The iPhone Cometh

Yes indeed, Dr Jax came through. There was a large box waiting under the tree for me on Christmas Day and Dr Jax told me to be careful with it as it was heavy and fragile. I was a bit suspicious because he sometimes tricks me by putting small boxes in large ones and I was hoping that the large box was a trick. But then it was very heavy. So I was putting on my determined 'so it's not an iPhone but I will like whatever it is if it kills me' face while I opened the box. And inside was a heavy, rusty piece of iron grille. And underneath that was the iPhone.
My hero. Sigh. :-)

And I had another piece of happy news on Christmas Day too. I had emailed my completed character bios to the editor the night before and was not expecting a reply until next week at the very earliest. But in my inbox on Christmas Day (yes, I turned my PC on, on Christmas Day. Yes I am sad) was a reply saying she'd read them and thought they were good! And that my conflict looked fine and I was to send through my revised synopsis and partial!

So big relief for me. Finally I have some characters that will work and a conflict that looks good from the editors point of view. There were a few issues that she told me to keep an eye out for but I'm hopeful I can avoid them. Now all I have to do is to write a partial that she likes! Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Yeah, right. :-)

Hope everyone's Christmas was a happy one and here's to a New Year filled with what you love to do best.

A Good Old Kiwi Christmas

That blaze of red right there folks (image to you right) is the flower of the Pohutakawa tree, NZ's Christmas tree. And see that beach beyond the flower? That beach (oh, okay, not that particular beach but one fairly similar) is where I'll be the day after New Year. Beaches, sun, sand and Pohutakawa trees are the vital elements of a good, old Kiwi Christmas, which, I know, is inconceivable to all you folk buried deep in the snow.

Well, can I say I'm envious? I'd love a white christmas, I really would. I did live in London for a few years but even then we didn't ever have a truly white Christmas. But then again, there is a certain something to sipping Christmas bubbles on the deck in the sun in your t-shirt and then perhaps going for a post-prandial swim... I guess it's all in what you're used to.

Anyway, I'll be be around until after New Year (still waiting on my character tweaks) and then I'll be up north at the beach where there is NO INTERNET! I do not know how I will cope. I'm hoping Santa will bring me an iPhone for Christmas so I won't be completely cut off...:-)

But the point of this blog post (yes, I do have one) is to wish everyone a very happy Christmas and New Year. Here's lots of lovely Kiwi sun and warmth coming to all those in the cold, and to those in the Southern Hemisphere, let's hope it doesn't get too hot!

Dr Jax Stages An Intervention

There I was, throwing myself dramatically on the floor, crying that I couldn't do it, sounding remarkably like my four year old daughter, when Dr Jax at last arrived home from work. Honestly, I don't think he knew what to make of it. No, that's a lie, he knew exactly. I am the biggest drama queen in the world when it comes to my writing. When it's not going right, NOTHING is right. I can't concentrate on anything, I can't do anything, I am a grumpy, horrible, whiny person. Dr Jax knew immediately what the problem was though and, luckily for myself, and for my CPs, he decided to stage an intervention before I bored them all senseless with endless emails of whiny, moany drivel.

Yup, you guessed it, heroine problems. I had changed her conflict so many times it was just one big mess and I couldn't think my way out of it. It's at times like this when I need a cool head to talk me through it and my husband is just amazing with stuff like that. Ten minutes later, a strong martini in hand, I was finally getting to the root of my problem - at least according to Dr Jax.

My heroines, he said, are too perfect. They have no dark sides. Which is very, very true. Not to mention the fact that they are defined by their conflict - like their personalities and their lives are totally formed by that one event. Argh!

However, it's not all bad. After a long talk, aided by more martini and the wonderful ideas and suggestions from my fabulous (not to mention very patient) CPs, I have finally got an idea for a conflict for my heroine. It's not exaggerated (I hope) and she has a personality outside of this
one conflict. I even managed to give her some weaknesses. Woohoo! She's becoming a person! Now all I need to hope is that the editor agrees with this new idea.

So three cheers for Dr Jax. I told him that he could do a guest spot on my blog and everyone could write in with character questions that he could answer. He told me that finally he knew the real reason he went into psychiatry: to help me write my romance novels. :-)

Anyone else had any breakthroughs this week? Or has it been full-on, kicking and screaming on the floor frustration?

Heroines Behaving Badly

I am going spare trying to figure out the characters of my new submission. The editor has asked me to do character bios of each of them in an effort to get me to focus on characterisation and it's driving me crazy! I think I've got my hero figured out but my heroine refuses to play ball. I have no idea why I can't write her but it's incredibly annoying. Why are women so difficult?? :-)

Anyway, for those of you thinking the editor is gently holding my hand, no she is not. She called my heroine childish and immature, not to mention unnattractive. No words have been minced there. The really irritating thing is that the ed is right. I don't think Cat is like that in the partial but the fact remains that her conflict is only half thought out. Which is my fault.

It wasn't all bad. She liked some of the actions my characters took (which is solely down to Michelle S's expert advice) and she really liked the central theme. Which is why, I'm assuming, she is giving me the chance to do this story but with fully-fledged characters.

So, I have sent her some more ideas about the backgrounds for both characters and she said she'd get back to me with tweaks. Haven't heard yet but since then I've gone through yet another set of ideas for my heroine. I am now officially sick of her.

