Five things that... made me go ohhhh, sweet!

A somewhat lazy post today.

My excuse is, I've actually been productive with my writing.

Between Tooth and Paw just went off to my editor.

A Model submissive hit 50,000 - I finished Nanowrimo late last night. (I still have about 5k to go to finish off the story line, and I'm going to do that over the next few days, but anyway...)

and so, I thought I would share five photos I recieved in a forward.

So sweet...

That's it for me.

Nos Da.

Friday's Five things... I was going to be when I grew up

Okay, I’ve been entirely out of sync all week. I just realised it was Friday five minutes ago.

Kaenar Langford has been over on Hitting the hotspot today talking about the ten jobs people would love to have. You can see that post here.

Anyway, I thought I would post up my five things about the five things I almost spent my life doing before I threw myself head first into writing and really committed myself to it.

1. Does anyone out there realise that knees are really important if you want to join the army? Well, I can tell you that they are really important I was about this *holds thumb and forefinger really close together* close to joining the army – actually getting accepted and going through the officer boards and all that - sort of close. My knees got buggered up (highly technical medical term) about six months into training and that was the end of that.

2. Engineering was top of my list of things to do for the rest of my life for quite a while. It seemed like a sensible thing to do. I do have moments when I’m sensible and practical and make decisions that make sense – honest *Grin*.

3. Embroidery and textile design. Well, I still do this. But it’s more of a hobby when I get time in between writing now. Patchwork and blackwork are my favourites but I’ll enjoy pretty much anything that involves a needle and a thread. I might make a good go of this one day – I’ve got the designs, now I’m looking for time to stitch them up.

4. Librarian. I suppose this is one every writer has thought about from time to time. Spending the whole day surrounded by thousand and thousands of books. What’s not to like? On the days when I still manage to be at least a little bit sensible, I suppose this is my back up plan. This is what I’ll probably be looking for if I ever get a traditional 9-5 job.

5. Perpetual student. You know those books of course information from various universities that you get through the post now and again? Well, I tend to look through them, ticking the ones I’d like to do at some point or another. I tick almost every course in the prospectus. For quite a while I studied with the Open University. I’ve got the first year of a BSc along with the first year and part of a second year of a BA to my name so far.

I finished a course in Ancient and Medieval Cities at the start of 2008 and I decided to take a year out of studying to see if I could make a go of writing if I really concentrated on it. After all, what was the point in having a back up plan if you never actually had a good go at the first choice plan?

I’d been writing pretty solidly (1000+ a day, every day) for quite some time before this, but I guess focusing all my energy on writing paid off. I wanted to send something off to a publisher before I turned 25. After a few minor false starts, I sent my first story to TEB a month before I turned 25, and it was accepted a fortnight later.

That one’s not coming out until March next year, but I’m incredibly chuffed to have The Gift come out in 2008. (Yep, you can be pretty sure I’m going to mention that in every single post until December 8th, lol)

…

Other news:

I’m on 37,500 for A Modal Submissive. On track as far as Nano is concerned.

I’m about half way through my first edit for Between Tooth and Paw. I’m pretty sure there’s not enough time in the word count for them to have sex as often as they would like to. One of the sex scenes is going to have to go so I can make more room for a bit more plot to happen. Other than that, it’s shaping up not too badly.

Wondering about... Threesomes

Apparently they're very popular - in erotic romances I mean. Well, rumour has it they are pretty popular in real life too, but I'm supposed to be talking about writing here, so I'll stick to the fictional stuff.

People like reading about them, people like writing them.

I'll admit that the particular type of threesome I'm writing at the moment, MFM (That's the ones where the two guys are straight) isn't the combination that comes most easily to me.

The only threesome I've written and had accepted by a publisher was a MMM in The Gift. (It's coming out 8th December - less than a month away - incredibly excited about that).

So, it took me a while to sort out the psychology of why two dominant men who aren't with each other would want to share. But I think, with a bit of help from the paranoral world, I've worked that out.

Now I have another completly different problem with this mini genre. Three main characters seems to be playing havoc with my word count. The story is supposed to be 15-20k.

So far I've edited about half the first chapter and that section has doubled in length. All the characters want to have their say - and their fun - they all want it to be their story, for the reader to see their experience.

I'm currently on 17,500 with another 12.5k left to edit, so it looks like there's going to be a lot of cutting out whole scenes in my future if I'm going to keep it under the word could.

