Jason Aldean Rocks!

Something I have become over the past year is an avid country music fan. I have a Pandora station playing at work all time and the radio in the car playing the local country station. I blame it all on my daughter. She turned the radio on last summer and Luke Bryan was singing “You’ve got your hands up, you’re rocking in my truck” and I was hooked.

So of course the logical thing to do was hit the next concert that comes to town. George Strait sold out in minutes, but I bought tickets to Jason Aldean’s Night Train concert without an issue.

This past weekend my daughter and I spent the weekend together. Making it an awesome time was staying at the Marriott. But the highlight was the concert itself. I’m ashamed to admit it has been almost forty years since I went to a live concert. I’ve attended the ballet, classical concerts, plays, but a real rock concert… nope.

Country music isn’t the twangy stuff from twenty years ago. The new country artists have rock and roll souls with a heart in the country. You feel it when the bass reverberates through your whole body and those drums shake you to your feet. Of course, you’re left half deaf by the end, but the thrill of getting to that stage out weighs the lack of ability to hear.

Opening the event was Thomas Rhett.

If you know anything about country music, this fellow sings “A Beer with Jesus”.

The next guy singing was Jake Owen. He was awesome. He’s really cute in person. My daughter says he looks like a younger, darker Matthew Mcconaughey. We love his music and band.

Then came the headliner!! Jason Aldean.

Every song was awesome. I sang the words to every one of those songs. That is an eerie feeling knowing every lyric he sings. He opened with “Take a Little Ride” and I waited and waited, along with the whole arena of fans, until he sang “She’s Country”. The roar of the crowd was overwhelming. I can only imagine what it feels like getting that reception on the stage. Exhilarating I guess.

The man looks great in a pair of jeans, by the way.

I had to use the little point and shoot camera for these pics. The concert promoter wouldn’t allow cameras with detachable lenses inside the arena. I still managed a few decent shots, but nothing as stunning as my regular Nikon delivers.

This is a short post just to get all this off my chest until I write about on my real person blog.

It was such an exercise in people observation. The writer in me went bonkers. I have so much going on inside my head it’ll be a few weeks before it all calms down.

Love this kind of stuff.

Nena

Let’s Fix It!

I love to write. God only knows why. But I really get a kick out of it. I don’t do it very well… yet. I’ll get there, though. I just need to keep up with the “saddle time”. This is term I used when learning to ride my horse.

I didn’t start riding until I was almost 40 years old. Goes to prove you really can teach an old dog new tricks. I just needed to spend a lot of time in the saddle. I took that horse out every day. Rode him all over our pasture, through trees, through tall grass and learned to stay on his back after a few well placed buck-offs. It just took time.

I approach writing in the same light. Write every day. Practice, practice, practice. I read A LOT and read a ton of craft books and collect craft websites like designer beads. The most recent acquisition is an editing site. There are a few out there, but this is a good one for me.

http://prowritingaid.com/

It has number of great features even for those of us too cheap to pay the fee. The one I use heavily right now is the over used words feature. After my mentor returned a chapter to me with several over used words highlighted, I discovered eliminating those words altered the sentence structure for the better. Who would’ve thought!

Lots of pretty colors there.

I know, I know… I probably should have learned this trick a year or so ago. Just because you can teach an old dog new tricks doesn’t mean she learns them right away.

Better late than never. Thank goodness!!

Nena

This is Who It’s Really All About

aka The New Man in My Life.

Did you think it was someone else?

Besides all the other hats I wear, I am also a grandma. Seriously though, I’m too young to be a grandma, but my kids are certainly old enough to parent children. Thank goodness it wasn’t up to me to keep that little miracle from happening. This little guy is a gem and his parents are the best people in the whole world.

His daddy is my first born. Hard to believe that thirty-two years ago he made me a mother. Happiest day of my life. Now he’s made me the proudest grandparent around, and I know quite a few proud grandparents lately.

Just one more….

I never dreamed the joy of having this little guy’s head on my shoulder would melt my heart that much more. Grand kids are something else.

That is my diversion for the week.

I’m still plugging along in the Mentorship program. My mentor has pointed out some very enlightening areas to correct and I’m going at it like gang busters.

Keep up the great work all you writers. Relax and let your muse take over.

A Visit From Best Selling Author Sylvia Day

This weekend my local RWA chapter was fortunate to enjoy the company of best-selling author both US and Internationally, Sylvia Day.

Sylvia came to Little Rock to attend the city’s Literary Festival as a panel member discussing erotic romance (quite a stretch for this Bible belt community). I can’t tell you how excited we are to have her here. As a small chapter of Romance Writer’s of America, we seldom have the funds to bring in such well written and renown writers. I should also mention Sylvia is the President of Romance Writer’s of America.

