ROMANCING THE KINDLE
Twelve of my books are now up on Amazon’s Kindle, Smashwords, Kobo, etc. I’d be thrilled if you’d read them, decide if you like them, and maybe write me a review on Amazon. Every book needs to be clothed in reviews, and mine are naked at the moment. Here’s the links and a sneak peek at the covers, as well as a quick explanation of how I came to write the book.
I was living in Kelowna, and one morning a newborn went missing from the hospital. It was before the safeguards that are now in place in hospital nurseries. A troubled woman had smuggled the baby out in an exercise bag. The baby was recovered, alive and well, but I couldn’t stop imagining how it had happened and why. Writers and their who, what, when, where and why. I couldn’t resist dreaming up a story that encompassed all the players in such a drama. And that was how Full Recovery began. Don’t ya love the cover my brilliant artist, Barbara Karnes, came up with? The adorable baby was photographed by Brooke Drellos, Paperlily Photography, Atlanta, GA
www.paperlilyphotography.com
I had a dear friend who was having serious marital problems. To stop her from obsessing about her husband, I asked her one day about life before she was married. “Oh,” she said, “I lived in the remote B.C. woods. I was the first female log scaler in the province, and one day the loggers brought me a newborn moose. I raised him.” A baby moose? Who could resist? And that was how Mortimer the moose became a major character in Follow A Wild Heart.
My sister Karen called me one day. “You won’t believe what our cousin did,” she said. “He held up a train with a rifle because it was killing his cattle. He was on Canada’s most wanted list for a couple days, and then he was picked up. But the judge gave him a suspended sentence and assigned him a parole officer. Guess what? He married her!” Whenever readers ask how I get my ideas, I say, from my sister.
My eldest son, Dan, married a beautiful girl, Trudy, who became a lawyer. She told me amazing, outrageous stories about the people she met, the Legal Clinic’s she attended, and the street people she defended. How could I not put them in a book?
HOW NOT TO RUN A B&B (previously published as Blue Collar B&B)
Once a writer, always a writer. I changed careers and became a B&B host, but life is a story that needs to be told. It’s said that like attracts like, and the dear, wild, whacky people who helped, hindered, stayed, and visited are all in this memoir. Think cats and gerbils and manic dogs, recipes and visitors from around the globe, and things that go bump in the night.
I’d love to hear from you, if you choose to read my books. Tell me honestly whether you enjoyed them or not. Writers need input from readers, because how else do we learn?
HOW TO WRITE A BOOK
Writing a book can be a daunting proposition. Where do you start, and for that matter, where do you end? How long should it be? What do you include, and more puzzling, what do you leave out?
There are so many differing opinions on writing a book. Take beginnings, for example–one expert says you must have an outline, while another says just start and let inspiration guide you.
The fact is, you can do it any darned way you choose. It’s your book—do what feels right to you. You can wing it, and then part way along decide you need an outline. Or you can write chunks of the middle before you ever get around to the beginning. Many writers write the ending before they do anything else.
Length is sometimes determined by the type of book you’re writing. Romances have a definite word count, and generally, it’s more difficult to market a very long manuscript than one with a moderate length of 300 pages.
Deciding what to include when writing a book can be decided in the editing phase. The most important thing you can do is get the whole thing down. Finishing a book in draft form is a huge accomplishment. You can work on making it perfect once you have the raw material to work with.
As Rudyard Kipling so wisely declared, there are four and twenty ways of composing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right.
Learning how to write a book is like everything else in life. The more you do it, the better you get at it. Just begin somewhere, and go on any way you can.
Let me know if I can help in any way.
