Why I Write

In no particular order.

(Seriously, if I wrote this tomorrow, the list would be mostly the same, but
shuffled to account for the phase of the moon, the price of gasoline, and the
quantity and colors of polka dots on my socks.)

1. After having children and turning my sewing room into a bedroom, I needed a
   creative outlet that was neither potentially harmful to small children (pins,
   needles, and shears oh my!), nor loud enough to keep them awake (my serger sounds
   something like a swat team helicopter).
   
2. Occasionally, one of the voices in my head hacks into my central nervous
   system and starts looking for a keyboard.
   
3. I had to legitimize my Starbucks habit.
   
4. I'm tired of punching a (computerized) time clock. Does anybody really care
   what I work on down to the tenth of an hour? (That's six minutes for all you
   non-math types). And the answer is YES. They do. Even if 5.5 of those 6 minutes
   are spent in the restroom.
   
5. I want windows. Not the computerized kind. I'm talking a pane of
   translucent glass through which I can see things that grow and the occasional change
   of season.
   
6. I have always claimed that my ideal job would pay me to go back to school to
   learn a large variety of completely unrelated and barely practical bodies of
   knowledge. Stuff like Mesoamerican history, the science of puff pastry, and the
   design philosophies of high-end women's shoe companies. Writers call this stuff
   research.
   
7. And of course, buying romance novels by the baker's dozen is also research.
   
8. I like women. No, not that way. But when having only 4 women in a group of
   20 co-workers means you have a more diversified team than any other in the
   corporation, you start really missing girl talk.
   
9. Sex with hot men. And since they're all make believe, it prevents the
   awkward conversations with my husband...
   
10. JK Rowling's net worth. Yeah, that kind of success is a pipe dream. But
    one that all writers secretly share.
    

Tweet Tweet

I'm on twitter. elitsirk. That's me.

Warning: I'm not likely to tweet all that often. Today, maybe. I've got a "sick" toddler (He threw up yesterday at school, so he can't go back today, but he is eating and acting overly healthy right now...).

Um, that's about all I had to say :) (I'm sure you're now waiting anxiously for my tweets, huh).

NaNo: It's a verb

Are you NaNo'ing?

I feel kind of torn this year. I'm not planning to participate in NaNoWriMo. Yes,
that's a mouthful. So I'm verbifying it. I'm not NaNo'ing this year. Just add it
to the dictionary and get over it. And add "verbify" while you're at it :) Ahem.

I've done NaNo (and won) the past two years in a row. It was actually the motivator
for starting and "finishing" my first book. I use the quotes because I've written
at least three separate endings for that first book, and have made a couple of
rather thorough edits to it since the first time I "finished" it. And I have half
an idea for a further edit that would be rather significant (changing wordcount, and
hacking apart the entire beginning). Not sure if I'll ever do that.

I can't seem to stay on topic this morning, can I? Well, therein lies my problem
with NaNo this year. I have three WIPs. Three! One that I started almost a year
and a half ago--a romantic suspense. Love the idea, love the characters. Paused it
to start NaNo last year. The second one is last year's NaNo book--Leap, my sci fi.
Its not done. But its sooo close. And I'm closing in on being able to finish it.
Really! Number 3 is the book I never thought I'd actually write, and started as a
lark, by writing a single scene. On this blog, no less. And here I am, closing in
on 40% completion.

So, it's Mid-October, and I have on my plate about 20,000 words left to write on
last year's NaNo book. And 30,000 more on my contemporary category-length. And,
say, 85,000 of 90,000 (or perhaps 50,000 of 55,000, depending on where I take it) on
my suspense. So, should I scrap it all and start a new book for NaNo?

Um, no. I think that would be bad, bad, bad.

And, did I mention that my family is taking a vacation in November? Going for a
week. To the beach. Not even to visit family. I'm reveling in the selfishness of
daring such a thing during the Holiday Season. We are driving to our destination,
and it is entirely plausible that I'll be able to crank out a few thousand words in
the car each way. But I'm thinking my hubby will be annoyed with me for holing up
in the hotel room writing alone while he's with the kids.

So, my official participation in NaNo is out.

But I'm going to try to finish both Leap and my category romance by the end of
November. Starting now. Maybe I'll even start tracking daily word counts. 50,000
between October 19 and November 30. NOT NaNo. But it will be a stretch for me.

I'm thrilled to cheer on everyone else who's doing it for real!

On POV

I haven’t worked on my sci fi manuscript for the better part of a month, maybe more. I’ve felt, for quite a while, that something was not quite right with it, and I think I’m beginning to see what that might be. I’ve known that part of my problem is the conflict—the external conflict. My two main characters are in a race for their life, but I didn’t feel like it was coming across the page that way. Yes, they were racing, but I knew that things didn’t read that desperate.

Now, when I first began the manuscript almost a year ago (ack!), I started with a prologue told in a secondary character’s point of view. An important secondary character. And the prologue wasn’t back story—it related one of the opening events of the book, and planted a clue for later in the book. I read the prologue and the first part of chapter one at my chapter’s critique group meeting, and got lots of negative feedback on the prologue. Not on its actual writing, but on the (temporary) focus on a secondary character. “Cut it,” I was told.

