The HEA Cafe

I like writing in the winter.  There’s something about the crispness in the air that galvanizes my muse.  That, and the lack of humidity.  In the winter I can take my laptop out onto my Florida porch and look at all my flowers in bloom, and gloat over how my colleagues up North are buried under snow.  In the summer, I’m out for brief periods in the morning and at sunset, because in between it’s just too, too oppressive.

But you still have to write, no matter what the weather.  I meet people all the time who tell me they want to write a book, and every time I have to bite my tongue.  My automatic response is, “Well, why don’t you?”  I’ve learned though that sometimes folks just don’t get it.  The only way to be a writer is to sit down and write.  The only way to get published is to finish the manuscript.  The only way to finish the manuscript is to keep plunking it out, one word after the other.

That’s all I’ve got today.  But even though I didn’t feel like writing, I sat down this morning and plunked it out, one word after the other.  It’s not perfect, and it’s not finished, but eventually it’s going to be a novel.  Then I’ll be able to lie out in the hammock (at least for an hour or two) and enjoy summertime the way it was meant to be enjoyed.

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Yesterday my youngest child graduated from college.  When my sons were younger I thought high school graduation would be the big transition.  Even though that was a milestone, the end of their undergraduate careers felt even more like an end-of-childhood rite of passage for me.

Part of it is I remember what I was doing when I graduated from the University of Florida, which is now my son’s alma mater as well:  I was married, running a household and working full time as a radio news reporter and anchor of the afternoon news.  A lot of responsibility for a 22-year-old, but that was my life and to me it was the norm.  Now I’ve got one son preparing for graduate school, and another who’s going to spend a year traveling and figuring out what he wants to do with his philosophy degree and his life (on his dime, I might add).

One thing I never expected when I got my diploma in broadcast news was that I would end up writing romance novels for a living.  At 22 I saw myself as always being what used to be termed a “news-hen”, a woman reporter/broadcaster/editor/anchor.  And I did live my dream.  I may not have conquered the networks, but I rose to become a news director, producer, and ultimately, radio station owner.

Now that I write fiction full time I realize that the neat thing about life is you never have to let go of your dreams, but it helps to ask yourself if there are new directions to explore.  While I often joke that I hate writing but love having written, the truth is, I love writing.  I loved writing news that informed people with the urgency of a radio bulletin, and I love writing about pirates.  Same dream, different day.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you you can’t follow your dream. Your dream may be to get a degree in philosophy, despite a whole bunch of nay-sayers staring at you and saying, ” How do you expect to make a living with that?”  Or your dream may be to realize one morning that you’d like to write pirate stories with a HEA ending.  It’s your dream.  Hold fast to it, and don’t give up.

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Ooops.  That’s what happens when my blogging day falls on a Saturday, especially a stunningly gorgeous Saturday in spring.  Thoughts of sitting and staring at a screen completely leave my head.

North Florida has three seasons–a looooong summer, and a delightful spring and autumn.  Between autumn and spring there are some cold days which I won’t dignify by calling them “winter”, but they offer a chance to build a nice fire and drink hot chocolate.

Right now though it’s definitely spring.  I’ve been wiping yellow pollen down from my porch nearly every day.  It finally rained, which was a good thing.  We needed the rain and it cleared much of the pollen away.  Yesterday was a breathtakingly beautiful day, with highs in the upper 70’s F and lows in the upper 50’s. I enjoyed my daily neighborhood walk and tried not to think about what it’s going to feel like in August.

It’s also time for spring cleaning.  In addition to the porch, I’ve been cleaning all over the house, clearing out clutter (including a ton of books to donate to the library book sale), catching up on put-off chores, and thinking about the relationship between spring cleaning and our writing.  In the first (and even second and third) draft, it’s not uncommon for my manuscript to get cluttered and messy.  But  I don’t worry about it.  I figure I’ll write it, and then I’ll clear out the clutter, when my mind is better focused on what stays and what goes.  If I try to do too much cleaning as I go, I get bogged down and end up with perfectly polished chapters 1-3…and nothing else.

So do your spring cleaning, and if you’re writing, remember it’s OK to let the clutter build.  Eventually a fresh breeze will blow through, and you’ll get it all cleared out and neat and shiny again.

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One of my favorite shirts from the recent presidential campaign said “Change in Which We Can Believe”.   You can find it at CafePress under writers, editors and grammarians for Obama.

Of course, the slogan heard nationally was “Change We Can Believe In”.  Catchy, but not grammatically correct.  I mention this because today, March 4, is National Grammar Day, so proclaimed by the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar.

I do not like to call myself a grammar snob, because I make mistakes.  I sometimes (but seldom) misuse “who” and “whom”.  I find my Southern heritage creeping in with “towards” rather than “toward”.  But I am educated enough that grammatical errors in others’ work tend to leap out at me, and this can be a problem. I was reading a historical last week by a well-respected author, and the sentence “He wanted to lie her down…” hit me like the sight of the proverbial turd in a punch bowl, taking me so far out of the moment I was tempted to not finish reading the book. I had already forgiven the author her misuse of “who” and “whom” in an earlier scene, but this was going too far!

There’s the possibility that it was not the author’s error, but the editor’s error.  If so, that is even sadder.  I depend on my editors to keep me in line, to catch those errors that might slip past me, like whether I should have used the word “may” instead of “might”.   The editors I know, the ones who have managed to cling to their jobs in an age when editing appears to be considered a luxury for academic presses, but not necessary for publishers of mass market fiction, I honor those editors.  They are fighting the good fight!

So as you go through your day today, red pen in hand, Elements of Style by your side, be ready to fight the good fight yourself!  Grammar counts!  Spelling counts!  Punctuation counts!

We owe it to our readers.  Someday they’ll thank us for it.  Maybe.  Regardless (NEVER IRREGARDLESS!!!), it’s the right thing to do.

Oh, and if you spot any grammatical errors in this post, please let me know.  I would appreciate it.

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I’m  thinking about the weather today because I live in Florida, and right now it feels like the low 30sF with the wind chill.  And that ain’t right.  But if I wasn’t writing this, I’d be hard at work on my novel because I find the weather affects my mood.

When it’s cold, I hunker down and write because the only heat in the house during the day is the space heater in my office.  When it’s rainy I get gloomy, so that’s a good time to write angsty scenes.  When it’s sunny and warm, I sit out on the porch with my laptop, and that helps me add color to my scenes, ’cause I’m surrounded by blooming flowers and trees.

Hot, humid days are for steamy scenes, of course. A low pressure system is for hurricanes, and for writing depressing characters. A high pressure system is for the hero and heroine adventuring.  Fog spurs on mystery, hot and dry conditions–wait a minute, this is Florida.  We don’t get to have hot and dry.

So that’s what it’s like where I live.  What are your best weather conditions for writing?