Category: The Writing

I don’t want to jinx myself, but I think I’ve *finally* got Mama C fully cooperating!

I’ve been chipping away at her story all month, but it was slow going.  I had the general feeling that something was wrong, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  I had all the players in place. I have the general plot in my head.  I’d reread the opening scenes and was pleased with them. But there was something missing.

Sometimes you’ve just got to talk out loud with people about a story, and so while we were at Granny’s for Christmas, I mentioned to my Beloved Sister that I was having problems but I didn’t know why.  I said the story wanted to be too many things.  It wanted flashbacks.  It wanted a story within a story.  It’s basically two romances in one.  No, three.  And it was just TOO MUCH.

In saying all that, I finally realized the problem.  It was me.  Snort.  Raise your hand if you’re surprised?

The problem was the tension in me fighting what the story wanted to be.  I *didn’t* want flashbacks.  I didn’t want to have to go back and write a bunch of scenes with Ty and Virginia twenty or thirty years ago.  I don’t have time!  I didn’t want to spend too much time fleshing out the story within the story.  Again, time!  The worldbuilding for that thing could get me in a heap of trouble in a hurry.  Thanks a lot, your deep dark secret identity sucks, Jeb!

But that’s exactly what I have to do, because that’s what the story wants.

And bingo, as soon as I sat down and wrote the first flashback scene with Ty, the magic was there.  It was like everything clicked.  All of the character motivations I’d been pretty sure of but not quite perfectly happy with suddenly slid perfectly into place.  That scene told me what I’d gotten wrong.  Jeb wasn’t best friends with Ty.  He couldn’t be.  He was Virginia’s best friend.  Ah.  Now that made things much more interesting and definitely made her conflict much more real and personal.

So I’m going to have flashbacks.  I’m going to have a story within the story.  I’m going to show her romance with Ty, even while the main romance with Jeb begins.  Because in the end, this is menage in a way.  Even though Ty is already gone.  And somehow I have to weave them all together into a tight, compelling story.  One story reveals the other story reveals the other.  It’ll definitely be a challenge.

Whew.  I definitely have my work cut out for me, but at last, the pieces are falling into place.  Now I just have to put it all together and finish the damned book!  It’s going to be like NaNoWriMo month around here but she’s finally cooking!

Now if I could only find the TITLE.

Some days I’m barely treading water, but I’m holding in there.

The Evil Day Job is still slamming me, but hopefully these last two weeks of October will be a little quieter, and then I’m done with major support for quite some time.  Of course I’m now behind on a new project because of all this, so the stress won’t go down — it’ll just shift to something else.  I’m really getting burned out, but I have a lot of scheduled vacation in Nov — assuming I actually TAKE it.  I plan to.  It’s just hard when project commitments have been made.  I have to find a way to get it done and still take my time off.

Coyote Con’s still going strong.  Well, strong isn’t quite the word.  Attendance is really down this year.  If you have ideas for getting bodies in the chatrooms please let me know, either here, on the Coyote Con site, or email me.  If I don’t figure out how to get more attendees, I’ll have to discontinue the con.  It’s just too expensive in both time and money to continue.

Some of the problem is my own scheduling.  I should have started preparation, notification, and marketing much earlier than I did.  It’s just hard to plan it out on top of everything else I’m doing.  But Raelyn and I are already talking about coming up with a better plan of attack throughout the year instead of rushing right before Oct to figure things out.

With all this going on, I’ve not been writing.  I just don’t have the mental strength right now.  However, I’m trying to do a few creative things to kind of get my excitement back.  More to come on that front.

AND… I have final copies of Lord Regret’s Price on hand!  If you’d be interested in reviewing, please drop me a note with your desired format.

As of 9/29, the Dream began ten years ago.

I’ve told this story before, so forgive me if you’ve read it — but those old original blog entries were lost long ago.  My Beloved Sister called and told me she’d done it.  She’d finished a book.  A HUGE book, well over 400 pages single spaced.  Of course I had to read it and somehow in there admitted that I’d been writing too.  I just hadn’t told anybody.

Seriously, like nobody knew.  That Man knew I dabbled a little but that’s all.  He didn’t have a clue about the Dream.  Even I didn’t know what the Dream was.  Not really.  Not yet.

I’d written a little when I was younger in 5th/6th grade, but other than a story I’ll politely call The Black Stallion fanfic, I’d never finished anything.  Just drips and dabs.  Here and there.  My little Gone With the Wind wannabe.  Little snippets that caught my fancy.  Dreams I’d had that I thought were cool and wrote down, incomplete and sketchy.

After Molly sent me her book, she insisted I had to send her what I had, even though it wasn’t finished.  I went through my old files and found the one book that was the most finished.  Then titled My Beloved Barbarian, I had a whopping 270 some pages finished.  I’d gotten to the dark moment (I didn’t know what that was then) and sputtered out.

But I’d been dreaming this book for YEARS.  I mean, I would literally put it in my mind at night and fall asleep while it played like a movie in my dreams.  I knew pretty much how it ended – it was just all those pesky details.  Plus, time.  Even then, I didn’t have a lot of free time.  It was my hobby.  The little thing I did to escape into my world.  It was mine and mine alone.

I’d never shared it with anybody.  Until I sent it to Molly on 9/29.  I still have that cheesy embarrassed email I sent her.  The subject:  turnabout…  With a few blush, blush, gasp, brace yourself comments scattered throughout.  Even then, I wrote sexy romance with some very politically incorrect elements I didn’t think or know to call BDSM.  There are some things in that original draft that never made it into the “final” version available today that were highly BDSM.  Even if I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

Within a few days, she’d read that rough incomplete draft and ORDERED me to finish it.  Like right now, sit down and finish it or I’m going to drive up there and kick your ass.  So I promised her I would finish the first draft by Christmas.  Surely I could do it in just a few months.

That’s how it started.  A simple promise.  Finish the book.  But it wasn’t so simple, because the Dream started to grow.  I’d dared let it out of the box.  Someone had seen it.  Someone had read it.  And now it was loose.  I couldn’t put it back.

I didn’t want to put it back.  I was going to write like I meant it.  I was going to finish that book and write another and another and another.  I wasn’t ever going to let anything stop me.

I finished that book by Christmas.  In fact, I even finished the sequel.  What followed then was a couple of years of learning, brutally honest critiques, RWA contests, etc.  The Dream got beat up a little.  I was told the book would never sell.  I should just put it in a trunk and move on.  But I couldn’t move on.  I couldn’t let the Dream die.

It wasn’t the first book I sold (Survive My Fire), but Drollerie Press did quickly accept the book that went on to become The Rose of Shanhasson.  By then, it’d been through more major rewrites than I can count.  Through it all, though, the core of the Dream remained.  It’s been a long road.  I had several different editors on the books.  Drollerie Press eventually closed its doors.  And yeah, that could have been the end of the Shanhasson books, but by then, the Dream had grown too large to ever be denied.

To celebrate the big Ten Year Birthday, the Shanhasson books are on sale for .99 each at Amazon and Smashwords.

And yes, they are still na’lanna, my beloved.  They always will be.