Every Professional Was First An Amateur

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Joe Moore

Welcome back to TKZ after our winder break. I hope all of you had a wonderful time off with your families and friends. So, now it’s time to get back to work.

When I graduated from college, I was making a living doing two jobs: a night gig playing in a rock band (that’s me on the right), and a day job working in a music store. On the marquee in front of the store, was the message: Every Professional Was First An Amateur. Since I was making decent dollars rocking out eight days a week, I considered myself and my band mates professionals. But that statement out on the store marquee stuck with me. Many decades later, when I took to writing fiction, that saying haunted me. Especially as I piled up an impressive stack of rejection letters. I used to brag that I had been rejected by some of the biggest names in the business. When I finally got an agent and had a novel published, I looked back at the trail of dead manuscripts left in my wake and realizes how true it was.

I believed that my first manuscript was so great, it was supposed to make me into the next Clive Cussler. As you can guess, things didn’t turn out as planned. The closest I ever got to Cussler’s success was having dinner with him while I served as ITW co-president.

I’ve had the opportunity to mentor new writers through the MWA mentoring program and held countless writing workshops. What I’ve noticed is that all beginning writers commit the same sins. And what I wind up telling them is that there’s good news and bad. The good news is, they’ve accomplished something that only a small percentage of the population ever will. Most just dream about it. Few really sit down and write a book.

Now for the bad news: Their first book is not publishable. The response usually goes like this.

What? Joe, are you crazy? Everyone says my book is great. My mom loves it. My neighbors and the girl that cuts my hair said it was a potential bestseller—as good as King and Patterson. I’ve even been told by my uncle who watches lots of movies that it would make a blockbuster feature film. JJ Abrams would snap it up in a heartbeat. So how can you say that about a book when you’ve only read a few pages?

The reason I can say it with confidence is that I’ve found first novels to all be the same—not in subject matter of course, but in common, predictable flaws. And if by some miraculous stroke of luck the literary gods smiled down and their first book is publishable as written, then I would suggest they run to the nearest convenience store and buy a lottery ticket. There’s a good chance they’re on a roll.

I’ve made a list of the most common flaws of first novels. Keep in mind that having one or even a couple of these present in your book will not render the manuscript DOA. But I guarantee you’ll find just about all of them in the typical first attempt at writing a novel. Here they are in no particular order of importance.

You often use adverbs at the end of dialog tags to “tell” the reader what emotion the character feels. Example: “I’m mad as hell,” he said angrily. “I love you,” she said adoringly.

You rarely utilize any of the 5 senses to draw the reader into the scene.

You resolve conflict with coincidence or luck.

Your manuscript is filled with back-stories that don’t relate to the plot or develop the characters.

You head-hop within a scene between multiple POVs.

You tell the story rather than show it.

You have a “unique” approach to the use of the English language, and the mechanics and structure of writing in English. Note: I mean this in a bad way.

Each page is filled with an abundance of adjectives that if deleted would not change anything other than make the writing cleaner.

You recently discovered the exclamation point and want your readers to share in your excitement.

You love ellipsis . . .

You have a pet word or phrase that you feel compelled to repeat often in hopes that it will become a favorite of your reader.

You beat your readers over the head with repeated facts just in case they didn’t get it the first dozen times.

You often rely on the lazy technique of imparting information to the reader by having a character tell another something they already know.

Your text is riddled with more clichés than you could shake a stick at.

You use profanity for no other reason than shock.

Your dialog sounds as natural as a first grade primer.

Your characters continually use the name of the person to whom they’re speaking.

You overuse flashbacks and/or start the story with one.

Act II sags like a piece of pulled taffy.

Your story wanders.

Your story starts in the wrong place.

You’re not sure how to create suspense, so you commit “author intrusion” even though you have no idea what the term means.

You confuse the reader.

Your facts are incorrect. Example: The assassin attached the silencer to the revolver so no one would hear the shots.

You slip from past tense to present in narration.

You describe every movement, every second, every detail and every breath of your characters actions for no apparent reason.

You don’t know when to end a scene.

Your plot is a rehash of The Perils of Pauline—your protagonist jumps from one terrible situation to the next equally terrible situation with no dynamics or variation in terribleness.

You either have no subplots or enough for 10 books.

All your characters sound the same when they speak.

Your characters have no flaws.

You rely on stereotypes. The men are all handsome with chiseled faces and athletic bodies. The women are beautiful fashion models. And the bad guys are ugly, disgusting monsters. Note: This is OK if your antagonist is actually an ugly, disgusting monster.

