What's in a Name?

Last month, I re-released a favourite mystery/romance of mine called FREEMAN. It's a bit of a mysterious title in itself, isn't it?  Why didn't I call it "Tense Suspense in London's Seedy Clubland" or "Romance Blossoms Between Two Very Different Men While Foiling Dastardly Plots"? Many fabulous titles are published in the Romantic Suspense/Mystery genre, which grab a potential reader's attention with an immediate snapshot of the book's content, in just a few words.

Well, Freeman is the name of my main character. And he's mysterious in his own way, throughout the book. One name, one purpose, one narration. But - Confession time! - that's not the only reason I chose the title.

The easy answer is that it was a working title that stuck. Authors, have you ever found that to be the case? A title isn’t immediately obvious when you start writing, so you decide to file the work in progress as "book XXX", "FinishByXmasOrElse", "The Mystery One", or just "That B****y Book". Then, as time goes by and the novel takes shape, the working title can’t be shaken off.

And for the character himself? The same thing happened with him. I can’t even remember where I got his name from, but one day it was there, and it stayed. Determinedly. Relentlessly. Doggedly. Dear me, that’s just like Freeman himself!

And why only one name? No one ever mentions Freeman’s first name in the book, not even the man himself. Maybe it’s like Inspector Morse, who doesn’t reveal his first name until the end of the series. Or like many a star in the public eye who’s known only as a single name. Is that behaviour kitsch? Coy? Paranoid? There are probably a variety of reasons for it, and to be honest, I can’t presume to know Freeman’s motivation.

He just is.

Names of books and characters are important to me. Sometimes the names declare themselves very firmly to me, right from the start. Even if I try to change them later on, it just won’t work! (like Freeman)

And sometimes I have to seek for a while to find the right names. As an author, I’ll often look for inspiration in a poem or a popular saying. Or search lists of baby names of all ethnicities and sources, looking for the right sound and meaning. For example, Maen in my fantasy novel Branded came from the Welsh word for “rock”, because that’s what he is to Dax and the other soldiers under his command. Niall in my suspense thriller 72 hours means “champion”: Red in my romance Flying Colors is a nickname for Richard, meaning “powerful leader”. I like to play with the names, you can see!

What do you think about names? Do you like seeing unusual ones? Readers, do they turn you on or off in a book?

Thanks for visiting today!

Clare

********************************

FREEMAN BLURB: 

Freeman’s return to the city is quiet, without fuss. Another client: another case. He’ll source what they need and be on his way. But he’s been missed by more people than he thought: his ex-wife, his ex-lover, and his ex-business partner. And at least one of them wants him the hell gone again. 

Freeman — private, controlled – just does his job. But when he strikes up an unusual friendship with the young runaway Kit, trouble comes looking for both men, ready to expose secrets that can destroy their fragile trust. Yet, for Kit, Freeman’s more than ready for the challenge.

BUY Freeman today at Amazon | in other formats plus excerpt.

~~www.clarelondon.com~~
Find me on Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads | Amazon

