Archive for November, 2005

November 28, 2005

above my desk

Anna asked on her blog, What do you see when you look above your desk?

I see this.

It’s a copy of, I believe, a Pisarro painting, done by my friend Kathy’s mother, Freda Dunn. She’s an artist in her own right, and usually does gorgeous scenes of Maine, where she lives. She had this painting hanging on her wall and when I was a teenager I was captivated by it. It was a jewel in a gold frame. I imagined myself in the sun-kissed cottage and on the soft hill, near those twinned trees. The whole scene is so warm. And I love the cow. Since reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles, I picture Talbothays Farm as much like this.

She gave it to me when I graduated from high school, and I look at it often, when I need a breath of calm.

November 27, 2005

other men

My husband has a weird sort of relationship with the fact that I find celebrities, become obsessed with them, watch their movies and listen to their music and put up photos of them on my computer, and then make up fictional personalities about them and write about them having sex and falling in love.

Mostly he puts up with it with amazing fortitude and good humour. He’ll watch the movies with me and he prefers it when I pick an actor whose films he likes. The other day he was watching a film and he called to me from the other room because Owen Wilson was going to be in it for a couple of minutes. (Actually it turned out to be Luke Wilson, but he was trying, bless him.)

At times he is somewhat bemused by it. He knows it’s fantasy, but it is, I admit, a pretty weird thing to do. He shakes his head and says, “Mucky books,” as if that explains my madness. More recently he has been staring at me as if I am a member of another species. Especially about the whole Constantine thing.

Anyway, he laughed at this photo of my current hero. “He looks like he’s standing there saying ‘Look at me, aren’t I pretty,’” he said.

November 25, 2005

le freak, c’est chic (NOT)

Yesterday, I had major plot problems. My poor editor got frantic emails and an earful of Panicked Author over the phone. Luckily, she is calm and cool enough to deal with such things with tact, professionalism, and good grace.

I’m not. I freaked out all over the place.

But today, Anna and I had a no-holds-barred brainstorming session and the problem is solved. In a very simple, elegant way, which should have been obvious from the start.

Which reminds me that I should always sleep on things and talk them over with my friends before I freak out. Unfortunately I forget that, mid-freakshow.

November 24, 2005

thanksgiving

Happy holiday, everyone in the US.

My husband and I had sweet & sour chicken balls and barbeque spare ribs from the local Chinese takeaway. Not traditional, but satisfying.

My mom and dad are apparently snowed in. They’d expected lots of guests–my aunts, my grandmother, my cousins–but are on their own, looking forward to the prospect of eating an 18 lb. turkey by themselves. Which is funny, but not quite as funny as the dilemma of my cousins, who are snowed in with nothing but desserts. (Waves at Marc and Jenna)

I had a frustrating day. But I still have many blessings to count. I think the frustrations are there to remind us of the blessings.

November 23, 2005

column

I’ve got a column up on Romancing the Blog today from 11 pm GMT. I like this one the best of all the ones I’ve done, I think. Which isn’t saying much because I tend to get topic block as soon as I think about writing a blog entry away from my own little green and orange home.

You know, the word “guinea pig” looks really weird when read upside down.

And I think that last sentence is evidence that I didn’t get enough sleep last night.

Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who left a comment about my extract. You have made me very happy and very excited to write this book.

November 19, 2005

peepshow

I’m writing about this very cool thing, the van Hoogstraten peepshow which is in the National Gallery. I saw it this summer and immediately thought it would be the perfect place for two people to meet.

Thus, this is from chapter 2 of Rush:*

The room she’d wandered into was quieter than the rest of the gallery, and unlike the other rooms in that it featured a large box on a wooden pedestal, along with the paintings. The outside was dark lacquered wood. She walked around the box and saw that the front of it was open and glassed over. The inside of the box was painted with the interior of a room, but the perspectives were skewed, irregular, and yet eerily realistic, like a small slice of Alice’s Wonderland.

