Celebrating Valentine's Day

Happy  Valentine’s Day!  Today we are celebrating romance. But let’s go beyond that. Let’s   As long as people love romance, there will be readers and luckily, there will also be writers. Who doesn’t love a good story with a happy or sometimes a bittersweet ending? 
celebrate and toast those special people who read and write romance novels.

Romance novels and novels and novelists come in all shapes and sizes.  I would love to run a list of them all, but it would be too numerous.  In danger of missing some of my favorite fellow writers, I am not going to list them all either. 

From the first time I picked up Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in my teens I was hooked. My best friend and I went through Sense and Sensibility and then Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. We always had a library book or two in our locker with our textbooks and they were usually romances. I spent summers walking to the library in the eastern Colorado heat every single week just so I search out a new romance. Then I picked up a Harlequin Romance and I got hooked even more.  And now I'm still reading romance, in all shapes and sizes, in print or on my Kindle and Ipad. I listen to romances on audio. As long as there was a good love story involved I've always enjoyed the story.

But I also found I loved writing romance. By the time I was out of high school I had written my own romance short story involving a kidnapping, a small town girl, and a rock and roll idol! I still have that story floating around in the basement somewhere though the penciled manuscript has probably faded and I doubt I could read my writing.

It wasn’t until years later that I began writing romances in earnest and trying to get published.  But I also had a day job that was pretty demanding and after a couple of rejections I stopped submitting and focused on writing TV news scripts. I saved the romance writing for evenings and weekends, and I didn’t submit again for a very long time.

Now, with a number of suspense books on the market and a mystery to come, I find I still haven’t lost the taste for reading and writing romance. There are still plenty of great stories out there and  I keep finding new authors every day. And I personally keep coming up with my own stories as well.

But I couldn’t celebrate Valentines Day without a tribute to one of my all time favorite love, Home Fires Burning.  That was the story of a young girl who met the man of her dreams when she was ten and knew from the moment she saw him that he was meant to be her husband. My mother told us the story over and over about the handsome cowboy who came to work at her family’s Colorado ranch when she was young and how she spent years trying to get his attention. It took her growing up before he even noticed her, and then a world war came between them and when he finally came home, she had been sent to California to live with a brother. But she wasn't going to be denied -- she caught the first train home and they eloped to New Mexico. Eventually they got to spend 48 happy years together. 
stories—that of my parents whose story I sort of stole and used as the beginning of my book,

And to me that is romance. I love to read those stories and write those stories where true love wins out in the end. Whether there is a family conflict involved, or a murder to solve or the love is between a poor woman and a royal or a shapeshifter or a vampire and the girl or guy next door, a great romance is always a joy to read.

So here’s a toast to the romance readers out there and to the many writers who make those stories come alive! Who are your favorite writers and what are your favorite romance novels?

Celebrating Success

Today I am celebrating my first great success of the new year.  Earlier this week, my latest book, Dead Man’s Rules became available on Amazon for Kindle.  The print version will be released in a few months, but Dead Man is now out there and available  and that is exciting news.

Dead Man is a book I began many years ago and then totally rewrote and then re-edited and finally turned into a series. It’s the story about a bloody hand print made left on a wall of an old dance hall by a dying man. Who was he? How did he die and does his ghost still haunt the dance hall?  Those are the questions my reporter heroine, Cere Medina sets out to answer in book one of the series.

After years of work on that story, I feel like I have good reason to celebrate, but it got me to thinking about celebrating as a writer in general and how often we forget to acknowledge our success, even the small ones.

Today I read a blog from a fellow writer who mentioned that we need to celebrate our successes.  I am in total agreement. There is nothing quite like finishing a book and knowing it is done. Oh, yes, it might need lots of editing, but when you write that final paragraph, those final words, wow, does it feel good. Your story is over.

That is a victory we all need to celebrate. How many people say they want to write a book, but they just don’t have the time?  How many have a great idea but just don’t know where to start? How many start, but then they get bogged down in the middle?  Each of these sentence probably has thousands of groups of people in them.  For the writers who do finish that book, you need to remember to celebrate that victory of getting to the end.

But there are other things to celebrate as well.  As I wrote in a comment to that blog today, I have taken to celebrating when I get a chapter done. For years now, when I finish a chapter, I give myself a round of applause. Yes, literally and out loud. Suddenly I’ll begin clapping and if there is anyone around they look at me as though I’m crazy. I’ve gotten strange looks at Starbucks, believe me. But why not?  Finishing a chapter, finishing a scene can be a reason to celebrate – especially when it’s been a tough scene you’ve been agonizing over.