Your story is melodramatic.

Your target audience doesn’t exist.

You manuscript is infested with misspellings, the wrong use of words, grammatical errors, and missing or incorrect punctuation.

You believe that placing the word “very” or “really” in front of an adjective increases the descriptive value of the adjective.

And the one that I see most often: You find it impossible to tell someone what your book is about without rambling on for 10 minutes.

Everyone’s first book contains just about all of the above. Mine did, and I’ll bet yours did, too. But that’s OK. That’s part of the learning process on the road to becoming a published novelist. Every professional was first an amateur. Every bestselling author wrote a first novel that should never see the light of day. Chances are it was just as full of these flaws as yours and mine.

The secret to this whole novel-writing thing is to keep writing. Few first novels are accepted by an agent much less bought by a publisher. Published first novels are the exception to the rule. For everyone else, you’ve got to write that second book. And the third. And the fourth. That’s how you refine the craft. And with each manuscript, you learn to use less clichés, eliminate “very” from your vocabulary, delete needless “ly” words, make your characters more human, find your writer’s voice, and all the other thousands of parts to crafting a well-written story.

So, Zoners, did I miss any beginner failings?

Every Writer Needs ‘Happy Accidents’

Posted on January 5, 2016 by PJ Parrish

Inspiration at breakfast at the Floridian

The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable.–Mark Helprin

By PJ Parrish

So I’m watching the Heat play the Mavericks the other night and I got curious as to how this odd game of basketball came to be. I mean, c’mon…giant men in shorts pounding back and forth on parquet and tossing a ball in a string hoop? Who came up with this idea?

The Heat was losing so I used the time to Google “origins of basketball” and there it was: the subject of my first Kill Zone post of the new year.

Now I didn’t know this at the time. I didn’t really come to the topic of today’s post until two days later on Sunday morning over my scrambled egg breakfast. But I am getting ahead of myself. Back to basketball.

It was invented in 1891 by a phys-ed teacher named James Naismith. He nailed two peach baskets to the wall of a gym and his students started tossing a ball into the baskets. But there was a problem. Every time a guy shot the ball into the basket, somebody had to get up on a ladder and take it out. That wasted a lot of time and it ruined the flow of the game. But eventually, the bottoms of the peach baskets wore out and the balls started falling through. This gave rise to a global billion-dollar industry we know today as professional basketball.

Fast forward to Sunday and my breakfast at the Floridian restaurant here in Fort Lauderdale. There I am, eating my eggs and reading my New York Times and in the back of my brain I am sweating over the fact that I haven’t finished my post for the opening of the Kill Zone’s new year. Deadline looms. I have started three different posts and all are meh. Then I open to the Sunday Review section and there it is on the front page — an article about serendipity in creativity.

The article points out that many of our modern conveniences, greatest inventions and scientific breakthroughs came about by someone stumbling on something by accident. You remember George de Mestral. He was the Swiss engineer who while hunting in the Jura mountains in Switzerland in the 1940s, looked down at the cockle-burrs in his dog’s fur and wondered how they got stuck there. Voila! Velcro.

Then there is Spencer Silver. He was a scientist slaving away at 3M trying to find a reuseable super-glue. One time he slapped some “low tack” adhesive on a piece of yellow scrap paper that was laying around the lab. Nobody noticed until five years later, a friend used one of the little adhesive papers to mark a page in his hymn book. Presto! Post Its.

The article in the Times (click here to read) goes on to pose two questions: Do some folks have a special talent for serendipity? And can we train ourselves to “cultivate the art of finding what we are not seeing?”

Now, as a writer, I think these are good questions for us. I am a huge fan of serendipity. First it is a lovely word, isn’t it? Sounds like a calliope tune carried on the breeze.
The word goes all the way back to 1754 and was made up by a guy named Horace Walpole. He read a Persian fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip. He got excited by the idea that the princes were “always making discoveries of things which they were not in quest of.”

What does serendipity mean exactly?

Hard to say really. It was voted one of the ten English words hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company. If you look it up, you get stuff like “fortunate happenstance” or “pleasant surprise.” But I think, when you apply it to creative ventures like writing, it becomes much more of a slippery fish, right up there with “voice.”

