Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

I know. I’m a freak. Sometimes I think I’m the only writer on earth who actually loves going through the editing process.

Not on my own, though. Those final revisions before something is ready to submit are torture, but there’s something about the collaborative process of editing WITH an editor. Like you’re both working together to make the final product this little slice of awesome.

The first round of edits for CAROLINA PEARL wasn’t as painful as I’d feared. Even though I like the process, this was the first book I’d turned in that I had serious doubts about. So it was a pleasant shock to find that it didn’t suck as badly as I’d imagined it did!

I like to talk my way to solutions, so as I edited the obvious stuff, I chatted in the margins.

Side note: The Chicago Manual of Style is pure evil. Rotten @(*%&@# comma killers. Up is down, right is left, and they’ve taken the comma out before “too” at the end of a sentence. The sky will shortly fall and kill us all. You’ll find my corpse clutching a dogeared copy of Elements of Style.

Aside from my new, permanent grudge against the CMoS, I read her suggestions, followed through on about 95% of them, edited out my extraneous “thats,” and asked questions about the rest.

Now that I have the 2nd round in hand, I get answers to those questions, a few new tiny things to shine, and we’ll be close to done. The end is in sight!

Provided I work my tushy off today getting them turned in.

Working on the 3rd Carolina story, as yet untitled. Although the DNPH did suggest CarolinAmok. Yes, he’s a funny, funny man.

I’ve struggled to get back into anything resembling a routine after the summer break. Now that the MCs are back in school, I’m slowly finding my raggedy old groove. So last night, I finally get some words down and I’m motoring along until… duh duh duuuuuuuh! My hero’s POV comes to a crashing halt.

Why?

Because he’s broken. Cracked. Mental. And I don’t know why or how he got to where he is. A couple of friends in RD Chat gave me some ideas, but until I get it settled in my mind, I’m at another bloody standstill.

Gah. Bloody nuisance. Bloody hero. Stoopid story.

In other news, I’m taking “hot yoga” classes. 26 poses, 90 minutes, room heated to 90 degrees. Awesome workout.

Also, I’m blogging at Beyond the Veil on Friday and I’m writing about Great Flood stories in comparative mythology. Fun!

And that’s me. What’s up with you?

Not forking out the dough for the RWA Conference this year, with evening wear, suits, high heels and whatever “business casual” means?

Not to worry! Romance Divas is hosting the

Not Going to Conference Conference…

The Conference You Don’t Have to Get Out of Bed For!

From July 28-31, come hang out with some terrific, savvy authors — and you don’t even have to brush your teeth (although, seriously, good dental hygiene gets you extra points.)

We’ll be hosting panels on:

The Power of Three: A crit group tell-all (Paranormal)

Crystal Jordan

Patti O’Shea

Dayna Hart/Rowan Larke

The Lolitas of STEAMED! Present Writing the Steampunk Romance -more than leather corsets and brass goggles!

Marie-Claude Bourque

Theresa Meyers

Whips, Chains, Slings, Oh My: It Really Isn’t About the Toys (BDSM Erotica)