The problems I'm having though are mainly because of the way I write which is writing my way into my characters. They have a half thought of background when I start but I don't know really what they're all about until the end. And that is not working for me clearly. I need to know all about them from the first page. I need to forget about the external conflict that brings them together and start from a core of internal conflict, building the rest of the character around that. And I need to do that before I start writing because working backwards like this is very, very hard. It's hard because I'm desperate to keep some of the things the editor liked but I'm not sure, given my heroine's new background, whether she would still act in the same way. And if I'm not sure, then she probably wouldn't, which means I'll probably have to change those bits. Changing bits the editor liked is NOT easy but then again, acting unbelievably is one of my heroine's main failings so therefore I have to change them. Argh!

Okay, I'm now officially, officially sick of my heroine and am going to take the day off her. Big hugs to all of you who got the dreaded R from the competition. Remember an R does not mean you or your writing sucks. It just wasn't the right story.

On Contests

I wasn't going to weigh in to the fray with the palaver happening on the I Heart Presents site, but I wanted to say a couple of things in response. No, not controversial stuff, there's enough of that floating around at the moment I 'm thinking, it's just something to think about.

I pretty much just wanted to remind everyone that a contest win doesn't automatically equal publication. Nor does a contest placing. If it did, I'd be published by now. All a contest is, is a faster-than-normal submission process. If you'd worked hard on your chapter and synopsis, and subbed them the normal way, the response you would get would be exactly the same. Some will get requests and some will get rejections.
Oh, but you say, didn't the winners get an editor for a year? That's different from the normal sub process. Well, actually no it's not any different. Because it's been a year since my contest placing and I am still working with an editor. And I was working with an editor before my placing too so me getting runner up in Feel the Heat really had nothing to do with it. It got a manuscript seen faster probably but that's it. They're not going to publish me because I got somewhere in a contest, they're going to publish me because I can write a book they want to publish. I know, it's all very well for me to say that but if you don't take my word for it, take Maisey's. She submitted through the slush, spent a year working with an editor, and sold. That's the prize right there, no contest required.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that you don't need a contest placing to win the prize. If the editors see potential, they'll want to see more of what you have. And people always forget that even when you do get to have that wonderful feedback, it's not the end. No, it's just the beginning of how hard you need to work. Winning an editor for a year, whether through the slush or the contest, means a year of slogging your guts out. And even when you do slog, you may not be published. Because that last part - writing a publishable book - is all dependent on you, your ability to take criticism and your skill as a writer to apply it to your manuscript, not a contest placing.

No part of this process is easy. Contests are great ways to polish up something for a deadline and get a response to a submission quickly. But they are not the only way. Keep submitting. That's all you can do.

Presents Competition - Congrats!

Hey, big huge congrats to the winners of the Presents Writing Competion! To get so far out of so many entries is a huge acheivement. Chocolate martinis and champagne cocktails all round.
Especially to fellow aspirant MH author and MH winner, Gill (AKA Jilly). I've only just met you but your talent is truly inspiring. Can't wait to read the book!

In other positive news, I have heard back from the ed. She wants me to send her detailed character back-stories for Cat and Sean before a partial and a synopsis. So I'm still in the game here! Now this is something I should have done way back when and just didn't because I'm so damn impatient to get to writing the story. No longer!

So this weekend is my time to sort out just who my characters are. I'm going to write detailed backstories for them, why they are the people they are when the story opens. Very excited as this feels like I'm finally getting to the root of my problems with conflict...

More next week!

Romance Writer, Amateur Psychologist

Why psychology? Because I got feedback about my synopsis and, yes, there were problems. Guess where my problems were? Yup, the evil heroine strikes again! Hero had potential, heroine...childish and immature.

Groan! I'll be honest here, I did wonder when I was writing this story, whether her conflict was right. Halfway through the book I was going um...not sure about this...but I persevered hoping it would fix itself. But it didn't. So Jackie's number one rule is going to be: Go with your gut! If it's not working for you then it's not working full stop!

Right, so where to from here? Well, I'm going to go with fixing this one because in spite of evidence to the contrary, I do feel like I'm getting there with fully backgrounding my characters. Kate, for a start, is much more fully realised than Cat is. And that's mainly due to me thinking long and hard about Kate before I started writing. Plus, I like this story.

What I should be doing is taking advice from all you people who do character sketches before writing. Either that or I do what I usually do which is to write my way into my characters, finish the ms, and then write the synopsis. Impatience is my besetting sin and does not help in my writing!

The one thing that does console me is that the editor did tell me that writing romance with psychologically compelling, believable characters is very, very difficult. Hear that everyone? This is HARD stuff we're doing. We have to have strong conflict but it has to be light and flirty. It has to extend to 50k but you can't have any external conflict. It has to be sympathetic but not too specific. It has to have the fantasy factor. These are not easy things to accomplish. In fact, I was having a moan to a good friend of mine who is very, very literary and she said, 'Actually, what you're writing is very difficult isn't it?' And I thought, no kidding! Category romance is a tough beast.

Anyway, the other thing that keeps me going is this: the ed told me that my writing was all there and that once I got the characterisation right, I'll be away.

So, you see, I simply have to keep going. :-)