The most important books for writing romance.

My favorite titles.

I wanted to talk about my favorite books on writing. Every author has her go-to's for inspiration and help, and here are mine.

How can one live without Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing?

People love to denigrate our genre. This book gives an insightful and quirky look at how much and how little attitudes towards women's words have changed. It taught me just what kinds of horrible internalized sexism colored what I wrote, how I viewed other women, and worst of all, what I did to myself.

Find it here: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/rushow



Making a Literary Life by Elizabeth See.
A far greater writer than I'll ever be says this:

If everyone who wants to be a writer would read this book there would be many more good writers, many more happy writers, and editors would be so overwhelmed by sweetness they would accept many more good books. So what are you waiting for? Read it! Ursula K. Le Guin

Find it here: http://www.carolynsee.com/Books/literarylife.html



Write Away by Elizabeth George.
From Publisher's Weekly:

Here's a useful book for the novice writer battling the fears and insecurities that attend when she contemplates her first novel....George illustrates her points with passages from both her ownworks and those of numerous writers she admires (Martin Cruz Smith,Barbara Kingsolver, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris), this remains more of a how-I-do-it book than a how-to-do-it book. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Unlike PW, I'll say that this book is good even for experienced writers. I love her examples - they illustrate her points brilliantly.

Find it here:http://www.elizabethgeorgeonline.com/books/write_away.htm

The most important romance specific book on my shelf is Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women by Jayne Ann Krentz.

"In Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, Jayne Ann Krentz and the contributors to this volume—all best-selling romance writers—explode myths and biases that haunt both the writers and readers of romances.

In this seamless, ultimately fascinating, and controversial book, the authors dispute some of the notions that plague their profession, including the time-worn theory that the romance genre contains only one single, monolithic story, which is cranked out over and over again. The authors discuss positive life-affirming values inherent in all romances: the celebration of female power, courage, intelligence, and gentleness; the inversion of the power structure of a patriarchal society; and the integration of male and female. Several of the essays also discuss the issue of reader identification with the characters, a relationship that is far more complex than most critics realize."

Find it here: http://jayneannkrentz.com/dangerous-men-and-adventurous-women/

I feel that the most important book on my shelf remains Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller. I'm not going to kid you - this is a painful and devastating book, whether you have been a victim of sexual assault or not. But it endlessly reminds me of what I feel is the great gift that romance gives every reader: That her pleasure is central to life, that her consent should never dismissed or belittled, and that each of us deserves to be heard.

Find it here: http://www.susanbrownmiller.com/susanbrownmiller/html/against_our_will.html

My Vampire world.

Buy here.

My father (Dr. Dad, PhD), often asks me, "Why Vampires?" And being the smarty pants he is, he then goes on to wise crack such things as, "Do you carry a lot of garlic to keep those vampires away?"

I have no idea how I survived growing up with that.

But seriously, I do have a fascination with the mythology of vampires.  They represent our suppressed Shadow sides, the part of ourselves that crave power at any cost. For me, vampires are also completely unafraid of confrontation. Since they are physically strong, they have to fear of walking alone in the dark or dealing with hostility.

One of the first scenes I wrote for Dracula's Secret explores what it would be like to face one of my greatest fears: being trapped by a group of people much stronger and aggressive than myself.

“You lookin’ for a good time, darlin’?” Chad propped his fist against the old brick building, blocking her in with his arm. The rest tightened their circle, like hyenas crowding a wounded zebra. Anger and lust from his skin teased her nostrils.

Their smell and movements telegraphed their intentions. As a group, they moved, boxing her in. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. No one to come to her rescue.

They would throw her against the wall. She would reel, stunned. The boys would start off with a little light brutality, moving on to rape. They needed to recover face from their earlier defeat.

 Stay tuned for next week for how my character Valerie Tate handled this!

Learning who you are.

I have had the honor and the pleasure of modeling with Michael Baxter, the genius of belly dance photography.

I never knew I had mystery inside.

Michael was gracious enough to experiment with me. The images he coaxed from me and his equipment showed me aspects of myself that I never knew existed.

If you asked me to describe myself, I would always say I was a little funny looking. I'm far from petite or graceful and - let's not mince words - overweight.

But Michael showed me a part of myself that was strong, passionate, and, yes, beautiful.  I learned a valuable lesson that day:

I no longer could justify my self-loathing.  

I wish everyone could have the experience of working with a gifted and empathic photographer. I wish you could discover the parts of yourself that you do not see.

Every day pleasures.

There are days when the rain is coming down too hard for words and you are feeling sad and scattered.

Me contemplating my current work in progress.

All you can do, then, is find a small pleasure and let it soothe your raw edges. Like letting the Rain Chains do their Rain Thing. That can bring a smile on even the rainiest of days!
 

Would I call it Rain Chaining? 

What are your small pleasures? What brings less stress to you?

