The missing muse

Some great news to start the week:  I’ve been nominated for a Series Career Achievement Award by the Romantic Times. The RT Career Achievement Awards honour authors for their entire body of work throughout their career rather than for a specific book.  Nominees are selected by RT’s staff of over 50 reviewers representing the readers’ voice in the women’s fiction industry, so it’s a great honour and obviously I am thrilled.

There is something a little ironic about it, too, as I have been struggling to get going on my next book and as always when I hit a block, I immediately decide my career is over/I’m never going to be able to write again/will have to sell the house etc., etc. (Overreact?  Moi??)

It’s all very frustrating as I was all fired up go when I realised that my muse had gone AWOL.  I called for her, but she wouldn’t come, no matter what blandishments I offered. 

At first I wasn’t too worried.  I made excuses for her. She’d had a lot of deadlines, she deserved a bit of a break.  My nose (still looking fairly gruesome but much better) had made it hard for her to concentrate, poor thing.  Then I started to get cross.  I was sitting here, ready to work, and the least she could do was show up and do her bit.

But no. 

A gin and a bath: what more could a muse want?

One of the sessions in my writing course is about dealing with block, and I was even reduced to getting out my notes.  I tried writing through it, and didn’t get anywhere.  I tried drawing up a character cluster and identifying goals and motivations. I tried writing a description of the heroine from the hero’s POV, one of Michelle Douglas’s suggestions (at that point my muse did, in fact, poke her head in the cat flap, as it were, but ran away when I attempted to coax her inside.  Should have ignored her, I suppose).  I tried gin, I tried a bath.

Nada.

Exasperated, I dragged a key member of my plotting team off for a walk.  George was the problem.  I didn’t have a sense of him at all.  By the end of the walk, we’d established that both George and Frith were problems, and neither of them were characters anyone would care about. 

And then, just when I’d given up on her and was cooking for friends arriving that evening, who should turn up but my muse, without a word of apology for her lateness, but bearing an idea that would turn everything around.  Now I know why George is the way he is, and why he is heroic in spite of appearing, on the face of it, a failure. 

Then we had a discussion over dinner about hen parties and various associated activities, and I learnt about the Mr & Mrs questionnaire.  This may be old news to you, but I had never heard of it before.  Apparently, you ring up the groom and ask him various questions to see how well he knows his bride to be, and then you compare his answers with hers, presumably over a bottle of wine.  So you can ask him whether he knows what her favourite sandwich filling is, or what their favourite book is etc.  I’ve now got a great idea for a scene, and all at once the characters and the plot are coming to life. 

Phew.

Now all I have to do is start writing.   (Muse?  Muse?  Where are you going?  Come back!)

While she’s being skittish, I’ll start by drawing up the questionnaire Frith and George discuss in the book.  So far I’ve got:

What’s his/her favourite sandwich filling?

What is his/her pet hate?

What does s/he do when s/he is nervous?

What is his/her worst habit?

What’s the name of his/her first pet?

What would his/her dream holiday be?

Any other ideas very welcome!

Blasting through the Blah

Donna Alward (Copyright Marti Corn Photography)

Are you serious about writing romance?  Perhaps you were brave enough to enter Mills & Boon’s New Voices competition or are having a go at National Novel Writing Month?   

It takes guts to write a book, and we need all the help we can get while we do it.   So if you’re in the market for some hands-on advice, why not try award-winning Harlequin Romance author  Donna Alward’s on-line workshop, Blasting through the Blah, which is running next week, 14th-20th November.    

Blasting through the Blah … what a great title for a workship!  That’s EXACTLY what we need to do when we write. If you’re anything like me, you’ll get lost in the blah the first time you try to get your story down on paper (or on screen for you techies).   

I’m trying to write a rough draft at the moment, and I am wallowing in blah, I can tell you.  Reading through the  course description below, I found myself nodding along and thinking ‘yep … yep … yep, need to think about that … God, I always forget to do that …oh, yeah, that too …’  Even though I know what I need to do, it still always helps to have someone else remind me to keep on track, no matter how many books you’ve written.

Donna won a Bookseller’s Best award and a Colorado Award of Excellence this year and knows what she’s about when it comes to writing romance.  She's also a ridiculously nice person, so you couldn't be in better hands.  If you’re looking to sharpen up your writing skills, sign up at Savvy Authors  next week and start blasting through that blah ...

