Tag Archives: Romance Writers

June 22, 2014 · 12:38 pm

More words of wisdom

I am a voracious reader of my monthly RWA magazine TheRomance Writers Report. The minute it arrives into my mailbox I am all over it.  An article in the June 2014 edition caught more than my eye – it spoke volumes to me as a romance writer. For the next several blogs I’m going to be dissecting the piece as it applies to me and my writing career.

Multi-published and talented writer, Barbara Wallace, in an article titled “Seven Habits of Effective Writers,” details  specific strategies writers should incorporate into their writing lives. The first is, basically, to write.

This may sound like common sense, but there are many distractions that can come along to prevent you from writing on a regular schedule.  In truth, you can’t  pen the all american great novel if you don’t sit down, get your but in the chair and type away. You can’t say “puff!” and your novel will magically appear in print. It MUST first be typed onto the page – or laptop screen. Let’s face it, if you are not employed as a writer -as I am not – finding the time to write can be difficult. Work obligations, children’s and  spouse’s needs, grocery shopping, laundry, and just dealing with the everyday stresses that being alive comes with it, can make carving some time out to write your book troublesome and problematic.

But….

If you really want to be a writer, you must write. Even if it’s for twenty minutes every night between supper and putting the kids to bed. Even if it’s on your lunch hour. I used to get up at 4 am just so I had two hours to myself before I had to get the family up to start the day. Saturday and sunday mornings were great because the members of my household liked to sleep in on those days. I recently attended a talk by famed writer Lisa Gardner, who shared with the audience that when she was beginning her career, she would write every night at eleven p.m. because that’s when she had alone, free time.

Whatever schedule you can devise that allows you to be working on your manuscript is up to you. As long as you do it consistently, regularly, and productively. It makes no sense to tell the family you’re going upstairs to the home office to write for an hour and then answer emails, check Twitter and Facebook, or be recruited into a particularly tedious game of Candy Crush. No. you are there to WRITE and that is all.

Personally, I consider everyday that I don’t write SOMETHING, a wasted day. Be it my blog, a character profile, or a scene in my current WIP. I schedule time for myself, away from everything and everyone, just so I can create. And I don’t think this is selfish, as a former friend  once told me she thought it was. Did you see the word former in that last sentence?

There’s an old saying that goes, “happy wife, happy life.” I want to change that up a little and declare, “happy writer, happy woman.”

 

 

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June 21, 2014 · 1:00 pm

Tips from the Pros

Last Saturday  I attended my monthly NHRWA meeting in Bow. The “featured speakers” that day were all members of our chapter who have had publishing success either traditionally with print publishers, or by self publishing their work. The round table discussion was a very informative one for me and the chapter.  Some of, but not all, the speakers included, Christyne Bulter, Susan A. Wall, Nora De Luc, and Maggie McGinnis.  This was a varied mixing of authors and styles, but they all had one thing in common: They were published authors, some of them many times over.

My take away knowledge from their discussion of their writing paths was that each writer has to decide for herself what she is hoping to accomplish with publication. For the self pub’ed writers, it was more of a sense of writing and marketing control that guided them towards that route. They wanted the final say in things such as distribution of their work, art design, publicity, and ultimately, the control of the monies earned from their sales. The traditional pub’ed writers were happy to give over those jobs such as worrying about cover designs, editing, publicity and distribution to the “professionals” and concentrating on what they loved doing most: writing.

I can easily see both sides of this literary coin, even though I have opted to try and fit into the traditional side of it.  I’ve opted to try and be published via the book route that arrives on shelves and flies into your hands to find its way to your home because, I’ll be honest,  I’m lazy. I enjoy writing. It is to me the oxygen that keeps me alive. I would rather be writing than doing almost anything else. Most days, anyway. If I had to worry about  the formatting font and type needed to upload a book on Amazon, or tracking my sales ( assuming I had any!) , or the licensing and regulations necessary for this to happen, and even the cover design, book jacket blurb, complete self editing, line copy and content-wise, and them having to promote the work myself, I think I wouldn’t like writing as much as I do. I don’t mind having other people who know what they are doing, well, do that, for me.

