Continued working on Possession. My "problem" chapter continues to complexify now that it's in the right POV. Complexifying is a good thing. It's exactly the opposite of my over-populated, too-complicated plots, which are what I always start with. For me, complexifying is when a character says or does something that makes me say, "Hey, I didn't know that." or "That's cool."

Example? Ok. Today while my son was at soccer practice and I was at Deaf Dog Coffee (G&G Dog for those in the know) with the laptop, I was working on my no-longer-a-problem chapter and my hero said to my heroine, in reference to the villain, "I've known him a long time." And just like that, I knew that my villian is actually quite old and that my hero means hundreds of years, not dozens. I knew that my hero and the villain have been enemies for a very long time. But that's not the complexification. This is: The relationship between my heroine, hero and villain is suddenly fraught with tension that wasn't there before, and it's a tension that will permeate the entire story. She does not yet know the villian, who has raised her from age 8, is ancient. She has already left him. My hero knows something about the heroine that she doesn't: to wit, that the woman who would interest my villian to the degree she has must be special indeed.This fact will resonate throughout the story. I love it when that happens. And it's all because my hero said, I've known him a long time.

Sigh.

Read his obituary at www.david-drake.com/bae...

I solved my issues of the past two days. As you may recall, I tried to write this particular chapter only to stall out 1 1/2 pages in. Then I deleted most of it and started over. Then I realized I was going off in the wrong POV, so this morning I notebooked at the gym, what's my heroine like? What really happened to her before my story started, etc. I made several backstory adjustments, one of which simplified the story remarkably, and then tonight I wrote 4 pages. That's a lot for me. Unless I'm on fire, I don't typically do many more pages than that on a weekday.

The lesson is this: I was right about what was wrong. And I stopped trying to hash my way through in the wrong POV. I worked out my issues by brainstorming (aka notebooking) and working on my outline. I know the next few scenes and what happens the very next thing. Tomorrow, I hope to write the second half of the scene. I have to go to a meeting, so I'll have to get as much done during my son's soccer practice as possible. Last time I had to leave the cafe early because the music was way too loud and not to my taste. Ick. Better luck tomorrow I hope.

I set aside my problem chapter(s) and started a new one. It's going OK, but perversely, as I was writing, I was thinking, shoot, maybe this should be from her POV. The whole reason I was starting over was I was CONVINCED the scene needed to be from his POV. I think I need to write more than 2 pages to be sure. I'm tired. I'll brainstorm tomorrow AM at the gym, and work on whatever I work out then while my son's at soccer practice. Also, I've been worrying myself over the suspicion that I am short on plot. I need to think of something else to have happen. I'm making some adjustments in characters. My hero is surprising me. He's a way bigger smart ass than I ever thought, but that's the way he keeps coming out on paper, so I'm not going to fight it. Much. Sigh.

Today, my son had a hike-a-thon dealie for soccer. Even though it occurred to me to conveniently forget, in fact, I got up at 6:15 am on a Sunday in order to get him down to Muir Woods to hike for soccer. So, I was not a slug this morning. Now, the problem is that I am navigationally challenged and worse, the Hike-a-thon flyer said Meet at the Safeway next to Bank of The West. But the directions, which I didn't really look at until this morning in the car, were for getting to Muir Woods. I duly followed the directions and we ended up at Muir Woods at 8:00 am. No Safeway sighted. Since we were there, my son and I decided to hike on our own. If you ever come to California, go to Muir Woods. It's old growth redwoods, the coastal rainforest that has been decimated in this State and others. And indeed, it was "raining" on us, condensation from the heavy fog off the bay. We hiked for 4.5 hours (and many of the trails are not for sissies). It was gorgeous. We saw a banana slug. Ew. Except not really. We saw a deer, too.

The directions did not include return directions, so I got lost on the way back, which should surprise no one who knows me. We drove around Mill Valley until I found the signs for the freeway. Mill Valley has only two main streets, I think, so this turned out to be a fruitful strategy after not too long. Luckily, the situation was not new for my son, so when I told him to please be quiet until such time as we were not hopelessly lost he did that. Something he was often unable to do on the hike. Not that we were lost hiking. Honest. Just when I was getting nervous about actually finding the freeway, despite the sign back there, I recognized a street. Yes! I had been lost there before! I got on the freeway, my son fell asleep and I had some blessed silence.

