New Adult Romantic Comedy

by Madelle Morgan

Can Rachel, a chambermaid at a luxury resort, raise the tuition for film school by September?

Or will she be stuck in a service job for life?

Rachel—like many New Adults, aka Millennials—is caught in a quarter-life crisis, a term I discovered in B.A. Binns’ September 2, 2017 post.

This is the stage of life when New Adults are trying to break into careers for which they studied and trained. However, their timing sucks. Their 21st century reality is contract work, unpaid internships, downsizing, and limited job opportunities. They’re frustrated at every turn.

Some start their own businesses. Some go on to grad school. Some settle in jobs they hate but need in order to pay off student loans.

As the parent of a millennial, I celebrated when my son with two degrees finally snagged a contract in his field that paid more than minimum wage. It’s tough in the real world, but there’s hope.

Rather than focus on New Adults' angst and frustration, I wrote a fun, light story about a twenty-something’s journey to a career that’s perfect for her. And it turns out that it’s not the career she originally wanted.

Caught on Camera Blurb

To achieve her dream of working as a camera operator 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 and pretend to be the bride's cousin, it’s her big chance to secretly take photos of celebrities and sell them to the entertainment media! Then Mickey, one of the groomsmen, sweeps her off her feet.

Mickey McNichol, talent agent to the stars, believes everyone in show business is out for what they can get. When he falls for the bride’s "cousin", he thinks he’s finally met a beautiful woman he can trust. But if Rachel betrays the wedding party, Mickey will ensure she never works in Hollywood.

Excerpt: Rachel is seated with the groomsmen and other bridesmaids at the wedding rehearsal dinner.

Mickey lay down his fork, having made his salad disappear in four bites. Rachel ruefully inspected her own small but artistically presented endive, pear, and Roquefort salad sprinkled with walnut crumbs.

In a normal day, she consumed carb-loaded meals to replace thousands of calories burned in a long, labor-intensive shift. That afternoon’s light spa lunch and a shrimp on a skewer left her faint with hunger. She swiftly polished off the delicious salad, then squinted greedily at Tiffany’s untouched plate.

“I admire a woman who enjoys food and doesn’t mind showing it,” Mickey murmured for her ears alone. “So many women at parties appear to survive on champagne and caviar.”

Asta snagged one of the fresh-baked multigrain rolls from a silver basket and slathered it with a ball of iced butter.

“Except Asta, of course,” Mickey continued. “And now you.” Cool fingers lightly tapped her bare thigh under the tablecloth.

At the delicious contact, Rachel’s brain emptied of all coherent thought. She blurted the truth. “We’re working women. I’d fade away to nothing if I ate like this every day.” She indicated her empty plate.

Mickey angled to face her. “What is it that you do, exactly?”

Oh my gods. She’d blithely set herself up for that question. She slunk low in her chair, quavered, “Do?”

“Yeah,” Wade said to the table at large. “What does Candy’s cousin do in Toronto?”

The men’s attention fastened on Rachel. Tiffany’s green-eyed glare spit daggers.

Asta leaned forward, chin cupped in one palm. “Candy never mentioned you before today. But then Candy has been notoriously closemouthed about her own sister. Tell us about yourself.”

Desperately stalling, Rachel licked a crumb of strong Roquefort blue cheese off her upper lip. That spring she’d completed a two-year community college Creative Photography program with top grades that garnered early acceptance into Toronto’s prestigious, private film school for the fall semester.

She’d supported herself while attending college with a part time minimum wage job as an evening room attendant in a three-star downtown hotel, and with summer jobs in the Muskoka resorts. Candy’d be furious if she revealed how she earned her living.

Nervy, Rachel twisted the cord holding her camera pendant and opted for the truth. “I’ve been accepted into Toronto Film School to study cinematography, starting in September. Wade, what do you do?”

Wade chuckled, apparently amused by her transparent attempt to deflect prying questions. Good natured, he played along.

“I’m an entertainment attorney. Producers hire me to secure rights to a book or screenplay, negotiate equity financing deals, and vet distribution licenses for film projects. I have the satisfaction of helping independent films I believe in get green-lighted. No money, no movie.”

“Do any Academy Awards decorate your mantle?”

He shook his head in exaggerated dismay. “Sadly, no. Producers get the screen credit.” He threw out his hands, palms up. “I merely bask in the reflected glory.”

Rachel decided she liked Wade’s wry humor. She shifted her attention to Garth, ready to inquire about his profession, but Asta broke in.

“Rachel, you didn’t answer Wade’s question. What do you do now?”

Rachel stiffened. Her lips parted and resealed a couple of times—a fish out of water. She had nothing.

Buy Caught on Camera on Amazon | iBooks | Kobo  

Subscribe to Madelle’s blog to be alerted to the release of Seduced by the Screenwriter, Hollywood in Muskoka series, Book 2, in December, 2017.

About Madelle

Madelle Morgan is a Canadian author who writes romance with heat, heart and humor. Her 2016 release, Caught on Camera, is a Hollywood wedding romance set in Muskoka, Canada—summer playground of the rich and famous.

Diamond Hunter, a romantic suspense, is currently in Kindle Unlimited.

Follow Madelle 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

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 .