Blog Jog Day for Readers and Writers!

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Chelle Cordero's Consistently Rated Top 100 Kindle Blog

Living, Breathing, Writing: A Lesson A Day

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Living, Breathing, Writing: A Lesson A Day!
Volume 1

“Having Chelle Cordero's blog on my Kindle is like having an author here
in residence with me. She gives inspiration, motivation, and best of
all, practical advice and solutions. I love the ‘writing exercises’ she
offers at the end of each blog, as well as the ‘writing prompts’.” ~J.B.
Naylor

And now, Kindle owner or not, writers are able to get in on the fun and
active lessons from the Kindle Blog—Living, Breathing, Writing, by
Chelle Cordero.

Welcome to a complete month of lessons about the craft of writing and
being a writer. In the BONUS Section of this book you’ll find more than
50 brain-starting exercises to help you get those words on paper.

These short lessons and activities have been previously published as
part of the acclaimed Amazon Kindle blog Living, Writing, Breathing
available by subscription for Kindle owners, and consistently in the Top
100, for just 99₵ a month.

Volume 1 in ebook formats and Coming in Print August 10!

Chelle Cordero Article (reprint)

The Problem with TODAY

Like many authors, I like to write the kind of stories I like to read and I like contemporary (like really present day) tales. Of course we live in a rapidly changing world and the time between writing and out-there for purchase can sometimes cause a few wrinkles.

When I wrote my most recent novel, Hyphema, I really decided to tackle a current subject. The (Matt Garratti) hero’s wife is a Pakistani born Muslim immigrant to this country. Sudah is working towards her citizenship and wants to be American, but the family’s move to North Carolina is met with some snide remarks and suspicion from their new neighbors about her background.

In one scene, Sudah is confronted by the wife of one of Matt’s co-workers; Donna grew up sheltered with limited contact to anyone “different”, all she knows about Muslims are the headlines and her family’s ire about an older cousin’s fiancé killed on 9-11. Donna shouts the statement, “And they say that Bin Laden lives like a hero in Pakistan.”

Hyphema was first made available for sale in e-book form on April 18 and scheduled for print in May. As we all know from the news, it was announced on Sunday evening May 1 that Osama Bin Laden was found and killed by American forces – in Pakistan. Although the actual news is much more monumental than the release of a novel, yikes! As an author my mind was spinning.

When I wrote my novel Hostage Heart I made a lot of references to the 2005 devastation in Louisiana after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In 2008 Louisiana was again bracing for another violent hurricane, Gustav. While the level of damage was far less, it still made a dent in my manuscript which I was already editing. I made mention of hurricanes “over the past few years” and alluded to the heroine graduating from a makeshift schoolhouse before the “last round of hurricanes hit”.

Writing stories that are “ripped from the headlines” can prove perplexing. All I can say though is, much like the action in my novels, life is fast paced and forever changing. They say that life imitates art and I am trying to keep up with it.

Multipublished Author Chelle Cordero

Download this Free Sampler of all Chelle's Novels!

About Chelle Cordero:

I was always a kid with a wild and vivid imagination and loved to spin a few yarns. Growing up in the city (NYC) and working my way through college, I had the opportunity of working some rather unusual and interesting jobs that only fed into the imaginary scenarios growing in my mind. By the time my husband and I settled in the burbs to have kids, I decided to write full-time and did so for a number of magazines and newspapers… but I still dreamt of growing up and becoming a novelist.

In 2008 my first novel Bartlett’s Rule was published by Vanilla Heart Publishing. My hubby says that when I received the acceptance note from Kimberlee Williams (managing editor), it was the first (and only) time he ever saw me speechless. I now have nine novels (7 romantic suspense and 2 mystery) and one writing instruction book. I also author an Amazon Kindle Blog called Living-Breathing-Writing and I am still writing for newspapers and magazines.

I think I like writing.