But here’s the thing: I am a true believer in the power of serendipity. It has pulled me across many a desert in my writing travels, giving me hope and nourishment when I am convinced I have dried up and will never produce another story of value ever again. I know I would not be a writer without it. My partnership with my sister Kelly was serendipitous in that I had been dropped by my romance publisher and Kelly was secretly spinning her wheels writing a mystery about some guy named Louis Kincaid. My husband suggested I give her a call.

Every one of our books since has had its own “happy accident.”

Dead of Winter found its footing and its villain only after a conversation I had with a good friend about his experiences as a pilot in Vietnam.

Paint It Black came from a family dinner as I listened to my brother-in-law’s son, who was doing a psychiatry residency, talk about a strange case he had about a black man whose delusions made him think he was a white racist.

The next book, Thicker Than Water, was about nefarious lawyers. But early on, I was writing a chapter in which Louis is interviewing a lawn maintenance man and suddenly, in my brain, I heard the screech of a bus’s air brakes. A second later, I typed that a young boy had entered the shed, just home from school. I hadn’t planned him, hadn’t talked to Kelly about him, but I knew the kid had to stay in the picture. Two hundred pages later the boy asks Louis: “Can a kid get in trouble for something he knows?” Turns out he knew who the killer was even though we didn’t.

Songs are often sources of serendipity for me. Our fifth series book, Island of Bones, came from one of my favorites by the J. Giels Band, “Monkey Island.” Here are some of the lyrics:

No one could explain it
What went on that night
How every living thing
Just dropped out of sight.
We watched them take the bodies
And row them back to shore.
Nothing like that ever
Happened here before.

On the east side of the island
Not too far from the shore
There stood the old house
Of fifty years or more
All the doors and windows
Were locked inside and out
The fate of those trapped in there
Would never be found out.

Kelly and I were twiddling our pens at a Borders signing one day and I showed her the lyrics and asked her “What happened on that island, you think?” We drew blanks until a lady came up to get her book signed and we asked her what she did for a living. “I’m a sociologist who specializes in the pathology of large families forced to live together.” Twenty minutes later, we had the plot for our next book.

A Killing Rain found its heart when I got lost driving in the Everglades and ended up in a place called Starvation Prairie (Where we staged the climax). Likewise, our story about Palm Beach society swells The Little Death found new dimension when I took a short cut driving to Belle Glade and ended up in a place called Devils Garden where there was nothing but a creepy abandoned cattle pen. (Where we promptly hid a beheaded victim).

An Unquiet Grave was another accident. We were revisiting our old neighborhood in Westland Michigan and decided to drive by the nearby mental hospital, Eloise, because it always had loomed large in our childhood memories. It was shut down except for a small museum, but we decided to walk the grounds, got lost and ended up in a large grassy field. I felt something underfoot, looked down and saw this:

Turned out we had stumbled on the asylum’s potters field where countless patients had been buried with only numbers to mark their lives and death — and a good story.

The next book, The Killing Song, was a happier accident. It came when my husband Daniel got tipsy on kir royales in a Paris café and started singing the Rolling Stones song, “Too Much Blood.” A tourist trip down into the Paris catacombs the next day nailed it.

And our most recent Louis Kincaid book, Heart of Ice, sprang almost fully formed from our brains when Kelly and the nice ladies at the Island Book Store told us about this abandoned hunting lodge on Mackinac Island.

Which brings us up to date with the latest, She’s Not There. This book is a mosaic of serendipity starting with the Zombie song title, which I heard on my iPod while jogging. Then I was reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog and he always posted a Poem For Saturday. That day it was devoted to an anthology Poems of the American South, and two spiky lines from Carolyn Wright’s “Lake Return” jumped off the screen at me:

Why I come here: need for a bottom, something to refer to;
where all things visible and invisible commence to swarm.

After that, Amelia’s journey to find her memories and life — her footing on the sandy lake bottom of her past — started to unfold in my brain and as the saying goes, all I had to do was run after her, pen in hand.

So when it came to serendipity, am I just lucky? I don’t think so. Even back in 1754, Walpole thought serendipity had two important dimensions: accidents and sagacity.
Accidents, he said, were the conjuncture of ideas, objects, intuitions, knowledge fragments etc. that in the usual course of things would not encounter each other.

But sagacity was the motor, he added. It is where your depth of experience, expertise, and craftsmanship (my italics) enter into the game and allows the unexpected to bear fruit. So for serendipity to work, you need a lot random encounters (accidents) and your creative disciplines (sagacity) to bring it to life.

