Category: writing

BOOK REVIEW: The Vineyards of Allegretti by Jennifer Davies

by Karen, posted in author, books, writing

I loved this story about Vivian and Michael, who have known each other most of their lives, but have been apart for a period of time and as the book opens, they are just coming vineyards-of-allegrettiback together. They love each other, but have not admitted this to each other. Heck, they have barely admitted it to themselves! Complicating things are paramours from the past. Each of them have a ‘bad guy/girl’ in their dating history that puts them both at risk.
Full disclosure: I was predisposed to love this book! The Vineyards of Allegretti is full of Italian things: food, wine, countryside, and beautiful people, and I myself am Italian, and love all things Italian.
I identified with Vivian’s tendency to try to fix everyone and everything in her life. Vivian at least has the presence of mind to realize that she probably isn’t qualified to give advice since her own life was (at the moment) a train wreck.
The romantic interludes are the perfect escape for your afternoon that is otherwise filled with dishes and laundry.

You can find The Vineyards of Allegretti by Jennifer Davies here. Read this book!

Taping an interview for TV

by Karen, posted in author, books, Brave books, Fashion Sense, friends, Interviews, no fear, writing

It was my great pleasure and good fortune to be invited to be on Write Now with Gayle Heney.  I met Gayle at the New England writenow3Authors Expo last summer. After the taping date was confirmed, a helpful email arrived with instructions for how to get there, what to wear, where to park…

But back to that ‘what to wear’ part. The part where it mentioned to avoid wearing black because that was the color of the backdrop of the set. Oh, and a collar or a lapel of some sort would be good so there is a place to clip the microphone.

If you want to discover really quickly how much you think “Black! I’ll wear black!” when you are in a dress -up situation, be advised not to wear that color.

I realized pretty quickly that I was, you know, in big trouble. Plus, collars? Lapels? I was bereft of them.

I tortured my friend Sheila with photos of dress and sweater combinations. Right up until a half hour before I left for the studio this morning. In the end, it wasn’t about the clothes at all, because it was about the BOOK. I was getting to talk on TV with a skilled interviewer who had read my book, about my book.

How great is that?

My episode should air in April or May. I will post the link when it’s ready! YAY!

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The BRAVE Interview #6 January 2017: Linda Buoncuore

by Karen, posted in The BRAVE Interviews, writing

Hello! Here is The BRAVE Interview for this month. ENJOY!

lindaI guess it’s not the biggest thing anyone has ever done, and of course many have already done it, I am sure.  I am an introvert in many ways. Going to work everyday in sales is a challenge for me, as many people are not very nice, as this society has changed so much. I brave going to work everyday, and holding my composure to many that think that the world revolves only around them. I used to work part-time, but now I am full-time, which makes it harder and sometimes tiresome to trudge through the day-to-day occurrences.  Retail is not easy, and it’s not my dream job, but I get through it.

The winter time is the hardest time for getting to work, as I have to catch a bus, and I have to walk a half mile down a steep hill to get to it at 5am. Luckily, the weather has not been too bad. I worry, as I have broken my ankle twice in my twenties, same ankle, the breaks an inch apart, and I fear falling, and getting hurt again, but I go. I know I am tougher than that, and do not let my fear control me. I just leave a little earlier, so I can walk a little slower. 

Each day I have to sell, sell, and sell memberships and warranties, as well as the products themselves. Not a very easy task. It seems you have to put up a front, almost to a point where you have to give so much to get very little in return. As I feel there isn’t much of an initiative to sell them.  I try not to lose myself, and my integrity, to do this, and it can be a battle at times.

So, I guess my brave thing is going to a place everyday that I am not even sure I want to be at times, and do what I am supposed to be doing there, though wishing I was somewhere else.

Trying to figure out what my next step should be to be happy. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the people I work with, and I do like some of my customers, but I am an introvert, and it’s not always easy for me to be someone I am not sure I really am.

Thank you so much, Linda, for your candid and honest expression of your brave thing. 

If you’d like to read the other interviews in the series, click here for the list: https://kwrites.com/?s=the+BRAVE+interview

If you’d like to be interviewed for this series about your own ‘one brave thing’, email me at kreads@gmail.com.

The power of one

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, author, book reviews, books, family, friends, Holidays, local fun, writing

I have been giving a lot of talks at local libraries. For my most recent one, I personally invited and Facebook invited a lot of people.

yorklibraryphoto2

A lot.

Plus, it was a full moon in Gemini (my sign)! At 7:05pm! And my talk started at 7:00PM!

I know this is a busy time of year for us all, but I was expecting at least 10 people or so.

When it 6:59pm and still no one had come, I began to consider that maybe I had saturated my geographic location.

