News and New Books!!

My first post on Operation Awesome in months went up yesterday and you can find out what I've been up to here.

It involves this ...

Isn't she beautiful?

Between paperwork and meetings for our buying/building project and baking a bun in the oven, I vacillate daily between Cloud 9 and Garbage Pail 5. It's a roller coaster-y time. But I find that to be true generally when my life is filled with blessings.

With every blessing comes a lot of work to make it worth it. New babies? Poopy diapers! New house? Unexpected expenses! New job? Awkward adjustment period!

While I've been hopping between clouds and garbage pails, so to speak, my blog partners have been very busy pumping out novels. Check them out:

Over the summer, Michelle McLean released ...

Amazon  Goodreads

A woman with a past…

Widowed mother, Brynne Richardson, gave up her bandit activities when she left California to make a fresh start with her young daughter in Boston. Working for a handsome doctor fulfills her need to be useful and independent, but he creates another yearning she can’t deny. 

A man with a purpose…

Dr. Richard Oliver assumes Brynne is just another debutante hunting for a rich husband, until she intrigues him with her steady hand for stitches…and guns. He can’t put her out of his mind, but the young widow has mysteries he’s determined to unravel. 

A love in danger…

When smugglers raid the much-needed supplies from the clinic, Brynne must resurrect her bandit persona for the good of the sick and the poor. Her secret life threatens to destroy everything she’s worked so hard to protect…her life, her family…and her heart.


and more recently ...

Amazon Goodreads

Ceri McKinley never stopped wishing that her ex-fiancé Jason Crickett would come back into her life. But when he finally does, he comes with a request that puts them both—and all of humanity—into jeopardy.

Jason only wants two things: to bury his brother properly and to convince Ceri to trust him again after he jilted her. But when Ceri agrees to help him get his brother back, they end up fighting for their lives as the second zombie uprising threatens them all.

And Angela J. Townsend, through Clean Teen publishing, released ...

Amazon Goodreads

Angus MacBain is unaware that his ancestral roots hail from an ancient sect of Scottish kings. When his dying grandfather gives him a dragon pendant, thirteen-year-old Angus learns of a legacy that will take him across an ocean to the island of Iona and thrust him into a heritage he did not know he had. 

He soon discovers that his mother, whom he had believed dead, is really a seal fairy, in hiding from a dangerous enemy. To save her, Angus must undergo a perilous journey of destiny and power to battle an evil Dacian knight and those who serve him. With only his family shield and the advice of a wizened vampire hunter to protect him, Angus must navigate dangerous terrain and dark enemies, in a land where the past and the present mingle, and sleeping kings wake.
and the day before Halloween ...

Amazon Goodreads

When 17-year-old Dharma Moore moves to Bayou country so her scam artist mother can work as a Paranormal Investigator, she discovers more than ghosts haunt the abandoned plantation they now call home. Centuries ago, a voodoo curse was placed on the swamp waters surrounding the old plantation by a murdered slave. A terrible curse that snares Dharma. To save herself, she must face the terror of the haunted waters, find the dead woman's skull and convince the slave's soul to release her from its torments. However, there is more to this curse for Dharma personally than anyone else knows as she discovers an ancient secret that links herself to the property—a secret kept from her by her own family. To survive, she must accept the help of locals and to learn to embrace the truth—that magic is not only real, but that it can be very, very deadly!

Max Gladstone and Wes Chu both came out with sequels to their big hits, THREE PARTS DEAD and THE LIVES OF TAO:

Amazon Goodreads

The new novel set in the addictive and compelling fantasy world of Three Parts Dead

Shadow demons plague the city reservoir, and Red King Consolidated has sent in Caleb Altemoc — casual gambler and professional risk manager — to cleanse the water for the sixteen million people of Dresediel Lex. At the scene of the crime, Caleb finds an alluring and clever cliff runner, crazy Mal, who easily outpaces him.

But Caleb has more than the demon infestation, Mal, or job security to worry about when he discovers that his father — the last priest of the old gods and leader of the True Quechal terrorists — has broken into his home and is wanted in connection to the attacks on the water supply.

From the beginning, Caleb and Mal are bound by lust, Craft, and chance, as both play a dangerous game where gods and people are pawns. They sleep on water, they dance in fire... and all the while the Twin Serpents slumbering beneath the earth are stirring, and they are hungry.

Amazon Goodreads

The sequel to The Lives of Tao.

The Prophus and the Genjix are at war. For centuries they have sought a way off-planet, guiding humanity’s social and technological development to the stage where space travel is possible. The end is now in sight, and both factions have plans to leave the Earth, but the Genjix method will mean the destruction of the human race.

That’s a price they’re willing to pay.

It’s up to Roen and Tao to save the world. Oh, dear…

So as you can see, my peeps have been busy bringing the AWESOME to the world of fiction. I'm so proud of them! If you get the chance, any one of these reads will transport you to another world with characters to love/hate and compelling endings. Happy reading!!

Blog Chain: All the Help I Can Get

Sarah asked...

Do you work with critique partners? How did you find your crit pals, and what influence have they had on your work?

