Defeating the Green Monster

By Kelly Bridgewater

Before you read this post, I would like you to read my heart-wrenching story of how the green-eyed monster has gripped my heart. Here are the links to: Part I  and  Part II. Read them first!! Please !!

It makes me pretty vulnerable, but I think it is necessary to show what today’s post is going to be about.

We have all been jealous of someone else’s success or life. It hits me a lot. I cry and hate that I did not get handed the better plate in life.

But I have some steps that I take to keep the green-eyes monster of jealousy at bay.

1.)    I pray for that person.

I know it sounds funny. But when I start to feel upset, I close my eyes and pray for the tinge of jealousy to move on. Then I bring that person to mind and pray for them. Sometimes it is a struggle, but I want to reap blessings on that person.

2.)    Worship and pray

Remind myself of the Great God that I serve. He wants what is the best for my life, even though it is really easy to remember sometimes. Spending some time focusing on God and reminding myself of what he has accomplished in my life brings a smile to my face.

3.)    Write

Sounds funny, but I pull out my laptop or journal and write. It does not have to be long, but something to prove that God gave me this desire for a reason. No matter how much I try to walk away because I get frustrated, God pulls me right back in and begs me to write the story he has placed on my heart.

What do you do when the green-eyed monster of jealousy attacks you?

The Green Monster (Part II)

By Kelly Bridgewater

I call this the latest tug on my heart. I know it might not mean much to some. It might even be called ranting, but this green-eyed monster has been tugging at my heart for a while, so I wanted to confess my latest wanderings. If you missed the first part, here is the link. It should take you back to part one of my story. Return next week, where I will tell you what I do to defeat the green-eye monster.

Here goes:

Michael was a mechanic, so companies would fire him every ninety days because they didn’t want to pay benefits. It was hard to try to raise a new baby while being the bread winner for the family. We had problems with the hospital of Indianapolis, so we left and moved in with his parents in Terre Haute. Having a built-in baby-sitter, I went to college at the Indiana State University. For the first time in a long time, I started to feel like myself again. I had two boys at home, and we rented a two bedroom house, but I loved taking classes at college.  I finished my bachelors and had three boys by then. I went to graduate school at the same college while being a graduate assistant who had grad school paid for with a salary of $7,000 a year. Not much to live off. My husband finally had a steady job while I was attending school, and Mike’s aunt watched the kids for free.

We finally bought a house with 2,500 square feet with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, but it is in town, which is not what we wanted at all. We wanted a house in the middle of the country.

While Michael and I have no debt but the house, which will be paid off in eight years and nine months, Michael and I still dream of more for our lives. I have sent out 230 job applications since I graduated with my Masters in 2012 to a number of publishing companies, newspapers, magazines, and local jobs. I’m overeducated for some. Undereducated for others. What gives! I can’t even find a decent paying job for the education I have.

I have struggled and followed God, and I still have nothing to show for it.

Back to the friend, a number of them have started this writing venture that I have been on since I could learn to write, a couple of years ago, now they are winning contests, being invited to appear on all these blogs, and being recognized in the writing community.

The green-eyed monster keeps telling me that it isn’t fair. They haven’t struggled for anything in their lives. God has given them everything on a silver platter.

Why not me? Where is my invitation to guest appear on popular writing blogs? Where is my recognition for writing? I have been writing forever. I have a Masters in Writing. I have four complete manuscripts. I have the degrees to work at the publishing companies.

But I do not have the “right” degree to work at the top notch publishing companies. I attend the ACFW conference and know a bunch of writers, agents, and editors in the publishing business. I write at least 2, 500 words every day. I have entered a number of contests. I struggle with writing Deep POV. I have seen my writing improve since I started the ACFW, but I still need to work on my writing. I know that.  I have studied all the “great” writing craft books. I have read and read the great books, studying how they handle aspects of the writing crafts.

We only make 30,000 a year, so we really do not have a lot of money to spend on lavish vacations or expensive writing retreats.

I keep asking God. If you want what’s best for us, then how come I do not have a publishing career or a job in a publishing company? I feel like God has abandoned me because of one mistake when I was nineteen. I have struggled my entire life while I watch my friends have all my dreams or their dreams realized without any problems in their path. 

I do not mean to be so whiny, but this has been on my heart for a while, and I wanted share my confession with others. Maybe someone will lift me up in prayer. I certainly have spent a lot of times on my news, praying and worshiping. 

