Ever Near is here!

The latest installment of the Dani Deane series, Ever Near, releases today!

Four Advent candles, two teens, a Yule Ball, a grief anniversary, and a quest for the perfect gift.

Christmastime is here and for Dani Deane, the season only brings memories of spending last December in the ICU, watching her dad die. But trying to hide her holiday phobia from her boyfriend is making life a lot more complicated. To truly heal, she will have to face the pain and lean into her faith. Can she learn to trust God—and Theo—to stick by her as she seeks to find joy again?

In the bleak midwinter, Theo Wescott is watching his girlfriend Dani slip away again. The anniversary of her dad’s death has turned the holidays into a minefield. The race is on to find the perfect present that will bring her comfort and joy. But getting her best friend’s help with his elaborate plan threatens to derail his relationship with Dani. Will patiently waiting to reveal his ultimate surprise bring the cheer he hopes, or will it be a triggering epic failure?

The ebook version is now available for your phone, tablet or e-reader at a
special introductory price of $2.99 through 12/31.

Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081ZSHV1D
Nook: https://nook.barnesandnoble.com/products/2940163400584
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/ever-near-2
iTunes: https://books.apple.com/us/book/ever-near/id1489279017

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Cover reveal for my next release: Ever Near

The release of my latest novel in my Dani Deane series is fast approaching!

My goal is to release the ebook shortly before Thanksgiving, and the paperback around December 1 in honor of the beginning of Advent. It's a holiday story especially for those who find the holidays difficult and triggering.

Here's the description, and as promised, the lovely cover:

Ever Near
Christian young adult

Four Advent candles, two teens, a Yule Ball, a grief anniversary, and a quest for the perfect gift.


Christmastime is here and for Dani Deane, the season only brings memories of spending last December in the ICU, watching her dad die. But trying to hide her holiday phobia from her boyfriend is making life a lot more complicated. To truly heal, she will have to face the pain and lean into her faith. Can she learn to trust God—and Theo—to stick by her as she seeks to find joy again?

In the bleak midwinter, Theo Wescott is watching his girlfriend Dani slip away again. The anniversary of her dad’s death has turned the holidays into a minefield. The race is on to find the perfect present that will bring her comfort and joy. But getting her best friend’s help with his elaborate plan threatens to derail his relationship with Dani. Will patiently waiting to reveal his ultimate surprise bring the cheer he hopes, or will it be a triggering epic failure?



Ever Near is book 2 in my series, with Never Gone preceding it and Almost There following. Books 1 and 3 are available NOW. Check out my Books page for details.

  

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Introducing 1001 Evocative Prompts for Fiction Writers

I'm delighted to share with you my latest release, a giant collection of writing prompts! The 1001 in the title is literal. There are precisely 1,001 prompts, covering 40 emotions, hundreds of "pivotal moments" and a few hundred character development questions.

Whether you need some inspiration to start a new project, delve deeper into an existing one, or simply add a no-pressure warm up to your routine, there's something here for you!

Throughout the month of April, I will be sharing 26 prompts from the book as part of the A-Z Blogging Challenge. Until then, Here's a description, and some images of the available formats.


1001 Evocative Prompts for Fiction Writers

Evocative /əˈväkədiv/ — Bringing strong images, memories, or feelings to mind.

Ideas, emotions, images, intriguing questions, perplexing dilemmas—these are the raw materials from which great stories are built.

1001 Evocative Prompts will stimulate your thinking wherever you are in your writing journey and get you writing today. It provides story starts and writing inspiration for a wide variety of genres by focusing on emotions, character development, and pivotal moments.

You can face a blank page with confidence when you use these prompts to warm up, beat writer’s block, develop and maintain a writing habit, change up your routine, start a new project, experiment in a new genre, deepen parts of an existing story, or overcome burnout.


What are you waiting for? Dig in and get writing right now!


This book comes in three formats to accommodate a variety of work styles.

For the budget conscious and on-the-go writer, use the economical e-book that can be loaded onto your phone, tablet or e-reader.

For the tactile writer on a budget, choose the condensed pocket edition paperback.

Sample of the pocket edition interior

For the longhand writer who wants to stay organized, choose the workbook edition.

Workbook interior -- 8" x 10" pages with room to write.

Add it on Goodreads

e-book: Amazon / Barnes and Noble / Apple iTunes / Kobo / Smashwords

Pocket paperback (5"x 8", 114 pp.) Amazon / Barnes and Noble / CreateSpace

Workbook (8"x 10", 426 pp.) Amazon / Barnes and Noble / CreateSpace



Wonder why writing prompts can be a helpful tool, no matter where you are in your writing journey? Check out my guest post, 5 Reasons to Write with Prompts!

