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I won’t lie, this is the most fun I’ve ever had in a bloghop! I did go a bit ‘above and beyond’ with what we were expected to do, but I had so much fun doing it, I’d do it again, dammit (same time next year, then?)!

Given that I’ve not really got a solid WIP at the moment (writer problems, sob sob), I’m going to use the characters from an upcoming release Tequila Bartender instead. It’s my personal favourite piece of work to date.

To give you a feel of what the story is about, here is the blurb from the back:

Salene wanted a drink. She also wanted an hour of peace. What she got was a black eye and a dead body on her hands. Unfortunately, the guy she killed was a dirtbag with a lot of dirtbag friends, and they all want to get their own back. So now Salene has no choice but to take them on, and put her trust in Adam – a man paid $40,000 to kill her. It’s going to be a long day.

THE CAST

This was a lot of fun. Choosing Salene was especially difficult because she’s been a canon of mine for such a long time (being one of the first real characters I ever created), but I think I hit the nail on the head in casting! Enjoy!

  

Other cast:

Denis Rodriguez: Guillermo Diaz

Portia Ross: Julie Benz

Tony Scott: Mickey Rourke

Adrian Verbinski: Michael Cera

THE SOUNDTRACK

Since the book is set in Texas close to the Mexican border, I felt a mixture of dirty deep-south rock and country, mixed in with a little Mariachi was exactly what it needed, so here’s the music that would fit a movie version perfectly.

Opening Credits: Tequila Boom Boom – Eclipse (if you’ve not heard this song you NEED to – it’s so much fun!)

Miscellaneous music:

Mama Tried – Merle Haggard

Hurt – Johnny Cash

Lead Me Home – Jamie Commons

Bamboleo – Eclipse

Wayfaring Stranger – Neko Case

Clutch – Blast Tyrant

Closing Credits:  L7 – Shitlist seemed absolutely perfect for it.

If you’ve got Spotify, you can listen to the playlist of the above songs here:

Some Fun Trivia:

1. The character of Marin Rodriguez was a direct homage to Cheech Marin, as he’s one of my favourite character-actors.

2. Pretty much all of the characters in the novel have surnames after my favourite film directors – see if you can spot them!

3. The book began as a short movie, which converted to a feature length, which eventually became a novel!

4. The book’s title (Tequila Bartender) is a play on the words ‘To kill a Bartender’.

And because I love me some graphic design, I decided to throw in a fake movie poster (click for full image)!

My list of fantasy crushes changes every so often, usually depending on what I’m reading or watching at that point in time. I know, fickle! But if I had to presently beg my parents to marry me off to anyone, it would be Antony Starr:

Now aside from the fact he’s extremely pretty, he’s also an amazing actor and has the cutest Kiwi accent. I will totally admit, I’ve got a thing for men with an accent (although not so much regional British/Scottish/Irish accents, they just don’t really do it for me in the same way). But his acting is not where it ends. He is an animal lover (and wants to work with them some day) and he’s multilingual, being able to speak around 7 languages.

Get your hats ready, ladies…

I want to talk about self-promotion today. To me, it’s one of the most difficult things of the whole writing game. Harder than editing, harder than getting draft one down in the first place. I made a very brief post about it previously but I never really touched on the finer points of why I get concerned about promotion.

To sell a book, one has to build up a network of not just other writers, but actual readers who are solely following your Facebook or blog for the purposes of finding out about your work and, when the time comes, either downloading or buying your work. Anyone can ‘like’ a page, but actually getting (god, I hate this word) fans? People who squee just a little whenever you announce that you’re releasing something new? Sadly the whole ‘if we build it, they will come’ mantra doesn’t really hold true on the internet.

Since throwing myself one hundred percent into my writing career, I’ve constructed a fantastic circle of writers. Let’s even call them friends; we chat about non-book things to and have a giggle about random nonsense on our Facebook personal profiles. But a circle of writers does not a circle of book supporters make. Not that I don’t appreciate everything they’ve done for me so far (proofreading, sharing links, even buying a couple of books), but writers are in your boat too!

I guess the whole point of me making this post is to say ‘I forgot how to internet’. Ten years ago it was easy to put a website or whatever online and people would be flocking in their thousands after a few months (I know, I did it several times with several websites), but these days it feels a bit like being a needle in a universe-sized haystack, and I’m not entirely sure how to find the edges of it.

