Oregon-- my inspiration

When writing a book, decisions will be made on plot and characters. These can come from many sources. In my opinion, one of the characters will always be the setting. A strong setting for a book does a lot to establish the reader in the story even if that setting is all imaginary. 

Living or spending a lot of time in a place is not required for using a region or city as the setting. Writers can also make up settings. Outlander, which is so set in Scotland for country, ethos and energy, proves such a story can be written since Diana Gabaldon says she had not been there before she wrote the book (although she has been there many times since). What she did was a lot of research to make it seem real to the reader.

Most of my books have been set in Oregon as it is the state where I was born as well as where I have spent most of my life. It's not though why I set my stories here. That is because I love it so much. I think even when I do base a story other places, the ethos of Oregon goes with me. 

I know it well because it's where I often choose to vacation. For  vacations, I like to be where I can spend enough time to just sit, experience, feel the soil, smell the fragrances, dip my hand in the water, and then draw on those memories when I need them, when I yearn to return, but cannot. 

Although I have traveled around the US (mostly due to circumstances that involved family or work), when it's my choice, I head for somewhere in the American West. I love this land. It speaks to me from the Rockies and Big Horns to the Pacific Ocean. 

The American West is where I have based all my stories, contemporary and historical. It will be where I want my ashes put someday (although exact location I am still considering). Even when I set a story in some other state, the spirit of Oregon comes with it.

Finding just a few photos to show why Oregon is so special, why I have based ten of my books (four currently unpublished) wasn't easy. It is a diverse state with many different ecological zones. You might think you know it; but if you haven't been here a lot of years and spent time in various parts of it, you most likely do not.

 Yes, those are a lot of photos and barely touch on all that I love about my home state. There are none of the Wallowas, Metolius, The Gorge, or Southern Oregon. Well maybe in a future blog because I have hundreds of photos of this place I love so much and feel fortunate to live.

sexuality in art

image from Canstock

In a world as divided on sexuality as ours is, any writer or even artist will have to decide whether they express sexuality in their work or avoid the issue. It is possible to write books with no sexuality at all or with just the implication some might be there. Think back to the days of Gunsmoke when Marshal Dillon had a girlfriend who ran a bar and maybe a bordello but did anything ever go on between them? You could imagine what you pleased. A writer of romances or any genre, except erotica, has that option.

Once the writer has written the book and a sexual relationship is there, then the question of covers arises. Famous writers, who sell books on their reputations, don't need anything to tell the potential reader what will be inside. For those not so well-known, a cover is part of what alerts the reader to what they will find and this benefits reader and writer (writers do not want disappointed readers).

How readers see covers has been an education for me. For some, a sweet cover with a man's shirt buttoned to the neck would be better. And that is probably true-- if the book is a sweet romance with no sex, but when someone writes what I do, I think a cover should depict the energy of the book. My sex scenes are not graphic, but they are there.

In the culture in which I live, nudity is suspect (especially male)-- even if it's just the guy's chest. Violence is fine but absolutely no bare skin of desirable parts (and a man and woman both have desirable chests). I ran into this zeitgeist with my painting and sculpture. I got past personally worrying about it with both.

Besides doing sculptures of nudes of both sexes, I also painted women and men without clothing (some more discretely than others). I did it when I felt it better told the story-- and I always felt my fantasy paintings or sculptures of people told a story often ambiguous but nevertheless a story.

Currently I don't sculpt or paint mainly due to time constraints and also with sculpture, it takes up a lot of space in the house. I don't sell the work nor do I hang the nudes here or in our Tucson house because I know that kind of art offends some people.

A story that goes along with it involves my going into an art gallery and seeing a clay bas-relief of man and woman that I liked. As I discussed it with the owner, she said a mother had come into her gallery with two sons, saw a nude male sculpture, and expressed her offense as she took them right back outside. These were boys. Shouldn't they know already how nude men look? This thinking regarding nudity-- partial or otherwise-- goes way back in our culture and not apt to change soon.

