Birthdays: W.D. Snodgrass (1926), Umberto Eco (1932), Robert Kinloch Massie III (1929), Florence King (1936), Seanan McGuire (1978), Stella Gibbons (1902), Tananarive Due (1966), Rudolf Christoph Eucken (1846),

W.D. Snodgrass won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for “Heart’s Needle”

Tananarive Due won the 2002 American Book Award for her novel “The Living Blood”.

Rudolf Eucken won the 1908 Nobel Prize for Literature

Umberto Eco’s most famous English book is “The Name of the Rose” but he has written many more.

Thought for the day: “I love the smell of book ink in the morning.” – Umberto Eco

Tip: When writing, be sure to ground the reader in the setting of your story. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but give us a time of year, and let us know where and when we are. If we’re in a house or apartment, show us what the place looks like.

Jumpstart: Come up with a list of names for your hero and/or heroine and villain for a variety of genres — historical, science fiction, fantasy, romance, etc. Why did you choose those names? Write a brief character sketch for each.

Birthdays: Birthdays: Jacob Grimm (1785), Max Eastman (1883), James Bond (1900), Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (1933), Gao Xingjian (1940), Doris Kearns Goodwin (1943), Natalie Goldberg (1948), Harlan Coben (1962), Christina Baker Kline (1964).

Doris Goodwin won the 1995 Pulitzer for History

Harlan Coben was the first author to win all three of these: the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony Awards.

James Bond – no, not the spy, though he was the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s character.

Gao Xingjian won the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature

Thought for the day: “Once I have the idea for a story, I start collecting all kinds of information… For example, I may see a picture of a man in a magazine and say ‘That’s exactly what the father in my book looks like!’…I save everything that will help.” – Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Tip: In addition to reading, watch movies—not just for fun. Study the characters, settings, and scenes. Make notes on what works for you and what doesn’t—and why.

Jumpstart: Imagine that you have found a treasure box. What does it look like? How big is it? You’re dying to open it. Should you? Why or why not? If you do, what is inside? What does it mean? Where is it from? If you don’t, why not? And what do you do with it now?

Who has not read a fairy tale by the Grimm brothers? Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and more. Almost any common fairy tale we know today was penned by them.

And Natalie Goldberg’s books on writing are among my favorites.

Birthdays: Cicero (106 BC), John Fletcher (1886), J.R.R. Tolkien (1892), Carolyn Haywood (1898), Erik Larson (1954), Patricia Lee Gauch (1934), Alex Wheatle (1963), Charles Yu (1976).

Erik Larson won the 2004 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime for “The Devil in the White City”.

John Gould Fletcher won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for “Selected Poems”

Quote: “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory.” – J.R.R. Tolkien

Tip: Figure out what you want to write and learn the craft. This doesn’t mean read one book on writing. You need to read dozens – and understand them. Go to websites and study them. Take classes. Writing is a craft that can be learned so put the time in and learn it.

Jumpstart: Write about a place you’ve never lived. For instance, if you’ve lived all your life in the north, you know January means snow, ice, and freezing temperatures. Describe a month in the Deep South or a tropical island. If you’re from the south, write about those frozen northern climes.

BLURB

Swingers Light Up Vegas

What happens in Vegas…

Swingers Brett and Jen head to Las Vegas to celebrate Jen’s fiftieth birthday. Through their friends back home, they’ve scored a free week at a posh Vegas resort condominium. They fill their days with every iconic Las Vegas experience they can dream up. But by night? They’re determined not to leave Vegas without sampling what it has to offer in the erotically charged swing lifestyle. A Vegas swing club beckons – will it live up to their fantasies?

Cover art from:

Go to: VRG

BOOK INFO

Genre: Erotic Romance, Bisexual, Later in Life

Release Date: January 30, 2023

Length: 5K words

Price: 99 cents

BUY LINK

Pre-order coming soon at https://books2read.com/

TAGS

Bisexual erotic romance, LGBTQ+, Swing Lifestyle, Ménage, Later in Life, Las Vegas

ABOUT ADRIANA KRAFT

Adriana Kraft is the pen name for a married pair of retired professors writing erotic romance and erotic romantic suspense together. We like to think we’ve broken the mold for staid, fusty academics, and we hope lots of former profs are enjoying life as much as we are. We believe that love is love is love, and we often feature bisexual women and ménage in our erotic romance stories. Together we have published more than fifty erotic romance novels and novellas to outstanding reviews.