If no one came (as I have heard sometimes happens, but thankfully had never happened to me), my Plan B was to have my husband make a video of me reading so I could post it on my YouTube Channel (still evolving–don’t judge it). At least this would be time well spent, right?

What I learned: Don’t accept a time slot that starts when the library is CLOSED. Duh. I’m not sure why they even did that… oh, wait. Yes, I do. I took the slot because I was hoping to sell a lot of books before Christmas, and this was the only December slot they had. They had one slot available in January, but I thought people might not come out in the cold when they weren’t possibly out already, shopping for the holidays (books make great gifts!). Note: the temperature was in the 20’s last night.

And then, at 7:05pm, one person came into the room.

My audience had arrived. She probably didn’t really feel like going out, but she wanted to support a fellow writer/author, and guess what?

SHE DID.

Thank you again, Katherine. ❤

For some reason, this song was in my head on my way home from the event, so I am including it here for your listening pleasure:

One week ONE BRAVE THING Kindle Sale!!!

by Karen, posted in books, Brave books, shopping, writing

For one week only, One Brave Thing will be for sale on Kindle for only 99 cents! If you have already liked my book, please consider sharing this post with any of your friends who prefer to get their books on Kindle.

amazon-cover

This special price is in effect only from December 9th (TODAY!) through December 16th, 2016.  Click HERE!

Thank you!

 

Humble

by Karen, posted in books, Grace, local fun, writing

Today I was so excited to get a copy of the York Weekly newspaper that my husband and I braved the ice and snow and rode down to the York Hannaford to pick it up before work. After I ascertained that the article did, in fact, run this week (there was a photo of me and of my book cover right there on page B3 of the Living Section!), I folded the paper back up. I didn’t read it on the way home.

york-weekly-article

This was a do-over chance. The first article that was written in the newspaper about me publishing my first novel had many errors (including the name of the main character! Her name is NOT Bebe Kristen Davis!) and so was very disappointing.
I had high hopes for this time around.

When we got home, I had to go right to work, so my husband started reading it. “I found something that you’re not going to be happy about,” he began.

Seriously?
Here is the line: “…she is a registered nurse, a health coach, weight gain teacher and author. 

Guess which part is wrong? Was it that stupid autocorrect?

Now the irony here is that I was just commiserating with a friend yesterday about how I had lost 30 lbs on Weight Watchers several years ago and then gained some of it back–talk about adding insult to injury!

Also, lesson learned. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I should have asked if I could give it a once over before the story ran.

And then I remembered myoneword for 2016: GRACE. I could just accept this with grace. I have made plenty of errors in my own writing, and have always felt terrible when I noticed them (or they were gracefully pointed out to me by others) after the fact.

Here is the article (it has since been corrected): Wells Author will Speak at York Library

This came to mind after the events of this morning, so I’m sharing it with you all:

I won NaNoWriMo 2016!!

by Karen, posted in books, Brave books, NaNoWriMo, writing

So, this was not my first NaNoRodeo, as many of you loyal readers already know. This was my 7th consecutive NaNo i-won-nanowrimo-2016win. I am so proud! I don’t always know what I will be writing, but this year I did.
I almost never write an outline prior to starting, but this year I did.

I always build in a buffer of five days in case I something comes up and I have to take a day off from writing, but that didn’t happen this year. I finished five days early!

I didn’t really look at my outline much as I was writing, but when I finished I discovered I had covered everything!

One thing that was the same this year is this: once I started writing, the words flowed out in a smooth (mostly) stream. I remembered not to edit as I was going and not to over think it, which is the death of all good “shitty first drafts” (nod to Anne Lamotte’s Bird by Bird).

Success!

Stevie Nicks in Boston

by Karen, posted in no fear, writing

I saw The Pretenders and Stevie Nicks at the TD Boston Garden this week. The Pretenders opening for Stevie Nicks? OMG.

stevie-nicks-and-chrissy-hynde
Stevie Nicks and Chrissy Hynde

A.MAZ.ING.

I saw Stevie Nicks once before, when I was in my extremely early 20’s (or maybe even late teens). It was by accident. I was at a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers concert, when they started playing Stop Dragging My Heart Around and Tom started singing and then (the way I remember it), suddenly you could hear Stevie Nicks singing her part, and then there she was, walking on stage. Unbelievable! What a gift that was.

This time, Stevie started singing the song, after saying that Tom Petty wasn’t there, and then Chrissy Hynde joined in, walking out on stage singing Tom Petty’s part! Talk about a time warp. (PS: They rocked it!!)

