In the old days, of small villages and smaller market places, if I made clay pots for a living I would know exactly how my neighbors felt about them. Joe the baker would say, “Great container for my onion rolls. Now I need another for the scones.” Or, less pleasant but equally informative, Jane the blacksmith would tell everyone in yelling distance that the pot she bought from me had shattered upon first use. “Shards, I tell you, shards!”

It’s not so much that an author wants to be liked. At the root, an author wants to be sure she was clear in her intent and that the reader understood. Because my books are my clay pots. But in the international world of online commerce, it’s a lot harder to hear Joe the baker and Jane the blacksmith.

Which is why I am so delighted with Lauren Szymanski’s book review of Waiting For You on her blog, Romance4theBeach.

Writing is a kind of trust game. The kind where you jump off a cliff and hope the group of hikers at the bottom looks up and figures out what you are doing in time to catch you.  Right. That’s not a trust game. That’s just insane.

But, in a way, this is what a writer does.

On the most basic of levels, all writing is about communication which, of course, is not basic at all. It’s a transfer of complex thoughts and emotions from the inside of the writer’s skull to the inside of the reader’s skull. It’s the essence of magic without having a wand.

Because I don’t know anyone who can read minds.

Yes, Zara the Magnificent can look at my well worn paint stained sneakers and divine that I am a sloppy painter. Or stare into my eyes and hone in on my eyelid twitch when she mentions my overflowing and purposely ignored mending basket. But that’s a totally different thing than understanding what’s going on between my ears. A lot of times even I don’t understand what’s going on between my ears.

Which is why I appreciate the process of writing and revising and revising again. It helps me understand better what I wish to communicate. But when it comes to being sure I managed it, that’s the scary part. The jumping off the cliff part.

So a book review like Lauren’s is enormously helpful. It reassures me that my clay pots are sturdy. Plus, it gives me an excuse to run around the apartment waving my arms and whooping.

Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. Wednesday is generally book review day. Unless it isn’t. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. All Of Me, Waiting For You, Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online.

It’s definitely chocolate time in my house tonight!

I’m super excited to share my news. A few months ago, I entered my romance novel, Waiting For You in the New England Readers’ Choice contest. Because there are so many entries in the contest, including entries from big publishers, I didn’t expect Waiting For You to get much attention. But I figured it was a way to get my writing in front of more readers.

I certainly didn’t expect the email I received from the New England Chapter of Romance Writers of America on Monday.

Waiting For You is a finalist in the long contemporary category and I am over the moon.

One of the challenges of writing is doing so in a bubble. There is a lot of private drafting, redrafting, polishing and critical review before the book ever comes before anyone’s eyes but mine. In that way, it’s a lot like music performance. What you see on stage, or in this case, within a paperback cover is just the tip of a very large iceberg.

But that means, for an author, there is a particular intensity when the first readers come back with comments. Because I can be happy with a story, but if a reader isn’t drawn in and hooked, I haven’t done my job.

When I sang for a living, the best part, the part I waited for and prized the most, was a certain kind of silence. When I heard that, felt it really, I knew my listeners were completely focused. I appreciated that focus for the gift it was.

I feel the same sense of gratitude and awe when I see a reader caught up in my stories.

But most readers read privately, and I rarely get to see them experiencing that sort of focus. That’s why finaling in the Readers’ Choice contest is so significant. And why I am pumped to get the book two launched and book three finished.

This process is addictive. Like chocolate.

Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. Wednesday is generally book review day. Unless it isn’t. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. Waiting For You, Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online.

Every time I feel confident in my knowledge of this new world of writing, I am reminded how little I know. Which ought to be discouraging, I guess. But instead is oddly reassuring.

There is something comforting about knowing there is so much more left to learn, to be secure in one’s own deficiencies of knowledge.

Last year, I struggled to understand how to best express a story’s essence. What goes into a plot arc and how pacing should work. How to build a character who had a life before this story. And in the marrow of things, I was struggling with whether there was any writing worth reading in me.

And I researched what an author’s website should offer. How to build a platform. What goes into designing book covers and where to find a designer. How to find a good editor.

Last year, I was trying to grasp how to begin beginning.

Now I am learning how to continue beginning. And in some ways, I am light years from where I was last January. I’m beginning to understand what I need to do next. At least when it comes to the writing part.

But today, I read a helpful article on How to Choose the Best Keywords when Publishing Fiction on Amazon and I was overwhelmed by the extent of my ignorance once again. I researched this information last year and I thought I understood it then. But I was wrong.

