Lynn Raye Harris

Cue Eddie Money. He sang about a rainy night, but today is a rainy day here in No. Alabama. I don’t mind. Sometimes, a rainy day is perfect because you just want to sit inside with a book and no pressure to go anywhere or do anything.

Today, I hope to get some writing done. It’s perfect writing weather. The rain is coming down pretty steady, the day is gray, and it’s pretty. I didn’t enjoy 37 straight days of rain in Hawaii (no one did), but I’m liking it here today.

I’ve discovered that many writers I know find rainy or snowy days peaceful and conducive to working on their stories. Why is that do you think? Is it because things seem quiet to us? Because we can’t see the world passing by and we can’t feel guilty for staying inside to write on a slow day?

Maybe that’s why some writers work better at night too. It’s quiet and peaceful. When I wrote my first book, I did it at night. I worked very well that way. I worked the day job, usually a swing shift from 1 to 10, then came home and stayed up until 6 AM sometimes writing. Since then, I’ve transitioned to writing during the day, though I often get my best ideas toward the late afternoon/early evening. When that happens, I keep writing, though I don’t usually write late at night anymore. I think it’s a matter of training the mind to work when you want it to. That can be difficult at first, no doubt about it. But I can’t imagine writing through the night anymore, so I must have made the transition successfully.

So, while it’s raining and the world seems quiet, think I’ll immerse myself into the fictional world I’ve created and see what happens next. Aloha and happy writing!

I can’t help it, I’m feeling quite offended over the misuse and abuse of the poor pitiful apostrophe today. Why oh why do people believe that you form the plural possessive of a word ending in S simply by attaching an apostrophe?

My husband is working with a recruiter on a document detailing his experience. I helped him write it. I wrote it correctly: “Mr. Harris’s extensive experience blah blah..” The recruiter sent back an edited document (some of his edits were quite amazing, really, and I learned something about business writing just from reading the way he phrased some stuff) where he’d changed it to Mr. Harris’. Excuse me?

Would you say “Mr. Harris car”? Or is it “Mr. Harris’s car”? Just say it aloud. Forget the apostrophe (which I did not attach at the end of the first Mr. Harris on purpose). I mean, puh-leeze! One makes no sense whatsoever. The other one denotes possession. It isn’t that hard for pity’s sake.

Who’s robe is it? It’s Jesus robe. Or is it Jesus’s robe? Jones hat. Jones’s hat. Which one sounds ridiculous when stated aloud and which one sounds correct?

Strunk and White are turning in their graves, I am sure. If that isn’t enough, I see it in newspapers too. Major newspapers. Drives me crazy! I am offended for the poor pitiful apostrophe who can’t speak up for itself.

Wasn’t it Lynne Truss who envisioned an army of punctuation warriors gleefully correcting signs? Well enlist me in the cause. Someone must defend the dignity of the apostrophe.

What’s your grammar peeve? I can stand almost anything, and really I am not nitpicky at all, but that apostrophe business drives me batty. Think I’ll go sit cross-legged somewhere and say some ohms……

What a great day! I attended my first Heart of Dixie RWA meeting in Cullman, Alabama, and learned all about Tactical Units (otherwise known as SWAT). I also met the greatest group of ladies (and a couple of gentlemen) who made me feel so welcome and excited about being a part of the group. You couldn’t possibly find a group of nicer people, I am certain. And that’s going some when I just came from the land of aloha.

But, I do believe Southern hospitality might just edge out the spirit of aloha by a slim margin. Hard to believe, but true. I don’t mean the difference between this chapter and my Hawaii chapter, but rather the difference in the population as a whole. Folks are just friendier than heck in the South. And that’s a good thing, especially since I learned that one can pack a concealed pistol here in Alabama (with a permit, of course). Not happening in Hawaii. Ever wonder why the Dog uses mace? Cause he can’t carry. No one but the PD can carry in Hawaii. I kind of like that, really.

Anywho, feeling good and inspired and ready to write. Now if I could just get some free time….

I was surfing the blogs, avoiding my WIP, and hoping for inspiration when I ran across this post over at agent Kristin Nelson’s blog:

Last week I found myself in the interesting position of calling two authors but not because I was offering representation. Sometimes an agent calls but it’s not THE call. You’re probably asking yourself why I would bother if I were passing on a manuscript.

Here’s why. Sometimes the writing is just that good (and in these two instances, I was torn and seriously contemplated whether we could work on revisions with the authors), but ultimately, if I think a manuscript is fatally flawed and it would entail the author revising more than half the work, I have to pass. It’s not fair to them to say, “well, representation is contingent on XYZ first” (despite being sorely tempted).

I got one of these calls once. I was too dumb to realize how good it was. I was crushed, heartbroken, downtrodden, etc. I was convinced I was a bad writer. Never gonna write a good book, never gonna get there, blah blah blah.

Did I mention it was the first book I ever wrote? Did I mention I was in my twenties, hated my day job, and terribly convinced I was on the cusp of making it? Sheesh, I would so love to have a talk with the earlier me, to tell her to cheer up and keep going and to never, ever give up.

