Pam Writes Romance

Ah, July… June, you tried, I’ll give you points for that, but you never really had a chance. I love July. Not because of the sweltering heat here (which some sick people actually love), not because of any patriotism or dates that have special meaning, but for one little reason.

It’s time for RWA Nationals.

Yes, I’m a Nationals slut. I love staying at the hotel, I love the different (though possibly crappy if you were at Dallas last year) food, the conferences are divine, the literacy signing is a treat and the free books are almost as good as chai tea. What I adore, live for, soak in and take with me when I go for, is the vibe. After 51 weeks of the year when you flinch every time you tell somebody you write romance, here is a convention that is made for you, celebrates you, what you write, what you read, and wants to see more of these Happily Ever After books in the world. It doesn’t matter who you talk to there–from a top agent or editor, to a New York Times bestseller, to the person who first wrote “Once upon a time…” the day before, they all want you to succeed. They are pushing for you to get published as much as you yearn for it. It is the most supportive, positive, active group I have ever been witness to. And this one little hit, one week per year, is enough to get me through until the next year. That’s how amazing it is.

So for the month of July, I’m going to be blogging about Nationals. My enormous experience of 3 previous conventions, combined with my innate knowledge of what’s best for people, is going to lead this month’s posts. (That’s my cheeky way of saying these posts will be based from my experiences and take what you will from them. Many roads to Oz.) I’d love to hear from those of you who have been there, have been to other conferences, or have any other thoughts about this Mecca I’m swooning over. It’s going to be great.

It’s 750 miles to San Francisco, I’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and I’m wearing sunglasses.  Hit it.

Hello. Since I am going to be out for the next few days with a dental procedure (trust me, you don’t want to know), I thought I’d give you fabulously lucky people a sneak peek at a guest blog I did for the Kiwi Writers. (These are the tremendously talented people who sponsor SocNoc.) It was scheduled to go up today, but I was told it’s actually not going to be posted until June 30th. They said it was a good post to end the month with.

I’ll take that as a compliment.

Writing Challenges—Who, Me?

As a participant from the Northern Hemisphere, I have to admit to not only never accepting the National Novel Writing Month challenge (NaNoWriMo for short, or NaNo for a shorter short), but also never wanting to. November is a time of holidays and decorating and eating and taking walks with your sweetie in the brisk weather. Why dedicate yourself to 1667 words a day during such a fabulous month? So I gave up the idea of a writing challenge, but then two things happened.

Number one, a few members from my writing group (Will Write for Wine) were getting ready to SocNoc and they offered the invitation for us to come and play, too. With such a friendly and gracious invitation, how could I say no?

Number two, and possibly the more important event, was a small realization I had on my way to June 1^st. When thinking about my goals for SocNoc, I realized that I didn’t have to write 50,000 words this month. I know some would say this totally goes against SocNoc (or NaNo or any other similar challenges), but I say it doesn’t.

Once I realized I was released of the daunting task of writing almost 7 pages a day for 30 days, my head was free to explore what I did want out of SocNoc, what would help me most as a writer. I found I wanted the accountability of a solid writing pace, along with the support of fellow writers, of knowing that others were going through the same march I was. Did I want to finish the book I was already 40,000 words into? Absolutely. Did it have to be in June? Not if it didn’t work for me.

So now with less than one week to go, I can see that I’m not going to reach the word count goal I set for myself, but I’ve achieved something better. I tried. I pulled on my boots and I got on the horse. By participating in SocNoc I’ve learned a lot about myself as a writer, things I thought I knew, but didn’t. I’ve also gained a support system that’s going to last me long past June 30^th and those people are going to help me more than crunching out 50,000 words ever would have.

So for those of you who have felt apprehensive or depressed or icky about participating in a writer’s challenge because the goal seemed too daunting, I say set a new goal. I stand here as living proof that the Challenge Police don’t come to your door and make you finish those last 31,667 words you promised you’d write. The next time SocNoc or NaNo comes around, take a deep breath and ask yourself what you want out of it. Then do it.

