Meet Caridad Pineiro

Until after I sold my first book, I thought the hardest part of the publishing process was writing and selling the book. Little did I know about all the hard work that came after the sale — revisions, galleys, new proposals and the promotion and publicity necessary to establish and advance a career as a writer.

Many aspiring authors don’t understand the entire process and in all fairness neither did I when I sold my first book. But I soon found out just what was involved in not only taking a book from sale to publication, but what was needed afterward to try and make that book a success.

For starters, the book that you sell to a publisher is oftentimes a diamond in the rough. It will take the editor’s skills to polish it and make it as bright and shiny as it can be on the shelf. After the sale, the editor will read your manuscript and generally offer up a number of revisions for you to undertake. The one rule I always tell writers about this phase – Don’t be a diva. Editors are there to help you make your product more marketable so listen to the comments they have to offer and work with them. There are some authors who think of their creation as being untouchable. That their vision is one not to be tampered with but the bottom line is, if a book doesn’t sell your vision will reach no one.

Having a successful book will also take the involvement of the art, sales and marketing departments to produce that final product and try to make it sell. The art department will work with your editor, executive editors and maybe even the publisher to decide on the look for your book cover. The marketing department may also have some input into the cover as well as the title. Another rule to remember – don’t get married to your title. Titles will often be changed to make the book more marketable. Finally, the book, cover and title may be discussed with the sales department to see if they envision any problems. For example, there are certain titles and covers which will not fly with some retailers, such as Walmart. Changes might be made to make sure your book will be bought by all of the important retailers.

It will also be up to the sales department to sell your book to distributors and retailers. During the process of selling the book, there may also be discussion of “coop” money. “Coop” money is the money paid by the publisher and/or agreed to by retailers in order to give your book prime placement in a store. For example, all those books that you see on the tables, end caps or face out as well as “dumps”. “Dumps” are those free-standing cardboard display boxes you see in stores. Not all books will receive “coop” dollars to help get them in premiere locations in a bookstore.

During the process of selecting cover art, sales, etc., you will receive copyedits. The copyedits are additional changes being requested by your editor and/or a copyeditor. These changes may be just grammatical, but they could also involve revising plot issues, issues with the timing in the novel or even fact checking.

Once you review the copyedits and send them back, the book will move on in the next stage of production and you will eventually receive what is known as the “galley”. The galley is the proof copy of the book that will be printed. Your contract will provide that you are supposed to review the galley for any errors and return the pages with errors to your publisher.

Revisions, cover art, sales, galleys . . . So how long does that entire process take? In general, about a year from the time you first deliver your full manuscript to when your book will hit the shelves.

But I did leave out an important part of the process – promotion and publicity. Many many months before the book is released, you will need to decide what you will be doing to promote and publicize your book. In most cases, the bulk of the work will rest with the author since many publishers will not do promotion on behalf of an author. But before you embark on a promotion and publicity plan, make sure to coordinate with your publisher to see if they are doing anything and if so, what they are doing so that you do not duplicate efforts.
What are some things that you can do to promote? Ads in trade magazines, press releases, newsletters, contests, giveaways, conferences, sending out review copies, a website, blog, social media sites and video trailers are all ways in which you can promote and publicize your book. You should discuss all of these things with your agent (if you have one) and/or your publisher. You may also wish to engage the services of a private publicist to assist you with all of these items.

And while you’re doing all of the above, don’t forget one very important thing – always be preparing your next book and/or proposal. Publishers love writers who always have something ready because it’s important to have regular product on the shelves so that you can build a following and increase your book sales with each release. So, always be writing!

Thanks for having me visit and I wish you all the best of luck in your writing careers!

Meet Shobhan Bantwal

Shobhan Bantwal
Author of THE SARI SHOP WIDOW

When I was offered a second two-book contract by Kensington Publishing after the first two books, THE DOWRY BRIDE and THE FORBIDDEN DAUGHTER did well in the fiction market, I was just beginning to emerge from writing on serious women’s issues like dowry and female feticide in India. I had been focused on combining social themes with a romantic twist. Weaving the two elements into interesting stories that would appeal to a wider audience had been both emotionally and mentally exhilarating yet exhausting.

Therefore for my third book, THE SARI SHOP WIDOW, I decided to step down from my soapbox and tackle an equally interesting but different subject closer to home – the Indian-American immigrant experience. With so many immigrants pouring into the U.S. to follow their dream and make a life for themselves, a unique Indian-American culture has evolved over the past 40 plus years. As a result, second generation Indian-Americans straddle both cultures and the process can put many of them on a rollercoaster ride.

Children of immigrants who belong to a conservative culture are more deeply affected by the conflict involved in meeting their own need to fit in with their peers while fulfilling their parents’ expectations. In THE SARI SHOP WIDOW, my protagonist, Anjali Kapadia is a classic example of a young woman born and raised in the U.S. by her old-fashioned parents who live in Edison, New Jersey. She is constantly trying to maintain the balance between preserving her independence and making her parents happy.