So by the time I got to putting my books out, I knew sex would be a public issue. I took time to think about it, as who likes to have people think poorly of them? It took me awhile to decide how much sex would be in the published books. 

What I decided is we need more depictions of healthy sexuality-- the steamy, consensual, responsible kind, which is not abusive nor manipulative. I am not trying to write about sex as it always is but as it can be. I also don't write about casual encounters, but that doesn't necessarily mean married. When the sex occurs, it's when it naturally would for these two people. It also does not solve all their problems as if by magic. It is part of a whole relationship-- not all of it.

This year I had brought out a series of asexual novellas-- fantasy western contemporary. When I decided to put them together in one book, I added back in the sexual encounters I had glossed over and only suggested before. I frankly liked the book better. It felt more complete. I then pulled the novellas as I didn't want to confuse readers. They get all three in the book but they also get the whole enchilada for each of the three couples.

Where it comes to reading someone else's books, I don't buy them based on sweet or spicy. I buy based on wanting a certain type of story. If there is too much sex in a book, dragging on and on, I'll skip those scenes. I also don't mind if there is none. It's not a factor to me. What is a factor is responsible behavior in hero and heroine. If it's not there, I will toss a book into the garbage, and if it's an eBook, it's getting deleted.

Since my stories do have sexuality in them, my covers show that. I don't put out covers hoping they will sell a book-- although I do take into account what readers enjoy in a cover.  Creating covers is recreation for me and changing them once in awhile, even leaving behind a cover I liked for something new, is a nice break from writing. Every cover out there on my books is one I like-- yes, including all those bare chested, hunky guys ;).

Beyond genre

While I am winding up editing all my books, I keep an eye out for articles by or on successful writers. I came across this one last week. I read Elmore Leonard back when he was writing what might be considered pulp westerns, but believe me, they were always more than that. When I learned he was the guy who was now writing bestsellers, I was surprised but not that he was a good writer. I was just surprised he had jumped genres and that he finally got recognition.

Elmore Leonard's rocky road to fame and fortune 

For me, one of the hardest things about writing is not writing but marketing and recognizing that what is popular is not what I want to write. How can I then whine if what I do write is not accepted by readers? The answer is cannot. 

Elmore Leonard had put out tips about being a writer which I have thought were good. While the romance genre has its own rules, I think his tips made sense for any author to take into account. I don't know how other romance writers see this, but I aim to write a story that can go beyond one genre even though it is a love story with a happily ever after. While I understand happy endings are plebeian to intellectuals, I am not an intellectual; so I love them. I like writing a story where a couple will go through hell to get to their happily ever after, but they will get there. Yeah, i know that's unrealistic-- good. Realism isn't on my high list right now!

Elmore Leonard's tips

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
And his most important rule, to sum up all the others: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”                  Elmore Leonard

Now every one of his rules has probably been broken and broken well by a best selling or even classic author.  It's like being a painter. You know the rules of composition and then you break them when you have a reason. Knowing the rules isn't a bad thing-- nor is knowing when you story demands you go a different way.
 

on writing and editing

After mentioning how much time I spent editing my books, like the whole summer, I thought it might be of interest what that means. Assuming you are doing your own, cannot afford to hire a professional editor, as best I know it, there are various ways to approach the job. I'll discuss two.

A writer can literally edit each chapter as they go. Write a chapter and go at it word for word as they write. Make sure each word/sentence/paragraph/page is polished before going onto the next. Have an outline nearby and stick to its basics. If they vary from it, they have a good reason and create a new outline.

If such a writer has a beta group to check what they are writing, they'd write that chapter, probably still trying to keep it right for spelling, punctuation, consistency, etc. Then send it off to their readers or even their editor-- while writing on the next chapter. When it comes back, they will take into account what the beta readers thought, if there is a majority opinion and, if it was also sent to an editor, what they suggested. Use what works and argue about what, as the writer, they believe did not.