It’s like what Seneca says about luck: It is just the intersection of opportunity and preparation. Or as Sam Goldwyn put it: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

But to return to that New York Times article for a moment: Can we writers learn to harness the power of serendipity? I think so. In fact, I’d plead the case that you need to, if you want to be a good writer.

Yes, you can learn your craft, you can read the books, you can go to critique groups. You can network at conferences, talk to agents and editors, and self-promote on Facebook until your fingers bleed. But isn’t it all for nothing if what you write has no feeling of surprise or joy? For your readers…or for you?

Here’s my takeaway: Yes, you must be sagacious. (See above). But you also must be willing to divert from the usual path, extend your antenna so high it hurts, look for hidden treasure and strive to make connections between it all.

You have to be what one person in the Times article calls a “super-encounterer.” Someone who can spend an afternoon searching through dusty Victorian journals on cattle breeding and find a use for it. You have to be a gatherer of string, a magpie cadging colorful pebbles. And you have to be willing to throw the occasional monkey wrench into your normal creative flow.

When he was a young reporter, Gay Talese wrote something wonderful about his home town of New York:

New York is a city of things unnoticed. It is a city with cats sleeping under parked cars, two stone armadillos crawling up St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and thousands of ants creeping on top of the Empire State Building. The ants probably were carried there by winds or birds, but nobody is sure; nobody in New York knows any more about the ants than they do about the panhandler who takes taxis to the Bowery; or the dapper man who picks trash out of Sixth Avenue trash cans; or the medium in the West Seventies who claims, ‘I’m clairvoyant, clairaudient and clairsensuous.’”

Talese went on to gather all his string into a book titled New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey. In this new writing year, may your own journeys be so clairsensuous.

________________________________________________________

May I be allowed a postscript for some BLP? Our book SHE’S NOT THERE was on special Kindle discount this past month and though it has been out since Sept. 5, it took off and for one brief shining moment, we became the #64 bestselling paid book in all of Kindledom. Today, it’s still hovering around #100 and is #25 in mystery/thrillers and #5 in psychological suspense. It has also given a boost to our back list Louis Kincaid titles sales so our current Amazon Author Rank is #24 in thriller. There are lessons in this for TKZ readers and I will try to gather this into a future post. ALSO: Amazon will be running a discount of the tree-book version this month but I don’t have details yet. Stay tuned, and thanks for supporting the new book!

Happy 2016 from TKZ

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

Happy New Year and welcome back to The Kill Zone blog for 2016!

Each year many of start of with resolutions and many of us end the year having not quite managed to fulfill any or all of them. For me, I managed to achieve about a third of what I planned for 2015 so this year I’ve decided that, at least in terms of my writing, I’m going to focus on just a few key aspects (okay…make those tics) that drive me and my beta readers to distraction. Thus, my three main ‘writing’ new year’s resolutions are:

Not to have another character with a surname that ends in ‘s’. How many times have I told myself this – thousands upon thousands – and what did I just do with my latest WIP? I had a character whose last name was…Brooks…argh!
To start introducing nicer weather. My poor characters are constantly beset by fog, rain and damp. I know my family are English and that is pretty much typical weather but still, would it kill me to let a character enjoy some sunshine now and again??
To (finally) kick the critic off my shoulder and stop her from plaguing me with self doubt when I’ve not even finished the first draft. Time to finally relax, have some fun in 2016 and wait at least until the first draft is complete to let that editor/critic/angst- ridden voice into my head…

So what are your ‘writing resolutions’ for 2016? What are you going to focus on this year?

Happy Holidays!

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Joe Moore

It’s Winter break here at the Kill Zone. During our 2-week hiatus, we’ll be spending time with our families and friends, and celebrating all the traditions that make this time of year so wonderful. We sincerely thank you for visiting our blog and commenting on our rants and raves. We wish you a truly blessed Holiday Season and a prosperous 2016. From Clare, Larry, Kathryn, Kris, Joe M., Nancy, Jordan, Elaine, Joe H., Mark, and James to all our friends and visitors, Seasons Greeting from the Kill Zone. See you back here on Monday, January 4. Until then, check out our TKZ Resource Library for listings of posts on The Kill Zone, categorized by topics.