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Do you feel it? Emotions writing prompts

I've been hard at work on several collections of writing prompts that I hope to release in the coming months. Just for fun, I thought I'd give you a small taste of what's in store. The prompts below are a very small sampling of the character and emotions prompts collection, over 1,000 in all. on 40 different emotions and numerous aspects of character development.

(Update: 1001 Evocative Prompts for Fiction Writers is available NOW!)

----

Emotions are the raw material for all creative writing (and quite a lot of nonfiction as well). Use one of the following prompts to delve into a strong emotion, writing as yourself, a fictional character, or a poetic persona. Let your exploration lead you toward the beginnings of a work of memoir, fiction or poetry. Some hint at a particular genre, others could be spun to fit multiple genres.

Amusement / Mirth

• The best prank I’ve ever pulled / heard about.
• How the court jester turned back an invading army.
• Ten terrible metaphors and/or similes
• Epic fail involving a skateboard, trampoline, or rope swing.
• Mischievous magical folk create havoc in a village one spring evening.
• Ten of the most ridiculous ways to kill off a character.
• I can’t keep a straight face when I see ____.
• A group of stand-up comics is taken hostage and must joke their way out of captivity.

Boredom

• The most boring family event I can remember (or imagine)
• You are a spinster noblewoman in 1815 England.
• An athlete recovering from a concussion may not do, watch, or read anything to rest his/her injured brain.
• A child’s eye view of a wedding.
• You work as a lifeguard at a lap pool in a retirement home.
• The diary of a prisoner in solitary confinement.
• To marry your true love, you must attend weekly three-hour prayer meetings with your future in-laws for the next six months.
• The dullest person you have ever dated.
• An astronaut must live alone on a space station for a year.

Defeat / Discouragement

• A setback or failure from which you thought you would never recover.
• You missed the last bus/train/flight for the day.
• Your science fair invention works perfectly until the judges come to observe it.
• A false rumor causes everyone to shun you.
• In a team competition, your teammates suffer a series of injuries, one after another.
• Your corporate sponsor threatens to withdraw funding for a minor mistake.
• You can’t hold a job because of a crazy relative who makes trouble everywhere.
• A chronic illness makes it impossible to complete an important task.

Embarrassment

• I have never been so embarrassed as when ____.
• A beauty queen gets a nosebleed/gas attack during a pageant.
• A dignitary comes for dinner and you/your child/your pet vomits on him/her.
• Your swimsuit gets gobbled up by the pool drainage system.
• Your parent with Tourette’s Syndrome chaperones the class trip/school dance.
• The bakery accidently sends a lewd bachelorette party cake for Nana’s 90th birthday party.
• The fart that changed my destiny.
• Your doting mother shows off your baby pictures/awkward adolescent pictures/dweeby polka-band pictures to a potential mate.

Hope

• You romantically connect with someone on a chance encounter, and the person asks for your number or gives you theirs.
• A woman who has suffered several miscarriages enters the 36th week of a healthy pregnancy.
• Describe the bodily sensations you have when you are hopeful.
• Interstellar explorers find what looks like a viable planet for colonization, capable of sustaining human life.
• A cancer patient begins an experimental treatment.
• Police get an anonymous tip about a cold case.
• The addict you love reaches their first anniversary of sobriety.
• A group of castaways finds a crate on the beach full of farming and fishing equipment.

Shame

• I could never tell ____.
• How someone with an eating disorder might think about his/her body.
• What deeply shameful experience could I more easily write myself free of if I gave it to a fictional character?
• What skeletons do my parents have in their closets?
• The day I realized there was something deeply wrong with me.
• What shameful secret might my antagonist hide at all costs?
• Deeply religious parents learn their child is leaving the faith because…
• You learn that your parent or grandparent was once a Nazi, a torturer, or slave dealer.
• A doctor makes a simple error that causes a patient to ____.

Interested in doing more with emotion in your writing? Pick up my guided journal Emotions in the Wild: A Writer's Observation Journal. This tool, based on exercises used in method acting, leads you through observation activities so that you can better describe character emotional responses in your writing. 

Pocket sized, with plenty of space to record your observations, this is a tool useful for writers of any genre. 

Available here: 
Amazon / Barnes and Noble / Createspace / Book Depository

Which of these prompts appeal most to you? Why?

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Release day and giveaway

Just in time for your long holiday weekend, my new novel Almost There is now available on all channels! It's a gripping summer read about sacrifice, forgiveness, and the surprising ways God meets our deepest needs.

Here's a snippet from the first page:

In Paris, art seeps into your feet and drips from your fingertips. Dark-eyed buskers in berets squeeze out sweet accordion songs, and the birds trill along. The air tastes like crème brûlée; the light is melted butter. Or so I’ve heard. In two weeks, I’ll find out for myself.

