Repititious Redundancy

Good Wednesday morning, world. I am slightly less perky than I was Monday morning. Doing final edits on a tragedy will do that to ya. ;)





Today, there is no news or links. Scratch that. We do have Ask the Author coming up on Monday (my bad!), so please send in those questions! Put them in a comment here, contact me on any of my 1 million+ websites, or good old fashioned e-mail leharvey77@gmail.com




Anyhoo, moving on. Today's topic is something that I've wanted to blog about for a while, but just haven't for whatever reason.



I, the very un-great Lauren, have noticed a frightening trend in writers' blogs.






We're all saying the same thing! (This is where you gasp in horror and the scary music plays.)











Soon after my blog on books being a dying art form, a small slew of other writers blogged about...literature going the way of electronics. Lovely. Yay for originality.







Since then, I have found that my topics (sans discussing MY OWN BOOKS) have been repeated. Other bloggers (even ones fairly close to me) have discussed music as an influence on writing, grammar, and everything in between.





Seriously?







Seriously.






Not good.







This begs the question: am I that lacking in originality that I am recycling other writers' work and I don't even realize it? OR, does it mean that there is so little to write about writing that redundancy is inevitable?



Say it isn't so!









What's worse is that I recently read an article discussing the fact that blogs need to have one main focus, or you loose readers. Thus saying, "Duh, L! You need to ONLY write about writing!"




Great. I'm redundant, boring AND no one wants to read my blog! LOL. As a writer, being boxed in like that is the worst thing ever. Writers love to write, regardless of topic/subject matter.



So, what do I do? Do I just stick to writing? How many of you want to read a blog on the joys of a semi-colon?




Do I just stick to my random political rants? How many blogs can one write about how they don't appreciate being stared at?



What do I do?






Honestly, I don't know. I'm a writer and I love to write. I like to write about writing, politics, life - you name it! So, I think that y'all will just have to deal with my blog jumping off writing topics from time to time. We're all adults here. You can handle it! ;)





As for the repitition in lit blogs, I don't know. Truth be told, I'm really quite disturbed by this fact. There is way too much for us to be discussing. If we all say the same thing, we send a message to our readers that literature is BORING.



It's not. It's anything BUT!









So with a heavy sigh, I shall go on blogging about things of a literary nature as well. I pray that when we blog about the same issues, that each writer puts their own spin/opinion on it. That will make each blog unique, and show people that there is far more to writing than just the same old-same old.



Happy reading!

Monday Morning News, NOT Blues!

Good morning, good morning! Yes, I am singing in my blog. Strange? Perhaps. But this rather low-key, bordering on comatose 'Rican had an incredible weekend and I am actually PERKY! LOL.





So, here's what we got for the news today:

1) It's read an e-book week! That's right, y'all! Read an e-book week! And to celebrate, my phenomenal publisher has some great deals on Smashwords on MANY of the great VHP titles. We LOVE Smashwords. They've been great to us. They support the authors - they don't promote piracy. It's fantabulous! :)



“We’re pleased to sponsor Read an E-Book Week for the second year,” said Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords. “Working in collaboration with Read an E-Book Week and other participating retailers and publishers, the initiative will introduce tens of thousands of new readers and authors to the joys of ebooks.”



So, because it's read an e-book week, VHP has a GREAT special - 25% off our already and reguarly low prices during Read an E-book Week! :) How freakin' great is that?!



Wanna read Loving Her and Unbreakable Hostage without breaking the bank? Here's your chance! Hurry, because this is for a very limited time!



When you purchase Loving Her and Unbreakable Hostage, put in the code below to get your discount:

DISCOUNT CODE: RAE25









Happy reading!! :)



Moving on...


