Alison Kent's Blah Blog

DAY OF THE DRAGON – Excerpt

Her secrets brought them together. His secrets could kill them …

Dr. Madison Dartmoor is set to prsent her career-making findings at a Las Vegas archaeology summit until a violent attack at her dig site forces her into silence. Everyone – including the mystery man who saved her life – wants to know what she found.

Ramsey Gallagher knows he isn’t human. Beyond that, his life is an enigma, and ever since a battle with his twin brother, his mental powers haven’t felt the same. He can no longer even manipulate the rolling of the dice. But he’s not in Vegas to strike it rich.

He’s there to find clues to his past that only Madison can unearth. He never expected for her to be so beautiful, or for her life to be in danger. Now he’ll do anything to keep her sefe – the secret to his own life depends on it.

I’ve got a copy of DAY OF THE DRAGON to give away, and I’ll draw a winner from all the comments left here by Tuesday, November 30, 2010 (CST).

At Writer Unboxed about writing THE ICING ON THE CAKE.

Look at my Books Read in 2010 sidebar section. Now look at me. Now back to my Books Read in 2010 sidebar section. Now back to me. Sadly, my Books Read in 2010 sidebar section does not reflect the writing me. Why is this, I wonder?

On Saturday, I attended Bob Mayer’s Warrior Writer workshop. Good motivational stuff about BICHOK (butt in chair, hands on keyboard) and other industry tricks and tips. As many before him have said, Bob made mention of many of us writing what we love to read. And I think we do start out that way. At least I know I did.

I swallowed Silhouette romances whole. Linda Howard, Diana Palmer, Elizabeth Lowell, Sandra Brown. Those were my original four go to authors for everything I wanted in a romance novel. I was at my local indie bookstore each month waiting for the new shipments to see which of my faves had new books, and what new authors I wanted to try. I found Theresa Weir, Nikki Benjamin, Mary Kirk and so many more.

The romance genre wasn’t the behemoth then that it is now. Classic historicals from Kathleen Woodiwiss and Bertrice Small ruled. I read those, too, and continued to read romances up until the day I picked up my first Andrew Vachss, Flood. And even then I still read romances. But more and more I found myself looking for thrillers. Many of the first romances I loved, those published by Silhouette Intimate Moments, had suspense elements, so latching onto the early days of romantic suspense was a natural progression. I followed Lisa Gardner (who wrote for SIM as Alicia Scott) and Tess Gerritsen and Tami Hoag out into the big bad single title world and was in heaven.

Honestly, I’ve never gone back. It’s sad that I’ve only read 22 books this year, but interesting that only four of those fit under the romance umbrella. I wondered if other authors wrote what they liked to read, so did an informal poll on Twitter.

• nope. Love to read historicals, but write contemporary. ;-)
• How does one write what one hates to read?
• No. I can’t write romance. I don’t have the ‘voice’ for it.
• Yes, yes, and yes.
• depends.
• yes. But I read more more out of my genre than in. Nonfic humor. I am a book slut.
• of course. why write anything else? Or, why would you want to?
• I write what I love to read, but I also read other stuff that I don’t write, like historical romance. Too much research. ;-)
• yes. Historicals with interesting characters. Love to read em & write em.
• I write about food and football. I cannot be happier. :)
• Yes. Is there another way to write?
• Yes.I like 2 read & write hot historicals w/ mature characters.My reading focus has narrowed, w/occasional paranormals.
• I read a lot of things, but yes, still most enjoy what I write. And read to “keep up” with what’s happening in my market.
• I love writing historicals…but I will read lots of things. Historical, contemporary, mainstream and books for research!!
• I write w/ a co-author & so we write something that is combination of what we both like to read. Mysteries w/humor & a whodunit.
• Yes.

The responses on Facebook were primarily YES on this thread and this thread. Now the question I need to answer is why I don’t write thrillers. Ha! Beyond the fact that I’m a linear writer and manage very few twists and surprises . . . I really don’t know. I wrote two suspense stories for Blaze, ONE GOOD MAN and GOES DOWN EASY. And my Smithson Group series is definitely action adventure with a touch of whodunnit.

