Book #2 needs a hunky cover model…

This weekend’s task is to complete my Art Facts Sheet for book #2, tentatively titled Her Irish Lover. The hero is a blond gorgeous man, but I’m having a little trouble finding a picture of an actor/model who fits the character. I need someone who has a rugged face, ala Aragorn in Lord of the Rings. Most of the blond guys I’m finding online look like surfer dudes or elves. Anyone have any suggestions? Brad Pitt looks a little too polished to me…Sawyer from LOST is a little too angry. Thoughts?

Researching a fictional setting

In the novel I’m working on now, my characters live upon the fictional ring fort of Laochre. It’s actually based upon Hook Head, a peninsula in Ireland near Waterford. I have an island setting, as well as the mainland. I bought, for lack of a better term, a coffee table book on Hook Head titled The Hook Peninsula. I’d highly recommend buying these types of books to anyone researching a setting. The color photographs make it so much easier to create the setting I want. By combining the different photographs, I can create something that would have been realistic for the time period, even though these places never existed.

Part of this book involves renovations. I affectionately nicknamed Patrick MacEgan’s story the “Home Depot” book. There is a great deal of rebuilding the damaged ring fort, and part of that is used to bring both the Irish and Norman forces together. It’s said that the Norman invaders became “more Irish than the Irish themselves,” and I think it’ll be fun to explore that.

This is an aerial shot of the Hill of Tara, which my fictional fortress of Laochre is modelled after. Hey, if I want my hero to be a petty king, he has to have a good bit of land. One of the interesting facts I learned was that Ireland had hundreds of petty kings. Any man who commanded more than 25-30 people would have been among the kings. There were three levels of kings: petty kings, provincial kings, and the High King. Seems like Ireland was overflowing with royalty! But the customs are fascinating, and I’ve enjoyed learning about the way kings were made. They were elected during the 12th century, and any man could be a king if he had the leadership.

There were some not-so-savory methods of claiming the kingship (one story speaks of a king who was asked to bathe in the blood of a white mare). Another bit of trivia: Instead of bowing before a king, the men would raise a knee as a gesture of respect.

Back in the Saddle Again…

So, it’s back to book #3 now. I’ve been working on revisions for book #2 so long, it was hard to get my head back in the story. It’s almost easier to write when you’re in the same book every day with the same characters. I tried to pick up where I left off and couldn’t get into it. Turned out I had made a wrong turn in the storyline and I had to find out where things unraveled. (You know you’ve made a wrong turn when sheep suddenly appear in the book. If you have nothing else to do but talk about sheep, there are clearly problems.) :loser:

Instead of making forward progress tonight, I deleted around 7 pages. Ouch. On the bright side, I think I fixed the problem (no sheep). Hopefully tomorrow will be better. My self-imposed deadline for this book is March 31st and I’m on page 96 now. The actual deadline is May 31st, but if I finish it earlier, I’ll have 2 months to work on revisions and line edits. Also, my copy edits for book #2 will likely arrive in March, just in time to interrupt my brain.

After 4 and a half books, I’m finally starting to get a sense of my own writing process. I need a loose outline to plan out what’s going to happen. When I revise, I’ve been known to delete massive amounts and add massive amounts. Then the editing process is kind of fun. I actually like that part because I don’t have to be so immersed.

I’m still excited about my cover. I believe I’ve stared at it around 736 times today. Each step in this process makes it a little more real.

My first cover

I have a preliminary image of my first book cover here. Oh my goodness. I LOVE IT. Hope you do, too!

24 - Season Premiere

So last night I stayed up until after midnight to finish the edits on Her Irish Lover. Why so late? Because 24 was on! Priorities, people. But the book is done, it’s e-mailed to my editor’s desk, and those of you who obsess over enjoy 24 as much as I do can join me in a discussion.

We begin with Jack Bauer being in a Chinese prison camp (ala Pierce Brosnan imprisoned in North Korea in the “Die Another Day” James Bond movie). Jack is being all heroic, but honestly, we know he won’t die. He’s Jack Bauer. When the evil Fayed dude with the bad accent takes Jack in for some serious torture, we’re just waiting for Jack to become Houdini and escape. But holy vampire, Batman! :batman: I wasn’t QUITE expecting Jack to get rid of the bad guys in quite that way. Ick. Biting the carotid artery? That one was a bit high in the squick factor.

And then we had Kumar/Ahhhh med who will likely kill off the high school nerd boy. The part that cracked me up was when Jack was interrogating the traitor terrorist and just couldn’t get any information out of the man. Then the Big Bad Reformed Terrorist takes care of business. Jack is dumbfounded, questioning whether he can “do this anymore.”
“Don’t worry,” says Big Bad Reformed Terrorist. “You’ll remember.”

What, there’s a school for this? Torture 101? What on earth would the syllabus look like? Week one: Ways to interrogate using sharp pointy objects. Week two: How to endure stabbing with aforementioned sharp pointy objects and still run around like a superhero.

Can’t wait for tonight’s episode. I imagine we’ll see someone set up a perimeter. Because every time CTU sets up a perimeter, it just doesn’t work. The bad guys always escape. Somehow the show manages to pull this off, and it’s good campy fun. What I do like about “24″ is that you truly can’t predict what will happen. No one is safe, especially not secondary characters. And speaking of which, how much do you want to bet that Fayed isn’t truly behind the attacks?

