Archive for June, 2006
June 29, 2006
done
I’ve been missing in action for the past couple of days because I’ve been editing like mad–oh and writing those sex scenes I couldn’t bear to write when my hormones were making me want to puke constantly.
Anyway, the good news is that this book is DONE, done done and it’s going out to my editor tomorrow, bang on deadline.
I’ve got to catch up on here properly–I’ve got a contest for a copy of Delicious I need to do a draw for, I’ve had several reviews to put up, and of course I need to update everyone on the general state of fatness.
Tomorrow.
Though Saturday I’m going to Birmingham to give a workshop on writing sex scenes to the BookCrossing Unconvention. Which should be cool.
Meanwhile, thanks to all my loyal and kind friends who were convinced that I was John Cusack’s stalker. It’s nice to know you all think so highly of me.
June 26, 2006
Spirit Willing cover
Okay, so this is my WAY COOL COVER and the back cover copy for my Headline Little Black Dress release, Spirit Willing, Flesh Weak, out this September!
Rosie Fox is a liar. A really, really good liar. But when you’re a stage psychic who’s not actually psychic, you have to be.
But then one night, while pretending to commune with the dead relatives and pets of her audience, Rosie makes a startling prediction – which tragically comes true. Suddenly she’s trapped in a media frenzy, spearheaded by the impossibly handsome journalist Harry Blake, a man intent on kick-starting his stalled career by exposing Rosie as a fraud. Yet when his interest in her goes from professional to personal, she thinks she can trust him not to blow her cover – but maybe she’s making a huge mistake.
A hilarious romantic comedy that only goes to show that the course of true love is never, ever predictable.
June 25, 2006
the inevitable letdown
I finished the first draft yesterday afternoon and immediately got depressed. Which is what usually happens.
You would have thought that after the struggle of this book, I’d be running around yelling “YES!” But no. Instead I have been sloping around trying to avoid editing. I think beyond the normal let-down of finishing a book (exacerbated, I’m sure, by hormones), I’m not all that sure that this one doesn’t really suck, so I’ve got uncertainty as well as general sadness at being done with these people and their lives.
I did read chapter one today (that’s all I could print out, because my [insert swear words] printer ran out of [insert more swear words] toner despite the fact that I just bought a [insert really offensive swear words] refill 400 pages ago). I enjoyed chapter one. Unfortunately that doesn’t really reassure me that the whole book doesn’t suck, because it’s perfectly possible to write a good chapter one and then have the rest of the book bite big donkey butt, but at least I won’t have to rewrite chapter one.
I went and got some more toner (£44!!!) and printed out the rest of the book, and it’s only the procrastination of writing this blog entry that’s stopping me going and doing some more editing. So I’ll go do that.
Keep your fingers crossed that chapters two to fourteen don’t suck, either.
June 24, 2006
a solemn oath
I will finish the first draft of this book today.
I swear to the gods of weird romance novels with raccoons and pigeons in them.
June 22, 2006
in bed with the mayor of Casterbridge
Even fatter today. I swear this baby had a growth spurt overnight. I felt exhausted and sick at work today and haven’t been able to motivate myself to write tonight. So I’m going to bed to read some Thomas Hardy and tomorrow I’ll write. The idea of curling up in bed with a Victorian novel and a big cool glass of water is too exciting to resist!
June 21, 2006
now what?
Mostly I feel fat today. Nothing is fitting except stuff with elastic waistbands. The minute I get home I put on my pyjamas.
I have written five pages and am in the last chapter of my book. The hero and heroine have had a massive fight. The hero is now running–unfortunately, in the opposite direction from the heroine, who is also running.
I don’t really know what happens in the next couple of pages. Or I do, but only in the most general of terms. Hopefully a good night’s sleep and some time driving around listening to my soundtrack will sort it out in my head.
Five pages seems such a paltry little amount to write in a day, especially as I came home at lunchtime to write, and that was eight hours ago. But I suppose I am working forty hours a week and am also pregnant. In the past, I could do a lot more, but then again in the past I had caffeine, alcohol, chocolate, and no little person sucking every calorie I ingest.
In other news, there are just a few more days to enter Kate Walker’s contest to win a bag full of books. Click here to enter, before 30 June.
June 20, 2006
not quite there
Still haven’t quite finished the book–nearly there, though. My heroine is going to have the best would-be exit line ever. (And then the hero goes after her and argues with her. Not sure what the raccoons are doing at this point.)
I had to be at work until 8 tonight, at a very nice farewell dinner for our year 11. Meanwhile, I got the cover image for Spirit Willing, Flesh Weak and I have to look at it every five minutes because it’s pretty damn cool. As a matter of fact, it is quite eerie how well it fits in with this very website.
So I haven’t done any writing tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll leave work early and write and write and write like a madwoman.
Can’t wait till I can post the cover here…
June 18, 2006
weirdness
I think I can quite safely say that this is one of the most bizarre books I’ve ever written.
I’m at the end of the book, the really emotional part, right?
So why is it that in the last two chapters I’ve had a symbolic anecdote about owls and crash helmets, my heroine has been bitten by a black fly at a very interesting moment in a very interesting place, and now, when my protagonists are having a potentially very tricky conversation about emotions, they are doing it to the sound of raccoons demolishing the yard outside?