Anjali owns an upscale sari boutique in partnership with her parents. When the business suddenly starts to go downhill and bankruptcy becomes imminent, Anjali’s rich and dictatorial old uncle arrives from India to bail them out. But the old man comes with a few surprises, one of them being a mysterious young Indo-British man named Rishi Shah. Sparks fly when the stubborn and proud Anjali is told that Rishi and her uncle have big plans for her store, none of which she approves of. However, she can’t deny the strong attraction she feels for Rishi, and turbulent emotions she hasn’t experienced since she became a young widow ten years ago at the age of 27.

THE SARI SHOP WIDOW offers a rare glimpse into not only the Indian experience in America, but also a look at the Indian-American fashion industry. With a protagonist who is a fashion designer and boutique owner, I was able to indulge in vivid descriptions of lush saris, salwar-kameez, lehengas, cholis, and sadras – a colorful spectrum of ethnic clothing from India.

THE SARI SHOP WIDOW is available at all U.S. and Canadian bookstores and online booksellers. To contact me or learn more about my books, author events, book trailer video, recipes, short stories, and sign up for my newsletter, visit my website www.shobhanbantwal.com

Thank you for hosting me on “Book Madness.”

Shobhan Bantwal

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About the Author

Shobhan Bantwal calls her writing “Bollywood in a Book,” romantic, colorful, action-packed tales, rich with elements of her own Indian culture — stories that entertain and educate. She is an award-winning women’s fiction author of three published novels and contributed to an anthology of short stories.

Shobhan writes for a variety of publications including The Writer magazine, India Abroad, Little India, U.S. 1, Desi Journal, India Currents, Overseas Indian, and New Woman India. Her short stories have won honors/awards in contests sponsored by Writer’s Digest, New York Stories and New Woman magazines.

You can visit her website at ShobhanBantwal.com

Wade Rouse, author

Wade’s Writing Women
copyright Wade Rouse

I have two women to blame for my lot in life: Erma Bombeck and my mother.

Both conspired, it seems, to make me not only a writer but a damn humorist. (And if you think art and books are subjective, try humor.)

As a kid, I used to write about everything going on around me in my tiny Ozarks town: Whether I was forced to go cowtippin’ with the country boys or watch my mom the nurse make dinner in her bloody scrubs, it seemed to be only the only way I could make sense of the world.

For a while when I was young, I called my mom “Digit,” because she became infamous in our little town for being the go-to gal whenever a local cut off a toe with a lawnmower, or whacked off a finger with a chainsaw.

My mother would answer our giant red, rotary phone, the kind presidents use in comedy skits when they are about to launch a nuclear bomb, and calmly say, “Do you have your big toe? Well, can you locate it? Good!”

And then she would rush out of the house, often barefoot, in a nightgown, with a little Igloo cooler filled with ice. She would retrieve the detached digit, and personally rush the injured idiot to the ER of the neighboring hospital where she worked.

She, of course, eventually found my journal entries about her, and ended up – one morning when I was inhaling a bowl of Quisp for breakfast – shoving the daily paper in front of my nose.

“You need to read Erma,” she sighed.
I immediately adored her.

From that point on, I was devoted to Erma Bombeck’s column, “At Wit’s End,” in our small-town newspaper, and even clipped a few of my favorites to adorn my corkboard wall.

Though I was very young, maybe 11 or 12 at the time, Erma connected deeply with me.

She was a humorist and human who made the mundane memorable.

She wrote about family and food, laundry and life.

She wrote about everyday stuff with which I could relate.

For instance, “The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank” was funny, yes, like its title, but it was also deeper: Along with daily suburban family issues, Erma tackled diet and self-image in this book.

And for a chubby little gay boy in the middle of nowhere who had a fondness for ascots and dreams of being a writer, I found a role model in a middle-aged mother who seemed to be dealing with just as many self-esteem issues as I was.

Actually, make that two middle-aged mothers.

From that day my mom led me to Erma, I wrote and journaled more earnestly about my life, yet I always tried to do it with humor, just like she did. I found laughter softened the pain, made life seem so much more bearable, even through incredible tragedy.

And that would be a fortuitous lesson. The summer my older brother graduated from high school, he was killed. That was followed in subsequent years by the deaths of my mom’s father and sister.

When my mother seemed no longer able to laugh, to dream, I made it my sole goal to bring her back to life. I read to her from Erma. I read to her from my journals. I held her hand. We became more than mother-son, we became friends.

