November is National Novel Writing month and many writers commit to writing a 55,000 word manuscript during that month.  Nanowrimo!  I watched as several authors I know embarked upon that adventure.  I even considered doing the same.  In the end, I did not.  I wasn't ready for a number of reasons.  For one thing, I had a lot of paying freelance writing jobs stacked up and I didn't want to put those off for something that didn't pay (until later if it gets published!)  I also had the holidays looming in front of me and a lot going on at home with my two daughters.  I couldn't do it.  But I could PLAN to do it.  So that's what I did.

I already knew what I wanted to do for my next romance novel.  I wanted to call it Mamarazzi and base it in Hollywood.  Since I admit that I am not good at coming up with names, I did a character naming contest and allowed readers to name the people who would appear in the book.  Once that contest was over, I took the holidays off.  Now that they are behind me, I am embarking on my own NanoWriMo.  Only it's more of a JanoWriMo.  I am doing my best to write the initial draft of Mamarazzi in the month of January.  So far, I am on track and it is going well.

Mamarazzi is my first goal for 2014 since it is the first thing I am doing in the New Year.  Once it is complete, I would really love to try using some beta readers to get some impressions from people before I go through and make changes, edit etc.  That is something I have never done before.  I do have someone who reads through and helps me with grammar etc, but outside that one person, no one really reads my stuff until it's in print...if it's ever in print.  So I would like to try something like that in 2014 and see how helpful it is to me.

This year, I am also going to see "Wrong Place, Right Time" in print in December 2014.  The editing starts in March followed by cover design and all sorts of other exciting steps.  I consider this book to be my first real published piece.  I have several other paperbacks but I have never been an intricate part of the process before.  Two of my paperbacks I self-published for fun (not saying anything bad about self-publishing here, it's admirable and lots of work.  I, however, did not put the work into it that many do.  My self-published novels were more so that I could see it in print and give it to family, friends etc.)  The other two paperbacks with my name on the cover were created by Blue Ribbon Books.  They bought the stories for ebooks and eventually turned them into paperbacks.  I had no idea the books would ever be in print and don't make any royalties from them.  So while it's cool to have all of those books out there, "Wrong Place, Right Time" is still what I feel will be my very first.

This year, I hope to get a publishing contract for "Accept this Dandelion" which is currently under consideration with my publisher.  With any luck, perhaps I can get a contract going for "Mamarazzi" as well and really get them lined up!

I would also like to set a goal in my freelance writing.  I just did my end of the year report and I made slightly more this year than last year.  I am amazed because I had a baby last January and there were several months where my grand total income was $0. :)  I don't have a number in mine, but I would like to grow my freelance business each year.  That doesn't mean I'll have time to write more, but perhaps I can write higher paying things each year.  Someday, when my girls are in school, I can write more as well.  But for now, I'm thrilled with the way things are going.




Outside of writing, I'd really like to leave the house alone more this year.  Haha.  With a 4-year-old and nearly 1-year-old I have left the house a grand total of three times in 2013 alone.  Each of those three times was when one or both of them was asleep and I was majorly rushed to make it back home before they awakened and terrorized my husband or mom.  :)  Perhaps sometime in 2014 when they are awake I can venture out alone.  Maybe at least once. :)




I don't want to overdo it with goals because I'm not good at backing down once I make them.  I feel like these goals are pretty decent and attainable and very exciting as well.  I look forward to letting you in on the journey as I go!

***Originally posted 1-1-15


What grabs you when you're looking for a book? The cover first, perhaps? Maybe even the author's name? The title? Then maybe you read the back of the book to see what it's about. If you're still interested, you open the front cover and read the first line. If that first line is good, you get the book. If not, you might move on to something else.

A year ago November I attended a writing conference in Kansas City. One of the classes was about writing that epic first line. It's important to drawing the reader in, but before you even have readers, it's important to getting an agent and/or a publisher. I thought to celebrate the first day of a new year, I would present the first lines from some of my books. Some were written before that conference and some after. I will not which is which so you can see if the conference class helped me be more conscious about that particular trick of the trade.

These books were written before the conference.


Someone Always Loved YouSomeone Always Loved You

The bright yellow taxi took the curve on two wheels.




Beyond the Bars

It was too hot in the San Francisco apartment, but the bomb maker hardly noticed.




Taxi Delivery

Jed Leida swerved to the left and laid on the horn.




Mending Fences

Maria Miller had never been so scared in her life.




Mending Hearts

Beth Schrock had a sore throat but since she was working on sewing some new clothing that day, it didn't matter.

