Lynn Raye Harris

Lots of writers like to make collages of their works in progress. Alison Kent, for instance, gets pics of her hero and heroine and makes a board (or a notebook — I can’t remember). Over on Murder She Writes, Allison Brennan was imagining who would play her characters if her books were movies.

I once went through a phase where I cut out clothes from a catalog and pasted them into a notebook, but I never got any farther than that. I love the idea of the collage (or notebook or storyboard), but for me it breaks down at the pictures of my hero level.

I feel like Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone. Her Jessie is always portrayed as a shadow man precisely because she doesn’t know who he is. He’s a figment of her imagination, and the man she secretly wants to find. He doesn’t get a face until Michael Douglas comes along, and even then you’re never sure until the end that MD will be the man of her dreams after all.

So while I flip through catalogs and Google Images, I just can’t land on a photo of my current hero. This one is too young, or too gay, or too square-jawed, or too pretty. They just don’t match. Now, if we chop the heads off and just look at the bodies, I have NO problem finding the perfect body……

Ahem, where was I?

Oh yeah. Heroes. Lots of men are attractive to me. Hugh Jackman is yummy, but he’s Hugh Jackman, not Matt from my book. The guy who played Superman recently was pretty fine, but he’s Superman, not Matt.

Imagine my surprise, however, to run across two photos today that gave me a glimmering of Matt. And the thing is, the really truly surprising thing, is that it’s Ricky Martin. Ricky-freaking-Martin! I’m not a teenage girl and I don’t go gaga over the Rickster. Never have.

But, holy moly, these two photos do wonders for my imagination. The arms and chest could be a bit bigger, more ripped, but I like the military haircut (facial hair out of regs, but who cares?) and the bad boy tattoo thing.

I’m just going to pretend like it’s not Ricky Martin, okay? It’s not quite Matt either, but it’s close. How about you? Do you make collages or find pics of your characters? Or do you have difficulty imagining anyone as your hero or heroine?

(I probably won’t have a blog post for the next few days, due to hubby being home for the holiday weekend and tomorrow morning’s book group meeting, so I’ve posted twice today. Sure would love to hear from the writers about their story collages…..)

If you like category romance novels, be sure to stop by The Pink Heart Society blog September 1st for the launch party!

The Pink Heart Society members & all their friends are free to pop in here and rave about romance any time they please… So why not come join us and tell us all about you and what makes you love the books we love to read and write!!!

We have plans for Guest Bloggers/weekly updates to the Hero Database/articles/reviews/Blogs of the Week/Romance destinations/Rom-Com reviews/Romance Tips/Nominations for Shipper Shows/Competitions & Giveaways/Challenge of the Week and MUCH MUCH more…

Sounds exciting, right?

It’s amazing to me how I can stare at a scene, know it isn’t working, wonder how to fix it, then decide to go take a shower since I’m stumped. And usually some sort of answer presents itself while I’m standing under the hot water.

I’ve been working on the rewrites to Seducing Evangeline, taking the revision suggestions I received from the Harl. editor and incorporating them into the story. Wow, I really like it too, especially now that I’m back to the point in the story where I was when I put the whole thing aside for the thesis.

Making changes is both fun and hard. It’s fun when the lightbulb goes off and you get it. It’s hard to decide what to axe and what to keep. It’s also frustrating when you first get the revisions and don’t quite know what to do with them. That’s the point where you think you suck, your story sucks, your ideas suck, and you’ll always suck and never sell this book or any other book, ever. I hate that part, but I love it when the aha moment happens and I get past that.

So, I went to the shower with this dilemma in my head: where to put this scene (already written, but feeling like it was in the wrong place) that explained something about one of the bad guys, a guy who unfortunately has to die very soon. As I stood there, it came to me. The scene is unnecessary. It’s a bummer to have to cut all that work, but I was so relieved to realize the answer that I didn’t care. I’m not so dumb as to cut forever, though. I have a “Discarded Scenes” file for every book, so I paste it into there. I never reuse them, but I like knowing they’re there if I need to.

