Writing a mystery series: the recurring character tease

Writing a mystery series: the recurring character tease

By Lindsay Downs

When our readers don’t have their noses buried in one of our books they might have their eyes glued to the TV. It doesn’t really matter what show they watching, most of the shows all have one thing in common. Repeating main characters.

NCIS, NCIS: Los Angles, CSI (all three cities), Rizzoli & Isles, Castle and Blue Bloods, to name just a few, all have the core actors. Isn’t that what brings the viewer back week after week? Following them week to week, watching them grow, develop?

So, why not give our readers a similar experience, the same main characters story after story. In my case - Emily and Dakota.

The whole idea is to get the reader to not only want the next book but to tell their friends, as many of us do with a TV show or movie we like. You can do this by constantly developing the lead characters.

Recently, I read the David Baldacci book Deliver Us from Evil. At the time, I didn’t realize this was the final book of a two part series. Unfortunately, for the author, not me, I learned enough about Shaw, the main character, so I didn’t need to buy the first book. Sure the information was scattered throughout the book but still, if some had been held back then a sequel would be interesting to read.

What I choose to do, and it might be wrong, is in short stories give the reader bits and pieces about my main character, Emily Dahill. In at least one case it was an experiment, as I was not sure how the reading public would accept a heroine and a collie for the heroes.

In my debut Army mystery, Emily Dahill, CID Part 1, the stories weren’t written in the order they appear in the book. The first, “A Body in the Snow,” was really the test story. Here I introduce the heroine and hero, and a periodic recurring villain a/k/a the brown-haired man. In this story I give you a little insight into her, even let you see a humorous side to her.

With “Right Place, Wrong Day” I showed a no-nonsense side of her plus my editor’s favorite scene of Dakota not misbehaving, not really acting as a dog but asserting his control over the situation, thereby giving a little insight into him.

With the third story, “Dog Gone Fishing,” I took a real gamble and told the story mostly from Dakota’s POV. I should point out this had my editor confused until she realized he was a main character. Hence, Emily and he are both on the cover.

Once I had the two main characters they still needed to meet, accomplished in “Final Mission.” I didn’t want her to wake up one day a CID special agent and I wanted my test audience to see the progress from MP to agent. This ended with her hooking up with Dakota.

As you can see, just like in TV shows, I continued to develop my characters, which is important. Don’t let them become stale. By keeping them growing and expanding you will keep your reader interested in them. And yes, even Dakota is growing and maturing.

The whole idea is to make the reader want to read more of and about them. Not just a rehash of old experiences and events.

One way to do that is to put them in difficult and or dangerous situations, as I did in “A Body in the Attic” with Emily. Make them act outside what you think the reader will expect.

Writing the series featuring these two characters allows me to carefully build them as a person would build a house, piece by piece. Each of the stories builds on others. In one story you might learn what color hair she has. Another, the length. Her eye color in a third. In “A Body in the Attic” the reader finally learns how tall she is.

This story starts out in the CID office where the reader meets the other members of her team, in name and technical skill. You learn a little about what the office looks like but I don’t bore the reader with extraneous data. As the series progress and one or more of the characters are in the office, then and only then will you get a better picture. Is this right or wrong? Truthfully, I’m not sure, but it’s the way I write, even if each of the stories was 65K or larger. I know some time I will have the characters back in the office and will give the reader more information.

In other Emily Dahill, CID stories I’ve had the opportunity to give you the reader an insight into her mindset. For example, in the YA, “Tears,” you get to see how she interacts with a bullied teenage girl.

All of this is carefully orchestrated. And that’s the advantage of writing a series especially when the stories range from 1K-23K.

However, not all characters are meant for a series and that’s fine. You have to choose what’s right for you, as I did with the Emily Dahill, CID series. To date, I’ve got something like fourteen short stories either finished or in some stage of being completed, along with story concepts for six full books.

Mystery genres: part two

Mystery genres: part two

By:Gunnar

In addition to mysteries, there are several other genres considered part of the crime fiction stable, each with its own format and reader expectations.

