Home! My eyes are starting to blur. Some quick photos from the last day of RWA:

Post RITA Celebration

Rae Monet, Golden Heart Winner for best paranormal: Blood Squad

Me and Megan Frampton wandering about

So maybe a spy gave me these pics.

edited: replaced one photo with a better one, added one. 7.30.2006

Atlanta Marriot Lobby

Spotlight on Dorchester (Chris Keeslar, Leah Hultenschmidt)

HQN Party

Me by the Crimson City Poster at the Spotlight on Dorchester

Obviously, I'm not the greatest photog. But you get the idea.

Wednesday is the day before RWA really gets in swing, but The Beau Monde has its chapter conference on Wednesdays so there was plenty to do. Eloisa James gave the keynote address, she was fabulous. She spoke about channeling Jane Austen, and when not to, which turned out to be was very helpful advice about writing historical romance. Loved it! I went to some Beau Monde workshops. Tonda Fuller's costume presentation was awesome. I have a booklet with fabric swatches in it!!

The Literacy signing is in half an hour. Hopefully, I'll remember to take my camera and I'll have some pics to post later tonight.

I made it to Atlanta. Boring flight, which is good. I decided to take a taxi to the hotel rather than get lost tying to find the hotel bus plus wait. The four ladies behind me were also going to the conference, including the always wonderful Jo Beverly. So we shared the taxi. It's hot and humid here. Cooler than home. Ick. I'm going to bed soon because I need to make it to the gym tomorrow AM very early.

I read my first Loretta Chase book on the plane and really enjoyed it. Then I started another Jack Reacher book by Lee Child and I'm enjoying that, too. So, to bed.

Today my son and I attended my nieces's combo birthday party. It was in Napa. Last year I complained (afterward and mostly to myself) that it was just too hot, because last year it was 104 degrees. I didn't know how lucky we were. Today, it was 110 in Napa. 110!!! The kids were fine. They were in the pool pretty much the whole time except for presents, food and cake. Since I am not an Englishman, I must be a mad dog. Funny, I felt more like a dead dog. I'm quite sure the grapes were shriveling on the vine. Gosh knows I was.

Anyway, in the morning I worked on Possession and made slooooowww progress. I am about to go back to it. I have tomorrow off to prepare for RWA.

1. A Phrase A Week As you might expect, you get a well-known phrase explained, dissected, researched and documented once a week or so. Any historical author should subscribe. It's amazing and I love this newsletter when it comes. I learn all kinds of stuff.

2. Still working on Possession. I'm in a transition phase right now. It went like this: Whew! The paradigm shift is done. Thank goodness! Hey, it really works, too. Write a bunch... Read a bunch. Uh, oh. This doesn't make sense. Plus it's boring and stupid. Who'd want to read this? Panic and depression during which I consider just giving up on the project. I chopped an entire chapter and gave up, for now, on the notion of two heroes. It's not working. For two days in a row, I bang my head against the problems with the plot and order of events and the motivation behind it. At LAST I realize there is not enough at stake for my heroine. My heroine is still not properly motivated. More head banging and futile notebooking. Then, yesterday, right after my 45 minutes of frustrated notebooking and peddling on the bike to no avail except sweat and 442 calories (according to the bike), I get in the car to go to work, freshly showered etc and the solution just kind of slides into my head. Very sneaky-like.

So, when I was at the cafe and my son was at soccer practice yesterday, I went back and started fixing chapters from chapter 1 and I think I've solved that problem. I'm getting the feeling I want from my hero and heroine.

3. I was able to solve item #2 from sheer stubbornness and because I've read Donald Maass's Writing the Breakout Novel. What helped me most with that book was his recommendation that the stakes be high. As high as they can. Except saving the world doesn't count. I think about that book a lot. Sure Superman has to save the world and all, but the reason his character is so compelling is that he's crazy about Lois Lane. Is he going to save the woman he loves? Defeat Lex Luthor: good. Boink Lois Lane: Excellent.

4. Yes, I am going to RWA Nationals, even though I've recently, as in the last couple of weeks, been thinking about not going. Whatever.

5. When I put an image in a blog post, why does blogger put it at the beginning of the post instead of where my cursor was when I clicked on the insert image. Maybe blogger needs Ev back. (Ev is the guy Google bought Blogger from).

6. Ways in which education pays off: Today, Miss Snark has this posted. I was reading along, because I've really enjoyed the poetry she's occasionally posted and I say to myself as I'm reading the lovely, poignant words, hey, this is Beowulf! And I was right. The Seamus Heaney translation is particularly good. Read the excerpt. It will remind you of how evocative words are. Lovely.

no writing at all. I've been working hard on Possession. Over the weekend, I fixed some major issues with the chapters I have and the order they're in. I cleaned up (I think) all the places that were from before my first paradigm shift. Which feels good. So, with my chapters rearranged and/or merged with others so as to fit the plot as it's developed so far, I printed out my ~95 pages across 16 chapters. Sigh. Many of the chapters are too thin and not well enough motivated. Neither the hero nor the heroine feel as though they are two fully-realized people who have only just met. What I have right now is a hero and heroine who are going to be in love. What I need is a hero and heroine who have no idea they are going to be in love. It's really hard to get there. Hard. Hard. Hard. I did have two very good inspirations about the story and those ideas are in the chapters I have, and the adjustments for that have been made in the other chapters. Oh, no, it sucks! Mad work to fix the sucky writing. Then more writing and adjusting etc, and then oh, no, it sucks! Repeat until insane or done.

