Author Archives: Patricia Bradley

Beware the Wolves Out There

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Scams and scammers are as old as the Bible (and fairy tales). Check out Genesis 27, where Moses records Jacob’s scheme to scam his brother Esau out of his inheritance with the help of his mother. Nowadays, dream stealers use the internet to ply their trade. If you’re a writer, you’ve probably received at least one letter telling you how wonderful your book is and how the sender can get you more sales or a movie contract. Some are quite well-written, and at first glance, sound like a wonderful opportunity. I copied this one from an email I received:

Dear Patricia, (Times New Roman font while the rest of the message is in Verdana)

I hope this email finds you well. My name is Jonathan Fuhrman, and I am a Senior Production Executive at Castle Rock Entertainment reaching out to you on behalf of my team. We are currently on the lookout for captivating books that have the potential to be adapted into compelling content for Castle Rock Entertainment, either as a series or a full-length feature film.

We have an exciting opportunity for a potential collaboration. We believe that your book has the potential to translate beautifully onto the screen, and we’re keen to explore the idea of adapting it into a feature film.

I would love to invite you to sit down with me and some of our investors to discuss this opportunity further. It’s a chance for us to brainstorm ideas, share our vision for the project, and explore how we can work together to bring your story to life on the big screen.

Additionally, we are prepared to offer a contract that outlines the terms of our collaboration, ensuring that both parties are clear on expectations and benefits.

I understand that this is a big decision, and there may be questions or concerns you’d like to address before moving forward. Please know that I’m here to answer any queries you may have and to provide any additional information you require.

Please let me know a convenient time for you to meet, and I’ll make sure to coordinate with our team to arrange everything accordingly.

Looking forward to the possibility of working together and bringing your vision to audiences worldwide.

Warm regards,
Jonathan Fuhrman
EVP and Head of Business Affairs

E:Jonathan@castlerockentertainment.com
A: 335 N Maple Dr, Beverly Hills, California
Can you imagine how I felt? Jonathan Fuhrman! The Jonathan Fuhrman and Castle Rock Entertainment! If you’re like most writers, including me, you have dreams of seeing your book on TV or the big screen. But you know the old saying…if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

My first niggle of doubt started with the greeting. It was a different font than the rest. My second niggle—if Castle Rock Entertainment found me and my book on the ‘net, why didn’t they discover I had an agent? That’s who they should have contacted. So I googled Jonathan Fuhrman and Castle Rock Entertainment scams, and there it was along with the story of a woman who’d responded to the email and lost a bunch of money. The money wasn’t why she was so angry, though. She was angry because the scammer had preyed on her dreams and had gotten her hopes up, only for them to come crashing down. She was left feeling like a fool for not recognizing the email for the scam it was.

Always check, double-check, and even triple-check someone’s credentials before giving them your money.

Another email popped into my inbox with the following subject line and greeting: Re: Fatal Witness (Pearl River Book #2) — A K-9 Cold Case, Buried Identities, and a Relentless Search for Truth
Dear Bradley Caffee,
I hope you have been well. I wanted to gently reconnect regarding my previous message about a potential feature conversation centered on Sides. (Note: I don’t have a book by that title, and my name isn’t Bradley Caffee.) What continues to stand out to us is not only the high concept premise of Zero Hour and avatar transformation, but the psychological and ethical undercurrent running beneath it. The idea of players physically becoming their digital selves feels less like spectacle and more like a sharp metaphor for the identities we curate, inhabit, and sometimes lose control of in an increasingly immersive world. The national countdown atmosphere, the cultural frenzy, and the ripple effect of a single design decision all contribute to a narrative that feels both gripping and unsettlingly plausible…

Evidently, the AI program got its books mixed up.

The problem is, despite their mess-ups, AI is getting better and better at sounding authentic. One excellent site for checking for scammers is on Writer Beware. Here’s the link: https://writerbeware.blog/2024/03/15/the-impersonation-list/

Now it’s your turn, TKZ. Any tips or comments on avoiding scammers?

 

AI and Romance?

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I know AI has been hashed and rehashed to death, but it seems the subject just won’t go away. On February 8, the NYT published an interview with Coral Hart (not her real name but a retired pseudonym and the name she uses to teach AI-assisted writing). Before she became an AI enthusiast, Hart published 10 – 12 books a year using 5 different pen names.

Last year with AI’s help and 21 different pen names, she self-published more than 200 books, ranging from sweet to hot to sizzling hot. She didn’t used AI just to research, but created the plot, characters, setting–the whole ball of wax with AI. According to the article that you can read here, none were  blockbusters but collectively sold 50,000 copies earning her a nice piece of change.

The article doesn’t say how long the books are, and it didn’t reveal her pen names which prevented me from hopping over to Amazon to read some of the sample chapters. It did say that she never revealed the books had been AI-generated because she didn’t want a bias against them.

It’s a free country so I don’t care that she created all the books using AI, but I do care that she didn’t reveal that fact to her readers. It was cheating. But even more disturbing, at least to me, is the article and others similar to it seem to treat her like she’s some guru who should be followed.

