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How do you write an angry character? #AmWriting #SciFi #MFRWhooksWelcome to this week’s Book Hooks, a snippet or intro to a book to whet the appetite and invite you to check out more.
Anyone could show anger when they are wronged. If someone steals from you, or cheats you, you’ll be furious, and rightfully so. But what if you have a character whose nature seems to exhibit more anger than usual? This is often true of a villain, but anger can be a problem for heroes and heroines as well.

Writing an angry character

Anger often comes from environment. Hunger, abuse, neglect, poverty, unjust treatment, lack of freedom — all these can lead to anger. If you’re writing an angry character, here are some things to consider for their back-story.

How do you write an angry character? Here are some insights. #AmWriting Click To Tweet

The Passively Angry character

While most of the time, we know quite well when we’re angry, that is not always the case. An angry character might not express anger out of fear of reprisal, or to keep from hurting someone. But they might lash out in passive ways. Here are several.

  • Apathy
  • Sarcasm
  • Meanness
  • Alienating family
  • Alienating friends
  • Self-defeating behaviors
  • Being awkward or rude in social situations
  • Failing to perform in a professional situation

Often, people experiencing passive anger do not realize it (at least at first). Others might think the character is intentionally sabotaging himself. He may not able to explain his actions. He is “out of sorts” and grumpy.

In one of my earlier books, Pietas fits this bill perfectly, and he knows it. Here’s a quote from Alitus. “What was that word you used last time? Oh yes, ‘fractious.’ What an entertaining word. ‘Likely to be troublesome.’ That was my favorite definition. It fits me, don’t you think? ‘Pietas tends to be fractious.’ A true statement. So, sister, you know I become ‘fractious’ when I’m annoyed. And you have annoyed me greatly today.”

The Aggressively Angry character

When a character expresses anger aggressively, he is fully aware of what he’s feeling. There’s no wavering. That doesn’t mean they know the root cause of their fury. If an angry character isn’t aware of why he’s so angry, he might display the following:

  • Attacking a scapegoat to deflect anger
  • Redirecting violence toward others
  • Retaliatory actions, hitting back
  • Physical damage to persons or property
  • Physical damage to himself

An aggressively angry character has not learned how to recognize his triggers. He does not manage the symptoms of anger. What are those? That’s next.

Physical Symptoms of an Angry character

If you have an angry character who has dealt with anger long-term, there are physical effects. While more than anger can cause the following symptoms, they are an indicator that something is wrong on a deeper level, beyond the physical.

  • Anxiety
  • Feeling of dread
  • Lethargy
  • Muscle tension
  • Headaches
  • Muscle pain
  • Memory impairment
  • Loss of concentration
  • Routine tasks become difficult
  • Rapid breathing
  • Nausea
  • Sleep deprivation

To show your angry character struggling with life, add some of these symptoms in what may seem an unrelated area. Readers will pick up on these clues. This is one way to show, not tell. That being said, it’s not wrong to name the emotion, because your character may recognize it, or recognize what he thinks he’s feeling.

However, he might not realize that the emotion he’s feeling comes from a deep-seated anger. And if he does, he might think it’s with someone other than the true person who’s angered him. The emotion might be clear and distinct, but its root is not.

Characters are people. When written true to life, they can have hidden emotions. Here's how to reveal an angry character. #Book Click To Tweet

Excerpt: Angry Character

In this scene from Bringer of Chaos: Forged in Fire, the immortal Pietas is about to face his father. Though hardly a child (he’s 1900 years old), that same feeling he’d experienced since youth dogs his steps. Pietas has ducked under a small waterfall to clean up How do you write an angry character? #AmWriting #SciFi #MFRWhooksbefore joining others. His human friend, Six, joins him.

Six waded into the pond, stuck a hand under the falls, screwed up his face, and stepped beneath the water. He sprang back out and danced around, shivering and swearing.

Pietas bit his lower lip to keep from laughing out loud. “That might have been the shortest shower in the history of mankind.”

“That’s freezing! How can you stand there with liquid ice pouring over you?”

“Discipline.”

