Tag Archives: Love

Do You Wanna Know What Love Is? Do You Want Me To Show You?

Author's Perspective Character Craft & Skills Doing Good in the World Goals Guest Posts Kristin Luna Motivation Narrative Voice POV Reflection Self-Awareness The Writing Life Tropes & Archetypes Writing Tools 2 Comments

Some like it hot. Others just plain don’t like it, hot or cold. I could either be talking about oatmeal or love. Unfortunately, we couldn’t figure out a month’s worth of posts about oatmeal, so we opted for love.

But not just any old love. Complicated love. Confusing love. Forbidden love. Exhausting love. Unique love. Carnie love. Maybe not carnie love, but maybe someone should start talking about it, gosh darn it, because love is love! And while we have our individual experiences, we share one thing: we’ve all been touched by it. How we’ve been touched by it is a whole ‘nuther conversation.

But we’re about to have that conversation. How can you make love between two characters unique? Should you or should you not marry your cat? How do you reach outside your own experience to create unique, surprising love between characters?  How can you get that guy to stop stalking you? We hope to answer most of these questions this month.

You can look forward to posts from all of your favorite bloggers, along with special guest posts by author Lisa Mangum, her talented filmmaker husband Tracy Mangum, Cthulhu convert and author Stephan McLeroy, aspiring author and illustrator Victoria Morris, and editor/hair god Joshua Essoe. Join us as we celebrate love and relentlessly pound the crap out of it this month!

Tales of Love and Triumph

Author's Perspective Motivation Nathan Barra The Writing Life No Comments

If we do our jobs as writers well, the product looks and feels effortless. However, I can assure you that it is anything but easy. The path of a writer is long and rocky, filled with rejection and discouragement from all sides. This, more than anything, is why most people who want to write a book never do, and why most completed manuscripts are never sold. It takes determination, passion and flat out stubbornness succeed. But, most importantly, it takes love.

The talent of all creative professionals is born from the love of a fan. First, we find joy in the work of others and then seek to develop our own skills through emulation until we are able to forge a unique style. Our efforts are nurtured by the love of friends and family until they develop enough to stand on their own merit. Then, the drive to create is fueled by the enthusiasm of fans. Without love, art is meaningless.

In recent months, we have been dealing with some pretty heavy topics on the Fictorians. When I was asked to lead July’s month of posts, I wanted to make sure we spoke on something meaningful, yet entertaining. I wanted to give my fellow Fictorians and our guests the chance to be inspiring and sentimental, clever and laugh out loud funny, and most importantly of all, real. So, I proposed that we speak on love, specifically those moments that keep us going when the road gets rocky. We will spend the next 30 days drawing back the curtain and letting you see into our lives, with the hope that our own stories touch and motivate you to create your own art.

This month, the Fictorians and I present the stories and moments that make us love to be writers.

Writing for Love and Murder

Guest Posts No Comments

My Bloody Valentine - Box SetA guest post by Tiffinie Helmer.

Love and murder have a lot in common. Passion. It takes passion to love someone, and it takes passion to kill someone. That tightrope of love and hate we all balance on. Love and murder are my two favorite things to write about. Interesting enough, love is the harder of the two (no pun intended). I could kill every day of the week. I don’t want to know what that says about me. My favorite writing days are the days I get to kill someone. And my least favorite writing days are when I have to pen a love scene. I agonize over the love scenes. Every sentence, every word is painstakingly written. Whereas I can kill without a thought or a plan and happily carry on, and have, check out DEATH CACHE. Some of the deaths in that book surprised even me. One in particular that I almost deleted because I had fallen in love with my character, but alas I left him dead because it amped up the tension in the story.

In the anthology, MY BLOODY VALENTINE, we all start our stories with the first line, “Love hurts.” In my story HEARTLESS, I have a heroine who is angry. Really angry and she is one of my favorite kind of heroine to write about. So much conflict and angst. There isn’t anything she isn’t willing to do since she is so angry. That makes her exciting. She’s moonlighting as a dominatrix because she’s been ordered to pay her deadbeat ex-husband alimony. Turns out whipping men for money is more therapeutic than therapy. To make matters worse, (because I can and will) her clients start turning up dead. Now the cops are investigating her with suspicion of murder. Maybe her anger got the best of her and she truly is heartless.

This was a very fun story to write. Lots of passion. I explore many different levels of love from the first innocent crush to the more deadly obsession. Oh, yeah and of course I killed people.

Oh how I love my job!

Guest Writer Bio: USA Today Bestselling Author Tiffinie Helmer is always up for a gripping adventure. Raised in Alaska, she was dragged ‘Outside’ by her husband, but escapes the lower forty-eight to spend her summers commercial fishing on the Bering Sea.

A mother of four, Tiffinie divides her time between enjoying her family, throwing her acclaimed pottery, and writing of flawed characters in unique and severe situations.

You can find her new anthology, MY BLOODY VALENTINE on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. You can find out more about her at her website www.tiffiniehelmer.com.

February – Love and Murder

Matt Jones The Writing Life Writing Tools No Comments

black-32834_640[1]February. The month that Greeting Card companies and Flower Stores wait for each year. The month where love and passion rule, and all things are possible. Where your true love holds you close and rips your heart out of your chest, still beating, to show you before you die. And why not? Every good novel needs some tension to balance the mushy love parts, right?

This month we will look at this balance and focus on the craft of writing a great love scene or a terrifying horror novel. We’ll seek out the secrets that have fueled stories told around camp fires for centuries. And we will look at why, when we are out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by whatever horrors our imaginations could dream up, the thing we inevitably do is create stories even more fearsome.

Both horror and romance work on playing with the readers emotions. They focus on the emotional response, a sense of longing or a chill of fright. They both focus on the passion that make us who we are. Even if you don’t write in the genre, we all want to elicit an emotional response in our readers.

So welcome to the Fictorians take on Love and Murder. Come in close where we can give you a kiss while we slide the blade home between your ribs.