Share a tweet with another #MFRWauthor member @MFRW_ORG

It's Retweet Day for MFRW on Twitter. All Marketing for Romance Writers are invited to set up tweets for their books.

Go into Twitter and create a tweet. Make sure to use #MFRWauthor or #MFRWorg You can share up to 280 characters per tweet.

Once the tweet has been posted, click anywhere in the white background of the tweet. This will open it and allow you to highlight and copy the URL.

Navigate back to here and paste the URL in the comment section of this post.

Each month, the RT post goes live the Monday before RT day. You can post your tweet until Wednesday of the same week.

Retweet Day is on the second Wednesday of each month. Retweet everyone on the list who uses one of the hashtags.

HINT:

To help people find your tweet, click the the white background and then the down arrow (found on the right side). Choose "Pin to Your Profile Page." This will keep the tweet at the top of your Twitter feed so more people can find it.

Retweet Day Rules

1. Must have #MFRWauthor or #MFRWorg in the tweet. (This retweet day is to promote each other and our group.)

2. Do not use profanity or sexual explicit graphics. Keep it for all age groups.
3. Please do not use adult topics for this one tweet.
4. Limit hashtags to three (3) per post.

5. Return on Retweet Day and click each link in the comments.**

6. On the tweet, click the heart and then the retweet button.

** To share a tweet, highlight the url, right click, and you will see an option to open the link or go to the url. Do that, and it should open in a new window and take you there.

Come back after sending the tweet and go through the entire list. 

PLEASE NOTE: If a tweet doesn't fit your stream, you are under no obligation to share it.

Here's to a great day of retweets!

Kayelle Allen writes Sci Fi with misbehaving robots, mythic heroes, role playing immortal gamers, and warriors who purr. She is the author of multiple books, novellas, and short stories. She's also a US Navy veteran and has been married so long she's tenured.

https://kayelleallen.com

The Wrong Idea about Story Ideas by Alice Orr @AliceOrrBooks #MFRWauthor #AmEditing

The major misconception about story ideas has to do with what they can and cannot accomplish. Let me illustrate with a cocktail party – or family barbecue or writers' event – scenario. The Author, maybe you or me, stands at edge of the crowd to maximize observation potential. We're eavesdroppers and surveillance experts after all. We know, as Nora Ephron said, that everything is copy, so we're always on the lookout for glimpses of story fodder.

Story Fodder

Since we are also savvy Authors, our glasses contain sparkling water, diet cola, tonic with lime or something equally nonalcoholic. We know that keeping the head clear is essential to keeping the perception sharp and the memory intact for later notetaking. We are further aware that every foray into the world holds the possibility for sighting a publishing pro, and we must be ever ready to do some sober impressing. Like I said, we're savvy.

Meanwhile, a fellow partier sidles over to you, but is unfortunately anything but a publishing professional. In fact, this guy or gal is a civilian, as in not a publishing person at all, and especially not an Author. Soon he or she discovers that you however are the real thing, an actual bona fide Author in the flesh. At which point, your new-found companion from the non-pub world suggests some variation on the following.

"I've got a terrific idea for a novel. Bestseller for sure. How's about I tell you my idea, you write the story, then we split the take fifty-fifty?"

More than one misconception is in play here. First off, this non-practitioner of the writing arts completely underestimates the writing process. Legendary sportswriter Red Smith once famously said, "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein." Of course, your sidekick with the bestseller idea, who has now glommed onto you like an overboard sailor in search of port in a storm, knows nothing about the bloodletting aspect of a writer's work. Worse yet, he does not understand that an idea is not a story.

An idea is only a kernel. That kernel may possess the potential to grow into the next Nora King Mary Higgins Grisham opus, or it may not. Either way, tons of nurture, strain, frustration, doubt and, ah yes, bloodletting must be applied between the planting of that seed kernel and its sometimes quite long-distant future harvest. A clever idea may be a jumping off place, but, without the sweat equity required, the storyteller is in for a hard fall and a lean crop.

Let me make very clear that not only non-writers are susceptible here. I have myself experienced the exhilaration of a Technicolor idea strike. Here's how that phenomenon generally goes. A story concept, or maybe just the flash of a scene, appears unexpectedly out of the blue, like lightning in the mind. And, in that instant, I am immediately certain something entirely new and previously unimagined has been revealed.

"This is it," I cry out in creative ecstasy between heart palpitations. "This is the story I have to write."

The problem is that I don't really have a story. I only have an idea, and an idea is only a beginning. A story, particularly in the commercial publishing arena where so many of us practice our craft, requires a plot with a beginning, a middle and an end. At best, my dazzling epiphany of inspiration will get me through the opening scene, maybe even the first chapter. Sadly, on the other hand, without a lot more work, the story tumbles downhill from there.

Any editor worth her blue pencil will see straight through the Technicolor bit to the lackluster follow-up. Even if she is impressed by the story's start, she'll have figured out the truth long before the probably nonexistent finish. Which did, in fact, happen to me with the proposal for a suspense novel tentatively titled Live Burial. I must admit I was as blindingly dazzled by that title inspiration as I had been by the initial idea strike. Until my then-agent leveled her critique straight at me.