During our academic careers, we lived in many states across the Midwest. We love to travel, so when we retired, we sold our house and took off in our motor home across the country. We now make our home in southern Arizona, where we enjoy hiking, golf, and travel, especially to the many Arizona Native American historical sites.

AUTHOR LINKS

https://linktr.ee/AdrianaKraft

This is the first day of a new year. What are your goals for the new year? Not resolutions, but goals? A goal has specific steps. A resolution might be: I want to get published. Unless you’re self-publishing, you have no control over that. A goal, though, might be: I want to finish a novel (or whatever you’re writing) and submit it to XYZ publishing by June 1st. In order to do this, I have to write (#) words each day. Be S.M.A.R.T. with your goals. (If you don’t know what this is, Google it). A S.M.A.R.T. goal is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. This is a new year. Be “smart” and set your goals. Now, let’s all get out there and write!

Authors Born Today: E.M. Forster (1879), J.D. Salinger (1919), Mary Norton (1903), Ouida (1839), JamesFrazer (1854), Audrey Wurdemann (1911), Ernest Tidyman (1928), Olivia Goldsmith (1949), James Richardson (1960), Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897), Claudia Rankine (1963), Mary Ann Shaffer (1934), Gina Berriault (1926)

Audrey Wurdemann at 24 was the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection “Bright Ambush”

Catherine Bowen won the National Book Award for her nonfiction like “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Scenes from the Life of Benjamin Franklin”

Claudia Rankine won the NAACP Image Award for poetry in 2015 for “Citizen: An American Lyric”.

Gina Berriault won multiple awards for her short stories including the O’Henry

Quote: “I think the first idea—or first feeling—of The Borrowers came through my being shortsighted: when others saw the far hills, the distant woods, the soaring pheasant, I, as a child, would turn sideways to the close bank, the tree roots, and the tangled grasses.” – Mary Norton (author of “The Borrowers”)

“The king died and then the queen died. That is a story. The king died and the queen died of grief. That is a plot.” – E.M. Forster

This is the end of the year. So what have you done? Did you reach your goals? What are your new ones going forward?

Birthdays: Holbrook Jackson (1874), Frank Marshall Davis (1905), Bob Shaw (1931), Edward Bunker (1933), Clarence Major (1936), Gerald McDermott (1941), Connie Willis (1945), Susan Swartz (1949), Nicholas Sparks (1965), Junot Diaz (1968), Joe Abercrombie (1974),

Donnie Willis won eleven Hugo and Nebula Awards for her science fiction.

Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”

Quotes: “I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie).” – Connie Willis

“Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice.” – Holbrook Jackson

“Publishing is a business. Writing may be art, but publishing, when all is said and done, comes down to dollars.” – Nicholas Sparks

Tip: It’s the end of the year and time to look at your goals that you wrote back in January and maybe revised in July. Did you achieve them? Why or why not? What could you have done differently? Did you set the bar too high? Not high enough? Did obligations get in the way? Think about what you want to do to set goals for next year.

Jumpstart: While traveling on a back road, you see a house with a tree-lined driveway. The scene looks very familiar to you, but you’ve never been here before. As you slow down, the mailbox at the end of the driveway has your name on it….

December 30

Birthdays: Rudyard Kipling (1865), L. P. Hartley (1895), Paul Bowles (1910), Jane Langton (1922), Mercer Mayer (1943), Patti Smith (1946), James Kahn (1947), Lewis Shiner (1950), Melissa Fay Greene (1952), Douglas Coupland (1961), Sean Hannity (1961), Chandler Burr (1963)

Rudyard Kipling won the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Jane Langton’s book “The Fledgling” was a Newbery Honor book.

Quote: “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” – Rudyard Kipling

Tip: End of the year business accounting: have you kept track of all your writing-related spending as well as your income? You’ll need these records for tax time. And note: some states/localities require you to pay quarterly taxes.