Basically chapter by chapter editing, with or without beta readers, likely means the book is ready to go out the day it's finished.

There is another approach to editing, and it's mine. It's how I used to paint and sculpt also. Write it in a white hot heat of feeling the energy of the story. Don't worry if it's perfect, although for those who tend to write with grammar as a natural part of their writing, it's not going to be totally unreadable. Basically this approach captures the characters, the plot, much of the dialogue. For me, those aspects usually end up being what stays with the book. 

For any book I have ever written, I had spent a lot of time thinking about it before I ever start writing. I know the characters and what I want them to be. I know the plot. What I have fun with along the way are the things that crop up, which I didn't expect. That doesn't keep me from the ending I knew it would have. The ending can be tweaked, but the gist of it won't be different.

Ideally I set my rough draft aside for a couple of weeks and work on other projects. It's hard to do an edit when you literally just finished-- it's too fresh.

Some writers have a different purpose for each subsequent edit. They look at specifics like say spelling or logic, etc. 

My approach is that I go for the polish whether it's the first or the seventh. I look for typos, punctuation that is missing, and the long blue line that Word uses to say a sentence is not correct. I always check out Word's opinion, but sometimes they are wrong especially when it's dialogue. In editing, I look for consistencies of timing and character behavior.

If in editing the first time, I can enrich a scene by more details; or if it had too much detail, I'll add/delete it there. The future edits are less likely to add but might still end up with deletions. 

Edits are also where I double-check my research when I come across specific points where I can see there might be a question. Literally I don't write anything that I haven't researched first, but sometimes I've forgotten the details, and I look for my notes or go back to the original source to be sure I got it right. This is true for historic, of course, but also contemporary. There are a ton of ways to goof up even a contemporary.

With each edit, I look for where I can enhance the action. This happens  a lot with 'said' where it is better to insert the accompanying action instead. It still must make clear the character speaking.

Editing also looks for consistency in thinking. I don't have this happen often but if say a character has a fear of snakes and the next chapter is handling one with no fear, that doesn't work. Likewise I ran into one, early on, where I had a heroine who didn't like coffee and then had her drinking it one morning on her desert patio. Definite no-no.

Recently, when I had edited a rough draft that I had written in one lunar cycle, I was very upset that on the sixth edit, I still found redundancies or places I'd gone on and on. I had not expected that. For awhile, it gave me some doubt about my writing ability, but I looked at the characters, dialogue, plot, conflict, the WWW, and felt overall it was all I wanted it to be. 

The characters and story warmed my heart where I wanted it to do so and made me feel the action. A writer has to find all of that in their own writing or there is no hope any reader will. If reading it to edit makes me lose interest in the story or feel it's blah, it probably means the book has a bigger problem than punctuation. 

wisdom on writing

Awhile back, I had the good fortune to be in Amazon's forum for writers when the well-known writer, Anne Rice had begun a thread she intended to help indie writers by offering what she had learned. 

That forum grew heated when trolls found it and began to argue with her or try to run out the clock on her thread. They became so domineering that she finally gave up coming. While she was there though, she gave out some helpful wisdom. 

The following was not necessarily there in that form but it was what she said again and again. I believe she expressed how it is if you want to write. 

On writing, my advice is the same to all. If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less. —- 

Ignore critics. Critics are a dime a dozen. Anybody can be a critic. Writers are priceless. —— 

Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write. And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules. Ignore what I say here if it doesn’t help you. Do it your own way. —- 

Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write. —- The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won’t write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any. Good luck.                                    Anne Rice

I am proud to be an indie writer and grateful I have had the chance to pursue my passion for writing without having to fit a niche in a publishing house. Today, thanks to places like Amazon, is a great world out there for writers. Yes, it allows us to make mistakes, but we are the captain of our own ship-- which means we need to learn all we can about where we want to sail. 

