Characters, Disclaimers, Falls and Newsletters

The title of this post sounds like a grouping of mis-matched things, doesn’t it? Well, it is. And since it is, I’ll talk about them out of order. (Yeah, it’s that kind of day.)

We’ll start with disclaimers. If you post reviews of books, then you know the FTC recently decided that you must also post a disclaimer with the review, stating whether you were paid to do the review or not, if something affected your review one way or the other, and so on. You may have noticed that I started added disclaimers to my reviews.

One of my fellow HoTSinC’ers (that stands for our local chapter of Sisters in Crime called Heart of Texas) seemed to think my disclaimers were funny so she asked me to write an article about disclaimers and give some examples. So I did. ‘Course, there are others who also write interesting disclaimers. So I included a couple of Maryann Miller’s disclaimers. If you want to read the article, click here. (It’s a long newsletter with tons of great links and a re-cap of a fabulous talk by a Texas Ranger at our March meeting.)

Now that leads us straight into newsletters. Clearly, the HoTSinC newsletter is great. You might want to bookmark it and check it out each month. If any of you are interested, I also do a weekly newsletter, although it’s not a beautiful one like the HoTSinC newsletter. Mine comes to your ebox in basic black and white, no pics, no embedded links. I’ve been writing Doing It Write for twelve years now. It has news, contests, events, links -- all geared toward writers. If you’re interested, you can easily sign up.

Moving quickly to Falls. I’ve been doing Spring Cleaning. This past Sunday I tackled the windows. While carrying a rolled up water hose, the hose came loose and I tripped over it. But I managed to stop the fall with my face. Had to cancel a dental appointment because I would not be able to keep my mouth open (dear husband likes that part). I didn’t even know lips could peel or that chins could blacken. No. I did not take pictures.

And, finally, (I hear you cheering.) Characters. Today, I'm over at the Blood-Red Pencil talking about establishing the character of your characters. Then, at the end of this month, I’m co-teaching a workshop on Characters. Right now, I’m working on handouts. For one of them, I’m searching for one line or one short paragraph from books or stories that establish the character of a character. Ways that the author showed the character without stating it directly or by writing it in such a way that you stopped at its perfection or uniqueness. If you’ve read or written such a character-establishing line, email it to me. Include the book and author. (Don’t send a whole page or long paragraph.) And if it’s your own writing, that’s even better!