I managed to reach word count and add 1,000 on Wolff brother. The novella I haven’t started. I keep trying to come up with a story.
The cover for Silver Town Wolf: Home for the Holidays is really lovely and I’ll show it when I can!
The Pegasus Winged Horse Origami was at an exhibit in Minnesota. Just beautiful. But I freed Pegasus and he’s off to take a flight, feeling free and happy.
Okay, so it’s time to get out some polar bear suits. Young man, put on a sweater, for heaven’s sake.
Baby is coming and I don’t feel like I’m making any headway on my stories. I did write the Walmart blog for You Had Me at Jaguar, yay! But I still haven’t caught up on Wolff brother word count, 1,000 words off, and I still need to start SEAL Wolf Team to the Rescue.
I did figure out a couple of names for characters though. That’s always tough for me. You can’t have names starting with the same first letter, or too similar in sound, or that you’ve used before in the nearly 70 other stories. Uhm, okay. And I don’t care for unisex names, probably because I have one and it confuses everyone. And then I have to have good guy names and bad guy names. And I have to be careful that my good guys who might end up in another story (unplanned, but then readers fall in love with them and they have to have their story) and all of a sudden, that name is not heroic enough, or sexy enough. And meh, I picked the wrong name. Seriously. A lot of gnashing of teeth goes into coming up with names.
And that’s my story! And I’m sticking with it.
Hope you are staying warm if you’re being hit with the polar weather!!! Most of us aren’t used to it, and they’re warning about being out in the really frigid weather and getting frostbite. Next week, unless the weather changes, it’s going to be 77 degrees. Unbelievable.
A friend sent me this picture of the snow they had that she woke up to. The fun is she lives in White Bear. Not the same White Bear, Alaska that I created for my polar bear shifters, but…I had one of my shifters check it out.
I’m usually pretty organized, but I just learned my novella for To Tempt the Wolf is due by March 1st and the Wolff brother novel is due April 1st. *sigh* I’m 15,000 into Wolff brother, and 0,000 into SEAL Wolf Team to the Rescue.
I’m off to write. I don’t have any time left not to! Have a great day!
Okay, so I was trying to update my blog face and guess what? I can’t figure out how to do it. I’ve done it lots of times, but with the NEW IMPROVED version (growling like a jaguar here), I can’t find any of the add on buttons to change anything. I finally managed to remove the cover of the book that came out early last year, but no way to add the latest.
Don’t you wish that developers would leave a good thing alone? My son had me take a “test” while he was in his graduate computer programming courses and it was to see if the directions he had developed for a program were as simple as could be so that even I could understand them. They were! If I clicked on this button, it would take me to this place. And all the buttons I needed were there to take me where I needed to be so I could make the changes I needed to. Some of these businesses need to hire him.
I bet I’m not the only one having trouble with this! In fact, often when I Google stuff like this, tons of people are having trouble with the same issues. Maybe we’re all dumber than the average programmer. That’s okay. It needs to be simple for us dummies, folks. Most of us don’t have degrees in computer science. I did take COBOL, FORTRAN, and BASIC, so it’s not like I’m totally clueless and yet….I am.
Onward and upward! Like I said, I was updating my website and while I was doing it, I was updating my new release links for a couple of upcoming books. Kobo is still not listed for either.
I’m really bad about self-promoting. I want to write. But I know it’s important to also tell the world when a book is out because nobody else will know if I don’t say something. So a good friend of mine told me about a couple of sites to create book mockups and I’ll share those here.
Yes, perfect! I was having fun creating a couple of pictures for the upcoming new release. This is really neat because I’ve taken the pictures of the jaguars and added it to the mockup, and the composite I created, I added to the laptop. See???? All this picture taking and composites I am making can be useful, not just fun, goofing off time. lol
Okay, I’m back to the book because, yes, without the book, there will be no need to put out the word. Have a super fun day!!! I’m off to try and catch up on word count.
Still doing the daily photo challenges–The one was using your imagination. I placed two bears, one paddling and one catching fish on a mirror on the grass, catching the reflection of the bears and the blue sky filled with white clouds to simulate water, a picture of a picture I took in Scotland and turned into a canvas, and jaguar hugs.
And I got a little ways on my writing, the 2,000 I needed for yesterday’s word count, but now have to do another promo blog for You Had Me at Jaguar. And she wants me to expand the other promo blog I wrote. Sigh.
I woke, couldn’t sleep, and decided to get up and do this blog, type up my notes that I wrote last night, and then go back to bed. It’s better than just lying there when I feel wide awake.
Yay, I was 3,000 words behind on word count, but just added another 1,000, so 2,000 words behind. 10,000 words into the story, 70,000 to go. Okay, I’m off to bed. It’s only 2 am, so I have enough time to get a little more sleep.
Have a great day as soon as you wake up! Hopefully, the puppies won’t want me to get up before I’m ready.
Okay, I’m late. I have NO excuse except I’m just running…late. I was looking for a dress for the wedding. Sandals for walking. That’s my excuse. Oh, and brainstorming. Yes!!! I still haven’t got it to where I want the story to go.
See, in a romance, you want CONFLICT. My hero and heroine are way tooooooo compatible. No CONFLICT. Boring. I’m reading how to add conflict to romantic relationships. I know, I’ve written over 70 books, but sometimes something will stand out and voila, I have it! One blog was talking about misconceptions. Yes, that ploy can work, but not all the time. If they can just talk about it to clear up the misconception, then it doesn’t make for a good ploy. How many times have you seen something like that? Just tell her, or tell him, already!!! And then everything is cleared up.