Which is a great question. I've blogged about my critique partners before and how I met them. In fact, when I did a search for keyword "critique" all of these came up:

The Joy of Community

WIP it good: Share your reading and writing adventures

You want me to change WHAT?

More Gushing About Operation Awesome

Would you keep going? (if you were the only writer in the world)

The Perks of Fellowship for Novelists

Celebrate Michelle, Operation Awesome's Newest Member!

Writing Enablers: Who's Enabling You?

As you can see, my critique group is pretty important to my writing process. Both they and the online writing community are a big reason I don't just give up writing when life gets busy or the craft gets difficult. 

I had just written my fourth novel when I met Amparo in absolute-write forums. Agent Mandy Hubbard had held a query critique workshop thingy (technical term) and liked my query enough to request pages, even though mine was an MG boy book and you can see from the pink on her website that it's not her usual thing. To polish up my work, I requested help on absolute-write and a few people responded. Amparo was the one who got back to me a) the fastest and b) with the most helpful, thorough feedback. Not only did she point out when something didn't make sense. She also put in her funny little comments, like "Grr!" when somebody was mean to my protag or "LOL" when something made her giggle. After that, I was hooked on exactly her kind of feedback. 

But I didn't really know what it was like to be a critique partner. It wasn't, at the time, a reciprocal deal. Separately, I posted about a partial request I'd gotten on the same book (my so-close-but-not-quite-competitive-for-the-market book) on the query tracker forum. Kristal saw me there and was interested in forming a critique group, one that hopefully wouldn't fizzle out like the last one she'd been in. I didn't respond right away. Like I said, I didn't know what it was to be a critique partner. It sounded like a big deal. 

But eventually, I did write her back and we started the work of forming the group. She invited two people (Kelly and Angela) and I invited the one person I knew (Amparo) who invited someone else (Lindsay). We emailed about a group name and came up with Operation Awesome... which I have to confess I thought was a really silly name at the time. Now I can't imagine it any differently.

When one member got too busy to do the critique end of things, we sifted through a few people's pages to sort of try out different writers, see if they fit with our group. That's how I met Michelle, and also how I ended up part of this blog chain. Without Michelle, I'd have forgotten to do Blog Chain completely! Thanks, Michelle!

Each member of Operation Awesome brings something unique, whether it's an eye for grammar and punctuation, an understanding of what makes literature feel realistic, an affinity for beautiful descriptions, or an ear for authentic teen voice. Sometimes it's tricky having five people's work to critique, especially because we are typical writers, switching up projects like we change clothes. But I can't imagine who I'd do without. I hope we'll be together for a long time.

How did you find your critique partners?

Make sure you also read Cole's post before mine and Michelle H.'s tomorrow.

How Critiquing Makes You a Better Writer

The other day I was reading somebody's unpublished book and I was like, "Wow, this part is beautiful and amazing and makes me want to weep."

Reading that made me a better writer (and probably a better person).

In the same manuscript, I spotted:

a) purple prose, where the writer takes originality an nth of a degree too far and ends up sounding artsy fartsy
b) an abundance of adverbs (is there a book with this title? because there totally should be)
c) run-on sentences that made me truly appreciate our good friend the period (.)

This person is a good writer, as evidenced by the above referenced awesome prose that made me want to weep. But they still had little drafting flaws that needed polishing. We all do. Finding those in someone else's work makes it easier to see them in my own.

And that makes me a better writer.

We're all learning and practicing by degrees, line upon line, precept upon precept (Isaiah 28:10). Critiquing helps with that. So if you're feeling a little stuck in your writing, read somebody else's work. It'll really help them out, and...

make you a better writer.



p.s. Sometimes feels like I'm preaching to the choir.


p.p.s. Matthew Rush has a new Afterglow Book Review up for Ghost Medicine by Andrew Smith (The Marbury Lens author's debut novel).


p.p.p.s. If you need a laugh, see this very brief but hilarious post by Kiersten White about an editorial note that made her day.

Have I Told You Lately?

In case you were in doubt...




Special shout outs to:

Angie Townsend
Amparo Ortiz
Lindsay Scott (aka Isabella Morgan)
Michelle McLean
Kristal Shaff
Kelly Andrews

"You fill my heart with gladness,

Take away all my sadness.

Ease my troubles, that's what you do."

And I'm grateful for all my blog buddies, too! Thanks for stopping by and sharing your awesome with me on a daily basis. It means a lot to me.

Have you loved on your critique partners and writing friends lately?

Amparo's 200 Followers Contest prizes are free critiques! Don't miss the contests and submission calls Kristal linked over at Operation Awesome today, either!

Would you keep going?

If you were the only writer in the world, and there were no blogging buddies, critique partners, or beta readers... would you keep going?

I don't think I could.

I picture what it must have been like for early writers who scribbled away on parchment or in notebooks without the technology that allows me to move an entire paragraph or just one word with Ctrl X, Ctrl V. I imagine my friends thinking I'm crazy because I'd rather write than go to a ball or a party. Can you just taste the disappointment mixed with utter loneliness that some of our favorite writers must have experienced?

Two of my heroes are J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Individually, they're epic and respected writers. Together, in their little Inklings group of writers, they are pure awesome. What would one of them have been like without the other?

