Online Critique

  I am so excited and grateful! At the Romance Divas site, I found three experienced writers who want to form a critique group. I’ve never had ongoing critique partners online, and I would like feedback. These gals are not “newbies,” so they will be able to give me good critiques. We’re off and running with a new group of four!

Critique is so important. You just can’t see everything in your own work. Sometimes, good critiquers can provide insights and thoughts that add another special spark to your WIP. Plus, they keep you writing. You wouldn’t want to disappoint or let them down!

Have I told you about the Romance Divas site? I believe I have, but I’ll say it again. They are helpful in so many ways! Lots of fun and information. Here’s another benefit of Romance Divas – Robin L. Rotham met their challenge to write a novella and post it for free. Now she’s turned around and sold that very same novella, SENIORELLA, to Ellora’s Cave!

Romance Divas! Go there!

Google You

  I’m wracking my brains for a blog topic today. Melissa and Robin post such cute stories about their homelives, kids, hubbies, etc. I swear nothing ever happens at my house! Dh works 60 hours a week so we’re kind of ships that pass in the night, my daughter is grown and moved out, my cats adore me as usual, and I carry on. If something funny or interesting happens on the homefront, I’ll be sure to blog about it.

In the meantime, here’s something I grabbed off the Romance Divas site:  Wanna know who’s googling you?

http://www.google.com/alerts – Google Alerts…you just enter in your search term and have the results emailed to you.

It’s fun. I did it, and guess what? Nobody was googling me! But maybe you’re more famous than I am. 

Split Personality

  I guess I’m confusing some readers with my many names.

My parents chose the name, “Elizabeth Ann Payne.” I’ve been told they were considering “Diane,” until they sped up the pronunciation and came up with “Dyin’ Pain.”

Growing up, I was always been known as “Betty” or “Betty Ann.” I never really liked “Betty.” It sounds like something from the ’50s. Plain and housewifey.

So when I began writing, I became “Elizabeth” again and try to use it in all my professional activities. Can’t get away from the nickname with people who know me, though.

Somebody online loved the name “Betty,” however! Said it means a hottie — as in “She’s a Betty.” Must come from Betty Boop, I don’t know. And I have been known as “Boops” in one of my incarnations. 

But jeez, just wait until I start publishing again under my pseudonyms:

Historical Romance          - Elizabeth Parker

Contemporary Romance -  Karen Parker
Mystery                              - E.A. Parker
Children’s/YA                   – Echo Howard
Magazine Articles            – Elizabeth Parker
Romantica             – Liz Howard

Hard to keep track of, huh? Sometimes, I feel like a split personality with all my many names. Maybe I should come up with one all-encompassing handle. But what would it be? How about ”Hey You”?

No More Ssshhh!

  So, Captain Morgan drew my attention to a profile of our local guy, Chuck Hagel, in Esquire magazine. I’m not going to talk about Hagel’s politics here, but something about that interview struck home with me: 

 . . . like the moan of a train whistle, soft and distant at first, but with increasing power behind it, the way the trains come through all the small places where Chuck Hagel grew up in Nebraska. All the little towns, where everyone knew if your father was drunk and smashed up the car or lost his job, where every family kept secrets that every other family knew anyway but were too polite or kind to mention. Rushville and York and Ainsworth.

Oh, I know that scenario very well.  I was raised in a town of 860, where everybody knew my dad was a raving alcoholic, but not one person ever mentioned it to me in all the years.

I wish they had. I never thought people were being “kind” or “polite” with their silence. I just remember thinking they didn’t care enough about me to validate my feelings or even listen to them. It was like carrying around a deep, dark burden – a secret that was too terrible to bring into the light of day. It was unmentionable, unspeakable — yet everybody knew it.

The “secret” always made me feel ashamed. Some well-meaning adult should have told me it wasn’t my fault, that I couldn’t stop my dad from drinking, and that it didn’t reflect on me as a person. Kids are very ego-centric and sometimes assume they themselves cause all the family problems.  

I don’t mean to whine though. Things are different today. I’ve often thought that the internet can help kids now. They can google ”alcoholism” or talk about their situation in chat rooms with anonymous friends – and get a better perspective on their ”secrets.”

Blogging also helps. I can casually blog about the “secret” now, and the world won’t come to an end. What a relief!

