Lori Fetters Lopez is Lost in the Writing

Current Works

What am I currently working on? Well, glad you asked. I am looking for the perfect agent/publisher combination. In my idealistic world, that person must and will love my book as much as I do and be enthusiastic in seeing them in print and in the hands of unsuspecting souls.

My romantic suspense, working title Death of a Political Nobody, is in search of a home and an agent/publisher.

Jon Murray is hoping to find his name on the presidential ticket in the fall, but his estranged wife shows at a political function and threatens to derail his childhood dream. Sabine is a Marine first. She works as a linguistics specialist, but what she does for our government has little to do with language and far more to do with national security. The problem is, someone wants her dead and Jon finds himself included in the contract because of his association to Sabine, or that’s how she presents the situation when she asks for his help.

Nothing is ever simple where Sabine is concerned, not for Jon. He fell in love with her when she moved in next door, Jon was eleven. Now they’re closing in on fifty, but the marriage of ten years was never consummated and the last time he saw her, was after the ‘I do’s.’ The more she draws him in the harder he fights his reemerging love and the farther his dream drifts away.

Okay, so that’s the gist of the story, at least as a romance, but Death of a Political Nobody is more than a romance. Or I’ve been told the story has too much plot for a romance, which I can’t see as much I see that it has too much romance for a straight up suspense. There’s intrigue, drama, family lies and deceit, as well some sexual tension. There’s violence and sex, not at the same time, and twists that you won’t see coming until you roll over in the morning into a face full of cat fur.

You’re going to want to read this because Jon’s basically a nice guy, who married his high school sweetheart and then had his heart ripped out when she left. Not literally, but still. He has resentment. And lust. When we first meet Jon he’s firm in what he wants, but by the end of the book, he wants something entirely different. Come, see how he changes and why.

Have I talked it up enough yet? No, well, I can’t give the whole story away.

Come back next week when I’ll explore some of Jon’s characteristics you won’t learn in the novel. What is the significance of the ball cap? Why is there family strife between Jon and his brother? Do these two items have anything to do with the other?

Yeah, stuff like that.

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Author: Lori Lopez »
May 10, 2012,
Categories: Writings

Today’s Word

ALTRUISTIC : unselfishly concerned for or devoted to the welfare of others

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Author: Lori Lopez »
May 1, 2012,
Categories: Writings

Today’s Word

EXTRANEOUS: Unneeded; irrevelant

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Author: Lori Lopez »
April 24, 2012,
Categories: Writings

Write Like Mad

The smell of burnt coffee drifted from the food court a few hundred feet away from where I was perched. It melded with a popcorn smell and then faded behind the sudden overwhelming scent of White Diamonds. Shifting my weight I followed the perfume lady and her big red hat.

“Bet she’s a secretary,” Jeremy said.

“Associate producer of a TV show,” I said.

A man wearing a pinstriped suit stopped at the watch kiosk beside where Jeremy and I sat crossed legged on a bench. The man didn’t spare us so much as a glance as he ordered the hapless teenager working the kiosk to replace the battery on his expensive watch.

I couldn’t help, but laugh. “Like a mall in cow country, would carry a watch of that caliber.”

Jeremy grunted, “Batteries are batteries.”

“Yeah, but if you were a lawyer type who could afford a watch like that. Would you trust a kid with five face studs working at a place blaring out christian screamo music?”

The above is a writing exercise I did today during the Mad Anthony Writer’s Conference. Our only rules were five minutes writing and the scene is a mall.

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Author: Lori Lopez »
April 14, 2012,
Categories: Writings

Babeling Babel

Streams of Babel by Carol Plum-Ucci takes place in several locations and has about ten POV’s. (Point Of View) It’s told in first person. Each chapter begins with the name of the character, their location, the date and the time. The main plot is a terrorist group is planning an attack on US soil. A computer spy in Pakistan has been tracking the digital conversations of two of the groups members. When two woman die in a small New Jersey town, three hours drive from New York City, USIC believes they’ve found colony 1. This is where the terrorist plan their first attack, infusing a section of the town’s water system with an unknown agent.

I found the book entertaining and kept me listening. It’s genre is YA, so that should tell you something, about me anyway. As for the writing, I’m not a fan of putting dates and such at the beginning of chapters; however, in this case I can’t see another way the author could have kept the reader straight on who was talking. Telling the story from about ten (5) POV’s made itdifficult at times to follow. A classic example why it’s usually suggested to keep the character number to a minimum. It wasn’t that there were too many characters, just that so many had a chapter in their POV.

The book read like a journal. It’s this date, time, place, and Ms. Smith is talking. Again, not my preference, but the author made it work. I always knew where and when we were. I wasn’t always privy as to the why. After finishing the book, I’m still left wondering why we spent so much time in character one’s head at the beginning of the book. She did not, in truth, end up being the main character though I suspect, the author initially thought she would be. Like this summary, I found the story to be all over the board, in that each POV had their own agenda on looking at what was happening. The story itself followed a time line, as the POV’s changed, the new POV picked up minutes after the last. I think the book would have read better if the author had picked one or three characters and stuck with them.

I will add that each character was their own. The voices were individual and their motivations came through clearly. The author did a nice job of developing the characters. You want to root for them all.

Was the book a good read? Yes. Would it appeal to others? I’m not sure that others would have kept going as the characters multiplied and changed. Then again, it was engaging and the story intriquing so, maybe.