These lines were written after the conference.




God in the Kitchen

"You should have a moustache," the check out clerk said as she grabbed a can of soup from the conveyor belt.

(I wrote this book before the conference, but revised the beginning after.)

Wrong Place, Right Time

(to be released December 2014)

"Stop the wedding!" Kate Covington shouted a little too loudly into the small wedding chapel.

Accept this Dandelion

(under consideration for publication)

"My favorite flower," Rene Lockhart said, blinking into the bright light of the camera, "is the dandelion."

Mamarazzi

(to be written starting in January, though I have the first line and a bit more already.)

She wasn't sure what bothered her more...what she did for a living or the fact that she was getting good at it.

So there are my first lines as they stand. For the first day of the year, I hope you enjoyed them. Looking back I can definitely tell a difference before and after the conference. Before, I'd just start writing. After, I thought about it quite a bit before I jumped right in.

Happy New Year! I need to get back to writing Mamarazzi so I'll make this short!

***Originally posted 11-20-13


One of the questions I get asked more than anything else is: Where do you come up with your ideas?  I don't know how many different answers I've given.  It all depends on what book or story I'm talking about at the time and where I really DID get the idea!  Even the WAY I wrote the book varies depending on when I wrote it.  Here are a few of the ways I've answered the question: Where do you come up with your ideas?


Someone Always Loved You-Real Life

Sometimes, my books are based on experiences from real life that I have fictionalized.  Take "Someone Always Loved You," for example.  This was the first book I ever wrote.  It is based around a woman in a coma.  The idea I had when I started it was that I wanted to have someone in a coma throughout the book.  The reader would get to see what she experienced.  She would hear people talking around her at times and she would be in a dream-like state at other times, re-living past experiences and so on.  That was the entire basis for the book.  It was something I wanted to write for a long time because my grandmother was in a coma on two separate occasions and I always wondered what she experienced when she was in that state.  I mulled the idea over for years before the prologue for the book just simply jumped into my mind...and then wouldn't leave.  The idea behind the prologue was that an EMT driver would actually hit the woman on her way into the hospital, sending her into a coma.  From that point on, I had no idea what would happen.  I wrote the prologue and then had to finish the book.  But I never knew what would happen day to day as I wrote.  A lot of the stories the woman in the coma relives are things that happened to me in real life.  Though many of them are figments of my imagination.  Many of the characters have pieces of me or someone I know, though they are all most certainly fictional at their core.  This book, more than any other, is based on real life experiences.




-Friend Ideas

A friend of mine enjoys the fact that I write and she likes giving me ideas.  Some of them I have used and others I have stored away for later.  One time, she told me that I should find an event in history and write about it from five different people's perspectives.  Her idea is the basis of my novel "Beyond the Bars."  Though when I sat down to write it, I knew I didn't want to do anything historical.  I'm a fiction writer.  I would make something up!  As the idea formed, I thought it might be neat to have similar events happening across the country with different people experiencing the blow back.  One would even die in the event and would then go on to speak about it from beyond.  There's a prisoner, a priest, a mother, and a cop involved and they all  have different views on what happened.  And it all came about from that one brief idea from a friend.  In this book, I experimented in truly writing it a chapter at a time.  I did my best not to think beyond that chapter.  I engulfed myself in the character I was working with and tried to see things as they saw them.  Then, the next day when I moved to another chapter, I would move on.  The result became more of a thriller than I expected and I struggled with the title for a long time, but settled on "Beyond the Bars."  Read it and you'll understand why.




-Random Sentences

I was in church one Sunday and the pastor talked about what we would say to God if He showed up in our kitchen.  I remember nothing else about the sermon as I'm sure I was entertaining my daughter and attempting to keep her as quiet as possible at the time.  but that one sentence became the basis for my novel, "God in the Kitchen."  I thought it might be interesting to have a God-like being (more of an angel, really,) appear to a man in his kitchen and help him find his way in life.  It became more of a romance/love story, but it had a deeper message of trusting God as well.  It was the first and so far only Christian fiction novel I have written.  And I got the idea from one phrase.

-Who Knows Where

I attended a writing conference last November.  An agent ran several classes and I attended as many as I could.  In one class, she taught us to write "hooks" for first sentences.  The idea was that people might pick up a book, look at the cover and the title, and then open it and read a bit to see if they wanted it.  The first sentence needed to hook them in.  She then had us write first sentences and share them with the group.  I came up with "Stop the wedding!"  Later in the conference, I attended another one of her classes about writing romance novels.  I hadn't ever written romance before, though all of my books had romantic elements involved in them.  When I got home, I caught up on some things and then I wrote "Wrong Place, Right Time."  The first line is: "Stop the wedding!"  The novel will come out December 2014 from The Writer's Coffee Shop.

