Posts in Category: Life
It’s Spring Break! *flings off bikini, then puts it back on again because NO*
Spring Break is heeeeere!
My poor, poor neglected blog. I still think about you sometimes, and that’s usually as far as I get. I’ve been so wrapped up in life and my characters’ lives that I’m not 100% sure where the past few months have gone.
It all started with National Novel Writing Month in November. Oh my God, that month was killer. I’ve never done NaNoWriMo before, and I’m pretty sure I left my brain somewhere between weeks three and four. But I wrote over 50,000 words. Boom! Some of them are really ugly words, more like a string of nonsense that may have more to do with my waning supply of Pop Tarts than the actual story. But still! Words!
I did learn a few things about myself as a writer through NaNoWriMo though–I can breeze through dialog with hardly a clickety-clack pause. Give me two or three characters with tons to talk about, and I’m set. But for a pantster, someone who writes with only a vague idea of where they’re going, NaNoWriMo will tear your arms off and beat you with them. I did have an outline, but the further I got into the story, the more bare-bones it got. There are many instances where I wrote *something happens here but I don’t know what*. I think I’m going to leave that in and let the reader fill in their own blanks. Just kidding!
Anyway, this book is called Sail, and it’s a New Adult sexy ghost story in space. I’m thinking it will be ready for consumption by Fall 2014.
What else? Oh, yeah! I expect to have edits back on The Grave Winner book 2 sometime this week. I’m excited to jump back into Leigh’s head.
One more thing! See the sidebar on the right where it says Subscribe to Lindsey’s Insider Newsletter? It will be a happy day if you sign up because you’ll get cover reveals (the one for Sail is going to be AH-mazing!) before anyone else, never before seen excerpts, and contests just for newsletter subscribers. It’s different from my blog in that I will actually do something with it! 😉
Now, excuse me while I continue licking dishes clean. Hey, it’s Spring Break–I can do whatever!
Summer Lovin’: In Which I Get All Mushy Because of the Heat
Crescent Moon Press authors are ready for summer! We’ll be blogging about our summer loves, our romances, and how much we love summer! Have you ever had a summer fling? Do you have a favorite book about summer? What’s on your summer reading list? What are some great beach reads? We’re blogging about all of it!
Visit our blogs below and enter to win some great prizes between June 14 -17.
Grand Prize: A Kindle Paperwhite & some of our eBooks to read on it!
1st Prize: A $20 Amazon gift card, and a Swag Pack that contains paperbacks, more eBooks, bookmarks, cover flats, magnets, pens, and more!
This is just some of the awesome swag!
Other Prizes – You’ll have to hop around the other blogs to find out what they are!
Drop by our blogs between June 14 & 17 and enter the rafflecopter!
Good luck & hope to see you there!
Okay, here’s my summer lovin’ post!
Schooooooooool’s out for summer! But that’s not the only reason I love this time of year. Sure, I have more time to catch up on life and I can write until my fingertips are bloody, but summer fills me with smiles for other reasons, too. The soaring temperatures, the freedom to do whatever I want, the excited stir in my stomach – it all reminds me of one summer long ago when love grabbed me around the waist and hasn’t let go since.
Yes, the ewey, gooey love stuff is about to begin, but you can handle it.
One summer in high school, my crush had a birthday party and invited me. After some high-pitched squeezing, I went, of course, and I sat next to a guy from out of town who I’d never met before. He was the drummer in my crush’s band, but that was all I knew. As we sat there, he kept showing me pictures of recent concerts he’d gone to and cracking me up with every bizarre thing that fell out of his mouth. He was strange in a just-like-me sort of way, and he had the prettiest green eyes I’d ever seen. And that smile…wow. I was a total goner. (He must’ve been a goner, too, because he’s sitting just a few feet away as I type this, many years after this happened.)
But anyway, he lived out of town, about six hours away to be exact. So, I would only get to see him during summers when he came to visit his dad (who happened to live in town) and to visit and practice with his band. Summers became the best time ever for that exact reason.
In between summers, we wrote letters back and forth. Real letters with paper and pencil since these were the pre-email and pre-texting days. If you guessed that I’m at least five hundred years old, you’re absolutely right!
I still have all the letters he sent me. He’d write about random things he was doing or planning to do, school projects, or odd things he’d seen. He would illustrate his letters with funny drawings in the margins. Getting one of his letters in the mail was almost as great as summer.