Of course not all responded favorably. Many romance authors responded that romance is all about emotions so how can a machine that has no heart or feelings write about such things?

It can’t. AI has no soul. It doesn’t sweat blood to get just the right emotion of someone who is dying inside because it doesn’t know what that emotion is. Hart even agrees that she has to diligently work on her prompts to get close to what she wants. I wonder what kind of writing she might do if she put that much effort into writing the emotion herself?

What scares me about this article is that there is already a glut of books out there and AI makes it so easy to put more out. But I have faith in readers and unlike Hart and many others, I believe readers will be able to tell the difference between an AI generated story and one that a flesh and blood author creates from the heart–a least at the present time. I’m not sure about the future.

What say you, TKZers?

 

Slow Opening–A Death Knell Or Not?

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I don’t normally scroll on Facebook. I don’t have time, but during the “Icemageddon” in Mississippi last week with no electricity and my computer dead, I suddenly found myself on my phone, scrolling Facebook every hour (make that every 15 minutes). Trust me, I was not meant to be a pioneer. That said, I did learn a thing or two.

One, people do crazy things when roads ice over. I don’t know how many videos I saw of grown men flying down a hill on a garbage can lid. I guess that’s my home state’s idea of a sled. And then there was the guy who ignored the barricades in front of an underpass that was flooded…that’s the photo at the top of the page…

I  also landed on a post where readers were dissatisfied with a book that everyone raved about. Over and over there were comments like: “I’m having the hardest time getting through this book.” Or “I found it took me several chapters to get into and then it ended up being an all time favorite.” “Or If you can struggle through this one then the next two are so much better.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never stayed with a book I couldn’t get into even if people told me that I’d love it after XX amount of chapters if I stuck with it. I’m sorry, but If a story doesn’t interest me by the end of Chapter 1, I’ll put it down. And before I buy a new author, I always read the sample chapters. That way I know if I’ll like it.

Does that mean I won’t like a story that isn’t action-packed? Or that a writer can’t open with a slow start? No. An example is Raymond Carver’s short story “Put Yourself in My Shoes”. It doesn’t start with a bang, and every sentence doesn’t advance the story the way I usually like. It’s a story about a writer who has writer’s block. He gets a call from his wife and agrees to meet her at a bar. Here’s an early paragraph:

Myers put the vacuum cleaner away. He walked down the two flights and went to his car, which was in the last stall and covered with snow. He got in, worked the pedal a number of times, and tried the starter. It turned over. He kept the pedal down.

Shortly after that paragraph is another one:

As he drove, he looked at the people who hurried along the sidewalks with shopping bags. He glanced at the gray sky, filled with flakes, and at the tall buildings with snow in the crevices and on the window ledges. He tried to see everything, save it for later. He was between stories, and he felt despicable.

No big problem in the opening. The character was doing mundane, boring things. So, why did I keep reading? Because I’d been where the character was–not between stories, but no idea where I was going in the story I was working on. He captured how I focused on everything but the story. it also described how I felt when I didn’t want to deal with a problem I was facing, and I think readers identify with that.

I’d like to say I came up with the idea of this post, but it came from a post on Jane Friedman’s blog by Seth Harwood. You can read it here. Sometimes we do need to slow down our stories to invoke mood, or theme, or develop a character. But as Harwood noted, the character is doing something–he put away, he walked, he drove…

Okay TKZers, how about you? Would or have you read the rest of Carver’s short story “Put Yourself in My Shoes”?

 

 

Show Up: The Discipline of Writing

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When I first started writing way back in the dark ages, even before the internet was dial-up…What’s dial-up, you ask? For readers who aren’t familiar with the term, back in the late nineties when you connected to the internet, first you heard a dial tone, then a series of screeching, beeps, and static as the modem connected to the ISP that might go on forever while the user sat there waiting and waiting for everything to connect…

Oh, and this was before Word, so everything was DOS…and even before that, it was an electric typewriter, and before that, a manual one (that’s what I started on), and the only critique groups were—gasp—in person. Only in my corner of the world, there were no critique groups. I wrote and wrote and kept getting rejections because I made the same mistakes over and over because there was no one to tell me what I was doing wrong.

Writing was hard. It took a lot of discipline to show up and keep going.

Let me tell you a little secret. Writing is still hard, even with all the shortcuts and conveniences we have. Need to research gunrunning? Instead of getting in the car and driving to the library and looking through the card catalogue for books or articles on the subject, just put your research question in Giggle, I mean Google, and instantly there are hundreds of articles on gun running at your fingertips. Off you go on a rabbit trail. Not only that, there are a gazillion books on writing.

When I started, I had a handful of books from my local library, and probably the best thing I could’ve had—the Writers Digest Magazine featuring a monthly column by Lawrence Block. Each installment felt like a masterclass in creative writing. Here’s a link to one of his columns—columns he wrote every month for fourteen years–talk about discipline! Later came Nancy Kress and then our own James Scott Bell.

However, books and articles don’t teach discipline, and in MHO, discipline is the difference between wanting to write and actually writing. Here’s my definition of discipline: Showing up and doing the hard work when you don’t feel like it.