Trust me, you’ll be glad you did.

Yes, I am still alive. I know those of you wonderful, patient, divine people who are still checking back in hopes that some words, any words, be posted here are happy to hear that. And I am happy to say it.

I did have my first brain leakage on Tuesday night. (I’m such a wuss.) Only 10 days into SocNoc and I start stumbling like Tonya Harding kneecapped me. Obviously I’m more of a distance writer than a sprinter. I am still writing, still aiming high, and am tickled I’m taking part in this writing challenge. You see, I’ve always wondered about doing NaNo, especially after the Wiffers had such a strong showing this year, but had rationalized it away with “getting ready for the holidays and all.” June had no holidays (or at least any I had to get ready for) so it was a great time to try a 30 day writing sprint (or as I referenced it to Caryn, 30 Days of Write. I thought it was funny.)

Am I going to finish my book in June? Not without enough Red Bull to power Chicago and a carefree abandonment of Montana, my job and sanity. But that’s okay, finishing the book was never my goal, I just wanted the accountability and support to get on a good writing pace, and I’ve found that. Woot for me! I know I’ve totally slacked off (forsaken is such an ugly word) on blogging and visiting other blogs, and I’ll pick that up again—I promise!—but the book is always going to come first. (Protect the writing, as the venerable Jenny Crusie would say.) I hope to return the gift of patience and support to all of you when you’re writing like fiends and my brains have returned to solid form.

So on other, lighter thoughts, in addition to writing a bunch, I’ve had a tremendous week with other areas of writing. I got to see Laurell K. Hamilton (and have her sign 2 books) and am thrilled and delighted to say that she’s very charismatic! I even got my picture taken with her for posterity—of course since I’m 5’8” she only comes up to my shoulder and I look like a freak of nature by comparison, but guess who she’s gonna call when she needs the cookies on the top shelf? Not me, that’s who.

Then, two days later, got to hear Lee Child, who I’ve not read, but Montana really likes. I learn something at every author event I go to and since Montana braved Susan Elizabeth Philips with me a few years ago and got targeted by her for the man’s view when it came to some questions, I certainly owed him. Yes, it was fabulous and I learned something. Dang, I love these events!

Some really fun news is I’ve purchased/ordered/claimed a website and played with it last weekend. As I’ve promised before, when it’s up, I’m posting it here first, so be on the lookout in the next few weeks. And the great thing is, it’s really fun! I giggled most of last weekend on a residual high from playing in my spot in cyberspace. (And now I can get my business cards—that’ll be goal #2 I can accomplish before Nationals.)

I think that’s it. I hope you’re having a great month. I certainly am.  And, since my usual zinger of an ending is so obviously missing, I think I’ll end with a cartoon. After all, distraction is the highest form of flattery.

Hello and welcome! It’s Day Three of SocNoc and I’m doing okay. No, I really mean that. Last week I kept alternating between hysterical giggles and periods of intense despair, but once Sunday hit, I took a tortoise-type view of it (instead of some of those crazy people who are doing it from the hare’s perspective), and things are going well. I do happen to think this period of wellness is more of a universal sense than just SocNoc, so my Tuesday Ten today is about the Crazy Good things that have been happening lately. Let’s rock on, shall we?

1.   The writing is going well, not only with SocNoc, but in general. I’m past the second turning point, and yesterday the girls sent up several wonderful scenes, all around a central occurrence. They escalate the tension, create more conflict (both external and internal), and throw the ticking clock into sharp relief. After those scenes comes a sequence I’ve got more or less figured out, then some gray areas, then the Big Black Moment and downhill ride, all planned out in my head. (And on paper—I know better than to trust my head.) Whee!

2.   I got my order from Amazon yesterday, which includes my copy of Jess Riley’s Driving Sideways, and the first three graphic novels of The Astonishing X-Men, as written by Joss Whedon. I am in print heaven!

(This next one you have to promise not to make fun of me before you read.)

