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WHAT A CHARACTER

August 15, 2012 by in category Archives tagged as , ,

One of the nicest compliments I ever received was from a reviewer who called “Josie Bates (heroine of my witness series) one of the best characters ever”. For an author, that is the highest praise.
Think about the millions of words written about thousands of fictional people, and then ask yourself how many stuck in your mind, reside in your heart, or continue to haunt you years after reading the book? If you’re like me, there are a handful of such characters in your memory. My list includes:
Gone With the Wind: Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler and Miss Mellie.
 Princess Bride: Buttercup, Inigo Montoya, Westley 
The Hunger Games: Katniss
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: Lisabeth Slander
Johnny Oops: Johnny Oops (a fine Indie book)
Analyzing these characters helped me become a better writer, and here’s what I have learned. Memorable characters are:
Spiritually Unique: Villain or hero, each one has his or her own demons and desires, strengths and weaknesses. Strength on its own is uninteresting without weakness.
Physically identifiable: A great character manifests his or her uniqueness in dress, mannerisms, and speech patterns. Imagine an actor tackling your character on screen. Can you hear them? See them? Are they so real you would know them walking down the street?
Logical: A character with a unique speech pattern may amuse your reader for a while but if the words coming out of that character’s mouth aren’t appropriate to story, plot and core of that character,  the affectation is illogical.
Unapologetic: Readers may not always embrace your vision, but if you give a character an unusual life, let them live it. Do not be swayed by fear of political incorrectness or tempted to take the safe route. Writing is about nurturing your bold voice.
Purposeful: A character’s journey is guided by principles born of experiences. In Josie Bates’ case, she is formed by her mother’s abandonment (personal) and her belief that the law and justice are two separate things (professional). The author’s objective is to create a passionate character willing to go to great lengths to protect what they believe in or secure what they desire.
For Example…
•   Katniss’s (Hunger Games) and Scarlett’s (Gone With the Wind) fight for basic survival.
•   Westley’s (Princess Bride) relentless search for his lost and true love.
•   Salandar’s (Dragon Tattoo) desperate desire for self-determination.
•   Rhett Butler’s (Gone With the Wind) code of honesty.
•   Melanie’s (Gone with the Wind) passionate belief in Scarlett’s inherent goodness.
•   Johnny Oops’ (Johnny Oops) wry but heartfelt search to define his teenage self.

Don’t be afraid to refine your characters. We are not born the people we will become; neither are those who populate your books. Nurture them, define them, polish them and they will live in the reader’s memory for a very long time.
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RWA 2012 RITA Awards VIDEOS including OCC’s own Tessa Dare along with Joanna Bourne and Ann Aguirre by Jina Bacarr

August 11, 2012 by in category Archives tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Even Sleeping Beauty wouldn’t have gotten a wink of sleep at the RWA 2012 Conference in Anaheim near Disneyland. I didn’t. I was as busy as the Mad Hatter running from workshop to workshop and shooting video. Lots of video. 12 GB worth. That’s 12 billion bytes as in billion.

This week I’m going to spotlight three of my favorite RITA award winners, beginning with OCC’s own TESSA DARE!!  Super congrats, Tessa, well deserved.

Tessa Dare, winner of the RITA for “A Night to Surrender” — her thank you to her hubby is beautiful.

Joanna Bourne’s wonderful tribute to teachers everywhere in her RITA speech for “The Black Hawk”

And here is the video everyone is talking about…

Ann Aguirre’s RITA speech for YA “Enclave” including her now infamous “interpretive dance.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, like Snow White’s dwarf, Sleepy, I’m…going to…take a nap…zzzzzzzzzzz

Best,
Jina

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Spiced Nectarine Jam

August 10, 2012 by in category Archives tagged as , , ,

Everyone I know is going to get a jar of Spiced Nectarine Jam for Christmas this year. Again. They have for past four years.

We have a dwarf white nectarine tree in our backyard. About four years ago it started going crazy producing fruit. One year my husband, who prepares and freezes the fruit for my jam making (bless him!) saved all the pits. He had harvested FOUR HUNDRED nectarines!