Thrillers are page-turners. If the classic mystery can be summed up as a whodunit, then thrillers are will-they-get-away-with-it stories. Usually the reader knows who committed the crime, as well as how and why; the thrill involves pitting the good guys against the criminals in a race against the clock, with a prize at the chase’s end. The prize can vary and possibilities include money, state secrets, military hardware, gold bullion, priceless artwork, and a person’s life or freedom. The broad category of thrillers is divided by subject matter and focus: medical (Robin Cook’s Coma), legal (just about anything by John Grisham), psychological (Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho), political (David Baldacci’s Absolute Power), espionage (“Bond. James Bond.”) and war and the military (Alistair MacLean’s Where Eagles Dare).

Techno-thrillers, a relatively new addition to crime fiction, were invented by Tom Clancy with his ground-breaking novel The Hunt for Red October. Here the focus is equally divided between the Soviet sailors’ attempt to defect, and the technical features of the new submarine they’re taking with them. This split focus, with its analysis of a technology’s inner workings, separates techno-thrillers from more traditional war and military thrillers, which may use the same technology but refrain from discussing it. A related and often overlapping genre, near-future speculative thrillers, creates the technology and projects it a few years or decades ahead, with the writer exploring how his creation can change the world. Note that, while Clancy created the technology of the Soviet submarine, he placed his story in the near past rather than the future. Also note that the “crime” in these categories of crime fiction are generally between political entities rather than individuals.

Suspense or adventure novels focus on what happens next, as the characters attempt to survive some disruption in their previously smooth and orderly world. These novels stretch the definition of “crime” yet again — a popular category, survival after an airline crash in the wilderness, may be caused by clearly criminal elements such as terrorism or hijacking, or by pilot error or a careless mechanic neglecting to fasten down a cargo container. No matter the cause, though, the characters must cope with the disaster that follows. War, espionage, and the military are common features in these novels (Alistair MacLean’s The Guns of Navarone and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels of the Royal Navy), as well as natural disasters (crimes by nature), such as Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm.

Caper stories tell the tale of a crime, from planning through execution and the subsequent aftermath, most commonly from the perspective of the perpetrators. The true caper involves a high-stakes game, with a superbly valuable prize protected by supposedly impenetrable security, and a team of experts determined to take it down. Common but not universal features include a charismatic team leader who organizes the heist, in-depth planning and practice sessions that are often organized by numbers or rhymes, and something going horribly or comically wrong at the penultimate moment. Capers can be funny (Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder series) or serious (Ocean’s Eleven, Kelly’s Heroes), featuring professional criminals (John Godey’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) or private citizens with a grudge against a corporation or political entity (Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang). They require great imagination and involve a tremendous amount of work, including in-depth plotting, from the author, but are among the most popular of all crime fiction genres.

Romantic suspense adds a kiss and some personal chemistry to the crime fiction blend. Any category of crime fiction — mystery, espionage, thriller, war, caper, even techno-thriller — can be turned into romantic suspense if the hero and heroine are making eyes at each other. They may team up to more efficiently fight criminals, the political process run amok, a corporation or organization, to survive a war or natural disaster, or to steal a priceless Rembrandt. Less commonly, they may be on opposite sides of the fence, with one a criminal and the other a detective, and one of them must change sides in the name of love. Because this is a split genre, the two plotlines, the romance and the crime fiction, must roughly balance each other in intensity and quantity. If the suspense plotline carries more weight, the ending can be questionable, but if the romance plotline is more important, then happily-ever-after must prevail.

Finally, crossovers spread the elements of crime fiction into other genres, most recently including science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, and horror. A police procedural may be set in an urban world of angels, a team of vampires may plot a caper to rob a blood bank, a time-traveling amateur detective may find herself up against a werewolf Jack the Ripper. In crossovers, anything and everything can happen, but the crime still must be solved.

While some mystery writers deplore these obviously speculative concoctions, others remember that in the 1920s, the ultra-realistic police procedural originated as a backlash against the unrealistic cozy. It’s possible these spec fic crossovers are another example of new genres breaking free, giving rise to new story opportunities for writers — and lots of new fun for readers.

