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The Muse and Her Sense Of Humor

Tuesday, November 27th, 2012

The day after Thanksgiving, I finished a proposal and sent it off to my agent. This meant I had two and a half days to work on something else and there is this trilogy idea that’s next in line. All I needed was some kind of over-arcing story for the series.

Um, yeah. Unfortunately, this is an idea I’ve had for more than two years, but I still haven’t managed to figure out the series arc. Of course, that’s because it’s never been first in line. Now that it is, I should figure everything out and be able to get some work in. That’s not exactly what happened. My poor writing buddies were subjected to many think out loud emails. They offered feedback, helped me brainstorm, but nothing really gelled.
It was extremely frustrating.

Then this morning as I was driving into work, pieces started falling into place. The first chip to fall was on hero and heroine number one. I wondered if they’d known each other previously, and if so, what was their relationship. Somehow getting the answer to the first of the two questions seemed to help me drop the entire series arc into place. I don’t know why knowing this one thing made the difference, but it did and I wasn’t going to question it too closely. I’m going with the assumption that my subconscious was working on it and when I thought about some of the characters, it brought the solution into my head.

And yes, I am excited to have the potential answer. I have to mull some more before I know for sure it’s the right arc. But it was frustrating as well. Couldn’t my subconscious have shaken out the information while I was home from work for the long weekend? That would have given me two days to fill in blanks and turn things over. I think I heard my muse laughing as I drove down the highway.

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End of the World

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

Yesterday while I was at work, my iPod shuffled to REM’s The End of the World As We Know It and suddenly a story I thought was off the To Write list zoomed back on the radar. I’m pretty sure I mentioned the post-apocalypse romance I was researching a while back. Yeah, that one returned.

It was pretty unexpected although I had been picking up interesting bits and pieces that would help with the story over the last week or so, but it was a more distant thing. Certainly nothing like having the heroine show up and start talking. Again.

I have another story I’m supposed to be working on during my lunch at work, but this one is whispering oh, so temptingly in the recesses of my brain.

Among the interesting things about this return is that the heroine is telling the story in first person. I’ve had this happen before and the story has morphed into third person, but I’m getting the sense with this one that it might not make the shift. We’ll see. I’m not a fan of reading first person and the idea of writing it, spending months on end trying to reduce the number of times the word I is used is overwhelming.

The other thing that was interesting was that my heroine looks completely different than I thought she did. Although, in all honesty, I did have a sense I’d picked out the wrong picture the last time around. I just didn’t realize how wrong I was, though.

And just so y’all know, I did work on the story I’m supposed to be writing at lunch on Wednesday and I’ll keep working on it when I can. But wow, I wish I could write more than one thing at a time.

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Going With the Flow

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

One of the best pieces of advice I received on writing was that the process will change, and instead of fighting to do it the same way every time, I should go with how the story wants to be written.

This has turned out to be so true. Right after I sold, the process changed dramatically from book to book. Now, the changes aren’t as drastic, but they still happen. Whenever I’d start to get all stressed because this isn’t the way I do it, I’d remember the advice and stop fighting.

It continues today. Right now, I’m working on a trilogy idea set in the Blood Feud World and the information is coming in oddly. Maybe it’s because the first two couples have been around for more than a year, but my thoughts are caught up on the third couple. Particularly, the hero, although I am getting stuff on the heroine now, too. I wasn’t getting anything on her even a few days ago, so this is welcome.

The most recent information has been stuff that happens after the third book ends. At first I was wondering why. It wasn’t after the book couple stuff, which I’ve gotten before even it usually came when the entire book was written and finished. This was stuff with the hero and his family. Including hours spent listening in on a conversation between the hero and his father.

I finally got the why of it over the weekend. The relationship stuff that I’m seeing after the book is all unresolved during the story. That means that all these issues I’m seeing him deal with after he’s had his Happy Ending are going to be in play as his book unfolds.

Maybe I could have gotten this information in other ways, and maybe with another book, I would. But this is the process I’m dealing with for this book, and when I’m writing it, I’ll have to consider how these family things will impact the hero’s actions in his story. It would be so much easier to see it first hand, but no one ever said writing was easy.

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Story Time

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

I posted the cover for Crave the Night on Tuesday and this got me thinking about sharing my characters from Enemy Embrace with y’all.