I’ve known writers who love to talk about writing and who love to have written, but when it comes to actually sitting behind a computer and actually putting something on paper, they are MIA. Unfortunately, no one can give you the discipline to write. Only you can do that, and if you don’t have a deadline, either from a publisher or a self-imposed one, it’s hard to make yourself sit at the computer and run (or plod) toward the finish line unless you have that drive to create a story and put what’s in your head on paper.

So TKZers, what advice do you have on developing discipline? And if I don’t show up to answer comments, then you’ll know the ice storm brought down the power lines in my area…

Winston Churchill and His 15 Favorite Paraprosdokians

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After I posted last month, which was my first post ever for The Kill Zone, I realized that many of you may not know much about me. But since I had already scheduled the post, and it was my last post of the year as well as my first, I made an executive decision to wait until my first post in January to properly introduce myself (Oh, and Happy 2026!). So here goes.

I’m Patricia Bradley, and I write Inspirational romantic suspense for Revell. Since 2013, I’ve written five novellas, 18 novels, and I’m currently working on the 19th. Since I’m not a fast writer, that means I’ve spent the last 12 years mostly sitting at my computer, living my dream. I also teach workshops on writing. In 2012, I met James Scott Bell in a line dance in St. Louis…or Cincinnati, I forget which. He was dancing…I was not. And I doubt he remembers it.

I have a website where you can learn more about me, and a Tuesday blog where I feature a Mystery Question, usually about dumb criminals. I feature four scenarios three of which are true and one that I made up. Readers guess which one I made up. You can find the blog at https://ptbradley.com/blog/.

Enough about me. Now on to my post about Winston Churchill’s favorite paraprosdokians. (We all know how accurate AI is, so they may or may not be his favorites.) Also, according to AI, Paraprosdokians are figures of speech where the latter part of a sentence provides an unexpected twist or surprise, forcing the listener/reader to reinterpret the first part, often for humorous or dramatic effect, like, “If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving definitely isn’t for you” or “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it“.

Winston Churchill was known for loving paraprosdokians. Here are a few AI says he loved:

  1. Where there’s a will, I want to be in it.
  2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but it’s still on my list.
  3. Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
  4. If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong.
  5. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
  6. They begin the evening news with “Good Evening”, then proceed to tell you why it isn’t.
  7. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.
  8. I thought I wanted a career. Turns out I just wanted paychecks.
  9. In filling out an application, where it says, ‘Emergency contact’, I put ‘doctor’.
  10. You do not need a parachute to skydive unless you want to do it again.
  11. Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure makes misery easier to live with.
  12. You’re never too old to learn something stupid.
  13. Where there’s a will, there are relatives.
  14. During WWII Sir Winston Churchill’s address to Congress began with:
    “It has often been said that Britain and America are two nations divided only by a common language”.

Do you have any favorite paraprosdokians to start this New Year with?

That Blinking Cursor

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It is a great honour to write my first post for The Killzone. I’m still pinching myself to make sure I’m not dreaming. So without further ado, my first post of 2025…and my last since we begin our hiatus next week.

About a month ago, I started a new book, and ran into the blinking cursor syndrome. Everything I’d ever learned about writing was gone. Pfff! Vanished. It was like I’d never written a novel before. But I had — eighteen times before, and yes, that blinking cursor syndrome happed Every.Single.Time.

With this book, I even had a one-page synopsis that I’d sent in with the proposal to my publisher. I knew the setting — the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee. I had a title — Deadly Connections, and I knew who the characters were. Actually, I only knew their names. I have to start writing and place my characters in difficult situations before I can really know who they are.

Finally, I got tired of looking at that cursor and pulled out my handy-dandy notebook and made a bullet point list of questions to answer.

  • What’s the setting? Why there? — I had that one.
  • What are my main characters’ goals? Why do they want them? What’s going to keep them from getting what they want? Needed to think about this one a little longer.
  • Who are my characters when they walk onto the page of the book?
    • What ghost from the past keeps them from living their lives to the fullest?
    • What’s the flaw that’s going to cause conflict in reaching their goal?
    • What are their competing values? What will they have to give up?

When I answer these questions, I’ll know my hero/heroine’s goals.

  • And last of all, what crime is to be solved now? Why not five years ago? Or six months ago? Or next year?

Why is this last question important? The crime needs a trigger (pun intended), something that rules out any other time frame, and until I nail that, I can’t move forward. In the book I mentioned, the heroine’s sister has been missing for fifteen years, and she’s just now digging into her disappearance. I needed a good reason for the why now question, so I brainstormed a list of reasons. Nothing was off the table. This can take anywhere from a couple of hours to several days.

When I finished, I chose two that I could work with. Then I started writing with James Scott Bell’s signposts in mind. I now have 25,000 words and have a good handle on my story and the main characters. Of course, they will continue to surprise me, but that’s the fun in writing.

Do you have questions that have to be answered before you can start your story? Let me know in the comments. It might help someone else…and me.

Wishing you a blessed holiday season. See you next year!