My DS file is over 200 pages (for one book — yes, I’ve cut quite a lot, including most of one previous version of the same story). The WIP file is right around 95 pages so far. Ah well, that’s the way it works.

What about you? Where do you get your WIP lightbulb moments? Shower? Walking? Gym? Grocery store? Do you have a DS file? Is it as big as mine?

My new addiction is reading Rachel Vater’s blog. Rachel is a literary agent with Lowenstein-Yost Associates, and her blog is chock full of good info. Take, for instance, today’s post. In it, she talks about a client’s first query to her. There is a sample of the query and the first page, which Rachel passed on. The writer rewrote the story and the query and tried again six months later. This time, Rachel was interested. Another round of rewriting and layering, and the writer got an agent and a book deal.

Jeaniene Frost kindly volunteered her old query (which was rejected by all 10 she first sent it to) and her newer one, which first got my attention. I sold Jeaniene’s novel in a two book deal to HarperCollins / Avon this spring shortly after signing Jeaniene up as a client. But Jeaniene isn’t an “overnight success” because she worked hard for this. She reminded me recently that I passed on her work 3 times before taking her on as a client: The first time, she got a form response. She revamped her query and tried again, and this time I gave her encouraging notes and revision suggestions. She was so fast and so good at creatively implementing editorial suggestions I knew she was someone I could work with further. So I gave her some more notes. And then one more round. (Remarkably persistent! Very impressive!) But you can see how her work evolved, and how her query and sample pages improved.

The examples from Frost’s pages are worth reading in order to see how a talented writer didn’t give up and kept trying until she got it right. I thank God every day that writer’s are so giving. Examples like this not only give me hope, but they also teach me something valuable.

Another great post today comes from Magical Musings. Here, Maria V. Snyder talks about the rejections she received before selling. Apparently, she got a LOT of rejections. But she didn’t give up and she’s proof that all it takes is one yes.

After 17 publishers said no – I finally, finally got a yes! And although I was thrilled to have an acceptance, there was a small (tiny, really) part of me that thought (with a smidgen of disappointment), “But I still have three publishers on my list!” And with all those rejects – I couldn’t help but feel the story was deficient in some way – I worried that I would get the “Oh, we’re sorry we made a mistake and we’re not going to publish you after all,” phone call. Instead, the publisher, Luna, decided to print the book in hard cover. It received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, won the 2006 Compton Crook award for best first novel, and was nominated for a Romance Writer’s RITA award.

Jeez, does it get any better than that? It’s stories like this, and my own stubborness, that bring me back to the keyboard again and again. I may set the work aside for a couple of months (especially with an academic deadline staring me in the face), but I always always come back to it again. I don’t want to quit. I just want someone to tell me how to fix what I need to fix.

Oh, wait, someone did that. And she works at a real publishing house buying and editing real manuscripts every day. I can’t complain about that, can I? Back to work, then.

I don’t usually do book reviews, but this weekend I read two books by two new-to-me authors and they just knocked my socks off! (Okay, so I don’t wear socks or shoes very often, but still. Maybe I should say they knocked my slippahs off.) First up was Over the Line by Cindy Gerard. Great romantic suspense with a very likeable hero and heroine. There was one thing toward the end that sort of stumped me, but otherwise I really enjoyed the book and will definitely pick up more books by Cindy Gerard.

The other book I read was Crazy Cool by Tara Janzen. I took it to the pool, started reading, and couldn’t stop. I finished it in a few hours and completely enjoyed the ride. I will definitely be reading more of Tara Janzen’s work too. Great romantic suspense. Her world building reminded me quite a bit of Suz Brockmann’s world. Lots of connecting characters, lots of secondary POV, lots of building toward other romances you’d want to read about. There were just a couple of things I would have preferred were done differently, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment at all. Great hero, so sexy. Loved him.

