YAY!
The Cimarron Legacy Series begins with a FREE prequel novella which costs no money and is also very affordable at the reasonable price of $ZERO. The Boden Birthright.
It's been up on Seekerville a whole lotta times, practically every Weekend Edition for about three months so any one who wants a copy no doubt has one by now.
It's FREE after all. No reason to suppress the slightest urge to 'buy' it.
I guess what I'm thinking about as I write is whether it's a good idea. Not to have it be free (did I mention that?) but I am not sure I picked the right 'prequel' moment to start the book.
 |
| Free on Kindle Free on Nook |
That's the 'surprise' brother from the Kincaid Brides series.
I've been looking for a home for Heath's story for a long time.
Does anyone know much about the prequel novella world? Do you read them? Should I have made the story more of a cliffhanger? After all it came out only about six weeks before the first book so it's not like you'd have that long to wait.
Instead I backed mine up about 20 years, I wrote the parents' love story, and a lingering problem from those days appears in the book.
The Boden Birthright story pretty much stands alone. Except my plan was to I introduce some fun characters you'd want to know more about.
I guess what I'd like to talk about today is the difference between Character Driven and Plot Driven books. It's an interest of mine because of this business I've involved myself in, in going back to old characters, children in earlier books, having them grow up and have love stories. Most of my Seeker novellas are like that. And now this prequel novella is sort of like that, because I wrote all of book #1 and part of book #2, Long Time Gone, before I wrote the prequel.
Is that fun or am I just being a self-indulgent twit?
Or maybe I should MOVE ON!
To me this is fun, visiting old characters, seeing what's up with them. But it's a different kind of writing.
I think of myself as a story teller.
That's first and foremost.
I think of a story I want to tell and launch into it and the characters sort of form out of the primordial ooze of the world that's being created.
 |
| Buy at Amazon Buy at Barnes & Noble |
But you can't do that if you're using already created characters. The characters are there first. They already have a personality (well, some don't if they were little babies--in two instances unborn).
I guess what I wonder is, does this change an author to go character first?
You know the old plot driven/character driven question. Which are you?
I've been asked that question and my answer is something like, "That's a stupid question."
(Okay, I'm a little more tactful than that).
But I think it's one of those questions authors get asked that honestly don't have a real answer. Because plot is...yes, the story you're trying to tell, but the characters in that story influence the plot with their behavior to an extent that the characters are driving it.
But it was still a plot first.
But all you've got to do is look at Bailey Wilde to see how different that story would be if say...Kylie Wilde was the hero. Different people, their world is all different because they are different.
Anyway, it's one of those questions that people ask that are just hard to exactly put into words, which is why I say you can't have one without the other, but fundamentally I consider myself a storyteller.
But these novellas...I'm just not sure. I might be creating the story to work with characters that already exist, in which case I guess they are character driven.
So my novella prequel which is...in case I forgot to mention it...FREE well, I created those little kids in that prequel and I already knew who they were going to be when they grew up.
 |
| Preorder Now |
Any thoughts? Are your books plot driven or character driven?
Do you know what that means?
Can you explain it to me?
To get your name in a drawing for a $15 gift card from Amazon tell me if your current wip is plot driven or character driven and why.
I would be honored if you'd use it to buy Book #1 of the Cimarron Legacy 'No Way Up'
Signed,
Mary "The Storyteller" Connealy
And...this is fun
Book #2 of the Cimarron Legacy is now available for pre-order
Long Time Gone
Here are blurbs for the prequel and books #1 and #2. Info about Book #3, Too Far Down coming soon.
The Boden Birthright
FREE
A city slicker on the run from a powerful family that wants his son.FREE
A beautiful ranch woman who wants the boy and may have to take the father to get him.
A little boy who needs a home
When Cimarron ranch patriarch Chance Boden is caught in an avalanche, the quick actions of hired hand Heath Kincaid save him. Badly injured, Chance demands that his will be read and its conditions be enforced immediately.
Without anyone else to serve as a witness, Heath is pressed into reading the will. If Justin, Sadie, and Cole Boden don't live and work at home for the entire year, the ranch will go to their low-down cousin Mike.
Then Heath discovers the avalanche was a murder attempt, and more danger might follow. Deeply involved with the family, Heath's desire to protect Sadie goes far beyond friendship. The danger keeps them close together, and their feelings grow until being apart is the last thing on their minds.
Long Time Gone
The Boden clan thought their troubles were over with the death of a
dangerous enemy. But with new evidence on Cole's shooting, Justin can't
deny that the plot to take their ranch was bigger than one man. While
the doctor and his distractingly pretty assistant Angelique DuPree help Cole, Justin has
to uncover the trail of a decades-old secret as danger closes in.The trouble is Justin sort of saved Angelique's life (well probably not really, she'd have lived, but still... he caught her when she fainted and carried her around for a while) So now he can't quite forget how perfect she felt in his arms. And the bad part of that is, finally a woman had come to the Cimarron Ranch who is perfect for....his big brother Cole.
http://www.maryconnealy.com