Ever feel that way?  Return next week, where I’ll tell you what I do to try to defeat the green-eyed monster.

The Green-Eyed Monster (Part I)

By Kelly Bridgewater

Today, I want to talk about the green-eyed monster that slips out in every person’s life at some time. Lately, I have been dealing with him a lot. Mostly because of the success of some other writers, friends, and cousins. This is going to be tough to read. It is what has been on my heart for a while now. Please, don’t comment with hateful words. This is just my personal feelings. Think of it as a journal entry.

First, let me give you a little background on how the green-eyed monster crept into my life. I have a friend, who I won’t mention their names. They grew up in a wealthy neighborhood. You know the ones with huge houses, nice manicured lawns, and new cars in the driveway. Every Christmas, this friend received all the best toys on the market and wore name brand clothes. They attended an expensive private Christian school and went to church all their lives. On the way to college, they attended an expensive one and succeeded at their degree. They met the “perfect” guy, fell in love, and had the expensive glamorous wedding at the resort. They married, bought a home, and have the perfect life with the painless pregnancy.  Never a blimp in the road. Everything goes as plan. No struggles. Never having to work for anything.

But my story is a little different. I grew up with parents that moved every two years because we rented and my father kept using credit cards to buy what he wanted instead of paying the electric bill or the water bill. You do not know how embarrassing it is to run next door and ask to fill up five gallon camping containers for water because your father forgot to pay the water bill. My parents argued all the time. My mother promising to leave my father as soon as my little sister graduated from high school, which happened. I graduated from high school with dreams of going away for college, meeting the great Christian guy, and living the great life in a log cabin in the woods. But plans changed that. All through high school, I attended church and really stuck to God’s Word. I read it. I devoured the Word of God. I loved worship music. I couldn’t get enough. I stayed away from drugs, alcohol, and sex, even though my friends were doing all of them. I did not get invited to these parties because I was religious. They did not want to hang out with me at times, even ditched me at school dances because they wanted to go drink and get drunk. Not my thing. Oh, as a side note, they are now avid Christians with the perfect Christian wives and are the ones quoting Scriptures on Facebook. Funny, how that worked out.

When I applied for FAFSA (government aid) to attend college my senior year, they said I was getting no government help. I had to take out loans. The college I want to attend was $25,000 a year. I cried. My father made too much money but had no money to help me. I was devastated, so I went to IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University of Indianapolis) to start my schooling. While there, I met some Christian college kids, and I started hanging out with them. I met my future husband. One night, we slipped up and had sex. A couple of months, I found out we were expecting my son, Elijah. We planned a wedding. Not expensive at all. My in-laws paid for everything because my parents didn’t have any money or refused to give it up. I’m shy when I meet people for the first time, so I didn’t speak up and mention that the whole wedding was not my taste. I allowed Michael to make all the choices. It was not my ideal wedding.

This is only the first part of the story. Return next Friday, May 15 and I will continue my narrative. Do not forget to return on Friday, May 22, where I tell you how I defeat or hold him at bay until he peeks his head up again.  

How does my story ring true with you? Are you ever visited by the green-eyed monster?

“Kill” Your Middle

By Kelly Bridgewater

Last week, I discussed opening lines and how to grab your reader’s attention. Today, I want to give four suggestions on how to bring more tension to your middle. Don’t forget to return next week to uncover some suggestions on how to work on your endings.

Everyone knows that the middle part of a story can be the most horrible thing to write. You may come up with a great premise and start off with a bang. You have spent hours and pages writing and discovering what makes your characters kick. Maybe, if you write like me, you know how the story is going to end, but as you travel the story you get stuck on what happens in the middle.

I have four suggestions that I have used to bring more interesting elements to the middle of my story. Of course, there are tons of variations to how to do each one.

1.      Kill someone

I know this works well in a suspense or mystery book, but in a romance it might not work so well. As an avid mystery writer, I enjoy finding dead bodies, throwing conflict in the ways of my hero and heroine. Nothing is worse than working on a current dilemma and come across a dead body that may or may not have something to do with your current problem. Wrecks havoc everywhere.

2.      Isolate

This will work in all types of genre. Have the hero or the heroine run out into the countryside or travel down a dark alley (told you I like to write mysteries). This is a good time for the character to ponder what has been happening, feeling abandoned, or being chased and hide. It allows the reader a moment to breathe and catch up.

