All posts tagged: Novel

Author Q&A with Jennifer Macaire – Part 3

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Jennifer Macaire is an expat wife, mother and novelist living in France. The following is Part Three of a trilogy of weekly Q&As that lead up to today’s re-release of her novel The Road to Alexander, Book One of the epic Time for Alexander series of novels. A separate post with an excerpt of the novel follows this sessions as well (link below). Q: So this book deals with time-travel, typically a device of science-fiction, but that aspect is rather low-key here. For those curious, and without giving too much away, can you describe your creative use of the concept? Time-travel fascinates me – and not only for this book, but for everyday things. When I drop a glass and it smashes on the floor, I try to imagine it floating back up and coming together like one of those slow-motion films played backward. I wish I could go back and see people I’ve known, redo certain things differently . . . it’s sort of a constant background noise to my life. So it wasn’t a surprise that …

Now Reading: The Road to Alexander

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~ Bookworm Ruckus | 2.19.17 ~ Something I’ve always dug is alternate history. That’s exactly what my friend Jennifer Macaire’s Time for Alexander series of novels is — a time-traveling trip through an altered history in which a modern  woman from our time becomes the object of Alexander the Great’s affections. Book One in the series, The Road to Alexander is the first to be remastered and reissued digitally worldwide on March 9th, via Accent Press. Available for pre-order now. (US) (UK) I’ve invited Mrs. Macaire to chat about and share excerpts of this intriguing novel here on the blog, so make sure to be on the lookout for that later this week on Thursday.

Guest Blog: 7 Writing Rules For Fiction (from A Writer’s Path via Kate Foster)

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Originally posted on A Writer's Path:
  Overwhelmed by fiction-writing advice? Me too, and I’m an editor as well as a writer. Everyone and anyone who has a blog or website seems to be keen on throwing in their penny’s worth. A lot of it is genuinely good advice. But what works for them won’t necessarily be right for you. Want proof? Here, in these six sentences, I’ve broken numerous ‘rules’ that would make grammar lovers wince. I’m not concerned, however, because this article is fairly informal in tone and what’s most important to me is that my voice shines through. So with this opening paragraph, I give you my fiction-writing rules.   Number One: First and foremost, let your voice carry your writing. The following rules are based on recurring problems I see whilst editing fiction manuscripts.   Rule Number Two: Always move the plot forward. Flashbacks or trips into the past might be frowned upon by many, but I believe they are fine if revisiting a character’s history in some way progresses…

The Morning Muse 2 | Write It Forward

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I’ve been writing fiction off-and-on for the better part of 22 years and I keep EVERYTHING.  I think historically I’ve not deliberately trashed anything I’ve written, good, bad or ugly, and have only lost two serious pieces that I regret losing, likely after a PC upgrade a decade-and-a-half back.  I remember the names of the stories, “Ride” and “Scars”; the latter one thankfully re-manifested itself two years ago in the form of lyrics for a song. That said, I’m happy to’ve written forward viable words for my novel, words that at the time  they were first typed up years ago did not seem to quite fit into the main narrative.  It was more like exercise writing or background material; non-chapter work that simply allowed me to brainstorm in free-form to explore the characters and the world they occupied, getting the chronology of past events straight in the overall timeline, making sure character motivations were solid, etc. For this project I had written a “bible”, some 6000 words worth of reference and supplemental material to help …

Project: Blood-Borne

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That’s not the actual title, but rather a codename, though in 2009 it was briefly one of the working titles, along with Bloodwerks.  I abandoned both of those long ago and have since arrived at an even more apt and cool and unique title for it, one I’ve never seen used before for anything, and thus have been sitting on it for years and have told it to no one, ’cause I’m cagey like that.  In fact, the titles for the other two are pretty darn neat and perfect as well.  So what’s the trilogy about?  Well, without getting all spoilery, let’s just suffice it to say that rather than a supernatural take, it’s a science-fiction approach to the advent of vampires through a modern lens.  There’s also a different approach to the subgenre I’m taking that I’ve not seen anyone else take yet (and I’ve been researching for years), but to reveal that would be real spoilery.  I offer this intel: my saga deals with living, biological, human vampires, some of which are natural-born.  It’s all made possible …

Novel. Now!

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At long last I’m finally returning to committed work on what I have codenamed Project: Blood-Borne.  That’s the umbrella codename for a long-gestating trilogy of novels I initially conceived just days before Halloween in 2009.  Yeah, I know, that was a long ass time ago (jaysis, nearly 6 years), but I…I can explain.  Actually, the one true, legitimate excuse is simply I was not quite the writer and visionary I needed to be yet to fully take on this huge world I’ve created.  When I finally decided to do my own little take on vampires, I knew I couldn’t do so without deliberately taking a stark departure from all (or at least most) of what had come before.  That required a bit of research of both vampire fiction and nonfiction.  So my particular conception, complex as it is, needed to marinate while I continued to ponder the cast of characters, their roles and motivations, and all the nooks and crannies I needed to successfully navigate the saga when ready. I thought that time was going …