Showing posts with label WIP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WIP. Show all posts

Pirate Turned Hooker

Monday, February 18, 2008

I'm not what you would call a fisherwoman but I have been before and there are times, when floating about on this pirate ship looking for anything to do to avoid writing, that I've dropped a line or two. Unfortunately, I've never caught a thing. (Remind me to pick a fishing guide hottie one of these weeks.) In analyzing why I fail to get any bites, I realize it might have something to do with my hook. Maybe the lack of a hook or I'm putting the hook in the wrong place. Fishing is a precise science, believe it or not, and just throwing any old line into the water won't get you very far.

Writing is the exact same way. You not only have to have a hook, you have to have the hook in the right place. You bury that hook in chapter three and you might as well forget it. Needless to say, I've learned this the hard way and I'm still learning it. In desperately searching for a topic for this blog, I found a series of articles called Romance writing: Tips for crafting that crucial first chapter and learned a great deal by reading Hook Them In and Keep Them There by Wendy Mackrell. What I learned is that putting the hook on page twenty or even on page five is not a good idea.

For the benefit of my point (which I somehow never seem to make in these blogs) I'm going to use my WIP as a guinea pig to show you how starting with the hook can make a difference in so many ways. Here's my opening right now…
"The universe is conspiring against me. It's trying to drive me crazy. Lucky for the universe, it's a short trip."
"I thought I was the drama queen."
"I'm not being dramatic, Miranda, it’s the truth. I’m resigned to my fate." Celi Cooper switched the cell phone to her right ear, gave a quick glance over her left shoulder and changed lanes. "Everything went wrong today. I'm sure a giant boulder will fall out of the sky at any minute. Right on my car."
"Tempting fate with that one, aren't you?" Miranda joked. Celi didn’t mind Miranda finding humor in her bad day. If it were anyone else’s life, she’d be laughing too.
"You want to know how my morning started?" Celi didn't wait for Miranda to answer. "Fatal Error. Those are the words that greeted me on my monitor this morning."
"Nice. Makes me feel better my scissors can’t talk to me." Miranda said, "Put your head down, hon" to the customer in her chair.
"I shouldn’t be bothering you while you’re working." Celi glanced to the rearview mirror and saw shades of pink, red and blue in the sunset behind her. She hoped to catch that same sunset on film over the weekend. "How much longer until you’re off?"
"Another hour."
Miranda spoke to her client again. "I need to find that gel of mine and I'll be right back." In a muffled voice she said to Celi, "If these heifers do not stop taking my shit, I'm going off."
Celi made the turn into her apartment complex. The management office looked squat between the taller apartment buildings but welcoming with its manicured shrubs and bright flower beds of fuchsia, yellow and violet. "I'm home so I’ll let you
go."
"I want to hear the rest of this bad day story. I’ll drop my stuff in my apartment and head upstairs when I get home. I don’t suppose you’ve eaten?" Celi figured Miranda wasn't talking to her anymore when she said, "I find my stuff on your station again and you're going to find that damn brush where the hair dryer don't blow. You hear me?"
Celi smiled for the first time in hours. Maybe the entire day. "No, I haven’t had time
to eat, but I’ll find something. You get back to work and remember someday you’ll have your own salon and those heifers will be long gone."
"Why is it you can be positive for me and not yourself?"
Celi parked across from her building, turned off the engine and laid her head back on the seat. With eyes closed she said, "Positivity is not what I need. A hot bath is what I need."
"Laid is what you need." Miranda believed sex to be the ultimate cure. "You pick one of the guys on the softball team tomorrow. We'll cut him from the herd at the bar afterward and get you in a better mood."
The only thing I've managed to do here is introduce a whiny heroine who has a funny and upbeat best friend who wants to get her laid and in this bit steels the scene completely. I also imply to the reader that the hero might be the guy they cut from the herd. I assure you, he's not. So, here's the changes I've made to move the hook forward…


