October 2016 – Liana Brooks

2016 October

Writing Realistic Romantic Relationships

There are a couple of hard and fast rules for writing romance genre that you need to keep in mind if you want to write category Romance. Anything market as Romance must have a Happily Ever After/Happy For Now ending. Anything less than that, and you will eaten alive by…

Stages of Love: Commitment and Happily Ever After

Welcome to the beautiful, danger fraught world of Commitment. The Basics Commitment is a place few authors dare to tread. Committed couples? Where’s the romance in that? (Confession: I totally think you can write a great romance with married characters and this is why EVEN VILLAINS FALL IN LOVE…

Stages of Love – Attraction

Yesterday we talked about the science behind Lust. The mad, crazy, passionate time when you are truly obsessed with another sentient being, or at least obsessed with getting in their pants and scoring a DNA exchange. After a short period of time the original chemical lust wears off. Reality sets…

Stages of Love – Lust and Rough-Hewn Spears

Love is a many-facted thing. We pine for it. We write about it. We dream of it. We mourn the loss and yet somehow always seem to wind up with our hearts broken again… Love is rough. And as much as people claim to know about love we often forget…

The Ultimate NaNo Prep Post (good for the rest of the year too)

This is the master post for everything I recommend to get you prepped for NaNoWriMo or a Fast Draft. Remember, each author is unique and so is each book, so be sure to play with this and make it work for you. The way I think and the steps I…

Plotting Beat Sheet

Plotting Session 1: Structure Plotting Session 2: Beat Sheets Plotting Session 3: The Epic Plotting Video During the epic plotting video where Amy Laurens and I fixed her Very Broken Novel™ I showed you the beat sheet I made Amy fill out before we replotted her book. This isn’t a…

Plotting with Amy Laurens and Liana Brooks – Part 3 The Plot Session

FROM LIANA: Grab some popcorn, a really big glass of water, and something to take notes with. This is not a quick plotting session, mostly because this was Amy’s original NaNo novel and a lot of scenes existed just to make word count. There were beats missing, motivations missing, villains…

Do You Need An Editor?

Every book is unique, and to keep the unique voice and dream of the book alive, you need a content editor who can catch the vision. A line editor is perfect for finding typos, but before that can happen, you need a content editor. You need someone who can fix…

Plotting with Amy Laurens and Liana Brooks – Part 2 Beat Sheets

FROM LIANA: The instinct of a new writer is push back against the tried-and-true, and this is especially true with beats. I think there’s something hardwired into new authors that makes us want to try and break a genre by doing something new and radical. What we forget (or don’t…

Plotting With Amy Laurens & Liana Brooks – Part 1

FROM LIANA: Back at the end of September I dropped off the grid for a week and was posting pictures of this other person, that was because Amy flew from Australia to Alaska to visit me. We’re basically twins, except we don’t share parents, genes, nationality, or birthdays… but we…