Hifa News April 09

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______________________________________________ Published by Heart of Iowa Fiction Authors Region 2, Chapter #135 April 2009 WELCOME

MEETING PREVIEW

Welcome to the April 2009 edition of Heart of Iowa, the monthly newsletter published by the Heart of Iowa Fiction Authors! A big thanks to Cindy Kirk traveling to our March 2009 meeting and presenting her wonderful workshop "The Selling Synopsis". Check out Cindy's newest release, Claiming the Rancher's Heart, a Silhouette Special Edition release. For more information, visit Cindy on her website, www.cindykirk.com.

OLD NEWS 2009 RWA CONFERENCE

Conference Bound? Register by May 31st for the early member registration fee of $425 ($500 for non-members). Registration information is available on the RWA website at www.rwanational.org. This year's conference will be held in Washington D.C. and will feature such exciting speakers as Janet Evanovich, Linda Howard, and Eloisa James.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! Our meeting in May will be on the 16th, and we will be making the trek to Des. Moines, where we will visit our sister chapter, Iowa Romance Novelists. If we have enough interest, we may plan an overnight "brainstorming" session. Mark your calendar and plan on joining us for a chance to meet other aspiring authors!

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April 2009 CARRIE LOFTY "Snakebite Scenes and Hollywood Plots: Adding Emotional Action to Romance."

This month HIFA would like to welcome Carrie Lofty! She'll share plotting strategies as well as meaningful ways to draw the hero and heroine together in a way that forces intimacy, creates a shared history, and brings their budding relationship into focus. These "snakebite scenes" can be found in almost any romance, but they're most effective in action-oriented stories where a good jolt to the system helps the hero and heroine realize what they mean to each other. Carrie Lofty was born in California, raised in the Midwest, and found the love of her life in England. She earned her master’s in history with a thesis on Old West outlaws .What a Scoundrel Wants, the hot, adventurous tale of Will Scarlet and his dangerous lady love, was a December 2008 Zebra Debut, and Scoundrel’s Kiss, the sequel featuring a Spanish warrior monk and an opium addict, will follow in January www.carrielofty.com 2010.

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______________________________________________ Published by Heart of Iowa Fiction Authors Region 2, Chapter #135 April 2009 NEW RELEASES

CONTEST RESULTS

"And Then There was One"

Wildfire by Roxanne Rustand is a 2009 Write Touch Reader's Award Finalist! Way to go Rox!

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Take No Prisoners by Cindy Gerard is a 2009 RITA Finalist! Congratulations Cindy!

Bura Randolph Freeman and Mary Freeman Boardman Available on www.amazon.com

Are you entering contests? Please keep us apprised of your contest entry results! We love to boast about our members!

2009 Program Schedule Below is the anticipated program schedule for 2009. Stay tuned for any changes or additions to the schedule. It's a year full of talented authors and exciting programs you won't want to miss!

"Night and Day" by Sherri Hansen

Jaunuary 24th - Cindy Gerard February 28th - Lois Greiman "Beyond the Honeymoon"

Available on www.amazon.com

March 28th -Cindy Kirk/ "The Selling Synopsis"

UPCOMING RELEASES May 2009 Deadly Competition - Roxanne Rustand June 2009 Colorado Secrets - Jacquie Greenfield July 2009 Terms of Attraction - Kylie Brant August 2009 Save the Last Dance - Roxanne Rustand September 2009 Waking Nightmare - Kylie Brant Final Exposure - Roxanne Rustand October 2009 Waking Evil - Kylie Brant Feel the Heat - Cindy Gerard November 2009 Waking the Dead - Kylie Brant

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April 25th - Carrie Lofty May 16th - Trip to Des Moines I.R.N June 27th - Jacquie Greenfield & Pamela Nissen July 25th - Michele Dunaway "Channeling Your Inner Superwoman" August 22nd - Kylie Brant September 26th - Leigh Michaels October - Roxanne Rustand

