Leslie Keller Books

If you have never written a full length manuscript or even begun to write one, you may not comprehend the enormity of the task.  When I first started my novel I had an idea that tugged at me write it down.  Putting the words to paper was the easy part.  At least it seems so now when I look back!  As I worked through the beginning I learned that an outline was a good idea.  That  job was fairly easy since I knew where I wanted my character to go.  Finally I finished the novel and then came the query process to find an agent.  Which, although incredibly time consuming, is not too daunting a task. What does take up my time these days?  Editing, editing and more editing.  I wish I could say that I wrote it perfectly the first time.  That would be a lie.  Despite having read it myself from cover to cover at least one hundred times, I still find issues every time I read it again.  This is d...

Up to this past week only a very few select people whom I know personally had been permitted to view my first novel.  It's really silly when I think about it because the whole point in writing it was for people to read it.  Why then have I guarded it like the crown jewels?  My guess would be because I'm paranoid that the person reading it won't like it.  What if she hates it?  What if she thinks it's horribly written and that becomes awkward?  It's much easier to accept rejection from agents or strangers than it is from someone you know.  I hope that agents won't hate my work but if they don't immediately call me and beg to represent me, I'm prepared for that.  If a good friend or family member reads what you've toiled over for months and hates it, how do you deal with that? First, for your sake (and mine) I hope you never get that kind of reaction for your work.  My feedback has been very positive and I thank you all for that (huge sigh ...

If you are a writer, and by that I am including anyone who writes anything from a personal journal to an article for the New York Times, what motivates you on a regular basis to allow the words and thoughts to escape from your mind and onto a page? In the years when I didn't blog or work on a novel, I used to keep a daily journal.  For me my motivation was strictly therapeutic.  It helped me purge the stress of my day and work out whatever was bothering me.  The more difficult my day, the more determined I was to write it down.  Of course, there were times when it also helped me remember how to be grateful for all of the blessings in my life.  Now when I know I should be writing or blogging or spending my time wisely, I am often tempted to read someone else's book or watch some "reality" television.  Sometimes I have more difficulty tuning out the rest of the world and focusing on the work.  So I am curious as to how others turn off the nois...

After all the hours I spent on the old website I changed the hosting company and had to start over.  Despite the fact that I consider myself to be a pretty technical person, creating a website seems to tap all of my energy.  I would much rather spend my time writing a manuscript than writing website content.  Why is it that as soon as I have to generate website content my mind goes totally and completely blank?  Talk about writer's block!  Actually I shouldn't complain because the web builder was easy and it didn't take me two weeks for the redesign only two days.  I can guarantee it will go through at least five more revisions (similar to writing a manuscript) before I'm satisfied. So here is the URL.  I hope you have a chance to view the website and I'm open to your feedback.  It's your first chance at a sneak peak of Menu for Murder. www.lesliekellerbooks.com

If you look up the word premise in my American Heritage Dictionary from 1982, you will find this as one of the definitions: A proposition upon which an argument is based or from which a conclusion is drawn. Wikipedia lists the definition as, "...a premise is an assumption that something is true." In writing my novel, I used premise to ask the question of "what".  What must my hero overcome to accomplish her goals?  What if a clumsy waitress is accused of murder and has to figure out whodunit?  What if I took some of my real life experiences in the restaurant industry and added a touch of "what if"?  Basically what is the novel about, what is the foundation on which the story is based? I like to use this thought process when I'm sitting in the airport waiting on my flight to depart.  What if the woman in the business suit is really a spy?  What if the man and woman traveling together are actually both married to someone else?  As you can probabl...

I would like to say that I never, ever get writer's block.  The truth is that I don't get it because unless I can really focus on the work, I simply refuse to start.  Is this a bad habit?  Absolutely!  There are probably hundreds of ways to get over writer's block.  There are classes offered on how to write your novel in thirty days and I've even seen one that suggested you could finish in a weekend.  I disagree with the "sit down and force the words onto the page" philosophy - to a degree.  I have found that if I schedule the time and make the commitment to work then the words do come.  Not all of them are the best but at least I am putting them on the page.  Later on I can go back and polish the prose but at the minimum getting something down is a good start. Unfortunately for me I am sometimes the most creative at midnight or very early in the morning while I'm still partially asleep.  I have written more of my novel by stayi...

There's a commercial which is popular now and my partner and I constantly imitate it.  The little girl describes how she wants "more".  If you like something you want more, more, more. I will admit to having very little patience and in today's fast paced lifestyle, I think that I am not alone.  Most of all I dislike being left on hold.  I don't just mean on hold on the phone but on hold for anything in my life. So you may ask, how do the two seemingly unrelated paragraphs fit together?  Lucky for you I will answer the question! I want more in my life - I want faster answers to my questions, I want my week to go by quicker so I can enjoy the weekend (of which I want more, more, more), I don't want to wait on hold while I'm trying to accomplish a task as I listen to a dozen different recorded messages asking me to press this number for that feature.  I want more chocolate and less calories, or at least less that show up on my bathroom scale.  I wan...

I'm excited to say that I've received my first positive response from an agent, asking for the full manuscript.  Fingers crossed that this will be the start down the road to publishing.  I'm also realistic in that this is just the first review and it doesn't necessarily mean I'll get Jayne's story published. The bad news is that I've been so busy since we moved that I've not sent the manuscript out to many agents.  I suppose that is also good news in that out of the few agents I've queried that I got a response. Leslie