Author of Paranormal Romance
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I can make you love me, little story…

Posted by Jill Myles in Blog - Writing - (0 Comments)

For me, writing starts with a scene. I’ll see something in my mind so clearly that I won’t be able to get past it unless I write it down. And from there, the story spirals outward. Somewhere in the middle, I’ll outline to make sure I don’t forget anything, but overall it’s an organic process.

But with books under contract, this doesn’t always work. You have to turn in something early (sometimes months and months early) before the writing has even started. You essentially have to draft the story in short form (my synopses are usually less than 5 pages), sit on it for about 4 or 5 months, and then you get to write it.

This is troubling for me (and anyone else that is an organic/pantser writer). You can outline anything in the world that you want. Coming up with stories is sometimes the EASY part.

Getting enthusiastic enough about it six months down the line? Enthusiastic enough to spend 90k with it? A little tricky.

I’ve run into this situation before. Right now, actually. I promised to write a story about a certain topic (nothing contracted, mind you, just a side project) but that was MONTHS AGO, dude. And I’m not excited about the story. But it’s something I want to try, so I knew I had to give it a shot.

And now I’m 9k in and absolutely loving (LOVING) the story and the characters. But it wasn’t easy to get to that point. I had to break myself in.

First step: Visualize.

I’m a big fan of visuals. If I don’t have a mental image of the character already, I flip around the internet looking for something to associate with the character. Sometimes it’s a picture of really great hair. Sometimes it’s a hand holding a sword. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. It needs to be something that evokes that particular story with me. For a long time, I made Livejournal icons for different stories and went with those – well, until I stopped paying for livejournal (*shakes fist at paid accounts and all their goodies*). Now, I switch out my desktop background on a regular basis with different thematic pictures that represent my story, and I pick actors that might share mannerisms or a photo that makes me think of the character.

And okay, sometimes I use Dean & Sam & Castiel as inspiration. A lot. Don’t hate!

Next Step: Getting to know you.

If I’m going to write a story about these two chuckleheads, I have to know them. Again, not part of my normal process. I do astrology charts (even though I feel dumb for doing so), I pick a tarot card for them. I pick an archetype and flesh it out.
And then I write a long, tl;dr boring-ass essay about their history. The end. I’m not picking what kind of ice cream they’d like, or what kind of tree they’d be if they were a tree…I hate that stuff. But I find that if I write out a character’s history, it changes their personality. Maybe I wanted Olivia to be light-hearted and sassy, but when I write out her history…she is anything but the laughing type. That’s ok too. All you need to do is learn enough about them to wiggle your way into the story.

Third Step: Slog your way through the beginning.

There’s really no way of getting around the writing. The first two steps were mostly cat-waxing and author noodling. They’re a big waste of time except for one thing – they mentally prepare you to dive in. It’s kind of like sticking your toe in the pool. You know it’s cold and you’re going to hate that dive in, but you’ve got to do it at some point.

So you just start writing. And it sounds awful as it makes its way on to paper, and it IS. There’s no getting around the awful. But you have to keep writing. And keep writing. And somewhere along the lines, you’re going to get excited about these characters. They’re going to matter. You’re going to have FUN sending them through the wringer.

Just write. I guess I could have summed this post up in two words, right? But keep on writing, because if the fun doesn’t come to you, you have to go to the fun. Or something. You can still make it work, even if you have to come up with a different ‘method’. All that matters is getting the story down on paper.

And this is all very srs bzns stuff, isn’t it? Blah. For silliness, check out http://www.theoddshots.com.

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Overshooting the Box

Posted by Jill Myles in Blog - Publishing Stuff | Blog - Writing - (0 Comments)

I’m making an effort to blog a bit more, you guys! But I keep running out of stuff to talk about. It’s weird, because I used to love to yammer about stuff I’m working on, but now that things are contracted or heading out on submission, I get weird talking about them. Now I’m scrambling for stuff to talk about! And I doubt you want to hear about the latest cute things my cats did, or how many times I played Left 4 Dead this weekend, or how many times my husband beat me at Magic. Or the chores I did not do. So I’m going to try and keep this somewhat industry-related for a bit (and if you have something you want me to blog about, feel free to poke me in the comments).

 So let’s talk about your favorite subject, and mine. Paranormals.

 When I was at RWA, paranormals were brought up and discussed repeatedly. As one of the genres that’s ‘here to stay’, it’s getting as much face-time as historical or contemporary or anything else you can imagine. Not to mention that if you troll any editor or agent tweets (or blogs) online, paranormal remains a hot topic.

