Month: February 2013

Find Your Voice

I went on a course a couple of years ago called ‘Find Your Voice’. It was for people wanting to get into commercial voiceovers…all about using microphones and marking up scripts to emphasise the right words and creating memorable characters with vocal tricks. The others on the course were real actors, hoping to get into the voiceover game, and they were pityingly tolerant of the non-vocally-talented writer who just wanted to make competent podcasts of her book.

We all went through that thing where you hear your voice and squirm because it’s not how you sound in your head but, unlike when you hear yourself on a tinny outgoing phone message, we had it booming at us in a pukka sound studio with boards full of things that blokes with ponytails know how to tweak. As if that wasn’t bad enough, then the room full of people who’d had voice training dahling discussed how you sounded. They’d make suggestions for changes; try this pace, try that tone, pretend you’re shouting at a class of toddlers or addressing a meeting of the Hitler Youth, remember when your cat died. You’d try again and listen again and sound different but this time it was less about not hearing what echoed in your head and more about hearing the things the others heard and wanted more of. Continue reading “Find Your Voice”

Sneak Peek: Don’t Tell Anyone

Today we have a sneak peek from the new novel by author Laurie Boris: Don’t Tell Anyone.

When pneumonia lands Estelle Trager unconscious in the emergency room, it ruins everything for the stubborn 65-year-old woman. She’d been keeping a secret—a deadly secret—that she’d planned on taking to the grave. But now her son Adam and his wife, Liza, know about her tumors. Adam is outraged, but Estelle, who watched her mother and grandmother suffer from breast cancer in the days when no one dared speak its name, has no intention of putting her family or herself through the horrors of cancer treatment. Estelle decides there is only one solution: ask Liza, the 33-year-old daughter-in-law she once called a godless hippie raised by wolves, to kill her.

A horrified Liza refuses and keeps the request—among other things—a secret from her furious husband. But she tells his younger brother, Charlie, a close friend from college with whom she shares her own confidences, despite Adam’s serious case of sibling rivalry. Armed with nutrition textbooks and her neighbor, a savvy nurse, can Liza win over her mother-in-law and convince her to consider other options before the cancer, the secrets, and Estelle’s determination to end her life win out?

Don’t Tell Anyone is available in print and ebook format from Amazon.com, Amazon UK, and Smashwords.

Here is an excerpt from Don’t Tell Anyone… Continue reading “Sneak Peek: Don’t Tell Anyone”

Meet the Author: Lara Reznik

Lara Reznik, a native New Yorker, attended college at the University of New Mexico where she studied under esteemed authors Rudolfo Anaya and Tony Hillerman. She later attended a summer program through the Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. Besides her recently published novel, The Girl From Long Guyland, which has garnered rave editorial reviews from such established institutions as Kirkus, Lara has written and optioned three screenplays, The M&M Boys, Bagels & Salsa, and Dance of Deception, which have received semifinalist and finalist wins in the Austin Heart of Film, Southwest Writers, TV Writer, Chesterfield and Writer’s Digest contests. She’s currently completing her new novel based on her screenplay, THE M&M BOYS, due out in September 2013.

Lara says her favorite part of the writing process is the first draft of the book, “… when the creative process is magical as the characters come alive for the author, and the plot takes on unimagined twists and turns.” She believes in good outlining, and she uses and recommends Scrivener. Continue reading “Meet the Author: Lara Reznik”

Indie News Beat: Is there a publishing industry or isn’t there?

We’ve lots of places to visit in this edition of Indie News Beat, beginning with a neat article headlined There Is No Publishing Industry, in which John Cavnar-Johnson suggests that what we generally understand as the publishing industry can now be broken down into four distinct “information delivery” industries, which are each advancing towards digitalisation at their own speeds. Continue reading “Indie News Beat: Is there a publishing industry or isn’t there?”