3.      Love interest

Nothing brings more conflict than bringing in another love interest. Either someone from the past or someone who can tell a secret about the hero or heroine. What I did in one of my stories was not have the hero mention to the heroine, not because he wanted to keep it a secret, the time was never correct to mention it, was bring in a current girlfriend. This threw the heroine in a fit where she confronted the hero, sparks flying. Great tension to liven up the story’s middle.

4.      Lie

Have a secret come to light. Nothing brings more tension than showcasing a secret that will wreck the character’s lives. It does not have to be a big lie, but something that will create conflict to your characters.

Of course, there are many more ways to bring conflict to sagging middle, but I enjoyed writing this. What do you do to bring conflict to your middle?

Jodie Renner: Captivate Your Readers

By Kelly Bridgewater

Back Cover Copy:

Are you looking for techniques to really bring your fiction to life for the readers, so they feel they’re right there, on the edge of their seats, struggling with the hero or heroine? Staying up late at night, worrying, glued to the pages?
This guide provides specific advice, with examples, for captivating readers and immersing them in your story world.
It’s all about engaging the reader and providing a direct connection with the characters through deep point of view, showing instead of telling, avoiding author intrusions, and letting the characters tell the story.
Today’s readers want to put aside their cares and chores and lose themselves in an absorbing story. This book shows you how to provide the emotional involvement and immediacy readers crave in fiction.
You’ll find techniques for making sure your characters come to life and your readers feel directly connected to them, without the author’s hand appearing as an intermediary.
And like Jodie Renner's other writing guides, which are designed for busy writers, the format of this one is reader-friendly, with text broken up by subheadings, examples, and lists.

My Review: 

I enjoy reading non-fiction books when they are books that are instructive in improving my writing. I have an overflowing shelf of writing instruction books. Many of them have highlights, notes in the margins, and post-it notes sticking out of them. I love learning how to do something to make my stories better. I have read Jodie Renner’s first book in this series, Fire Up Your Fiction and own Writing a Killer Thriller, but I have not gotten around to reading it yet. As a budding writer, I would love to get advice from a fiction editor and that is exactly what readers will get when they read these three writing books from Jodie Renner. She is a highly-sought after fiction editor who shares her experience and advice pretty cheaply.

I enjoy how Renner divides the book into tiny chapters. The book features six bigger parts with little chapters in each section. I enjoyed how Renner included a button to help the e-readers readers to return to the table of contents if they are done reading a certain chapter.

There are tons of examples to entice the reader into learning how to see the difference in their writing in the before and after examples. You can learn a lot by comparing the before examples to the after ones. There were also tips, techniques, and examples to engage the writer with the actual text. However, there were techniques and questions to avoid. Another thing I enjoyed was the words of advice from other popular writing books. If you enjoyed how Renner was showing an element such as Deep POV, then you could read more examples from other books.

Two chapters, Sensory Details Suck Your Reader In and Show Characters Reactions to Bring Them to Life, appear to be chapters that I will have to spend more time on and come back to. One quick read through for this review would not give justice to the words and exercises showed in the chapters. I probably will find more chapters on another read through to highlight and study.

Overall, Jodie Renner’s latest writing release, Captivate Your Readers, does exactly that. It offers writing advice to budding writers who do not have lot of time on their head and want to spend a couple of hours working on their skill. Plus, it draws connections to other writing books in the craft to further study. I highly recommend this book.  

I received an ARC copy of Jodie Renner’s Captivate Your Readers in exchange for any honest review. All opinions stated above are all my own.

From Renner's Amazon Author Page

Jodie Renner’s Writing Bio: 

Jodie Renner is a sought-after freelance fiction editor and award-winning author of three craft-of-writing guides and two (so far) e-resources for writers. FIRE UP YOUR FICTION, which offers concrete tips to tighten your prose and take your writing skills up several levels, has won 3 awards (2 silver medals -- Readers' Favorite Awards, FAPA President's Book Awards -- and an Honorable Mention in Writer's Digest E-Book Awards). WRITING A KILLER THRILLER will show you how to engage readers by adding tension, suspense, and intrigue to any novel. Jodie's third book, CAPTIVATE YOUR READERS, is all about engaging readers, bonding them with your protagonist, and drawing them into your story world through techniques like using deep point of view, showing instead of telling, avoiding author intrusions, writing dialogue that zings, and generally letting the characters tell the story.

If you could ask Jodie Renner one question related to writing, what would it be?