"The universe is conspiring against me. It's trying to drive me crazy. It's working."
"I thought I was the drama queen."
"I'm not being dramatic, Miranda, it’s the truth." Celi Cooper switched the cell phone to her right ear, ventured a quick glance into her rearview mirror, and changed lanes. "You want to know how my morning started? FATAL ERROR. Those are the words that greeted me on my monitor this morning."
"Makes me feel better my scissors can’t talk to me." Miranda said, "Put your head down, hon" to the customer in her chair.
"I shouldn’t be bothering you while you’re working. How much longer until you’re off?"
"Another hour."
Celi made the turn into her apartment complex. "I'll stop whining and let you go then."
"You're not whining, you're venting. Totally different." Miranda DiCarlo had been Celi's best friend for nearly five years and her loyalty unshakable. "I want to hear the rest of this bad day story. I’ll drop my stuff in my apartment and head upstairs when I get home."
"Alright, I’ll see you then."
Celi flipped the cell shut and dropped it into the top of her purse. The complex mailboxes set directly across from her unit and a quick check of her box revealed several bills, three credit card offers she'd never open and her latest copy of Photography Today. Tucking the envelopes beneath her arm, Celi slid her key ring on her pinky then flipped through the magazine as she crossed the lot.
Head down, Celi failed to see the black Eclipse coming up fast on her right until it was almost too late. Diving for her life she hit the ground with a thud, landing hardest on her left side and coming to a stop flat on her back.
Afraid to move, Celi remained as still as possible while attempting to catch her breath. Eyes closed, hip throbbing and knee burning, she heard a car door then foot
steps rapidly approaching. With any luck, they were coming to put her out of her misery.


What do you think? I've managed to move the hook from page seven to page two. And all of that conversation (there's even more before we get to the good stuff) can easily slide right back in later. So what have we learned? When determining where to start your story, you need to do two things - A) find your hook and B) get it in as soon as possible.

How about you? Are you pulling out your hair trying to figure out where in the hell your story starts? Do you have ten pages of back story before any of your character's speak? Are you ready to throw something at me for rambling on with no point whatsoever? And if you're a reader, are you willing to stick around for five or ten pages to get to why you should care to read a book in the first place or do you give up much earlier than that?
PS: I'm going to be away from the computer most of the day but I'll check back in as soon as I can!

Laughing Me Right Off the Boat

Thursday, January 17, 2008

I grew up in a loud, rowdy Irish Catholic family characterized by equal parts healthy debate (read: scream until you’re red in the face arguing) and side-splitting hysteria. My father had to be the funniest person I knew and my mother was his constant straight (wo)man.

Therefore, I love to laugh. In fact, I would say that my life is defined by laughter. I laugh at crazy times. For example, after breaking a nail which in turn runs my hose which in turn causes me to change my outfit while running incredibly late only to find that the baby needs a diaper after he’s already in his coat and now we’ll never make it on time to church (again), I laugh. When I make a long list to go to the grocery store, only to leave it on the counter, but at least I remembered to put on my lipstick, I laugh. In fact, I laugh while sitting in traffic when people behind me honk as if that is just the catalyst to get the rush hour traffic in NJ jumpstarted. Oh, and I still laugh every time I tell my husband that my nose is running only too hear him say, “you better go catch it, ha ha ha.” (Yeah, it’s just as stupid sounding in person, trust me, but that’s why it’s funny). I just enjoy the amalgam of irony, sarcasm, and slapstick ever present in the world around me.

What does this have to do with writing, you ask? So far it just sounds like I’ve flipped my suburban housewife mind, you say. Not at all. Well, maybe, but that’s a different blog.
Today I want talk about how humor affects my writing. And, because we wenches here on the boat tend to drag the rest of you down with us, by default I’d like to know how humor affects your writing as well.

So many authors do comedy in romance well. Julie Garwood, Julia Quinn, and Sherrilyn Kenyon, to name a few of my favorites.

I think some of my WIP is funny, but I am not sure that I’ve set out to make it funny on purpose. This frightens me a little because humor is such a subjective thing. What I think is funny might leave others cold. I worry about putting humor in on purpose because then I feel like it sounds forced. On the other hand, if the story is playing out in my mind as I am writing it down, removing stuff that I think is funny because I’m worried it really ISN’T funny leaves my voice sounding stilted and forced too. *sigh*

Ultimately, I think “funny” is just something that is. It isn’t something you can force to be in your voice if it isn’t there naturally and it isn’t something you can take out of your voice if it’s there of its own accord.

What do you think about humor in novels? What makes it work, what doesn’t work? Who do you think does it well or not? I think we’re a funny bunch of aspiring pirates. Does that humor show up in your novel(s)? Finally, does anyone else laugh in traffic? Oh, it’s just me huh? Whatever people….

