marie-beaulieu-blog

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Does it make anyone else confused and sad that the Goodreads Choice Winner for Best Romance isn’t really a romance novel...? 

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Rom-Com Countdown #21: One Fine Day (1996)

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Rom-Com Countdown #22: The Wedding Singer (1998)

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Rom-Com Countdown #23: You’ve Got Mail (1998)

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Rom-Com Countdown #24: The Back-up Plan (2010)

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Rom-Com Countdown #25: This Means War (2012)

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Rom-Com Countdown #26: Pillow Talk (1959)

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Rom-Com Countdown #27: French Kiss (1995)

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Rom-Com Countdown #28: Tammy and the Bachelor (1957)

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https://advertising.amazon.com/ad-specs/en/policy/book-ads Well, if this an example of what’s unacceptable to run a paid ad for on amazon, then I guess I’ll never be paying them money to advertise my books.

Seriously, their guidelines are an interesting read... In that it sounds like they simply aren’t good at targeting their own ads to appropriate audiences, if they’re that worried about anything that could remotely offend anyone being on a book cover.

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Had a long weekend of Holiday Shopping? 

Feeling harried and rushed by the season?

Take a moment to relax and enjoy with a sweet and spicy, and utterly satisfying holiday read.

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Paranormal Romance Character Study/Mood Board: True Montgomery

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Okay, so having read more of Tessa Dare, this only becomes more true. I’m noticing a pattern of the hero and heroine having their ‘confession of love’ moment about two-thirds or three-quarters through the book. And the rest of the novel is about what that means for these strong, independent characters, what they’re willing to sacrifice for the love, what and how their lives will work together. 

I LOVE IT!

Don’t get me wrong, I also really enjoy novels that build up to and end with a confession of love. But seeing the consequences of accepting such an emotional upheaval (which her characters never seem to be expecting or really wanting either).... LOVE LOVE LOVE!

Tessa Dare’s infusion of humor and slightly offbeat but still dreamy and endearing characters into historical romance novels is my new favorite thing.

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Working on my Writing Project Schedule for next year... (Needs many more adjustments, but I need it to keep me remotely on track. Deadlines are good for me.)

Big difference between e-publishing and traditional publishing (both of which I will be doing next year): Waiting vs Taking Active Control of Process.

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As some of you may know I’ve been studying Professional and Creative Writing for three years now, and I’m heading into a fourth year of study for Honours, and one thing that has really stuck out for me over the past few years is how much pressure people put on you to write a story with some kind of important meaning.

This needs to stop.

There’s nothing wrong with writing a story with purpose and meaning, but when you limit yourself to writing a story around those morals, then you restrict what you can write.

Write what you want to write. 

Write stories for fun. 

Write stories with no moral messages and see what meaning other people read into it.

Write a story by focusing on the characters, the plot, the narrative, whatever; just write the story you want to tell, becasue if you limit yourself to writing around that moral message then you lose the possibility to open your text up and create depth to it by having multiple meanings and moral messages, contradictions and ideologies that your readers will hold onto and literature students will gush over.

Write what you want to write.

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Got my Work In Progress Notebook by Jeannie Ruesch.

First impressions are very positive. Already started jotting down ideas for my next major novel. I wanted an organized space to house all my random notes, since I won’t be getting to this project until next year, but didn’t want to loose any sudden inspiration or insight I’ve been having. This seemed like a good option to try.

It actually seems most conducive to Romance Novel writing. Or at least allows for specific features of that genre, including an HEA option in the Plot section, as well as giving a two-protagonist scenario for major characters with lengthy templates and family tree options for both, with the rest of the spots designated Secondary Characters or Bit Characters. There is flexibility in most all aspects of the notebooks, which is nice.

I wish it was a bit smaller/more portable. Its size will likely mean I’ll still be making notes on the fly on random bits of paper. But its layout and ideas could be transferred to a smaller notebook, maybe with tabs for quick reference. And it does hit all the major things an author needs to keep on hand while writing.

The Sections it has are:

Work-In-Progress Specs (Basic info about your novel; title, word count, genre, etc.)

Characters (a master list, space for family trees, and character sheets of various detail depth for protagonists (2) Secondary Characters (12) and Bit Characters (36))

Setting (Has space for outlining 4 Major Settings and 4 Minor Settings)

Plot (Broken down into Theme & Summary with Beginning, Middle, End and Happily Ever After sections, including questions to make you think about the purpose and progress of the plot)

Scene & Sequel Breakdown (if you use that method, it’s useful, but if you don’t it does eat up a bunch of space)

Timeline (By Month up to 6 months, so usefulness would depend on specific storyline; I think a variety of time measurement would’ve been more useful, such as: an old school history class timeline to mark years or decades/centuries, etc, then a few months, and a daily/weekly)

Polishing & Editing Checklist (great to prevent you from panicking and to help you remember all the post-writing things you need to do to complete your work)

Sticky Notes (blank space to literally place any sticky notes you ended up making despite having this wonderful organizational too; could also use for sketches or flow charts or other necessaries to your writing process)

Notes (lined pages to scribble notes)

Submissions (some advice on querying and sections to help you keep track of your agent and publisher queries; list of additional resources)

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This next novel I’m planning... I could put a romance plot in it and give it a HEA ending. But I know for a fact, that if I don’t write that romance and give it the ambiguous ending, I could query with it as ‘Contemporary Literature’. 

Because somehow when the exact same story has romance in it, it’s somehow transformed into a ‘lower form of fiction.’

If I had the time and energy, I would write both versions and query different major publishers and track the response. It would be such an interesting experiment.