Writing is hard work. And if you’re like most authors, you feel more like the juggling clown in the center ring than a writer. You have too many balls in the air at one time and usually the one that drops is writing. When you do find a few spare minutes to sit down, the muse turns her fickle nose up at you because you ignored her the other day in the car. Never mind you were trying to find the house with the birthday party, referee your kids fight and navigate traffic in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Oh, and did I forget to mention the pile of chores and housework waiting at home that was nagging at the back of your mind when the GEICO squirrels ran out in front of your car.

Now, you have thirty minutes to spare to write before another ball drops. What do you do? The muse isn’t talking. I find instead of looking at a blank screen going back a couple of pages and reading helps. It grounds me back into the story so I can pick up where I left off. By the time I get to the last written sentence and the blank pages take over, I’ve connected with my characters again, the muse’s feeling are assuaged and the words flow.

This is all of course if I’ve stopped writing and I still know where the story is going. But what if you don’t know what happens next? Some writers are neat and organized. They sketch out a draft, the plot with charts and use fancy methods to get from the beginning through the middle and to the end.

Me? Not so much. And the muse knows it. She’s in charge of the story and she lets me know it too. As soon as I make a hard plot, she turns up her nose at me. My characters take her side. They refuse to be who I want them to. Like when I wrote my story Missing Pieces. I like beta heroes and my hero, Addison Cougar, started out as a beta. The story starts in his POV. I’d gotten a few sentences into the story and he pulled a switch on me that made my head swim. No matter how I tried to force it, he refused to be a beta. He was an alpha all the way and would not bend. I think the muse was sitting smugly in a corner laughing at that one. When I changed to her way of thinking, the story poured out of me. 

So I make what I like to call a soft plot. I come up with a few things up front. Like a GMC (goal, motivation and conflict), a few twist and an ending. I take one chapter at a time, figure out the beginning and an ending hook. For each chapter I have to have down time. I literally lie down and close my eyes. I listen to my characters tell me their story and see it play out in my head like watching it on a movie screen. Then, when I have time to write again, I start the next chapter from what my characters told me. I proceed to follow the steps as I mentioned above until the chapter is done and it’s time for down time again.

If in down time nothing comes to me, then I know the story took a wrong turn somewhere. Maybe I have my characters doing something that isn’t their personality and they clam up. Turn fickle on me again. Take the muse’s side. Once I fix the problem and my character’s actions are back in line with who they are the words flow again.

In defense of the muse, I have to say that I, too, can sulk at her. I don’t always like the way she takes the storyline, and I can walk away because I just don’t want to write the scene. I fall in love with my characters, and I hate to make them suffer. My conflicts and black moments can be soft blows. Sometime the muse allows this. But on my current WIPP I’m afraid she’s not going to. I already know what she has in store for the black moment and I’m dragging my feet to get there. I wrote 18K in a few short weeks, which is very good for me. Now that I’m getting closer to the black moment I’m prolonging it. I’m at 24K. I’ve had time to write, but I don’t want to make my hero suffer the fate I know he is about to be dealt. I know I have to. This story is calling for it and it’s time to cut deeper. And if I want to keep the ball in the air, I’m going to have to do it. But I’m going to drag my feet and fuss at the muse the same way she fusses at me. I just hope I give in soon, because I know she won’t. She has no problem letting the ball drop.  

Jsmine Black

http://jasmineblackromnce.blogspot.com

What’s the surprise that I mentioned yesterday on the Avoid Writers Hell Group and AWH Chatters? What is it that had all the AWH puppies calling me and Tess teases?

Well, Michelle “Emmy” Ellis designed our first AWH Magazine!!!

I came across an online magazine the other day that was so cool, and I sent the link to her and Tess, mentioning how I’d love to be able to do something like that for PDFs or whatever.

Next thing I knew, Emmy is asking me lots of questions, lol, and sends me a link later in the day.

My. Jaw. Dropped. This magazine is damn amazing!

However, this is NOT to be confused with the AWH newsletter. The AWH Newsletter is a monthly publication and is for my AWH puppies to share their news, their accomplishments, reviews, who is sick, who got out of the hospital, who had a baby, so on and so on. The AWH newsletter is only available to AWH members of either or both groups unless a member forwards it to someone, which is perfectly fine.

