Winner

And the winner of the necklace is: (drum roll please) Opal Campbell. Hope you enjoy it. I personally love it!

Long overdo contest




Lisa Aaron of Jeweled Ambrosia hand-crafted a specially designed necklace for my book Upon Eagle's Light. All the jewels match the book cover with a beautiful eagle's wing at the center point. I love it and wish I could enter myself and keep it, but that would defeat the purpose of a honest contest so I'll just have to have her make another similiar, though not exact.
Anyway, this contest is fairly simple. All you have to do is sign up for my newsletter and let me know that you did so by leaving a comment. You can either click on the newsletter sign up box below or email me privately at cloverautrey@gmail.com with your email or leave your email in the comments. However you'd like. The contest will end on Oct. 20th.

Wendy Watson



I've interviewed another NTRWA pal for the Examiner. Wendy Watson. She is great. She gave a workshop for us once called "writing naked" which was very fun and extremely informative, but then she is a professor by day so she should be able to keep a bunch of students, fellow writers in this case, engaged.




Wendy's book Ice Scream, You Scream (love the title--though it makes me hungry) is out this week.




I SCREAM, YOU SCREAM is the first in a series of cozy mysteries featuring
Tallulah Jones, proprietor of Remember the A-la-mode, who solves murders in
between scooping sundaes. In I SCREAM, YOU SCREAM, Tally's got a
struggling business, a crumbling historic house, a two-timing ex, and a big ol'
mountain of debt. She's forced to swallow her pride and cater dessert for
a company picnic thrown by her ex Wayne and his new girlfriend Brittanie.
What's more, Tally's high school beau, Finn Harper, returns to town just in time
to witness Tally's disgrace. Then Brittanie drops dead, and everyone in
Dalliance, Texas, starts placing bets on whether Tally or Wayne killed
her. It's up to Tally to find the killer before she gets fitted for an
orange jumpsuit.



What is something most people don't know about you?



I'm an enormous geek. In high school, I hit the nerd trifecta: Quiz Bowl
team, competitive computer programming, and math summer camp. I'm
not ashamed of that, mind you, but given that I'm now in a more right-brained
field, my inner mathlete surprises some people.



Wendy Watson's next book in the series, SCOOP TO KILL, is due out next July (National Ice Cream Month!).I SCREAM, YOU SCREAM Launch Party, Denton Barnes & Noble - October 20, 7:30 p.m.Death By Decadence: A Chocolate Tasting and Book Signing (with Misa Ramirez), The Book Carriage in Roanoke - October 23


"Murder By Numbers: Plotting the Mystery Novel," (part of Mansfield Writes!), Mansfield Public Library - November 6, 7-9 p.m.

My pal Mary Malcolm

Mary is one of my NTRWA chapter mates and she is so sweet and funny. She's just one of those people that everyone likes to be around because she makes them feel great. Anyway she was generous enough to let me do an interview with her for my Examiner column, which I always like to reprint here.

Diner Girl has only been out a few short weeks yet it is already your publishers #1 Bestseller. How does that make you feel?

I don’t think back flips translate on paper very well, but that’s how I feel. I feel like a back flip. *grin* No, truly I am surprised/ecstatic/thrilled/terrified and have wet myself at least twice. Don’t judge me.


Tell us a little about Diner Girl.

Diner Girl is such a sweet little story. You can absolutely read the back cover blurb anywhere, so instead I’ll tell you about the behind the scenes story. I took a creative writing class with Von Jocks and wanted to write a romance novel. I’d been thinking about a situation for weeks, the idea of having to whether out a storm with a total stranger and how that would go. So, my thought was, what if this stranger turns out to be your perfect kindred soul but you’re so busy living your life that you don’t see it right away? That’s what Diner Girl was born from.

Jennifer is this busy-living-her-life waitress who wants to succeed on her own terms. Mark has more resources than he knows what to do with, yet can’t see his own passion past his believed obligations. When they come together, it is obvious to the reader pretty much from the beginning that these two were meant to be together, but they have to make it past their own pain, and reset their priorities before either can realize they are meant to fall in love. I love this concept. I think a lot of people can relate to that. Perhaps they’d met their perfect kindred soul but were so busy living their lives they forgot to “live” in their lives. I want Diner Girl to reflect the idea that life is short and you should embrace love when you find it. That’s my only goal for this book.

