Mishmash

Been a really fun week entertainment wise. American Idol wrapped up with a really great winner, probably my favourite performer on the show since Kelly Clarkson.
House ended with two stunning episodes. Best episodes since the season 1 ending. Amazing, especially because I’d reached a point with House that it felt boring, and I’d felt they’d tapped out everything they could with the character.
And then they go and delve deeper. (spoilers ahead) Threatening House with his friendship with Wilson, brilliant. Without that friendship, what is he, but an addicted, middle age, lonely man.
And that they made Cutthroat Bitch the perfect woman for Wilson, and showed us brilliantly through the process of buying a mattress.
When House does character driven development, they do it better than almost anyone else on TV.
Also realized this week, that as writers, we need to focus on what we do well, but we can’t ignore what we struggle with. I was reminded as I read the latest book from an author I normally love. The book feels really paint by numbers. What she does well, is all there, but what she fails at, she really fails at in this book.
I think as writers there comes a point where we have to push through and really improve our weaknesses. Maybe that’s the push that can take some authors from midlist to bestseller.
It certainly reminded me that I really have to work on character driven story developments, rather than my usual, kill off a character, to drive the plot.
Now, if only I could find some motivation, I’d get right on that..
But first I’m going to listen to David Cook’s/Chris Cornell’s version of Billie Jean.

Guest Blog by Jess Riley

Today, I'm thrilled to host a guest blog by Jess Riley, whose debut novel, DRIVING SIDEWAYS, just hit the shelves. Isn't it a cute cover? Jess blogs every week over at The Debutante Ball, and on her own blog.

Take it away, Jess!

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When Maureen graciously invited me to (okay, I probably shamelessly threw myself at her) guest-blog on Drunk Writer Talk, I nearly broke an ankle jumping at the chance. Drunk writers? Dishing about writing, publishing, and the vast differences between the two? Oh, few things could appeal to me more…

I was reading Maureen’s May 7 post (Writers Helping Writers) and have to add that I’ve been truly humbled by the generosity and support I’ve experienced from the writing community, and from friends and family. Watching my first novel being sent out into the world after 30 months in the publishing chute is quite surreal—it still doesn’t feel like it’s happening, actually. My emotions are all over the map. It has been a godsend to be able to share the journey with other writers going through the same experience.

I’ve had a few interviews so far, and I’ve explained the book to many people, and there’s always that point after they see the bare feet on the cover when you can see the bingo balls lining up in their minds and then? We have the winning question! “So how do you feel about writing chicklit?”

Frankly, I want to reclaim the word ‘chick.’ Like I want to reclaim the words ‘liberal,’ ‘feminist,’ and ‘styrofoam.’ Chicklit carries connotations of fluff and superficial pursuits. And though it helped me ‘Get my Stiletto in the Door,’ the very word also is persona non grata in the publishing world. Officially, NOBODY is writing chicklit anymore. (Or its life partner, ‘ladlit.’ Or ‘dicklit,’ if you’re feeling cheeky.)

Only many of us still are. It’s like we went underground. We’re all at a giant speakeasy, only instead of booze, you go for the chicklit. And well, maybe there’s still booze.

In certain circles, yes, I’m a chick. I like shoes, but I don’t like diamonds. I love to eat, I was once a little boy crazy, but I also subscribe to Mother Jones and once worked in a prison AND a cheese factory. (Guess which I liked more?)

To me, ‘chicklit’ is simply a catchy if somewhat maligned handle to convey that I wrote a story in which a young woman comes of age … while coming to terms with her own terminal illness, the suicide of her father, the absence of her mother, a strained relationship with her brother, and daily reminders that she is too sick to be as young as her friends. (I know, I know…it’s a barrel of laughs, really! Sicklit, is more like it. But actually, that makes me think of Chuck Palahniuk. And he may be a genre unto himself.)

Bottom line? You tell the story you want to tell, the way you want to tell it, and if someone likes it enough to pay you so they can share it with more readers, and if those readers like it, too? Well, you can’t ask for much more than that.

Other than maybe that pony you didn’t get in the second grade.

Where the Hell is that Pendulum?

A friend of mine asked to borrow some books the other day. This friend has two young kids and she just wants something to read in the five minutes at night before she passes out cold. She belonged to a book club and just found the selections too much and too depressing at this point in her life. Which I totally agree with - considering I can't watch the news without bursting into tears, the last thing I need is the five minutes before I pass out at night to be filled with angst. Book club - I'll see you in a few years.

