Aftermath

Time again for Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday!

Continuing with my YA coming-of-age mystery, Shades of Blue, (You can catch up on the earlier excerpts here.) this scene takes place immediately following last week's snippet when Sam rescues JoJo from Chip Wiley and she realizes just before she passes out that it was a trap to get Sam out there so Chip and his two friends could gang up on him. Warning: creative punctuation used!

When I opened my eyes again, Sam was smoothing the hair away from my face and saying my name over and over in a tear-choked voice.

“Don’t cry, Sam, I’m okay.”

He cried harder.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner, JoJo.”

When he raised his head to look at me, I saw his bloody nose and cut lip and started to cry too, then we hugged each other until our tears slowed and he took out his handkerchief to wipe my face with it.

“JoJo, did he . . .” he started, then he stopped and looked at me with fearful eyes, but I was too ashamed to meet his gaze.

“No, he just put his filthy hands on me and made me . . . touch him,” I said, scrubbing my palms on my jeans and staring at them in disgust. “I don’t think they’ll ever feel clean again, and neither will I.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Yes I did, I led you right into their trap.”

Come back next week to see what they plan to do about it. Or you could always go buy your own copy of Shades of Blue here. ;-) And please check out the other WWW and SS bloggers. Something for everyone among these talented writers!

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
Like my Facebook Fan Page here

I Told You This Wasn't No Sweet Valley High

Time again for Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday!

Continuing with my YA coming-of-age mystery, Shades of Blue. (You can catch up on the earlier excerpts here.) Last week's snippet ended with JoJo in peril because she foolishly went into the woods with Chip Wiley on the way home from school. He doesn't rape her, but he touches her inappropriately and makes her touch him as well. As bad as that is for JoJo, she's almost more hurt by being overpowered and paralyzed with fear, because it completely shatters the tough image she's always had of herself. This snippet takes place after JoJo finally manages to scream, although they're in the middle of the woods where nobody will hear her. Or so they think.

(Image License: Creative Commons)

When I stopped screaming, Chip was laughing in my ear.

"Next time we'll—"

He broke off and let go of me abruptly. When I opened my eyes to see why, he was on the ground with Sam on top of him. My knees buckled and I slid to a sitting position against the side of the tree house as I watched Sam’s fist hitting Chip in the face over and over.

That was when I saw the bruises on Sam’s back through the thin material of his sweat-soaked T-shirt. They registered in my brain but were quickly overshadowed by fresh terror when Freddy and Danny rushed out of the tree house and grabbed Sam. I watched them pull him off Chip and realized the three of them had planned this to get Sam out here so they could gang up on him.

Then everything began to go gray.

Tune in next week to see if those new muscles of Sam's came in handy. Or you could always go buy your own copy of Shades of Blue here. ;-) And please check out the other WWW and SS bloggers. Something for everyone among these talented writers!

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
Like my Facebook Fan Page here

Innocence Lost

Time again for Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday!

I'm continuing with my YA coming-of-age mystery, Shades of Blue. (You can catch up on the earlier excerpts here.) Last week's snippet showed JoJo's mistake of cutting through the woods on her way home from school with obnoxious Chip Wiley. He tells her he knows where there's a treehouse that fell out of the tree, and her innocent curiosity gets the best of her. She follows him to a spot off the path that he marked with a piece of red string, and she's enchanted when she sees the gingerbread-like treehouse in the middle of a huge hydrangea bush, as if it had been built there. She wants to go inside and investigate, but Chip says he wants to tell her something first.

I used creative punctuation again, but all this was necessary for the scene.

“You wanna know what Sam said after he sucker-punched me at the creek that day?”

“Not really,” I said, realizing that I didn’t like the way he was looking at me and that my earlier uneasiness had returned.

“He said for me to keep my hands off his stuff from now on.”

“You’re lying, Sam wouldn’t say that.”

“I bet you thought he’d never go for a girl like Melissa either, but it just proves what a big fake he is, always acting like he’s so perfect and sucking up to the teachers, acting all smart and stuff.”

“Stop it, I don’t want to talk about Sam with you.”

“Fine, I don’t wanna talk about him either,” he said, his hands tightening on my shoulders as he took a step closer to me. "In fact, I don’t wanna talk at all.”

"Let me go, Chip," I said, really starting to get scared. I backed away from him, but he trapped me against the treehouse.

“I sure did like the way you looked in that wet T-shirt, JoJo.”

Nope, this can't end well. Tune in next week to see what happens. Or you could always go buy your own copy of Shades of Blue here. ;-) And please check out the other WWW and SS bloggers. Something for everyone among these talented writers!

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
Like my Facebook Fan Page here

Mental Toughness

My husband is a coach. No, let me correct that: my husband is a Coach Extraordinaire, especially when it comes to softball. Although my own athletic ability starts and ends with bowling, I have always loved watching sports. I got my daddy to explain football to me when I was 13 years old. Okay, sure. It was mainly because the Minnesota Vikings were in the Super Bowl that year and I had a crush on Fran Tarkenton, but I also wanted to know what I was watching him do instead of just admiring the way all the players looked in their football pants. (Holla, Lee Ann Ward!)

Anyway, I said all that to make the point that I understand sports and coaching and the dynamics of being a successful athlete even though I’m not one myself. One of the main things my husband stresses to his players is their need to develop mental toughness. And trust me, none of his players will last on his team if they can’t become mentally tough.

But it occurred to me recently that the same principles of mental toughness apply to writers, so I wanted to pass on my brilliance to the blogosphere.

These are the key psychological characteristics associated with mentally tough elite athletes.

Self-Belief:
~ Have an unshakable belief in your ability to achieve competition goals
~ Have unique qualities that make you better than your opponents

Motivation:
~ Have an insatiable desire and internalized motivation to succeed. (You’ve really got to want it!)
~ Be able to bounce back from performance setbacks with increased determination to succeed

Focus:
~ Remain fully focused on the task at hand in the face of competition-specific distractions
~ Don’t be adversely affected by others’ performance or your own internal distractions, such as worry or negative mind chatter

Composure/Handling Pressure:
~ Be able to regain psychological control following unexpected events or distractions
~ Thrive on the pressure of competition
~ Accept that anxiety is inevitable in competition and know you can cope with it

And the MAIN COMPONENT of mental toughness is learning to condition your mind to think confidently and overcome frustration/self-critical negativity.

