One Writer's Life -- Barbara Mountjoy

Welcome today author Alyssa Fox, whose first novel ROAD TO RECOVERY has just been released.

First off, I want to thank Barbara for having me on her blog today. This is how I came up with the plot, my characters for my debut book Road to Recovery. Well, I was writing another medical book at the time, and it just came to me while cleaning my house. I know, glamorous life right? I was trying hard to get a contract with Harlequin’s Medical line at the time, but have since learned my sex scenes are too steamy for them.



Anyways so, I thought what would happen if two doctors were competing for the same mentorship at the hospital. Then I thought what if they were both attracted to each other, but they didn’t want to admit it to one another. And that’s how the book was started. It was a fast write for me both characters came to me really stronger.


Kyle came to me first, and he was very demanding in my head. I mean, what else would you expect from an alpha man, but that? At first he didn’t want to tell me his dark secrets, but finally, I was able to squeeze it out of him. Since I started writing I’ve never had a character surprise me with their back story, but he sure did. As I wrote more he still at times would reveal things I never saw coming throughout the book. He even made me cry while writing in a few places with the things he had been through with losing his wife and daughter.

Erin pretty much laid it all out there on the line for me as I started writing their story. She was one pissed off woman that a man had used her in the past. And she wasn’t looking to fall in love at all. She had a neatly outlined five year plan, and no one was going to mess with it. Then the mentorship came along, and she could move that plan up to a two year plan. She never even saw Kyle coming to knock her on her butt and turn her plan upside down. She didn’t take to kindly to it either.

I’ll admit the title took me some time to come up with. It gave me so much trouble! And then one day it hit me really hard out of all the words I had thrown together. My family more than likely thought I had lost my mind, as I was asking them does this work? So that’s how I came up with my plot, characters and the title of the book.

I can be found at my website. Twitter and Facebook.


Here's a blurb for the book:


Dr. Erin Miller’s life was going great; for the most part, anyway. She was single, had a career she loved, and a cherished circle of friends, but something was missing. When a mentorship with the Chief Pediatric Surgeon becomes available, she couldn’t be more thrilled. Maybe this is just what the doctor ordered! That is, until the handsome and charismatic Dr. Kyle Reynolds decides he wants the mentorship as well.

Kyle Reynolds has lost everything including his wife and daughter. With nothing left in his life except for his job, he sets his sights on the new mentorship position with single-minded determination. The only obstacle he faces is the sexy Dr. Erin Miller.

Excerpt

Erin leaned back in her chair. She sat surrounded by the tomes she’d pulled from the shelves. It made no sense to her. The tests she’d been waiting for had all come back fine. Those two hours she’d hoped it would take had turned to six. She was still waiting for an ultrasound report, which should be coming any moment. She placed the latest report on the table and reached her hand to her head, slowly rubbing her temples. It wasn't like her not to be able to figure out what was going on with a patient. She dreaded the look on the parents' faces when she had to tell them. Sometimes it seemed like days before reports came back, and that was the only part of her job she hated. Her stomach knotted as she glanced at the clock. Only twenty minutes before she had to give them an update.

Her mind wandered back to the meeting six hours ago, and the way her body had warmed under Kyle's gaze. It had only been for a brief moment. Girl, you seriously need to get laid, that's all it is. There's nothing to the way he looked at you. You're imagining things.

“Good afternoon, Erin,” She jumped at the deep voice coming from her left. A glance over her shoulder confirmed what she already knew.

Kyle.

“Afternoon.” She fumbled to grab the chart in front of her, hoping he'd leave. He sat down next to her. His gaze singed her cheeks, but she couldn't look up; instead, she concentrated on the chart in front of her.