"Sorry, Alice," she said, and she actually did look sorrowful. "You've got no second act."

My own twenty-twenty hindsight eventually leveled its critique as well. I had no subsequent acts at all, only a wham-bam opening scene. What had been buried alive, by me, was my story, along with my chances of making that all-important boffo first-read impression on my agent. The object lesson here is this. Follow my advice, not my example. Tell your partytime buddy, "Thanks, but no thanks," and never let The Wrong Idea about Ideas enter your storyteller's mind ever again.

For more insights into writing and publishing, visit my blog at www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Alice Orr is author of 16 novels, 3 novellas, a memoir and No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript that Sells. A former book editor and literary agent, Alice now writes full-time. Her latest novel is A Time of Fear and Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 5. Find all of Alice Orr's books at amazon.com and other online retailers. Alice has two grown children and two perfect grandchildren and lives with her beloved husband Jonathan in New York City.
Author Website www.aliceorrbooks.com
Author Blog www.aliceorrbooks.com
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/aliceorrwriter
Twitter https://twitter.com/aliceorrbooks
Amazon Author Page https://www.amazon.com/Alice-Orr/e/B000APC22E

Give your tweet more reach with #MFRWauthor members @MFRW_ORG

It's Retweet Day for MFRW on Twitter. All Marketing for Romance Writers are invited to set up tweets for their books.

Go into Twitter and create a tweet. Make sure to use #MFRWauthor or #MFRWorg You can share up to 280 characters per tweet.

Once the tweet has been posted, click anywhere in the white background of the tweet. This will open it and allow you to highlight and copy the URL.

Navigate back to here and paste the URL in the comment section of this post.

Each month, the RT post goes live the Monday before RT day. You can post your tweet until Wednesday of the same week.

Retweet Day is on the second Wednesday of each month. Retweet everyone on the list who uses one of the hashtags.

HINT:

To help people find your tweet, click the the white background and then the down arrow (found on the right side). Choose "Pin to Your Profile Page." This will keep the tweet at the top of your Twitter feed so more people can find it.

Retweet Day Rules

1. Must have #MFRWauthor or #MFRWorg in the tweet. (This retweet day is to promote each other and our group.)

2. Do not use profanity or sexual explicit graphics. Keep it for all age groups.
3. Please do not use adult topics for this one tweet.
4. Limit hashtags to three (3) per post.

5. Return on Retweet Day and click each link in the comments.**

6. On the tweet, click the heart and then the retweet button.

** To share a tweet, highlight the url, right click, and you will see an option to open the link or go to the url. Do that, and it should open in a new window and take you there.

Come back after sending the tweet and go through the entire list. 

PLEASE NOTE: If a tweet doesn't fit your stream, you are under no obligation to share it.

Here's to a great day of retweets!

Kayelle Allen writes Sci Fi with misbehaving robots, mythic heroes, role playing immortal gamers, and warriors who purr. She is the author of multiple books, novellas, and short stories. She's also a US Navy veteran and has been married so long she's tenured.

https://kayelleallen.com

It's All About Her Humanity – How to Create the Perfect Heroine for Your Story by Alice Orr @AliceOrrBooks #AmEditing #MFRWauthor

Mike Nichols was a master storyteller, one of the best that ever lived, in my opinion. I saw him in an interview once where he was asked to name the most important element in a story. His answer was this. "All we care about is the humanity."

How to Create the Perfect Heroine for Your Story

He was saying we must put the core of what makes us all human into the characters in our stories. Their dreams and hopes. Their disappointments and losses. Especially how they FEEL about their dreams, hopes, disappointments and losses. All portrayed in well-written scenes.

In Nichols' film Heartburn, from the novel and screenplay by another great storyteller, the fabulous Nora Ephron, humanity is at the burning heart. Rachel Samstat spends the entire story trying to get into, get through and eventually get out of the marriage of her hopes and dreams. She is toppled into disappointment, one she creates for herself by an error in judgment.

Her blunder sets her up for what feels at the moment like the most devastating loss of her life, the discovery that her husband Mark Forman has been unfaithful. Let me emphasize that Rachel FEELS like his infidelity is the greatest loss of her life and this is what matters. How the situation FEELS to the character. How what happens to her impacts her humanity.

We may know she is better off without this lying, philandering so-and-so, but she doesn't FEEL that truth. She triumphs, so to speak, in the end because she comes to grips with that truth, and we FEEL that triumph with her. We also FEEL her heartache. We FEEL her humanity.

The entire story really belongs to Rachel Samstat. It could have been titled The Adventures (or Misadventures) of Rachel Samstat. Similarly, each of our own stories could be titled The Adventures of ________ (fill in the name of your story heroine). Or more accurately The Emotional Adventures of ________.

