One Lovely Blog Award

Thank you very much to the marvelous Clare Dugmore

for this award.

This one has been going around a lot lately. We all know the drill by now. Seven random facts.

1) I decorated for Halloween already. My son is uninterested in the decorations, but my husband keeps telling me there's too many!

2) I sometimes randomly start talking with a Canadian, British, or southern US accent. Most of those times, I don't notice unless someone points it out.

3) Halloween is my favorite holiday. I love seeing people in costumes!

4) I was a vegetarian for 15 years until I got pregnant. Now I crave meat a lot.

5) I shampooed my carpet and took great satisfaction in how it looked. Never in my life would I've thought I would ever think such a thing! I'm not the domestic type.

6) I hate wearing belts.

7) My husband refuses to speak in his Severus Snape voice while we're in bed together. That's no fun!

I pass on this award to all of you who have seven more random facts you'd like to share!

Wicked Wednesday - sexy accents

I love nothing more than a man with an accent. It makes me weak in the knees. A lot of paranormal romance involves old beings like vampires, demons, and gods from hundreds or even thousands of years ago. They have old accents, or even just European ones. Sometimes the characters are from our modern day and from the southern US or from a little island in the ocean. Any way to get that butterflies-in-the-tummy feel from an accent.

Yet it isn't easy to write accents. In fact, if you aren't intimately familiar with the one, don't do it. A badly written accent is a turn off. You don't want your Scottish vampire in the kilt to sound like he's from London. If you're going to give it a go, make sure you research the accent and the dialect. Different regions have several.

A recent article in Romance Writers Report (RWR) listed a number of great sites to help when writing accents and dialects. Here's a few for you:

Accent and Dialect

A British-American English Dictionary

Regional Dialects in the US

America's Regional Dialects, Holding Fast

Regional Accents of Australia

British Accents

I do my best to avoid writing characters with accents. I might have a light British one, but that's only because I watch at a lot of the BBC and grew up with neighbors who were from England.

Have you ever written a character with an accent? Was it one you knew or did you have to research it?