Author: Sarra Cannon

Every year, the Romance Writers of America give two sets of prestigious awards at the national conference. One is the RITA, which is for published authors and, in that way, somewhat more prestigious and glamorous. The other, is the Golden Heart. The Golden Heart is an award given to the best manuscripts written by unpublished authors. There are 10 different categories that cover everything from inspirational to historical. I have looked through the RWA website for years wishing I could join, and everytime I was always drawn to reading about the Golden Heart and thinking I would love to enter…

I am very excited to report that Friday night / early Saturday morning around 1:10 AM, I finished the first draft of my very first full-length novel! Over the past two years, I have started many projects, but I have never actually seen a full novel from start to finish. Last year’s NANO WRIMO was close. I wrote 50,000 words of a novel I was calling “Into Darkness”, but when I hit my word count goal, I still didn’t have a complete ending to the story. Plus, for a horror novel, I really needed more like 65k or more words…

At this point, I am less than 7,000 words away from finishing my manuscript for Silhouette Desire! That basically means one good day of writing (well, one best day) or at the most, two days. By tomorrow afternoon, I should be revising and reading through the finished manuscript. I can hardly believe it! Even though I technically finished a version of this a few months ago, it needed some serious help. After I sort of reworked the plot, the story changed significantly and even though I was able to use a lot of what was already written, I still had…

Every time one of our most favorite reality shows begins, my sister and I choose the person or team we think will win the whole thing. We don’t even wait for the first episode to air, we simply go online and look at the character’s videos or biographies, then choose the person we think most likely to win. We always say we’re going to put money on it, but so far that really hasn’t been the focus. I think it’s more about the bragging rights than anything else. Here are the shows we are watching and choosing from this Fall:…

I was so sad to hear that Patrick Swayze finally succumbed to his pancreatic cancer. For a while there, he was the star of two of my favorite movies – “Dirty Dancing” and “Ghost”. I know he starred in a lot more movies than just those two, but in my heart, he will always be remembered for those specific two. Especially Dirty Dancing. He made that movie what it was. Something else that always touched me about Patrick Swayze was the fact that he was one of the few Hollywood stars who actually seemed to be in love with his…

On my writer’s loop this morning, I got a link to this article, discussing a man named Robert M. Fletcher who, with his girlfriend and two other accomplices, managed to scam would-be writers out of half a million dollars a year for four years. Reading through it, I started to think, who would fall for that? We’re all taught that there are vanity publishers out there who will ask for money in order to publish your novel. But as I read further, I saw that they had a link to one of his “fake” websites. It looks like a real,…