MOVED!

I moved! I will no longer be posting here at wordpress.com. To leave comments on anything you read here or to see what I’m doing right now, head on over to www.AliceAudrey.com.

A Little Change Here and There

As you may have noticed, I posted my recipe yesterday instead of today.  This is a permanent change.

I’m going to make some other changes too. 

Saturdays are going to be photo days for me, which generally means Gerbil TV. 

I’m calling Mondays Monday Madness and will be posting stuff from the mailbag, guests bloggers other than Mr. Al, games, and whatever else comes to mind.

Tuesdays will be Talk To Me Tuesday.  It’s a space for all of us to talk about what we’re doing and what’s on our minds; a place to post off topic stuff all week long.

Mr. Al will still be here every Wednesday.  I’ll still be posting Thursday 13 most Thursdays, and Suzie’s House will still appear every Friday.

Eventually I may be adding a feature called Fiction Fridays in which I will link to other people who have posted a piece of fiction sometime during the week.

Various news or snippets may be posted on top of these so that more than one post will go up on a given day, but I hope to keep that to a minimum as I find bloggers who blog all day long overwhelming.

In the grand scheme of things it’s just a little change.  I hope you enjoy everything you’ll find in Alice’s Restaurant.

The Newsletter

I’d like to thank everyone who signed up for the newsletter.  This is my first ever newsletter.  Not surprisingly there were a few glitches.  If you signed up, but did not receive this week’s episode, please email me directly.  I will be sure you get a copy.  I greatly appreciate everyone’s patience with me as I iron out the details.  Well… as much patience as my readers will allow. 

Alice

Newsletter Update

It appears I will not be able to pull off a love scene this week on Suzie’s House.  I’m having trouble setting up the newsletter.  Actually, I have it set up, but I want to get the settings right, and the way things are now anyone and everyone could sign up.

Ah well.  You all wanted me to surprise you anyway.

Did You Miss Me?

I sure missed you.  Between one thing and another I was unable to get online for two days.  That in spite of having three computers in the house!  If I hadn’t set the Monday recipe to post automatically, I’d have missed it.  As it was I couldn’t get here to fix it when it didn’t work.  Not that I know how to fix it even now.

 I’m still piecing together my desktop, but I haven’t lost anything I miss yet.  Hopefully everything will be fine from now on.

 To those who ran off to a certain convention, welcome back!  I’ve been hanging around your blogs, enjoying the show and wishing I could be there with you.

Alice

Have a Nice Convention, Ladies

To everyone who is off to the RWA convention, have a wonderful time.  By now a fair number of you are already in the air, winging your way to Texas.  I wish you happy-networking and wonderful inspiration gathering.  Suzie and I will be waiting here when you get back.

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Alice

Anchors Part I

You all know what an anchor is, right?  Nope, not that thing you throw over the side of a ship to park it.  I mean the part of your writing that helps the reader get oriented at the beginning of a scene.

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Anchors are details, but not just any details.  They are the ones that set up the scene, telling the reader when and where the action is taking place and whose head we are in.  They make the reader a part of the story.  Other details take care of how, why, and what, though an anchor may also answer such questions inadvertently.  Anchors focus on who, where, and when.

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Anchors can be scattered throughout a scene, but are most important within the first three paragraphs.  Details in that position tend to carry more weight, provided they are not piled one on top of another.  Too many anchors up front will come out looking like the purple prose from a hundred years ago.

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Anchors aren’t necessarily individual words either.  They can be an entire sentence or one really strong image.  If you can pull off a strong image, it can often be enough so that a reader will provide countless other images to go with it, helping you make the story real.

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So let’s look at a couple.  Can you guess what kind of stories these might be from?

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Exhibit 1:

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The day Kevin Tucker nearly killed her, Molly Somerville swore off unrequited love forever.

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She was dodging the icy places in the Chicago Stars headquarters parking lot when Kevin came roaring out of nowhere in his brand-new $140,000 fire-engine-red Ferrari 355 Spider.  With tires shrieking and engine snarling, the low-slung car sprang around the corner, spewing slush.  As the rear end flew toward her, she flung herself backward, hit the bumper of her brother-in-law’s Lexus, lost her footing, and fell in a cloud of angry exhaust.

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Exhibit 2:

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On this, the day after Christmas, the great hall of Rothgar Abbey was merry with holly, ivy, and mistletoe, all tied up with festive ribbons.  The massive Yule log burned in the hearth, and spiced oranges scented the air.

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The Marquess of Rothgar had invited many of his family to his home this Chritmastide, and this chamber had been the heart of the celebrations.  Now, however, the guests were drawn to a very different sort of entertainment.

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Scandal.

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Exhibit 3:

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The southwest wind picked up turbulence around the San Francisco Peaks, howled across the emptiness of the Moenkopi plateau, and made a thousand strange sounds in windows of the old Hopi villagers at Shongopovi and Second Mesa.  Two hundred vacant miles to the north and east, it sand-blasted the stone sculptures of Monument Valley Navaho Tribal Park and whistled eastward across the maze of canyons on the Utah-Arizona border.  Over the arid immensity of the Nokaito Bench it filled the blank blue sky with a rushing sound.  At the hogan of Hosteen Tso, at  3:17 P.M., it gusted and eddied, and formed a dust devil, which crossed the wagon track and raced with the swirling roar across Margaret Cigaret’s old Dodge pickup truck and past the Tso brush arbor.  The three people under the arbor huddled against the driven dust.

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Exhibit 4

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The messenger was a woman, and though she was wearing Darkovan clothing, she was not Darkovan, and not accustomed to the streets of Thendara’s Old Town at night.  She walked warily, reminding herself that respectable women were seldom molested in the streets if they minded their own business, acted and looked as if they had somewhere to go; did  no loiter, kept moving.

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She had learned this lesson so well that she strode along briskly even through the marketplace, looking neither to one side nor the other, keeping her eyes straight ahead.

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The red sun of Cottman Four, informally called the Bloody Sun by Terran Empire spaceport workers, lingered at the rim of the horizon, casting a pleasant red-umber twilight.  A single moon, like a pale violet shadow in the sky, hung high and waning.  In the marketplace, the vendors were closing the front shutters of their stalls.  A fried-fish seller was scooping up the last small crispy crumbs from her kettle, watched by a cat-scrimmage underfoot, which she watched, amused, for a moment before she hoisted the kettle on its side, straining the fat through several layers of cloth.  Close by, a saddlemaker slammed down the front shutters of his stall and padlocked them shut.

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Prosperous, thought the Terran woman in Darkovan clothing.  He can afford a Terran metal lock.

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Tomorrow I’ll talk about each of these examples, and give you the titles and authors each came from.  Today I’ve run out of time.
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Alice

Linky Linky

Here are a couple more you might find interesting, though not the same way.

 http://jauntyquills.com/2007/04/27/fun-vacation-things/

 http://wordflirts.blogspot.com/

Alice

Have you all been over to see CM’s blog for today?

 It’s about property law in Regency England.  Check it out: 

http://www.courtneymilan.com/ramblings/2007/04/28/correcting-some-legal-misapprehensions/

Alice

And the Winner of the Patricia McLinn Contest Contest Is

Ericka!  I was thinking Tessa might get into Pat more, as she doesn’t write Romantic Suspense or Mystery at all, but the coin insisted.  Ericka, send me your choice from Pat’s backlist and your mailing address and I’ll get that out to you.  Keep in mind I have her early backlist, but am missing releases from 2007 and 2006.

Alice