The AWH Magazine has articles, short fiction, recipes, Author Splashes, and much, much more. It will be available on the AWH blog site and anyone can access it, so if you have a story featured in it, your work will be presented to others, both readers and writers, outside of the AWH groups! However, the new issues will only be published when Emmy has the time to put them together. A day here, a day there, until she has enough material and has everything edited and formatted to publish the next issue.

Can you submit something to the AWH Magazine? Yes, but there are guidelines! Those are pending, so please be patient.

Here’s what Emmy has to say:

“Short fiction really does need to be short—no more than 1K words like your story, Faith—and edited [polished] as best the author can get it before they send it to me. I haven’t got time to do extensive edits. Writers must treat the AWH Magazine like any other mag submission.
 
“Also, if any puppies want their picture as the front cover, they’ll need to send me one. First come first served etc., on that—it will also depend whether or not the pic is small with low res as opposed to bigger and high res. Small and low res will make for a grainy, pixilated effect, so their pic may have to appear as a small one inside a frame like they have on mag fronts. Small ones would be cool if they also feature inside on Author Splash or the Author Bio pages.
 
“Aaaaand, basically, what they see in Issue 1 is what they’d have to send to me should they want to appear as any of those features. So, the sidebar stuff and recipes would have to be low word count. Author Splash!…they can see what info I want from Kiyara Benoiti’s double page—a personal quote is a must for that page because I want readers to connect with the author better. If I get too may Author Splash! requests, some might have to be held off until future issues. Any Top Tips, Dear Editors (these will be in confidence), and the confessions page—can stretch to two pages on those features if we get a lot of stuff sent. Confessions page is in confidence too.”

Guidelines will be available in the groups’ FILES section and on a page at the AWH blog site too (http://authorsalacart.com/awh/). PERMISSION TO FORWARD THIS MESSAGE GRANTED.

And drumroll…LOL…here is the link to view this amazing magazine:

http://en.calameo.com/read/000149014352beed9ca2e 

Play with the tools on the mag to tailor it how you are comfy viewing it. Note that wherever you point the curser it will move the entire page. No scrolling needed, which I find so nice.

Faith, Group Owner

www.faithbicknellbrown.com

Weaving Magic into Romance…
   

If you’re a writer, have you ever had that one story, novella, or novel that would only flow in fits and sputters? I have one of those. It’s my latest manuscript that I’m finishing up and preparing to mail off to my agent this month. No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, I can only work on it in sections, then I have to walk away from it for a while. 

Granted, this novel is very complex. RUBY is an erotic paranormal romance (Ruby is the name of my heroine and the first word in the novel’s title). It’s all told from my heroine’s POV (point of view), but she has so many personal issues to resolve due to her weird and very hard life, then there’s the romance and her unusual hero, plus things from her past come back to haunt her, and there’s the subplot of her friendship with a Marilyn Monroe look alike who’s not what she seems, and…pant-pant…the novel’s paranormal mystery to solve. 

I have cussed this novel so much it’s pathetic. I’ve gone back and revised, revised, revised—six revisions thus far—up to these last three or four chapters that wrap up the novel. 

Then I caught a minor flaw in a subplot and had to go back and rewrite sections or delete them. 

However, I started writing this novel six years ago. Even then, it irked me to no end, and I finally put it away for a while. During that time span, I  pulled it out of the “drawer” every now and then. Revised the old—I guess that means there’s been more than six revisions—added more chapters, then I put it away for months or a year or two during this six-year period. 

What IS it about this novel that is so frustrating? 

I’m really not sure.

My readers who dissect and blurb my work are waiting for the finished product, and my agent knows he’ll be receiving the manuscript soon, but Lord have mercy, why can’t I get the words to flow on this particular novel where they keep flowing until I type THE END? It’s not like I have half a novel to write. I’m down to the last three or four chapters. 

Is it stress? No, not really. I have other WIPs (works in progress), but I don’t have this problem with any of them. It’s just my RUBY ms. 

Is it lack of time? Hmm…partially, but only a small part. And lack of time translates more into constant life interruptions. The phone rings, teenagers arrive unannounced, the youngest is crying in the living room and no one knows why and only Mom can solve it, kids are sick with viruses and colds, and lately I’ve had to pick up my husband’s chores since he’s been laid up from a surgery. I’ve also had to stop taking on private editing clientele because I had so many manuscripts to edit. 

