Upcoming Attractions & A Book Review of Dreamspell

Next Wednesday (July 11th) marks one year since I began blogging, and I'm wearing a huge grin. Seriously, it's as much of an accomplishment for me as the day I completed my first novel.  I refused to blog for years, believing that I wouldn't have the commitment to do it and would probably run out of things to say.  But I've done it, I've suceeded, and I'm looking forward to another year of blogging fun. :-)

Thank you to all who follow my blog and leave such encouraging comments.  You are a tremendous blessing, and I hope to meet each one of you someday. :-)  To express my appreciation and celebrate my blog birthday, I'm going to host two fabulous Christian authors and give away a copy of their latest books.  Michelle Griep will be here on the 17th, and Laura Frantz will be here on the 24th. 

If you scroll through the archives, you'll find my beginning post for "Serving With Words" on September 9th, 2011.  The reason I consider July 11th my blog birthday is because that is the day I began "The Way of Impressions" -- a story I began writing live as I stepped into the blogging waters.  I didn't expect to want to publish it--I intended it to be story that would be limited to a blog--but those of you who suffered through my first draft with me inspired me to re-write, shape and mold TWOI, transforming it into a story that deserves to be printed on paper, or at least put in e-book format someday. THANK YOU, and may God bless you for being such great friends.  In honor of that crazy writing adventure, I'll post my new revised chapter one next Tuesday on the 10th.

Okay, enough of upcoming posts. :-)  My thoughts on Tamara Leigh's Dreamspell.

Time travel through dreams?  Now there's a new twist on my favorite genre niche.  I love time travel romances, and when I discovered that Tamara Leigh is a Christian author, of course I grabbed it.

Doctor Nedy Plain is dying of a brain tumor, and she's spending her last days immersed in a study of her own sleep disorder.  Finally succumbing to sleep after days of deprivation, she dreams herself into fourteenth century England where she crosses paths with Fulke Wynland, a man condemned and remembered throughout history for killing his young, orphaned nephews.  Can she stop him and save the boys' lives before her own life is spent?

Dreamspell is mainstream clean romance (not Christian fiction), and the sensuality is high in places--for example, the hero is taking a bath and the heroine walks in and stays to talk to him, and then takes a bath after him while the hero is supposedly sleeping.  I'm not used to mainstream fiction -- the characters I usually read are growing and changing spiritually throughout the book, and perhaps that missing element distanced me from Fulke and Nedy.  Nedy's attitude toward her ex-husband, Graham, bothered me. Even if he had failed to cut Mama's apron strings, Graham seemed to be a good man who loved Nedy and wanted to reconcile with her.  Failure to leave and cleave is no reason to give up on a marriage, and Nedy's choices made her seem shallow and driven by her feelings.

My nitpicking aside, Dreamspell is a fascinating story, with well-paced action and suspense.  Kudos to the author for such an imaginative, interesting read.  The epilogue was one of the best I've ever read and it had me in tears.  I'd recommend it to those who enjoy mainstream clean romances, time travel, and medieval history, and to women who have lost their hair and other womanly features to radiation treatment.  Fans of Bergren's "River of Time" series may also love this one. :-)

What?! Show and Tell?

Gone are the days when most readers could appreciate a book written in third person omniscient, when "he said", "she said" tags were not the mark of "lazy writing" and narrative "telling" wasn't the unpardonable sin.  We aspiring authors are told to forget storytelling, and "show" the movie inside our heads. Metaphors and similes are our friends, and finding original ways to describe cliched expressions/feelings can be more exciting than stumbling upon buried treasure.

But.  What if James Scott Bell is on to something? 

I just finished chapter seven of "Plot & Structure", in which Bell covers what he calls "the intensity scale".  He says we should rate the intensity of a scene using numbers between "0" and "10" ("0" being no intensity and "10" being max intensity). Anything below a "5" should be written in "telling" form.  His reason? To save "showing" for the more intense scenes, and therefore spotlight the emotion and experience for the reader.  Bell claims that if you write an entire book in "showing" form, the reader will be exhausted by the end, and the more critical scenes won't stand out like you want them to.

It makes sense, but I'm still very hesitant to take him up on his suggestions because "show, show, show!" has been drilled into my head by authors, agents, readers and publishers alike, and this is the first time I have ever heard of a scenario where its okay to write in "telling" form.

What do you think?  Do you agree with James Scott Bell?  Should a writer write low-key scenes in "telling" form to make the more intense scenes more dramatic?

Move Update & Kreativ Blogger Award

Okay, the move is finally over, and the process of adjusting from life in big city Dallas to Kentucky farmland has begun.  I'd appreciate your continued prayers...here's a list of things weighing on my mind.