Having said that, the women I know who have self published their work are dynamos at all of this and I am eternally envious of that. They are organized, focused, determined and talented women who have opted to be in total control of their careers, and my hat is off to them. I  know myself too well to know that I could never be as dedicated, methodical,  structured and regulated as they are. Not to mention, they are a talented bunch of writers.

So, whether we are self published, traditionally published, or not published at all, it is good to know we have options as far as the routes we want to take our careers through. The New Hampshire arm of the RWA is a wonderful mix of talented, spirited, informative writers who make it a joy for me to come to every meeting. You can check out their website at:  NHRWA and maybe catch us at the next meeting. This is a very welcoming, supportive, and encouraging group of romance writers, and women, in general.

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June 14, 2014 · 12:42 pm

E-D-I-T is a four letter word

“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”
― Dr. Seuss

I love me some Theodore Geisel!

Truly though, as a writer, I feel my words are my babies. I impregnate the page with them, nurture them through sentence structure and thought processes, expell them into a full story and then foster their development and maturation into a finished manuscript. Then I sit back and revel in their brilliance. And no one had better say a disparaging or unkind word about them or they will suffer my mamma lion wrath.

And then, reality sets in… and I edit.

Editing is a lot like trying to lose weight. You have all this extra weight ( the words) that is making you feel heavy and lugubrious (telling, not showing, non-action words, fragmented sentences). You need to go on a weight reduction plan ( edit) to loose those unwanted pounds. Along the way you struggle, cheat, become discouraged, plateau, feel deprived, and then – if you are lucky – shed that unwanted and not-needed poundage. Now, you hopefully have a beach body. Or, in other words, at this point you have a manuscript that is cohesive, thought provoking and tightly written.

I have been sequestered for days, foregoing all pleasurable aspects of life such a watching Housewives of NYC and Major Crimes,  eating, and exercising, in order to edit a piece that has a very good shot at publication.  I am determined to “get the weight off” this piece and make it the best thing I can write.

My hair is suffering from all the pulling I am doing and my fingers are beginning to go numb from typing. But, I am pressing on and killing my babies – as Stephen King says – and whittling down the words, the fat, the bloated sentences.

I will be beach body ready soon!

My words, though they flow, are more tell than show. So I’ll  cut them and prune them, and hope I don’t ruin them.

Dr. Seuss has nothing to worry about!

 

 

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June 13, 2014 · 9:08 am

Words of wisdom

A few blogs ago I shared a devastating rejection that made me question everything I’ve been doing to enhance my writing career, and that I’ve written, for the past year. I was so emotionally low that I didn’t even want to touch my laptop. It sat, closed and loosing charge, lonely and still, in my writing loft.  I couldn’t even tell the people I loved the most about the rejection because I was so depressed and embarrassed.

When I finally did share the news with my husband and then my daughter, just saying the words out loud made me feel like an even bigger loser. All I felt like doing was wallowing. I admitted to my daughter that I thought the entire year had been wasted, that I was back to square one with no foreseeable chance of moving forward again.  At 54 I felt like I was basically done and didn’t know if I had the energy or the desire to start over. Again.

Here’s the difference between a 54 year old and a 24 year old: perspective.

My daughter, in that clear and educated voice she uses on me when she likes to throw the stupid things I say back in my face, said, “So, the website you constructed, all the connections both personally and via the internet that you’ve made,  the conferences you’ve gone to, the Twitter followers, your new Facebook friends, and the writing group you joined, have all been for nothing? None of that has been worthwhile or made a difference to you this year?”

“Well, no,” I admitted, sheepishly.  “All those things have been wonderful.”

“So, tell me, again, exactly, how you’re back to square one?”

See? Perspective.

I’m so glad I had a daughter who loves me enough to tell me when I’m being an idiot. Who has the confidence to throw my own dumb words back in my face just to make me see them for what they really are. And for respecting me so much that she’s willing to show me the error of my ways.

I’d like to think when I was 24 I had the same kind of perspective, but I know I didn’t. At least at 54 I’m beginning to learn it. Let’s all hope by the time I’m published – and I will be! – it’ll be ingrained my my psyche.