The bright side is I have a list of things I need to work on.

Another bright side is this is what I go through with every book.

So, in reality, I should be saying, "Yay! It sucks!"

That, I do believe, is what you call irony.

I'm not out of my pout yet. But I've been working away at Possession.

For a frightening glance into one author's mind, read on, if you dare. This is pretty much EXACTLY what it's like when I notebook. When I realized I was blogging as if I were scribbling in my notebook, I reordered the paragraphs in the order I thought of them, instead of in a logical grouping. Scary. I know.

The problem right now is that I have no plot. Nothing really bad happens, there are no characters to kill off, unless I kill my heroine or one of the 2 heros. I killed off a minor sorcerer but he was like one of Captain Kirk's love interests: doomed to death. He died of a broken neck. I'm thinking of bringing him back as a zombie. No, not really. Maybe I just need to kill him in some better, more interesting way. Which helps me not at all. Or maybe he needs to do more than just stand around in his scene.

I guess my heroine needs to move out of hero #2's place and move into her own, and then the bad guy comes after her.

Sigh.

OK. I have it. The bad guy has switched bodies with the minor sorcerer, at the moment his name is Santiago, and Hero #1 needs to kill the bad guy, only it's not really him, and the bad guy aka Santiago escapes with them realizing too late what's happened.

Now, when the bad guy shows up at the heroine's house, it's as sexy Santiago, and his one goal is to get her under his power and he succeeds. That's pretty bad, right?

The problem is it's more dramatic if they don't know at all that Santiago is really the bad guy. The heroine needs to discover this. This means I need to adjust an earlier chapter so that the events that happen when they think the bad guy has escaped still happen.

After that, I have no idea. Gee, now I don't even need to notebook. This book so far has been like that. I write a chapter with no idea whatever what will happen after, aside from some sort of vague notion of a big fight at the end. But I only have 22K words right now, so it's too soon for that. But at least I'm interested in having Santiago appear at my heroine's place. So, I now have one resurrected dead evil sorcerer's apprentice swapped with my villain.

There you have it. Carolyn's patented brainstorming method. Clear as mud right?

Yeah, yeah. I haven't made a real post since July 2nd. A whole week. And, aside from the soccer god post (still having palpitations) I wasn't going to today either. But then when I was drooling over Mr. was-a-midfielder-now-a-fullback, I read my blog tag line, What's it like to be a fiction author.

So, you know what? Sometimes it's really hard.

Possession is going pretty well, not that it matters I guess. For a while I had a bunch of crap on my hands, but then I worked out how to fix it, I think, so now I'm feeling better about it. This is pretty much the way it works with my writing. I'm constantly fixing stuff that sucks, which is pretty darn depressing most of the time. I have a chapter to fix tonight, so off to it.

Mr. Zambrotta is the physical model for one of the heros in Possession. Yeah, there's two. Always choose to cross the line. Pull back only if forced to in order to fix crap.

Gianluca Zambrotta, No. 19.

When I started reading this post, I was thinking, what on earth is this letter doing posted on Miss Snark? But then I got toward the end and I got it. This a a post worth reading to the very end. The writer is absolutely correct. In poetry words and images are used in ways that stretch the mind. Read the post at misssnark.blogspot.com/... . Also, the letter is pretty funny, so check it out.

I really struggled with Possession this weekend. I'd sit down and write a sentence, sometimes just half a sentence, then get up and engage in avoidance behavior. Then go back and write another sentence, then get up... ad naseum. Somehow I managed to write about 1400 words Saturday and a bit over 1000 today which, considering all the jumping up and down I did, is not too bad. It's not what I was hoping for, but I'm OK because the little things that came out of all that jumping up and down turned out to be more important than my having written 3x as much without those little things.

Little pieces kept falling into place in ways that made me happy. Examples include: Changing the spelling of my hero's first name, then changing the first and last name of my heroine. Not long after that, I was writing this chapter that was going OK (in the context of write a sentence, go do something else, come back, ect.) and in the middle of it, I realized that the guy who had arrived at my hero's house was, in reality, playing the role that belonged to my hero. Once I switched that around so that the guest now possessed the social position of my hero and my hero the social position of the guest, the scene worked wonderfully. So then I went back to chapter 1 and adjusted everything to mesh with that. And then I printed out my 7 chapters and damned if it isn't working even better. I now have a more interesting and complex world and my h/h are much better, too. I've got it printed off for another read through before bed.

In other news, I have to confess I am discouraged about selling anything ever again.

Things are going OK. I guess. Tomorrow I have to go to work, Tuesday I don't. Wednesday I do. More later. I'm actually testing something.