Guest author Bernadette Walsh

Today we have author Bernadette Walsh as a guest on RtM

“The score is not what matters. Life does not have to be regarded as a game in which scores are kept and somebody wins. If you are too intent on winning, you will never enjoy playing. If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live, If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.”

                                                    ---- Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton was a big deal at my alma mater, St. Bonaventure University. He had taught there for a short time and had mentioned the university in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. I am embarrassed to say that I didn’t read a word of Merton while at Bonaventure. I was too busy taking business classes and studying for the LSATs and chasing boys.

Thankfully as an adult I discovered Merton and when I donated twenty-plus years of books to my local library, some of the few that survived were his books. I took one out today, a book of essays entitled Love and Living and found the above passage, and it really spoke to me.

You see, for most of my life I have been a classic “type A” overachiever. But once I hit forty, I began to revaluate how I lived my life. I think being a working mother taught me the valuable lesson that sometimes “good enough” really is good enough and through simple lack of time, I had to let my perfectionist ways go. I joined a local choir and learned to appreciate being part of the group, rather than striving to be the soloist out front. And when I first started writing, I swore that I would not get caught up in the quest for publication and would instead savor the pure joy of writing.

Of course, despite my original good intentions, my type A tendencies crept into my writing life and I became a slave to my Amazon rankings and how many people on Goodreads added my books on their “to-be-read” pile. Taming my inner perfectionist demons and just going with the flow is probably the most difficult part of writing for me. But last week on Goodreads a friend from college gave one of my books a five star rating. When this woman last saw me I was a skinny twenty year old. But now she has been able to experience who I am and how I’ve (hopefully) grown as a person through my writing. And really, how cool is that?

So Miss Inner-Type-A-Perfectionist-Tyrant, the next time you scour the Amazon rankings and lament how few books you’ve sold, remember what Merton said: “If you are too intent on winning, you will never enjoy playing.” It is true for writing as much as anything else in life.

Thanks for being here today.

Bernadette is currently busy promoting her series Devil's Mountain


Devil’s Mountain
Book One of the Devlin Legacy

Genre: Paranormal Romance/Horror

Publisher: Lyrical Press

ISBN: 9781616503697

Number of pages: 122

Word Count: 39,000

Blurb/Book Description:

You will hate Him for all that he's taken, but you will love Him. God help you, you will love Him.

Mary Devlin accepted her fate years ago, to serve Slanaitheoir, the mountain spirit who saved her ancestors from the Irish Famine. The hauntingly beautiful woman submitted to His every caress, His every humiliation, but He’s gone too far by threatening her family.

Mary’s daughter-in-law is now an unwitting pawn in the fickle spirit’s game. Mary must challenge her fate and that of all future Devlin women, but Slanaitheoir is the most powerful being in the land. And when part of her still yearns for His touch and love, how can she fight him and win?

Bio:

Bernadette Walsh has been writing contemporary and paranormal romance for four years. She has published three novels to date (The House on Prospect (Echelon Press) and Gold Coast Wives (Lyrical Press)) and the first book of her paranormal trilogy, Devil’s Mountain -- Book One of the Devlin Legacy. While Bernadette has hopped around genres, all of her books to date have a common theme: strong women handling what life throws at them the best way they can.

http://bernadettewalsh.com

@BWalshWriter Twitter

https://twitter.com/#!/BWalshWriter http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bernadette-Walsh-Author/196567653686807

Guest author Christina Leigh Pritchard

Today we have author Christina Leigh Pritchard at RtM.

I asked her my favorite question,
What is the most difficult part of writing for you?

I try to create outlines for my stories, really, I do. The only problem with this is that once you've created a character, they take on a life of their own.

Sure, I want my story to end happily or with a twist. The characters, to my dismay, take control of how the story works. Sometimes, I want to save one that originally was supposed to die, disappear, move, etc., but in all actuality, I've zero control over what happens. This makes serials hard for me. I know what direction my story needs to go in to coincide with the next novel but, when writing; I come to be so engrossed in the characters that they literally shock me by what they end up accomplishing or doing. Sometimes it’s so real, I hate the words my fingers type knowing I’ll have to readjust all future novels. I scream at them for making me pen such things!

Unfortunately, crying is a necessary evil when scripting serials. In order to keep with the outline of the current and existing novels, sometimes I have to follow through on a plan I no longer wish to do. Sometimes the characters dishearten me with their treachery, some I fall deep in love with, others I love then hate... It's a necessary evil in the world of writing but also the hardest struggle. When you hold the power over life and death for even a fictional character, it's not any easier than if they were real living, breathing beings.

When you love the ones you create, it’s hard to destroy them, even when they’re rotten to the core. I think of a new mother when I write. The child is born with such promise. Sometimes, that same baby grows up into the parents’ worse nightmare. Do they love them any less? I doubt it. My characters are my children, writing their misfortunes, even when they probably deserve it, rips my heart in two.

Thank you for being here today, Christina!

Christina is busy promoting her C I N series

 

Genre: YA

Blurb:

Seventeen year old Lisa Brown’s life is falling apart. First, her mother and father divorce, then their house forecloses and now, her mother has decided to commit herself to a psychiatric hospital.

If that weren’t enough, she must leave sunny south Florida to attend a boarding school full of geniuses in cold, Lynn, Massachusetts. The city where the locals chant “Lynn, Lynn, city of sin; you never come out the way you went in.”

And, they aren’t kidding. Lisa must live in a tiny shack with two strange teenagers, a dog named Pig who growls when you look at him and a cat named Rat. “Mind the cat,” everyone says. What the heck is wrong with this place?

Lisa thinks she’s landed in her own house of horrors with the anti-social Alex and his facetious sister Ally. But, the real drama begins the day she is struck by lightning…

About the Author:

Christina Leigh Pritchard was born and raised in South Florida. Her first stories were written at the age of nine in $0.15 wide ruled, spiral notebooks (which were supposed to be used for class), and in the various diaries she kept. Stories she wrote from age nine to twelve fill about four storage boxes!

Since she's upgraded to a computer, she's completed over fifty books and still going strong. Her genre's include dark fantasy, young adult, drama, suspense, historical romance, multicultural, comedy, poetry and many more.

 Web and social media links:

Book trailer: http://youtu.be/yRdrGVinWdQ

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Christina-Leigh-Pritchard/118941638145057

C I N Series Blog: http://cinseries.com/

Author Blog: http://teeny120.wordpress.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/teeny120



Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Lynn-city-never-Series-ebook/dp/B003T0G84A