Tag: love

Home > ArchivesTag: love

What About Love? by Kitty Bucholtz

April 9, 2015 by in category It's Worth It by Kitty Bucholtz tagged as , ,

After six weeks of Lent and the booming joy of Easter, I’ve got love on my mind. Not just the cute, mushy stuff that most of our acquaintances seem to think we write about. 😉 But love with power and strength and purpose, the kind of love that changes people and changes lives.

I’ve been thinking about a sermon I heard recently where the pastor told a story about an elderly woman who was kidnapped and forgave her kidnapper, asking the judge to get the man into a drug rehab program. The pastor said what I often think – I’d like to think I would be that forgiving. But he also said the other thing I think when I hear these stories – I’ll probably never be in a position to know.

So he challenged us to something else. Don’t worry about loving your enemies today. Start with something easier. “How about if this week you just try to love the annoying people in your life?”

And it occurred to me that that just might be harder.

Then he said, “When you get so you can love the annoying people, take a step up and try to love the irritating people.”

Ouch. I think I’d rather try to love the kidnapper. At least I can blame it on the drugs and believe in his potential rehabilitation.

And then I started thinking about my writing. If I can’t personally love the annoying and irritating people I come across on a daily basis, how can I write about people with a dozen layers – no, a hundred layers – of relational emotion? Because that’s who we all are – people with uncountable layers of emotion covering hundreds of different relationships in each of our lives.

Love is the emotion that packs a punch. It’s active. It changes things. It changes people.

Love changes us.

We’re romance writers. But do we love the annoying and irritating people in our lives, let alone our enemies? If not, how can we write about love?

How does the love we write about change the people who read our stories? Does it change them at all? Are we afraid of saying too much? Too little? It takes a double dose of vulnerability to put that kind of love on the page.

We must be fearless.

We are among the bards of our generation. Bards tell tales of heroes, warn of danger, and give people courage. All in a fearlessly entertaining way.

That’s the power of love.

Kitty Bucholtz

 

Kitty Bucholtz decided to combine her undergraduate degree in business, her years of experience in accounting and finance, and her graduate degree in creative writing to become a writer-turned-independent-publisher. Her novels, Little Miss Lovesick, A Very Merry Superhero Wedding, and Unexpected Superhero are currently available on Amazon. The free short story “Superhero in Disguise” and the new short story “Welcome to Loon Lake” are available wherever ebooks are sold. You can find out about her courses on self-publishing, marketing, and time management for writers at her website Writer Entrepreneur Guides.

0 0 Read more

“The Princess and the Stilettos” Video Love Poem

February 11, 2014 by in category Archives tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Valentine’s Day is almost here…chocolate and flowers and romance. What girl could ask for more?

This Valentine’s I decided to do something totally different…I wanted to tell a story in pictures and rhyme. With the way books are published now as e-books and I’ve heard that books with soundtracks etc. are in the works, I wanted to experiment on my own.

So I bought a bunch of photos from www.Dreamstime.com and then found the perfect music from Kevin MacLeod www.incompetech.com and put it all together with my voiceover and a poem I wrote about a little girl who wanted to be a princess…

So here you are: the story of The Princess and the Stilettos…and how she found her prince told as a  Valentine’s Day video poem.


The Princess and the Stilettos for Valentine’s Day from Jina Bacarr on Vimeo.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Best,
Jina

www.jinabacarr.com
http://jinabacarr.wordpress.com  

https://twitter.com/JinaBacarr

http://facebook.com/JinaBacarr.author

http://www.pinterest.com.jbacarr  

0 0 Read more

What Does Love Mean? by Kitty Bucholtz

February 9, 2013 by in category Archives tagged as , , ,

Valentine’s Day is coming up and I won’t be with my husband, I’ll be on a writing trip with friends. I’m not too worried about it though. I mostly think of Valentine’s Day as a Hallmark holiday.

That being said, I don’t think you can say “I love you” too much. You never know when it will be the last time, but more than that, expressing to someone that you love them forms and shapes and repairs the foundation of your relationship.

But what does it mean?

This year, the day before Valentine’s Day is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent in the Christian faith. Lent is a time of repentance, turning from the wrongs of the past, and pressing closer to God. It’s a reminder that God loves us so much that he’d be willing to take a bullet to keep us safe.

