Sorry this is up late! Between illness and internet outages,
I’ve been having a terrible time keeping up with things! ~DD

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Welcome to Small Towns, Big Personalities—An Exploration of Setting as a Character

Hello, my name is Cyndi Faria and I’d like to thank Delilah Devlin for hosting me today. One of the topics I’ve studied and would like to share is Personality Types. A writer can use setting as another character, be that as a protagonist or an antagonist. If you’re a reader, watch for the following techniques used by your favorite author.

Of the Nine Personality Types, consider the Reformer (Type One). If this were a real person, their occupation might be as a crusader, advocate for positive change, or teacher. As a healthy One, Reformers are wise, discerning, humane, hopeful, warm, and friendly. On the other hand, unhealthy Reformers are self-righteous, intolerant, hypocritical, condemning, and willing to be cruel to rid themselves of “wrong-doers.” Their ultimate fear is of being corrupt, evil, and defective. Their desire is to be good and to have integrity and balance. I bet you know a real One.

Setting can be typecast as a character who must also consider the thematic premise. In my current work in progress, I’ve typecast my setting as a Reformer who must also bear the consequences of secrets and the resulting oppression (Think: the truth will set you free).

The Beginning (An Unhealthy Reformer And Town):

Enter a cursed drive by coastal town shrouded by both storm and mist. Bedrock below. A restless sea sits to the west. A coastal range overshadows the town from the east. A highway carves a swath and separates the marina’s blue collar folks and stilted cottages from the bluffs’ white collar citizens and estates. The town’s grey hub boasts a diner with peeling paint and boutique fronted by a leafless sycamore tree. Because of the dwindling fishing industry, the one-block town’s corroded lampposts are missing light bulbs. Due to law enforcement budget cuts, the highway traffic rarely respects the 35 mph sign. At the edge of town perched on a rocky crag overlooking the pacific, a lone mission church steeple pierces the condemning sky. The mission bell rarely tolls in celebration of life and marriage, but more often to announce death, forever reminding the citizens of their inescapable errors and the curse that tethers the secret-keeping founding families to the foggy town inhabited by spirits seeking redemption.

Similar to a fictional character, in this four book series, book one represents Act 1 in the series arc. In a well-written novel, a character’s flaws must be shown just as the town’s flaws are shown. Hence by the end of book one, the town has debated and decided to move in a new direction.

How To Show New Direction:

Culminating Act One, the church bell chimes in celebration of a new marriage. The newly painted lampposts’ lights twinkle. The entire community has rallied together for a single cause as two citizens faced challenges relating to the theme and have moved into wholeness, essence, healthiness. Therefore the curse lifts for the couple as they enter their happily-ever-after. The town hasn’t completely changed, however. This absolute transformation will come at the end of the series.

The Series End Results (A Healthy Reformer and Town):

The highway has been rerouted, so the town is no longer divided. Visitors can leisurely shop and enjoy the warmth exemplified by newly painted building facades, the addition of welcome banners, and lamppost floral baskets. Clear skies bless the harbor and fishing boats fill the marina. A farmers’ market bustles with tourists. A new church has been erected near the historic mission, never forgotten but finally released from bondage as the citizens have been freed from the curse.

The next time you pick up a book, will you see the setting in a new light? The next time you drive by an unmapped town, will you wonder about the dynamics, politics, economics, and inhabitants in that town? Of the history behind the original settlers? I bet you will now.

To learn more about yourself and Personality Types visit www.cyndifaria.com/more-than-skin-and-bones-characterization

Happy reading and writing,

Cyndi Faria

Leading the lost to happily ever after…

An engineer turned romance writer, Cyndi Faria satisfies her craving for structure with cursed spirits, lost souls, harbingers, and a haunted coastal town. On and off her sexy romance pages, this California country girl isn’t afraid to dirty her hands fighting for the underdog. Find her helping fellow writers at www.cyndifaria.com, eyes attuned to her e-reader illuminating the midnight hour, or short-order cooking for family and friends while knee-deep in critters as she leads the lost to a place called home.

Follower her on Twitter: @cyndifaria

I’m under the weather today. Hot and cold. Coughing my head off. I’m going back to bed. But I thought I’d ask you all for your favorite comfort suggestions when you’re feeling sick. All I can think of doing is sleeping. Have you dodged colds and flu this season?

It’s January 14^{th –}  Do you know where your resolutions are?

I’ll admit it. I love the beginning of the year.  Anything seems possible. I have 12 entire months to meet my goals.  12 months for the magic to find me.  But sometimes, I let my goals fall to the wayside and at the end of the year, I don’t have anything to show for my time.