I vividly remember the New Year’s Day in 2005 when I stood in front of my city mailbox clutching a fistful of query letters after I’d spent two years completing my first memoir, AMERICA’S BOY. It was cold, and I was shivering, but not because of the temperature. I was nearly 40. I hated my job. And my mom was tired, after having lost a son too early, of her only remaining child being unhappy, unfulfilled, not living his dream.

“Here’s to rejection!” I said, waving my query letters.

“Here’s to dreams coming true!” my mom had said.

She forced my hand into the mailbox, made me drop the letters, and then promptly slammed the slot on my fingers.

“Thanks, Digit!” I told my mom. “I’m glad you’re here, so you can save my fingers, or I’d just be all nubs and unable to type the letters H, J, M, N, U or Y, forever knocking words like ‘hominy’ and ‘yum,’ from my vocabulary.”

“This is meant to be,” she said, laughing. “And, I’m retired now anyway. Really, how many times are you ever going to write, ‘I love hominy. Yum!’”

Two weeks later, I had three formal offers of representation from literary agents, and a few months later – when I went to visit my agent for the very first time in New York – I was overwhelmed by what greeted me when I entered her office: Knee-high stacks of manuscripts and packages swallowed the lobby.

“This is what you were picked from,” I was told. “The slush pile.”

But, oddly, that didn’t overwhelm me; it emboldened me. It made me realize that if I – an odd Midwestern boy with zero connections in the publishing and literary world – could get his foot in the door, then anyone with talent, drive, thick skin, and a gut-wrenching desire simply to write, could do the same.

“People are going to read about you now, mom,” I told my mom after I returned from New York. “And some of it’s not pretty.”

“Good!” she told me. “Life isn’t pretty, sweetie. It’s life.
That’s why you better have a damn good sense of humor.”

My mother passed away this June, but only after seeing my current memoir, AT LEAST IN THE CITY SOMEONE WOULD HEAR ME SCREAM, featured on NBC’s Today Show as a Summer Must-Read Selection.

“To dreams!” she had said from her hospital bed. “And laughter.”

Though my mom and Erma are both now gone from my life much too soon, they remain with me: They continue to make me laugh, think, dream, and appreciate the fragility and foibles of people and life.

Because those are things that are most beautiful: The imperfections in each of us.

And that’s what I still try and remember every day, focus on in each and every memoir: I write about everyday life from a unique perspective – with a whopping dose of humor and cynicism – touching upon those themes that touch us all, be it unconditional love, loss, family, sex, relationships, jobs, self-esteem, neuroses, dreams. I believe that the very best books force us to hold a mirror up to our collective faces and take a good long hard look at what’s reflected back.

And that image always looks so much better if we somehow manage to smile, even through all those damn tears.
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WADE ROUSE
Author Bio
Wade Rouse is a “laugh-out-loud-funny” (NBC’s Today Show), “wise, witty and wicked” (USA Today) writer whose humor is “successfully akin to suburban housewife Erma Bombeck” (The Onion). Rouse “beautifully combines humor and pathos” (Out Magazine), and, in a short time has established himself as “an original writer and impressive new voice” (The Washington Post) whose “combination of honest emotion and evocative prose seems destined to be a hit!” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

Wade Rouse is the author of three, critically-acclaimed memoirs, including America’s Boy (Dutton/2006), Confessions of A Prep School Mommy Handler (Harmony/2007), and At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life (Harmony 2009). At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream chronicles the misadventures of two neurotic urbanites who quit their jobs, and leave the city, cable and consumerism behind in order to move to the Michigan woods and recreate a modern-day Walden. At Least in the City Somone Would Hear Me Scream was an IndieBound bestseller, and named a Summer Must-Read by NBC’s Today Show, Detroit Free-Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Petersburg Times, Grand Rapids Press, Out Magazine, MetroSource Magazine, Chicago Magazine, Chicago Public Radio, Michigan Public Radio, St. Louis Magazine, Frontiers Magazine and bestselling memoirist Jen Lancaster’s “Jennsylvania” blog, among others.

Rouse’s writing has been lauded and named to multiple “Best of the Year” lists by such influential media and booksellers as the Today Show, USA Today, The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Detroit Free-Press, Out, Genre, Entertainment Weekly, OK! Weekly, WGN and KMOX Radio, as well as Border’s, Target, B&N, and the nation’s independent booksellers.

Rouse’s first memoir, America’s Boy, which chronicles his life growing up gay in the Ozarks thanks to the unconditional love from an unconventional family, was named by Border’s as one of its Best Books (Literary Memoirs) of 2006 (alongside Gore Vidal, Jonathan Franzen, Gay Talese and Augusten Burroughs), “A Best Book of 2006” by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as well as a May 2006 BookSense selection by the nation’s independent booksellers. The memoir was also included as part of the American Library Association’s inaugural “Rainbow List” of recommended books for GLBT young readers and their families, and PFLAG has placed “America’s Boy” on its permanent must-read list for families.