Just more benefits of our beloved World Wide Web!

Dream Stories

  Over at her blog, Robin L. Rotham wrote about a dream, and it got me to thinking of the dream I had last night. Do you all have a first love that turned out tragically? Do you still dream about him sometimes at night when you’re asleep?

Miles was his name. Sounds like a “knight in shining armor,” doesn’t it? In high school, I thought he was one. He was best at sports, most popular, Homecoming King, had a great sense of humor, loved little kids – he was a big handsome hunk with a sensitive soul. I saw him reading CATCHER IN THE RYE, and I immediately ran out to get it, so he introduced me to Holden Caulfield. Everybody loved Miles, and I did most of all.

But it was so tragic. My sister was jealous, so she told him I didn’t like him. Hated him. That I’d said ugly things about him behind his back (which, of course, I never did). When he was looking for a girlfriend, my sister (who was dating his brother) set him up with her twit girlfriend, instead of me. He went on to marry this girl! They’re still married, as far as I know. I didn’t find out about this subterfuge until much later; but even if I’d known it at the time, I was much too shy to ever approach the Godlike Miles and tell him the truth.

My heart has never fully recovered — from the betrayal, the loss, the shame of him thinking the worst about me.

High school is long over (Thank God!). I now realize Miles wasn’t such a sensitive paragon, after all, or he would have chosen me – sister and subterfuge be damned! After all, Dh (bless his heart) would have none of it when my sister later tried to break us up.

Every once in a while, I still have dreams about Miles though. They come unbidden, out of the blue, like last night. I used to wake from these dreams, ashamed, horrified, and unutterably sad. But over the years, the dreams have changed. Now, when I dream about Miles, we’re happy at last. He finally understands. In last night’s dream, I can’t even remember what the details were, but we were bathed in a soft, warm glow together, and I woke up happy.

I don’t know what this means. Maybe I’ve matured and learned how to choose better dreams. Maybe, from a distance of years, I can see things in perspective. Maybe I’m a happier person than I was then. But it’s funny where our dreams take us. 

Blogosphere

  Well, I’ve been blogging for awhile now, and what have I learned?

(1) First, that I like it! It helps me to write daily and get my thoughts in order. My purpose isn’t that the blog be read by huge numbers of people, and believe me, it’s not. But I do plug along with between 20-40 of my faithful readers checking in. Interestingly, I had a huge spike one day with 143 readers. The title that day? “Character Torture.” Hmm, makes me think the PRE-verts (as Dh would call them) were doing searches for “torture”?  Hehe.  When they got here though, they found a post about writing and didn’t come back. Ah, well . . .

(2) I see that my blogger friends always go back to reply to comments left at their blogs. I hadn’t thought to do that. Duh! I must admit I always go back and read what they replied to my comments. So, I’ll start replying to comments and keep up the conversations.

(3) There’s lots more out there in the world of blogging that I haven’t explored. Technorati, Adsense, MySpace, tagging, RSS feeds. I’ve read articles about people who run 6-10 concurrent blogs on niche topics. They’re blogging full-time for money (by putting ads on their sites and trying to attract a lot of readers who click through the ads). However, that’s not my purpose, and I don’t want this thing to take over my life, so I explore a little bit at a time.

Wonderful new world, and I’ve always been fascinated by “technie” things. So, it’s blog on!  

A Hymn to Proulx

  Therese’s recent post about why books do or don’t “do it for us” made me think about my own reading. I read widely in both fiction and non-fiction because I’m interested and because I look for techniques that can be used in my romance writing. I can usually pick out some small interesting facet to keep me reading most books, but I must admit that very few books truly excite me. Why is this? Sometimes it’s the subject matter that I’m interested in, but the truly exciting books have a great quality of writing.

The last book that awed me was the short story (in a stand-alone edition) of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. In analyzing why the writing so excited me, it was two things:

(1) She has enormous empathy for her characters and makes me feel it. On the second page, we’re introduced to two very real cowboys:

Both high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life.

After Ennis gets married, the details couldn’t be richer:

Their daughter was born and their bedroom was full of the smell of old blood and milk and baby shit, and the sounds were of squalling and sucking and Alma’s sleepy groans, all reassuring of fecundity and life’s continuance to one who worked with livestock.

