I’m paraphrasing here, so don’t pelt me with rocks if I get this wrong, but I think it was Gustav Flaubert who said “Live you life as a bourgeouise so that you may write like a madman.” I’ve always liked that quote, because I’ve found it more or less to be true. My life has never been what one would describe as “sedate”, but the less outward stress I have, the more creative I tend to be. I think focusing all one’s creative energy on solving real life crises takes away from what you can put on the page for your imaginary friends.

Let me tell you. In the last couple of months, I haven’t had a lot to spare for the page. I’m glad this year is over. I’m not going to bitch about all the badness, that’s not what this blog is for. This is mostly just a year-end wrap up, so hopefully next time I check in, I can see how well things have progressed.

Like that optimism, do ya?

An illness in the family has forced me to move back home to be closer to my family. Which means I’m giving up my first apartment. My very first all on my own apartment. And I hate that. I really love that place. It was the first space I had that was truly all mine, that I could leave as pigpenny or clean as I wanted. I had all my junk spread out the way I wanted it, decorated it with all my pictures and whatknots, and made my own. I’m not looking forward to boxing all that crap up again and driving it across two states, but you do what you have to do. Family always comes first. I’m hoping it will be only a temporary arrangement, that by summer I’ll be back in my own digs again, but I don’t feel very confident about that.

On the upside, I finally got another job after two months of unemployment. The job was literally an out of the blue, right place right time thing, and the money was good, so I pounced. Now maybe I can get out from under that mountain of debt I’ve tunneled into. That will do a lot to get rid of that burden on my creative thinking. You get pretty damn creative when you’ve got creditors calling you at all hours of the day.

If moving back in with the family doesn’t drive me over the edge, if I can pay off my debts, if I can just hang in there, baby, by this summer I might be a published author. Regardless, I will always be a writer. I write, publishing be damned, because I love it and it keeps me sane. A friend once asked me what I would do if the book I was working on never got published. I told her that I would just put it in a shoebox and move on to another one. It’s all I can do.

I’ll leave on a positive note here by listing things I’m thankful for. It’s cliche, but sometimes I think its a good idea to take inventory.

Things I’m Thankful for:

• good friends
• my dog
• a car that runs and has heat most of the time
• two hands and ten fingers for typing
• a home (and all the things that go with it, like food and warmth)
• a job
• a new beginning, again

That being said, I hope the New Year is a new wonderful beginning for everyone.

I’d planned to write a huge blog for Halloween, seeing as its my favorite holiday (free candy and dressing like monsters. Monsters who gorge on free candy.) but that came and went in a sugar coma, and I find myself in the middle of November wondering where the hell the rest of the month went. The trees have finally shed most of their leaves, and a thick morning fog winds through the mountains. It’s a nice, cozy scene to wake up to, one I that find stokes my creativity. As I knew it would. As much as I love early autumn, with its explosion of colors, sweet woodland smells, and Halloween itself, I think it just overstimulates my mind. I need the cold November nights (hah, you thought I was going to say rain, didn’t you?) to give me a chance to filter everything through.

And with that comes good news. The 350 page novel I trashed may be salvageable. I’ve given it another looky-loo, and I think I can rework it into something I can finish. It requires killing a bunch of subplots, axing several of my favorite characters, and worst of all, throwing out my favorite conversation between two certain characters, but all in all, I think I can make it work. It’s worth another shot, definitely, so I’m cutting everything that needs to go away and saving it in a file that I might go back to later. I’m sure I could rework a lot of it into later stories, so I’m going to hang onto it. Just in case.

I’m also writing a story for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month to those who think I just passed out and mashed various keys on the keyboard with my forehead. It’s a neat thing to do, writing a 50,000 word novel in a month. I’ve competed in it for the last three years, but only finished it once. But still, it’s fun and I usually end up with something I can work on later. I highly recommend it to anyone who would like to try writing a novel. You can just dive in without worrying about whether the novel is good or great literature, or what have you. The goal is the word count, and it can be a liberating thing for someone who gets hung up on getting it right, as opposed to getting it down. You can always make it better, but you can’t improve on something you never write. I can’t tell you how many times I had to tell myself that. Still have to tell myself that, actually, though not as much as I used to.

Well, I’m heading back to work. Gotta get those words down.

Another country music song title, this time by the talented and awesome Tanya Tucker. And it fits my mood tonight. Its been a week of ups and downs, and I’m trying to focus on the ups. One of my best friends recently came back from her tour of duty. (Hug a veteran or soldier today. Seriously. Do it. No matter what you think about the current war, respect the soldiers. These people deserve it.) So that’s a definite up. As soon as she gets back from family time, she and I are going to have a lot of catching up to do. She’s been gone for seven months, and I can honestly say I’ve been about to lose my mind because of it. She’s helped me through so much, personal and professional, and she keeps me grounded and boosts my ego when I need it. And trust me, as a writer, your ego can gather a lot of shoeprints on its backside.