Okay, so how do these things apply to writing?

Self-Belief:
~ If you don’t believe in your writing ability and love what you write, how can you expect anyone else to believe in it or want to read it?

~ Develop a unique voice that sets your writing apart from any other writer, so much so that when people read unattributed excerpts, they will immediately recognize your work.

Motivation:
~ Writing needs to be as much a part of who you are as your eye color or your sense of humor. It needs to be something inside you that HAS to come out regardless of whether you want it to or not. Everyone doesn’t have the luxury of being able to write full time, but when you’re not able to write, you should be thinking about what to write the next time you get the chance.

~ Know WHY you write. Is it for your own fulfillment, because you want to be famous, or (gasp!) because you want to make money? Or are you like me and write because you want the world to meet your characters? Whatever it is, let that be your driving force.

~ Unless your motivation is writing only for yourself, remember that writing is HARD WORK, and you must take it seriously if you want to succeed. Don’t expect anyone to do your homework for you and tell you what you need to do to get published. As my nephew Aaron used to say, “It’s Googlable.”

Focus:
~ Again, not everyone has the luxury of writing full time or having their own private writing space. Most of us have to write around family life, some more than others. I wrote my first two books between the hours of 10:00 pm and 2:00 am, after my kids and husband went to bed. But whenever and wherever you have to write, immerse yourself in the world you create for your characters.

~ As Stephen King says: “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the tools to write.” Make time to read your favorite authors’ new books and other books in the same genre as yours, but don’t be dismayed by their talent. Even when I was an adolescent, there were some books I read and thought, “I can do better than this.” Then there were those I read and thought, “I’ll never be able to write this well.” The more I write, fewer and fewer books fall into the latter category, but I don’t ever expect it to be empty. I will never stop feeling that I can still improve.

Composure/Handling Pressure:
~ You CANNOT let rejections stop you or lessen your belief in yourself. If your self esteem is based on other people’s opinions, you will never make it as a writer. If you somehow manage to survive the submission process, you’ll crash and burn when you read your first negative review (everybody gets them!) and you’ll end up a suicidal, drug-addicted alcoholic. I guess that could be good if you’ve always dreamed of being famous posthumously, but that’s not for me. From what I’ve heard, suicide is frowned on in the Afterlife Admissions Office, and I definitely don’t want Flo on my case! (You’ll understand this if you read my novel After Me.)

~ Yeah, I know there are millions of books out there and the competition is harder than ever. But if you don’t think there is something about your book that makes it different and worthy of the time and money you want readers to spend on it, DON’T WRITE IT. There’s enough crap out there already. Sorry if that’s harsh, but I get tired of people flooding the market with mediocrity that even the authors themselves don’t want to read. I read my own books over and over because I love the characters and the stories. I wouldn’t have published them if I didn’t.

~ Does this mean I don’t get nervous when I have to pitch my books at conferences or through query letters? Of course not. I’m petrified, but I do it because I believe in my books and want as many people as possible to read them. I had to develop a tough skin early on in my writing career. That doesn’t mean I don’t still get mad or cry if I get a rejection from an agent or editor and they criticize something specific about my precious baby, but I do it in private (or on my BFF’s shoulder) and then get over it. And when I go back and look objectively at what they said, I find some way to put it to use and make my baby shine even brighter for the next submission.

So you can see that the principles of mental toughness are basically the same for athletes and writers, but I’ll summarize to remove all ambiguity:

NO WHINERS ALLOWED. SUCK IT UP AND GET BACK IN THE GAME. AND NEVER, EVER GIVE UP!

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
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All Together Now: "Don't do it, JoJo!"

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday!

Continuing with my YA coming-of-age mystery, Shades of Blue. (You can catch up on the earlier excerpts here.) Kudos to everyone who picked up on the early foreshadowing in last week's snippet. I don't think there will be any doubt after this week that things are about to get dark. This scene picks up right after JoJo agrees to walk home from school with Chip Wiley because Sam makes her mad.

Chip was nice enough for the two blocks from the school to the Minit Mart, but when we got to the beginning of the trail through the woods that Sam and I always took, I felt the first twinges of unease tickling my spine. Something told me I shouldn’t go into the woods with Chip, but when he said he’d race me to where the path split leading to the creek, I was still too much of a tomboy to resist his challenge, so I ignored the warning voice in my head and took off running.

I barely beat him to the split, and it wasn’t really fair since he was carrying two backpacks. He dropped our bags and bent over with his hands on his knees.

“Not bad for a girl,” he said between breaths, “even if you did have to cheat back there at the big log.”

“That wasn’t cheating, it was an accident, and you’re the one who bought me the ICEE, so it’s your fault it sloshed on you.”

“Yeah, yeah." He crumpled his ICEE cup and threw it at me. "Hey, you wanna see something cool? I know where there's a treehouse that fell out of the tree."

Alas, I don't think she'll listen to us. Tune in next week to see how big of a mistake JoJo makes. Or you could always go buy your own copy of Shades of Blue here. ;-) And please check out the other WWW and SS bloggers. Something for everyone among these talented writers!

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
Like my Facebook Fan Page here

Redhead Tip: Don't Make Decisions When You're Mad

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday!

Continuing with my YA coming-of-age mystery, Shades of Blue. (You can catch up on the earlier excerpts here.) Last week we left Sam and JoJo in the midst of some unfolding drama at lunchtime. When JoJo tries to shoulder her way past Chip Wiley while holding her lunch tray, she ends up sitting on his lap—quite the sensation in a middle school cafeteria as you might imagine. Sam is not amused (even though he was currently sitting between a couple of Touchdown Twins) but he leaves without saying anything to JoJo. This next scene takes place as JoJo stops at the gym door as she's leaving to walk home and sees Sam lifting weights with the other boys who are trying out for football. While she's wondering where Sam got those new muscles he's using, Chip Wiley comes up behind her and says he wants to walk her home since she and Sam "are quits and all."

“Me and Sam were never anything to call quits except friends, and I sure don’t need you for a replacement.”

“Oh, I think you do,” he said, taking my book bag. “Girls shouldn’t be walking home alone through the woods—no telling what might happen to them.”

I eyed him suspiciously and said, “Why are you being nice all of a sudden after making my life miserable for the last eight years?”

“Maybe I been noticing things about you I never noticed before,” he said with shrug.

“More likely you just want to make Sam mad.”