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______________________________________________ Published by Heart of Iowa Fiction Authors Region 2, Chapter #135 April 2009 Jan and Jen's Excellent Adventure Part Two: "Onward and Upward" By Jan Schliesman, HIFA V.P. positive plans with her negativity? What if she was right? We flipped to a clean sheet of paper and wrote from the assumption that the worst comments were the most valid. This meant different things to each of our stories. Jen got many comments about her heroine being too needy and unrealistic. She re-wrote the first chapter and created the character the judges expected to read about and boom…her story took on a new direction. I got a lot of comments about my overuse of ellipses (…) and words ending in –ly. At the end of my first chapter I also had my heroine giving up her gun just because the hero asked her to. Easy enough to fix with a couple comments like “fat chance” or “you first”. Of course it’s not PERFECT and it’s not ever gonna be perfect, but it was BETTER. And I finally realized getting a little bit better is a great goal. And speaking of goals, when was the last time you had one? It takes effort to track your progress and hold yourself accountable in any endeavor. But writing is a beast with fangs that takes some taming. And Jen is a lot braver than I am. I entered a couple contests and got icky feedback and never wrote a word for TWO YEARS! Jen entered a contest, got icky feedback and got over it! (Maybe she drinks heavily when I’m not looking…) I wrote a few manuscripts, got rejections from a couple agents and convinced myself to hide everything in a file cabinet. Jen wrote a manuscript and sent it straight to an editor! How brave is that? She also makes me accountable when it would be a hell of a lot easier to fall back into an old routine. So, onward and upward with our mutual admiration society. You’ve got to aim high if you want to reach your goals, and Jen and I are headed to the top! Jan Schliesman is the Vice President of HIFA and a 2009 finalist in the GOTCHA! Contest.

There are two ways you can look at the creative endeavors of our mutual admiration society. You either acknowledge our blatant attempts at filling space in the monthly newsletter or you believe our warped sense of humor and creativity will eventually lead us to great fame and fortune. Don’t ruin our fun and voice your opinion quite yet because we are just getting warmed up☺ Last fall after the October meeting, Jen and I decided to team up and hold each other accountable for our writing. The best way to do this (for us) was to pick a contest with a realistic deadline that wouldn’t send either one of us into freak-out mode. Jen was a contest virgin and I hadn’t entered a contest in almost five years so it was a good starting point for both of us. The GOTCHA contest offered three critiques on your first fifteen pages for $25 and I think the deadline was around Thanksgiving. We spent a couple weeks shooting pages back and forth to each other, trying to provide useful comments up until the final day. Then the entries were gone and the holidays were upon us. We both got a little side-tracked and suddenly the end of January was upon us. Jen remembered the GOTCHA results were supposed to be announced soon and I came home to a phone message saying I had placed in the contest. We shared our contest critiques with each other and tried to pin down our judges comments into three categories: valid, possibly true and simply ridiculous. At first it was easy to strongly dislike the meanest judge on both our entries. She either had an ax to grind or hated all of humanity and would probably kick kittens out of moving cars and brag about it. What kind of nasty person would choose to judge a contest and then be so harsh to our fragile egos? We were incensed. But a few weeks later, after we had time to stop taking the criticism personally, things began to make more sense. What if the mean judge knew what she was talking about? What if she wasn’t a whack job out to destroy all of our

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______________________________________________ Published by Heart of Iowa Fiction Authors Region 2, Chapter #135 April 2009

A Writer's Core by Carrie Lofty

I am obsessed with “So You Think You Can Dance,” where raw, enthusiastic dancers get their shot at achieving their personal best under intense circumstances. I even go so far as to watch the versions from other countries. Only two weeks until the Australian finale! See? Completely obsessed. But my interest doesn’t necessarily stem from my background. Although I was a bellydancer and competed in amateur college ballroom competitions, I love watching those dancers progress as artists. They work hard, put their hearts into every performance, and battle inner demons. A dancer who messes up a step will dwell on that fault much more intently than on any applause or praise. Sound familiar? Even if you can’t tell your pas de deux from your samba, you know, as a writer, what that creative struggle feels like. We try to progress and learn and appeal to the market, while also remaining true to that ever-elusive “voice” that makes us unique. But we also tend to dwell on the negatives, which does us no favors when trying to craft beautiful happily ever afters! We as authors must develop a strong core. This term is used in dance and fitness to indicate a well-developed core of abdominal muscles, from which most movement originates. Core strength is essential to control, endurance and the craft of dance, but

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the same idea can be applied to writers. Without a central core of self-belief and a strong sense of our worth as storytellers, we can be pummeled by negative reviews, harsh comments, yet another rejection, unsupportive family members or friends, or any number of mean inner whispers that say we should never try again. Those of us who can mature a strong core of self-confidence and worth will persevere against untold trials and become successful, no matter our personal definitions of success. Geez, I sound clichéd…and that isn’t my self-doubt talking. Go to any conference and you’ll hear a motivational “I’ve been in your shoes” speaker who recounts her trials, successes, and struggles against doubt. My personal favorite was Sherilyn Kenyon as the PRO speaker at Nationals in 2007. She tells a mean story—complete with a happy ending, of course—and I was in tears by the conclusion. The point remains that we say these things to each other because they’re true, and because we need to protect each other from the rigors of a business that is, after all, based around two incompatible things: money and art. One way you can strengthen your core belief in yourself is to identify what triggers the most stress and what works to relieve it. What makes your doubts swell to ten times their normal size, and what can you do get back to creating? Personally, I’ve discovered that waiting is the most damaging. We wait for

