Thank you, Everyone, who stopped by and made the book review party so fun!

The winner of the copy of A ROGUE BY ANY OTHER NAME is:

What a lame-o title. Sorry, folks.

I’m still revising. I know. It probably feels like forever to you too. I swear, I’m almost done. I’ve got about another 50 pages to cover, I think, and then I’ll be ready for people to read it and let me know where it sucks for them. Because I’ve done what I could with the sucky parts that I see.

You know, the past three months have been a real eye-opener. I’d love to say in only good ways. Like I'd love to say I’ve had some massive epiphanies and that the heavenly host alighted while I revised or some such. But I’d be lying. I’ve had to fight hard for the eye-opening parts and some of them just hit me on the head by accident.

So, I thought I’d share these things for you. I give you, the four things I've learned.

1). Take a Break. No, seriously, this is huge. After you hit the end of the first draft, for the love of all that is good and holy, TAKE TIME OFF! Find something to distract yourself. Go on vacation. Plan to finish right before the holidays so festivities sweep you away. Take on a DIY project. That’s what I did, I painted my kitchen cabinets. You don’t have to be that ambitious (read: crazy), but do yourself this favor and step away. A first draft needs time to ferment in your mind. Right after I finish, I can still hear the way I thought it should sound echoing around in my head. I needed the time to stop hearing it, to forget what I “meant” to say so that I could read it and hear what I really said. Definitely worth it.

I’d like to say I’ve always taken this advice. But I didn’t. Not my last two completed manuscripts.

2). Make a Game Plan. This one is my own personal thing, but maybe it’ll work/help you readers as well. For me, revising my novel seemed like this huge, insurmountable undertaking. So, I went at it like I do other seemingly insurmountable undertakings: I came up with a strategy to get from Point A to Point B.

In this way, I formulated a plan to tackle my manuscript. I decided to do Big Picture things first and then tackle the finer details (ie grammar, word choice, etc).

I write in Four Acts. So I went back to my outline and started with the first act. I looked at each scene, tried to picture how the story “should” flow, and I rearranged scenes. Then I thought about what each scene accomplished and made sure that they did what they were supposed to do. I moved forward in this way through each of my acts.

When I finished that, I went through and looked for emotional flow. What was keeping them apart physically? Then, after they did the nasty, what kept them from being together emotionally?

I’m just finishing up that part right now. Then I’ll hit it for grammar and word stuff and then I’ll let people read it.

I have no idea if this will work for you, but it’s how I did this one. Will it work for everything I write in the future? No clue. But it was something and certainly something better than staring at my monitor and feeling helpless.

3). Be Strategic about the Reveal. When I started to revise, I decided to wait to let others read it until I’d done what I could with it. I’m not sure yet if this was a good tactical decision or not. My thought process was that I wanted to get through my own “vision” before I let anyone have any input into how my vision translated for them. I’ll keep you posted on how this works out for me.

And--- my final thought here---
4). Emotion Trumps Plot. Please note, I have not become a pantser. You may all have a seat again, relax. What I mean is that I have realized that no matter how you plot, if my story doesn’t have that emotional pow, it’s going to be boring. This is sort of a topic for a bigger blog post, but I will add it here anyway. I’ve just been struck again by how plot is important but we read for the emotion.

So, how’s writing going ladies? What have you learned during revisions? Any major epiphanies? Anything that you’ve heard people say before but didn’t listen until you got there and made the mistake anyway?

I have had an embarrassment of riches--books to review on the RWR site--and I'm commandeering Tuesdays for book reviews. The first book I'm reviewing for this new tradition is the much anticipated and eagerly awaited Sarah MacLean novel, A Rogue By Any Other Name.

I am a lucky pirate and you can be too.

I just finished reading Sarah MacLean’s newest delicious truffle of delight: A Rogue By Any Other Name. Delectable. Actually “truffle” implies something light and frothy—and this was really dark, rich, and sustaining. Like Starbuck’s coffee, maybe. A little frothy foam on top for sweetness, and dark and rich goodness to flood your veins and make you believe in a new day again. Yeah. Like that.

The hero was yummy, yummy delectable, though a bit of, well, a rogue. He, of course, has excellent reason to be a rogue—you burn for him, you do, but he’s a truly complex and broken hero who you want to wrap in a snuggie, feed him soup, and reassure him it’s all going to work out all right. The heroine does us one better and devastates him in (and out of) the bedroom. (Which is only fair, because he does his own share of being a devastating creature.) So when I wasn’t sad and weepy for either the hero or the heroine’s unfair life situations and hurt feelings, I was amazed my fingers weren’t scorching, turning the pages to some of the hottest love scenes I’ve read twice. (Believe me, they all need to be read twice. The man is delicious.) Complex, sensuous, life- and love-affirming—this book had it and a box of chocolates. Love really does conquer all.