Even total strangers have received the gift of Spiced Nectarine Jam. Last year I filled 25 jars; I’ll do that and more this year. Three more batches to go!

The nectarines are positively, absolutely Organic. No spray. No fertilizer. Hardly any extra water. (My husband isn’t exactly fond of gardening.)

Since it’s hard to send jam via the internet, I thought you might like the recipe. The jam’s really yummy.

Spiced Nectarine Jam

4 Cups prepared fruit
7 ½ Cups sugar
1/4 Cup lemon juice
1 tsp each of cinnamon, cloves & allspice
1 packet of Certo

Combine fruit, sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon, cloves and allspice in a large pan. Bring to a rolling boil for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Add packet of Certo. Stir to cool and skim foam for 5 minutes. Pour into jars. Use either self-sealing jars or cover with melted household wax. (This recipe can be used for Spiced Peach Jam.)

Happy jam making….

What do you preserve from your garden?

Char……

Montana Love Letter, Love Inspired, 10/2012
Home to Montana, Love Inspired, 3/2013

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My Creativity is Currently in the Warehouse (13)

August 9, 2012 by in category Archives tagged as , , , , , ,

I’m on a Warehouse 13 marathon right now. Even though we’re watching episodes we’ve seen, starting at Season 1, Episode 1, I still love it. That’s the great thing about stories you love. You can enjoy them over and over again.
The other thing about stories you love is that they inspire creativity. Watching episode after episode of Pete and Myka grousing at each other, competing with each other, and always having each other’s back presses all my creative buttons. When Pete asked Myka if she was afraid they were the Red Shirts, and she said yes, John and I laughed out loud when Pete replied, “First, we aren’t going to die. Second, I’m so pumped you know what that means.” [paraphrased]
Over the last 20 episodes, I’ve gone from just enjoying the show for its own sake to thinking about my work and how I can make it funnier, more interesting, tense without being over-serious, adding death and destruction if necessary without a Law & Order feel.  All the artifacts and the things that they do make me think about what I can add to my stories, whether fantastical stories or “regular” ones.
One of the “ah-ha” moments in creating my current romantic comedy series, Strays of Loon Lake (Love at the Fluff and Fold, book one in the series, will be out later this year), was when I decided that a local dog was the frisky father of a lot of puppies in town. Suddenly I had this funny element that I could play up.
In addition to a lot of TV watching, I’ve upped my hours of reading lately. It feels soooo much better to be reading more, like I’m eating healthier or something. I’m reading a lot of nonfiction on writing, self-publishing, and neuroscience. But I’m also reading a lot more fiction than I have in the last year or so. I’ve been reading inspirational, historical and contemporary romance, young adult books, paranormal and urban fantasy books and short stories, some horror, and some suspense. (Trying to track it all on Goodreads, but forgetting to add every book.)
Now here’s a chicken-and-egg thought: in the midst of this burst of desire to pull creative stories IN, I’ve also been writing more, getting creative stories OUT. Did the extra reading inspire me to write more? Or did the deadlines for the two anthologies I’m in push me to gobble up more stories for inspiration? My answer is YES.
Add to all that, my jump from wanting to know more about how the brain works to finding books explaining it to me, and I’ve added yeast to the bread mix. I mean that in terms of rising and growing, not in terms of becoming gaseous and fermenting. Though the fermenting part is making me think of wine, which reminds me of living in Australia, which reminds me of some of the unexpectedly creative pieces I wrote in uni. (Now that I have Australia-brain, my brain is using Australian terms. “Uni” is short for university, i.e., my master’s in creative writing program.) And using Aussie vocabulary reminds me of my friends whom I miss terribly, which reminds me I was going to call Verizon this week and get that international calling plan, which makes me think about having some international characters in my superhero novels, which makes me think of the Cowboy character I created for a short story that went nowhere. Now I just need to figure out how to get an Australian superhero named Cowboy, and his super horse, across the ocean to Michigan where my superheroes are living.
And THAT is how creativity so often works. It’s a bunch of very quick, sometimes illogical jumps in the synapses of the brain that lead from one idea to another. The more you allow and train your brain to make these jumps, the more creative you can be. Sometimes you can even get more creative more quickly.
Many writers have named the part of their unconscious that does this work. Jennifer Crusie calls her unconscious “the girls in the basement” I believe. Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird that her friend Carpenter says there is a little boy in the cellar handing up characters through the cellar door.
I get this “down below consciousness” idea, but I’ve rarely, if ever, been in a basement that made me feel happier than any other room in the building (even the very cool basement of the State Library of New South Wales isn’t as awesome as the Shakespeare Room there; that’s a room I could be locked in forever!), and I’ve never been in a cellar that I wanted to stay in for hours. (Not even a wine cellar.)
I had problems being nice to that creative part of myself. I found myself whipping it to give me more, faster. It didn’t produce much, so I whipped it more. Then I read and really got the idea that you needed to be nice for the unconscious to flow. But basements and cellars didn’t seem that nice to me.
So I created a character named Katie, a little girl about 10 or 12 who plays in the sunroom or in the huge beautifully well-kept backyard. (I live in a small apartment.) Katie loves to read and watch TV and movies that make her laugh or make her a little scared but that always end well. She likes to pretend after the movie or book ends that she is the hero who vanquished the enemy and tamed (rather than killed) the dragon. Or she is the heroine who helps the hero save the day and they live together happily ever after.
I like Katie. I like her so much that I like to play with her even though she’s a little girl and I’m a grown woman. She’s fun. And when she’s making me laugh or making me wonder what will happen next in her one-girl backyard plays, I find myself writing more words with more joy than ever before.
As it turns out, both Katie and I love watching Warehouse 13, and mostly for the same reasons. Katie is giving me ideas about “artifact”-like things I can put in our stories. She wants me to put in more pop culture references like Red Shirts to make people who get the jokes laugh. I tell Katie this is too much work, I’d have to do more research, keep better notes, and I remind her that I too often lose my notes-on-napkins anyway so really–
Katie interrupts me with some cute begging and funny faces and tells me that surely these touches will make me really famous and make me heaps of money and (she knows this is the coup de grace) I’ll make people laugh.
I think about it and then consider the alternative. But what if I don’t make people laugh, Katie? What if they think it’s dumb?
And in her properly outraged 10-year-old voice, she shouts, “Then they’re dumb!”
I laugh and shake my head and agree to try harder to be cute and funny like her. And then I start writing and…well, Katie and I like the results.
What about you? Where does your creativity come from?