Ok, scene cut. The story mostly works without it. And the rest of the writing sticks to the H/H POV’s. But because of that, I’ve struggled to show the whole story. This is sci fi—with a big badass enemy, 3 additional crew members on the heroine’s ship, plus a small assortment of other secondaries who help drive the story (and provide jumping off points for other interwoven stories that are still tangled in my brain). And the H/H don’t see everything that’s going on, some of which is rather significant.

“But this is a romance, right? You need to focus on the romance.” Yes, and no. I realized last November that I might be writing Science Fiction with Romantic Elements. And then I let the voices of the chapter critique group and other crit partners lull me into thinking I was writing Romance with Science Fiction Elements. But it isn’t working.

I must remember to listen to my own gut sometimes, and not get caught up in the herd mentality. Don’t get me wrong—both my chapter’s critique group and the smaller one I belong to are great, and have many talented, print-published writers who are generous with their time and experience. But, most of them write pure romance, several are category-length pure romance, and I’m wracking my brain to come up with one who’s published in paranormal (published in another subgenre and writing paranormal, yes). So, maybe their advice is perfect, just not for the manuscript that I’m writing.

So, I’m about halfway through Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. I love it. Just like I loved his previous two novels, and the two National Treasure movies. The adventure. The chase. They mystery. I wish my story worked like that, with the added bonus of a little forbidden love to tangle everyone’s emotions along the way. Hence, my little revelation overnight about how I’ve killed my story.

I’m not Dan Brown, and Leap is unlikely to sell millions of copies before its even released (assuming its ever released). But he uses multiple POV’s (like a dozen so far), killing many of these secondaries while in their POV (and thus, pulling that camera back to a very omniscient view point). And its effective for me as a reader. Very effective. Forcing-my-husband-to-fall-asleep-with-a-pillow-over-his-eyes-to-shut-out-my-reading-light effective.

No, I’m not going to have like 20 POV’s in my novel, and I’m not going to kill every other one that I do use. But by golly, “rule” or no rule, I’ve got to show more of the story than I am. Because to reveal all of the action that the H/H don’t personally experience through dialogue is literally “telling” it, not showing it, and its not working for me. Some of that “off-stage” action is significant (in quantity and impact on the story), and it doesn’t deserve to be “off-stage.” My prologue might or might not come back. One of the other crew members might get a voice. And my big badass enemey (BBE?) might just get to cackle gleefully and rub his palms together over his evil plans to take over Earth. Shortly before he realizes how grossly he’s underestimated us lowly Earthlings, of course.

There, decision made. Of course, while I’ve been waffling on my “Leap” into sci fi, I’ve been chugging away at my category-length contemporary romance. That one’s fun too. No BBE, the whole story can be shown through the H/H. And a little forbidden love to tangle everyone’s emotions along the way. And Helmut and Claire are about to take their little affair to the most romantic city on earth (after a quickie in her kitchen, I think…)

God I love writing romance (and sci fi).

Big Girl Panties

At least twice in the past three days, I've read references to putting on one's "big
girl panties." Its kind of funny, really. The first time I read it was in a novel,
and I first pictured the heroine putting on a pair of granny panties (in lieu of a
thong?). Or that she'd grown by half a dozen sizes and was suddenly a "big" girl.
Then I realized that she was thinking it was time to grow up a bit.

The second instance was similar. It was from someone who is also a mother, who was
annoyed that a kid's school activities prevented her from participating in some
activity of her own. By putting on her big girl pants, she was letting go of the
selfishness and embracing the responsibility and sacrifice of motherhood.

One would think that, as the mom of a potty-training toddler, that I would have
leapt to the correct conclusion a little sooner. Alas, no. Maybe because my
toddler isn't yet wearing "big kid pants" (he's a boy, so I kind of hope he'll never
need big "girl" panties). Or maybe I missed it because when my daughter switched
from pull-up diapers to "big girl panties", then she started wetting through two to
three outfits a day in her stubborn refusal to use the potty. I guess, to me,
switching to panties is more like jumping without a parachute than a rite of
passage.

Every now and then phrases like this strike me as hilarious. Slightly overused, but
hilarious. At work the other day, we had a "stand-down" meeting. I still don't
quite get that one. I've been to stand-up meetings, so named because they're
supposed to be so quick that everyone could just stand for them. And sit-down
meetings where everyone comes prepared for a discussion. But I still don't know
what I was supposed to do during that stand-down. I certainly didn't stand. And I
won't even get started on how many times I hear the phrase "bird-dogging" a problem.
Ahem.

But back to the panty issue. As far as my writing goes, I'm more of a pull-ups kind
of gal, rather than a panty person. I'm too much of a scairdy cat to really "get
out there". I need to. I need to do a lot of things. I need to buckle down and
revise my paranormal. I need to do a bit of querying. Or, I need to enter more
contests (though querying is a tad cheaper).... But like my 2 year old, I'm
sticking to the old fall-back plan. I keep hiding behind my (paying) career, and my
family as excuse not to try harder at the writing (and submitting). It makes it
easy to deal with lack of progress (I'm too busy to put in that kind of effort) and
rejection (I don't give enough people the opportunity to do so).