Positive feedback...

I'm still recovering from working on campus for Alumni Weekend.  Being a Board member, I'm there all weekend and now have to tie up the loose ends of projects that we worked this year...then SUMMER vaction or as the Beach Boys say... fun all summer long!  

I met a couple of people who had read my new book, She's Not You, and the feedback was wonderful.  One man said that he had really enjoyed it and then asked a very poignent question... "How did you ever write that scene when she learns that her parents were killed?"  Here's a bit of the scene that he was speaking of...

"Jamie pulled back the curtain above her desk. She had been so intent in finding her saint that she hadn’t noticed that it had been snowing. The front lantern covered in Christmas lights showed through the snow that had turned to ‘snice’ as her parents called it.

“Looks nasty out there. Please be careful,” she said as her Mom hugged her.

“We’ll be home before you know it, honey.” And then they were gone.

...

“What? Tell me, what happened?” Jamie’s heart pounded. The ice? “Where’s Mom and Dad?”

Pita broke down sobbing, her face in her hands.

Jamie ran past Pita yelling, “Mom, Dad?” She turned at the top of the stairs, “No… no…. nooooooo.”

Pita held out her arms to her.

She didn’t want Pita’s arms; she wanted her parents. She bolted down the stairs yelling, “Mom? Dad? Please, please answer.”

She halted on the landing. Two policemen stood in the downstairs doorway, framed by the Christmas lights on the porch. Jamie’s hands shook. “No… please tell me they’re okay.”

Pita touched her shoulders. When she turned, Pita shook her head, tears streaming down her lined face.

“Take me to them, please Pita. I have to be with them,” she begged.

Jamie tore away from Pita, stumbled down the remaining stairs, and grabbed her heavy red plaid jacket hanging alone near the door. “Please take me,” she asked the policemen. She knew him. Joe, a friend of her father’s.

“It was icy, Jamie,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry, honey.”

“No… I won’t listen to this,” she cried, searching for the armholes in her jacket.

“A car hit them head on. There was nothing they could do. Your father still held your mother’s hand,” the other policeman added.

“No… no… stop saying it, it’s not true. I won’t listen,” Jamie sobbed, covering her ears. “It’s not them. You’ve made a mistake. They’re coming back to help me with my paper.” Then, as the realization of what had happened hit her, she slid to the floor, filling the house with a terrifying primal scream. Pita grabbed her up and held her close."  

There's more to the scene... the priest appears and then...

"That day had changed Jamie forever. She had lost her parents, her God and her protection. At sixteen years old, she was alone, an orphan. She felt her heart become hard as a rock as the molten rage that coursed through her cooled and solidified."

He said that it had touched him so much that he had actually cried reading it because it made him think of his son's death.  I told him that I had lost my Dad at a young age and as I wrote that scene, I had gone back in time and felt the pain of loss, the denial that he was gone, the betrayal of my God taking him from me... 

What this encounter showed me is that what my mentors had said through the years... you have to connect with your readers... is absolutely true. 

Well, the time is short and I have more writing to do, but I wanted to pass on a real example of what "touching your reader" means.  Dig deep and make those scenes real and connect to your readers.

Till,

Judi