Friday, November 25, 2011

LADYLIKE LOOKS FASHION TREND ©

  
by Polly Guerin
RWA/New York Fashion Historian



Bring on those Ladylike looks in fashion in your stories. Turn your heroine into a femme fatale that smolders passion underneath boucle suits, bouffant hairdos and baked Alaskas for dinner. The trend, which reigns supreme for fall right into spring 2012 revisits the 1950s and 1960s and also takes inspiration from the popular 60s fashions graced by the “First Ladies of the Air.”


GRACE KELLY RECALL

Remember those dolman-sleeved coats and suit jackets that so personified the Grace Kelly look. Well those shoulders were featured on the runways of Balenciaga, Donna Karan and even Marc Jacobs, and many others. Don’t forget the Kelly handbag or its hybrids as well as those pearls are demure ways to revive the Kelly look with a modern twist. Dressing-up also heralds the return of the 1950s black cocktail dress worn with a frivolity of the era, the cocktail hat.



DIOR REVISITED

A well groomed very feminine woman can be an object on display but she can be a smoldering seductress underneath it all. Remember the 1947 ‘New Look’ introduced as the world recovered from World War II. Paying homage to the past the nipped in waist in jackets and dresses returned at Christian Dior. His ladies were prim and proper in pretty print dresses, some with portrait collars. The head scarf makes a comeback and with it teasing brushes to create raised-hive hairdos. The classic pump is a most accessory and includes the black and cream tuxedo pump with vamp bow and a modest slim heel for ladylike chic.

FLY THE FRIENDLY SKIES

The hit TV show, which gives viewers a blast from the past with popular 60s fashions brings back crisp white blouses with shapely powder blue suits and oversized leather handbags. The proper suit with nipped in waist is a ‘must’ in a heroine’s wardrobe. For a modern twist on these iconic styles, visit OneStopPlus.com, Dots.com, the fast fashion retailer and eDressMe.com the contemporary fashion boutique, where you can find similar styles.


WALK SOFTLY LIKE A LADY

It’s time to lift up our feminine heads and walk the walk like a Lady. Your heroine gets interested in dresses in skirts for the first time in decades. Feminine details like gloves, particular white or pastel shortie styles that end at the wrist and “garden party” cosmetics, pink and lavender nail polish create pert looks that call for cat-eye sunglasses and puckered pink lips.

HERE’S TO THE RETURN OF THE PRIM AND PROPER WOMAN!!! SHE’S LONG OVERDUE IN FASHION!!! ♥




Polly Guerin, fashion guru and former professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology writes about fashion presentations in her book, “Creative Fashion Presentations,” Fairchild Books. Visit her at http://www.pollytalk.com/ where you will find a link to her Blogs. Polly is currently soliciting for a publisher for her book, “A Tale of Two Sisters,” the founders of the Cooper Hewitt Museum.
 
 

Monday, November 21, 2011

WILL WRITING ON THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT HARM AN AUTHOR?

  
The National Sleep Foundation defines shift work as any schedule that falls outside standard daytime business hours. Factory workers, hospital staff, police and firemen, aircraft pilots, road crews, and yes--writers--commonly perform shift work.

Working off hours, especially between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. goes against the body’s natural sleep/wake rhythm. Consequences can include health problems, irritability, work-related errors, and increased accidents. Working extended, excessive hours can add to the problems.

It is common for writers to work late into the night after coming home from a day job. How can they mitigate the untoward effects of their self-imposed shift work?

1. Decrease the number of night shifts worked in a row.

2. Avoid overly-extended work hours as much as possible.

3. Avoid frequently rotating shifts; have a consistent writing schedule.

4. Get enough sleep on days off from writing, and do not start a writing stint when sleep-deprived.

5. Caffeine and wake-promoting prescription medications may have a role in maintaining alertness, but getting enough sleep is a better plan.


Maintaining your health while doing the shift work that writing demands will require planning and pacing—for yourself as well as for your manuscript!



Elizabeth Knowles Palladino writes a monthly column, WriterCare, for the RWANYC newsletter.  She lives in Kingston, New York, where she works in health care and writes medieval romance.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

FIGHTING SEX

by Isabo Kelly


Intense, action-packed, emotional, potentially dangerous, and reveals a lot about who and what your characters are. What type of scene does that describe? If you guessed a fight scene and a sex scene, you’d be right.

In fact, these two scenes have more in common than many people might realize. And you can learn a lot about writing a good sex scene by studying the way fight scenes are written. When done well, both add levels of intensity and emotion to a story. But these scenes have to matter each and every time. They have to add to the plot and to character development. And that’s the trick with writing erotic romance, to manage so much sex without it getting boring.

