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Archive for October, 2008

Help! Please!

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

My agent is going to have a paranormal romance week on her blog in November and she asked me to write a guest post. I said I would, but I’m not coming up with any kind of topic. So let me throw it out to the world–what would you like to see a paranormal author blog about during paranormal week? Any and all suggestions would be most gratefully appreciated.

All week I’ve been debating whether or not to buy a Kindle. Every time I think I’ve firmly made the decision not to buy one (There’s a $50 discount until Nov 1 thanks to Oprah), someone else gets one and starts talking about how great it is. The thing is that even with the discount it’s still over $300 and that price tag just makes me balk. I want one, but I really don’t need it.

My problem is I love gadgets. Not all gadgets, but if it’s tied in to books or computers or both in some way, I have to fight myself. And with the Kindle the ease of research and the ease in which facts can be highlighted are two very tempting components. The best part is that say I need a book on a certain topic and it’s on Kindle, instead of waiting days to get it, I could have it in a minute and do the research. How cool would that be? And I could load my manuscripts on there and do some minor editing while I was waiting for an oil change or something.

And darn it, I’m talking myself into it again! I thought I’d pretty much managed to corral the latest urge. If it weren’t for the $50 off coupon expiring Nov 1 I could just say I’d pick it up in a couple of months, but because of that deal, I have to make a decision now.

So here I sit, waffling. If it weren’t over $300 it wouldn’t be such a huge deal, but it is and my Evil Day Job is up in the air since we were bought out this week. Argh! Want vs. need. Which wins?

Tags: blogging, kindle, shopping
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Quickies

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

I read my first short romance story today–one publisher calls them Quickies and another calls them Bites–and the one I read was around 40 pages or so. I’m not sure how I feel about it, TBH.

I liked the story and the hero and heroine, and the writing was good. And that’s where my problem came in–I wanted more. Forty pages just wasn’t enough. I wanted to see the story completely unfold between the hero and heroine. I wanted to know why they made the choices they made. I wanted to spend more time with them. It was so frustrating to be enjoying everything and have it come to an abrupt end.

On the other side of the coin, I don’t have much reading time so the length actually worked for me. I was able to read a romantic story with sex in less than half an hour. If it had been a full-length, single-title story, I wouldn’t have been able to take the time to read it. And if I could just figure out how to load PDFs on my iPod, the short length would be perfect to read on that rather than the computer.

And I wonder how the story premise would have held up over 100,000 words. It was a great premise, one that had me thinking cool, but could it be stretched to support a novel? I don’t know. For that reason, maybe the short length was a good thing.

It also intrigued me–I’m infamous for writing 115,000 word books. I laugh when I see the contract clause about writing at least 90,000 words because the only way that’s going to be a problem is if they won’t let me go over that number. But reading this story made me wonder if I could write something that short and have it be as satisfying a read as this one was? Because even though I wanted more, the story was a satisfying read. I don’t know. Short is not my natural length.

I’m interested enough to want to try. I won’t, of course. I have another story I need to be working on that has a deadline and I don’t have any characters I want to use up on something short when I could get a full book about them. But. But what if I did like a series of little vignettes about the same characters? Kind of a serial-type thing?

Argh! Back to the WIP, the one that’s due March 1st.

Tags: ideas, reading
Posted in writing | 4 Comments »

Character Sketches

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

Last night, I was chatting with my writing buddy who’s doing NaNo with me. She didn’t feel like she knew enough about her heroine and we spent about 45 minutes going through and filling out a grid from a workshop we’d both heard. She attended an all-day version and I’d listened to an abbreviated version from one of the RWA conferences. We managed to make a lot of progress before she needed to log off. Before she went, though, she said she just didn’t feel like she had a grasp on this hero and heroine like she’s had with her other heroes and heroines. I offered to send her my character sketch after I warned her not to be scared by it.

This got me thinking about character sketches. Someone a while back accused me of not being a character-driven writer because I will fill out a sketch when I feel the need to do so, but she was completely wrong. I am a character-driven writer and I always have been. My characters come in as fully-formed people from minute one. They’re not flat or cardboard even the first minute they’re there. Take Mika for example. She showed up and told me her name and didn’t say one more word, but I knew she was mischievous just from that three second interaction.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t times I don’t fill out character sketches. For one thing, the information my hero or heroine passes along might not be everything I want to know. Like most people, there are things they’d rather not talk about and if I don’t put the questions to them, I’m not going to find out about those items until I’m writing the book. If I need to foreshadow something, I’d like to know about it at the start instead of figuring it out midway through the book and having to go back and add it later.

