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I Asked and You Answered. Thank you!

January 6, 2010 — Pat Bertram

A couple of days ago I posted a plea for interview questions to submit for my Blog Radio interview on Thursday at 12:30 pm CT, and you generously came up with some wonderful suggestions. I don’t know how closely the moderator, April Robins, will follow the list, but it should give us a great starting place. Thank you all very much!

Here are the questions I submitted:

You are the moderator or co-moderator of four successful Facebook groups. How did you get started, and how did you end up with four groups? What’s the secret to your success with the groups?

How much time and organization does it take to be active in online communities?

Is your Suspense/Thriller writers’ group only for suspense/thriller writers?

Does it make sense to join a FB group, like the ones you host, if the writer writes for the YA audience?

How do you balance your time between writing, blogging, promoting, moderating 4 groups, and other day-to-day responsibilities? Do you have a written schedule or “to-do list”? How do you keep up with it all?

You have three books published. What’s next?

What is the most common question you are asked by fans or would-be writers?

What are your writing goals for 2010?

Which of your books was the hardest to write/most research intensive? What’s the biggest writing challenge you’ve ever faced?

How did you decide your genre?

Please stop by April Robins’ Blog Radio show Red River Writers Live — Savvy Designs on Thursday, January 7 at 12:30 pm CST to hear my responses. You can also call in with additional questions. The call in number is (646) 595-4478. Hope to hear you there!

Posted in blogging, internet, life, writing. Tags: April Robins, blog talk radio, Facebook groups, interview, Red River Writers, Savvy Designs. 4 Comments »

Interview Questions Wanted

January 4, 2010 — Pat Bertram

I am going to be a guest on April Robins’ Blog Radio show Red River Writers Live — Savvy Designs on Thursday, January 7 at 12:30 pm CST, and I need to supply ten interview questions. A few of those questions have to relate to the facebook groups I moderate or co-moderate, and the rest are up to me. I like a freewheeling interview, where we just talk rather than do a Q&A, but I can see that some guidelines would help. I will talk about my Facebook groups and how I ended up as moderator for four of them. And I will talk about how generous the members of all the groups have been with their time and expertise during the discussions, but beyond that? Haven’t a clue. If I were still in my blog tour/self-promotion phase, I could feed April questions about my books, but that phase seems to have passed. I’m just me again, not an author on tour, and so I’m plumb out of questions.

Any suggestions?

Oh, and if you haven’t yet joined one of my Facebook groups, I am extending a personal invitation. Well, it’s more of an impersonal invitation, since I’m posting it here and not sending it to you individually, but still, it’s an invitation.

Suspense/Thriller Writers

Second Wind Publishing

Genre Book Club

Help Support Independent Publishers

And, of course, there is my live chat on Thursday evening at 9:00 pm ET. Always a lively discussion! So, feel free to join this group, too: No Whine, Just Champagne.

Posted in blogging, internet, life, writing. Tags: April Robins, Facebook groups, No Whine Just Champagne, Red River Writers, Savvy Designs. 10 Comments »

Whole Lot of Forgetting Going On

January 2, 2010 — Pat Bertram

I find myself in a peculiar situation. For two and a half years, I lived for the Internet. First thing in the morning, I went online to see what was going on, checked again in the afternoon, and then spent all evening and late into the night in cyberspace. Most days I posted to my blog. That was always one of my favorite things — being able to say what I wish for everyone (or no one) to read. So it came as rather a shock when I checked my blog today and discovered my last post was ten days ago. Ten days! Whatever happened to my addiction? How is it possible that after all that time, I started forgetting to go online?

This has happened before. When I was younger, I used to run a mile every day. Did that for years. And then one day I simply forgot, and that was the end of my running. Same thing with writing — for eight years I wrote almost every day, sometimes two and three times a day. And then one day I forgot. And that was the end of that for a couple of years. To get back into the habit, about three weeks ago I started writing a page every night (mostly stream of consciousness, not fiction, but still it’s writing). And then one night I forgot. I was half asleep when I finally remembered, so I turned the light back on and did my page.

