Canadian Romance Authors

by Madelle Morgan

Canada has some wonderful romance authors. No wonder. We do a lot of research on those long, cold winter nights... 

You can sample awesome authors Kayla Perrin, C.J. Carmichael and Brenda Gayle in this new anthology published by Lachesis Publishing, a Canadian small press. Love & Hope offers three stories of hope, healing and the power of love. All proceeds support Ovarian Cancer Canada.

Kayla Perrin is a USA Today bestselling author from the Toronto, Ontario area who writes very hot romance. Kayla is a trailblazer in African-American fiction. In 2001 she was awarded the Romantic Times Career Achievement Award for excellence in multicultural romance.

C.J. Carmichael, a USA Today bestselling author, lives in western Canada. She started out as a Harlequin Superromance author, and wrote 35 Harlequin romances. She also writes mystery series and western romance.

Brenda Gayle and I belonged to the same Ottawa RWA chapter for years. You could say we developed the craft of writing contemporary romance along side each other. She was published by Wild Rose Press before being picked up by AmazonEncore. 

Maureen Fisher is another Ottawa writer. We share a friendship and a love of writing romantic suspense and humorous, hot contemporary romance.

Free Book Giveaway on Amazon June 23-26

Mark your calendars for June 23-26, 2017 to download Diamond Hunter, my romantic suspense about diamond smuggling set in Canada's far north in July—24 hour daylight. Diamonds weren't geologist Petra Paris' best friend!

About Madelle

Madelle Morgan is a Canadian author who writes romance with heat, heart and humor. Her new release, Caught on Camera, is a Hollywood wedding romance set in Muskoka, Canada—summer playground of the rich and famous.

Subscribe to her blog at MadelleMorgan.com and follow her on  Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Pinterest, and Wattpad. 

Editing Your Book, Part 3 Copy Editing

by Madelle Morgan

Copy editing. Copyediting. Copy-editing. 

Which is correct? Answers will differ, depending on the editing style guide used. 

Copy editors go though manuscripts word by word, and their job is not simply to correct spelling and grammar.

After the developmental edit (See Part 1) and the polish (see Part 2), I contract out copy editing to a professional. The first question to ask when requesting a quote is which style guide she or he prefers.

Choose the Style Guide for Your Book

Editors may select from several editing style guides for the English language. The goal of a style guide is to ensure consistency within a manuscript, or across all books published by a particular publisher. A style guide addresses: spelling; grammar; dates; times; italics; capitalization; titles; punctuation including hyphens (three types); formatting (such as this list); numbers (spell it out or use numerals); and much more.

In the United States (abbreviated U.S. or US depending on the style guide), The Chicago Manual of Style is one of the most widely used. Some publishers may adapt a style guide to use for in-house editing of their publications.

The British have several style guide choices. Canadians tend to choose between The Canadian Style: A Guide to Writing and Editing, or an American style guide, depending on the nationality of the majority of the readership. One important consideration for Canadian authors is that American readers are accustomed to American spelling. Canadian/British spelling may appear to be typos. Examples of Canadian spelling include modelling, honour, and centre instead of the American modeling, honor, and center. 

Then there are the dozens of words with multiple spellings; e.g., fore, for, and four, or your, you're and yore. Spell check software doesn't know which you intended to use. Copy editors are trained to watch for these spelling variations.

A style guide will provide guidance on how to handle foreign words. Should ingénue have an accent? Should it be italicized? Not according my copy editor for Caught on Camera. The style guide she used considers the word ingenue to be one of the many foreign words absorbed into the English language.

To illustrate how complex and seemingly arbitrary these arcane rules can be, a style guide dictated how to address the song and film titles in Caught on Camera's playlist. Here's how the first track was edited:

"Train on a Track," performed by Kelly Rowland, from the film Maid in Manhattan.

The rationale, to paraphrase my copy editor who used The Chicago Manual of Style, is that shorter works, such as song titles, are set in quotation marks. Longer works, such as an album name or book title, are set in italics. Who knew there was a difference? Not me, before the copy edit.

Style guides don't cover everything. A copy editor will present the author with a manuscript marked up with an overwhelming number of proposed changes/edits, including his or her own preferences. It's up to the author to accept or reject each change.

I overroad style rules for some compound words that, to my eye, are more readable when hyphenated; e.g., I retained post-traumatic rather than change to posttraumatic, but agreed with the change to makeup rather than make-up.

Sentence Structure & Errors

Copy editors will normally identify and suggest changes for problematic sentences and dialogue, lack of clarity, paragraph breaks, inconsistencies (e.g., the hero's eye color changes), and structural weaknesses that were not caught in your revisions or by beta readers. Be sure to ask a prospective copy editor what s/he includes in the price quoted.