3.   Earlier this year, I finally listened to the thousands of romance readers and writers who have raved about Loretta Chase’s book, Lord of Scoundrels, and picked up a copy. They were all right—this book is fabulous, wonderful, amazing and will make you cry in realizing most of us mere mortals will never be able to wield a pen (or keyboard) this way. So enchanted was I, an immediate trip to the bookstore to pick up Lord Perfect was necessitated. Could lightning strike twice? Oh yes, it did. I was gasping before I left page one. Being a bona-fide fan, I finally did what any other fan would do—I checked out her webpage. Your Scandalous Ways came out last week? Rapture! But here’s the really good news—Loretta (I can call her that since we’re such close and personal friends) does a group blog with Mary Jo Putney, Jo Beverly, Edith Layton, Patricia Rice, Sarah Gabriel, and Susan Holloway Scott. How could I not have known about this wonderful, lush, incredible collection of writers before?

4.   I’m one step away from ordering my webpage. All I have to do is decide which template I want to start with and then press the button. I’ve got some pretty good choices, all that will make me happy to have my name on and I’m getting itchy to order it and start diving in to the customizing. My goal of having a basic webpage set up before Nationals is coming closer to being checked off. And as soon as it’s ready, it’ll be unveiled here first.

5.   Between SocNoc and Will Write for Wine and blogging and The Cherries, I’m building a fabulous network full of amazing friends, readers and writers. I feel blessed beyond chocolate and thank each and every one of you. Mwah!

6.   Saturday morning, the girls gifted me with a very fleshed-out idea for a YA book. We’re talking hook, theme and arc, characters, plot directions, turning points—it was all there in one form or another. Now, you may be asking yourself, “But Pam, I don’t remember you ever talking about YA except for a few books you recommended. I didn’t know you wanted to write it.” And you’re right! I’ve got enough not only planned between the para-lite-rom-com and my tortured historicals, but with my other “stuff on the horizon” that I was assured of projects for years and years to come. But this sounds like a fun book, one that really weaves together a lot of what makes me go “ooh!” and then wraps it with a big brocade bow. It’s playing in deep in the dirt for now, so we’ll see what happens, but if my brains do start leaking out of my ears, you’ll know why.

Well, I’m sorry to say the Tuesday Ten has turned into the Tuesday Six. Nothing else is jumping to mind and rather than force four more entries, I’m going to do the merciful thing and stop the list. This is just for today and falls under the SocNoc rules of The Blog’s Going to be a Little Thin This Month. I’ll make it up to you, I promise. Here, let me distract you with something cute (and Australian, in honor of SocNoc):

There, don’t you feel better now?

First, I must offer deepest apologies to those of you who have been looking for my Tuesday Ten. I even had a swell post in mind, listing the reasons I’m hyperventilating about the Southern Cross Writer’s Challenge(a.k.a. SocNoc) I’ve signed up for in June. Then I see my writing bud Carynhas blogged about it and I’d hate to copy her cat, so I may end up doing that next Tuesday. In fact, this may move up to a moral imperative as Montana asked me where my Tuesday Ten was last night. Ye-owch.

I think another reason I didn’t set fingers to keyboard is my writer’s brain is still going. In fact, it feels like it’s racing so fast that it’s making Sunday’s Indy 500 look like a bunch of old ladies in their 1979 Oldsmobiles going to church. The rope I’m holding onto in the middle of this storm is I’m picking up my pace with my writing. (No wonder–I’ve got 50,000 words to do in June. Hang on–I’ve gotta go breath into a paper bag.) I’ve written 15 pages across Sunday, Monday and Tuesday and have plans to add to that tonight. All good, right? Of course right–that wasn’t a trick question.

