The HEA Cafe

Or: Everything I needed to know, I learned from George Costanza

I’ve always loved to read, so it was no surprise to anyone when I eventually decided to write a book of my own. When I did, I attacked it head on. I planned, I worked, I outlined more than any woman should. The end result? I wrote three mysteries that didn’t sell.

I don’t know how many of you watch Seinfeld, but there is a time in George’s life where he decides what he’s been doing hasn’t been working, so he decides to do the opposite. That’s what I did with my books. I’d been writing serious mysteries, with lots of science and research involved. They’d generated some interest, enough to almost, almost sell. But nothing quite happened.

To take my mind off the latest mystery making the rounds with agents, I decided to write something completely different, a funny paranormal romance where I could build my own world and make up my own rules. I fell in love with the idea of a preschool teacher who is forced to run off with a gang of geriatric biker witches and THE ACCIDENTAL DEMON SLAYER was born.

Instead of a 20-page plot outline, I had a 5-page list of ideas, one of which included “but little did they know, all the Shoney’s are run by werewolves.” Instead of following the rules, I broke a few. Instead of painstakingly writing over the course of a year, I giggled my way through the book and had a complete manuscript in five months.

The opening chapters did well in contests and caught the eye of an editor, who asked to see the whole thing. That same editor bought the book less than a week after I finished it.

I still can’t believe THE ACCIDENTAL DEMON SLAYER will be an August 2008 release. And just this afternoon, I was working on the sequel, laughing with the characters and having more fun than I should.

While I’m not sure Seinfeld is the best place to go for life lessons, I really do think there’s something to be said for following your instincts – in writing and in everything else. Can you think of a time you’ve taken a different path? Broken out of a pattern and started something new?

Does writing make you cry?

Not because you’re banging your head against the keyboard in frustration, but because what you’re writing wrenches at you.  It should.  When you’re writing an emotionally draining scene, especially the “black moment”,  you should be feel it.

Remember Joan Wilder at the beginning of “Romancing the Stone”?  She was sobbing her way through a box of tissues while typing the end of her novel, and I laughed, but I totally understood it.  If you’re not affected by your own writing, can you expect your readers to feel the emotion coming off the page?  I was writing a scene yesterday that ended with the hero crying, and by the end of the scene, I was blowing my nose too.

I suspect for some writers it is a purely mechanical process, but I’m pleased by the number of authors who confess that they too have “Joan Wilder” moments.  I always wondered if I was just odd. After all, I’m a sucker for cheap sentimentality.  Hallmark card commercials make my eyes misty.  Give me a scene in a movie with a dying dog and music in a minor key, and I’m plowing through the tissues.

On a totally different note, you might also “feel the burn” when crafting a good sensual scene.  At least, you might feel it before you’re in the 15th reading for edits.  Some writers have to set the mood for themselves with candles, soft lighting, utter isolation.  Others can hammer them out with screaming kids running in asking for snacks.  Every writer’s different, but I know that for me, I have to be feeling something if I want my reader to be feeling something.  I wrote a scene in Captain Sinister’s Lady that still gets to me, where a young man has to leave his adoptive family because racism in his antebellum town make it impossible for him to have a decent life.  It wasn’t easy to write it.  But I took the tissues and got to work, and when I was done, I blew my nose and said, “Hey!  That’s not half bad!”

So when you’re writing those key emotional scenes, ask yourself if you’re investing enough of yourself into it–are you feeling sad over your characters, or aroused, or elated, or happy?  If not, maybe you need to give it a second look.

Does this happen to anyone but me? You’re reading along and find that you’ve misspelled a word. That instead of cheek you’ve wrote check. Not once but every single time you’ve used that word through out an entire 400 page manuscript. Or even still chef instead of chief and vice versa. This drives me crazy. Because no matter that I’ve read and reread the manuscript. I’m still finding these types of misspellings.

And I always have to look up how to spell refrigerator. Always. I can never spell that word. Thank God for spell checker! But spell checker can’t catch everything. How about this? I’m happily, merrily reading along and discover that I have this sentence.

She wouldn’t surround that again for anyone. Well, I hope not!!  It should have read surrender that again.

Why doesn’t my brain catch these things while I’m editing, revising, proofing, submitting . . .

You thought you wanted to come here. But instead you had them hear it instead.

They red something without a paint brush, when all they really had to do was read it.

Relying on spell checker wouldn’t catch these spelling errors. Even reading a page doesn’t catch all of them. Because you’re mind is in the zone. You wrote it. You know what it should say, so your mind automatically fills in the blanks, and corrects the errors.

What are some ways to help with this problem? What do you do to try and catch these types of errors before the story goes out the door? If you’re critique partners are as good as mine they point them out for me, but sometimes if I’m editing or changing some things based on their critique they may not see that passage again if I made the same mistake twice.

I like reading books about pirates.  I like writing books about pirates.  But let’s face it, pirates are people who rob other people for a living.  This is a problem for me when I’m trying to write a pirate hero.  Would I write a bank robber hero?  Not very likely.  So why are we willing to accept pirate heroes?

