When I attended the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) convention in May 2012, the Author Learning Center taped the following when I discussed publicizing “Playdate”:

Recently, I sat down in Manhattan to chat with “Savages” author Don Winslow for Yahoo! Movies. Afterwards, there were transcript bits on the cutting-room floor that novelists interested in craft would appreciate. Here, Winslow on using the omniscient point-of-view:

Don Winslow: Writing books I’ll change point-of-view inside a sentence. I just don’t care, as long as the reader can hang in with it. And then people, particularly heavy-duty crime genre types, go nuts on me. They say you have a chapter where there are two or three points of view and I want to say, dude, I have a sentence where there are two or three points of view. I would switch every syllable if I could. It doesn’t bother me at all.

TA: When I went through editing on “Playdate,” which has an omniscient narrator, my editors encouraged me to go through a rewrite and pull any point-of-view that would shift within a paragraph, and since it was my first published novel, I went along.

DW: In my first book, whatever they said, I was like, yeah. But, now, it’s stet, stet, stet. And you’ve seen the book. It’s a copy editor’s nightmare. I said, ‘when you get to the copy-editor, take away his belt and shoelaces.’

Thelma Adams talks about her debut novel, “Playdate.”

She is currently a Yahoo! contributing editor and her column “Thelma Adams on Reel Women” runs on AMCFilmcritic.com. She was Us Weekly’s film critic from 2000 to 2011, after six years reviewing at the New York Post. She has written for Marie Claire, The New York Times, the international Herald Tribune, The Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan, More, Interview, and Self.

This month, I sat down, put my feet up and chatted with Minnesota radio host Teri Knight. Click here to have a listen…

Tomorrow, I’m going on WRITERS ON WRITING. KUCI Irvine, NPR, Orange County and I’m considering reading a short, short piece from my novel that I haven’t read aloud before, an intimate moment between father Lance and daughter Belle while they are making breakfast before school:

As Lance and Belle stood side by side in the kitchen, with Belle’s wild head of black curls at Lance’s hip, he experienced such a feeling of oneness that it scared him. How would he pull himself back together if something happened to her? He relished these moments of gooey eggs on their hands; the brush of his arm hair against Belle’s; and the simple knowledge that Cinnamon Toast Crunch was his daughter’s favorite cereal, having vanquished Lucky Charms and an austere period of plain organic yogurt.

This quiet harmony Lance and Belle shared was what he had imagined he would experience with Darlene as their marriage ripened. Instead, as the newness of their passion waned, a gulf had appeared between them, competitiveness entered the void, and, it seemed to him, a desire on Darlene’s part to assign blame. He still wanted to bridge that gulf, but wasn’t sure how.