So what do both fights and sex have in common? Each of these scenes has four major elements that are necessary to both to make them important and engaging for readers: emotion, choreography, believability, and character. Let’s look at these characteristics in a little detail.


Emotion

Emotion is what distinguishes erotica and erotic romance from porn. Emotion is what makes each scene significant to the plot and the characters. And you can’t write either a convincing fight scene or a convincingly erotic sex scene without this element.

What emotions are portrayed depends on your characters and what you want from the scene. Even the most jaded protagonist will get a charge from being in a fight or from having sex. There is always some kind of emotion involved, even if that emotion is not what a reader might expect.

This fight scene is from my fantasy romance, THE HERON’S CALL, published with Samhain Publishing. In this scene, the warrior heroine, Rowena, has just flashed back to a traumatic afternoon many years earlier and it’s put her on an emotional edge. She turns her fear and pain into a fight with the hero.

***

Gods, he’d probably seen her tears. Humiliated, she started back to camp, but he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. She spun around to face him and without thinking, her sword was in her hands. “Leave me alone, Kael. I mean it.”

“No. Tell me what’s wrong. Why are you crying?”

“I’m not. And it’s none of your business anyway.”

His eyes narrowed, sparked with a dangerous glimmer. “Yes. It is.” He pulled his own sword from the sheath strapped over his back, touched his blade to hers. “Winner take all,” he murmured.

“You don’t want to fight me.”

“You’re right. I want to fuck you. You’re the one insisting on a fight. So we’ll play your way first. Then we play mine.”

Her fear morphed to anger. “Arrogant bastard.” She spun away then swung back to catch his blade with her own, the sound of steel on steel ringing in the dark copse. There wasn’t a lot of room between the trees, but she used what she had, unleashing her anger and frustration, slashing, testing, pushing him to show her just how good he was.

He tried to back her against another tree, but she turned the trick on him, had him braced between bulging roots, barely able to deflect her attack as he untangled himself. She laughed at his growl, let the energy rushing through her wash away everything but the battle. Her muscles bunched and flexed, her feet danced, her blood pumped in time to the rhythm of the fight. “You underestimate me, Heron,” she said, swinging her blade to push aside his blow.

“Never.”

But on his next attack, he overstretched. She twisted around behind him and slapped him across the ass with the flat of her blade. She laughed, pleased with his yelp. As he turned on her, she continued to grin, enjoying herself, reveling in the play of skill against skill. He was good. Very good. And it made the battle more exciting.

***


Notice it’s not so much the fight itself but the way the two characters are reacting and how they feel that matters here. Rowena enjoys a good fight and losing herself in this one lets her forget her fear. Contrary to what a reader might expect a character to feel, Rowena is using this particular duel to bury feelings of hurt and confusion so she doesn’t have to deal with them. And it’s those conflicting emotions that make this fight scene important to the story.♥



Excerpted from FIGHTING SEX by Isabo Kelly. For the full article as well as many more fabulous articles on spicing up your sex scenes, pick up: HOW TO WRITE HOT SEX: Tips from Multi-Published Erotic Romance Authors, edited by Shoshanna Evers.

Isabo Kelly is the award-winning author of multiple fantasy, science fiction and paranormal romances and erotic romances. Her newest fantasy romance, BRIGHTARROW BURNING, is out now from Samhain Publishing. For more on Isabo, visit her at http://www.isabokelly.com/.
  
 
 

Monday, November 14, 2011

KNIGHT OF RUNES

  
By Ruth A. Casie



I'm on the Carina Press site admiring the cover of my debut novel, Knight of Runes. Okay, so you may think I'm staring at it because he's a really hot guy. I have one in residence, hot to me that is. The picture may be the illusion, a picture of a make believe lord but my novel is real – and it’s published. That’s no illusion.

I really thought writing, re-writing and editing were the hard part. I was excited and relieved when I got The Call. I was so naïve. I went from writing mode into marketing mode. I researched and investigated and finally came up with my plan.

• I picked two major events to attend – the NJ Romance Writers Conference Oct 21-22, and the RT Conference in Chicago in April

• I picked three places to spend money for advertising: Romance Sells, RT Book Review, and Eye on Romance.

• I worked hard to develop a marketing package that includes: a three chapter book, trading cards (of my hero and heroine), chocolate with a QR code to my website, tattoos (my hero is marked with rune tattoos so why not my readers), and a tissue pack.

• I also set up a blog tour beginning the week before and so far ending the week after release and have been busy writing blogs and conducting interviews with myself. I’ve even had a Tarot spread for my hero. That one was fun.


