Twisted?

When I told my husband about my idea for a thriller (after writing two romances), he glanced sideways at me and took a few steps back. Then announced he would be sleeping on the couch that night. I guess the idea scared him, which is great for a thriller. Or maybe I scared him. Which is not so great.

This is my battle when I write. Where did this idea come from? Am I twisted? What will people think of me when they read it?

Books that scare me, or books with really evil villains, fill me with both awe and envy. I don't think negatively of the author. In fact, it's just the opposite. I want to create things like that. Is that because I'm a writer? Or do all thriller readers have that reaction? I believe it's this second one, because a lot of those books are best sellers.

I think I will post a list of the authors whose books have inspired me to write great thrillers next to my computer to remind myself to ignore the voice in my head that questions what Aunt Sarah will think and listen instead to the other voices telling me the best way to torture that character.

Oh, wait. Maybe I am twisted.

I love craft books!

Almost put the title of this post as my facebook status but I have a lot of friends who don't know me as a writer and I didn't want to talk about crocheting. :)

I'm reading "Writing the Breakout Novel" by Donald Maass. I missed the RWA conference this year, but read several blogs about it and his Fire In Fiction workshop was highly praised. I attended his workshop last year (well, most of it) and loved it. Borders was out of "The Fire in Fiction" when I was on my latest craft-book-buying spree but I happily picked up WBN instead.

Loving it! It's getting me inspired and helping me find answers to questions I didn't even know I should be asking my characters or about my story. Making progress!

And yet also feeling overwhelmed. :)

Revise or start over

I sit down with all these new ideas to revise a scene. Then I start reading what's there and end up just making little changes here and there and none of my new fabulous ideas come out in the "finished' product. :(

So my new approach is to just start the scene over. Fresh page, new document, whatever - just start with a clean slate and get the new ideas out there. My plan is to later merge the two and keep what I like from both.

We'll see if that works. :)

Catching up: kids, goals, backstory

It feels like I've missed a week, but according to the calendar I haven't. My kid has been sick this week, so it's dragged, but she's feeling better and returned to school today. Yay!

I met my most recent goal by getting my entry into the Sheila under the wire, so I'm waiting (im)patiently until May 1st when they announce finalists. Yeah. What was I thinking? :)

Next up: backstory. I'm listening to a thriller right now that has a TON of backstory. Each chapter, nay, each SCENE has backstory in it. It's pissing me off! I work hard to avoid backstory - weaving in only what's necessary and then I spend my hard-earned, uh, time (since I checked it out from the library) on a not just published, but a best-selling author, only to be bombarded with it. Ugh. It's frustrating.

And yet a bit inspiring, too.

It's not the writing that gets them.....

I saw a blurb somewhere the other day (very specific, huh?) where Stephen King was talking about J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer and how they were both targeting the children/young adult market, but he said the difference was that Rowling can write.

My first thought was who cares? Meyer is just as successful as Rowling - maybe a tad less since Harry Potter pulled in both boys and girls and Twilight is attracting mostly just the girls, but still. What I wouldn't give for a fraction of that success! I read the whole Harry Potter series and I've read two of the Twilight books. I'm reading Twilight (the first in the series) again with my second daughter so this is all very fresh in my brain.

HP is a wonderful, fabulous story and I love Rowling's imagination and the world she created. I'm amazed by how plot points in the early books still have revelance in the last book, and I was so caught up in the adventures I could hardly put the books down.

Twilight is similar. Yet so different. And I'm sorry, but you can't compare the Twilight movie to the Harry Potter books, so don't even try. To compare, you have read the books. Not that I'm going to compare the books. I'm just stating my opinion on why the Twilight series is so popular. Now, I know that I haven't finished the series yet. I know what happens in the last book (darn spoilers!), but I haven't read it. So, judge me if you must, but this is just my opinion, not policy. :) Okay, on with the post.....

So, why does Twilight work? For me it's the first love aspect of it. The angst. The holding back, afraid you feel it more than he does. Add to this the fact that he could kill you at any moment and isn't sure he trusts himself not to until the middle of the book and it just turns up the emotions. First love is wonder. Insecurity. Obsession. And Meyer covers these well. Yes, she uses too many adverbs. Yes, she often tells instead of showing. But still, the story grabs you. It's hard to put down. You want to know what's going to happen next. There's danger, intrigue, and all those wonderful emotions that are brand new to some of these readers and fun to remember for others. :)

Is Meyer's book perfect? No. But is any book perfect? No. I guess when it all comes down to it, the bottom line is that I still hope my books are a fraction as successful as hers have been. I hope the reader gets sucked in and can't put it down and wants to buy the next one. And the next one.

POV

I just finished reading Suzanne Brockmann's latest book called "Dark Of Night" - and loved it - as I do all her stories! The woman is a master of the deep point of view (POV). Master, I say.

She really gets into her characters' heads, thus pulling us, the readers, in with her. It's wonderful. Impressive. And loads of fun. I can read her books over and over again because I consistently get yanked out of my world and into hers.

Another book that really nailed POV was Elizabeth Bevarly's "Taming the Prince" (Desire #1474). Her heroine is a prim and proper girl with a bit of a British accent, while her hero is cool. Just one of the guys. A real down-to-earth dude. There is never a question in any scene who is talking. Each character's speech is so distinct it's like you're hearing it as you read. Fabulous! I re-read this one periodically for inspiration, too.

Got any great examples of POV?

I got nothing this week. Except cedar fever. And it's sucking the life out of me. I've only done a smidgen of the writing I planned to do. Only a smidgen of the planning, too.

The worst part is that with weather in the 70's in the afternoons (almost 80 yesterday), I fear the cedar blooming is just gonna get worse. Ugh.