What's something most people don't know about you?

I can write backwards, in cursive, readably. I Love that about me. *grin*

Anything else you'd like to talk about?

Let’s talk about ducks. No, kidding. Mostly, I want to encourage people to follow their passions. When I started that creative writing class, I’d actually been on track to go to medical school. Math and science are easy for me and I’m naturally curious, so I had always wanted to be a doctor. Thing was, when I started writing, I found it consumed me. If there is something in your life that you Love, something that you would spend every spare moment doing if you could, then do it. Don’t be responsible. Forget about what others think or getting that bigger television or that cup-o’-java once a day. Follow your passion and believe that your love for it will make others love it, too.

Where can readers find you?

Well, of course my website. I’ll be attending the North Texas Two Step conference on November 6th and 7th. Um....Every third Saturday of the month, you’ll find me curled up with thirty of my closest friends at La Hacienda Ranch in Colleyville for the NTRWA meeting. When work permits, I attend the DFW Writers Workshop in Euless on Wednesday nights at 7:00 PM. Oh! I love this little coffee shop in Burleson, called J.J. Mocha’s. If anyone wants to e-mail me at: marymalcolm@yahoo.com, I’d love to set up a time when I’m not working to meet you there for a cup of coffee, or tea, and definitely a cup of their soup or a cinnamon roll. Mmm, love that place. Also, I practically Live at Central Market in Fort Worth. Truly. It is my Mecca and where I go to breathe. If you ever are in the area and want to breathe with me, I’d Love to meet you there!
Thank you, Mary, you are such a sweetie!

Saoirse Redgrave: A Tale of Werewolves


Saoirse Redgrave’s cell phone novel 13 to Life: A Werewolf’s Tale was picked up by St. Martin’s Press in a 3 book deal after taking first place in the 2008 Textnovel contest.

Teenage love, loss and--oh, yeah--Werewolves. Monsters are everywhere and what if the most frightening isn't a werewolf at all? Jessica's life seemed tragic enough since the loss of her mother, but meeting Pietr turns her world upside down again. The newest member of Junction High, Pietr has secrets to hide--secrets including dramatic changes he is undergoing that will surely end his life early.

Saoirse, you wrote 13 to Life in 5 weeks. Did you do several installments per day? How long did this novel end up being? I've heard the norm for Japanese cell phone novels are around 6000 characters. For St. Martin's to pick it up I imagine it would have to be longer. Beside any expected revisions and edits, did you have to change alot from text novel to traditional novel?

Because I was experimenting with the medium, I thought a lot about how I wanted to present things. I thought about limited time, schedules and readibility. I did a lot of odd jobs back in college (factory stuff and tour guiding mainly) and I thought about the schedules we kept on the line. Break time was freakishly short. So I decided to post 2 (occasionally 3-4 as we approached the contest's end) segments every day. One before work and one sometime in the afternoon. It kept me on the site's main page because I was updating relatively frequently. [I wanted bite-size chapters with a hook in the beginning and a cliffhanger at the end to keep it fresh in readers' minds. And I wanted readers to feel they'd contributed. I built a blog about the characters, added playlists, brief bios about the primaries, snippets of info about werewolves and the paranormal. And I posted a number of polls related directly to the action. The trick was posting the polls, getting the answers and then writing according to public opinion (and almost immediately). It kept me on my toes. The polls helped determine what both Derek and Pietr looked like, who the werewolves were, how Pietr's family wound up, who Jess went to Homecoming with and what the first dance was she and Pietr danced together to. It was fun!

The main things that changed in 13 to Life from the abbreviated TN version and what will release next year from SMP relate to subplots, description (I had more room to build the world and describe my characters), some important twists and a totally--totally--different ending that lines things up for book 2. Essentially I went from 50 pages to 350 pages--79,000 words, but the heart of the novel remained the same.

More with Saoirse Redgrave...

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