His second memoir, Confessions of A Prep School Mommy Handler, about his tenure (and lack of self-esteem) as PR director at an elite prep school where he quickly learns his “real job” is to cater to a Lilly Pulitzer-clad clique of “Mean Mommies,” was selected by both Barnes & Noble and Target as a Breakout Bestseller, and hailed as “Funny!” by Entertainment Weekly.

Rouse was a contributing writer to the humorous essay collection on working in retail, The Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles (Counterpoint-Soft Skull Press/October 2008), which was featured prominently on NPR and in the “Wall Street Journal.” Rouse’s essay on working at Sears after years of wearing Husky’s was selected to kick off the collection.

Rouse is a columnist with MetroSource Magazine (www.metrosource.com), the largest gay magazine in NYC and LA, and his essays and articles have appeared in numerous regional and national magazines, and collections. He earned his B.A. in communications (with honors) from Drury University and his master’s in journalism from Northwestern University.

Rouse’s fourth memoir, Big Box O’ Wine: How I Survived My Family Holidays, from Easter to Thanksgiving, will publish (again from Harmony/Random House) in fall 2010. It is a compilation of tender, torturous and touching tales about his family’s holidays and America’s obsession with picture-perfect holidays. He is working on his next memoir about his mother’s battle with cancer and how they turned to Erma Bombeck, humor and each other throughout life and hardships to forge an even more beautiful relationship. It is tentatively titled, Me, My Mom & Erma: How I Learned to Laugh through Tragedy and Live with Passion from Two Great Women.

Rouse lives on the coast of Michigan, where – in between beach weather and blizzards – he writes humorous, heartbreaking memoirs and battles for bed space with his partner, Gary, and their beloved mutts, Marge (a 12-year-old Husky-Ridgeback-Collie’ish sort of dame) and Mable (a 2-year-old Labradoodle-beagle inbred who looks like an insane bat).

For more, please visit his web site at Wade Rouse

New Twists to Old Tales

by Kathleen Cunningham Guler

Thank you so much for inviting me to write a guest post. I am honored!

Have you ever wondered, as more and more books are set in the same historical periods, are the authors really coming up with any new ideas? How many books are about the Tudors: Henry VIII and Elizabeth I? An endless string of them. How many about Richard III? As many as there are theories about whether he killed his nephews.

Way back in the beginning of time when my interest in Britain’s early history and Arthurian legend started to develop into the Macsen’s Treasure Series, it seemed that few well known modern Arthurian novels existed. Of course we had Mary Stewart’s best-selling Merlin trilogy and its sequel, T. H. White’s Once and Future King, and a few others. Then in 1982, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon was published. Ever since, like the Tudors and Plantagenets, one Arthurian-themed book after the next has popped up. Single books, trilogies and longer series have been published by the truckload. Some are straight up historical fiction, others are fantasy, most are somewhere in between.

As writers of this sort of fiction, we all draw on the same sources: the historical facts, the legends, the archaeology, the theories, the mythology. The question taunts: what if I don’t want to produce yet another story detailing Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin or any of the other legendary characters’ lives? Or another book told from some obscure monk or retired warrior recounting Arthur’s life?

How do authors keep from writing the same old thing? Enter imagination.

And how to poke the imagination into action? Start asking the “what if” kind of questions. In digging through the trenches of history (literally if you’re an archaeologist!), questions will constantly arise that the characters must answer in the course of their lives.

My brainstorming asked these questions: What kind of hero could have existed to meet the challenge of that time? What if my hero was someone who cared tremendously about his country’s freedom and integrity? What if his upbringing was ordinary, but something happened to him that deeply influenced his thinking and impelled his need to make things right? What if he had a reason to believe the prophecy that Merlin had made of a great king to come? What if he met a woman who shared the same beliefs and reinforced them through her actions? What would he do about it? How would he go about fulfilling all of this?

All of those “what ifs…?” evolved into iron-willed, blunt-talking Marcus ap Iorwerth: master spy, master of disguise and master swordsman—Braveheart, MacGyver and James Bond all rolled together. And with him, his true love, Claerwen, strong-willed, stubborn and gifted with second sight. Through these two characters, I’ve offered new voices for the fifth century. And perhaps as a bonus, a new sub-genre—the historical spy thriller!

About the Author

Novelist Kathleen Cunningham Guler is the author of the multi-award winning Macsen’s Treasure Series. Drawing on a long background in literature and history as well as her Welsh and Scottish heritage, she has published numerous articles, essays, reviews, short stories and poetry. The author is a member of the Historical Novel Society, the International Arthurian Society and participates in various writing organizations.

You can visit her website at KathleenGuler.com

Meet Carol Sue Gershman

Who Needs An Agent Or A Publisher?

