I spent part of last weekend working on a short piece for a contest.  I think my primary reason for doing so was to see if I could DO it, lol.  Writing very short stories is a challenge, and requires discipline—something I don’t require from myself often enough.

At one point in the story, I wrote a line I really liked.  What the line was is pretty irrelevant.  What’s important is that I really, really liked this sentence.  I typed it with my keyboard.  I printed it out.  Pared it down, because there was a word limit.  STILL loved it.  Read it aloud in the context of the rest of the story, and it tasted good on my TONGUE (a good test, BTW).  I was HAPPY with that sentence, almost excited about it.  (And if that sounds strange, just think about how many movies you’ve seen in which one line of dialogue stayed with you long after the film was over.)  It was that kind of sentence to me.

And then it happened.
Then it began to creep over me, a cold, needling chill that rapidly progressed to nauseating panic…

HAD I READ THAT SENTENCE SOMEWHERE BEFORE?????

Gawd.  It was a GOOD sentence.  Was it TOO good?  Was this something I’d pulled out of thin air without effort?  Or was it good because I’d read it in someone else’s work and subconsciously thought, “Damn that’s good!”, and squirreled it away somewhere in the dark, hungry-hack recesses of my mind?  Was it in a book?  A line of poetry?  Somewhere on the world(sob!)-wide Internet?  Was it possible I might’ve even stolen a whole passage, maybe a paragraph?!

I set the story aside.  I thought, pondered, strained, reached back over the years to everything I could ever remember reading that was remotely similar.  I did dishes, mopped floors, finished the income tax forms, shoveled snow, letting my mind wander all over my warped psyche as I worked.
Nothing.  Nada.  If I’d read it somewhere, I just couldn’t remember.

I decided I should delete the line.  It was a short fiction piece, written for fun.  After all I’d read recently about plagiarism, crediting, footnotes, copying—was it really worth the risk, after all?

Damn right it was.  I loved that sentence.
I left the sonofabitch in place.

How sad is it that such a thing should ever even OCCUR to a writer who’s not consciously trying to steal from someone?!

So if you’re out there, and I happened to have picked up on your sentence-vibes…
Sorry.
Sue me.
You won’t get much.
But I’m keeping my sentence.  So there.

First off, I TOTALLY forgot I was up today.

I even came in here this afternoon wondering why somebody hadn’t posted. Then it suddenly dawned on me at 3:30 while I was on my way to pick up my son that today was THURSDAY—my day!

Okay, so I screwed up. Mom was right. If I had a brain, I’d be a threat to all humanity. Anyway, the sad part is that I’d already written this week’s post, and had it saved on my hard drive, but today’s brain malfunction got me thinking about forgetfulness. So I’ll save my other post for next week, provided I can remember to post it!

Have you ever had a ‘well duh’ moment like this? Where you just completely blanked out about something you routinely do? Maybe you missed an important bill payment, an interview, an appointment? A deadline? Or perhaps :::gasp::: you forgot to pick up your kids? I’m talking major whoppers. I know I’ve done it in my writing. Left out whole chunks of important stuff … even characters.

Please join me in welcoming author Delle Jacobs. She’s a TRIPLE Golden Heart Winner and currently writes for Samhain books.

And now, here’s Delle!

=======================================

I’m so tickled to be a Chica for the Day! Thanks for inviting me. I feel sort of as if I belong because I’m Southern on my mothers side. And there’s no doubt parts of me, especially my brain are a bit fried. As for “chica“, well, that means little, and I’m not—anymore—But at least I got the first two parts right.

I admit I get all excited every time my books come out, but APHRODITE’S BREW is even more special to me, for several reasons. You know how we writers get used to going from rejection to rejection? How editors can look us squarely in the eye and tell us they didn’t quite love our babies enough? (And if any of you ever figure out what the heck that means in real words, be sure to let me know.) Well, that’s not what happened to this book.

