A little college advice from Emily and Zainab

Today Emily and Zainab, my dynamic duo from The Smartest Girl in the Room, is over on K.C. Wilder's blog giving future freshman some college advice.

What would you do if you could do it differently?

This was relevant for K.C. because her son is getting started on his higher education adventure next year, but it made me wonder what advice grads of all ages would offer our younger selves. Study more? Party harder? Join a club?

"Sassy Chick Lit"? I'll take it!

The blog tour for The Smartest Girl in the Room continues with a review on Kay's Novel Nook, who just so happens to be a fellow Bostonian. (I will take that too.)

Please go read it; I can't talk because I'm too overcome, and in the good way. I like this review so much, I even like her criticisms. (Another confession: most writers are that way.)

Excuse me while I beam for the rest of the day.

I'm interviewed on Keira's Corner today

...and I actually share some things I haven't shared ad infinitum!

Want to find out why I picked the title The Smartest Girl in the Room? What else I'm working on? Or what time of day I like to write? Then read on.

Oh, did I mention there's a giveaway? Because there is (click the above link!).

Thanks again to Juniper Grove!

The blog tour for The Smartest Girl in the Room continues (Jess's Book Blog)

And this time I got a little help from the lovely people at Juniper Grove Solutions, who came highly recommended to me by my good friend Lisette Brodey.

My first stop was on their blog yesterday, but today I'm featured on Jess's Book Blog, and I get Four Daisies. Woo hoo!

(Readers, I'll let you in on a little secret; tell most writers you don't hate them, and we might want to go home with you. But you shh...you didn't hear that from me.)

How much spice do you need in your story?

The Family You Choose is coming out at the end of the month, and I'm taking a lot more risks with this story than I did with The Smartest Girl in the Room. When you think about the characters, this makes sense: Emily wants to protect herself and those she loves at all costs, whereas Miranda is willing to be vulnerable.

There is more sexual content in The Family You Choose, but none of it is graphic. That works for my characters and their story, but maybe not for others.

For more of my thoughts on the matter, please read on.

The Smartest Girl in the Room is on sale for 99 cents

Grab a copy of The Smartest Girl in the Room for 99 cents if you haven't already.

The sale will run at least through Monday evening- I'll let you know when it's coming to a close.

Do I write strong female characters?

I'm pretty sure I've described my heroines thusly before, but this article makes me think that maybe I didn't, and that's not a bad thing.

What writers and readers really want, I think, are characters that are real. Writing someone who is always strong and always right is exhausting, and readers who have to read about those people quickly lose their motivation to continue with their story (at least, this reader does).

In The Smartest Girl in the Room, Emily does a couple of things for her friends that you might expect a man her age to do. I didn't put that in to make her "strong", and some people are going to question to what extent it shows she's courageous. It shows she's willing to take risks, but (spoiler alert?) that's one of the questions I'm asking in the book: at what point is a risk brave, and at what point is it foolish? Perhaps as a corollary, does the former make you "strong" and the latter make you "weak"? More to the point, does being weak on occasion mean that you aren't allowed likable or readable?

Gosh, I hope not, because I'm going to keep writing about people who try, sometimes fail, but never give up. If that's strong, swell, but I prefer to call it "human".

"Whether I'm strong or weak is irrelevant to whether I can solve this case- which of course I can."

Perfection is boring

The "Careful You Don't Outsmart Yourself" blog tour continues on the Free Book Dude. I write today about the importance of writing flaws into your main character. I use The Fountainhead as my example; it works as philosophy (even if I don't agree with it), but it doesn't work as literature. If the main character is already perfect on page one, why do I want to keep reading?

Please read the post here.

"I've got this all figured out. I'll just wait through the rest of the book for the rest of you to figure it out."

Why do we write what we write?

A few nights ago, as part of my Orson Welles binge, my husband and I watched his version of Jane Eyre. He went into it rolling his eyes at why anyone would find Rochester attractive; I went into trying to explain why Jane would be attracted to someone like him. By the time the movie was over, our positions were reversed: he was so impressed with Welles' performance that he could sympathize with both of them for the first time; I was so horrified by some of the highlighted dialogue that when Jane left Thornfield I couldn't get the door closed fast enough. 

Rochester just might be the prototype for the manipulative alpha-male many modern readers groan about in romance novels.

I had another disturbing thought as I watched Welles (who was magnificent in the role) teasing, belittling and wooing Joan Fontaine's Jane Eyre: he's a lot like a character I had originally written as the romantic lead in The Family You Choose. I shuddered a little bit before I reminded myself that at this point he is most definitely not, but still.

On that note... Loren Kleinman was kind enough to host me on her blog today to talk about some less disturbing influences. I promise- no more alpha males :-)

"Don't look sad yet, Jane; I haven't asked you to compromise your principles for our love yet"

There's violence all around

One of the concerns I have about my series is that I talk about violence against women in three of my books.  It's a real thing that happens, especially to this age group. In The Smartest Girl in the Room, the violence moves Emily to take some drastic measures on behalf of her friends; in the upcoming The Family You Choose, we'll see how such an act can chase two families for generations. It's not glorious at all.

In retrospect, it seems funny that I worried so much about the violence against women that I wasn't too concerned about the violence against men, but maybe I should have been. College hazing propels the plot in The Smartest Girl in the Room, and that's the start of the series. Although we don't see it happen, we know via Mitch that it was serious enough that he left his fraternity and later joined the Student Government Association because of it.

I include this article about high school hazing because, as someone points out, there is a link now between the hazing boys suffer in high school and what they might suffer later in college. Reading about students sexually exploiting more vulnerable classmates as a way of "breaking them in"- and the adults who condone it as a conditioning technique- makes me ill; that their older brothers might come up with ways to top that once in college makes me shudder.