-TV shows

There aren't many shows that I feel like I HAVE to see.  One such show is the Bachelor.  People who know me think that's funny because it's not really in line with my personality.  But I find the show hilarious and highly entertaining.  After writing one romance, I wanted to base a novel on the Bachelor.  What if there was a local bachelor show without so much glitz?  What resulted was "Accept This Dandelion," and the characters can't do anything right.  It ended up being a lot funnier than I intended, simply because of the mood I was in when writing it.  And probably because of the lack of sleep two little girls provided me with.  This novel now awaits an answer from my publisher.  I am hoping it will be in the line up to come out sometime after "Wrong Place, Right Time."




So in conclusion, how do I write thee?  In a number of ways!  Who cares why!  I enjoy it and with any luck, readers do as well!

I grew up on the very edge of Iowa, very close to Illinois.  Most of my family was in the area and all of my friends.  After my freshman year in high school, my dad got transferred across the state.  I'd seen new kids come into my school, but I had never BEEN the new kid.  It was finally my turn...whether that was good or bad!

In grade school, I was an outgoing kid with a huge circle of friends.  Somewhere in the middle school, that changed.  I became much more shy and reserved.  I attribute it to the fact that kids became more in tune with what was cool...clothes, hair, makeup...and I just never cared.  So moving was scary and I had no idea how I was going to make new friends.  In fact, it's sad, I know, but I actually ate lunch in the bathroom on my first day at my new high school.

Skipping forward, I DID make friends.  Most of them fellow band members.  They called me the pit chick, which sounds like an insult, but really it was just a description.  I played in the pit in the marching band...the mallet instruments were my forte.  Since the other band members who became friends didn't know my name, when they talked about me, that's what they called me.  Eventually, they just called me Brooke. :)

Moving was hard, but it turned out fine in the end.  However, when it sounded like my dad was going to get transferred AGAIN and I might have to move between my junior and senior year, I was not okay with it.  Start a new high school as a senior?  Graduate with a bunch of kids I hardly knew?  That didn't sound like fun.  My mom looked into the possibility of me graduating early.  I never took a study hall in high school.  I found them boring.  With just one summer school class, my junior year became my senior year and I graduated with the class above mine...at the age of 16.  Okay, so I was only 16 for a week or so after graduation, but still, I was technically 16 when I graduated high school.  The below picture is one taken of me around the age of 17...maybe 18.




My dad did NOT get transferred and I went to a local college so I could live at home for at least the first year.  Since I quite enjoyed having a quiet house to return to for studying, a mom who made meals and did laundry and read papers, and a basement with a pool table and a pop-filled fridge for friends, there was really no reason for me to move out!  I went through all four years of college living at home.

I'm getting to a point with all this background information.  That part of my life leads me to a lot of what if questions.  What if I hadn't moved?  Where would I be now?  I wouldn't have attended the college I attended for sure.  If I didn't go to school there, would I ever have gotten into radio?  Would I have moved to Nebraska for a job after college?  Would I have met and married my husband?  Would I have my two little girls?

I guess I'll never know.  Occasionally I'll think about that time in my life and wonder what might have been different.  I'm glad things worked out the way they did, but it's interesting to rearrange life and see what might have been.  I think it's my writer's curious mind that does these things. :)  In fact, that's exactly what writing a book is like, only I really DO get to decide what happens.

When I write a novel, I think about a few different scenarios at times.  What if I make the characters go here...what might happen?  Or maybe they should do this, how would that look?  Though I'm not in control of many of the what ifs from the past, I CAN control what happens to them and that is the paramount of fun!  If you're a writer, you know what I mean!  It's fun to mess with characters.  The book "Accept this Dandelion" that I completed writing last month and am currently editing is a prime example.  I actually feel sorry for my main female character.  She gets lit on fire accidentally...she has an allergic reaction to lobster...her dress rips open on TV...the list goes on and on.  Nothing goes right for her!  But everything is just how I want it.  haha

If you're a reader, you can relate as well.  You might sometimes read a book and think, huh, I wonder what would have happened if the characters had done or said something else here.

Our imaginations are powerful and very entertaining.  I'm so glad to be able to use mine on a daily basis.  Messing with other people's lives...even if they are fictional people...can be quite a bit of fun!