Sunday, September 11, 2011
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Countdown to the Contest (and Super Secret Bonus Prize) by MB Partlow
When I took on the job of Contest Coordinator for Pikes Peak Writers, I thought I would wave my arms a lot, wear a small but tasteful tiara and generally make Great Things happen with little to no effort on my part.
Then I woke up, no longer in Oz. Or Panem or Barryar or Jamie and Claire’s Scotland or the futuristic New York that belongs to Eve Dallas. I’m in the here and now, dancing as fast as I can as the opening of PPW’s Fiction Contest draws near.
The Contest will officially open on September 15th and close on November 15th. The details are all laid out on the website, but we’re also hosting a WriteBrain on September 20th that’s all about the contest. And guess what? There’s a super secret bonus prize being offered for people who enter in the first month of the contest! We’ll be announcing all the details at the WriteBrain, and on the website the next day.
Speaking of the website, have you visited lately? The Contest has its own tab now, thanks to the magical machinations of Ron Cree. You can find the rules, FAQs and a handy checklist there, all designed to make the Contest experience a rewarding one for everyone involved. (Translation: Follow the rules and you won’t piss off the judges.) We even have a document telling you how to keep your Contest Coordinator happy—although they wouldn’t let me say anything about foot rubs or my favorite kinds of tea or chocolate.
This website, already the embodiment of awesomeness, is not a static instrument. We’ll be adding updates, interviews, tips from Contest winners and Contest judges, and the all important VIP judges who rank the top scoring entries in each category. For anyone who struggles with the synopsis (and who doesn’t?), we’ll be adding a winning synopsis from a previous year’s Contest. (Why, yes, the entry went on to become a published novel. Thanks for asking.)
If you have any questions or comments about the Contest, please feel free to email me at pgcontest@gmail.com. I hope to see a lot of you at the WriteBrain on the 20th (held in the Celebration Place at Citadel Mall, 6:30-8:30 p.m.). If you haven’t already met me, I’ll be the one in the front of the room, sans tiara, waving my arms as I talk.
MB Partlow
2012 PPW Contest Coordinator
About the Writer: MB Partlow abandoned a promising career as a toenail model to pursue writing fiction. She believes fiction is currently hiding behind an incorrigible Siberian Elm in her backyard, but might be lured out with the proper application of P.G. Tipps and chocolate cookies. She's an active member of PPW, and believes that the Conference every year is like a brief but necessary trip back to her home planet. This is her first year as Contest Coordinator for PPW, so treat her kindly and avoid sudden moves and loud noises. You can read her blog at http://partlowspool.wordpress.com.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Friday, September 2, 2011
Sweet Success! - Harvey Stanbrough
Harvey Stanbrough's magic realism YA+ short fiction collection, Stories from the Cantina (ISBN: 978-1-4581-8047-6, ~26K, ebook) was independently published in May 2011 by StoneThread. The collection is available online from Smashwords, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble in all formats. The author's website is at http://HarveyStanbrough.com.
In these five stories, you will meet people significant to the life of young Maldito and the fictional village of Agua Rocosa. Eufemia and José, his parents; the Storyteller himself, Juan-Carlos Salazár; and several other colorful characters who are used to the magic that surrounds our everyday lives. If you've enjoyed the works of Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende, if you enjoy reading about characters who live at the precise point where reality folds into imagination, you will enjoy these Stories from the Cantina.
His nonfiction essay, The Essentials of Digital Publishing (ISBN 978-1-4580-4909-4, ~6k, ebook) was independently published in July 2011 by Writing the World. The essay is available online from Smashwords, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.
This book discusses manuscript preparation for submission to Smashwords premium catalog and how to create an attractive ebook cover. Step by step prep including screenshots, how to create an interactive table of contents and several other notes and tips. Cover design section includes step by step instructions for changing the color and texture of your stock cover photo, adding and adjusting stylized text, and using the Print Screen feature on your PC and the Paint program to create your own JPG files. Includes how to size the cover for Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others, how to create a thumbnail image, and more. Also includes a section on marketing, social networks and much more.
Harvey Stanbrough was born in New Mexico, seasoned in Texas, and baked in Arizona. He spent most of his early life in the home of his heart, the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona. After graduating from a 21-year civilian-appreciation course in the U.S. Marine Corps, he attended Eastern New Mexico University where he managed to sneak up on a bachelors degree. In 2006 his traditional poetry collection, Beyond the Masks, was nominated for the National Book Award. He writes and works as a freelance editor and writing instructor from his home in southeast Arizona.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Quote
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. – Toni Morrison
Friday, August 26, 2011
Sweet Success! - Beth Groundwater, Carol Berg
Beth Groundwater's mystery novel, Deadly Currents (ISBN 978-1410438317, large print hardcover, 397 pages), was released in large-print format on July 27, 2011 by Thorndike Press. The large print edition should be available "everywhere fine books are sold." Visit her website atbethgroundwater.com and her blog at bethgroundwater.blogspot.com.
The Arkansas River is the heart and soul of Salida, Colorado. It fuels the small town's economy and thrums in the blood of twenty-seven-year-old Mandy Tanner, a river ranger. When a whitewater rafting accident occurs, she deftly executes a rescue, but a man dies anyway. But it wasn't the river rapids that killed him, it was poison. Tom King was a rich land developer with bitter business rivals, who cheated on his wife, refused to support his kayak-obsessed son, and infuriated environmentalists. Mandy's world turns upside down when her beloved Uncle Bill—the respected owner of a raft outfitting business—dies of a heart attack. Suspicious that his death is somehow connected to Tom King, she goes on an emotionally turbulent quest for the truth—and ends up in dangerous waters.
