She's alive!

We both are, actually - just incredibly, insanely busy.

Me, I'm busy with my job, which since our fiscal year ends a full three months behind the calendar year, gets a little crazy right about now. The last couple of weeks have been chock full of my regular work duties, special projects requiring me to work some overtime, and last minute "oh my gosh this has to happen now!" emergencies.

Oh, and I'm also trying to work on my manuscript every night. Twenty-five pages a week is my goal every week, and there are nights when I don't close the laptop until close to midnight. I'm staying on track, but some nights it's a close thing.

Christine is on deadline. She's due to turn her current manuscript in to her editor on Monday and yesterday she realized she's writing the wrong book. When you look at the outline, realize you're on plot point #12 and nothing has actually happened yet, well, that's not a good thing. Today she told me she pretty much scrapped everything and started over. With three days to go.

I guess she thought she didn't have enough challenges.

So that's what's going on around here. How are y'all?

and now here's something we hope you'll really like

Neither Christine or I have much to say right now. Me because I'm battling a killer case of writer's block, her because she's on narcotic painkillers (dental work, you know).

So in lieu of our writing talents, we give you a picture of her dog, Levi.


I snapped this with my cell phone when he was draped across my lap (which accounts for the crazy zombie eyes), all hundred furry pounds of him. He's a belly rub slut, and has taken to crawling into a lap when he wants some rubbin'.

He's also taken to dragging my good shoes outside. But he's still cute, don't you think?

Why Rejection is a Good Thing, or, Those Bitches Will Pay One Day!

In my email last night I had a response from the big NY publisher I’d sent my most recent manuscript to. It was a rejection, though probably the nicest rejection I’ve ever gotten. A sort of “really like your voice and your writing, not so hot on the story” thing.

I made Christine read the email first, which she begged me not to make her do. But she is a good and loyal friend, so while I guzzled half a glass of pinot grigio for courage, she did. And I think she was as sad as I was when she gave me the news.

Except that I’m not really that sad. Oh, I’m certainly disappointed – a rejection wasn’t what I was hoping for, after all. I was hoping for a multi-book contract that would allow me to walk into work and quit on the spot, but that’s not the point. The point is that rejection is sometimes a good thing.

How, you ask, can that possibly be good? I’ll tell you.

First, the story I sent in? It’s not my best work. I knew it wasn’t my best work when I sent it in (even though both Christine and I think it’s better than half the stuff out there). And though I did rewrite large sections of it to tighten the story and strengthen the characters, I simply wasn’t willing to put in the weeks and possibly months it would have taken me to really revamp things properly. I started writing this story in the fall of 2007, and it’s really been the only project on my plate since then. Frankly, I was sick of looking at it, and wanted it gone.

And really? I think my fatigue and apathy for it showed. So it deserved a rejection.

The other reason rejection is good? It strengthens me – eventually. It’s a multi step process:

• Step One: mope for about twenty minutes, during which time I’ve been known to wail and cry out to the heavens: “When will it be MY turn?!”

• Step Two: When sanity returns, I take a good look at the rejection, and what exactly the editor was saying – in this case she said she liked the voice and writing, but the story was a bit weak. Hmm…okay, that’s something I can work with.

• Step Three: Talk to Christine. She is my compass, my sounding board for all things author related, so I dump everything on her - all my fears and worries and anxieties about my work, my career, etc. And she, bless her generous soul, tells me what she sees as the problem with the manuscript, what she thinks I need to do to get it back on track, and anything else she thinks I need to hear. She tells me the truth, even when I don’t really want to hear it. And after I’ve digested all that, rehashed anything I was unclear on, maybe had a little time to mull things over, I’m ready to move on.

• Step Four: Go back to work. I take all the things Christine and I talked about, all the good points from the editor, all the things I know in my gut need to be fixed, and I go to work on them.

They say the best revenge is living well. My best revenge is writing well. I am a good writer, and I will eventually sell to New York. And when that day comes, I’ll think fondly of all the editors who rejected me, making me better and stronger in the process. And I’ll smile, and think, “I told you bitches you were going to pay one day.”

block

Wow, it's been a while nice I've posted. It's been longer since Christine posted, but since she was on deadline and is now on a cruise ship in Alaska, she's forgiven.

I have to tell you, it's been a bit of a struggle finding my groove with this blog. I don't want it to be strictly a writing blog - nobody wants to hear day after day how I write, or research, or edit, or any of the other really boring details that make up the process of writing a book. Or maybe you do, I don't know. But I can tell you I don't want to write about that every day! I live it, writing it down seems like the height of narcissism.

Not that I object to narcissism, really. Anyone who knows me will vouch for that. It's just that if I'm going to indulge in that, I'd rather it be interesting.

In any case, trying to find things to write about here has proved more difficult than I anticipated. I guess you could say I have writer's block, at least when it comes to the blog. And while I hope that clears up for me soon, I'll be honest - I'd much rather be blocked here than elsewhere!

feast or famine

For the last six months I haven’t had one good story idea. Not one. To be fair, I’d just finished polishing a manuscript for submission (the editor at the Big NY House to which I sent it has now had it for 49 days, not that I’m counting) and was gearing up to do a lot of promoting for the July release of Secrets Volume 27, so I did have other things occupying my mind.

But an artist doesn’t quit painting just because he finished the one he was working on. He picks up his brushes and starts anew with a blank canvas, and a writer must do the same. The problem was, my whole mind was a blank canvas, and trying to pull an original idea out of it just not working. There is nothing more frustrating to a writer (at least to this writer) then not knowing what to write.

Then lo, lightning struck. A story idea I’ve been kicking around for a very long time finally slid into place, and after four years (yes, four years!) of not knowing where to go with it or how to make it work I suddenly knew exactly what to do. And the floodgates opened.