So, back my peculiar situation. I had resolved to cut back on Internet time — I really was spending way too much time here — and now I have to resolve to spend more time. Or not. I could just go with the flow, I guess, and see what happens, but going by past exerience, nothing would happen. I’d simply disappear.

Hmmm. That could make an interesting story, though perhaps it’s been done. The idea seems familiar, but if I ever read such a book, I forgot.

Posted in blogging, internet, life, writing. Tags: forgetting, internet addiction, running. 10 Comments »

The Place is More Than Scenery

December 6, 2009 — Pat Bertram

I am pleased to welcome Malcolm R. Campbell as a guest on this blog. Not only has he left myriad thoughtful comments on my posts, he has written one of my favorite books, a delightful mystery called Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire. Though Jock Stewart is a throwback to the Hollywood’s film noir reporters, Campbell’s delight in words and wordplay shows through the hardbitten shell, and the novel has a gleeful undertone. If you are searching for a Christmas gift for a booklover, look no further. You don’t have to take my word that this is a wonderful book, you can see for yourself. Click here to read: an excerpt, or the first chapter, or download 35% free at Smashwords. About scenery, Campbell writes:

“The breakout novelist does not merely set a scene; she unveils a unique place, one resonant with a sense of time, woven through with social threads and full of destinies the universe has in store for us all. She does not merely describe a setting, she builds a world. She then sets her characters free in that world to experience all it has to offer.” –Donald Maass, “Writing the Breakout Novel”

In his 1974 classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Robert Pirsig said that he disliked traveling across country by car because the world outside the windows was too much like television. Pirsig preferred a motorcycle because it placed him solidly within the place as an engaged participant rather than a passive observer.

Young writers often focus on plot and characters, viewing the setting’s importance as minimal, a dated nineteenth century writing technique or filler to be skipped over in a modern novel. Their resulting fiction resembles a cheaply drawn animated film with talking characters in the foreground and sequence of meaningless doors, trees, and buildings scrolling past in an endless loop in the background—like the Pirsig’s unimportant scenery outside a car window.

Maass writes that “In the twenty-first century, we may have less patience for scenery, but we certainly expect a novel to show us the world as a vital force in which the characters move.” The reality of this vital world is built on specific detail that goes beyond unsupported assertions such as “a grand old house” or “a lovely meadow” to the very heart of the place the characters willingly or unwillingly find themselves.

Place, like everything else in a story, is filtered through the character’s point of view. This makes it an interactive tool that engages all of the senses. It facilitates the creation of three-dimensional characters, a harmonious or counterpoint tone and mood, and a dynamic plot and action. Readers see, hear, touch, taste and feel only what the character perceives and believes about places. One character sees the forest as random trees, another knows their names. One character sees house as structures, another notices architectural styles. One character running from a pursuer finds a random boat and causes it to founder, another understands how to escape in it.

Detail supports assertions about the place, bringing an otherwise vague setting into three-dimensional authenticity. What–within the POV character’s knowledge and experience–makes the house grand and the meadow lovely? Symbolically, psychologically or empirically, place always tells the reader something about the character, plot and theme.

It’s a barometer indicating a character’s circumstances and attitude. For example, a snow-covered path is exciting during a sleigh ride but grim when one is lost in the woods. Frightened characters experience dark houses differently than confident characters. Same woods, same houses, different interpretations.

When place is utilized as a vital component in fiction, the characters experience, interpret and interact with settings like men or women on motorcycles rather than bored kids staring out the window of a car on a family vacation. Whether authors write about clean, well-lighted places or dank, dimly lit places, they’re not showing readers random backdrops. They’re showing worlds that mirror the characters’ moods and circumstances, worlds those characters must often navigate or fail to navigate en route to the climax of the story.

When readers hear the oak falling in the forest, feel the harsh limestone cliff below a mountain’s summit, and smell the dank stink of Cyprus swamp, then the setting has been well conjured, the spell properly cast, and the magic of enchantment into an imaginary world has been accomplished. At this moment, the novel’s world is more real than the reader’s comfortable chair.