It's All About Her Humanity

In the romance genre in particular, our audience, our readership, cares most about the humanity of our heroine, and how that humanity acts itself out in our story. How her humanity comes to life on the page in the way she behaves and talks and most of all FEELS. In other words, what our readers care about most is our heroine's Emotional Truth.

Emotional truth is what's really going on in your story. The real, underlying truth of what is happening to your heroine, and all of your characters. What your characters allow us to see and hear on their surfaces can conceal what they are truly feeling. Great stories are all about TRUE FEELINGS REVEALED.

This is exactly like real life, and real life is the mother lode from which you mine your own emotional truth and refine it into storytelling treasure. The precious coins of that treasure are the deeply felt emotions at the beating heart of your story, the deeply felt emotions that make your reader feel deeply too. Like we feel for Rachel Samstat, because we recognize her heartburn and her heartbreak, because at one time or another it has most likely been our own.

I write romantic suspense novels. Scary things happen in my stories. In my latest novel, A Time of Fear and Loving, my heroine, Amanda Miller Bryce, is terrorized by a brute. That same thing happened to me once. Fortunately, Amanda and I both survived. In the meantime, as I wrote the story, she and I both benefited from my emotional truth of that awful experience.

We shared the powerlessness we felt while the awfulness was happening. We shared the shock and numbness we felt after it was over. We also shared our awareness of the way others reacted around us. I didn't need to take notes. All of that was branded on my own, very personal humanity in indelible emotional ink. Now it is branded on my heroine's humanity.

We have all had emotionally indelible experiences. We have been changed by them, traumatized by them, sometimes stopped in our tracks by them. As writers, we get to pass those experiences on to our heroines. We get to convert our own emotional landscapes into the very raw material of very intense, very dramatic, very powerful storytelling.

You know what these stories are for you. Pass them on to your heroine. Write those stories the way your heart FEELS them to be true. Don't worry about whether or not these stories may differ from factual truth. Facts are verifiable. Feelings are not. Someone else's emotional truth may vary from yours, but that doesn't make your truth any less valid. Besides, you are creating fiction, which can be anything you, as creator, want it to be.

Emotional Truth is individual, for you and for your heroine. Her truths are what she honestly FEELS. That honesty gives your story authenticity and makes your heroine come to life on the page. That authenticity gives your heroine her humanity. It is what makes your story really matter, to you as you write it, and to your readers as they read it.

Dig Deep

So, dig down and dig deep. You will know when you hit the humanity mother lode because it will zing straight to your heart, just before you zing it straight onto the page, where you will create the perfect heroine for your story.

For more insights into writing and publishing, visit my blog at www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Alice Orr is author of 16 novels, 3 novellas, a memoir and No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript that Sells. A former book editor and literary agent, Alice now writes full-time. Her latest novel is A Time of Fear and Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 5. Find all of Alice Orr's books at amazon.com and other online retailers. Alice has two grown children and two perfect grandchildren and lives with her beloved husband Jonathan in New York City.

Author Website www.aliceorrbooks.com

Author Blog www.aliceorrbooks.com

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/aliceorrwriter

Twitter https://twitter.com/aliceorrbooks

Amazon Author Page https://www.amazon.com/Alice-Orr/e/B000APC22E

On Retweet Day we share tweets with members #MFRWauthor @MFRW_ORG

It's Retweet Day for MFRW on Twitter. All Marketing for Romance Writers are invited to set up tweets for their books.

Go into Twitter and create a tweet. Make sure to use #MFRWauthor or #MFRWorg You can share up to 280 characters per tweet.

Once the tweet has been posted, click anywhere in the white background of the tweet. This will open it and allow you to highlight and copy the URL.

Navigate back to here and paste the URL in the comment section of this post.

Each month, the RT post goes live the Monday before RT day. You can post your tweet until Wednesday of the same week.

Retweet Day is on the second Wednesday of each month. Retweet everyone on the list who uses one of the hashtags.

HINT:

To help people find your tweet, click the the white background and then the down arrow (found on the right side). Choose "Pin to Your Profile Page." This will keep the tweet at the top of your Twitter feed so more people can find it.

Retweet Day Rules

1. Must have #MFRWauthor or #MFRWorg in the tweet. (This retweet day is to promote each other and our group.)

2. Do not use profanity or sexual explicit graphics. Keep it for all age groups.
3. Please do not use adult topics for this one tweet.
4. Limit hashtags to three (3) per post.

5. Return on Retweet Day and click each link in the comments.**

6. On the tweet, click the heart and then the retweet button.

** To share a tweet, highlight the url, right click, and you will see an option to open the link or go to the url. Do that, and it should open in a new window and take you there.

Come back after sending the tweet and go through the entire list. 

PLEASE NOTE: If a tweet doesn't fit your stream, you are under no obligation to share it.

Here's to a great day of retweets!

Kayelle Allen writes Sci Fi with misbehaving robots, mythic heroes, role playing immortal gamers, and warriors who purr. She is the author of multiple books, novellas, and short stories. She's also a US Navy veteran and has been married so long she's tenured.

https://kayelleallen.com