I think I lack the plotting gene to pull off the sort of suspense that would satisfy me. It takes a lot to surprise me and those surprises are what I read for. The Greg Rucka I just read did that for me. Jo Nesbø does that for me. Harlan Coben is THE MAN at unexpected twists. Lee Child, Michael Connelly. My latest discovery, Jack Kerley.

I hate being sexist, but it’s usually the male authors who do that for me, heh. And there’s probably a whole lot to analyze right there! But then there’s Chelsea Cain who I can’t live without. Almost all of these stories still have romantic or at least sexual relationships, and I could never write a book that didn’t include the same.

But these days, so wrapped up in my own amazing happily ever after, my reading tastes have changed. I love writing romance. I love exploring that wonderful male / female tension. Getting those scenes to come alive just makes my creative day. It’s just when reading, or even in television and movie watching, that I gravitate toward the more deeply disturbing parts of the human psyche that make people tick.

Do I have any twisted sisters? ;)

Some buying options updates on LOVE IN BLOOM:

Buy the Kindle Edition

Buy the Nook Edition

Buy the Smashwords Edition
(including ePub and Sony reader)

The Smashwords store includes an ePub format that can be used most anywhere including Stanza, and an option for the Sony Reader format. The book will eventually be in the Sony store (or so I’m anticipating, checking the “pending approval” status daily).

I’m now working on converting LOVE ME TENDER, and will then tackle PLAYING LOVE’S ODDS. I also have a couple of short story ideas and may offer those as original works, being all publishing independent. ;) Doing that means I have to stop spending my days climbing hills at the park with the dogs, or hours looking at recipes for dinner, or more hours looking at images for cover art and actually, you know, write. But then, writing always is the hardest part of being a writer. ;)

Miriam “Mim” Bracca’s career seems to be unraveling–almost as fast as her life. After hitting the bottle too hard while on tour with her rock band, Tailhook, the 26-year-old guitarist is sent home to Portland, Oregon, where she’s expected to get some rest and get her head back in the music game. But as Greg Rucka makes clear in A Fistful of Rain, nothing remotely close to relaxation is in Mim’s immediate future.

Even before she can get through the front door of her house, Mim is kidnapped at gunpoint, forced into a truck and told to strip, then driven around for a while before being dumped back where she started, bewildered but unmolested. Shortly thereafter, nude photos of her turn up on the Internet, and her drug-dealing brother, Mikel–whom Mim fears helped make this pornography possible–is shot to death. The musician is quick to blame Mikel’s murder on their father, Tommy, who’s just won release after spending 15 years in prison for killing Mim’s mom; yet she concedes that such premeditated violence is probably beyond him. “He wasn’t a planner,” Mim says of the hated Tommy. “He was like me; life happened to us, we didn’t do things to life.” But then, who else would want to hasten the destruction this woman has already been bringing on herself? To find out, the petite and pissed-off Mim will have to elude police, confront a blackmailer in Portland’s “shanghai tunnels,” and stay sober long enough to stay alive.

I have been remiss in reviewing what I’ve been reading, but since finishing the Hunger Games trilogy a couple of months ago, I haven’t read much at all. (Yeah, you can ignore those titles on my sidebar.) I’ve tried, but my attention span these days has been nil – though I did finally finish Jo Nesbø’s The Redbreast which was awesome!

That all changed yesterday when I sat down and read Greg Rucka’s A FISTFUL OF RAIN. In one gulp. Which wasn’t really surprising since I did the same a few years ago with his book SHOOTING AT MIDNIGHT. I can’t get to his site right now to pull the back copy, so the above is from an Amazon review. And I can’t type up the back copy from the book since it was an impulse purchase and I downloaded the Kindle edition and read the whole thing on the 2″ x 1.5″ screen of my Blackberry Bold.

The prologue hooked me. The first chapter guaranteed I wasn’t going to put it down. The initial pace was a bit slow with some backstory and setup, but none of it was gratuitous. It was all information that played into the story development. Bottom line, I couldn’t read fast enough, and kept at it until I plugged in the Blackberry to recharge at 11:47 p.m. I’m just happy I started it at 5:00 so I didn’t have to stay up all night. ;)

Mim’s lifestyle was absolutely nothing I could relate to, but she was such a compelling character I knew exactly was she was going through – and why – and I felt every bit of her pain and fear and rooted for her. I loved Mim. She was a mess, she was responsible for being so, but she never expected or waited to be rescued. And she was smart. SO smart. Maybe a few moments of not smart (don’t we all have them *g*) but her choices made sense for her. A FISTFUL OF RAIN is a great read!