The heroine is Nicole Ruiz. She’s a psi tracker–an elite vampire hunter–and she’s got a personal crusade. She wants to find the vampire who killed her family when she was ten and avenge their deaths. The vampire in question was out of Los Angeles for a long time, but he’s come back at last.

Her hero is Daktan, he’s a demon and an executioner (like Andras from Demon Kissed). Dak’s been assigned by his king (no less) to take out the same vampire Nicole wants dead. It’s a favor the demon king is granting to the vampire clan lord in LA. If you read Blood Feud, you know that the demons and vampires are trying to forge an alliance and this is viewed as one of the bridges. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to have a vampire clan lord owe a favor or two, right?

The vampire they both want dead is a rogue. In this world, any vampire who is not affiliated with a clan lord is considered a rogue, but the title itself doesn’t connote they’re evil. Of course, this particular vampire is, but well, you know.

The clan lords are the original vampires, the origin vampires, and one of them was killed during the war with the demons. All his blood line became “rogue” instantly, but many chose to form affiliations with other clans. There are a large number, though, who didn’t. They remain untethered to a clan lord, but there are power plays and issues going on that I hope to address in future stories.

This turned out to be a very complex world, and with stories all being short in length, it means I can only focus on small segments at a time. It’s actually kind of an interesting way to reveal society and the issues going on. Blood Feud introduced the demon/vampire divide and that they’re trying to form an alliance. Demon Kissed focused on the demon world and the fact that there are human demon slayers out there. Shadow’s Caress introduced human vampire hunters and psi trackers. In this case, I use “introduce” to mean when I reveal its existence to the readers. There is a whole bunch more yet to come.

Enemy Embrace will reveal a little bit more of the world. Because Nicole is a psi tracker, I’ll show a little more of that. I’m also bringing in another group of humans that have a stake in the magical world beyond demons, vampires, rogues, hunters, and slayers. They won’t have a direct role in the story–there isn’t space for them–but the wizards are coming. :-) I have a story with a wizard human on the back burner, but he won’t be in EE.

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Evil Plot Bunnies

Sunday, April 10th, 2011

The plot bunny is evil. Seriously. I say it like there’s only one of them, but that’s not true. Like real bunnies, they multiply like crazy and leave authors going, oooh, shiny. Yes, we are your poster children for short attention spans.

It’s not like we want to be distracted from our current Work In Progress (WIP), truly, but well, um, shiny!

And let’s face it, the WIP is work–that’s why it’s called the WORK in progress. New plot bunny is shiny. There’s that word again, but it’s the most accurate. Writing is hard. Really hard. Ideas are fun. Ideas aren’t work. Yet. Ideas can be gazed upon in their shiny magnificence and make a writer orgasmic.

For these reasons, the new plot bunny is always more appealing than the WIP.

Years of hopping around (no pun intended) and never actually finishing a book (add anal perfectionist in there, too) taught me a few things about tuning out the new shiny.

Some writers can work on multiple ideas/projects and do just fine, but I’m not one of them. I sink so deeply into my characters that switching around leaves me making little progress on any story. I had that problem on the project I sent to my agent a few weeks ago. I had so many ideas I was in various stages on (some just planning) that I was unable to write the WIP.

Finally, I realized I hadn’t changed enough to be able to multitask stories. I had to focus on one, the WIP, if I wanted to write it. I did. It took weeks of forcibly dragging my mind away from other ideas and forcing it back to the job at hand, but it worked.

And just as I was finishing revisions to the proposal in preparation for sending it to my agent, a new plot bunny arrived. Ooooh, shiny!

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Regionalisms

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

One of the things I try to keep in mind when I write is regionalisms. This is word choice/slang that is common in one area of the country and unfamiliar to other people. This isn’t something that I’m always thinking of, but I do try to have it in the back of my mind. Authors have leeway, but only to a degree IMO.

As an example, writers who do the Fargo movie speech for someone from Minneapolis make me insane. I’m from Minneapolis and it’s not something I hear often. The people who do talk that way in the Cities tend to be older and tend to have grown up in outstate Minnesota. (Outstate is anything other than the Twin Cities or its suburbs.) So if I read a book and the author has their 20-something secondary character who grew up in Minneapolis talk like Fargo, it takes me out of the book.

You betcha. Uff-da, uff da. Yeah, right. If someone is talking like that, they’re parodying how others think we speak.

