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IS THERE A DIFFERENCE?

February 5, 2015 by in category Pink Pad by Tracy Reed tagged as , , , , ,

I want to talk about the preconceived notions people have about Christian, Inspirational or Faith based books. When someone hears a story has one of the three aforementioned tones, they immediately shut down thinking the story is going to be sweeter than cotton candy dipped in chocolate and covered with gum drops.

There’s CIF [Christian, Inspirational, Faith] fiction that falls into that description and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s written extremely well and packs a message for the reader. However, it’s the misconception that all CIF books are like that which provokes a closed mind to experiencing some really great stories. [I swear I’m not preaching.]

When I decided to start writing, I’d dabbled a little in high school and college. Even so far as to writing a couple of plays. I found them later and felt they’d be a good base for a barbecue fire. When I read them again, I realized, although they were poorly written, they had a few things in common. The characters were all Christians but in real life situations. Let me explain. In a lot of CIF books, the story centers around the church with conflict between the pastor, the board, the choir director, pastor’s family and some evil person not affiliated with the church. There’s nothing wrong with those books. I’ve read a few and like them, however, they weren’t the kinds of stories I wanted to tell.

I have always loved God, fashion and cute guys. I liked “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Bergdorf Blondes,” “Elements of Style” and “The Debutante Divorcee.” These were characters I could relate to. The books are filled with the most incredible fashion and very handsome men. The only thing they didn’t have was a faith based theme. It was reading these books that it occurred to me, why not write a book with similar content, but add a little CIF to it.

My first attempt at writing a book sounded very much like ChickLit. I was fine with it until my beta readers ripped it to shreds. After a lot of re-writes, I finally had a book I was pleased with. Problem was, it wasn’t considered acceptable. Why not? Response, Christians don’t act like that, Christians don’t care about designer clothes, Christians are happy being upper middle class at best, Christians don’t get challenged, tempted, have racy dreams or wicked thoughts, Christians only have sex for procreation and on special occasions. And there is no way a Christian would get divorced, commit adultery, fornicate, swear, drink wine or dance.

Needless to say, I was stunned at the comments because I know a lot of Christians that have experienced and or faced a few of those things. So I set out to write books for “my people.”

It ticks me off when I hear people say no one will read books about Christians [or people of other religious beliefs] in real life situations. I want to read about “my people” dating, regretting, marrying, divorcing, falling in love, wearing designer clothes, traveling and being pursued by wealthy men. I don’t want my heroine to be naive and deceived by an evil protagonist whose only objective is to steal her virginity or corrupt her. What about the sexy, fun Christian girl who works hard and falls for her boss, or divorces her cheating husband or who used to be a little slutty and is now in love with God struggling not to slip back into her old ways. These are great stories and if they’re written well, you can take the CIF elements out and they’ll still be great stories.

Generational Curse

My next book is a take on Sex And The City. It’s five successful women all searching for love while wearing amazing clothes. I hear you saying that’s not possible because that book was all about sex. Not really, the core of that book was friendship. Sex was just one of the supporting characters, much like the clothes, men and New York.

I think it’s a little more challenging to write a CIF book because you have to determine how far is too far. Although I want my books to have a little heat, I’m very careful about crossing the line. I want my kissing scenes to be as passionate as those found in traditional romance. Although most of my characters are Christians, I don’t want their passion or desire to be watered down. I have chosen to share my characters thoughts. If my heroine finds the protagonist hot, she’s going to say so. And if he’s having a lustful thought, I want you to read it. These little nuances make the characters feel real…just like in traditional romance.

So back to the original question, IS THERE A DIFFERENCE? Not really, just different levels of intensity.

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Writing Romantic Suspense

January 27, 2015 by in category Guest Posts, Spotlight tagged as , , ,

I’ve always been a plot-oriented writer, which can be a boon or a burden. When I came up with the idea to write three books set in Alaska, I knew immediately knew I wanted the stories to revolve around three brothers. I had written about the Raines brothers when I began my AGAINST Series with Jackson, Gabe, and Dev, in AGAINST THE WIND, AGAINST THE FIRE, and AGAINST THE LAW. 