The WWW

For me, keeping a story interesting involves using the WWWs. These are not so much like the patterns one might find in romances but more how life is-- real life, not just fantasy plots. It is about ups and downs. It's about fate. It's about the unexpected changing everything. It's about how a high often is right before a low and vice versa. I use it in my writing, like it in what I read, and can give an example from one of my days in August. 

That day, I had literally just been thinking how much I enjoy my life since my husband mostly retired. He has his projects, as I have mine, but we also have time to sit outside and sip wine while we talk about what we're doing or how the world is going. 

Walking away from my editing and into the kitchen, I was having a warm, glowing moment -- not something I didn't know before but just the moment I stopped to think-- yeah, this is very good.

When literally, my husband walked in from a check of the cattle and strapped a belt and holster with a gun around his waist. Eight of the cattle were missing, and he'd seen a truck go up our road with a big cattle trailer on behind. "Who do you know up there that has cattle?" he asked as he headed back out to drive up and see what was going on.

He was gone so fast I had no chance to say anything. From a high, I went to instant fear. What if it was someone out to rustle cattle? It's not as though I don't know it happens. I thought of the value of the eight animals. That was nothing when compared to running into a potentially violent encounter. 

 The problem was when he drove off, we could not either one know what it actually was. The trailer could have been unrelated to our missing animals. The potential of the other possibility made me feel fear. I went outside to listen for any sounds indicating a violent encounter. Maybe ten minutes later, he was driving back down with the information that the trailer had had nothing to do with our wayward livestock, which he later found deep in the brush and hiding after breaking down the fence.

I can think of a hundred moments like that on a ranch where with big equipment and livestock, life  changes instantly. It is the way though of all of life. The WWW in fiction is also life. It does make a book more exciting. It also reflects reality into fiction. The best fiction, including romances, is, after all, a reflection of life.

Looking at a body of work

Many times I mention the two sides of writing and of life itself. 

The rose with the thorn. 

The love with the loss. 

The yin with the yang. 

The dark side completing the light side. 

Joy completed by pain. 

Winning and losing.

As humans we don't want to think that we must accept and expect what we call the dark side of life. We want it all to be what we consider light, but there are always two sides-- whether we are aware of them at the time or not.

After a summer of what I can only call hard work, I have a mix of emotions, which suit the dichotomy of the writing life. I put in a lot of hours, but I also got to look at my stories, plots, characters, dialogue, and see it as a body of work.

I have never been more proud of that body of work.

I wish I had not put that work out until it was at this place.
I love what I wrote, my plots and characters.
My craft is better today than yesterday.

It's hard not to wish I had been this good at the craft of writing when I brought them out. But I know, what has made them this good, has come from the demands of putting them out. That is what forced me to keep looking at them. As I wrote new work, I couldn't let go of looking again and again at the old. 

This is why I say again and again how important it is to write and keep writing. You don't get better by thinking about it. You get ideas for characters, plots and dialogue by thinking about it, but you get better at writing by writing.

Eventually my recent binge of editing has taught me a lot-- but later than I might wish. These are not typos, spelling errors, the kind of thing Word catches, but instead, better ways of saying something. It wasn't that what I had was wrong (although on a few books it was), but more that it could be improved.

Fortunately, where it comes to eBooks, the books can be re-downloaded by anyone who bought them; but it'd have been better if they had been in this shape in 2012 when they first came out. Or if I had known then all I know now... except I learned what I did by bringing them out. It is kind of a catch-22.

This is where someone usually says you should have hired an editor and that would have resolved this. I am one of those who merges the practical with my dreams. I have 17 published manuscripts (with one more combining three novellas which means it's also out there but the original work was the novellas.) Let's assume I went to someone who was not charging over $1000 per manuscript. Let's assume I found a talented editor for say $400 (definitely not a given that it could be done), that still would mean $7000. There is no way I could assume these books could ever repay that and the question would be-- who would loan it to me?! Since I am not into crowd funding-- not that I think it would have worked in this case-- nobody would loan it to me. And if they had, I would not have accepted the debt.

