Archive for March, 2005

March 30, 2005

mt. ms.

You can best appreciate how much hard work writing is when you print out the whole completed manuscript.

Or, in my case, when you print out the whole completed 450-page manuscript four times.

It’s a mountain of paper. Practically an entire ream. It’s nearly as tall as my computer. It weighs more than a small child. I’ve got it in a box on my floor right now and if I stubbed my toe on it, it would hurt.

I’m thinking about stubbing my toe on it anyway. Just to feel how real this novel is.

It’s a big thing. But even though seeing it makes you aware how big it is, a huge box of paper is much, much smaller than what a novel actually means.

March 28, 2005

done!

Yes! I am so darn happy to be DONE with these REVISIONS. I’ve added and cut and probed and deleted 60,000 uses of the words “just” and “still” and fixed the places where I couldn’t tell the difference between “revelation” and “relevant” and made a secondary character more prickly and introduced a ghost subplot and made my heroine go through even more hell and added a hand-knitted llama-wool scarf.

And I’m done. It will go to my agent tomorrow, with the pages marked with post-its to point out the changes I’ve made. And she’ll send it out into the world.

I feel bad that it’s taken this long to revise this book. I decided to revise it back in October. And what with revisions and copy edits on Dream Lover and writing all of Reckless, plus the workshops I’ve done and sorting out my website and keeping this blog up to date–*pause to gasp for air*–I haven’t had time. And oh yeah, there’s that little full-time job I happen to have. Oh, and the small matters of my marriage and my social life. Not to mention that pesky need for sleep.

Still though, I feel bad. Not revising this book was a burden of anxiety on my shoulders for quite a while. And now that it’s done, I can move on to something else.

Like all of my marking. Sigh.

March 27, 2005

r.u.e.

Resist the Urge to Explain. Resist the Urge to Explain. Resist the Urge to Explain. Resist the Urge to Explain.

(Today’s mantra brought to you by Michelle, who is pretty experienced with a chainsaw herself.)

cataromance

Hey, there’s a column about my reading habits up on Cataromance today.

March 26, 2005

ha!

Some massacre this has been. I spent the day doing the most pathetic bit of gardening and then I had to take a walk to buy string cheese (I know, but I just felt like walking and eating cheese, and string cheese is easy to eat while you’re walking–it was nice) and then I got caught up in the excellent book I’m reading, Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold, and then I figured out that Gold is married to Alice Sebold who wrote The Lovely Bones and who is also very talented and I got all jealous of their incredibly talented marriage which really just doesn’t seem fair. But the book is truly very, very good.

And then I watched three episodes of Six Feet Under. And talked on the phone.

So I’ve written like a paragraph and done no cutting at all.

But at least I feel relaxed. And I don’t have to deal with blood stains on the carpet.

March 25, 2005

the berkshire chainsaw massacre

Okay, so far I’ve been adding and changing scenes in this darn book. Tomorrow, I’m gonna cut. I’m going in there with the red-pen equivalent of a chainsaw and the limbs are going to fly.

I’m going to show that editor from [insert big-name publisher] who rejected my work what kind of homicidal maniac she is dealing with!

“Overwritten dialogue” she said? BROOOOOOOMZZZZZZZZT! There go chunks of dialogue, speech tags and action beats flying into the air like so many amputated fingers and toes.

“Narrative that slows down the action” she said? VRUM, VRUM, VRUM, WHIZZZZZZZZT! There goes the unsightly flab. Only the bare skeleton will remain.

It’s gonna hurt. But my book will thank me in the end. Really, it will.

heroines and me

In the comments for the last post, Olga asked:

Do we writers try to live our lives through our heroines? And does it benefit or hurt our writing?

My first instinct was to say “No.” My heroines are different from me; they’re my creations but they have their own lives and their own ways of thinking about things which is often different than how I’d think about things. Okay, I put myself in their place when I’m writing about them falling in love with and having sex with the gorgeous heroes…but that’s half the fun.

But thinking about it more, I think my heroines do reflect certain aspects of me. I definitely drew on my own experience of hopeless teenage crushes to write Kitty, the heroine of Dream Lover. In my case, it was on Paul McCartney; in her case, it was on the hero, Jack. But while I was writing the parts where she remembers how powerless she felt in the grip of such huge emotion for someone she couldn’t have, I felt that all over again.

I was never a beauty queen like Marianne, the heroine of Reckless –nor have I had an eating disorder–but I was valedictorian, voted Most Likely to Succeed, went to an Ivy League university. I had some of the same pressures she had of living up to my own top-of-the-class image. I think I was definitely stereotyped as a “good girl”, too…at our tenth high-school reunion, I snuck outside to share a cigarette and one of my classmates said, “Wow, I never thought I’d see you drinking a beer and smoking a butt!”

Rosie, in Spirit Willing, Flesh Weak, is a liar, and I very consciously set out to explore some of the feelings I had about writing fiction when I wrote about her. But she ended up reflecting more about me–mostly my faults. Like me, she is self-centred and loves attention. She enjoys performing. She gets carried away with her own fluency with words, her own ability to speak, and forgets the effect those words may have on other people. Some people are kept up at night because of the bad things they’ve done; I’m kept up at night by the careless things I’ve said. And so is Rosie.

Writing is like therapy, sometimes, though I think in general my impulse isn’t to examine my own personality and its failings; my goal is to examine my characters and their failings, and to use my personal experience to do that.

There are so many things about my heroines that don’t reflect me at all. Thank God. I’ve never been ashamed of my family; I’ve never developed anorexia; I’ve never labelled myself as a failure; I’ve never decided to act completely the opposite to my own impulses; I’ve never become a con woman.

On the other hand, I’ve never built up a business from scratch; I’ve never become top of my profession; I’ve never donated all the cash I had to charity; I’ve never offered counselling to complete strangers.