My website: http://ChelleCordero.com

My blog: http://ChelleCordero.blogspot.com

Be sure to visit our New VHP Author's Blog and Site where we'll be giving away prizes through the month of September for our Grand Opening. We'll have Author chats, a time to visit with a VHP Author and win giveaways, our title catalogs (Kindle, Print, AllRomance, and Smashwords Multiformat, Author Accolades, drawings for neat swag, and more...

http://VHPAuthors.wordpress.com



And over on our Vanilla Heart Books And Authors Website, you will find book videos, announcements, specials, more freebies, extensive author pages, and our FREE downloadable and printable Book Club Extras, with discussion starters, title information, and color bookmarks, plus catalogs with buy links, seasonal discounts and specials, and surprises...

http://www.VanillaHeartBooksAndAuthors.com

The Value of Writing Fast by Malcolm R. Campbell

You begin your new novel with gusto: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times on that dark and stormy night when Eliza Doolittle Smith tripped over the bloody body of one of her lovers and fell down the basement steps into the cold arms of another dead lover. “Yikes,” she shouted fearfully.

Before Eliza sees the demon hovering behind the neat rows of canned peaches, your inner editor proclaims: “This is crap.”

You know what happens next. You ponder. You stare at that first paragraph until, crap or not, all the life drains out of the story.

When you write fast, you don’t have time to listen to your inner editor or worry about what your parents will say when they read your novel later. Writing fast is scary. We can’t help but notice words and phrases flying by that make us cringe.

Writing fast is also empowering because the story is happening right now, evolving and unfolding before your eyes. Characters are doing things you never expected them to do. The plot is twisting down unexpected streets. You suddenly learn the butler didn’t do it and that the demon behind the canned peaches used to be your protagonist’s sweet grandmother Emmy. What a flowing river of words your story can be when you take a deep breath and just step out of the way.

I signed up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) this year because I was stuck. I was pondering things too much! No, I didn’t make it to the 50,000-word level. But since I told everyone I was signing up, I had to do something. Staring at each paragraph for an hour just wouldn’t cut it. So, I wrote the opening chapters as fast as I could. Now I’m over 21,000 words into a story I was beginning to worry about writing at all.

NaNoWriMo forced me to turn off my inner editor and just write. No, I’m not happy with every word and phrase on my screen. But frankly, I’m surprised by some of the things that have happened between the characters. I feel empowered because I now know I can finish this book and ultimately be proud of it.

Some writers do their own versions of NaNoWriMo day in and day out by writing for a set number of hours at a specific time every day. Others have a daily word-count goal of, say, 2,500 rough draft words. Whether it’s the satisfaction of a disciplined approach or the pep talks we get through NaNoWriMo, writing buddies and critique groups, each of us needs to find a viable incentive for turning off the inner editor and writing fast.

Writing fast doesn’t necessarily mean writing sloppy. To some extent, it means zoning out and getting into a pure storytelling state of mind in which you more or less learn what’s going to happen as the words appear on your screen. Like your prospective readers, you’ll be spellbound about what might happen next.

You can edit and polish later.

Just write:

She turned on her flash light. There stood her canned peaches in neat rows. Something moved behind the Mason jars. “Oh, Mark,” she cried, is it you? I’m sorry about our silly little argument. Forgive me?” But the thing that moved was thinner than Mark, and its eyes glowed pale yellow, brighter than the peaches, and with an intensity that made Eliza’s skin feel like she was covered with snakes Her late Grandmother Emmy, bless her heart, had always been kind to snakes. Kind to a fault, some said.

For now, hang on and enjoy the ride!

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of three novels. Look for “The Sun Singer” and “Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire” on Amazon and Smashwords. His most recent novel, “Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey” is available on Amazon and OmniLit.

Acckk!! Where's That List? By Chelle Cordero

Organization, or rather the extreme lack of it, is the bane of my existence. As a self-employed – and too broke to hire assistants – writer, I have to keep track of my different projects, deadlines, invoices, bills and other “I gotta do it(s)”. Organization has NEVER been my forte. I am tempted to say I thrive on chaos, but that only seems to expand the piles of papers and JUNK. sigh…

Yet to survive as a writer, or at least manage to hang on to the dream, I have to keep track of what I am doing and when it needs to be done. Sometimes it seems a bit overwhelming, but I’ve learned a few tricks.

