Author: stephaniehurt

Stephanie Hurt lives in Georgia with her husband Tommy and their son Hunter, along with two dogs, Daisy and Jake. When Stephanie is not lost in one of the worlds that she creates, she's an accountant and children's minister. She has been writing the stories that fill her mind since she was a teenager. The moment a story comes into her mind, she's mesmerized and soon she's diving into the story with a cup of hot green tea and a notebook. Before long, the story has bones and is ready for the laptop. She happily types away in the early morning and at night. You can always find her with a notebook full of stories that have yet to come to life. Follow her journey in each of her over 40 published works! Stephanie Payne Hurt loves to hear from fans and hopes that she's helped them go to another world for at least a while! Connect with Author: Twitter: https://twitter.com/StephanieHurt4 Email: https://stephaniehurt4@gmail.com Website: www.stephaniehurtauthor.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StephaniePayneHurt Sign up for my newsletter at www.stephaniehurtauthor.com to keep up with upcoming events and new releases.

Dreams of a young woman…

It’s Friday! Hope you have something great planned this weekend. As for me, we have VBS at Church next week, so I’ll be busy setting up this weekend, then Sunday we’re having a huge celebration to kick it off. I love the excitement that surrounds all the preparations, but I really should lay off the coffee when designing the decor for VBS.

Dreams… We all have them… I’m not talking about the dreams you have while asleep, I’m talking about the ones that push you forward and make you strive to do what you love. When I was a preteen, all I dreamed about was being a concert pianist and playing at concert halls all over the world. I spent at least two hours a day practicing. Also, I took piano and organ lessons for several years. I was lucky enough to be offered the chance at a full scholarship in music, but at the time, I was engaged and turned it down. (And I’m no longer with that man, so that was a bad move) But, everything has a reason. If I’d gone through with that, where would I be today? I often wonder that.

Another dream as a child was to write. Well… I’m living that dream now, although it took me a while to realize this dream. When I was a teenage girl, I’d lay across my bed and fill notebooks full of stories. Some were crazy and unbelievable, but others, well they had some merit. Ghost Lover, my first published novel, and my first bestseller was based on one of those stories penned by a dream filled teenager.

Some days I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not literally dreaming. The stories still fill my head and some days I sit in a daydream, living out the stories in my mind. But, isn’t that what a writer does. To me, the stories take on real life. The characters become important and like old friends. My daydreams then spill out of my fingers onto the pages of the books I’ve published. It’s such an exciting thing when you write. Your daydreams come to life.

As always, good writing and May God Bless You…

Highlander’s Son is coming in just days…

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When the plot changes…

Good morning! I hope everyone had a great 4th…

I’ve been working on the first book in my newest series and it’s going along well, but a change has come over the story. Of course, I blame the characters for the turn in the plot. I had the story figured out, then midway, a bump in the road turned into a whole new world.

But, do you go off down the rabbit’s hole or not? My advice is to always make sure the plot is going somewhere. What do I mean? Well, you have to double check where the plot is headed and can you make it work. Don’t go down the plot black hole. I’ve been there and it’s a painful way to go.

With the new plot line, I’ve checked all the different roads it could take and I’m satisfied with the direction it’s headed. I even outlined the new plot and it works. So, now I’m off to finish the story so I can share it with everyone.

As always, great writing and May God Bless You…

Just a little promotional reminder… Highlander’s Son is coming in a couple of days! highlanders son front cover

Social media promotions…

It’s Tuesday, which means we made it through Monday!

I want to talk with you about promotions. As authors, we constantly struggle with how to promote our books. Do we spend money? Do we wait and see how it goes? What do we do?

I’ve asked these questions many times. Advertising can be expensive, but there are less costly choices. You may be saying, but what do I do now? Promote, I say promote. I’ve been doing a little experiment with promotions. It’s amazing what I found out. Now, don’t get me wrong, paid advertising does have its great points and bad points. But, today I want to talk about promotions.

I went a whole week without promoting my book on social media. Let’s just say my sales went down. So, the next week I promoted to one site. Guess what? My sales started back up. I added several sites to the promotional train and boom, my sales went up.

Now, I’ve been doing steady promotions on several social media sites and what I’ve found is that every day I have sales, instead of gaps. Also, it’s helping to grow my platform, which is good. I’ve gained several newsletter subscribers too.

A great point of social media promotions is that they are free! What’s better than that and you still get results. Try it out. Do the test and let me know how it goes for you…

As always, good writing and May God Bless You…

P.S. Don’t forget to promote on your blog! Here’s mine:

myBook.to/Tuscany Take a trip to Tuscany and fall in love with Lana and Romeo!