I started out writing APHRODITE’S BREW almost as a joke, a way to soothe my author’s ego, which was quite battered at the time. I decided to write something utterly silly. Just for fun, for me. It would never see the light of day. I did the bare bones first draft in a month. But in the process of that first draft, Sylvia and Val stepped off the page and told me I was not treating them fairly, and I had no notion at all what the real truth was. By the time I typed The End, guilt overwhelmed me and I gave in. All right, I’ll do better, I told them. Later.

Then came the Golden Heart deadline. I wasn’t going to enter. I’d already won the year before with HIS MAJESTY, THE PRINCE OF TOADS, and what would I do with another heart? Make earrings? But the Regency category was in danger of not having enough entrants and my friends started nagging me about doing my part. I had three weeks. By the time I finished the second draft, I was even more sure I had not been fair to Val and Sylvia. But no matter. It was far too rough and had no chance of winning. So I could still go back and no one would be the wiser.

It won. But you guessed that, didn’t you? Earrings it would be. Three editors requested it, so I wrote and polished like crazy. And three—-I KID YOU NOT—-three editors wanted to buy it. As luck would have it, that was the very moment the Regency market folded in on itself. By then it had become the hot and sensual Regency Historical that was worthy of Val and Sylvia. But its market had vanished.. Maybe if it hadn’t won the Regency category, editors might have been more open to seeing it as the Historical it became, who knows?

So it sat on the shelf like a maiden aunt. Then finally a friend persuaded me to send it to Samhain, where once more I found an editor who fell in love with it, and this time, bought it. And every time I go over the story again, I love it even more. I love that it’s got all its original silliness and fun, yet has a poignant story that goes deeply to the soul.

On the surface, it’s the story of a love potion that falls into the wrong hands and gets out of control, with Sylvia and Val caught in the middle of the turmoil. But it’s what happens to them in their quest to uncover the supposed fraud that is the true story. And in the end, Val does the most amazing thing- something I had no idea he would do until he did it. But now I can see he did it because he’s Val, and he could never have done less, once he was changed through his interaction with Sylvia.

I hope you fall in love with Val and Sylvia just as I did, and may they give you much reading pleasure.

It’s not even a week until my book APHRODITE’S BREW comes out. To celebrate, I’ll give to one person who comments on my blog a download of the book (when it’s released March 4th) along with a little surprise- providing you like chocolate. (I’ll write the names on slips of paper and give them to my cat, and see which one she plays with. Or sits on, as the case might be. Who can tell? She’s a cat.)

AND every person who requests it will be entered in my drawing for the Grand Prize, to be given away in June. Anyone who buys the book and shows me the receipt will get 10 extra chances for the Grand Prize. If they also buy my second release, SINS OF THE HEART, in June, they’ll get an additional 20 chances. Other opportunities abound—-check them out on my website.

And if you buy within the first week of its release, there’s a 20% discount at Samhain. Right now it’s still a “Coming Soon” but you can read the blurb here. And when it comes out, you just take the “coming” part out of the URL to go straight to the book. Or go back to my website.

What’s the Grand Prize? I’m offering a choice of prizes, each valued at around $100. First, there’s The “aider” set of Barbie & Ken, after Jude Deveraux’s book of that name. Still in its original packing and box. Here’s an example on Ebay.

Or there’s a SkinIt which I will custom design for you. What’s a SkinIt? Look here:

Here’s the one I did for my own laptop:

There is perverse pleasure to be a writer. I can sit here bang out my next rejection (kidding, kidding, Anyhoo…) talk on the phone, get my “day job” done all while in my ratty sweats, Dirk t-shirt and Minnie Mouse slippers. 

(or god forbid days like yesterday wearing the same clothes I slept in while I rush between toilet hugging kiddos…ICK!) 

I digress…there’s something for a writer’s life where you don’t have to be glamorous hell, you don’t have to be particularly kempt. I must admit, I don’t normally wear a lot of make-up anyway, so really slapping on a pair of jeans to schlep kid A to kid Z to school, doesn’t require a lot.  