Do You Need a Copy Editor?

You may believe that your grammar and punctuation is excellent—oops, that should be are excellent—did you catch that? You may figure your readers care about the story, and will not notice the trivial errors a copy editor painstakingly corrects. However, the bottom line is this:

Do you want the quality of your published work—your legacy—to be comparable to that of traditionally-published books?

Professional editing raises the apparent quality of the career-focused indie author's work, as does a professionally-designed cover. Caught on Camera is my September release. As I promote it on various websites, I've been asked by a couple of site owners if the novel was professionally-edited. When I entered it in the Romance Writers of America RITA contest, short contemporary romance category, I was required to supply the editor's name. I'm careful to include my editors' names in my books' acknowledgements.

It appears that professional editing is becoming a quality benchmark for indie-published books, as in:

Good cover? Check.
Four and five star reviews? Check.
High sales rank in an Amazon category? Check.
Professional editing? Check.

Finally, copy editing won't transform a poorly-written story into a great one. However, a copy edit guarantees that oh-so-important reviews will be focused on the story, not jarring typos and grammar mistakes which take a reader out of the story.

Caught on Camera Blog Tour November 21-December 2

On this two-week blog tour there'll be interviews, reviews, guest posts with the inside scoop on the book, playlist and the rest of the series, and Rafflecopter ebook giveaways at each stop. US, Canada and UK residents may enter for a chance to win the grand prize—a Muskoka T-shirt, a movie clapboard, and a print copy of Caught on Camera. 

Subscribe to MadelleMorgan.com or like my Facebook author page where you can join the event to be reminded of each stop on the tour and the daily giveaways. 

Caught on Camera is 99 cents / 99P for the promo period!

Author Bio

Madelle Morgan is the author of Caught on Camera, a New Adult romantic comedy, and Diamond Hunter, a romantic suspense about diamond smuggling inspired by her years as a young engineer in Canada's far north. Retired from a career in the public service, she lives with her husband in Ottawa, Canada's capital, visits beautiful Muskoka every summer, and watches too much TV.

Madelle tweets and posts about Hollywood, filmmaking, the settings for her stories, and of course, writing.

Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Pinterest | Wattpad | MadelleMorgan.com

Book Launch: Caught on Camera Has a Playlist!

by Madelle Morgan

Two years in the making, Caught on Camera, my New Adult romantic comedy, is finally published!

In an awesome coincidence, Cosmopolitan.com is featuring an "excerpt from an exceptional Wattpad fiction story. This week, "Caught on Camera, a very hot story by Madelle Morgan."

Caught on Camera is a fun, light, sexy read with a Cinderella trope and several special features.

Playlist

In my (ahem) several decades of life I've listened to a lot of music. In creating the playlist, I had fun selecting a variety of songs to complement the storyline—everything from The Work Song, from the Disney film Cinderella, to Michael Bublé's infectious song Hollywood. I posted the playlist on my website for people who read on ereaders.

Character Names

In the RTG post Here Comes the Bridezilla, two Romancing the Genres authors suggested songs for the wedding reception and named two characters.

B.A. Binns chose "Juanita Ramirez" for the Reception desk agent. I used her song suggestion, John Legend's hit song "All of Me", for the wedding reception scene.

Sarah Raplee selected "Derek" for Rachel's server friend. He'll star in a future Hollywood in Muskoka story.

Mopette

The character of the bride's pet Maltese, Mopette, was inspired by my sister Lorraine's dog Rudy. Here he is at a cottage in Muskoka on Penninsula Lake.

$0.99 Promo Price

Caught on Camera will be on sale for $0.99 or the equivalent world-wide for an extended launch period this fall. The regular ebook price will be $4.99 USD. As I write this post, it's available on Amazon and Kobo, and will be on iBooks soon. A print version will be available in October, 2016.

Buy Links and Description:  MadelleMorgan.com

Reviews

Caught on Camera needs several dozen reviews to generate marketing momentum! If you can spare a minute or two to post a short review and give it a multiple star rating on Amazon or Kobo, I'd really appreciate it!

Subscribe to MadelleMorgan.com and receive a free copy of the sexy short story, The Next Big Thing.  

Madelle tweets and posts about Hollywood, filmmaking, the settings for her stories, and of course, writing.

Follow Madelle on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Pinterest, and Wattpad. 

Hollywood Falls in Love Off Set

by Madelle Morgan

Do you love movies, particularly romantic comedies? They're such a rich story-telling medium. But off the film sets, the people making those movies have their own lives and love stories.