Maybe I’m not in love with the novel? No, I am very much in love with the plot and characters, and I truly believe that this is a story that’s going to knock readers’ socks off. 

Is it the fact I don’t have a comfortable place to write at the moment? Partly, yes. I’ve been unable to furnish heat for my camper office this winter, and, since I do 95% of my serious writing on my laptop, I don’t have a quiet place to go, nor a comfortable chair of some sort to sit in. For the last three months, I’ve been writing on the bed. Add to it the fact my sciatic nerve is screwed up and I can’t sit in certain chairs without making it flare up…yeah, that’s irks me to no end and puts me in a foul mood. 

But what IS the key to why this novel is driving me insane and not flowing well? 

I think I’m afraid of failure. 

What, you say? Me? Afraid of failure? 

Those of you who know me well understand this comment. But for those of you who don’t, it boils down to one thing. I’ve had the carrot dangled in front of my nose only to have it yanked away so many darn times it’s ridiculous. In my subconscious, I think I feel RUBY will be yet another one of those glowing rejection letters raving about my work with a ‘but’ added to the end. 

However, as I’ve always said to my AWH puppies, I truly believe half the NYC publishing battle is determination. Don’t give up. 

I have to chant that to myself. 

Don’t give up, don’t give up, don’t give up….but oh, how tempting it is at times! 

Is it just me, or have any of you had a similar manuscript that gave or gives you fits? If so, did you determine the reason it bugged and frustrated you so much? Share it with me and my AWH puppies in comments. 

Don’t give up, don’t give up, don’t give up….

Posted by Aeryn Traxx

2009 was not a banner year for me by any stretch of the imagination. There were a few high points but ten times as many lows. With 2010 only a few hours away I am looking back and find the words of a friend echoing in my ears. “You are letting yourself be overwhelmed by the big picture. Take smaller bites and you’ll do just fine.” She was right. In looking back on the disaster that was my life in 2009 I did let things overwhelm me on far too many occasions. I am embarrassed to say this applied most succinctly to my writing. Instead of focusing on one piece, a chapter at a time I got too overwhelmed with the big picture. Instead of reaching out for help I let a little speed bump keep me from finishing a story. I let a beta’s remark about a chapter of a story derail the entire story. In trying to see my writing career for the Imax screen that it is I lost my way, got overwhelmed and shut down completely. I have a novel waiting to be edited. I have a short story that needs to be pimped to e-pubs and I have over 400 works in progress that need to be finished but for the life of me I can’t seem to get a handle on things. I have two conventions I want to go to in 2010 which will require a lot of preplanning, a divorce, a 16 year old daughter going thru some trauma and an evil day job. I have a lot going on but I know others who have even more on their plates so I suppose I shouldn’t whine. I need to chop things up into smaller parcels so I don’t get overwhelmed. Everything in moderation is a phrase that certainly comes to mind. My writing is important and while I would love to devote every spare minute I have to it I would feel guilty about putting the family on hold while I did that. So my one objective for 2010 is going to be all about moderation. Taking smaller bites. There are lots of cliché’s that would apply but I’ll leave those for someone else to use. My friend was right. Looking at a small corner of the picture may be exactly what I need to do in order to stay focused both in life and my writing career.

It is now the close of my first year as a published author. I received my first contract on October 30, 2008 and my first release was February 22, 2009. With 2009 being my first year in this business, I thought it would kinda cool to see where I stood at the end of the calendar year. So here are some numbers to get you rolling.

Submissions: 17

Contracts: 17

Releases: 15

Print books: 3

Rejections: 3

Revise and Resubmits: 2

Anthologies: 3

Short Stories: 8

Novellas: 6

Novels: 2

Bestsellers: 4

Publishers: 8

The rejections were both right at the very start of my career. Two for Silver Lining and one for the first version of Runaways. The publisher who turned down Runaways didn’t even have their doors open yet and didn’t open them when they had posted that they would. That was probably a narrow escape I had there. The two for Silver Lining were followed by an acceptance. However, the small press where Silver Lining is didn’t give the antho a very attractive cover and I haven’t seen any royalties from this short story.

The R&Rs were for The Phoenix Prophecy (Where There’s Smoke.) Loose Id was interested but since it was an anthology they wanted some changes. Liquid Silver said they’d take it as a series rather than an anthology but wanted the ending to have more pop. I fixed the ending and LSB contracted it.