Note from Kathryn: This year, I thought it would be fun to post holiday photos of the TKZ bloggers and readers over the break. I’ve already collected some wonderful photos of some of my co-bloggers celebrating the holidays. We’d love to include your holiday photo, as well. You can send your holiday photo (you can choose a photo of you celebrating any holiday, from any year) to our blog’s email address, killzoneblog at gmail dot com. Include in the body of the email any info or a greeting to go in the caption. I’ll add the photos as they come in, as “rolling updates.” It’ll be our way of throwing a “virtual office party” to ring in the New Year! To kick things off, check out our own Joe Moore and his gorgeous wife in a shot from Christmas Past!

Here’s a photo of Carol and I celebrating our 3rd Christmas together (1973). This year will be our 45th. — Joe Moore

Clare in front of Taj Mahal looking suitably festive!

Kris Montee and family!

Kris: “Obviously, this is photoshopped.” (We were wondering!) ?

Mark Alpert “pretends to be surprised to see my latest book THE SIX at our local Barnes & Noble on Broadway and 82nd Street.”

Kathryn and husband Gene took a cold (but fun!) bus tour of NYC last Xmas

White Elephant Christmas Exchange, with Jordan Dane

Elaine Viets with her awesome sidekick, “Black Beauty”

The Christmas Santa Didn’t Bring It

Posted on December 20, 2015 by James Scott Bell

One Christmas I decided to give Santa a doozy.

After all, little Natalie Wood did that in Miracle on 34th Street. Remember? She asks Kris Kringle for a house. He thinks she means a doll’s house, but no. She wants a real one! With a swing in the back yard, too.

Hoo boy. (SPOILER ALERT): So at the end of the movie she’s riding with her mother and soon-to-be stepdad, when she screams “Stop!” She jumps out of the car and runs up to this house, unoccupied and for sale. With a swing in the back! The old man really was Santa Claus!

But of course, the two adults have their doubts … until they see Kris Kringle’s cane leaning against the fireplace.

So, my kid-self thought, Santa really can deliver the goods if you ask big!

The other part of this story is I’d just seen the movie Five Weeks in a Balloon, based on the Jules Verne adventure novel. It starred Red Buttons, Barbara Eden, and Fabian (before Fabio, there was Fabian, only Fabian could sing). I loved adventure movies as a kid, and this one had it all. Ballooning over mountains and cities and wild game in Africa. The balloon had a cool gondola, too, shaped like a ship with a unicorn figurehead.

How boss it would be if I had one of those! I could float over my school, Serrania Avenue Elementary, and land on the playground. All the kids would run up and want a ride. And Susan––the girl I was in love with but who thought me a doofus––would finally realize I was the boy for her. We’d fly off toward Disneyland. She’d give me a kiss as we sailed over the Matterhorn.

Filled with hope, I sat down and wrote a letter to Santa. I can see it still. Because I drew a picture of the balloon I wanted, unicorn gondola and all. I think I told him that we had a cement badminton court in the back yard that would be the perfect spot for it.

Thank you and Merry Christmas, Jimmy Bell.

I addressed it: Santa Claus, North Pole. I mailed it myself, in plenty of time to reach him before the holiday.

Back then, on Christmas Eve, my two older brothers and I would sleep in the same room on the far side of the house. In the morning we’d stay there in our PJs until Mom or Dad gave the go ahead, and then we’d charge into the living room. There’d be a fire in the fireplace, the tree would be all lit up, and under and around it, the presents!

But on that particular Christmas morning, I slid out of bed and went to our back window. Surely the hot-air balloon would be there, perhaps with a ribbon attached to the unicorn’s horn.

All I saw was the badminton court––barren, cold, with a hint of mockery to it.

Dejected, I sat on the edge of my bed, wondering if I’d been too naughty that year. Had I exceeded my spitball allowance? Pulled a pigtail? Surreptitiously removed a box of Good & Plenty from Lonny Ezer’s lunchbox?

Nay! Nothing that would deny me my dream gift!

Eventually we boys got the signal, and into the living room we ran. Like always, a fire was roaring, my dad was smiling, my mom sipped her coffee on the sofa.

And there, over by the front door, the coolest blue Schwinn cruiser a boy ever saw. And it was mine!

I don’t remember much more of that Christmas, but I do the aftermath. At some point I told my mom about the detailed drawing I’d sent to Santa Claus, and asked why he did not deliver. She averred that perhaps Santa did not think it safe for a kid my age to have his own hot-air balloon. What if I ran into electric wires, or the wind blew me out to sea?

That was a wrinkle I hadn’t thought of. It made sense. My mom had gotten Santa off the hook.

