Tag Archives: Celine Kiernan

Even the smallest #mom wields the powerful #magic of #love. #celebrating #motherhood #writing #kidlit #writinglife

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“Why isn’t Huck Finn’s dad nice to him?” Blondie asks from  behind her beloved stuffed dog Sledgehammer.

Bo closed The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and stared at the cover a good long moment before answering. “Some parents are not that nice, kiddo,” he says, and goes on to talk a bit about alcohol addiction.

I came in after her prayers as I always do to give her a hug and kiss goodnight. “I hope Huck gets away soon,” she says.

“He can’t have any adventures if he doesn’t.”

Blondie nods, then brightens. “I can’t wait until my birthday party!”

So it goes when talking to an almost-nine-year-old: from horrifying parents to birthday celebrations in the blink of a beautiful eye.

It struck me, then, how few stories I read during my own childhood that contained positive parent figures. There’s no parents in the Chronicles of Narnia that I recall. Ramona Quimby had a mom, I think…but she wasn’t a major character, or at the very least, memorable. Fairy tale parents are usually evil or inconsequential. Babysitter Club books are usually about girls solving their own problems without parental help (why else would a babysitter be around?). I don’t recall Nancy Drew having extensive scenes with her folks. Few of the detective novels I read had much of anything to do with family, come to think, unless you count Sherlock’s brother Mycroft. But that’s a brother, not a parent, and he only shows up twice.

Huh. No wonder Blondie’s reaction to Huck Finn sticks with me still: I didn’t have that kind of exposure to the Nasty Parent at her age. Even the evil stepmom of Cinderella doesn’t go on drunk binges and whip Cinderella with a belt. Huck Finn’s dad is nasty. Scary-nasty. The sort of nasty that’s talked about on the news or in a television series, not a kid’s book.

Now why am I going off like this? Because here in the U.S. Mother’s Day approaches, and I want to celebrate the positive parent characters in children’s literature. Seriously, they exist! Like…um…oh! Ray Bradbury created a loving relationship between father and son in Something Wicked This Way Comes. Even Diana Wynne Jones, who had a miserable relationship with her own parents, could still create some flawed yet very loving parents in books like Archer’s Goon and The Ogre Downstairs.

Today, I’d like to look at one of the strongest moms in fantasy fiction, a widow with four young children, one of whom’s gravely ill.

I am, of course, talking about Mrs. Frisby.

Or Brisby, if you knew her by the Don Bluth film like I did.

For some reason the film adaptation of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH named her Brisby. I’d like to think it’s because Hermione Baddeley, who voiced Auntie Shrew, really rattles your teeth whenever she shrilly hollers Mrs. Brisby’s name.

With all due respect to Robert C. O’Brien, the book moves with a much…quieter, calmer pace, I’ll say, than the Bluth film.

And, well, let’s face it: O’Brien doesn’t have any electro-magic wielded by rats voiced by the majestic Sir Derek Jacobi, let alone a soundtrack composed by the ever-wonderful James Horner.

Bluth’s version of Mrs. Brisby is a widow just like the Mrs. Frisby of the book, and both versions do have four children and one suffering from pneumonia. But unlike Mrs. Frisby of the book, Mrs. Brisby is constantly facing certain death in order to protect her kids. From standing in the bones of other mice to speak with the Great Owl…

…to running under the farmer wife’s feet in order to sedate Dragon, the barn cat that KILLED HER HUSBAND, Mrs. Brisby puts her life on the line time and again for her family. I can still remember the terror racing through my little-kid heart when the giant rat guard tries to electrocute Mrs. Brisby at the gate into the rose bush…

…or when the Brisby home begins sinking in the mud and all the kids inside are gasping for air.

(Oh yes, Bluth’s films are both awesome and TERRIFYING. Just ask MG author Celine Kiernan—she worked for him!)

But because I felt the terror then, and saw this little mommy mouse defy her fears to run into a moving tractor to disable it while the ceiling started to cave in around her sick son, because I felt the panic in her pulling rope after rope around her sinking house to keep her children from drowning—because I felt all the fear Mrs. Brisby experienced, the courage she also displayed resonated with me very, very deeply; it resonates with me still, thirty years later. In a story of mice and electro-magic rats, I saw motherhood in its purest form:

Love, fearless and boundless, strong and eternal.

May our own hands brave the fire to protect those who matter most.