Hell, I do whatever I have to in order to ferret out my character’s deep and dirty secrets. I’ll interview siblings, parents, friends, co-workers, whoever is handy if I have to. I want to know more than what they’re open about. And sometimes characters aren’t being reticient, sometimes they really have a skewed vision of themselves (and why wouldn’t they since so many real-life people can’t see themselves clearly either). Talking to other people my h/h know after doing a character sketch gives me a whole knew perspective of the character.

I’ve also filled them out because I’ve had characters who lie to me. That doesn’t mean they’re going to tell me the truth when I put the sketch questions at them, but because I’ve asked the same questions of characters who have told the truth, I’m better able to gauge when someone is fabricating.

The third reason is a big one–sometimes I proposal won’t sell right away and I’ll work on other projects between when I put together the chapters and synopsis and when I’m actually able to write the book. (In the case of In the Midnight Hour, it was 2 years between proposal and being able to start the book and in the meantime, I finished 2 other books.)

Or when I end up doing a spin-off book when I didn’t plan on it. Eternal Nights spun off of Ravyn’s Flight, but I wrote three other books and several proposals between RF and EN. I couldn’t remember things from four years earlier when I’d written RF and the character sketches were a life saver, especially for Alex and Stacey who were the secondary romance in both books. Even with the sketches and time lines I’d drawn out, I still had to go back and reference RF a few times, but I shudder to think how many times I would have needed to reread if I didn’t have the sketches handy.

Of course, just because the sketches are useful doesn’t mean I fill them out on every book. I don’t. Sometimes I’ll just fill in the facts about the h/h’s appearance–height, hair and eye color, age and stuff like that. Other times, I’ll fill in parts of the sketch, usually if there are areas where I think I could probe a little deeper than what I’m being told.

Sometimes I don’t fill them out at all. I didn’t on Edge of Dawn and I don’t think I’m going to do it for the WIP either, but then I didn’t need to. Logan and Shona are both open characters and I learned a lot about Logan’s brother Kel and his heroine while I was working on EOD. In fact, Kel was talking to me while I was trying to write Logan, so not only did I get to know him from his own point of view, I got to know him from Logan’s point of view as well. I love the different perspectives and that’s been one of the cool things about writing a series is seeing not just different characters from varying viewpoints, but also seeing their society from different viewpoints.

Tags: characters, learning, sketches
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Shona Blackwood

Friday, October 24th, 2008

When I started writing In Twilight’s Shadow, I believed that Creed Blackwood, the hero, was an only child. As alone as he was, I assumed his parents were dead and had been for awhile. I didn’t learn differently until Maia visited a store with a glass pyramid made my Shona Blackwood.

Who’s Shona? I asked as soon as I heard who the artist was. There was no chance she was unrelated to Creed, I knew that, but he wasn’t talking.

At first, I wondered if she was his mother, but something felt off about that. I kept writing and putting questions to Creed. I learned who Shona was around the same time he finally told Maia about her. As it turned out, Shona was his sister and his parents weren’t dead.

It was interesting to discover the true circumstances and how it all shaped Creed, but I had no idea I was going to write Edge of Dawn, Shona’s story, not until I was ready to start working on proposals and she was suddenly there.

I didn’t know much about her when I began. She was a glass artist and about 10 years younger than Creed. As it turned out she was an interesting dichotomy. Shona loves the energy of crowds, but isn’t comfortable with people she doesn’t know well especially if they’re around her own age. I guess it comes from growing up an only child who spent a lot of time with adults, but she’s much more at ease with people in her parents’ age range than her own.

Her circumstances became even more interesting when I learned a secret about her–something she, herself, didn’t know and something Logan didn’t know either. Logan is her hero and the Seattle-based troubleshooter for the Gineal people.

Some facts about Shona. She’s 26 and nearly 6 feet tall, something the other kids she went to school with continually ridiculed her about–and it’s another reason why she’s not completely comfortable around people her own age. Her eyes are brown and her hair is dark.

Shona lives in the guest house behind her parents’ house and is taking care of everything while her mom and dad are living in London for a year. She’s had a pretty easy life with her parents bankrolling her so that she can work on her art full time.

At least things were easy for her up until about 2 months before she meets Logan. You see, Shona has lost her desire to work on her art. It’s as if her creativity has been drained from her and she’s struggling with that. She’s attacked one night leaving a nightclub and is rescued by Logan. This is when things really start testing Shona. Someone is after her, she’s seeing monsters and sensing invisible presences, and things are moving far too fast with Logan.

And this is all before she learns about the Gineal and that she’s part of this society of magic users.

Logan has his own list of problems to deal with, but I’ll save that for another day.

Tags: characters, twilights_shadow
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NaNoWriMo

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

For the first time ever, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). The idea is to try and write 50,000 words between Nov 1st and Nov 30th. The participants come from all levels of writing experience–from those who will be attempting their first book to multi-published authors. I’ve heard more and more people doing this with each succeeding year, and that’s part of why I decided to try it–I wanted to be part of the camaraderie.

