MAEGAN BEAUMONT--GIVE HER SOME LOVE!

Hi folks,
I want to introduce you to a friend of mine--Maegan Beaumont--and ask you to check out her new blog and join if you like what you see.

You will find it at http://maeganbeaumont.blogspot.com/

Maegan has been a student of mine for a couple of years now. She's on her 7th or 8th class with me--not sure--time flies by! At this point, she administers the class for me, along with another terrific writer, Linda Thompson, although Linda has pretty well turned over the job to Maegan.. Maegan has a special place in my heart as she spent nine weeks in what the folks who take my class refer to as "inciting incident hell." Maegan holds the record by a long way!

Nine weeks! Out of a 12-week class. Here's what it amounts to. In my classes, students have to create a proper beginning for their novels before they're allowed to proceed. That means they have to write a scene with the inciting incident as that's where novels need to begin today. When the trouble begins. And, that's with the inciting incident. Each student is allowed to send in up to five pages until they escape inciting incident hell. Most spend several weeks there--that's the norm. It means that until they graduate what they've reduced to shorthand as "Inc Inc" they have to keep rewriting that first five pages until they've created a bona fide inciting incident. That means that Maegan spent over two months--nine weeks--writing five pages over and over. And over...

Most would have given up in half that time or less. Not Maegan! She's tough and she's persevering and  there's no quit in her.

Get this. When she began the first class with me, she had a finished novel, and was sending it out to agents and publishers. A 700-page novel...

(That novel is long gone... It's in a drawer somewhere, I understand...)

She confessed later that she hated me. I can't say I was surprised. If I'd been in her place I probably would have hated me as well. Probably more than she did.

But, she stuck it out! She's a fighter and she's one of the people I want in my foxhole.

Since that long-ago class, she's finished a publishable novel and has secured an agent and is on her way to what I feel are going to be huge successes in writing. She writes thrillers and has a protagonist that students in our classes say "out-Reacher Jack Reacher." Her Sabrina is a kick-ass bad ass who you wouldn't want to get on your bad side...

She's also the master of plotting. That's what she's basing her blog on--plotting. So, if you have questions or issues about your own novel's plot, run on over to Maegan's blog and ask her.

More, she's just an inspiration to me and everyone who knows her and has worked with her. Check her out and I think you'll agree.

Oh, yeah... Maegan began writing her second novel in our present class and breezed through the inciting incident. She's also breezing through this novel and it's a winner. As she's learned, the things you learn in creating a quality beginning carry through the entire of the novel. The rest of the novel becomes infinitely easier to write if you just take the things you've learned in that endeavor and apply them to the rest of it.

Blue skies,
Les

P.S. And, since you're already on the 'puter, once you check out Maegan's blog, consider heading over to the Spinetingler Magazine voting booth and vote for my own novel, THE BITCH, which is a nominee for Best Novel in the Legends category. You'll find it at http://www.spinetinglermag.com/2012/03/31/2012-spinetingler-award-voting/

THANKS!