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Creating a new series…

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The birth of a new series is always fun and exciting, but scary all at the same time. Will it hold together for the number of books planned? Will the characters stay interesting or just lose interest?

With Wishful Harbor, I’ve thought of this for a while, a long while. I’ve had this series in my mind, but it wasn’t until I sat down and started mapping it out that I realized that it could work. And when I say mapped it out, I truly mean I drew a map of the town of Wishful Harbor. I placed each place that would take part in the series and put it in the front of the series notebook for reference.

There will be five books, each one can stand alone or work together. I’ve written a synopsis for each book, even named the main characters.

But, will it hold the test of five books?

The way that I’ve assured this is that each book can stand alone. That’s how I know it will hold together. Each story has its own world held within the little town of Wishful Harbor. Although there will be repeat characters, and there will be repeat locations, the main story and characters will lead the story. That’s what makes it work in this instance.

Keep looking out for the cover reveal for the first book in the series, ‘Breakwater Lane’. I’ll be doing a huge reveal blog and have some exciting things to give away. There will be a more definite date soon, but let’s just say, it’s coming soon…

As always, good writing and May God Bless You…

Life…As a Writer

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Good morning! Hope everyone had a great, productive weekend. Let’s make the best of the week ahead.

Life as a writer is sometimes crazy. There are stories running through our heads at every turn. Some days it’s hard to do my day job because a character is knocking on my brain, wanting out. But, when I finally sit down to let the character out, they are stubbornly sitting there with arms crossed refusing to come out.

Then, when you get a couple of days to do some serious writing, everything else has to be done. I try to do social media posts and write on weekday mornings. Of course, I need to train myself to wait on the social media posts until after I’ve written my designated word count for the day. Social media is like a leech, it sucks the time out of the morning.

What’s fun is when you have a great story come into your mind, but you’re in the grocery store… LOL! That’s why I have notes on my phone. Usually, I’ll stop where I am and at least get the basics down, if not, I’ll forget them until a much later time.

Oh, and then you have a deadline, but also a list of things to be completed. That’s when you get creative with your time. Even eating breakfast while typing. Ok, so my laptop has crumbs in the keyboard, but it still works.

So, how do you juggle things?

As always, good writing and May God Bless You….

Editing is like Detoxing for writers!

Good morning! As you can see, I’m eating healthy. This week I’m doing a mild Grapefruit detox, trying to get the bad stuff out of my system so I can jumpstart this summer weight loss. So far it’s working, but we’ll see…

Editing… That word that writers have a love-hate relationship with. But if you think about it, Editing is like detoxing the work. When we write, we go straight to the point of the matter, but sometimes, we need to take a step back. We need to analyze what we’ve written.

Take for example: Words misused or misspelled. If left to sit in the gut of the manuscript, it will weigh your work down. Here’s a piece of advice from someone that sent out a piece of work that had some extra unwanted weight, for this example we’ll call it sludge. Don’t let your baby go out without making sure everything is clean and ready. I sent out a manuscript, to the world, and it wasn’t ready. Some of the comments were nice, but held a little advice, ‘go back and edit’. They all said it was a good story, but it needed to be looked at again to make it a great story. Needless to say, this was in the first year of my publishing career.

So… I went into detox mode. I sat down with my manuscript, printed in double space and a red pen. Yes, a horrid, red pen. A writer’s nightmare, but I took a deep breath and did it. I actually cringed with the first page and it got worse from there. I printed every comment I received and used them as a guideline. As I delved deeper into the story, the sludge was so heavy that I couldn’t believe I’d actually sent this out into the world.

Needless to say, I almost used up all the ink in the pen. Now, don’t get me wrong, the story itself stayed the same, but the wording was a little different. I gave it a lot of grapefruits, I mean editing and to my surprise, when I sent it back out as a revised edition, some of the same people reviewed it again. They loved it. I’d taken the heavy bags of sludge that kept my story from taking flight and it became a bestseller within a couple of weeks.

So, when you finished your masterpiece, go back through it again and again. Then send to your editor. If you can’t afford an editor, then you have to be the chief and pull on your gloves. Make the hard choices, delete the bad grammar, and make your work soar!

As always, good writing and May God Bless You…

Can’t sleep…then write!

Good Monday morning! It’s rainy and dreary here in Georgia, so I’m half asleep and needing a nap…

Have you ever had a night where no matter what you did, sleep just wouldn’t come? I had one of those last night. Finally, after tossing and turning for over an hour, I got up. I wasn’t in the mood to watch television, so I wrote. It’s amazing how well your mind works in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep. I finished a chapter and started another.