• That my grandmother's broken foot heals quickly
• Grace to adjust from living with two people (hubby and Micah) to ten people (note: not all in same house, but five young children are living in the same house)
• Grace to get along with family members
• That hubby gets the right job quickly
• My computer needs repairs (yep, the new one I just bought)
• Creativity to flow while writing using pen and paper
• Energy to stay up and write after Micah goes to bed
• Patience in the face of internet complications

A big thank you to Amy at Threads In The Nest for blessing me with the Kreativ Blogger Award!  Amy has a gift for beautiful crafts, and a love for vintage history that makes her blog a treat to visit.  She always has such beautiful pictures and inspiring ideas!

As a part of the award, I'm to share 7 interesting things about myself, and then grant this award to 7 other blogs. 


7 Interesting things about me:


1. As a child, I once damaged a brand new jeep by pelting it with gravel rock, inside and out.  And yes, I'm afraid of Micah becoming the troublemaker I once was.

2. My husband and I were engaged within two months of meeting, and married four months later.  Neither of our families ever said a word against it, despite the fact that we were total strangers to our in-laws.  Still trying to figure that one out.

3. A Chinese border agent turned a friend and I away from Shenzhen because we were traveling with diplomatic passports and quote, "might be spies".

4. In the Philippines, I slept through an earthquake rated a "7" on the Richter scale.  The weird thing is, I'm a light sleeper.

 

5. Before marriage and motherhood, I frequented rock climbing gyms and gun ranges.

6. I once climbed a mountain side without a rope. It sloped in a lot of places, but I remember resting in the cleft of a near-straight drop, unable to see the ground.  It remains one of the top ten stupidest things I've ever done.

7. I just made my 23rd move.  If anyone deserved to be called a nomad, that'd be me.


7 Kreativ Blog Award Winners:


1. Helen and Jess from Book Review Sisters

2. Jenn from Jenn Musing

3. Loree Huebner ~ Between you, me, and the gatepost

 

4. Brandi Boddie - Penning Praises

 

5. Jessica R. Patch

6. Gabrielle Meyer

7. Heather Day Gilbert

 

Blog Turbulence & Fun Facts

June may be an awkward month for me to blog...my world is topsy-turvy, and routine is flying out the window.  Don't worry, it's just a move.  Just a little out-of-state move.  God is leading my family and I to Kentucky for a season.  I'm still a bit in shock and very nervous about it, so I would appreciate your prayers when you think of me. 

I'm going to write up a few blogs and schedule them to post on Tuesdays as usual, though I haven't had any luck with scheduling blogs since Blogger made changes.  If Tuesday comes around and nothing shows up, you'll know that I still don't know what I'm doing.  I'll try to blog consistently and interact with everyone's comments and blogs, but please forgive me if I drop off the face of the Internet and you don't hear from me for days or even a week.  Honestly, I don't know what to expect.  God's got this, I know, but isn't it hard to trust the unknown to Him?

My blog posts haven't been very entertaining lately, so I thought I'd throw you some interesting facts I've learned while researching the 18th century.

1. At a ball, dinner came before the dancing, and not everyone was invited to the dinner.  Don't roll your eyes--you may have known that, but I didn't!  I had to re-write three chapters of TWOI to get it right.

2. Gents and ladies wore gloves when outside the home, and during formal occasions, such as a ball. (Not sure why women would choose mitts over fingered gloves other than when needing finger dexterity--still checking that one out.) They removed their gloves before dining, and placed them on their laps and their table napkins over them.  This was the perfect detail to fuel Louisa's misconception of Altamont in TWOI's new chapter one. :-)

Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

www.metmuseum.org

  

3. Fruit was scare and expensive, and only the wealthy could get it.  It was quite a feat for Lord Admiral Howe to provide citrus fruits to the scurvy-ailing men of the Royal Navy!  Yes, my novel is about Louisa, but Richard Howe was quite a character.  Did you know that he went from being blamed for Britain's failed efforts in the Revolutionary War to the hero of the "Glorious First of June" battle about twenty years later???  Yes, he's begging for a book of his own.  Where was I?...fruit.  The English cooked their fruit for superstitious reasons.  They believed that indigestion or even the plague (the plague? really?) could result from eating raw fruit.

4. For the wealthy, vegetables were more of a garnish than side dish, and they ate a lot of meat. Venison was a status symbol.

18th century "rose water sprinkler" from India

5. Ooh, love this one!  Obviously, men wore perfume as well as the women, but did you know that nothing distinguished the men's perfume from the women's?  I'm getting an image of Lord Altamont walking around in a cloud of "Aqua Admirabilis" (a perfume made popular by King Louis XV, consisting of grape spirits, lavender and rose water) LOL!  Nah, I think he'd wear musk or some kind of bergamont combination (which they had in the 1700s, but by the turn of the century when cleanliness and hygiene was becoming important to society, wearing a stronger perfume such as musk was thought to reflect bad hygiene.)