2) Yours truly made the top 10 in a little competition for the Turnaround Media Review. I have won 12 months of FREE advertising to book stores, libraries, and the like. So keep your eyeballs peeled for ads for Unbreakable Hostage! ;)





3) Imperfect will be coming out in July! Woo hoo! I am SO excited! My publisher gave me some GREAT news to go along with it, but I am currently not at liberty to divulge such greatness! I will, however, display the cover art because I'm nerdy fabulous like that! ;) There is also a new fan page for Imperfect, too. You'll wanna check that baby out as well! :)






Last, and certainly NOT least of all, I will be in Suffern, NY on Saturday, April 24th at 2 pm at Raider Book Store!



Come meet me! Get your copies of Loving Her and Unbreakable Hostage autographed by yours truly! Hear a midget Puerto Rican woman read to you! It's like nothing you've ever experienced before! ;)




So there is much joy in the air today! I'm happy, and I hope you're happy too. Happy reading and happy Monday to you all! :)

Author Spotlight: Smoky Trudeau

Good morning, everyone! Today's Author Spotlight is the incomparable Smoky Trudeau!





Welcome, Smoky! And please help yourself to all the virtual cookies, coffee or tea you like! As I told Chelle, I am quite inept in the kitchen, so they're store bought, but I was able to boil the water for the coffee and tea without burning the house down! :)






First off, I think it's important that our readers know a little about your work. You're a multi-published author. You write and non-fiction alike. You also have an anthology that was released recently. As a writer, which do you find to be more enjoyable: fiction, non-fiction or something like Observation of an Earth Mage, which is a compilation of poems and essays?



My writing really is all over the board, isn’t it? I think that’s because I started my writing career as a freelance features writer. I wrote about everything from baton-twirling champions to endangered ecosystems to turbine engines. I had to be versatile to be good at my job, and that versatility has carried over into my books.


If you’d asked me this question a year ago, I would have said unquestionably, fiction writing is my first love. I not only get emotionally involved with my characters—they become like family to me—I am emotionally involved in my settings.


The setting of Redeeming Grace is Windy Hill Orchard on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. That was the name of my beloved aunt and uncle’s peach orchard when I was a child, so the setting is a real place (although the orchard is long gone).


The setting of The Cabin is the mountains and Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where my roots run deep through my father’s side of the family.



But Observations of an Earth Mage is me truly writing from my soul. My connection with our Mother Earth is profound and spiritual, and I’m told that really comes through in the book. I’ve had readers write me emails or contact me through Xanga or Facebook and tell me I’ve inspired them to go camping, or take a hike, or take up gardening. I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment knowing I’ve helped others get attuned to the wonders of nature.




Speaking of Observations of an Earth Mage, could you tell us more about it? I'm very curious as to what inspired you to create this incredible anthology. Did you write these poems and essays with the intention of creating this book, or are these writings from over time that you put together to create Observations of an Earth Mage?




They are both. I had my first earth mage experience when I was a three-year-old child, while sitting in an apple tree in my family’s back yard. (I define earth mage not as one who does magic—I’ll leave that job to Mother Nature—but rather as one who sees the natural world as a magical place.) I had an epiphany about my place in the natural world, that I was no better than the bees and the birds and the bears, I wasn’t above the snakes and the snails and the swallows. I am Nature; Nature is me.



So, I’ve been writing about my experiences in the natural world all my career, and had essays and poems published in a variety of magazines and newspapers. After floundering around for a year or so on my Xanga blog, searching for what the right niche was for me, I took a camping trip to Yosemite and wrote about it. My readers responded with such enthusiasm I started blogging regularly on my meanderings. My publisher took note, and invited me to put together a book about my experiences. She didn’t have to ask me twice! After that, my husband and I took to the trails at least a couple of times a week to gather more story material, and volume one of Observations of an Earth Mage was born.





Another passion of yours is teaching writing. You have Front-Word, Back-word, Insight Out,


Left Brained, Write Brained,



you also have “Write Well with Smoky Trudeau” as well as regular blog talk radio shows where you give listeners information on how to improve their writing skills. Did you always have a passion for teaching and assisting other writers?




