In the celebration of motherhood...

Nineteen authors from around the world were given six weeks or less to produce a story involving a mother, and the result is here! 

In A Kind of Mad Courage, we have a collection of tales that will make you laugh, cry, and truly appreciate the “mad courage” of motherhood. 

 

Samantha Stroh Bailey - “Hide and Seek”
Regina Cash-Clark - “Autumn's Eyes”
Laura Chapman - “Oh Baby”
Elke Feuer - “The Sacrifice”
Diana Gliedman - “Love in the Time of Cannibals”
Carey Heywood - “A Poem for Mommy”
Wendy Janes - “Verity”
Francine LaSala - “Monkey Bread”
Sheryn MacMunn - “Last Words”
Nikki Mahood - “This Year's Love”
Karen E. Martin - “Two Thousand Steps”
Heather McCoubrey - “Emily's Promise”
Monique McDonell - “A Tale of Two Mothers”
Maria Schulz - “Like a Boomerang”
Jen Tucker - “Heartstrings”
Donna Valenti - “In the Nick of Time”
Julie Valerie - “LLL”
k.c. wilder - “Lady in Red”
Louise Wise - “Becky's Mum”

 

Amazon.UK | Amazon.com

  All proceeds benefit The Guthy-Jackson Charitable Foundation

Bringing the pain of real-life into fiction

Sad. Scary. Tragic. (But Funny!)

by

Francine LaSala

I got a call from an old friend the other day. We'd fallen out of touch over the years, but she reached out when she'd heard I'd been through a significant loss. We spoke for a while, sharing memories and getting caught up.

Then she told me the thing I most needed to hear. "Francine," she said, "I know you're going to come through this. Your sense of humor always pulls you through."

77p/99c for ONE week only (ending November 8th) 

I thanked her, as you do when people say seemingly absurd things to you at times such as these. And then I thought about what she'd said and why she'd said it.

I have always been in the awkward habit of laughing when I hear terrible news. Not all terrible news, but those things that are so terrible that sorrow somehow doesn't seem appropriate. That giggling (yes, crazy), somehow makes more sense. It's not schadenfreude. Maybe it is schadenfreude. But whatever it is, it's the defense mechanism that gets me through.

I do it in writing, too. All of my books--the two that are published, and the ones that are in progress and will be published next year--have all been born from some pain or loss. For Rita Hayworth's Shoes, it was the heartache of a boyfriend's betrayal. For The Girl, the Gold Tooth & Everything, it was the fear of financial ruin, dread of the dentist--among other things. No one would ever call my books "tragic"; they're all totally screwball and silly! Yet they center on various plights of the human condition. Laced with laughs.

I don't think you need to be sick in the head like me to find the humor in any given situation, and then weave that humor into your own stories. Sometimes you can do it with a situation; sometimes with a kooky character you bring in to the situation to help break the tension. The Girl, the Gold Tooth & Everything is peppered with these characters. There's Char-a'tee Pryce, who continually mocks protagonist Mina Clark for allowing the world to roll over her. There's neighbor Harriet Saunders, who takes all of Mina's "bad mother" anxiety and flips it on its ear. (I wrote a character piece for Louise Wise a few months back that will give you a taste of just how kooky Harriet is.

What I've come to learn is that in any horrible situation, there is the possibility to laugh. To take "Turn that frown upside down" to the extreme in your life and in your books. It feels good to laugh. It pulls you (and your characters) out of the gloom and doom; it helps you take a step back and detach so you can breathe.

I've been awarded a Reality Blog Award

Thank you, Anita Stewart for nominating me for an award. I don’t get nominated often so forgive me for blowing my own trumpet here.

I’VE BEEN GIVEN THE REALITY BLOG AWARD!

Anita has asked me a few questions. Check out her blog www.ancientbreeds.co.uk and her answers to the below questions. My questions and answers are below:

Q: If you could change one thing in your life, what would it be?
A: I wish I’d been this dedicated at writing earlier. I’m sure I’d be ‘doing lunch’ with Marian Keyes if I had.

Q: If you could repeat any age which would it be?
A: Ten years old. Wouldn’t it be fun to live the childhood years again? Wouldn’t want to stay there, mind, but to relinquish all responsibility for a day. Bliss.

Q: What really scares you?
A: Losing my parents. I’m at that age now where I realise they won’t be around for ever.

Q: If you could be someone else for a day, who would it be?
A: Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea. I’d like to know what’s going on inside his head. 

Thank you, Anita. That was fun! And to keep the ball rolling I would like to nominate fellow chick lit authors Francine LaSala and Sarka-Jonae Miller head to their blogs for their answers to the question.

