Authorpreneur Dashboard – PD Workman
Tattooed Teardrops
Teens
Tattooed Teardrops is the winner of the Top Fiction award for the 2016 In the Margins Best Books for Teens book award! A realistic and beautiful story filled with suspense, heartbreaking friendship and loyalty award-winning author P.D. Workman’s brings you the intriguing story of Tamara’s struggle to make a life for herself after her incarceration. But things aren’t going to be easy. I don’t plan on getting in any trouble. Tamara had thought that when she got out of juvie, things would be easier. But before long, it seems like her life is spiraling into chaos. If she can’t prove to her probation officer that she is innocent of the allegations against her, she’s going back to prison, and Tamara just can’t let that happen. By the author of Ruby, Between the Cracks, a winner of the Top Ten Best Books for Teens 2015 award, Tamara’s poignant story will change the way you think about the nature of evil.
Book Bubbles from Tattooed Teardrops
Point of View
As a writer, it can be a challenge when writing from a first person point of view or a limited third person point of view to write about what happens while your character is out of the room. Do you switch to omniscient third person? Or do you use another method to tell what is going on in the POV character's absence?
Just about breaking point
All of the stress at trying to fit into the kind of life she's been cut off of for three years is getting to be too much for Tamara and her nerves are stretched taut. It won't take much to drive her over the edge...
Diverting the conversation
Tamara decides that she has said a little too much. While this tease is brief, it will become much more important later in the book...
Characters' voices
In this excerpt, both pro and anti abortion opinions are mentioned at the same time. I was surprised when this passage set off a firestorm of activity on Wattpad as readers cheered Holly's decision not to have an abortion or argued her right to have one. I always wonder when what a character says will be taken as the author's opinion. The opinions that my characters express are often negative, unpopular, or just plain wrong, and I wonder which ones will someday be mistakenly attributed to me rather than to a fictional character.
Adjusting to non-institutional life
This little vignette is central to Tamara's challenge in Tattooed Teardrops. How is she going to adapt to living in the real world again after being in juvenile detention? She suddenly has to make her own choices after everything being dictated for her. After spending most of her adolescence locked away, she now has to function in society and make her own judgments. Not as easy as it sounds...
Wearing Makeup
This passage prompted an interesting discussion on Wattpad, where an Asian reader asked if North American girls really start wearing makeup in junior high school. Where she lives in China, women do not begin wearing makeup until they enter the workforce. My North American readers confirmed that here girls do start wearing makeup at 12 or younger (some mention as young as 5 or 8). An interesting cultural difference!
First line
The kind of reference you never want to get. Tamara is ready to embark on her new life, but is anxious about leaving juvie, her home of the past three years, to join her peers in the outside world. The last time she was in foster care, things didn't go so well...