I loved the interaction between the three men and wanted to try it again. I knew I wanted all three of the brothers to be tough outdoorsmen, the kind of guys who face the harsh challenges of Alaska every day.

Being a plot-oriented author, the stories that came to mind didn’t all fit into one tiny town. AGAINST THE WILD was set in the fictional village of Watertown on the Alaska panhandle near the real town of Wrangell. AGAINST THE SKY is set near Anchorage, AGAINST THE TIDE is in Valdez. The action takes place miles apart, but the Brodie brothers, Dylan, Nick, and Rafe have a very strong bond. The kind of men who are there for each other, no matter what dangers might befall them.

In AGAINST THE SKY, Nick Brodie, a former Army Ranger and ex-Anchorage homicide detective, has a serious case of burnout. He wants a new life, something that doesn’t include violence and death. Unfortunately when his neighbor, twelve-year-old Jimmy Evans, comes to him beaten and battered, claiming his father was murdered, Nick has no choice but to help him.

To make matters worse, Nick has a lady friend visiting from San Francisco. Samantha Hollis, owner of the Perfect Pup pet grooming parlor, isn’t cut out for the harsh life in Alaska. Unwillingly swept into Jimmy’s problems, she finds herself on a wild ride with Nick that leads them both into passion and terrible danger.

Because I write bigger stories, this one pulls Nick and Samantha into the seedy world of drugs and prostitution when they come up against the Russian mafia.

It’s one of my favorite stories–lots of heart in this one.

I hope you enjoy AGAINST THE SKY and that you’ll watch for Rafe, the oldest Brodie brother, in AGAINST THE TIDE, out May 27th. Until then, all best and happy reading.

 Kat

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KatMartinAuthor
Twitter: @katbooks
https://twitter.com/katbooks

Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/luvromance/
Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/Kat-Martin/e/B000AQ0OJQ/
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/49381.Kat_Martin


One lucky random commenter with recieve a copy paperback or ebook copy of AGAINST THE SKY. (United States, only.)

AGAINST THE SKY
By Kat Martin

Release date: 1/27/15
AGAINST THE SKY is a fish out of water story.  Nick Brodie, an ex-Anchorage cop, is tough as nails, a true man’s man, comfortable in the hard life in Alaska.  But Samantha Hollis, owner of a pet grooming parlor in San Francisco likes shopping at Sak’s and a day at the spa.   Unwillingly swept into Nick’s problems, Samantha finds herself on a wild ride that leads them in to passion and terrible danger. 
It was fun finding ways to make their relationship work when they seem so very far apart. This one’s very fast paced, but it has a soft heart.  It turned out to be one of my favorites.

KAT’s WEBSITE
www.KatMartin.com

AGAINST THE SKY BOOK TRAILER VIDEO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxy5mi2cFJM

CONTEST
http://www.katmartin.com/contests/
BUY LINKS
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1420133845/
BN: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/against-the-sky-kat-martin/1119437332?ean=9781420133844
Indiebound: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781420133844

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Be Your Character’s Life Coach, with Terrel Hoffman

January 26, 2015 by in category Archives

Having trouble with your characters? Our OCCRWA February Online Class can help!

Terrel Hoffman is here today to talk about the online class she’ll be teaching starting February 16, 2015:

WHO YOUR CHARACTER THINKS SHE IS MIGHT NOT BE WHO YOU THINK SHE IS

Who are you?

Who do you think you are?

Is who you think you are who you really are?

Are you sure?

Read the questions above again. Slowly. Now, apply those questions to your characters.

Who you are is an amalgam of every experience you’ve ever had. Everything you’ve thought others think about you. The same is true of your characters, if you’ll let them experience their lives.

Who you are (as in who you really are) is deep inside you. And that authentic person cannot be revealed unless you give her (or him) space.

That’s the idea behind life coaching. It’s a process of discovering the person you were always meant to be, discovering the path you were always meant to take, living the life you were always meant to live.

That’s what you try to do for your characters, right? You want your characters to be three dimensional. You want them to be memorable, believable, realistic. And yet, what if that realism is something you can’t reveal without understanding everything that ever went into creating your character as she is today?