But, I say, but! In the midst of this writing pace lap to the 500 miles of my book, I’ve had some great conversations with Montana and my CP about Book #4–the parnomal lite romantic comedy (para lite rom com). I’m giving the heroine sucha better goal (and conflict), giving my overly beta male a little shot of personality Viagra, and bringing the original trilogy I had in mind to a tight, cohesive place. This is no longer your grandmother’s edit. We’re talking big changes–not enormous, but big. All with the thought of pitching this at Nationals at the end of July. With the SocNoc challenge for June. (Damn. Where’s that paper bag?) But I really can’t complain about this–these are fabulous changes and are going to make this book (and the succeeding two) so much stronger and tighter and better. How can I kvetch that the girls are sending all of these changes up? It’s money, baby. Money.

So I am a bit scattered. All of my focus is on those two books so everything else is racing in circles around them. (See, tied in the Indy 500 reference again. Guess my focus likes obvious metaphors.) If I were Luke I’d be dropping Yoda on his little green butt.

Luke: I can’t believe it.

Yoda: That is why you fail.

Hmm. Maybe the little green guy was onto something after all.  

So Wednesday night I’m all tucked in, drifting off to a much-needed night of sleep when it happened. (I’d be amazed if this had never happened to any of you.)

My book woke me up.

I’m writing along on Book #5, happy as a clam, but I’m also doing some smoothing on Book #4, contemplating a light rewrite of the first scene. I’ve never been the type to go to sleep the instant my head hits the pillow, so I’m used to letting my mind wind down after the lights go out. Sometimes I can guide my mind in a certain direction, sometimes I can’t. Wednesday night we seemed to agree–I’d think about the first scene of Book #4. 

After two minutes or twenty, I’ve managed to come up with what I thought was a pretty good first paragraph–it made my heroine sympathetic, established her goal, and set the tone of the book, all in three lovely sentences. What a wonderful way to drift off to sleep, right? Because I knew I’d remember this in the morning, right? And you know where this is going, right?

Wrong.

Been there, done that. I’ve told myself I’d remember it in the morning more than Nora’s written ‘The End’ and have had disastrous results each time, so I’ve finally learned my lesson. I got up, turned on my laptop and wrote those three lovely sentences down. Then, I got back into bed and went to sleep the instant my head hit the pillow. 

Damn writer’s brain.

I’ve discovered another thing you can’t turn off once you cross the threshold into WriterLand is the dreaded movie eye. This is where you watch a movie, even a movie you’ve watched countless times before with a childlike innocence, and dissect it like Buffy fighting a vengeance demon. You see the arcs, the continuity errors, the theme, the infodump and backstory, the turning points, and depending on how good or bad some of those craft techniques are, you say something. After all, you have to. When I watched August Rush with my mother a few weeks ago, I couldn’t hold my tongue after what was essentially the second beginning, and there was no way I could be silent after the third. And a month ago when I watched Twister for the umpteenth time because it’s a fun way to pass two hours, I saw Jo and Bill’s arcs and how they tied into the theme and forced Montana to watch it (again) with me, liberally using the pause button to show him what I discovered. 

It’s true. Once you’ve looked behind the curtain and discovered the great and wonderful Oz, there’s no going back. 

It’s a very special day here at Pam Writes Romance–I’m doing my first author interview and it’s also the release day for this author’s debut novel. Ten questions on a Tuesday Ten, that Tuesday being release day? That’s some major karma there, but I can’t take all of the credit. I think you’re going to be wonderfully enchanted by Jess. She’s got the off-center sense of humor and underlying determination that I really enjoy. In fact, when reading Jess’s replies to my interview questions, I kept feeling more and more at home with her, like she was somebody I could have sat down in a coffeeshop with and not left for hours because she was so much fun to talk to. So that you can love her as much as I do, let me introduce her properly and then get on to the interview.

Jess Riley is the author of Driving Sideways, a story about Leigh Fielding and how Leigh wants a life. Seriously. Having spent the past five years on dialysis, she has one simple wish: to make it to her thirtieth birthday. Now, thanks to the generosity of the late Larry Resnick and his transplanted kidney, it looks like her wish may come true.

With her newfound vitality (and Larry’s kidney) in tow, Leigh hits the road for an excursion that will carry her from Wisconsin to California, with a few stops in between: Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, the Rockies, Las Vegas–and a memorable visit to thank Larry’s family for the second chance.