Yet, to me, when you see a writer portrayed in a movie or TV show, they’re either orthopedic sporting Jessica Fletcher-ish or uber-cool and uber-disturbed (Johnny Depp) Mort Rainey-ish. 

Both have a style, well miss Flethcer, while you were working the cable knit cardigans and pearls, not so much. But Mort… I have always fantasized about having a place in the woods, or renting a beach house to finish up that dern book that is past due to this editor or that. But in reality, I am banging out a paragraph between soccer practices and band concerts and scouts. Not to mention, the commercial break during Idol wacthing on the Alphasmart or note taking sitting in line to pick up schlepped kiddo from school.  

Not too terribly sexy, but again, garbed in my best house-frau apparel I take an odd and perverse pleasure in writing headboard thumping sex scenes while Guitar Hero and Spiro echo through the rooms.  

Hell, maybe my warped can give ole Mort’s warped a run for the money… naw, I don’t like to garden…

Swiped from The Swivet*:

“I tell people that I want to see your plot summed up like a TV Guide entry: three sentences. No more. If a writer can’t do that, I know there’s something missing.”

So, let’s play a game. Can you condense your project down to three lines????

9:00 PM Sunday Night - Scifi: Set in a post-apocalyptic world, mutant rebels try to overthrow the government that wants to annihilate them.

Oooooooooo one sentence! Okay it’s your turn. GO!

———
*Editors comment to La Gringa was tongue-in-cheek but I think there’s something to be said for being able to condense your story down to a line…or three. If nothing else, it’s a great exercise in the importance of word choice/usage/phrasing.

It was really, truly, finally happening.

The guy at work.  The guy I’d been drooling over for weeks.  That rare guy in my jobspace who was even WORTH a second look.  Single.  No sign of drug use.  No loud-talking, profanity, gossiping, or need to prove how “cool” he was.
And yes—good-looking, with a broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, bicep-bulging body to DIE for.

That guy was actually sitting in the passenger seat of my car.

It just so happened that he needed a ride home.  And it just so happened someone had mentioned to him that I just lived a few streets away from his place.  That was the ONLY way it would’ve happened, because I’m naturally quiet ANYWAY, but when it comes to men I find REALLY attractive, I swear I’m just too shy, too awkward, too DUH to approach them myself.

Two hours before the end of our tour, he asked me for a ride.  I nodded.  I think.  I said “sure!”.
And spent the next two hours…fantasizing.
Oh yeah…
Maybe we’d make a stop at the lake on the way home.  It’s not much of a lake, but moonlight on water?  Yeahhh…
Or maybe this was the chance he’d been waiting for.  After all, any woman in the joint would’ve gone out of her way to give him a ride.  Yeahhh…

I was sitting behind him on the job.  I found myself staring at the back of his head, sending out signals.  Thoughts.  Vibes.  It’s a wonder his cranium didn’t crack from the pressure.  This was gonna be one interesting ride home.
Yeahhh…

(more…)

I just finished a book that got trashed by a reviewer. The woman hated the plot, the writing, the characters … hell, she even hated the cover.

But guess what? I **loved** it. So given the sharp differences in our perspectives, it makes me wonder about the other books I may have passed on because of a sour review. That’s why I think it’s very important to analyze a reviewer’s past reviews, just to see what he/she likes. Agents do it all the time with publishers. If your agent knows Editor A hates Beta heroes, she’ll send to Editor B or C instead. Reviewers are no different. If you’ve been reading a particular reviewers column and you notice she’s consistently hating on, say, heroes with tattoos, or heroines being chased by a psycho, or plots set in the Far East, then you’ll know to take her words with a grain of salt.

How influenced are you by reviews? Do you read Amazon.com reader reviews? How about Publishers Weekly? Or Romantic Times? Has a bad review ever made you reconsider a book? Has a good review ever prompted you to buy? Or are you more influenced by a friend’s recommendation?