The excerpts I’ve put up the past two days? Those are from LOVE IN BLOOM, a book originally published by Kensington Zebra in June 2000, a book which has been out of print since about July 2000. Such is the way of series category books. They’re on the shelves for a month and that’s it. And since in the year 2000 there wasn’t much in the way of ebooks, unless you owned a Rocketbook or another of the early adapter models of ereaders (and I did!), LOVE IN BLOOM was never available in digital format – until now! And this brand spankin’ new digital copy of LOVE IN BLOOM can be yours for only $2.99! Click the cover to buy!

From their very first kiss . . .

Seventeen years ago, America’s premier young model, Eva Channing, ran from the glamourous world of New York fashion to small-town Texas, where she could forget her passionate, doomed affair with photographer Carson Brandt. Today, a single mom with a successful nursery business, Eva is content . . . until a magazine piece on former models brings the intensely sensual Carson tumbling back into her life.

. . . to a second chance at love

Carson has always been most comfortable expressing his emotions through a camera. The only person who ever broke through the armor around his heart was Eva. Now he’s determined to uncover the reason she left without saying goodbye, and the secret behind the son who bears a strong resemblance to Carson. One look at Eva’s beautiful face starts a fire deep within him that he hasn’t felt in years.

At the moment (meaning this morning as I write this post) it’s only available in Kindle format. I’m still waiting for the nook version at Barnes & Noble to go live and eventually I will explore making it available for Sony, Kobo, etc. And don’t worry if you don’t have a Kindle. You don’t need one! All you need is a computer!

Since this book was written in 1999, released in Y2K, I did a minor amount of updating:

1) A dead pager became a dead cell phone so the missed phone call from son to mother is still logical.
2) The very sexy scene set to the VHS of Last of the Mohicans, is now a very sexy scene set to the DVD.
3) I wavered between going all digital with the photography stuff, though settle with a mix of digi and film.

I also updated a bit of the, ahem, overwriting I had a tendency to do ten years ago, but for the most part, the book held up. I had a wonderful beta reader go through and read it for me. I sent her the Kindle file so she read it electronically and pointed out blips my scanning and my own read through didn’t catch. Typos, weird punctuation, stuff like that. She only found about a dozen instances and those have been fixed, so fingers crossed this edition is fairly clean!

The cover art? Yes, that’s courtesy of ME. I designed it myself. I scanned the book, I formatted the book, I will now market the book. I am my own publisher and it is a WHOLE lot of work, ack! But it’s also a whole lot of fun! Now, go forth and BUY and ENJOY!

Another, longer tease . . .

**

Before Eva had even stepped around the counter, the front door opened. Three more customers. Great. Time to reassess the personnel budget. Katie Crenshaw, Zack’s girlfriend, often stopped by to help out after school and any Saturdays when she had the time. Today she’d had weekend cheerleading practice, and naturally everything was falling down around Eva’s ears.

She didn’t have a choice. “Mrs. Appleton, why don’t you step out into the garden and find Zachary? He’ll be glad to show you the selection of hibiscus. I’ll be right out as soon as I take care of these customers.”

“Fine, dear,” Mrs. Appleton said, taking tiny steps toward the door and waving her handkerchief all the way there. “Zachary!”

Eva grimaced. It looked like she was going to have to spring for whatever piece of photographic equipment her son couldn’t live without on top of his pay.

She blew out a puff of steam and looked around. Two of the customers had walked outside to the garden. She’d take care of the couple after she finished with the third.

She found him, or at least heard him, clinking bottles of liquid Diazinon on the back shelf. She came around the corner and stopped.

“Can I hel—”

“Hello, Eva,” said Carson Brandt.

Oh … my … God.

Read the rest of this entry �

I hope in a few days to have a surprise for you. Not a huge surprise, but something I think is kinda cool. In the meantime, here’s a tease of writing that I thought I’d share.