As far as plots go, it works a nice Shakespearean kind of revenge. Our hero is young and foolish—as young men frequently are—and during a “winning streak” at the gaming tables, wagers everything not entailed on the turn of some cards. He loses everything to his guardian, the guardian who had spent the last several years building up the fortune that the hero was due to inherit through no work of his own. Of course, our burned and bitter hero seeks revenge at all costs, to claim back his inheritance and ruin the man who ruined him. The book is only missing a sword fight to make it really Shakespeare, but there are a few really lovely brawls for the pirate who adores a bit of blood-lust in her novels.

There are romantic moments galore to show the growth between the hero and heroine—mostly to show how far he has come because he has a long, long, long, long, long way to get to his happy ending. In fact, when I finally arrived at the Happily Ever After and our hero was pouring out all his apologies and “I love yous”, I was a bit, “Okay, enough already. He’s waxing way poetic.” But then I thought about it. I loved the hero—I felt bad for him—but he was an ass. He needed to grovel. If he was effusive in his praise of his bride, she deserved it for putting up with all the shoddy behavior he exhibited to her.

This story was just the sort of fantasy I love to get my hands on and consume in one sitting: Beauty and the Beast—the selfish prince who doesn’t believe he’s worthy of being loved by the woman he’s fallen in love with. Only her love can transform him back into a man, and it does.

Ms. MacLean hit this one out of the ballpark and set up her next book in one fell swoop, and I don’t know how she did it, but she managed to make me long for the next book even more than I longed for this one! Well done, Ms. MacLean!

Best of all, A Rogue By Any Other Name is out today, February 28, 2012. Go get it!

Now—to make another pirate as lucky as me. One lucky commenter will win a copy of A Rogue By Any Other Name (not my copy—a new copy I didn’t drool on). To be eligible, your comment should be either your favorite book featuring Beauty and the Beast as its structure or the book/series you’re looking most forward to devouring this year?

So we've got this lovely revamped ship, with awesome new digs by our revamp artist Carrie and Terri assisted (because Terri is awesome at these things). Getting a new home, pulling back into our first port and taking a look around with more experienced eyes puts me back into memory lane.

But I'm not going to rehash a blog that I wrote five years ago or anything for this occasion. No, I think we should take the day to consider how far we've all grown in the past five years. Five years ago I wouldn't come out and say that before I start a story, I need to outline and see where it's all really going. Five years ago, I was just starting out with the writing thing. I had no direction. No clarity of where I wanted to be.

Things that have changed for me from the time we were in our old port (blogspot) to our new port (URL) and back to our beginnings:

1. I have a grasp on outlining.

2. I can write in actual format.

3. I have this insane need to write the entire story before posting. (Of course, this applies only to my fan fic writing.)

4. I love all my heroes. And most of my heroines. This was not so much the case when I first started writing originals.

I'm sure there are other things that have changed for me in the writing world but as of right now, this isn't just about me. This is about you- our readers, our fellow writers- and how you've changed since you've become our blog mate, our faithful blog readers and our friends. So take today to tell us how you've grown. (And I'm sure it's okay to comment on how much you like our revamped look.) I can tell you it's nice to be “home”.

Music Influence: “Scars Align” Cyrenic (Dying to Live, 2011)

 

I spent a large amount of time traveling on Thursday from airport to airport hoping planes as if I were an Easter bunny tripping on sugar. Had twelve minutes to make a connection flight in Salt Lake City- don’t think I’ve ever run through an airport faster in my entire life. An airport is a world all to itself. When you're inside it's a complete different mindset. Even the most bashful of people will find their inner hellcat. You have to bite, scratch, claw your way into position to board the plane. You have to elbow and throw dirty looks at the guy sitting next to you taking up half your elbow space. And put up with the other person getting rip roaring drunk, which in turn, you have to get drunk to deal. Airplane courtesy is not everyday courtesy. It's a one man island. You've gotta look out for yourself and say screw the others. Leave them for the sharks.

But while I was doing all this traveling I had nothing more to do than read. And I’ve seriously been low on reading time lately. I’m three years behind on Melissa Marr’s faerie series and I absolutely love these books. The Fae world is a world within our own as the Fae walk the streets most humans are oblivious to their presence unless the Fae want the humans to see. There are a few humans who have the sight. The notion of something abnormal happening in the normal intrigues me. This is the type of Urban Fantasy I enjoy reading. The world within the world.