One thing I have come to realize about my stories, after looking at so many of them, one right after another. I don't write romances so much as novels about people. My love stories are about sensuality, passion, and even danger, but they are about real people caught in something bigger than they expected. They are about what feels like very real relationships set in situations most of us would just as soon never encounter. They have another difference that real life does not give us-- a happily ever after. Read the newspaper and you see the other side over and over.

In each of mine, exploring love is the glue that holds the story together. It is why each couple's story is one book and not fifteen-- which is what describing a lifetime relationship would be. Well, the Outlander series so far has only eight books to tell the story of one couple's relationship; so maybe it wouldn't take fifteen.

A love story starts at the beginning with we're attracted, but can this work? (which might also be two people who have come to the edge of divorce). It ends when they reach the happily ever after point (and before the nitty gritty of daily living cuts in-- although sometimes there is an epilogue). 

More on this topic coming next blog-- which by the way will now be on two-a-week schedule on a Sunday and Wednesday. My life is about to get busier, and I think I can do a better job keeping this blog active and vital if I drop back in frequency. I enjoy writing about writing, far more than I expected, but I am hoping when I finish the last of the 'edited' books (with I might add some new covers), I finally can get back to the fourth Oregon historical. 

'George Banks and all he stands for will be saved. Maybe not in life, but in imagination. Because that's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.'       from Saving Mr. Banks

Sometimes it's a bad fit

CJ Hollenbach who wrote a book on being a model for romance covers--
back then they still had hair on their chests, sometimes

Last blog I discussed small groups meeting to work on their books. There is something else out there in the writing world with large conferences held by different groups but pretty much open to any romance writer who lives nearby or is willing to travel. Some of these meetings are totally about learning the craft of writing. Others have scheduled fun events. Preface: what I know about all of them comes from reading as I have not gone to any.

For this summer my writing world has revolved around the craft of writing. I have edited every story I have put out (and two I haven't). Editing like this doesn't involve the most creative aspect of writing which is creating characters, dialogue, and plot etc. This is about word for word making the writing flow as well as I am capable of doing. Unfortunately my ability with the craft of writing has grown the more I write, which has meant each story has places I can upgrade what I had originally written. I say unfortunately because it is a lot of detail and anal work which definitely is not what I most like.

While doing this work, I take breaks. Some of those involve going outside or housework. Some are to surf around the internet, following up threads which might be political, personal, or literary. In following a craft thread, I came across the image above and it led me down a rabbit hole-- in a manner of speaking. 

Before that surfing, I had never heard of the above cover model, nor had I seen him on a book. From what I learned, he was posing during the years I was writing romances but not reading them at all. I learned though that he has written a book about being a cover model. I also came across the following link which describes the kind of conference I used to read about years back in one of the romance writer magazines. 

Mr. Romance Contest

I hope that link works as it takes you to a pdf of a 2007 article by a journalist-- IN SEARCH OF THE NEXT ROMANCE NOVEL COVER MAN -- by Joshuah Bearman. The article describes the men competing in that contest and also the women who were attending that conference. (This contest incidentally is no longer part of RT conventions as of 2011).

The article describes why men entered such competitions and likely why they still put out their images for indie writers to hopefully buy and use on their books. For some they desire to get into acting. Others consider it a sideline. A really top cover model, such as Fabio years ago, can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. He branched out into writing romances and other money-making enterprises. So for the ones who succeed, it can be a lucrative career.

The article though also described something more-- why many years ago, I decided, even though I love to write romances, I'd never fit in certain conventions. I might have thought that was then and this is now-- except I have read it discussed by current authors as they talk about the 'fun' at some of their big events. Again, this is not all the conferences out there. It's the one with a costume ball, contest for hunky guys and 'fun' events. To be totally honest, at events like that, I would be a wet blanket. 