But that wasn’t the biggest reason. The main impetus behind my signing up was a writing buddy. (I’m safe admitting this here because she doesn’t read any blogs.) I’ve been trying to encourage her to write for the last couple of years–she’s enormously talented–but haven’t had much luck, so when she mentioned maybe trying NaNoWriMo, I was like yea! Then she didn’t say anything else about it. That’s when I had the brainstorm to suggest that I’d like to participate, but that it would be easier to do it with a friend. She’d already signed up, but since I’d already made the offer, it was too late to say, oh, well, since you were going to do it anyway, I’ll just forget about it.

So I went over to the site, registered and buddied up with my friend and a few others. I have a word counter on my page. My word counter is on the buddy page of each and every one of the people who friended me.

This is when the panic began to set in.

It’s stupid. I’ve completed books before and I’ve even written quite a few words in a short period of time more than once in order to make a deadline. It doesn’t matter. There’s something about that word counter that I find intimidating.

I’ve never counted words before, ever. I count pages. I’d have to do math to come up with a word count because I use the 250 words per page method. I like it because then I know exactly where I am in the book by the page number I’m on. My usual daily goal is 4 pages, which equals 1,000 words and I usually get more done on the weekends when I can write all day. I usually do around 8 pages then which works out to 2,000 words.

I can do NaNoWriMo. Maybe I won’t get 50,000 words in the month, but I’m not trying to win, just participate and work on my next book. But it doesn’t seem to matter; I look at that counter and become anxious. It’s almost Pavlovian. I’m torn between going to the counter page over and over in an effort to inure myself to its insidious effect or avoiding it except when I have no other choice once November kicks into gear.

Of course, my anxiety might end up being for nothing. If I get revisions for Edge Of Dawn in November, I’ll be dropping everything to work on them and NaNoWriMo will just have to go on without me, but in the meantime, I guess I’ll just keep fretting.

Tags: nanowrimo
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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Long title and one I have trouble remembering. I keep calling it Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, which gets the gist of it across, I guess. Harrison Ford reprises his role as Indy and Karen Allen is back as Marion Ravenwood, although I’d argue that she isn’t the co-star. I think that title goes to Shia LeBouf as Mutt Williams.

Warning: There might be spoilers ahead

I’m going to try really hard not to give too much away since it’s a new movie, but I might slip up and I don’t want to spoil the movie for anyone.

The plot gets rolling when Indy is kidnapped and dragged onto a US military base by Soviet agents. They want him to find something in the warehouse, but he doesn’t know where it is. (And if you saw the warehouse with its millions of crates, you’d know why.) To buy time, he goes along, pulling a MacGyver like stunt–the contents of the box is highly magnetized, so he uses gun powder and shotgun bbs to find the correct box.

This is where the adventure begins. The Soviets are lead by Col. Dr. Irina Spalko (played by Cate Blanchett) and she and her troops are the opponents that Indy has to best. Along the way, Indy is joined by Mutt Williams, Marion Ravenwood, and an old school friend, Oxley.

Um, I think I better leave the plot description here. No spoilers, I believe since everything I said happens in the first fifteen minute of the movie.

I wanted to love this movie, but it felt as if the energy was missing from it. I enjoyed it and I’m glad I watched it, but I’m also glad I didn’t spend the money to go to the movie theater. This is the perfect rental film, I guess.

Aside from the missing energy, I also thought the plot was farfetched, and considering I write paranormal romance, you have to go some distance to get me thinking something is farfetched. The concept should have been something I loved, but it was just a little too far out there. I know the first movie involved the Arc of the Covenant and all that, but the crystal skull was beyond that.

There’s no real relationship between Indiana and Marion in the movie although we’re supposed to buy that feelings have been running strong since the first movie despite their not seeing each other in years. And the humor of the first and third films was definitely missing here. (I’m not a fan of the second Indiana Jones movie and see no reason to ever watch that one again.)

My other disappointment came with the ending. For one thing, it made me think of The Mummy and for another, it was just a bit anticlimatic IMO. After all the build up, I expected more than what was delivered. Again, the energy was missing from the end the same way it was from the rest of the movie.

That said, there were some nice moments in the movie, too. If you watch the movie, pay attention to the car chase at the beginning inside the military warehouse. You’ll see one of the crates break open and show something special.

I also liked the relationship between Indy and Mutt. It worked for me both before and after, and the way it changed, seemed natural to me. Another part I enjoyed was Oxley. Everyone thought he was mad, but the man had the key to what was going on and he came through–most of the time.

