ITW Debut Authors

Writer Resources, Books & Bram Stoker’s Birthday

Books are more fun when we share

Thought I’d share some fun book goings-on with myself and other authors today!

Promo fun

Stop by Night Owl Reviews Suspense today where A Human Element is featured and so am I in a fun Author Q&A interview.

I’m also interviewed this month in the Bucks County Women’s Journal, talking about the power of change. Check out pg. 34 in the PDF or pick up locally. A wonderful magazine promoting women’s business and successes. Visit the BCWJ website.

Plus I love waking up to more five-star reviews for A Human Element on Paranormal Romance Guild and Amazon, by a reader who won the book through my Library Thing giveaway and says it’s a “good mix of sci-fi, mystery and romance…this book grabbed and kept my interest from the get go.” Watch for my short story collection coming soon, featuring characters from A Human Element and new ones from its sequel, A Hidden Element (2013).

Writing Resources

Don’t miss my friend, author, and agent Marie Lamba’s series Agent Mondays and get great info on landing agent from the source! Want the newest scoop on publishing industry trends and help with writing craft? Visit The Author Chronicles, a resourceful blog run by five aspiring authors. Need experienced advice to take your writing to the next level? Stop by The BloodRed Pencil, a team of editors and writers who share their techniques and advice on writing and editing.

Hot new reads!

Looking for new reads by cool xanaxlowprice.com debut thriller authors and words of wisdom by legendary thriller authors? Then get yourself to the International Thriller Writers Debut Authors blog The Thrill Begins and November releases!

Horror more your thing? In celebration of Bram Stoker’s birthday today, check out the 2012 Bram Stoker recommended reading list chock full of goodies by new and veteran authors. Two of my new faves? Billie Sue Mosiman and Michael McCarty (my review).

And congrats to my friend Stacy Green who has a short story out, Welcome to Las Vegas, that’s a creepy prelude to her debut suspense novel that hits the streets this month, Into the Dark! Participate in her charity blog tour to help the homeless.

Events

Local to Philly? Stop by Chester County Book and Music Company on November 23rd and help support a landmark bookstore that may be going out of business. Local authors will be there for a grand social to talk and sign books, including Lisa Scottoline, Kelly Simmons, Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban, and Jon McGoran.

I’m thrilled to have been invited as a guest author to my first conference, Farpoint, for their 20th anniversary conference in Timonium, Maryland on February 15 – 17, 2013. This is an annual gathering for fans of all genres and types of imaginative fiction, including media, books and more. Fun to share the event with Lee Arenberg, “Pintel” from Pirates of The Caribbean.

That’s all folks!

Romance + Suspense = Thrills + Chills

By Donna Galanti

Anne Marie Becker

Today fellow International Thriller Writers Debut Author, Anne Marie Becker, is here to talk about the math of romantic suspense. Her novel, AVENGING ANGEL, recently received a 4 1/2 star TOP PICK! from RT Book Reviews as well as a starred review from Library Journal, which compared her to Mariah Stewart and Mary Burton.

Romance + Suspense = Thrills + Chills

I apologize for beginning your week with math, but hang with me a moment. For those of you unfamiliar with the romantic suspense subgenre, I think you’ll soon see the appeal. And for those of you who are familiar, I hope you’ll chime in with why you love these stories that have (approximately) equal parts danger and love story.

I love a good challenge.

That must be why I chose a writing career in romantic suspense. Not only does the suspense have to build to a crescendo, so does the romance between the hero and heroine. And I typically include both of their points of view (which makes it a lot more fun for me). Then there’s the question of how to intertwine the two within the story, pace everything so it builds in a believable but fast-paced manner, and make everything come out all right in the end.

I love a story that makes my heart pound and puts my brain to work.

Here’s where the thrills and chills come into play. Both danger and love make your heart beat faster. A love story should remind the reader of that thrill of first love—the butterflies-in-the-stomach kind. But with suspense, you’ve got the added premier-pharmacy.com/product/lamisil/ chill of continued xanax danger. Not only is the reader’s body reacting to a steady supply of adrenaline jolts, but their brains are puzzling out how the characters will find that happy ending when the world is crumbling around them. As far as delivering maximum bang for your buck, romantic suspense has it all.

I love a happy ending.

While there is a place for literary fiction on our shelves, when I want something that is a feel-good, entertaining read, I reach for the romance section. For me, real life is hard enough. And for characters in romantic suspense novels, life is even harder. Yet I know it’ll all be all right. I read to escape, and I like being able to trust that, no matter what is thrown at the characters, they’ll come out okay—better, even—in the end.

What genres (or subgenres) are your favorites to read/write and why? Who are some of your favorite authors and/or what books would you recommend? (And thank you, Donna, for having me here today. I appreciate your hospitality!)

