Month: February 2011

February Blog Tour

HEAD OVER HEELS will release in audio book from AudioLark on Valentine’s Day. Next week! February 14th, for you non-romantic types. I’m setting up a bit of a blog tour to celebrate the release. Yes, for once, Cindy is going on a blog tour instead of hosting an author who’s on one. Not to worry, I’ll announce the blogs here the days they post. But just to get organized…

Thursday, February 17th, you can find me at the new group blog, 4 Writers, For Readers.

The following week, Wedneday, February 23rd, I’ll be at author Edie Ramer’s blog. UPDATE: This date may be changing. I’ll post next week with the new details.

Lastly, the week of February 28th, I’m getting interviewed at The Pen Warriors, although I’m not sure of the exact date yet.

Two blogs and one interview. Cyberspace will get sick of me.

I’m also sending out a new copy of my newsletter next week, to coincide with the audio release of HEAD OVER HEELS. If you’d like to sign up before I do, there’s a handy-dandy little newsletter sign-up box at the top right of this page.

And Now Television…

While I’m blabbing about my childhood influences, I might as well confess my childhood TV addictions. Because I think they also influenced my desire to become a writer. And my tendency to write humorous/comedy. Even when I’m writing emotional contemporary romance, I like my characters to possess healthy senses of humor. At least one of them, anyway. The other one can be serious. I’m flexible like that.

I tend to believe I’m one of those writers who was born a writer—or at least a reader. I learned to read early (aged 4, so family legend goes), and once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. Yes, we had TV, but for years we had one, maybe two channels. And neither of those channels was dedicated to children, let me tell you! (“Let me tell you!” is something my grandfather used to say all the time, so when I say it, I think of him, let me tell you). Oh, we had a couple of Canadian children’s television shows, like The Friendly Giant and Mr. Dress-Up. And we had The Walt Disney Show on Sunday nights. If we kids were good, we were allowed to watch The Ed Sullivan Show following Disney. And Ed had that little mouse who told jokes and made everyone laugh and feel good about themselves.

My father loved The Red Skelton Show. I watched and loved it, too. And so comedy seeped its way into my veins.

No one could top Red for me until The Carol Burnett Show happened along. I LOVED Carol Burnett. She was funny, too. Especially her pitiful Eunice character. Tragic and sad, yet, in the midst of all that dysfunction, laugh-out-loud funny. Suddenly, funny seemed so natural to me. When you’re shy as a child, humor is a great way to break out of your shell. Every once in a while I run across someone who tells me I was shy when they first met me. Usually, they just tell me I was weird.

Well, I was raised on Topo Gigio, Red Skelton, and Carol Burnett, with a healthy dose of Bugs Bunny and Grover from Sesame Street thrown in (I didn’t discover Grover until I was 15—long story involving a coveted color television set and my high school that year being on split shift and not starting until afternoon).

And people wonder why I’m a bit odd. Now you know.

Childhood Literary Influences

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE books are the earliest influence I can remember (other than Dr. Seuss) that made me want to become a writer. Well, Dr. Seuss didn’t make me want to be a writer so much as he made me want to learn to read. And I did learn to read as a preschooler, through the Dr. Seuss books. I didn’t go to Kindergarten (it didn’t exist in my little backwoods community and this was a few decades ago!), and, because I’m born in January, I was 6 and a half by the time I entered grade one. I would have been bored to tears if I hadn’t learned to read before grade one.

I most likely “taught myself” to read because my older sister, two grades ahead of me in school, would sit and read with my parents for her homework. I was a bit competitive, so was in there like a dirty shirt. If Big Sis was learning to read, then, by gum, I was learning to read, too!

So by the time I entered grade one, at six and a half, I was reading at a grade three level. Big Sis was in grade three. Makes sense.

My grade three teacher, Mrs. Brady, loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and read them to us every day. I fell in love with them, too. I must have read each book three times over the next couple of years. I identified with Laura because she had dark hair and had to wear pink all the time whereas her blonde sister got to wear blue. Yes, my mother was forever forcing me into pink. I was a tomboy (which is weird, because I have no athletic ability whatsoever…oh, yeah, I was competing with my brother, the only boy, for my father’s attention—that’s why I was a tomboy) (have I mentioned I’m a middle child?). As I said, I was a tomboy, and what tomboy wants to wear pink?

We also lived in a very tiny farming community that, to this day, doesn’t have a stop sign or a store of any kind. Laura came from a pioneering family, and as a child I felt pretty much that way about myself. Especially when a bear happened into the yard.

Did you know there’s a blog devoted to all things Laura Ingalls Wilder? Well, there is. It’s called Laura’s Little Houses. And it’s worth a visit.

My favorite Laura Ingalls Wilder book was ON THE BANKS OF PLUM CREEK. Do you have a favorite Laura book? Or a favorite author from your childhood? One who inspired your love of reading or led to dreams of becoming a writer?

My grade seven teacher loved Ray Bradbury and read Bradbury short stories to us nearly every day. Ray was fun. But Ray wasn’t Laura.

It’s Laura for me!

Wordle Fun

You’ve seen tag clouds (those clusters of words in some blog sidebars that show the most commonly used tags or categories). I’m not a fan of tag clouds. The bigger words always look like they’re bragging. But I am a fan of having fun. I stumbled across the Wordle website and inputted the first three chapters of the book I’m currently submitting to agents. This was the result:

I like that the Wordle is shaped like a shoe with the hero’s and heroine’s names jutting out. #1, the book is a romantic comedy/mystery and the hero, Gabe, is a newbie P.I., so the shoe form = “gumshoe.” And, #2, the jutting out of the names looks fun.

I inputted my text block into the Wordle form, then opened a new window, took a screen shot, then expanded the screen shot as wide as my monitor would allow. I then pasted the screen shot into Photoshop and created this JPG (You can choose to post your creation to a public Wordle gallery instead of going to all this trouble. But you know me. I like trouble).

Like a tag cloud, a “wordle” highlights the most commonly used words in your uploaded text. Gabe is the hero and Ursula is the heroine, so their names should show up the largest. I’m pleased that they do.

Mackie is Gabe’s uncle. He has several point-of-view scenes in the novel and plays a major role in the plot.

The Wordle website has several font and color and shape variations. Play with your own Wordle then let me know about it in the comments section. When I have a moment, I’ll pop over to your blog and check it out.