Ute Carbone
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Inside the Writer's Garret

On writing and life, with a little chocolate thrown in from time to time.

#8Sunday Opening Lines--Confessions of the Sausage Queen

6/28/2015

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Over the next few weeks, I'm going to feature the openings of my romantic comedies.  Confessions of the Sausage Queen isn't so much a romantic comedy as it is chick lit. Then again, it isn't really chick lit either. The main character, Mandy, isn't much interested in shoes, though she does take a great interest in saving the town's sausage factory and the jobs of the folks who work there. She's not interested in getting a man either, she's already got Randy, her on-again off-again husband, it's more a question of not quite knowing what to do with him.  If I had to file it into a genre, I guess I'd go with crazy fun book. That's a category, isn't it?



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You might think driving all the way out to Over’s Pond, to the little bend where Randy kept the Airstream parked, somewhat illegally, on Big Bill Ludowski’s land, was overkill. It was eight miles out of town. On that day, of all days, I didn’t have eight miles to spare. Besides which, Randy, despite the transient look of an Airstream with a chemical toilet, was pretty much a permanent fixture in my life. He had a cell phone. A cell phone whose number was on my speed dial as three, one being Gran Lila’s house and two
being Sammy’s school. Given all this, you’d no doubt think driving all the way up an old dirt road to remind Randy to pick up Sammy from kindergarten was overkill. You could have just called, you are probably inclined to say. Which is, pretty much word-for-word, exactly what Randy said.

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#8Sunday Opening Lines--The Whisper of Time

6/21/2015

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I'm continuing to feature the opening lines of my books today with the first eight lines of The Whisper of Time. This novella is the story of Gwynn Powell, a woman who buys a farm in the Green Mountains of Vermont and gets a lot more than she bargained for.

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It figured that I would get lost. Kyle was always telling me I had a terrible sense of direction. “Turn left,” I would say, and he would answer “Which left, Gwynn, yours or mine?” I used to think everything Kyle said was charming.
I’d since found out that Kyle, like GPS, had a limited range. Out here, in the middle of Vermont farm country, my GPS had stopped functioning. A signal kept insisting the phone was searching for a satellite, but it was becoming pretty clear that the satellite was nowhere to be found. It was hiding, perhaps, from the snippy woman’s voice that commanded me to turn left when I wanted to turn right.
Luckily, the real estate agent had given me directions. I’d scribbled them down on the back of an envelope and was now trying to decode them.

When fate offers Gwynn Powell a chance to start over, she jumps at the opportunity. Laid off and living with a husband whose gambling problem has eaten through a good part of their savings, Gwynn buys a farmhouse sight unseen, leaving both her marriage and her old home behind.

But fate has more in mind for Gwynn than just a new home. The farmhouse, tucked away in the Green Mountains of Vermont where even GPS can’t find it, is also a step back in time. And Slate Peck, the farm’s caretaker and part owner, is tied to Gwynn’s destiny in ways she never expected
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For more great #8 Sunday Snippets, please visit http://www.wewriwa.com/
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#8Sunday Opening Lines--The Tender Bonds

6/14/2015

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Opening lines, the very first part of a story, are crucial to setting the tone and pulling the reader into the story. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to share the first eight to ten sentences of my books with you.  I hope you enjoy them. I'm starting today with my new release. The Tender Bonds is a story about going back to reconcile the past in order to move on into the future. Patty's journey begins with the discovery of letters from a father she thought had abandoned her when she was a child.  



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My Aunt Ruby resurrected my father the month after she died. She didn’t do it on purpose. Given a choice, Ruby would not have given such a gift to a man she despised. And she must have despised him. How else could she have kept a secret that would have changed my life had I known? That did, in fact, end up changing my life? No, given a choice, it’s far more likely my aunt would have chosen my mother, who had died a few years earlier, for resurrection. Given a choice, I would have done the same

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#FridayFlashback--I Live in my Own Little World

6/12/2015

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Over the past few years, I've done quite a bit of guest blogging and I was a regular blogger at The Writer's Vineyard. While looking over some of these old blog posts the other day, I thought it might be fun to republish them here at the Garret and so I'm beginning a new feature called Friday Flashback.
This inaugural installment was first published at The Writer's Vineyard back in 2013.

Time Out

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I have a t-shirt the reads “I live in my own little world. It’s okay, they know me there.” It’s meant to be funny, but there’s a lot of truth in the statement.

I love spending time in the worlds I create. A lot of writers feel the same way. One of my favorite authors once thanked his wife and daughters for allowing him to spend so much time with his imaginary family while he was writing his novel.

Creating a fictional world is like living in an alternate universe. One of the things I’ve learned as a writer is that I need to honor the time spent in made up words with made up people. The more time I spend in the little world of my creation, the more real I  can make it for the reader.

This can be difficult in today’s face-paced on-line tuned-in world. It’s easy to get caught up in reading tweets and status updates and e-mails. These things are important to a working writer. Equally important is shutting the door and letting yourself dream.

I have to remind myself that staring out the window is part of the job. To imagine is what I do, and the better I imagine the more deeply human the characters that come from imagining. If I don’t honor time out for imagining, I’m left feeling anxious and bereft. I’m learning to listen to the signals. I’m learning to carve out time each day to spend in my own little world. After all, they know me there.


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In the Garret-- Polishing Georgette

6/10/2015

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Does the title sound funny? It did to me, because it brought up a picture of me with a cloth buffing a woman named Georgette, who, for some reason I will leave to the psychoanalysts to figure out, is dressed up like 3CPO in my imagination. To clarify, I'm polishing a book, a romantic comedy, called Georgette Alden Starts Over. It's the story of a woman named, as you might have guessed from the title, Georgette Alden, who has played the same character on the daytime drama Our Time Tomorrow for thirty years. When the character is killed off, Georgette doesn't know what to do with herself and she needs to, as you might have guessed from the title, restart and reshape her life. 
I'm having a lot of fun hanging out with my character. She's very dramatic, has a lot of energy, and is more self assured than I'll ever be. I'm hoping to find her a good home, and, someday, a place on my shelf of published books. Wish me luck. 
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    This writing journey, this life,  is a long road full of pitfalls and wrong turns. Also, incredible beauty, kindness and friendship with those I've met along the way.I'm so glad you're here to share the road..


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