To-do lists – very important. Not only does the list serve as a reminder of those things to be done, it also helps keep you on track. I’m sure you’ve heard the joke of the person who started out looking to address a letter, but they needed their glasses – while looking for their glasses they came across something else they meant to do, and so on until the day was over and they sat down exhausted at the table to find they never addressed or mailed the letter. I hate to admit this, but that really should be my biography, truly, that’s me.

I keep getting distracted by things I come across during my pursuit to accomplish just one thing. My to-do list helps me snap back to what I am supposed to be doing and helps me keep my focus. Besides, I leave plenty of room on the bottom of the list to write in all the things I came across to distract me so I will eventually get those done as well. And I don’t try to finish the list every day although it is nice when I’ve accomplished the bulk of it; I just copy the balance to the next day’s list.

Calendars can help keep you afloat. I carry one in my pocketbook and keep a full size one on my desk – these are regular old fashioned write on it yourself calendars. I also maintain a webmail calendar that I can set up to send me periodic email or text-to-phone reminders. Occasionally I do have to sit and coordinate each calendar to make sure I have the same info (ie: deadline dates and appointments) on each. Having a calendar at hand is a great way to make sure I am not double-booking myself or missing important dates. I also include social obligations and religious holidays since those can affect my availability. Some of my friends use the electronic calendar feature of their phones, that can work, but I prefer something I can easily look at and scribble on at will.

I keep a “project book” next to my desk. There are various methods you can use here – keep your lists individually, by date, by client (for multiple assignments) or just assign a sheet or two for each month and list an upcoming deadline appropriately. If I scheduled a blog visit, have a deadline, am hosting a blog stop, have an appointment or anything that will alter my time commitments, I list it here. This is in addition to my little note on my calendar(s). I check things off and even make a few notations about the job and or results so I can refer to it the next time I have a similar task.

When you are feeling overwhelmed with too many things to do, the stress builds and causes distractions and headaches. I work at home so my distractions may include family or neighbors, social phone calls or housework you just know has to be done. Caller ID and answering machines should be used to the fullest extent when you don’t need to be interrupted – I’ve gone so far as to turn off the ringer when I am really feeling frazzled.

As for interruptions from family, close a door or even hang a sign if there is no door saying “I am at work” and demand compliance. Plan a timed schedule for any must-do’s that you simply fee you can’t ignore and don’t devote more time than allowed. Finally, if you are really overwhelmed and stressed and reacting badly (as in you can’t seem to accomplish anything), take a break – yep, walk away from your desk and work and relax for at least fifteen minutes.

I hope you’ll find some of these helpful tips useful. For me, I am getting back to work – WHAT WAS I DOING when I thought to write this little ditty?

Chelle Cordero is a multi-published author with Vanilla Heart Publishing and a full-time freelance writer with local and national newspapers and magazines. She resides in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband, family and three spoiled pussycats. In addition to her books and articles, Chelle pens a weekly writing course available by subscription at Amazon Kindle Blogs http://bit.ly/Wmg8W and volunteers with her local ambulance corps as an EMT. Her website is http://chellecordero.com/

Should I write about Paris or Peoria?

The Anti-Stratfordian movement says William Shakespeare didn’t write the plays attributed to him because he lacked the education, scholarship, travel and political involvement required to support the subjects, locations and themes in the work.

While I have no intention of opening the Shakespeare vs. Bacon can of worms here, the “lack of knowledge” argument in the debate shows us that the write-what-you-know advice for prospective authors has been around for a long time. This advice is not always heeded. After reading bestselling novels with high-stakes characters working in exotic locales, many of us are tempted to write about what we don’t know.

That is, we’d rather write about a fashion designer in Paris than a coach in Peoria.


Everyday People and Places

Great fiction confronts well-intentioned (usually), flawed protagonists with conflicts in rural and city settings that could be almost anywhere. If you know Paris or Tokyo, then by all means use them. If not, consider Peoria—or the town where you grew up or now reside.

