A big welcome to Tali Spencer , who is visiting us today at Love Bytes !

She is talking about prompts offering an excerpt of her new * FREE * story and also kindly offers a giveaway 🙂

 

Prompts and Circumstances – Tali Spencer

Hi everyone! I’m just here today to talk a little bit about how prompts can lead to some wonderful books. There’s also a giveaway just for the heck of it, just check the bottom of the post. Thank you to Love Bytes Reviews for giving me a chance to share!

 

Remember prompts? Maybe you, like me, associate prompts with writing assignments in school. You know “Write a page about your summer vacation”, or maybe “describe your dream house in two paragraphs.” Lately, though, some of my favorite stories have come about because the author used a writing prompt. Two of my top fantasy reads from last year were inspired by prompts: Kaje Harper’s Nor Iron Bars a Cage and Amy Rae Durreson’s The Lodestar of Ys.

A prompt is a topic, image, or other sprig of inspiration from which a writer spins off a story. Almost anything can be a prompt: a photograph, a single word or short phrase, a bit of dialogue or line from a song lyric, even a person or building. The idea is to give the writer something to build the story around, kind of like the seed that starts a pearl.

I like that image: the seed that starts the pearl. To me, writing a story is a lot like making a pearl. The writer starts with something quite rough but adds layer after layer until the story is perfect, round, and smooth.

Sometimes writers stick close to the original prompt, but often they take it off in their own direction. A prompt is just the starting point, the seed.

There are lots of ways to use prompts:

• Jump start the writing when fighting writer’s block. Whether fiction, an essay, or something for the blog, a prompt can often come to the rescue.
• For fun. I take part in the Wednesday Briefs weekly blog hop just for fun. Every week we’re given prompts and I will choose one run with it. Sometimes these prompts lead to a good story, which I post on my blog so I can share the fun with readers.
• Writers and readers often use prompts as a form of communal activity. One example is this year’s Goodreads M/M Romance group’s Love’s Landscapes event. Readers (and often other writers) provide picture and word prompts and writers turn the prompts into free stories for everyone to enjoy and read.
• Sometimes a writer isn’t suffering from writer’s block, but is facing other problems that make writing problematic. When I was diagnosed with a serious illness and ended up having surgery early this year, I found it too much to deal with my current WIPs. They were too important and my energy was limited. Instead, I spun out a few prompt-inspired stories. Prompts are great for when writing should be a lifeline and not yet another burden when a person already has too many of those. I didn’t even have to think up the ideas. I just ran with them.

So here’s how two prompts played out for me as a writer:

I wrote my sword and sorcery fantasy romp, Thick as Thieves, entirely for fun when I ran with the prompt: unicorn, mandolin, some kind of plant. If you read the book, the prompt is still there in the first chapter, as are many of the other prompts I used during the ten weeks the story blossomed on my blog as part of the Wednesday Briefs. I was worried a book born that way wouldn’t appeal to many, but readers embraced Vorgell and Madd.

My first contemporary story, The Last Cannoli, was born from a prompt for the Goodreads M/M Romance group’s Love’s Landscapes event. I was dealing with serious medical issues and that prompt just looked like so much sweetness and light! So I claimed it and wrote a story about a man in a career crisis, an Italian-American family, cannolis and love. It was just the right medicine. I hope readers enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. It will be available as a free read (in the group or you can find it through links on my blog once it appears) sometime in June.

So enjoy those prompts. Tape that photo to your computer. Type out that lyric you love. Set your imagination free, unleash your inner writer, and follow that muse!

And on that note, here are some samples of The Last Cannoli.

BLURB

After marketing ace Sean Whelan is kicked to the curb by his business partner, he calls quits on the rat race and takes a part-time job at Dippolito’s Italian Bakery. The job is everything he loves—busy, rewarding, and honest—especially the boss, Joe Dippolito, whose hard-working family made its reputation with the town’s most delicious cannoli. Sean knows he can use his serious marketing skills and connections to help the bakery make a bigger name for itself, but Joe wants nothing of it. His bakery already has all the business it can handle.

A night of passion during a snow storm convinces Sean that Joey Dippolito is a man he can love for the rest of his life. But Sean puts them on a collision course when he signs Dippolito’s up for the glitzy and prestigious Philly Cannoli Contest against an archrival from the bakery’s hidden past. Can Sean pull out a victory when the Dippolito family declares a cannoli war?

 

EXCERPT

Joe heaved one of the plastic bins onto the table. “Put on fresh gloves. You’re about to experience one of your wet dreams.”

Really? Sean quirked a smile. He’d had a particularly interesting one a couple nights ago. His smile dimmed only a little when Joe led him over to the big mixer where he made batches of cannoli cream. Dipping in the big scoop, he filled a large pastry bag fitted with a tip and shoved it into Sean’s hands. He then filled another for himself.

“We’re making cannoli. You’ve seen me do it. Hell, every time I turn around, I can tell you’re getting a hard on from watching. So now put that knowledge to work. Just think of it as putting icing in a hole.” Lifting a shell from the bin, he demonstrated the technique. “Make sure you fill the center. Don’t chintz, because customers hate that. No cream in the center is the mark of a crappy cannoli. I’ll hear about it. And put a little flair in the finish. Make the ends pretty.”

By his fourth or fifth cannoli, Sean had the hang of it. By his second dozen, his right hand was ready to fall off. Squeezing dainty bags of decorating icing was ten times easier than squeezing hefty bags of thick creamy cannoli filling. But Joe was unflagging— not to mention twice as fast— so Sean kept pushing the cream, bag upon different flavored bag, into both sizes of shells. There were large cannoli and small cannoli and by the end of the hour he was sick of filling them both. At last there was only the last bin of shells and Joe told him to stop while there were still a dozen or so left.

“We made enough for the orders. I think you deserve a break.” Joe snapped off his gloves.

Sean lifted one of the remaining large shells, and, while Joe looked on, filled it. He extended it to his boss. “I want you to be my first.” It wasn’t completely a tease. No one had yet test-tasted one of his creations. “I filled it special just for you.”

Joe shook his head and chuckled. He understood what Sean was doing, of course. With just the hint of a swagger and a look that said “fuck you, I got this”, he reached over and picked up the cannoli. Sean held his breath as Joe lifted the cannoli to his open mouth and his tongue emerged, strong and pink, to lick suggestively at the creamy tip before he leaned back and enveloped the end with his smiling lips. He looked like a porn star showing off a parlor trick— bold nose and head of wavy hair, dark eyes half closed, with his beautiful lips wrapped around the thick golden cannoli tube. Watching Joe’s jaw and lips move, cheeks hollowing while he thoroughly licked and sucked out the creamy filling, brought a groan to Sean’s throat and a boner to his pants. Damn! What he wouldn’t give for his cock to be that cannoli. Joe’s demonstration was so unbelievably hot it was even worth the little smirk of satisfaction when he finally finished and showed off the hollowed tube.

“You did good, Sean. You filled the creamy center. Made me work for it.”

“That was… how did you do that?”

“It’s a skill Italian men are born with. Women, too. You get a bunch of us around a table with a plate of cannoli and anything can happen.” He turned his head. “I think I hear Freddie with the truck.”

 

In conjunction with this post I’m giving away a copy of any one of my books. Choice of paperback or ebook. Open to worldwide entries.

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