Dishing the Dirt with best-selling author, Matt Dunn.

From Simon and Schuster to indie. 

Romantic comedy novelist, Matt Dunn, has chosen the indie route with his latest book, A Day at the Office. Read his amazing interview here . . .

You’re a man in a woman’s genre, top of the pile too, how does that make you feel?

Thanks, though I’m not even sure I’d be top of the slush pile! To be honest, I don’t think about it. I just try to write entertaining stories about real people, and hope they appeal to both men and women. If there’s one thing ‘unique’ about someone like me writing in this genre, perhaps it’s simply that I can give the male point of view. Though I do write as a woman (or two) as well in A Day At The Office, so maybe that’s all changed!

At last count, you have seven published books, have you stayed with the same publisher with those seven?

No. Simon and Schuster published my first six novels, but I published A Day At The Office myself.

Out NOW!
Amazon.UK
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You’re an accomplished writer of many novels, but how long did it take you to get where you are today?

I'd known I wanted to write since I wrote/read out a piece at school assembly when I was fourteen – I’d put a few jokes in and they actually got a laugh, and I was hooked - but didn’t know what to do about it until I read High Fidelity in the late nineties, and realised there might be a readership for the kind of thing I wanted to write. A couple of years later I ‘decided’ to take a sabbatical (when my headhunting business collapsed thanks to 9/11) to write up the idea I'd been toying with, and actually finished the first draft pretty quickly. It took a while to get it published (see below) but to be honest, I wasn’t in any rush – rather than spend my evenings typing in a draughty garret, a friend of mine had loaned me his villa in the south of Spain, which was nice. From typing the first word to actually seeing the book on the shelves probably took around five years. Though playing a lot of tennis didn’t help speed the process up.

How did you find your agent? Was it in a long line of writing submissions and receiving the rejections before being signed, or were you one of the lucky ones and found the process easy?

I took the traditional route of sending my ms off to agents and publishers, and had the usual load of rejections (31, I think), so no, it wasn’t easy, especially when the ones who did deign to reply with anything more than a ‘no’ would often give me conflicting advice (‘loved the plot, characters need work’, followed by the next one saying ‘love the characterisation, but the plot needs developing’) but every third or fourth one would give me a little tip, or suggest how I could make the manuscript better, which I tried to take on board – the best being ‘read the bestsellers in your genre, and see how they achieve their page-turning quality’. Eventually, after a LOT of rewriting, and after being a bit smarter in the way I approached them (making personal contact by directly emailing ones I knew who represented similar writers, making my approach email more ‘salesy’), an agent took me on.

How to be a domestic goddess! Or at least pretend to be one.

by Harriet Saunders 

from the novel The Girl, the Gold Tooth & Everything by 

Francine Lasala 

*Author's Note:

Harriet’s Helpful Hints

Harriet Saunders is a supporting character from my second novel, The Girl, the Gold Tooth & Everything. As one of my main character Mina’s only friends, harried Harriet helps ground Mina in her life--in fun and irreverent ways! The character herself is a cocktail / composite of all the frazzled mothers I have known, myself included. In this “Anything Goes” post, I imagined someone had asked Harriet to write a home-making column, sharing some of her best tips for domestic bliss. Please leave me comment sharing one of your most incredible household hints, helpful or horrid. I’d love to hear them. Enjoy!

Squalor is the new black.

Who says that? I say that! In this day and age, it’s much more important to over-parent your kids. To get down on that filthy floor and play with them rather than clean it. Of course there does get to be a point when cleaning is necessary. In that case...

Never clean your house in full.

Straightening up is really all you ever have to do, most of the time. Just let the neighbors’ kids leave their shoes on when they come over so you don’t have to explain to their parents why their once-white socks are as black as your soul. (If you don’t care about their stupid parents and what they think, by all means have those kids run around in their socks and pick up some of the dirt and grime while they’re at it. Mop, schmop. Am I right?!)

If you must scrub, don’t wimp out on the chemicals.

Especially if you clean as infrequently as I do. As well-meaning as vinegar and baking soda are, they’re just not going to cut it on a toilet bowl ring that’s had months to set in. No. You’re going to have to go with the strongest cleaning chemicals you can legally buy. If they burn your skin and your throat when you breathe them in, you’re doing it right.

If you want your husband to help you clean, clean naked.

You know you can get your husband to do whatever you want him to as long as you ask him when you’re naked. Also, cleaning naked means no bleach stains or other crap on your clothes, which is kind of a plus because god knows, if you’re hanging around your house with your kids all day, your clothes are crappy enough as they are.