Jumpstart: While cleaning out your parent’s attic, you find a shoebox full of postcards from a person signed M.G. and addressed to your mother. They come every year on the same date and go back to the day of your birth…

I am putting out a plea to anyone who would like to have a spotlight or review done by me. PLEASE read the pages “You’d Like a Review Done” or “You’d Like a Promo Spot” before you contact me. For some reason, I’ve been getting a lot of requests for things I don’t read (Horror, heavy thrillers, basically anything with graphic gore) or will not post (book covers that are not PG13). Also, if I’m doing a spotlight for you and you send me your photo – please put your name on the file and not “image###” or other generic file name. I do these things (reviews/spotlights) at no charge to you and it’s a lot of work so following the guidelines makes me more likely to help you out again in the future and keeps me from having to send you a letter telling you why I won’t take on your project. Thank you.

Today’s Writing Tips, Tricks, Thoughts:

Birthdays: Richard Atwater (1892), Vera Brittain (1893), Robert Ruark (1915), William Gaddis (1922), Molly Garrett Bang (1943), Jim Shepard (1956), Paul Rudnick (1957), Sean Chercover (1966), Jenny Lawson (1973)

William Gaddis’ first novel, “The Recognitions” was nearly a thousand pages long and was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 best novels from 1923-2005.

Quotes: “So many of us feel like we’re misfits until we finally find our tribe – the other people who are are strange in the same way – and suddenly everything clicks.” – Jenny Lawson

“As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write.” – Paul Rudnick

“There’s no secret formula. The main thing is, you write. Sounds obvious, yet it amazes me how many people say they want to be writers but don’t write. Odd, that. Anyway, you write, and then you write some more. You revise, and then you revise some more. You show your work to others and you learn from their reactions.” – Sean Chercover

Tip: Stop worrying about being a “good” writer and just write. You can come back and edit later.

Jumpstart: You’ve struck up a casual friendship with a coworker. She often comes in bruised and you don’t buy her story about falling. You follow her one evening and find out the bruises aren’t from an abuser as you suspected, but from…

Birthdays: Carol Ryrie Brink (1895), Mortimer Adler (1902), Emily Neville (1919), Stan Lee (1922), Simon Raven (1927), Manuel Puig (1932), Alasdair Gray (1934), Cynthia DeFelice (1951), Charlie Pierce (1953), Gilles Leroy (1958), Andy McNab (1959)

Carol Ryrie Brink won the Newbery Medal for her book “Caddie Woodlawn”

Emily Neville won the 1964 Newbery Medal for “It’s Like This, Cat”

Stan Lee was a comic book author and president of Marvel Comics.

Manuel Puig is best known for books like “Kiss of the Spider Woman”

Quote: “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” – Alasdair Gray

Tip: There is no secret to publication. It takes dedication, hard work, and perseverance. If you can’t put in the time, you won’t be successful.

Jumpstart: “We need three keys to open the door. I have one, you have the second. I wonder who has the third?”

“I do.”

You turn and see…

Birthdays: John Roberts (1822), Mirza Ghalib (1869), Mina Loy (1882), Louis Bromfield (1896), Ingri Parin d’Aulaire (1904), Mary Howard (1907), Charles Olson (1910), Elizabeth Smart (1913), Wilfrid Sheed (1930), Aidan Chambers (1934), Greg Mortensen (1957), Gerina Dunwich (1959), Wendy Coakley-Thompson (1966), Chris Abani (1966), Sarah Vowell (1969), Erin Stead (1982)

Louis Bromfield won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for “Early Autumn”

Erin Stead won the 2011 Caldecott Medal for her illustrations in “A Sick Day for Amos McGee”

Quote: “Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people’s books, one’s own books – it does not matter whose or where. Simply to be among books, glancing at one here, reading a page from one over there, enjoying them all as objects to be touched, looked at, even smelt, is a deep satisfaction.” – Aidan Chambers

“Dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It’s called Canada.” – Sarah Vowell

Tip: Consider setting up a separate bank account for your writing. Then when it’s tax time, you won’t have to muddle through personal stuff to find your business stuff.

Jumpstart: You go to a pound to get a pet dog for your son. When you get home, you discover the dog has a very unusual talent…