Posted in blogging, books, writing. Tags: description, Donald Maass, importance of setting, Robert Pirsig, scenery, Setting, Writing the Breakout Novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 11 Comments »

A Spark of Heavenly Fire Outtake #3

December 4, 2009 — Pat Bertram

A Spark of Heavenly Fire takes place during the month of December. To celebrate, I am posting outtakes from the book. Like movie outtakes, these are scenes that were deleted from the final version. Posting them is not as easy as it sounds. Since the original version is no longer in my computer, I have to retype the pages from my handwritten draft copy. Still, it’s fun being able to revisit some of my original scenes. Hope you enjoy this look at my characters. Oh, and if you’d like to see a photo of the handwritten book, you can find it here: A Spark of Heavenly Fire Pre-Anniversary.

One of Hollywood’s highest paid actors, Jeremy King had a tendency to take himself and his status too seriously, but here, on his vast Montana ranch, he felt centered. A man, not an icon.

After a satisfactory day riding fence, he crawled into bed so blissfully drowsy he felt no need to take a sleeping pill.

His wife Nora rolled over into his arms, enveloping him in her inimitable scent: jasmine, cinnamon, woman. He felt a momentary tug of arousal, but it dissipated when she didn’t respond to his exploratory kiss. Before he even had time to register a flicker of disappointment, he fell asleep.

To his annoyance, he woke an hour later. As he started to get out of bed, Nora grasped his wrist.

“Don’t go,” she said, still half asleep.

“I have to. This damn prostate.” He gently disengaged her fingers and headed for the bathroom.

When he returned, Nora was sitting up, the heirloom quilt clutched to her throat.

“Don’t go,” she repeated.

“I won’t.” He laughed humorlessly. “Not for an hour or two, anyway.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“It’s late, honey. Go back to sleep.”

“I had a dream.”

Jeremy yawned. “Can’t it wait? We can talk tomorrow before I leave.”

“I don’t want you to go to Denver,” Nora said. “Something terrible is going to happen to you there.”

“I’m only going to be gone two days, just long enough to shoot a few exterior scenes. That’s all.”

Jeremy’s latest film, Cry of Hope, was the story of a Colorado cattleman who, while trying to survive a severe drought, discovers that his son has leukemia.

Test audiences had been singularly unmoved. In an effort to rescue the movie, the producers had decided to shoot a few more scenes showing the rancher’s despair. Jeremy had readily agreed to take the extra work; he was at that age where one disappointing film to could an end to a long career.

Nora knew this too, so why was she giving him grief? Maybe she was lonely now that their two children were away at college.

“Why don’t you come with me?” Jeremy said. “Go shopping at Cherry Creek Mall, eat at some fancy restaurants.”

“You think that’s what this is about?”

“Look, it was just a suggestion.”

“Oh, never mind.” Nora flopped down on the pillow, pulled the covers up to her chin and turned her back on him.

Jeremy had just about drifted back to sleep when Nora sat up again and turned on the light.

He squinted at her in the sudden brightness. For just a second he wondered who the worried old woman was. What had happened to the slim, raven-haired beauty he had married twenty-five years before?

With a pang of compassion, he sat up, put his arms around his wife and pulled her close. “What is it, honey?”

Nora started to cry, loud gulping sobs like a child.

Jeremy patted her back and made soothing noises.

“I don’t want to lose you,” she said after she had calmed down.

“You’re not going to lose me. What can happen in Denver? There’s no earthquakes, no hurricanes, no tornadoes, no tidal waves or flash floods. There’s an occasional blizzard, but eh weatherman says it’s going to be clear this week-end.”

She pulled away from him to study his face. “You’re making fun of me.”

“No, I’m not.” He smiled at her. “Well . . . maybe a little.”

She snuggled back into his arms. “The dream really scared me. You and someone else — a girl, I think — were alone in a very desolate place. There were a few skeletons of buildings in the background, and some trucks and bulldozers parked haphazardly around an immense smoking pit, but that was all. The sun was just setting. Because of the smoky haze, the sun was red, like the sun of a dying planet, and it made everything else look red, too. Blood red.”

Jeremy felt Nora shudder. “It’s just a dream,” he said. “Remember when I was doing The Sultan’s Pride? You called me in Mozambique, all frantic because you dreamed I was going to be tortured. You were right. I was. But it was just a scene in the movie. And that time you dreamed I was going to be hit by a car and end up in a coma? Another scene from one of my films.”