The Importance of Being Edited

by

Francine LaSala

When I tell people I’m a book editor, they generally reply: “Wow, you must be a great speller!” Well, the thing is, I’m an exceptional editor, but not the best speller. Gasp! How can that be? Keep reading, because I’m going to get into all the aspects of editing and, most importantly, why you cannot, cannot, CANNOT put your work out there without passing it under a set of editorial eyes--or several even. Even if you are able to spell antidisestablishmentarianism without looking it up. Or spellcheck. (And yeah, I needed both for that.)

First, the WHY.

Number 1: It’s an important part of the process to self-edit, but in all truthfulness, you cannot successfully edit your own book unless you are a robot. It’s impossible for us as human beings to regard ourselves with complete objectivity. I’m serious. You can’t pour out something from your head and your heart onto a page and decide whether it’s good or not. You can feel it, for sure, and some people are very good at that. But our heads and hearts are not reliable and they will also trick us into thinking and feeling that what they believe is good is actually good. (Remember these are the two jokers responsible for your last bad relationship. Still want to trust them completely?) An editor is objective, and that’s essential. (Unless it’s your mom. Don’t ask your mom to edit your book.)

Number 2: As wonderful as you are (and you are wonderful), you know it is impossible for a single human being to know everything. (Many, including my husband will disagree with me about this, but, look, it is what it is.) And hey, even if you do know everything, consider this: You may know too much! That saturation of knowledge of yours could very well affect how you present it, and you can drown your reader in confusion without even realizing it. Sometimes it’s an editor’s task to pare down, to tell you when to rein it the freak in. But sometimes an editor also must let you know what’s missing. What lacks development and exposition and what sorely needs it in order to communicate effectively with readers--scientific essay or love story or whatever you’ve written.

And finally, Number 3: The most obvious reason to work with editors is...the more you see, the less you see. The mind (remember that joker from before who made you suffer that “good-on-paper” guy you wasted the better half of a year dating?) enjoys sabotage, and gets off on tripping up even the most eagle-eyed among us. Especially when the mind is tired, and cranky, and frankly bored to death reading and re-reading the same material over and over again (no matter how genius that material may be). Look, you are always going to miss something. Deal with it. And work with an editor, whose mind (unlike yours) doesn’t care to play tricks on you, and who will see glaring boo-boos you’ve read over ten thousand times and never seen.

And Now: The HOW.

Editors come in all shapes and skill sets. Here’s a rundown.

Acquisitions (commissioning) editor.

May be considered more “marketing” then “editorial.” These are they guys that scan P&Ls to decide what’s going to work for their lists. They read your stuff, but not with the depth of someone who’s actually going to work on your stuff. If you’re indie, they don’t really matter to you.

Developmental editor.

Like a beta reader, but trained. Work with a developmental editor after you’ve completed a draft of your book--before you’ve spiffied up and polished things. The developmental editor lets you know what’s working and what isn’t, and for what isn’t, advises how to make it work. (“Kill Charlie, he’s useless!” or “Save the hot washing-machine sex scene for later in the book, after we get a chance to get to know Fred and Marva and their feelings about laundry”) Once you have this great OBJECTIVE insight, you can use those suggestions to revise and rework. And now you can polish.

Line editor.

These guys have a knack for writing a good sentence and a good grasp on grammar, and make sure that your chosen words are relaying your meaning correctly. And they suggest new words to use if you’re not quite hitting it. The line editor will not (should not!) re-write your book. Rather, he or she will clean up phrases that don’t make sense, help slice out redundancies, and make comments where appropriate (“AU: Fred and Marva and the washing machine...you explain on page 40 that he’s five-foot-four. Wouldn’t he need to be standing on something here?” A good example from my last book: “AU: Peonies don’t bloom in the Northeast in September.” Who knew? Not me. But the line editor did!) Line editors hone in on the details so easy to miss in when you’re all caught up in the throes of the rhythm and the music of the writing of a story (which, as the writer of the story, is where you should be, BTW).

Copyeditor.

A copyeditor’s raison d’etre is to get your grammar right. Like specially trained soldiers, “SEALS” if you will, copyeditors annihilate misspellings, missed words, wrong words, and other dumb crap, and can shame even the most confident grammarian. That’s okay. If you’re telling a story, your crisp command of grammar should not be the part you’re most focused on.

To recap: No matter how Type A you may think you are, if you’re writing, working with an editor is a good idea. Remember: Your heart and your mind are mischievous little beasts who want you to look bad on paper. A good editor is your best defense!