You don’t need to go deep into your character’s Freudian psychology, or know who her 3rd– grade teacher was, if that stellar individual didn’t contribute to your character’s persona, nor do you need to be your character’s armchair therapist. Coaching is a process of asking a series of powerful questions and listening carefully to the answers. Each question’s response leads to further questions.

With Be Your Character’s Life Coach you construct your characters from the inside out.

You probably know what your character’s wound is, where it all started. But what if your character’s behavior and choices led her to the event? Now I’m not talking about rape or war or other catastrophic events as being your character’s fault. But even with those, the events in your character’s life that precede catastrophe can reveal how your character might deal with it afterward.

So, if you aren’t who you think you are, how do you discover who the real you is? And how do you dig out from underneath all the false “you”s to reveal the bright and shining authentic you?

When you write your characters, that’s what you’re doing, right?

Why not make it realistic? Internally consistent? Organic? Why not also make it fun, thought provoking and surprising too?

With this class, and the exercises in it, you’ll discover how persistent and sneaky your character can be to make sure she gets in her own way. You’ll expose the stories your character has told herself that cause her to believe being stuck is okay. And you’ll discover how your character can grow over the course of her book to attain the balance needed to allow her authentic self to come forth to achieve her happily ever after. You’ll also discover how your character can fail to grow, can reinforce her stories, energize her sneaky side, and so continue to live an inauthentic life. Which is what villains do, right?

I hope you’ll join me for Be Your Character’s Life Coach. But I need you to know, this is a demanding class. As with any life coach, I ask the questions, but you, and your character, do the hard work after the session is over.
 
Be Your Character’s Life Coach, with Terrel Hoffman, starts February 16, 2015 and runs through March 15, 2015.
 
For more information and to enroll go to the OCCRWA website.  

 
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The Court of Public Opinion

January 24, 2015 by in category Archives

I learned one thing when I served on a jury.

Well, in fairness, I learned more than one thing, but one thing really did stand out, and I’ve never forgotten it.  

Perhaps because it was so obvious.  Perhaps because at the time the people I shared my revelation with felt that it should hardly have been a revelation.  And perhaps it shouldn’t have been.  But OMG it is something I truly wish everyone actually felt was not only obvious, but something they should live by on a daily basis.

My particular case was excruciatingly boring and interminable (yes, even the Judge went to sleep once), but the experience truly reinforced the home truth: 

Don’t judge before you have heard both sides. Really.  Don’t.

Now in life, you often don’t have the opportunity to hear both sides.  

So pop quiz: what shouldn’t you do?  

Correct: don’t come down on a final judgement.  

Sure you can have an opinion, but acknowledge that you’re shooting from the hip and your aim and accuracy will suffer for it.

Of course, it is fun to judge others—it can be enormously satisfying and quite entertaining—but not if you start to take yourself and the numerous equally uninformed others seriously.  If you plan to make a serious judgment you have to investigate all sides and unemotionally do your homework. And it’s hardly reasonable to take other opinions seriously unless they’ve listened to all sides and done their homework, right? But reason doesn’t seem to have much cachet right now.

A favorite childhood tale was a friend who had a somewhat…difficult relationship with her older brother.  Her favorite method of pulling his chain was to wallop him, then shout, “Mommy, Johnny’s hitting me!!!!” Mom would, naturally arrive just in time to see with her own eyes Johnny retaliating, and send him off, no excuses.  Eyewitness account!

Our judge instructed us in our role as a jury, noting that it was up to us to discern the truth from the information we were given.  “Ask yourself,” he requested, “why someone is saying something.  Figure out what their motives might be, what the repercussions might be, and assess the information accordingly.” (Like: will it sell more papers? Get hits? Go viral? Make me famous? Yes? Think about it.)

Good advice.

But in this self-obsessed, self-revelatory, boundary-less world of private/public yammering, everyone is a self-anointed judge, jury and executioner.  That is until someone points out the accused wasn’t even there, or the visuals were utterly misinterpreted, or the victim was actually the perpetrator—or vice versa.  Oops!

Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. [Matthew 7:1-2]

I appreciate the power of stories, books, films—whatever—to put us in the shoes of those pilloried by public opinion.  And, I hope, offer us some insight and restraint in controlling our own often irrational and thoughtless behavior.  

Bullying isn’t just the province of the young.