Yes! I taught writing and creativity workshops at Parkland Community College in Champaign, Illinois, for many years before moving to Southern California, and was a frequent keynote speaker at writing conferences throughout the Midwest. I loved teaching. I get a profound satisfaction of watching aspiring writers grow, and when I find out a former student of mine has published something, I feel like a grandauthor (like a grandparent, only of writing, not kids!). One of my students, Robert Hays, has published three books since taking my class, all from Vanilla Heart Publishing. I’m very, very proud of him!




I personally LOVE your “Write Well with Smoky Trudeau” exercises. You really push people to be creative and to push themselves as writers. What do you think is the most important thing for aspiring writers to learn or remember?




To have fun with it. Yes, writing is hard work, but if you take it—and yourself—too seriously, you’ll end up frustrated and your writing will be weak. Writing is supposed to be fun! That’s why a lot of my writing exercises involve silliness and cartoon characters. They seem fun, non-threatening, so how hard can they be? Yet even the silliest of exercises get the writer to stretch their creative imagination, and that’s what writing exercises are all about.



Another aspect of your writing that I highly admire is your range of storylines. Not only do you write in various genres, but you also explore different eras and lifestyles. There is such diversity in your writing. Is there anything in particular that inspires you to learn about these different time periods?




Well, Redeeming Grace was supposed to be a love story. My aunt and uncle were nineteen and forty when they met and married back in the 1920s, and were the most devoted couple I have ever known. I inherited their love letters, and I set out to write about that. But the book took on a life of its own, which as you know, manuscripts often do, and the story doesn’t bear the foggiest resemblance to their story. The Cabin, on the other hand, stemmed from an incident in my own family’s history. My triple-great Granddaddy Benjamin’s cabin, built in the late 1700s, still stands in Virginia. Benjamin had fourteen children. The youngest, Elizabeth, had a child out of wedlock in the 1860s, then disappeared completely from our family tree. No one has the foggiest idea what happened to her. The Cabin is this fiction writer’s wild fantasy of what may have become of her ancestor.



As an open history nerd, I absolutely LOVE the fact that you have Redeeming Grace, which occurs in the late 1920s, and The Cabin, which throws James-Cyrus Hoffmann, your main character, into the era of the Civil War. What was the most fun or interesting part of writing historical fiction?



Doing the research. For Redeeming Grace I had to research what sort of lingerie women wore in the 1920s, and that was quite an education! Really fun. Because The Cabin is a time travel novel, I had to research when a lot of things we take for granted were created, like Coca-Cola, indoor plumbing, and refrigerators. That was fun. I love trivia, and doing this sort of research for a book is a trivia-lover’s Nirvana.



As you know, I love giving authors the opportunity to talk about their books! :) Would you mind sharing the synopses or premises of each of your books as well as some quotes?



Here’s the synopsis for Redeeming Grace:




The tragic deaths of her mother and two younger siblings have left Grace Harmon responsible for raising her sister Miriam and protecting her from their abusive father, Luther, a zealot preacher with a penchant for speaking in Biblical verse who is on a downward spiral toward insanity.

Otto Singer charms Grace with his gentle courtship and devotion to his brother, Henry. But after their marriage, Otto is unable to share with Grace the terrible secret he has kept more than twenty years. Otto believes he is responsible for a tragic accident that claimed the life of a young woman and left Henry severely brain damaged.

Luther's insane ravings and increasingly violent behavior force Grace to question and reassess the patriarchal religious beliefs of her childhood. Then tragedy strikes just when Otto's secret is uncovered, unleashing demons that threaten to destroy the entire family. Can Grace find the strength to save them, and in the process find her own redemption? Redeeming Grace is set on Maryland's eastern shore in the late 1920's. The book will appeal to lovers of literary fiction who enjoy theological debate and who understand happy endings, in novels as in life, sometimes come at a heavy price.