So, anyway, I said no problem to my friend and consulted my bookshelf. Now, I've been reading historical and paranormal romance -- not her bag. I've got some great Elizabeth Berg books and of course the incomparable Alice Hoffman. So, I grabbed those. But I knew that she called me because she wanted top shelf romance. I am, after all, a romance writer. And I realized there is a giant hole in the genre right now. Single-title, contemporary romance. Romance/women's fiction. Juicy, meaty, fun and satisfying. No vampires, no spymasters, no raunchy sex. There's Jenny, SEP and of course, Nora. But Jenny is writing romantic suspense that I'm not loving and SEP writes maybe a book a year. And, frankly, I haven't enjoyed a Nora book in a long time. Even one of my favorite "chick-lit" authors - Eileen Rendahl is coming out with romantic suspense. (But I loaned my friend Do Me, Do My Roots.)

I know I need to check out Susan Mallery, but Debbie Macomber doesn't do it for me, and who else is out there right now - lighting things up?

The pendulum has swung so so far to subgenre books that it's a waste-land in the other direction. Which, frankly has got to mean any moment now the pendulum will start it's long slow creep back to hearth/home contemporary style. I hope so, anyway. I really do.

And not just because I have this great idea for a book....

Celebrity Overload

Sorry about the late post. Two sick kids and a lack of sleep have made me really ineffective today.
Been trying to narrow down blog topics, but the one that keeps coming back to mind is the current obsession with celebrities.
Maybe it’s always been there, but it’s really only hit my radar in the past five years. And it seems to have hit a frenzy lately.

What does this have to do with writing?

Celebrity gossip is the only reading a lot of people do anymore. And I’d say most of the gossip is fictional, or arranged. A washed up pop singer releases an album and gets married/engaged within a week of the album’s release, giving her a lot of media exposure which helps sell albums. An actress is promoting a new movie, around the same time she starts to date a hot actor. Nicely convenient.
Why do people care?

Because it gives them a fantasy. Impossibly good looking people leading glamourous lives, wearing beautiful clothes in exotic destinations. Sounds like the tag line for Harlequin Presents.

We even have the ‘good’ celebrities and the ‘bad’ celebrities. The good being the mother’s who manage to lose the baby weight in three days, campaign for underpriviledged kids, all while ensuring they look perfect out in public, while holding their adorable moppets.
What’s never mentioned is the four nannies, several maids, cooks and personal trainers behind the scenes.

Then you have the ‘bad’ celebrities, the ones who get caught DUI, sleep around, and somehow decided that underwear was bad. What is never brought up is how much of this behaviour is done to get attention.

Celebrity magazines give us heroes and villains, all dressed up with glossy pictures of beautiful people.

We writers don’t have the advantage of glossy pictures, but we can make our heroes three dimensional and more real. We can find ways to give our readers escapism, but still ground our stories in some sort of reality.

And maybe soon this celebrity obsession will pass. Because I’m so sick of hearing about Brittany, Paris, Nicole, and almost everyone else.

Active Characters

I can't believe I'm going to blog about Survivor, today. But I am. And how does this classic reality TV show relate to writing?

Well, on pondering the outcome of the finale on Sunday night, I decided it was a perfect example of why we popular fiction authors write proactive protagonists.

For those of you not addicted to this show, (that I swore I would NEVER watch when I first heard the premise, but find more addictive than crack -- not that I've tried crack, just saying), the final two contestants were Amanda and Pavarti. Two very pretty girls who'd both been contestants on previous seasons and were part of the original "favorites" tribe.

I read a few blogs about the outcome and I think it's fair to say that most fans of the show expected Amanda to win. The final winner is based on a vote of the last 8 people voted off the show before them, and so it's expected that the players who have done the most backstabbing will lose, because the "jury" is raw from just being turfed off and often want revenge. That's the way this show normally goes -- the most liked player generally wins at the end -- and so the contestant who gets the power to choose who to take to that final vote with them, typically takes someone the others don't like, and that's what Amanda did in picking Pavarti. Pavarti had flirted with a bunch of the jury members -- men and women -- she'd lied to just about everyone, and she'd staged a coup against one of the most popular and powerful players, Ozzie, who was so angry he wouldn't even let her talk that night.

Now Amanda, in my mind, was no angel in the game. In her "confessional" interviews, (when it's just her and the camera), I thought it was pretty clear that she had a strategy and was pretty smart about the game and pretty smart about who to trust and who not to trust and how to keep people trusting her. She was good at the game.

BUT... In the final tribal council she made a huge mistake. She decided to play the innocence card. She sat there with her big brown eyes wide open and told people how trustworthy she'd been. How she'd been lucky to be in the right alliance. How she'd only lied to people she believed had lied to her. How she'd been really loyal to the people she'd given her word to.

While Pavarti took the opposite tack. She owned up to all her devious actions and, in fact, took more credit for the powerful "women's alliance" forming than I thought she deserved. I know we only see what the producers/editors want us to see, but it seemed to me that Cirie and Amanda were both pretty big players in orchestrating the amazing blindsides these girls pulled off. But Pavarti took the credit/blame. Even as everyone they'd tricked was spitting venom at her, she just sat there, didn't get defensive, and said, "Yes, I did it. I fooled and tricked you all."