I’ve gotten back another batch of rejection letters, which sucks, but I’ve gotten some personalized letters, which is a boost. It means I’m doing something sort of right. I’m going to dive back into my synopsis and sample chapters and see if there’s anything I can do to spruce them up. I’ve spoken to several authors who hate the synopsis/query part of writing more than any other part. Don’t know why, since they’re the shortest part of the book. I think that in and of itself might be the problem, at least for me. I tend to be a long-winded storyteller (it’s a southern thing) and I have a difficult time condensing my ideas. Why say it in five words when you can throw a couple of subjunctive clauses and prepositional phrases in just for the hell of it? My writing group is helping me with it, pointing out my repetitions and helping me be more succinct, but sometimes it feels like someone is taking a file to my teeth- it grates me that hard. I write very stream of consciousness, and spend more time refining my thoughts than getting them on paper. I like to tell people I’m not so much a writer as a rewriter. I may have mentioned that once already, though.

Another up: I’ve started another story, which I’m having fun with. Its a paranormal erotica, quite a departure from the stuff I usually write. I like urban fantasy and mysteries best, blame Poe for it, and even though I have some romance in most of my stuff, it tends to be spice to the stew, not the stock. This time, though, I decided to write a full-on erotic romance. With paranormal overtones, of course. Got to have something of a safety line there. Still, I’m having fun with it, and right now, I could use a little fun. Especially since I just trashed 350 pages of a novel I’ve been working on for over a year now.

I’ve known the novel was in trouble for a while now but, like a bad relationship, I just refused to give up on it. I thought there might be something in it I could salvage, that I could somehow make work. Then, last night, I realized that I’d been working on this novel for over a year and a half, and I was still tweaking Chapter freaking One. I should be to the point where I have to go back and reread the chapter just so I can remember what I’ve written, not still be writing the damned thing. Its my fault, though. I got in a rush with it, and then panicked when I realized how boring it was. I went back and tried to shoehorn a bunch of things in to make the story more interesting. The result? I lost control of the whole thing. My main character is lost in the maisma of secondary characters, my plot is completely gone, and I have no idea even how to begin to salvage it. So I chucked everything into my dump file, to possibly salvage later, opened up a new word.doc file, and started at page 1 again. But I’m going to let the story rest for a while before I start again. I’m going to finish the erotica novel, and maybe dive into NANOWRIMO again this November before I start again on this novel. I want some time apart so I can fall in love with it all over again.

I have the hardest time reminding myself that this job is supposed to be fun. If I’m not having fun while I’m writing, then I’m not going to finish the book. It’s that simple. I can’t count how many projects I’ve thrown down because I got so bogged down in getting them finished that I forgot to have fun with them. And I’ll be honest here. When I stop having fun with the book, that’s when they start sucking. Like bilge-water sucking.

So like I said, its been ups and downs this week. Autumn tends to be the roughest time for me as a writer. It’s the most fertile time for my imagination, but my restless nature tends to take over and I have a difficult time buckling down to one thing and sticking with it. I thought for a while that it was just because I was used to the upheaval of getting ready for another school year, but since I’ve been out of school for quite some time now, I don’t think that’s it. I think its something deeper than that, but darned if I know what.

So, in any case, I am working on something. I usually need a couple of projects to keep me happy. I work much better if I have a couple of balls in the air than if I’m just working on one thing. I’ll just ride it out. It’s all I can do at this point, honestly.

By the way, does anyone have any good music to recommend? All the bands I listen to have either gone on hiatus or broken up, and I am in desperate need of some good toonage. I like just about everything, so any suggestions are welcome.

I survived West Virginia, and had a blast. I got to spend some time with both old and new friends, drank more than I should have, and bought more books than I’ll ever have time to read. But I couldn’t have enjoyed three days more if they’d involved a secluded beach and a cabana boy.

It’s the only vacation I’ve had this year, and between working and throwing my book at anyone who’ll read it, I think I deserved a little R&R. Although, in retrospect, all I did was work and throw my book at anyone who would read it. Hmm. Maybe I’m just not getting this whole “vacation” thing. Anyway, I spent a lot of time with a lot of nice ladies who listened to me blather on about my book, both drunk and sober, and encouraged me to write and not give up. They also gave me a few heads-ups about where to submit my manuscript, so I’ve spent the evening doing just that. And I can’t believe how much of a nervous wreck I am!