The memory of their first week working together came to her mind again. When she walked into the office, she'd been drawn to Kyle, who had sat in a chair across the small room, so arrogant and sure of himself. Kyle wasn't her type at all; she normally stuck with the safe, boring guys. Everything about him had screamed he was more. Just once, she wanted to take a chance and not do what everyone else expected. It had been time to let go and have some fun. Well, that's what she had wanted to do, and based on his flirting he’d seemed to be into her too.

For a moment, her mind drifted back to the dance they’d shared at the Christmas party three years ago. Against her best judgment, she’d said yes to Kyle's offer to dance. Really, what could one little dance do? Boy was that ever wrong, from the moment he’d taken her in his arms. She could feel the chemistry between them. The smoldering heat took over, and she couldn't think of anything but him, as fire raced down her spine, consuming her. Her mind told her to break the dance, that it had been a mistake, and yet she couldn't. The pull between them was greater than her need to move away.

Her gaze had traveled upward. His eyes had darkened, her knees had weakened, and it had taken everything in her to fight the strong attraction she felt toward him. She saw the unspoken question in his eyes. The song ended. "I'm sorry...I just can't," she had whispered and left him on the dance floor.

Instead of taking a chance on Kyle, she’d gone the safe route and starting dating Dr. Lopez. Someone she had thought was ready to settle down and start a family like she had been. Too bad the safe route had turned into the biggest mistake of her life. It had caused her to re-examine her plans. To wait until she was more established in her career before she seriously started dating again.

She continued pointedly ignoring Kyle, and relief washed over her when Jenny, one of her interns, walked up and said, "Here's the CAT scan report."

“Thanks,” she said, taking the report. She studied it. Erin closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. This keeps getting crazier. She opened her eyes slowly to skim over the report again. Nothing had changed. “This makes no sense,” she whispered, more to herself than to anyone else.

“What's doesn't make sense?” Kyle asked.

Setting down the piece of paper, she turned to look at him. “I've got a three year old patient, and it shows he has no appendix, yet he has all the classic symptoms of having appendicitis. I don't get it; I've run every test I can think of.”

“Here, let me take a look at his chart.”

Erin handed him the chart and watched him as he read it. His eyebrows drew together as he concentrated. Her fingers itched to trace the scar above his right eye, and she wondered how he'd gotten the injury. He cleared his throat, jarring her back to reality.

“This doesn't make sense. Come on, I want to check him out myself.” Kyle stood.

Although she wasn’t crazy about his taking over like that, she was so relieved to have another brain working on the problem that she let it slide. Her bruised ego was nothing compared to the well-being of her young patient.

Kyle’s hand brushed against the small of her back as he let her precede him into the room. Shivers of pleasure raced down her spine so quickly they were gone in an instant.

PROMOTIONAL BASICS: GETTING THE WORD OUT, WHEN YOUR WORDS COME OUT: Online Course  by Barbara_Mountjoy

INSTRUCTOR: Babs Mountjoy DATE: August 1 – September 2, 2011

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Congratulations! Your book or project has just been published. Now comes the real work: making sure your audience can find your book, purchase it, enjoy it and share it with others, bringing you fame and fortune! Most publishers want to hear about your platform, which includes a website, blog, or other publicity method to sell and promote your product or book across the world.


The internet and social media are great methods to share your news and can go a long way toward reaching your potential audience. This online course will teach you the basics of publicity and marketing, some old tricks and some new tricks, to make your new release a real success.

* 4 most important things to include when developing a website


* Discover a variety of ways to get your work noticed online and offline


* Blog tours: how to get one started and why they’re a great way to spread your name

* Freebies and giveaways to attract readers and followers

* Setting up personal appearances and book signings (Have a program in mind, not just a chair behind a table)

FREE BONUS: A list of 50 sites where writers can submit their books for review.


TESTIMONIALS:


"Definitely a 5 out of 5. So much information, and the handouts were great!" - Emma T.


"Loved this! Worth the price of the whole day." - Kathleen B.


"Very informative. A wide breadth of material covered."


"This is the reason I came to the conference--I learned so much that I can use." - Linda A.