After we got home, I was tired and decided to read for a bit only I fell asleep, rather sluggishly. Then I had to make dinner. I didn't make cookies or cupcakes, both of which I was supposed to do, never mind why. My son and I ate both the containers of strawberries I got at the store. They were delicious. But now there's none for tomorrow. Then I went to read some more. Ultimately, it was not a keeper book, even though it was a page turner. I did not like the hero at all. He was a black ops guy, well done, detailed, but somehow, the book left me emotionally flat. At times, I actively disliked the hero. The writing was not tight enough for my tastes. I am of the opinion that "Pretend dialogue here," he ran off at the mouth. is simply wrong. It drives me insane when writers do that. It's telling, not showing, and to me it's an indication of sloppy thinking. Yeah, yeah, lots of writers do that, but I think it's cheap.

Anyway, you've noticed by now, there's no mention of writing. True. I did none today. But as I was "fixing" a chapter yesterday, I ran into trouble. The chapter is, at the very least, in the wrong place. It's probably in the wrong POV, too. I found myself writing around it, that is, trying to shore it up so it would work with the least elimination of stuff I like. Past (and very bitter) experience, has convinced me that this leads to boring crap. So, last night I stopped working on the chapter to give myself some time to think about the problems with the chapter. At random times today, my brain would switch over to analyzing the issue, and I've decided to do what that little voice was whispering for me to do when the chapter began to go awry. Set the chapter aside and start over. Which I will do. Tomorrow. I'm tired and going to bed. Sluggishly.

It's been hellishly hot here. Yesterday it was 104 in Sonoma where I work. Today, 97. 88 in Petaluma. On the other hand, Death Valley was 119, so it could have been worse. I am not a hot weather kind of gal. Just, not. I've been working away on Possession and it's going well. The paradigm shift is complete and I'm letting things go. I like where this is going right now.

Tomorrow is my son's birthday. He'll be 11. We went to get frozen yogurt after I picked him up from day care and I realized that girls are starting to look at him. Young girls, mind you, because he is young. But they are looking. There were two or three groups of young girls in the yogurt shop and he got looks from them, several peeks the whole time we were there. He was oblivious. I noticed this at the soccer event Tuesday when there were kids running around all over the place. The problem is, he's a good looking boy. When he was a toddler, people used to stop me to tell me how handsome he is. He's got these startling grey eyes and well, I think I'm in for it. But right now, all I can do is wonder what's going to happen when he notices the girls looking at him.

I have no idea how he got to be 11, but he did. He's such a great kid. 11 years ago now, I was in labor and still 24 hours away from delivery. Ouch. When I came to the hospital when the pains were less than two mintues apart (ouch!) one of the nurses said, "This is going to be the greatest day of your life." At the time, I thought she was nuts. But she was right.

I took some days for this other project but now that's done and I'm back solidly working on the writing. Possession is going well enough. I'm still adjusting to my paradigm shift, and I think it's working out. My hero feels solid. I like him a lot. Not sure yet about the heroine, but since she was shifted most, that makes sense.

A Word A Day is having a great theme this week: Common names that are based on old professions. Totally cool because it combines my love of words with my love of history.

Tired and off to bed.

The July RWA has a market update for Virgin Books, which is looking for erotica. And in the Please Note section it says For female erotics imprints we accept mss from female authors only.

WTF?

About my contest post. I was just in a really bad mood that day. Honest. Beginning writers need a break because school doesn't teach fiction writing. There are skills to learn about and then acquire. So, I can and will be nice. The thing that I think got me all het up was the number of writers who are nasty about feedback. You can see that by wathing the lists after a big contest closes. Ouch. Anyway. I'm going to try to get some work done.

So I went and worked on Possession. I chopped a chapter and reordered what I have in order to fit the new paradigm, then I started reworking chapter one. It went really well. I did a good thing. Stubbornness can help you get from page 1 to page 400, but it can sure make those 400 pages horrible. When I write stuff that stinks, I try to fix it fast. I'm trying harder to listen to that little voice that says, no, not that way. That way lies boring and stupid. This time I listened pretty early on.

So, I'm judging a writing contest. Oh my. One of the entries is printed in ink that is not black. ohmygawd. I think I'm blind. None are very good. Two are wretched. One is just -- not -- good. One writer doesn't know the difference between illusive and elusive. WTF? I know I'm supposed to be supportive and positive. (Which is why I always comment in pencil.) And when I go through and re-read and reassess my scoring, I will do my darndest to add nice supportive positive comments and erase the ones that seem too blunt. But I don't have to do that here. So, after this BAD LANGUAGE ALERT! With no further ado:

• Commas do not exist, to be liberally sprinkled, wherever you fucking feel like, it.


• Talking heads. I hate talking heads. I don't know who's saying what to whom or where they are. Floating in space, I guess. Boring even the space time continuum to death. We're all going to die!! Except the talking heads because they have no body parts except mouths. They can't even see each other.