73 Year Old First-Time Author Self-Promotes Memoirs to a Roaring Success

For Immediate Release (Miami, Florida – August 2009) 73 years young Carol Sue Gershman opted not to wait around to find a publisher or agent. She bravely self-published her memoir and hit the road. Through herown efforts and putting 4500 racy miles on her hot, yellow mustang convertible, she has signed in more than 25 national locations.

When she decided to reenact the places she wrote about in her memoir; road-tripping along the same route, she spontaneously called Barnes and Noble, Borders and independent book stores along the way and interested them in her story. Much to her surprise she secured bookings.

“I had a story to tell, and at my age, I wasn’t’ going to wait around to see if any professional agent agreed with me. I picked up the phone, and booked myself. I have always been a believer in following ones dreams and not taking ‘no’ for an answer.”

The highlight was Washington, D. C. Omar Berry, store manager of Borders placed a banner covering an entire window of her in the heart of downtown Washington. “Now that was a thrill,” she said.

Now taking a break and residing in Sag Harbor, N. Y., she gives formal book talks. She tells her audience that they can live agelessly and passionately too. She says by discovering your passion and by paying no attention to your age, you can follow your dreams – sans the expiration date. Keep yourself in good health and follow your spirit!

Says Gershman, “you would be at how much you have inside of you that needs to be discovered. There is so much more to come.” She says a new world where good things happen every day. “Just think, if I had waited for an agent or publisher none of this would have happened. I might still be waiting to be chosen, and if my book was published, it would have taken another one or two years to hit the shelf.”

Would she turn down a publishers offer? She’s not sure. “You know those contracts…” There is a new self publishing world out there. When I run out of states, I might consider driving around Europe and Australia? Why not?

About Carol

Constantly reinventing herself, Carol Sue Gershman attended the Miami Dade College memoir class and decided that she would turn her two and a half page “Adventure in Love Story” into a book. Never having written before, it was passion that drove her each day to write.

After spending 25 years in New York City, she was one of the first to arrive into the new phenomenon of Miami Beach (South Beach) She is presently writing her next book while working on laws to ban
smoking in residential buildings.

Now at 73 she will take her completed book back on the road re-living the cities and states visited on the road trip. You might just see her driving her hot yellow mustang convertible packed with books, hats and what it takes for life on the road.

You can visit her website by clicking here: Carol’s Site

Meet Betty Ann Harris

About the Author:

From my home in southeastern Pennsylvania, I can look out at the scenic rolling hills, watch hawks soar above, or see a family of deer run back to their wooded safe haven. It’s an ideal place to live and work, and to be inspired. It is from this beautiful place that I write my stories of romance.

I have been a self-admitted hopeless romantic ever since I can remember. My love of words and the English language was developed in elementary school when I had the good fortune of having an awesome sixth grade English teacher. She had the class do a visual book report, either finding or drawing pictures with written captions, to explain what the book we had read was about. It’s then I realized how important a writer’s description of characters and scenery is when telling a story.

My first published written works were poems, two of which won places as entries as Poetry.com contest winners. One was a poem I wrote after the tragic death of Princess Diana. The other was a lighter theme, a poem about the moon, titled, The Moon Is A Silver Slipper.

I had always enjoyed reading Nancy Drew mysteries when I was a teen, and then became intrigued by a good spy story, like James Bond. As I became a young adult, romance novels would just take me away, to a place I would fantasize about. I combined the two genres, romance and suspense, and my first novella, Eureka Point, was written. It’s a spellbinding tale of deceit, danger, love and romance. Eureka Point is available at Red Rose Publishing.

As I had thoroughly enjoyed writing that type of spellbinding romantic suspense, I dove right into writing the second book in my Special Agent Series titled, My Very Special Agent, which is also available at Red Rose Publishing. The third book in the series, The Darkhorse Conspiracy, was released on July 9th. The fourth book in the series, Agent of Mercy, will be released in early 2010.

A third story, Storm At Midnight, will be my third published work. It’s a sweet southern romance story in which the main character, Erin, is venturing on a new vocation. She has just purchased and is renovating a romantic and historic inn, which she will open as a bed and breakfast, with the help of her ruggedly handsome assistant, Darien.

I’m also writing a sequel to Eureka Point, that has turned into a major undertaking, but a lot of fun. I’m basing the characters on people I know personally. And also on the burners is a comedic romance about quirky librarian, Prudence (Prudy) Trivet, who inherits her dear aunt’s estate and family business. She is thrown into an unsavory situation, and falls in love with an unlikely man with whom she develops a love-hate relationship. Love wins out.

Writing is my passion and an important part of my life. But besides writing, I’m a happily married mother of two grown boys and two adorable dogs. I enjoy reading, music, gardening, and interior decorating.