Usually, what kind of ending a novel will have will pertain almost entirely to what genre the book falls into.

For example, if your book is a chick-lit story, it’s unlikely everyone’s going to die in a Hamlet-esque bloodbath. These stories are meant to be uplifting and so we expect the main character (usually a 20 or 30-something female) to get together with the “unlikely” (yet utterly predictable) love interest.

If your book is a cancer story, the person with cancer will more than likely die, or someone else integral to the story will die to give the message that we can somehow learn and grow from their demise.

If your book is a war story, regardless of what decade it’s set in, your main character might die heroically, or inadvertently get his entire squad killed in a valiant attempt at being a hero. Perhaps, in doing so, your character stops the bad guy or at least learns something.

But are you contriving your endings to fit in with the genre you’re writing?

Spoilers for The Fault in Our Stars/My Sister’s Keeper ahead, so the below paragraph is hidden.

click to read click to read
I just got reading The Fault in Our Stars earlier, and one thing came to mind: just for once, I’d like to see a Cancer story where nobody had to die. Why? Because it’s predictable. You know that if the main character lives, the person closest to them will die. It happened in My Sister’s Keeper, and it happened in The Fault in Our Stars.

I like to kill of characters in my novels. I will admit, I like to make them suffer, if they do get to live. But then my books call for it. My debut novel, Paradise Incoming, is about a group of travellers who get kidnapped and tortured by terrorists. It stands to reason that at least one of them would die (no spoilers!).

If I had decided that I wanted to appease people who hate it when characters die, I would have had the CIA (or whoever) swoop in at the last moment and perform a rescue. But that’s what us writer’s like to call Deus Ex Machina, which is a posh term for ‘contrived, plot-convenient bullshit’.

If your novel seems to be heading face-first into the kind of ending that would have Cruella-de-Ville sobbing into her morning tea then let it run. Forget genres, forget what you believe readers of that genre alone will want. The same goes if your character truly seems like he’ll escape the villain’s trap right before it closes in on him, let him free. Don’t find some contrived way of having him ‘accidentally’ losing his balance at the last minute, or sitting doing nothing for just long enough to get caught.

Don’t be afraid to let your story take you in its own direction. Just write. Then, if you’re not happy you can write a new ending in edits, and let proofreaders tell you which one they believe worked better.

Have you ever changed an ending to make it more realistic or less contrived?

Here at TGM I’ve decided to start a new feature that I hope will be monthly (or bi-monthly, depending on circumstances) feature on this blog. This feature is called ‘Interviews with Authors’.

I’m quite excited to announce that the extremely talented K.M. Weiland, author of the epic fantasy Dreamlander (full bio at the bottom) has agreed to answer a few questions for me.

1. If you weren’t an author, what would you see yourself doing?

That’s a really tough one, since it’s difficult for me to envision myself not being a writer. When I was young, before I started writing, I wanted to train horses, so perhaps I would have gone that route after all. If I had to stop writing today and find a new outlet, I could see myself pursuing something in graphic or web design.

2. What’s the worst piece of writing advice you’ve ever come across?

I find that advice, in itself, isn’t so much bad in general, as it is just plain wrong for certain situations. However, I do have a special place of loathing in my heart for the idea that authors shouldn’t use an interesting and complicated vocabulary in an effort to avoid offending certain readers whose own vocabularies may not be so rich.

3. Do you feel it’s important for books to have a moral message behind them?

Yes. Every story makes a moral statement, whether author intends it to or not. The most powerful stories are always those that can maximize the thematic impact to its full potential. I don’t particularly like the terms “moral” or “message,” since they tend to connote moralizing. But I definitely believe that without a theme, a story has no lasting point.

4. How true do you find the phase ‘never judge a book by it’s cover’, and have you ever done it?

As a matter of fact, I just finished a YA book with an absolutely gorgeous cover. I have to admit the cover was pretty much the entire reason I bought the book. And… I regretted it. One of the worst books I’ve read in a while! But it works the other way too. I’ve read absolutely fantastic books with lousy covers. Covers are all about marketing. The only bearing they have on the writing is as a reflection of the author’s professionalism. So it’s always worthwhile to pursue excellent cover art.

