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Seven Things I’m Thankful For

11/26/2015

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This has been a year of enormous transition in my life, including retirement from psychology practice and relocation to the South Carolina Lowcountry. I could not be happier with these changes. As Thanksgiving rolls around, I have much to be grateful for, including:

1. We took the risk of moving to an area we hardly knew, because it spoke to us.  How fortunate that Bluffton lived up to its promise – beautiful, with its live oak, palmettos and Spanish Moss, temperate and filled with local attractions (including great restaurants).

2. Living on a lagoon (okay, technically a reclamation pond) is pure joy.  In the afternoons, the water sparkles like diamonds.  As I’ve written in previous posts, egrets, herons, turtles, alligators, hummingbirds, butterflies and, once, a snake grace our yard.  The sunsets are amazing.

3. Pickleball!  I’m still loving it, playing at least three times a week.  My serve is now better than decent, my backhand still not so hot.  So much fun, such great exercise and lots of laughs with a great group of ladies, The Haven Hot Shots.

4. Trixie the Trike has become my faithful chariot.  I managed to fall with her twice by taking downhill corners way too fast, but we both came away unscathed.  Riding the bike trails and pedalling home from Pickleball with my buds – two neighbors who also play – makes me gleeful as a kid.

5. I’m excited to be finishing the fourth draft of my new thriller, Tell On You, seeing the novel start to shine.  A special thanks to my beta readers for their invaluable feedback.

6. I love not having to go to work!  My days are my own at last.  Retirement is mellowing for my husband and me and I’m glad we did this while we’re still young and healthy enough to enjoy it and each other.  So grateful that we can share this adventure.

7. Finally (not that I couldn’t go on), I’m deeply grateful for the new friendships I’ve found here at The Haven. As we prepared to move, friends in NJ would ask whether we knew people down here.  The answer was no, but I hoped to meet people.  And those hopes have been realized in abundance.  We’re blessed with lovely neighbors, including the ones hosting us for Thanksgiving.  Our social life is richer than it was in NJ.

To all my readers, best wishes for a happy Thanksgiving.  May you find much to be grateful for and the courage to embrace change.

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Interview with Kay Ellington (A Wedding at the Paragraph Ranch)

11/21/2015

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I am excited to kick off my new interview series! I will be featuring a new author each week. Today my special guest is Kay Ellington. She is the author of A Wedding at the Paragraph Ranch. It's the second book in a series she has written with Barbara Brannon.
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Tell us about your genre.  How did you come to choose it?  Why does it appeal to you?

a. We write smart, book club fiction. These are the kinds of books that I like to read. Authors like Jill McCorkle, Jan Karon, Dorothea Benton Frank, Wendy Wax. Our books appeal to 40+ females

b. Texas doesn’t have a lot of female authors writing these kinds of books, and we felt there was an opportunity.

c. We want to write in a way that our readers savor the language as well as the story. 

What do you find most challenging about the writing process, and how do you deal with it?

Attention spans are so short these days. You have to have a quickly moving story or people get bored. Revise, revise, revise

When and where do you do your writing?

In the den at my desk. I have to have a keyboard. I can’t do paper and pen.

What have you learned about promoting your books?

Facebook is very powerful tool to target the exact kinds of readers you’re looking for –across the globe. We have readers in almost every English speaking country. (Our books haven’t been translated—yet!)

What are you most proud of as a writer?

The 125+ reviews on Amazon that are either 4 star or 5 star. Especially the ones that end with “can’t wait for the next one”.

If you could have dinner with any writer, living or dead, who would it be and what would you talk about?

I think you can’t be a former newspaper person, and not want to have dinner with Ernest Hemingway. I think we’d talk about Paris, life on the Left Bank, and we might even gossip about Scott and Zelda, and we’d probably get very drunk.

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Author Bios
 
KAY ELLINGTON, a native West Texan, has worked in newspapers from New York to California to the Carolinas—and back again to Texas.
 
BARBARA BRANNON formerly led the Publishing Laboratory at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, but got to Texas as soon as she could.
 
Social Media Links
 
On Facebook: The Paragraph Ranch
www.ParagraphRanch.com
@ParagraphRanch
A Wedding at The Paragraph Ranch on Amazon
A Wedding at The Paragraph Ranch on Goodreads

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Guest Post: To “Plot” or to “Pants”, That is the Question! by Michael Bradley

11/19/2015

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If you've ever attended a writers conference, you probably have seen at least one session on the agenda debating which is better, being a plotter or being a pantser. It's a topic that comes up frequently when writers get together as they compare writing styles. Some die hard plotters swear that it's the only way to write, while pantsers often say that their writing feels constrained when they try to do anything other than “pants it”. Have I lost you yet with my highfalutin writer babble? Let me explain.

Writers often fall into one of two categories: a plotter or a pantser. Let's start with a plotter. A plotter is a writer who often will pull out a stack of index cards, or a notebook, or a spreadsheet, or whatever they feel comfortable with, and plot out their story. They will meticulously define their chapters, outline their plot twists, and map out their scenes. The plotter will develop a detailed dossier on their characters, including their fears, motivations, their deepest secrets, favorite foods, hometown, and anything else that the plotter feels is relevant. Usually, a plotter will do all of this before writing a single word of the actual story.

