Writers are often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” The question will elicit a different answer from every writer. But I’m guessing the subtext to the myriad replies would be something like, “I get my ideas from my fascinations.”

We all have fascinations; they’re definitely not restricted to writers—we just tend to blab about them in a public forum, our books. Fascinations are diverse, kooky things; some dark as the catacombs, some bright as tulips. They can be passions, curiosities, a shade of kink, green eyes, space travel, ghosts, or a pair of red shoes. Or they can be issues: health, politics, murder, love affairs, the crazy cult of celebrity. There are no end to things that pull our minds, and draw our inner eye to the realm of fascinations. And when a writer’s fascination matches up with a reader’s? Voila! A connection.

One of my fascinations is old buildings; abandoned places, once built with purpose and enthusiasm and meant to last. But buildings seldom do last, at least in the form in which they’re originally created. They age, molder away, rust, breakdown, and eventually become hazardous to humans. They go from their purpose-filled beginning to a condemned notice pasted on a padlocked door. In the end we discard them and they discard us.

I’m particularly fascinated with old hotels. The Old Boys, I call them.

In whatever city you visit, you’ll find these once proud but now tatty old gents. Look up at the third floor window and you might see a dimly lit room, a single light bulb hanging from a tangled cord behind grimy windows. Maybe that cold white light illuminates a bottle of whiskey and an ash tray on a scarred table. Or a single cup of cold coffee  held in gnarled hands. Maybe a journal with writing only on a tear-stained page one. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe…

Often these hotels are in a seedy, seen-better-days part of town where many of the people in and around them appear to have moldered in sync with the hotel’s decline.

Oh, but what stories these Old Boys could tell–if their walls could talk. What mysteries they’d solve. And what hearts their secrets would break.

IN ROOM 33, now on Amazon, I created my own Old Boy hotel, The Hotel Philip, and it comes with some peculiar tenants, murder, romance, and some very creepy secrets of its own.

You may not want to check in to The Hotel Philip, but you may want to check it out. You’ll find it here: http://amzn.to/IHzRQp

In a few weeks, my son will graduate from high school. That watershed event, coupled with a number of other passages that I’ve marked in my personal life over the last few months, has me thinking about the inevitability of endings.

In the case of Teen Freud, his graduation will be a poignant mix of sadness and joy. As his twelve years of education comes to a close and he says good-bye to the familiar, he’ll be embarking on a new beginning at university just a few months from now. His ending (possibly even a well-dressed one if I can convince him to ditch the low riders and wear a suit) offers both closure and promise.

It’s a lot like the ending in a good book. The best endings have a sense of irrevocability to them. They wrap up the story, at least as much as the writer wants it wrapped up. In the case of a romance, there’s a happily-ever-after. In a whodunit, the bad guy is caught. A YA, depending on the tone, usually ends with a significant growth in understanding and often, though not always, with hope or a promise. But whether it’s happy, sad or somewhere in the middle, a good ending provides another grace note. It leaves us feeling as though that story and those characters live on long after the last page.

A lot has been written about first lines and book openings but endings don’t seem to elicit the same attention. We don’t talk much about them. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because beginnings are joyful, hopeful places while endings, no matter how you slice them, have a certain finality that tugs at our heartstrings. But brilliant endings are memorable, and worth striving for. Consider these:

“And then, right in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, with the whole world looking on, he planted a long, lingering kiss on the lips of the President of the United States.” First Lady, Susan Elizabeth Phillips

“Tomorrow I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.” Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

“I take his hand, holding tightly, preparing for the cameras, and dreading the moment when I will finally have to let go.” The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins.

“But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.” The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne.

A good ending, like a hard-earned graduation, is a well-deserved wrap. It is both an ending and a beginning. If you have a favorite last line – one you wrote or one from another author – I’d love to read it.

No, this is not a post about how beneficial chocolate is for the writer’s soul. I think everybody knows that, and personally, I tend to indulge on a fairly regular basis. But back in February, one of our readers asked if someone could do a post on the differences between analogy, allegory and metaphor, and I thought starting off with an example from a popular movie would be a good idea.