Mystery genres: part one

Mystery genres: part one

by Gunnar

“What’s in a name?” Juliet asked the velvet night. A rose, after all, would delight us with its scent no matter what we called it.

But in the crime fiction genres, the name tells us a lot about what we’ll find between those covers. Mysteries, for example, range from delightful cozies to hard-boiled police procedurals — but a thriller is something else entirely and romantic suspense something else again. And capers aren’t only found in the woods, you know. So for your delectation, here’s a brief discussion of the categories that are generally lumped together under the heading of crime fiction.

Mystery is the original and classic of these genres, invented by Edgar Allan Poe with his 1841 short story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” These are detective stories, where a crime’s been committed and someone must figure out whodunit so that justice may be served, and the reader’s fun lies in pitting wits against the book’s main characters, the detective and the villain. Arthur Conan Doyle made these stories popular in Victorian times with his celebrated consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, and a slew of brainy writers made them the most fashionable books to read in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. In the United Kingdom, everyone was reading Agatha Christie (first published in 1920) and Dorothy L. Sayers (1923). In the U.S. Ellery Queen brazenly told his readers when they should have solved the mystery, if they’d been paying proper attention. (This “Challenge to the Reader,” introduced in 1929, was a page near the end of the novel where the author stated that only one solution was now possible.)

But even as these writers perfected the classic mystery tale, the genre began to shatter. These brilliant stories, so perplexing and challenging, were also cerebral and unrealistic. Murders happened, but in the most bizarre of manners and always (always!) offstage, with no visual violence to mar the serenity of the tale. They happened in locked rooms, where no one entered or left, in theater companies, in art galleries — in civilized places rather than dark alleys. Amateurs drawing on their life’s experiences out-detected police professionals, usually in English country villages or Manhattan parlors. And would a murderer really hang around the scene of the crime long enough to strip the victim and replace all his clothing the wrong way around? (The Chinese Orange Mystery by Ellery Queen, 1934. All the furniture in the room was reversed, too.)

Dashiell Hammett didn’t think so, and he was a Pinkerton operative so he should know something about this. In 1923 he began writing a different type of detective story, one with a focus on police stations, private detectives, forensics, weaponry, and the law. He was followed by other writers who felt the same: Earle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane. Their stories were dark, violent, often stark commentaries on modern city life, and distinctly American. Although these stories fascinated a different audience, they became just as popular as their gentler counterparts.

Today these two different categories of mysteries form the two ends of a genre spectrum. On one end is the so-called cozy, with an amateur detective and the violence covered by a lace tablecloth; on the other end is the hard-boiled police procedural, with autopsies on cold metal slabs. Most modern mystery novels fall somewhere between these bookends, with varying degrees of realism, police involvement, and on-screen violence. Cozies tend to focus on the puzzle, with the story’s climax coinciding with the revelation of whodunit, while police procedurals may reveal the criminal’s name earlier and instead focus on the take-down and evidence collection. Female readers tend to lean toward the cozy end of the spectrum, male readers toward the hard-boiled end, but like all other generalizations, this one shouldn’t be considered absolute.

"To Dr. Lee McClain of Seton Hill University's Writing Popular Fiction Program, for insisting I learn all this no matter how much I whinged."
http://www.setonhill.edu/academics/fiction/faculty_get.cfm?FacultyID=67

Halloween YA Releases

http://en.loadtr.com/Excited_chipmunk_-471318.htm

Halloween isn't just for the kiddies it's for the parents and the teens too. Well here at Astraea Press we are busting with excitement with our YA Halloween Releases....Check em out...

Dragons and Wizards Make Their Mark In YA

Astraea Press is thoroughly proud announce our latest YA release by S.G. Rogers. The Last Great Wizard of Yden. Check out this amazing cover and blurb. The click the title, purchase and download this promising new hit.

The Last Great Wizard of Yden.  

