Six Sentence Sunday 14/10/12 ~ More Than Friends #1

This is my first time participating in Six Sentence Sunday. I'm posting my Six Sentences from my new romantic comedy, More Than Friends. It's a friends to lovers story and Lily, my heroine, has just turned up at the hero's apartment to give him a piece of her mind!

“Open up, ya louse!”

Justin Knight’s apartment door rattled under a hammering fist.

He yanked it open to find Lily Harper—irate and slightly unsteady on her feet—in the hall outside his door. She glowered at him with the indomitable intent of an avenging angel.

Despite the menacing scowl, her emerald eyes were as stunning as he remembered, and his male hormones jerked to life. It was after ten p.m. and she reeked of booze, but the sight of her stalled his breath in his throat.

 

Copyright Monique DeVere 2012

Thanks for stopping by to read my Six. Should this have whet your appetite for more, you can purchase More Than Friends from:

AMAZON *~* AMAZON_UK *~* SMASHWORDS *~* KOBO

Note: More Than Friends is on sale at Smashwords for $0.99! SALE HAS ENDED


 

Please also check out this week's other participating authors on the official Six Sentence Sunday site  HERE.
 

Self-Editing: the final step

 

SELF-EDITING: the final step

 

On Wednesday my friend Celeste Jones wrote a blog entry about the perils of Spell Check. So I thought I’d share my method of editing.

One thing I’ve noticed about the Indie publishing world is the stick some of its authors get for bad editing in their books. I can see how this can happen, but let’s not forget that the Big Six also put out books with mistakes! Only last night, while reading a novel from a big-name author—one of my favs—I came across a few mistakes in her book. Things like though when she meant thought and closest when she meant closet. There was another one, but it slips my mind at present. The point is, nobody is perfect, and whilst we would all like to put out pristine books, that often isn’t the case.

 

However, we can do a few things to ensure we put out the very best final draft we can.  As Indie authors, we have to work harder because unfortunately, we have something to prove. After all, some people think only writers who can’t get book contracts go ahead and settle for the Indie route. When, in actuality, the smart authors take this option.

 

The very fact that tons of traditionally published authors—of which I’m one—now publish their own work is solid proof that this is the way of the future. Much like when we moved from vinyl to CDs, from VHS to DVDs & from print books to eBooks. The world is going digital and we’d be stupid not to grab a slice of the pie while we can.

 

I suspect that publishers will soon wise up and include some kind of clause in their author contracts, preventing signed authors from Indie publishing any of their work—whether under a different name or not—while under contract with that publishing house. I’m thinking they will come up with some way to tie contracted authors hands, and hem them in with longer contract years. Or traditional publishing will be outdated in no time.

 

I digress.

 

Let’s get back to editing.

 

First, I’m going to suggest you hook up with at least a couple of good, eagle-eyed critique partners (CPs). I can’t stress how important this is for any writer who is thinking of taking the Indie publishing route. Even big-named authors have several CPs!

 

Then I’m going to presume you already know the fundamentals of writing and editing. Things like looking for repeated words and repetition, coincidences, too many speech tags, info dumps, point of view (POV) slips, tense slips, too much telling—some telling is necessary and adds to the story, but too much distances the reader.

 

Okay, you’ve edited for structure, style, grammar and spelling, pacing, goal, motivation & conflict (GMC),character/story arc and all the rest. You’ve read and re-read the MS until you know every word. You’ve even printed it off, and read it from hard copy, because you realised that your mind has played a little trick on you and made you think you saw exactly what you expected to see on those pages. Every line of your pristine MS says precisely what you intended it to say, right?

 

You now consider your book to be ready.

 

But wait, there’s one thing you forgot.

 

You forgot to read it aloud.

 

Oh, you did that too? Sorry, I meant to say, you forgot to have it read aloud to you!

 

I learned this trick long ago. You can read your MS aloud and still miss problems. I’ve found that when you get your computer/laptop to read your story aloud, you are far more likely to catch problems with the story. Anything from misused words, to sentences that go nowhere, to story and sentence structure.

 

When we listen, we engage the left hemisphere of our brains, which is the same part we use when editing. The right hemisphere is our creative side and the left is our logical, analytical side. With our analytical minds engaged, we are able to take a step back from our work and judge it with a critical eye. Enabling better editing.

 

The excellent bit is, if you own one of the Kindle series that has the text-to-speech function, all you need to do is email your Word doc to your Kindle email addy, and it’ll be sent directly to your Kindle.

 

Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

 

Now all you have to do is make yourself a hot drink, and listen with a critical ear. You now get to hear how your book sounds to the reader.

 

I would love to hear your final editing step. The one you take just before you hit the upload button! Please share with us by leaving a comment below.

 

Thanks :)

    

 

Come Join Me!

I'm in the smokin' author spotlight over at Sister Scribbler today! Please pop over and keep me company. Don't forget to leave a comment so I know you came to visit!

As a reward, I'll be giving away a FREE copy of my sexy new romantic comedy--MORE THAN FRIENDS--to one random commenter!!

Sister Scribbler

 

 

 

 

 



More Than Friends--A Sexy Romantic Comedy

Good Monday morning!

Hope you had a lovely weekend, because mine was flat-out wonderful!

Why is that, you ask?

Because my new Romantic Comedy, More Than Friends, was released this weekend. I'm so juiced about this new road I've taken. As a few of you know, for a very long time I stood at a career crossroads trying to decide which road to take.

