Hi everyone. Welcome back to the blog. Dusting things off around here I see it’s been a while since my last post. I’m going to fix that with regular (I hope) Wednesday guest posts. First up we have author Adam Mann talking about writing romance.
Here’s Adam:
Hi, my name’s Adam Mann and I live and write in a mountainous area in the north of Viet Nam.
Why Viet Nam, I hear you ask?
I came to work here in 1997, and I’ve been here ever since apart from some short inputs in Cambodia and Malaysia. Before that I had worked in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa for more years than I care to record. My work was always with low income families in villages in remote areas, and basically I had to try to develop some sort of sustainability within their livelihoods, so that they didn’t always have to live from hand to mouth.
I retired four years ago and started to write romance novels.
Why romance novels, you frowned at me.
Well I’ve always enjoyed my family life, in spite of dislocations and difficulties. As you can imagine working in remote areas, with limited electric power, and very limited communications is not for everybody, especially wives and families. The result was I’ve been married four times – the first ended with three children and unfortunately I became a widow; the next produced another child but the remoteness ended that in a divorce. The third was quite humorous; I met a devastatingly beautiful lady from the Gujarat. We found we liked one another, and that like became love and marriage until one day her first husband turned up! Really not joking! She told me that she thought she was divorced, but her family explained to me that a divorce from an arranged marriage is very complicated, and that marriage had to be dissolved.
In Viet Nam I tried to learn the language! I employed a young lady as a teacher, and she complained to me that I never had a social life outside my work. She started to introduce me to her friends, and I’m a sucker for drop dead gorgeous, especially dark haired beautiful widows, so she brought with her three teenage children, and now between us we have seven adult children, and four grandchildren.
Now you ask again why romance novels? After four wives, not to mention the ladies in between that I can’t mention, I think that I do know a thing or two about love, passion and marriage, in detail.
Most of the time I dream up stories whilst I am supposed to be sleeping, and I get up and write down the outline of the plot often in the middle of the night. When I start writing in the morning the actual details may change a bit, and sometimes that is decided by my characters in the story! I have to keep a careful track of my characters’ names, and I try not to duplicate them.
Now my books, I know you’ve been dying to ask me.
I only write Happy Ever After endings, but of course with some complications and problems in the story, but I find that I couldn’t write sloppy sex; it just wasn’t real – it takes more than a kiss to cement a relationship.
What I don’t like is four letter words, and my reason for that is a bit strange, but many of those four letter words actually mean something quite different in another language, and I know because I’ve worked there. I’m not a prude, and I do use these words when I get attacked by a rose bush or a bee, or I drop something heavy on my toe!
Please have a look at my website: www.adammannauthor.com and you can also find me on Twitter @adammannauthor and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/adammannauthor
The Showers by Adam Mann
Published by Global Publications Group LLC.
BLURB:
Bill Harrison meets Helen Roberts, a lovely farmer’s ex-wife at a farmhouse in the West Yorkshire Dales, as he guides a group of guests on a pony trekking holiday.
Helen decides to take the lead and actually joins James in the shower! He soon finds himself helping out on more than a holiday romance, but also some of the guests looking for ancestors in a local church registry; a young student couple running into their own romantic problems; and Amanda, her teenage daughter, who wants to learn to drive.
In the midst of all this the wife’s belligerent former husband, Harry, turns up who had abandoned her and her unborn child nearly twenty years earlier. Harry Townsend is being pursued by the local constabulary on a murder enquiry, and might have been looking for a place to hide out, and reluctantly accepts a small cash handout from Bill.
Then Helen finds that some elements of local society have a memory longer than the twenty years since she divorced her first husband for desertion, and the most spiteful can still remember his name.
The police catch Harry; they overcome local spite and gossip, and Bill and Helen live happily ever after.
This book is sexually explicit and is designed for adults and the over 18’s.
Adam Mann’s Bio:
Adam Mann has written twenty-four romance books all based in parts of the world where he has lived and worked. As a result five are in sub-Saharan Africa, eleven are in South or East Asia, and only seven based in the UK. One based in war torn Eastern Sri Lanka is still in draft form.
Adam has been married four times. His first wife died, the second divorced him, the third marriage was annulled as that wife had forgotten to get divorced, and the fourth wife is fit and well. They have between them seven children and four grandchildren. As a result Adam thinks he knows a bit about life and loving.
Adam has lived and worked in Vietnam since 1997, where he lives in a provincial city with his wife, and has a constant stream of visitors from the families of their seven adult children.
Cindy here again.
Thanks for stopping by. Be sure to check in every Wednesday to see what talented author we have talking about writing.
Keep writing
Cyndi Faria is an engineer turned romance writer whose craving for structure is satisfied by plotting heart-warming paranormal romance stories about Native American folklore, cursed spirits, lost souls, harbingers, and even a haunted coastal town. If you love a tale with courageous heroes and heroines, where their unconditional love for each other gives them strength to defeat their inner demons, Cyndi Faria invites you to enter the pages of her stories.
Cyndi Faria is an engineer turned romance writer whose craving for structure is satisfied by plotting emotional and cozy paranormal romance stories about Native American folklore, cursed spirits, lost souls, harbingers, and even a haunted coastal town. If you love a tale with courageous heroes and heroines, where their unconditional love for each other gives them strength to defeat their inner demons, Cyndi Faria invites you to enter the pages of her stories.
In A KILLING AT COTTON HILL the chief of police of Jarrett Creek, Texas, doubles as the town drunk. So when Dora Lee Parjeter is murdered, her old friend and former police chief Samuel Craddock steps in to investigate. He discovers that a lot of people may have wanted Dora Lee dead—the conniving rascals on a neighboring farm, her estranged daughter and her surly live-in grandson. And then there’s the stranger Dora Lee claimed was spying on her. During the course of the investigation the human foibles of the small-town residents—their pettiness and generosity, their secret vices and true virtues—are revealed.
Terry Shames grew up in Texas. She has abiding affection for the small town where here grandparents lived, the model for the fictional town of Jarrett Creek. A resident of Berkeley, California, Terry lives with her husband, two rowdy terriers and a semi-tolerant cat. She is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. Her second Samuel Craddock novel, THE LAST DEATH OF JACK HARBIN will be out in January 2014. Find out more about Terry and her books at www.Terryshames.com.
No, this is not about the world’s oldest profession. It’s about the first page of your manuscript. Do you know how few seconds an author has to hook an agent, an editor, or a reader? Precious few. Attention spans just aren’t what they used to be. If you don’t hook a reader (and by readers, I mean agents, editors, and the reading public) with the first page of your book, chances are, she won’t read the second page.
That’s the first line of Revenge of the Crafty Corpse, the third book in my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series. Reading that sentence, the reader knows something is about to happen. Hopefully, she’ll keep reading to find out just what that something is, why it happens, what sort of impact it has on my protagonist, and how it drives the plot of the book.
What is a perfect critique partner? A perfect critique partner is the writer who is right for you at that specific time. It is a person who can give you guidance, who can point out what does and doesn’t work. It is someone you trust to be honest with you and someone you know who wants what is best for you and your work. It may seem simple, but we’re asking people to tell us what is wrong with our babies. We’re asking them to rip apart something we feel great pride and joy in. Hearing your baby is ugly isn’t easy, right? So we need to totally believe in the person giving us that difficult news.
And if you like “Bug Stuff,” maybe you’ll like “San Diego or Bust,” available at: 
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