And it worked. In spite of everyone saying how much they hated her, the majority of them voted for her to win the million.

Why? I think it was at least in part because Amanda cast herself as the passive character. The one who sits back and lets things happen to her. This let Pavarti take clear hold of the active role. The one who makes things happen.

And the cast, the jury, the people voting, didn't see what we'd seen at home. They hadn't heard Amanda scheming behind their backs as we had. They hadn't seen her taking action. (Except maybe with Erik, but that was so funny, no one except Erik would hold it against her.) So, they believed that Amanda had been passive most of the game and gliding along on the Pavarti ride. And they went with the woman of action.

And I took that as a good lesson for why readers like active characters.

See? It ties in.

Post Script (that I could probably fit in above if I weren't too lazy to do some editing, but I really must get back to my manuscript...)

This outcome was also a lesson about not letting your protagonist cry. I think Amanda's tears, that many took as false the night she chose Pavarti over Cirie, really worked against her. Fresh from seeing her acting job in tricking Erik, many questioned the sincerity of her tears, plus they made her seem weak. Now, I'm a big crier myself, but readers don't generally like their main characters to cry. Just saying.

Things To Do When The Writing Is Not Working....

So, as I mentioned, my current WIP has been the bane of my existence for the last few months. Nothing about this book was easy and I took a big chunk of time off in the middle of things to work out my aggression and try and get back on track and as I was working things out - I took some special notice of what I was doing and I thought I'd share it here.

First of all, I think for newer writers who perhaps have not finished a manuscript or have finished one that took them years to complete -- DO NOT STOP. DO NOT START THE NEXT BOOK. This becomes addictive - whenever the book gets hard (and it will, they always do, no matter what) it's simply too easy to drop it and start on the book that sounds so fresh and exciting in your head. You've got to push through - pushing through is the singular biggest learning experience in a writer's self-education. Nothing, I repeat, nothing is more important.

That said, I think if you've been around the block with your muse a few times. You've got some finished work making the rounds with editors and agents. You've finished books and you know you will finish the current problematic WIP -- I really think the best thing to do is Stop. Stop pushing through. It's time to think and do some unraveling. Go for some walks, do some reading outside the genre (or some fantastic reading inside the genre), talk with friends. Get out of your own head.

For me, I know with this current WIP my problem was plot and not enough of it. So, I had to stop writing these scenes that were going nowhere and doing nothing (all written while I thought I had to push through) and scrap about 75 pages and go back and plot. For those of you who are pantsers and you hit the wall -- try plotting -- not a lot just to get you past the hump.

If you've got plenty of plot, take some time to look at your characters. I find a lot of times when things get rough it's because I need my characters to change and grow and I have not set it up properly, so that beautiful moment of self-realization falls flat and I end up writing a bunch of boring scenes, when what I should have done is gone back to the first three chapters and feed in all those questions that I want my reader asking.

I also find myself running out of conflict. And when this was a real problem for me a few books ago -- I had this terrible love/hate relationship with chapters 4 and 5. I realize now, it's because I didn't have that plot point that made the external conflict tie to the internal conflict. That end of the first act jaw-dropper. IE - in A MAN WORTH KEEPING - Delia calls her ex husband to tell him to leave them alone. My hero hears this and chooses because of all that internal conflict not to get involved. His internal gets all tied up in her external -- keeps things moving.

If all this fails you can do what Sinead does which is murder someone. Or, do what I do -- throw in a kid. Or what we should all try and do is be more like Maureen who figures this stuff out a head of time.

Hope this helps and PLEASE what are some of your tricks?

When do you give up on a series?

Two series I was completely addicted to – the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich, and the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton. By series, I mean books with the same lead protagonists.

One is a sort of humorous contemporary with strong romantic elements and the other is a dark, violent, paranormal with strong romantic elements.
The elements these two series had in common were they were fast paced, and had amazing sexual chemistry, and funny enough, two strong male protagonists that the heroine had to choose between.

And, to me, they both went off the rails. For me, with the Stephanie Plum series, it was book eight, and for the Anita Blake series, book eleven. And both authors have released more in the series since, which have become bestsellers, so the general public disagrees with me. Hell, I have a good friend, who is still addicted.

But I felt with the Plum series the books just got repetitive and the Blake series, went in a direction I just didn’t buy. But to give Laurell K. Hamilton her due, at least she tried to move the characterization forward.

And hey, if a publisher was throwing buckets of money at me, I’m not sure I wouldn’t continue to write a series, even if I had run out of ideas.

For me, I’ll always compare each book to the best in the series, which means all the books that come after are disappointing to me.

Sucky for the author, but there you have it.

Otherwise I’m looking for inspiration. Wasn’t thrilled with the last episode of Battlestar and nothing else on TV right now has really hooked me in. And yes, Molly, I know I should be watching Lost again.