“I still feel terrible about accusing you of having an affair with your co-star while you were making Mesa Grande — what was her name? Janet Richards? — but I did see the two of you in a dream.” Nora sighed. “You must think I’m a foolish old woman.”

When he opened his mouth to speak, she kissed him, stifling his protests. “You’re a good man, Jeremy King,” she said, then she turned off the light.

Within minutes, she was sound asleep. Jeremy, however stared up at the ceiling, unable to get her words out of his head.

His affair with Janet Richards has been very discreet, so it had come as a shock when Nora had confronted him with it. He had managed to sidestep a battle by swearing the affair was nothing more than a protracted love scene that had been cut from the movie, but he had never understood how she had found out about it in the first place. Could she really have seen it in her dreams?

An hour later, still wide awake, Jeremy took two sleeping pills.

I always liked this scene. It put a different slant on Jeremy’s flirtation with the gorgeous Pippi O’Brien, and it foreshadowed the terrible sight that greeted them when they fled Denver, but too much of Jeremy at the beginning pf the book overwhelmed the story and made it drag. I can’t believe I had the courage to eliminate it.

Read the first chapter of the published version here: A Spark of Heavenly Fire
Free download: get the first 30% of A Spark of Heavenly Fire free at Smashwords
Read blurb at Second Wind Publishing: A Spark of Heavenly Fire
Blatant hint: Books make great Christmas gifts!

Posted in blogging, books, fiction, life, writing. Tags: A Spark of Heavenly Fire, fiction, foreshadowing, novel, outtake from novel, romance, Second Wind Publishing, smashwords, thriller. 2 Comments »

A Spark of Heavenly Fire Outtakes #2

December 2, 2009 — Pat Bertram

A Spark of Heavenly Fire takes place during the month of December. To celebrate, all month I will be posting outtakes from the book. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Since the original version is no longer in my computer, I have to retype the pages from my handwritten draft copy. Hope you enjoy this behind the scenes look at my characters. It’s a continuation of the scene posted in here: A Spark of Heavenly Fire Outtakes. Oh, and if you’d like to see a photo of the handwritten book, you can find it here: A Spark of Heavenly Fire Pre-Anniversary.

The waitress brought a Coke, which Jim drank in one long gulp. He hauled himself out of the booth.

“I’d better be going.” He started to leave, then turned back. “I almost forgot. When we talked earlier today, you said you had some news.”

“It can wait,” Greg said. “You have more important things to worry about.”

Jim sat back down. “Tell me.”

“I asked Pippi to marry me.”

A big grin softened Jim’s forbidding face. “Hey, that’s great! I’ll bet Pippi’s thrilled. She’s had that look in her eye for quite a while now.”

“What look?”

“You know—that ticking biological clock look.”

“She’s only thirty. I didn’t think their biological clocks started ticking until they reached thirty-five, at least.”

Jim shrugged. “Depends on the woman. Letisha’s clock started ticking when she was only twenty-four. Just think, if she hadn’t proposed to me, I would have been a swinging single, too.”

Greg ignored the comment. Jim always pretended to lament the loss of his bachelorhood, but Greg knew the truth—Jim loved being married.

“Have you set a date yet?” Jim asked. “Letisha will feed me leftovers for a month if I can’t give her all the details. It’s only fair to warn you, she’ll want at least one of out kids in your wedding party.” He stopped and peered at Greg. “Hey, you okay? You don’t look too happy.”

Greg tried to smile, but his face refused to cooperate.

“Don’t worry, kid,” Jim said, sounding as if he were twenty years older than Greg instead of just eight. “Everyone gets pre-wedding jitters.”

Greg shook his head. “It’s not that.”

“Then what? Pippi didn’t say no, did she?”

“Not exactly.”

“Did she say yes?”

“Not exactly.”

“Hell, kid, you’ve got me so confused I don’t know whether to slug you or congratulate you.”

Greg toyed with his beer. “You’re confused? What about me? I thought she wanted to get married—she’s been hinting at it for months, so I finally decided to ask her. Know what she said?”

