Writing...Just because!

It gives me great pleasure today to interview another one of my new author friends who I met on D'vorah Lansky's Book Marketing Boot Camp Facebook page. What an amazing group of dynamic authors, many of whom are now on virtual book tours. Sophia Bar-Lev is the author of Pasta, Poppy Fields and Pearls and she and I are doing interview swaps today so make sure you pop by her blog and read my interview with her as well. So... Sophia, please tell us a little bit about your book and what it's about. Pasta Poppy Fields and Pearls is a 'Boomer Fiction' novel featuring four very different women from different parts of the world who have chosen Tuscany as their retirement haven, expecting a quiet and tranquil existence.  As their lively friendship develops, the best and the worst of each woman's past experiences and memories begin to emerge like the patterns of a kaleidoscope and just when you think you know what's next, a completely unexpected twist in ...

I’ve been trying to write the closing scene of my next novel for months. I’ve been talking about it in my writers’ group ad nausea, setting and breaking deadlines weekly and agonizing over it in my sleep. I’m a master procrastinator so I put it off by going back and doing the first edit and then the second edit for which I’m using AutoCrit for the first time. In my mind I was making progress!  It wasn’t until today, while I was answering questions for an author interview that will post this weekend on a fellow indie author’s blog, that it finally hit me. One of the questions she asked was which character in my book was the most difficult to write about. As I described the antagonist in my current WIP as a ‘true narcissist’, I realized that I hadn’t developed him fully enough. I was even starting to deeply dislike him and was not sympathetic to him one little bit. I then knew I had to go back and build in a little more of his back story to try to explain why he was so deepl...