Well, I loved my bike. It lasted me a good long time, got me to school, to the drugstore (for candy and comic books), to my friends’ houses, and on cool bike trips around my home town. I even remember peddling past Susan’s house once, but alas she made no showing.

That was the last time I ever wrote to Santa. I was a little sad to accept the cold truth about the North Pole’s most famous citizen. But every Christmas since I’ve honored his memory. We had some good times together. Santa gave spice to my young life, and dared me to dream of floating through the sky relishing grand adventures.

I ended up with a Schwinn cruiser, upon which I had adventures of other sorts. And that was fine with me.

So go ahead and dream big, friend. Dream of hot-air balloons. And if perchance you don’t get one, remember to love the bike you have.

Either way, you’ll go places.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and may you go further in 2016!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Joe Hartlaub

A confession: I had a post all written and ready to go, zip, zap, rock ‘n’ roll, but something about it was bothering me. I checked this and checked that, looked here and there, got an idea about what was causing my hesitation, and verified the source. Lo and behold, one of my fellow TKZers had written an excellent post on the identical topic a couple of weeks ago. You will see mine eventually, though not for awhile. We like to provide variety here at The Kill Zone. Unfortunately, it’s somewhat late and I don’t have another topic to write about. So…

…let me thank you for stopping by on what is probably the busiest weekend of the year. If you are having trouble thinking of what to give that special someone, might I suggest that, rather than stressing out, they would probably rather have you — “nice you” — rather than 1) a present or 2) “stressed you.” Just a thought.

With that in mind…if you can take a moment, tell us: What is the best present you’ve ever given? What is the worst?

Thank you again for all of your visits, all of your comments, and all of your contributions this year. I get choked up thinking about it. But don’t tell anyone. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and we’ll see you, God willing, in a few weeks.

Confess and Tell Us Your Worst

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Jordan Dane

Surprised Laura Hale – by Jon ‘ShakataGaNai’ Davis

At the risk of earning a permanent place on Santa’s naughty list, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done (as a writer) to one of your characters?

A New Series & Book Giveaway

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Jordan Dane

Jordan Dane
@JordanDane

I am very happy to have my dear friend, Desiree Holt, on TKZ. With over 200 books under her belt, USA Today called her “the Nora Roberts of erotic romance.” She’s a multi-award winner, critically acclaimed author of all things romance and action/adventure, and she has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning National TV Show (an amazing feature that had me giggling) and in The Village Voice, The Daily Beast, USA Today, The (London) Daily Mail, The New Delhi Times and numerous other national and international publications. She is a very generous person and always inspires me to keep the faith and the fun in my writing. I love her dearly and am proud to be a contributing author to her new Amazon Kindle Worlds series. A great combination of romantic suspense and action/adventure. She’s giving me the freedom to put my Jordan Dane spin on her Omega Team world and I’m having a blast! Take it away, Desiree.

Thanks so much for the opportunity to guest blog with you today.

My first love, both in reading and movies/television has always been suspense/action adventure. So when I finally discovered the lure of romance, it was a natural for me to combine everything. In recent times I had drifted slightly away from that but now I am back to romantic suspense/action adventure with a vengeance

I’ve had the opportunity to interview at length two men who definitely could be part of The Omega Team. When I lived in Texas they were, at different times, my firearms instructors, one a former Delta Force and one a former Force Recon Marine. They willingly gave of their time so I could get every detail of my stories exactly right. Any mistakes I have made as I wrote other series are truly my own. Their knowledge—and my copious notes—stood me in good stead as I attacked this new project.
I was very excited when Amazon invited me to create a World specifically for their Kindle Worlds. I love the essence of these stories and the men and women who are the silent heroes.

As I dug into creating the series, based around a private security agency, I realized just how valuable people like this can be. There are places where the government cannot take a role, where men and women have to operate in the shadows to successfully accomplish their mission and no word of it can leak. Every agent is either former military or formerly in some branch of the police, from local departments to the FBI.

The first three stories, laying the basis for this world—The Omega Team—have already been released to give people a taste of what is to come. The Kindle World of The Omega Team will officially launch February 16 with a select group of authors, including my special friend Jordan Dane.

So what is The Omega Team?

In this age of danger and conflict, when security is a high priority, a new entity is born. Whatever your needs, they will protect you. They are The Omega Team.