“What?”

“She said she’d think about it.”

“Ouch.”

“I asked her what there was to think about and she said she wasn’t sure if I knew what love was. Then she said that even if I did know what love was, she wasn’t sure if I was capable of loving her the way she wanted to be loved.”

“Sounds to me as if it’s herself she’s unsure about.”

“Could be. I don’t get it though. Marriage, I mean. It’s not like it’s forever any more, so what’s the big deal?”

Jim raised his eyebrows. “Very romantic.”

“I didn’t tell her that. I may be unromantic, but I’m not stupid, you know. And I do love her.”

When Greg was alone once more, however, it was not his would-be fiancé who occupied his thoughts, but the unknown woman whose corpse had been so savagely mutilated.

Posted in blogging, books, writing. Tags: A Spark of Heavenly Fire, fiction, novel, outtake from novel, romance, Second Wind Publishing, smashwords, thriller. 7 Comments »

Frivolous Post Month

November 29, 2009 — Pat Bertram

Writers have NaNoWriMo, bloggers have NaBloWriMo (National Blog Writing Month), which is also known as frivolous post month. Since I was going to post most of the month anyway because of my blog tour, I signed up for NaBloWriMo, though I haven’t had time to participate in the forums. Getting the articles posted every day was enough of a challenge! Today is the second to last day of the month, and I almost reneged. I’ve got nothing to say (though that hasn’t stopped me before!) Anyway, that’s why it’s called frivolous post month — because of all the people who have nothing to say but say it anyway.

Oh, wait! I do have something to say. I’ve been meaning to tell you about a way cool WordPress tip that you might not have heard of. You know how on the sidebar, there is a monthly archive? Doesn’t do much good, because if you or your readers are looking for a particular post, chances are you haven’t a clue as the the date you wrote it. Well, WordPress has a shortcode for an archive that lists all your articles. See the page here on my blog entitled “Archives — All My Posts”? It lists the title and link to every single one of my blog posts. Bet you thought it was difficult. Nope. All I had to do was start a new page, title it, and put the word archives in brackets [ ] in the body. That’s it. Magic!

So perhaps this wasn’t such a frivolous post after all!

I tried to put archives in the brackets to show you how it was done, and ended up with my archives in the body of this post, so I had to remove it. If you need any further information, check out the wordpress article: Archives Shortcode.

Posted in blogging, How to, internet, writing. Tags: archives, archives shortcode, NaBloWriMo. 5 Comments »

I’m Not Waiving Any Moral Rights I Have in My Blog!

November 28, 2009 — Pat Bertram

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from a marketing company doing a social media campaign for a major corporation. Apparently they wanted to get bloggers to do a contest for them, and the winner would receive . . . nope, better not go there. If I told you what the prize would have been, it would be tantamount to telling you who the corporation is, and I’d probably get sued. For my part in the production, I would have received the same prize, but since I have no use for it, it wasn’t much of an incentive. I like doing online promotions, though, whether for me or someone else, so I was going to do as they asked just for the fun of it.

(It’s a good thing I didn’t. The last contest I promoted got almost no entries, so if you’d like to help me redeem myself as a promoter, you can check out: Free ebook giveaway of the latest thrillers!)

After I said yes, I received a four page contract. I suppose it makes sense — after all, if they were going to give away a couple of items worth two hundred dollars each, they would want to make sure I did what I said I would do. The agreement seemed standard until I go to the part that said: You grant us the right to link to your blog and to reproduce, display and distribute excerpts from your blog, for any purpose, in any media now known or hereafter invented. Like I’m really going to grant them those rights forever. I told them they could have the rights to any article I wrote on their behalf, but that’s it.

Anyway, they changed that section, and I went through the agreement one last time before signing. In a section about attesting to being over eighteen and being the sole owner of my blog and not defaming the company, etc., I found this: You hereby waive any moral rights you may have in your blog.

What???? I don’t even know what that means. Still, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and said if they removed that line, they had a deal. I never heard from them again.

The contest was supposed to start in two days. I’m keeping my eyes open for contests pertaining to that corporation. I’m curious how many people got suckered into signing away the reproduction, distribution, and moral rights to their blogs. I hope you weren’t one of them!