I'm at the point where I'm hoping this is the flu so that it will go away. Before, say, March. :)

Next up: find a contest for my current WIP. I'm looking for the right agent or editor as the final judge. This manuscript (ms) doesn't fit into any of the nicely defined categories I typically see in contests, but it could maybe swing it as Mainstream with Romantic Elements or something along those lines.

Okay, good. I've posted a goal. Now I just gotta get on it.

How are your resolutions going?

My co-worker lamented yesterday about the crowd at the gym in the afternoons and how she was going to have to get up early to get in her workout until they all got tired of trying to get in shape.

I laughed. Then I did a few sit ups this morning. Maybe tomorrow I'll get up even earlier and get on the Wii Fit.

As for my resolutions, the second day of writing at the coffee shop has commenced. I didn't actually write yesterday, except to get more of the outline in the computer. No actual manuscript pages, though. And today I'm writing the blog. That technically counts toward my resolutions, though, since one of them was to blog more.

Today I need to do a little more outlining. Maybe by tomorrow I'll actually get to some real writing. Maybe.

Happy New Year!

Wow! Only two weeks since the last post. Which I would be proud of, except that I set a reminder to blog every week and have already skipped one. But it's not the new year yet, so I'll count that as a skipped practice. :)

Tonight's the night, though, so get ready for 2009.

Some of my resolutions:
write more (in general)
blog more regularly
finish book 3 and send it out
write book 4 - all the way in one year (can she do it? stay tuned to find out!)

There's some family stuff, too, but this is supposed to be my writing world, so I'll focus on that here.

Happy new year to all and to all a safe night!

Progress

School's out and yet I'm making progress. It seems strange. With the kids home more you'd think I'd have a harder time getting to the computer, but it turns out that I have an enforced hour every day to work on MY stuff because they're in swim practice. Plus I don't have Internet access at the pool (thank God!), so I actually get real stuff accomplished. What a concept!

I sent off my quitch to the CPs and got some good feedback, so I'm moving forward. Yay!

So close and yet...

Heh, heh. I thought I'd get a jump on the day and post early while the computer's free. I'm skipping work this morning and supposed to be posting my query/pitch ("quitch") to my CPs, but instead I'm going to whine about how long I've been working on it. :)

This little exercise (figuring how long I've been working on it) has taught me two things. First, I love doing my writing in a notebook. I've gotten into the habit (finally!) of putting the date first whenever I start working, so I can go back and track stuff like how long it takes me to get something useful. Or hopefully useful. I guess that's up to the CPs.

Second, I really was lost somewhere in May. I feel like I've been struggling with this quitch and working on it constantly, but when I go back and look at my notebook the reality is a slap in the face. There's a major 2 week gap. Then a couple of days of work, then a few more off, then a few more of work. I know my work times were chunks of 45 minutes to an hour, but I really felt like I did more than about 4 hours of work on this thing. Reality bites.

And the thing that really bites is that it's not even finished! I'm in the midst of revising the book(don't even ask how long THAT's been going on), and writing the quitch is supposed to help me focus down to the essence of the story. I'm on the cusp of making a breakthrough. The key that ties it all together is right there. Just out of my grasp. I can't quite see it, but I can feel how close it is.

Maybe shipping it off to the CPs will help me gain some perspective.

And hopefully June will be more productive.

Howdy!

So , here’s the thing about blogs. I recently started reading them, and found they’re quite addictive. They are also quite abundant. So why would I start one? Why enter into the fray of self-absorbed thoughts? Why spew my much un-touted opinions out into cyberspace?

Perhaps more importantly, why would someone read it? Not that I want to dissuade you, because I hope to eventually write some gem of an idea. Some fabulous tidbit that has the masses raving. Of course I’d like it to be published by a reputable publisher, and to have received an advance on it, but that’s just me.

There’s this fine line between – damn that editor in my head. I got started on this idea and then realized I needed something more in the first paragraph and went to fix that. By the time I got back here, I’d forgotten what I was going to say.

This happens to me all the time.

In fact, I used to joke about needing to go to Storytelling 101 because I’d always get side-tracked in the middle of a story I was telling and go off on some completely unrelated tangent (which, I think is the definition of tangent, so I really didn’t need to say it was completely unrelated, but.…Hmmm. I’ve done it again.) I had, of course, forgotten all about this for many years (in which time I decided I wanted to write novels), and when I inconveniently remembered it, I was hip-deep in two books, trying to dig my way out of the story structures from hell that I’d created.

It turns out that in order to have a good story you have to have, well, a story. Things have to happen. And they have to not happen for reasons that the characters have to overcome. And the characters have to want to overcome those reasons. In other words, they have to want this thing that’s not happening enough to go through the things that I make up to put them through. It’s kinda fun in a weird way. But it’s also hard. Why would they want that thing so much? You have to give them reasons. And not overly dramatic reasons, either. But everything I’ve come up with so far is this awful tragedy. And I know it doesn’t have to be this way. I see it in other people’s books. (But then again, I see worse tragedies than I’ve come up with, in other people’s books, too.)

Then I get to thinking. Hey, it’s kinda like real life. Here I am struggling to get this thing that I really want (to be published) and even though no one (agents, editors) seems to want me to have it I keep trying. Why is that? There’s no tragedy that made me want this. No deep dark secret that made me want to write a book and see it on the shelves of a bookstore one day. (And another one next to it, or heck, even four or five at the same time – different titles, of course.) But it is something I want. And I want it enough to keep going through the things they put me through (rejection letters).

So, I’m jumping on the blog bandwagon. Still not entirely sure why. Or how often. But I hope that it releases me in some way and frees me to think of those non-tragic things that happen in real life, but in a way that makes you guys want to shell out the bucks for a really good story.

That’s it for now.