• It is not necessary to write the minutiae. He went to the closet and opened the door. He took out his coat. He put it on. For the love of Puppies everywhere! Just say the damned man put on his fucking coat, okay? And then he went out to skeet shoot. The talking heads play the role of skeet. ka-blam!


• Speaking of heads, could you please just get in one and effing stay there?


• I have my issues with men, but you know what? I do not believe they get an erection and think about sex in the middle of a crisis. If your hero does this, he's not alpha. If there's any justice, he's about to be dead.


• illusive is something that is not what it seems. elusive means hard to capture or find. So, a person you can't find is elusive. Like that "demmed elusive Pimpernel." Even if you seek him here or seek him there, the Scarlet Pimpernel is not illusive (except when you're talking to him and think he's a fop instead of a totally cool Alpha hunk.) See there's this thing called a dictionary, and another called a thesaurus. If you learn to use both, you might actually use words that convey the story in your head.


• Characters need a reason to be in your story. And that reason is NOT because it's convenient for you. Just like you can't give the hero a bitchy girlfriend just so the heroine will get all pouty about how the hunk (the jerk) has a girlfriend. Oh, gee. Too fucking bad. Man in the coat! Shoot the bitchy GF and the boyfriend too, for having such bad judgment.


• Why the fuck should I care about your stupid story? Make me. I dare you.

Ahem.

In other news, the big adjustment has been made in Possession. I feel better.

So, I'm working on Possession. As of right now, I have 6 and a fragment of 7 chapters. Not bad except I think I'm at a crucial decision point. My supposed hero isn't showing up until chapter 6. That's bad. My main secondary character is present The border collie came to the sliding glass door in my room. Obviously, she's waiting for the signal from me that means she should run to the other door to be let in. OK, so I hit ALT-S to save because my head was in my story problems, and I always save before getting up from the computer. Oops. In Blogger, that publishes. The dog's in the house now. very early. Here's the thing: I always reach a point where my initial idea undergoes a major shift. In the past, I have been very stubborn about ignoring this, to my regret pain and sorrow. No more. I've learned to consider these tangles with an open mind, as I must mentally give up several darlings of plot and structure while I consider a better way. That's where I am now. Then I usually do it and things get better quickly. So, I am not going to write any more tonight. I am going to brainstorm how to mesh my hero/secondary character as they are more than plainly one and the same.

P.S. I'm with Patti O'Shea on the Word vs. Word Perfect issue. Honestly. Word is horrible, and I too am forced to use Word at work.

My agent has The Rake, she emailed to let me know it arrived along with the Shards of Crimson anthology contracts. But I still know nothing of the other proposals, as in are they still in house being reviewed or did they get sent out? Sigh. Information. All I seek is information. I hate being in the dark. I guess maybe no one liked any of them. But then someone should just tell me that, right? Whatever. This is driving me crazy. I have zero privacy at work, so a phone call involves going outside I suppose.

In the meantime, I've been working on Possession. It's going OK. I'm using my modified process which seems to be a good one, further modified after I read Jack Bickham's Scene and Structure.

In my chapter outline, which I write in tandem with my first draft chapters, I've been adding in some of his elements, such as tag lines that force me to identify the conflict and the disaster, or if it's a segue, a note that it's that. I've already modified my outline notion of what the chapter will be when I realized there was action with no disaster, Definitely a book worth a read.

I had to go to Amazon to get the correct information for the Bickham book and that reminded me that I have that plog thing going. So I posted there. I found some old posts that had comments. Oops. I'm terrible at stuff like that, writing interesting blog posts. Whatever.

Well, The Rake proposal is all ready to go in the mail now. That's pretty much all the writing work I've done so far. Last night I read Janet Evanovich's current Stephanie Plum, Ten Big Ones. Loved it. Then I started a book by an author I hadn't read before. I threw it in the trash about halfway through, a point I reached by reading portions of every other page. The heroine was 21 and the hero 35. In a contemporary! So, yeah, make her super smart, blah blah blah. I just couldn't get past my wondering why on earth a 35 yo man would be interested in a 21 yo except for the obvious. A girl, by the way, he's been waiting to nail since she was 17. Ick. He's a sicko. The book just did not work for me (new acronym: dnwfm) So then I started another one, also by an author I haven't read before. It was page 80 before there was any plot thread that so much as whispered these two would meet. I haven't given up yet, but I'm close. The villian is, I fear, a mere variant of the CSK (Crazed Serial Killer). Give a baddie an MA (wtf?) and 2 PhD's and send him into the hills to conduct biological/pharmacological research. Where's the electron microcsope going to fit? Is he running ELISA gels? On what equipment? He's got rats so I guess he can just dissect them and know for a fact that his biopharma agent is what killed them. Who needs to centrifuge the livers and reduce them to a slurry so they can be run through a gel to confirm the genes that are there? Not the Crazed Molecular Geneticist! (CMG) He's got an MA and 2 PhD's so he doesn't actually have to do the science.