About Anne Marie:

Anne Marie has always been fascinated by people—inside and out—which led to degrees in Biology, Chemistry, Psychology, and Counseling. To date, as a tutor, waitress, personal and family counselor, and high school counselor, she has indulged her curiosity through sanctioned professions. Now, as a stay-at-home mom of three young children, her passion for understanding the human race is satisfied by her roles as mother, wife, daughter, sister, and writer.

She writes to reclaim her sanity.

Find out more at www.AnneMarieBecker.com, or visit her on Facebook or Twitter.

Purchase AVENGING ANGEL:

James M. Tabor: Meditations on Voice

By Donna Galanti

James M. Tabor

I have a treat with fellow International Thriller Writers Debut Author on today and all-around fascinating guy, James M. Tabor. James is lauded as “the new Michael Crichton” and is the writer and host of the acclaimed national PBS series, “The Great Outdoors”…among many things.

New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry notes his debut thriller THE DEEP ZONE is “Dark and terrifying. This book should come shrink-wrapped with a seat belt.” James is also an award winning non-fiction writer, but today he is here to talk about voice in fiction.

Meditations on Voice
by James M. Tabor

After having tried mightily–and failed–to define pornography, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, no mean writer himself, threw in the towel, adding, “But I know it when I see it.” One of the most famous and indefinite definitions of all.

That about sums up my own attempts to define the thing we call, for lack of a better term, “voice” in writing. Googling “voice in writing” produced 417 million results in 0.48 seconds, including this from Wikipedia: “…the literary term used to describe the individual writing style of an author…generally considered to be a combination of a writer’s use of syntax, diction, punctuation, character development, dialogue, etc., within a given body of text (or across several works). The key word there is generally. My response to that kind of thing is, generally, dozing.

At the spectrum’s extreme other end, consider this ultra-specific gem from Ben Yagoda’s Sound on the Page: “I love words with lots of consonants. If you print out all the five vowels, they have six points—serifs—total. But x,k, and t each have four points, like a young boy deer.”

Rita Mae Brown once told me, “Voice is when it sings.”

Joyce Carol Oates said, “It has energy.”

Recently, an aspiring novelist lamented that she just couldn’t seem to “find her voice.” I asked what she meant by “voice.” She said, “What sounds like me and nobody else.”

“Sounds like me and nobody else.” We know that when we read it. Dickens, Melville, Crane. Closer to us, Hemingway, Faulkner, Woolf. Closer still, Charles Frazier in Cold Mountain. But not only premier-pharmacy.com/product/inderal/ “literary” novelists have distinctive voices. Think of Elmore Leonard or James Lee Burke or, one of my personal champs, Raymond Chandler. For example:

“He got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water.” (R. Chandler)

Chandler’s sentence has 31 words, three adjectives, three verbs, one simile, six phrases and clauses. That’s the quantitative analysis. Qualitative: Chandler’s description creates emotion. He believed that dialogue should never be people just talking and description should never be writers just, well, describing.

That sentence (as opposed, say, to “He crossed the sidewalk”) makes me feel scorching heat, vague threat, relief—(that “cool water”)—and apprehension. Something not good waits beyond that crossing.

Perhaps that’s the best definition of voice that I, at least, can conjure. Writing that creates emotion.

The girl was waiting for a train.

Mary’s daughter was stretched tight as hide on a tanning rack over rails then beginning to hum.

Oh, by the way: Chandler’s editor cut that sentence from the story before it was published.

BIO: James M.Tabor is the author of THE DEEP ZONE, a thriller that explores one of the world’s last frontiers as a brilliant and beautiful scientist and a mysterious special ops soldier must lead a team deep into the earth on a desperate hunt for the cure to a deadly epidemic. Lauded as “the next Michael Crichton,” debut novelist James M. Tabor won an O.Henry Award for short fiction.

He is also an international award-winning, best-selling nonfiction author. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Time, Smithsonian, and many other national publications. The writer and on-camera host of the acclaimed national PBS series, “The Great Outdoors,” he was also the creator and executive producer of The History Channel Special, “Journey to the Center of the World.” The second novel in his Hallie Leland series, FROZEN SOLID, is due out next April from Ballantine/Random House. He is also at work on a memoir, SALT AND PEPPER, of his days as a street cop in Washington, D.C.

Visit James here: www.jamesmtabor.com

BUY THE DEEP ZONE:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
iBookstore
IndieBound

Mystery Author Rochelle Staab: Beyond Pure Reason

By Donna Galanti

Rochelle Staab

Today Rochelle Staab is here to talk about going beyond pure reason in writing about the occult. She is the bestselling author of the Mind For Murder Mystery series and a 2012 Anthony Award nominee for Best First Novel. If you ever wondered what if or why, stayed up late to find out whodunit, or read the last page of a story first, then you understand the need to know and are a mystery lover like Rochelle. She puts characters in danger, then answers the who, what, where, when, why, how, and what ifs, all the way to The End.