The two contracted submissions that aren’t out yet are The Phoenix Prophecy: Where There’s Smoke and a dark tale in the Weirdly 3 anthology, Ain’t Nuthin’ But a Hellhound.

The three print books are Tales of the Darkworld Volume One (Shifting Winds and Hot Water), Fire Season, and Love Me Dead.

The three anthologies are Weirdly 3 (that isn’t out yet), Thrilled (with Silver Lining), and Love Me Dead (with Rousing Caine.)

The short stories are Silver Lining, Mating, Runaways, Ain’t Nuthin’ But a Hellhound, Christmas Hookup, Christmas in Hell, Christmas Catch, and Holiday Hearts.

Novellas are The Wise Guy, Shifting Winds, Hot Water, Rousing Caine, The Pixie Prince, and Where There’s Smoke.

Novels were Fire Season and Ride the Lightning.

My publishers are Pink Petal Books, Liquid Silver Books, MLR Press, Cobblestone Press, Freya’s Bower, Wild Child Publishing, Noble Romance, and Midnight Showcase Fiction.

Now, the term bestseller is where you all may find yourselves scratching your heads. What ranks as a bestseller on some publisher’s lists (for their house only) would not cut it up against the numbers of a bigger house or a third party distributor like All Romance eBooks. I’m not going to get into a big discussion on that. I think it’s a topic for another day, but I need you all to understand the framework for the numbers I’m about to give you.

Basically, I have four bestsellers: Fire Season, Mating, Shifting Winds, and Christmas Catch. All of these have earned their silver star at ARe. The reason I’m using ARe as my yardstick for what’s a bestseller is simple. ARe sells books from ALL publishers, not just my publisher. So those books have sold really well at ARe despite the fierce competition. Christmas Hookup, which isn’t counted here because it’s free, has been listed as the best selling book of the western/cowboy category at ARe for a year. (When you sort the category by best selling Hookup rises to the top. It’s been that way since January 2009.) My estimate (I’ll have actual numbers on this probably next week) is that it’s been downloaded over 2,500 times between ARe, PPB, and some damned pirate site that showed actual download numbers until I had em remove the book. I can tell you that Fire Season alone has sold over 500 copies. Shifting Winds, in a single day of freebie downloading at ARe, was downloaded almost 2,000 times.

At PPB, to make it onto the bestseller chart, you have to have sold about 50 copies there on the publisher’s site.  So the #1 book on their bestseller list is probably closer to the 150 copy mark. (These are guesstimates. I don’t have hardcore numbers but Mary says it sounds about right without us crunching the actual numbers.) So far, all of my PPB releases have reached this benchmark. This sounds pretty good to me for a small pub only in its second year (but growing.) I know I’ve sold more at PPB with any one single title up against my one title at Cobblestone.

Now, looking at the numbers from a royalties perspective I can tell you that Fire Season (which released in July) would have made me PAN eligible. It’s my understanding that to be PAN eligible an author has to have made at least $1000 from a single title in a calendar year. (There’s a whole other criteria thing re non-vanity publishers and RWA eligible blah blah, but I’m just talking money here not politics.) A thousand bucks from one book in six months is a lotta clams. And I can see what I’m making in royalties but those payouts don’t give me a true sense of where I am with sales. I just go spend the moolah. LOL I can tell you that my royalties jumped significantly when my publishers put my books on ARe, My Bookstore and More, Fictionwise, Amazon, and others. Which is one reason I used the ARe yardstick here to define bestseller.

I could give you more numbers. Promo related stuff like:  I did three radio interviews, was a featured author on TRS once, did thirteen interviews, and fifteen guest blog posts.  I could tell you how many contests I’ve had, how many bookmarks and magnets I sent out. But promo is something I’ll get into another day. Suffice to say that I gave away books (both Ebooks and autographed print books), magnets, bookmarks, bookcards, and sent out author holiday cards.  This coming year I’ll have stuff going to some cons too. Lori Foster’s may see a very unusual Lex basket. The Escapade Slash con will have Love Me Dead bookmarks. EPICcon will have Ride the Lightning magnets. Promo stuff builds goodwill and people really remember you for those darn magnets!