This was more than a concert for Stevie this time around. She had a message to deliver. She said over and over that she is a writer. She never said songwriter. She said writer. She also said that she doesn’t feel old, even though at age sixty-eight, she most certainly was old, by anyone’s definition. She had written a song when she was twenty-one and never got to sing it on stage. It was always a dream of hers, and now, ate age sixty-eight, she was finally realizing it! Her message is this: only you know what your dreams are, and it’s never too late to make them come true.

And then she said Beacon Street was awesome and she was so moving there.

🙂 Right? It’s never to late to have a dream and to make it come true.

[Stevie and Chrissy singing Stop Dragging My Heart Around this week in Boston. Sorry for the crappy picture but it’s the only one I was able to get. P.S. Remember when we all had our lighters lit in the audience at concerts? Now the audience is all lit up with cell phones! HA!]

And here, for your listening and viewing pleasure, is my favorite song by The Pretenders:

Blog Identity Crisis

by Karen, posted in author, writing

I’ve been experimenting with different looks for my blog, which some of you will (of course) have noticed. I actually spent a lot of time setting it to look ‘more professional’, with my author presence dominating the show. As my husband is always telling me, “Focus!”

cropped-1st-booksiging-author-expo.jpgHere’s the thing, though. I have to reinterpret what the word focus means to me. In this case, I interpreted it to mean focus on one thing. In this case, I chose my authorship (word!). I redesigned the blog to highlight that.

It’s changing how I’m writing, though. I used to write about anything and everything  but now when I go to write something, I’m thinking, how does this fit in with my blog’s look. Should the way my blog looks be informing what I write about?
I don’t think so. Also, when I look up my blog online, I don’t recognize it anymore.

I took a writing class last weekend and one of the participants mentioned how he had spent a lot of time working on pieces that he never did anything with, and how wasn’t that a waste of time. I told him that I didn’t think so, because all of that work got him to where he is today. It was part of the process. It was therefore all worthwhile. So I am applying my good feedback to myself and my blog. All of the work I did helped me figure out what I don’t want.

So for now, I’m going back to the old look. I may continue to experiment, but I want my blog to be about the writing, not about the theme.

The BRAVE Interview #4 November 2016: Kristen Conley Leighton

by Karen, posted in author, books, Interviews, no fear, The BRAVE Interviews, writing

Hello and welcome to the next in the series of The BRAVE Interviews! It’s the Who, What, When, Where, How,  (and sometimes Why) of YOUR ‘one brave thing’!

kc-leighton-41

Welcome to Interview #4 with Kristen Conley Leighton!

  1. WHO are you? Share whatever you want to about yourself personally.

Wow, so we’re starting with the hardest question!  Most days, I’m not really sure.   That statement can be traced back to the day I was born.  See, I was switched at birth.  Truly.  I was somehow confused with another baby girl born at almost the exact same time.  The next morning, a nurse arrived in my mother’s room with the wrong bundle. “That’s not my baby,” my mother said to her.  “Go back and try again.”   

The socially acceptable answer: My name is Kristen Conley Leighton.  I am a yoga teacher and a storyteller/writer. 

  1. WHAT is your One Brave Thing (so far!!) for 2016?

I destroyed a manuscript that I had been working on for seven years.  I’m not sure if that is brave or just plain stupid.

My trusted readers advised me to set the manuscript aside because so much of the story wasn’t working for them.  The consensus was that I should begin writing a new novel.  I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was born to tell THAT story, the one I’d just thrown away.  Instead of taking the professional advice, I turned to a blank screen and began rewriting the manuscript I had discarded.

  1. WHEN did you do it?

 It was March of this year. 

  1. WHERE did it occur?

The magic happened in the space in my home where I read, write, and practice yoga.

  1. HOW did you make it happen?

 I had burned the pages, permanently deleted all the drafts from my computer, and smashed the memory stick with a hammer before putting it in the trash.  I had no other choice.  It was a good thing, really.  

  1. WHY did you do it?

That’s a great question, and one my husband keeps asking over and over again.  It probably would have been easier to start working on something new.  That said, I had a pretty strong feeling that if I couldn’t save the drowning man in my novel, I’d never be able to save myself.  I felt like I had to tell the story.  And, based on feedback from the original manuscript, I had to find a better way to tell it.

This novel and its main character brought me closer to all of my well-guarded fears and insecurities than I’d ever come before.  The subject I was writing about could not be explored from a safe distance.  When I tackled the story in a more honest way and allowed myself to dive in and swim around in all of that fear and insecurity, well, I think it resulted in a more empathetic character in the final draft.   If you love a drowning man with a fierce heart, he just might figure out how to swim to shore on his own.  The first draft lacked heart.  Deep down, maybe I always knew that. 

So, that’s it.  It’s not glamorous…but it is my “one brave thing.”

Thank you so much for telling your story here, Kristen!

Check out Kristen Conley Leighton’s other writings here on her website:

https://kcleighton.com/