My heroines do all sorts of things I could never do, and though I don’t think I’m living through them, I get darn proud of them sometimes.

How about you?

March 24, 2005

emotions

Thank you, Michelle and Anna for your comments and advice on writing a difficult scene.

Thanks too to my very cool cousin Marc, who is also a writer and who emailed me to tell me how he’d handled a similar problem in his own work.

I wrote the scene yesterday and it’s much shorter than the original, and much darker. I wrote it without looking at the original scene, and I’m glad–when I reread the original, after finishing the new scene, it appeared hokey and over-sentimental to me. Gina, who is a prickly character all through the book, just turned open and sincere all of a sudden.

It took my rewriting the scene to see the problems with the original, if that makes sense. Now Gina is still difficult, but we see why. Rosie, who has been wanting to get closer to Gina throughout the book, suddenly is closer to Gina, and she can’t handle it. It’s turned from a sort of expository scene to one where both characters are trapped in emotions they can’t handle, and don’t want; where they both face some truths about themselves they don’t like.

In the end, it was all about the characters, not me. I’m really glad I did it.

Now I have to get my ass in gear and finish revising the rest…maybe today.

March 23, 2005

tricky

I haven’t written about writing in so long even I am beginning to view myself with deep suspicion. In fact I’ve been very remiss on this blog in general, and many of you will know that my mind has been on other things–things which shall remain nameless in this blog for the time being.

I have about seven chapters left to revise in Spirit Willing before I send it off to my agent and editor. The ending’s not changing much, so theoretically, these should be the easiest chapters to revise. However, they require two new scenes to be written, one to finish up a subplot I’ve introduced, and another to make an existing scene much much more emotionally potent. The subplot scene is easy. The other scene…well, that’s hard.

It’s a scene between my heroine Rosie and her cousin/manager Gina. Despite Rosie’s efforts to make friends with her cousin, Gina has been distant and cold, and this is the scene where Rosie figures out why: Gina has a secret that she’s desperate to hide from everybody, and she’s afraid, since Rosie is a psychic, that Rosie will find it out. Therefore she can’t get close to Rosie.

Now Rosie isn’t a psychic; she’s fake. She doesn’t know that Gina is afraid of her, because she sees her “powers” as helping people. I want this scene to teach her that the life she’s chosen can alienate others, as well as helping them.

Originally, Gina broke down and revealed her secret to Rosie. But I’m changing that; now, Rosie, stinging from her rejection by the hero and determined to get closer to Gina, guesses Gina’s problem. And that frightens Gina to death, and makes Rosie feel ashamed. It will make the dark moment darker, make a later scene tenser, and will make Gina’s eventual redemption more satisfying. I’m pleased with the way I think it’s going to go.

The big problem is this. The subject of the scene–Gina’s secret–is something that, has, in the months since I wrote it originally, become a personally important topic to me. A topic that doesn’t just stir my characters’ emotions–it stirs mine.

So I’ve been afraid to tackle this scene for the past week or so. It’s going to force me to face some ideas that will probably upset me.

It’s taken about a week, but I think, now, I’ve got some distance on it, and can, hopefully, write it truthfully about the characters’ emotions without letting mine impinge on it.

Has this happened to you? How do you deal with it?

March 19, 2005

romance in murder one

I’ve got a couple of photos from our trip to London’s specialty crime, fantasy, and romance bookshop, Murder One, last weekend.

Quite by good fortune, we ran into my buddy the writer and webmistress extraordinaire Wendy Wootton with friend Rosemary Laurey, who was signing copies of her books. I picked up one of her Brava novellas, Immortal Bad Boys. Gotta love sexy vampires.

I’m on the left, then Wendy, then Rosemary, then the lady who runs the romance section, who’s very friendly and very enthusiastic and has a groovy polka-dot bracelet.

We spent some time drooling over the Ellora’s Cave selection, going crazy about how many of our friends’ books we could see on the shelves (which were guarded by a life-sized mannequin dressed like Sherlock Holmes…I imagine old Sherlock has some interesting thoughts).

Then I made my poor friends Anna and Biddy pose next to copies of my friend Kathy Love’s novels.

Notice Biddy’s fab new coat.

There are some other photos from the weekend, but they are far, far too compromising to share.

March 17, 2005

well, well, well

You know, it has come to my attention that if one were to peruse the recent contents of this blog, one could easily leap to the conclusion that I haven’t been writing much lately.

And you know what? That would be true.

However. My rest has proven to me that I still like this ms I’m revising–a lot. That I’ll still probably like it even if it doesn’t sell. That I can come up with new ideas that are good. And that I really enjoy my friends and family.

“Fill the well,” they say. Emphasis on well.

josh rouse

Sela posted an interesting reply to my musings about music on Romancing the Blog the other day. In fact, her entire blog is just darn interesting. And it made me cry. Go check it out.

Anyway, on Tuesday I got the chance to see Josh Rouse at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. I didn’t know until Monday evening that he was playing–and that my friend, who is Josh’s tour manager, had put me on the guest list, bless him.

I love Josh Rouse’s music. I listened to his album 1972 incessantly when writing Spirit Willing and I intend to listen to his latest album Nashville when writing Connected. But I am, believe it or not, fundamentally lazy, especially when I know I have to get up the next day at 6.30 am to go to school. However for once in my life my love overcame my laziness and I hauled my sorry ass to Shepherd’s Bush.

Man. I am so, so glad I did. It was the best gig I’ve been to in ages. He was dressed like Willie Loman, he looked like Donnie Darko, he sang like an angel and he writes songs that would make Brian Wilson proud. I just stood and beamed and beamed and beamed. And tried to think up ways I could use this joy in the next thing I write.