What positive parent characters appear in your favorite stories? Please share so I can give Blondie something to look forward to…

I’ll be the first to admit the moms of my own fiction are, shall we say, some nasty pieces of work. Scope out my novel and free short stories on this site to find out more.

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

#writerproblems: #writing a #cliffhanger vs. a #standalone in a #novelseries

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I’m going to pause before I even begin in order to say how amazingly patient you all have been for enduring this 30-day blog-o-thon. I’ve been doing my damndest to catch up on reading your sites, but I have a feeling it’s going to take a month of NOT writing just to see all that you lovely folks have done during this cold, snowy month.

During one pre-dawn hour set aside for morning coffee and blog reading, I came across an old book review by the amazing Chris Lovegrove. His closing nails the very topic I wish to discuss today:


I felt a little cheated by the end. The lack of resolution for one character felt manipulative. Increasingly, fantasies these days are clearly labelled Book One of a spellbinding new series or The first volume of such-and-such saga; it wasn’t till near the end that I realised that this wasn’t a standalone novel but that I would have to invest time and maybe more money in the sequel. 

Chris Lovegrove, “Suspending Disbelief”

Indeed, what has happened to the standalone story? We are an audience of franchises and serieseseses to the point where filmmakers will divvy up a book and spread its material so thinly that a single story is transformed into a film trilogy. (cough cough HOBBIT cough cough)

When I study Diana Wynne Jones’ library (as every good and proper fantasy fan should do), I see 25 stand-alone stories. 2 duologies, 1 trilogy, 1 quartet (quartology?), and the octology of Chrestomanci. (I’m just making up number words at this point.) We won’t even get into the short fiction stuff here, or plays, or whatever else. Strictly novels. (If I missed any, let me know!)

If you go through all these novels, not one ends with a cliffhanger. Correct me if I’m wrong, but DWJ was one to practice what she preached:

My feeling is that the best stories leave the reader trying to imagine what happened after the story stopped.

–Diana Wynne Jones, “Some Hints on Writing”

As far as DWJ was concerned, the story she needed to tell began and ended in one volume. Even the DWJ stories considered sequels or parts of a series are only considered such because they’re in the same universe, NOT because they’re picking up where the previous plot left off. Look at the Howl trilogy: Howl and Sophie go from primary characters in the first book to making cameo appearances in the second. In the third book they appear halfway through the novel with some importance, but still, they are not the primary protagonists. One of the primary characters of Deep Secret returns in The Merlin Conspiracy, but again, he is not the main character. DWJ utilized the same universe for multiple stories, not necessarily the same characters. Heck, Chrestomanci’s rarely a main character in his own series! (But I already wrote about that.)

I started paging through other Young Adult Fantasy stories read from my bookshelf or local library to see which stories end on a cliffhanger, and which are capable of standing alone.

Celine Kiernan’s The Poison Throne: She was travelling at a good pace, though, and it was not long before she disappeared up the winding path, to be swallowed into the treacherous depths of the bandit-laden forest and the company of wolves.

Cliffhanger. The protagonist’s clearly beginning another journey. Not only is the primary antagonist of the story is still in power, but we learn our protagonist is entering yet another enemy’s territory.

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Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games: Out of the corner of my eye, I see Peeta extend his hand. I look at him, unsure. “One more time? For the audience?” he says. His voice isn’t angry. It’s hollow, which is worse. Already the boy with the bread is slipping away from me.

I take his hand, holding on tightly, preparing for the cameras, and dreading the moment when I will finally have to let go.

Both. This one’s a bit grey to me. On the one hand, the protagonist has survived the Hunger Games. The primary conflict of the story has come to a close. However, we read here that the protagonist’s personal journey is not over, so there is, in a sense, a cliffhanger, just not like the life-or-death situation the protagonist’s been in for much of the book.

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Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight: I touched his face. “Look,” I said. “I love you more than everything else in the world combined. Isn’t that enough?”

“Yes, it is enough,” he answered, smiling. “Enough for forever.”

And he leaned down to press his cold lips once more to my throat.

Standalone. You read right. Yes, I’ve read the whole series, so yes, I know there are more books after this. But I’ll give Meyers credit for giving this novel an ending that feels like an ending. As far as everyone knows, the last of the bad vampires has left the region and the girl’s got the guy. All’s right with the world.

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JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (hush, I’m an American, THAT’S the title here): Harry hung back for a last word with Ron and Hermione.

“See you over summer, then.”

“Hope you have–er–a good holiday,” said Hermione, looking uncertainly after Uncle Vernon, shocked that anyone could be so unpleasant.