Most impressive to me was the resolve with which she spoke about handling our careers as authors. She was very adamant about knowing where you are going and walking into a new contract with your eyes wide open. She stressed looking at each contract by evaluating its value not only now, but how it will impact your next work. If you have to, don’t sign.

Right now, I’m just trying to write something someone will want to buy.

Sylvia also stressed that this is the best time in the world to be a writer. We are not under the thumb of the big publishers. She has made more money on her self pubs than the she has after she turned them over to the NY publisher. Her decision to do that was to enable those books availability on the international market. She is one savvy lady. I loved every minute.

This was one of our largest turnouts for our chapter. So worth it. Had a blast ladies!

Nena

It’s Spring! Time for a Fling!

A fling indeed!

Not the one you’d think though! I’ve been so busy enjoying my family and the outdoors I’ve barely set any words to this new WIP (not that it hasn’t been speaking to me, mind you). I am  a grandmother for the first time and my little darling turned one year this past March. I haven’t seen him since he was four months old. So a weekend trip was in order.

Need I say more?

To say the least, this little guy stole our hearts.

To continue the family trend, my mother came to visit for the three days following the weekend trip. That was wonderful, because she cooked dinner every night AND she brought the food with her. Who can turn down such an offering? She’s making her summer migration to the north and cleaned out her fridge in the process. Last week was heaven.

After a particularly strange winter fraught with weather ups and downs and, thankfully, frequent intermittent rains we finally had a weekend to work in the yard. I must note we have a LARGE yard. So, after a cold, wet winter we leaped to the task of mowing and disking and planting.

We have a large place here and put in a garden every year, a small one. The deer have made my garden their dinner table the past four years. I cannot tell you how frustrating that is. We have devised ways to keep them out of the tomatoes, but the beans and cucumbers and spinach and anything in a row have been fair game.

This year I thought I’d try a raised garden as an alternative to the deer decimation problem. Much to my surprise, we had just the thing on our farm to use as a raised bed. Trusses! They have been sitting here for a few years and make the perfect raised garden.

They went from this…

To this….

I may not be sitting at my computer, but this is just as much fun. Granted, I paid for the work in spades later that day, but it was all worth it.

I love spring.

Nena

A Little Sizzle and a Little Pop

This week’s shinnagen’ s included dumping a whopping 5000 words from this new little story I’m writing. But… The replacement chapter and a half puts the story on track. I owe this revision to another on line class hosted by Romance Writer’s of America. Seven Steps to Sizzling Sexual Tension by Tracy Wolff.

 

Somewhere in the class Tracy asked what were the stakes for my H/h and I had to sit down and write them down. I must remind you I had filled out an excessive character sheet the week before for each person, so I really got to know them pretty well.  After looking at what was at stake I knew the first chapter had to be in his POV and from there the whole plot fell right in place. If only I could type as fast as my brain thinks.  Now I just have to get it all down.

Furthermore, I see all the tension build from that first meeting.

The first class talks about 12 steps to physical intimacy as a part of reaching good chemistry between our h/h. We all know these by instinct, but I had never seen them written out in plain sight.

1)eye to body
2) eye to eye
3) voice to voice
4) hand to hand
5) arm to shoulder
6) arm to waist
7) mouth to mouth
8) hand to head
9) hand to body
10) mouth to breast
11) hand to genitals, and
12) genitals to genitals or mouth to genitals.

Now I know the proper order, you can mess with those people in my head and ramp up the tension by breaking the rules, without being sleazy of course.

This one tool has set me free!!! And I’m going to make their world crazy.

I promise to add to this post with more secrets to sexual tension. Stay tuned.

Nena

Who Are These People in My Head?

That’s a really good question.

 

As a writer this is something I have to know. How else will I be able to write them? As a newbie writer this is something I am still learning.  I took a class last week to shed some more light on the subject. A lot of light really.

RWA offers free classes to its members every other month or so through its RWA University. In between it offers a class at the cheapest rates ever. I can’t not take a class for ten dollars! This one was well worth it too.  It was Building Great Characters by HelenKay Dimon.  She deftly taught us to take the obvious traits we give our characters and find out why they are the way they are. Then dig deeper and see how they walk through thier world.

One of the tools she provided for us was this link: 100 Character Development Questions for Writers.

Oh. My. Goodness. It took me over an hour to fill out the questions on my first person. The questions delve into the past, pulling up back story and history. Some of it had to be revealed by that character as I sat and ruminated on it.  I found this filled in bunch of the plot details, because I like character driven plots.

Yes, I have found the character sheet of all time. I should tell you I have a collection of them too. I can’t find the one I really like either, because half of them are hard copy and the others are in some file on my computer. I have no clue how to get organised. Except, I put this sheet into a Scrivener template to drive me crazy when I start a new project.

If inclined, check it out and let me know what you think.

Happy writing!

Nena