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!”

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.

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!

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!

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?

I’ve had the cover for my next Little Black Dress, One Night Stand, but I’m waiting a little bit to post it for one reason or other. But while I’m waiting, I thought I’d post an excerpt. It’s a long one, so I’m doing just a bit in the regular post, and you can click “More” if you want to read the rest.

The heroine, Eleanor, writes erotic novels. She’s pregnant by mistake after a one-night-stand with a mystery man she hasn’t seen since. And she’s recently discovered that she is wildly in lust with her best friend and neighbour, pastry chef and womaniser Hugh.

The first part is from the novel she’s writing, The Throbbing Member of Parliament, which is becoming more and more like her real life.

So it could get you pregnant and make you feel worse than you’d ever felt in your life.
(more…)

I’m too tired to write tonight; have managed 453 words, most of that written in the John Lewis cafe while Fecklet napped in his pushchair. The John Lewis cafe is one of my new writing venues because it is merely a shop floor away from a nursing lounge and a baby changing room. However, it doesn’t do decaf lattes so it is far from ideal.

(Ah, what a change from ten years ago, when my quest was to find a cafe that didn’t mind my chain-smoking Silk Cuts while marking GCSE coursework.)

I’m having pacing problems with this book. For one thing, it’s just slightly longer than my usual books, so I have to adjust my mental measuring stick a little, and I’m not exactly sure how much. I sort of figure I’ll finish the book and then add or subtract.

For another, I’m trying to fit the character arc into the timings dictated by several plot factors: my heroine is pregnant and this book covers the nine months from conception to birth; she is writing a book and the book covers the time from writing to publication; there are a few other things that secondary characters do that either seem to take too much time or too little. I have one plot strand that I cannot figure out what to do with, because I don’t want to wind it up too quickly, but I don’t want it to take up too much space, either.

And of course I have the problem that I’m writing in first person, so the hero’s character arc has to be shown from the heroine’s point of view, and so I can’t go so much into it, and so it’s not quite as easy to make up the word count by exploring his side of things.

Anyway. The crows of doubt are present, but not really looming. It’s more like they’re hanging out in some nearby trees in case they’re needed.