Yet Leigh’s itinerary takes a sudden detour when she picks up a seventeen-year-old hitchhiker, Denise, a runaway with a bunch of stories and a couple of secrets. Add a long-lost mother, a loaded gun, an RV full of swingers, and Hall and Oates’s Greatest Hits to the mix, and Driving Sideways becomes a hilarious and original journey of friendship, hope, and discovery.

3. Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently? Did you break any rules along the way?

Other than nearly being orphaned and switching publishing houses (which delayed the book release for a year but kept me paired with an awesome editor who ‘gets’ the book), I am very lucky that things have mostly gone smoothly for me, and I don’t know if I’d have done anything differently. I think I’ll have some thoughts on things I’d do differently on the promotion-side of things, after the book’s been out for some time.

After the resounding rejections for novel number one, I became methodical about improving my writing and approaching agents with a polished, professional project. So, after a rebellious start, I became a real rule-follower. But I skipped the ‘write and publish short stories first’ rule. Instead I wrote grant proposals and entered a few contests, doing well enough to ultimately attract the attention of several agents.

4. What is your day-to-day writing process?

During the school year, when I’m writing grant proposals, I am too mentally exhausted to write much fiction. But I’m very fortunate to have summers off to write, and then I write daily until the muse closes up shop. Or the ice cream truck drives me crazy.

5. Panster or plotter?

Kind of a plotter, in a very broad way…before I start a novel I figure out the conflict & climax, but how the characters get to the end (which is still a mystery to me at that point) is very much done by the seat of my pants.

6. If an evil gremlin (gotta love a question that starts with an evil gremlin) came and took away the one thing that would cause you to give up writing, what would it be?

Hmmm…the one thing that would cause me to stop writing…death? J Actually, self-doubt … that would be really nice to live without, as far as its effect on writing.

7. What’s been your craziest writer moment so far?

This is a fun question. Probably getting a personal email from Marian Keyes with a fantastic endorsement for Driving Sideways. That was crazy in the ‘wildly fantastic and unexpected’ sense. Also, moving the book contract from HarperCollins to Random House. I had no idea that was even possible.  

I may have some really fun answers to this question after I’ve done some readings this summer.

8. What would you be doing in an alternate universe? Or maybe I should ask, in any of the alternate universes out there, what is Jess Riley doing in them?

Let’s hope she’s not procrastinating! I think the alternate me is an urban garden or native plant consultant. She’s a nerdy, walking encyclopedia about plant care and the fauna certain flora can attract, and she drives friends and family a little wonky sometimes.

Oh wait. I kind of do that now.

9. What’s next? What are you looking forward to? What are you not?

I’m working on a novel that takes place in a medium-security men’s prison, actually. (Sounds like a barrel of laughs, right?) I taught in such a facility in college, and discovered the setting was actually FULLof opportunities for warped humor and darkly funny storylines. The next novel focuses on the relationships between several staff members and examines how we heal after a particularly gruesome romantic betrayal. I’m having a blast with it.

So, I’m looking forward to finishing the next book. And I’m looking forward to connecting with readers…I’m not a natural salesperson, so I’m not really looking forward to some of the things on the promotion-end of the spectrum. But I’ll try to have fun with them anyway.

10. Wild card–what do we need to know about you?

Well, I don’t know if you need to know it, but it is something people get a kick out of: in the summer, I grow milkweed and raise Monarch caterpillars. Last year I released 48 butterflies in my backyard. 

Oh, and you won’t solve the ‘nature vs. nurture’ dilemma with me: my biological and adoptive fathers both were/are English majors and writers.

Now do you see why I’m going to be referring to her far and wide as my BFF? I’ve placed my order with Amazon today and have already started looking in my email for the tracking confirmation. This book sounds so funny and so sweet that I’m stocking up on Kleenex to both wipe away the tears and the diet Coke that spews out of my nose. And I was tickled to notice that she’s going to be presenting at RWA Nationals this year, so I get a chance to stalk, er, meet her in person.