But, you know what? I'm actually enjoying editing this story far more than I thought I would. The characters are really coming together. It just might turn out not half bad. Now, if I can convince it to turn into a not half bad story that's less than 20k - that might be a different story.

Either way, I'm hoping it will go off by the end of the month, so I should know sooner rather than later if it will fit the call.

....

Other news in brief:

A Modeal Submissive - my nanowrimo project - is on 33k at the moment. I'll add at least 1k more before the end of the night. That's ticking over on target.

I haven't hit half the plot points that I wanted to include yet and I'm pretty sure one sex scene somehow expanded to fill two whole chapters on it's own. But at least I'm having fun writing it :)

Monday Memo: Decisions, Decisions

Note to self: Make up your damn mind.

I have a decision to make.

Apart from a few that need to be extended a little bit, all the stories in the Perfect Timing series are written. They have to be edited and stuff, but they are written.

I'm hoping to finish my Nano novel by the end of the month, so I've turned my attention what which series I'm going to work on next.

Now, the series can be roughly split into two different types.

There's the ones I like. I like the plots, I like the characters, I want to write them. I'm looking forward to writing them. I run them over in my head and I want to sit down and right them right now. I smile when I think about the characters. I want to write them their happy ever afters.

Then there are the ones that I know, before I even start them, that I'm going to get even more attached to. I'm even more invested in these series than I am in my other series (and I'm pretty damn obsessive about them!). The individual stories are going to be longer, the characters will appear in several stories. There are more complicated plotting and continuity and characterisation issues, they deal with more complicated and more delicate subbjects.

My heart wants to write one of the later series next just becasuse it does... My head says I should pick the safe option and do one of the simpler series. I find I'm learning more and more as I'm writing, each draft I write shows up some of the things I learnt writing other stories in the past.

What if I'm just not ready to write one of the majorly complicated series yet? A little bit more practice, a little bit more polish, before I tackle them couldn't hurt. They would be better if I waited a while before I tackled them.

The stupid thing is, I know I've made the decision. I've made it over and over again, and I always come up with the same answer. I know what I'm going to work on in December. I just can't stop wondering if I'm making the right decision.

...

Other news:

I hit 50k! Technically that's a Nano finished, except only 31700 of that 50k was on actually on my nano, so I still have a way to go on that, but I'm up to date and it's going okay - nothing like I planned it, but still good.

Started editing Tooth and Paw today. Will report more when I'm done more to it and I can see where it's going more clearly.

That's it.

Happy Monday everyone.

Friday's Five Things that... are harder to write than I expected

Okay, here's a question for you all - have you ever sat down to write a story and then ended up just sitting there staring off into space or scratching your head. These are five of the stories that I expected to find far easier to write then I do.

1. Sweet Romances. I've looked back over the writing I've done for the last few years, and I've realised that two of the ones I lost interested in and didn't finsh were the ones where the characters were too sweet. Don't get me wrong, I like the characters, I even liked the plots, I jus didn't have this desire to know what would happen next. There was no spark to them.

2. Vanilla. Other people seem to be able to write it no problem, I'm starting to realise I'm just not wired up to wirte about sex that doesn't have some sort of kink in it. It doesn't always have to be much, a bit of power play, a pair of hnadcuffs and I'm fine. It doesn't even have to look like kink - everything that's kinky about it can happen inside a character's head and that's fine with me. The kink just has to be there somewhere.

3. MFM. I write about men and women having sex all the time. Writing about one woman having sex with two straight men should be easy, right? Wrong. I have two main problems with this little subgenre. First of all - the two guys keep guying each other up - I write a lot of male/male. If there's three people in the bed, it does seem a waste not to let all of them play with both the other people in the bed. Secondly - my guys tend to be possessive - why are they inviting another man into their bed to have sex with a woman they feel possessive over? I've just finished writing a MFM and I'm about to start editing it. And I'll admit I have struggled with the psycholoy. In the end the only way I could make it work was to go down the paranormal route. I think it works now. I'm keeping my fingers crossed I still think that once I've started editing it.

4. Historical. Believe it or not, when I started writing, I was all about sweet Regency Romances. I even wrote a whole 80k first draft. The thing is - research. I never feel like I've done enough. 20 books on the Regency period later, and at least quadripple that number of websites, and I never felt like I even scratched the surface. I've come to the conclusion that I'm better off writing psydo-history/fantasy for those plots and characters who aren't happy living in the hear and now.