James Buchanan

Joey Hill

The Great Big YA Panel

Rhonda Stapleton

Shannon Delany

Kiersten White

Carrie Ryan

Linda Gerber

Saundra Mitchell

Lara Zielin

Brenna Yovanoff

Register for free at Romance Divas, then come join us on the forums for the discussions, as well as some terrific prizes:
Eden Bradley/Eve Berlin:
1) erotic e-books, THE SEEKING KISS and TEMPT ME TWICE.
2) a synopsis critique in any sub-genre of erotica/erotic romance.
Jax Cassidy:
1) erotic e-books, DEVIL’S HEART and BRUSH STROKES.
2) book cover design or banner ad
Kristen Painter:
copy of her e-book, ALL FIRED UP
Rhonda Stapleton:
1) STUPID CUPID YA Book trilogy
2) a proposal critique (1st 3 chapters and synopsis) for any genre of book, romance or not
K.B. Alan:
1) The choice of one of her e-books: PERFECT FORMATION, ALPHA TURNED or BOUND BY SUNLIGHT.
2) A $25 Barnes and Noble gift card.
Robin L. Rotham: Signed copies of BIG TEMPTATION, ALIEN OVERNIGHT, and ENEMY OVERNIGHT
AJ Chase: copies of e-book CAT AND MOUSE
Inez Kelley:
1) e-book package of both MYLA BY MOONLIGHT and SALOME AT SUNRISE
2) The complete Dirty Laundry Series (3 e-novellas) co-written by Ginny Glass aka Wordsugar and Inez Kelley
Kate Pearce:
1) a three chapter ~and~ synopsis critique-any erotic romance, paranormal romance or historical romance.
2) Winners choice, in either print or e-book format (if available), of a set of the Simply series (there are 5) ~or~ a set of the Cowboys (there are 3) ~or~ a copy of KISS OF THE ROSE-readers choice.
R.G. Alexander:
Winners choice of any two e-books from her Samhain or Ellora’s Cave back list
Nadia Lee:
Critique of 1st chapter & synopsis-paranormal or contemporary romance
Shelley Munro: Winners choice of any one her backlist books from Ellora’s Cave or Cerridwen Press
Ciar Cullen: Winner’s choice of any one e-book on her website.
Voirey Linger: A copy of her e-book RISKING ETERNITY
RF Long:
1) a submission package critique (letter, synopsis and 3 chapters)
2) e-books! (details TBA)
Crystal Jordan:
1) 1st chapter and synopsis critique
2) One copy of any e-book off her Samhain backlist (http://samhainpublis…/crystal-jordan)
3) One copy of IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (print or electronic, winner’s choice)
Jeannie Lin:
1) a first chapter critique, any genre
2) an official BUTTERFLY SWORDS souvenir charm
Elise Logan: Winner’s choice of any e-book from her backlist
Marguerite Labbe:
1) A critique of an m/m story
2) Signed copies of her m/m vampire trilogy MY HEART IS WITHIN YOU, HAUNTED BY YOUR SOUL and OUR SACRED BALANCE
Seeley DeBorn:
One jar of home made body or face scrub, customized to the winner’s preferences and skin type.
For example: Orange Spice Oatmeal, Coffee-Cocoa, Citrus Salt, Lavender Mint, Honey and Flax
Sela Carsen: a copy of her e-book CAROLINA WOLF
Hailey Edwards:
1) a copy of her sweet fantasy romance ebook, EVERLONG.
2) two five dollar MBaM gift cards
Charlotte McClain:
Copy of her two e-books, LOVE TO DECLARE and ROCK STAR’S RETREAT
Cynthia Justlin: (Golden Heart Finalist!) Proposal Critique (3 Chapters and synopsis)-any genre other than erotic
Lainey Bancroft:
1) signed copies of her contemporary romance, THE TROUBLE WITH TESSA and her chick lit romance COZUMEL KARMA
2) Proposal critique (3 chapters and a synopsis) any genre except Steampunk
Tina Burns-Publisher-Liquid Silver Books:
1) a critique of 1st 3 chapters & synopsis
2) 3 be-book prizes for 3 different winners! Winners choice of any one e-book download from LSB library.
Mima:
Winner’s choice of one e-book from her backlist-see her website for booklist.
Taneasha: handmade jewelry by our own Taneasha-details to come!
Barbara Sheridan:
1) Winners choice of one e-book from her backlist-see her website for booklist.
2) Critique of up to 20 pages of either M/M, or M/F romance or erotic romance in various subgenres (contemporary, historical, paranormal or suspense/mystery)
David Bridger:
A copy of his ebook BEAUTY AND THE BASTARD
Victoria Janssen:
3 print books TBA (whatever she finds at the RWA Conference)
Gemma Halliday:
Signed copy of SCANDAL SHEET
Jennifer Leeland/Jennifer McKenzie:
1) copy of her e-book MARKED FOR PLEASURE (Kindle version available upon request)
2) copy of her e-book MARKED FOR DESIRE (Releasing June 29th) (Kindle version available upon request)
3) copy of her e-books The Command Series (Trilogy)
4)copy of her BDSM e-book series (3 from TWRP and 1 from Samhain)
Emily Ryan-Davis:
1) Critique of novella-length (up to 30k) manuscript; any time period, m/f, menage, f/f (m/m not her area of expertise)
2) signed print copies of her anthology: MATING CALL, DRAGON DANCE and DRAGON BOUND
3) e-book copy of CHANGING THUMBELINA
Sabrina Darby:
1) Signed copy of her erotic historical novel, ON THESE SILKEN SHEETS
2) Critique of first thirty pages of any Regency (erotic or non erotic fine, but m/m outside my area of expertise)
Alina Morgan:
1) copy of her e-book The Twilight Deception
2) copy of her e-book The Shadow Unveiled
Debbie Mumford:
1) Critique of a synopsis
2) Winner’s choice of any e-book from her back list.
Kimberly Troutte:
1) copy of her e-book SOUL STEALER
2) copy of her e-book CATCH ME IN CASTILE
Sasha Devlin:
1 pair of hand made writing mitts or gloves-style and color TBD by the winner
Julia Knight
Winner’s choice of one copy of any of her books available in e-book format

I know, I know. A month. It’s been almost an entire month since I wrote anything here.

Actually, it’s been almost more than a month since I wrote anything anywhere. “Slump” doesn’t begin to describe. More like “descent into an airless hell.”