This was cool. It reminded her of a stage set. She could use something like this for a senior production at school. She began to walk around it again and noticed that there was a peephole in the side of the box. Jo stooped and looked through it.

As if by magic, the small, limited perspective made the whole picture make sense. What had been skewed became straight. What had seemed flat suddenly appeared three-dimensional. Jo was looking into a real house, with a tiled floor and red velvet chairs and paintings on the wall and a small black-and-white dog.

And on the opposite wall was another hole. And in the other hole, a pale blue eye.

Jo blinked and straightened up. At the same time, the man across from her straightened up. And once again she was staring into the eyes of the beautiful stranger.

The box still separated them, the picture of the room that suddenly fell into place when you looked at it the right way. She felt something similar happening with her view of what had happened this afternoon. Of course they’d been trying to find each other. There was something that fit when they looked each other in the eye.

“What do you think of the peepshow?” the man asked, as if he could read her mind. In fact, she wouldn’t be surprised if he really could.

“I like it,” she said. “I like it when things suddenly make sense.”

*Rush will be released by Mills & Boon in autumn, 2006. If all goes well.

November 18, 2005

6118

There.

They’re talking to each other, too.

I also downloaded Take That. Which also helped.

friday night

Gee, nobody commented to tell me how gorgeous Cillian is. What a surprise.

Anyway it is Friday night and I am determined to get to 6000 words tonight. With the help of some downloaded Andy Gibb music I have progressed from 4025 words to 5003. (The Gibb brothers are great motivators. Something about those infectious tunes and falsetto voices.) This has taken me two hours. I’m not sure why this book is moving forward slowly. It is probably one of two things: either I have the conflict slightly wrong for the main characters, or I am spending too much damn time on introspection.

It is probably the latter. Jo and Bruno first set eyes on each other on page 11. So far I’m on page 22 and they have said exactly a dozen words to each other. I think I need to get them talking. However, they’re not going to talk until they’re alone, and I’ve put them right smack dab in the middle of one of London’s biggest tourist attractions.

Right. Back to Andy Gibb and working.

November 17, 2005

more cillian

You know, if you do a Google image search for Cillian Murphy you get this blog first. Hey, I’ll take a brush with fame any way I can get it, baby.

So to celebrate that I’m putting another pic up.

He needs longer hair and a bit more experience in his face and he is my hero Bruno.

November 15, 2005

snoozin’ and schmoozin’

3288 words in, and the heroine has the hots so bad she can’t control herself.

This is fun.

I’m off to the RNA winter party tomorrow in London, where I will schmooze with my writer friends and with my agent. I am looking forward to a very schmooze-worthy evening.

I could write more tonight but I won’t, because I need sleep so I will be at my schmooziest tomorrow. I’ve figured out I need to do an average of 1000 words a day to get this book done in time. I started this book four days ago so I’m behind on my word count, but not by much, and I’ll hopefully make it up this weekend.

Meanwhile, my editor emailed me yesterday to ask if I wanted to write a short (30K) story for an anthology of “sizzling” stories for summer 2007. I think this is deeply cool, and you know, two years ago I never dreamed that editors would be asking me to write stories. Asking ME! Two years ago I was begging THEM to read something, anything, I wrote.

Off to bed. To snooze. In order to be rested to schmooze.

November 13, 2005

2243 words in…

…and despite my cliched beginning, I have managed to include:

–women’s weight lifting
–a litre of spilled milk
–a lovelorn Greek called Spiros
–a troublemaking kid called Vince
–a pink suitcase
–turquoise toenails
–a knickerless heroine
–Botticelli’s Venus and Mars
–the adjective “post-coital”
–the noun “cow-dom”

This is not bad.

November 12, 2005

call the cops

Oh no.

I have just begun my new book WITH MY HEROINE WAKING UP. In the MORNING, no less.

Cliche police, please come and slap the cuffs on me. I won’t resist arrest.