He sneered in Sam’s direction and said, “I don’t give a damn what he thinks about it.”

I looked across the gym at Sam one last time just as he rose from the bench and could see him flush when he saw me with Chip, then he just turned his back. Instantaneous anger made up my mind for me.

“Come on, Chip, let's go.”

I had to utilize a little creative punctuation to keep this one from going over ten sentences, but all of it was needed to set up the snippet coming up next Sunday. Or you could always go buy your own copy of Shades of Blue here. ;-) And please check out the other WWW and SS bloggers. Something for everyone among these talented writers!

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
Like my Facebook Fan Page here

The Young and the Hormonal Revisited

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday!

Since this week was so crazy, I'm repurposing a photo and title I used last year when I was sharing snippets of Shades of Blue while it was still a WIP. This will be one of the last snippets before things get very real and you'll see that this book definitely ain't no Sweet Valley High.

The following Monday, Sam and I didn’t talk at all in the car while Daddy drove us to school, and Sam walked away without saying a word when we got there. I reminded myself of my decision to give him some time and resisted the urge to call him a rude butthead. Remarkable restraint, in my opinion.

We ignored each other all morning, but when I saw him at lunch, sitting at a different table from our regular one, I decided his time was up and he was gonna talk to me whether he wanted to or not. I started toward him but stopped after three steps because Melissa Caton and Cindy Rester sat down on either side of him in a gush-and-giggle duet.

I was glad to see that at least Sam still blushed the way he'd always done when confronted with any girl who wasn't me. When he looked up and met my gaze, I thought for sure he’d send me a silent message to rescue him and we’d be back to normal again, but all he did was look away and nod in response to something Melissa said. She and Cindy giggled some more, then I heard one of them say something about Sam playing quarterback. I turned to walk away in disgust and collided with Chip Wiley’s smirking face.

Remember Chip? He's the one who broke JoJo's bathing suit top at the creek and got punched by Sam for it. Tune in next week to see how he makes things a lot worse.

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
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Wait'll I Get My Hanes on You

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday!

Continuing with my YA/coming-of-age/mystery Shades of Blue, this snippet takes place a short while after Sam leaves JoJo's house after last week's excerpt.

It almost seemed as if Sam had been about to kiss me or something when he was on top of me. Where had that come from? We were best friends, and that was the way I wanted it to stay.

At least I thought I did.

I went to my window and looked across at Sam’s house, but his shade was pulled all the way down and his window was dark. I don’t know how long I sat there hoping for some sign of him, but I fell asleep and was still there when Mama came in to tell me goodnight.

I dreamed about Sam that night, but the only thing I could remember in the morning was him standing on the creek bank yelling something at me, wearing nothing but his Hanes one-hundred-percent cotton, size 30-32 briefs.

And I had absolutely no idea how I knew anything about his underwear.

Poor JoJo is so confused, and things are about to get a lot worse. Tune in for another snippet next Sunday, or you can buy your own copy of Shades of Blue here. And please check out the other WWW and SS bloggers. Something for everyone among these talented writers!

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
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Why Didn't I Go Pee When I Had the Chance?

© Emmet and Edith Gowin, Etherton Gallery

Welcome back to Snippet Sunday and Weekend Writing Warriors!

Here's another snippet from my coming-of-age/YA mystery, Shades of Blue. (You can catch up on the earlier excerpts here) Sam and JoJo have been best friends since they were kids, but puberty changes everything. This scene takes place while they're watching a movie together in JoJo's living room. Sam grabs her foot during a scary part and makes her squeal, then they start wrestling. He has her pinned down and is threatening to tickle her if she doesn't do what he says. She skipped her chance for a bathroom break and is afraid she'll wet her pants if he tickles her, so she has no choice but to agree to his demands. His first one is that she has to read The Lord of the Flies, no surprise since he's always trying to get her to read more books. But his second demand is a lot different.

“Say you hate Chip Wiley and that I’m your favorite football player.”

“Fine, I hate Chip Wiley, and Sam is my favorite football player.”

He smiled, then his expression slowly changed to one I’d never seen on his face before. It felt like his eyes had mine locked in some kind of tractor beam, and I could feel his heart pounding against my chest. Or maybe it was my own heart, because it sure seemed amplified a hundred times louder than normal, and it felt like a giant hand was squeezing my chest. Sam’s hipbone was sticking me in the side something fierce, and I truly thought I might pass out at any second.

“Let me up right now, Sam, I mean it.”

His expression changed again to something else I couldn’t read--like fear and embarrassment mixed with anger--but he let me up and scrambled to his feet.

Don't you hate it when your bladder betrays you like that? Tune in for another snippet next Sunday, or you can buy your own copy of Shades of Blue here. And please check out the other WWW and SS bloggers. Something for everyone among these talented writers!

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
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Carrie Dalby in The House!

I don't always have guests on my blog, but when I do they're AWESOME! :-)

Today my dear friend, critique partner, road trip buddy and fellow SCBWI member, Carrie Dalby (AKA Wonderwegian) stopped by on the blog tour for her new YA historical release, Fortitude. I don't usually like historicals, but this one is so beautifully written and has such a profound message that I fell in love with it immediately. Plus, the main character is a redhead, and we gingers gotta stick together, you know! ;-)

Carrie has written a wonderfully insightful post about the importance of a support system for writers, and I couldn't agree with her more. Here's a little bit about Carrie and her book.

Born and raised in California but a resident of Mobile, Alabama since 1996, Carrie Dalby is a homeschooling mom with a love of literature for young adults and children. Some of Carrie’s favorite volunteer hours are with Mobile Writers Guild, SCBWI, and Metro Mobile Reading Council’s Young Author workshops.

Growing up with a Creole best friend, sixteen-year-old Claire O’Farrell held little regard for the Jim Crow laws and the consequences of befriending those of a different color. But once she leaves the haven of her home on Dauphin Island, the reality of racial intolerance can no longer be ignored. Though she’s underage, Claire makes the bold decision to serve alongside Loretta, her best friend, in the “colored camp” hospital tents during the Spanish-American War, but her idealistic attitude and choice of working location immediately puts her in danger. Claire gives her heart to a soldier in the camp, only to find herself caught in the racial violence besieging the area. When the intolerant attitudes and stigma follow her home, she clings to her faith to navigate through her social isolation and find the path she was meant to travel.

(Buy Fortitude here)


Take it away, Carrie!