So, I sit and look at the cover (on the buy site) and realize that all that hard work, the disappointments, and even the doubts were so worth it. I look at the cover, a symbol of reality to me, and the excitement bubbles up all over again. And that hot guy, the one in residence, told me he knew it all along.♥


BOOK SUMMARY: It’s the 21st century and time travel is still a Wellsian fantasy but not for Rebeka Tyler. Rebeka is a renowned renaissance scholar at the prestigious Kensington University in upstate New York. She’s awarded an inheritance that includes an English manor but more importantly it includes an unknown private library with documents dating back hundreds of years, a researchers dream. She goes off to England to claim her inheritance.

While on an impromptu tour of Avebury, she takes a misstep at the standing stones, and finds herself in the right place but tossed back into the 17th century. When Lord Arik, a druid knight, finds Rebeka wandering his lands without protection, he swears to keep her safe. But Rebeka can take care of herself. When Arik sees her clash with a group of attackers using a strange fighting style he is intrigued.

Rebeka is desparate to return to her time. She poses as a scholar sent by the king to help find out what’s killing Arik’s land to get access to the lib:rary. But as she decodes the ancient runes that are the key to solving his mystery and sending her home, she finds herself drawn to the charismatic and powerful Arik.

As Arik and Rebeka fall in love, someone in Arik’s household schemes to keep them apart and a dark druid with a grudge prepares his revenge. To defeat him, Arik and Rebeka must combine their skills. Soon Rebeka will have to decide whether to return to the future or trust Arik with the secret of her time travel and her heart.





Ruth A Casie is a seasoned professional with over twenty-five years of writing experience but not necessarily writing romances. No, she’s been writing communication and marketing documents for a large corporation. Over the past years, encouraged by her friends and family, she gave way to her inner muse, let her creative juices flow, and began writing a series of historical time travel romance novels. When not writing you can find her home in Teaneck, New Jersey, reading, cooking, doing Sudoku and counted cross stitch. 

Thursday, November 10, 2011

TIME TO WRITE

    
by Margaret Birth


I don’t think I’m at all unusual among the writers I know to have so many interests other than writing. As a matter of fact, I suspect that busy writers with multiple hobbies are more the norm than the exception—we’re curious and self-motivated by nature. I have one writer-friend who shows dogs, another who writes cookbooks in addition to fiction, several who are also actors—and I spend hours every week on genealogy. Like a lot of writers, I also stay very busy caring for my family—and love every minute of it.

But what of my writing? I love that too.

Over the years, I’ve developed several strategies and attitudes that I’ve found help to keep my work pace steady but in balance with the rest of my life:


● Accept that there are times in life when writing goes more slowly than at other times. Years ago, my writing went slo-o-owly when I wrote or typed with a baby on my lap. Pain from fibromyalgia can slow me down. Simply because work pace slows doesn’t mean that it stops completely. If you think you’d rather not write at all if you can’t keep up a certain creative pace…then you’ll get less writing done in the long run than you will if you persevere at whatever pace.

● Remember that all you need to do to be a writer is…write. You don’t need to write a book. This struck me anew, recently, when working on a submission to a publisher that wanted to see a list of my previously published works. I gave specific examples from my most recent, but also listed a tally, which included: 13 short stories, 21 fictional confession stories, 99 nonfiction articles, 113 poems, and 4 comic books. So far, there’s nary a book among my publications—but yep, I am most definitely a published writer. Also, as you publish smaller pieces, you can build a reading audience that will follow you wherever your career leads.

● Learn to embrace interruptions to your writing. They can become a blessing in disguise: if you have to stop writing while you’re in the middle of a scene or a chapter, the next time you’re able to write you’ll already be in the midst of creative momentum. I’ve actually come to prefer stopping my writing in the middle of things, because I get re-engaged in my project so quickly whenever I return to it.

● Juggle multiple writing projects simultaneously. This works on much the same principle as embracing interruptions. Instead of stopping your writing when you run out of steam working on one particular project, just move on to another. I like to work on a combination of short and long projects. You can feel encouraged as you continue to work on longer projects when you see smaller publications happen along the way. Also, different genres of writing use different elements of creativity—this can stretch your skills as a writer, as techniques that work well in one genre may enhance your writing in another. Yes, “The End” comes more slowly than it does when you work on one project alone—but you may find that you accomplish more writing when you look at your collective efforts over a certain period of time.

● Realize that writing can be a fulfilling part-time endeavor. You don’t need to devote full-time workdays to writing in order to be a legitimate writer, or a productive one. If you write steadily for only an hour or two at a time, but do so every day, plenty of words will get written—trust me. As a matter of fact, you may be surprised to see how much you can accomplish in how little time when you view your writing as a special treat, to savor and to honor with the best work you’re able to do in the time you have to do it.


