Old Faithful

Mar 13, 2008

As I’ve nattered on, confessing my neophyte stupidity when I first started writing, you’ve learned a few things, just as I did. There’s a word-count feature on Word, and 25,000 words is not a book. You can root out all adverbs doing an “ly” search. A hero’s infidelity is fatally catastrophic. Guess who had their heroes catting around in their first two completed manuscripts?

This brings me to Elliot Spitzer, New York’s newly ex-governor, a self-proclaimed Mr. Clean who’s just been caught with someone named Kristen in a Washington hotel room. Kristen is not Mrs. Spitzer. Kristen can apparently command up to $5,000 an hour, and all I can say is she must be really good at being bad. This is not a new newstory. I can think of preachers and principals and presidents who should have kept their pants zipped. I’m tired of hearing about their sexual peccadilloes. I don’t want to watch people blubber and apologize to their wives and children. And just once I’d like the wronged wife to whip out a frying pan and bash her husband on the head at the press conference. Or perhaps she should aim lower.

One never knows what goes on behind closed doors of any marriage, and this one doesn’t want to. But I do know in the fairy-tale world of romance, fidelity is paramount. So I fixed Waking Beauty. And after revising Paradise (only the synopsis to go!), I’m ready to return to Mistress by Midnight. My characters Con and Laurette have loved each other since they were children, but Con was forced to marry someone else. He remains faithful to Laurette in his own way, and there will be a HEA. It’s time to write it.

Is fidelity an unreasonable expectation? Are men and women equally guilty? Do you take pleasure, as I do, when hypocrisy is exposed? What makes powerful men in the public eye become complete peckerheads?

Thank you, John, for a frying pan-free marriage. You really are my hero.

If a man could have half his wishes, he would double his troubles. ~Benjamin Franklin

In the Beginning

Mar 10, 2008

Long ago and faraway (well, several years and two counties over) I woke up in the middle of the night and started to write. My ‘book’ turned out to be a 25,000 word novella, so I wrote three more and tried to peddle them as a family saga. I was quite in love with the Anthony family, so wrote another four novellas, dividing up the chapters into ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ stories. Needless to say, the girls and boys have gone nowhere except two counties over.

I think about those eight Anthonys quite often, going so far as to change an earl’s name in a recent revision from Adams to Anthony as a little tribute to my first characters. Paradise has a scene plagiarized from the first novella, and particularly brilliant (!) paragraphs and phrases have been lifted and grafted into newer manuscripts. I feel like I have my own little bank to raid, although more often than not, when I step into it to pillage, I don’t find much worth plundering.

Which in an odd way makes me happy. I have actually grown as a writer. My mistakes were legion, and I’m not making so many of them now. Headhopping seems to be my most egregious offense. What’s yours? How did you get your writing start? What’s your favorite writing rule?

Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum. ~Graycie Harmon

Giggle to Grumble

Mar 6, 2008

Memory is a selective thing. Mine is not what it once was. I do okay with the kids’ names at my high school library, because I have to look at them, hear them say their name, then type it in to the circulation desk computer. It seems it takes three senses for everything to be branded in my brain. It’s not because I’m a complete fluff-head; I used to be pretty smart. I started college when I was fifteen, the same age as quite a few high school freshmen. But now everything needs to be written down if there’s any hope of me remembering to do it.

But memory is a selective thing. See above. If you repeat things, they stick with you. And it’s weird what sticks with you. When I was a senior in high school, there was this guy who sat in front of me, Paul Korn. Everything was alphabetical then, and my maiden name was Lanman. He did this nifty thing when he signed yearbooks. He took names and then started a word with each letter to make a silly sentence. Mine was
Maggie
Always
Goes
Giggling
Into
Everything.

True? I guess it was. I’m not sure it’s true now. I read an article somewhere about a minister who encouraged his congregation to stop complaining for a stretch of time. They had purple rubber band bracelets to remind them to switch wrists when they did complain, and then they had to start the count all over. I’d probably be getting whiplash changing sides. Not only do I complain, but I’m not always going giggling into everything either.

So this post is turning into a complaint session about writing, circuitously but surely. Right now, I’ve had a requested full manuscript on an editor’s desk for over five months. Playing the waiting game. Wondering if I should send a gentle reminder. Thinking my SASE went into the shredder with the rest of the paper. Just worrying out loud. What’s your frustration? Let’s snap those virtual purple rubber bands. What’s your silly sentence?

The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory. ~Author Unknown

D-U-N

Mar 3, 2008

Yes, I do know how to spell “done.” This is a tribute to my youngest daughter who, when she graduated from college Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude, taped those three letters to her mortarboard with masking tape. It was her birthday the other day, and she’s never far from my thoughts. None of my kids are. Here they are (#1 son is missing), so nobody gets jealous. The birthday girl is on the right.

But I wanted to say that Waking Beauty is all boxed and ready to go. It went from a 93,000 word mess to a sleek 67,000 word manuscript. Whatever happens, it was worth the month of revision. And while I’m at it, Paradise is getting its turn next. I was somewhere in the middle of revising it when I had to whip WB into shape, and the difference in my writing style and content could not be more different. My only hope is that when I’m finished, I’ll still remember how to write new stuff. There are a whole bunch of starts on Begin As You Mean To Go On (Goon, for short) that are clamoring for those sultry, significant words The End.

So I guess I’m not really d-u-n. But I am trying to stick to one and get it done. How about you? Do you have more than one work in progress? Do you read more than one book at a time? Do you give yourself permission to walk away from writing for a while, or stop reading altogether?