That’s the kind of love many romance writers weave into their stories every day. It’s most obvious in romantic suspense where one person can literally take a bullet for the other. But it’s in all the other stories where someone says, I’m sorry, I made a mistake, and the other person says, I forgive you because I love you. And then they grow closer than ever.

I love those stories!

Some people theorize that the reason people respond to stories of love and sacrifice and forgiveness and happily ever after is because we are wired that way. Our enjoyment of such stories opens our hearts to the possibility that those tales represent the Truth of why we are here. We are loved, we made mistakes, a sacrifice was made on our behalf so that we wouldn’t be lost forever, forgiveness was offered, and happily ever after is ours for eternity.

That’s a pretty amazing love story. Loved forever. I want that.

Much as I can’t wait for my writing trip, I’m going to miss my husband. I’ll miss waking up beside him every morning, trying to be the first one to say “I love you.” I’ll miss how much he makes me laugh. And as much as I’ll try to deny it, I’ll miss how much he teases me to the point of losing my mind.

Because somewhere in the layers of all of those things, I’ve found a taste of what love is all about – someone who sacrifices to make my life better, who always forgives me, who wants to be with me forever, no matter what.

Love is the answer to why I am here. It’s the answer to why I write about love.

2 0 Read more

Love Notes: Hitting the Right Ones

February 15, 2012 by in category Archives tagged as , , , ,

It’s Valentine’s Day once again. Time to express our love, admiration and/or adoration with candy, flowers, and cards in colorful envelopes.
It is the card in a colorful envelope that makes me sweat. Over the course of thirty-five Valentine’s Days with my husband, I have penned every permutation of ‘I Love You’ that I can think of. Sitting with the yearly card in front of me, wishing it was already in the envelope, I was stumped. My mind wandered to the words we choose as authors to express love between our characters.
To that end, I took my favorite passage from Hostile Witness and analyzed why I found it sexy, deep and real. Every author is different, but here is here is how I believe I hit the right love notes between Josie and Archer in the Witness Series.*

HOSTILE WITNESS

Introduction of my characters’ relationship

Josie got out of bed and searched for her clothes. She found her muscle shirt and panties but the sweats and sports bra were missing in action. (Sure I could have said ‘naked’, but I liked that the action implied that. This passage felt sexy to me) She shimmied into what she had, glanced at the picture of Lexi, Archer’s dead wife, and then went looking for the man they shared. (This note creates an instant characterization of Archer as unafraid of commitment and Josie as a woman who honors his first love). She found him on the rooftop balcony, a perk of owning the building.

“Morning,” Josie walked up behind him and wound her arms around his waist. He was a big man; made her feel downright dainty. She loved the smell of his shirt. Starched and pressed by the man who wore it. (Archer is a guy who can fend for himself, something an independent woman would love. Josie’s note about his size making her feel dainty, tells us that she is not a small woman and that she doesn’t mind feeling feminine.)

“Don’t move,” he commanded.

Josie didn’t but only because she didn’t want to. (Josie chooses to do what her lover asks.) She held her breath, loving the feel of him when he was excited by what he saw through his lens. His gut tightened beneath her hands. A solitary muscle rippled. Quick like a snake. A click. He sighed with satisfaction and stood up slowly, surveying the beach once more before turning around to kiss Josie. (To me, a detail is very telling. Her notice of the one muscle rippling speaks to how familiar Josie is with her lover’s body.) She kissed him back just long enough for them both to be happy. (She cares about his needs). When she slipped out of his arms, he let her go. (He understands her.) No nonsense. No jealousy. No neediness. Respect. Affection. Comfort. Chemistry. It was the kind of relationship people who could take care of themselves did well. (Deep love in a nutshell).

Writing love scenes is as challenging as writing sex scenes. Sometimes they are one and the same, sometimes they aren’t. The way to create successful, believable relationships between characters is to ‘show’ their reality and shade a your character’s lives with the extra notes that provide a background to the more prominent melody.

The end result of communicating a fabulous fictional relationship should seem effortless despite all your hand work – just like real life love.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

*Josie and Archer’s love has lived on for 4 books, the fifth is being written. I love lasting relationships!

1 0 Read more

POKING DEAD THINGS: Confessions of a Romantically Challenged Author

February 15, 2011 by in category The Write Life by Rebecca Forster tagged as , , , , , ,

Rebecca Forster

A dear friend sent me a T-shirt for Christmas that declares, “I love poetry, long walks on the beach and poking dead things with a stick”.