Isabel Swift

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Why I Chose Self-Publishing

January 16, 2015 by in category Pink Pad by Tracy Reed tagged as , ,

Why Did You Chose To Self-Publish? This is the first question most Self-Published Authors are asked. However, what’s really going through the mind of the person asking is, “So you couldn’t get an agent or your work wasn’t up to snuff.” That’s so not true.

I’ve learned a lot on the road to becoming a self-published writer. First, I had an agent. A well-respected agent in the world of Christian Fiction. Let me preface this by saying, she knew my writing style. She’d read the first five chapters of my book. Actually, it was a different book. [That’s a story for another time.] She got my book to ‘Board.’ Two years later and I’m still waiting to hear if that publisher wants to move forward with my book. I think it’s safe to say, they passed on it.

I need to back up. I write what is classed as Edgy Christian Fiction. What is that you ask? ECF [Edgy Christian Fiction], is fiction with Christian themes. What makes it ‘Edgy’ is that it includes elements not common in traditional Inspirational or Christian fiction. In my books, that means the kisses are a little more passionate, there’s sex between the married couples, language with a little bite, lots of physical descriptions voiced by the characters, wine, talk about abortion, divorce, fornication, lust, not liking your in-laws and anything else that goes on in everyday life. The men are hot, the women are loaded with curves and both are quick to render their appreciation of the opposite sex.

As a Christian, I wanted to read stories about women who weren’t ashamed or embarrassed to express their feelings, with strong personalities and business owners. Let’s be real, when you’re sitting down with your girlfriends talking, you’re not talking in prose. No, you’re very descriptive in your comments on how amazing Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Johnny Depp or Daniel Craig looked in their last movie. So why not write stories from that POV.

I feel it’s a little difficult to convey to the reader the heroine’s attraction is to the hero by not being descriptive in this manner. Traditional Inspiration Fiction, the heroine’s feelings might be described with something like, ‘His thick black hair was beautiful blowing in the wind, brought a smile to her face.’ That’s nice, but in my world, it would have a little more umph, like, ‘She wondered how his thick black hair would feel brushing against her chin as he placed hot kisses along her neck.’ Or maybe, ‘When he kissed the back of her neck, she lost the ability to stand.” Statements like this aren’t necessarily acceptable CBA approved.

In my GENERATIONAL CURSE, I wanted to tell a story about a man who never turned down a drink or a woman. But when he hit rock bottom, he went cold turkey and fell in love with God. His priorities changed and he refused to let anyone or anything destroy that relationship. The heroine, is the complete opposite. She hasn’t had a relationship with God since she was a child. And even then it was more forced. Now as an adult, the only part of marriage she wants, is a married lover. She has no desire to be with a single available man. In her mind, a married man is less complicated. But she is intrigued by the hero and he her.

In order to tell the story, I had to take the reader on a journey with the heroine. I had to show how complicated and empty her life was by detailing her relationship with her married lover. I’m sure the story could have been told without the sex, but I don’t think it would have had the same impact. I don’t want to give too much away, but in the end it all makes sense.

So Why Did I Choose To Self-Publish? I wanted to tell the stories I wanted to read. I met an agent at a conference and she gave me two options: tell the story with the sex and no God or tell the story with God and no sex.

I wrestled with that statement for quite a while. But, I felt God had given me a great platform and I refused to back down. Also, I wanted covers and titles that were a little racy, another thing not really permitted in Inspirational or Christian Fiction.

So here I am, a newbie writer taking a chance writing stories with a little heat and taboo subjects. I know my style of book isn’t for everyone and that’s fine. For those willing to read something a little different, I think they’ll enjoy it.

Funny thing, a few weeks after I published my book, I got a LinkedIn request from my former agent. I’m still deciding if I should accept it.

That’s why I chose to self-pub.

Tracy Reed

readtracyreed@me.com
www.readtracyreed.com

Fiction for Women Who Love God, Couture and Cute Guys

 

I’m a single Christian Woman who loves God, Fashion and Cute Guys. I live in California, but consider myself a partial New Yorker because of the two and half years I lived there. I own www.thepinkduchess.com, a lingerie site for curvy women. GENERATIONAL CURSE is my debut novel.
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