Dreaming of Laughing Hawk

by Linda Katmarian

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Linda will be awarding a $25 Amazon gift card to a randomly drawn commenter during the tour.

 

To improve your chances of winning, follow the tour and comment at all the stops. The tour dates can be found here:

http://goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com/2013/05/virtual-nbtm-tour-dreaming-of-laughing.html

 

BLURB:

 

In 1964 Elizabeth Leigh is looking forward to college, escape from her unhappy home, and the fulfillment of her dreams. Adventure. Love. Her place in the sun. On a restless afternoon, she leaves school early and discovers her mother is packing to run off with a lover, abandoning Elizabeth and her stepfather. Worse, she learns her mother has squandered the college money her grandfather left her.

 

A fortuitous invitation from her cousin Melina to come to Los Angeles rescues her from an uncertain future. In Los Angeles, Elizabeth finds security in the embrace of her aunt’s family and is introduced to the man who soon becomes her fiancé, Collin Greenslade, an ambitious, up-and-coming real estate developer. Life could not be more perfect.

 

When her cousin’s boyfriend, a civil rights activist, has his Thunderbird vandalized in Mississippi, he enlists his roommate, Mark Laughing Hawk, to tow his car back home. Melina insists that she and Elizabeth should come along for the ride, but what starts as a fun romp across the country becomes a journey of the soul that complicates love and endangers lives.

 

Dreaming of Laughing Hawk explores the desire for love, power, and sense of purpose and the lengths we will go to attain them.

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EXCERPT:

Collin

 

Collin walked down the front steps toward the driveway and glanced over his shoulder at the house. A sacrifice by someone who had failed to perform his crime perfectly, he thought. The house had been payment to his father for legal services, and it was a constant reminder that C.J. Greenslade exacted his own special justice. No matter how the verdict fell, C.J. saw that justice was served—if a guilty client did not do time, he paid dearly for his ticket to freedom. The house’s taint of guilt did not trouble Collin so much as the thought that his father had given him this house and he had accepted it. For a long time he had taken his father’s generosity for granted, had expected it as a birthright, but lately he had concluded that this all came to him with a hidden price tag.

 

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The Writing Life

Thanks for the opportunity to share a blog post with your readers. I thought I would talk a little about the writing process. These are the things that are important for me as a writer to keep in the front of my brain when creating a story. They are important because they are also important to readers. I try my best to adhere to these rules.

Always keep the story moving at a good pace. I don’t want to be bored and neither does the reader by wordy passages and dull dialog.
Allow characters to be real and to be themselves. Don’t try to make the world better for them. You’re not their mother.  You’re their creator and you should give them free will. Avoid cardboard characters.
Dialog is shorthand, the illusion of speech. Recording actual speech is boring. Speech must have tension. It is there for a purpose—to illustrate character, to foreshadow, to develop the story line.
Always set the stage before starting a scene. Orient yourself and the reader as to where the characters are in space and time. This doesn’t have to be lengthy, but it has to be sufficient so that readers aren’t confused.
Use all your senses. There are smells, sounds, colors, sensations, and tastes that the readers should be allowed to experience. These hold both writer and reader in the story.
Determine the voice to use for telling your story. Get this right from the beginning because you don’t want to have to rewrite it in a different voice. First person is often easier and more spontaneous, but a limited point of view. Third person can support multiple points of view but you have to always be aware of the camera angle and whose head you’re in at any given moment. Watch out for point of view shifts within a scene.
Be analytical about structure and plot. Make sure all the pieces fit together and are logical and build tension.
Take the time to choose the right words. Know when to be concise and when to be lyrical. Listen to the sound of the words when they hit the page. There’s a beat.
Get in the habit of being your own editor. Yes, you should hire a professional to do that for you, but as you go along you should also being doing that for yourself. Look for the words and phrases you tend to overuse; the words so easily misspelled; the sloppy, imprecise word structures and just plain bad grammar.
Do the research necessary for your book. Verify the facts your story is based upon.

Most important of all, tell a story and tell the truth.

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Author Linda Katmarian grew up in the Midwest and graduated with a Master’s Degree in French literature from Illinois State University. She has studied under Sol Stein, prolific author and former owner of Stein & Day publishing company in New York, and Louella Nelson, an experienced romance writer and teacher of fiction writing. In 2012, after a long career as a technical writer, Linda committed herself to writing fiction full time. She lives in Southern California. DREAMING OF LAUGHING HAWK is her debut novel.

 

Author page:   http://amazon.com/author/lindakatmarian

 

Website:  http://www.lindakatmarian.com

 

Blog:  http://www.scheherazade-thewritinglife.blogspot.com/

 

Twitter:  http://www.twitter.com/LindaKatmarian

 

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/authorlindakatmarian

 

Link to ebook: http://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-of-Laughing-Hawk-ebook/dp/B00B2NWZRK/

 

Link to print book:  http://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Laughing-Hawk-Linda-Katmarian/dp/0988297205/