Other me has asked me to let any readers of my blog know that she will be here next Wednesday:
Wednesday, March 26, 2008 starting at 7:00 pm at Intermedia Arts, I'll be taking part in the Carol Connelly GLBT reading series with Elizabeth DiGrazia, hosted by Andrea Jenkins and John Medeiros. Intermedia Arts is located at 2822 Lyndale Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55408. For more information call: (612) 871-4444. The event is free and open to the public, although a $5.00 donation is recommended.
On Sunday, my partner Shawn noticed some activity over by our compost pile. A hawk had caught something and was proceeding to devour it, like something our of WALKING WITH DINOSAURS (my son Mason's current DVD obsession.) I quick grabbed the digital camera and tried to take a decent picture of it. As you can see, I mostly failed in that regard, but I blame the awkward position I was in - standing in the bathroom sink. Still. A pretty awesome bird, eh? Or as Mason would say, "A mighty hunter!"
***********PERMISSION TO FORWARD*************
Join Wine Country Romance Writers, RWA, as we GEAR UP TO PITCH AT NATIONALS.
Pitch Perfect: Getting to the Heart of your Romance Novel with Janet Wellington.
4 weeks ** 4/7 - 5/2 **
$20/$25
Register by mail or online -info at: http://winecountryromancewriters.com/workshops.htm
You might be the most talented writer on the planet, but if you can't describe your story in an exciting but succinct way, you're in trouble. Everyone needs to learn how to pitch -- to be able to present story ideas within query letters, synopses, and during frightening agent and editor appointments at writing conferences!
Can you capture the essence of your tale in 25 words or less? When your listener wants to know more about your story, do you know what to say and, more importantly, what not to say? Do you know the biggest benefit of having an agent or editor appointment at a national or regional writing conference?
This workshop is designed to help you learn, step-by-step, how to whittle down a story summary (for your romance or women's fiction novel) that will be perfect for a query letter and/or a pitch to an> agent or editor. If you read all the lectures, do all the homework (instructor provides feedback), you just might end up with a perfect pitch!
Janet Wellington is an award-winning author, writing teacher, line-editor, and writing coach. Janet started learning the art of pitching stories in 1995 when she attended her first Romance Writers of America national conference, and hasn't stopped since! She has presented workshops on the art of pitching both regionally and nationally, and teaches privately as well as through the online school: Long Story Short School of Writing. In addition to her own writing, Janet also enjoys assisting other writers in critiquing and line-editing their unpublished manuscripts, and she also does some one-on-one coaching of other writers through her business "Wellington Word."
I also posted over at Fangs, Fur & Fey today. The reader question of the week is: how do you pick the supernatural creature you chose to write about? Check it out there, or read it here:
How do you choose the creatures that you use?
I'll be honest. There are a lot of creatures that show up in urban fantasy that I have a hard time stretching my own personal "suspenders of disbelief" for... and a lot of those creatures are extremely popular with readers and writers. Take werewolves, for instance. I think shape-shifting is cool, but I've already had my main vampire scoff at the idea that they exist in Garnet's universe and mutter something under his breath about the law of "conservation of mass."
Of course, with a snotty attitude like that, I had to prove him wrong, didn't I?
In my May release Romancing the Dead, Garnet comes face-to-snout with someone named Micah Cloud who just *might* be a werewolf. I don't want to give away too many spoilers for the book, but nothing about Micah is what it seems. But I will say I chose to bring Micah into the story precisely to get a chance, as a writer, to play with the reader's assumptions about werewolves and what they do. I even have Garnet ask Micah about that old bug-a-boo the law of conservation of mass, to which he laughs and says, "Yeah, that'd be a problem, if it wasn't MAGIC."
So the short answer is that sometimes I pick the creatures that show up in my urban fantasy in order to comment on what other writers have already written about the subject. I picked werewolves this time, because I'd never written about them and had something about them that I thought I could add to the public dialogue, as it were.
Um, plus, they're fun, and Micah is way hot.
I've written here about the strange dreams I've had in the past, but today at SF Novelists my alter ego decided to write about some reoccurring dreams that seem to be "writing-related."