Posted in blogging, internet, life, writing. Tags: blogging, Contest, contract, marketing company, social media. 11 Comments »

Grateful to be an Author

November 25, 2009 — Pat Bertram

It seems a bit paltry to have a single holiday to give thanks when I have so much for which to be grateful. I am grateful for my online friends and for my fans. (Odd to think I actually have fans!) I am grateful for the readers of my blog, who never fail to offer support and suggestions. I am especially grateful for my publisher, who understands my books better than I do. But I am most grateful for being the author of my novels rather than being a character in them.

It’s an author’s responsibility to put her characters through as many traumas as possible. Readers want to worry about characters, they want to see how characters act when faced with horrendous conditions and dilemmas, and they want the characters to go bravely where they themselves would never go. As an author, I might give readers what they want, but frankly, I would never choose to be in any of the situations my characters encounter. And, although I am trying to be bold and brave in my own life, I will never be as bold as my characters. Nor do I want to be.

When Mary Stuart, the hero of Daughter Am I discovers she inherited a farm from recently murdered grandparents she never knew she had, she becomes so obsessed with finding out who they were, why someone wanted them dead, and why her father claimed they had died before she was born, that she ends up driving halfway across the country with strangers. That these strangers are all in their eighties might have put her at ease, but when she finds out about their less than lawful pasts, it still doesn’t deter her from her goal. In fact, she heads for Leavenworth, hoping to talk to Iron Sam AKA Butcher Boy AKA Samuel Bornstein, a hit man for the mob who might have known her grandfather.

Um, yeah. Like that’s something I would do! I am grateful that I have never had to deal with such a situation. When Mary discovers that one of the aged crooks is carrying an illegal weapon, she confiscates it and tucks it in her purse. Forgetting for the moment that I don’t carry a purse, having a gun tucked away in a handbag where it might accidentally go off is not high on my list of priorities. (Though I would be interested in firing a gun just once to see how it would feel. Strictly for research purposes, you understand.)

Sneaking onto the property of a connected guy to dig for stolen gold . . . hmmm. Perhaps I might do that, but I’m grateful I don’t know of any such treasure in real life that would put me to the test.

And that’s just one of my books. When I consider all of them, my gratitude is unending. I am grateful I never had to twice attend my mother’s funeral as poor Bob Stark did in More Deaths Than One. I’m grateful I have not yet had to deal with an epidemic so severe that the entire state of Colorado needs to be quarantined as described in A Spark of Heavenly Fire. I am grateful that I am not being held captive in an underground installation run by a quasi-government agency as are my heroes in Light Bringer, which will be released in the spring of 2010.

I am also grateful to Margay Leah Justice for inviting me to be a guest on Moonlight, Lace, and Mayhem, where this post first appeared.

So, what are you literarily grateful for?

Posted in blogging, books, writing. Tags: A Spark of Heavenly Fire, Daughter Am I, grateful, More Deaths Than One, murdered grandparents, stolen gold. 2 Comments »

Treasure Hunt!

November 22, 2009 — Pat Bertram

Daughter Am I is a quest novel — a hunt for truth, a hunt for self, a hunt for gold — so what better way to celebrate the end of my Daughter Am I blog tour than with a treasure hunt! Unlike Mary, you don’t have to travel halfway across the country in the company of seven old rogues (well, six old rogues and one flirtatious old woman). All you to do is hunt for their names. I will even give you a clue. I mentioned the names a couple of times during my blog tour, so all you have to do is find the right article.

When you find all seven names, send an email to secondwindpublishing@gmail.com with your list, and you will be eligible for the real prize — the one and only proof copy of Daughter Am I, signed by the author . . . me. One person chosen at random from all those who send in correct responses will win the book. Who knows, one day it might be a collector’s item, and then you can exchange it for gold. As long as gold remains legal, that is. Teach doesn’t think it will. Oops. I gave away one of the names. So now you only have to find six others.

The hunt is on! Oh, did I mention there were seven octogenarians who accompanied Mary?

The contest ends November 30, 2009 at 11:59pm ET.

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