Overall, it was a pleasant enough diversion, but not the best Indiana Jones movie ever. I rank Crystal Skull ahead of the 2nd movie, but the original and the third with Sean Connery are by far the best films.

My rating: 3.5/5

Tags: movies, reviews
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My Own Worst Enemy

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

I thought of a blog topic this morning that I thought was interesting and that people would enjoy reading. I’ve spent the last hour and a half trying to remember what the heck it was! Do I need to mention that y’all are getting potluck on the topic instead? I hope I remember it some day and can write whatever it was some other day. I’m afraid, though, that it might be gone for good.

So instead I’m going to talk about a TV show that I actually watched. I know, shocking since I rarely watch anything other than baseball. The truth is that I didn’t see it the night it was on, I hadn’t even heard about the show until after the fact when I saw so many Twitter comments about how good the show was. Hmm. I decided this might be a good test of watching television on the iPod. I know, I could watch for free on the computer, but I just can’t do it. I blogged about that a week or two ago.

The show is called My Own Worst Enemy and stars Christian Slater as Henry…and as Edward. Edward is a top CIA spy who has had a dual personality developed–Henry. When Henry is in control, Edward is sleeping and vice versa. Only something is going wrong and the two men are becoming aware of each other.

I thought the first episode was good and the series has incredible potential. Christian Slater did a good job as Henry/Edward and his CIA boss, Mavis Heller (played wonderfully by Alfre Woodard) is trying to keep Henry/Edward from destroying her program.

Seriously, I enjoyed this show and I usually lost interest in TV and wander off or flip away and forget to flip back. Maybe it helped that I had it on my iPod, I don’t know, but that really worked well for me, too. In fact, I’m debating watching the rest of the series this way rather than on the TV.

I’m looking forward to next week and hoping that the show lives up to its potential. I just need to figure out what day and time it’s on. I do know it’s NBC, so I get points for that.

Tags: reviews, TV
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Midnight Moon Interview

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

My interview is up at the Midnight Moon Cafe. Please stop by and check it out. If you comment, you can win a copy of In the Midnight Hour.

Tags: blogging, interviews
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Down Melody Lane

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

Before I get started, I wanted to let everyone know that I’ll be a guest on Thursday, October 16th at the Midnight Moon Cafe blog. You can read my interview and enter to win a copy of In the Midnight Hour, book 1 in the Light Warriors series. I’ll post again to remind y’all.

Now on with today’s blog:

I guess music has been on my mind a lot lately. Probably because I’m listening to it so much more often now than usual. What can I say? Boring project at the Evil Day Job (EDJ) and I’ve hooked my iPod up to my car stereo, so I can listen on the commute. Anyway, on Sunday evening, I decided to go through my old music and buy the MP3 versions so I could have them on hand. It was a very enlightening endeavor.

Before I began, my expectation was that I would have a ton of music I’d need to buy. I was wrong. Part of it was because I already had the songs I really loved, but the biggest reason was how much my musical taste has changed. This was something I already kind of knew. There are songs/groups I hated when I was younger that I actually listen to now and enjoy, but I guess I was kind of stunned by how many songs I looked at and went, ewww!

An even bigger surprise was how many songs I had no memory of ever hearing. Wow. These songs are from back when I could remember conversations verbatim six months after having them. I can still sing commercial jingles from my grade school days even though those ads haven’t been on television in years. And I amazed my young cousin years ago when we were at a wedding and I could sing along with every single song the DJ played. Despite all this, I’d look at a song and go, huh?

After sorting through everything, I ended up with a small selection to look for, maybe 10% of the total. I was able to find eight of the songs available on Amazon. I like buying music there because it’s DRM free, and after I was unable to load songs I bought on my new iPod because they were locked to the wrong format, I have become an advocate of DRM-free files.

There were songs, though, that I couldn’t find and/or some of them were by pretty big artists. Smuggler’s Blues by Glen Frey and Nobody Does It Better by Carly Simon are the two that immediately come to mind. TBH, I was completely shocked that I didn’t already own a CD with Smuggler’s Blues on it–I have a ton of 80s compilations.

My next stop was iTunes. I discovered a week or so ago that some of their music is exclusive only to them. I found four more from my list there including the Carly Simon song and Lulu’s To Sir, With Love, but that still left me with half my list unfilled. Why isn’t Marrs’ Pump Up the Volume out there? Why can’t I find Glen Frey for heaven’s sake? I would have thought that I’d be able to buy any song I wanted, after all, I did find the theme song from The Banana Splits Show. This was truly a WTH moment for me.

I ended up putting these songs away, unfound and unbought. I suppose after a while, I’ll dig them out again and see if Amazon has them for sale at that time, but it was hugely disappointing not to be able to buy them and listen to them again.