He Loves me, He Loves Me Not

My son loves me, there’s no question about that.

One day, I crouched down and held out my arms. “Come give Mommy a hug.”

His face broke out into a huge smile, and he started to run toward me… but stopped in his tracks when the basketball game that my husband was watching switched to a car commercial. My son raced back to the TV and watched the entire commercial. Only then, without further prompting, did he run to me and give me my hug.

Yes, my son loves me. But he loves cars just a little bit more.

I'm a guest blogger and "Dear Lucky Agent" Contest Details

Head on over to Dawn's blog to read an excerpt from Book II in my Kingdom of Arnhem series, Knight of Glory.

http://www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog/Sixth+Dear+Lucky+Agent+Contest+Paranormal+Romance+Urban+Fantasy.aspx

HOW TO SUBMIT
E-mail entries to sixthagentcontest@gmail.com. Please paste everything. No attachments. 
WHAT TO SUBMIT
The first 150-200 words of your unpublished, book-length work of urban fantasy or paranormal (adult fiction and/or YA fiction are both accepted; no "high fantasy" with dragons, elves or other planets please). You must include a contact e-mail address with your entry and use your real name. Also, submit the title of the work and a logline (one-sentence description of the work) with your entry.
Please note: To be eligible to submit, I ask that you do one of two things: 1) Mention and link to this contest twice through your social media—blogs, Twitter, Facebook; or 2) just mention this contest once and also add Guide to Literary Agents Blog (www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog) to your blogroll. Please provide link(s) so the judge and I can verify eligibility. Some previous entrants could not be considered because they skipped this step!
CONTEST DETAILS
      1. This contest will be live for approximately fourteen days—from Sept. 22 through the end of Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2010, EST. Winners notified by e-mail within three weeks of end of contest. Winners announced on the blog thereafter.
      2. To enter, submit the first 150-200 words of your book. Shorter or longer entries will not be considered. Keep it within word count range please.
      3. This contest is solely for completed book-length works of urban fantasy and paranormal romance (both YA and adult novels are accepted).
      4. You can submit as many times as you wish. You can submit even if you submitted to other contests in the past, but please note that past winners cannot win again.
      5. The contest is open to everyone of all ages, save those employees, officers and directors of GLA's publisher, F+W Media.
      6. By e-mailing your entry, you are submitting an entry for consideration in this contest and thereby agreeing to the terms written here as well as any terms possibly added by me in the "Comments" section of this blog post. (If you have questions or concerns, write me personally at literaryagent@fwmedia.com. The Gmail account above is for submissions, not questions.)
PRIZES!!!
Top 3 winners all get: 1) A critique of the first 10 pages of your work, by your agent judge. 2) A free one-year subscription to WritersMarket.com.
MEET YOUR (AWESOME) JUDGE!

Marisa A. Corvisiero is a literary agent
at the L. Perkins Agency in NYC.

To Reap the Harvest Newest Column

I write a monthly column for The Medieval Chronicle and the latest edition is out. Now TMC is free for everyone to enjoy so I hope you'll read my column! This time, I talk about a family as they celebrate Michaelmas Day.

Carie Lawson - Guest Blog about Inspiration

Carie Lawson is a talented author from Desert Breeze. She home schools her four kids, drives the soccer van --- complete with dirty socks and McDonalds bags scattered throughout --- and tries to sneak away to her computer whenever possible to write. She is an active member of a local writer's group, Middle Tennessee Christian Writers, and received third place in the North Texas Romance Writer's Great Expectations contest in the Inspirational Romance category. She's here todat to talk about inspiration.

Take it away, Carie!

Where does my inspiration come from? 


      I loved writing about the kids in Beyond Summer. They danced and played through my imagination so vividly. I also got to use some of my favorite memories of my own kids in them. Instead of telling you about the scenes I've already written, I am going to tell you a story that might make it into another book.