As I sat in the quiet of the night, not a sound from anywhere, I wrote. Even though sleep wouldn’t come into my brain, the story flowed like a river in the rain, freely… Finally, after I got that part of the story out of my head, I was able to close my laptop, walk to the bedroom and fall asleep. Needless to say, I feel sleep deprived this morning, but I was able to further my story…

As always, good writing and May God Bless you…

Beginning…???…Ending

Has this ever happened to you? You sit down with a story in mind and it’s a great story. You know it like you know yourself. Your fingers hover over the keyboard. The words flow easily from your fingertips. Everything is good with the world, then snap… something happens and you stop writing. The words are gone…

This happened to me recently. I was working on a manuscript that I’ve been trying to finish for some time and it was going along good, then …………. Yep, that’s how it went, nothing. It’s like I had the beginning and the ending, but the middle was a huge, gaping black hole. I couldn’t see it for nothing. The sad thing is, I had it completely outlined, but the middle part wouldn’t come together, at all.

So, you might ask, what did I do? Well, here’s what I did and if you’ve ever experienced this black hole, I hope it helps you too. Of course, this is not a tried and true method…

1: I stepped back. I looked at the screen before me and it was blank, just as the story had gone in my head. That’s when I took a deep breath, stood up and walked away from my laptop. I had to put distance between me and the story. That’s not easy to do when the characters are screaming loudly in your head.

2: After a cup of coffee to clear my head, I picked up the outline, knowing there had to be a way to get this story flowing again. I knew I had it right there in the outline, but it refused to come out. So, I read the outline, several times, but nothing.

3: In complete frustration, I put aside the notes, outline, and anything to do with the story. Now, don’t think the characters were quiet. No, they were ticked off at this point. They were screaming so loud, that I had to do something, so I started the next manuscript that was in line on my schedule. It helped quiet them somewhat, but they were still pulling at me.

4: As I worked on the other manuscript, pieces of the other story filled my head. You as writers know all too well the problems that can cause. I pulled out my notebook for the other story and as things came filtering through, I wrote them down. But, I didn’t work on it, I just jotted down notes. Pretty soon I had a couple of pages of notes.

5: Then, one morning as I sipped my coffee, scanning through my emails, social media, and work in progress, getting ready to start my writing session, it came flowing in. At first, I was afraid to give it a chance. I was afraid that if I got started again and it quit, I’d end up chucking it altogether. But, that’s when it hit me, write the ending. So, that’s what I did. I wrote the ending that I knew so well in my head. The moment I hit the end, I knew the middle as though it had been lurking there the whole time, it just needed the guts to move forward. Once I knew where the story was headed, the middle came in so fast that my fingers could hardly keep up.

So, sometimes you have to iron out the ending to get to the guts of the story. That’s what happened with ‘Highlanders Son’. I had to know that my characters would be alright and that the story would hold up. Once I finished the first draft, I could breathe again. It was done.

I’ve written things in the wrong order before, but never because it was the only way to finish the story. Most of the time I do it because the ending comes to me louder than the beginning, but it’s always there. With Highlander’s Son, it wasn’t there anymore. I had to get it back straight in my mind. The funny thing was, once it was completed, I looked at my outline and it was just as I’d envisioned it, to begin with. With a smile, I printed it, handed it to my editor and knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt that if that happened again, I’d immediately go to step five above and finish the story…

As always, good writing and May God Bless You…

“Highlander’s Son” is coming soon…

highlanders son front cover

Coffee…Writing…More Coffee

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Good morning! Are any of you having a hard time getting awake this morning? I’m struggling after the three day weekend. It was a great holiday, but my body and mind seem to still be on vacation.

Oh well, this will be a pot of coffee morning…. I’m working on getting my word count in this morning. I finished Highlander’s Son last week and hope to finish Lacey’s Choice this week. Both of these books have been in the works for a couple of months, so I’m trying my best to get caught back up. Tax season really slammed me this year and it affected my writing like no other year has.

It doesn’t help that my two new series ‘Sky Ridge’ and ‘Wishful Harbor’ are knocking on my mind, wanting to stay inside. Every time I push them back for a day or so, they jump back in with full force and win. But this week, I plan to finish a couple of in-process manuscripts before I go back to the newest ones. Let’s just hope I do.

So, what are you working on this week?

As always, good writing and May God Bless You…

Proud mama!

It’s Graduation Day! As I sit here, sipping my coffee, I can’t believe that I have a son ready to graduate from high school. Where have the years gone? The memories flood in and the tears slowly roll down my cheek, but I’m so happy for him. He’s about to embark on a whole new chapter in his life. It’s scary for all of us, but I know he’s got what it takes to be all he wants to be.

So, to all of those graduating today, good luck and May God Bless all of your endeavors!

As always, good writing and May God Bless You…