***

Carson couldn’t take his eyes off Eva. He’d finished with the portraits an hour ago and once he’d packed away his gear, had stayed as a volunteer chaperone. He shouldn’t have bothered. He had no idea what the kids were getting away with right under his nose because Eva had his full attention.

She, on the other hand, was checking up on her young charges, deftly separating those who stood too close to one another, rounding up those who stood too far away from the crowd. But it was the way she accomplished both tasks that had Carson’s face aching from the grin that wouldn’t quit.

Like a nymph, a sprite nipping in and out of a field of flowers, she flitted and flirted her way through Lake City High’s darkened cafeteria decorated in silver and blue. The kids either laughed or dropped their jaws in awe. This age group was too young to have known who Eva had been during her two years in the modeling industry. But word was circling like a wagon train.

Eva was in her element. As much as she hated any reminders of her days in New York, she had survived and gone on to build this life here with her son. She had survived worse times as well: the loss of her mother, the loss of the man to whom she’d been married—the man who’d been the father of her child.

Eva had told Carson she didn’t know if they stood a chance of making this thing work the second time around. She was wrong. Having been with her here the last month, he knew without a doubt she was wrong. They might not have been able to make a go of the relationship they’d had in their younger years. But now they had what it took.

Standing just inside the cafeteria door watching her, he was suddenly stuck with an overwhelming sense of all that he was feeling. The emotional and the physical had long since ceased to be two separate entities.

What he felt for Eva was love, complete with all the emotion’s complexities and simplicities. He couldn’t concentrate on any one aspect without the rest coming away attached. And the power of what he was feeling was something he needed to share with her. Now.

He moved into the room, hugging the perimeter as he began his advance and seduction. After a moment of reconnaissance, he found where she had landed. The poppy-red butterfly had found her offspring and was gettin’ down with an energy that rivaled Zack’s and Katie’s. He recognized several of the teens’ friends. Holly and Aaron. Bonnie and Ben.

Hands stuffed in his pockets, Carson ventured forth into unfamiliar territory. He acknowledged Katie’s wave, the lift of Zack’s chin, but had no real attention for anyone but Eva.

He wanted to lick away the bead of sweat rolling from her temple to her neck. He wanted to make quick work of her dress, even if it was with the scissors she’d been contemplating earlier. None of those were possible with an audience, or even practical from any point of view.

He had to get her out of here. He took hold of her upper arm. She glanced his way and asked him a question with her eyes. He inclined his head with a silent, “Let’s go.”

She smiled and answered, “Were you looking for me?”

Had there been a time in his life when he hadn’t been looking for her? Hadn’t half his travels around the globe been in search of what he’d found here in Lake City, Texas?

“I can’t decide who’s having more fun. The kids or the chaperone who thinks she’s a kid,” he said, as she walked beside him off the dance floor.

“I never had a prom,” she reminded him. “I finished high school with a tutor’s help and graduated by correspondence. I missed Homecoming and Valentine’s and Sadie Hawkin’s. So don’t give me a hard time.”

The hard time he had in mind for her had nothing to do with the prom. He glanced back over his shoulder, a furtive check to see if they were being watched. And then he propelled Eva out of the school cafeteria.

The hallway was empty and quieter, though not silent. Eva’s heels clicked against the tiled floor. The bass from the band playing in the cafeteria boomed and rattled the walls. He heard as well the beat of his heart in his ears. And the cadence of his labored breathing.

Finally they reached the door to the gymnasium. He put a hand flat on the sign that said, “No Admittance—Photographic Equipment in Use,” and pushed. The cavernous room, dimly lit and darkly shadowed, echoed the sound of Eva’s laughter.

“What are we doing in here, besides breaking more than a few rules?”

“We’re adults. The rules are for the kids.”

“We’re chaperones.”

‘Most of the kids are gone. The chaperone ratio won’t be undermined if you slip out for a quickie.”

A quickie?” she asked, and her eyes flashed. Even in the dimly lit room, her eyes flashed.

He placed his hands on her shoulders. His palms skimmed both red silk and flesh. “I’ve wanted to get my hands on this dress since I walked into your bedroom.”

“You have?”

He nodded, skated his fingers down the line of her spine and dragged his palms to her sides. He measured both the strength and the muscles of her back, and the decidedly female indentation of her waist. “I’ve wanted to get you out of this dress since I walked into your bedroom.”