      My son Zeke is four, and the baby of the family. You know how everyone says the baby is always spoiled. Yep, they're right. But there's something else too, something about never being as strong or as fast or as smart as anyone else in the house that makes them reach higher and try more things because, while they might not be able to beat their siblings in a race, they can do lots of other things that other kids their age couldn't...or wouldn't.

      Our family spends about ten hours a week during soccer season at the field, so the kids are very comfortable there...sometimes bored. As the game we were watching was over, the teams stopped in the middle of exchanging the requisite high five and "good game" and started yelling and pointing behind me. In the deepest part of my heart I KNEW it was Zeke. I turned slowly around and there he was about fifteen feet up a light pole. He'd shimmied up there like he was after coconuts in South America. Below him the ground was half concrete and half grass. I was afraid to yell at him, so I jogged over there and stood quaking in my flip flops while he slipping back down. Once he was safely in my arms, I looked around for my bad-parent badge and slapped it on, trying my best to get to the funny-later stage of embarrassment.

      Then, this is not an exaggeration, the next week my husband is up at the fields with Zeke and the other kids at yet another practice. No one could find Zeke during their game of hide and seek. Another mom from the team went into the Ladies Room and heard a little voice say, "I can't get down," not screaming or crying, mind you, just making a statement. So she followed the voice to a stall, where my son stood on the small steel trash can mounted to the wall stretching up grasping the top of the stall. How long he'd been in there, no one really knows. Long enough to be sure he couldn't dismount by himself. She helped him down and he burst back into the light of day happy because he'd won the game of hide and seek.

      So fun kid stories come easy for me. If you read Beyond Summer, I'll let you guess which ones are fact and which are fiction. Enjoy.

Thank you for joining us today, Carie. The purchase link for Beyond Summer is here, isn't it an awesome cover? Next week, Inspiring Mondays will return with a picture especially for Danielle.

Writing Compelling Characters

This blog is a part of The Great Blogging Experiment, the brain child of awesome blogger, Elana Johnson.

As writers, we all strive to make our characters compelling. After all, who wants to read a story about a boring character? Not me. I'd rather catch up on sleep. ZZZZzzzz.....

Where was I? Right, compelling characters. So what makes a character compelling?

Backstory. A compelling character has to have a reason for being the way they are. In my assassin story, the main character is an assassin because she witnessed her father's murder. There's a reason why she has such a horrible profession. It also gives the reader to somewhat empathize with her.

Strengths and Weakness. A character should have some great traits and some flaws. After all, no one is perfect. Hubby and I recently watched the entire series of Lost so I'll borrow some characters from the show to illustrate my point.

 Jack Shephard: A man of science, a brilliant spinal surgeon, stands by what is right even to the point of telling the board of medicine that his father was abusing alcohol. Those are his strengths. His weaknesses lie with his not wanting to be a leader, his obsessive personality, and his overriding drive to fix things.

James Ford / Sawyer: Sawyer doesn't have many strengths until he undergoes growth throughout the show. He manages to fall in love. He can be kind (when he wants to be). In his own way, he's also a leader. But he's also selfish, macho, and a con man.

Kate Austen: Resourceful, quick-witted, and willing to do anything to save her friends, Kate also killed a lot of people before Oceanic 815 crashed on the island.

Drive. Compelling characters need a problem to overcome. Something has to happen to them in the story, stakes must be laid out. You could take notes from Jack on this, although he did have to be kicked a few times in order to get into gear.

Growth. As the characters try to fix the problem, they needed to develop and grow. The characters can't be static or flat. They need to be well-rounded and multi-dimensional. Sawyer is the perfect character to examine for this.

Quirks. It's okay for your characters to have a little quirk. It makes them more real. But quirks alone don't make for compelling characters.

Nobody's perfect. No one wants to read about perfect people with perfect lives. Give your story plenty of conflict and have your characters react realistically according to their code of ethics and morals.

People read stories to be able to fall in love with the hero, to pretend to be the heroine. Make your characters believable and realistic, strong and brave, and your compelling characters will practically turn the pages themselves.