 So celebrate. Clap for yourself when you finish a tough scene. Celebrate those successes. You’ve earned it!

Celebrating NaNoWriMo

by Becky Martinez

 For some reason every year for the past five years I have sat down during the month of November and attempted to write a 50-thousand word novel.  It’s all part of the fun of National November Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. For thirty days I plug away at a book or two to see how many words I can possibly write.  Most of those years I’ve actually made it to the 50-thousand threshold.  (See my Writing Corner on Monday for why I love to do it and how those NaNo deadlines can help you to keep the writing process going and how to keep the word count flowing, even past November.

You’ll notice I didn’t celebrate until a week later. That’s because I think I was all written out when I finished last Friday, November 29. (Yes! I got through a day early).

But today I am celebrating that accomplishment. Tomorrow I will pick up the book I wrote and start in on the process of editing. It will take some work, because some of those scenes need to be moved around and some need to be fixed and there is lots of research I need to check.

But as I’ve often heard Nora Roberts and other prolific writers say, you can’t edit what you haven’t written, and a blank page cannot be edited.  That is one of the joys of NaNoWriMo. It frees up the imagination so that you are just writing down whatever pops into your head.

Many times I’ll come back to the words and find out that I had a really good scene going. It just needs some cleaning up. Other times I’ll discover plot twists I might not have known about if I hadn’t allowed my brain and my characters to carry me off in some crazy direction.

So for now I am celebrating the brain-freedom for writing provided by NaNoWriMo. Oh, and also those 50-thousand-plus words!

For December, I am going to celebrate my good fortune in finishing 50-thousand words by helping other writers. Please join me at The Help Desk at Savvy Authors. Along with several other writers and writing teachers I will be donating my time to answering questions and looking through your material. Click on the Workshops and Classes and look for the sessions for Becky Martinez. I'll be there all next week to answer your questions and provide you with help.

Celebrating why we Write

Writing conferences are always stimulating for me and I am a big fan of smaller conferences where the smaller venue gives writers a better chance to talk and to visit with the headline authors who are giving workshops. Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Tony Hillerman Writer's Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a smaller conference with several hundred writers and would be writers in attendance. What a great experience!  I only attended for one day, but it was so jam packed with information, I came home with my head spinning.

Perhaps one of my favorite parts of the day was hearing from the "the father of Rambo," David Morrell, but action-packed military thrillers were not on his agenda for that day. He discussed his latest book,  Murder as a Fine Art, which is historical mystery, but still packs plenty of action. As part of that discussion he provided a fine lesson in writing and being a writer. He told us there should be one of three reasons for writing and none of them had anything to do with making money or simply chasing the market place, which so many aspiring writers do.


The three reasons can be very fulfilling to any writer, even if you don't get sold or make millions:

1. Write for yourself. This had to do with having a story you want to tell, something you want to impart to others. He has written plenty of thrillers, but he wanted to try something different so he turned to Victorian England for his latest book. It was a personal choice that spurred him, and he says you as a writer should look for those sort of personal decisions.  Look for what you want to write or experiment with and go for it.

2.  Write to learn something.  If you want to do research on something, or if you want to explore a topic, what better way to do that than to do research and then write about it. He is well known for his well-researched books and just from the way he described the work he put into Murder, it was obvious he wanted to learn something about the period, the people and the setting in Victorian London.  He urged us to look for something we want to know and then to learn about it and write about it.

3.  Write to express a part of yourself. This can be a good way of letting go of the past, or searching for the future or digging deep inside of yourself to say things you might not be able to say in another way. I've always felt that writing can help a person (me) express things I might not otherwise do. Want to tell off a nasty boss? Kill him off in your mystery.  Wish there were things you had said to an old boyfriend? Put them into a romantic scene.  Wish you had been stronger in a certain situation or wish you had just broken down and cried your eyes out?  Let your characters do it in a book. All the emotion can be useful when you're writing a story. 

All three made perfect sense as he discussed how he had started researching his book from one angle, as research on writer Thomas de  Quincey, a friend of Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth who was known for writing Confession of an English Opium Eater.  de Quincey was an influence on writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But the more research he did, the more he found himself going in a different direction until in the end he pulled in de Quincey's daughter as one of his main characters, telling the story from her eyes, using her perspective.