Rachel’s request stuck in my mind for two reasons. First, we seldom get asked to write about a particular subject so it’s very nice when readers give us ideas, and second, I thought I had a pretty good handle on how metaphors and similes were structured, but I wasn’t all that clear on allegories. With that in mind, I went to the Font of All Knowledge (Google) and did some research.

So this is for you, Rachel—with apologies for the delay—and for all the rest of us who are a little hazy on the similarities and differences between allegory, analogy, metaphor, and simile.

First, let’s begin with some Official Dictionary Definitions:

Analogy (noun): a likeness or a comparison between two things that have some features that are the same and others which are different.

Straightforward. Now we get into the types of analogies:

Simile (noun): a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike objects, often by using the words like or as. (‘Abe grumbles like a bear in the morning’, or ‘Bob is as stubborn as a mule’)

Metaphor (noun): a word or phrase used to compare two unlike objects, ideas, thoughts or feelings to provide a clearer description. In other words, where unlike things have something in common (‘Joe is a diamond in the rough’ or, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates’). So, a simile is an expressed analogy, where a metaphor is an implied one.

Here’s another type of analogy:

‘I am to dancing what Roseanne is to singing and Donald Duck to motivational speeches. I am as graceful as a refrigerator falling down a flight of stairs’ Leonard Pitts, “Curse of Rhythm Impairment” Miami Herald, Sep. 28 2009.

Our last term is also a comparison of ideas but on a larger basis:

Allegory (noun): the rhetorical strategy of extending a metaphor through an entire narrative so that objects, persons and actions in the text are equated with meanings that lie outside the text.

Whew! Sounds a little lofty, but in its simplest form, an allegory is a fictional story where the characters and situations echo a ‘real world’ situation. Movies like The Wizard of Oz, Metropolis, The Seventh Seal, and District 9 have all been quoted as examples of allegorical films, as has one of my favourites, Avatar. “The Pandora woods are the Amazon rain forest. The attempts to get the Na’vi to cooperate carry overtones of the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.” (Owen Gleiberman, review of Avatar. Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 30, 2009)

So, there you have it. Hope that helps, Rachel. And now, feeling my energy drop like a meter in a brown out, it’s time to dip into the box of chocolates again…

IMPROPER MISS DARLING, available now from Mills & Boon Historicals

       ”Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.” Goethe 

Oh, the lure of the other side, where the grass is greener, the prose leaner, and the air pure and inspirational.

I don’t write when I travel. I keep a few scribbled notes, but they’re pretty much indecipherable by the time I get home. I’ve always felt my inability to parse sparkling and eternal prose while experiencing new places made me less of a writer. And maybe it does. But when I  travel—which is not nearly enough—I become too enthralled, my senses are overwhelmed by the unfamiliar;  the enticing newness of ancient buildings, untried roads, foreign foliage, and strange exotic foods. Given so much to absorb, the idea of writing slips to the backside of my mind, where it lurks petulantly, spitting out *should-dos* on a semi-regular basis.

While I may push the labor of writing aside, I do dream. I dream about how wonderful it would be to take an extended writing holiday where I could give my all to creativity and creation. A holiday with just me, my laptop, a new Moleskin notebook, colored pens, and a brilliant—no, spectacular!—premise for that dazzling, luminous book, I’ve always planned to write.

I would rent an apartment with no wireless.  I’d go to Italy or France, maybe Spain. Once there, my muse and I would set up shop in ideal digs. There’d be uninterrupted time, sunshine, a sidewalk cafe (every writer needs one of those), a flowered terrace—and lots of strong black coffee. Maybe a cool Pinot Gris to end the writing day.

I would stroll every morning down narrow cobbled paths between ancient stone buildings and drop into the nearest Internet cafe to check my email; this to make sure my family wasn’t starving and that there’d been no North American zombie apocalypse during my extended leave. Then, having put my mind at ease, I’d return to my sun-drenched terrace where the words would flow endlessly. Indeed, they’d tumble onto the page so perfectly and so fast my brain would tremble at their onslaught. Voila! A book in one seamless draft, every comma tucked into place, every word pulsing with energy.  Yes! The writer’s life as it is meant to be.

