Birthday Wishes

Toooo meeee! I partied last Friday--thank you to all who so sweetly wrote me. Lol.
I love celebrating my birthday. It's the one day All About Moi. Presents, dinner, cards--nothing feels better. Right?

Definitely, there's nothing better than birthday cake and I'm pretty non-discriminatory. I love almost every kind of cake, especially the ones with lots of icing flowers and leaves. (I bet you're thinking get out the cholesterol medicine.)

PP Welcomes Alisha Paige: Silent Lucidity...Writing From Dreams

How do you come up with new ideas for your latest novel? I'm always curious to see what inspires writers. I'm a big dreamer..yeah, I dream big and I actually remember very vivid dreams. I've been known to wake up from a dream and jot down everything before I forget it. Have you done this?

Once I dreamed I was this teenage girl that moved to a new world (Early America) with my parents. I was very wealthy and our home was ready for us when we arrived, built with the best materials of the day. Servants were carrying my large trunk inside our new home. I watched from the windows, looking out at this foreign, new land as a very handsome man rode up on a horse. I'm watching all of this out the wavy oval glass of our front door. A bear approaches and the man pulls out a knife and spars with it. I gasp and know right then and there that I will marry this man one day. Then I woke up. Ahhh! How disappointing! I immediately wrote the dream down. I usually don't dream of other time periods. This was really odd.

Another night I dreamed I was the member of a wedding party. This is the weird part..my ex husband was there too. After the wedding, there was a huge party in this hotel and we were all staying in two adjoined, very luxurious hotel suites. It was late night and everyone had crashed. In my dream, I wake up when I hear voices, whispers really and doors creaking open. I look over the shoulder of the person sleeping next to me..again, this was highly odd....I don't make a habit of sleeping with a herd of people...and I see all these men coming in, posing as waiters in white coats, pushing room service trays.

Plotting Princess Sylvia McDaniel: Plotting Made Simple

People think writers have a burst of brilliance and then we sit down at the computer and the stories pour out.  When the idea for a book comes along and it's a good one, you have to stop and think about what company would want to publish this idea. Is there a market for it? How did these characters get into this predicament? How do I get them out? Is there enough conflict to last four hundred pages? Do I like these people enough to spend six months with them?

I admit, I'm an anal plotter and I spend months plotting a book. Then I spend several weeks researching, picking out names, doing a story board before I ever sit down at the computer and put those first words on the page. I envy the ladies/gents who are pansters and just sit down and write.  I have blinking cursor syndrome when I try to write without my road map.

BACK TO TEMPTATION (THURSDAY)

It's that time again. Welcome to Temptation Thursday. The first Thursday of each month here at Plotting Princesses we'll be bringing you little snippets from the current works in progress of several of our members, both published and aspiring authors. Every month will be a little unique with different contributors, new short stories, articles or books we are working on, to give you a taste of the variety of writing talents from the Princesses.


So sit back, grab your favorite beverage (and maybe some chocolate to go with it) and enjoy the ride.


UNTITLED—Elizabeth Essex
The toff limping out of Spring Gardens onto Cockspur Street was just the sort she liked, if she couldn’t have a drunk. Big man, but tired, he was, weariness stewing from his bones like the cold steam of his breath in the frigid, snowy air. And he was a gimp—heavily favoring his left leg—but without a cane or walking stick. So far so good. It paid to stay well clear of walking sticks.


STRANJE HOUSE, EXILE FOR DREAMERS, Book 2—Kathleen Baldwin
I raced toward the woods. He wouldn’t be able to run me down as easily in there. The trees would hide me. After all, I am part forest. My eyes are green as leaves, my hair ash brown like bark, my skin pale as air. I am Welsh, a daughter of the earth. My mother used to say the spirit of these things, the soil and trees, the rocks and beasts, they call to us. “We are part of this land,” she would say. Only now, my mother lies silent, cloaked beneath the very earth she spoke of with such fondness.