But what struck me was his willingness to stop and talk to everyone and to provide advice to writers of all ages. When I stopped in the book store he was talking writing to a group of young people.  Earlier he had been very willing to discuss with me and a friend why he finds short story writing so difficult, but why he likes to do it. She was expressing a concern about attempting to write a short story and his advice was, "go for it." I'll be writing more on what he had to say about short story writing in a future blog.

In fact I'll be writing more about the entire day.  But at the end of the day the main thing I kept thinking about was Morrell's comments. Write for yourself. Make that your goal and you won't be disappointed if the sales aren't there or if the reviews are bad. Know at the end of the day you've learned something and you've improved and pleased yourself. I went home ready to write!

Celebrating Books … of all Kinds

by Becky Martinez (writing as Rebecca Grace)

Today I am celebrating the arrival of my latest book in print, but I also have a sad confession to make.  I am a bookaholic.

There is nothing quite like seeing your book in print, and even though I enjoyed the release of my novella, Shadows from the Past, as an e-book last year, I was even happier last month when my publisher, The Wild Rose Press, announced they would be releasing it in print. Yesterday the print copies came and it was great to finally hold it in my hands, even though it was already on my Kindle, Nook and Ipad.

Oh, yes, I have all three and I use them all.

See, books have always been a great joy to me. They’ve been my constant companion since I was very young. I may be writing them now, but I have been a fan of books and reading from the moment I learned to read. I always seemed to have a book available or around me. In those days we lived on a farm and I can remember checking books out from the Bookmobile that visited my rural school. I remember going into town on Saturday for groceries and sitting at a little table that was set aside at the front of the store with lots of books and I spent the entire visit there. 

My mother also introduced us to the library around that time and from then on, wherever we lived, she got a library card and we paid weekly visits to the nearest library. Imagine my surprise years later when I was driving down a street in Carpinteria, California, and recognized a small building on a corner. It the old library we visited back in the 50s.

I am still an avid reader, and I am thrilled to be able to enjoy them in so many different ways. I now have bookcases full of books, as well as dozens on my Ipad, Nook and Kindle. But I’ve also become a real fan of audio books, even if my sister doesn’t consider listening to them as reading a book.

They became a real necessity 15 years ago when I worked in Los Angeles and had a house in Las Vegas. While I had always been a fan of Sue Grafton and read everything from A is for Alibi all the way up through M is for Malice at the time, I listened to them all as I made those long drives every weekend.  I listened to most of the John Sandford books I'd already read too, and discovered Harlan Coben on audio on a trip to the Northwest. Then I fell in love with the books of Robert Crais on audio and had to listen to all of them. And don’t even get me started on Stephen King.  Just don’t make the mistake of listening to something like The Shining while driving through the back roads in the Colorado mountains or Desperation, while making the drive from Las Vegas to Phoenix in the middle of the night.

And now I find myself with a real predicament.  I’m not only buying the audio book version, but since I don’t drive as much as I used to, I must also get the actual book as well so I can keep reading between driving. And I’ve been known to also get the Kindle or Nook version for when I’m travelling or when I'm in a rush to start reading a favorite author immediately. Yes, the sad truth is I have audio, hardback or paperback and e-book versions of the same book in some cases.  

So today I am celebrating books… in all sizes and every way we can get them. While I love the audio books and the electronic books, I will always have room for another one in print.

 Just don’t give me another option.

 

Celebrating Writers

By Becky Martinez

Writing conferences can be invigorating. I recently just returned from Left Coast Crime in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I always come home from gatherings like this feeling like I can hardly wait to sit down at the keyboard and get to work.  To me, a writing conference is a wonderful way to rejuvenate yourself.

Why?

The answer is simple.  It's always fun to meet other writers -- like best selling author Craig Johnson.

And it's not only fun to listen to the processes some of the others writers use, but it always interesting to hear their publishing success stories. And who wouldn’t want to listen to an award-winning, best-selling suspense writer like Laura Lippman talk about why she thinks women writers deserve more credit for their work?  That discussion was inspiring on many levels. 

For instance she noted that the book, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” deserves every bit as much acclaim as “Catcher in the Rye.” That was a book many young girls still read and can relate to. She’s right. It stands out as one of those books that inspired many young women. She says it was the book that made her want to be a writer, and I’ll bet it inspired a good many other young writers as well.

It was also interesting to listen to Craig Johnson, who has reached a high level of success with his Longmire mystery series. It features longtime lawman Walt Longmire who keeps law and order in a Wyoming county. The series is being made into a television drama series by A&E. He told us about starting to research his series many years ago, talking to a sheriff about his story idea. Ten years later the sheriff came up to him and asked him how the story was going. Well, he hadn’t finished it. But he did. He went back and began writing and eventually was able to finish and get his work published.