Something I’ve learned in the past few years of living is that, in the words of Yogi Berra, it ain’t over ’til it’s over. I had one book under my belt when I almost got the call. I had nothing else ready to go and no real vision for the future. You simply MUST keep writing new stories. Never pin your hopes on one story, never keep tweaking and tweaking and hoping the only story you’ve ever written will get published. You have to keep going, no matter how heartbreaking.

What would I do if I almost got the call right now? I’d probably wallow a bit, sure. But I hope I’d pick myself up in a day or two and press on. Have you ever almost gotten the call? How did you handle it? What would you do if you got it today?

Hope your celebrations were fun and safe. We stayed up until midnight, said Happy New Year, and went to bed. My parents were in bed much earlier, my mom sicker than a dog (having caught a bug from my dad who is now over it — I wonder if we’re next).

We drank our wine earlier in the evening, with dinner, and toasted friends, family, the coming year, and our lost kitties. Miss Kitty passed on New Year’s Eve 2004. Thumper joined her on Dec 26, 2006.

It is indeed a brave new year for us. We’ve transitioned from the military to civilian life, from the tropics to the South, from living thousands of miles away from family to living in the same house. It’s been amazing.

What does the new year hold? Hopefully, new opportunities — a fulfilling career for Mike, a lot of writing and submitting for me, a new home, and continuing good health.

I don’t usually make specific resolutions, so I suppose I won’t start now. I intend to write more, to submit my work, to attend chapter meetings, to go to my first conference, to work harder and become more focused on my goals of publication. 2007 is the year to put up or shut up. I don’t have to get a contract, but I should at least have some rejections to show for my trouble. This is the year I submit my work. No more letting time get away, no more saying I’ll do it later or I need to make things perfect first. Write, submit, repeat.

How about you? (Photo courtesy of bigfoto.com)

Okay, raise your hand if you know a writer who believes her work will be stolen if she shares it with anyone. Someone who laboriously puts a copyright symbol on every page or, worse, registers the copyright by paying the $30 (or whatever it is now). Found this post today over at Edward Champion’s blog, which made me nod and say “Amen!”

The point of all this is that if you’re a writer clinging to the stubborn notion that someone is out there to “steal” your work, and if you are letting this get in the way of writing, submitting, or pitching, then I ask you for the good of humanity to step out of the way. Take up something else. All good writers are idea machines. All good writers have distinct and original voices in which an “idea” is just one component of an equation as intricate and inexplicable as love.

Perhaps this fundamental misunderstanding of the writing process is what causes so many people to ask the question, “Where do you get your ideas from?” Would these same people ask a bookkeeper, “How do you keep focus when you’re inundated with so many numbers?” It’s just the way writers are wired. For a writer, ideas flow through the noggin like a barely controllable fire and trying to manage all this is a bit like a good head rush during a run. There’s really nothing writers can do about this other than set it down on paper and do the best they can to convey this frenzy in coherent terms. If they’re lucky, they can make a living at this.

Afraid someone’s going to steal my ideas? Nope. However, there IS something to be said for not talking about uncontracted work in detail on a public forum such as this blog. Suppose I outline my plot for you right here, in all its glory (snort), and you write up a proposal and sell it to your editor. Your work won’t BE my work, but you may be cutting into my chances of selling a similar storyline because you already did so. If you think that’s crazy, Alison Kent talked about that very thing on her blog a while back. (I linked to the post at the time, but can’t find it now of course.) And Diana Peterfreund talks about the same thing in her post today.

When I said “keep that stuff off the internet,” I was talking about writers who blog at length about their uncontracted ideas. Call me superstitious, but I don’t do it.

Sounds like good advice to me. And that is totally different than the person in your critique group who won’t let anyone take a chapter home to read and comment on at leisure because he’s afraid that you, dear writer, may take his brilliant idea and write it yourself. Gimme a break!

Yesterday, in fact, someone sent me a link to a blog that was criticizing (okay, ripping to shreds) that Left Behind series of books about the apocalypse. And I realized, as I read the post, that OHMYGOD, I once wrote a story in 8th grade English class about — gasp — the people left behind after the Rapture! Those thieves! They somehow got a hold of my story! They took my idea! They made millions! I’m going to sue!

Okay, okay, I’m not really that insane, and I realize that me writing about the people left behind (I called the story “Alpha and Omega”) came from a really warped church experience with a group of people I won’t name but who are pretty common in the American South. They scared the everlovin’ shit out of me, and so the second coming was on my mind quite a lot at the time. Maybe those two dudes went to the same church, or maybe writing about what happens to those who don’t get sucked up to Heaven with Jesus is a pretty common idea since, oh, every New Testament contains the story about the second coming and no one who’s read it or had it preached to them wants to be left standing on the Earth after Jesus picks up his friends and boogies.

Ahem.