Over-the-top soldiers of fortune, global industrialists, surgeons, and sports figures appear to be among the top protagonists of choice. Which of these are you? If the answer is none, then unless you know one of these people and can follow him around for months, perhaps your own job in “Peoria” will result in a more realistic main character in a more believable setting.

My recent protagonist teaches English at a small Midwestern college. It was an easy decision: I used to teach at a small college. I saw the ivy-covered buildings, quadrangles, students, aging tenured professors and absurd educational politics first hand. For intrigue and conflict, I added in some corrupt deans and administrators, a maintenance man who owned a rifle and was willing to use it to support the status quo, and a deranged ex-lover out for revenge. (Most of us can look at the nastiest people in our workplaces and imagine then ten times worse!)

Your town and your career probably have more to offer prospective readers than you think. One hard fact of life for writers is this: readers are smart enough to know whether you’re faking it or know what you’re writing about. You either have a feel for the location and the characters and their professions, or you don’t.

If you’ve traveled to or lived in Paris, you might stage a convincing crime on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées because your photographs and experiences will help you create realistic incident.

While my memories of a long-ago trip to Paris along with the knowledge gained from watching Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou careen around the city in The Da Vinci Code made me consider the location for travel scenes, my muse reminded me to write what I know. I know College Avenue in Tallahassee and the nearby Tate’s Hell Swamp because I grew up in the Florida panhandle. I don’t have to consult a tourist guidebook to learn what kinds of houses and stores are found along College or what kind of flora and fauna are in swamps southwest of town.


Your Neck of the Woods

Like it or hate it, you know the town where you grew up (or live now). You are linked to it by people and events. You know whether the neighborhoods there have 1990s homes or older Queen Anne and Craftsman houses. You know when the first flowers bloom in the spring and what the weather is like during the dog days August. The joys and hurts you experienced there are—from a writing perspective—icing on the cake.

Like the swamps near Tallahassee where I once camped and hiked, there are lakes, rivers, mountains and farmland near your hometown that you can describe better than, say, the forest of Fontainebleau or the gardens at Giverny. You already know the sights, sounds, roads, and recreational activities there and won’t have to research them heavily to make them come alive in your stories.

Modern-day novels seldom include page after page of description. Yet, details about jobs and locales are important. When characters are at work, they’re at specific places using tools and equipment to complete daily tasks. What should the reader see and hear when you show him the characters on these jobs or on trips to a nearby theme parks or resorts?

My hometown and your hometown may not be as exotic as Paris or Tokyo, but we know them. Most of us haven’t had unique careers. Instead, we know what it’s like to work as administrators, bankers, cooks, teachers, sales people, computer programmers and secretaries.

What we know makes good stories because the knowledge, experience, emotions, physical reactions and locations are natural to us and our thinking. The reality of our lives flows out of our pens as smoothly as the ink. What we know is the stuff that captures the reader’s attention and makes him believe our fiction is real.




Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey, The Sun Singer and Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire.

Write Like An Earth Mage by Smoky Trudeau

My latest book, Observations of an Earth Mage, is a collection of essays, poems, and photographs on nature. I am, at heart, a nature writer.

But you don’t have to be a nature writer to need to know how to write about nature. It’s the rare novel that doesn’t at least have some element of nature in it, and writers of all genres need to know how to write about it convincingly, even writers who never get closer to nature than their local city park. Of course, there’s not enough room in a blog column to teach an entire course in nature writing, but here are some tips to make sure your scenes evoke Mother Nature in her finest light, as well as some exercises to get your creative juices flowing:

Use specific, descriptive language. Descriptive, specific language is what distinguishes beautiful prose from the mundane. While this is true for every element of fiction writing, nowhere is it more true than with setting description. Yes, I could have written the sentence, “It was foggy at the river,” as the opening to Chapter 22 of my novel, Redeeming Grace, and readers would have gotten a general idea of the setting. But I didn’t write that. I wrote, “The cool, early autumn air hugged the still-warm sandy shores of the Choptank, enveloping the river in a surreal, steamy fog. Water droplets clung to each blade of grass in the yard, dangling precariously like a precious crystal earring from a dainty lobe. The air smelled sweet, a sticky mixture of fish and pine.” Specific, descriptive language turns a bland sentence into words worth savoring and creates a three-dimensional, color picture in the reader’s mind.