Ten years!

 

But some writers take longer, as many published authors will attest to. How many writers start out and then shove their book in a drawer and never come back to it? But how many do come back? And how many eventually succeed? Those kind of stories are inspirational. You don’t fail if you keep trying. Perseverance and hard work and continued drive can often make the difference in whether you succeed eventually.

I started out writing as a teenager and it took years before I considered trying the publishing world. When I did, I was immediately sent several rejections. I still have them. What bothers me most about those rejections is what they said and what I didn’t understand at the time. The editors liked the story. They even said they might look at my work again, but it needed work. All I saw was the part that said they didn’t want this story. I put it away and it’s still in a drawer somewhere.

Years later I tried again. This time when I got a rejection, I read it more carefully. It said my work lacked polish. That was some of what the other editor said. She kept questioning my POV – I didn’t know what POV was. But this time around, I was determined to find out what “lacked polish” meant. I went to a writing group. I went to writing classes, and I kept writing.

This time I was much more determined. And eventually it happened. I got short stories published and eventually a novel.

My success has not reached that of Craig Johnson or Laura Lippman, but my determination is there and I won’t quit writing this time. And I heard similar stories from other writers at the conference as well. We’re not best sellers – yet – but we’ve got stories to tell and we’re going to tell them. And sell them!

  

Celebrating 2011 - A Little Late

Okay, 2012 hasn’t started out so well. My car battery keeps dying, the cat has scratched her eyeball and my diet has resulted in a two pound gain. My exercise program is going nowhere and I can’t find my new pedometer. My calendar for keeping track of everything is lost in a pile on my desk--a pile that was going to be sorted before the end of the old year.

Now January is starting out with Friday the 13th. Grrr...  I refuse to give in to bad luck! In the spirit of looking on the bright side, and thumbing my nose at evil spirits I’m going back to a blog I was supposed to have written two weeks ago to end the old year -- looking at all I got accomplished in 2011 and some of the rewards I witnessed.

145,069 new words. That’s how much I wrote in 2011. That is one book or two at least. Of course, 52,484 were for NaNoWriMo. I used those words in Part two of a suspense series I am writing. That leaves another 92,585 words unaccounted for. Those went into re-working other books, blogs and new classes. But it still means I was writing and that is what counts. It is something to applaud!

One good habit I started last year (and I’m sticking to this year) is keeping track of how many words I write every day. I put it on a spread sheet so it totals itself at the end of the month. I also write down all the pages of editing that I get done. When I looked back, I discovered I didn’t do too badly with my writing last year. I finished editing one novella, sent it in and ended up with another publishing contract with The Wild Rose Press. I did re-edits with my editor and then went through the galleys and final galleys. The final result is Shadows from the Past, a gothic suspense story that will be published in March.

Dreams may take time but they can come true! Sharing important events with friends is also a good way to celebrate life. 2011 saw two of my good friends reach for their dreams and I was happy to share great moments with them. For my friend Liz, it was joining the Peace Corp after years of wanting to join and then going off to Azerbijan to teach. I got a chance to visit her in California for a champagne goodbye at our favorite Chinese restaurant.  

For my Cary, it was building her dream house with a fantastic view atop a Colorado hillside.  We celebrated early with champagne as she gave me a preview in June. It is now finished and the pictures look gorgeous. I can hardly wait to visit again for a guided tour and celebrate with mimosas.

Looking Forward. Speaking of dreams, that brings me back to the new year and reaching forward to making more of my own dreams come true. Last week I ran across a blog that said you need to touch the ball every day. I realized I’ve been taking practicing that idea because of my writing spreadsheet. I like being able to look back and see the progress.  

I’m continuing to keep track and suggesting the idea to others. It only takes a couple of minutes every day and it’s great to be able to go back and get a good look at how much you’re actually doing. Start by writing down the number of pages you edit and keep track of your new word count. Try it for a day, a week, a month. It can pay off on those days when you feel you haven’t accomplished anything or you will never accomplish anything. We’re often so hard on ourselves that we don’t pay attention to what we do accomplish.

Rewards, Rewards, Rewards!  And don’t forget to reward yourself! I’m a big believer in celebrating success. Last year I rewarded myself with major league baseball! I followed a trip to Spring Training with tickets to Opening Day at Coors Field and then the great experience of my third All Star Game.

This year, well, who knows? I’m keeping the champagne cold just in case anything comes along.

Good luck.