You can win read a short excerpt from Girl from Mars and win a copy of Honey Trap by going to Nell Dixon’s blog today and leaving a comment on the post with my excerpt. You can also win a copy of Nells’ book Animal Instincts, too!

Here’s another excerpt from Girl from Mars, which I’m posting to amuse Donna Alward, because as I said in the previous post, I’ve named a foul-mouthed character after her. This is from chapter two. Fil, the heroine and an artist with long-running British comic Girl from Mars, is going to an editorial meeting for the comic with her friend Stevo, another artist. Recently, Stevo’s dropped the bombshell that he’s fallen in love, and since then he hasn’t been hanging out so much with his friends, Fil and Jim and Digger.

“I really could’ve done with some extra time in bed this morning,” Stevo said.

But he wasn’t. He was all detached again.

Still revising Girl from Mars.

While this is a really, really hard job, I can also say that I’m very pleased with this book. I love the characters, the setting, the emotions, everything. I identify so, so much with the heroine Fil and her friends. And there are lines that just make me laugh out loud.

Of course, there are problems too, and those are what make it so hard to revise the book. Thinking about what the characters would do, and what the plot requires, and what my editor has recommended, and what the reader will think. Agh!

Anyway, as it’s out in May, I’ve put up a blurb and excerpt from Girl from Mars on my website, huzzah! Check it out.

I’ve been working on my revisions for Girl from Mars (which should be out in May, by the way) and I’m finding it all very puzzling.

My editor has asked me to tweak the heroine’s motivations and feelings a little bit, to give her some more depth and conflict, and that involves writing a couple of new scenes. I’ve spent the last three days working on one of them, which is a scene where the heroine’s best (male) friend, Jim, meets the guy who she’s supposed to hate, but really is attracted to (Dan), and they take an instant suspicion to each other. The best friend Jim, having more to lose, dislikes Dan more, and gets all protective of the heroine. Dan is just sort of bemused and feels challenged by Jim. The heroine basically wants to crawl under a rock at the sight of all this testosterone.

The thing is, when you write a new scene to go into an already-written book, it’s like fitting in a jigsaw puzzle piece with the rest of the book. Actually, it’s more like forcing a whole new piece into an already-finished jigsaw. You have to readjust every other scene so that the new one fits.

In this case, the new scene could go in two different places–before chapter seventeen (where it fits better structurally and thematically, and makes the following conflict worse) or before chapter twenty-one (where it produces more conflict in itself, and makes everything that seemed okay before, more complicated).

I have no idea where to put it.

Oh, and did I also mention it introduces two new characters (one of whom is “George” from One Night Stand)…and I have to figure out what to do with them now, too?

throws self down on floor in fit

On Friday, my lovely editor sent me a revision letter for Girl from Mars, so I’ve got to drop everything (including YouTube soaps) and get to work on that now. Of course, down deep, as an author you always want your editor to tell you “This is great, a work of genius, don’t change a single thing” but actually, it’s much better to have revisions to make the book stronger.

In this case, nearly all of her revisions focus around doing something that I know I wasn’t capable of doing when I wrote the book originally. I’ve spent so many years being so focused and disciplined in my stories that the idea of breaking out a little bit makes me hyperventilate. However, distance, time and having written another book makes me more confident of being able to do what she’s asking. It’s exciting.

Today, I started reading the manuscript, which I haven’t done since last spring. I sat on my bed with it spread out around me and attacked it with pens. I got about a third of the way through. My best guess is I’m going to have to write two or three new scenes, and change the focus of several more.

Tomorrow, though, I have the day off because I’m going to the RNA Awards Lunch in Kensington to see my lovely agent and lovely editor and lots of my lovely lovely fellow romantic novelist friends. More snow is predicted (the south of England is brought to its knees by an inch or two of snow) and I’m coming down with a cold but I will not be deterred! I have a new dress and I will wear it!!!

And this is my beautiful, amazing, wonderful, absolutely gorgeous cover for my May 09 Little Black Dress release, Girl from Mars.