The story behind the book: Hair, Sugar Packets and Homones

I got the idea for His for the Taking when I was at a Keith Urban concert in London. I don’t actually like Keith Urban’s music all that much. I went, I will admit it, purely to look at his hair.

Hair can only hold your attention for so long, though, especially through very long guitar solos; my mind started to wander. I got a mental image, suddenly, of a man in outdoor clothing pitching a tent. The unusual bit was that he was pitching a tent in the middle of an expensive upper west side Manhattan apartment.

I even knew who he was: Nick Giroux, the brother of the heroine of my first Halrlequin/Mills & Boon book, Featured Attraction. He was a park ranger and he liked rescuing animals and helping hopeless cases. I knew he was there because he was looking for his father, because I’d written in Featured Attraction that Nick’s father had abandoned his family when Nick was ten. I had no idea where his father was, of course. I suspected he wasn’t in the apartment. I also had no idea whose apartment it was, though I suspected it was Nick’s heroine’s.

I tried out all sorts of heroines for Nick. Mostly, because of the apartment, I thought they would be rich, probably beautiful, sophisticated city-girls. I played with one after another, and none of them seemed to work. But I had to keep the apartment. It was so real in my imagination.

Then my friend lent me the first series of Battlestar Galactica, which I was immediately hooked on, especially because of Starbuck, played by Katee Sackhoff. I couldn’t stop watching her. She was tough, she was competent, she made self-destructive decisions, she was vulnerable, she was even more boyish than one of the boys, and yet wholly feminine. What if I took someone like her, a woman in a man’s world, someone who had so much to give, wanted so much to love, and yet couldn’t let herself because she had to keep up the tough facade?

So I had Zoe. A New York city cab driver. And, I decided because I wanted her to be fit and strong, an aerobics instructor. Obviously she couldn’t own this apartment, either…so who did? Why was she there? And where was Nick’s father, anyway?

One question led to another and so of course I trapped my friend in a car with me on a long journey and made her listen to all my questions and ideas, and then rejected all of her suggestions and came up with my own. I do this a lot. I really do feel sorry for my friends sometimes.

Even after I had those mysteries solved, I still had some problems. Writing for Harlequin/Mills & Boon, I’d always concentrated on emotional conflict rather than plot. I’d never handled a mystery before, or a quest story. I didn’t know how to structure it. My big question was, did I wrap up the mystery before or after I wrapped up the romance? If I did it before, wouldn’t it get annoyingly in the way? If I did it afterwards, wouldn’t it seem like an anticlimax? I remember getting another friend drunk and making her listen to all of this, while I drew diagrams with sugar packets and candle holders on the table.

And what the hell was I going to do with the pigeon who turned up on page 69?

Then, of course, I got pregnant. I reached the first sex scene, set in an orange hotel room in a place called The Lobster Trap, when I was about eleven weeks pregnant, and I discovered that it is nearly impossible to write sex when all you want to do is throw up. I wrestled with that damn scene for days until I decided to give up and leave it for later; I just wrote down the emotions and the barest plan of the scene and went on to the next scene.

A couple of weeks later, I got to my second trimester, you know, the sexy trimester, and I went back to the scene and wrote and wrote and wrote, aided by the best hormone high I have ever had.

Anyway, despite all my angst and puking, Keith Urban’s hair must have done something right, because His for the Taking (under its original title, Driving Him Wild) was shortlisted for the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s 2008 Romance Prize, for the year’s best category romances. It’s out now in print and ebook in North America, as a Harlequin Presents in the Nights of Passion collection.

Links:

My website
http://www.julie-cohen.com

Excerpt of DHW/HFTT:
http://www.julie-cohen.com/books/driving-him-wild/

Buy book on: Amazon.com

Buy book/ebook: on eHarlequin

THE JERK is one of the formative movies of my youth–how and why a 9 or 10 y-o saw the movie . . .  you’d have to ask my mother . . . there were many such movies that have warped, er ah, contributed to the psyche that makes up Dennie-of-many-issues! But back to THE JERK: There are many aspects that just ring true in this movie, but for today’s purposes we will focus on one in particular. All I need is . . .