Get better website and book sales results from proven promotion methods! LIMITED CLASS SIZE. Enroll now.


$79 ($89 non-Pennwriters members) $89 ($99 non-Pennwriters members) EARLY-BIRD PRICES END SOON!

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:

Barbara “Babs” Mountjoy has been writing ever since she was a little girl, unable to control the urge of stories that wanted to percolate through her fingers into the keyboard. Or back then, onto the old Royal typewriter (before the TRS-80 even! Wow!). She's been a published writer for over 35 years, spent seven years as a news reporter and editor in South Florida, and has contributed stories to two CUP OF COMFORT volumes. Her non-fiction book 101 LITTLE INSTRUCTIONS FOR SURVIVING YOUR DIVORCE was published by Impact Publishers in 1999, and her first novel, THE ELF QUEEN (under the pen name Lyndi Alexander) came out in 2010. THE ELF QUEEN is the first of the Clan Elves of the Bitterroot series, with THE ELF CHILD coming out in 2011 and THE ELF MAGE to be released in 2012.
 
Her romantic suspense novel SECRETS IN THE SAND was released by the Wild Rose Press in 2011 (under the pen name Alana Lorens) , and her women's fiction book SECOND CHANCES comes out from Zumaya Publications in 2012. She blogs about autism, writing and life at http://awalkabout.wordpress.com, and continues to write tech articles and TV reviews at Firefox News online.
For more information on Babs Mountjoy or this course, email her at bmountjoy at zoominternet dot .net or visit the Pennwriters site today.

Organizing: One Less Thing


When I started writing fiction years ago, I read an estimate that a novelist needs to spend 2000 hours learning the craft of fiction writing in order to get published.


I thought that was excessive. I figured a smart guy could learn to write a novel in a few hundred hours.

Maybe I'm just not all that smart, but it wound up taking me quite a bit more than 2000 hours of writing to get my first novel accepted by a publisher and on the shelves of bookstores.

Even though I wildly underestimated the amount of time it would take, I always knew it wasn't something you do in a weekend, so I made a point early in my writing life to find ways to spend more time writing.

I believe that if you're a serious writer, you need to be writing at least 10 to 20 hours per week.

Why?

Because when you finally sell your manuscript to a publisher, they're going to expect you to polish your novel within a few months. And then they'll expect you to do a second novel soon after that. And then a third, and a fourth . . .

That level of effort is easily going to cost you 20 hours every week for the rest of your writing life. Easily.

If you're not already writing at least 10 hours per week by that time, you just plain won't be able to gear up quickly enough to meet those demands from your publisher.

You don't have to start out writing 10 hours per week when you first begin writing fiction, of course. Hardly anybody can do that.

I recommend that you work up to the level of writing about 5 hours per week by the end of your first year of serious writing. And yes, it may take you a full year just to get up to that level.

Once you're writing 5 hours per week, you can then ramp up over the next year or two to writing at that magic level of 10 hours per week.

How do you do that? How do you find that kind of time when you're probably already overwhelmed by all the other things you're doing in life?

It's not easy. It's going to call for you to make some hard decisions on what's most important to you.

We're all juggling a lot of different things in our lives. I am. You are. That's just how things are.

Think about all the things on your plate. You probably have 10 or 15 that are important. Maybe more. You've got 168 hours in every week, and you're awake for at least 110 of those. That's a lot of hours. How do you fill up those hours?

Is it possible that you could live your life with one less thing on your plate?

(I know that the grammar purists will probably say it should be "one fewer thing," but that just doesn't ring well in my ear.)

If you've never tracked your time, this might be an enlightening exercise. Keep a daily log of where your time goes over the course of a full week. Keep a record of anything that takes longer than about 5 minutes. Lump together things that take less time than that. You may be amazed at what you spend your time on.

Now it's time to get serious. Every three months, ask yourself if there's one less thing you could do. One thing you could shove off your plate that would gain you at least an hour per week in writing time.