“Yeah?” Six sloshed through the pool. “I figured out something. You Ultras are supposed to be genetically enhanced. You ask me, they packed more strength genes into you by yanking out the genes for hot, cold, and sleep.” He pulled off his shirt and wrung it out. Even in the lessening light, the teal dragon tattoo across his back showed. He put the shirt back on, muttering about ice water the entire time.

Pietas stayed under the numbing flow, wishing it had the power to numb his dread. He faced every fear, ignored every pain, refused to permit regret any place in his life. But dread? Dread dogged his steps. No matter how hard he fought, dread seeped into his life, insinuated itself under his skin, and muddied his decisions.

Dread soiled him.


How have you used anger in a character’s arc? Leave a comment below. Be sure to click other links in the hop!


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Popular PNR Themes (paranormal romance) #PNR #paranormal #romance

Popular PNR Themes (paranormal romance) #PNR #paranormal #romanceBefore we discuss popular PNR themes, let’s look at what PNR is. It’s also known as paranormal romance, which is a mix of romance and speculative fiction. It involves elements beyond scientific explanation and focuses on romantic love. On the MFRW (Marketing for Romance Writers) Yahoo Group and our Facebook page, this genre is discussed often. Here’s a look at categories and popular PNR themes.

Categories in PNR

Paranormal romance encompasses themes from fantasy, science fiction, horror, and speculative fiction subgenres such as urban fantasy, time travel, ghosts, witches, demons, vampires, were-creatures, and fairies (or fae). Although some say vampire romance is on its way out, the fascination for this subgenre is holding strong.

Popular PNR themes

In romance, as in filmmaking, a broad trend seems to be extensions of pre-existing properties. In other words, books that revolve around a universe peopled with specific characters or locations. If you read series romance or you like trilogies and boxed sets, this is likely your favorite. Sequels and prequels are the order of the day. If one story set in a specific world is popular, chances are another one will be too. When an audience already knows the “rules” of the universe (i.e., whether vampires sparkle), they are set for the next story to unfold.

Many popular PNR themes offer glimpses of paranoia, fantasies of power, and stories based in parody or satire. The themes involve scenarios that pit “us against them” and showcase heroes/heroines who protect the family, tribe, or world from outside threats. There are also “love overcomes” themes in which the love between two people (romantic love and/or love of a sister for sister, mother for child, etc.) drives the story. Another popular type shows how banding together wins the day by pitting society or a tribe or family against an individual threat such as a monster or demon. Sometimes, these types of stories involve quests to obtain an item of importance or to complete a ritual.

The forbidden fruit in PNR

One of the most enticing aspects of the paranormal romance realm is the forbidden. Falling in love with a blood-sucking vampire or a soul-sucking demon? Crazy! Or helping an otherworldly being defend those in this world? Scary! But that’s part of the charm.

Not so popular PNR themes

Overemphasis on supernatural aspects
If the character’s abilities or supernatural gifts are the most important part of the story instead of the plot, there is little to hold the interest of the reader.

Unwarranted gore
Why must a story open with a scene of horrific death or torture? There are surely better ways to establish the evil and/or dangerous aspects of a monster or villain.

Saving the World – Again
If every story puts saving the world (or tribe or family, etc.) at stake, then the stake becomes commonplace. Ho hum, world saved. Check.

Mary Sues
The perfect character. Mary Sues have no faults, but many talents. They are usually princesses, princes, or the children of powerful beings who hold such titles.

That’s quite a list. What did I leave out? What genre bending books have you read (or written)? What are you currently reading? And what are your least liked aspects in a paranormal romance? Please share it in the comments. Like this post? You’re welcome to share it on social media.

5 Exercises and 5 Excuses for Writers #writerslife #MFRWauthor

5 Exercises and 5 Excuses for Writers #writerslife #MFRWauthorYou might not be aware, but writing can be hazardous to your health. For example, carpal tunnel syndrome affects millions and is a serious threat to many writers. I had surgery (called a carpal tunnel release) on each hand, one after the other, many years ago. I’m completely recovered but it was a long haul. Here are some exercises that helped me recover.