The world of mythical creatures inhabiting the world I know enthrall me. As if I were the one walking down a dark alley with enchanted eyes watching me, waiting to make a move. The world where creatures of the night fight with one another. The world where only in my wildest imagination things happen. This is essential when writing Urban Fantasy novels. Build your world around the one the reader can understand and relate to. I’ve read a lot of fantasy/paranormal books where as the reader I can’t relate to the characters or the world they live in. Either the explanation isn’t there for the world, or the creatures who inhabit the world are too strange and foreign for comprehension. This is a problem I have as a writer. It’s so hard to paint the right picture for your reader when you see it so vividly in your head but lack the worlds to properly explain it. And when you’re beginning to write a new world, you want to dump as much information into the beginning as you can possible pack. You want the reader to experience the world immediately, when actually; you want the reader to wade in slowly as if to test the waters. Too much information could spook off a reader from reading your really kick ass world you’ve built.

So what I want to know from my fellow readers and writers is how do you wade in? You don’t have to be writing (or reading) a paranormal/urban fantasy novel to see the world within the world. We all create our own world when writing. What’s the right mixture in the beginning of the world the reader knows and relates and the world you’ve built and created? What’s the best world you’ve read in a book lately? Anyone read any really good paranormal or urban fantasy novels?

 

One of the major principles of Weight Watchers—or really any eating plan in which you want to lose weight—is planning. If you don’t plan to succeed, then you’re planning to fail.

This is never more evident than when you don’t pre-determine what you’ll be eating through out the week, or at least hatch some possible plans to pick from if you don’t like being tied to one thing. The benefit to planning healthy foods to keep you from overeating also keeps you (usually) from overspending. You’re not going out to eat every night, you’re not planning last minute meals that require you to buy everything each night—no, instead you’re taking stock of what you do have, what you are capable of making and what you enjoy, and creating from that.

If you’re not a leftovers person, then you have to figure out what one portion meals are easy to throw together without involving a lot of prep work. I like having pre-cooked chicken or beef and making various things: Italian, Mexican, or Chinese themed that can be adjusted by using different sauces or vegetables. But I also enjoy making a meal—like meatloaf—and figuring it out how to use it to make something new a couple meals later, like Bolognese sauce.

I am pretty good at this because 1.) I’m not adverse against recycling what I already have; 2.) I’ve cooked enough that I can be flexible and creative about it without relying too heavily on following the recipe exactly; and 3.) I plan. Food matters to me. I love food. Some people eat to live, but I’m definitely a live to eat type of gal.

Now think of writing.

If you want to succeed in finishing your novel, you need to plan—or you’ll be planning to fail. Have a goal—you want to write a story where the hero triumphs and love conquers all, great—and decide how you’re going to make that happen.

You don’t want to grow bored while you’re writing, so take some basic ingredients that can carry over into whatever you’re doing. The rakish hero, the intelligent but plain heroine—and think of the ways you usually like to devour these characters when they’re presented by other writers. How can you make this recipe your own? What tricks do you know that can make the story better, funnier, more emotional?

Take a classic story line—like Beauty and the Beast—and figure out how you can make a different twist or story out of it. Is the woman the beast? Does she lose her beauty? How do you take a successful “recipe” for storytelling and create something new? How do you make a fusion of your two favorite writing styles? You play with it. You take a chance. The worst that will happen is that you have to throw it out, but most of the time, it’s still edible…and sometimes you come up with something truly delicious and innovative.

Be daring. I know you’re good at this because I’m sure you’ve all already taken to recycling things from your own writing that you couldn’t use in another story, something too good to bury forever. You’re great writers and you keep improving because you’re always writing or thinking of writing. The only thing left is to plan…plan for your success. Really think about your story and the story questions. What do you wish to achieve with this story? And like nearly all achievements, the best ones are the ones for yourself and not for others. Writing for yourself first is almost always more successful than just picking something you think will sway the marketing trends. The marketing trends are always fickle.

It’d be like if the marketing world’s new trend was BEETS, but I hate beets, I don’t even like to eat them—so how could I possibly cook with them? And usually these sorts of trends only last a year or two, which is the average length it takes a person to get published anyway. Wouldn’t it make more sense to find a food you’re passionate about and write about that? You love chocolate…and beta scholars—then write about them. Maybe some sweet, sensitive hero discovers how to make the world’s best chocolate bar. Wouldn’t we all love to read about that guy? Haven’t we all wanted to thank him?

Write what you love. Make a plan. Realize nothing worth doing is going to happen overnight.

In the meantime, if you want to learn more about planning your novel, I highly, HIGHLY recommend the book: Outlining Your Novel by K.M. Weiland. (Incidentally the Kindle version is only $2.99! What a deal!) I’m reading it now and writing in my notebook as I go along. It’s definitely one of the top five craft books I’ve ever read. Structured enough to keep you progressing, creative enough not to make you feel stymied. This is a woman in favor of a plan.

So it’s Monday…and I’m sure everyone’s not done being hungover yet. But once you get a few cups of coffee in you, let’s talk about planning, cooking, and success. What types of things do you plan in your writing/novels or other things in life? Do you have a favorite recipe that you’ve had to lighten up over the years so you can keep enjoying it? What do you think it takes to be successful?