Questions/Comments and Other Stuff

A little breather before we finish up our NES next week.

News flash, news flash—BG makes a sale!

Lynette Sowell has sold a novella to Barbour for the romance anthology Get Me To The Church On Time. In each of these four novellas, natural disasters almost prevent four couples from making it down the aisle. Lynette’s novella is Heart’s Refuge, set in the California wildfire country. There will be an element of danger, she says.

I know Lynette is working on writing suspense and has been for some time. I have no doubt she’ll make a sale there, too. Lynette is one of those people who studies, studies, studies, and reads, reads, reads. She will read my suspense books and really pay attention to elements such as story structure, hooks, foreshadow, etc. It’s always fun to receive Lynette’s letter after she reads one of my novels, because she’ll point to many techniques I used and comment. She’s working hard in her writing and her reading. So congratulations, Lynette! May you have many more sales to come.

Questions/Comments from yesterday:

Was teaching at Mount Hermon last year my first time to teach? No, just my first time to teach at Mount Hermon.

How did the I and Randy Ingermanson end up teaching together? Randy gets all the blame for this one. He had this bright idea, see, about us team teaching. He wrote me and pitched the idea. Said between us we’ve covered a lot of genres, so we oughtta be a good fiction teaching team. I’ve done women’s fiction and suspense, plus a how-to fiction book, and oh, yeah, that true crime way back when. Randy’s done futuristic and historical, plus written on erudite subjects like the Bible Code, using his quantum mechanics knowledge (or whatever it is in the world he does—I just know it makes my eyes cross) to debunk certain myths on said subject. And about his fiction—how exactly is it that the first book in a series can be a futuristic, and its follow-up is a historical?

That’s what happens when those mathematical Ph.D. types write fiction.

Anyhow, you can see I must have been crazy to say yes to a guy like that. Except that he had two Christy Awards to his name and had written some cool stories, so I thought, hey, why not? Fun guy to share a stage with. The really crazy part is that, after we put our proposal together and Randy sent it off to Mount Hermon—it was approved! Who’d a thought?

Hence the Randall ‘n’ Brandilyn show. Yes, Evelyn, that’s the way you spell it. Say it fast and it works. Randy’s title idea, of course. See how wittier he is than I? He first suggested the Randy and Brandy show, but there was just one problem with that. People only call me Brandy once.

Final question: How is Paige? BGs, you are so very nosy. The book will be a little over 40% done by end of today. Okay? And Paige is . . . well, she’s out of her immediate pickle, but about to fall into the entire pickling vat. I have gotten Paige into so much of a mess, I’m not sure how I’m going to get her out. I think I should have named her Paige Turner after all, because I have to turn the page to see what’s gonna happen to her. And no, I don’t like writing when I haven’t figured out how everything’s gonna work yet, but such is life. I don’t have time to quit writing to figure out what I’m gonna write. So I keep writing, hoping I’ll figure out what it is I’m writing.

Are you now as confused as I am?

Now, here’s the scary and sad part. This new series is set in fictional Kanner Lake, a little north of my favorite place in the world, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. I didn’t want to set my new series in wonderful Cd’A ’cause I didn’t want yucky murders occurring in that paradise. Now looks what’s happened up there. Such a sad and tragic case! Fortunately our lake house is not near the one currently making the news.

By the way, would you like to name some characters in my novel and give ’em some quirks? (These are secondary characters, not the “personalized” main characters.) I’m just about to start introducing some of the colorful folks about town that hang out in a certain coffee shop. There’ll be a pastor in his, I don’t know, maybe late forties. A retired good ol’ boy who’s lived in that North Idaho area all his life and loves to fish. Couple of business people, maybe one or two on the town council. And who knows who else?—you come up with an idea. (Yes, there is room for some humor in this series.) Leave your comments over the weekend—and I’ll tell ya who and what I’ll use on Monday. If you give me something I end up using, I'll of course include you in my acknowledgments.

Happy weekending, BGs. And to Bo Bice out there—hope you’re practicing up some rockin’ Bon Jovi for the finale.