Grey Holden was raised to believe in honor and duty and the dedication of men to fighting evil. Both his father and grandfather taught him the tradition of the Omega Male, men who carry a resourcefulness, cunning and strength to get a job done with their own skill. They take great pride in what they do without it manifesting as “ego.” They differ from the typical Alpha Male who MUST absolutely be perceived by his peers as the toughest, most popular, and smartest. An Omega Male cares little for this recognition…but knows that he is all those things and more. It’s what made him a good soldier and what makes him a good security and covert agent. Athena Madero fits perfectly into his world. They meet when separately they are trying to prove that a wealthy and high profile political figure is actually The Snake, a shadowy arms dealer whose weapons armed the insurgents that Grey was fighting in Afghanistan.

They form The Omega Team, an agency that takes on even the most dangerous cases. They draw as members of the team former military such as Delta Force, SEALs, Force Recon Marines, Coast Guard, Night Stalkers and others, law enforcement and private security who have the same code of conduct and dedication they do. They will also work with similar agencies on joint ventures. Headquartered in Tampa, Florida, they accept assignments all over the world, no matter how dangerous.

They work in the shadows, riding the raw edge of danger. Their passion for their work is as hot as their passion for the men and women they love. When all else fails, they are there for you—The Omega Team.

And a little taste to tempt you for the first three books:

Romance Author Desiree Holt

Raw Edge of Danger
Grey Holden was on a mission to find the source of illegal arms. The death of his best friend on a compromised mission left him filled with anger and dedicated to bringing down whoever was responsible. Athena Madero had her own mission, to take down a major politician who had been preying on young girls. She hated him enough to quit her job as a cop and go on her own hunt for evidence. When she and Grey crossed paths, chemistry sparked and suddenly, unexpectedly, shockingly, there was a lot more between them than searching for evidence and pinning down a traitor. In a split second, they were riding the raw edge of danger. Together.

Mission Control
Krista (Kris) Gauthier and Mason Rowell are like oil and water from the moment they meet. He never expected the team from Mission Control, the security agency made up of former military, to send a woman to lead the team he hired to fix his problem: find out who is helping smugglers cross his land from the border. Their antagonism is only heightened by the sexual attraction that keeps blazing out of control. Neither of them is happy about the fact they keep falling into bed together and Mason, who values his unattached existence, can’t wait for the team to be finished and Kris to be gone. But when the bad guys are identified and caught and Kris is wounded in the process, the thought of losing her nearly destroys him, and makes him take another look at their relationship.

Lethal Design
Someone is putting a kink in Shannon McRae’s very orderly life. The video games she designs aren’t about electronic battles or gory crimes. Her projects include team building exercises for executives. It’s bad enough she’s plagued by possessions moved out of place, flat tires, strangers following her at night. But most importantly, someone is messing with her current project, corrupting the file so she has to rework it over and over. When activities escalate, Athena Madero decides it’s a case for the top security and protection agency, The Omega Team, which she owns with her partner with Grey Holden. Owen Cormier has been isolated emotionally most of his adult life. Twelve years fighting wars haven’t made him warm and fuzzy. Then he discovers his new client is the one night stand he could never get out of his mind. When the case is over, will he just be able to walk away?

FOR DISCUSSION:

So what do you think of private security agencies? The subject has been debated every since they first appeared on the scene. Do you think they serve a useful purpose? If so, why?

GIVEAWAY: I hope you will leave a comment to enter. Winners will be picked randomly. First place winner will receive digital copies of all three books. Second place winner will receive an Omega Team coffee mug.

Desiree Holt Giveaway

Desiree Holt
www.desireeholt.com
desireeholt@desireeholt.com

Farewell

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Nancy J. Cohen

Nancy J. Cohen

Dear Friends,

I regret to announce that I am leaving the Kill Zone. I’ve been blogging on this site for five years, and it’s gotten harder to think of things to say and to cover new ground. I have learned much from my illustrious comrades, and I’m grateful for the time spent in this writing community. To readers and my fellow authors, your feedback and responses have been highly gratifying and much appreciated. I wish you all the best and a Happy New Year. It’s been a blast.

Please note that you can still follow my posts at Nancy’s Notes from Florida. I’ll hope to see some of you there when I’m not popping in at the KZ to leave a comment. Blessings to you all.

Nancy

Things To Do On Your Holiday Writing Break

Posted on December 14, 2015 by Larry Brooks

More than any avocation I can think of, writers are likely to view the holidays as a time to get more work done, especially if it means they get some time off from their day job.

In theory… could be. In reality, there are risks.