And not just for that story. When that little thing, whatever it is, clicked open in my head and let in the juju, it invited unrelated juju to the party as well. So now, in addition to that project, I have four others jockeying for position in my head. Two that are related to the current one, and two that are completely separate. And every single one of them wants to be written right fucking now.

(Incidentally, I used to hear writers talk about how the people in their stories would harass them, or nag them, or not let them do what they wanted to do with the story, as if these were actual people instead of made up characters. And I used to think, “Jeez, you must be nutso – they’re made up people! They can’t nag you, or make you write the story their way, because they don’t exist!” Yeah, I was completely wrong about that. I imagine that this is a little like what multiple personality disorder must be like, except the people in my head don’t actually push me out of the way. They just nag and harass and refuse to let me write the story the way I want to write it.)

Having all that going on is great! It’s fantastic, knowing that when I’m done with this project there are four more ready to go. It gives me a sense of security, and relief that I won’'t have to face that blank canvas again (at least for a while), but the problem is that I can’t write more than one book at a time. Oh, I can think about more than one, but I won’t be able to start writing any of the other stories in my head until the one I’m currently working on is finished.

But that doesn’t mean the people in those stories are satisfied to wait until I’m ready to talk to them – quite the contrary. They want to be heard, they want their story told, and they’re not shy about letting me know. The notebook I keep in my purse is getting crowded with my little scribbles about characterization, plot, research…so much so that when I go back later to look at them I’m having a hard time telling which notes are for which book. So I’m going to Office Max today to get four notebooks to carry around – one for each story.

I’m going to have to start carrying the big purse.

Nerves of paper

It’s a strange process for me, print publishing. Having begun my career over at Ellora’s Cave in e-publishing, I’m used to the relatively quick turn around of that. From submission to publication can take as little as a few months, and print of course takes so much longer. I first submitted my short story “The Boy Next Door” (excerpt here) to Red Sage in the late summer of 2006, after pitching it to an editor at the RWA conference in Atlanta that July (Lord, the drama I went through with that – but that’s another story). I got the word that they wanted to publish it the following spring, in 2007, and later that year discovered it would appear in Secrets Volume 27. So it’s been nearly two years since anything really significant happened with the book, and now all of the sudden it’s coming out.

Which is really exciting, don’t get me wrong. I love this story, and I feel like it represents a turning point for me as a writer. I rewrote it at least twice before I submitted it, and once at the request of the editor looking at it. I sweated blood over this story, and the sense of accomplishment when it was finished and accepted for publication was incredible. And it was good, dammit. I'd worked damn hard to make it so, and I knew the finished product was something I could be proud of.

Which, now that it’s coming out, and now that the reviews are starting to come in, doesn’t mean I’m not nervous as hell. My stomach gets that “oh, we’re on a roller coaster!” feeling, my head gets a little buzzy, and I hold my breath.

But thankfully, I don’t have a lot of time to concentrate on being nervous. There’s too much to do! All the inactivity of the last two years has been transformed into a frenzy of scheduling book signings, guest blog spots, interviews and other promotional appearances. Ordering business cards, little give away gifts for book signings, and prepping for the workshop I’m co-presenting with Christine in July (jeez, we really need to work on that this weekend!).

So not a lot of time to focus on being nervous. But that roller coaster is there, in the background, just waiting for me to open my email and find a new review.

in the wee small hours

This morning I woke up at 4:25 am and couldn’t get back to sleep. My mind was spinning in all different directions. Balancing my checkbook: did I remember to record the electric bill I paid last week? My upcoming weekend: meeting my boyfriend’s mother, eek! The dog's heartworm medication: did I already give that to him this month? And so on.

4:25 is way too early to be awake. It’s what’s referred to in our house as “the crack of stupid”, as dawn was still a ways off (though the sky was starting to lighten - dawn comes pretty early here in the Pacific Northwest). And all the unproductive wandering my mind was doing was making it impossible to get back to sleep.

So in an effort to at least be semi-productive while lying there staring at the ceiling, I started thinking about the story I’ve been working on since October 2005.

In October 2005 I was sitting in a bar in San Francisco with Christine and our darling friend Shannon. It was our joint vacation, the only time the three of us would be able to get together for the year, as I was still living in Texas and they were both in New Jersey. We’d planned to go to New Orleans, but Hurricane Rita had just recently made visiting (and living in) New Orleans impossible, so at the last minute we changed course and headed to SF.

While Christine had visited the city before, I’d never been and neither had Shannon, so we were doing all sorts of touristy things (and other things, seeing as how we were there for Fleet Week, but that’s another story). So we’d traipsed up to Haight-Ashbury – just to say we had – and found this little bar. Traipsing is hard work, especially with all those hills down there, so we settled in with a round of cocktails. And I got to talking about this idea I had for a new book.

Paranormals aren’t my strong suit , but I had an idea to combine the basic elements of a paranormal with a contemporary romantic comedy, which is what I do best, into a story about a witch. A witch who has “issues” with her unique gifts, some rather unconventional ideas about how to best make use of them, and the trouble that ensues.

I remember scrounging for a pad of paper and a pen, bouncing ideas off both Christine and Shannon and incorporating their feedback into the notes I was making. I came out of that bar jazzed and raring to go.

And almost four years later I’m still not finished. Lest you think I’m a complete sloth I have started it. A few times, actually. But I always end up hating what I’ve done and tossing it to start over, and the result is that after four years I’ve got a handful of notes and nothing else.

But you know, that nearly two hours between 4:25 and my alarm going off at 6:10 might have jump started things. I’ll keep you posted.