 And as you can imagine, everyone has horror stories of ‘paranormals that went too far’.

 Everyone jokes about vampires being out one moment, then being in. Big cat shifters are in. Werewolves (actually, I have no idea if werewolves are in or not). And then there was the discussion a few days ago here about if were-bears are sexy. Some say yes. Some say no. Steampunk and post-apocalyptic are the buzz words of the moment.  Man-harem romances are in (like the BDB), but are quickly getting glutted. Demons remain hot, angels are a case-by-case scenario, and no one seems to show much enthusiasm when you mention the words ‘time’ and ‘travel’ together.

 Here’s the thing though. Don’t be weird. Just because it’s paranormal does not give you the go-ahead to throw every wacky idea down on paper and call it a day. I’m guilty of this too! I know! I came up with an idea a few weeks ago and immediately emailed my crit girls and said “OHMYGOD I just had the best idea ever. It’s X meets Y! It’s like Z, but totally sexified up and (cue buzzword here)! What do you guys think?”

 Friend One: Um.

Friend Two: Uh…yay?

Obviously they were not feeling the vibe that I was. Now it’s true that a lot of stuff doesn’t sound so hot until you read it. I had a horrible time trying to tell everyone what my succubus books were about (“It’s a girl! Who is like… a sex vampire! But not!”). And the valkyrie book that I pitched long, long ago? Yeah. Didn’t happen.

But there’s a fine line between Batshit Crazy and F#cking Genius. Know the line. Be its friend.

F#cking Genius: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (did you see that? You take the familiar and give it a twist and suddenly everyone is amazed at how clever you are)

Batshit Crazy: P&P&Z…but you make Mr. Darcy the zombie. That’s just nasty.

 Or here’s another example.

Let’s say you want to write a book about shifters that run a summer camp just for shifter kids. But all the good shifter types are taken, right? (there’s a reason for that). You could go with were-cats (too overdone) or werewolves (yawn) but you’re really wanting something that will make the reader sit down and take notice. Stand out in a crowd!

So you come up with… were-armadillos.

See the box? You just punched a hole right through it.

Box GOOD:  Shifter summer camp!

Box BAD: Shifter summer camp…with WERE-FREAKING-ARMADILLOS.

Seriously guys. There are bad were-animals out there. If it’s a vegetarian were-animal, it’s a bad idea. If you’ve ever had it hit your bumper on a farm road and you had to scrape it off your front tire? It’s a bad were-animal.

The trick is to delicately be inside the box, but at the same time, offer a new twist. Don’t re-invent the wheel! Give the wheel some jazzy spoke-beads and a nice flashy decal.

Shifter summer camp is a good idea but doesn’t really have that zing, right? What if all the shifters…don’t know how to shift? And they’re learning at summer camp? Or what if there’s a West Side Story rivalry between the were-dogs and the were-cats?

That’s your story. That’s how you jazz up the box.

Reminder:

 In the Box: A man-harem of immortal men in search of their soulmates and saving the world from um, demons!

 Box GOOD: A man-harem of immortal men (let’s make them Greek Reapers) in search of their soulmates (let’s make them rival Norse Valkyries!) and fighting over recruits for their cause (let’s say they’re hunting down souls)!

Box BAD: A man-harem of immortal men (Let’s make them Greek Reapers with skeleton hands and skeleton, um, manly bits! That only come to life when the heroine touches the skeletal peen!) in search of their soulmates (virgin widows who suffer from vagina dentata!) and fighting over (does it even matter at this point?)

 Inside the box. Insiiiiiide. Box is your friend. Don't punch holes in the box.

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Plotting. You either take it in the front, or in the rear.

Posted by Jill Myles in Blog - Publishing Stuff | Blog - Succubus Diaries | Blog - Writing - (1 Comments)

So, plotting. Some people ‘pants’ their way through a novel, without an outline except what’s running through their heads. Some people religiously outline before starting a book. There’s really no wrong way to write a novel, but I know that a lot of people will tell you that if you are a pantser, you’d better learn how to plot once you get contracted! Or else! And I think I’ve even said that before myself.