Gossip magazines and entertainment news shows highlight the Hollywood celebrity culture, the glamour, the awards. Supporting the high profile people we hear about in the entertainment media are hardworking craftspersons who pour creativity and passion into creating on-screen magic. 

The public sees the glitter, not the grit.

In my upcoming series Hollywood in Muskoka, the hero and/or heroine has a career in the film industry. I've been spending way too much time researching their jobs - director, screenwriter, producer, agent, cinematographer, actor, etc.

But I've come to realize that, while the screenwriter establishes the foundation story, the director holds the vision for its realization on screen, and actors' performances make or break a film, a quality film crew is essential to the creation of a product people will love and watch over and over and over again. 

What Do You Want to Do On Set describes a few of these behind-the-scenes roles. Which job would you choose for a career?

See the original of the decision flow chart below at Filmsourcing. 

Image Credit: Filmsourcing

In the first book in my series, Caught on Camera, the plot revolves around a wedding in Muskoka, Canada's premiere vacation destination. The wedding party includes a film lawyer, a producer, a stunt double, an ingénue actress, an agent and an aspiring cinematographer. The groom is the star of a blockbuster superhero franchise who decided to hold his wedding in Muskoka to escape the paparazzi. 

I planned that each groomsman and bridesmaid will have his or her own story in subsequent books. Then a security guard, a personal assistant, and a makeup artist emerged from the background, waved at me, and insisted on finding love too!

Filmmaking Starts with a Screenplay

In addition to learning about filmmaking in general, I've intensively studied the elements of a good script. Authors, have you dreamed of seeing your story up on the big screen? By understanding the elements required in a visual and auditory storytelling medium, you'll ensure they're in your novel. Hint: every word of dialogue, every action, every expression on a character's face has to count. Your words must convey information on several levels.

Learn about the process of writing a script in FutureLearn's FREE online course. The Introduction to Screenwriting course starts February 29, 2016. I've taken several of these UK-based courses and enjoyed every one. The time commitment is as little as an hour a week for three to six weeks, depending on the content.

Writing a Romantic Comedy

Need an idea for a RomCom screenplay? Or a laugh? Filmsource used well-known movie plots to create a Romantic Comedy Generator for Valentine's Day. It's hilarious!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Madelle

Bio: 

Madelle's debut romantic suspense, DiamondHunter, was turned into an action/adventure screenplay by screenwriter Marie Lilly. The novel is available in ebook format on Amazon and Kobo for $0.99 USD and £0.99 GBP.

Madelle tweets and posts about Hollywood, film-making, the settings for her stories, and, of course, writing. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter, or subscribe to her blog at MadelleMorgan.com .

Romance Novel Tropes

by Madelle Morgan

In my teens I devoured Harlequin category romances, so I knew exactly what I wanted to write about for this month's topic: Favorite Romantic Clichés. 

In the Muskoka series of contemporary romance novellas I'm writing, I will incorporate several of the familiar tropes listed below. 

Although, honestly, none of my books will have titles like The Bad Boy Billionaire's Secret Bride so as not to be confused with category romance!


Types of Hero

Protector (Military, Cop, Secret Agent, Firefighter, Bodyguard, etc.)
Sheikh
Billionaire/Tycoon/Developer
Royalty (King, Prince, Earl, Lord, Count, etc.)
Medical doctor/Surgeon
Cowboy
Boy Next Door
Bad Boy

Who Are You Again?

Amnesia
Mistaken Identity
One Night Stand
Reunited Lovers

With Friends Like These...

Friends to Lovers
Enemies to Lovers

Marriage

Marriage of Convenience
Bride

Babies
Baby on Doorstep
Secret Baby
Accidental Pregnancy

Literary Tales of Love
Beauty and the Beast (damaged Hero)

Cinderella (Heroine is transformed)

Upstairs/Downstairs (Heroine falls for Hero in higher social class or vice-versa; e.g. Wuthering Heights)


Have I left out any of your favorite tropes?

Which are your favorites?

www.madellemorgan.com

Introducing Encore Month Part Two

Hard to believe but true! Tomorrow, May 1st marks the beginning on Encore Month - our 3rd Blog-O-Versay Month. 

As a treat to our readers today we are encoring the most popular post in 2014. Enjoy again Sarah Raplee's The Ghost Cat. At the end of Sarah's post you'll find links to the next two most read blogs.

Thank you for your support! Judith, Sarah and the Genre-istas  

The Ghost Cat by Sarah Raplee

The Ghost Cat visited our house again last night.

