Writing/Romance Posts

The Twelve Days of Anna: Day Ten: Arcing a Romance

I leave the action plots to Bob.  He likes blowing things up, shooting people, black helicopters, all that stuff.  I just make sure he never kills a kid, an animal, or anybody in the plot we like.  It’s a full time job.

The rest of the time, I am trying to arc the damn romance, which is not easy because Bob likes short-time plots.  Like Anna takes place in a little over a week.  Starts on Friday with the one-night stand and ends in gunfire a week later on a Saturday night, with a nice denouement on Sunday morning at breakfast.  Insta-love?  Nope.  More “This could be the start of something great.”  This is why I like series.  I have two more books to arc the romance over. (more…)

The Twelve Days of Anna: Day Five: The Meet

But first, a request was made for the Anna blurb, so here it is:

Anna Jones is having a bad day.

Her boyfriend dumps her in an e-mail, her boss orders her to go to an Atlantic City casino to deliver a suspicious package, and her best friend urges her to have sex with a billionaire while she’s down there.

Nate Sadler is having a worse day.

The intel on his no-knock warrant is bad, he gets transferred to the weirdest team in the FBI, and he’s sent to Atlantic City to work with the team leader who doesn’t know what she’s doing with orders to surveille a guy they don’t have identification for.

But then a fed-up redhead picks him up in the casino bar (he’s not a billionaire, but she’s not fussy), and the next morning they both leave Atlantic City feeling a lot better about life even though they’re never going to see each other again.  Until it turns out that the FBI really wants to know what was in that package Anna delivered since it was addressed to the guy they were surveilling. And everybody wants to know why the minion who delivered the package spent the night with the FBI agent sent to arrest her.

As Nate and Anna try to work out the tangle they’ve found themselves in, they’re dealing with gun-toting minions and matchmaking mamas, nefarious bosses and deranged workmates, an alien-looking rescue dog and a chatty nemesis, and the most dangerous people of all, each other.

Arresting Anna: Sometimes a bad day is the start of something good.

And now, lets get those two tired millennials together.

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Writing/Romance: The Conflict Box

The key to a great conflict is that neither the protagonist nor the antagonist can resign from the action. They must keep fighting each other to the bitter end because they need their goals and because they cannot escape each other’s actions. One way to analyze the strength of your story conflict is with a conflict box.