“Oh, I will,” said Harry, and they were surprised at the grin that was spreading over his face. “They don’t know we’re not allowed to use magic at home. I’m going to have a lot of fun with Dudley this summer…”

Standalone. When you consider the primary conflict (protecting the Sorcerer’s Stone from Voldemort) that conflict officially ends in this book. Yes, Voldemort gets away, but his plot’s been thwarted. Even the other school-friendly subplots of making friends, succeeding in a wizarding school with a muggle’s childhood, and so on are wrapped up. The Voldemort conflict does not start creating cliffhangers until the third book, Prisoner of Azkaban.

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Cassandra Clare’s Clockwork Angel: Magnus reached behind himself and locked the parlor door. “Very well,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what the problem is?”

Cliffhanger. Any time a story ends with a question, it’s an automatic cliffhanger–especially when that question pertains to a protagonist’s “problem.”

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Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Call: Early in the new year, she tells her parents that she has to leave again.

“The Nation must survive,” she says. “I can help with that.”

She sits alone on the bus, her suitcase propped up on the seat beside her so she can pretend it’s Megan sitting there instead. And off she goes through the snowy roads, Agnes and Ferg waving her away, hugging each other, their pride so fierce it burns.

Standalone. The protagonist has survived her three minutes. The fight goes on, and so will she, determined to leave her parents and teach other children how to survive the dark land of the Sidhe. By this story’s rules, she cannot be summoned back into the Sidhe realm for another hunt, so again, by this story’s rules, our protagonist is officially free.
Of course, Peadar totally subverts these expectations in The Invasion, but I appreciate how he made this novel self-contained. Had this remained a standalone, it’d still be awesome.

Off the top of my head…

Other good examples of what I feel could be considered standalone novels whether or not they’re in a series: Court of Thorns and Roses, Uprooted, Neverwhere, Chronicles of Narnia 

Know any others? Let me know!

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Other good examples of what I feel are cliffhanger novels: Cruel Prince, Mortal Instruments, Fallen Princeborn: Stolen

Ibid on the knowing and the letting of me knowing

Hey, what’s my own book doing there?

Yes, I must plead guilty. I was in a similar situation as JRR Tolkien; as you know, LOTR is one HUGE tome broken into three books for readability’s sake. The same thing happened with Stolen–my publisher kindly pointed out that people aren’t necessarily going to be drawn to a debut novel 650 pages long. Two novels, though, would split that length into readable installments. The result?

Her head nestles against Liam’s knee. The Voice in her heart sighs, too exhausted to notice a pounding, a drumming rising from deep, deep in the Pits.

A cliffhanger.

So what makes a cliffhanger tolerable and not infuriating?

Closure.

Somewhere along the way, SOMEthing must be resolved.

A series is bound to have many plot threads, and that’s fine. But if a few hundred pages cannot tie off a single thread, readers are going to get pissed.

Rightfully so, too. In a way it comes back to those expectations and payoffs: the patience of a reader lasts for only so long. The more you build, and build, and build, yet never follow through, the more readers will feel lost, disengaged, or both. Why spend time in a world that’s constantly tangled with characters never decently understood?

So sure, maybe the antagonist is still free at the end of Book 1. Maybe the hero’s journey has only just begun. Was a battle fought and one? Was an internal conflict resolved? Did a relationship come to fruition or destruction? So long as SOMEthing has been brought to a close, a cliffhanger ending will still bring some satisfaction to the reader.

Resolve nothing in that first book, and readers will resolve not to invest time in the second.

Tie a thread or two, and hold your world–your series–together.

Today’s the LAST day of my sale! If you haven’t snatched up Stolen yet for just 99 pennies, get it now while the gettin’s good!

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

An #Author #Interview with @Celine_Kiernan, Part 2: #writing #characters to hook #readers of any age

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Celine Kiernan’s critically acclaimed work combines fantasy elements with the exploration of political, humanitarian and philosophical themes. She is best known for The Moorehawke Trilogy, a dark, complex trilogy of fantasy YA books set in an alternative renaissance Europe. In this second part of our interview, I ask Kiernan about writing characters and storytelling for a Middle Grade audience in her latest book, Begone the Raggedy Witches.

You created some amazing characters when you wrote The Moorehawke Trilogy. The trio of friends in the first book, The Poison Throne, are delightfully unique, genuine, and engaging. So much can happen in five years, especially when one changes from a child to a teen. What do you feel was the most challenging aspect of writing teenaged characters for The Poison Throne as opposed to writing them younger, or as fully-grown adults?