Tis but a dream, of course, but dreams are what life is made of, and all writers have secret dreams woven in the space between their work and real lives. We’re all about what ifs and if onlys.

I’m telling you my dream so you’ll understand the reason I’ve not yet written that staggeringly brilliant, unmatched-in-the-universe book. To quote my inner child, “It’s not my fault.”   It’s because my romantic dream of sun-saturated, uninterrupted  writing time has never been realized.

I’m still mad at a universe that insists the only way to write a book is to put butt in chair (be it in a closet, at a kitchen table, or local Starbucks), and lay down those words, one at a time, one after the other, all while praying for a pleasing symmetry—and an entertaining yarn. It’s not about heaven-sent words tumbling onto the page; it’s about keeping on, and on, and on—wherever you happen to be. I know this. I truly do. But again to quote that stubborn inner child, “It’s not fair!”

EC Sheedy  (who somehow managed to write some books without endless time or an endless summer, which she considers a small miracle.)

You can find her books here:  http://amzn.to/yC1Ffm

When my novella, BodyWork was in the launch anthology, The Hard Stuff,for Kensington’s Aphrodisia, I had a significant birthday right when the book hit the shelves. To celebrate my birthday, my husband took me to an island paradise where, for the first time ever, I saw my book on a bookstore shelf. 

My novella Bodywork

I got photos in the store with a clerk! I took pictures of the shelf…I sighed and whooped and my heart burst with pride. Meanwhile the cover hit the news: a program on a news network called On the Money, local TV Stations in Buffalo and Boston and even Geraldo Rivera used the cover on a segment about the money to be made writing romance novels. Not your “mother’s romance novels” these newspeople pointed out, but erotic romance novels. (ooh, nudge nudge, wink wink)
I woke on my birthday morning and went to the hotel’s internet and business center to check my email. Back then, tablets didn’t exist and I’d left my laptop at home for vacation.
There, in my newly-minted website email, was a message from one “Bonnie Edwards” furious that I’d ruined her name! Not satisfied with one hateful message, she immediately fired another demanding to know: “are you even educated?”
I don’t have to look these emails up to refresh myself because they’re burned into my memory banks forever.
I was, to say the least, taken aback. In these joyous heady days, here was a lady I’d deeply offended by writing books. Books that I loved writing.
Trying to come up with a response that sounded reasonable was impossible. I tried! Several times I attempted to frame a message that would convey . . . something nice, or friendly or kind.
Then I thought, to hell with it! I’m here in Hawaii on my something-mumble birthday, with my wonderful husband, seeing my book on the shelves for the first time, and why ruin a perfectly good time?
Nothing I said to this lady would change her mind about the “filth” I’d written. Nothing I said would make her feel better. I certainly wasn’t going to quit writing.
I have never heard from that particular Bonnie Edwards again, nor do I wish to, because I’m still not going to quit writing.
But what has happened is quite marvelous. I have discovered a couple of talented women named Bonnie Edwards who are in professions that require a level of “public awareness”. One is a lovely young woman who models swimsuits. We follow each other on Twitter and occasionally, I get handsome young men following me. They must be looking for the model, because they unfollow me just as soon as they enlarge my picture! It’s fun in a weird way for both of us.
Another Bonnie Edwards is a blues singer with a band called “Bonnie Edwards and The Practical Cats”. (I cannot sing a note so her career’s safe from invasion.) After knowing about her for months and wondering how to get in touch, she friended me on Facebook just yesterday. Yay! I’ve wanted to make a connection and now we have. (Thanks, Bonnie!)
Next month on this blog I plan to have interviews from both: on modeling, on her singing career, and on how we all manage this “Public Awareness”. If you know of another Bonnie Edwards in a similar “public” career, please be in touch, we’d all love to say hello!