Various Spitzy Updates

Remember spitzy? New word coined here in March. Spitzy=spiffy and ritzy. Use it with pride.

Update #1: Guess what today is. Photo shoot Take 2. This time in studio. Hope to get some nice portraiture-type shots with interesting lighting, plus maybe some ooooh-cool shadowy ones. You know, that suspense writer look thing. Hope it works—we have no time for a Take 3. A photo’s got to be dropped into the Violet Dawn back cover very soon now.

Update #2: Auditioning posts are beginning to come in for Kanner Lake’s Scenes and Beans blog. The SBGers (I don’t have to explain this one, do I?) are cleverly creating posts for the various characters after reading Violet Dawn. This is going to be one fun project.

One of the auditioners wondered what she’d gotten herself into. Ane Mulligan calls herself a member of the “Big Honkin’ Chickens Club” (name dubbed, as I remember, by Deb Raney, prez of said club)—open to anyone too scared to read a Brandilyn Collins suspense. When Ane received her ARC, she wrote me a nervous e-mail, sort of an I-don’t-know-if-I-can-do-this. I assured her (again) that the Kanner Lake series is meant to be different from the Hidden Faces series, and that Violet Dawn is not as tense as, say, Dead of Night or Web of Lies. The first act is creepy, yeah, and there are heavy action scenes, and the Big Bad Guy slithers around like he's Black Mamba, and it’s got the fast start of a Seatbelt Suspense—but out-and-out scary? Nah.

A week went by. Then I heard from Ane again:

I actually read Violet Dawn. I have no idea why you said it wasn't that scary. I need to re-dye my hair--it's all white now. I could only read during the day, with my husband nearby. And like someone running from a stalker, the scarier it was, the faster I read!

Sheesh. Just goes to show you how diverse an audience a suspense author has to write for.

Update #3: Forensics and Faith is getting a new face! The blog will be set up to look more like my Web site. I toyed with the idea of changing the name. The title Forensics and Faith is pretty narrowly focused, given all that goes on here, as some of you have aptly noted. Also, it’s got the same initials as Faith in Fiction, so I can’t ever call it F ‘n’ F. (I’d love to blame Dave Long for this, but his site was around long before mine, so mea culpa.)

On the other hand, the name Forensics and Faith has established somewhat of a reputation, so why mess with that? I’m now thinking I might keep the name, but change the tagline regarding what the blog is about to better describe what goes on here.

Which is . . . what, exactly?

Now there's a challenge for you. Can anybody adequately describe this eclectic blog in two or three sentences? Have at it. Sort of like a blog pitch. (I’d coin this term a blitch, but somebody might be reading too fast.)

By the way, somewhere near the top I am definitely going to note what a BG is. Then I won’t have to keep explaining for the newbies. (BG=bloggee, for that new person joining us today.)

Update #4: On the new blog, I want readers to be able to click on a particular topic and go to a separate page just for that topic, rather than scrolling through the archives for that month. Some of our topics are long, so we’d have to have more than one page for them. (I do remember the Never Ending Saga being nearly 70 posts.) At any rate, my assistant needs to find out how to code these separate pages within blogspot. Anybody out there in BGdom know? We’d sure appreciate a quick lesson.

Over and out for today.