I had faith that I would eventually choose the right road, but still I neglected to do one crucial thing--take a step! I'm glad I finally moved my feet, (faith without works is dead James 2:20 NKJV) because this road is amazing. The scenery is breath-taking and the sun seems a lot brighter here. The skies are so clear and so azure that I don't think a single dark cloud has ever marred them. And there's definitely no sign of that awful black cloud that I found myself walking under for the last few years.

In case I lost you somewhere up there, I'm not really talking about roads, but following your dreams. And my dream was to become an Indie publisher. I know a lot of writers don't understand why an author would want to go it alone when--if she has any talent--she can grab an agent who will snag her an eye-popping fab publishing deal and all she has to do is sit back, write, have someone approve and publish what she writes, then repeat.

I am also aware that some of the "big" authors believe Indie publishing is for untalented writers who would never make it as authors if they didn't publish their work themselves. They imagine these books are substandard and unworthy of reading.  This is so far from the truth, it isn't funny, but it makes me laugh anyway, because I don't think I have ever read a book by any big author published with major publishing houses that didn't contain mistakes, typos, name changes etc.

I've found lots of amazing books which were published by talented Indie authors who had the foresight to cut out the middle men. Why split you pot of gold when you can keep it for yourself?

Lots of writers prefer to write for a publisher, but I never did. I like having control of every aspect of my work, and I thank God that He keeps adding to my talents. I thank Him, too, that I finally got the confidence to go it alone and start on the Indie Publishing road.

My new Romantic Comedy is the beginning of a marvelous journey which I intend to continue. I'm no longer targeting Mills & Boon, but will concentrate on writing what I should have been writing long ago--romantic comedy, mystery suspense. So watch this space!

I'd like to introduce More Than Friends, a friends to lovers romance about colliding loyalties. It's a story I thoroughly enjoyed writing and publishing.

Blurb

 

She just broke the Best Friends’ Code of Honour!

 

What do you do when your best friend’s fella dumps her?

 

You get drunk, catch a cab to his place, offer to bop him on the nose, then... sleep with him?

 

Lily Harper should have taken her secret attraction to Justin Knight into consideration before rushing to his swanky apartment. Now she’s caught in a dilemma. Lose her best friend, or the out-of-this-world sexy guy who could be The One.

 

Justin fell for Lily almost from the moment he met her, but she was with someone else and he'd  just started seeing her best friend. Now Lily is available, and so is he, only, he isn’t having much luck making her see that sometimes when loyalties collide, a girl has to choose love! 

Excerpt

 

“The fact of the matter is—” he nuzzled her ear “—I’m going to kiss you and every guy in this place is going to go wild with envy because I’m the lucky sod who gets to do it.”

 

Lily sucked in a breath, missed a step. He was making love to her, disguised as a dance. People were beginning to take an interest.  He’d made her a spectacle.

 

“Justin, people are watching.”

 

“Sweetheart, that’s nothing new, they’ve been riveted from the moment you first walked in the room.”

 

“Are you sweet talking me?”

 

He pulled back, his gaze darkening.  “Only if it’s working.” While his hand caressed her back where the dressed dipped, he stroked his other thumb against her palm.

 

Goose bumps raised her flesh. Oh, it was working. That and the off-the-wall chemistry between them. Every part of her craved his touch.

 

He turned her, dipped his head, and took the kiss he’d warned her he was going to take. It was as if everything stood still, the room, the hum of conversation, the mellow music, Lily’s heart—everything.

 

You can purchase More Than Friends from:

Amazon, AmazonUK, Kobo, Smashwords


 

Friends to Lovers Romance

The weddings are all over and now I have two happily married kids. The tween's health scares are behind us, praise God! He is good, He is good all the time and His mercy endures forever!

I don't mind sharing how awful the last three years has been while we walked out the tween's Leukaemia. My concentration was shot to pieces and my motivation to write...what motivation? Getting more books out was not my priority, I can tell you. Yet, I ached to write despite the lack of  absorption or time. I thought, for sure, once Meg was better, nothing would stop me driving full steam ahead with my writing career. I hadn't factored in the possibility of more health scares, so when we hit that wall it winded me--nearly even crushed me. I lost the will to write and went weeks without writing a single word. Not that I didn't want to! I just couldn't get the story to flow. In fact I couldn't even seem to string a sentence together, and deleted far more than I wrote! Convinced, I'd lost my talent, I was at the point of tossing the towel into the ol' writing ring, but couldn't bring myself to say "That's it, I'm never going to write another story."

 

I'm glad I held off making such a serious decision because once we'd scaled all of Meg's health hurdles, my creativity returned full-force. 

 

It was as if the Leukaemia had build a dam across my creative river and it dried up. Then, as the weeks past and I could see Meg was okay, suddenly the dam broke and my creative river flowed again. Where before I couldn't think of a thing to write, I now couldn't jot down the ideas fast enough.  

 

I have a couple of friends who decided to take the indie publishing route and are extremely successful. They kept encouraging me to do the same. I mentioned in my last post that I am going to do just that and I will start with a friends to lovers romance entitled More Than Friends. I was hoping to publish it by now but, as I mentioned above, things went a bit belly up.

 

I  anticipate I will put the story on Amazon within the next couple of weeks and trust that all of you who have been so very supportive will enjoy the read.

 

For now, here is a peek at the cover above. Stay tuned for snippets of the story.

 

Hugs to all of you!