*hands over sparkly blue microphone*

Thank you, Joyce, for hosting me on your site today. As someone who’s seen Fortitude from before it was a complete first draft, you’re well aware of the long journey and my emotional rollercoaster over the past several years. You’re part of my “inner circle” (whether you like it or not.) Today I’d like to share a peek into my literary support system, which includes plenty of Blue Attitude, with your readers.

The act of writing is often done alone (or in the company of great music) but to be successful as a writer, a strong community is essential. I was blessed to meet Laurie Halse Anderson at a book signing in the fall of 2008. We’d been communicating on social media for a few years and at the book signing she asked if I was “Wonderwegian” then embraced this baby-wearing, wannabe writer. Laurie knew of my struggles to write and told me I needed to find my local SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) group to help me on my journey.

(Joyce, LHA, Wonderwegian and the Little Princess)

Being the dutiful fan, I looked up information and was put in touch with the local liaison. While the LL didn’t have an active group going at the time, she invited me to come to a Mobile Writers Guild meeting, which I did in early 2009. It was there I met then president of MWG, Joyce Scarbrough. At the time I didn’t join SCBWI but I joined MWG. At the guild, I was invited into my first critique group—by Joyce, of course. Since we were both working on young adult manuscripts, we splintered from the others, recruited a few more people, and started our own Write Club, but I can’t talk about that. It was with the new group, surrounded by people who also enjoyed YA literature, that I completed my first manuscript (Corroded, coming in the spring of 2016) and began Fortitude.

When I met up with Laurie two years later she asked if I’d joined SCBWI. I had to tell her “not yet.” She told me “YOU NEED TO JOIN!” So I finally did. (When The Queen of YA/YA Goddess tells you something, you do it!) Within the next half a year, I became the local liaison for Mobile in the Southern Breeze Region of SCBWI (I still am) and the acting president of Mobile Writers Guild (I served for two years, and am currently working as vice-president.)

Without this ever-expanding circle of literary connections, I wouldn’t be where I am today—blog hopping to promote my debut novel. I’d been writing, reading about writing, and studying the marketplace for MG/YA books since I was a teenager, but it wasn’t until I joined a physical group that I took my writing completely serious. As a believer in holding yourself accountable, the best way I’ve found to do so is to surround yourself with people who will ask you how you’re doing with writing and get excited when you talk word count and query letters. You need people who understand the frustrations of form rejections and the excitement when an agent or editor requests a full. Whether you write, knit, paint, or volunteer at a shelter, surround yourself with likeminded people who will laugh and cry along with you on this rollercoaster of life. Your goals will thank you in the long run.

For more stops on Carrie's tour, click here.

You can also find her all over the Web (She's everywhere! She's everywhere!)

Website: http://www.carriedalby.com

Twitter: @Wonderwegian

Pinterest: pinterest.com/wonderwegian

Goodreads: goodreads.com/user/show/27124063-carrie-dalby

Google +: https://plus.google.com/+CarrieDalbyCox/posts

Facebook: facebook.com/carriedalbyauthor

Thanks so much for stopping by, Carrie!

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
Like my Facebook Fan Page here

Rivalry Weekend a Little Late

Welcome back to Snippet Sunday!

I'm continuing with snippets from Shades of Blue, my coming-of-age/YA/mystery. (You can catch up on the earlier excerpts here) This week you get to meet Sam's step-sister, affectionately known at school as "Backseat Britney." JoJo goes to Sam's house to get him and Britney answers the door.

“Is Sam here?” I said as politely as I could manage.

“He’s busy right now,” Britney replied, flipping her long black hair off her shoulder and leaning in the doorway to block my path.

“Just tell him I’m here, okay?” I felt my temper rising and started counting backward from a hundred--Sam’s latest anger-management suggestion.

“I said he’s busy, little girl,” Britney said. “Go play with your dolls or something.”

I stopped counting and said, “Hey, I heard Ford wants to hire you for their commercials to say their back seats are better than Chevy’s. Maybe they’ll pay you enough to buy yourself a brain.”

Wow, my heroines sure do have smart mouths, huh? Wonder where they get that from. ;-)

More next week, or you can buy your own copy of Shades of Blue here.


~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
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Puberty Raises Its Ugly Head

Hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving and didn't overindulge like some people (who shall remain nameless) seem to do every year. I had a pretty great week considering I finished the prequel to my first novel that I'm redoing as a trilogy. :-) I'm really excited about it because it's unique in that it features a middle grade novel, a young adult novel, and a new adult novel. More about it later.

This week's Snippet Sunday post from Shades of Blue takes place while Sam and JoJo are swimming at the creek with a bunch of kids from school during Spring Break. A loud-mouthed jerk named Chip Wiley snaps JoJo's bathing suit top and breaks it, so she's swimming in her T-shirt. Chip starts teasing her about putting some Band-Aids on the mosquito bites on her chest, and Sam is not amused.

Sam’s eyes turned a strange dark-green shade, and he walked over to the rope swing where Chip and his two moron friends were taking turns. Without another word, Sam hauled off and punched Chip right in the stomach. I almost swallowed a minnow when he did it.

Chip’s eyes got real big and his mouth kept moving the way it always did, but for once nothing was coming out. Danny and Freddy did what morons do best—laughed like a couple of hyenas. Sam said something to Chip I couldn’t hear, then he dove into the water. When he came up next to me a few seconds later, I was still gawking at him for punching Chip.

“Come on, JoJo. Let’s get outta here.”

Hmm... Sam and JoJo have only been best friends until now, but it looks like "the times they are a-changing" thanks to puberty. Wonder how JoJo will take it? Stay tuned to find out. Or you can just buy you own copy of Shades of Blue here.

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

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Snippets, Wishes and New Releases

Cover photo by Tieshka Smith/Mom of Three Photography

Yay, I finally made it back to participating in Snippet Sunday just in time to reintroduce my novel, Shades of Blue. This book was still just a WIP the last time I did a Snippet Sunday post, but I finally got my butt in gear and finished it! It's another one of my coming-of-age/YA/mystery/whatever-the-hell-Joyce-likes-to-write books that didn't fit neatly into any genre, but I love the story and refused to change it just to fit in (kinda like me and all my characters!) I decided to publish it myself and couldn't be happier about the decision.

My first snippet is from the opening of the book so that everyone can meet Sam and JoJo, the young couple so perfectly depicted by the photo on the cover.

