Lynn Raye Harris

Woohoo! I typed 2763 words today to reach THE END, finally, of this frickin book!!!!

I’ll think about revisions tomorrow. Just call me Scarlett O’Hara.

I forgot where I left off on Thursday (pre-retreat), though I only had a few hundred words, but today I’m sitting at 3214 words completed since then. Almost 1900 of them were today. My brain is tired. My book is nearly done. I’d have never gotten here without Sven, or at least not so soon. I clearly need deadlines and pressure. How depressing.

I picked a picture of a grindstone for this post because that’s what today is: back to the grindstone. After a weekend of fun and games, I must return my mind to a working state. I’m Sweating with Sven, after all. I don’t even know my Th-Sun word totals, but they aren’t much. I’d be surprised if I broke 600. (I’ll figure it out later today.)

I took the laptop to TN, and I even used it a few times. I did spend about an hour and a half writing in the two days I was there. Not enough to brag about, really.

And I did solve, I think, a plot issue while lying facedown on the massage table and breathing in lavender while a tiny woman with really strong hands kneaded my back.

The coup de grace of the entire retreat was the Murder Mystery Party on Saturday night. Everyone did a fabulous job, though the coordinator did the best job of all in arranging everything. The costumes were elaborate, the hijinks hilarious, and the mystery was good. I have pictures that I’ll upload eventually.

My mind is rested, but also weird. I dreamed last night that my husband decided to write a horror story, had 50 pages done, and somehow got a passel of agents interested (because I was trying to get them interested in me and one saw his stuff instead, LOL).

After a major bidding war, my husband (the non-writer), got offered a $5.6 million advance on the strength of 50 pages. Everyone asked me if I was jealous, but I said hell no I wasn’t jealous, just envious, and besides, I’d get the benefits of the money anyway. (I ain’t stupid.)

When I told the hubby my dream this morning, he started plotting. I told him that all I knew about his story was that it had a werewolf in it. He thought that wasn’t very interesting and had been done before. I told him it’s the twist you put on a story that makes it unique.

Hubby, being a smarty pants, has decided to pen GayoWolf, about a decorator who goes to Sweden for furniture and gets attacked by a werewolf. The man ain’t right. I’m afraid my dream was just a dream after all. No multi-million dollar advance in the Harris future, it seems.

Has your mind ever come up with weird dreams after a period of relaxation? I don’t know where that came from, believe me. Partly, I’m sure it’s a fear that I’m not a good writer and that I won’t succeed. Partly, my mind was keeping the success close to home in giving it to my husband. And the werewolf had to be a manifestation of my frustration with the paranormal market (and the approach of Halloween).

But most importantly, do you think GayoWolf has a chance?

I’m off for a fabulous weekend of talking, eating, and drinking with my fellow Heart of Dixie chapter members. We’ve rented an inn in the Tennessee mountains and today we descend en masse to take over the place.

Tonight is fun and games, tomorrow I get a table massage, and tomorrow night is our 1920s themed Murder Mystery Dinner party. I’m playing a gambler, which isn’t nearly as exciting as being a flapper, but that’s okay. I’m a terrible actress no matter which way you cut it.

Lessee, Wednesday, I wrote 1377 words. Yesterday, not so good. Too much washing and packing to do. I only got 497 words done. I’m not sure how today, or this weekend, will pan out. I’m taking the laptop, but just look at that picture. Do you really think I’m going to get anything done?

See y’all on Monday!

If you still lament the exit of Miss Snark from the cyber world, maybe Jessica Faust over at Bookends LLC can soothe your wounded soul. Jessica is doing a perfecting your pitch critique that just started today. Unlike Miss Snark, she won’t do 500 of them, but they are a great learning opportunity, especially when you see how downright pedestrian some entries can be. If you have a great story, but you don’t know how to convey that in a pitch, how the heck will you ever get anybody to look at your work?

Edited to add: There are more query/pitch links here today on Diana Peterfreund’s excellent blog. She even has a link to a site where paranormal authors are posting the queries that worked for them in getting their agent or selling their book. The actual queries, with comments by the author about why he or she wrote the query the way they did. Hmm, must be query season….

I didn’t anticipate writing over the weekend, because it’s difficult to do so when the hubby is home (simply because I don’t want to ignore the man who goes to a job every day and lets me stay home to pursue this dream of mine), but I did write on Sunday because he wanted to play with the computer.

Sun = 926

Mon = 1435

Tue = 863

So I’ve written 3224 words in three days (haven’t done today’s words yet)**. I think I’m on target (though my goal was 1285 a day) because this feels right for the story. I’m finally coming to the end of this thing, and I would not have done that if I hadn’t been Sweating with Sven, I guarantee it.

This weekend will present challenges because I’m off to my Heart of Dixie chapter retreat in Tennessee. I’m taking the laptop, and I’ll try my darndest to work, but who can resist the lure of friends, fun, and margaritas?

**It’s Linda Howard’s fault I haven’t started today’s writing yet. Yesterday, I received Mackenzie’s Legacy from Amazon (featuring Mackenzie’s Mountain and Mackenzie’s Mission). Yes, I’m like the only romance reader on the planet who hadn’t read Mackenzie’s Mountain, or any of the Mackenzie stories, yet. This morning, when hubby left for work, I decided to crawl back in bed with the book — just to get a nice start on the morning since it was raining and chilly and I didn’t want to get out of bed yet. Big mistake. I didn’t finish, though I wanted to (less than 100 pages to go of Mountain), but I had to finally drag myself out of bed and to the computer or I’d have spent the whole darn day reading. Wonderful story, great characters. And, as my CP would say, not an explosion or dead body in sight. Just great storytelling. We need more of this kind of story!