Betty’s Site

About the Book:

Stephanie Alexander is an international journalist who is missing, and under suspicious circumstances. The beautiful blue-eyed blond and ex-fiance of Simon Fox, owner of The Darkhorse Stables, who raises Kentucky Derby winning thoroughbreds, has vanished. James must find her, if she’s still alive, and finds himself smack-dab in the middle of a terroristic conspiracy that is a threat to the security of the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. Will he find her in time? Can they work together to find the answers they need so that the State Department can defray The Darkhorse Conspiracy? You can find out all the answers to these questions when you read, The Darkhorse Conspiracy, available NOW at Red Rose Publishing.

Buy Link:
The Darkhorse Conspiracy

Meet Lisa Lipkind Leibow

About the Author

Prior to pursuing the literary dream of novel writing, Lisa Lipkind Leibow practiced law for over a decade, drafting legal briefs and memoranda much like the young attorney in her novel. This professional environment was the inspiration for the characters and settings in her debut novel, Double Out and Back. After being stuck at her office on 9/11, a month-long siege on the city by a sniper, and discovering that the other parents at her twins’ preschool thought her au pair was her sons’ mom, Lisa decided to trade the billable hour lifestyle for fiction writing from home. Her work has appeared in the Pisgah Review. She is currently working on her second novel.

Lisa lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, three sons, a clumber spaniel, and two red-eared sliders.

About the Book

Today is a special day for me. It’s the day I delete the adjective aspiring from “aspiring novelist” when I describe myself. I’m thrilled that Kim Smith invited me to celebrate the moment on her blog.

Double Out and Back by Lisa Lipkind Leibow is now available as an e-book from Red Rose Publishing. Be among the first to read it!

Not every woman who rides the fertility treatment roller coaster winds up like Octomom.

Who will find friends, family, and fertility?

Three women’s lives are intricately intertwined, as Amelia Schwartz and Summer Curtis struggle with the complex dynamics of intrafamily embryo adoption, and Chandy Markum strives to make her patients’ dreams a reality.

After more than a decade, of mourning her parents’ deaths, anal-retentive Amelia Schwartz decides to take control of her life, pursuing single motherhood via embryo adoption. While her fertility doctor, Chandy, is preoccupied with the destruction of the cosmopolitan Cape Town of her youth and her first love in apartheid-torn South Africa, believing all is lost, her niece, a young, married, overachieving attorney Summer Curtis, juggles zealous career ambitions, demanding bosses, and friction with her husband over family and fertility issues. They must confront the painful reality that, no matter what technology humans devise to manipulate reproduction, prolong life, and construct family units, they have not yet mastered control over their beginnings and endings.

Thrown all into this is one story that can make or break. Are you up to it?

In honor of the first day Double Out and Back is available for sale, I thought I’d share with you some of the tools in my writer’s toolkit that helped bring to life characters and settings in the novel.

I write novels because I tend to think on a grand scale and I love the challenge of weaving together multi-faceted plots with large casts of characters.

I spend a lot of time getting to know my characters before I set out to animate them in a written scene. I “interview” them and craft detailed back stories for them. Much of this never makes it into the story. But knowing a character’s motivations and how she would react in a given situation based on her past experiences helps me to make a character come alive on the page when I drop her into the plot.

For me, writing fiction is a lot like method acting. A director might give an actor a five-minute explanation of what his motivations should be to utter one line of dialogue. And these motivations permeate the performance, coming through with facial expression, posture, gesticulations, and inflection of the actor’s voice. Someone watching the performance can infer a lot about an actor’s motivations and emotions without a lengthy narrative explaining where he’s coming from. When I write prose, I work hard to balance dialogue and narrative to give the reader a vivid, sensory experience with realistic, fully-drawn characters.

Bringing a character to life is merely one layer of detail, in the crafting of a novel. One must also bring a location to life on the page.

Avoiding talking heads by having characters interact with their surroundings not only adds depth to a written scene by developing characters, it also enhances the total reader experience by revealing the world in which the characters inhabit, enhancing the fictive dream, transporting them to the environs.

Early readers of Double Out and Back praised my knack for creating an interesting setting. The opening chapter of the novel takes place at an old, abandoned Drive-in theater.

Here’s the paragraph I wrote to begin to bring this unique setting to life for my readers:

They had arrived at the old drive-in site, now a vacant lot. The pavement was cracked, and random clumps of crabgrass had sprung through gaps in the blacktop. Nature had commenced reclamation of land with which man had interfered. The evenly-spaced posts still stood, though most of the speakers that used to hang from them were missing. Someone had scribbled graffiti across the old movie screen, a huge abandoned wall that loomed before them like an enormous billboard.