Now that book #2 is turned in (and please God, I hope my editor likes it), it’s onto book three: The Book Which Must Be Written. I’m 100 pages in, and I’m now at the point where I need to start setting up the secondary storyline. I have a few different directions I could go, but I’m going to do a little research, brainstorm a bit, and see what would work best. I like this raw stage, where virtually anything can happen. It’s scary, but fun, too.

First Birthday Parties

My son is turning five in a few weeks, and we’ve decided to let him have his first birthday party. He wants a Batman theme, and right now I’m trying to figure out exactly what I want to do. I do want to keep it to 2 hours, with cake, presents, and a few preschool-appropriate games. But it’s not as easy as I’d like. I plan to go to the party store today and stare dumbly at the rows of batman gear and hopefully I’ll figure something out.

I’m not an artistic or craftsy person. I know! How can I call myself a writer? I have not a creative party bone in my body. I live for instruction books. I bow down to those who know how to generate cool party games and create those activities that kids love. This is why I teach middle school and not elementary school. I flunked Bulletin Board Creativity 101.

So, if you had to do a Batman theme party, what sort of bat games would you have the kids play? Help! :batman:

Why Coke before bed is not a good idea for a toddler

As a treat for the kids, we picked up dinner last night and I allowed my 2-year-old to have a rare treat: a small child-sized Coke. Now the reason she loves Coke is because of her grandfather, who decided to give it to her when she was still in diapers. Thanks, Dad. While my son thought it tasted like battery acid, my daughter was instantly in love. In fact, any time I happened to be carrying a soda from a fast-food place with her in my other arm, she would launch her body sideways and aim her mouth for the straw. It was rather scary.

Now my daughter is a bundle of energy anyway. She has been known to randomly sing songs, spin herself in circles, and bounce around the house. Why in the world did I think giving her a dose of caffeine before bed was a good idea? She was running around like I’d given her an amphetamine high. I tried to give her a bedtime story and she started jumping on the bed. After I turned the lights off and closed her door, she kept on a running dialogue between herself and her baby doll. :blahblah: Remind me not to do that again.

The revisions are coming along well. I have about 40 pages left to go. The tricky part is making sure the emotional intensity is right. You can say a lot with body language and action, as well as revealing character thoughts. Subtext is really fun to play with. I listened to a workshop by Jolie Kramer once where she described the market scene in Casablanca. Rick and Else are standing before a vendor who’s trying to sell his goods to Elsa. Rick is talking about what happened the other day and Else is answering questions for the vendor. At one point, she looks at the vendor and says, “No, I don’t want that.” But we know she’s talking about Rick and what he’s said earlier. It’s a great example of subtext.

Someone asked me the other day if I read other romance novels to get ideas for my books. In all honesty, I never do that. If anything, I’m very conscious of what’s already been done and I make a concerted effort NOT to follow those trends.

Now how’d that happen?

Apparently somehow I’m killing my Meyer Lemon tree. This makes the third tree. The first one, got hit by an unexpected frost a few years ago. The second one sat in water too long and the roots rotted. The third one? Hmm. Well, I only gave it a little bit of water before I went on vacation and when I came back after a few days, it was sitting in water. Weird. I emptied it out and tried letting it sit for a while. It lost all the leaves. I took all the ripe lemons off and yesterday I fertilized it. It’s not looking good, is it? Anyone have a lemon tree? Anything else I can do before it truly loses all green? I’m afraid it’s a lost cause. (It’s been indoors for a while now.)

In writing, I pushed past my toughest revisions and now I’m on the homestretch. Yay! I just have to make sure I keep the tension high and hopefully it’ll all come together. I still need to do a printout and line edits before I e-mail it back to my editor. That way hopefully the copy edits will be light this time. My last experience with copy edits was a bit more than I’d anticipated. I didn’t worry about commas, punctuation, etc because I figured it would all work out in copy edits anyhow. But still, there were places I missed that somehow got past all three of us. There’s a missing quotation mark that hopefully will be caught in galley stage. Anyway, I’ll try to be more vigilant this time.

Back to the lemon tree. I now have about 8 lemons that I need to use. Any ideas? What should I make besides lemonade?

Huggies Commercial

Okay, this is just too funny not to share.

I think it’s taking baby fashion a little too far…

The Page that Would Not Die

Page 276. I hate it. I’ve been working on it for three days, and this one scene has been driving me insane.

But today, I got it right. I think I’m one of the writers who writes a scene in every possible WRONG way before I find the right way. It’s like a stubborn male who won’t ask for directions. Only I’m begging for a writer’s GPS system that will somehow point me in the right area.

The solution? Switch the internal conflict into a direct argument between the hero and heroine. Show, don’t tell. Duh. You’d think that after four books, I would know this.

But I’m feeling good about it now. The real challenge at this point of the book is having the hero be strong and an alpha male without being a complete jerk. It’s a fine line to walk, and it’s all about how much you reveal. Too much, and he’s a weepy wussy man who needs a skirt. Not enough and you want to smack him in the face.

My goal is to finish all of these revisions by Friday. If I don’t hit any major stumbling blocks, it could happen. Then I can go back to Patrick’s book and start obsessing over that. May deadline. Oh lordy. But we won’t think about that now. I’m just glad to be past page 276!

A Sunday chuckle–The priest was raising the Eucharist bread for the blessing in church the other day. My two-year-old daughter sees the divided circular bread and yells out, “Oooh, Mommy! I want that waffle!”