Believe it or not (and those of you who know me won’t be shocked by this at all) but public speaking doesn’t bother me. I’m a ham and and attention whore, so any time I get to be the center of attention, I adore it. But standing up in front of a group of people I don’ t know and talking about things I’m only partially informed of has nothing on licking that envelope and dropping it in the mail and waiting for an agent to respond back.

My first agent query almost ended up as a felony crime. I’d agonized over the thing for days, and finally decided to just throw it in the mail and deal with the devil as it came. My workplace has a handy mail box right outside the building on the curb, so I took my little manilla envelope full of all my hopes and dreams and shoved it into the slot. Only to freak out the moment my fingers let go and jam my arm as far as it would reach into the slot, trying to get the envelope back. Maybe I could go over it one more time! Send it to another beleaguered friend! Spell check it just once more to make sure I hadn’t forgotten a period or a semi-colon! I’d crammed my arm further than it ever should have gone, only to look up and find the mailman staring at me as if I’d lost my mind. I only made it worse, trying to explain it to him, so I sheepishly tugged out my poor bruised, mangled, and mashed arm out of the mailbox and slunk inside my workplace, where of course my coworkers had a hoot at my expense.

Why does submitting a query letter freak me out so much? I really don’t know. I think it might have something to do with the finality of it. I will admit, I’m a tweaker. I don’t write so much as I rewrite. And it doesn’t bother me to let other people read my stories because I can always go back and tweak them if I want. Sending off that letter, though, means no more tweaking, missy! It’s all bets down, no holds barred and no turning back. And let me tell you, that is scary with shark’s teeth!

So I’m going to reward my bravery with a nice hot bath now. And then back to work on the books. I have a few things I need to tweak . . .

I definitely goof off way too much. Right now, instead of writing, I’m watching Mythbusters. Specifically, I’m watching Mythbusters blow things up. I can call that research, right?

Tomorrow I’m leaving for the weekend, heading to the RAW retreat in the great state of West Virginia. The Blue Ridge mountains in early autumn are amazing. The sky is never that blue any other time of the year, and when it’s the backdrop of mountains of green trees gilt-edged with gold, its more than amazing. It’s beautiful.

The RAW retreat is actually the Reader’s Appreciation Week. Lora Leigh (an awesome writer you need to check out if you like racy supernatural erotica . . . and I do!) has invited several writers to come and sign books and hang out with their fans. It’s in a beautiful place, with fun and wonderful people, and I for one have been waiting all year for this. I’d love to tell you where it is, but I haven’t yet figured that out yet. I’m carpooling with friends, and given my previous track records with not ending up where the map tells me I’m supposed to be, I’m relegated to ballast for the backseat. Which is cool with me, actually. I can get caught up on my reading and maybe get something written. I’m looking for some good inspiration, and I’m hoping the mountains will be just that extra something that gets me going. I’ve been battling the big black demon lately, most commonly known as writer’s block, although to me it feels more like being mired in Alabama mud. I can see what I want to do, just on the other side, but I’m slogging through the middle like an upended elephant. I have a hard time battling my own inertia, and eventually I will overcome. It just means digging in deeper.

I wonder if Mythbusters could bust the myth of writer’s block? Hmmm.

I plan on uploading some pictures when I get back. I actually remembered to pack my camera this year. I hope to have lots of fun stories and embarassing anecdotes to share.

See you Monday!

It’s been a while since my last update. Summer always tends to get away from me. I can’t believe it’s already August!

Yes, August, that most blessed of times known to man as Shark Week. From the time I was seven years old, I’ve never missed a single Shark Week. Every July, I sit glued to my television, watching the same shows they’ve played for twenty years, and spending that night terrified to go to the bathroom in case one of those massive Great White Sharks is swimming in my toilet. That’s the great thing about a phobia – its complete lack of logic.

Shark Week combines two of my greatest phobias. Sharks, obviously, and water. If there was a way to work clowns into the mix, it would be the Unholy Trinity of Terror.

I love to swim, but I’m terrified of water if I can’t see the bottom. I have never been swimming in a lake (and never will) because that greenish-brown water could be hiding God only knows what. Alligators, snapping turtles, dead bodies, zombies (they don’t need to breathe, you know). All of that and more might be just below the surface. God help you if you happen to be near me and something brushes my leg while I’m in the water. I’m going to climb you like a cat climbs a tree with the dog hot on its heels.

