Romance and Chocolate Blog
ON THE PAGE
Along with the many great panels and ways to interact with readers and answer questions is a huge vendor booth hosted by Bella Books that will have a wide variety of actual, real, smell the ink, pick-up-and-hold books. Every author present will have books there, including me. Read More
ON THE PAGE
Once I got that laugh I was hooked on the feedback loop in public readings. I enjoy readings immensely. But it took practice and learning from a lot of mistakes to get there. All in all, it’s no surprise to me that one of the most common requests for advice from new authors is how to survive that first reading. In 2020 it got even more complex because we had to manage cameras, lights, and microphones, as well as working with tech or someone running the tech. It was that, or have no opportunities at all to appear for readers.
I’ve attempted here to create a useful checklist of advance work that will take a lot of anxiety out of the process. Plus tips for managing the event itself gleaned over many years in a changing landscape of opportunities for live readings. Your experience will be different!
Hidden bonus: Reading my work aloud has also proven an invaluable editing and feedback tool. I hear clunky phrases, wrong words, repetitive structure, and awkward sentences when my eye thinks they’re fine. Once, before publication thank goodness, I even discovered a paragraph was one long sentence, all 143 words of it. I had also used actually, really, and just multiple times each. My ear heard them; my eye didn’t see them. Read More
ON THE PAGE
I like everything from soft serve to supermarket gelato to the artisanal goodies made in small batches in restaurants. I happily range from a Mickey D’s vanilla cone on a 105 degree day after running errands, to a Talenti pint of whatever chocolate, caramel, crunchy gelato concoction was on sale, to fancy plated desserts. Baseline, it has to have balanced flavors that work well together and a mouth-pleasing creaminess.
And yes, I stalk ice cream on sale and pounce on any brand that doesn’t use substitutes for the sugar or fat. They can use less of those two things, but not substitutes. There are concoctions that use molecular gastronomy techniques, emulsifiers, and stabilizers which can taste good. To me, they’re ice cream cousins. Not ice cream.
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ON THE PAGE
Most of the time, my favorite thing is what I last imagined in my head and actually made it to the page the way I hoped it might. Or that scene that for some reason always makes me cry. Or has a writer’s tool in it that I managed to use to its best effect. It’s hard to answer “That scene – look at the foreshadowing!” and have anyone who isn’t a writer really get it. Read More
ON THE PAGE
If you follow me on social media, you know I was having a crisis of “One of these Things Is Not Like the Other” about my new Coin of Love novella series cover art. It was making my brain itch.
Once the next four installments were planned and the covers set side-by-side with Velvet in Venice, the five covers looked like this:
The itch in my brain was that the lovely gondola, canal, and old building on Velvet was nothing like any of the other covers, all of which featured a character from the story inside and conveyed (at least I hope so) the time period of the story.
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