The back-cover blurb:

I, Philomena Desdemona Brown, do solemnly swear to forsake all romantic relationships…

It’s not like the vow, made by Fil and her nerdy best male friends so they’d always stick together, was a big deal at the time. Frankly, Fil wouldn’t know romance if it hit her in the face anyway. Her one true love is her job as the artist for the famous comic Girl from Mars. Just like the comic’s heroine, Fil’s never had or needed a love interest–just her best friends. Until one of them breaks the vow and falls in love, bringing her smack back down to earth.

Could it be that romance is in the stars for Fil after all?

Well, I got the call from my agent, and all is well. *big sigh of relief*

But I’ve got some tightening up to do. So my task is to print out the thing again, and then arrange it by chapters. Chapter-by-chapter, I have to pinpoint the major high point of that chapter, and then adjust things as necessary so that the focus is on that high point.

Sounds easy, huh? (not)

In my professional capacity as a writer of popular fiction researching her latest novel, that is. Not because I am a giggly fangirl. No, never.

2000AD is famously edited by a green-skinned Betelgeusian called Tharg the Mighty. In real life, the editor is a very nice bloke called Matt who works with a handful of other nice people in a corner of a big warehouse even more green-skinned and mighty than he appears in the comic, and he rules his droid workers with a rod of iron. In fact he executed one while I was there. You should have seen the sparks and oil fly!

I am happy to report that I giggled my ass off and couldn’t stop saying “cool” like the sad fangirl I am I learned a lot of very useful information for my novel.

Anyway I can wholeheartedly recommend that you rush down to your local newsagent tomorrow, when the next issue comes out, and buy yourself a copy. “The Ten-Seconders” is worth the cover price alone.

Okay. I need some help. I need a plausible-sounding, yet original, name for a device in a science fiction story, which causes localised time distortion.

At present I have “Particle Deconstructor” but I don’t think it sounds convincing enough.

Any ideas? I will love you forever if you can come up with something.

(And yes…I know I write romance and not science fiction. But I have found myself having to make up the entire story arc for a series of comic books that the heroine is drawing. Why do I get myself into these messes??)

Despite all that planning in the photo below, my heroine has just done something completely unexpected which changes her perception of everything, so I’ve got to rearrange. I think.

Which goes to prove that all this planning bunk is completely rubbish, because the characters are just going to tell you what they’re going to do anyway, and stuff the coloured cards.

I’m about at the halfway mark for Girl from Mars, so today I attempted to plot out the rest of my novel. I did this by using a technique I’ve recommended to my students, but I’ve never done myself. So this is the first time.

I brainstormed all the things that I thought should happen, and then I wrote them, with different colours of card depending on which story thread they fit into. Then I tried to put them into an order that made sense, so that each story thread is spread throughout the book, and so their climaxes roughly fit together and interact.

Then I Blu-Taked them to my closet door, going chronologically from top to bottom, with roughly simultaneous events side by side.

There you have it: the rest of my novel. A little scary, huh?

I’ve had fun today writing about the differences between comics and film. See, my heroine is a comic book artist, and my hero is a screenwriter, and they approach narrative in a completely different way. Anna gave me the idea that their learning about each other’s way of working should be the first step towards them learning about each other. So I’ve been writing about them doing that.

Comics are so cool though. One thing I love about them is that they are visual, like film, but they tell stories through space, rather than through time. A comic will show the still beginning of an action in one panel, and then in the next panel show the outcome of that action. The action itself takes place in the blank space between panels, and the act of the reader filling in that action is called closure. Therefore the reader participates in the deciphering of what’s going on, and there’s potential for big differences of interpretation.

Gaps are interesting. I’ve started to leave more and more gaps at the end of my books; I used to do epilogues quite a bit, but I’ve moved away from them because I like the reader to fill things in herself. I read a review of His for the Taking which speculated on what happened to the characters and the pigeon they rescue after the end of the book. The reviewer wanted something totally different to happen than what I would have written. I’m sort of glad I didn’t write it, because the reviewer got a happier ending for her that way.