I have been swimming in the ocean. I love the beach, and someday hope to have a little cabana right on the water. With a cabana boy, but that’s another post. I can deal with the water better there because its blue, it looks cleaner, and you can see deeper into it. Still, every time I go into the water, I see the flailing legs in that great underwater POV scene where Jaws first attacks Amity Beach.

It doesn’t help that I’ve had my own Amity Beach experience. There’s nothing more frightening than looking up and realizing you’re the only person in the water as far as you can see up and down the coast while the lifeguard is frantically gesturing at you.

You might be wondering what all this has to do with writing. Well, I’ll tell you. Phobias can be a writer’s best friend. Take Shark Week for example. I’ve been terrified of sharks since the first time I watched Jaws. That damned shark tormented me for years, haunting every puddle and nightly bath of my childhood. Just hearing the theme song was enough for me to have a week’s worth of nightmares.

I read somewhere that a therapy for dealing with fears involves exposure to said fear. People fear the unknown and what they don’t understand. I certainly didn’t understand sharks, so I began researching them. A naturally curious nature never hurts here. I started out with books, as I often do, and then with the Discovery channel. Sunday nights in our house were always planned around church and the National Geographic program. When I discovered a whole week dedicated to sharks, I knew I’d hit the jackpot. The more I learned about sharks, the more they fascinated me. Truly one of God’s marvels, this creature is evolution at its finest. Pared down to its most necessary parts, it functions on an instinctive level that humans can only admire. It swims, eats, and procreates, and does it in a way to make itself the most feared animal in the ocean. I learned through them about keystone predators, how important a creature can be to its ecosystem, and in turn how that ecosystem affects the rest of the planet. Not to mention that sharks are just freakin’ cool. If sharks were people, they would be Al Pacino, James Dean, and Robert Mitchum all rolled up into one person. They’re that badass.

Am I still afraid of sharks? You bet. But now it’s not so much an irrational fear as it is a healthy respect for a creature that owns its nature the way few other animals do. I’ve also learned they are not soulless killing machines, but merely animals doing what animals do – surviving.

It doesn’t keep me from imagining those flailing legs every time I get near a body of water, but now I know the shark isn’t actively trying hunt me down. It merely thinks I’m a fat seal, which is enough incentive to get my butt on a treadmill. Proving that conquering your fears can be healthy in more ways than you think.

Writing through fear is something most writers, well, fear. Be it sharks, fear of commitment, fear of the unknown, or those daddy/mommy issues you’ve wrestling with since childhood, examining what we don’t understand makes us break out in that cold primal sweat.

That’s a good thing, really. Nothing speaks more clearly to the human soul than fear. It’s what kept our ancestors from becoming dinosaur food. It’s why horror stories and scary movies continue to be a part of our lives, even though deep down we known vampires and zombies are silly.

Writing from the gut takes guts. It means looking hard and honestly at the things that make us scared and uncomfortable. Every square inch of it. It means taking the thing apart, seeing what makes it tick, putting it back together again and watch it scare the bejeezus out of us. Not an easy task even for the bravest of us.

What we learn from that fear, though, far outweighs what it costs to examine it.

 Give yourself a cookie if you know where I got that title. If you guessed country music, get yourself another cookie. If I haven’t completely turned you off yet, keep reading. There’s some good stuff ahead, I promise.

The title, aside from being a good song by the Highway Men, begs an interesting question. Why do we have a fascination with bad men? From vampires to mafia dons, we love those who walk on life’s shadier side, and no where is that more greatly realized than on celluloid and between the pages of the biggest bestsellers.

My first encounters with treacherous villainy came from monster movies. I had the best babysitters. Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, Lon Chaney. I’d sit up late at night with Mom watching the Hammer classics and any monster movie we could find back when it was still known as the Superstation TBS. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was carrying on a family tradition. My mother sat up late at night with her dad, also watching those same film stars sink their teeth into virginal throats or tramp through foggy graveyards at night. I rooted for them against the stalwart hero. I always found the good guys bland, as wholesome as American cheese and just as boring. No thanks. Give me something rich and preferably European, something with a little bite to it.

My first true love affair with a villain came from a not so humble movie titled Die Hard. Maybe you’ve heard of it? I grew up on two types of movies. My mother imparted her love of all things dark and scary – so monster movies were a staple of my youth. My dad loved action movies. The first movie I remember seeing in a theater is Invasion USA, starring Chuck Norris, although I’m told I was quite riveted during The Karate Kid. I’m really dating myself here, aren’t I?