Answer: Like me, minus Amparo, Lindsay, Kelly, Angie, Kristal, and Michelle (my Operation Awesome critique partners and blog buddies). Sad. Discouraged. Alone.

I can't even tell you how many times one of them has cheered me up or kicked my butt into gear. And I couldn't possibly count or even recall every time one of your blog posts (yes, you, reading this blog) has taught me something about writing, or reading, or being human.

Without you guys, I wouldn't know how to start a story or how to finish one. I wouldn't understand story structure or characterization half as well as I do now. And I'm still learning from you.

We're not alone. And that makes writing 100% fun and 0% lonely.

For a glimpse at how much I've learned from my blogging friends, check out Pot Holes and Aha Moments in Your Writing Career by me over at Operation Awesome.

Pick and Choose Revision

It's impossible to please everybody with a single book. The first time I met somebody who didn't absolutely adore Twilight, I was slightly in shock.

Me: *gasp* You didn't feel the passion in her writing?

Them: Meh. It was sloppy.

Me: *gasp*

Same thing with Hunger Games, when I finally got the guts to read something everybody told me was really dark. I loved it, of course, and then met yet another person who said, "Meh."

It's easy for me to think, "What's wrong with you people? This is genius! Brilliant stuff!"

But people have different needs, different perspectives. That extends to literature as well as everything else in life.

That's why you should always take revision suggestions with a grain of salt, EVEN if they come from an agent. Of course, give them a little more weight if they come from your dream agent! Take a serious look at them. But don't lie down and take every single revision suggestion from all two dozen of your beta readers.

Why? Because you'll go insane. They won't even agree with each other half the time. What one person thinks is truly poetic, another will think is "trying too hard." What one person thinks is stunning characterization, another will label cliche or "bad original."

In the end, you've got to go with your gut. Feedback is priceless. But the revisions will all be yours. Make sure you own them before you implement them, or you'll end up with a book even you don't want to read.

 Don't forget to enter my 100 followers contest for a chance to have your whole Nano novel beta read by yours truly. :)


And don't miss author Roni Loren talking about What Makes Romance Awesome on the Operation Awesome blog.

Celebrate Michelle, Operation Awesome's Newest Member!

Michelle McLean recently joined our ranks at Operation Awesome as critique partner & fellow bloggista, and, as if her bio tab doesn't already clinch it, she's proving further just how AWESOME she is!

WITH A CONTEST!

She's giving away a book for every five followers who follow her from her lovely blog to the group blog. And if OA goes over fifty new followers, one lucky winner will win a gift certificate for $20. It is an international contest and deets are on the contest page.

Come get to know Michelle and welcome her to Operation Awesome!

Thanks, guys!

Writing Enablers: Who is Enabling You?

These chubby birds are obviously junk food enablers, always turning a blind eye to the problem.

Enablers are usually a bad thing. 

A junk food enabler stands by or maybe even joins you in your weekend binge, with nary a word about how maybe you both ought to eat more healthily. 

My CP, Lindsay (a.k.a. Isabella), is my book-buying enabler (which is a favor I gladly return), and my amazon account thanks her, though my wallet does not. :)

There are friends who turn a blind eye to your Sims3 addiction, or your OCD need to run back to that last sidewalk crack so you can "make it even" by stepping on the crack with both feet. There are friends who enable you to badmouth your spouse or to continue buying stuffed animals from garage sales even though you have quite enough garage sale bunnies at home. 

And then there's my favorite kind of enabler: the writing enabler.  

The writing enabler knows all about your writing habit. He or she just chooses not to intervene. Or they do you one worse-- encourage the writing habit. These people are worse than drug dealers! They hook you with the first seemingly innocuous writing compliment and then....

Okay, they're not as bad as drug dealers. Actually they are awesome! Without writing enablers, we wouldn't have published books to read, because writers worth their salt all have inferiority complexes and require a little enabling in order to move past the first rejection. 

HOWEVER...

There is a bad kind of writing enabler who maybe is as bad as a drug dealer (okay, nobody is as bad as a drug dealer). The bad kind doesn't do you any favors, though. This is the person who gives you flowers-and-sunshine feedback without any criticism. 

They enable your pervasive passive voice. They enable your tendency to start every sentence of your YA fantasy with, "And even though I knew..." They enable your unrealistic dialogue and lack of interiority. And they tie it all up in a neat little bow with a tag that reads: 

THIS BOOK IS SPECIAL. 

Beware the bad writing enabler. The writing community is full of amazing, incredible, fantabulous people (links to critique group page) who can give you brutal critiques without being brutally mean. Find the writing enablers who encourage you to keep going while encouraging you to try harder. It's okay to be friends with the bad writing enabler, too. Just be careful when you're critiquing their work. ;)  

And now, back to writing. Go ahead. Write. You know you want to. I won't even tell anyone. *whispers* It will be our little secret. 

p.s. Kelly is talking about useful humility over at Operation Awesome, which ties in nicely with this talk about the necessity of critique partners. :)

p.p.s. Don't forget to polish your Twilight fan fiction for the awesome All White For Twilight contest.