I graduated high school and went to college where he lived, and then we didn’t have to rely on summers or letters anymore after that. We had the rest of our lives.
Your turn! What’s your favorite summer memory? Leave your answer with your name and email for a chance to win a $5 gift card to the bookstore of your choice!
Here’s the link to the Rafflecopter: a Rafflecopter giveaway
Don’t forget to hop around the blogs below for more chances to win!
Shawna Romkey Author blog
Constance Phillips, A Writer’s Musings
Katie O’Sullivan;
Summer Lovin’ – On Olympus…
Kate’s Blog
Kary Rader
Lindsey R. Loucks
Summer Lovin’, postcards, and maybe bookmarks
Jody A Kessler Summer Lovin’ Mountain Style
Official Website of Maer Wilson
Author Jean Murray ~ Wicked Romance Blog
Summer Lovin’ Heat
Hildie McQueen’ s Author Site
Loni Lynne’s Blog Site
Author Avery Olive Blog
Wendy S. Russo
Cindy Young-Turner
Michelle Clay – The Darkside of Romance
the Marvelous Misadventures of Mrs. t
Shannon Eckrich
What’s Love Got To Do With It? Everything!
Love’s got everything to do with everything in my life. I love books so much I became a librarian so I can build forts out of them on my desk and pop out from behind them whenever anyone comes into the library. (If that doesn’t wake the students up, nothing will).
Chocolate and the Foo Fighters and Firefly all put a smile on my face because I love them/it so much.
So, yeah, love is huge in my life. But why do I feel the need to write about it in most of my stories? I’ll answer that question with another story. Don’t worry – it’s short.
Lightning struck my heart when I first got to know my BF eighteen years ago. No, not literally, but it sure felt like it. Every time I thought about him, which was all the time, my cheeks heated, a smile would dance across my lips, and I’d lose my appetite. Oh, yeah. I was falling for him. Big time.
Fast forward to now. The lightning that struck me has fueled a raging fire, and me and the BF are still ridiculously in love. We leave love notes for each other. We call each other cute nicknames. We walk each other to the door before work for one last kiss goodbye. It’s almost sickening how cute it is, isn’t it?
But that’s why I write about love. I want to capture that feeling for my characters because that feeling will stay with them forever, even if that particular love doesn’t last. Plus, as a reader, I enjoy reading about characters who find first love or long-lost love or love in the strangest place. I feel what they feel all over again.
Now, because I love all of you, here’s a gigantic contest! The winner gets a $250 e-giftcard to Amazon or Barnes & Noble, your choice. The contest is international and ends February 19th, so hurry! Enter the Rafflecopter below to win and good luck!
If you want to hop around to other Crescent Moon Press authors’ sites to see what they think love’s got to do with it, you can start here.
My Knickers Aren’t in a Twist Over Word Count – Are Yours?
From openclipart.org
So NaNoWriMo is over, and while I didn’t participate, I did try to write a little every day on A Boy and Her Scratch. I didn’t succeed, and I didn’t even come close to 50,000 words. But I’m okay with that.
The story and characters have solidified in the 10,338 words I’ve written on it, which is always a plus. I keep fighting the urge to go back and “fix” things because the first draft is supposed to look like word vomit, and it does, so yay! I’ve decided to keep writing this story until December 31st, and then at midnight, instead of turning into a pumpkin, I’ll start writing like a mad woman on What Gifts She Carried.
From January onward, I won’t be staying the night at work (something I did do in November), I won’t have as many loooong work days, and I won’t be going out of town. It gets too cold in Kansas to do anything but stay home in my pajamas and write anyway!
My point to all this rambling is that I’m trying this new thing where I don’t stress about writing. I let it happen, word by word. It’s slow going, but I’ll get there.
Does word count stress you out? Does getting the book finished twist your knickers?
Why I Write, Part I: I Suck at Speaking
There has been a lot of drama in the bureaucratic part of my school district lately including finger wagging, playing the blame game, and administration suspending. The teachers and I all wrote down positive things about the suspended administrator and planned to confront the bureaucracy at a meeting. Everyone read what I wrote beforehand and said how phenomenal it was. I think I was expected to speak at the meeting as eloquently as I wrote, but as soon as the tears started flowing in the room, I was useless. All I could do was try to silence my sobbing and sniffles. I guess that was okay because other people spoke instead, though I could feel people looking at me expectantly. This is why I’m a writer and not a speaker. And yet somehow I can speak to children with no problem.