For me, it’s easier, to make monthly goals (in line with the resolutions), then break that down even farther to weekly goal list. And then daily. A lot of lists you say? Not really when you think of all the things we do and try to keep in our heads.

Recently, I realized as I was flipping through the weekly ads that my favorite store had missed giving me the $5 gift card for the required purchase.  That was last week. From the time I left the frozen food aisle to the checkout, I’d forgotten all about the gift card bonus. It was seeing a similar sale that alerted the brain neurons that I’d missed out. Brains are funny like that.

Or maybe it’s just the writer brain that can pull out a memory from twenty or more years ago to bring back the emotion and dialogue from an event for our stories, but can’t remember to pick up coffee at the store.

Or just me.

Anyway, weekly planning is a lifesaver.  On Sunday night I plan. ‘I will write 5000 words, blog twice, and start a short story.” I send this off to my accountability partner. On Monday, life intervenes and I get nada. Tuesday, I’m back on track, but not caught up, at least with my words.  Wednesday, I have critique group (oops, forgot to add that to my list.) By the next Sunday when I report, I have better caught up with my goal list, or be willing to explain why to my partner who’s written twice that in a week. And catered her daughter’s eighteenth birthday party.

Report, make new goals for the week, then repeat. At the end of the month, we report our progress and make new goals.  Same at the end of the year.

Last year, this process helped me write two books, two novellas, and a combination of twelve short stories or essays. I’m hoping for similar success this year.

A Member of the Council was an item on a goal list that I kept moving from one list to the next.  When I finished the story, the line I’d been targeting the story to, changed, so I sent it to a contest. I didn’t win, but my editor liked what she saw and offered a contract.  Now, we’re working on book two (Return of the Fae) and AMOTC is getting great reviews.  Book three is on my list for 2013.

So what are you doing this week? Are you reaching for a dream with a weekly goal?

A Member of the Council

A rogue hunter, a clueless witch and a mission to save an unknowing world.

Parris McCall, owner of the dive bar, The Alibi, has finally constructed a life where her little quirks don’t show or matter to anyone. As for her grandmother’s warnings that she’s different, well, she’ll cross that bridge if she comes to it. But when Ty walks into her bar, both lives are instantly changed.

Ty Wallace loves his life. How could he not? He’s a powerful human lawyer by day and the Magic Council’s rogue witch hunter by night. But after he agrees to substitute on his secretary’s dart team, all hell breaks loose. Now Ty has to help Parris admit who she is before her long-lost relatives kill her.

Buy link:
http://www.amazon.com/A-Member-Council-ebook/dp/B00A262YW4

Love Equality

One of my favorite parts of being a romance writer is meeting the characters who shape the story. I know that sounds a little odd, but trust me. Beyond giving them a name and a few physical attributes, they are their own people. Sometimes to such an extreme that I have to exert my author-ly influence and reel them back in, or worse, leave tasty tidbits on the cutting room floor.

I love creating characters of all shapes, sizes, colors, and creeds. I like to mix them up and place them in atypical situations. I also love exploiting stereotypes almost as much as I adore sketching out a renegade. Depending on my mood that day, I may resist typecasting or I may embrace it to the nth degree. You never know. Doesn’t matter which way I go, everyone will meet his/her match. It may not be the one they expect, but it all works out in the end.

You see, I believe in love equality.

There are a few preconceived notions about what will play with romance readers. Some people think heroes or heroines should not be over a certain age. They shouldn’t have jobs/lives/families that are too typical, lest they be considered boring. They should be preternaturally good-looking, and effortlessly physically fit.

In other words, they don’t want to hear my love story.

I didn’t meet the love of my life until I was over *gasp* thirty.  I’ve held jobs in accounting, insurance, and human resources. My family is large and noisy, but we all get along disgustingly well. I’m not beautiful, but I don’t scare small children when I smile at them. And as for my body…well, I have a nice rack. Too bad I have the hips, belly, and thighs to match. Still, after eleven years and a lot of ups and downs, our love affair is just as fierce as it was when we fell for one another.

Real life love isn’t perfect. As a matter of fact, it’s often far from it. That’s why I love creating not-quite-flawless characters.

I’ve spent the past year writing a collection of twelve novellas set in a small Missouri town. The Hot Nights in St. Blaise series is centered on a fundraising calendar that changes the lives of the volunteers with the guts to expose themselves in all their glory. Each story is unique, and every relationship as savory as it is steamy. Some of the characters may be pretty, some not so camera-ready. A few may have youth on their side, while others know the richness experience brings to a relationship. A couple buck societal notions, and some push their personal boundaries both in the bedroom and out. This series was great fun to write and I am beyond excited to share it with you!