Every Girl Loves a Bad Boy

Friday, January 11, 2008


‘Tis true.

I grew up loving bad boys. I have this thing for tall, dark and handsome. Just ask my DH. He’ll agree. Because he’s like that. He’s not modest at all. lol.

The ultimate bad boy just makes me tingle all over. The swagger. The way he doesn’t care about what people think. The ability to throw caution to the wind and just do it. (And not just that “do it”. But still they do it well.) There hasn’t been a time in my life when I hadn’t thought about the bad boy and how I was gonna get my hands on him. It’s that initial rush when you’re in a bad boy’s arms, the way he makes you feel about yourself. The way everything is new and exciting. And it stays that way because he’s mysterious. He’d dark and edgy. And he knows how to light you on fire with one single look.

The bad boy is my favorite part of writing a novel. Creating the man who’s gonna make my heroine want to pull her hair out with his sarcasm. The man who is gonna knock her socks off with his looks and make the room feel two sizes too small when they are together. He’s the man, who at the end of the day, when she’s trying to sleep, all she can hear is his smart ass comments. And remember the way his eyes raked over her when she stepped into the room. The way he makes her temperature sky rocket when he brushes up against her. The man who invades her dreams, kisses her lips, touches her bare skin, makes her cry out his name.

He is her bad boy. He is her crutch. He’s everything she could want and more. If she was looking for someone.

When I started fleshing out my Romantic-Suspense WIP, I had this vision of a man. I could hear his voice in my head as I was driving to work one hot summer day. I was sitting in traffic, minding my own business (okay, so I was flipping off the person who had cut me off) and I could hear him laughing. It was this deep, gruff laugh, the kind that belongs to a man with dark intentions and even darker abilities. Then I heard this woman, very girly voice, yelling about him not sneaking up on her. They got into a very heated argument. And then I knew. I had my leads for my first original.

I wasn’t looking for them at the time. At the time I was in the middle of a very intense and detailed fic about a Colombian drug lord who had almost killed my heroine in the first fic and she was trying to stay alive long enough to solve the mystery. I was thoroughly involved with the story line. I wanted to give it life, watch it soar and remember it always. After all it was a part of the first time I’d ever written for pleasure. Writing 20 page papers on music theory and computer programming are not really up my alley. No matter how much I like to talk about computers. lol

But there are some times no one listens to you, the writer. Sometimes your characters dictate what you’re going to do and what you’re going to write. And so Double Vision was born. A novel created from the insanity that is my mind. A plot that I’ve consistently changed every three months for the past year and a half. My hero/heroine are very hard to please and every time I think it’s right it’s not.

But it is this time.

So this man keeps coming to me. He talks to me in the shower. He talks to me while I’m putting on my makeup. He scolds me when I let people in front of me while being stopped in traffic. And he laughs when I swear at the person I just let in front of me. He tells me I need to get a new job because I can't shoot anyone who pisses me off. And he follows me to the gym while I run on the treadmill, bitching that I don’t stay longer ( I think an hour is long enough, thankyouverymuch! ) and he follows me into my dreams. He shows me what he wants to do, how he wants to do it. Ash is a doer. He doesn’t follow. He blazes the way and he won’t rest until he gets his way from me. And Sadie. However he can get it.

So I guess the question of the day is: Do you have a bad boy in your life? A favorite bad boy from a series or book? And if you have one in mind, does he play a major part in writing your own WIP bad boy?

Faking it... An art form of acquiring perfection.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

"Life is like a dirty pirate ship, you never know who your mates are gonna be."

There is a lot to be said for a supportive cast.

Especially when they are a seductive group like aboard the Romance Writer’s Revenge. And in honor of the sultry wenches on board, I’m going to take the time out to talk about a subject that’s near and dear to a lusty wench’s heart.

Faking it.

Now, I know you’re groaning and thinking where the hell is she going to take this. But I assure you there matey, this topic holds no bounds.

There are things to be said for faking it. If you fake it, you don’t have much to worry about if you do it right. Faking it absolves you of a guilty pleasure you might have gotten from it. Faking it allows you to think of the gardener, the hottie half your age that winked at you, next week’s episode of Moonlight *clearing throat*. And faking it can be done at any time of the day, no matter the circumstances. But faking-it just isn’t laying there and taking it. Faking-it is an art form that requires perfection. It’s a well honed skill that, if mastered, can serve you well for the rest of your life in all facets.