The pantser, on the other hand, gets an idea. It may be the beginning of a story, or it might be the end. It could even possibly be both. There's even a chance the pantser might have a character name, but that might be pushing it. A pantser will get this epiphany, rush to the nearest keyboard, and start writing, flying by the seat of their pants the whole way (hence the name). They have little patience when it comes to outlining and plotting. The urge to write is too strong, or they may just not be all that organized. It just depends.

Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. A plotter knows where they're going to start, and where they're going to end, as well as how to get there. They know their characters, almost better than they know their own family. There are no surprises for the plotter. However, as the writing process is evolutionary, sometimes plotters can plot themselves into a corner,finding it difficult to deal with that evolutionary process if it takes them outside of their defined map.

The pantser doesn't have that restriction. They're free to allow their story to evolve as they go. Just as with a reader, the story unfolds before the writer's eyes with the turning of each page. The pantser doesn’t know what's going to happen on the next page, until they write it. However, sometimes, a pantser can find themselves in a bit of a pickle when they finish writing a scene or a chapter, and then have no idea what happens next. There's nothing more depressing to a pantser than staring at a blank screen and not know what to write.

The debate over which is better has raged on in the writing community for years to the degree where, at this year's Writers Digest Conference, they had a session that talked about how to be a "plotting pantser". Is one method right and the other wrong? Plotters and pantsers alike have graced the New York Times Bestsellers list.

I've tried both methods over the years, with varying degrees of success. And, I'm not sure if I've settled on one or the other yet. When I was writing my debut novel, SIRENS IN THE NIGHT, I plotted out each chapter ahead of time, not in great detail, but enough to know what was going to happen through the novel. By the end of the first draft, I found that I had thrown out almost a third of what I had originally plotted. SIRENS IN THE NIGHT had evolved as I wrote, taking shape in ways that I hadn't imagined. Then, somewhere during the dozen or so edits it's undergone since the first draft, it received a shiny new ending. So much for my efforts to plot out SIRENS IN THE NIGHT ahead of time.

So, to answer the question so cleverly interjected in this post's title, I believe the jury is still out, at least for me it is. As I recently told a group of high school creative writing students, you have to go with what works best for you. Trying to force one method or the other will show in your writing, and that is never good for anyone, especially the reader
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Before and After:  Rewrites in Action, Part 1

11/12/2015

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Too consumed with my rewrites to blog, I keep thinking.  Then the thought occurred:  Maybe readers are curious about how authors revise?  So I decided to offer a glimpse.  I’ve likened the process of going from the third to the fourth draft of my new thriller, Tell On You, to performing surgery.  Cutting away filler words, like was, well, felt, thought, sighed, could, etc.  But also grafting in new material to improve scenes.  What does that look like?  A couple of examples follow.  First, a section that needed both tightening and fleshing out, beginning with the third draft, then the fourth draft revision.  

Third Draft 

AFTER AP ENGLISH, NIKKI jumped into action.  How perfect was it that Heather’s note and her own cupcake had turned up on Mr. B’s desk at the same moment?  It offered a golden opportunity.  By the end of the school day, her whispering campaign against Heather had kicked into high gear.  Did you know?  She’s been writing love letters to Mr. B.  Have you heard?  She left a cupcake with a heart on it right on his desk.  As each pair of lips spread the lie to each little ear, the tidbit grew juicier, its origin more remote.  By the time classes ended, the whole story became Facebook fodder, with no one able to recall who’d started the rumors in the first place.

Which suited Nikki just fine, as she read the posts on her iPhone, awaiting Mr. B on their usual park bench. Her deft thumb plunked away.  We should all take it easy on poor Heather, she posted.  She’s in therapy, after all.

Fourth Draft

NIKKI WASTED NO TIME.  How perfect that Heather’s note and her own cupcake had turned up on Mr. B’s desk at the same moment.   

“Samantha!”  Spotting a classmate from AP English in the hallway, Nikki rushed over and clutched her arm. “Did you catch that?”  She leaned in to murmur in the girl’s ear.  “Heather left Mr. B a cupcake and a love note.”

Samantha gaped through her oversized eyeglasses.  “They were from her?”

By the end of the school day, Nikki’s whispering campaign had gone viral.  Did you know?  She’s been writing love letters to Mr. B.  Have you heard?  She left a cupcake with a heart on it right there on his desk.  As each pair of lips spread the lie to each little ear, the tidbit grew juicier, its origin more remote.  By the time classes ended, the story became Facebook fodder, no one recalling who’d started the rumors.

Which suited Nikki fine. 

She read the posts on her iPhone, awaiting Mr. B on their usual park bench.  Her deft thumb plunked away. We should all take it easy on poor Heather, she posted.  She’s in therapy.  A nice touch, she reflected, imagining Heather reading it.  See how I stuck up for you?  The bimbo wouldn’t know what hit her.

What do you think – progress?  Next week, a scene that needed liposuction.
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    Author

    Freda Hansburg is a psychologist and co-author of two 
    self-help books, PeopleSmart - which h​as sold more than 75,000 copies and has been translated into ten languages - and 
    Working PeopleSmart, 
    as well as numerous professional publications.  Her first novel Shrink Rapt, 
    is a psychological thriller with a dash of romance. She lives in the South Carolina Low Country.

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