Why I Love Pinterest!

I'm not very good at social media. I usually have flurries of activity where I'm tweeting and posting things on my Facebook page everyday, then I drop off the grid. Sometimes it's because I'm knee deep in a writing project, sometimes it's because I'm busy with real life stuff but the rest of the time I'm not sure what happens. Do I forget? Do I have nothing interesting to say? Have I been abducted by aliens? Possibly. But when conventional methods fail there is always another shiny new social media outlet to tempt me and this week, it's Pinterest.

"But Claire," I hear you telling me. "Pinterest isn't new. It's been around for ages."

"I know," I say, hanging my head. "But I thought it was just a bunch of people posting recipes and wedding dresses."

So yes, that was the extend of my interest in Pinterest. It was non existent. After all, I have no need for recipes since I don't cook and I'm not exactly a dress kind of girl. But one day last week I read a blog post (sorry but I don't remember whose blog it was) about how great Pinterest was for authors and decided to check it out.

What I found was an endless parade of pictures, great pictures, awesome pictures. So I created a board for my book My Deliberate Mistake and I started pinning things. Photos of lakes, drowning girls, pills. It was so cool! I was able to pin gorgeously haunting pictures of the Olsen twins. Even though they don't really act any more because they are busy being brilliant business moguls, I still think they would be perfect to play Ana and Julia in the movie adaptation. It was like creating a story board for my book and I loved every minute of it. (I also wasted a couple of hours in which I should have been writing but never mind!)

I love Pinterest! I think it may turn out to be a great tool for writers block. I can pin things for my work in progress and get ideas for where the story is going. It also lets me show you what's going on in my head when I write the book. Things I visualize about the story. But the cool thing is that the things I visualize may not be the same things you do and that is what makes reading so great.

So I encourage you to make your own My Deliberate Mistake boards. Pin things that you thought of while you read the story. Maybe we'll even pin some of the same things. Two minds momentarily joined through reading and writing!

I have a new board for my soon to be released crime thriller but right now it's secret. Don't worry though, I'll be revealing it soon. I can't wait to share it with you!

Check out my Pinterest page here

Why Genre Hopping Is Bad (and I don't care!)

Writing has rules and we all know rules are stupid. Don't head hop, get rid of those pesky adverbs, always end a sentence with a period. Okay, those are all pretty good rules but you know what they say. Rules are meant to be broken. Except genre hopping. They say it's bad. The worst. Career suicide. I don't know who they are but I do know that they're pretty opinionated about it.

What is genre hopping you ask? Well let's say you want to buy a book. You go into your favorite bookstore, or at least you did before they all closed down, and you walk to the section where all your favorite books are. Now that might be science fiction or thrillers or romance. There they sit on the shelves all shiny and new with the authors names on the spines and flashy covers. The books you want to buy. But what if your favorite author of space opera just wrote a historical romance. Would you read it? Probably not. But how about an action adventure novel? An apocalypse novel with aliens? What if someone recommended it to you? I like to think you'd take a chance. I know I would.

As a reader, I like to read a lot of different genres. As a writer, I never even think about what genre I'm writing in until the book is almost finished. You see the story comes to me one piece at a time, like a jigsaw puzzle I'm putting together in my head. Now all my books are dark and twisted. You won't find me writing a straight romance or a comedy. That's just the way the words come out. But you may find my books straddling the lines between thrillers/suspense/horror and who knows what else. I hope you'll take the leap and follow me down the path of words I leave behind.

In a couple of weeks I'm hoping to release a book I wrote last year. This is a crime thriller with a plucky, damaged private investigator and a serial killer who wants her dead. It's not new adult. It is what it is. I have an awesomely scary cover for it which I'll be revealing in a few days. Honestly, it's really creepy. I think you're going to love it. And I'm also still working on my dark fantasy. I hope when that book is finished, you'll follow me there too!