But be aware, there is this little place in the deep dark corner of your heart that just gets a kick out of ruining all the fun faking-it can bring you. There are sometimes that faking it isn’t your best option. When you’re so into it, that faking it isn’t even considered. When the only thing in your mind is you and him and the moment. Special times in your life when faking it is very inappropriate- like when the face god graces you with his presence.

Writing sex is the same way.

I’m not going to write today about those truly inspired moments. We all have them. Those moments are worthy of a blog, but not like this. Instead, I’m going to talk about those dark moments in your life when sex is the furthest thing from your mind. The times when faking it is the only option you’ve got to save the relationship of your WIP and the stunted writer in you.

You can NOT know sex and write a good sex scene. Faking a sex scene can be some of the hottest sex ever caught on page. If you allow yourself free thought flow, allow no-holds-barred-anything-goes, then you quite possibly will write something you never thought sexually possible. For a lot of us, plain Jane sex is the norm. It’s something we grew up knowing, it’s something that’s easy for us to get into the groove with. It allows us to be comfortable. And we all LOVE to be comfortable. But when faking-it, you should go for it. Always. Push past that comfortable zone. There is no room for sweatpants in the faking-it territory.

When I write sex, I like to push boundaries. I like to write things I don’t know if I could ever possibly do or would even want to contemplate. The wilder the scene for me, the better I feel about faking-it. Anger, spontaneity, that first taste of ecstasy as you know you’re doing something forbidden. I love it all. And I love the scene that follows directly after when the pair (or group, if you will), realize what just transpired and try to backtrack. But there is no going back from passion like that. But there are times that forcing it is my only option. When my words feel stunted, the scene feels cold, the characters not working together or bouncing off each other. It’s those times when you realize writing a sex scene can feel horribly awkward and there will be times that you pull up the word processor and you’re trying to put those words to fruition but it just isn’t happen. You just aren’t feeling it. These are those times that you need a back-up plan. Your faking-it-plan (FIP).

There is only one phrase that I remember when I resort to my FIP.

“If you’re gonna fake-it, you better bring it.”

This means if you’re going to fake the whole sex scene you better dump all the emotion you can muster up and pull out all the stops. The FIP requires concentration and to write everything you can find at the moment in your little writing brain (it can always be smoothed out and edited later on. The goal is to get something on paper that is half way workable.)

It has to be one of those scenes that literally burns up the monitor, shuts down your word processor, makes you and your momma fan yourselves when you re-read it. (And I know what you’re thinking, “Your momma!? You let your momma read that?” Well, yeah, my mother is a woman. And I’m a writer. If I’m ever going to get out of the rut of being embarrassed, you have to let go. Who better to teach you this than your mother? Your mother has seen you through every embarrassing moment of your life… but this is another blog at another time.)

And PS- Nothing embarrasses me. Just ask Hellion. My mother gets embarrassed at my ability to never be embarrassed.

Faking it requires a certain pizzazz that you wouldn’t normally bring to the table. You have to be spot on perfect; your performance depends on your execution. One false move and the reader is going to laugh you off and shut the book. And they won’t pick you back up. The goal is to be realistic while pushing your limit. Never written a sex scene in a shower? To employ the FIP you have to be willing to take a risk. Writing is always a risk, but be willing to go out on that extra limb for a sex scene you’re stumped with. Give that FIP flava.

In the same respect, there is a fine line to tread when faking it. You get too showy, get too porn-like (ie: “Give it to me daddy! Oh Yeah! Right there!”) I assure you, if your character is screeching that at the top of their lungs and you’re writing a contemporary romance where your character is a little shy and self-conscience, you’re NOT doing the FIP scene justice. Even worse if you’re writing a historical. I’m not saying that doesn’t ever happen. I’m saying it’s not likely and your reader is going to feel the same way. Remember your target audience and your characters when making your FIP. Stay within your realm. If your character is willing to take risks, take that chance with the FIP. Be willing to take a chance for yourself. This goes hand and hand with the risk factor. I know you have guts. You’re a writer for goodness sakes. Trust your instincts. Shut down that inner critiquer and get down to business!

The FIP is depicted solely on your writing style. It’s based on what tools you use in order to get in the mood. So tell me, when you write a sex scene what do you require in order to write it? And when you’re in the mood to fake it, what do you do differently?