Welcome Author Kira Sinclair-Guest Blogger

Please welcome my fellow Heart of Dixie writing friend, author Kira Sinclair.  


She's a Harlequin  BLAZE author with a heart of gold. I'm excited to share my Veranda with her today as she shares about one of her favorite topics: Writing. Today's topic? Setting. And she's got setting nailed in her fabulous new novel, What Might Have Been.  I hope you enjoy meeting Kira as much as I enjoy knowing her!! 

Setting – More Than Just a Place

One of my favorite topics to talk about is writing.  Ask me a question, get me rolling and I can talk your ear off.  I recently had a nice discussion with a friend about settings.  Part of it started because of my bio – if you’ve read it you know I’m a self proclaimed city girl who’s been plopped down in the middle of the country.  The transformation started when my daddy moved us from Michigan to Alabama (and I seriously asked him if we could still wear shoes.  Hey, I was only nine). And continued with my husband’s penchant for bringing home critters...but that’s another discussion for another time.

I’ve come to realize, during my talk of settings, that up until What Might Have Been I’ve focused my attention on fairly urban locations.  Maybe I was feeling homesick.  However, WMHB returned me back to my present existence.  It’s set on a commercial peach orchard.  Now, I don’t live on a working farm.  At the moment the most we raise are goats and baby hamsters, but I do enjoy looking out my kitchen window and seeing the clear stretch of our land instead of my neighbor’s dilapidated trampoline and overgrown flower beds. 

There are definitely advantages to living in the country.  I just miss my pizza delivery guy sometimes. 

I did love doing the research for WMHB though.  Building a fictional small town where everyone knows your business.  The kind where there’s only one funeral home and multiple Baptist churches.  I enjoyed pulling out my learned Southern heritage and finally getting to use it.

So, do you find you gravitate towards a certain kind of setting?  Do you read books where that feel familiar or do you like to change up the pace?  Are you a city girl who likes to read about cowboys or a country girl who likes to travel to the urban meccas?

Kira

OnLine Workshop Plug--Join in the Fun!!

One of my new volunteer positions with my writing chapter, RWA's Heart of Dixie, is to be their online workshop moderator. I'm new at this game, but just finished my first workshop and enjoyed meeting more virtual peeps in the classroom. The class is officially finished, but soon another workshop is available for online learning. I've included the information in this blog for three reasons:

1) Participants will learn a new way to create writing income even if you're not published in full length fiction.

2) Participants will have the opportunity to send in the first few pages of their manuscripts for critique by PUBLISHED authors and TWO of these will be selected for FULL CRITIQUES! How cool is that? Very cool.

3) I am offering a PRIZE to the first person who signs up for this class and mentions that they read about it on DIGGING OUT OF DISTRACTION. The prize is an autographed copy of Kira Sinclair's book, AFTERBURN.  I have a copy. It's fantastic.

So come on and join in the fun. I can't wait to see who signs up first!

Airing Dirty Laundry – Use Family Stories, Eavesdropping and Cable TV to Create Writing Income

Instructor: Marilyn Puett

Online Workshop Through Heart of Dixie, RWA, www.heartofdixie.org

June 7 – 21, 2010

Cost: $20, Deadline for Registration June 5^th.

Course Description:

Airing Dirty Laundry offers information and tips on how to create a source of outside income by writing short stories for the confessions and romance magazines.  This two-week workshop is geared for writers who want extra income while waiting to sell their first book, are between royalty checks or simply want an extra income stream.

This course takes students step by step through writing a confession.  It begins with learning the market, developing hooks and compelling story lines and structuring a story properly.  By the end of the course, students should have a story ready for submission.

Additionally, participants will be given the opportunity to submit the first few pages of a story they start during the class and have the pages critiqued by published writers.  Two stories will be selected toward the end of the class to receive a full critique.

Instructor Bio:

Marilyn Puett has sold over thirty stories and a half-dozen short feature articles to the confessions and romance magazines.  She has also sold to an e-zine called Chick Lit Review and an anthology titled, appropriately enough, I Confess.  She appears in both the 2008 and 2009 Bylines Writers’ Desk Calendar and her article “Short Shorts – Not Just a Fashion Statement” was featured on the Writing for Dollars website.  Marilyn is a member of Heart of Dixie RWA and serves RWA on both the local and national levels.  A founding member of The Writing Playground, a website for aspiring writers (www.writingplayground.com), she lives in her empty nest in north Alabama and dotes on her granddaughter.