After his father is kidnapped, sixteen-year-old Jon stumbles across a closely guarded family secret--one that will challenge everything he has ever believed about his father and himself.  A magical ring his father leaves behind unlocks a portal to another dimension, but in using it, Jon unwittingly unchains the forces of evil.  A crisis develops when a malevolent wizard transports to Earth to kidnap one of Jon’s friends.  With the help of some unlikely schoolmates, and a warrior princess from Yden, Jon embarks on a dangerous quest to free his friend and his father from the most vicious wizard the magical world has ever known.  In the end, Jon will be forced to fight for his life as he attempts to rescue the last great wizard of Yden.

Ghostly

Ghostly

High school has never been effortless for social misfit Juice Zander and her sophomore year is proving to be no exception.  Having a new boy in homeroom actually pay attention to her might be a start to all that changing.  But there are some big issues brewing.  That fact that Shane Elliot has revealed himself to be a ghost isn’t her biggest problem.  Neither is the fact that he wants her to help him find a “host body” so he can be a real teenager again.  It’s not even that when she does find a possible donor for her supercute ghost, it’s another so-not-ugly guy who for some unprecedented reason likes her.  No, her real problem is that after years of platonic friendship, she discovers one of her best buddies has feelings for her, and she’s afraid those feelings might be mutual.

 Enlisting the help of her tight group of best friends, Juice sets out to 1) find the perfect host for her ghost, 2) figure out her surprising new relationship with her longtime friend and 3) maybe discover she’s not such a social misfit after all.

The Ugly Duckling Debutante

The Ugly Duckling Debutante

Blurb

Since childhood Sara has lived with the reality of being ugly. Something her awful family never ceased to remind her. After her sisters run off to Gretna Green, she's left with one choice—go to London and take their place for a Season. It's up to her to marry well and save her family from financial ruin.

A distant aunt decides it’s in her best interest to sponsor Sara for the season and help her snag a husband by any means possible.

Nicholas Devons, Earl of Renwick, is a retired rake and consequently bored with life. He’s given up beautiful women and carnal pleasures. Desperation makes him decide to give his massive fortune away and marry the first country girl he sees.

Lucky for Sara she's that girl. Unlucky for Nicholas, he's to be her new tutor in the ways of the ton. Two waltzes, one masquerade, a violent carriage ride, and two duckless ponds later.... and all that's left is a fun twist on one of the oldest stories ever told.

Fall Between The Pages Blog Hop Tour: Astraea Press Publishing House

We are so very excited to be participating in the Fall Between the Pages Blog Hop Tour. Before we get to the post and prizes we have to go over the rules first.

Tour Rules

1) HAVE FUN!!!

2) INVITE ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS!!! SPREAD THE WORD!!!

3) THIS TOUR STARTS: Monday, Sept 19, at Midnight (Arizona Time)

THIS TOUR ENDS: Monday, Sept 26, at Midnight (Arizona Time)

Winners will be drawn and posted Sept 27! ***

4) MEET AND MINGLE WITH ALL THE AUTHORS AND BOOK PAGES! EXPERIENCE A NEW PARTY DESTINATION AT EVERY STOP! PARTICIPATE IN EVERY BLOG CONTEST AND BE ENTERED FOR CHANCES TO WIN MULTIPLE PRIZES! EVERY BLOG VISITED IS ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO WIN!!

5) PARTICIPATION AT ALL BLOGS IS RECOMMENDED, BUT NOT REQUIRED. REMEMBER, THE MORE BLOGS YOU HOP, THE BETTER YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING PRIZES. EVERY AUTHOR AND BOOK PAGE IS WAITING TO MEET AND INTERACT WITH YOU, SO PLEASE BE SURE TO SHOW EVERYONE SOME LOVE!

6) DID I MENTION TO HAVE FUN? WHOO! HOO!! 


***Hosts have full discretion to choose an alternate winner in the event any winner fails to claim their prize(s) within 72 hours of their name being posted or after notification of win, whichever comes first. Anyone who participates in this blog hop tour is subject to these rules***

Now for the fun part..Fall and Books.