Blasting Through Blah! Instructor: Donna Alward. Most authors have written a scene that just doesn’t feel quite right, or lacks that certain spark. Saggy middles? Stilted dialogue? Can’t seem to see what’s wrong? This one-week workshop will introduce some fun techniques to blast through the blahs of your manuscript! Come prepared with a work in progress, as each day attendees will try their hand at employing the day’s technique. This is a five part (one week) workshop with assignments for participants. Assignments will not be graded. Target Audience: Mixed. Must have a work in progress ongoing. Topics covered by this online class will include: Lesson 1: Say What? Switching dialogue to tease out motivation and conflict. Assignment: take a scene and change dialogue attribution Lesson 2: Get Out Of My Head Play with POV: the benefit of trying opposite points of view. Assignment: take a scene and change the POV Lesson 3: Let ‘Em Have It Holding back on that crucial plot point? Do it now, and let the chips fall where they may. Assignment: introducing a crucial element earlier than planned Lesson 4: Everyone Can Do With A Change Of Scenery Moving the scene to a different setting can make all the difference! Assignment: take a scene and put it in a different setting. Lesson 5: You Big Meanie! Take away your character’s security blanket. Assignment: examine a scene for what your character wants most – and then take it away. This day will also be for any lingering questions/observations.

Men in uniform

There’s something about a man in uniform … How many women of my generation can think about Richard Gere sweeping Debra Winger off her feet in An Officer and a Gentleman without a sigh?  I have a real weakness for Kevin Costner in No Way Out, too. Tom Cruise in Top Gun … not so much (too much smile, I think), although all those planes screaming around the skies were unaccountably sexy.  Oh, and I liked the beach volleyball scene too, now I come to think of it.  Hhhmnn, I think I can feel a DVD coming on ...

I’ve often wondered how they keep those naval uniforms quite so pristine and white.  You’d think they’d be so impractical.  But the combination of a super fit body and the competence that all members of the Services seem to bristle with is irresistible. 

I’ve been thinking about men in uniform recently, and not just because Remembrance Day is approaching. Last-Minute Proposal has been re-released in a volume called Loving Our Heroes, and for every book sold, a £1 donation will go to Help For Heroes which provides practical, direct support for members of the Armed Forces who have been wounded in recent and current conflicts, and whose bravery puts my nose into humbling perspective.

Loving  Our Heroes also includes stories by Australian RuBY award-winner Amy Andrews, and India Grey’s Mistress Hired for the Billionaire’s Pleasure, which won the UK’s coveted Romance Prize in 2009.  Last-Minute Proposal was a RITA finalist in 2009, so this is a great line up of books from three different series in one volume. 

All the stories feature fictional heroes with a Forces background, but the real heroes are those who put their lives on the line for us every day, so why not have yourself terrific read and contribute to a really great cause at the same time?

One last copy of Loving Our Heroes to give away for free before I make a donation to make sure Help For Heroes don’t miss out.  Do you have a favourite man in uniform, real or fictional? 

Grip getting

I’ve been so taken up with my wretched nose (now minus stitches but revealing a revolting crater where the skin graft has yet to puff out – I’ll spare you the photo this time!) that I’ve got completely out of the way of working, and it was something of a shock this morning to realise that (a) I felt much better and had no excuse to loll around feeling sorry for myself any more, and (b) I had to write another book.  Grips must be got, in fact. 

The next book will be another romance, number 59, and so far I have only the vaguest of ideas to work with.  I was reading an article in Hello! not very long ago about some celebrity A-list person who had had some lavish wedding, and was described as the apple of her (obscenely rich) father’s eye.  Almost as an aside was the fact that one of her bridesmaids was her sister who was six or seven years older than her.  I don’t know anything more about these people, but it was enough to make me wonder what that wedding had been like for the older sister who was not the apple of her father’s eye. 

So the ghastly wedding will have to feature, and I need my heroine, who I’m calling Frith, to be as different as possible from her sister, but still close enough to grit her teeth and do what it takes to make her sister happy on her big day.  I’m thinking of making her a civil engineer.  I know lots about civil engineers, and while I’ve had plenty of engineer heroes, can’t understand why it’s taken me so long to have an engineer heroine instead.  My hero is called George for  now, and I suspect he’s going to have to be a laid-back, devil-may-care type of hero to contrast with Frith, but that’s not necessarily the case.  I’ll need to start a shitty first draft and see how he emerges.

And of course, I’ll have to do what I tell everyone to do on my courses, and think about what the emotional conflict is going to be.  What is going to drive Frith and George to behave the way they do?  What matters most to them, and what are they going to learn?  I use the SFD to ask myself questions about the characters and to build up a backstory, so that when I start a proper draft (otherwise known as the shitty second draft) I’ve got a clear idea of their goals and motivations.  

I tend not to use questionnaires or clusters or any of the other techniques there are for ensuring that you know your characters thoroughly.  I much prefer going out for a drink with one of my plotting team, and talking it through with them over a bottle of wine, but selfishly they are all elsewhere this week, which means I’m going to have to fall back on the last resort, otherwise known as writing.

By the way, the winners of the latest lucky dip for a copy of Loving Our Heroes are: Charlotte McFall, Catherine Coles, Annie Seaton, Kiru Taye and Kavya Rizwan. Kiru and Kavya, let me know your address (jessica@jessicahart.co.uk) and I’ll put a copies in the post to you.