I can see it all now: In the golden mornings, Mum and I will set up matching easels on the banks of the Seine and paint side-by-side. She’ll be too excited to sleep till noon, too inspired to stare blankly at the wall. Her sadness will fall away like a too-heavy coat, and she’ll once again fill canvas after canvas with works of aching beauty. 


Short description:
Paris, the City of Lights. To seventeen-year-old Dani Deane, it’s the Promised Land. There, her widowed mother’s depression will vanish and she will no longer fear losing her only parent, her arty New York life, or her devoted boyfriend.

But shortly before their Paris getaway, Dani’s tyrannical grandfather falls ill, pulling them to rural Pennsylvania to deal with his hoarder horror of a house. Among the piles, Dani finds disturbing truths that could make Mum completely unravel. Desperate to protect her from pain and escape to Paris, Dani hatches a plan with the flirtatious neighbor boy that only threatens the relationships she most wants to save.

Add it on Goodreads
Read the first four chapters for FREE on Wattpad

Purchase the ebook on Amazon (US) / Barnes and Noble / Smashwords / Kobo / Apple iTunes
Purchase the paperback from Createspace / Amazon (US) / Barnes and Noble

Giveaway

To celebrate the release, I'm running a fun giveaway of an Almost There themed gift basket. Enter by June 9 for a chance to win.

The gift contains:

Paris-themed lined journal

Be Still: a Psalms adult coloring book

Trouvaille vanilla candle 

Parisian market-style wire basket with linen liner

Here's a peek inside the coloring book:

Not only does this verse nicely sum up some

of Dani's goals and struggles in Almost There, but also

a dressmaker dummy makes an appearance in the novel.

Intrigued?

Enter to win using the Rafflecopter form below.

THIS GIVEAWAY HAS ENDED

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Update and sneak peek

I am busily preparing to release my new novel Almost There, thus it's been difficult to find the brain space for my usual meaty tips posts. I hope to get back to them in a few weeks.

In the meantime, I've been lining up some great guests to share their stories and tips with you. Tomorrow, a group of awesome ladies will be sharing their tips on collaboration and creating collaborative works. If you've ever wanted to team up with others on a writing project, please come back and check it out!

In preparation for my release, I've begun publishing sneak peek scenes from the opening chapters on Wattpad HERE. It's free to read there. You simply have to sign up for a free account. Please stop by and take a look, and if you'd be so kind, give it a vote. Thanks!

Second, I am running a giveaway of three paperbacks through Goodreads. Simply click the link on the sidebar on the right to get to the entry page.

What's new with you?

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Reclaim lost hours developing your emotions repertoire

Every season comes with special challenges for writers. In summer, it's often kids home from school, friends and family visiting, and time away for family vacation that can destroy your writing routine.

But what if time away from the keyboard could be as useful to your craft as the hours of "butt in chair"? The hours you spend out in the world can indeed be a creative gift to you, putting you in new places with access to new experiences. In particular, you have wonderful access to the laboratory of human emotion. You just have to pay attention.

People-watching is the best way to gain an understanding of how real people express their feelings. Observe and record, and you'll never be at a loss for how to represent your characters in your fiction-- without resorting to tired cliches.

Do this haphazardly, however, and it won't be as useful an exercise. Organization is truly key.

With these issues in mind, I created a tool that writers of any genre can use to develop their own "emotions bible" in their own authorial voice. It is based on an exercise used by method actors: observing and journaling expression, gesture, carriage, stance, motion in order to better embody it on stage.

Emotions in the Wild: A Writer's Observational Journal contains over 200 pages of guided journaling exercises to help you record your observations of how real people express thirty nine different emotions. Once completed, the journal can serve as your go-to source for creating realistic dialogue and facial and body language that is uniquely yours.  You can use it again and again on any fiction project.

Tuck the journal in your bag and make use of any and every opportunity to observe emotion, whether you're stuck in line at the grocery store, waiting for your child at swim lessons, sitting in a doctor's waiting room, or lounging on the beach or at the pool. Watch your emotional vocabulary grow, you productivity soar, and your reliance on cliches fade away,

Add it on Goodreads
Purchase the paperback from CreateSpace / Amazon (US) / Amazon (UK)

Where will summer take you? How might your writing benefit from observation research?

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Muddy-Fingered Midnights

The happy day has arrived! It's release day for my first-ever poetry collection.

Muddy-Fingered Midnights
poems from the bright days 
and dark nights of the soul


This thirty-poem collection is an eclectic mix of light and dark, playful and spiritual, lyric and narrative free verse. In an intricate dance of sound play, it explores how our perceptions shape our interactions with the world. Here child heroes emerge on playgrounds and in chicken coops, teens grapple with grief and taste first love, adults waver between isolation and engaged connection. It is a book about creative life, our capacity to wound and heal, and the unlikely places we find love, beauty, and grace. 