5. If you could recommend just one book that people must read, what would it be?

That’s hard. Art is so subjective. What I recommend to one person might not be what I’d recommend to another. However, I will say that my current favorite book(s) is Brent Weeks’s Night Angel trilogy. Smashingly good fantasy. But I don’t recommend it without the caveat that it’s the kind of book that would get a hard R rating if it were a movie.

About K.M. Weiland:

K.M. Weiland lives in make-believe worlds, talks to imaginary friends, and survives primarily on chocolate truffles and espresso.

She is the internationally published author of the Amazon bestsellers Outlining Your Novel and Structuring Your Novel.  She writes historical and speculative fiction from her home in western Nebraska and mentors authors on her award-winning website Helping Writers Become Authors.

So you’ll probably notice that the blog has undergone a very slight make-over. There was one or two tiny things about the old theme that didn’t quite sit right with me, and luckily this theme has the same general feel to it, but manages to fix the things that I felt were a bit broken.

Theme is now more responsive
Easy-access to like/follow on social networks
Improved author info box below posts
Improved reviews – now with cute rating system and user ratings!

That does mean, however, that the blog’s appearance may seem a little… messy, for a short time. See, the only superior thing about the other layout meant that the theme automatically resized thumbnails to the same size for the purposes of the home page/archives, and on this theme it doesn’t. So at the moment there are quite a few ‘wonky’ looking images.

I have around 100 posts on this blog, and no desire to go through them all, resizing their featured images in PhotoShop and re-uploading them. So for now I ask that you bear with me; from now on all thumbnails will be of equal resolution, so that whatever theme I choose in future things should look tickety-boo.

However…

At the time of writing this, the homepage still looks disorganised (I’m trying to work out what widgets to put where – shouldn’t take long) and the background graphic is just icky. But I’m going to be working full-pelt on it until I’m happy.

I’d better put the kettle on!

When Americans try to portray British people on telly (or, indeed, in any kind of fictional works) it always makes me laugh because they tend to always portray Brits as the following:

1. The bumbling, upper-class, Oxford educated ‘toff’ that wears bow ties and sips tea from a bone china cup and saucer.

2. The ‘lad’ gangster/crook type that speaks constantly in cockey rhyming slang and walks with a bow-legged swagger.

3. Everybody comes from London. Everybody.

I can’t speak for how to write a convincing person from Australia, or North Africa, but if you’re not British and you want to write a British person into your novel, here are some tips to make your British person more realistic:

Hugh Grant is not the National Representative of British Persons
Most British people don’t live in London
Nobody except the upper class and the occasional Whovian wears bow ties
Avoid the phrases ‘jolly good’, ‘tally ho’ and ending sentences with ‘wot wot’
We love tea. The rumours are true, we drink it THAT much, and God have mercy on you if you put the milk in first.

Okay, they were more jokey guidelines, but seriously, here’s some traits that, as a non-Brit, you may have missed:

Sarcasm and Irony

We are ironic and sarcastic to our best friends. If we call you a ‘dopey twat’ to your face, it means we probably like you. However, if we call you a dopey twat to someone else, it means we probably can’t stand you.

More polite than Canada… Mostly

We are by nature a polite nation, holding doors open and offering someone a cup of tea before they’ve even pulled up outside our houses. And, indeed, with our best friends and family we have no guilt in texting ahead to say ‘put the kettle on’ before we arrive.

We love complaining about the weather

25 degrees celsius weather is the height of summer for us. 10 degree celsius weather is often seen as ‘quite mild’. If it doesn’t rain at least twice a month the local media leads us to believe we’re about to go hurtling into the sun.

Politics and how we hate it… but love complaining about it

In Britain, we are fairly vocal about our political stance. Befriend 10 British people and I assure you at least three of them will never shut up about the ‘state’ of the nation.

Contrary to many movies out there, we do not all live in country mansions or wear tweed. We often do not consider our living quarters to be an ‘apartment’ and we do not call people who live with us ‘roommates’. Most of us live in a flat, maisonette, bungalow or semi-detached house with flat/housemates.

The Sunday Roast is a staple of our nation, and is the one day of the week you can practically guarantee the whole family will sit at a table and eat a meal together.

Your Constitution Has No Power Here

British people, by large, have never even seen a gun that wasn’t a TV prop. So unless your British character is in America, or perhaps is part of a criminal gang, leave guns out of it as they’re not a regular feature in our households. The amendments have no use to a British person, and even when moving to America they’re unlikely to quote it to get their own way.