I didn’t find it a challenge. To be honest, I just write my characters as they are in my head. I make no conscious decisions re market or target audiences or anything. A book occurs to me and I write that book.

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Razi, Christopher, and Wynter of The Poison Throne

I think young characters can be tempting to write about, because it’s a time of life when you’re not too much tied down to the minutia of daily life (paying bills, feeding babies, getting to work on time) and so your mind can be better focused on big issues – and freer to physically engage with changing injustices. Everything is so new too – first love, first sex, first meaningful encounters with death, injustice, triumph, philosophy etc. In Resonance, however, the young characters are very much the working poor and so their minds are on how to get and keep work, how to pay the bills, how to survive in an unsympathetic society, while also battling the uncaring supernatural forces which want to use them up and discard them. In Moorehawke and also in Begone the Raggedy Witches, there are many older and middle-aged side characters which bring balance to the younger, innocent and more idealistic main characters.

Now the heroes of Into the Grey caught my attention for a different reason. Here, the protagonists are twin brothers. Being a mother of twin boys m’self, I find this particular bond both fascinating and exasperating. As a writer, what led you to select this specific kind of protagonist duo to head the story as opposed to, say, twin sisters?

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Funnily enough there are a lot of twins in my books. Ashkr and Embla, the twin brother and sister, in Moorehawke; Dom and Pat, the twins in Into the Grey. Though it’s never made much of in the book I also always think of Aunty and the Queen in Begone the Raggedy Witches as being twins. I also have twins in two of my unpublished novels (brothers in one, sisters in the other) It had never occurred to me before to explore why, but I do think it’s probably because of my fascination with the different paths people take in life. What could be more interesting than two identical people, starting from an identical base-line, growing into individuals?

The twins in Into the Grey had to be boys as it was specifically a boy’s experience of war which I needed to explore in that narrative.

Now this year you published Begone the Raggedy Witches, the first book of a new trilogy. Unlike your previous works, this trilogy is geared for Middle-Grade readers. What are the benefits—and challenges—of writing this story for a slightly younger audience?

None really, to be honest. I just approached it as I always do. There was no historical research to these books, though, I guess that’s one difference. I was writing purely to explore personal and sociological themes within a pure fantasy set up. But the books didn’t feel easier to write than the more historically based ones. In fact, they’ve taken me longer than most of my other books to complete. (Mind you, this is happening more and more – I think it’s because I’m better aware of the craft now. My first draft takes longer to produce, but nowadays they’re more complete and better polished than previously.)

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Okay, I just have to end on the first line of Begone the Raggedy Witches, because it is KILLER:

“The moon was strange the night the witches came and Aunty died.”

Ye gods, we’ve got time, intrigue, magic, and doom all packed into one sentence! How on earth did you create this first sentence, and do you have any tips for other writers in creating that killer hook of an opening line?

The first chapter is nearly always the last thing I write. That’s not to say I have written a first chapter ( I write liner narrative, so I work from the start to the finish of every book) It’s just to say that I always go back to the first chapter and refocus it so that it better leads into the narrative. By the time you get to the end of your novel you’re always so much better tuned in to what the themes are, what the characters’ motivations and personalities are etc. etc., the first chapter should evoke or foreshadow these things, I think. Make a promise to the reader as to what journey this novel will bring them on. Often you can’t do that properly until you’ve taken the journey yourself. Funnily enough though, the first lines of most of my books have stayed the same through all the drafts. I can’t explain why. I think it might be because they’ve always been the point from which I enthusiastically dived into the process of starting a new novel. That excitement and enthusiasm doesn’t always last for the whole long, siege-like process, but its almost always there for the first line.

“The moon was strange the night the witches came and Aunty died.”

“We were watching telly, the night Nana burnt the house down.’

‘The sentry would not let them pass.’

‘For a moment, the Angel looked directly at him, and Cornelius’s heart leapt with joy and dread.’

All these lines were bringing me somewhere. All of them were promising me something – I had no choice but to follow them onwards.

My deepest thanks to Celine Kiernan for sharing her stories and experience in the writing craft. It’s an honor to speak with one whose creativity has influenced my own imagination for decades. Please check out her books & her site at https://celinekiernan.wordpress.com/.  Be sure to share a review when you read her, too!