Oh. I kind of went off there didn't I? CMG. ohmygosh. I gotta tell my friend Peter about this. He's a molecular geneticist doing neurobiology now. I wonder if any of his colleagues are crazed? Course, Peter only has one PhD. Maybe he's not smart enough to be crazed. (This is me laughing because Peter is pretty freaking high on my list of smartest people I've ever known.)

OK, off to do some writing or something. CMG. That's just killing me, I swear.

The Rake proposal is done. I'm getting it ready to send to my agent on Monday. I've posted the new Chapter 1.

I found out today that the contractual due date for DX was June 15 AND that the contractual word length was 15-25k words. As dedicated readers of this blog may recall (that would me, um, me?) I worked under the assumption that the delivery date was June 1 and the word length was 15-20K. Both of those true facts would have been incredibly helpful to know BEFORE I finished the stupid thing. I could have expanded the vampire story line a bit. Not that it matters any more. I calculated my daily word count based on the information I had at the time, but I asked twice if the due date was June 1 and never heard different. Whatever. I like the way DX came out.

So that's pretty much that. I went to the book store and bought more books.

into shape? Maybe maybe not. But I'd like the "New" Rake to be in my agent's hot little hands next week.

Nothing else interesting to say. My life is dullsville.

I am totally accepting of the fact that I am rewriting The Rake essentially from scratch. But it works. I think I've nailed this version. It still needs some cleaning up, but it feels about as solid as any writing ever does.

Oui, je suis l'agonista. Rather than make up words in English, I'm making them up in French so as to disguise how I avoided things today. My synopsis continues to be agonizing. I have made slow progress, but progress nonetheless.

I've found a new author, I think I hope. I just read Lee Child's One Shot and stayed up horrendously late reading it. I finished it over breakfast this morning. I know it was a good book because when I was done, I was torn between giving it to my sister to read or my father. I elected to give the book to my dad first. Then my sister. I think they'll be hooked, too. Good story, interesting writing style. It reminded me of McDonald's Travis McGee stories, which I loved years ago. As with McDonald, there's something quintessentially male about the writing, but (as with McDonald) the story and the characters are compelling. Highly recommended. I'll be reading more of Child, that's for sure. Yay on finding a new author!

I forgot to mention that one thing I especially liked about One Shot was the plot twists. Very well executed and laid down so that even when I knew they were coming, I was enthralled and surprised. He has a spare writing style that I liked, particularly since it's so different from my own.

... of writing a synopsis. It's like pulling out my fingernails, I swear. I've eaten 8 chocolate chip cookies to get me through the ordeal. Tomorrow I'll have to make more cookies becuase they're for my son's school lunch. Uh oh. Speaking of my son, he's over at a friend's house. I'll pick him up at 4:30 and take him directly to his cousin's for a birthday party sleepover (his cousin's birthday) so I have hours and hours to myself! But I always end up missing him.

No so good news is that my car is in for service, to the tune of $400+ bucks. Crap.

Too bad the closet's already organized. I've scrubbed out the electric tea kettle (well water leaves scales on the inside). So I have little choice but to go back to the torture. How desperate am I? I am seriously looking around for something to clean or organize. Arghhh!

OK, so, I'm applying my brainstorm-write it approach to The Rake. This morning at the gym I figured out how to re-approach chapter one. I did that. Now I pretty much know how to deal with chapter 2, but now it's my bedtime. I'll get that fleshed out tomorrow. Then chapter 3, and that's freaking it, because that's all I need for the proposal.

Today, soccer practice was cancelled so my son and I came home instead. I made cookies, did laundry etc. Played with the puppy (asleep in my lap right now) and then went out to cut roses. I made 2 bouquets of fully opened roses because they were just so gorgeous. The American Beauty rose is exactly that, it's just a shame they don't have a scent. Then I made a third with newer roses, which I selfishly put in my room. They should last a week or so. Tomorrow is Friday, my son has a weekend of activities that require only my services as a driver, so I should get a lot of writing done.

I've confirmed that DX made it to NY. So now all I get to do is hurry up and wait on proposals. Are they in editor land or just sitting around?