The day I saw the bruises on Sam’s back, I knew his stepfather was beating him. I also knew somebody needed to kill the SOB for it. I just didn’t know who, when, or how.

Looking back on it now, I realize Sam had already been acting strange for a while that year. I thought it was just some kind of hormonal craziness he was going through from being fourteen. Then I saw the bruises.

Of course, I’d known Sam was different from other boys since the day he’d moved in next door, when he was just a little five-year-old blond kid staring at me through the fence. He always seemed older than me, even though our birthdays were only two days apart.

I hope you'll want to get to know these two precocious teens a lot better as they deal with some very adult issues, as if growing up and falling in love isn't hard enough.

And now is the perfect time to buy your own copy of the Kindle ebook! Not only is it on sale right now for 99 cents, when you use the link below, you can enter for a chance to win a $400 Amazon Shopping Spree! No purchase necessary to enter or win, but every purchase supports the Make-A-Wish Foundation via the Amazon Smile program!

Go here to purchase your copy of Shades of Blue. Just scroll down and click on my book cover, and don't forget to fill out the Rafflecopter form to enter the giveaway. Buy a few more books while you're there since every purchase helps to make a sick child's wish come true! :-)



~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Visit Joyce's Web site
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Writing Goals: Love 'Em or Hate 'Em?

Since we're still within the time period I like to call the "Resolution Rubicon," I thought a post about writing goals would be quite apropos. Plus it would allow me to keep my resolution to have at least one new blog post a month. ;-)

I never used to set writing goals (other than to finish the book I was writing and then start another one!) but we started writing down monthly goals in my local writers' guild then reporting to the group the following month on whether or not we'd met them. I really liked having that accountability. Of course, I try to keep my goals easily within reach (write one chapter of my WIP and work on editing), but my intention is to challenge myself a little more each month.

So when my fellow Wild Rose Press author, Louise Lyndon, was looking for blogs to visit on her blog tour for Of Love and Vengeance, I thought this topic would make a great guest post.

Welcome, Louise. What say you?

When Joyce first approached me about writing a post on setting goals for the new year, I am not going to lie to you, it sent me into a tailspin. I am a PANTSTER. I do not plan. I started to hyperventilate—perhaps I could make something up (after all, I am a fiction author!) But, once I had a coffee with an obscene amount of sugar, I calmed down enough to realise that yes, even though I am a pantster, I also do plan. Kind of...

Let me start off by saying I personally think there is no right way or wrong way to set goals. Everyone is different, so it stands to reason that everyone will have different ways to plan their goals. What I do think is, it is important to have goals, because without goals how do you know where you’re going?

But what happens if the thought of trying to work out what you’re going to do for the next 365 days (a little less now, given today’s date!) sends you to the nearest darkened corner with your thumb in your mouth, rocking back and forth?

Well, don’t plan for the next three hundred and something days. For me, that is too far in advance and too big to comprehend. Break it down into manageable chunks. What is it you want to do? How will you achieve it? Can you measure whether or not you have achieved your goal? What small steps do you need to make that will get you closer to your end goal?

For me, I want to finish writing the follow up to Of Love and Vengeance. I want to be able to have that with my publisher by the end of March at the latest. So, in the next 60 days, I need to write about 42,700 words. How am I going to achieve that? It’s all very well saying that’s what I want to do, but doing it is a different story. Okay, so here goes.

I need to be realistic. I have a day job and I know I am not going to come home after a hard day in the office and write for eight hours. That’s not going to happen, so why set that as a goal? That would just be setting yourself up to fail. What I do know is that I reckon I can manage two hours of writing after work. I also know I am easily distracted (curse you, Dr. Phil—I have to get my daily fix!) but that is a wasted hour. So, I have set my daily goal to go to the library straight after work. I do not go home first, I do not just ‘have a rest’ or get distracted by Dr Phil and then go to the library—do not pass go, do not collect $200—I go straight to the library. Goal one achieved. Go to the library.

OK, so I am now at the library. I cannot stare at a blank screen for two hours. How much do I need to write in those two hours to reach my end goal of 42,700 words? 711.66 words to be exact. Give or take. Wow, I can actually do that! A little over 700 words in two hours—that’s only 350 words an hour! Hmm, me thinks this 42,700 is suddenly manageable, achievable, and measurable. Suddenly needing to write such a large chunk of words isn’t so daunting. Why? Because I’ve broken the end goal into smaller goals. The smaller goal is manageable (realistically speaking.) My goal to write 700 words is measurable because, well, we have word count to count the words!

So, this is how a pantster, scared to look too far into the year ahead, sets goals and plans how to achieve them.

Why not share your goal-setting stories? I would love to hear how you all not only set your goals, but how you achieve them as well!

You can contact Louise by e-mail at louise_lyndon@yahoo.com, or find her on her Web site, Facebook, or Twitter. And be sure to check out her book here and enter below to win a copy!

a Rafflecopter giveaway



~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Joyce's Web site
Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
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Everything Happens For a Reason

Through a series of unfortunate events, two of my publishers had to close their doors last year. I went from having three books available to having none.

That was hard.

Now, over a year later, I'm thrilled to announce that I have four books available! I found a new home for my novel Symmetry with The Wild Rose Press, I signed a contract for my YA novel After Me with Buzz Books USA, and I ventured into the wilds of Kindle Direct Publishing to make my first two novels, True Blue Forever and Different Roads, available again as e-books. You can buy them all here.

I never thought self-publishing was for me, but I fell in love with the KDP process so much that I've also decided to publish my short stories as free Kindle downloads to attract more readers for my books. And since I can do my own editing and formatting and my daughter is a graphic design major who can make totally awesome book covers for me, I haven't spent a dime so far. (She made that beautiful logo for me above and also built me a kickass Web site you can see here.)

Does this mean I won't be submitting my future manuscripts to agents or publishers? No. But it does guarantee that every single book I write in the future will be published, no matter what.

And that's a good feeling.


~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Joyce's Web site
Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
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Happy Book Birthday to Me!

So excited that my orphaned EPIC finalist Symmetry has been reborn thanks to my new publisher The Wild Rose Press. It released to Amazon Kindle Select in March, and today marks its worldwide release! Here's the blurb and an excerpt.

