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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?

It’s 2009.

Stop and think about that for a moment–the year is 2009.  I was born in the middle of the 20th century.  I’m living in the future I used to read about in science fiction, though that does raise the question, “If it’s 2009, where’s my flying car?”

Regardless, it is an amazing time to be alive.  I recall attending a SF convention some years back where there was a panel called “What we didn’t predict”.  One of the items I remember from that discussion was personal computers.  Despite Star Trek’s tricorders, there was almost no writing in science fiction about portable personal computers.  Now we live in an age where my son carries a smaller than pocket-size computer that makes phone calls–the iPhone.

I think this is one reason I enjoy writing historicals.  I’m not a Luddite, far from it.  I enjoy waking up in the morning, popping in contact lenses that correct my vision, turning on a tap confident I’ll get clean and hot water, and turning on a machine that allows me near instant communication with people around the world at an affordable cost.

But when I’m writing a historical, I know I’ll enjoy the research, partly because it helps me appreciate the time in which I live.  One of the books I’m using for my new WIP is called Medical Firsts by Robert E. Adler, and I found this passage on the germ theory of disease:

“Germs cause disease. This simple idea is so much a part of our thinking that it seems as self-evident as gravity…the humdrum basics of medicine–…a quick swipe with an alcohol-soaked wad of cotton before an injection–can seem more like rituals than the lifesaving offspring of a profound concept.”

He’s right. There’s so much we do now that we take for granted, it’s good to refresh our memories as to why these “rituals” are important and why they made such a difference in our world.

At the same time, I don’t want to fall into the trap in my historicals of giving my characters knowledge before their time.  If my surgeon hero bleeds a patient, it’s because he’s practicing state-of-the-art medicine–for his time.  I get annoyed with writers who feel compelled to insert anachronistic information into their historicals because they believe no true hero would bleed an injured man or treat syphilis with mercury.Cover via Amazon

I have little doubt that 100 years from now readers will be looking at the 20th century and saying, “Can you believe it?  They used to treat tumors with poison chemicals, cut them out with knives and burn them with radiation!  How could they have been so benighted?”

I enjoy the research involved in historicals because it’s not only educational for me in crafting my characters and scenes, it reminds me of how much I have now, and what a fortunate person I am.  And if you don’t believe you’re fortunate as well, pause for a moment the next time you go to flush your toilet, and think about what that action would have involved in 1809–both the action of obtaining water in the first place, and disposing of waste afterwards.

I’m glad it’s 2009.  But I still want a flying car.

I have three books published in German.  You can see them at Amazon.de, and you can also see the covers at my website.  I was very happy when I saw the covers for Samt & Sabel (Sword and Velvet, aka Captain Sinister’s Lady) and Rache & Rosen (Revenge and Roses, aka Pirate’s Price) because they were so…tasteful.  Swords and flowing fabric and coins and daggers.  Even the titles were euphonious!

Then I got the cover for Im Aufruhr der Gefuhle. At first, I thought it was a mistake.  I used Google translation on the page and it said the title translated to “In the Turmoil of Emotions”.  It started out in life as “Smuggler’s Bride”.  I had a blank moment as I stared at the page.  What happened to my tasteful covers? Why was Julia falling out of her bodice? And most puzzling of all, why was there a killer pink flamingo looming in the background over Julia and Rand?

I contacted my editor in Germany at Random House.  She hemmed and hawed a bit via email, but then she said the first books weren’t selling as well as they’d hoped.  Apparently, with those oh-so-tasteful covers, no one knew they were romance novels.

At first, I wasn’t happy about this change in covers.  But as I stared at the busty babe and the half-naked dude, I began to smile.  Yes, my book is full of turmoiled emotions and passion.  Yes, there are definitely scenes where he’s bare chested and her bodice isn’t fully fastened.  And while there’s not a pink flamingo in this Florida set romance, there are lots of possums.  And I acknowledge it’s hard to get possums to equal passion.

So if this “old school” cover leaps out at my German readers and screams, “I’m a historical romance! Buy me!” then I’m all for it. I’m in the business of writing books.  I want to sell as many of my books as possible, and I want to make it as easy as I can for the reader to get her hands on my publications.  I still like my tasteful books, but if In the Turmoil of Emotions replenishes my 401K, then I guarantee I’ll be smiling all the way to the bank.