I also picked up Roxanne St. Clair’s Thrill Me to Death after reading her guest post over at Murder She Writes and I’m looking forward to it. This will be my first RSC book. I don’t know how I float along through life and writing and manage not to read some of these authors for so long. I intend to, but get sidetracked with other books and other authors. Still, I’m so glad I found these three authors to read! Great fun with the first two, and I’ve already taken enough of a peek at Roxanne St. Clair’s book to know I’m going to be hooked when I start it.

First, however, I think I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough with the WIP. I started working on it Wednesday, got my idea on Thursday, and then the hubby took Friday off. So, no working when he’s home because it’s play time. And did we play! Went to the pool over at the Hale Koa (resort hotel in Waikiki), swam, ordered poolside daiquiris, and had a good time.

But now it’s back to work time, which is always so hard after a weekend of play. I’m actually looking forward to it, so maybe this idea will pan out. No way to find out other than to go do it. So aloha for now……

This is not about writing (though I will tie it into writing eventually). This is about an absolutely unbelievable article written by Michael Noer in Forbes magazine (found via the Smart Bitches). Thank God for the counterpoint article by Elizabeth Corcoran which, according to the SB’s, only recently appeared on the site.

Writes mommy’s boy Mr. Noer:

Guys: A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.

Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women–even those with a “feminist” outlook–are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.

Cough, choke, sputter. Jeez louise, it gets even worse after that. (And let’s not even discuss the faulty argumentation in that second paragraph: “many social scientists” — how many? Names, please. “Recent studies” — bibliography, please, not just for these amorphous studies but also for the Social Forces article.)

What Mr. Noer fails to consider is that the patriarchal culture, which has been around for, oh, a few millenia or so, has inculcated women with the idea that taking care of the family is their primary responsibility. It’s only in recent decades that women have had the freedom to pursue careers on a large scale (and, in case you thought women had equal standing with men in the workplace, you only have to read the bigoted opinions of men like Mr. Noer to realize it ain’t so).

Yeah, so maybe women might retain some uncertainty with the career/caretaker dynamic! Not all women, certainly, and I’m not even going to check the veracity of the studies he (almost) cites but if we just go ahead and believe those studies are correct in their essential claims, then might there be a reason other than women belong in the home and therefore feel unfulfilled when they are not?

Yeah, and maybe it’s because women do feel some guilt and, worse, pressure to conform to what the dominant patriarchal system still claims as its right: women taking care of men and children and households (the system doesn’t claim this on the surface, necessarily, but if you question that it’s still the norm, just read Mr. Noer’s article. Occasionally, the truth rises to the surface like a rotting corpse that just won’t stay tied to the bottom of the lake).

That doesn’t mean women are necessarily happier when they are homemakers or that they want to be homemakers. Yeah, we think we live in enlightened times all right, but here’s more evidence we don’t, not yet. And, yeah, my knickers are in a twist because my thesis was about this very damn thing (The Heroine’s Journey: The Feminine Quest for Identity in the Selected Fiction of Virginia Woolf). Sure, we may have come a long way, baby, but the journey ain’t over yet.

The fact that a man could say such things in a national magazine, could call professional women “career girls” (do we ever call professional men “career boys”? Maybe we should) is a sign that we aren’t as enlightened as we like to think. No, I don’t think Mr. Noer should be silenced. It’s his right to say these things and to think he’s offering an intelligent, reasoned argument while doing so. I’m saying that the fact he could write it and think it reasonable, and that Forbes published it thinking it perfectly reasonable, and that people are reading it thinking it may have a point, is merely a sign that we have a long way to go in our thinking about gender roles and sexual equality.

I have a graduate degree (or will soon). I don’t, at this time, work outside the home. My reasons are my own, but you can bet it wasn’t so I could take care of my husband. Yeah, I do the bulk of the household chores — the cooking, cleaning, and shopping. I even do the finances. If I worked outside the home, you can bet we’d be having a discussion about divvying up the responsibilities. Of course writing is a career, and of course I take it seriously. But I don’t yet have a book contract, so I can’t say “Hey, hon, I’m going to ignore everything and concentrate on a story.” It’s my choice to do it the way I do it. And I am fully aware that a man is currently taking care of me, providing income and insurance so I can do what I want to do.