But here’s the thing. It’s not like if you’re a pantser, you turn in this random mess of garbage to your editor. You don’t claim that 25 independent chapters are a book, and weird shit happens on page 3 and then we switch narrators on page 300. Or maybe we do. Anyhow. I’m a pantser. I shamelessly admit this. I don’t like to know where a novel is going until we’ve shaken hands and possibly gone out on a first date. This is about page 50 or so.

This post gets really, really long right about here (fair warning).

I digress – I did want to share plotting out book 2 for my succubus series. When we had editor interest, my agent said “Can you come up with a concept for book 2?” So I sent her back a paragraph blurb about what I thought book 2 would be about. My agent wanted more info, so I actually came up with an extended ‘back blurb’ pitch. I phrased it like the back of a book, got into a little more detail about who would be doing what, and included some plot points that were key and a few funny scenes I was interested in writing. The whole thing was about a page. Not an outline by any stretch of the imagination.

Still, it was all I had when we sold the two book deal and got the go ahead to write it. I wrote the entire novel in about a month and a half, did an edit pass, and returned it to my editor. Because my book got rescheduled, it took a while for me to get edits because I got bumped.

But! The day of glorious edits came, and my editor had only small tweaks. Things like, “You’re not showing us why this character is likeable” or “I like this plot! Can we see more of it?” and just general clean-up. So I read through the book again (and it had been a while since I’d even thought about this book) to see what I thought of it as a reader.

And wow. What a surprise. I’d dropped entire story threads and characters back and forth in the book, and so when they popped up again on the back end, *I* was surprised. I’m the author!

This is not good.

About this time, Caitlin Kittredge posted her plot board for The Witch’s Alphabet . This looked inspiring to me, and organized! So I created one of my own, which you can see here.

Wall of Notes - Before

Wall of Notes - Before

Let me explain what you’re looking at. I broke the book up into chapters. For each chapter, there’s a white notecard and my main character’s interal conflict and external conflict. Mind you, since I’m a pantser, I had no idea what these conflicts were until I finished the book. So they needed tweaking as well.

At any rate, the white notecards are for the main character (Jackie). Since it’s 1st person POV, every chapter is in her POV so I don’t have to worry about her not being in the chapter. Each other color post-it is for someone else that interacts with her in the storyline, and each has their own motivation and subplot. One color post-it is actually for Jackie’s ‘growth’ arc. I wanted to make sure I built that across the story as well. This may look like a bunch of garbage, but if you pick apart the colors (like, say, pink), you’ll notice that there’s long spans of book where the character and their plotline doesn’t show up.

To me, this is bad. That means this character/plot isn’t even on the radar.

So I added notes to myself on how it should look when I’m done. I filled in notecards for the ‘missing’ plot holes and wrote such helpful things on the post-its like “ADD STUFF HERE STUPID”. Here’s the end board:

Plot Board - After!

Wall of Notes - After!

The colors are much more even, aren’t they?

Too bad these boards didn’t help me. Well, not really.

I mean, I tried really, really hard to be organized. I took my changes from this plot board and wrote them all out on an outline. For Chapter 3, I needed to add more X! Sprinkle in Y! Set up the plot for Z! And I was going to go chapter by chapter. First the page edits (which I always do, cleaning up phrasing and tweaking reactions). And then my editor’s edits! And then my notecards! And then I could finally move on to the next chapter!

And this was freaking overwhelming, y’all, it really was. I was going back over the same chapter over and over and over again without looking at the entire story’s cohesiveness and it was driving me crazy. Took me a week to just do one chapter. Obviously this wasn’t working for me.

So I went back to my old method. I made a list of things I wanted to fix. Things like this:

1) Make X more sympathetic.
2) Give Y a subplot! What’s his/her motivation?
3) Foreshadow Z a lot more!

And I treated each one as a separate draft. For the first draft, I’d work on nothing but #1 on the list, and making X more sympathetic. That was my entire goal. This might take 5 minutes, or it might take 4 days and re-tweaking every page. But that was my goal. Once that was done, I flipped back to the beginning of the manuscript, and started with #2. Rinse and repeat until I hit all bulletpoints. There were about 15 on my list, of various sizes. So this meant I re-read my manuscript over and over again, but it was far easier for me to tackle one aspect of revisions at a time than 20 all at once.

And when that was done, I printed out the manuscript one more time and read to make sure that it flowed as seamlessly on paper as it did in my brain.

And I liked it. I’m very happy with it, and I felt confident about turning it in. It might have taken me a dozen drafts and far more reads than I preferred, but that was my method, and it worked for me. Everyone’s methods are going to be different. The trick is finding what works for you.

