Carolyn's Blog

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The Carolyn Character Meld is Tricky

I'm still in the middle of pulling an excess character out of the Work in Progress (WIP). I've done three chapters, and had to stop at the last one because it's late and this chapter will be the most work. Some interesting stuff happened and also, quite happily, I've solved the problem of the disappearing hero. Tip: when your hero is unconscious for a chapter and a half, this is bad. Especially when those are the chapters you were thinking would be hot. ::sigh:: A couple of years ago the spectacular Mary Balogh was on a list I was on and she said she'd been told never to have her hero and heroine apart for more than 5 pages. Probably in a longer work you could get away with a few more pages, but not many. I've found I have fewer boring passages when I try to follow that advice. So, 15 pages or so of an unconscious hero is bad. Very bad indeed.

Anyway, today was a boring day except for when I was watching Buffy and doing my character-ectomy some of which I did in the car at lunch time.


My editor emailed me to let me know the page proofs for My Wicked Enemy should be arriving tomorrow. I'm kind of excited to read it. This is Carolyn ignoring the unpleasant fretting in her head, hey it'll only cost me thousands of dollars to re-write the whole book! I have a day off Friday, and Monday is a holiday so, I have a 4 day weekend coming up. Yippee!


Still obsessed with Spike, though.

Labels: Buffy, My Wicked Enemy, Spike, writing, Xia

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Monday, February 11, 2008

Today's Subject: Obsession

Today as I was noodling on about something non-writing related, the writing portion of my head was obsessing about Xia. Major breakthrough involving some forward motion, as in now I have some. It's nice to know where to go from here. Also I'm deleting my first character from the story and folding him into another one. Yay! Bloody carnage, agreed, but this is going to be way better. My stories seem to start out with multiple personalities -- 2 or more characters playing the same role/function. I am ::sigh:: not one of those writers who easily handles a cast of dozens. A dozen makes my head spin. Heck, half a dozen is uncomfortable. So, obsessing was good to me today.

Tonight, The Darling Boy and I watched the last three episodes of Buffy, Season Six. Which brings me to my obsession du jour.



The episode ends with Spike having endured horrific trials in an attempt to return to his original bad and evil vampire self. Make me what I was originally so Buffy gets whats she deserves, he says, all mean and vampire-nasty. Uh-huh. And that's exactly what happens, because, who doesn't deserve a hottie like Spike?

Thank goodness I have it all on DVD, because I don't think I'd make it waiting for TV time to get me to season 7.

Off to remove a character and then have my hero demon-napped. Or is it mage-napped?

Labels: Buffy, Spike, writing, Xia

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Sunday, February 10, 2008

Catching up

Had to do some day job stuff this morning. Yuck. Took longer than it should have due to an issue that was out of my control. But all's well and I'm home now. Xia has been going very slowly lately. I need to make up some words today. But I also have a lot of RITA books to read. Sigh. On the good side, despite the slow going, the ideas have been good. I have 41K words now and things are starting to gel. I'm trying to think of something amusing or interesting to say here, but no go. So! instead of that I'll talk about a growing obsession of mine.

Spike

Oh, my gosh. As perhaps you know, if you read here from time to time, my xmas present to myself was Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. So, the character Spike is a bad boy vamp who's pretty dang hunky. Plus, there are scenes in which he has very little clothing on and it's quite clear he keeps up a regular workout without overdoing it. And yes, I should be hanging my head in sexist shame for this, but I'm not. It's finally our turn!

Labels: Buffy, Scandal writing, Spike, Xia

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