“I don’t think this is the time or place.”

Her voice quivered, and he knew she was only giving lip service. His hands had reached her stomach now. He opened his fingers wide and pressed upward, cupped the fullness of her breasts. “I’m going to get beneath this dress and I’m not going to wait until we get back to your bedroom.”

“Here? Now?”

Her unbound nipples pebbled in the center of his palms, and she pulled in a thready breath when he tugged. “Now? Yes. Here?” He glanced around. “Not exactly.”

He took her hand and drew her forward, past the doorway to the weight room, the dressing room, and then around the corner and down the narrow aisle that separated the gymnasium bleachers from the wall.

And there in the darkest corner, he blocked her body with the bulk of his, reached behind her, and tugged up the hem of her dress to expose her bare bottom and her garters.

“Carson. I don’t think we should be here.”

He didn’t care what she thought. He grabbed her bottom and squeezed. “Unzip my pants.”

***

What do you think? Do you want more? Does this work for you?

Originally published July 28, 2008

If like me you have craft-oriented blogs on the list of those you visit, you’ll no doubt have seen a lot of posts on voice, defining it, analyzing it, wondering what it is. Sasha White is doing a workshop this week called VOICE: The Magic Behind the Words, and says:

What is it that makes a story stand out? We all want to know the secret, but the truth is…there is no secret. What makes one book stand out from the other, what makes one story memorable isn’t always the complicated plot or the unique characters. More times than not, it’s the author’s voice.

Jordan Summers recently wrote about uncovering one’s writing voice, saying:

Voice is something a reader recognizes instinctively. It’s what makes bestselling authors. Sure skill comes into the picture, too. You have to know how to plot, pace, create settings and characters, etc. But voice is what readers really fall in love with when they’re reading. It’s ‘HOW’ you tell your stories.

Wikipedia defines a writer’s voice as follows:

Writer’s voice is a literary term used to describe the individual writing style of an author. Voice is a combination of a writer’s use of syntax, diction, punctuation, character development, dialogue, etc., within a given body of text (or across several works). Voice can also be referred to as the specific fingerprint of an author, as every author has a different writing style.

Voice is an author’s fingerprint. It’s *how* she tells her stories. It’s what makes one book stand out from another. Yep. Gotta agree with all of that. Now let me take things in a new direction and see if I can fog up your brain the same way I regularly fog up mine!

How often have you heard said that it’s easy to tell a favorite author has written a book by doing no more than reading a few pages, the author’s voice being so unique, so individual, so strong, etc.?

How often have you heard said that editors are looking for fresh new voices?

How often have you heard said that voice encompasses not only an author’s word usage, sentence structure, and other elements of style, but her world view, her favorite themes, her outlook on life?

Final question. Where in the discussion do character voices come into play?

Now onto the tricky brain fogging part . . .

If it’s possible to read a few pages and know a favorite author has written the book, does that mean all her characters sound the same?

I struggle with this subject as I’m writing dialogue, but even more so as my characters internalize their thoughts. When I am deep in their point of view, am I writing with my voice or their voice? Do I inadvertently make the same word choices for one character as I do for another in a different book? I suppose a character’s voice could be considered part of characterization, and it is, but I posit it goes beyond.

If a reader can open a book and tell immediately who wrote it, I can’t help but surmise that the author is using her voice rather than her character’s (or narrator’s) voice. And as important as voice is to readers and editors, I wonder if an author’s books shouldn’t sound as unique as the characters whose stories are being told . . . because there *is* a narrator telling the story, whether a point of view character or an omniscient voice, and it’s one that belongs to that story alone. Isn’t there?

Trust me. In no way am I saying I’ve mastered this or even thought it through completely. I know much of what I’ve written sounds like *me*, the author, and not the character telling the tale. And this is why I’m fascinated by the mingling of character voices in a book. I want a scene in a heroine’s point of view to reflect who she is – her word choices, her rhythm, her outlook on life, even her mood at the time, and not mine. I want the same when I move into the hero’s head. What I don’t want is a reader to say, “Oh, that sounds just like Alison,” rather than to *hear* the characters’ voices. (And I often wonder if blogging makes it easier for a reader to hear *us* as authors in our books.)