These five exercises are ones my physical therapist taught me. After those, I’ll pass on five excuses for the author who likes less of a challenge. Any writer can do these hand exercises. They are pleasant, and simple. Performing warm up exercises for your hands can help prevent carpal tunnel syndrome and other maladies.

I am not a doctor or a trained physical therapist, but I am a writer who has dealt with carpal tunnel and lived with the pain it causes. These are suggestions based on what I do myself and what my therapist gave me to do. As with any exercise program, check with a medical professional before beginning, or if you have concerns. I personally do all the exercises below and they work for me. I hope they’ll help you.

Exercises for Writers

Exercise 1

Spread your fingers as wide as possible, hold the stretch to a count of five. Make a tight fist and hold that to a count of five. Repeat. Do this at least twice per hand before beginning your day.

Exercise 2

With right hand open, place fingers in the palm of your left hand. Press with the right while resisting with the left. You might feel this all the way to your elbows. That’s okay. It means there’s a good stretch. Hold for a count of five. Reverse hands and repeat. Do this twice per hand. I credit my fast recovery from surgery with this kind of therapy.

Exercise 3

Holding your hand straight up, keep fingers together and bring your thumb across your palm. Try to touch the base of your little finger. Stretch for it. If this is difficult it likely means your hand is tight. Repeat five times. You can do both hands at once.

Exerci5 Exercises and 5 Excuses for Writers #writerslife #MFRWauthorse 4

Use a small stress ball. Here’s one available on Amazon that is safe, non-sticky, and is said to last a lifetime. This one claims to be safe around children, but use your own judment.  http://amzn.to/2tEhEOi Place the ball on a firm surface and place the palm of your hand atop it. Keeping your fingers straight, roll the ball beneath your hand. Stress balls often come with their own suggested exercises.

Exercise 5

If you have twin sinks this is easy. If you don’t, try two deep bowls. Fill one with hot water. Make it cool enough to hold your hand in comfortably, but still be considered hot. Fill the other side with cold water. You can float a few ice cubes in it. Plunge your hands in the hot water and hold for 30 seconds. Then put them right into the cold water for 60 seconds. Repeat five times. This makes my hands feel wonderful! I hope you enjoy it too.

Excuses for Writers

We all have days where we just can’t seem to cope. Days when good enough is good enough. For those days, try these excuses. Because we’re writers, these are writing-related.

Excuse 1

You’ve worked hard on marketing and writing so take a break. Play Spider Solitaire, Mahjongg, a word search puzzle, or other game. Alternate option: read.

Excuse 2

The submission process is stressful, so write in a pre-formatted document. To create, open a blank document and save it as Chapter One. Double-check the formatting. Set a new format to indent automatically five spaces when starting a new paragraph, format it for double lines and name it Editing.

Excuse 3

You should be well hydrated before beginning any exercise. Fill your coffee cup, lift, sip, and put it back down. Repeat with the other hand. Do this until the cup is empty. Refill so you can repeat again later if needed.

Excuse 4

You should keep to your schedule as much as possible, so check your email and calendar for any upcoming events. Because these tasks fall under marketing, this is an acceptable writing activity.

Excuse 5

Writers should use good equipment, including things used for exercise. Double-check the exercise equipment you have on hand to be sure it’s high quality. You might try comparison shopping online. While you’re ordering new items, stock up on coffee, creamer, and sugar. This might be a good time to consider the meal plan for the week.


There you have it. Five exercises and five excuses. Which you use depends on you. Have you faced similar issues with pain when writing? How did you deal with it? Feel free to leave a comment.

What is a Hashtag? #writerslife #MFRWauthor @kayelleallenWhat is a hashtag? I’ll share a simple definition in a moment, but to understand you need to know what they were created to accomplish. Do you know what the abbreviation “etc.” means? It’s the word et cetera which is Latin for “additional unspecified odds and ends; more of the same.” It’s intended to reduce the number of characters (or sentences) needed to explain an item.

That abbreviation is a perfect example of not wasting time. We don’t write an entire list, or even the entire word. Although, here’s a question: why is the word abbreviation so long? Hmmm. Another post for a different day.