Every Reader Matters!
Thank you, dear readers, for buying Fallen Princeborn: Stolen! 

It’s still hard to believe my debut novel is out in the world. This story was born the same year as my daughter. Like Blondie, Stolen has gone through many growing pains before setting out to forge its way through the world (or elementary school–that’s epic enough for Blondie). Every time I see a purchase or read a review, my soul goes runnin’ through the clouds. If you haven’t yet, please share your thoughts with me on Amazon or Goodreads. Your reflections mean all the world to new writers like me!

Shouting for Shout-Outs Again!

Now that we’re halfway through November, I’d like to start gathering up kudos and plugs from fellow creators to share on my newsletter on the 1st of the month. If you’ve a book, an album, a site, or all of the above you’d like to share with new readers, please email me and I’ll hook you up. 😉

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

An #Author #Interview with @Celine_Kiernan, Part 1: #writing & #worldbuilding in #fantasy #fiction with a little help from #history

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Born in Dublin, Ireland, 1967, Celine has spent the majority of her working life in the film business, and her career as a classical feature character animator spanned over seventeen years, before she became a full-time writer. I am honored to spend this week and next sharing her thoughts on world-building, research, character, audience, and hooks.

First, let’s talk about the imagination behind the worlds. I see on your biography you spent years in film and animation. What drew you to visual storytelling as a profession before written storytelling? How does your work as an animator influence the way you write today?

 

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Illustration of Chris and Wynter from Poison Throne

From the moment I could hold a pencil I was always either drawing or writing. In terms of satisfaction, I don’t think there’s a dividing line between the two disciplines for me. But at different stages in my life one has dominated the other by the simple fact of making me a living. At the age of nineteen I left college for an apprenticeship with the brilliant Sullivan Bluth Studios, and as a consequence of that went on to a 25 year career as a classical character animator (Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven, Anastasia, etc.). Animation is a great love of mine ( I animated the book trailer for Raggedy Witches and it was tremendous fun)–

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–but it’s not really ‘story telling’ for me. It’s more akin to acting or dancing, where you’re using your skill to enhance or express someone else’s story. To me writing is my true story-telling outlet. You’re god of your own universe in writing. You get to explore the themes you want to explore, with the characters you most want to be with, in a world entirely of your own invention. Its purity has no equal. (I am a compete sucker for graphic novels, though. The combination of pure story telling and visual representation there is intoxicating. One day someone will offer to pay me to sit down and draw up one of my own scripts, at which stage I may just implode with happiness. Until then I get great joy in drawing bookplates and small illustrations for readers who contact me about my stories.)

I love utilizing the world around me as a foundation for world-building, which means Wisconsin’s landscape is a heavy influence in my work. Into the Grey and Resonance are both set in different historical periods of Ireland: the former in the 1970s, and the latter in the 1890s. What logic led you to choose these particular periods for these stories? Are there any pieces of the Ireland around you that helped inspire the settings? 

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Book plate for Into the Grey

Both Into the Grey and Resonance are set in very specific time periods due to the long and involved back stories which feed into the protagonists’ experiences. Although they are both readable simply as supernatural adventures (Into the Grey is a haunted house tale of ghostly possession; Resonance a story of inter-dimensional aliens and ‘vampiric’ immortal humans) there are deep historical roots to both that not only feed the story, but also the themes that I was exploring as a writer. For instance, Into the Grey explores the divided nature of Ireland’s history and the way our view of our selves and our lives is warped by the stories history tells about us. Resonance explores the value human beings place on themselves and on others, what does it mean to be alive, to be ‘worthy’ in other peoples eyes, etc. These underlying themes are the reason I write in the first place – I write in order to explore the world around me. But I love the stories to be readable as adventures too, to be scary and fun and exciting (in as far as you can ever anticipate what others will find scary and fun and exciting. I’ve found it’s best to just please myself in that respect and hope at least some others will enjoy them too.).

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The mansion in Resonance was deeply influenced by the exterior of Belvedere House in Co Meath and the fabulous interior of Bantry House in Cork, in which my son shot the linked video. (Bantry House is not at all spooky, but this video was shot as a specific tribute to Italian horror movies, so it gives the place the exact frantic, off kilter vibe that the I wanted for the later scenes of the book. It even has a dollhouse – though, admittedly, this one lacking a blood soaked four-poster bed!)