Here’s the thing. I could have saved myself a lot of time (a LOT) by outlining the book ahead of time. Right? It would help if I was organized and knew that by Chapter 4, L needed to show up and cause trouble. And to foreshadow something by Chapter 7. But I didn’t, because that’s not my method.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that being a pantser does not make you WRONG on how you write your book. It does not make your book less ‘well thought out’ than a plotter’s book. It does not make your work shoddy. It makes you have to do your editing and plotting on the back end of the book, rather than the front. I can edit and build plot and give the character a redeeming arc, but I have to have the groundwork laid first.

Make sense?

(And you may be that rare unicorn that can pants out a book with zero edits in the end, but I am not a unicorn. More of a donkey.)

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Sticking with the tried and true.

Posted by Jill Myles in Blog - Writing - (1 Comments)

I really, really want to write the story in my head.

It's dark. Gritty. Urban. Unique. Possibly post-apocalyptic. With fantasy elements. It involves a harsh world for my heroine and a hero that is part savage beast and all alpha.

But I'm not going to write it. Some ideas are better in my mind than they are on paper, and the trick is figuring this out. You learn as you go along that just because the idea comes to you, it doesn't mean that it's a good idea for YOU to write. In the right hands? It would be awesome. In my hands? Perhaps not so much.

This isn't to dog my own writing, of course. I have strengths - light, witty banter. Conversations. Sexiness. Twisting small storylines into something fun. First person.

But I also recognize my weaknesses: in-depth, massively detailed worldbuilding. Dark, gothic storytelling. Emotional angst out the wazoo. In other words, I can't write like Meljean Brook. ;) I wish to god that I could, but I can't.

It doesn't make me a bad writer. It just means that I recognize (finally) what I'm good at and will try to stick to that.

And I think that's an important realization that all writers come to, at one point or another. Think of it as dressing for your body type. Just because that gorgeous sweater comes in your favorite color and happens to be in your size DOES NOT MEAN YOU SHOULD WEAR IT.

It might look awesome on the person next to you, but it can make you look like Humpty Dumpty. Is this the story's fault? Nope. The trick is finding what is good for who you are, and wearing that one. In the right outfit, you can look awesome no matter your body type. In the wrong one? Everyone suffers. ;)

Finding Your Inner Squee

Posted by Jill Myles in Blog - Publishing Stuff | Blog - Writing - (1 Comments)

Someone asked how I come up with the elements/themes of a book that bring out my inner geek. Long story.

So, once upon a time there was this valkyrie book. This author absolutely loved this book, but it had flaws. For one, it was poorly written with a character that liked to talk with exclamation points!!! And talked to herself because that was how she was explaining the story to the reader. Noob mistakes. Happens to the best of us. But this author loved this book so much that she decided to rewrite it. And decided to update a few things in it. The first version had a funny, talking horse that the author loved – gone. That romantic interest that shows up in the second half of the book? Gone too. The wacky shenanigans? Gone. This was going to be a serious, extremely dark urban fantasy. Gritty. Dark. Noir. Despairing with just a touch of hope. The love interest would still be in the story, but the love plot wouldn’t come in this book. The author made him a junkie instead, because that was edgy.

I’m sure you can guess who wrote that second valkyrie book. And you know what? Writing that book really sucked.

Oh, it wasn’t a total loss. There were a few cool worldbuildy things I liked, and some neat twists I’d given the story. But writing it was a total slog, and by the time I was done with it, the end result was much better, grammatically, but I’d given up on it mentally. One crit partner told me that the second one was a better book, but it had no spirit. The first one was the one with the spirit.

So where did I go wrong?

I was so frustrated after finishing that book (and believe me, it took forever just to finish the first draft) that I turned to comfort reads instead. The Elfquest comic book series. Julie Garwood’s THE SECRET. Jude Deveraux’s A KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR. Sharon Shinn’s ARCHANGEL. And as I re-read each of these, it stewed in the back of my mind. What did these books have that I loved so much? So I made a list.