Maybe it's an "essential" TV show that really isn't all that important.

Maybe it's time spent browsing the web, fooling around on Facebook, texting, Skyping, tweeting, or whatever your favorite way is to chitchat electronically. Can you carve out an hour from that?

Every three months, can you find one less thing that "must" be done? Something that's really not essential? Something you can offload to somebody else?

Can you take that time and use it for your writing?

One less thing, every three months. If that one less thing buys you an extra hour per week of writing time, then in a year, you'll be writing at least four hours per week.

In two years, you'll have an extra eight hours per week to devote to your writing.

In three years, you'll have twelve hours a week.

This is not easy. At first, that "one less thing" won't cost you much. But as the months go by, each "one less thing" is going to sting more and more.

Life is full of sacrifices. If you want to write a novel, you have to give up something else that you like doing. You have to give up lots of somethings.

You can get there. One less thing at a time.


REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION-- Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the
Snowflake Guy," publishes the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 25,000 readers, every month. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

Download your free Special Report on Tiger Marketing and get a free 5-Day Course in How To Publish a Novel.

Where's Bette Davis when you need her?
The last thirty days have been quite a rollercoaster for me. I finally got the job with the county I've been angling for since about 2008, with full benefits for me and the whole family. Fantastic. My book THE ELF CHILD, second in the Clan Elves of the Bitterroot series, came out. My first romance, SECRETS IN THE SAND, was released in ebook by The Wild Rose Press. My first teaching gig in the writing field got WOW reviews from attendees at the St. David's mini-conference.

At the same time, my father's painful bone cancer finally rendered him incapable of caring for himself, and we took him into our home, with the help of Hospice, for his final days.

So much got put aside as we really took things day by day, not planning farther ahead than the next morning. Work took a back seat, and I am grateful for the court's understanding and patience. Writing was set aside, too, except for the moments when I just needed to escape to some other place to get through an hour, anywhere except real life that was all too real.

Here's hoping the "bumpy night" is over, and spring might actually arrive sometime here in the frozen Northlands, setting my fibromyalgia pain to 'low' for the season. My hyacinths are out, sharing their delightful aromas, so that's a good sign. Writing on book three, THE ELF MAGE, is proceeding again at last. Working up to the Pennwriters conference in three weeks, where I'll meet with an agent about an autism project very close to my heart. Forward, world, forward.

I'm hosting a number of my sister authors on their blog tours at the Clan Elves' site, Other Writers, Other Worlds, including Brianna Soloski, Mayra Calvani and Jessica Zellman, and making the rounds myself to celebrate my new books as well. See me at Brianna's blog, asking the question, Are You an Old Dog?

I'm guest blogging today on The Book of Your Heart at Mayra Calvani's blog, The Dark Phantom Review.  Come by and say hello!

And for a look at Mayra's column at the Clan Elves' page, see A Typical Writing Day!

One of the things an author needs to have in his or her arsenal is a good photo to send with press releases, interviews and post with notices of book releases, etc. I've been putting this off for some time, partly because of cost and partly because I HATE HATE HATE having my picture taken. :)  (That's why I'm always the one with the camera--then I'm sure I'm out of the viewer range!!)

But as more and more opportunities come along, (and more and more books, too!) it seems like an inevitable task that we need to accomplish. Yesterday, I gathered the courage to go to the studio. My lovely "Theatah" friend Pam with the fabulous shoe store AND a Mary Kay business (how does she find the time!!) did my 'glam' makeup, and sent me off to the photo session, where a lovely young woman named Jennifer cajoled me through the process. I can't wait till she gets her own studio up and running--Capturing Moments Photography seems like the perfect name to me! Thanks so much to both of you for your help and encouragement!

It wasn't too painful, and I in fact survived. I've already sent out some of the shots as accompaniments to interviews and the like. What do you think?