Jessica Cassady is a copyeditor for a small newspaper in Georgia where her husband Lee is a sportswriter. When he attends a convention in New York, Jess is shocked when she calls his room in the middle of the night and a woman answers. Lee swears things aren't what they seem, but Jess isn't so sure and kicks him out. Things become even more complicated when a sweet man from her past named Noah Hamilton shows up and makes Lee even more determined to get Jess back. Should she forego the beefcake brigade and give the sensitive type a try like her cat and her best friend Deb want her to do, or should she give in to the addictive rush she's always felt whenever she's close to Lee? It's enough to make any girl pull out her hair!

Jess always woke a second before she could complete the castration. Curses, foiled again. She blinked at the red numbers projected onto her ceiling by the clock on her night stand—4:23 a.m. Plenty of time to go back to sleep and finish the job, but she knew it was useless. She’d only end up dreaming about giving birth to a canned ham or grocery shopping in her pajamas, and Lee’s manhood would escape the knife again.

She snuggled against the body pillow occupying his place beside her in bed and got an indignant rowl from the Siamese cat curled up there. Jess smiled at the thought of what Lee would say about letting Ming sleep with her and decided maybe she’d tell him he’d been replaced by his feline nemesis when she saw him at the meeting later that morning.

She fell asleep reminding herself of how much better off she was without her two-timing, cat-hating, conceited jerk of a husband, and she dreamed he made love to her on the conference table at work, castration the furthest thing from her mind.

God, she hated him.

Five hours later, she sat across from Lee in the conference room at the Espanola Times and tried to focus on Thad Crandall’s weekly lecture about deadlines. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought Lee knew what she’d dreamed about him from the way he kept nudging her with his foot under the table and flashing that damn blond-Adonis smile at her.

She tried to suppress the dream images of his face over hers, but every time she looked at him, her mind became a private movie screen featuring the world premiere of Position: Impossible. Shackled as she was with a redhead’s proclivity for blushing, she knew he noticed her agitation and probably thought it was from simply being near him.

Don't you hate it when your heart and your head (and a few other body parts) are at war with each other? Hope you enjoyed the excerpt. You can read the rest for 50% off right now, so get your copy here!


~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
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Big Easy Blog Tour

Welcome to the Big Easy Blog Tour, where writers talk about their writing process and the projects they're working on right now. I was suckered into . . . er, I mean invited to join the tour by my friend and fellow Wild Rose Press author Gloria Davidson Marlow who writes wonderfully chilling romantic suspense books that will keep you up reading all night.

Okay, on to the questions we're all supposed to answer.

1. What am I working on?

In between promotional efforts for my women's fiction book Symmetry and my YA novel After Me that's coming out this summer, I'm redoing my first novel, True Blue Forever, as a trilogy that includes a prequel about the main characters when they were children. This means I'm in the equivalent of Writer Heaven. Not only do I get to revisit my four favorite characters, I get to take a trip back in time to the days of playing outside until the streetlights came on, pinky swears and lifelong friendships, first loves and first kisses, broken hearts and broken promises, and that moment when you meet the person you're going to spend the rest of your life with and can't tell anyone because you're both eleven years old.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Actually, fitting my books into any one genre has always been a problem for me. One reason is that I have a penchant for writing about young characters dealing with adult issues. And although all my books include a love story that's central to the plot, they also feature sub-plots and other relationship issues for the hero/heroine that keep the books from fitting neatly into the required structure for romance novels. This has caused me a few problems in the past when pitching them to publishers and also with reviewers who were expecting a category romance and didn't get it. That's regrettable, but that's me. I like multi-dimensional plots when I'm reading, so that's the only way I can write mine.

3. Why do I write what I do?

Two reasons: First, I write stories that entertain me and just hope others will enjoy them as well. I've been making up stories to entertain myself since I was four years old. Sometimes I couldn't wait until bedtime so I could lie in the dark and envision the stories in my head. It wasn't until many years later when I began plotting my first novel that I realized I'd been plotting books all my life. The only difference is that now I write them down. This is why I don't really understand it when writers say they're so sick of their own book by the time it's published that they never want to read it again. I never get tired of reading my own books because I wrote them to entertain myself in the first place.

Second, I follow that age-old advice for writers to "write what you know." I write about epic loves that were meant to be because that's the only kind I know. My husband is my hero, the love of my life, and my absolute favorite person in the world. My characters might all be fictional people, but the love between them is the real thing. And since everybody in my family is a wise-cracking comedian, my books always have plenty of humor in them too.

However, I guess I probably need to point out here that the psychotic killer and other general scumbags in my upcoming YA novel After Me do NOT come from my real life. Neither does the smartass dead girl. Well, the dead part.

4. How does my writing process work?

I always start with the characters. After I have a clear picture of my protagonist and the other main characters in my head and my Blue Spiral Notebook, I ask myself the "what ifs?" What if this happened to them? What if somebody was trying to do this to them? What if they had to do this and couldn't get out of it? Etcetera, etcetera. Then I write a narrative overview of all the major plot points, making sure I have a strong beginning, middle and ending. This ensures that I don't get halfway through a book and stop because I don't know how to end it.

However, the overview sometimes changes as the actual scenes are written, because the characters often decide they don't want to do what I had planned for them. Sometimes the bad guys steal my heart and become not-so-bad guys. Sometimes my heroine doesn't end up with the guy I thought she'd pick. And sometimes someone just has to die no matter how hard I try to save them. When these things happen, I go back and adjust the overview to match the new plot developments.

And although I don't get stuck without an ending, I sometimes get stuck between how to get from Major Plot Point A to Major Plot Point B. I once left a pair of characters in a Jacuzzi for two weeks while I figured out what happened in their next scene. (Aside from a lot of wrinkled skin, they didn't seem to mind it too much. They were naked, after all.)

Luckily, I found a solution for when I find myself in one of those literary bogs. I use a tip I got from the amazing Laurie Halse Anderson and make a list of 25 things that could happen next, making sure that at least some of them are nonsensical. This works every time and has resulted in some of my favorite scenes.

Once I have the first draft completed, I try to let it sit for a couple of weeks before I start editing and revising, but I don't always make it that long because I actually love the editing process. When I do begin editing, I print out the manuscript so I can read it aloud to myself and Princess Tilly, my rescued Pomeranian. Not only does this do wonders for spotting stilted dialogue and problems with flow, Tilly thinks I'm the greatest writer in the world, so it also does wonders for my ego.