In a broader sense, the settings in my upcoming novel make a statement about the nature of our small world—the broadening circles of families, and how we rely on, and impact, one another across continents and oceans. Three main settings in my upcoming novel are Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Cape Town, South Africa. These locales feature prominently on the cover. I hope my readers will be able to visualize the banks of the Potomac, Fisherman’s Wharf, and Table Mountain in Cape Town, as they page through my story. It is my job as a writer to help a reader escape into another world – realistic or fantastic, familiar or foreign.

Thank you, again to Kim Smith for allowing me to celebrate my big debut on her blog!

If you wish to learn more about Lisa and her writing you can visit her website at http://www.LLLeibow.com and her blog, Lisa Leibow’s Fodder for Fiction. She is also a member of the Roses of Prose, five fabulous authors out to bring you the very best in fiction. You can find them at RosesOfProse

Follow Lisa on twitter.

Join Lisa on Facebook.

Meet Etta K. Brown

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Etta K. Brown received her undergraduate degree from the Ohio State University with a major in Dental Hygiene Education and the Masters in Education degree from South Carolina State University with a major in Special Education. The Educational Specialist Degree was conferred at Kent State University with studies in School Administration, and a major in School Psychology.

Through her graduate programs, and internships, the author acquired skills with speech and language, visual-motor training, auditory training, and the teaching of reading and handwriting.

During twenty years of professional experience in the public schools in Ohio, Iowa and California she has worked as a special education teacher, a school social worker and as a school psychologist. At no time, in either of those positions did she feel that she was able to apply any of her acquired knowledge to help children to learn.

Instead, while she didn’t always agree, much was learned about what not to tell parents about their children. She also learned how school systems function, why they function the way that they do, why there were some things that it was not in the best interest of the school district for parents to know and why they should not be told.

Those were long, frustrating years watching children being placed in Special education because that was all that the School District had to offer. On the other hand were the frustrated parents who agonized over what to do about their child’s learning problems and the stigma of being placed in Special Education.

Having recently retired from public education and started a practice as a Licensed Educational Psychologist, the author is now free to discuss Special education and share information believed to be in the best interest of parents without being unprofessional or disloyal to employers.

She continues to reach out to parents and children through her writing. Her current book is a summary of all that she would have told parents during her career had she been permitted to do so.

Ms Brown may be reached at www.understanding-learning-disabilities.com

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Etta On Writing

Becoming an author, it seems to me, takes more than just writing something on the page and binding it within a cover as some self-publishers seem to have done. An author to me is an individual with something to say, and the ability to say it well in writing. Then added to that definition should be “ something to say that is of interest to and has meaning for someone other than yourself. “ Hopefully, a lot of ”others than yourself”. The sale rack at Barnes & Noble attests to the number of writers who wanted to become authors so they wrote something down and self-published it. A lack of sales would indicate that not many others found it interesting.

The best way to tell if what you have to say is interesting is to make sure that it has meaning for you after you have written it. Or, is it just the venting of an angry person who has lost sight of what he was really angry about. Were you just venting; and having written so much you decided to capitalize by publishing it? Self-publishing companies will let you do just that you know. However, if what you wrote was something that you were passionate about, it is likely that someone else at the same stage of development might be having a similar life experience and find somewhere in your discourse a solution to their problem.

The key to doing this successfully is to edit your own material for content and grammatical errors. This will force you to read your own writing from a reader’s perspective. If the content is not new and exciting from this new perspective, it is not likely to be new and exciting reading to any other reader. Really dynamic insights are still dynamic no matter how many times you read it, even if you wrote it yourself.

So begin by writing what you are frustrated, angry, and passionate about and then reread it. As you reread it, edit out all the anger and frustration, and keep the passion that you felt about how things might be if the ”people who run the world” gave attention to the important things. Those important things that they should give attention to will result in a very interesting, if not comical, farce of a book that will be of interest to others. At least they can have a good laugh at all the things they have thought but didn’t take the time to write down, reread, reedit, reread and then reedit again.

Surprisingly, with all that editing, if your venting has been cathartic, you will have released the anger that muddled your thinking making you believe that someone else would want to read your stuff. If you have received some therapeutic benefit from your venting, you may begin to isolate a few insightful passages that may be worthy of publication. Then edit, and reread it again before publishing. After publishing, be sure to check to see if it winds up on the sale rack at Barnes & Noble and see if it winds up there. If it doesn’t end up there then good for you! If it does may it to the sale rank, purchase one of the other books on the sale rack and try to read it. If you don’t find it something that you can’t put down, you may gain some insights into what is wrong with yours. Then go home, reread and rewrite your book now that you know what not to do.

Be sure to give the book a different title though. Don’t want your new best seller to be associated with the unfortunate fellow who self-published that first angry rant about a subject that no one else cares about.

Meet Tom Weston

By Tom Weston

Originally from England, Tom now hangs his hat in Boston, Massachusetts; with occasional spells in such faraway places as London and Luxembourg. Tom has a degree in Computer Science, and he claims to speak three languages: English, American, and Visual Basic. Before turning his hand to fiction, Tom had a successful career as the CEO of a systems consulting company, conference speaker, and writer of industry articles and business books.

