Archive for the ‘One Night Stand’ Category
October 23, 2007 | One Night Stand, contests
It’s no good. I’ve got these gorgeous, gorgeous hardback copies of One Night Stand sitting here in front of me and I have to give one away.
So…I’m having a contest. All you have to do is to email me, using the contact button on the right. Put “contest” in your subject line.
(If the contact button doesn’t work for you, email me at julie at julie-cohen.com–using @ for “at”.)
And after a decent interval I will choose a winner totally at random.
Also…if I get twenty or more entries to this contest, I’ll add a mystery prize to go to someone else…and I’ll add another mystery prize for every ten people who enter over twenty. So the more people who enter, the more prizes there will be!
Come on, enter! Tell your friends! Tell your granny!
Small print: if you enter, I’ll add you to my newsletter mailing list, which is a text-only email that is sent whenever I have a new release. You can easily unsubscribe whenever you like.
September 26, 2007 | One Night Stand, covers
I got a copy of One Night Stand in hardback today.
How GORGEOUS is this. And the wonderful thing is, the paperback (out in January) is EVEN MORE GORGEOUS.
It almost makes me forget the crows. Almost.
June 17, 2007 | One Night Stand
12,000 words added, along with a vicar, a few friends, and a toddler named James. Something changed on nearly every page.
I’m going to celebrate by doing the washing up.
June 15, 2007 | One Night Stand, parenthood, writing
School finished at 2.00 today, and I didn’ t have to pick up the Fecklet until 5.30, so I had three hours to work on revisions, and I’m 1/3 of the way through typing the changes in. I also wrote a scene where the heroine reads aloud the subtitles of a film about Danish wife-swappers.
I’m very proud of the following line, which I think sums up the entire book quite neatly:
If you couldn’t accept unpleasant truths about yourself when you were up the duff from an anonymous one night stand, when could you?
The Fecklet made a Father’s Day card today with my wonderful childminder, of which I am inordinately proud, although his actual contribution consisted of having his feet painted with red paint and then pressed against a piece of paper while he sat and sucked on a rattle. I can see already that I am going to be the type of parent who has her child’s artwork up all over the house.
To bed. Again.
June 6, 2007 | One Night Stand, writing
Okay, two people have contacted me about doing the first page challenge, and since the last time I did this was in October, I figure it’s about time to do it again.
The idea is to post the first few paragraphs from your wip–either here, or on your own website, posting a link here–and then examine them to see if they’re doing what you want them to do. First impressions are really important to readers–whether that’s an editor deciding whether to buy your book, or a reader deciding whether to take it home.
I did this originally in this post, and looked at the first page of my June release (OUT NOW!! hooray!), in this post, so today I’ll look at the first three paragraphs from the book I’m working on right now, One Night Stand.
Another Saturday night down the Mouse and Duck.
Here, I’m trying to give a sense of monotony, over-familiarity. This is the primary setting for the book, the heroine dislikes it, and I want the first line to have the quality of a resigned and bored sigh.
Jerry, the landlord, was swearing in the kitchen. Paul and Philip were nearing the end of their pints and arguing about football in the preliminary step to arguing about whose turn it was to get the next round in. Gets Drunk, Gets Horny, Gets Angry Man was steadily making his way through his fourth pint and was making the lip and eye movements that signified that he was having an imaginary conversation with himself. Maud and Martha were eying up the karaoke machine through their haze of smoke. And I’d spilled half a pint of Stella over my shoes when I was serving the group of students who were starting to get loud over in the corner.
I’m trying to give quick thumbnail sketches of these people, making them sound not very appealing, but instantly recognisable as pub regular types. We can see this isn’t an upmarket pub, and also that the heroine’s heart really isn’t in her bar job. This is a longish paragraph, written as a list, and I used the repeated present continuous tense (was swearing, were nearing, etc) to give a sense of being in the middle of something which happens over and over and over again.
I made sure that nobody was watching me, and topped up my orange juice with vodka from the House Special optic.
Anna didn’t like this line. She thought that having a heroine who drinks in secret whilst working was a bit unsympathetic. I kept it, though, because a) the heroine needs to get drunk in order to have her one night stand (hence book title), and b) I think it shows that something is wrong here. Why is she getting drunk in secret? Hell, if she’s drinking on the sly, why doesn’t she steal the good stuff? Why does she care if anybody sees her, especially as her boss is out of sight in the kitchen?