On one of my loops recently, someone said that one of the ways she motivated herself was to imagine that she couldn’t write at all. That her writing life was done and she just never wrote anymore. That, she said, made her fly to the keyboard to prove it wasn’t true.

And I thought, yeah, good for you! And then I thought, if it were me, that wouldn’t do it. Because writing is NOT all that important to me.

Now, before I seem nutty or like I don’t appreciate what it takes to live a writer’s life, I’m not saying that I don’t want to write.

What I’m saying is that it’s not WRITING that keeps me writing. I hate to write. I love to tell stories. If I couldn’t tell myself stories anymore, if the pictures in my head dried up and no scenes ever appeared, yeah, I’d be seriously depressed. It’s all about telling those stories to myself. Actually writing them down, well that’s a pain in the posterior. I don’t enjoy that part of writing. I enjoy the thinking and imagining and seeing.

I have always had stories in my head. I’ve even spoken the dialogue, pretending to be two characters (or three or four). When I was twenty and doing that, I thought that if anyone could see me, they’d think I was pretty crazy. Hell, even I thought it was pretty odd. I didn’t know that I should write it down, that the act of writing it would release the tension from my mind and let the story flow across the page.

I’d always written things, mostly short stories, but it never occurred to me that what I was seeing in my head were scenes from a novel. Took me until 26 to figure that out. Once I did, I had a blast. Until the real world intruded and selling what I’d written wasn’t very cut and dried after all.

The pictures didn’t dry up, but the desire to put them on paper did. I didn’t understand that I had to push through that, keep writing them down, and keep sending them out. Not writing isn’t a scary prospect to me. Not having the scenes inside my head — yeah, that terrifies me.

But I’ll keep writing, because now I know how this stuff gets done, how you keep climbing the wall, even when you slide down a few pegs, until you reach the top and get the contract. And then you have other walls to climb. But telling myself that my writing life is over? Nah, won’t work for me. Take those scenes away, however, and I’d be lost.

Thursday words written: 1278

Friday words written: 1248

No words done on Saturday, or yet today. Weekends are much harder because of hubby being home and things needing done.

Weekly total = 6543. So, I actually beat my five day goal by 118 words. Whew!

I’m thinking of Simon and Garfunkel, of course, and replacing Joe Dimaggio with LK.

I received an order from Amazon yesterday, and as I greedily handled the books I’d ordered, I realized something. There was only one historical in the bunch. (And only one straight contemp that didn’t feature suspense or some version of a vampire, demon, shapeshifter, whatever, but that’s another story.)

What happened to the long, lush, character driven historical romances of yore? Where is Laura and why isn’t NY throwing petals at her feet? I know she burned out, I know she had trouble, but my God, the woman came back with Shadowheart. This is the woman who wrote Flowers from the Storm, Seize the Fire, and The Shadow and the Star. Not to mention The Prince of Midnight, The Dream Hunter, and For My Lady’s Heart. (Okay, my command-copy-paste fingers are getting tired. Go to Amazon. Search for Kinsale.)

She wrote a book with dialogue in Middle English. She wrote some of the most lush prose ever. She made me weep with longing to write like that. She also depressed me because I knew I never could.

I didn’t like all her books. I wasn’t a Midsummer Moon fan. It wasn’t the prose or the storytelling so much as it was the ditzy heroine. I just couldn’t connect with her. But, damn, I still admired the craft. Disliking characters is better than being indifferent to them.

I started thinking about this because of a discussion over at The Soapbox Queens the other day. Brenda Chin was talking about her first romance novel and how it changed her life. Woodiwiss cropped up quite a lot in the comments, and deservedly so. But, if I’d thought more about it at the time, I’d have realized that it was Kinsale who affected me the most.

I miss the woman. I checked out her website, found a post from nearly 2 years ago where she stated she wasn’t selling her latest book because NY wanted dark and she’d written light for a change. She had offers, but they weren’t what she wanted, so she shelved it. That, my friends, is a tragedy.

My fabulously talented critique partner and I have been discussing this for a while. She’s sick of suspense (though she sweetly reads my stuff anyway and offers great suggestions). She wants big contemps that are character driven — the SEPs and Rachel Gibsons — novels without a car chase, dead body, or explosion (oops, the current WIP has all three).

I agree. There’s room for a lot more variety than we’re getting right now. I do seem to be picking up a lot of paranormal these days, but is that because they’re there or because I’d pick them up anyway? Not sure, though I do enjoy the good ones. Just like I enjoy any good romance.

How about you? Is there any writer you miss? Are you sick of certain trends? Or do you think they’ll continue?

(No 70 days update tonight as I’ll be going to dinner and a concert with hubby and parents. But, so far today, I’ve made half my word count…)

Edited to add: All this talking about Kinsale got me distracted into searching up stuff on her. I found two posts over at the Smart Bitches where they do lightning reviews of all her books. Only one book got less than an A grade from them (which, if you follow the SBs, you know is pretty amazing). Go read if you’re interested….

Part I
Part II

Goal – 1285

Total – 1208

I’m happy with that, however, since I wrote extra words the first two days. Now my only problem seems to be that I’m not going to wind this book up in 60K. I’m afraid it’s going over. Ah well, that’s what revision is for.

I sure am sorry to see Clive move down the page. Maybe I can turn him into my blog header…..

Happy writing! I’m off to watch Life and Pushing Daisies. Love those shows.