What do I know about my voice? I write in incomplete sentences. A lot. I write in threes, explaining, defining, honing – and I leave out the conjunctive *and* in such series. (Note: I am NOT a grammarian and remember nothing about English classes!) I use passive voice on purpose in many situations, and “to be” verbs a lot. I also use dialogue tags more often than not because the flow reads better to me. I’m a definite wordsmith, and love the poetry and rhythm in well written narrative.

So, let’s look at some examples of voice. These tidbits are from something I’m working on, and this project is what has me thinking about what voice means in a whole new way. I have four viewpoint characters. I’ve posted sections from three of them, and will point out how I think an author’s voice and a character’s voice merge.

The boy! What was he thinking? Running like a fox with a mouth full of hen away from the house to the stables!

Kitchen shears in one gloved hand, Maria Ballestero spun away from the utility room window and hurried across the floor of red tiles to shoulder open the adjoining kitchen’s screen door.

“Rafael!” she called across the hacienda’s expansive grounds. “Rafael!” But she might as well have summoned the wind because Rafael was not to be seen.

Since the day he had learned to use his two feet, had she not warned him of the need for calm when working near the horses of Esteban Vargas? ¡Diós! The boy was going to be the death of her, if not first the death of himself!

Surely she had been loco, crazy, to think he would stay this evening and help her greet guests and pour drinks to toast the return of Senon, Don Esteban’s son. Rafael was seventeen. Maria well understood seventeen. She understood, too, that between her nephew and Senon Vargas there was no love had, or love to be lost.

Maria lives in Mexico, and English is not her first language. Because I’m writing in English, however, I’ve made her voice more formal, somewhat stilted, as if she’s looking for the right words (though in reality she would be thinking in Spanish). That’s her voice. But in *her* thoughts, *I* have used incomplete sentences along with painting poetic word pictures. Those choices belong to me. The result is, I hope, a combination of Maria’s voice as narrator, and my own.

He was only thirty-four. Not quite ready to be put out to pasture. Though more and more often these days he was feeling a strange creak in his bones. A stiffness in his back after a long one in the saddle. A sharp catch in his hip when he first swung his left leg out of bed.

He’d always thought age was more a state of mind than body, but lately, well, time was taking its toll on both. Battling Mother Nature had long been a part of a rancher’s life, but the last four years she hadn’t given an inch.

At every setback, he’d reconnoitered, using the arsenal the family had built up over three generations. But this drought? She was one dried up withered old bitch, sucking the soul from every precaution he’d taken, leaching his strength the way she did flesh from a bone.

And until they got some rain, some sticking rain, some staying rain, she’d continue to purse her fat lips and suction every ounce of sweetness from his spot on this earth. That left Kit feeling like a man spent, a man fresh outta options, walking the edge of a dime.

Kit’s a cowboy, one who happens to have four years of military service under his belt. Here are more incomplete sentences, and several “series of three,” but all those style elements that are my voice are written in Kit’s words – words which would never be Maria’s. Even Kit’s poetry is harsher, more brutal, sharp and cutting rather than flowing. His voice is gritty compared to Maria’s that is thoughtful.

She’d left for college a young girl of eighteen, returned a graduate with her ingenuousness, if not her innocence, intact. Her parents had died four years later, and in the four that followed, she’d had no choice but to toughen up like a cowboy and his gear, seasoned by exposure to the elements, hardened by a life that ran thick through a rancher’s veins.

Now she was the boss who signed his paycheck. And through it all, she’d been the daughter of the man who’d given him a job and a home and a chance when jail time had thrown the long shadows of steel bars across the window to his future.

Cullen Sloan leaned a shoulder into the door frame and remembered the promise he’d made to Doc Mason. To make sure Cassie was taken care of in the event of his death. To keep away the sons of bitches who’d take advantage of her tender heart to get at the part of her they wanted.

Well, hell. What was Cullen supposed to do with her now? When she’d gotten in this bad habit of sizing him up the way a woman sizes up a man, her eyes doing that slow dance across his shoulders, waltzing with a lazy grace down his chest, two-stepping gingerly from his belly to his legs? Wouldn’t Doc be rolling in his grave if he could see his only daughter making a move on his foreman with nothing but a look?