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Tom Weston on the Artistry of P.G. Wodehouse.

My favorite writer, P.G. Wodehouse, the genius who created Jeeves and Wooster, published 99 works, beginning with the Pothunters in 1902 and ending with Sunset at Blandings in 1977. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English Language, no easy matter considering that his chosen genre was light comedy. Evelyn Waugh said that he had, “grown up in the light of his genius.” In Russia, he was revered by many above Tolstoy. And I think that he is some sort of deity to Indian Computer Programmers.

Yet, although he was someone who never had to compromise between quantity and quality, he began each work like the rest of us – with nothing but optimism. Coming from an age that predated the word processor, his tools were an old typewriter and a stack of blank sheets of paper, but there is much in his methodology that is to be emulated. In fact, it is his disciplined approach to writing that was the basis for both his productivity and his brilliance.

Wodehouse would begin each novel by gathering about 400 sheets of paper. He would then enter his office and spread out the paper on the floor, up against the base of the walls. Then depending on whatever thoughts were going through his head, he would pick up a piece of paper and scribble notes or type a bit of action or dialogue on it, and then put it back on the floor. Sometimes he would rearrange the papers into different orders, as the chronology of the novel was starting to take shape.

After scribbling and typing and transferring the work in progress to a new piece of paper, when it was sufficiently fleshed out, he would take the page from the floor and pin it to the bottom of the wall. As he continued to refine each page, he would pin it higher up the wall, and the pages would compete with each other in a slow race up towards the ceiling.

This gave him a great visual aid into the status of the work: what was coming along nicely, what still needed work and how much work overall was still left to do. It also allowed him to develop his ideas and novels in a non-linear fashion, which is how most of us think anyway; and to see the interaction between different parts of the story, between set-up and punch-line. After all, in comedy, timing is everything.

When all the pieces of paper were pinned to the top of the wall, Wodehouse knew that the work was finished. Not only that, he knew that each page in the book was as good as it could be, and that no page was more important than any other.

It’s probably this last factor that is most essential to good writing, but the one that is easiest to overlook. We put these critical things in our books: the unique characters, the plot twists, the snappy bits of dialogue, etc. Yet we tend to focus on these things, and then we pad the in-between with filler that hasn’t received its due attention. A book may have great attributes, but, like a chain, it is only as strong as its weakest link. P.G. Wodehouse’s genius was in using a technique that made each link as strong as possible.

Tom Weston is the author of the fantasy novel, First Night; and is currently working on its sequel, the Elf of Luxembourg.

Here’s Heidi!

Meet Heidi Thomas, author of Cowgirl’s Dreams, available now from

Treble Heart Books

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Don’t miss Heidi’s show with me on Introducing WRITERS! radio show at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/kims on June 24, 2009 730 pm CST.

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Hi Heidi, Welcome to Book Madness.

Tell us a bit about you, something that will surprise us?

I once sang at Carnegie Hall. (It was with a Sweet Adelines group from Missoula, MT)

Why do you write, what is it that makes you do it?

I love the creative process, building a character from nothing or creating one that is based on a real person and making her seem real. I like telling a story and making people laugh or cry.

Who is your favorite character from one of your books, and why?

At this point, with one published novel, I’d have to say Nettie, because she is based on my grandmother. The character I’m creating for my fourth book in the series, Samantha, is quickly becoming a favorite, though. She’s another strong, independent Montana cowgirl.

If you could have dinner with six people, alive or dead (LOL), who would they be?

My grandparents from both sides of the family, my dad and mom, Ivan Doig, a Montana author I admire, Jane Kirkpatrick, another favorite histotical novelist, and Randy Travis, the country singer. That’s more than six, but I think it would be a fun, eclectic group!

Tell us a bit about your writing process.

I’m a journalist by education, and I have had to overcome the habit of writing “just the facts.” Usually my first draft is pretty spare, and I have to go back and flesh it out with emotions, senses and always more conflict. I’m not an outline writer—I do an outline after I’ve written a large portion or all of the book, to help me stay on track with facts and events.

What is your current release? And how did this book come about.

Cowgirl Dreams is based on my grandmother who rode steers in Montana rodeos during the 1920s. That tidbit of information about her stuck with me through the years as fascinating and courageous, and I knew I had to write a book about her.

Summer’s coming… where would you like to go on vacation?

The beach—anywhere with water and sunshine. But, I’m spending most of the month of June traveling through Montana on my book tour—lots of sunshine, but not a lot of water.

How can readers find you?

My website is Heidi Thomas and I have a blog at WordPress Blog for Heidi

Thank you, Kim. This has been fun!