And, by golly, being the force in the home, the caretaker and primary child raiser, should be a CHOICE that women CAN make without feeling like it’s a bottom level job. Some women will want to stay home. Some men will want to stay home. That’s fine, and I’m not saying women should all have careers outside the home or should want to have them. But don’t tell me that those who do are bad mates. Studies, which I don’t have in front of me but which I think Ms. Corcoran talks about, still show that when both spouses work, the woman does the lion’s share of the household chores anyway. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, I take him to task for not providing citations, but this is a personal blog and not a national magazine; if I were writing for a magazine, you can bet I’d be EBSCOing my butt off.)

I have only to talk to working friends or to look at certain women I know (my mother) to see the truth of this one. Women will work demanding jobs and then go home and cook dinner, put the kids to bed, do laundry, etc, while the man sits on the couch with the remote. No, I’m not about to say all men or to generalize, but I have seen this in nearly all the dual working relationships of people I know. That does not make a study, I realize, so don’t think I’m saying it’s wholesale true. (That would make me as bad as him.)

How does this relate to romance writing? Romances are by and large written by women. Romances cross the spectrum of styles. You’ll see the fainting flower of a heroine who needs a man to take care of her, sure, but not so much anymore (or at least not in romantic suspense, which is what I write and read mostly). (See the NYT article on Nora Roberts — though they still make fun of romance, and aren’t as respectful of her as they would be of, say, Margaret Atwood, they have to admit she doesn’t write needy heroines which they conclude is a good thing.) But, most often now, you’ll see a heroine who’s morphing into something more. A kick-ass, take names, join up with the hero as an equal kind of gal. Yeah, men are still there, and the couple ends up happily ever after at the end. We romance writers like men; go figure.

But, dammit, I think (my opinion) that women write and read romance not because we want an escape from our humdrum lives, but because we want a MAN LIKE THAT. Not a gorgeous muscular man (but oh who would complain?) but a man who a) loves a woman with his whole being, who b) wants to please her, sexually and other, who c) understands her motivations and knows what she needs to be comfortable and happy in a relationship.

Oh geez, there’s so much more to it, and it could probably turn into a dissertation, but romance heroes are not fantasy men in the sense of their physicality, though of course they are that too, but fantasy men in the sense that women want more from men than a lot of grunting, scratching, and channel surfing. We want a man who isn’t afraid to talk to us when we want to rant (Mars/Venus stuff
), who knows we sometimes want a strong shoulder to lean on, who gets that we don’t get the appeal of NASCAR (okay, so that’s me, I know there are plenty of female fans) or boxing, who will rescuse us if we need rescued, and — real important — doesn’t mind us rescuing them when they need it.

Romance heroines get the guy, but not by being needy doormats. Whether we write stay at home moms or CIA spies, our heroines want something and aren’t afraid to go after it. It’s a quest, and if it’s going to be successful, then she will grow and change and learn to do what she didn’t think she could do.

So, for Mr. Noer, who surely had a stay-at-home mother who took care of all his needs and who desperately wants that in a wife (maybe he has it, though the tone makes me think not), you can’t lay all the blame for failed marriages and unhappy males at the feet of “career girls,” dude. Maybe it’s the men who need to shift their paradigm. Did you ever think of that? Multi-dimensional women with goals and intellect and attitude shouldn’t be feared. Men who do fear them need to look inside themselves for the answer because the problem isn’t with women. It’s with the men who seek to define feminine life on their terms. How can you ever be happy with yourselves if you insist on laying the blame on us? Maybe that’s the point. If you aren’t forced to look within, you won’t have to confront that vast emptiness inside you. So go define yourself and leave me the hell alone.

Over in the comments trail of one of Miss Snark’s posts, author Jenna Black writes this gem:

It would be a great pity to give it all up after only one book, no matter how many rejections that book garners. My “first” novel, which is coming out in September from Tor, was actually the 18th novel I’d completed. After going through all that toil and rejection, I now have four books under contract. A writing career is a marathon (or maybe even one of those iron-man races), not a sprint.