I adore that shirt beyond reason because it so totally captures my outlook on romance. Poetry is okay if it rhythms, beach walks are good if it’s not too hot, but poking dead things with a stick rocks. Please do not take this literally*; realize this is a metaphor for my romantic soul.

All this brings me to the question of the (Valentine’s) day: why am I not romantic? More specifically, why the thought of poking things with a stick accompanied by the person I love is more romantic to me than walking on the beach in the moonlight with a poetry loving guy? Or even more precisely, as an author, why don’t I love writing about – well – love?

I began my career writing category romances. There were many things I liked about the genre – a clearly defined format, brilliant marketing, loyal and supportive readers – yet, when I tried to write sex scenes, I embarrassed myself (not to mention my mother). Worse, I agonized over whether I was doing it right. Good lord, I’d been married for years and had two children, you’d think I would know how to write about ‘IT’.

I tried writing more delicately about romance only to find myself disinterested. I never cared for whispered sweet nothings. I have a wee bit of trouble hearing and there’s nothing worse then asking to have a sweet nothing repeated. Longing looks make me nervous. I once dated a guy who liked to stare into my eyes and all I could think of was that game ‘blink’. I remember that guy didn’t blink and it freaked me out. Long walks are fine but inevitably I find myself hungry and cranky if the walk lasts too long.
How, I wondered, could my incredibly talented romance author friends pen multiple books a year, revel in the challenge of making characters fall in love again and again while I struggled to get my characters to their first kiss? Romances did not come trippingly off my tongue, I had no idea how to build delicious tension, my heart was challenged and therein was the problem. As much as I admired true romance writers, as much as I wanted to be one of them, my heart was different.
The final blow came when I was fired from romance writing by an editor who suggested I was cut out for something different. “You cannot,” he told me, “kill everyone before you get them into bed.”
He was right. I preferred a good murder, a fabulous stalking, an excellent mystery, an angst filled story. But did that preclude writing about romance? I think not. I believe every story needs to have a compelling relationship as part of the mix. So how could I satisfy my romantic heart and my thriller soul? The answer was simple. Romance writers had defined their romanticism; I had not defined mine.

For me, fictional romantic relationships were a means to an end and not an end in and of themselves. My characters fell in love so that the plot stakes would be higher. If you love someone and had to choose their life or yours then that made for great suspense but it also was the ultimate in romance.**
What turns me on as a reader is the same thing that excites me as a writer and intrigues me as a woman. I want to be invested in people with a sense of purpose, people who show their mettle in situations bigger than themselves. That kind of story sets my romantic nerves atinglin’. This take on romantic entanglements wasn’t bad it was just different than my romance-writing counterparts.
Once I gave myself permission to side-step the bedroom, I became a more fluid writer, character relationships grew from the plot and my storytelling took on a new spark. Now, when my characters fall in love it is because they have poked and prodded one another, talked through problems, worked together and, yes, poked dead things with a stick together. It is their inquisitiveness about the world around them, not their exclusive curiosity about one another that define my romantic parameters. Strangely, I find I write more realistic relationships now that I am comfortable with my own rules.

So, I confess, I will always find a body on the beach more exciting than a walk in the moonlight. I will always appreciate the quirky gift over a dozen roses; I will anticipate with bated breath the first kiss of two people who are caught in the crossfire more than two people headed for the bedroom.
The nice thing is that I know there are others out there who think like I do. There are honest-to-God-stick-carrying- dead-thing-poking- curiosity-seeking folk who will fall in love with the way I see love. When we pass our poetry-spouting- hand-holding- dreamy-eyed romantic counterparts on the beach they will smile, we will raise our sticks in greeting and all of us will be romantically satisfied in our own, very special, very unique way.
So, to all you writers, musicians, artists, husbands, wives, girlfriends and boyfriends this Valentine’s day, poke something, walk somewhere, kiss the one you love or watch their back. However you decide to romance that someone special it will be perfect.
*Okay, literally. I do poke dead things with sticks when I find them but I don’t find them very often.

**Currently I am reviewing my romance and women’s fiction novels and find that, indeed, I had a glimmer of a romance writer in me. Dreams, Seasons, and my mother’s favorite, Rainbow’s End even brought a tear to my eye and I think a good cry is always romantic.
0 0 Read more
123

Copyright ©2017 A Slice of Orange. All Rights Reserved. ~PROUDLY POWERED BY WORDPRESS ~ CREATED BY ISHYOBOY.COM

>