When my editor asked what happened in this book, I told her, “Well, I’m not sure, but they go to Maine.”
Little did either of us know just how much weirdness that would entail.
I’ve also decided a better title for it: On the Wild Side. From the evidence of what I’ve written lately, it fits.
June 17, 2006
Thank you.
Wow. Thanks to all of the people–some of them old friends, some new friends, some relatives, some I’ve never met–who left such kind and generous messages of condolence and cheer under the last post. I am touched, and my family is too.
I am consistently overwhelmed at how supportive the online community is, and particularly the romance writing and reading community. And I was touched to see the message from my cousin Lewis, who was my Grammy’s first great-grandchild, and called her G-G, for “Great Grandmother”. Thank you, Lewis.
I couldn’t make my grandmother’s funeral. I’m just barely into my second trimester, and with my past miscarriages, we thought it was best not to take any chances with overseas flights for another month. My brother read my blog entry at the funeral, though, so that helped me feel like I was there.
Meanwhile, I’m spending today lounging in the back garden, writing the final sex scene of this book, which is due in two weeks. Once the sex scene is written, the ending should fly by, because it’s mostly fighting and intense emotion, and that sort of stuff writes itself, especially when you’re at the mercy of your hormones.
June 14, 2006
Lillian Cohen, 1916-2006
She died quietly in her sleep yesterday.
Every Sunday of my childhood my brother and I would go across the street to her house for brunch and comic books. She had porcelain figurines on the television and my grandfather had easy listening on the radio. We would play cards and she would usually win. She made steak and eggs and home fries, chicken soup, noodle kugel, chopped liver, chocolate chip cookies, lemon meringue pie. She had stories about hiding non-kosher lobsters and pork roast.
Bridge player, crossword solver, doodler of pages and pages of hatched scribbles. Later, she lost one eye and her glass eye always stayed open while she slept. I went to stay with her in Florida over spring break and we pretended to pick up men on the beach, went to novelty restaurants, and I weighed myself every day to see how much weight she was putting on me with her constant feeding. On her own plate, she pushed food around in a way that was so purposeful it looked as if she were eating it.
She talked to everybody. When she felt joy she shared it. She kept every card everyone had ever given her in a drawer of her glossy secretary. She said “darling” in a Maine accent. In her wedding photo she was a princess, my grandfather Erroll Flynn.
Her letters ended with strings of XOs and her telephone calls with slobbery kisses down the line. She could recite every word of poetry learned in her youth.
I could never tell her enough how dear she is to me.
June 13, 2006
I blame the judge
Tired. I am really, really tired. Today I came home at 5.15, lay down on the couch watching Judge Judy until 6.30, and was so worn out by that I had to go take a nap.
I’ve been trying to think if I have anything else to say about Delicious. I think I’ve run out. It’s been great blogging about it, though. Sort of makes me feel like I know what I’m doing. Thank you to everyone who commented; I really enjoyed the dialogue.
I’m not sure I know what I’m doing with my current book, though the word meter over there tells me I only have about another chapter and a half left. I like the characters, the story, and the ending…but my attention span is about sixty seconds and I seem to need to sleep ten hours a day. Oh, and I cry at everything.
Of course that could all be down to the emotional roller coaster that is Judge Judy. Man, I love that show. Today it was about two McDonald’s workers getting in a brawl. Excellent.
June 11, 2006
delicious, third draft (part 4: the heroine)
I didn’t change Elisabeth, my heroine of Delicious, very much. I knew she was a caring person, a dedicated teacher who was afraid of losing control over her life because she had made some mistakes in her past; I knew she was quick-witted, clever, and a little bit sardonic, that she forgave others’ mistakes far more easily than her own, and that down deep, she was desperately in need of fun. And she’s still that in the final draft. What I did do was beef up her backstory to give her more reason to be the way she is, and to develop her emotional reactions.
To give her a reason for her obsession with control and stability, I decided that her childhood had been disrupted by her family moving frequently around Canada (nude Canadian hippies, dontcha know). I also decided her parents had not been strong authority figures, so she values rules and boundaries. In the first draft she’d had a bad relationship with a superficial man in her past, but I decided to really explore the pain that relationship had caused.
Something strange happened while I developed Elisabeth’s backstory, though–something that shows the odd interaction between imagination and real life.
I didn’t check my first draft of Delicious before I wrote the new draft–not beyond the first few pages, anyway–and so I happily built up the backstory I thought I already had…that Elisabeth had gotten pregnant from an earlier disastrous relationship, and miscarried the baby.
Except when I was checking something different in the first draft, I realised something I honestly had not remembered before.
Elisabeth in the first draft had never been pregnant. And she’d never had a miscarriage.
She hadn’t. But I had. About a month and a half before I wrote the new draft of the book, in April 2005, I lost a baby at ten weeks.
Of course, this gave me a huge well of emotion to explore, because I was still dealing with so much of it myself.
And honestly, writing that book helped me hugely. I expressed emotions that I was keeping in, and through my characters, I dealt with them. And just as importantly, I visualised a happy ending for my heroine.
It’s the ultimate in positive thinking. And it’s also why I cry when I finish reading the book, every time.