The PPs welcome one of our own: KAT BALDWIN

Act it out loud!

You’re gutsy women inviting me to blog with you here on Plotting Princesses…

because you all know I’m a notorious Pantser.  Perhaps I can play the villain of the group.  Heh, heh, heh, picture me twirling my moustache (which won’t go away despite getting lasered.)

Originally, I’d intended to tell you about my fun Tween fantasy: IF WISHES WERE KISSES, which was scheduled to be released soon from www.InkLionBooks.com, but my agent recently pulled the book and is considering it for traditional publishing possibilities.  We will see what happens.  She is a marvelous agent, so I bow to her judgment on the matter.



Plotting by Committee

I collaborated with another author on IF WISHES WERE KISSES, mystery writer, Andrea Sisco. Imagine if you will, two Pantsers trying to write a book together.  Yikes! It was a challenging process. Fortunately, Andrea Sisco and I have been friends for a very long time.  Even more remarkably, we stayed friends through the collaborative process.

We began the writing process by getting together in her hotel room for a brainstorming session and had a truly fun-filled, wild, crazy, brainstorming day.  It was sooo much fun.  I love brainstorming.

Andrea is a crazy blonde with more energy than a two year old on a sugar high.  She acted out scenes, jumped on the bed to illustrate our fairy heroine flying, she hid behind the curtains, and pretty much put on a one woman show.  I wish I had a movie.  But here’s her author photo. Note the mischief in her eyes. 

The PP gals welcome: author Karilyn Bentley

Tell us about yourself. How long have you been writing? Thank you for having me here today. I'm so excited! I've been writing since 2001 or 2002. I remember sitting in my then cube and thinking that I needed to find something to do so I could sit home and eat bon-bons. I had these stories running around in my head and decided to put them on paper. Still haven't found the bon-bons. :) But I have a bunch of nice, invisible friends that like to talk to me.

How did you get from  research coordinator to writing romance? Apparently, I'm an overachiever, as I think I already answered this in the previous question. :) If you must know, I did not start out writing romance. I'm not sure what you would call what I first wrote (it's hiding in the closet now), but although it had some romantic elements in it, it wasn't a romance. I hadn't read a romance in years b/c I thought them silly. Then I picked up one of Sherrilyn Kenyon's at a book faire at work and was hooked. Didn't realize it was a romance until I was partway in and it was so good I didn't put it down. Once I realized the genre had changed and had paranormal critters, I started reading all sorts of romance. Always heard that you should write what you read, so there you go. Romance story coming up. Of course, thinking of the story took some doing. :)

Who is your favorite author(s) and why? This changes, but currently my favs are J.R. Ward and George R. R. Martin. Maybe I have a thing for initials. Ha! I like JRW b/c her dialogue rocks and her characters are gritty and you just can't put down the book. My friends call them the crack series b/c we read them over and over and over, well, you get the picture.

Liz Lipperman: Looking for Plot in all the Wrong Places

Looking for Plot in all the Wrong Places

Okay, so I spent three hours in the dentist's chair recently getting three lower back teeth ready for crowns. It was only supposed to be two but my dentist found a huge crack in the third one.

Cha ching!

Anyway, I'm on FaceBook with my dentist and some of her very capable office staff, and I posted an update about how I was thinking about creating a character that looked like a few of them and torturing them with a dental drill. That led to a lively discussion involving a possible title.Death by Dentistry, Drill M for Murder, Nightmare on Route Canal, and Nitrous and Old Lace were a few that made the cut. It was fun for all of us until I realized on the weekend that the gum around the last tooth was probably infected. My first clue was that I cried every time I bit down on something.

So I called my dentist who was at a restaurant with her staff, and she phoned in an antibiotic RX for me. I'm sure my writing became a dinner table topic after that. Long story short, I had to go see her the following day and lo and behold, my sweet, girl-next-door dentist who looks more like she should be modeling swimsuits for Sports Illustrated than shoving both hands into my mouth, said she had a great idea for a book.