In addition, Beth's mystery novel, A Real Basket Case (ISBN: 978-0738727011, trade paperback and ebook, 312 pages), will be released in trade paperback and ebook formats on November 8, 2011, by Midnight Ink, and will be similarly available.
Feeling neglected by her workaholic husband, forty-something gift basket maker Claire Hanover joins an aerobics class. In a moment of weakness, Claire agrees to let charming aerobics instructor Enrique come to her house to give her a massage. She realizes she has made a deadly mistake when Enrique is shot and killed in her bedroom and her husband Roger is arrested for the murder. Determined to clear Roger's name and save her marriage, Claire sets out to find the real killer, encountering drug dealers, jealous ex-girlfriends, and angry cops along the way.
Beth Groundwater writes the Claire Hanover gift basket designer mystery series (A Real Basket Case, nominated for the 2007 Best First Novel Agatha Award, and To Hell in a Handbasket, released in May, 2009). She also writes the Rocky Mountain Outdoor Adventures mystery series starring whitewater river ranger Mandy Tanner. The first, Deadly Currents, was released in March, 2011. Beth lives in Colorado and enjoys its many outdoor activities, including skiing, hiking, and whitewater rafting. She loves talking to book clubs, and not just for the gossip and wine! Visit her website at bethgroundwater.com and her blog at bethgroundwater.blogspot.com.
* * *
Carol Berg's fantasy series, Collegia Magica (The Spirit Lens, The Soul Mirror, and The Daemon Prism [forthcoming]), has been licensed for audio by Audible.com. No release dates have been announced yet.
Also, her fantasy novel Song of the Beast (ISBN 978-0451464231, trade paperback, 400 pages) will be released in a new trade paperback edition by NAL/Roc books. The book will be available at brick and mortar bookstores as well as online.
Seventeen years of brutal imprisonment has broken Aidan McAllister. His voice is silent, his hands ruined, his music that once offered beauty and hope to war-torn Elyria destroyed. The god who nurtured his talent since boyhood has abandoned him. But no one ever told him his crime. To discover the truth, he must risk his hard-bought freedom to unlock the mind of his god and the heart of his enemy.
Carol Berg is a former software engineer and PPWC success story. Since selling her first books at the 1999 PPWC, she’s been flown to Israel, taught writing in the US, Canada, and Scotland, and answered mail from New Zealand, Kuwait, the slopes of Denali, and beneath the Mediterranean Sea. Her twelve epic fantasy novels have won national and international awards, including multiple Colorado Book Awards and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews calls Carol’s latest novel, THE SOUL MIRROR, "compelling and altogether admirable."
Visit Carol's website at www.carolberg.com for more information.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Column: The Business of Writing - First Two Pages Checklist (From Iowa) by Linda Rohrbough
Recently, a couple I knew when I lived in another state contacted me. Their youngest daughter, the one with Care Bear flip-flops on tiny feet who used to crawl up in my lap for a hug, is now ready to go to college. She wants to be a writer and they asked my opinion on the best school for writers interested in being novelists. They mentioned a couple of prestigious schools and I am pretty sure I shocked them when I recommended the University of Iowa.
But I read a piece in the New Yorker a few years back about that school. Evidently they turn out more New York Times best-selling novelists than any writing program in the country. I said all that to say, I have a checklist of what a professor teaching at the University of Iowa Writing Festival this summer said he found was common in the first two pages of every best-seller currently in the bookstores.
Want to see it?
Okay, here it is, courtesy of guest instructor Gordon Mennenga of Coe College, (who got his MFA at Iowa).
Checklist of the common nineteen things found in the first two pages of best-selling novels:
a sentence containing three commas
a one-word sentence
alliteration
food (the universal ritual)
body fluid--sweat, blood, tears, urine
reference to sex or death
something sinful or painful
a color
a physical feature
a personality trait
question mark
mention of nature
anything with a brand name
furniture
body part or parts
smell/odor
metaphor, each of which saves five pages of description
city, state or street
walk/gesture/overbite/musculature
Now, what’s interesting to me is the person who sent me this list, also said the students taking Professor Mennenga’s workshop started counting to see how many of the nineteen they had in the first two pages of their novels. The person in the workshop with the most had ten. I did a check of my recently published novel The Prophetess One: At Risk and I had sixteen. Then I did a check of my new work in progress, The Prophetess Two: A Son For A Son and found fourteen, but was easily able to change the text to add three more to make it seventeen from the list.
(Will these changes stay? Depends. I usually go back over the first chapter once the book is done to make sure the first chapter and the last chapter are connected. But I was able to say to you guys that I now have seventeen. <grin>)
The temptation here would be for newbees to say, “Okay, when I write a book, I will make sure I shoe-horn those nineteen things into the first two opening pages. Then it’ll be a best-seller.” If only it were that easy. But I noticed the items on that list are all things that show up when you’re writing well, meaning showing the reader what the characters want and feel, creating the environment, the initial conflict and setup for the book, with very specific details. In other words, when you are weaving a world that hooks readers.
Like it or not, hooking the reader has to happen in the first couple of pages of a novel. Or else the reader isn’t going to stay with you. I think this is doubly important with the advent of ebooks because it’s so easy now for readers to get a sample chapter - give a writer a test drive. This is what you want if you’re doing the job right.
So my suggestion is take this list and compare it against the first two pages of your novel. See if it helps. Then compare it against the first two pages of a best-seller you like. Why take Professor Mennenga’s word for it?
Sunday, August 21, 2011
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