But I think I can now tentatively state that I’m writing. I started a 3rd Carolina Wolf story on Saturday and have just over 1K words down. I don’t want to get too excited, but it’s good to write again.

Really, really good. I feel like I have purpose again.

Not much of a blog post, I’m afraid, but I feel like it’s a good beginning.

Since she’s concerned that I’ve lost my mind since I started working. Actually, I do have something interesting to tell y’all. Friday and Saturday, my local RWA chapter hosted a Margie Lawson workshop on Deep Edits: The EDITS system, Rhetorical Devices and More.

She wanted us to bring a piece to work on, handed out her worksheets and a package of highlighters, and off we went. I learned a lot about how to punch up emotional impact, discovered I already use a lot of the rhetorical devices she covered, and yes, people think my stories are weird. I was using “Monster Love,” my Gorgon story, as the guinea pig.

Other than that, I don’t have time to do much more than breathe. We’re in our last week of rehearsals and I need to find a pair of khaki trousers that don’t make me look like a zamboni ran over my ass. Seems like the ones I find that actually fit through the hips hang horribly on the thighs so I look like I’m walking on massive columns. *sigh* I hate shopping.

Anyway, that’s all the news from my end of the world. What’s happening with you?

Am I supposed to write?

Lately, my days have not been conducive to getting words on the page.

Work.
Sit and stare for 15 minutes.
Make dinner.
Clean up a little (DH has been helping clean the kitchen a lot!)
Go to rehearsal.
Come home.
Stare at the TV with DH for a while.
Go to bed.

I guess I could write in the mornings. Now my schedule is back to normal, I wake up waaaaaay before I have to leave, so I do have some time now. Which I’m using to blog instead of write. So, ummmm. I’m'a go write now.

It’s been an interesting week.

I spent the first part of it in a personal-drama-induced haze of nerves and nausea. Thank goodness that part’s over.

Still rehearsing the show. It’s going well.

On Wednesday, I had an interview at a local high school for a position as a library assistant. It’s part-time and just until the end of the school year. I GOT THE JOB!!!

I haven’t worked outside the home in 13 years. I’m freaking out. I start on Wednesday, so today and tomorrow are catching up on all the stuff I was supposed to do last week and didn’t because I was too busy being psychotic. (I see you, April!)

Let’s see….what else….what else….

Oh yeah.

I SOLD CAROLINA PEARL!!!!

Laurie Rauch, my editor at Samhain, sent me an offer last week while I was angsting and I returned the contract on Friday! I’ll fill in further details as I get them. I may even write a 3rd story in Culford, just to see what happens.

Happy dancing for everyone!!!!!

I’ve been in downtown St Louis, wearing holes in my shoes. Ok, so that wasn’t my primary reason for haunting the city. I was at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association national conference. I was on a panel discussion on the Romance track, presented by the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. Crystal Jordan, who is both an author of erotic romance as well as a university librarian, invited me, Jeannie Lin and Amanda Berry to sit in with her on a panel called “Romance Publishing: Canadian Romance, ePublishing, and Erotica, Oh My!”

The highlights of the conference:

Seeing Crystal again. Squeeeee!!! We even hugged!

I see Jeannie and Amanda every month at my MORWA meetings, but I like hanging out with them.

Finally meeting James Buchanan, who I’ve bumped into here and there online, but we finally shook hands.

And honestly, meeting Sarah Frantz who is this powerhouse of intellect and drive and genre love. She also has the coolest accent. What can I say? I love accents! She is part of the brains behind the awesomeness that is the Teach Me Tonight blog.

I wasn’t able to get to the conference until Thursday night when the folks on the Romance track met up for dinner. And it was soooo cool! I *never* hear people discuss romance novels like this! We’re always too afraid of hurting someone’s feelings because, at the very least, we understand the sheer wretchedness of the process of writing, submitting, getting rejected, getting the contract, finding the agent, going through revisions and edits and marketing and…This business is not for the faint-hearted. Even the worst writer who has ever been published (not self or vanity published) has gone through the wringer like everyone else.

Although, let me back up a minute. The first thing I attended was not the dinner. It was the business meeting of IASPR before dinner. As a non-academic, it had nothing to do with my professional interests, but Amanda Berry and I looked at each other part-way through this discussion of finding PhD programs and writing papers and said, “Dang. And we thought romance publishing was hard.” Being an academic is brutal.

So, dinner was awesome and we were there for over 3 hours, just talking and yelling across tables and generally getting to know each other.

Friday was the day of the panel I was on and I got there for the panel before, then stayed well after, as well.

My world is very insular. I keep my head down, hang out on one forum primarily, write my blog and hope people read, and try to get some words on the page.