Autumn is an amazing time of year. Halloween, cooler weather, apples, pumpkins, and for your paranormal lovers the releases seem to kick out more in that genre this time of year. But all and all whenever we think about autumn at Astraea Press we think about books. Maybe it's back to school, maybe it's cooler nights, and shorter days that open up to reading by a fireplace or with a cup of cider. All we know is we love it. And what better way to celebrate that love than be giving away some of our amazing reading material.  

Before we can get to the prizes we have to go over the requirements. They aren't hard at all. 

1. First follow our blog and leave a comment or ask a question on this post. Make sure to leave your email so we know how to contact you if you win. 
2. Second go to our Facebook page here and like us and leave a comment letting us know.
3. Third go to our Twitter page here and follow us. 
4. Fourth Share the hop with your friends.

Time for Prizes 

1. First Place Winner will receive their choice of 6 Astraea Press eBooks, a shout out on our social media, in addition to a critique of the first three chapters of a manuscript
2. Second Place Winner will receive their choice of 4 Astraea Press eBooks.
3. Third Place Winner will receive their choice of 2 Astraea Press eBooks. 

Here are just a few of our titles to check out. Go here to get a head start of picking out your favorite books. 

A gunshot echoes thrusting Darby Lambert into a near death experience.  Inside the confines of an ambulance, she meets “the man in white light”.  He takes away the guilt, but makes her question everything. “You will see them,”  he whispers, as he catapults her back into the real world where she is plagued with dreams of demons, nurses, and rock stars. 

Why has He sent her back? Does she have the courage to rectify her sins? Given the chance, could you erase it all?

Fired with a determination to find the reason why the Moon affects his planet so badly, Berannes gains the magical skills to transport himself there. On misty, sparsely-populated Lume he discovers the sorcerer Tironsar, bent on completing his mysterious Lodestone, which may give him supreme domination over many worlds; and the lovely princess Falmorwy of the Far Galaxy, who is somehow involved in the sorcerer’s plan.

 Berannes finds his dreams of becoming a hero don’t always turn out the right way. The two “star-horses” may be allies, but they carelessly order him around; and dwarfish Dron and Lalmi also have a different agenda for him. Even his growing love for the princess brings him inner torment, as she insists on returning to the perils of the sorcerer’s Citadel on a quest for further information. And always he is conscious of the fact that time is running out—fast!

Michael Drake, a part-time private investigator and part-time jazz club owner, starts the day as he has many others, doing a favor for a friend. In doing so, he falls right into the middle of a torrid affair. As Michael tries to decide whether or not to tell his friend of his wife's indiscretion, she is murdered. Through no fault of his own, Michael is entangled in a murder plot that reaches back to his days in college. The problem lies in the fact that, in clearing himself, he may implicate the friend that he intended to help. That is only the beginning when murder and passion collide in a small south Louisiana town. When the true killer is revealed, Drake must deal with the consequences and the lives he helped destroy.

Don't Forget to go back Here and hit the other blog hops. Happy Hopping.

 

Rave Reviews for Lucky For Her

The Romance Reviewers had this to say about Lucky for Her.

"Die hard romantics, listen up! Stephanie Taylor has your number and lucky for you her latest, LUCKY FOR HER, is her ace in the hole! Lana and Lucky's story takes a past that was all kinds of wrong and turns it into a future that is all kinds of right.

Lucky O'Donnell and Lana Roche grew up in the same small town, living very different lives. Of course, during that time Lucky was known as Fat Jack who loved the head cheerleader from afar. During senior prom time, he took a chance and asked out the shy beauty only to be shot down. Motivated by his mistakes, Jack turned his life around, got fit and returned to become the hunky Sheriff of his hometown. Lana married the captain of the football team right after high school and lived to regret it. Nearly a decade later, she manages to escape her abusive marriage and returns home to lick her wounds and hide the baby she hopes her ex, James, never finds out about.

