ROW80 – Page 34 – Linda Nelson

Here’s a great example of how an Author Blog helps gain fans.

I like to scope out blogs of others from time to time. Today I stumbled across Tawna Fenske. I had never heard of her until today. She too is a RWA (Romance Writer of America) member.

It only took a few minutes of my time to read her last two posts and wow… She is a riot. This prompted me to not only follow her posts via email but to also check out her books and add them (all of them) to my to-read pile.

If she writes her blogs the way she does I can only imagine how her books are.

This is what the experts are talking about when they say how important a blog is to a Writers Career. I may never have come across her works before today but just that brief little bit in her blog made me want to read everything she writes, even if it was the first book she ever wrote.

This brings me to the next thing – Growing as a writer

How funny is it to see your own writing skills change over time? It is even funnier to see all the mistakes you made in the beginning of your career. And when you can go back to the beginning and look at it all those mistakes and laugh then you truly know that you have grown as a writer.

Kudos to Tawna, she has acquired me, her newest fan, just from keeping a blog.

ROW 80 Check In:

Two weeks into the year and after finishing up my last book, Road Salt, I have started on the next story. At first I was going to go back to my fantasy series but after my last RWA meeting I’ve been hooked. Now I have to go on with the Wings from Ashes series.

I am happy to report that I have started this next book. I am 3k words into the story and I think I have dug up a pretty good plot for it.

Plots are what I like in my stories, that and lots of conflict. Everyone has at least one nemesis in their life and Karla has one too. That is Maggie.

Maggie will do anything she can to get back at Karla and she does not need much of an excuse. How this effects Karla’s next relationship is to be seen in Along Came Neil.

My goal is to make this story my first official Teen Contemporary Romance.

Would you like to see what other ROW’ers are working on? Come and check out our Linky List

Yesterday was my NHRWA meeting. We had another great meeting.

This month we had our annual Christmas Party and Book Swap. The book I received is, The Trouble with Valentine’s Day by Rachel Gibson. I will be looking forward to reading this book next even though it is not on my Kindle but in paperback instead.

We also had a speaker. She was none other than one of our own who travels all the way to Bow, NH from Massachusetts, Christyne Butler . She spoke at the RWA Nationals just last year. I didn’t get to go to it. I hear they had a great time.

Her Presentation was The Soapy Way to Writing Category.

Christyne was introduced to Day-Time Soaps at an early age by her mother. This later grew into a desire to write fan fiction for one of her favorite Day-Time Soaps. She eventually developed a following among those who followed fan fiction and at her husband’s suggestion she decided to try writing stories she could sell.

So she used what she learned from the Soaps and infused this into her Romance Writing.

She studied how the characters were cast in the shows, the Archetypes, The Hero – The girl/boy next door, The Millionaire Tycoon, The Professionals – like doctors and lawyers, The Family Matriarchs, and so on…

She had a good point. Those shows are infused with so much character building it can be overwhelming. But that is what makes you keep coming back to watch those shows.

I am a Grey’s Anatomy Fan – Hence this is a Romance with a Professional theme and it is Soapy.

She also talked about Romance Plot devices. You can find a great list here à
Romance Plot Devices

To cap off her presentation she explained how Romance writing was all about the Characters and their Dialogue’s.

I’m going to hold on to all this info and try to put it into use when I begin writing the next book in my series Wings from Ashes.

ROW80 Check In:

Nope… There has been no writing going on this week. I have been rewarding myself for a job well done that I definitely deserve for finishing and releasing on Kindle. Road Salt is done. This is the first book I have ever had to research so much info for writing a fictional book. The last time I had to research so much was back when I was in high school and had to write a term paper for biology.

It was kind of fun even though it was troublesome in the beginning. There isn’t much known about Bath Salts so I had a lot of scrounging around before I finally realized I had a great source at my finger tips on my Facebook Profile. He happened to be an EMT who dealt with individuals being treated for Bath Salts on a frequent but scary basis. He was all for Road Salt and was more than happy to divulge some really great info on the subject of Bath Salts.

So I thank you Scott for all your help in getting this project done.

Next up:

Begin working on the next book in my fantasy series, Orgarlan Saga.

Maybe the animals will make another appearance in this next book as they try to retrieve the Dragon Claw from Lord Ky’debaul.