Thanks, kid, for showing me the way.

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June 12, 2014 · 11:31 am

A little luck and a lot of hard work

I never dreamed about success. I worked for it. ― Estee Lauder

Icons are icons, whether writers or uber-business moguls like the lady quoted today. You don’t get where you want to get in life without a lot of hard work. Hard, finger-splitting, muscle making, soul growing work.

I’ve been asked to edit a piece I submitted for publication with the hope  that once I do, it will be good enough to warrant publication. So, I’ve been arduously typing away these past few days, rewriting, editing, editing some more, and trying to live my normal every day  life as best as I can. Because, you see, I don’t just want this to be good enough for publication. I want it to be the best I can make it. I want to feel, once the last word is typed, that this was truly the best  job I could do, that I gave it everything I could, and that I made it better than good enough.

A difficult task, to be sure.

My words, my thoughts, my ideas all have one thing in common: they are MINE.  My babies. I gave birth to them, nurtured them, then when they were ready, let them go. When I let them go out into the world to be read, I can’t help feeling trepidatious that they will be judged harshly. No parent wants to hear anything “bad” about their child. You always feel as if you failed in some way when someone makes a harsh comment about your baby.

I feel exactly the same way with my written words.  Like a wild mamma lion protects their young -sometimes to the death- is the way I feel about my words. My hard work, my soul growing work!

But, as with children, sometimes you have to let them feel a little pain, face a little judgement, in order for them to grow to be bigger, stronger, better.

So, today I struggle with the edits, hating to change or delete one word, one thought, one scene, in order to make the work good enough.

No, scratch that. Not good enough. The best it can be.

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June 3, 2014 · 9:33 am

Rejection, Part 2

“After rejection – misery, then thoughts of revenge, and finally,oh well, another try elsewhere.” Mason Cooley.

The misery part of the above quote I totally agree with. After my most recent rejection I did the following, not necessarily in this order: cried, ate a package of Milano cookies, cried, cursed the person rejecting me, cried some more but now howled, too, ate two chocolate donuts then two more, cried, cursed the air and then fumed.  After fuming I moved into seething, then cried again, not because I was upset about the rejection, but because I had now moved into embarrassment over it. I was ashamed that I had told people about my potential good news – based on what I was told by the person reviewing my work – and now I had to tell these same people that I had – gulp! – been rejected.

Red faced, trembling lip, crimson eared, embarrassed.

I wasn’t able to tell anyone for a week. Seven days I held all that emotion in, stuffing it with bad food and mentally castigating myself. Life I said in my  previous post, I had to talk myself off a proverbial ledge.

And then, the final part of the above quote filtered through all the hurt and the rage and the humiliation of failing. I woke up one day and decided that this wasn’t going to dissuade me from writing, that it wasn’t the end of the world or of my writing career, and that today was a new day.

A little Scarlett Ohara-ish, but true.

If we were to quit every time we failed at something, new inventions would never be discovered.

If we were to give up on love every time our heart was broken, we would never know the joy of rebirth that new love brings.

If I quit every time something I’d written was rejected for publication – no matter how much it hurt or how wrong the rejector was about it – I wouldn’t be at my laptop right this second typing this.

So, tomorrow is another day ( Thanks, Scarlett for making me realize that!) and there are more places to submit to and different people to read what I’ve written.

Rejection hurts. This is true. But it’s not the end of the world.

I have to go exercise those damn donuts and Milanos off now.

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June 1, 2014 · 1:16 pm

Rejection

“Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work.” James Lee Burke

To write about this topic is stomach-upsetting for me. I am the penultimate expert on the subject of rejection: in my personal life, in my work, in my career, and in my writing. I joke that failure is a familiar friend to me, but that rejection is my sworn enemy. I can deal with failure because I know that out of it will some day come  success. Rejection, on the other hand, is a form of failure that is so much more personal and ego-devouring, that when it hits me, it throws me into the bowels of depression, and I have a very hard time clawing my way out of its clutches.

