* It's Major League Baseball's All-Star Week *
I'm happy to have Margo Dill as my guest blogger today. Margo and I met when I attended my first writers conference in 2007. She was the Missouri Writers Guild conference chair that year and in charge of a huge production. She was so kind and helpful to a very green, unpolished, untrained, in-awe-of-the-entire-experience, writer -- yours truly! We became fast friends, partly because we're authors, but also because we have the same sense of humor, and in my book..... that's everything! Margo also helped edit my memoir and she didn't just fix grammatical errors; she suggested different things that I mostly agreed with! If you saw us standing next to each other, we're quite a unique sight. Anyone who remembers an old cartoon strip named Mutt & Jeff will know what I mean. J
(I'd be the short one!)
Margo is here today to share some thoughts on books, and writing, and fictional characters, and she also brought along some fabulous PRIZES! So, without further ado, Margo, take it away.....
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WRONG!
Turns out, McGuire drew me
in with her hero and heroine, both twenty-something flawed, delightful people
trying to figure out love and life, and I couldn’t put the book down. I stayed
up past 5:00 am, trying to finish it. I couldn’t figure out why I had been so
drawn in.
My mom (I know it’s my mom,
but just bear with me) said the same thing about my second novel, Caught Between Two Curses, which is a
young adult novel with love, magic, and baseball. She read the whole thing in
one day, and the only reason this makes me a bit happy is because it took her
weeks to finish my first middle-grade novel, Finding My Place (if she ever really did finish it!). So what was
it about my YA novel that made her stay up all night? Why did I stay up reading
about people 20 years younger than me?
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My mom’s theory is these
books take us back to our youth, something about the characters makes us
connect with them and reminds us about ourselves. I think she’s on to something
here. Most readers have connected with Julie, my 17-year-old main character
trying to figure out love and what sex has to do with that while also breaking
a curse that’s been on her family for decades. But a couple haven’t, and those
reviews have read something like: “Margo Dill is a good writer, but I didn’t
like Julie and wished she wouldn’t be so stupid.” OUCH! But these readers
didn’t connect with her, so that’s okay.
I checked reviews on Beautiful Oblivion—most were 4 and 5
stars, but she got a few bad ones and most people just didn’t get the
characters.
So is that what draws us in?
Characters that remind us of ourselves in some way? I think this is probably
true for 95 percent of readers—think about books that are a series—most of the
time a book is part of a series because a good writer has created a remarkable
character, and readers want to know MORE about this character. I can name a
hundred (I won’t, Becky would kill me), but think about it: Harry Potter, Alex
Cross, Mma Ramotswe, Katniss Everdeen, and so on.
So here’s to the characters
we love—whether we write them or we read them. And hopefully if you have a
chance to check out Caught Between Two
Curses this week during the All-Star Sale and Contest (details below),
you’ll connect with Julie, just like my mom did.
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| Margo Dill |
Thank you, Margo! And now bloggers, please continue to read all about Margo's very generous sale prices and FREEBIES!
DETAILS: Margo’s book, Caught Between Two Curses, is on sale
this week thanks to baseball’s All-Star Game!
You can find out all the details about the sale here (http://margodill.com/blog/2014/07/10/all-star-week/),
but basically, the e-book for KINDLE is on sale for $1.99 (July 16-17) and $2.99 (July 18-19).
An autographed copy of the print book is available for $5.00 off the cover price--$6.95.
Thanks to All-Star week, she is also having a contest with a prize of one $25 gift card to one of 5 restaurants (Olive Garden, Starbucks, Panera Bread, Applebee’s, TGI Friday’s) (U.S. mailing addresses only please)
And a 3000-word free edit (anywhere in the world, English-language only).
Enter to win those prizes on the Rafflecopter form below—no purchase necessary!
Check out more about Margo and her books at: http://margodill.com/blog/
