The Writing Blues

Now that I'm working full-time again, it's really hard to find the energy or concentration to write in the evenings, even just a little bit. It's very depressing, and it makes me feel down about the book, and then it's really hard to get excited about writing.

Hitting My Stride, and then Tripping

My own advice to myself about more conflict played off in spades when I finally got down 500 words that work for a situation at the very beginning, and from there I put together an outline for the first five or six scenes, up to the first time my characters have sex. I popped over 10,000 words for a minute, then dropped back down when I had to rejigger a scene to fit with the new outline. Plus I'm pretty certain, after doing a bit of research (I talked to a friend that owns a motorbike) that a scene I'd already written is physically impossible, so there's going to be a bit of change-around to do there.

It's always so depressing to be editing while you're still writing the text, like if what you already wrote has already collapsed under the weight of its own crappiness, how can you continue? Plus it seems a sort of weariness of the banality of the whole book, and the idea of it, has already begun to set in. How to keep such a repetitive thing (there's a constant litany of how much sexual attraction the characters have for each, plus what's keeping them from giving into it all the time) from getting dull while I'm writing it, and from getting dull for the reader? It's easier for the reader because everything moves much faster.

I am a Walking Romance Novel

I've fiured it out. I don't want to write a romance novel: I just want to have an everlasting, ongoing one in my head. The hero regularly changes his features and his name to fit whatever unlucky guy I have a crush on at the time (be he real or celebrity), although I generically assign him the qualities which I consider essential to my hero: funny, silly, charming, sarcastic, wild, athletic, bookish . . . although it seems obvious that Elijah Wood (a previous incarnation of the hero, about three years ago) probably does not have all these qualities in the way I imagine and neither does hot-guy-I-saw-twice-on-bus.

The fact that I indulge in these harmless fantasies (usual plotline: we meet and are instantly in love, at which point I somehow take revenge on someone I don't like simply through the hero's very existence) isn't a problem, I've done it since I was eight years old. (Although the fantasies? At eight? Were about as graphic as the Care Bears.) However, now that I'm writing a romance novel, it is sort of a problem, because I approach the novel in the same sort of way. Because they're my fantasies, I consider "obstacles, overcoming" as not necessary, and in fact annoying, parts of the fantasy. Especially if the obstacle in question is something keeping myself and the hero apart. There's never any bickering, or personality clash, or one of us saying "No, I can't love you, because X." Bo-ring! Let's move on to the bit where everyone I know is so very impressed that I'm dating Johnny Depp, mmm-kay? But that's not how a novel works. There need to constantly be obstacles to the relationship that they're overcoming, but everytime they overcome one, there's more, usually supplied by their own warped psyches. (Hmmm, I wonder if my own warped psyche and its plethora of fantasies would make a good obstacle to a romance novel plotline . . . nah, too meta).

I have to work harder at having my lovers hate each other, that's all.

Sharing the Office

I just don't get stuff done when I'm at home---mainly because I've got access to the Internet, I think. So today I tried having an "outside office," by which I mean I took the laptop over to the library and had a go with their new cubicle area. It's possible to get the Internet there, of course, but I didn't take my Internet cable for the very reason that I thought I might get more done. And I did! I forced myself to write 2,000 words of a scene in which my heroine allows the hero to ride on her motorcycle with her (that's not a metaphor for anything else). Tomorrow I've really got to finish hashing out a tentative outline and get down to the hard business of producing at least 1,000 words per day, which is harder now that I'm working full time. But 1,000 words, once I get rolling, is less than 30 minutes work. I'm sure I can fit that in. At that pace, I could be finished in two months. If I manage more than that on any evening, or especially on the weekends, I could be done and shipping the thing off before Christmas.

Onto Plot Related Concerns

I now know that nothing I write can be too ludicrous. Next month my chosen series will publish a novel featuring a woman who will be tracking down a pirate treasure with the treasure map she inherited. And it's not a historical novel. It is a modern day novel. This is . . . ridiculous.

I've finished my work with the characters and am satisfied with the results. Now I just need to iron out a few wrinkles with the plot, which, now that I know more about my hero and heroine and their respective massive chest and perky bosom, doesn't quite mesh with the way I see the book going. But I'm sure it'll all be under control by tomorrow, when I can get back into the actual writing down of words.

More research, and spending time with my characters

Picked up another book for research at the supermarket last night, 25% off. Yes! What a steal. This one was equally terrible, although for entirely different reasons. The set up was ridiculous, the characters not particularly believable, and the sex badly described. Plus the title sounded like a slave-sex porno. It seemed like the author had two plots she was considering, but neither one on its own was quite enough to flesh out to a whole book, so she combined them, meaning there were two couples pursuing happiness, related tangentially, but not really, through the plot. The more minor plotline was so different than the main one (the minor one involved an aging ex-stripper unsure if she could handle a relationship that went beyond the sexual, while the major one was about an ex-FBI agent who couldn't handle his attraction to a young woman he'd had arrested ten years before) that the transition between them was awkward.

I was like, pshawwww, my sex scenes are better than this. But I do need to spend some time working on my characters, because I'm still not very clear on which of the possible romance novel cliches are making them tick.

"Research" Reading

For "research" purposes (plus I was being lazy and wanted to lie brainlessly in bed) I read a really terrible romance novel today. The hero was blatantly a rip-off of Bill Gates, but made to look like Brad Pitt, romancing a widowed single mother on the isolated Mexican coastline. It was too pat for words. At least the more scandalous ones have a little bit more of a modern tone to them. In this one the one sex scene went like this:

"They made love all night, and then again in the morning."

If the sex is so bad you can't even describe it, why should I care to read about it? Then again, it's probably the Bill Gates side of the hero coming out in him.