BEYOND PURE REASON
by Rochelle Staab

Call me a supernatural agnostic. My is-it-or-isn’t-it attitude toward the mystical began in high school on a rainy afternoon in the basement study of a Midwest mansion. Three girlfriends and I were goofing with the Ouija board we found hidden in a bookshelf. Snorting with cynicism at the board’s responses to our queries we dared the raunchy spirit, or whatever was guiding the planchette, to appear. Our answer bounded through the empty house and down three flights of steps. Its thunderous live appearance sent us into a screaming huddle. Decades later, not one of us can forget, explain, or deny our terror.

The Ouija experience didn’t stop me from exploring the supernatural; it fueled my curiosity. Years later my career transplanted me to Los Angeles where psychic and occult shops are as prevalent as banks and delis in Manhattan. We Los Angelenos will give any crackpot a chance—once. And I did. Psychics, séances, palm reading, tarot reads, and astrological predictions left me thinking “lucky guess” if/when they proved correct. I viewed fortunetelling as sleight of hand, a shrewd knowledge of body language, coincidence, or a flat-out scam. But I won’t deny the possibility of mysteries in the universe beyond my comprehension.

As a writer, I was intrigued with an idea to drape a veil of mysticism over a rational murder investigation. The cerebral view of religion and cults held by my former, real-life Religious Philosophy college professor inspired me to create Nick Garfield, a younger, wittier, and better looking version who studies belief systems, and under the rose lends LAPD a hand with occult-linked crimes and scams.

I wanted a strong character to stand up to Nick’s intellectual certainty and mirror my personal doubts. A psychologist friend with a contemptuous view of the supernatural provided the role model for Liz Cooper, my non-believing protagonist/shrink. Liz employs Nick’s expertise to help her clear a friend of a murder charge in my first novel, WHO DO, VOODOO? Liz doesn’t believe. Nick does. The Mind For Murder Mystery series exploits their differences, leaving the reader to decide who is right.

At the outset, plotting occult-themed mysteries seemed simple. Spooky rituals, a few superstitions, a real murder or two, reveal the killer, and bang!—everything gets pharmacy-no-rx.net/viagra_generic.html explained scientifically.

Or does it?

De-mystifying the occult enough to write about it became a challenge and an adventure. WHO DO, VOODOO? opened with a mysterious tarot card. Couldn’t be just any card. My search led me through four months of tarot reading classes to understand the Fool’s journey.

The plot twisted to Vodou. The syncretic religion developed in the 17^th century when French and Spanish missionaries forced West African slaves in Haiti and Cuba to convert to Catholicism or be punished as heretics. Loyal to their homeland beliefs and fearing for their lives, the slaves employed icons of Christian saints to manifest their African deities. The resulting syncretic religions, practiced in secret and never written down, became Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santeria.

The commercialized voodoo we find in the media is an offshoot of the spells, rituals, and superstitions practiced by powerful 19^th century New Orleans voodoo queens. Their stories fascinated me enough to take a tour of the French Quarter with a voodoo priestess. I followed her through back rooms of voodoo shops and into sanctuaries. She gave me a lesson in how to hold spirits at bay in a cemetery.

My second novel BRUJA BROUHAHA involves Santeria—the Cuban version of voodoo. In search of another first-hand experience one bright Saturday morning I wound up at a tiny altar in the back room of a downtown Los Angeles botanica (Santeria charm and ritual shop) while a local Santera (Santeria priestess) performed a protection spell on me. She only spoke Spanish; I only speak English. My experience became a scene in BRUJA BROUHAHA.

I picked up a few new habits along the way: you won’t see me set my purse on the floor (money drain) or hear me wish evil on people (comes back to you.) One thing I absolutely believe in? Parking Fairies.

Like my doubting psychologist Liz Cooper, I keep my mind and my eyes open. However as I’m working, every now and then I look up to the sky and say, “Fiction. I’m writing fiction.” Just in case.

ABOUT ROCHELLE:

Rochelle Staab, a former award-winning radio programmer and music industry marketing executive, blends her fascination with the supernatural and her love for mystery in the bestselling Mind for Murder Mystery series featuring Los Angeles psychologist Liz Cooper and professor Nick Garfield. BRUJA BROUHAHA, the second novel in the series, follows WHO DO, VOODOO? an Anthony, Agatha, and Eureka! Best First Novel nominee.

BRUJA BROUHAHA, the second novel in the Mind For Murder Mystery series will be released on August 7. A mid-city clinic assignment near historic MacArthur Park sends psychologist Liz Cooper into the midst of local mayhem, a puzzling disappearance, and a vindictive Santeria hex. Liz and her new love, Religious Philosophy Professor Nick Garfield, help an elderly Santera through a heart-breaking tragedy with repercussions that test their relationship and Liz’s professional ethics.

Connect with Rochelle:

www.rochellestaab.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rochelle.staab

Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/rochellestaab

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4705211.Rochelle_Staab