“In Muddy-Fingered Midnights, Garver seamlessly integrates unpredictable rhyme and alliteration to undergird the themes and strange beauty of these poems. The collection explores moments of cowardice and melting purity, ‘my only fruit / a cool ooze / that bubbles up / on blistering days,’  yet holds strongly onto faith as much as ‘Yankee girl grit.’ Even in dark times that are ‘glassy with misery,’ there’s a hidden reflection in the pane: hope.” 
—Jessica Bell, co-founder of Vine Leaves Literary Journal and author of Fabric, semi-finalist, Goodreads Readers’ Choice Awards 2012: Best Poetry.

The title comes from the final piece in the collection, "A Writer's Parable," which explores fear in the creative process, using imagery from the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 (the one where the cowardly servant buries his piece of gold in the ground rather than take a risk and invest it like his faithful co-workers do).

The collection includes a number of all-new pieces, plus previously published favorites that appeared in international literary journals. About 2/3 of the poems are general topics, a 1/3 have spiritual themes. I love using sound-play, but don't use traditional forms. Within free verse, rhythms emerge organically and rhyming is nearly always inside lines rather than at the ends.

Here are a few sample pieces:
Affliction, about the writing life
Storm Shelter, rom-dram fiction-in-verse
Not Quite Away, experimental narrative poem

Fun and soulful, dark and bright, Muddy-Fingered Midnights has a little something for everyone in small, bite-sized pieces.

Add it on Goodreads

The digital book is just $1.99. 
Find it here: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords

Or get the paperback for $6.50 from CreateSpace, Amazon

Can you help me spread the word? Simply use the share links below. Thanks!! 

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An exciting announcement

Photo: earl53 from morguefile.com

I've been hard at work putting together my first-ever poetry collection. It includes select pieces from my undergrad days up through the present, both previously published poems and a number of brand new pieces. It's an eclectic mix of lyrical, narrative, spiritual, humorous, experimental, and fiction-in-verse. I'm excited to share it with you all.

The collection is called Muddy-Fingered Midnights. The title comes from a line in my poem "A Writer's Parable," published in 2011 in the British journal Rubber Lemon (page 4).

To give you a little taste, I thought I'd share this short "ars poetica" piece (poem about the nature of poetry or the writing process) composed for the collection.


Affliction

In the decade between
dawn and alarm sound,
a new story swells
like a sprained ankle.
It pains you to wakefulness.
Dough-rising, volume-doubling,
pressing ever outward,
it stretches the sorry sock
that deigns to contain it.
Huge and purple it emerges,
in every sense an enormity.
The only medicine for it
is bloodletting, bard-style:
pen, paper, patient play.

© Laurel W. Garver, 2013

The collection will be available in mid-March. I'll be doing a cover reveal next week! Stay tuned.

National Poetry Month is coming up in April, and I'd love to visit some blogs to talk poetry. Let me know in the comments if you're willing to host a guest post, interview and/or giveaway.

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New release!

I'm excited to announce the release of The Best of Vine Leaves Literary Journal 2012 anthology! My fiction vignette, New Hues, was selected to appear in this wonderful volume, jam-packed with evocative poetry and prose from 108 contributors.

Here's the description from Goodreads:
The vignette is a snapshot in words, and differs from flash fiction or a short story in that its aim doesn’t lie within the traditional realms of structure or plot. Instead it focuses on one element: mood, character, setting, or object.

The journal, published quarterly online, is a lush synergy of atmospheric prose, poetry, photography and illustrations, put together with an eye for aesthetics as well as literary merit. The annual print anthology showcases the very best pieces that appeared in the journal.

From the haunting prose of Theresa Milstein and Carrie Mumford, to the controversial and quirky work of H. Edgar Hix and Greg Belliveau, the pathological effects of cigarettes and apple seeds, ice sculptures and mental illness, a lovable old man named Joseph, and how the good old washing machine can change one's life. Oh, and how could we forget the mother with the scissors? Each vignette merges to create a vivid snapshot in time and place. Prepare for big stories in small spaces, between and beyond the words. 

Read them one at a time. Savour them. Taste them.

Live them.


To purchase, go to: http://emergent-publishing.com/bookstore/the-best-of-vine-leaves-literary-journal-2012/

Vine Leaves Literary Journal website
Vine Leaves Facebook Fan Page
Vine Leaves on Twitter
eMergent Publishing website
eMergent FB Fan Page
eMergent on Twitter

Any good news to share with me?

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