Britain is Politically Correct – Too Much, at Times

One mistake many foreign writers make when writing about Britain is comparing cultural diversity to their own. I am looking right at you, America. We are very culturally diverse – indeed in parts of London the ‘minority’ groups literally outnumber native British people. In our TV shows we often have a mix of trans, gay, bisexual people, we have people with mental health problems, physical disabilities… all in main, important roles. It’s something to be proud of really; we simply don’t ‘whitewash’ or discriminate in the way some parts of America’s media does.

Did I mention irony?

We complain when we’re happy. Oh it’s okay, we enjoy it – it gives us something to do! We like to moan about the weather, about TV shows that we never stop watching – my dad, bless him, used to watch Top Gear for the sole purpose of complaining about Jeremy Clarkson for half an hour. Every single week. Our soap operas are miserable (you’ll never see so many gay people, trans people, murderers, psychotics with mental problems and people who can’t stop shagging everything that moves, living in a small farming village until you watch Emmerdale), but we love it. Our greatest achievement is when someone does something we can complain about.

Lastly, I thought I’d throw in some British words and phrases that might be useful. Some of these will vary by where in Britain a person comes from, but generally you could easily find these used all over the country.

WORDS:

Idiot: twat (pronounced twAt not twAHt), twit, pillock, berk, dickhead, prat

Thank you: Ta, cheers, nice one

Stop that: Leave it out, give it a rest, pack it in

Friend: mate, geezer/geez, bruv, chick

Affectionate: bab, babe, love (as in ‘you all right, love?’)

Drunk: Munted, pissed, trollied, rat-arsed, ratted, kaylied< we like to invent fun words, for example saying you were totally ‘Ken Barlowed’ last night, is just as acceptable as saying you were totally ‘arse over elbow pissed’.

Party: Often called a ‘do’ (e.g. a Hen Do or a Stag Do)

PHRASES:

Bollocks to that! – ‘I don’t think I’ll be doing that’

Pisshead – Someone who is drunk/drinks often

Don’t know your arse from your elbow – ‘You don’t know what you’re doing’

Sod that for a barrell of biscuits – another ‘I don’t think so’ < again this can be ad libbed with any collection of words ‘sod that for a Fiat Uno full of frogs’, or whatever takes your fancy.

Raining cats and dogs, pissing it down – ‘it’s raining’

New! From Bloomsbury Spark, a sunny heartwarming story of discovery and sisterhood. 


A road trip. A singing competition. And super-hot cowboys.

What could be better?


For Charlie, a post-high school road trip isn’t just a vacation, it’s  life changing . While her parents think she’s helping a friend move, a chance at fame is the real reason to grab her best friends and  drive to L.A . But when her super annoying, uber-responsible, younger sister, Lucy, has to tag along, it isn’t quite the summer of  fun  she imagined.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

So this bloghop is all about sibling relationships! I have an older sister, and to say we didn’t get along as children would be a massive understatement. We were born less than three years apart and according to my mother the first words my two-and-a-half year old sister said when she saw me was ‘take her back to the hospital, I don’t want her’.

Charming, eh?

Fast forward to the present and we get along just fine. We’re friends, even. Despite all the fights and scraps we endured as a child, we now get along better than most members of our family. In fact I don’t think we’ve argued since we were teenagers.

It’s funny how things change.

A new release? Well this is all a bit out of the blue, isn’t it?

Well yes and no. Yes because I wasn’t expecting to release anything before December, and no because I wrote this story years ago and even though it’s quite short at just about 27,000 words it has become one of my favourites. It’s fun, it’s fast-paced and it’s energetic. Great for anyone who likes a bit of light yet intense reading.

The book’s page will be here. As with Paradise Incoming, you’ll get a massively discounted copy if you order direct from me. Payment is via PayPal, so no card details or what have you will be shared.

The novella will be released on the Kindle store sometime in the middle of March. Until then, you’ll find lots of promotional material that you can share around. Just be sure to like my Facebook page to be kept up to date on everything, including exclusive giveaways!

In other blog-related news, I’m starting up a monthly feature (beginning in February, circumstances willing) called ‘Interviews with Authors’, where I’ll be featuring an author and asking them a few questions and also dropping a hint about whatever book they have out. Interested? Leave a comment!