn’t. They were like the people in the image. There, but somehow, not there.

My heroine was a mystery who took me by the hand and waded into the unknown with me. I was watching her, judging her, wondering about her. The question of whether she seemed real to me kept surfacing. When would she seem real? Should she start to feel real? Would I suddenly start to miss her when I wasn’t writing? Would I wish that she would ring the doorbell and ask me to go to Starbucks with her? (I’d have to pass on that one..coffee gives me palpitations…) Would we show up at a party wearing the same outfit?

I gave up wondering about the reality of it all. I wrote about my heroine and since I didn’t want this to be a book with just one character, I added more. The funny thing is, I started to like all of these people. I looked forward to what they would do next and I started to SEE them. They weren’t blurry like the bride on the bow of the boat and they had personality…the bride just kind of stood around and looked “bridal”.

So why am I writing this? Just because I’m so close to the end of the first draft that I can smell it and the people in the book?…Well it’s like some kind of magic happened, because…….THEY SEEM REAL TO ME!

WE JUMPED THE SECOND HURDLE!…

Photography

BOB WAS EXCITED!!!!! all rights reserved.
BOB WAS EXCITED!!!!!
all rights reserved.

 

 

BOB BRAIDED HIS HAIR TO LOOK HIS BEST! all rights reserved.
BOB BRAIDED HIS HAIR TO LOOK HIS BEST!
all rights reserved.

 

BOB WAS TOO ROWDY IN THE BACK SEAT... all rights reserved,
BOB WAS TOO ROWDY IN THE BACK SEAT…
all rights reserved,

 

 

MAMA WANTED TO GET AWAY FROM THE ROWDY BOYS, SO I LET HER SIT IN THE FRONT SEAT NEXT TO ME. all rights reserved.
MAMA WANTED TO GET AWAY FROM THE ROWDY BOYS, SO I LET HER SIT IN THE FRONT SEAT NEXT TO ME.
all rights reserved.

 

 

SOME OF US HURRIED HOME, SOME OF US DID A LITTLE SIGHT SEEING (BOB)... all rights reserved,
SOME OF US HURRIED HOME, SOME OF US DID A LITTLE SIGHT SEEING (BOB)…
all rights reserved,

 

Well…we did it!  I loaded the car up with all of the animals…and headed south.  Many, many hours and potty breaks later, we made it to Nashville…spending money buying treats from the vending machines at the rest stops for everybody to keep them happy is expensive!

I checked into the cool hotel and got everybody through the lobby and into the elevator…getting all of us into a glass elevator was fun and scary….I think there might be some smudgy spots on the glass…Bob and Joe kept putting their mouths up against it and breathing hard.

In all seriousness…  It was really interesting…I had to check in the next morning and get an I.D. badge and then found out who would be interviewing me…the entire floor of the hotel that our room was on was used for the interviews…there were SO many people!  I even met a fellow whose son is looking for someone to write the book he wants to illustrate!

I had no idea that this would be such a big deal and I found out that I wasn’t the only nervous human there!  Long story short…I had my interview….we discussed the books and then started talking about Mama and the boys and horses and animals in general and it was a great meeting.  I was given a business card…told to send an email to the interviewer and he would give me the secret information on who to contact and work with next!  We still have a way to go…a few more hurdles…but we’re just happy to have made it over the second hurdle!