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______________________________________________ Published by Heart of Iowa Fiction Authors Region 2, Chapter #135 April 2009 feedback, wait for The Call, wait for news about a contest or a new contract. It’s exhausting! The more time between successes, the more time I’m able to dwell on those negative demons. Maybe I’m not good enough! Maybe my agent or editor is ready to drop me. Maybe my idea is too pedestrian or, on the other end of the spectrum, too “out there.” And what if—that ultimate horror—I’m just not good enough? But like a dancer who keeps her core muscles strong and ready for anything, the only balm for all these doubts is to keep working. Keep flexing those creative muscles. Draw support from your cheering section, because really, every writer needs a group of noholds-barred girlfriends who’ll be there in times of despair and uncertainty. And this may seem counter-intuitive, but take a few days off if the stress gets too overwhelming. I tend to watch TV just long enough to get bored out of my skull. Then the ideas start pounding,

demanding to be let out, and I’m back at a keyboard. The solution is to keep working, keep dreaming, and keep strengthening that core belief in your worth as a storyteller. Speaking of TV, I’m going to go watch the SYTYCD Australia Top 8 results. I need help…. Carrie Lofty was born in California, raised in the Midwest, and found the love of her life in England. She earned her master’s in history with a thesis on Old West outlaws .What a Scoundrel Wants, the hot, adventurous tale of Will Scarlet and his dangerous lady love, was a December 2008 Zebra Debut, and Scoundrel’s Kiss, the sequel featuring a Spanish warrior monk and an opium addict, will follow in January 2010. www.carrielofty.com

MAY CONTEST DEADLINES Deadline: May 1 Golden Acorn - $25 entry fee, sponsored by the Charter Oak RWA Golden Claddagh - $25/$20 entry fee, sponsored by Celtic Hearts RWA Maggie -$20 entry fee, sponsored by the Georgia RWA TARA - $20/$25, sponsored by the Tampa Area RWA International Self Published Book Awards - $100 fee, sponsored by Writer's Digest Summer Sizzle - $20, sponsored by the Ohio Valley RWA Deadline: May 9 Ignite the Flame - $20/$25, sponsored by Central Ohio Fiction Writers Deadline: May 15 Aspen Gold - $20-$35, sponsored by Heart of Denver RWA Information taken from the website of Stephie Smith. For a complete listing of contest deadlines, entry fees and entry requirements, visit: www.stephiesmith.com

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______________________________________________ Published by Heart of Iowa Fiction Authors Region 2, Chapter #135 April 2009

HIFA MEETINGS

ROMANCE WRITERS OF AMERICA

Romance Writers of America® National Headquarters 14615 Benfer Rd. Houston, TX 77069 832/717-5200 Phone 832/717-5201 Fax [email protected] www.rwanational.org

Heart of Iowa Fiction Authors currently meets the fourth Saturday of every month, with the exception of November and December. Meetings are held at 10:30 a.m. at: The Longbranch Restaurant 90 Twixt Town Rd. NE Cedar Rapids, IA 52402

A national, non-profit corporation founded in 1980 to encourage mutual support among romance writers. Annual dues are US $110 for the first year, $85 for renewals.

An optional lunch buffet is available after the meeting. The cost is $12 per person and includes tax.

HIFA INFORMATION Board of Directors 2009: Roxanne Rustand, President [email protected] Jan Schliesman, Vice President 319-358-9219 Jennifer Arnold, Secretary 319-754-1711 Denise Lloyd-Lawrence, Treasurer 319-437-3451 Maggie Rivers, Webmistress Email: [email protected]

ADDITIONAL NOTES

Jennifer Arnold, Newsletter Editor Email: [email protected]

Website www.hifarwa.org Newsletter Submissions will be edited and published at the discretion of the newsletter committee. RWA chapters reprinting articles must give credit to Heart of Iowa and the author. NonRWA groups or individuals are required to secure permission from the author of any article they wish to reprint. All information contained in these pages is offered in good faith. HIFA makes no warranties, expressed or implied of any material offered herein.

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Joining HIFA You must be a member in good standing with National RWA to join the Heart of Iowa Fiction Authors Chapter. Annual dues are $30. We welcome visitors, members, and their guests.

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Dear Readers: In the words of Carrie Underwood at this year's ACM Awards, "I got nuthin'". I think my brain has been fried by jobs, kids, in-laws and my always-on-the-back-burner writing habit. I hope you are finding time in your daily lives to continue your writing quest, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, and word by tedious word. Oh, and while you're at it pray for spring, will ya? Until next month! Jennifer HIFA Newsletter Editor

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