So that's the way I do it! Next up on the tour will be these talented ladies who'll tell you next Monday, June 9, all about their own writing processes and their upcoming books.

Lee Ann Ward -- Lee Ann is a former Senior Editor for a digital romance publisher and a multi-published author of adult and YA fiction. She's won several awards for her fiction and can't remember a time when she wasn't writing, having completed her first novel at the age of sixteen. She has four gorgeous sons, a sweetheart of a husband, two lazy cats, and the most rambunctious poodle in existence.

Brenda Barry -- Brenda is the author of a four-part saga of star-crossed lovers separated by the war in Vietnam titled Seasons of Love and War. Her husband was in the military for 21 years and gave her help and encouragement while writing her novel. They now live in Roseburg, Oregon, and when Brenda's not writing she can normally be found walking the trails with her husband and their little dachshund or traveling in their RV.

Angela Quarles -- Angela works at an independent bookstore and lives in a historic house in the beautiful and quirky town of Mobile, Alabama, with her two matched gray cats, Darcy and Bingley. When she's not writing, she enjoys the usual stuff like gardening, reading, hanging out, eating, drinking, chasing squirrels out of the walls and creating the occasional knitted scarf. She's had a varied career, including website programming and directing a small local history museum. She has a B.A. in Anthropology and International Studies with a minor in German from Emory University, and she has a Masters in Heritage Preservation from Georgia State University. She was an exchange student to Finland in high school and studied abroad in Vienna one summer in college. She is represented by Maura Kye-Casella at Don Congdon Associates, Inc.


~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
Like my Facebook Fan Page here

Spanning the Testosterone Scale

Welcome back to Sneak Peek Sunday!

My release party on Facebook this past Thursday was so much fun! Thanks to everyone who came, and congratulations to all the game winners. This week's excerpt from Symmetry features the first encounter between Jess's estranged husband and the soft-spoken man from her past. Just as Jess and Noah get home from their date, Lee shows up unexpectedly and loses it when he realizes that the "old friend" Jess had plans with isn't a girlfriend.

“Well, it shouldn’t make a difference to you either way, Lee, because we’re getting a divorce. What I do is none of your business anymore.” She turned to walk back to Noah, who looked as though he wished the Earth would open up and swallow him.

Lee grabbed her arm and stopped her. “Like hell it’s not my business! You’re still my wife, and I’m not letting any man put his hands on you!”

She whirled around to face him again. “Well, maybe I’ll come up with some story about being drugged and not knowing what I’m doing, then it won’t matter. Right, Lee?”

He moved her aside and started toward Noah. “Why don’t we see if your boyfriend’s willing to get his ass kicked for you!”

Noah held up his hands and took a step back. “Look, I don’t want any trouble with you, but I intend to keep seeing Jess.”

“Oh, really?” Lee sneered at him. “Well, I intend to break your face!”

Will Jess go back to Team Hunk, or will she defect to Team Sensitive? Buy your own copy of Symmetry to find out! And please also check out the other Sneak Peekers. Loads of talent on this list!

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
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Book Reincarnation

Welcome to my first week participating in the Sneak Peek Sunday blog hop! I'm really excited about joining all the other great authors sharing their excerpts, so click on the blog name to read them all!

My contribution is from my novel Symmetry, which has been reborn thanks to my new publisher The Wild Rose Press. It's releasing to Amazon Kindle Select this Thursday, and the paperback and Nook versions will be available in July. Here's the blurb.

Jessica Cassady is a copyeditor for a small newspaper in Georgia where her husband Lee is a sportswriter. When he attends a convention in New York, Jess is shocked when she calls his room in the middle of the night and a woman answers. Lee swears things aren't what they seem, but Jess isn't so sure and kicks him out. Things become even more complicated when a sweet man from her past named Noah Hamilton shows up and makes Lee even more determined to get Jess back. Should she forego the beefcake brigade and give the sensitive type a try like her cat and her best friend Deb want her to do, or should she give in to the addictive rush she's always felt whenever she's close to Lee? It's enough to make any girl pull out her hair!

The excerpt I chose is the beginning of the first chapter and does a great job of showing Jess's dilemma when it comes to her hunky but clueless husband.

Jess always woke a second before she could complete the castration. Curses, foiled again. She blinked at the red numbers projected onto her ceiling by the clock on her night stand—4:23 a.m. Plenty of time to go back to sleep and finish the job, but she knew it was useless. She’d only end up dreaming about giving birth to a canned ham or grocery shopping in her pajamas, and Lee’s manhood would escape the knife again.

She snuggled against the body pillow occupying his place beside her in bed and got an indignant rowl from the Siamese cat curled up there. Jess smiled at the thought of what Lee would say about letting Ming sleep with her and decided maybe she’d tell him he’d been replaced by his feline nemesis when she saw him at the meeting later that morning.

She fell asleep reminding herself of how much better off she was without her two-timing, cat-hating, conceited jerk of a husband, and she dreamed he made love to her on the conference table at work, castration the furthest thing from her mind.

God, she hated him.

Five hours later, she sat across from Lee in the conference room at the Espanola Times and tried to focus on Thad Crandall’s weekly lecture about deadlines. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought Lee knew what she’d dreamed about him from the way he kept nudging her with his foot under the table and flashing that damn blond-Adonis smile at her.

She tried to suppress the dream images of his face over hers, but every time she looked at him, her mind became a private movie screen featuring the world premiere of Position: Impossible. Shackled as she was with a redhead’s proclivity for blushing, she knew he noticed her agitation and probably thought it was from simply being near him.

Don't you hate it when your heart and your head (and a few other body parts) are at war with each other? Hope you enjoyed the excerpt. You can read the rest when Symmetry releases on Kindle this Thursday! I'm having a release party here all day on Facebook, so come join us for a chance to win a free copy plus games and other goodies!


~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
Like my Facebook Fan Page here

New Romance Author

Today I'm featuring an interview with my friend and fellow Mobile Writers' Guild member, Marilyn Johnston, writing as cj petterson. Her first book, Deadly Star, was recently published by Crimson Romance. Here's one of its early reviews from John Gordon, author of Katelyn's Killer:

"A gutsy astronomer finds herself at the intersection of twinkling stars and secret satellites. Stir in bribes, blackmail, and international intrigue and you have a thriller from start to finish. Highly recommended!"