Engage the senses. When you take a hike in an apple orchard in full bloom, you smell the blossoms. When you walk along the ocean shore, you hear gulls overhead and waves crashing on the beach. Make sure your readers can smell, hear, or even taste your nature descriptions. In my novel The Cabin, I could have written: “Corrine walked into the forest,” and left it at that. But I didn’t. What I wrote was, “The first thing she noticed was the smell. It was the same scent she had breathed in every time she walked in the forest, but this time, she could break down the individual essences perfuming the air: rotting rhododendron blossoms mixed with moss-covered granite and cold, crisp water. She had never noticed granite had a scent—like the air during a thunderstorm, vaguely electrical—or that water could smell cold.”

Don’t get carried away with this, of course. You don’t have to engage all five senses at once! But don’t rely only on the visual.

Use unexpected, surprising phrasing and metaphors. A good trick here is, when describing an inanimate object in nature, such as a rock, liken it to something animate. You might write something like, “The granite rock was like a gray whale in the middle of the meadow, swimming in a sea of big blue stem and purple coneflowers.” The rock is inanimate; a gray whale is animate. Doing the opposite works well, too: when describing something living, like an animal or a flower, liken it to an inanimate object: “The flock of Canada geese overhead looked like the Blue Angels doing maneuvers at an air show.” Another trick is to compare something small to something large: “When the hiker wandered too close to her babies, the mother marmot charged like a rhinoceros.”

Do your research. I recently read a lovely book that was set in what today is Turkey several thousand years BCE. The main character had a pet cockatoo. What’s wrong with that? Cockatoos are from Australia. There would have been no cockatoos in Turkey five thousand years ago. If you are writing a nature scene in a work of fiction, please remember to ensure the plants, animals, and weather phenomena you write about actually exist in the place you are writing about. Don’t have grizzly bears attacking tourists in Shenandoah National Park; don’t put triggerfish in the Great Lakes, and don’t set white Christmas stories in Sydney.

Beware of purple prose. Purple prose is prose that is so over the top, so flowery, it breaks the flow of your essay, story, or poem by drawing attention to itself. It often is exaggerated, overly sentimental, and evocative beyond the call of duty. To avoid falling into the purple prose trap, evoke only one or two senses at a time. Use only one metaphor to describe something, not five. In short, don’t get mushy.

Practice, practice, practice. Learning to write about nature (or anything else, for that matter) is no different from mastering any other art form. Picasso’s first painting probably wasn’t a masterpiece. Chopin had to learn to play a scale before he could compose and perform his piano masterpieces. Rudolph Nureyev took dance lessons before he became a world-class ballet dancer. Anything worth doing is worth learning how to do well, and that means practicing!

Ultimately, the best way to learn how to write about nature is to spend time in the woods, on the prairies, at the seashore, or in the garden. Nature is as close as your backyard or city park. Second, read nature writing. Read modern day nature anthologies, like my Observations of an Earth Mage. Read the classics, like Thoreau’s Walden or A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. Read nature poetry. Read novels where nature plays a thematic role, like Moby Dick. Then, go to your keyboard and write!

Smoky Trudeau is the author of the recently released Observations of an Earth Mage, a collection of prose, poetry, and photographs celebrating the beauty and splendor of the natural world. She is also the author of two novels, Redeeming Grace and The Cabin, as well as two books on writing, all from Vanilla Heart Publishing. An ardent outdoorswoman with a deep reverence for nature, she lives in California with her husband, daughter, and a menagerie of animals, both domestic and wild, in a ramshackle cottage in the woods overlooking the San Gabriel Valley and the mountains beyond. When she isn’t working, Smoky spends her time hiking in the mountains, camping in the Sierras, splashing in tidepools, and fighting the urge to speak in haiku.