All in all, it’s not a bang-flash-wallop beginning. Not much is going on. However, that’s precisely the effect I’m trying for…Eleanor, the heroine, is bored bored bored and you have to understand that in order to understand why she does what she does next, which is something that changes her entire life.
What do you think? And more importantly…what’s yours?
May 22, 2007 | One Night Stand, writing
Well, today we found a cup that the Fecklet drank from (eagerly and greedily), and immediately went out and bought two more just like it. Hopefully it’ll work tomorrow at the childminder’s.
In other news, I said I would blog about writing. While my husband took the Fecklet out for a long walk this afternoon, I went out in the garden and started my revisions on One Night Stand. My editor has pushed back the release date for this book (to October hardback and January 08 paperback) so I have time to do the revisions properly, which I appreciate, given the Fecklet and the day job. I think these revisions are going to be serious fun to do; they involve deepening character, strengthening plot and broadening setting. In other words: making more stuff up. Hooray!
In two hours, I worked on about forty pages and got a sunburn on one arm. It doesn’t seem like a lot to have achieved but perhaps it will get faster.
Tomorrow…reviews.
April 26, 2007 | One Night Stand, crows, writing
I just emailed the revised draft of One Night Stand to my editor, whom I will be seeing at the Romantic Novelists’ Association awards luncheon at the Savoy tomorrow.
Terrified? Me? Never.
crawls under couch
April 23, 2007 | One Night Stand, lame jokes, writing
So the next thing I did was to analyse the content for repetition.
In my word document, I highlighted all the bits that were about the romantic relationship, and tried to see whether they had the same structure. I noticed that two chapters began the same way, with my narrator summing up the fact that time had passed, in a similar fashion–so I changed that.
I noticed that the hero kept on meeting up with the heroine and offering her food (he’s a pastry chef, yum), and while I like that in a man, I decided to change one of those incidents so that it happens somewhere else and he doesn’t offer her food–instead she has to grovel a bit (hooray!). Altering the pattern there actually makes the character arc better, because before the hero came to make the peace, whereas now the heroine has to do it herself.
I’m going to go through it again looking for more structural similarities.
Mostly right now though, I’m tired. Fecklet was up from 3-5 am with teething troubles and itchy skin and although it’s only 8.20 pm, I’m wrecked. I’m going to bed to read a book on eczema. (How exciting.)
Oh. And it’s Shakespeare’s birthday. I could quote some Shakespeare for you, but as I do that on a daily basis in my day job, I’ll skip it. Instead I’ll offer you a great joke:
Shakespeare walks into a pub. The barman takes one look and shouts, “Oi, you! Get out of here! You’re bard!”
April 22, 2007 | One Night Stand, writing
My agent called me about One Night Stand, and she says it’s “85% there”. (She also said some very good things about it, but I’ll save those for my own personal satisfaction.) The problem isn’t the ending, which I was a little afraid of, as it ventures into some quite broad comedy; she liked the ending. Nor was it the beginning, which she’d said in a former draft was rather slow; I’d revised it. No, unfortunately my middle sags. The external plot disappears, and some of the scenes are quite similar in their setting and structure.
(Actually I was delighted with 85% of it being right, considering I wrote this book when very pregnant and with a newborn in the house. I’m not surprised the middle lacks a bit of imagination when really, all I could think about was breastfeeding.)
So I’ve spent this weekend (what time I didn’t spend waxing, see below) working on revisions.
First, I looked at the notes I wrote down while talking with her and I made a list of things to do.
Then I analysed what happened in the middle of the book. It really helps me to see things visually, so I drew a flow chart of each chapter and its events, and looked to see what sort of events these were. Sure enough, chapters 18-19, and 22-25, were all more or less about the developing relationship between the hero and heroine, with only a short interlude for chapters 20-1 to deal with external plot.
I decided that I didn’t want to cut the romance scenes, not wholescale anyway; they’ve got important emotional development in them, and besides, I like them. I decided instead to go with the assumption that the book itself isn’t slow-paced and lacking tension; it’s the reader’s perception of the book, because although things are happening (and happening fairly quickly), they’re the same sort of things.