This sense of being lost at sea, is amazing. Exciting.

And I am so grateful for it. And for the new confusions and misunderstandings I struggle with in this becoming-more-familiar writing world. Because I had thought one of the sorrows of growing up was becoming jaded in knowledge.

Adults I knew growing up always seemed so sure. And I worried it wouldn’t be fun to be an adult if that was the way my mind would become. I never trusted certitude.

Which is why feeling stupid again and again is so invigorating. Irritating, too – I can’t lie – but refreshing too.

Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. Wednesday is generally book review day. Unless it isn’t. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. Waiting For You, Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online.

I think a lot of us struggle with impossible standards we set for ourselves. Well at least I do. Which explains this book review of My Not So Perfect Life by Sophie Kinsella.

I’m a fan of books which address this issue. Like Katie Brenner, who is trying to make a success of herself in the heart of London, many of us believe the way people accomplish great things is through sheer refusal to acknowledge the possibility of failure. After all, if Columbus had decided the ocean voyage was too formidable to even attempt  – well, you get my drift.

“Failure is not an option” is certainly the message inherent in any motivational book I have ever read. And I have rolled my eyes through quite a few of those.

Because that old Yiddish saying, Mann tracht und Gott lacht, Man plans and God laughs, is so true.

When Katie is fired by her loathsome but brilliant boss, her entire world view is shattered. I loved the way Kinsella treated this period in her protagonist’s life, walking her through a bereavement process as surely as if Katie had lost a loved one.

I’m extra conscious of plot structure these days so I also appreciate how much time and space Kinsella gave Katie to rebuild her life at her parents’ farm in Somerset. As a result, the reader feels more confident in Katie’s ability to cope when her old life comes calling.

Sometimes, in romances, the lovers are too obviously created for each other. Understandable, since the author wants their relationship to be inevitable.

Writing characters this way ties them together at the ankle doomed to an endless three legged race.

Neither lover can successfully stand alone. They have to embrace in order to move forward.

But I didn’t get that feeling here.

Kinsella has managed to create such a strong believable main character, by the end of the book the obligatory happy ending is less significant than the growing Katie has done.

And Katie’s happy ending is all the more pleasing for having been her own choice.

Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. Wednesday is generally book review day. Unless it isn’t. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online. Waiting For You is coming soon.

Personally, I would never consider moving to Oxford, England. Like Gotham City, it is home to way too many fictional murders. But I love reading about them. Which is why today I have a book review of The Bookseller’s Tale by Ann Swinfen.

The Bookseller’s tale is (spoiler alert) a tale of a Bookseller in medieval Oxford who finds himself sucked into a murder mystery. But the mystery itself is not the most interesting part of this book.

Many historical novels I read use the history as a colorful background, sometimes even as a way to move the plot along. One might, for instance, set a story in revolutionary France and move the plot along by having one’s heroine bear a remarkable and unfortunate resemblance to Marie Antoinette.

Sometimes the setting proscribes the plot so strictly, it can only move in certain directions if it is to maintain structural integrity. Regencies, for instance, focus heavily on the social protocols of a specific subset of British nobility. The rules and whether a hero obeys or flauts them are almost as significant as the actual physical setting.

So I do respect the significance of setting and time in a novel. It’s just that many historical novels can be a bit wearisome in their determination. It’s almost as though the author is trying to demonstrate the depths of her research by using absolutely every jot and tittle of it in the book, whether the information applies or not.

This is not the case with The Bookseller’s Tale which is why it won this week’s book review contest.

Ann Swinfen winds up her characters, places them in a medieval college town just after the plague has backed off, and lets them go the way they must. As a result, the historicity is organic.

Swinfen doesn’t lecture. She just lets the story unfold.

And in the process, the reader develops a fascinating picture of the challenges and also the good things about life during that period.

There are some things I wished for when I was reading. I’m not usually a fan of maps in books, but I would have liked one in this case.

I would also have loved a glossary of some of the terms. Swinfen is good at slipping unfamiliar words in contextually so you can guess what they mean. But that’s not the same as knowing.

I understood cotte was a garment but I had no clue what type. Similarly I was sure pease pudding was food. But I had to look it up to figure out how it might be a sliceable food.

Still, these are minor complaints. Because now I’ve read one, I want to read more. If I’m lucky the next in the series will be illuminated and I can settle down to read it while sipping a stoup of ale.

Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. Wednesday is generally book review day. Unless it isn’t. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online. Waiting For You is coming soon.