Since 2012, I have hosted over 350 authors a year on my Romance Lives Forever blog, and I’ve seen trends come and go. One that’s endured is adding hashtags to the subject. Why is this valuable? Because when the post is shared on social media, those hashtags will enable people to find it. Here’s an analogy that might help you understand.

What is a Hashtag

This symbol: # is called a hashmark. It’s also the abbreviation (there’s that word again) for number. On Twitter (and most other social media) when you add that symbol in front of a word, it changes the word to a search program.

Let’s say you want to look up the word “tweet” on Twitter. In the Twitter search box, you type #tweet. The URL that pops up is this: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23tweet&src=typd and all the tweets with that hashtag are listed.

Why Do I Need Hashtags

I’m a busy person. I know you are too. Imagine if you needed to pick up something at the grocery store, so you run in, grab a cart, and head for the produce department. When you get there, you discover a case for milk next to the lettuce. Not the milk you buy, unfortunately. Then next to the milk is a shelf with bread, but the brand you prefer isn’t there either. Then comes oatmeal. The quick cooking type–but your kids like the instant version.

At this point, you stop, look around, and realize the entire store has been completely rearranged. There is no rhyme or reason to its layout. It’s just whatever the store received that day in the back went out onto the sales area. No more aisles with bread, or aisles with canned veggies, or aisles with cereal. You have to walk up and down every aisle hoping to find what you need. How fast would you push that cart back to the exit and go elsewhere? Yeah. Me too.

Twitter is a store for information, news and opinions. It puts out whatever comes in as the info arrives. There is no order. You get what you get. If you want to find something on Twitter, you either look for a person who interests you, or a hashtag that does.

Hashtags are to Twitter what aisles are to a store. They are the “departments” where you can find what you need and what you’re looking for. I recommend having 1-2 hashtags in the title of a blog post, near the end of the subject. Use 1-2 in a tweet also. Generally, using over 3 hashtags is considered “spammy.”

What is a hashtag that works well for certain genres? That depends on what you want. Are you looking for suspense books with romantic elements? Try #romanticsuspense #suspense and also #romance #suspense together. What is a hashtag you can use to find info on your favorite TV show? Many times it’s the name of the show. Try #BigBangTheory #TheFlash #Arrow or initials, such as #TVD for The Vampire Diaries.

You could just scroll on Twitter and read, but what if you went there to find out if others are watching the same TV show you are? What is the show’s hashtag? Enter that in the search box and pow! There are all the show’s tweets. How cool to discover the cast is live tweeting! You can interact with fans, actors, and writers. Without a hashtag, you’d be lucky to stumble across even one tweet.

In the banner above, I use the hashtags associated with my writing, so people can watch those and find my books. What do you use when you search for books? When you browse Twitter the next time, click on a few hashtags and see what you find.

If you’ve used specific hashtags to find info, what are they? I follow #Thranduil #ThranduilThursday #LeePace and #Fanart – what do you follow? Please share in the comments.


Want to hear about a new book every day? Visit Romance Lives Forever. Our hashtag is #RLFblog which means posts by our guest authors are easily found on Twitter and Facebook. Check it out!

Coming next week – Best Hashtags for Writers

Is it right to quit? 10 times it's ok #author #entrepreneur @kayelleallen

The question, “Is it right to quit?” seems to require a “No!” in response. But does it? Not if you are quitting for the right reasons. Here are ten times it’s okay (and perhaps advisable) to quit.

When is it right to quit?