5. Short Stories. This one has been annoying me a little bit lately. I decided a while ago that I was going to post up a free little short story - maybe 1-2k every Friday. Should be easy right? I got a few ideas together and... suddenly I didn't have 4 short story plots, I have four novella plots. So, I told myself, okay. I'll write a free story to go up on TEB's free story section. That could be longer - maybe 3-5k. A little bit of thinking about it later, my list of novella plots has grown a bit more and I'm still without a short story to my name. Maybe I'm just not a short story writer and that's that. I always want a context around what happens, I want more to happen for the characters than I can fit into a short story.

Okay guys, so what do you find harder about writing or to write than you thought you would when you started writing? Any takers?

.....

Other news:

A model submissive - my nano project - is coming along nicely. I'm on 21,500 words so far, so it's about on target. I'll be passing the half way mark on the weekend.

My secondary writing project - In the heat of the moment - was going to head for an anthology call, but it's going off in an unexpected direction, so it's probably going to end up as a stand alone and not a anthology sub at all.

Editing - I'm taking the weekend off editing. On Monday I'm going to attack Between Tooth and Paw with the intention of subbing it at the end of the month.

And that's it. Take care all.

Monday Memo: Re-write the damn thing!

Okay, time to get back up to date now.

Note to self: Once you realise something doesn't work, stop fussing about and just re-write the damn thing, you know you'll have to in the end.

Secret Service is finally gone. It was a bit of a bugger - I think I only managed to save about 3000 from my first draft, but the re-writes finally paid off once I stopped trying to fix something that would never work and just wrote most of it again from scratch. I also re-wrote the synopsis - only the first paragraph or two were accurate once I finished the re-write!

It's with my editor now, so I have my fingers crossed for it.

The Stroke of Twelve verdict is in. It didn't make it into the anthology I was originally aiming for (it didn't fit the tone set by the other stories in it), but TEB still liked it and I was offered a contract for it as a stand alone. It's now going to be extended into a novel length story and it's going to slip into my Perfect Timing series in place of Time Out, which is going to form the basis for a whole new series I have planed :)

I'm actually quite pleased. Don't get me wrong, I'd have loved to have been in the anthology, but I'm also really existed about extending the story and giving it room to grow into something a lot better than it is right now.

A Model Submissive - my nano project is slightly behind schedule. I should have been on 15k last night, I was on 14k. Hoping to catch up a bit tonight.

Okay... I think that's it. All up to date :)

Except one other announcement - there's a chat tonight with Total-e-bound authors on Night Owl Romance. It starts at 8 pm EST and runs to 10 pm EST. In British currancy, I think that translates to 1-3 am tomorrow morning.

I'll certainly be there at the start, and hopefully until quite a way through it.

Drop by if you can.

Monday Memo: Why?

Memo: Why a character does something is just as important as what that character does.

Character motivations have been a big thing for me over the last couple of weeks. I have one character that really can't settle on a good reason why he's doing the things he's doing. His personality keeps flickering around and he just won't get with the plan at all.

I know what he's going to do.

I've written what he's going to do.

But I can't finish the damn story until he admits defeat and just confesses why he's doing these things.

I've come to the conclusion that some things just have to be explained or they can't happen in a story. If a character says he dislikes something - not just isn't in the mood for it, but hates it on a really primal level - the reader needs to know why.

Come to that, the writer needs to know why to.

Alister, as he informs everyone very early on in the story, doesn't approve of kink. Okay - fair enough, not everyone does.

But the problem is, he keeps changing his mind about why he doesn't like it. Doesn't understand it? Thinks he understands it but has it all wrong? A bad experience in the past?

He's gone through every possible reason and some I didn't even know existed until I started writing this story - and I've played along and re-written the story for each new theory he's come up with.

It's a 20k story and I must have written about 50k on it so far.

Yesterday, four days before I want to send the story to my editor, he hit on a new theory.

It sounds plausible. It just might work. He might stick to this theory for more than two minutes.

I'm currently re-writing the last chapter to see how it works out for him this way.

Wish me luck people.

.....

Random bit of other news:

My Nano novel - A Model Submissive is on 4000 words as of last night - that characters in that are cooperating nicely.