Question about your Moorehawke Trilogy: research. Clearly you did your share of research on medieval life to transport readers into the castle’s kitchens and secret passages. Ugh, that research! I know some writers love the research—friend and author Shehanne Moore does a ton of research for her historical romances, whereas I only research when I have absolutely no other choice. Now granted, that’s partly because I just want to write and work out the nitpicky things later, but the other part is that I get so overwhelmed in the data I can’t decide what details are necessary for the narrative’s clarity and what’s minutiae. Can you share some tips on how to research productively and selecting the best details to ground your readers in the setting?

I usually have a book in my head for a long time before I start writing it. For example, when my first agent took me on I was just finishing up writing The Poison Throne, the first of the Moorehawke trilogy. I still had to clean up draft one of Crowded Shadows and still had to write all of Rebel Prince. There was years of work ahead of me on Moorehawke (taking into account editing etc.) but I arrived at the agent’s with a biography of Harry Houdini in my hand, my reading material at the time. I’d already consumed many books on the history of the American slave trade and was nibbling away at websites and articles about the history of Jewish persecution in Europe. I knew that all of these things would feed into the characters and setting of Resonance, which was the book I planned to write after Moorehawke.

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If memory serves me, it would be at least two years before I started draft one of Resonance, but at that stage I would have had over three years of historical research floating around in my head. I do this with all my books, this years of reading before writing. It means that when I start to write, my story and characters are already pretty firmly grounded in a time, place and setting. They live for me already. So, in a way, it feels like I’m writing about contemporaries. I’m used to the world they live in, and the relevant details settle naturally into the narrative. As I write then, it will be small things that need clarifying – was that type of knife available then? Did they eat that kind of bread? Would they have had access to carriages, to time pieces etc. etc. – and those things only crop up in the narrative if they’re important to the scene. You can quickly check them and move on with the story.

I do the same with all my novels (at the moment – while writing the Wild Magic trilogy – I’m consuming biographies from the 1700s, trying to understand the lifestyle and mindset of the people I hope to populate a future novel with.).

Don’t forget too that editing is a writer’s best friend. You should feel free to put as much useless trash into the first draft as possible. If it makes you happy or interests you, put it onto the page. You can always cut it later (as I’ve got more experience, I’ve learned to cut more and more. I’m far more spare a writer now than I was at the beginning.)

Another element in The Moorehawke Trilogy I LOVE is your world-building. You base the world in an alternative medieval Europe, where cats can talk to people and ghosts are common to see, but religions such as Christianity and Islam have a strong presence. You also explained much of the inner workings of castle life without making readers feel like they had wallowed into info dumps. Exposition can be such a dangerous line to walk in epic fantasy—how on earth did you craft those paragraphs to help readers learn your world without slowing down the narrative?

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Tattoo design for a Moorehawke reader

 Thank you, that’s so nice of  you to say. I do feel that one person’s excruciatingly slow narrative is another person’s meaty delight, so I think the best approach is to write as you like to read and try and be honest to that. However, it’s a good idea to ask yourself in edits whether the information is truly important to the story itself – whether it furthers the readers understanding of the characters, or the plot; or whether it nudges them deeper into the mood or atmosphere of the scene. If it does any of those things, then it’s working for you and you might consider keeping it. Get honest beta readers too – people who will tell you where and when the story has begun to slow or drag for them. Try and get a few of them. If they all tell you that a specific portion of the narrative is a slog for them, then you need to consider cutting a little deeper or refocusing. Make sure the narrative is telling the reader something new or important, and that they feel rewarded by the read.

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Stay tuned next week for more from Celine Kiernan! Now pardon me while I, an 80s child raised on Bluth films, fan-girl squeal for the next several hours. To meet a storyteller of powerful fiction who also helped create the visual stories from my own childhood is soooooo awesome! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Ahem.

Time to be professional.

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I’ve more thanks to share with wonderful indie writers who took time to talk to me about my novel, Fallen Princeborn: Stolen. 

+ Writer and Environmental Lawyer Pam Lazos shared such a lovely interview–I blushed when she called me “a writer’s writer!” Thanks, Friend!

+ Young-Adult Sci-Fi Author S.J. Higbee wrote both an interview and book review. Thank you SO much!

+ Writer and fellow Wisconsinite Jon also wrote both an interview and book review, and on top of shepherding a church, too! You’re too kind.

These are talented writers with stories of their own to tell, so I hope you check them out. Please be sure to share your own thoughts on Stolen or my FREE collection Tales of the River Vine on Goodreads or Amazon–I’d love to hear what you think. 🙂

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!