Guest Author Gilian Baker: Prepare for a great day of writing

Welcome to an occasional series of guest bloggers.
Today our visitor is GILIAN BAKER.
We hope you enjoy these posts as well as our usual fare!
~~~from the Not Your Usual Suspects team~~~

Being Gilian: How I Mentally Prepare
for a Great Day of Writing

For writers, having the right mindset is a big part of the process of writing anything worth reading. I can easily stress myself out about needing to produce a magnificent chapter, especially when deadlines are looming. When I’m in that freaked out, “gotta-get-it-done” space, the Muses are nowhere to be found—just when I need them most. Today I wanted to share with you a few of the tricks I use to mentally prepare for a great day of writing—for being Gilian.

Meditate—I’ve been meditating for many years now, and I like to do it first thing in the morning. It centers me and helps me keep focused on the moment I’m living in instead of the future full of deadlines I’m worried about. Meditating in the morning sets the tone for my whole day.

Streamline my day—As I mentioned in the intro, when I’m super busy, it’s a challenge for me to get into my creative space. I personally need quiet time to ponder and sketch out ideas before, during and after writing. So, when I’m preparing for a day full of writing fiction, I clear my schedule as much as possible. Trying to squeeze it into a full day never works for me.

Write in the morning—Since I’m a morning person, I almost always write during that time. By the late afternoon, my creative spirit has dwindled, but in the morning I feel fresh and ready to create. I believe one of the most important things for writers to understand about themselves is when their creative time is and then to use it faithfully.

Journal—It’s typical for me to stop and jot down ideas that pop into my head about other scene as I write. Or if I come to a place in the story where I’m not sure what direction I should take, I’ll journal out my ideas to see which one feels right. It’s just another way I avoid forcing the words to come. When I’m writing, I always have my book journal and favorite fountain pen handy.

Reread the last chapter—Being a writer is kind of like being an actor. I find I need to get into character to write fiction. Rereading the last chapter or two often helps me prepare for the role I need to play that day.

Drink out a special mug—After I’d chosen my pen name and was elbow deep into writing Blogging is Murder, my mom bought me a mug with a big ‘G’ on it. I only drink out of it when I’m Gilian—when I’m writing a book.

Listen to different music—I personally can’t listen to music with lyrics when I work, but I do enjoy having soothing music playing in the background. I’m fond of chanting, Native American flute music and other “new age” type music. I have a special playlist that I play only when I’m being Gilian.

Use special aromatherapy scents—Our olfactory system triggers memories quickly, so I like to use a special blend of refreshing essential oils in a diffuser while I write. This prompts the memories of past successful writing sessions and keeps me creative for hours without fatigue.

Sit in my writing chair—I made room in my home office for my chair-and-a-half and ottoman. I feel more creative when I’m not sitting at my desk where “work” happens. My writing chair is positioned right across from the window, so I can look outside when I stop typing to ponder what comes next.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

About Gilian Baker

Gilian Baker is a former writing and literature professor who finally threw in the towel and decided to just show ‘em how it’s done. She has gone on to forge a life outside of academia by adding blogger & ghostwriter to her CV. She currently uses her geeky superpowers only for good to entertain cozy mystery readers the world over. When she’s not plotting murder, you can find her puttering in her vegetable garden, knitting in front of the fire, snuggled up with her husband watching British mysteries or discussing literary theory with her daughter.

In her next life, she fervently hopes to come back as a cat, though she understands that would be going down the karmic ladder. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona with her family and their three pampered felines.

Blogging is Murder Synopsis

Though she was certainly born with all the traits of a world-class private detective, blogger Jade Blackwell believed she would do nothing more than solve the murders in her latest favorite cozy mystery book.

Set in mountainous south-eastern Wyoming, Jade Blackwell lives in a log home in the quaint village of Aspen Falls with her husband, Christian and daughter Penelope (Ellie). She left her life as a tenured college English professor at the University of Wyoming four years ago, sick of the bureaucracy, mounds of essays to grade and apathetic students. She turns to blogging and ghostwriting as her new career.

Jade’s promising career as a blogger halts abruptly when she learns of a hacker who is controlling her friend and fellow blogger Liz Collin’s business remotely. When the hacker is found dead in her home, Liz is thrown in jail.

Determined to help her friend regain her life and livelihood, Jade teams up with Liz’s reluctant lawyer, Gabriel Langdon, to get Liz off the hook and out of jail. What she learns will break the case wide open, while unraveling her faith in humanity and the safety she feels living in the Rocky Mountain hamlet she calls home.

An exciting thrill ride from the first page, to the last. Read Gilian Baker’s Blogging is Murder, the first book in the Jade Blackwell cozy mystery series!

Contact Gilian Baker directly at mailto:Gilianbakerauthor@gmail.com

BLOGGING IS MURDER on Amazon

BLOGGING IS MURDER on Goodreads

GILIAN BAKER’S WEBSITE

BOOK TRAILER

FACEBOOK TWITTER

"The Harder I work, the Luckier I get"

Welcome to an occasional series of guest bloggers.
Today our visitor is Charlie Cochrane, the well-known and award-winning author, notably of the Cambridge Fellows series of historical mysteries.

We hope you enjoy these posts as well as our usual fare!