This plan can be hazardous to your health and your writing if:

You live with a significant-other who ends up doing all the requisite Holiday shopping, wrapping and entertaining work while you lock yourself into your writing closet “making things up,” which is a phrase you’ll likely hear before the season winds down;
You use the season as a sort of deadline, as in, “I want to finish my novel before New Years Day because, well, that’s when I said I’d do it,” because rushing to meet a self-imposed deadline is like taking off the parachute before the pilot solves the engine problem;
You waste the time completely in the name of getting away from it all for a while.

Many writers have discovered that this last one – getting away from it all for a while – can be some of the most creatively productive hours you will retrospectively realize you’ve spent as a writer. Here are a few things to consider.

Read a Bestseller

The dirty little secret among working writers is that we don’t read as much as we would like to, or that we should. Find that book you haven’t gotten to, or have in mind, and lose yourself in it. Go ahead, tell yourself this is your time… but the truth is you’ll be reading to learn how that writer did what they did.

Which is a good thing. A great thing. The more you understand about the craft of fiction, the more you realized you can’t “un-see it” when you read it out there.

Catch Up On Your Craft

It can be hard to dive into writing books and websites while you’re in the middle of a project. And yet, there is so much to learn, so much valuable and immediately applicable information that may contribute to the very project you are putting on hold until the Super Bowl.

This isn’t a long range strategy, more like a steroid shot at halftime to make you stronger when the clock starts ticking again.

Hey, you’re already here, reading The Kill Zone. Spend a few hours catching up on the archives. Read one or more of Jim Bell’s terrific new ebooks on craft. For that matter, read my new writing book on craft, too, which I promise you will take you to a higher level.

Even seasoned pros, upon going back to training camp, see immediate payoffs in their WIP, because no matter how hard you try, it’s never that far off your radar.

Test Fly Your Premise

Chances are most people in your life know you’re a writer. That doesn’t mean they’ll ask you about your work at the office or neighborhood party – there’s often about a 30-second window for your answer to “what are you working on here?” before their eyes glaze over –but if the opportunity presents itself, pull out your story pitch and let it fly. Then ask for feedback, assuring that you are seeking brutal honesty.

The look on their face is, by the way, just as informative as the words they say to you in that moment. They won’t be brutally honest, by the way, but you’ll see it in their eyes. Confusion never hides.

You may find that the plot twist you had planned in the middle – the one in which your hero is suddenly visited by the ghost of their high school creative writing teacher urging you to go plumbing school – isn’t as clearly logical or clever as you believed it to be.

Read From Page One

If you do have a WIP, stop writing it and begin reading it. Not necessarily editing it – this goes contrary to the common advice to not edit while you write, which isn’t something I buy into but won’t be the nay-sayer here until I get to write an entire post about it, which is forthcoming in 2016. Find a way to do this away from a keyboard (like, put it on your e-reader or even go old school and print it out), and read as if you are an agent or an editor or someone browsing through Barnes & Noble.

Do this from a story perspective, rather than that of a line-editor. The payoff may prove to be significant… because if there’s a reason you story may not work, chances are it’s already on the page. Use this time to find it.

Journal New Story Ideas

The world is your idea machine, if you look in the right places. Go to a bookstore and read as many hardcover dust jackets and paperback covers as you can.

Got Netflix? There’s an entire free channel available that is nothing but movie previews, where you can get Hollywood’s best story pitches in two minute bites. (Notice that every movie trailer shows you five essential things, see if you can find them in each preview you see: the premise and the concept that fuels it, the first plot point, the first half of the character arc, and some hints of the story points beyond the FPP that turn it all into an immersive experience.)

Have a notepad nearby. Not only will you want to capture those flashes of inspiration. Trust me, it won’t be ripping off anything you see; what will happen is your brain will take something you’ve just absorbed and send it hurdling toward another story opportunity that isn’t in front of you at that moment… that happened to me watching the preview of the new Netflix series Jessica Jones (killer, by the way), when out of the blue a new thriller landed on my head with an almost audible thud.

Embrace the Siren Call of Your WIP

Which, if you’ve done this right, is calling to you from behind the closed door of your writing space. Imagine yourself as Kirk Douglas, roped to the mast of that ship as the sirens wail Celine Dion ballads from the shore, driving you crazy with desire.

Don’t go to her. Your heart will go on. Missing your story is healthy. Being too close to it… that’s the point here.

Wishing you all a very happy, relaxing and productive holiday season. The best story of all is the one you are living, and like the stories on your hard drive, you have control over what happens next. Make it count this year.