I could quote chapter, book and verse on the number of ubersuccessful people who suffered rejection before ever  seeing their proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. 27 publishers rejected Theodore Giesel’s first book. Stephen King was rejected 30 times before his first book sold. Supposedly, Jack London received over 600 rejection slips before he ever sold a story. The list goes on, but one thing they all had in common was that rejection did not mean the end of their desire to write. It probably spurred it on just to prove the rejectors  wrong.

Obviously, I’m writing this today because I, too, have suffered another writing rejection. And it hurts. Like hell. This time I was so confident that something good was going to come out of my submission – based on what I was told by the person I was submitting to –  that when the final rejection came, with no explanation of why, I was devastated. Beyond devestated, actually. I had to talk myself off a ledge. A  proverbial one, but a ledge just the same. To be rejected, to have my work rejected, my thoughts, my ideas, the way I write the words, is soul-killing. I could barely put a sentence together for a while because every time I opened my mouth, all I wanted to do was wail, “Why??!!”

A little overly melodramatic, but true.

I’ve had a few days now to get over the hurt, shock, annoyance, dismay and anger.  I no longer want to make a phone call and say vicious things to the person at the other end about their heritage and schooling. I’ve pulled myself back in from the ledge to my writing room. I am still having a little difficulty with the “Why” but for now, I will ignore that question and ask myself this one: “Where do I go from here?” The easiest answer is back to my laptop, so that is where I am today.

And where I will be every other day I have the time opportunity to be. I will not let this latest rejection steal my joy about writing. And it is a joy. No one should ever be allowed to rob you of that.

To quote one of the smartest women I know – my friend Jill – who is quoting her father when she says, “every thing happens for a reason.” This is so true. I don’t know the reason now, but I am confident I will someday. As the James Lee Burke quote of above tells us, this rejection is dues I am paying that will some day, some way, be translated back into my work.

Want to talk about your rejections??

 

 

 

 

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May 31, 2014 · 5:34 pm

A “Lonely Labor”

“To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life.  The money is the gravy. As everyone else, I love to dunk my crust in it. But alone, it is not a diet designed to keep body and soul together.” Bette Davis.

Many of you may only know the name above from the Kim Carnes song  Bette Davis Eyes.  But this was a woman who reached the pinnacle of her acting career and held on to it until she died.  She lived to make movies. It was her passion, her tragedy, her ultimate joy above all else, and she let’s us  glimpse in to the agonies of her private world when she calls it her ” lonely labor.”

As writers, we are mostly a solitary breed. Yes, many people collaborate on books, but for the most part, the names you see listed in an author’s index and on the book shelves of your local stores are singular ones. That translates  to the writer spending large amounts of time alone, just writing, editing, thinking, editing, typing and editing some more. Some of us are lucky to do this as a full time job. Many of us, like me, have to go to paying jobs each day until we are afforded the opportunity to stay home and write full time without worrying about how things like mortgages, kid’s tuition, electric bills and groceries will be paid for.

I am lucky enough that I do not work full time at present. I go to a paying job 3 days per week and then two weekdays, and whatever time I can eek out on the weekends is devoted to writing. I often do “sweat over my lonely labor.” But to me it is the penultimate labor of love. If I never get published,if no one likes what I write, I will still do it because it is the one thing in my life that gives me joy above all other endeavors. Writing, to me, is the meat and potatoes. Publication would be the gravy. Delicious, but not necessary.

 

 

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May 29, 2014 · 10:22 am

Emotions

“To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.” Anais Nin

Why am I including a quote from one of the first women writers to pen female erotica? Simple. Anais Nin was a profoundly adept writer of human emotions – both male and female. That she chose to write about emotions as they related to sexuality and sexual awakening is a point that can be debated in a college literature course. For my purposes, she helped me understand the underlying themes of human sexuality and emotions with regards to my romance writing.

There are as many different categories in romance writing as there are romance writers. I happen to like writing  stories about people finding love and companionship in a contemporary setting. The here and now. I’ve mentioned before that I like to read Regency Historical romances. It’s a time period I know I can’t write, but one that gives me a great deal of pleasure to read. Some romances are considered “Inspirational,”  some defined as “Sweet.”  There is a very large market now dealing in romantic female erotica. There are paranormal, urban, suspense and thriller categories as well.