~~~the Not Your Usual Suspects team~~~

People can’t buy your book if they don’t know it exists. (Well, thank you, Charlie, for stating the bleeding obvious.) I’ve come across several authors - no names, no pack drill - over the years who don’t seem to grasp that simple fact. They write their book, it gets published, then they wait for their royalty statements and wonder why sales are so low. The simple fact is that, for the majority of authors, they have to make an active and effective contribution towards their book’s marketing and that’s not just in our genre, it’s across the breadth of genres. You might say some authors are lucky, but I subscribe to golfer Gary Player’s viewpoint, when he said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

There’s a checklist of basic things (apart from the usual blog, website, Facebook, etc) which cost us nothing but a bit of time, that every author should make sure they have in place. Amazon author pages for a start, with biog and links - at least for the country the author lives in and for Amazon.com. It also doesn’t take a lot of effort to have your blog, twitter, whatever, linked to automatically cross post there. Same applies to your page on Goodreads. And don’t make assumptions that these pages work automatically or by fairy dust. You’ll need to check that all your books are listed on amazon on your author page, especially if you’re in an anthology, and that your Goodreads page is linked to the books you wrote. It won’t happen on its own. There are other opportunities for one time setup, low maintenance online presence, such as Authorgraph, none of which are not technically difficult. Let’s face it, if I can do it, anybody can.

Now, you might say, “But, Charlie, I’ve got all that going, and I’m on twitter and Facebook and all the usual suspects,” (see what I did there?) “Now what?”

To which I'd reply that I think we’re just scratching the surface of the great world of book readers. There is no denying that the core of our genre - our loyal readers of LGBT books - is what supports us and keeps us going. Without them there’d be no business. But there are other potential readers out there. People who loved “The Song of Achilles” would adore Elin Gregory’s “Alike as Two Bees”, and viewers who swooned at Jack and Ianto might like the science fiction books by Blaine Arden or Anna Butler or Becky Black and the rest. And it’s not just that crossover. Readers who like historical fiction in general might enjoy Elin’s books for the settings, as cosy mystery fans would - I hope - enjoy my Cambridge Fellows or Lindenshaw mystery series for the crime element.

So how do we get our books in front of that wider audience? Well, if I had the answer to that entirely sussed, I’d be writing this from my beach house at Provincetown, but I can offer some ideas.

Think wider with your promotion - all aspects of it, not just where you send new release notifications. Do you only promote on sites with an LGBT flavour? What about the other genre elements? Let’s consider historicals as an example, although this applies to other types of book. Are you blogging about them in places where the focus is on the history bit of the story? Could you try to get your work reviewed on a site like the Historical Novel Society? Could you enter their awards? Could you join the organisation as an author, or find other places where you could network with authors/readers who share the non-LGBT “tags” for your book? Are there events you could attend (or better still be on a panel) that relate to that non-LGBT bit? Could you get together with local historical novelists and put on a panel at a local library or nearby literary festival?

There are lots of opportunities out there, and clearly we all need to pick and choose because our time is limited, as are our resources, and we’ll have to try and work out what will be cost/time effective for us as individuals. What works for one author may not work for another. I’d certainly recommend you make yourself marketable. What on earth do you mean by that, Charlie, you daft old thing? Well, we can all think of authors who have got themselves a bit of a reputation for being spiky, for always stirring up trouble. Likewise we can think of people who are a bit unreliable, who never do what they promise. There will be occasions they miss out on offers to do things because their reputation precedes them.

Be reliable, be pleasant, be the sort of person people want to work with!

Biog and links:

As Charlie Cochrane couldn’t be trusted to do any of her jobs of choice—like managing a rugby team—she writes. Her favourite genre is gay fiction, sometimes historical (sometimes hysterical) and usually with a mystery thrown into the mix.