Part of it is the romance of piracy.  Running away to sea, answering to no one but your shipmates, living life for the moment rather than the future, all good things.  Who would you rather spend an evening drinking with, Long John Silver or the guy who owns the tavern?  Plus the pirates get to dress with more flair than the shopkeeper.

As romance writers we work around this by making our pirates tragic, or funny, or on a mission, or in disguise, but unless you’re really tricky, it all comes back to him taking what isn’t his, and that’s theft.

You can avoid this issue, to a degree, by making your pirates privateers instead.  The difference between a pirate and a privateer is that a privateer has a license to steal.  Literally.  Governments would issue “letters of marque” to sea captains, authorizing them to stop-and-rob enemy ships.

The legal line between piracy and privateering could shift around, and many famous pirates were also privateers, and vice versa, Sir Henry Morgan and William Kidd both had letters of marque, but were also charged with piracy by England.   In the early 19th Century, Mexico and South American countries breaking away from Spain issued letters of marque to captains of all backgrounds who would agree to harass Spanish shipping.  Many of these sea rovers were little more than pirates, but it was in the interest of the rebelling countries to harass Spain, even if the privateer captains were neglectful about making sure the government issuing the letter of marque got its cut of the booty.

In the United States, the US Merchant Marine proudly includes privateers among its founders, pointing out, rightly, that in its earliest days the US only had merchant ships that could be put into action, not a standing navy. In the War of 1812 there were 23 USN ships in service, and 517 privateers.  Becoming a privateer was a favorite “get rich quick” plan for merchant captains, though naturally it carried a high risk.  The ships you attacked were likely to fight back, and if you were captured, the enemy nation might not wish to honor the letter of marque. John Paul Jones was a hero to the US, a pirate to the British.

All European and US governments engaged in privateering (they got a cut of the take) well into the 19th century, however, the US did not sign the 1856 Declaration of Paris that ended European use of privateers.  The Confederate States of America issued letters of marque to allow Southern privateers to harass US shipping during the Civil War and while we don’t issue letters of marque in the US today, it’s still possible.  Section 8 of the United States constitution says that Congress has the power “To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water”.

It would make for an interesting contemporary romance–a bold, swashbuckling adventurer, perhaps a former Special Forces operative, is issued a letter of marque and reprisal to go hunt down terrorists.

I’m not going to write that one, but it’s an interesting idea.  In the meantime, I’ll go back to working on my pirate and privateer historicals, ‘cause who doesn’t like to read about pirates?  I know I do.

I went away for the weekend to Mudgee which is a wine growing region in the Central West of New South Wales. There was a big rock concert on called A Day on the Green with some of the classic Australian rock acts of the past thirty years, like Jimmy Barnes from Cold Chisel, the Black Sorrows, Richard Clapton and the gorgeous Deborah Conway from Do- Rei-Mi. It was hot, flies were everywhere and when the sun went down, it got cold.

The only place that could accommodate several thousand people was a big field at one of the wineries. My friends and I took a picnic, some chairs and bought some wine. It was very pleasant and civilized as rock concerts for baby boomers generally are. I had a great time.

There was a family in front of where my friends and I were sitting and I spent a lot of time watching them. Couldn’t avoid it really. They were only a couple of feet away. He was a bit taller than middle height, solid, maybe of Mediterranean background with a strong hook nose which gave his face terrific character. Dark eyes. Good looking in that vaguely brooding, tough way. Dressed in cut-offs and a T-shirt but looked as though he should be in Armani.

She was a classic ice blonde. Hair in a ponytail, stylish jeans, diamond ear studs. Four kids with them, three boys, one maybe four or five the others a couple of years older. Eldest child a surly girl of about fourteen. Looked like Ice Blonde’s parents were with them too.

Tough Guy and Ice Blonde barely talked to each other. They had blank faces and empty eyes when they did communicate. Their kids were lively and Tough Guy engaged with them when needed. But she said hardly anything. I kept thinking her parents, the grandparents of the kids, kept shooting her looks filled with anxiety.

Why am I telling you all this? It falls in the category of ideas for stories. I had several scenarios worked out by the end of the night. One was the clichéd one – they are a Mafia family and she’s going slowly round the twist with nothing in her life but shopping and childcare even though she wants more; one was a bit more snazzy – he was an undercover agent trying to protect her from a mad ex husband (although that’s been done a lot too); and the last one was that she was a girl friend of convenience he’d picked up for some as yet unknown reason – something to do with the kids.

But the real story I think, was this. Their marriage was stale and about to collapse. Everyone knew it, even the kids, and everyone ignored it. So what then? Does he have an epiphany in the middle of the field and realize he has to save his marriage or see his life go down the toilet? Does she have an epiphany and realize she has to leave or go crazy? Does he go back to his city life then on Monday morning, take out his Armani suit and find himself weeping uncontrollably? Does she walk in on him weeping and silently wrap her arms around him? Do they spend the next few hours on the floor in their walk in closet telling each other all about their fears and failed dreams? Or do they make wild, bone shattering love that doesn’t help and makes her more resolved to leave?

I don’t know. But I’ll file this away and one day come back to that family in the field and ask them what happened.

What do you do with all those fragments of stories and lines of thought that can leap into your mind in a nano second, just after you see a quick sideways glance or a head turned away too quickly?