I think this segues nicely from yesterday’s discussion. Patience, perseverance, persistence. Yep, it works if you just stick with it. Learn and grow and keep writing.

I usually start every morning with two things: a cup of coffee and my laptop. I get up around 6:30, make hubby’s lunch, feed the cats, brew the coffee, and turn on the computer. Then I settle down for my favorite activity — reading blogs. Blog surfing is, to me, like emerging every morning into writer school. It’s like we’re all sitting at a big round table in some immense coffee shop, drinking our cuppas and chatting about our industry. I love it.

I especially love it when I come across a new-to-me blog that has a post which gives me an aha moment. This morning, that blog was Elizabeth Bear’s (thanks to Alison Kent for the link!). This post contains so much great information that I had to read it twice.

Writing is a series of compromises. One of the reasons it gets harder as you get better at it is that you become aware of the compromises you’re negotiating and the choices you’re making, and they become conscious choices (1). When you’re learning to write a novel, you are learning to write a novel. Any novel. To find some kind of a path from beginning to end of the book. It’s like a war–you go wherever you can find a path. Any port in a storm.

This, after all, isn’t easy.

Later on, if you do finish a book (and its a big if) and you revise it, and you learn from it, and you write another one and another one, you start developing skills. You realize that you have choices–in what you show, in what you don’t show, in what you imply and state outright, in which way the plot tends, in what technique you use in any given difficult scene. In the POV the book is told in, what papersky usefully calls the mode (which is the conjunction of scope and POV and so forth that are the underpinning of the narrative–the structure the rest of the book hangs off.)

You realize why you get a different book if you tell it in first person instead of in third. You begin to understand that there are strengths and weaknesses in any choice you make. In the process of becoming an educated writer, you become an educated reader.

You lose the ability to read as a reader. First, you read as an inexperienced writer, and you find yourself comparing everything you read to how-you-would-have-done-it. Some of us, at this stage, become incapable of reading anything. Some of us become incapable of writing anything. Some of us become incapable of doing one or the other with pleasure. Every choice this asshole made is wrong! This isn’t the book I would have written at all!

Sadly, some people get stuck in this stage.

There is much, much more and I urge you to go read it. Indeed, I remember that stage of the journey, the one where I would read the first 100 pages of a book and get so frustrated with the story that I’d put it down and go back to my own tome, convinced mine was better and bolder and more interesting. Oh geez, if only I’d had a clue! But, it’s part of the rite of passage as a writer. We start out thinking we can do better than X, tap out a disjointed narrative that we’re convinced is the best evah, then wonder why we can’t sell it. This is the part, I think, that separates the diehards from the hobbyists.

If you want to write for real, you’ll drag your bleeding carcass through that stage, maybe whining and crying and moaning about the unfairness of it all, but you WILL get through it. And when you get to the other side, you’ll realize there’s still a long and winding road to be traversed, but you’ll feel like you’ve just learned the secret handshake and all you have to do is stick to the path. (The path is never obstacle free, and you can still run off the road and into the underbrush, but that’s another story.)

Or, maybe more appropriately, it’s not a road you have to traverse, but a mountain you have to climb. A big, K2 mother with ice and jagged rocks and wind shears all vying to knock your puny ass off the mountain. And let’s not forget the other climbers, working hard to pass you up or knock you down a few feet or just leave you in the dust. Sometimes, it’s all you can do to hang on to the mountain, let alone inch yourself upward. But if you want it badly enough, you’ll make the climb, even if you slide back from time to time, or get stuck in one place weathering a storm.

Some writers try to shortcut the mountain. Some try to take a helicopter to the top, or parachute in from above. They miss the importance of the climb, the significance of making their own way. I also think, unfortunately for them but not for the rest of us, that they tend to disappear pretty fast even if they do successfully land on the mountaintop. I can’t begin to count the number of writers I’ve known who sold the first book they ever wrote never to be heard from again. It happens far more frequently than some of us may realize.