Please read the article and let's think of better ways to socialize our children.

No, really- write what you know

I'm pleased to be featured today on Draven Ames' blog talking about how I made the advice "Write What You Know" work for me. Shorter: what you know isn't confined to what you've experienced- and your imagination won't be constrained by familiarity.

If you notice some similarities between this and my last guest post, you're right. This really was something I personally struggled with for a long time. If you've read The Smartest Girl in the Room yet, just imagine Miranda Harel in Victorian England, or Jessie Bartolome in the Deep South. Yeah... not so much!

Now wait until I tell you which character I originally wanted to narrate the story, speaking of writing what you don't know. But that's another story for another day...

The Smartest Girl in the Room is now available in paperback!

Aww yeah!

Now, every author is going to be excited about getting their work into paperback (well, most), but I am particularly excited because I went through four proof cycles. I just kept finding something, and while rounds two and three were minor (I'd probably be forgiven for an errant period and a couple of extra prepositions in the dedication), but they would have tormented me. Also, even though this has been through multiple beta-readers and my editor, I know someone is going to find something else. As I said in a forum last night, I have found typos in the classics, and I am betting that Euripides had some too, you know? But because I am self-published, any error of mine is magnified by a factor of one thousand and proof that we're all amateur-hack-charlatans, so I have to eliminate the most glaring ones.

So you know, some of the corrections I needed to make were also in the electronic copy, aka the one I imagine I'm going to sell more of. Those changes have already been updated electronically. If you bought before yesterday (May 15, 2013), please let me know and I will be happy to send you a clean copy.

So, without further ado, here is the link to the CreateSpace page where you can now buy my paperback. (The link to Amazon proper should be live in a few days.)

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to figure out how to get my book into the libraries :-)

When an author isn't promoting...

She's editing, proofing, coming up with new ideas, writing and formatting. Not necessarily in that order.

Today there was a little bit of most of that, but I'll spare you the gory details. Two pieces of news worth sharing: first, I finally went through the proof of my paperback copy and am now waiting on version two. This, I hope, is just a formality; hopefully by Friday I'll be announcing that the paperback is ready for sale- and distribution to libraries. Woot!

The second bit of news is that my editor just got the first round of changes to me for The Family You Choose. That's a big woot woot!

Never fear though: there will be more guest posts soon. AND The Smartest Girl in the Room will be available for free download this weekend. Woot woot woot!

Chick Lit And Romance- it isn't either or

My latest stop on my "Careful You Don't Outsmart Yourself" blog tour is on Every Free Chance. Here I discuss why The Smartest Girl in the Room is both Chick Lit and Romance.

There's a certain group of people that sees both Romance and Chick Lit under the umbrella of Women's Fiction and won't understand why someone would make a distinction in the first place. At the other end of the spectrum are purists who will insist that any given story can be either one or the other. What I'm hoping is that most readers will fall into the category I do: genre is irrelevant as long as it's a good story.

After I decided to self-publish, I spent a long time trying to decide which genre my stories fell into. When I first started writing The Smartest Girl in the Room, I set out to write a romance. Everything in my novel is pinned onto the basic structure of one: Emily meets Mitch, Emily and Mitch come together, apart, then together again, then Emily and Mitch get their Happily Ever After (HEA). So Romance, right?

Yes, but there is a lot that happens otherwise, and that action focuses on Emily’s journey into adulthood. Not incidentally, her friends are a huge part of her story. And if she’s going to get into any trouble... let’s just say that while even arguing with her romantic rival would be beneath her, she doesn’t think twice about taking on someone who hurt one of her friends, no matter how risky. That, to me, says Chick Lit.

Please read the rest here.

Chat with Lisette Brodey

On Friday I decided on a name for my blog tour: Careful You Don't Outsmart Yourself. Given all of the anxiety some writers go through trying to promote their books, I think it's fitting both for my main character Emily and me ;-)

Lisette Brodey offered to host me for a chat a few weeks ago. Anyone who has ever spoken to me in person should not be surprised that the "chat" ended up going long. How I edit (don't worry, that's the shortest part), why this is a quintessentially American story (and series), the importance of reviews, where I think publishing is going and, just to keep it interesting, my feelings about the current state of soap operas. It's all there.

Please stop by, give a read and let us know what you think.

 

Building a Better Villain

Thea Atkinson, author of character-driven fiction, features my thoughts on what makes a good villain. For starters, in many cases it's all about how you define a villain:

What is a villain? Various dictionaries give different answers: a deliberate criminal or scoundrel; one blamed for a particular evil or difficulty; a character in a story who opposes a hero. My favorite comes from, of all places, Google: a person guilty or capable of a crime or wickedness. Because, when pushed far enough, I think most of the characters I write for are. Depending on how we define “wicked”, Emily, the main character of my book The Smartest Girl in the Room might be accused of being a villain; certainly, stealing someone’s drugs and punching another in the jaw right before you blackmail them are criminal. But, I submit, Emily isn’t a villain at all: she’s a young woman trying to protect her friends. If her actions are questionable, her motives aren’t.

Which leads me to my first observation:

1. Villainy is about perspective. You, the reader, know immediately that Emily isn’t a villain because you know what led her to her actions. Someone else (say, law enforcement) might not be so forgiving. Emily is trying to protect her best friend Zainab from someone she hasn’t trusted since the first chapter. What she does is ill-advised (breaking the law should be avoided at all costs), but you know why she did it. If someone else did the same things but for a different reason- they really wanted to get their hands on a stash of drugs, for example- your conclusion might be different.

Please check out GonzoInk to read on.