I still don't know what I'm doing, but I'm not going to stress about it!

Best of...

For my retrospective, here is a blog post from November 22, 2009. Enjoy!

***

No fear?

A dear friend of mine has characters and stories roaming her head. She wants, no, yearns to write.

Just like the rest of us, she is frightened.

Writing is scary stuff. Let's list a few of the things that scare her.

1. Rejection by publishers.
2. Rejection by agents.
3. Rejection by friends and family.
4. The possibility that you really DO suck.
5. The possibility that you might learn something about yourself that you didn't want to know. (I was pretty surprised that I wrote vampire stories. I wanted to write screw-ball comedies).
6. Bad reviews.
7. Good reviews.
8. Not getting published which leads to...
9. Feeling like you've wasted your time.
10. Not making money.

These fears are real. They stop people in their tracks every day. They even stop me from time to time.

I have no easy answers about how to not be afraid. In fact, these fears are important. You have to look at them and say, "Well. What if I do suck? What if my work does gets rejected from now until the end of time?"

The payoff might not be worth the pain. If so, then congratulate yourself, and realize that there are many other dreams waiting for you! Maybe you will find fulfillment in improv comedy or Linux open-source work.

Make your fears work for you.

Another growth opportunity.

"What is the hardest lesson you've learned on your writing journey?"

Oh, ouch. I so didn't want to think on that.

Fortunately, I learned how to deal with rejection early (pro-tip: read Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See).

What should I talk about? The difficulty in believing in yourself? The need to Dare to be Average?

No, the hardest part was learning to talk about my work.

(I just now completely stalled out on writing this, thinking about what I was going to say about talking about my work.)

When you have a dream, you might have to keep it under wraps for a little while - protect it from those who would, in a completely innocent way (of course), say or do things that discourage you.

I got stuck there. When it came time to pitch my book or to ask for help, I would either stall or simply not answer.

I do not recommend this course of action. Once your dream is sturdy, share it.

What is your dream? What are you working on?

Painful reality

My dear friend, Su Lute, is a gifted writer who is one of the co-authors of the witty and important blog, "See Jane Publish".

Today, she reminds all of us of a frightening reality of a woman's life. She shares the story of a fellow nurse and good friend who was killed this week by domestic violence.

What is there to say when this tragedy occurs?

I'm sure there are 'helpful' people who will scold Su for "not getting her friend out of there" or "not alerting the authorities".  To these people, I gently remind them - stopping domestic abuse is not as simple as riding in like the Lone Ranger and saving the day with a Grand Gesture.

For the rest of us, I say that that romance is important.  Abuse is one reason why. Women must have hope that they can survive an angry man. We must have hope that love will mitigate the violence that is rampant against women.

When we are fatigued and hopeless from the odds stacked against us, romance gives us a chance to restore our souls and refresh our bodies. Then, we can go back into the world and fight the good fight for our rights.

Fear can drag us down, convince us that we are trapped by a world that hates us, wants us to be silent, wants us to disappear, wants us to be available as sexual objects only, and that dismisses our intellect and our talents.

Anything that gives us hope, bandages up our courage, that helps us remember our fallen sisters, cannot be dismissed.

Try, try again.

Yesterday was a low output day - only 5 pages out of my goal of 12. That said, I did some very good work on moving things around and making the flow better.

Today is day five of my ten day marathon. Let's see where it goes today.

Crippling self doubt

Self-doubt attacks everyone in the world. My experience is just like yours.

It starts with unease around your creativity.

Something in your world is not right. It might be a big crisis such as a death in your family, an ecological disaster, joblessness or divorce, and the ensuing poverty of these tragedies.

Your crisis is smaller and subtler, but it still cripples you. Perhaps everyone around you is suffering and there is nothing you can do to help them. Maybe your sleep schedule gets mucked up, or you experience a shift in your intimated relationships.

Trying to be productive under these circumstances *hurts*. And since people rightly avoid what is painful, they go to step two - procrastination. 

After all, what is the good of something as frivolous as writing your little shameful romance stories when the world is exploding?

Putting off your dream can lead to panic and second guessing.

Did you make the right decision to set aside the stuff that brings out the best of you? Shouldn't you be able to keep working no matter what? All you have to do is "force yourself to do it".

This panic churns your stomach, makes your sleep worse. I can tell you from personal experience that sleep deprivation is an untold horror. In a particularly bad part of my life, I experienced both olfactory and auditory hallucinations. My heart didn't stop racing, and I was constantly nauseated from the lack of sleep. Yet, through it all, I constantly demanded that I keep up my work schedule.

This leads to despair, that tar pit of sorrow.  You can barely leave your rooms. Despair drags at your limbs, saps you of vitality. You try to do something, anything, but you feel like you are wading through cold molasses.

It's very easy to lose all hope. In Part Two, I'm going to throw you some rope so we can pull each other out of these energy sucking cycles.