  1. When you realize what you’re doing is wrong. You’ve gone about it the hard way, for example, or you realize your information was incorrect.
  2. When it’s harmful or dangerous to yourself, others, or the environment.
  3. When it’s wasteful and not a good use of resources. Is it right to quit if you can fix the issue? Perhaps not.
  4. When someone else can do it better for less. This is an iffy one — quality and quantity are market related. If you can make a widget for a dollar and someone else has a means to make ten of them for that price and they outperform yours, give serious thought to moving on.Is it right to quit? 10 times it's ok #author #entrepreneur @kayelleallen
  5. When it’s not going in the right direction for your purposes.
  6. When you can’t control what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, this is a good time to step back and reconsider how and why. Is it right to quit if you can’t control the outcome? This is probably one of the best times, depending on what you are trying to do in the first place.
  7. When it’s no longer necessary. At some point, when no one needs this product or service, set it aside and move on.
  8. When it’s time to hand it over to a new person. Perhaps someone you know needs a chance to succeed and this project would be ideal for them. Step back and coach, but let it go. Is it right to quit when it means enabling others? Yes.
  9. When you’ve lost your enthusiasm. Perhaps a different approach to the issue is needed, but if you’ve tried different things and you still don’t care, quit. I know, that flies in the face of contemporary advice, but don’t beat a dead horse. Ride a live one.
  10. When you no longer love it. You might be enthusiastic about the concept or the product, but you’re tired of it. You don’t want to do this anymore. Then by all means, step back and move on.

The point of knowing when to quit is knowing what to do afterward. Is it right to quit just because you feel like it? Well, why do you feel like it? Is it because one of the reasons above?

Let me share some things I decided to quit doing recently. I unsubscribed from a few online services I no longer used and from a few newsletters I never read. I stopped wasting time opening email and then filing it and instead, set up a filter in email to automatically file many emails from my target people (friends, family, and businesses). Now I can see the folders have unread mail, read it, and then either delete it or go on to the next thing. It cut down on time filing quite a bit.

I am a graphic designer and love creating fanart, plus book covers, banners, and more. I created a company, The Author’s Secret, for that purpose. However, after five years, I realized I was spending so much time maintaining social media, websites, blog posts, and more for both myself and the company that I had little time left to do what I want to do most. Write. So after a long soul-searching period, I decided to close the company.

Instead, I will offer a few of the same services from my own website. That way, I’m promoting only one site and one set of social media. It’s a win-win.

Is it right to quit? I think so, yes, when the reasons are sound. What do you think? Is it right to quit or should you slug it out no matter what? Share your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to hear from you, yea or nay.

It’s Mother’s Day and I’m only online for a little bit. Have plans to hang out with family, chill, and take it easy today.

My ROW80 update is short this time. I had a week planning for Outlantacon, which went uber well. I had a wonderful time at the con. I then had a week of work catching up with things I missed the previous week, and posting updates on various spots.

This week, I’ve focused back on my writing. I ripped out two chapters that — while well done and interesting — didn’t take my characters where I wanted them to go. The equivalent of ripping out about 30 rows of crochet stitches. Painful, but necessary to move forward. Those two chapters were holding me back. Someone once said cutting chapters was akin to killing. Well… I can maybe agree. Although I’ve never killed anyone, it was painful enough to do that it took me three days to get up the nerve to do it. I’m still working on the rewrites. Set me back about two weeks.

On the other hand, I went to see the Avengers yesterday with my son and his son. It was a treat getting to see my kind of movie. I love scifi, and any movie where stuff blows up. ^_^ Favorite line… wow. There were many great parts. Probably the best is a scene in which Captain America is delivering orders to two NY cops, and they give him a cold stare. One says “Why should we listen to you?” About then, the invading force (not a spoiler – it’s in the previews) shows up and the good captain takes on about half a dozen baddies single handedly. The questioning cop gets an eyeful. He grabs his mic and repeats the orders without hesitation. Abit later in the film, Capt America is again giving orders to the other Avengers, who up to now, hadn’t been that crazy about taking orders from anyone. This time, they all bounce off to obey. That’s where my favorite line comes in. Last to receive an order is the Hulk, who’s been running amok all day. The captain says, “Hulk?” and the green monster turns and gives him a critical eye. The order? “Smash!!” With an evil grin and a nod, the Hulk sets off to do just that.

The two-and-a-half hour movie was over far too fast. Great pacing, excellent dialogue, wonderful imagery. I want to write like that.

Kayelle Allen is an award-winning, multi-published author. Her heroes and heroines include badass immortals, warriors who purr, and agents who find the unfindable–or hide it forever. She is known for unstoppable heroes, uncompromising love, and unforgettable passion.