I can’t tell you how many times I have said, “All I need is this [fill in blank for writer’s tool]” and I will be able to be a better writer. One week it’s, if I have my fuzzy Mickey Mouse Pen that jiggles when I write, I can sit and smack out a new and improved version of rusted-novel three (Thanks M Blue . . . I am hooked on rusted now!). The next week it’s a $600 graphics program that has abso-freaking-lutely nothing to do with a manuscript, but I know it will inspire me. Next week it will be an Alphasmart because I just know if I can lug something around smaller than my PORTABLE LAPTOP I will be 100% more productive!

I have an extensive list of, “All I need is . . .”

~ The Sims–so I can “see” my characters

~ Writer’s Dream Kit–so I can have a detailed outline

~ Thirty different notebooks–because I have so many freaking ideas and need a new fangled notebook for eacha dn every one. (don’t get me started on the pens–GAW!)

~ Candles–for inspiration

~ Music–for inspiration

~ Jade ring–for inspiration (for real, for real–when I am in “the mood” I put it on to write)

~ a bazillion books–for comparison and inspiration

~ the Publisher Alley subscription–because if I can see my sales, I will be inspired to write and sell more–WHATEVER!

~ plus many, many, MANY more that I can’t think of now.

It never ends. Every time I see a “new” writer’s tool I want it and KNOW it will be the THE THING that makes me plunk my ass down in front of the computer and write, write, write. Every other royalty check I get is put right back into tools, gizmos and gadgets. I don’t see this ending any time soon. Hell, look at THE JERK, he started with, “All I need is this paperweight,” and by the time he hit the street his ass was laden down with a couple of handfuls of crap.

And by the by, If you need an excuse of “I can’t write cause I don’t have [blah],” ask me and you can totally borrow one of mine.

So Emma blogged about her hangups last week and said, “The more and more I write the more and more I notice there are certain things I have to do before I start writing or have to do while writing. I don’t have to do them but I just feel more comfortable if I do.”

I thought this would make kind of a fun Me-Me so here goes……….feel free to join in!

1. I write in Arial 13. I hate looking at Courier. Plus when I switch to Courier I always get the pleasant surprise of more pages. Yes, I totally psyche myself out.

2. I CAN write with pen and paper and will sit in the car while the boys are at b’ball and switch off between pen/paper and Neo when I get stuck on the typing. It’s a bit weird but it works well. I think pen/paper uses a different part of your brain than typing. I’d almost go so far as to say more creative but I’ve read Emma’s writing (and she can’t use pen/paper) so I know it’s not true.

3. I’m VERY superstitious about talking about my wips (outside of my CP’s).

4. I have no set-in-stone plotting technique. Please do not ask me about GMC especially if I’m gabbing about this scene or that scene. Chances are I don’t KNOW the GMC, but I can tell you why a scene is needed and how it needs to play out and what the characters can realize. Just don’t ask me about GMC or I wig out because it frightens me more than Freddie Kreuger.

5. I ALWAYS freak out about 2/3 the way through writing the book. Always (just ask Vee, Lynn, Mik…Dennie…Shell……..um yeah okay)

6. I rarely can write a book I’ve just thought up–they need time to cook though I can usually vomit up at least 25 - 100 pages and a plot.

7. I can write during Prison Break and Terminator but I can’t write during AI or The Biggest Loser so Tuesday is a no-writing night at my house.

8. I can’t read during Prison Break and Terminator.

9. If I put my mind to it, I can write in pretty much any situation–noisy, not noisy, complete silence whatever as long as I don’t wan to sweat anyone “looking over my shoulder” and the kid’s aren’t speaking (to me).

So what about you? Any hangups? Quirks? Whatever? Share becuase I KNOW I’m not the only freak out there