Tag: novel

BOOK REVIEW: The Story Of Arthur Truluv by Elizabeth Berg

by Karen, posted in books, Life's too short to read bad books, relationships

I just closed this book and I have tears streaming down my face. Usually, I wouldn’t care for a book that left me in this emotional state. This book was different, however.

This is one of the best books I have ever read, maybe in my whole life.

I was looking forward to this new book by Elizabeth Berg, The Story of Arthur Truluv for months. I have read all of Berg’s books, but I can’t remember when the last one was. It has been a while, that’s for sure.

It was so worth the wait!

This book is a love story, but not a typical one. You will be drawn into the lives of these people immediately. This is a book you will not be able to put down, and yet you must, because you are going to want to go slowly and savor the characters and the story, to make it last as long as you can.

You will truly love this book. The characters will stay with you long after you turn the last page.

Read this book!

My new book

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

My new book started out as something else. I published my first novel, One Brave Thing, last year. Over the course of the year of doing talks and readings, I thought a lot about my characters and the story. One day, I had the thought: What if Bebe stays with Steven? How would her life have been different? I got excited re-imagining how the story might go.

What_if_Bebe_Stays_with_Steven_Karen_CreamerI decided it would be nice to write a couple of bonus chapters to give away at my book signings. I started outlining what I wanted to write. This was last October, and I thought I would take advantage of National Novel Writing Month in November to write it. This gave me plenty of time to work on the outline, and as I added to it day by day, I realized that hey, this wasn’t a couple of bonus chapters.

This was a book.

So, I wrote my second novel the same way I wrote the first. What if Bebe Stays with Steven? was birthed during NaNoWriMo 2016, edited over the winter, and will be launched this month.

 

To celebrate, I am running a special on the Kindle amazon-coverversion of my first novel. One Brave Thing will be 99 cents from March 13th (my mother’s birthday :)) to March 20th, for one week only.

And then my second novel, What if Bebe Stays with Steven? launches March 21, 2017!

How Bebe got her name

by Karen, posted in author, books, Brave books, family, relationships, writing

When I thought about naming the characters in my novel, I thought it would be fun. I could pick any names I wanted! I didn’t have to please anyone but myself! No worries about coming to a consensus with someone else! My father-in -law’s mother chose his name from the society column in the newspaper. One of my siblings was named after the greyhound dog (I believe; it may have been a horse) that my father bet on at the track that kept winning. My husband and I could only agree on one boy’s name and one girl’s name we both liked. Good thing we only had one of each…

Anyway. You know that old saying, ‘Be careful what you wish for’?

The character naming wasn’t as fun as I thought it was going to be. In fact, it was hard. Bebe had several other names before I settled on Bebe. I started out using a baby name book. Then I started writing down names from the credits of TV shows. I don’t remember where I heard to do that, but it was in my memory from way back. I made list after list of first names.

I wasn’t satisfied with any of them.

I knew I wanted her to have a nickname, so I started over with that. I thought the main character was in the process of becoming herself. Becoming… be…Bebe! Beatrice was the middle name of a relative, so that fell into place.

I also knew that I wanted her to have an Italian last name. I thought of Bebe as coming from a family that had secrets, and after making list after list of Italian surnames, a thought presented itself: What is the Italian word for ‘secret’?

Segreti! I spiced it up a little by adding an additional ‘t’ to it and Bebe Segretti was born!

Fellow writers: How do you name characters?

 

P.S. So far, the voting for who should play Bebe in the movie of my novel One Brave Thing is not going the way I’d hoped…people are not voting for my number one choice!!! (Hint: this is her picture)

the-duff-mae-whitman

My soon to be published book

by Karen, posted in author, books, NaNoWriMo, no fear, The write words at the write time, writing

bestseller…soon to be published, as Blondie so fabulously put it, one way or another. The most important step, to FINISH it, is done!

My next step is to send out a query to an agent. Yep; I’m starting with just one. I’ll go from there. The one I am sending it to is with an agency that was recommended to me by someone who has read (and liked! and did I mention: liked?!) my book, which I am taking as a hopeful sign.

Since I finished the manuscript, you may be wondering what I am waiting for.

Here’s the thing: the planet Mercury has been retrograde all month and so I have been waiting for it to turn direct. Which it did today around 3pm.

I understand, however, from my extensive You Tube research :), that it can actually take a few days for Mercury to really, really be going direct again, to get it’s mojo back after being retrograde for so long.

Why not control what I can? Set myself up for success? The new moon is in Gemini (my sign!) on the sixteenth of June. I have decided that this is the most auspicious day to launch it.

Just for more good luck, I am putting the title out there:

Why Buy the Cow?

Fingers crossed.

Finishing my (first) book

by Karen, posted in books, education, my one word, no fear, writing

My One Word (aka New Year’s Resolution) for 2011 was to finish my book.

Instead, I wrote a second one.

What’s that about? Well, what I told myself at the time was that I was following a strategy that Stephen King advocated in On Writing, where you put your “finished” manuscript into a drawer and basically ignore it for a few months.

My gut tells me that it was really about procrastination.

So there I was, in December of 2011, and I had only reached Chapter 2 (of 50+) chapters in my book since I’ve been editing the typos and such out of it. My husband, once again, took pity on me. He suggested that I get a room with a view to work on my edits, freer from housework, mail, mommy (and wife!) roles, and other distractions, since this had been so effective (I’m ashamed to admit this) almost one year ago, when I was getting the printed out copy ready to become a proof copy.

And so I did. I got about one-third of the way through the proof that day. I set a goal to reach page 100, which I accomplished. I estimate the book is a little over 300 pages at this point (since I neglected to add them in the proof copy, I don’t know for sure!) so that’s not a bad day’s work.

The good news is that the manuscript for the second book is much less of a mess than was/is the first. I figured out that I needed to put in the chapter breaks and blank pages as I go, because they do not magically appear at the end when you finish, as I had previously thought. I also know how to paginate the darn thing, which I didn’t know for manuscript #1.

Maybe it was really all part of the writing process?

Here’s hopin’.