Pat Bertram's Blog
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Dec.23.2010
Wishing you a warm and safe holiday weekend and a new year filled with possibilities.
Click on the gift to open. Have fun!
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Dec.15.2010
I have a thick spiral notebook stuffed with notes I took from books on writing. Needing a topic for this week’s discussion, I opened the notebook randomly and I found these four snippets from The Writer’s Handbook.
1. If violence erupts in fiction, it should be the outcome of tension, it should not...
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Dec.14.2010
My mother died almost exactly three years ago. To understand the humor rather than the pathos behind that sentence, I’ll have to tell you a bit about my mother. She spoke with perfect diction, in easy, unaccented English, and she loved words and word games, especially the kind of game where you...
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Dec.13.2010
Second Wind Publishing is running the best contest ever! The winner will receive a copy of every book published by them in 2011, which will include my latest, Light Bringer.
If you have not yet signed up for Second Wind Publishing's contest, you can go to my blog and leave a comment: http://...
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Dec.06.2010
I know you’ve seen the video, everyone has. It’s been emailed and remailed, Facebooked and Twittered, blogged and Gathered, clogging cyberspace with the message: Let It Be. At first I thought that perhaps this was the answer to my confusion over the death of my mate of thirty-four years. Just go on...
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Dec.01.2010
In Glimmer, a book about Bruce Mau’s design theory written by Warren Berger, Berger writes:
As we age, our focus of attention widens and we can actually take in more information. We also become better problem solvers — able to take the information soaked up from one situation and apply it to...
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Nov.06.2010
My grieving woman novel is taking shape. Amanda and her twenty-nine-year-old daughter Thalia are having problems that seem to antedate her husband’s death. I’m not sure why the daughter has such a problem with her mother, but perhaps we don’t need to know. It could just be more of the unfinished...
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Nov.05.2010
While walking in the desert today, I saw a dead rattlesnake. I hesitated to take a photo, not wanting to memorialize death, but it was so beautiful lying there, that I went ahead and snapped an image of it. Although it looked vibrant, as if it were sleeping, I could see that it had been run over....
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Nov.03.2010
I’m sticking to my NaNoWriMo schedule, though I’ve developed an aversion to my character. She sounds whiney and self-pitying, which is normal since she’s grieving, but I need to make her sympathetic, special, someone a reader would care about. She is not coming alive for me.
Often books start with...
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Oct.22.2010
After months in preparation, Rubicon Ranch, a collaborative novel that will be written online by authors of Second Wind Publishing, is just days away!
Recently widowed writer/photographer Melanie Gray finds the body of an eight-year-old child in the desert. Was it an accident? Or . . . murder! But...
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Oct.21.2010
In The Art of Creative Writing, Lagos Egri states:
Whatever a character does, it is for one basic purpose -- to strengthen his position in life and his security; all the chameleon-like changes for one reason only -- to remain alive, to be secure (overcome insecurities), to be happy, and most of all...
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Oct.15.2010
I have never seen the point of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I always figured that those who wanted to write wrote and those who didn’t write didn’t really want to. I used to be in the first category, and gradually slipped into the second. After the past couple of years of editing,...
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Sep.21.2010
Heraclitus believed that a person’s character is their fate. Character -- the sum total of a person’s traits -- influences the choices a person makes, and the consequences of those choices ultimately become that person’s destiny. Or not. Much of life is luck, happenstance, and totally out of our...
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Sep.02.2010
Death came in the spring.
In March, the doctors said that my life mate -- my soul mate -- had inoperable kidney cancer and that he had six months to live. He had only three weeks. We’d spend thirty-four years together, and suddenly I was alone, unprepared, and totally devastated. I couldn’t even...
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Sep.01.2010
I went through my notes about writing to find a topic for this blog, and I came across a reminder to always remember the five Cs:
Character (characters are paramount, they personify the story)Conflict (without conflict, there is no story)Change (characters change, circumstances change, the plot...
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About Pat
When the traditional publishers stopped publishing Pat Bertram’s favorite type of book — character and story driven novels that can’t easily be slotted into a genre — she decided to write her own. Daughter Am I is Bertram’s third novel. She is also the author...
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