Jade Varden Official Blog

Have you ever told a lie? Had a drink before you were legally allowed to do it? Taken something that wasn't yours? Did it make you a completely evil person? Have you ever met a completely bad person?  So why would you write a character that way? If you're writing in black and white, you're not writing at your best. The world, and every person in it, is filled with shades of grey.  Good vs. Evil Novels often pit a hero, a good guy, against a villain, a bad guy. This is the oldest literary plot device, the most basic foundation of many stories, and there's no reason you can't use it in your novels. Just remember not to get too literal about it. Rarely are people all bad, so inherently evil that they have no spark of human kindness or compassion, guilt or regret, anywhere inside them. Writing a villain that's totally evil is going to make that villain feel two-dimensional, a caricature rather than a character. But you can get away with it. Villai...

I'm being featured on Spotlight Monday at Goodreads . Visit to find out some of my writing secrets, and how I like to relax when I'm not writing!

Author Joann Pence gave me a list of books to potentially review, and I selected Dance With a Gunfighter right away. The title immediately brings to mind an incongruous image of a hardened bad guy...dancing to the sound of fiddles. I figured this couldn't possibly be what takes place -- the "dance" referred to has got to mean some sort of exciting Western shoot-out occurs. I was wrong about that, but this book didn't disappoint.  There are a lot of dances in this book. There is the very real, literal dance referenced by the title. It's a romantic little scene: young girl, sweet sixteen, at her first dance. She's a wallflower, and doesn't expect to get asked to dance. Something about her touches the hardest man in the room, a gunfighter by the name of Jess.  This is where the book gets confusing right away. The girl's name is Gabriella, but she's a tomboy so she goes by Gabe. The guy's name is Jess. It's two neutral names, an...

Being indecisive is one of my biggest flaws. I can be tenacious once I set my mind on something...but getting to that space can be a tough journey. What Am I Writing? For example, my newest book project. Like many writers, I get lots of ideas. They aren't necessarily any good, but I write them all down anyway. So when I finished the Deck of Lies , of course I pulled up my idea notes. One of them struck me right away, a story that's really different for me because I settled on the idea of a male protagonist. I don't know, maybe I was feeling brave. So for over a week I worked on two pages of this new novel, as yet unnamed. I thought about it and pictured it and made up all my cast lists and notes and all the crap I collect when I'm working on a book. Then last night, I got to being indecisive again. I pulled up some old notes that I put together over a year ago, while I was still writing Justice. And I started working on a totally different nove...

Find out what happened when River Scott, from the Deck of Lies series, visited Mia Darien's blog for a character interview!

Mommie Dearest was the very first book of its kind, and since it was printed it's been highly debated, studied, quoted and called into question. Depending on where you stand in the argument, it's either the very first non-fiction Book on Film I've featured...or it's not. The Book No one knows for certain whether or not the events depicted in Mommie Dearest are true in entirety, embellished for dramatic effect, or fabricated in whole. One person who would know is dead, and has been since before the story was released. The other person swears it's true...but then she would, because she authored it. Mommie Dearest was the very first tell-all book written by someone close to a celebrity, and relationships don't get closer than this. It was penned by Christina Crawford, daughter to the mega-star Joan Crawford. She was on Hollywood's A-list before it had an A-list, married into its most famous family, and ruled the screen for so long they were...

It already sounds scary, right? Split infinitives -- they're a grammar no-no, but most people have no idea what the heck they are. Some writers wouldn't even know one if it fell right out of their own books. The truth is, most people write with split infinitives. Try to observe this outdated grammar rule, and I can just about guarantee that you'll make yourself crazy. Splitting Infinitives, and Other Grammar Rules to Ignore My favorite example of a split infinitive is to boldly go . It's a common phrase, thanks to Captain Kirk, and by strict rules of proper English it's totally wrong. An infinitive is an unmarked form of a verb -- and go is a verb. You split an infinitive when you put an adverb between the verb and its companion to . Need some examples? Split infinitive look a little something like this: To quickly walk To forcefully push To uncharacteristically yell Any of these phrases might appear in a sentence that reads well, and s...

Every English teacher cautions against using run-on sentences. It's the writer's job to totally ignore them. A little extra prose is to be expected in novels, where description reigns and dialogue is meant to sing. But there's always a line that any author can cross. Are your sentences too long...and do you know how to tell?  Running On and On Novels are supposed to be descriptive. You are supposed to literally paint a picture, only with keystrokes instead of brush strokes. It's not always easy to find the right words to use to describe events, places and people. It's even harder to put those words into the proper structure, and long sentences are a perfect example. She looked out over a horizon painted in shades of red and gold, an endless sea of color in hues of danger, a warning that she was running out of time and the bandits were drawing closer and closer.  That sentence is pretty descriptive. It's also too darned long. Many authors struggle...