And for The Cabin:




James-Cyrus Hoffmann has just inherited his grandfather’s farm, and with it a mysterious cabin deep in the woods on Hoffmann mountain; a cabin he has dreamed about since childhood. When James-Cyrus enters the cabin, he is vaulted back through time to the Civil War era, where he meets Elizabeth, the brave young woman who lives in the cabin, and Malachi, a runaway slave. James-Cyrus realizes his dreams of the cabin were visions of the past, and that Elizabeth is his great-great aunt—a woman who vanished without a trace from the family tree. He also learns of his ancestors’ pivotal role in the lives of dozens of runaway slaves who were offered a safe haven at the cabin, a station on the underground railroad.
Cora Spellmacher, James-Cyrus’s elderly friend and neighbor, begins to unravel the secret of how he is able to make his fantastic leaps back and forth through time. In doing so, Cora begins to hope a tragic wrong from her own past can be righted, and that she can regain something precious that was lost to her many years earlier.
The dreams continue, and James-Cyrus realizes Elizabeth and Malachi are in terrible danger. With Cora’s help, James-Cyrus undertakes a daring plan of rescue that promises to rewrite his family history and change all of their lives forever.





I've often been asked how much of myself is in my characters or vice versa. Since you use familial locations and stories, how much of yourself do you give to your characters/how much of a personal reflection are they of you?



I haven't intentionally modeled any of my characters after myself, and hadn't even thought about it until you asked. But, thinking about it, James-Cyrus in The Cabin does have a lot of my personality traits. He loves the wild animals that inhabit Hoffmann Mountain, and is nonplussed when he ticks off a mother bear by inadvertently getting too close to her cubs (actually, it was the cubs that wandered too close to James-Cyrus!). He handled that encounter well; I've had a lot of close encounters with black bears, so I knew how to write that scene based on my own experiences. James-Cyrus is also very curious and has a strong sense of what I call wonderlust--that constant urge to answer the question, 'I wonder what's over there/up that mountain/under that rock/etc." That's me to a T. During the book, he begins to really connect with the magic of Nature. He learns to be an earth mage, although that's not the central plot of the story. That's really interesting and a good question, Lauren. I hadn't realized how much of myself I'd put in James-Cyrus.





Thank you so much for joining us today, Smoky! It was a real pleasure having you here! :)




Smoky is the author of two novels, Redeeming Grace and The Cabin; two books for writers, Front-Word, Back-Word, Insight Out: Lessons on Writing the Novel Lurking Inside You From Start to Finish and Left Brained, Write Brained: 366 Writing Prompts and Exercises. Her new photo/essay collection, Observations of an Earth Mage, is now available as well.

She is working on her third novel, The Storyteller's Bracelet.


Visit Smoky at www.smokytrudeau.com.

Oh, so you're the girl from Vegas who...

My reputation preceeds me, and not in a way I would like.




Let me take you back to Friday night. It had been a long week for both of us, and the Mrs. and I decided to blow off some steam. We ate at a beautiful log cabin restaurant and then we went over to a small local bar. I'm not one for the bar scene, but it was karoke night, and some of her co-workers and friends would be there, so we went to meet up with them. It was a typical small bar.






While we were there, she saw a man she had gone to school with. He was busy talking to other folks, so I figured it would just be a "sighting."


He actually came over a little while later. He greeted and hugged her, and he even hugged me as we were introduced.


This is where it gets good. As I was being introduced, she said, "You've probably heard about her." To which he said, "yeah."





Yeah.



Yeah?



Yeah!



Lovely. Just freakin' lovely. We often joke about how I need to get a tee-shirt that says, "I'm the girl from Vegas who..." The sad part is, that's how I'm known around here.




This is why I prefer larger metropolises. There's anonymity. You don't have a label before you have a name.


I've already had some rather "interesting" welcomes to the area, most of which were not warm. They don't know a thing about me. They just know one tiny piece to a VERY large puzzle and they assume based on that one tiny piece.




Here's the thing about me: I pride myself on my diversity. I love the fact that I am multifaceted. I also LOATHE prejudice, discrimination, ignorance and assumptions. I was a co-president of my high school's anti-bias committee. Yeah, I hate hate that much.