But sometimes ideas really do run in common threads. And what you think is unique, brilliant, never before been done, may exist in many incarnations in many writers’ heads. All you can do is write your story your way, and then market it to agents and editors in the hopes of seeing YOUR vision be the one on the shelves.

Steal your ideas? Puh-leeze. I’ve got too many of my own.

Now tell me about a time when you saw your plot or your idea or your character’s name in a published book. I just told you about my left behind story, but I have another one. Once I named a horse in my WIP Sirocco. I loved it, and it’s the name of that wind that blows from Africa up the Med and into Europe. Loved it. Imagine my surprise when I read, after I’d finished the book, Laura Kinsale’s Prince of Midnight and she had named a horse, you guessed it, Sirocco. Damn it.

A tiny bit. Went to Haleiwa on the North Shore and took the AlphaSmart. I wrote a few paragraphs while sitting at the beach. Mostly, I didn’t get much done because I’m at the point where I need the manuscript on the screen in front of me because I have a lot of revising to do on upcoming scenes. This is what happens when you write the first half in a white heat, and then realize maybe your characters’ goals aren’t strong enough. Darn Debra Dixon. (grin)

I love Goal, Motivation, and Conflict, DD’s book. Wow, if I can’t figure out how to write a cranking plot now, I need to find something else to do. Everything is explained so well, and when I charted out the characters’ GMCs, I learned that the heroine’s goal wasn’t strong enough. She needed the possibility of a dream come true and a limited timetable to do it in. So, hence the rewrite. It was just some weaving in the beginning, but now I’ve had to cut a couple of scenes. Some scenes need extensive rewriting. I love being a writer, though I sometimes hate the pressure of staring at the screen and having NO idea what comes next or if I can even pull off the idea I began with. I’ve written four complete novels and I’m working on a fifth. I don’t think it gets easier, though you do have a better idea with each successive book on how to go about telling the story.

First novels are almost uniformly bad, though there are exceptions. And I mean first novels one writes, not first novels one publishes. Those usually aren’t the same, though in rare cases it happens. Not to me, thank heavens, because I would be embarassed to know that clunker was out there.

Hubby is working on a paper for his law class, so I hope to get a little bit of writing done tonight. We’ll see. I tinkered with the website this morning, then we went down to Honolulu’s Chinatown for lunch, then back to the store for cat food. I have no excuse not to work on the book tonight……..

Not nearly enough. I have been too fascinated with this whole website/blog thing. I’ve changed my webpage a zillion times today, moving things around, adding things, etc. It’s an addiction! And then I sent the address to a few select friends, which increased the pressure to have the site look good. I can see them now: “Where on earth did she get this crap? I hope she didn’t pay anyone!” No, I did not pay anyone, and I got that crap from Yahoo Sitebuilder (I don’t happen to think it’s crap, btw). I have Frontpage and Publisher, and yeah, I prefer Yahoo’s freebie program. So I’m not a techno dweeb, sue me. Though, proud moment, I did not use a template. I designed it myself.

Okay, so what did I accomplish on the writing front? I edited my webpage. Uh, that’s not what we mean, is it? All right, I did work on the WIP just a tad. I probably cut 50 words and typed 10 new ones. It wasn’t much.

This week has been a wasted writing week! Monday, I rock and rolled. I wrote pages of the WIP, got an idea for two more books, wrote 7 pages of a new book, and basically had trouble shutting my brain off to go to bed. Tuesday, I had to take a Hawaii newcomer shopping. Stopped my flow dead. I had a blast with this lady, though, and I wasn’t sure I would. We giggled like schoolgirls and we’re definitely going shopping together again. Wednesday, I think I was recovering from the shopping. Wednesday night was critique. Thursday, I got this bright idea to finally complete and publish that webpage–cuz God only knows when I might need it–and then today I couldn’t stop tinkering, even when I tried so hard to work on the WIP (okay, probably not hard enough).

I borrowed an Alphasmart from someone so I could see if I liked it. Oh yeah, baby. I definitely plan to buy one. If I’d gotten off my butt and taken that thing somewhere, the temptation to toy with the Internet would have been gone. *sigh* I should have gone to the beach with the darned thing (the clouds did clear up, just like I said). I’d have gotten more done by sitting in a chair on the sand than I did in a whole day with two computers.

My God, we are so spoiled as a nation. Watched a Tsunami program tonight, and then a program about teenagers whose parents paid for them to get boob jobs. Where are our priorities? People lost entire families, their homes, and we have a tiny boob epidemic. Oh the humanity! And here I’m whining about writing and going to the beach to accomplish something and ohmigosh, am I an ungrateful idiot or what?

Tomorrow, I don’t know if I’ll get anything done. Husband is home, and though he has school work for his MBA classes, he’s sure to interrupt my flow at some point. I never get much done when he’s home, even when he leaves me completely alone. If I’ve got to be bothered, I’d rather go to the beach. At least the scenery is gorgeous.

All right, I’ve wasted another day goofing when I could have (should have) been writing. I won’t make promises for the weekend, but Monday is a new day dawning. If I get something done over the weekend, even better.