A Triple Book Launch, Building Tension Through Questions, and Giveaway

Party Time! Three books launched at once? I think it's a great marketing ploy. Hm. I might consider something like this for myself. Anyway, it couldn't have happened to a nicer author, er pair of authors. 

Jo Noelle grew up in Colorado and Utah but also spent time in Idaho and California. She has two adult children and three small kids. She teaches teachers and students about reading and writing, grows freakishly large tomatoes, enjoys cooking especially for desserts, builds furniture, sews beautiful dresses, and likes to go hiking in the nearby mountains. Oh, and by the way, she’s two people—Canda Mortensen and Deanna Henderson, a mother/daughter writing team.

And the 3 books are:

Damnation: Cassie is going to heaven—if she can get amnesty from hell in the next twenty days. 

Newbie: The housing market is crashing, and Sophie’s life is crashing with it. 

Lexi’s Pathetic Fictional Love Life: Falling in love is easy in fiction--in high school, not so much.

I picked to focus on Damnation because I was lucky enough to critique several chapters and found it intriguing. I didn't get to read it yet but when I do, you'll find my Goodreads rating on the sidebar below.

The Spotlight for Damnation:

   Cassie is going to heaven—if she can get amnesty from hell in the next twenty days.  Her assignment is to change the eternal destination of a girl in Albuquerque to earn admittance into heaven.            No sweat.

   But when Cassie returns to earth during her three-week, mostly-mortal assignment, her old habits get in the way, (apparently habits don’t die when you do), the partners assigned to help her are anything but helpful, and it turns out the girl she is supposed to help is the only enemy she made on her first day of school.            Oh, I’m so going to hell.

   Things aren’t all bad—it helps to have a hot angel on your side. Mmm-Marc. Even though he’s all about heavenly business, Cassie would like to make it personal.            Assignment with benefits.

Jo Noelle has provided us with the following guest post and giveaway:

Building Tension Through Questions

We’re looking at some ways to build tension in our stories and decided to ask a lot of questions to get us started.

Questions!

Decide what the overall book question is going to be for your story. This is the overall premise you are writing to achieve. For Damnation it is:

v Will 17 yo Cassie Witlon earn amnesty from Hell in the next 20 days?

Then as you plan or revise each scene decide what questions you can plant for the readers to be motivated to learn the answer to. Here are some more we used:

v Will Cassie beat the deadline?

v Will Cassie escape?

v Will Cassie get distracted from her purpose?

These are a little cryptic but they become more detailed as we wrote the scenes. We need one question for each scene. Some authors describe this step as making sure your scenes have a "purpose" or a "goal." It's just a little easier for us to think in terms of answering a question.

Possible Sources of Conflict

v Incompatible values

v Grown up issues v. kid issues

v Competition

v Role definitions

v Different relationship needs

v Personality conflict (motives and styles for dealing with people)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Tension Levels for Two (or One)

Ever read a book where the main character is really two main characters? Something like a split personality. This creates interesting opportunities for tension throughout the story rather than smaller instances where one character vacillates between choices or comes into conflict with other characters. I’m listening to an audio book of Stephenie Meyer, the host. Here a ‘soul’ has taken over a ‘body’, so one character becomes two. I’m a quarter way through it and find the tension between the two interesting and a good study in employing different levels of tension within the same character.

A friend of mine recently posted about the tension between two characters and I’m going to use Canda Mortensen’s list.

• Tension created by conflicting character goals.
• Inward thoughts are opposite of the outward actions and words toward another character.
• The outcome is unknown because the characters are equally passionate about their position.
• The interactions changes one of their lives.
• Leave the scene with the definite feeling that it’s not over when it’s over.

In the host, the‘soul’ and the ‘body’ definitely possess conflicting goals, one’s inward thoughts are opposite of the other’s outward actions, they are equally passionate most of the time, and there is cause to wonder if one will change her life because of the other. The scene endings are also great. That covers the above ways of creating tension and we’re only talking about one/two characters. Anyway, I’m recognizing ways to add tension, to utilize in my own writing, and multiple levels at once have captured my attention. Good books help good writing.

Keep it tense with small spaces of rest or a breather between and you’ll keep readers turning those pages!