Updates and some thoughts on POV...

Bestial Cravings has dropped to #2 on the main Best Sellers List at TWRP as of yesterday, but hey! that's still good:)

The weather here is getting hot and humid. Dark Goddess that I am, I prefer the dreary, thundery, rainy weather *grin* And, of course, the Florida winter. This time of year we tend to stay in the old AC like the Northerners stay in during their cold months.

I've been pondering, plotting, and jotting ideas and events down for Book Two of the Roma Wolf Tales series. And for those who've read Curse of the Marhime , you know the book is in third person with only one POV character. The next book will be in multiple POV not really sure how many POVs but no more than four or five. I am really only considering three main this time around but we'll see how it goes:) I began the series this way because Pita was the main character as well, the catalyst for the story, and I wanted to challenge myself to keep at it. It was a test of wills to keep Niko's POV out of it, so for me as a writer, it was both a test and an exercise.

I am not a fan of many POVs in my writing. Nor do I like to read books with more than a handful of POV characters. I feel it confuses and convolutes the main characters who, in my humble opinion, are the most important. Also, as a reader it annoys me when I have to keep track of too many characters. So I guess we can say I write within the parameters I like to read.

In my experience, the editors I've worked with have been of the same mindset. Some are stricter than others but most prefer limited POV characters and headhopping within the story. Headhopping, as most know, is when the POV jumps back and forth between characters sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph. This is a strick no-no in my experience but there are bestselling authors that get away with it. They've earned the privilege, but us newbies need to stick to the basic rules, LOL.

I stick to one or two POVs per scene. If I do go into two POVs, I will transition as smoothly as possible from one to the other and split the scene between the two characters.

For a fast-paced scene, such as in a highly charged action scenes that are all happening at the same time with different characters, I've seen a spiraling POV used which does jump multiple POVs to anty up the fast pace. I've used it and read it in many action suspense-type books, and it really is an interesting concept. But again, I want to mention it still does not jump POV sentence to sentence or even paragraph to paragraph.

Whoa! Sorry...

I think I've gone a bit overboard and turned this into a discussion so I will move on with some more updates and then slink off to get some work done now.


Other things in the works are a newsletter I am working on putting together with all sorts of shares and information. As you may have noticed, I've set up a new Yahoo group as a venue to sign up for the newletter and share lots of other information such as new releases, events, guests announcements, recipes, craft articles, pictures, etc. Please take a moment to sign up. The loop is informational only. No need to worry about posting and keeping up with yet another loop:)

Look to the sidebar as well for upcoming guest bloggers. Next up is Donna Sundblad, author of Pumping Your Muse, a nonfiction, craft writing book used in current writing classes.

As always, thanks for dropping by.

Dayana~