In that paranormal romance writing class I was taking, once I’d gotten myself through the travails of trying to figure out why my heroine wasn’t quite as externally interesting as my hero, the next step was plotting. I’m a character-driven creator; plotting a story before I’ve spent a little while hanging out in its characters’ [...]
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Tags: plot, Ravyn vs. Paranormal Romance, writing | 
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One of the most interesting revelations I had in my online paranormal romance class came from not from one unit and its assignment but from two, and the corresponding assignments. Describe hero—describe heroine. Shouldn’t be too hard, right? I’d even written up most of what I knew about Eira already.
The unit for the hero was [...]
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When my paranormal romance class assigned me the description of a supernatural creature, I had a bit of an advantage already; the combination of being in that class, and going home on the trolley one day having just finished Discount Armageddon, had already put me in the mood to come up with a supernatural protagonist [...]
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Tags: Eira, Ravyn vs. Paranormal Romance, supernatural creatures | 5 Comments »
The fourth unit of the paranormal romance course I took covered cliches, stereotypes, and how to avoid them. I’ll come back to the stereotypes later—one of the points of the lesson treated the common-knowledge traits of various well-known supernatural creatures as cliché—but what got my attention more was the assignment: get all the cliché out [...]
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Tags: cliches, Ravyn vs. Paranormal Romance, writing | 1 Comment »
My third assignment in the paranormal romance class (bet you thought I’d forgotten about it!) involved getting a big picture together—or more specifically, a plan for getting a book finished. This left me with a few issues, mostly based on the fact that I really didn’t want the first novel-length piece I finished since high [...]
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The second unit in the online paranormal romance class was on backstory. Nothing new; I think by now I’ve got a pretty decent handle on the importance of backstory driving a character. Just a little.
So it was sort of, “nod, nod, nod, are we there yet, nod…” and then I got to the assignment. [...]
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Last week, I continued my journey into the dark and dangerous alleys of paranormal romance with an early assignment on suspension of disbelief—or rather, half of an early assignment. The other half got my attention. Take something from my ‘ridiculous’ list. Write a two-paragraph summary of a PR plot centered around that idea.
Dang. She’s good.
The [...]
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The first thing we covered in the online class on paranormal romance I found myself taking was suspension of disbelief. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that it would need to be explained; I take suspension of disbelief pretty seriously, to the point where it occasionally prevents me from performing what would otherwise be [...]
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Tags: Ravyn vs. Paranormal Romance, suspension of disbelief, writing | 3 Comments »
This weekend, I signed up for an online class: Writing Paranormal Romance 101.
I can’t really tell you what prompted me to get into it. It started with a message from Headquarters, introducing a new program picked up for our library system. Free online classes, what’s not to like? Being the first adopter that I am, [...]
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Tags: Ravyn vs. Paranormal Romance, writing | 7 Comments »