She’s a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, Mystery People, and International Thriller Writers Inc., with titles published by Carina, Samhain, Bold Strokes Books, Lethe, MLR, and Riptide. She regularly appears with The Deadly Dames and is on the organising team for UK Meet.

To sign up for her newsletter, email her at cochrane.charlie2@googlemail.com, or catch her at:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/charlie.cochrane.18

Twitter: http://twitter.com/charliecochrane

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2727135.Charlie_Cochrane

Blogs: http://charliecochrane.livejournal.com and https://charliecochrane.wordpress.com/

Website: http://www.charliecochrane.co.uk

Everything I Know About Writing I Learned From Mary Stewart

Welcome to an occasional series of guest bloggers.
Today our visitor is Jeannette de Beauvoir.
We hope you enjoy these posts as well as our usual fare!

~~~the Not Your Usual Suspects team~~~

Everything I Know About Writing I Learned From Mary Stewart

That’s a slight exaggeration, of course; but not as much as you’d think. I grew up in France, the daughter of an American mother and a French father, and my mother’s TBR pile was always toppling over with the English-language books she shared with me—and in fact insisted I read. Romantic suspense appealed to me from about age nine on, and we had (thanks to trips to Paris to raid W.H. Smith’s bookstore) nearly the entire Stewart opus. And I fell in love with those books, over and over again, reading and re-reading them until I had entire portions down to memory.

I may have been unconsciously following her style when, in my early teens, I myself began writing; but it was as an adult that I truly came to see Stewart’s whole opus—20 adult novels over 40 years—as the best writing classes imaginable.

Her opening lines draw readers immediately into the story and the personality of the protagonist (talk about “you had me at hello”!). Check them out:

·       “Carmel Lacy is the silliest women I know, which is saying a great deal.” (Airs Above the Ground).

·       “The whole affair began so very quietly.” (Madam, Will You Talk?)

·        “I am an old man now, but then I was already past my prime when Arthur was crowned king.” (The Crystal Cave)

·       “My lover came to me on the last night in April, with a message and a warning that sent me home to him.” (Touch Not The Cat)

·       “I met him in the street called Straight.” (The Gabriel Hounds)

·       “In the first place, I suppose, it was my parents' fault for giving me a silly name like Gianetta.” (Wildfire at Midnight)

Her descriptions of places have you smelling the flowers she lovingly names and feeling hot sun on your face; whether you’re in southern France or Greece or Lebanon or Austria or England, you have an instantaneous and extraordinarily vivid sense of the locale. “Her eye for detail could be used to maximum effect—the texture of a cloak or the color of a sky—with nature to the fore of the action,” reads one of her obituaries.

And she can scare you with the best of them. Other authors, darker than Stewart—I’m thinking Thomas H. Cook, Phil Rickman, masters of suspense—may be able to build atmosphere; she weaves it around you until you suddenly realize your heart rate is increasing and your palms are sweating.

The relationships she enables are no less complex. I use the word “enables” intentionally: these don’t feel like artificial creations, but like real organic feelings that come from the characters rather than the author—she’s just letting them flow through her. Her protagonists are smart, educated, independent, with a strongly developed sense of humor and not without faults; and so are their romantic interests. The development of these relationships (along with the requisite misunderstandings and obstacles) is both natural and sophisticated.

Her novels are filled with literary allusions, and they’re smart: she fully expects you to keep up, but never in a heavy-handed way. I’ve always felt with authors like Umberto Eco that if you don’t speak Latin you miss all the good jokes; Stewart’s allusions are unobtrusive and clever. She prefaces chapters with appropriate quotations from classic literature, and her protagonists have all had classical educations. “Mary Stewart sprinkled intelligence around like stardust,” columnist Melanie Reid wrote in the Glasgow newspaper The Herald in 2004. “The fineness of her mind shone through.”

So what did I learn about writing from reading Mary Stewart? To put readers in the story’s context as early as possible, preferably in the opening line. To nearly always write in the first person—yes, it’s limiting, but it’s also intense. To present a protagonist that readers will care about. And to be (old-fashioned as it sounds) a lady about it. Sensationalism is out, lyricism is in.