So, this man, not meaning to, REALLY got under my skin. It's not his fault that the locals are talking. It's not his fault that I am the new face around town. He has no control over what he hears. It's local gossip. But it bothers me to no end.




Now mind you, he was very polite and cordial. We had a very pleasant conversation, so I do not hold him at fault in any way. I'm just bothered by the fact that people are saying and assuming things about me when they may not even know my name. Ugh.




So here it is folks: the run-down on yours truly.



Yes, I came here from Vegas, but that is not where I am originally from.




Yes we met out there, but I did not "corrupt" her as so many of you like to think.




I am a writer, not a free-loader.





No, I am not here just to make a political statement (I was seriously asked if that was my only purpose to moving to this locale. Amazing what people assume, isn't it?).





No, I am not the anti-Christ.


I am just a woman trying to live her own life.







There is tremendous depth to me, far more than you may ever know.







Before you start talking about me like I'm a thing (say a hurricane or tornado), why don't you ask my name first.


It's Lauren, by the way.

News and Book Club Discussion Day! :)

Good morning, all! I don't know about you, but I'm having trouble getting started this Monday morning. ;) We'll take it easy today. :)






First, I want to remind all of you that there is still time for the Grand Prize drawing (no pun intended, I promise! LOL).


Here's the low-down:

The GRAND PRIZE contest goes until Friday, 3/5! Send in your submissions! :)
For your own PERSONALLY autographed copy of Unbreakable Hostage, go check out the coloring page of the cover at the VHP Yahoo Group - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VHP_Readers_Club/

Go to the VHP Time Out Coloring Pages Folder, find the Unbreakable Hostage cover and have at it! :) Send in as many submissionas as you want! :) The only rule is that NO PHOTOSHOPPED IMAGES WILL BE ALLOWED! Scan or up-load your pictures and e-mail them to me at leharvey77@gmail.com by Friday, March 5.

ALL ENTRIES WILL BE FEATURED ON LEHARVEY.COM, FACEBOOK AND MYSPACE! :)

IF you are unable to access the Yahoo group for any reason, please do not hesitate to e-mail me! I'll be more than happy to e-mail you a copy of the picture, provided you submit to me in time, ok?








Moving on, this Thursday, I am uber excited to announce that the one and only Smoky Trudeau will be here in my Author Spotlight. She's a fellow VHP author, a lecturer, an educator, and a real sweetheart! I really think you'll enjoy our talk, so please stop by for that! :)






I, myself, am doing a small blog tour here and there. I will keep you all posted as to my various on-line ventures. As well, I am beginning to book appearances and signing events. I'll keep you all posted on these events. Also, if you know of a really good local event, let me know! I'd love to participate in something YOU believe in and/or support. I think we're gonna have a great season this year & I'm looking forward to meeting you all! :)






I think that's it for news. Since today is the first of the month, we're doing our good old On-line Book Club Discussion. Remember that we are currently working on Loving Her. Once we finish the stories in Loving Her, we'll move on to Unbreakable Hostage.





Ok, today we'll be discussing Donna's story in Loving Her.






To start off, I have to say that Donna is one of my favorite characters. What I like about her is her vulnerability and insecurity. She's not just a hardened Philly cop. She's a real woman with real emotions. I didn't plan for her to be that way, it just kind of happened. What do you think about her, her work and her personality? Does it work for you? Do you find her to be a relatable character? Why or why not?





What is Donna's relationship with John & Beth like?







What is Donna's role in the group? Is she happy with her "place" in the group? Use examples if you can. :)







Which of the gals is closest to Donna?






Is Donna to blame for what happened to John? Why or why not?





How did you feel about the end to Donna's story? Did you think it was fitting? Did you like it or despise it? Why?





Ok, that's more than enough for a sluggish Monday morning. :) Enjoy! I can't wait to read everyone's answers! :)


Happy reading!!!! :)