So what’s my point? Aside from just loving her post (you really have to read the whole thing to learn about the “art of implication” she talks about), what I want to convey is the importance of being patient. And thorough.

Keep your eye on the peak and keep climbing. Learn the lessons that each manuscript has to teach you, never believe that what you write is perfect, always search for the best elements in your work. Be willing to rip it apart and rewrite the whole blasted thing from scratch. But don’t rewrite the same manuscript 10 times. Move on to another one, no matter how hard that might be. (I know someone who has written one novel. Six years ago. And she’s on the 7th complete rewrite. I can’t tell her to give up the ghost, but I wish she’d feel compelled to move on, wish she’d get an idea so great that she has to pursue it and that the old book would take a comfy back seat.)

These are the things I try to remember in my own writer’s journey. Patience, perseverance, and persistance. The three Ps. Lather, rinse, repeat. Or, if you prefer it said prettier, in the words of Thomas Edison, “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” How much stuff do you think he threw away, or failed at inventing, before he moved on and kept climbing?

Terry has tagged me to do this meme. Quoth Terry, “The challenge is to look through random quotes and pick 5 from this list with which with you identify and explain why.”

Never give advice unless asked.
German Proverb

Why do I identify with this one? Maybe it’s my overly cautious personality, but I’ve learned it’s not just advice you have to watch for. Everything you say has the potential to influence others, so be careful what you say. Only say what you believe to be the truth, don’t repeat rumors, and realize that others are listening. On the other hand, sometimes it just doesn’t matter what you say or how you say it. There are people in this world who are just looking for a reason to hear what they want.

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do. Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962)

This one’s easy. It says so much about how I want to live life, taking the challenges, getting through them, and going on to the next thing. Doesn’t make it easy, but it’s surprising what you can endure when you have to.

There’s only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I’ll get married again. Clint Eastwood (1930 – )

Doesn’t matter how long you’ve been married, it’s still a work in progress. Marriage can be fabulous, but it isn’t easy and it isn’t for people with short attention spans. See Eleanor Roosevelt above. Those you love the most often drive you the craziest. Are you surprised when you hear that another Hollywood marriage has broken up? I never am.

Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal their private real opinions from the world and give out fictitious ones in their stead for general consumption. Mark Twain (1835 – 1910), Mark Twain In Eruption

How often do we avoid topics that we know people have strong opinions about when we also know their opinions differ from ours? In fact, this quote goes along with my own opinion that you never really know anyone, maybe not even yourself. If you aren’t sure about yourself, how can you ever know someone else? I think we all present one face to the world and another to ourselves.

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.
Lynda Barry

Ha, see Clint Eastwood above. Wouldn’t it be easier sometimes if we could just exist in our own little vacuum? But, love comes with risks, so opening yourself up to it means the cigar might explode when you least expect it. On the other hand, it might not. Love is volatile and crazy and wonderful all at once.

I am participating in a blogging experiment hosted at dearauthor.com. To enter the contest, put up this blurb, image, and trackback and you are entered to win the following prize package.

$200 Amazon gift certificate
Signed copy of Slave to Sensation
New Zealand goodies chosen by Singh
ARC of Christine Feehan’s October 31 release: Conspiracy Game

You can read about the experiment here and you can download the code that you need to participate here.

SLAVE TO SENSATION
Nalini Singh Berkley / September 2006

Welcome to a future where emotion is a crime and powers of the mind clash brutally against those of the heart.

Sascha Duncan is one of the Psy, a psychic race that has cut off its emotions in an effort to prevent murderous insanity. Those who feel are punished by having their brains wiped clean, their personalities and memories destroyed.

Lucas Hunter is a Changeling, a shapeshifter who craves sensation, lives for touch. When their separate worlds collide in the serial murders of Changeling women, Lucas and Sascha must remain bound to their identities…or sacrifice everything for a taste of darkest temptation.

Excerpt