Like Kit, Cullen is a cowboy, but he’s older and has a completely different background. He looks at things with the eye of a romantic rather than a realist. Where Kit’s tone is pessimistic and tired, Cullen can’t be anything but an optimist – and that’s reflected in the rhythm of his voice as he works through solving what he doesn’t want to see as a problem. Again, my voice is present throughout his viewpoint, but the scene sounds like him – not like Kit, not like Maria.

So, bottom line, is an author’s voice more than her style? Is her voice also the composite of all her characters’ voices? It is a bad thing if a reader can recognize an author’s writing without seeing her name on the page? Or is it a good thing because the author tells such a strong tale, even if the reader hears *her* instead of her characters?

There is a NYT author whose early series category work I devoured, but when she moved to hardcover telling a different sort of story, she lost me as a reader. I think with those hardcovers she found her voice, but her voice became so strongly identified with her, she’s the one I heard. I never heard her characters. Even when in her hero’s point of view, I still heard her speaking the words. And I truly think having this happen made me aware of how important it is to let our characters tell their stories in their voices.

Additional Resources:

Julie Leto’s DITCHING “THE BOOK OF MY HEART” for “THE BOOK OF MY VOICE”

Holly Lisle’s Ten Steps to Finding Your Writing Voice

Thaisa Frank’s and Dorothy Wall’s Finding Your Writer’s Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction

Following are four very smart NaNoWriMo related tweets.

Two from Lauren Dane:

Instead of thinking on NaNo as a way to sell a book or not, how about using it as an opportunity to make writing central to your schedule?

Use NaNo to be a writer. Don’t quit. Keep writing. In December and January, February and beyond. Use NaNo and don’t listen to sales talk

Two from Jason Pinter:

Writing Tip of the Day: though 50k words in a month is terrific, most adult novels fall between 80-100k. Make sure your book is fleshed out.

In my opinion NaNoWriMo is more about learning discipline than producing a salable novel. Helps sharpen your tools–not carve a masterpiece.

Lynn Viehl has a great no nonsense NaNo post up today, saying:

I’ve made this novel journey almost a hundred times now, taken the same roads, moved at the same speed, and followed the same lines. Even when I make stops in the same places, not once has it ever been the same trip. It’s always different. No matter how carefully I plan, I will never really know what’s around the next page corner. That won’t stop me from writing, because a big part of this is discovering what’s waiting for me to find it.

The post below (since edited) was originally published January 31, 2008

Time management and I need to have a come to Jesus meeting; I figure I can dispense with the politeness and get straight to the threats. Or, I can do something more positive by sharing with you something that works for me. One of the most helpful books I have in my inspirational library is Way of the Cheetah, by Lynn Viehl (available for free until December 1, 2010). In the introduction, Lynn says:

I wrote Way of the Cheetah to help writers make the most of their writing time. By removing doubt and hesitation, taking care of what’s important to the writing process and discarding what isn’’t, I believe that a writer can create the ideal physical and mental environment to produce more marketable work and write better, faster, and cleaner.

(…) Following the Way of the Cheetah does not guarantee you’ll write five books a year. All writers are different, and what works for me may not be the best method for you. However, by following the way you may identify some of the problems that impair your productivity, and that self-awareness can help you create your own unique solutions.

Although I’m writing this book primarily with writers in mind, you can apply the philosophies from Way of the Cheetah to other areas in your life where you’d like to be more productive. I’’ve used these techniques for everything from more efficient housecleaning to motivating myself to exercise, and they still work. Maybe that’s why the cheetah has been around for four million years; it knows exactly what it’s doing.

The book is a practical guide as well as offering inspiration. And it’s not about writing like the wind, or speeding through manuscripts, cranking out one after another. Not at all. It’s about being the efficient writing animals we need to be. It covers:

* Proper Motivation
* Sharpening Focus
* Establishing Self-Discipline
* Creating the Ideal Work Space
* Writing Through the First Draft
* Efficient and Effective Editing

When reading through again yesterday, I actually set the picture on the right as my desktop wallpaper as a reminder of the need for motivation, focus, and self-discipline. Clicking will give you a larger 1024 x 768 version if you’d like to download it for your own use.