Anyway, I saw Die Hard when I was thirteen, on a bootleg VHS. I couldn’t believe it. As a child of the 80’s, most action movie villains were of the egomaniacal, insane terrorist variety. They were always out to either take over the world or destroy it, and mowed down their own henchmen just as much as they seemed to take out random victims designed to pluck the audience’s heartstrings. But here, in Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber, we had a villain who was not only sane, but also realistic. No James Bondian plans to destroy the world here. (Spoilers ahead!) Just an elaborate plan to pull off a bank heist. That’s it. Throughout the movie, he was calm, collected, and thinking not only one step ahead of the hero but apparently everyone in the city of Los Angeles. And that accent. Who couldn’t love an accent like that? Even at his most evil, Hans Gruber could make sweet, sweet love to you with that voice.

Ahem. Anyway, getting back to the point. It was nice to see a smart villain for a change. They have the best clothes, the best sidekicks, and all the best toys. So why were they all affected with the dreaded Stupids? Die Hard was the first movie I saw where a bad guy didn’t accidentally help the hero kill him off.

I suppose that was my first blueprint for a bad guy. If he’s a pansy, then the hero really isn’t so heroic, is he? And face it; you’re only as interesting as the people you surround yourself with.

I think that’s a big problem with today’s movies. I really haven’t seen a movie where I could honestly say the bad guys seemed awesome. I’m instantly suspicious of computer-generated baddies. I feel they’re off-putting at best. Part of the attraction of the best baddie is the intimacy they bring. Dracula is a great example of this. He literally implores you to ‘look into his eyes’. You have to get pretty up close and personal for that.

The best baddies draw you into their world. They take you in and, in their own special way, make you a part of their diabolical deeds. Hannibal Lecter, anyone? Under that charm and wit lies a psychosis that’s mind-boggling, but he lures poor Clarice Starling and the audience to his side. While we’re horrified when he eventually escapes, a small, secret part of us is gleeful, even if we’re terrified to know he’s out there, somewhere, and probably eating people.

A writer or an actor has a lot more room to play with a villain than they do with a hero. Think about it. The things we love about our bad guys would send us shrieking through the night away from the hero. I just can’t imagine too many people getting behind a hero that likes to snack on the brains of innocent bystanders while he plots to bring the Villain to justice. (However, if you can make that scenario work, do so with my blessing. There’s nothing better than a well-written anti-hero. That, however, is a blog for another day.)

A good villain has more room to walk around than the hero does. Heroes tend to be good to their mothers, good to the women in their life, drive the speed limit, pay their bills on time . . . you know, all that boring stuff we do without having the baggage that we mere mortals often carry around with us. Bad guys say, “Screw that,” to all of those things, and while we’re horrified, we secretly admire them having the guts to throw off society’s conventions and go at it their own way. A villain is an individualist at heart. Think about Dracula. He refused to die.

A villain should be more complex than the hero. One note bad guys (“I’m going to nuke New York City because I am eeeevil!”) need to have their villainy card revoked. They also need to have their feet sunk into cement bricks and be tossed off a bridge, preferably by their own henchmen. Just like the Hero, Villains should have a personal stake in the way things turn out. Even Sauron, the omnipotent, ultimate evil of Tolkien, has a personal stake in getting the One True Ring.

Tortured villains are also tricky. “Woe is me, for I am so evil” really grates my last nerve. Vampires are especially bad for this. They have immortality, the strength of ten men or more, they’re practically invulnerable to harm, and they have the ability to make people do their bidding with just a whisper. Yet they moan about the fact they never get to see daylight. (Sorry, but its way overrated.) Sorry, emo kids, but get over it. If you have the balls to be bad, have the balls to enjoy it, too.

I think this brings up another interesting point, for anyone who’s stuck around long enough to see where I’m going with this. Most bad guys don’t realize they’re bad. Maybe they do, deep in the darker pits of their crusty black hearts, but they probably think of themselves as misanthropic at the worst. Remember, most terrorists refer to themselves as Freedom Fighters, and who the terrorists are largely depends on where you are in relation to the bombed out hovel.

So what does all this mean? It means that a writer has an obligation to spend as much time on the bad guy as the hero or the love interest. It means no matter how charming, brave, strong, good-looking, or great-in-bed your hero is, unless he has a super-awesome villain to clash against, we’re honestly not going to care. If nothing else, the villain has to seem insurmountable. There has to be no earthly or otherworldly way the hero can overcome.

Then he does.

That’s the kicker. After dealing with the Ultimate Evil, despite traitorous sidekicks, duplicitous love interests, a crippling injury, no support from the Good Guy Network, and an apparently sadistic author who has no sense of decency or compassion, the hero has still conquered all. Through courage, cunning, and human spirit, your hero has won the hearts of the readers by doing the impossible. Now that’s a hero I can get behind.

That’s why angels love bad men.

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