Want to learn to write? Read Mary Stewart. Want a fantastic story? Read Mary Stewart. Want to see how the best of the best of romantic thrillers unfolds? Read Mary Stewart.

Mary Stewart’s last book was published in 1997; the rest of us are still just trying to keep up.

Jeannette de Beauvoir’s most recent novel, Deadly Jewels, came out in March 2016. Kirkus Reviews says that it "cleverly weaves real events into a mystery/thriller whose flashbacks contain the clues to solve the puzzle," while it's the top pick of RT Book Reviews, "seamlessly weaving the historical and the modern, de Beauvoir crafts a mystery that gives her engaging protagonist... a strong return. De Beauvoir's voice and character development are stellar."

Reach Jeannette at:
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Email.

Romance Heroines that Kick Ass

 Thank you to Wynter for hosting me here at Not Your Usual Suspects today! Since this blog has mystery and romantic suspense authors I thought it would be fun to talk about kick ass heroines in the romantic suspense genre.

1. The first book that came to mind is Cry No More by Linda Howard. I read this book long before I even knew I wanted to be a writer and the determination of the heroine has stuck with me all these years. Mila Edge, the heroine of the story doesn’t have any law enforcement or military training and she’s not an expert in martial arts, but she is a woman on a mission. Someone kidnapped her child when he was an infant and the lengths she goes to in searching for him are nothing short of amazing. This book is definitely a romance but it’s also about a woman’s struggles to find answers and to find her son.

2. The next heroine I really dig is FBI Special Agent Monica Davenport from Cynthia Eden’s Deadly Fear. She gets inside the minds of serial killers and brings them to justice. After being kidnapped by one when she was just a child she came through hell and ended up helping people even after all her trauma.

3. Sonora ‘Sonny’ Vasquez from Jill Sorenson’s Crash Into Me is another kick ass FBI agent who deserves a mention. Sorenson’s books have an edgy, gritty flavor to them and her characters tend to have real flaws and real problems. Sonny is no different. After overcoming a craptastic childhood she goes on to hold her own in a male-dominated career.

4. Lieutenant Eve Dallas from J.D. Robb’s futuristic In Death series. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Eve. She’s the perfect romantic suspense heroine. Tough and gritty, she overcame a really bad past and if you commit a crime in her city, you better pray she’s not the cop on your case. In addition to her all awesomeness, she manages to balance being married to sexy billionaire Roarke (who wouldn’t?) and all of the social obligations, etc. that entails. And she never loses who she is or tries to change any facet of her personality/outward appearance to fit in.

Who are some of your favorite heroines in romantic suspense? And why? One commenter will be selected to win a digital copy of Deadly Obsession. I’ll announce the winner tomorrow, August 31, 2011 after 12 EST in the comments section so make sure to check back.

Deadly Obsession now available from Carina Press.

The chilling words of a killer: This is just the beginning…

Ten years ago, Lilly Carmichael left town without an explanation, breaking Braden Donnelly’s heart. The death of her aunt has brought Lilly home–and face to face with memories she thought were long buried. Still getting over a traumatic incident from her work as an NSA agent, Lilly initially dismisses the face at her window as a figment of stress-induced paranoia.

Now the sheriff of Hudson Bay, Braden has spent the last year hunting a sadistic murderer. But his investigation is turned upside down when new evidence indicates that Lilly is the killer’s next target. Determined to protect the woman he’s never stopped loving, Braden must race against the clock to trap a dangerous psychopath—before it’s too late…

A little about me: I’ve been reading romance from a young age (since I discovered my mom’s hidden stash) and the addiction stayed with me into adulthood. I write dark paranormal romance and sexy, fast-paced romantic suspense. Currently I write for Carina Press, Harlequin Nocturne (Destined Mate, October 2011), and in early 2012 the first book in my paranormal series will release from NAL/Signet Eclipse (Alpha Instinct: A Moon Shifter Novel). To learn more about me please visit my website, my blog, facebook or find me on twitter @katiereus.