Kitty Bucholtz decided to combine her undergraduate degree in business, her years of experience in accounting and finance, and her graduate degree in creative writing to become a writer-turned-independent-publisher. Her first novel, Little Miss Lovesick, was released in September 2011 as an ebook and will be available soon in print format. Kitty has also written magazine articles, devotionals, and worked as a magazine editor. She is the co-founder of Routines for Writers where she blogs every Monday. Her next novel, Love at the Fluff N Fold, will be released in late 2012.
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Short Recap of RWA National 2012

August 6, 2012 by in category Pets, Romance & Lots of Suspense by Linda O. Johnston tagged as , ,

Last month I blogged about how it was almost time for the Romance Writers of America National Conference. This month, at PAW, we’re all going to discuss what we learned there.

Unfortunately, I was too busy with meetings to attend many workshops, so I’ll have to try to listen to the recorded ones on CD that I particularly wanted to hear. My own panel on Writing a Series You’re Passionate About went great!

But of the workshops, the Published Author Network (PAN) retreat programs, and other events I was able to attend, one thing was made abundantly clear: all of us, even major publishers, are accepting the wave of the future. E-books, and e-versions of print books, are only going to get bigger.

I get it. I still like to hold a real book in my hands and be able to turn the pages. But I also have a Kindle and enjoy its convenience and portability, too. I recognize reality, so I’ll try to adapt as much as I need to both in my writing and reading.

How about you–were you there? What were you particularly interested to learn?

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