Weekend Update and Book Winners!

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. Mine was great! On Saturday I went to my RWA Chapter meeting in Toronto and was inpsired by medical suspense author CJ Lyons who spoke to us about character driven plotting. For someone who's mostly a pantser, it seemed a really great way of breaking down your plot, along with my characters' motivations, goals, and conflicts into something really short and loose but that will help me to know how I need to drive the story even if I'm not planning every little whimper and sigh, or the villain's every dastardly deed. (Last night I even started to try it out with my current work-in-progress and found out that I do know a lot about my characters--I just need to sharpen my vision of how the major turning points of my plot connect to their goals/motivation/conflict.)

After the meeting, I met a friend for dinner who I don't see very often. It was wonderful. We've been friends for as long as I can remember. We were neighbours when our families both lived in Alberta. Then my family moved to Ontario when I was 8 or 9 and Brandon's family moved to BC before also coming to Ontario, and at some point we managed to get in touch again. Now we see each other about once every three months and it's always a really nice evening.

And...

I came home to find that Dark Immortal is a finalist in the EPIC competition!

So now without further ado, the news you guys have been waiting for:

The winner of a copy of Morgan Ashbury's The Lady Makes three is:

Natasha A

The winner of a copy of Kimber Chin's Invisible is:

Amber Leigh

But don't go yet!!

I'm taking part in a "Contest to Win a Kindle" with other Samhain authors. You can find some of the details here (my "turn" is going to be November 30)

Oh, and for you writers, how are you all doing on NaNoWriMo?



(Cartoon courtesty of Inkygirl.com)