Damsel in distress, meet knight in shining armor. Lana finds herself majorly attracted to the Sheriff in town but doesn't make the connection between the awkward boy and the man of today. Once she does, despite all her fears of men and love, she agrees to give him a chance. In return, Lucky agrees to pose as her new husband to give her unborn child the safety from its father that she desperately desires. Funny thing about pretending to be in love with Mr. Right Now, sometimes he turns out to be Mr. Right.

Writer or Story Teller by Iris Blobel

Writer or Storyteller?

“To be or not to be “ ..... Now I’m not here to tell you that there’s a difference. Quite honestly, I wouldn’t dare. I’m not Wikipedia. But in my humble opinion, yes there is one. See, when people come up to me and ask whether I’m an writer I’m always tempted to tell them I’m a storyteller.

Author Marketing, Cross Promotion and Sharing

There is an overwhelming amount of info on marketing for authors. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Blog Tours....etc etc. These suggestions are supposed to add to your platform and therefore create notoriety and book sales.

Image curtesy of http://blog.songcastmusic.com/cross-promote-yourself-using-social-media/

That's the concept. However, there is no scientific study to prove this is true. Nevertheless, there is no study saying it's not true either. In fact most authors will say it's very successful.

With that in mind we will share another tool that combines promoting your novels while simultaneously building your author platform.

Writer Wednesday: Why Your Book Needs a Realtor

Why Your Book Needs a Realtor

By Kay Springsteen

This is it! You’ve decided to move. Maybe your house is too big, maybe it’s too small. Maybe you just want to live someplace else. Either way, you’ve decided you’re finished with the house you’re living in. It’s time to sell it. To do that, you have to put it on the market.

So let’s say you’ve been living in this house long enough to get comfortable. You’ve made a few improvements, tweaked a few things. Maybe you’ve put on an addition. And along the way, your kids have grown, so you’ve added growth charts with some cute little nicks in the woodwork of their bedroom doors. Nothing big, and it’s so cute and heartwarming, you just know the house’s next owners will want to preserve those marks forever like you were doing.

And, well, maybe getting in and out of the master bath is a bit awkward because the door sticks, but if you just give it a tiny kick, it opens just fine. Yes, those stains on the carpet are a tad unsightly, but—hey, it was New Year’s Eve of 2000 and Auntie Em thought the world was about to end when the clock struck midnight, so she was chugging the grape juice. And when the countdown ended and the neighbor shot off his gun…yeah, maybe that’s not as cute now that 2012 is approaching and Auntie Em likes prune juice.

So your house has some quirks that not every prospective owner is going to love…some might even hate them. What do you do? You clean it up. And since you have a hard time with destroying the evidence of some of your best memories, maybe an objective opinion is called for.

You wouldn’t consider selling your house without cleaning it up and having a third party (AKA your realtor) evaluate what you still need to do to show it off successfully, right?

So why would you consider doing anything less for that story you’ve been sweating over for the past several months or even years?

You’ve built your world, met your characters, introduced them to the world, added in a plot so they have tasks to accomplish. You’ve given then a voice and shown them participating in activities that lead to other activities. You’ve crafted a heart-stopping climax and finished with a breathtaking flourish. You’re ready to submit to a publisher and take that bow into the world of publication, right?

Wrong.

No one tells the perfect tale in a flawless fashion. We’re all human – more human than the characters we’ve created, actually. We’re bound to miss a period or a set of quotation marks. We probably have too many commas or a misplaced modifier. We may even…gasp! We might have a plot hole or two.

So, your story isn’t 100%. What do you do? You can send it in and risk rejection before the acquisitions editor reads past the second or third page. Or you can polish it.

Oh, you’ve already polished it? What about page 17, where your character said she hasn’t been home in 10 years, and then on page 24, she says she’s been away for 11 years?

It’s easy to miss the small details by being too close to the story you wrote. And it’s those small details the reader is going to notice and say, “Wait a minute!” 

So after you realize you’ve done as much as you can with the story, what do you do? You call a realtor. Or at least a critique partner or a group of them. You need someone to look over your work. Someone who will be able to look at what you’ve crafted with a…well, a critical eye. An objective party. Not the spouse, who will either joke your story’s foibles away or not get it. Not your best friend who will gush about your work because, well, you wrote a book!

