News & Notes

May 2010

The award season began in earnest in April, and I’m happy to report that I have more thrilling news. Not only is Book 2 (AN EYE FOR AN EYE) in my Heroes of Quantico series a RITA award finalist, but Book 1 (AGAINST ALL ODDS) has WON the RT BOOKreviews Reviewers’ Choice award. The magazine named it the best inspirational novel of 2009! And I’m also very, very gratified that Book 3 in the series (IN HARM’S WAY), which came out in April, has made the CBA bestseller list—as did its two predecessors. Suffice it to say, April was an exciting month!

The release of a new books always brings lots of promotional activity. I did a blog tour the week of March April 18 as well as a number of interviews. Here’s a link to a couple of them if you’d like to take a look:

http://kaytebug2002.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-tour-in-harms-way-review-interview.html

http://margaretdaley.blogspot.com/2010/04/interview-with-irene-hannon.html

Despite all the excitement of awards and a new release, deadlines don’t go away! I’ve just packaged up the manuscript for my next Steeple Hill romance and will be mailing that off in the next week. CHILD OF GRACE will be a February release. I’m also hard at work on my new suspense series, Guardians of Justice. A few days ago I got a sneak preview of an early version of the cover for Book 1, FATAL JUDGMENT, which will release in January, and all I can say is WOW! It’s fabulous! I’ll share it with you as soon as it’s finalized.

Now on to this month’s writing/publishing question!

I’ve recently joined a critique group and am very confused. I’ve been bombarded

with people telling me I shouldn’t use conjunctions at the beginning of

sentences and I should limit the use of ing and ly word. I listened to them,

and suddenly my writing became bland. So I started looking closely at published

authors and noticed these rules are broken over and over.

Should I stay in this critique group?

There are pros and cons to critique groups. Frankly, sometimes it’s the blind leading the blind. If you have published authors in your group (not self-published, but authors who’ve sold to royalty-paying publishing houses), that’s a good thing. The mix of the group is important for learning purposes. An alternative is to find a critique partner whose work you respect. (I’ve never been involved with a critique group nor had a critique partner, and that’s worked fine for me.)

As to the rules of writing—rules were meant to be broken…but judiciously. Avoiding the passive voice is important—but that doesn’t mean you have to avoid starting all sentences with an ing word, as this sentence proves! (Or with conjunctions, for that matter.) Adverbs are, however, overused by many writers. I used to be guilty of this myself until an editor pointed it out to me. I now go through every chapter as I finish it and use the “find” feature to identify every ly word—then eliminate as many as I can.

Rules are there for a reason, but that doesn’t mean you have to follow them ALL the time. Just be aware when you break them, and do it for a good reason. Sometimes story flow is helped by breaking the rules. The secret is not to overdo it.

You’re doing the right thing by studying the work of successful, published authors. Most of what I’ve learned about fiction writing has come from reading authors I admire. I’ve also learned by attending writing conferences. A critique group or partner can be a good way to learn, too—but choose carefully!

Now it’s back to work for me. Please check in again next month for all the latest news and another publishing question. In the meantime, I love to hear from readers, so feel free to drop me a line at irenehannon @ irenehannon.com.