We've lived with this possible pussycat for five years. Doors on cupboards full of nice soft towels and blankets--exactly the sorts of places a kitty might choose to curl up in--seem to open when we're not looking, even when our alive-and-kicking cat, Freckles, is shut in 'his' room in the basement. When we're in bed for the night, sometimes what seems to be Freckles jumps on the bed and lies down--but when one of us reaches to pet him, poof--he's not there.

That's just freaky.

Would Ghost Hunters Jason and Steve from TAPS
( http://the-atlantic-paranormal-society.com/ ) suggest that vibrations we don't notice affect the cupboard doors? Maybe we dream the cat-on-the-bed incidents--but why would two people dream the same dream, sometimes at the same time?

Tonight, we had a new experience. Freckles jumped onto the couch beside me, eyes dilated, tail swishing, and spent ten minutes playing with something that wasn't there. He acted exactly as though he were playing with another cat. He's never, ever done that since he moved in with us seven years ago.

At least whatever-it-is, is friendly.

And playful.

That's good, right?

Check out Sarah's website at www.SarahRaplee.com and her author page at www.WindtreePress.com

Second is Genre-ista Madelle Morgan who shared memories of her favorite family vacations at Muskoka: Canada's Premier Summer Playground

April Guest, Contemporary Romance Author Pamela Aares and Genre-ista 
Diana McCollum co-author of Love & Magick tied for third.

We've some spectacular guests lined up for your reading pleasure in May starting this Saturday with former Genre-ista and best selling author, Opal Carew! Also up on Saturday's in May: Bob Mayer, Laura Baumbach, Cherry Adair and Cathryn Cade! 

Muskoka: Canada’s Premiere Summer Playground

by Madelle Morgan

"We're going to the cottage." Magic words in my childhood.

I was very fortunate to have grandparents who owned a waterfront summer home in one of the most scenic, ruggedly beautiful lake districts in the world - Muskoka, Ontario Canada, where generations of families have vacationed for over a hundred years.

Two hour drive north of Toronto, Canada

The National Geographic Traveler magazine chose Muskoka as one of Best of The World - Must-see places for 2012. To my knowledge, no other romance author has set her books in Muskoka. To much of the world it's a hidden gem. Therefore I decided to locate my new series of contemporary romance novellas in the cottage country I love so much. 

As a child and teen, I enjoyed nineteen summers at my grandparents’ sprawling cottage near Honey Harbour on Georgian Bay. My three sisters and friends spent lazy sunny days water skiing, reading, swimming and sunning... until we were old enough to obtain summer jobs, that is. Then the fun took on a whole new dimension!

Summer jobs in a vacation destination are THE BEST. Let’s just say the fun involved boys! And late night parties! And trysts in boathouses... but you can read about that in my upcoming novellas.

Sadly the cottage had to be sold after my grandfather’s death. Muskoka prices skyrocketed well out of the affordable-to-ordinary-people range, and no one in the family could buy it. My relations have since spread across Ontario, but Muskoka is still where we gather. My sisters and I jointly rent a large cottage for a family week in July or August.

Cottages in Muskoka range from bare bones (no electricity or running water on a rocky island)... 

.... to palatial four season homes owned by the fabulously wealthy, including many Hollywood celebrities who value their privacy far from the paparazzi. 

Below is a boathouse with guest quarters above. The main cottage is hidden in the trees!

Muskoka Boathouse - HouseandHome.com

The first in my Muskoka series, Caught on Camera, is a romantic comedy with a Cinderella trope.

To fulfill her dream of working on Hollywood film sets, star struck chambermaid Rachel Lehmann needs $35,000 for film school tuition by the end of the summer. When she’s asked to fill in for a missing bridesmaid at a movie star’s wedding, it’s her big chance to take candid photos of celebrities and sell them to the gossip magazines. Then groomsman Mickey McNichol, agent to the stars, sweeps her off her feet.

Mickey’s bitter experience is that everyone in show business fakes emotions. When he falls for the stand-in bridesmaid, he thinks he’s finally met a beautiful woman he can trust. But if Rachel betrays his friends’ privacy, Mickey will ensure she never works in Hollywood.

My first summer job was – you guessed it – as a chambermaid at the Delawana Inn in Honey Harbour.

Not that I can afford to stay here myself, but the exclusive Windermere House in Muskoka is the inspiration for the fictional Sterling Inn and Spa where the wedding takes place.

WindermereHouse.com

Over the years the extended family has loved many dogs, and their personalities will live on in my Muskoka books!

Rudy at Peninsula Lake, Muskoka

View more Muskoka pics on my Pinterest Board.

I'm hard at work writing the Muskoka series, and aim to release the first two — Caught on Camera & Sex and the Screenwriter — in fall 2014. 

Stay tuned!

Madelle

www.madellemorgan.com