To go to this conference and realize that people are seriously discussing romance in critical terms was mind-blowing. They’re talking about food in romance (I missed that panel and I’m bummed), creating a community through film and internet presence, discussing the actual internet presence of romance readers and reviewers like SBTB and DA (Jane Litte was there. It’s not fair that she’s so gorgeous AND smart.), Canadian romance, erotic romance, gay interpretations of Dracula, TSTL heroines and uber-assholes in Christine Feehan’s Carpathian series…and that was pretty much just Friday!

Saturday started off with sexism, racism, heterosexism, fetishism in romance, interracial romance in film – but also an interesting point about how AA fiction has always focused on the struggles of being AA as opposed to just being part of a relationship – in essence, romance creates a space for AA women not to have lit-angst, discussing dress and gender roles, the idea of a true anti-heroine in romance (that one engendered a lot of discussion at lunch as we tried to figure out if we’d ever seen one. The answer, probably not, according to the terms defined in the paper.), and tons of Twilight stuff (oy). The final papers were all about HEAs: what constitutes them, satisfying and unsatisfying endings, ambiguous endings, happy-for-now endings, genre expectations…It was awesome and Sabrina Darby, a fellow Romance Diva and author, was one of the presenters.

One of my favorites was a paper called “She quoted Shakespeare! The inclusion of highbrow literature in popular romance novels” presented by Tamara Whyte from University of Alabama. Basically, I loved it for its discussion of all that cultural connectivity that I talk about.

But over and above all the lit-nerd stuff that I love so much, I enjoyed getting to know people with whom I would otherwise never connect. After everything was over on Saturday, 7 of us piled into my car and we headed over to the Arch. We couldn’t go up as it was closed for the day, but we just wandered around and enjoyed the gorgeous weather. We were in that happy-tired state, half-wired/half-wiped.

The PCA IASPR conference takes place in the days right before RWA 2011 in NYC. (Edited per Sarah’s clarification) I think I’m going to start saving my pennies because I would LOVE to see these folks again.

Someone asked a question today about whether using the opening line of a poem as the opening line of their story constituted plagiarism.

You know what? I’m not sure. Personally, I don’t think so. I really don’t. For one, it sounded like the whole of the story was a riff based loosely on a relatively famous poem and that the one line she wanted to borrow was just a lead-in. I think that if the poem or a stanza or line of it could be used as a frontspiece, that might make it easier for readers to identify it. Or if there was attribution made elsewhere, then it would fall into the area of intertextuality, rather than theft.

I could be wrong. There seem to be rules, written and unwritten, about how many actual words you can use in a row before reference becomes theft. Not to mention, the rules that ARE written are skewed toward non-fiction and academic writing rather than fiction. Writing fiction in a cultural context, then, becomes sticky when you want to use things that would be quoted and attributed and footnoted in academia, but are just plain awkward when you work it into a story. Unless you’re Susanna Clarke and the footnotes are part of the story.

The gray area often stems from how much we can expect our audience to know. If the reader knows that the line is from the poem, then he or she will read it as simply being a nod to the poet. They’re going to get that allusion. But perhaps the poem is more obscure than I think it is. In that case, there needs to be some direct attribution, either within the story or even in a footnote.

I have to say, I think it’s a little sad that we’re so taken up by the fear of plagiarizing that we’re losing that connectivity between literary works that makes for a rich cultural discussion. We can’t let that niggle of fear stop us from making connections and enriching our stories.

Intertextualizers, unite!

The weekend was heinous, but Monday, aside from a shaky start, was pretty awesome overall.

I’ve applied for a job as a library assistant at a nearby middle school. As I was filling out the application, I realized that I’ve been volunteering in school libraries for the last 7 years. And for the last 2 years, I’ve juggled 2 libraries. Both of the librarians I work with wrote me lovely letters of recommendation.

This is an affirmation. I don’t suck. I am not a horrible person.

They also personally e-mailed the librarian who advertised for the assistant.

I don’t suck. I am not a horrible person.

I got more fan mail about “A Dark and Stormy Knight”! Yay!! I’m writing the next installment, but I got stuck until it was time to go to bed last night, when I got UNstuck, so now I can keep writing today. More conflict!

I am not a horrible person. I am a half-decent writer.

Also, dinner turned out well. It was just homemade sloppy joes, but I also found fresh green beans at the grocery store, so I steamed them until they were juuuust done, then tossed them real quickly in a bit of browned butter with a pinch of salt. Perfect! I could have eaten the whole pot!

And you know what else? I have friends who rock. I really do. They’ve absolutely got my back and that’s an amazing feeling.

I am NOT a horrible person. I’m not all sweetness and light, but I’m also not crap on the bottom of someone’s shoe.

I CAN write.

And I can cook, too.