Elfquest:
1) Prehistoric fantasy (you have to admit that’s neat)
2) ‘Stranger in a strange land’ theme
3) The epic quest
4) Soulmates (I’m a nerd, I love this trope) & Romance
5) Exploring old ruins & learning forgotten history (Book 4)
6) Factions warring with each other (Go backs vs Wolfriders, etc)
7) Animal bonds (another nerdy trope I’m a sucker for)
8.) Moments of light-hearted humor

Julie Garwood’s THE SECRET
1) Medieval England & Scotland setting
2) Heroine is a ‘stranger in their strange land’
3) Humorous circumstances involving the heroine and her efforts to ‘help’
4) The warring clan factions
5) The heroine’s quest for her own history
6) Romance between the gruff clan leader and the cheerful heroine

Jude Deveraux’s KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR
1) Time travel (love this trope too)
2) Heroine is a stranger in a strange land
3) Humorous circumstances involving the time travel and the heroine’s lack of knowledge
4) Elizabethan period
5) Romance between the strong hero and the weaker heroine

Sharon Shinn’s ARCHANGEL
1) The warring factions of slaves (edori) vs angelic society
2) The soulmate thing
3) The heroine is a stranger in the hero’s society
4) Romance between the strong asshole hero and the equally asshole heroine
5) Angels!

So. These are some pretty different books. One’s a time travel. One’s a fantasy. One’s a ‘classic’ medieval romance. One’s a freaking comic book (which I love, but are a little different from the norm). But there are a couple of themes that happened in all 4 of these stories.

1) Every story had some sort of faction/group pitted against another
2) Every story had the ‘stranger in a strange land’ trope
3) Romance

These are the ones that popped up repeatedly, but not every time:
1) Fantastical elements (time travel, angels)
2) Soulmates
3) Humor

Okay. Then I looked back at my first valkyrie manuscript. It contained the following:

1) Stranger in a strange land
2) Two factions fighting each other
3) Romance
4) Fantastical elements (norse mythology, hello)
5) Humor

Sure, there wasn’t a way for me to squeeze a soulmate or two out of it, but not for lack of trying! ;) Then I looked at the second valkyrie manuscript to see what elements were in there:

1) Stranger in a strange land
2) Two factions fighting each other
3) Fantastical elements

No romance. No humor.

I had no idea those two things were so important to me as a writer, but it was a stark contrast between one manuscript that I wrote in six weeks (and loved every moment) and one that I struggled with for six months. I figured I was on to something, so I went back and looked at a few other manuscripts that I’d written. Ones that were missing the humor? Major fail. The romance? Fail again. Some didn’t have the theme of the ‘stranger in the strange land’. Equally fail.

For me to get excited about a project, it needed to have pretty much 4 out of 5. All 5 was like mental jackpot. 4 out of 5 means I’m happy with it. 3 out of 5 means that I can put my finger on it that something is not quite right, but it’s hard to identify. 2 out of 5? I’ll be lucky if I even finish the darn thing.

After all, 2 out of 5 doesn’t press my internal squee button hard enough.

You can play this game with your own stuff, or a few of your favorite comfort reads. Moreover, you can apply it to your writing. Does your current manuscript hit 5 of squee points? Or are you further down the food chain?

Think of your writing as, well, a wagon at the top of a bumpy hill. The bumpy hill is the path you take to complete your project. The wagon is your book. If you let it coast down on its own, it’ll eventually get to the bottom. Consider each of your squee-points as weights. We can toss those weights into our wagon. One will definitely add to our momentum, but five will make it race down that hill like, well, like a racing wagon. A racing wagon gets to the bottom a lot faster and might not go off on track as much as a slow one with lots of minor path corrections along the way. And a racing wagon is far, far more thrilling than a plodding one.

I think we all want the racing wagon. :)

(PS - GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI contains all 5 squee elements. /plug)

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How do you write AND hold down a full-time job?

Posted by Jill Myles in Blog - Publishing Stuff | Blog - Writing - (1 Comments)

Some authors can afford to work on writing full-time, and some have day jobs. It’s just the nature of the business. There are so many factors in play (health insurance is a big one) that sometimes having a job is a safety net you just can’t do without. So how do you manage to squeeze in writing time after working the 40-hours-a-week day job?

Here’s what I do:

1) Have no children. Opt to be known as the ‘crazy cat lady’ when you get older.

2) Don’t clean the house. Seriously. Don’t bother. It’s just going to get messy again. And the cats like the mystery of random piles of junk in the living room.

3) Make use of your lunch break. I used to edit on my lunch break (back when I took one). Bring a laptop or alpha-smart with you, or go over what you wrote the night before with a red pen. This can be difficult if you have a shared kitchen at work, but I find snarling at co-workers that approach and muttering to myself does the trick nicely.