You need someone with strong grammar and usage skills, someone who understands fiction and how it’s written. The best critique partners are other authors—this also gives you a chance to critique their work for them to return the favor. Trust me, every time you critique someone else’s work, you will learn also.

Now, I’ve developed a partnership of trust and fun with my critique partners. When they point things out, they’re not trying to undermine me or say my work stinks. They’re giving me insights that I can’t have about my work because I’ve been looking at these pages for so long I overlook things. They’re helping me improve and become a better writer.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t have fun at it. My Achilles heel is the difference between lay and lie. I even tried to teach myself to remember the difference by remembering that chickens lay and people lie. But I frequently miss it because it’s one of those things I grew up with: “The shirt was laying on the floor.” It’s a family colloquialism.

So, what do my crit partners do? They cluck-cluck like chickens whenever they find I’ve done this. We have fun with it because writing fiction, through all its processes, should be fun. Otherwise, why do it?

I trust my crit partners with my baby. I may or may not agree with everything they tell me, but the things they find are things at least I am made aware of. Sometimes, I don’t agree with them and yet I can see I’m not right either, and at such times, critique partners are great persons to brainstorm with. “Obviously plan A isn’t working, so what do you think might fix it?”

As a writer, you owe it to yourself and to the story you’ve been working so hard on, to include crit partners in the process. They are your first line of editing so you can present the most polished manuscript possible to the publisher. And believe me, if you can’t take what a trusted critique partner says without folding, you will have problems when your book goes into the publisher’s editing stage. A crit partner will help you polish your work for the editor to prepare for publication. An editor, on the other hand, has a job to do, and that is to spin your work into gold for your readers to enjoy to the fullest possible extent. The more polished your submission, the easier the process of editing will go.

If you need further convincing about the benefits of a critique partner, consider this personal story. Based on my tag line and brief synopsis, I was invited to a chat pitch with a major publishing house’s top editor. I became finger-tied (the equivalent of tongue-tied) and completely bombed the chat. However, this editor obviously sensed my nervousness, and she changed her question tactic. She asked if I had a critique partner or group, and I told her yes. She asked what they thought of the work, and I told her they liked it. She then asked me for a full submission directed to her attention. Why? She confided to me that my pitch was weak but the fact that I worked with critique partners showed a level of professionalism and dedication, and she knew the manuscript would be more polished than if I submitted it with just my own editing. Editors want the submission to be as polished as you can get it, too.

Critique partners can be found in various writing groups at http://groups.yahoo.com/ (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RWCcritique/ is one; others can be found using the search function, http://groups.yahoo.com/search?query=romance+writing+critique) and at reviewfuse.com. Also, eharlequin.com has a forum in the community tab, where you can reach out to and connect with other writers.

Happy writing! If you want to learn more about polishing your manuscript to make it gleam, check out Kim Bowman’s blog, where she’s discussing how to format your manuscript for submission.

Kim’s blog link:  http://kimbowmanauthor.blogspot.com/

Character Monday: LOVE and HATE---the fine line we make

In writing the characters for Every Girl Does It, I wanted to play with the line of love and hate and see if I could add a heavy dose of humor to go with it.

My favorite stories are ones where the main characters fall in love inspite of themselves. Don’t get me wrong, I love stories where people fall in love like normal human beings, but the type of romance that gets my blood pumping is the kind where the two main characters can’t stand each other. Usually, this dislike stems from characters that are extremely independent and confident, not to mention stubborn.

My main character Amanda is a control freak. She’s the girl that you’re friends with because she brings you out of your shell and makes you laugh. Her inappropriate remarks and self-deprecating humor are what draw you in—even if some of the things she does make you cringe. We’ve all had friends like this; the type of friends that you can only take in very small doses, but also the same type of friend that you know would go to prison for you.

Feature Friday: Why Does Inga Like Clean Fiction

Welcome our first guest in the Feature Friday series on clean fiction at Astraea Press: Inga Kupp-Silberg. Find out more about her and why she always finds her way back to clean fiction.