(2) The writing is never predictable or boring. As one reviewer wrote, “Every single sentence surprises and delights and just bowls you over.” Here are some examples:

It would be Jack Twist’s second summer on the mountain, Ennis’s first. Neither of them was twenty.

Ennis, riding against the wind back to the sheep in the treacherous, drunken light, throught he’d never had such a good time, felt he could paw the white out of the moon.

We can feel the first honest love scene without any lavendar cliches:

Ennis jerked his hand away as though he’d touched fire, got to his knees, unbuckled his belt, shoved his pants down, hauled Jack onto all fours and, with the help of the clear slick and a little spit, entered him, nothing he’d done before but no instruction manual needed.

And the deep POV about the pathos of their doomed love affair makes me feel like crying:

Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it. . . And maybe, he thought, they’d never got much farther than that. Let be, let be.

To me, this is great writing — true art. Few books have it. I can only hope to strive to write like this, always failing, always inspired, always admiring.

A Better World

  I’m substitute teaching in the public schools today — middle grade computer classes. No fistfights in my classroom – but just last week, it was a different story.

I was teaching English in another middle school, and they were working independently. Heads bent over desks. Pens on paper. Everything nice and quiet. All of a sudden, a Black girl flew across the room and began beating up a Hispanic girl. I mean, hitting, punching, slapping, kicking, etc. The Hispanic girl fought back; but, by and large, she was getting the worst of it. I told them to stop, but they wouldn’t, so I called the office. A calm voice said, ”Somebody will be right down.” Before anybody could appear, the two girls ran out of the classroom and were intercepted in the hall. They were taken to the principal’s office.

I never did find out how or why the fight started. Later in the day, students told me that the Black girl had been suspended. These things are sad and upsetting, but it was amazing how the other kids just laughed and continued on as if everything was normal. The fight in their classroom didn’t seem to faze them.

Today is a much better day. Here’s something that’s posted on the wall of the computer room. I’m going to copy it here, because I want to remember it:

I can take good care of myself, even if I am mad!

I can be productive and accomplish things, even if I don’t feel like it.

I can be okay, even when others are not okay.

Pretty cool, huh? These are words of wisdom to help middle-school kids; but if we all just followed these simple ideas, what a better world it would be. 

Love Scenes

  I found something today that should help with my rewrite. The editor told me to add “more and varied” sex scenes in the book, since it’s for a publisher of erotic romance. But it just didn’t feel right to gratuitously add sex scenes to plump up the word count. It’s also hard to keep these scenes fresh and different. What to do?

Then I found Angela Knight’s blog, Knight Errant. She’s a very successful writer, and here’s her advice:

Love scenes need to grow out of the characters themselves. Every time the hero and heroine go to bed together, it should reflect where they are in their relationship. In fact, ideally you should be able to read through the sex scenes alone and track the progress of the romance through the book.

In that first scene, maybe they’re uncertain or cautious or exploring — or maybe they just go nuts from pent-up sexual tension. In the next scene, maybe they’ve had an argument right before going to bed, and that anger bubbles under the surface so that the love scene becomes another expression for the conflict.

Thank you, Angela! Wise words of advice indeed. Writing this way focuses on the romance, which is always the most important part anyway.

This is one of the wonderful things about Romance Writers of America. Authors are willing to freely and unselfishly share what they know, what they’ve learned “in the trenches,” their words of advice. What a great group!

February Progress

  I’m so scared, my stomach hurts! I had submitted a novella to Ellora’s Cave, and just got their letter back. They want me to revise and resubmit. The letter was very positive, giving specific suggestions on what to revise.

So, why am I scared? Well, to be this close — what if I don’t revise it right?

*sigh*

But I ALWAYS counsel writers to never ignore positive letters like this — to just knuckle down and do the work they suggest. It is very foolish to not follow through after you’ve come so far. So I will take my own advice and do the work. I do have critique partners to help and cheer me on, thank goodness.

February Progress:  I mailed out no new submissions, but I did lose another 1.8 pounds, for a grand total of 4.8 pounds lost. Next week, I should get my Weight Watchers “5-lb-loss silver star”! 

All this reminds me of something Napoleon Bonaparte once said:  “I’ve discovered a very strange thing — men are willing to die for a piece of ribbon.”

Yes, and diet for a silver star. Hehe.