4) Suck at social networking. I have a twitter window of, oh, about an hour. My LJ gets neglected when I can’t take a lunch at work. I don’t even remember how to log in to MySpace and I haven’t seen my Facebook in weeks. I might reply to your email…someday.

5) Don’t have hobbies other than writing. All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl, but she hits her deadlines.

6) Catholic Guilt. It’s a great motivator.

In all seriousness…there are lots of ways to squeeze in writing. Sometimes you’re more successful at it, and sometimes you’re not. The trick is to recognize what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are.

My biggest weakness is the internet. I’m a compulsive, A.D.D. browser. Even at work (shhhh). I can’t work on a project for longer than 5 minutes before I feel the need to click over to something else. I’ve gone to look up a state capital on Wikipedia and emerged 5 hours later after reading up on the Black Death. Seriously. Don’t let this happen to you. When I find myself sucking all my writing time away on Facebook, I set up the (non-internet-connected) laptop in the living room, or grab my alphasmart. A good time to write? My small window of reading time just before bed. I can crank out a few pages in 20 minutes and feel virtuous that I wrote.

But the biggest thing that will stop you from writing?

Do you want to write it?

No, seriously. Wanting to write a novel for the sake of writing a novel is very different than writing THAT novel because you are so excited to put the words on the page that you can hardly stand it, and you race home and race through dinner so you can give yourself a few more minutes with your book. That’s the kind of writing we all want, right? Not just putting pen to paper because you NEED to have output? (I am so guilty of that at times)

I used to have that crazy obsession with fanfiction. I used to have that insane NEED to write with some of my early novels. Somewhere between there and here, I lost it for a while. I was writing stuff that felt like homework, and I hated it when it was done. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

So I sat down and figured out what geeked me about the fanfiction, and what geeked me about the geeky novels. I wrote lists. What did I like about this? What made me squee? Some common elements came up, and I decided that I needed to start including these things in my new projects. Even if they’re subtly hidden in the background (major props if you *really* think I’m subtle), they’re there in one way or another.

That’s my recipe for success, in this order:

1) Sloth.
2) Ixnay on interwebzay
3) Geekiness

If you do those, you’ll find the time to write. Oh, and waking up early on a Saturday morning for a write-a-thon helps things too. Or a husband that watches hockey and you, say, don’t want to watch hockey. But mostly the above three.

When You’re Not Writing…

Posted by Jill Myles in Blog - Writing - (3 Comments)

...what do you write about?

I started this journal because I wanted to keep myself honest about the writing. And for a while there, when I was writing every day, I was journaling every day with metrics and snippets and details and life was great. I haven't done metrics a lot lately, mostly because they'd read like this:

Monday: 0
Tuesday: 0
Wednesday: 0
Thursday: Does paying my bills online count?
Friday: 0

You see the drill. No darlings, no snippets, only the occasional emo angsting on Twitter. I haven't been going out and doing exciting stuff, I've just been sleeping and working, sleeping and working. Occasionally winding down with some X-box 360. Very little reading. Little to no writing.

I'm in the nebulous 'between' stage again, and we hates it, preciousss. For a variety of reasons, I'm holding off on new projects and am working on completing an old one that's about 75% done. You know how it is with old projects. They're like leftovers. They loiter in the back of your fridge like the virtuous, stockpiled-for-later things that they are, and you tell yourself "I'm going to eat that tomorrow!" Except when tomorrow gets here and all you have staring back at you is leftovers, you opt for pizza delivery (or the new manuscript) instead.

I *KNOW*. I do this with manuscripts all the time. "I'll come back to this one later! No problem!"

Except it IS a problem when it turns into leftovers. Still, I am being virtuous and slowly working my way through it, even if it is by small spoonfuls. I'm hoping April provides a little more excitement and guidance, but I think it's going to be a slow burn until the beginning of summer. We'll see. In the meantime, I am debating what to do with said story when I am done with it, since it looks like it will only be about 55k or so, max. And kind of nerdy. Romantic, but nerdy.

But who cares about all that, right? Did you see that Meljean Brook's awesome novella, "Thicker Than Blood" in the FIRST BLOOD anthology has been nominated for a RITA Award? The only paranormal novella - I'm so excited for her and I hope she wins! I absolutely loved this story.

Also nominated? Roxanne St. Claire’s excellent NOW YOU DIE and Nalini Singh’s MINE TO POSSESS.

Congrats to all the RITA nominations. :)

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