So at the end of the year, I’ve surpassed my only goal of a dozen releases by three. But a dozen releases, even with so many of them being novellas or shorts, is a shitload of work. You have to be committed and driven. You have to have a promo plan and manage it while managing to write and keep to deadlines. You have to learn from your edits and editors. You have to read and pay attention to industry blogs to see what pubs not to sub to. You have to have a PLAN for your CAREER. Because at the end of this year, that is the one thing I’ve taken away from this experience in spades… I have a new career. And fuck me if it ain’t getting hotter with each release.

I may not have arrived yet… but I think just about everyone knows I’m coming.

What do Annie Proulx, Neil Plakcy, John Varley and Arthur Golden have in common?

They all write about places and people diametrically opposed to what they are.

Annie Proulx, a thrice divorced woman with three sons and a daughter, wrote the multi award winning short story Brokeback Mountain, a story about two Wyoming ranch hands who work together one summer and become reluctant lovers, a love affair that goes on in secret for years, neither man able to speak of the love they have. Annie Proulx is a) not a man b) not gay c) not a ranch hand. Yet her writing won awards and went on to become an iconic film that won awards all over the world, including Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and Director’s Guild awards.

Neil Plakcy is another award winning author who has written a series of books about Kimo Kanapa’aka, a mixed Hawaiian-Japanese-Chinese-Haole homicide detective in the Honolulu Police Department. Now I’ve met Neil, he’s a wonderful, talented man, but he’s not a) a cop b) Hawaiian, Japanese or Chinese c) does nor nor has he ever lived in Hawaii (he lives in Florida) But his books are wonderful and I’ve never heard of anyone taking exception to his skill in writing about the place or the man.

John Varley is a Hugo Award winning white Texan who wrote some remarkable books set on a goddess made world called Gaea. His characters in that series ranged from a bi-sexual black female ship’s captain turned wizard called Cirocco Jones, and impossibly, bizarre creatures out of legend like centaurs and flying angels.

Arthur Golden is a middle-aged, Jewish American man who authored the critically acclaimed Memoirs of a Geisha, a story about a young, Japanese girl who was raised/trained to be a geisha girl.

How can these people, so different from the characters they portray do it? Is it wrong for them to try? Is it wrong for a white person to write about a black, a male to write from a woman’s POV? Someone who lives on the east coast to write about the west coast, or an American to write about a Chinese character living in 4th Century China? Are there lines that writers shouldn’t cross in their stories? And if there are, who draws those lines?

My books all deal with gay men living in modern America, in most cases in Los Angeles, a city I did live in once, but haven’t visited in over twenty years. My most recent book, not yet published is about a young Latino man from a gang ridden barrio in South Central Los Angeles. As I wrote it, I wondered if I was going to get flack for writing about a world I have never lived in, so in the last while I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I’ve come to some conclusions. I know I’ve been criticised for writing about L.A. since I don’t live there now. And all of us who are female and write gay male fiction face the criticism that we have no business doing so. Is there any merit to what those critics say?

Personally I’m of the mind that as writers we are supposed to delve into worlds and people we don’t know, in some cases can never know. This is the nature of good fiction. Tame books, told about everyday lives, can be good literature, but for me that’s not what I want in my books. I want to explore new places, from new POVs in a way that allows me to live them vicariously. My final argument about this way of thinking is that there would be no science fiction, no fantasy and no historical books, since all those require the writer to step outside of their comfort zone and put themselves in another’s shoes. Our bookshelves would be a lot lighter and less interesting if we followed those rules.

L.A. Boneyard

I also think, that as long as we invest in the research and don’t succumb to stereotypes, that I want the freedom to write the stories that come to me. I use the Internet on a daily basis to not only find out about people and places, but I use Google Maps and their Street View to see what a neighborhood looks like. I’m lucky in that L.A is one of the first cities to have its streets mapped. I’ve also invested several hundred dollars over the years in books about police procedure, bios of active gang members, and I have built up contacts within both the LAPD and people who are considered gang experts. I can tap these, as well as some L.A. friends, who can help me keep my facts true. It must work, I’ve had more than one compliment on how I make L.A. live and so far, not one taking me to task for getting it wrong. Finally, I devour any and all books and movies I can find set in Los Angeles.

What do you do to ‘keep it real’? Do you write about places or people unlike your own? Do you think there are things we shouldn’t write about?

Write a comment and I’ll enter you in a contest to win an ebook copy of L.A. Boneyard, the latest L.A. series book.

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