It's not that I saw what was described in the article, or I've heard writers talk about, as being wrong. In some ways, I envy those who can let loose that way, but it's not me. It wasn't even me when I was a kid in high school. To this day I have never been to a beer bust. Who would have invited me? Everybody knew I was the serious one. It's not that I am the religious one. I am not. It's purely personality type (and when I took those personality tests years ago, I came out being like 5% of the population or less).

I read the above article with a grimace as I imagined myself being at one of those big events and trying to fit in. I would not. And it's not that I don't admire handsome men. I write about them and put their images on my own covers. I am not too old to smile when I see a hot male body (beautiful woman too). But ogling it or making comments about how hot it is, voting for one man over the others in a beauty contest, that's not happening. It's not that I couldn't probably fake it if required but why would I want to?

I am not sure what all this means. I've been told for years that I should go to such events for support and networking, that it'd be good for me. I certainly could travel to some, but it would be expensive and would it really be worth that level of cost? I am sure writers there can skip the contests, etc. but then do they make the friends they were hoping to find-- the friends with whom they could then schedule individual retreats such as I described in the last blog? 

Mostly when such big groups were recommended to me in the past it was about getting connections with book editors with the idea of having a manuscript read-- except, I had mine read via the query letter route but the problem was in the manuscripts not being 'romance' enough. So what's the answer to that?

Lately I've been thinking that maybe I should stop surfing or even the marketing things they say a writer should do. It's in those situations or settings online, when I feel the most out of place, frustrated, and once in awhile even teary. I am relatively sure at a convention with costume balls, I'd have the same issues crop up.

Instead maybe I should stick to writing, making the books as good as I can, and if nobody else promotes them or finds them, well that's how it goes. At least I won't be out there in the social media feeling like an outcast or that proverbial wet blanket who just can't get into the fun and ruins it for others.  

In that vein I spent some time updating two of my book oriented blogs-- Rainy Day Romances and Romance with an Edge. The first is specific to my books while the second is more general to what I am trying to accomplish with my writing. Describing what that is can be a challenge. With the hope I'll get better at doing that, I got a new potential blog I named Romances with an Edge. It isn't up and active yet but maybe I'll find a way there to get across what my books are about... maybe ;)

Writer retreat

I saw this awhile back and thought it worth saving the link as inspiration that might help others plan their own such retreat with like-minded friends. 

Caroline Clemmons on a writers' retreat

Because I haven't ever gone to retreats, taken workshops, nor do I have a networking community, I've never plotted a book with anybody else-- although sometimes I do talk to my husband about scenes when I am in the midst of writing a rough draft. This happens most when I am working to resolve whether something seems logical.

Still to get together with other women the way Caroline described to discuss plotting future books, deepening characters, seems like it would be enjoyable and beneficial. The ladies (and I've read others who discussed this kind of experience) who can find such working friendships are fortunate indeed.

The workshop Caroline describes (link at her blog) had more about it online. It's geared to help writers put together a character-driven, magical story. It's what many writers hope to do. Those putting together the classes are aiming it at helping writers understand how to create characters who are compelled to act, where their emotions drive the story, and their actions create the drama where they will capture readers on a deep emotional level. Some of it sounds like the Joseph Campbell approach in the Hero's Journey.

I don't know that a plotted out system of writing would be helpful to me, and right now can't justify the $500 it would cost, but it was interesting to see this possibility. I know I would love getting together with other writers where we could discuss what we do, what we are trying to do and the frustrations.

So, a retreat is something to keep in mind for the future especially if I ever reached a point of not having new ideas. Some of it could be done as an online project since I am unlikely to be traveling to one of these workshops-- especially not if it lasted many days.  The link to that workshop and the theories behind their teaching can be found from Caroline's link above.