After all, there’s nothing more satisfying than watching two imperfect people find perfect love.

Be sure to check out book one in the Hot Nights in St. Blaise series, Jumping Mr. January!

When she pitched the idea for The Men and Women of St. Blaise Regional Medical Center fundraising calendar to her Board of Directors, Beth Watkins thought she wrote the perfect prescription for the small town hospital’s budget shortfall.

The moment she got a green light, Beth went after the man she wanted to be her Mr. January and so much more. She had no time to waste. Hunky EMT Robert ‘Spence’ Spencer was leaving for medical school within weeks of the photo shoot she arranged and there was no way on earth Beth was going to miss the chance to sneak a peek at her old high school crush in all his glory.

Focused and dedicated, Spence wants bigger things than his hometown can offer, but when brainy, sexy Beth Watkins breezes back into St. Blaise with a plan that includes getting into his pants, he finds she is the one woman who can offer him something he doesn’t want to refuse.

Be sure to visit my website for a taste of each delicious St. Blaise story coming in 2013.

Buy Jumping Mr. January at: Turquoise Morning Press Bookstore | Amazon | All Romance eBooks

Thank you Delilah for inviting me into your home.

I would love to tell you about something I do to relax that I just love. I’m a very domestic person. Gardening by the age of five. My father taught me how to make pepper steak at ten. I worked on farms, literally. I slaughtered chickens, hogs etc.

I picked up a love for fabric sewing with my mother. Unbelievably, my hubby gave me a sewing machine as a wedding present. A used “White” for those that sew. I knew I had the right man. Then after our first child was born, I started making baby clothes and pillows and then… the crib blanket.

Any one having a baby I started picking out fabric squares.  I wish I’d taken more pictures through the years, but I did it for fun. Then a gentleman I worked with complained he couldn’t find a heavy blanket like the one’s his mother used when he was a boy. He asked if I could make one and I fell in love all over again.

Only pictures of the recent one’s are on the computer. The other’s are in photo albums.

The one with the baby is my daughter and hubby. She’s eighteen now.

The purple quilt I made for my youngest’s purple and green party. Kids wore purple, teenage helpers wore green.

Now my latest project will be to make the cover of my fantasy book into a quilt and give it away during my release for book II in a month or so.

Now you know the country girl in me.

Thank you for allowing me to share a bit of what I do other than write, with your readers.

Cora Blu

Some books have a way of getting right down into your bones. The first book to grab hold of me like that was Jane Eyre, which I read a dozen times before I even hit high school. It’s a lonely story and a very strange romance, with its governess heroine and un-handsome, sarcastic hero. One of the strangest parts in it is the scene where Jane is compelled by Rochester to show him her portfolio of paintings and sketches. He picks three in particular to quiz her about.

Reader, these are strange artworks — a seabird stealing jewelry from a shipwrecked corpse, a woman imagined as the Evening Star, and a pale, gigantic head in a landscape choked with arctic ice. They are keenly described and yet somehow still ghostly. Before now we have seen Jane neglected in her family’s house and isolated at Lowood School, but we have never seen her thoughts and anxieties expressed so vividly in images rather than in words. Those cold, mournful pictures are her own deeply felt loneliness projected outward on the world — it is no wonder Rochester responds to them and calls them “elfish.”

Jane sketches several other images over the course of the novel — portraits, mostly — and there’s always a little something wild in the way she does it, as though despite all her self-restraint and discipline there is some part of her that is always trying to escape. It’s a fascinating thing to read, and I can’t help wondering how Jane’s sketches and paintings changed once she found her way back to Rochester and their own peculiar form of happiness. Was there still something wild about her? Or did she allow her paintings to show more warmth, more human connection than she’d known before? Would that make her more or less successful at depicting the scenes in her imagination?

These questions didn’t go away. (For authors, such questions never go away.) So now I’m finishing up work on Color Me Bad, an erotic historical romance with a hero who’s a painter. And though I’m no Charlotte Brontë — for one thing, my books are much, much smuttier — it was fun to borrow this particular writing trick and see what it did to the shape of the story. To let my hero’s paintings say what he wasn’t ready to say yet himself, or to let their images take the place of his own hopes and fears. Whether I used this technique successfully, or whether my imagination outpaced my skill, like Jane’s — well, dear Reader, you will be the best judge of that.

Olivia Waite

Ooops! I was supposed to have a guest today, but she must have forgotten all about me. So, very quickly, I’m posting a question. I love these, because you all cheerfully come to play. Now, I have to go pack!

What is the one attraction or place you’ve visited that didn’t live up to all its hype?