So what I did instead was brought the external plot into this part of the book. I added a bit of a scene in chapter 19 that has nothing to do with the romance and happens in another town. I cut an external conflict scene from chapter 27 and put it, with some changes, in chapter 23. So now I have bits of external plot alternating with the romance. Hopefully that will keep up tension in both areas.
I did those things on Friday and Saturday and today; tomorrow I’m going to deal with the repetition issue, and I’ll blog about that then.
April 1, 2007 | One Night Stand, covers
Well, it’s up on Amazon, so I’d better post it here…
This is my gorgeous, gorgeous cover for my next Little Black Dress book, One Night Stand!
March 20, 2007 | One Night Stand, writing
I am, according to the word meter there on the side, over 80% done with this ms (though I think it’s actually more like 90%), and I am beginning to be sad about finishing it. I’ll miss these characters when I’m done with them. I like Eleanor, and her self-doubts, and her sense of humour. I love Hugh, and his casual devotion, and his gorgeous resemblance to David Tennant. I even like the secondary character of an old man who sits at the end of the bar in the pub where Eleanor works and gets steadily drunker and steadily hornier until he suddenly erupts into verbal violence. (Imaginatively, he’s called Horny/Angry Man.)
There are other things about it that are close to my heart…the heroine is pregnant and I got to put in some of my experiences. She’s also a writer, and her doubts and insecurities are very definitely like my own. She also lives in Reading, so I’ve had fun putting her in places that I’m familiar with.
And on top of all that, this is The Book I Wrote When I Had My Baby. In fact there’s a break on page 72 that says “Pause here to have baby”.
My writing friends all remind me that I always get depressed when I finish a book, and that it’s a good sign because it means a) that things are normal with me, and b) I like this book and therefore it’s probably not utter crap. Sela called it “The Seasons of Julie.” It’s very true, and one of the reasons I started this blog was to remind myself that my feelings about my writing go in cycles, invariably in this order:
fear (starting book),
elation (liking book),
crow attack (hating book),
optimism (book could be all right), and
depression (book is over).
Does that happen to you too?
P.S. Don’t forget my book giveaway!
March 6, 2007 | One Night Stand, writing
Phillipa asked a really good question in the comments to my post below, and I’m copying and pasting it because I want to write about it.
Julie - I hope you don’t mind me asking (I bet you’ll laugh) but do you think is it more difficult to write a sex scene in the first person? I expect it’s no different to writing about the experiences of a fake medium in the first person but…I always think I have the distance of the third person when I write about sex.
I know a first person character is still ’someone else’ not ‘you’ but is it more difficult to shed the consciousness that parents/aunties/whoever might be reading and thinking it’s you?
My experience is YES–it is SO much more difficult to write a sex scene in the first person, so far anyway in the two books I’ve written from that point of view.
In this book, I write about sex in two ways–one, through the heroine’s eyes, and two, through the third-person erotica novel she is writing. The third person erotica novel extracts are so much easier. This could be because I don’t have to write the whole thing, and because I don’t really have the weight of characterisation to convey in them (since they’re only snippets), and also because they’re pretty much parodies…but I think, too, that it’s because they’re in the third person.
All of my M&B novels are in the third person, and I don’t have trouble describing sex in them in quite a bit of detail (unless I’ve got morning sickness, see below). But in Spirit Willing, and in this book I’m writing now, my instinct is to skip over the nitty-gritty detail and concentrate more on the build-up, or the dialogue, or even fade to black.
I don’t think it’s because of what Phillipa suggests–that I think someone might think I’m describing my own sex life. I never am, and that idea stopped bothering me a long time ago. I think it’s because when you’ve got a first person narrator, it’s as if that person is there telling you the story, and people just don’t describe their sex life in detail that way.
Or, rather, the character I’m writing now doesn’t. I can imagine a character who would. But Eleanor is actually quite shy, a fairly inward-looking person. I’m having trouble even getting her to use graphic or coarse language to describe her own sex life, though obviously she knows it and uses it on a regular basis, because she writes graphic sex scenes all the time for her job. Yet they feel wrong coming from her point of view.
This isn’t a problem in third person, because I can just describe what happens–obviously slanting it to suit the point-of-view character, but some of it is just objective description. First-person narration is too intimate, not because I’m too close to the character, but because she’s too close to the reader. It’s as if she (not I) gets embarrassed.
What do you think? Have you had this problem with narrative viewpoint and sex scenes? Why or why not?