That’s not to say Minneapolis doesn’t have regionalisms. The biggest one is how we tend not to finish sentences. What you’ll hear is something like: Do you want to go with? To me, this makes complete sense. To a friend of mine that grew up in North Dakota and moved to the cities, it makes her nuts. Go with? Go with who? Go where? To her, she needs to hear Do you want to go with us to the mall this afternoon? for it to make sense. To someone who grew up in Minneapolis, we infer the rest of the sentence because we’re talking about going to the mall after work, what else/who else could we mean? :-)

Traveling a lot helps with regional differences, but so does hanging around online with people from different areas of the country. I try to pay attention to how someone from the west coast words something versus someone from Texas versus someone from Alabama.

When I wrote Eternal Nights with my hero who grew up in Ft. Worth, Texas, I had a friend who grew up in the South correct my southern. :-) Not that I did too badly on that. I pick up the speech of others pretty easily and I even pick up words my characters use all the time even if I didn’t use them before I wrote a particular story. Anyway, my biggest mess up that she corrected was how I used the word fixin’. I used it as in the future some time, she told me that fixin’ is the immediate, like in minutes, future.

In Edge of Dawn, my hero, Logan, grew up in the Chicago area and my heroine, Shona, in Seattle. So when Logan refers to the freeway, he calls it the expressway. Nearly all my cousins grew up in Chicago or the surrounding area and they always call it the expressway. I’m guessing since there are so many tolls, that you can’t really use the word free in relation to their interstates. :-) But Shona calls it the freeway. And I did ask on Twitter because I wasn’t 100% sure on Seattle. I’ve only been there twice.

I also think there’s differences in speech between city/suburban people and people who grew up in rural areas or small towns. I picked up some of that when I was in college out in Morris, MN with a lot of small town/rural kids.

So IMO I believe that writers should be aware of where their characters grew up and how people from that area tend to speak. Not that it should be copied exactly because heaven knows it gets extremely annoying to read authors who feel the need to write “dialect” in their dialogue, but using words those characters would use like calling the freeway an expressway is important to writing real people. Again, JMO.

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How Dark Is Too Dark?

Sunday, April 3rd, 2011

How dark is too dark? That’s a question I’ve been mulling over a bit lately.

I have a story set post apocalypse and the world is very grim. The heroine was born and raised and has lived her entire life in this time and place. Her actions and lack of remorse make complete sense in her world, but I wonder if her actions will make her unsympathetic to readers.

It seems as if heroes can get away with being darker more easily than heroines. But this hero grew up in a considerably better place than his heroine did and he’s not as edgy as she is.

Maybe this is one of the struggles I’m having as I write this idea. If I stay true to Point of View (POV), there’s a very real chance that the reader won’t like her, but if I try to soften her, I’m doing my character a disservice. She is as tough and as emotionally insulated as she’s needed to be to survive. Her life is a hard one, her decisions and actions fostered from a totally different reality than what we face today.

Despite this, I like her. She’s tough and smart and she’s fiercely loyal to those she loved–even after their deaths. She knows she’ll die young since average life expectancy is around 25, with people like her who are loners dying earlier than that, but instead of bemoaning this, she survives.

That’s the bottom line–she’s a survivor.

Meeting the hero will rock her out of her rut and change everything for her. She’ll have to learn to go beyond survival to living.

The only way I can think to temper her edge is to write a lot of the story in her POV and hope that if the reader sees how she thinks that they’ll be more accepting of her actions. I guess I’ll have to see how that goes after I write more, but I’m hoping it works.

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Stories Are About Change

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

I figured out my heroine’s growth arc for the Work In Progress (WIP). I say that as if I had a choice in this. It might be more accurate to say that my heroine allowed me to see her growth arc.

Characters need to grow and change. If they don’t, the story seems pointless to me. I’ve run into this in a few movies I’ve watched and books I needed to read for university Lit classes. It’s why I’ve quit reading a couple of popular series that I used to enjoy. The change doesn’t have to be huge, but to me, the point of storytelling is to give the reader a peek into a life-altering event of the main character(s). Without this, it’s just a day in the life.

To use an example from the movies, I watched Crossing Delancey starring Amy Irving. I was completely engrossed in the main character’s life and waited for her to learn and grow. It never happened. The movie just ended and I was like, What?!? That’s it?!? That ruined the entire film for me.

I’ve written stories before without really knowing the growth arc when I started. Like with the last project that I sent to my agent a couple of weeks ago. I thought the arc belonged to the hero, but it turned out to be the heroine. This required two revision runs through the book that were larger than I like, so it’s always better to know before I start writing.