You can make time to write…. ♥



Margaret Birth is a Christian writer who has been widely published in short fiction, short nonfiction, and poetry, both in the U.S. and abroad; in addition to working as a freelance writer, she's spent over a decade freelancing for multiple publishers as a manuscript reader, proofreader, and copy editor.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

RWANYC TRIO ROCKS LADY JANE'S SALON!

 
RWANYC took over Lady Jane's Salon last night at Madame X's.

Reading from their latest books were Addison Fox (BABY IT'S COLD OUTSIDE), Isabo Kelly (BRIGHT ARROW BURNING) and Jeanine McAdam (HUNGRY FOR LOVE anthology).



The audience was also full of RWANYC members, who lounged around on red velvet sofas and chaises and sipped spirits during the lively readings.  Audience members included Mala, Elizabeth, Karen S, Kwana, Maria, Melissa, Kristina, and Stacey.  Peppered among the group were also friends, family and fans of the authors, including Addison's best friend Roxanne from Texas.

Next month on December 5, another two RWANYC members -- and Lady Jane's Salon founders -- Hope Tarr and Leanna Renee Hieber will be reading from their latest works.  See you there!

Thursday, November 3, 2011

FIRST SALE!

  
By Karen Cino, Chapter President



Imagine my surprise when I received an email welcoming me to the Secret Cravings Publishing family. I had to read the email over and over again before I believed it – my First Sale!

Writing has always been an important part of my life. My writing has been my best friend, and is always there at all the low times of my life, making it all bearable. The rejection letters that have come over the course of the past 30 years have always set me back.

But something happened this past year – I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to give up and I was going to send out my novel ROSES one last time. I wasn’t going to stop writing, as I would just be spiting myself. My writing is the one part of me where I don’t have to lie or hide. I can release all my inner feelings, and create characters that (I hope) will make a lasting impression on the reader and possibly help them deal with similar problems.

My genre has always been Women’s Fiction. It’s not that I don’t believe in happy endings, but I believe that life isn’t a fairytale. We all make mistakes, get involved in relationships that we shouldn’t, and we should be given a second chance at love.

Back to the email…I can go on and on about what reading that precious email meant to me and how I did my happy dance for two days, but I won’t. What I want to do is share something that’s more important than getting a contract. (Yeah right. Whom am I kidding?) What I want to share with you is my journey of rejection and determination.

I began sending out manuscript partials when you had to buy manila envelopes and send a SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope). Can’t remember the exact costs, but I do remember it cost me quite a bit. I patiently waited for those SASEs to come back only to realize that no one read past the first page. I didn’t understand why back them, but now I know why. My manuscript wasn’t ready for publication. I stopped for months, not writing and being disgusted, but I never gave up hope. I rewrote, revised and revised and revised. And every time I revised, my manuscript got better and better.

My advice to aspiring authors is to never give up. Be yourself, write what you know and love, and don’t be afraid to ask one of your fellow RWA peers for help.

I’d also like to share with you my secret for keeping sane. Every day, something happens in my little world over here in Staten Island, making it almost impossible to get any writing done, causing me to become extremely agitated. My remedy, besides going out to the local DSW shoe store or Sephora and stocking up, is to take a walk through my neighborhood. Try it. You will be amazed at what you see and how it will boost your creativity.

And lastly, remember to write, write and write some more, in hopes that one day you too will receive an email welcoming you to a publishing family.♥



Karen Cino is President of Romance Writers of America New York City Chapter.  Her novel ROSES has been bought by Secret Cravings and will debut in e-book format in February 2012, with book format in July 2012.
  
  

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

READY, SET... WRITE!

  
By Maria Ferrer



This is it -- November 1.  The first day of National Novel Writing Month aka NaNoWriMo. And the challenge is on – 50,000 words in 30 days.

The secret to winning this challenge is to write, write and write some more.

Don’t think.

Don’t edit.

Just write.

Write whatever comes into your head --- dialogue, narrative, lists, et al. If your character is thinking of a song, of a poem, of a blog post, then write it out. It will keep your writing juices flowing.

Remember that EVERY word counts.

Don’t cross out any words.

Don’t delete anything.

Just write.

And, don’t stop to do research or track down references. Make a note in your manuscript that you have to research this and that and keep writing. You can do the research later.

You want to write as many words as possible every day. The mathematical formula states that if you write 1666 words a day, you will reach your goal of 50,000 in 30 days. But let’s be realistic, some days you’ll write more than 1666 words, others you’ll write 66.

It doesn’t matter how many words you write per day. It only matters that you make the 50,000 by November 30.

So, don’t get discouraged.

Remember that every word counts.

And write, write and write some more.

Good luck. Happy Writing.♥



Maria Ferrer has entered NaNoWriMo four times and won twice. She is looking for a few good men and, oh yeah, her third NaNo win.