My creativity has been ramping up lately. And it hit me while at RWA why that is. My Spirit Animal has been crossing my path almost daily. I’ve been walking/jogging in a park with nice walking trails near my house and I see a Great Blue Heron nearly every time I’m there. I live on a farm with several water sources nearby so we have herons in our neck of the woods as well. And while at RWA in Orlando, I jogged every morning and saw two every morning. Some of you are probably thinking, “Well, Michille has gone off the rails.” And if someone had seriously uttered the words My Spirit Animal to me before I took a Jungian psychology course for my master’s degree, I would have said the same about them. But that was before . . . Continue reading
Author: Michille Caples
Michille: RWA 2017 – Michael Hauge
I made it to my mostly annual homage to RWA for a hefty shot of fiction-writing craft. I, however, made it late as my flight was delayed for three hours. (Note to self – come a day early next year.) I missed the session I really wanted to hit today (Writing Emotion: Opening a Vein with Virginia Kantra) which was a double whammy because it isn’t a recorded session. But my first and only session for today was worth the price of admission. Michael Hauge’s Seducing Your Readers in Chapter 1 was exactly what I needed in the here and now for two reasons. The big reason is that I’m rewriting my first manuscript, which sucks because I wrote it before I had taken any craft classes. The bones are good, but it needs work and I’ve been working on the opening with some success. Today’s session gave me fabulous ideas and motivation and confirmation that I’m on the right track. Woot! The second smaller reason is that I’m reading an old Christina Dodd, and when I came back to the room tonight for some much needed down time (this conference is extremely intense), I picked it up and found a passage that is a good example of one of the things Hauge talked about. Continue reading
Michille: First Lines – And then the murders began.
Life interrupted again, so I’m digging out an old post and adding on. A while back, I posted about a bag of books my daughter brought home from work from a girl who knows she loves to read. We sat around the dining table after dinner that night and read the first paragraphs of several of the books.
There were several Debbie Macombers which I brushed off. I’ve read her stuff before and it’s great, but she doesn’t even open the bedroom door, much less close it after the kiss, and I like the sexual tension in stories and she doesn’t deliver that. There was a Nora Roberts that I’d read before and since she breaks a lot of rules, I wasn’t surprised that hers didn’t deliver the expected. We added in a Fern Michaels, an old Janet Evanovich, a Susan Wiggs, and a Jayne Ann Krentz. Continue reading
Michille: Revising Book 1
I have a new plan of attack for my series that involves blowing up my first story. There are four books in the series with the fourth book serving as a segue into the next series. The first two books are (or were) completed and the second two are partials. But now, the first book is in line for a major overhaul. There is a big age difference between the hero and the heroine and the way it starts now makes that too obvious. There are two main reasons I want to avoid highlighting that. One is that my other stories have a more traditional age ranges for the hero and hero. I usually go with late twenties to early thirties, although the next series has an older heroine. And second but related to the first, is that as my first book, readers might think that is my style and expect that in future stories only to never see it again. Continue reading
Michille: Preparing to Attend a Writers’ Conference
RWA National Conference is fast approaching. So it’s time to start prepping for it. Of course, getting the conference schedule is a top priority and deciding which sessions to go to, which to avoid. I’m not pitching this year, or I’d be working on that. I suck at elevator pitches and tag/log line type descriptions so creating those is torture. In order to make sure I’m not forgetting anything, I googled to find some internet advice. Continue reading
Michille: Summer Reading List
Now that Memorial Day is behind us and summer has officially begun, I turned my mind to my summer reading list (it should be on my summer writing list, but alas . . . ). Right now, I’m reading Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy by Karen Abbott. It’s about four women undercover during the Civil War. Next up will be Nora Roberts’ latest, Come Sundown, and The Uses of Enchantment has been on my shelf for a while now and I’d like to get to that one. Continue reading
Michille: Recorded Sessions
So many recorded sessions, so little time. Actually, the second part isn’t exactly true. I have all the time in the world. I’m referring to the RWA National Conference recordings. I bought them at the last RWA Conference I attended with every intention of listening to them regularly for motivation and craft reminders. I thought, oh, I have lots of time because I don’t have to listen to them all at once and was looking forward to parsing out the listening as motivation until I went to the next one. Continue reading