The heroine in the current WIP lives for revenge. Given the world she inhabits, the society that sprang up in this world, and the events that happened in the past, her need is understandable, but she’s going to have to learn that there’s more to life than hate. That obsessing over vengeance has hurt her more than anyone else.

It’s getting her from where she is now to this place of epiphany that I’m still struggling with, but then I have another story and world vying for my attention. Focusing on the WIP is difficult when the New Shiny is whispering alluringly.

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Shadow’s Caress Coming In Feb!

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

Shadow’s Caress, my short story from Nocturne Bites, has a release date now! You can find it online everywhere February 1, 2011! This is the third story set in my Blood Feud world.

I’ve been trying and trying, BTW, to come up with a name for the series that wasn’t the title of the first story that takes place in it, but nothing fits better. I finally decided to surrender and just call it Blood Feud because it fits. One of the main issues in the world is the animosity between vampires and demons and how their respective leaders are trying to bridge that and form an alliance. It’s not easy going for them because it is a Hatfield and McCoy situation.

So the vampires and demons realize that humans have become a bigger threat and would be better addressed with a unified front. Humans have vampire hunters and demon slayers out there, although the vast majority of the population is unaware any of this is going on. And the vampires have a small issue–the rogues.

In my world, all vampires are part of a clan through blood exchange. If you’re bit by someone who was bit by someone who was bit by clan lord #1, then you’re part of his clan. Everyone is affiliated–except during the Demon Wars, one of the clan lords was killed. Most of these vampires joined other clans, but a sizeable number did not. They haven’t made an appearance in any stories yet, but they’re out there. Waiting.

The thing that’s so interesting from a writer’s perspective (at least to me) is introducing this all in small chunks because they’re short stories. I’ve never subscribed to the barf out everything about your world up front school of writing. It’s hugely boring to read. But I have been able to reveal bigger chunks of say my Light Warriors world than I’ve been able to do with the Blood Feud stories because of the length. Blood Feud, the first book, introduces the vampire and demon conflict. Demon Kissed brings in the demon slayers, and Shadow’s Caress will introduce the vampire hunters.

I do have plans for more stories set in this world. There are two characters (vampires) mentioned in Shadow’s Caress that have stories. I just need to finish a few other projects and take time to work things out. Time is always such a problem!

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Jarved Nine Short Story

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

The Troll Bridge is available for download on Kindle now! This is a short story that I wrote for The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance and it’s a story set largely on Jarved Nine. I had a lot of requests from fans of Ravyn’s Flight and Eternal Nights to make The Troll Bridge available on its own and I’m happy to finally be able to do this! It’s only in Kindle format right now, but I have plans to make it available on other ereaders as well. It just might take me a little while.

Amazon doesn’t have the description posted yet, so let me tell you a little bit about the story.

Troll Maglaya is the hero. He’s a member of Wyatt’s Special Ops team from ETERNAL NIGHTS. He wasn’t introduced by name then, but he stayed in my head and wouldn’t go away. I knew that somehow, some way I had to write his story, so it was hugely excited to get that opportunity. His heroine is Lia Stanton. She’s someone who’s played it safe her entire life, but when she’s sent to cover a test at a particle accelerator as part of her job in corporate communications, she finds herself flung down a wormhole. The next thing she knows, she’s on Jarved Nine forty years in the future. Alex (that would Lt. Col. Alexander “The Big Chill” Sullivan) thinks she’s a coalition spy and assigns Troll to guard her while the rest of the team searches for the coalition transport.

Aside from Alex, Damon also makes a brief (non-speaking) appearance. Sasha is in the book, too. She wasn’t introduced in ETERNAL NIGHTS either, but she’s the ex-wife that Flare was still carrying a torch for in EN. Because it’s a short story, things happen quickly between Lia and Troll and I didn’t get to unfold the suspense plot at all. If I had, it would have been a 100,000 word story and Mammoth Books didn’t want that length. :-)

As I mentioned on Sunday, The Troll Bridge takes place about 7 years after the epilogue of ETERNAL NIGHTS. In those intervening years, Flare, Gravedigger, and Z Man have gotten married. Someday, I hope to write those three men even if I can only do it as short stories because I just love all of Wyatt’s team to death.

Here’s the extremely awesome cover for the story:

The Troll bridge cover

Find The Troll Bridge on Amazon

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