I watched a movie last night–true story about a cop who was obsessed with a woman and when she’d had enough of his crazy, controlling behavior, she called it quits. He ran her off the road, kidnapped her, and shot her in the head. What I liked about the story was that she told everyone what was going on, but no one believed her because he was a cop and he was telling everyone she was crazy. And then he had a woman alibi him out for everything. Her mom and friends believed her. But the chief of police protected the cop because he was like a son to him. In this case, there was a misconception that the girl was lying. But she was telling everyone the truth! They thought he was telling the truth, though even the chief had to tell him several times to knock it off with her before the cop shot her. She survived, three days out in the woods, by the way, and he went to prison for life. Happily Ever After. But it works. As long as she’s not covering up for his behavior. And he’s a cop, so people tend to feel a cop is more truthful, especially when he’s got a girlfriend covering for him.
Conflict in actions–sure, they help to create forward motion. A volcano erupts, how do the characters react…etc, but what really helps is the emotional conflict. In the stories I’ve written where the characters have really great defined goals, great motivations for achieving their goals, and a deadline to reach them, it works!!!
So in Flight of the White Wolf, she has to fly the private investigator to the backwaters so he can paddle, only he’s not on vacation like he says he is. He’s investigating someone. And she doesn’t want him to investigate her! She was forced to be the getaway pilot during a jewelry story robbery some time earlier, where he was taken hostage when he was a cop. So lots of conflict, their plane crashes–again, and they have to survive that, and other situations, while she’s trying to hide who she is and he’s trying to remember where he’s met her before. That works! It was a fun story!
Or, where the heroine is a bounty hunter, trying to take the hero back for trial after he skipped bail because someone has used his ID to pretend he’s him. Again, fun story, lots of conflict while he proves he’s not the guy she wants, but then again, in a romantic way, he really is. All’s Fair in Love and Wolf
SEAL Wolf Undercover, she’s joined up with a shifter force to find jaguars who have been injuring wolves. He’s after the man who nearly killed his friend, thinking it’s her brother. She’s protecting her brother and shoots the hero. Now we’ve got real conflict. lol And she wants him to join with her and the shifter force to find the bad guy. But he thinks she’s protecting her brother.
That’s what I need to do. Is come up with a totally interesting conflict between the characters…. that is totally brand new!
Okay, I’m off to work at it and getting behind on daily word counts, but I had more promotional blogs to do and I did the wolf logo too.
Have a super lovely day!!! I’m off to brainstorm some more. I refuse to call this writer’s block. It’s just my way of processing until I have a story to run with.
I don’t know what’s going on with WordPress, but all of a sudden, I can’t find the icon to add pictures. I wish they’d leave it alone. lol I finally figure out the new one, and it’s changed again!
I think it’s a test! Or the fae are messing with me again. Okay, found it!
Yesterday, while I was taking care of my grand-daughter, I managed to create some ads for an upcoming sales promotion of 4 of my books, and a header for FB and need to do one for the new release coming up: You Had Me at Jaguar. And I made the video trailer on Animoto.
Canva is free. You can also use Animoto for short videos for free.
Kobo finally fixed their issues and Claiming the White Bear is now up at Kobo! I also finished proofing the print version and just waiting for it to go through review. So it should be ready in a few days.
We had a wild night of it and we might even have snow flurries! Yes, in the Houston, Texas area! I was up in the middle of the night, putting things away that could fly off the patio. We had 20 mph winds and hard rain, sounded like hail. What had the weatherman predicted? Light rain. So I was awake most of the night and sometime I noticed it was time to get up. Just a few more minutes. The next thing I knew, I have five minutes to get ready before baby got here.
Baby was ten minutes late. Lucky me. lol
So I made progress on Claiming the White Bear, but none on Wolff Brothers. Though in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, I was thinking about the plot again.
Claiming the White Bear
A Romeo-Juliet type family feud, polar bear style, tore them apart; can they find true love again?
It’s nearly Christmas, no tours on the schedule for Edward MacMathan
and his brother and so they’re working in their uncle and aunt’s tavern
when the love of Edward’s life returns with two young boys in tow, and
they look a lot like him when he and Rob were that age. Robyn Conibear
is in trouble and she’s fled her deceased mate’s sleuth to keep his
parents from taking custody of her and Edward’s sons.
Can she and Edward renew the love they had for each other despite the
six years that have passed? Or will her return only cause more grief
between her family and his as the hostilities renew?
But Edward is the boys’ true father and she wants to be with him no matter what. Likewise, Edward is determined to protect her and the boys, both from her former mate’s sleuth and her own, and take up where the two of them had left off. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MXPH7NDh
Since my granddaughter didn’t show up yesterday, holiday, surprise to me since her mom’s job means she often has to work some of the holidays, I managed to get some work done on Claiming the White Bear’s print book. See, a day off does not mean a day off. It means an extra day to work! And I was glad!!
I managed to create the print cover, formatted the book, and halfway proofed it. I wanted to finish it and get ahead on my word count on Wolff Brother, BUT, that was a little too much for one day.
Today, I need to get word count, run errands, yet, what I want to do is finish proofing the book. I’m going to try and do all of it today. Try.
Hope you are having a grand day!! I’m off to proof some more! Oh, and it is going to be 70 degrees today. Weird, weird weather. But enjoying it! Temperatures are dropping again tomorrow.