The one thing all these diverse types of romance writing have in common is emotions, and the number one emotion is of love. Now, love doesn’t necessarily have to translate to sex, but for my writing purposes, it does. People have sex. Even your parents, gross as that may seem to you. (How do you think you got here?) My characters have sex. My characters have emotions. Those two facets – emotions and sex – are very important themes for my writing.

Anyone can write a sex scene. It’s basic anatomy and algebra 101: part A goes into part B and you wind up with C. I’ll let you figure out what the letters stand for. To be able to write a love scene and not just a sex scene, and make the reader feel the emotions coursing through the characters, is a talent I have been trying to develop for years.Romantic fiction isn’t about the sex – although that plays a large part in it. No, it’s about how the characters feel  about, and respond to, one another. It can be just an askance look that heats up the emotion, a simple touch of hand against a cheek, or a knock you out of your socks kiss.

Look up the word love in any dictionary and you will get descriptors for emotions, such as, an intense feeling of deep affection; a romantic or sexual attachment. Notice the first definition states an INTENSE FEELING… The words intense and feeling both denote something more than the ordinary.   To be able to delve into the deepest emotional troughs of a character’s psych and explain it so that the reader recognizes it as an emotion that they themselves have felt – or want to feel – is the mark of an exceptional writer.

Nin’s quote explains that the writer  must  dig deep down into the emotional well of  characters. To excavate, which literally means to extract layer upon layer to get to the core, the underground storeroom where true emotion lives. As writers, we need to strip away at our characters to find the essence of what makes them who and what they are. As writers of romantic fiction we must be able to express those rolling emotions  effectively when love, sex, and conflict come about. Your reader needs to understand what the two love interests mean to one another – during sex and after it. To do that convincingly, we, as the writers, need to delve deep down ( per Nin) and unearth our own true and hidden desires. That’s a tall order.

If you’ve never read any of Nins work, don’t worry. You don’t have to. She was pioneer and the time period in which she wrote makes reading her a chore if you just want to kill an hour. But her quote is a profound one. To write, is truly to descend into our own and our character’s inner emotional true selves and then express those emotions in a way common to all who read our work.

Any thoughts?

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May 27, 2014 · 8:19 am

Failure, Part II

“Develop success from failure. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” Dale Carnegie

For those of you who don’t know who this influential and superbly brilliant man was, I suggest you GOOGLE him or open the name link above. Many of Dale Carnegie’s teachings in his breakthrough book How to Win Friends and Influence People can be directly related to whether or not you consider yourself and your writing as successful or as failures.

As I mentioned previously, take ten writers and ask them what success means to them with regard to their writing and you will get ten individual, different answers. The same can be said of failure. I was at a writing conference recently and an agent said that if you have a writing blog, you need to have at least ten thousand hits per week to be considered a success if you are querying a publisher.  Ten thousand. Per week. I’ve had this blog up since february and I’ve had a grand total of 584 hits since then. So, am I considered a failure by this agent’s guidelines? Yup.

At that same conference I attended a session about social media. The maven at that one stated categorically that you need a minimum of ten-to-twenty thousand followers in order to promote your book through TWITTER. Anything less than that and you won’t generate any buzz about your books, which will translate into not making any money from non-existent sales. Again, I’m a failure in her eyes.

I left the conference considering my choice of writing as a boondoggle.

By the time I got back home, that thought went the way of the dinosaur and disappeared from the face of the earth.

Social media is a very powerful tool this days. I’ll admit that freely. If and when I have a book published I will certainly take advantage of my Twitter followers ( all 80 of them!  )and my Facebook friendships to help generate buzz and sales. But I certainly don’t consider myself as a writing failure because I don’t have hundreds of thousands of people checking in on a smartphone to see what I’m up to. No. Taking the above quote into consideration, I will post my successes along the way and HOPE two friends will tell two friends, who will tell two more friends, and so on and so on.

I still believe in my heart and mind that the best way to get people to read your work is to write a good story that they can’t put down and don’t want to. Everything else will fall  from that. I am not a failure if I write a good story.

Thoughts?

 

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