Deadly Star is available from Crimson Romance, Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, iTunes, and Sony. The paperback will be available in June 2013.



JSS: Tell us a little about yourself.

cjp: Born in Texas, raised in Detroit, retired as a manager in the New Product Development Research department of Chrysler Corp. and moved to Mobile to be near family.


JSS: Where did you get the idea for Deadly Star?

cjp: My son, Jeff, came up with the idea. "What if what looks like an asteroid was really a satellite?" he said one night. "Suppose it was a weapon?" My imagination took over and gobs of research followed. I found that in the 90s, the U.S. government funded something called "Operation Dawgstar" and provided grants to college students to develop nanosatellites, that one was actually launched from the space station in 2001, and that they could possibly go undetected by world powers for some time. The surprise meteor that hit Russia in February 2013 proved that premise. It was reported to be as big a five-story building when it entered the atmosphere but wasn't detected. Scary stuff.


JSS: How do you determine that all-important first sentence?

cjp: A good bit of trial and error goes into the first sentence. I want to begin in the middle of some action. I write something down, continue writing, go back and re-write it, continue on, go back and re-write the first sentence again, etc., etc. Starting my stories with a hook is paramount for me, and I think that comes from having spent a few years on the editorial staff of the corporate newspaper. (At that time, it had a readership of 100,000, more than a lot of hometown newspapers.)


JSS: What are your protagonist’s strengths and flaws?

cjp: Dr. Mirabel Campbell is a bit of a nerd who withdrew into her work and laboratory after a divorce. She is also smart, loyal, and sassy.


JSS: Are you a pantser or a plotter?

cjp: I'm basically a pantser. I found that writing an outline made me feel as if I had already written the story and it dampened my enthusiasm. However, I'm a few chapters into a female detective story that I hope to make into a series, and that will definitely require some plotting and planning. Of course, it will constantly get tweaked as I put the protagonist into threatening situations and then create believable escapes.


JSS: Where do you find inspiration for your writing?

cjp: When I'm stumped or bored with the computer, I read something from a how-to, like Stein on Writing or from a mystery/suspense/thriller author I like or watch the news on TV.


JSS: What is a typical writing day like for you?

cjp: Generally, I'm jockeying for the computer. My son is a photographer, and the big monitor of the Mac is perfect for his work. I spend an hour or so in the morning writing or researching, then give it up and come back later for another hour or so before I go to bed...which is usually after midnight. I recently set up a PC workstation opposite the Mac, and once I get a chair for it, I'll have no reason for not writing.


JSS: Your body of work includes both full-length novels and short stories. Do you prefer one over the other and how do you decide the length of a story?

cjp: I prefer short stories, and I think that's because I got used to writing newspaper style. I consider a short story like haiku. I don't have a lot of words to "tell" the story. Each word becomes very important and must show as well as move the story along in the reader's imagination. I think it was Mark Twain who said something like, and I'm paraphrasing here, "The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is like the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." As for the length of my stories, I write a beginning, a middle, and an end, and when I get to the end, the story is done. Sometimes the arc is completed at 60,000 words, sometimes it's 70,000. I had to work hard, even added a chapter, to get close to 80,000 words for Deadly Star.


JSS: Who or what has been the biggest influence in your writing career and why?

cjp: My family is a great influence on my writing. I constantly think about what they might like or not like to see. Professionally, two of my bosses during my sojourn in corporate communications were positive influences. They were humorous, exceptional wordsmiths and generous mentors. Makes me smile just to remember them.


JSS: What do you consider the most important element of a story?

cjp: For me, the most important element of all stories is a likeable protagonist. She or he can, and should, have flaws, but the reader has to find something to like about the character or the story may not get read from start to finish.


JSS: How would you categorize your writing style?

cjp: Someone told me once I write a little bit like James Lee Burke, but I think that was because one of my early short stories had a protagonist named Thibideaux. If it is true that readers can identify the sex of the author by the style of the writing, I intentionally tend to write with a man's voice, even for female protagonists. Some of that comes from being a tomboy when I was young and from having raised two sons (no daughters). I also try to "write tight."


JSS: Everyone's road to publication is different. Take us down yours.

cjp: I was fortunate enough to have several short stories, both fiction and non-fiction, published in different anthologies—the first three in 2008. However, Deadly Star, which I had written as an action/adventure/woman-in-peril piece, went through several years of query = rejection. I put it aside after several reviewers and contest judges made note of an unfulfilled love story in the novel. So, when I saw the request for submissions from Crimson Romance, I tweaked a few places, beefed up the romance, changed the ending to happily ever after, and sent it off in October 2012. Crimson Romance offered me a contract in November, and the e-book was launched in February 2013. The paperback is slated for May or June.

The thing I have to constantly deal with is how my name is printed on the story ... cj petterson has no capitals, no periods, and no spaces in cj. Everybody and every computer program, including Word and Facebook, doesn't know how to accept that style. I guess it'll either get me noticed or forgotten.


JSS: Are you working on anything new?

cjp: I have three novels as works-in-progress. The story of lady detective Jake Konnor is one. There is another suspense romance almost ready for a beta reader, and I have about four chapters done on a fantasy YA that has a boy as the protagonist. I often, however, stop what I'm doing on the novels and try a short story for an entry into a contest.


JSS: When the work day is done, what is your favorite way to relax?

cjp: If I'm not watching some grandkid play one sport or another, I deadhead roses or pull weeds. Nice mindless work that helps me get rid of my aggressions.


JSS: What do you enjoy reading for pleasure?

cjp: I enjoy Robert B. Parker's "Spenser" and "Jesse Stone" series. I also like Robert Ludlum, Tony Hillerman, and some of Nora Roberts.


JSS: Mark Twain said, “Southerners speak music…” As a transplanted Southerner, do you have a favorite Southern saying or expression?

cjp: I think of myself as a Texan, but I agree with Twain, almost ... I think it's writers that speak music (see my blog-site name). I guess my favorite Southern expression would have to be, "Well, bless her/his little heart."


JSS: Where can readers find out about you and your events online?

cjp: My shared blog-site is Lyrical Pens, and Crimson Romance also has an author paragraph for "cj petterson."


JSS: Thanks for stopping by to tell us about you and your book, cj. I have it on my Kindle and can't wait to read it.

cjp: Thanks, Joyce, for asking me to be on your blog today. It's been fun.




~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Follow me on Twitter: @JoyceScarbrough
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