Five Secrets Shared by Author Sara Beth Williams

Five Secrets From Sara Beth Wiliams

If you could describe me with one word, it would be CREATIVE. I love to be creative. I love to paint, draw, sing, build things, design/organize interior rooms and outdoor spaces. I’m not especially great at any of those, but I have always been especially great with words. So, I use words to create. 

Hi, Sara Beth, please tell us Five Secrets we may not know about A Worthy Heart or you, but will after today! 

1)  A Worthy Heart was not easy to write. Whereas my first book flowed like water from my fingers, this one challenged me on all levels. It took patience, practice, determination and the willingness to be flexible. I had to use every single piece of writing knowledge I’d picked up while working on my first novel and I am hoping it pays off. 

2) People who know me in real life know that I am an extrovert. That’s not all that surprising. What is surprising is my need for downtime by myself. Or what some people refer to as ambivert. The mesh of introvert and extrovert characteristics. I still love to be around people, but I also love being alone a lot more than I ever did when I was a kid.

3) A Worthy Heart features Serena Hayes, a biracial female lead character with an African American father and a Caucasian mother. That was not done on purpose to fulfill some call or quota for more diverse books. Serena’s background was developed purely based on my own experiences. My husband and his sister are both biracial, and yes, they’re both incredibly tan. (you’ll have to read the book to get that reference) It’s not fair really how well they tan. If only…

4) While I show Serena journeying out of an abusive relationship, I have never experienced what she goes through. However, I know friends, and family members, who have experienced abuse in relationships to varying degrees. The more entrenched I became in writing, and further developing Serena’s back story, the more I began to realize how many people close to me have suffered. I think the internet gets bogged down with horror stories, or depressing depictions of abuse, and yes they’re out there, but this book is for all of your success stories! 

5) Let’s do something else about me… I mentioned I love to create. Right out of high school, I discovered an obscure job posting – someone was hiring and offering to train balloon twisters. So, I learned how to balloon twist, and I absolutely love it. I entertained in restaurants for a couple of years, then after I went to college, and married, I ran my own business and entertained at birthday parties for another couple of years. It was a blast, and if I ever have a larger space, more time, and more money to put into running my own business, I’d pick it up again.

Blurb:

Joel Bennett has always known Serena Hayes as his sister’s gregarious best friend. In the three years since Lacey began college, Serena became a regular houseguest, but lately, she’s absent more than not. When Joel discovers she’s in an abusive relationship, protectiveness from within roars to life. 

With only a part-time job to support her and nowhere to go, Serena fears leaving her current relationship would jeopardize her chances of graduating college. After a brutal attack leaves her no choice, she courageously moves out.

On her journey toward regaining confidence, self-worth, and independence, Joel falls in beside her, encouraging her. The way he emulates Godly love and compassion draws her close—not just to him, but to the God who can satisfy her longing for love better than any man,

Attraction sizzles between them, but events from their pasts cast shadows of doubt. 

When the unthinkable happens, can Serena open her heart to a second chance at love, or is she destined to be alone?

Buy:
Amazon

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Also, When Hearts Collide is available now. Amazon

R&R: Raves and Rants from Multi-Published Author Amanda Cabot

I'm so pleased that Amanda Cabot is going to be a monthly contributor to this blog. I've always admired her mastery of grammar as I suffer from grammar-itis.

Thank goodness we have folks like Amanda around to help us.

Take it away, Amanda.

Welcome to R&R.  No, we’re not going to talk about rest and relaxation today.  R&R is shorthand for “One Writer’s Raves and Rants.”

When L.A. invited me to write a monthly column, she suggested I discuss grammar, perhaps because she knows that I’ve been known to throw books across the room – at least figuratively – when I encounter basic grammatical mistakes.  She might also have made the suggestion because she knew I once wrote a column whose original title was “In Defense of the Semicolon.”

 

Even though I suspect most of you are rolling your eyes, wondering if you’re going to be subjected to a discourse on that much maligned punctuation mark, I can assure you that there will be no semicolons … at least not today.  Furthermore, as the column’s title implies, there will be more than rants about grammatical mistakes here.  I’ll also talk about things that I see other authors doing well.  But today, we’re talking about grammar, and I’m going to rant about the misuse of the apostrophe.

I can’t imagine writing without apostrophes.  They’re used for contractions and to indicate a word’s possessive case, but – except in one extremely limited instance – they are NOT used to make a word plural.  (Did you notice how I used apostrophes in that sentence?  Those are the correct usages.)

Now, let’s start the rant.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen sentences like the following in published and supposedly edited books.  “They’re having dinner with the MacLean’s.”

What’s wrong with that?  If this were a book set in Scotland where the head of the clan is called “the MacLean,” the only problem might be that it’s missing a noun at the end of the sentence.  Perhaps the author meant to say that someone was having dinner with the head of the clan’s daughter.

Unfortunately, 99.9% of the time when I see a sentence like this, it’s a mistake.  A big one.  In all likelihood, the author’s intent was to say that someone was having dinner with several people whose last name was MacLean.  But our grammatically challenged author didn’t know that the correct way to form the plural of MacLean is very simple – MacLeans. 

No apostrophe! 

The same rules that apply to common nouns apply to proper ones like names.  The plural of chair is chairs, not chair’s.  The plural of horse is horses, not horse’s.  Why would anyone think that the plural of MacLean is MacLean’s or that the plural of Smith is Smith’s?  There’s only one reason I can imagine, and that’s that they didn’t know any better.

What if you were having dinner with several people whose last name is Simmons?  How would you form that plural?  No, it’s not Simmons’.  The answer is Simmonses.  If that seems awkward, I agree.  That’s why I changed one of my characters’ names from Simmons to something that did not end in an “s.”

We’re almost done.  Remember that I said there is one extremely limited instance when an apostrophe is used to create a plural.  Do you know what it is?  Lowercase letters, but only if the apostrophe is needed for easy comprehension. 

Consider the first letter of the alphabet.  I doubt anyone would misunderstand, “The child wrote a full line of As.”  But what about “a full line of as.”  Clearly, you need something to distinguish the word “as” from the plural of “a.”  That’s where our helpful apostrophe comes into play.  The same thing happens with the letters “i” and “u,” but those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

So, repeat after me.  Apostrophes are almost never used to make a word plural.

End of rant.

~Amanda

A lifetime of reading and writing, not to mention a host of teachers who believed that good grammar was one of the essentials of life, have given Amanda Cabot such firm opinions about the printed word that I asked her to share some with us in her Raves and Rants posts.  Although her working career was in Information Technology, Amanda achieved her dream of selling her first novel before her thirtieth birthday and is now the author of more than thirty novels as well as a number of books and articles for Information Technology professionals.  Her most recent release is A Borrowed Dream, the second of the Cimarron Creek trilogy.

Find all of Amanda's books, newsletter info and social media links here.