Monthly Archives: May 2012

My Lady Untamed blurb: take 2

This is my second attempt at a blurb for my romance. It’s almost completely different to the first, so it may seem like I ignored all your excellent critiques – but that version was, let’s say, the flat mess of a souffle that made me rethink my ingredients. These ingredients may be no better, but it’ll narrow my options down again. So before you start getting confused by all the foody metaphors, here’s attempt number 2:

The brilliant, troubled Duke of Darlington plays games with London’s rich and famous to distract himself from his desperate loneliness. He is the King of Manipulation and entirely unmatched – until the day he meets Katherine Sutherland, the Queen of Brutal Honesty.

Katherine has kept her family out of the workhouse for years, but she doesn’t realise until the duke invades her life just how narrow she has made herself in the process. He’s unlike any other man on earth – in fact, Katherine suspects he might just be the most complicated bloody man in the universe. He thinks nothing of dressing as a woman so that he can share her bed, or making himself frighteningly vulnerable to gain her trust. Then there’s the fact that the only thing he appears to love more than himself is his pet pig.

But the duke’s games have dangerous, political consequences, and when his title is threatened Katherine is faced with a choice: live a quiet, safe life – or go to battle for the man she loves.

If you have time/inclination to comment, please do! For example. If you read this on the back of a book would it make you: a) want to read the book; b) throw it back on the shelf with no regard for alphabetisation; c) feel confused; etc.

I stopped being able to see this story with any objectivity about 2 years ago, so I really appreciate any input people are happy to give!

(Also, THANK YOU to Catherine for being my willing guinea pig/beta reader, and for dubbing my characters the King of Manipulation and the Queen of Brutal honesty.)

heartbreak remakes the heart into a different organ

I just finished reading Meredith Duran’s At Your Pleasure – and though the cover was as gorgeous as ever, it was the first book of hers I didn’t love.

The prologue and first chapter made me feel fizzy and dark with, well, pleasure. It was brimful of the kind of romantic angst that’s been missing in all these lovely, nuanced, thoughtful romances people have been writing. It begins:

Faster.

Adrian had abandoned the lathered horse a mile behind. He ran now, his feet no sooner striking the ground than lifting again, all his instincts and memories combining to aid him, directing him sure-footedly and safely over the darkened field where he had played as a boy and later loved her as a man.

Faster.

This woman can write. Which is why my overwhelming feeling is “puzzled”; I can’t entirely figure out why this book did the opposite of wowing me.

The most convincing reason I’ve been able to come up with is that the “childhood lovers reunite” trope is incredibly difficult to do – and Duran didn’t quite manage to pull it off.

The premise: Adrian and Nora were neighbours and lovers in their youth, but as one was Catholic and the other Protestant there was no way they could marry. Their families intervened and helped cause one hell of a misunderstanding between them – major heartbreak included. They spend six years at court pretending not to notice the other exists – until Nora’s husband dies, and Adrian turns up at her country estate to arrest her treasonous brother.

The problem was, the heartbreak had changed them both irrevocably, but I never felt they got to know each other now well enough for their love to be convincing. It seemed to all stem from that earlier love that was clearly juvenile and careless, if also true.

I wanted them to just be in a room together and talk. Then talk some more. In fact, the most riveting scene in the whole book is when Adrian practices sleep-depravation torture on Nora, trying to get answers from her. They’re both worn down by it until they can’t help but be honest – and it’s not the treason that comes out, but the truth about their past.

The thing about first love is this: To get over it – to truly accept that you’re not magically going to be allowed to have that person because you really really want them – you have to change. It’s the only option. You have to become a person who doesn’t need them.

You have to outgrow them.

So it’s a lovely daydream that you might one day be thrown into a situation with that person where you can’t avoid each other or help but sort your history out – but that’s all it is: a daydream. It feels wrong to me to see it happen, because all my own experience disproves it.

When you’ve had to go through that moving-on – if you’ve ever attempted to go back to a lover and discovered the heartbreak of no longer fitting – you don’t forget it.

I needed conversation. And more conversation. I needed them to experience how ill they fit, compared to the dream of how well they fit. I needed to watch them surprise each other – and when the past turned up at unexpected moments to hurt/delight them, I needed it to be a complex thing that didn’t fit easily into the present.

The fit was so wrong, for me, that I ended up shipping Nora and the young spoilt nobleman in Adrian’s company who was obviously going to end up doing something villainous. He at least, I thought, would be something new for her. Something she didn’t know she wanted for herself. And she would have shown him the gulf between who he was and the man he might be.

Plus, I find it hard to go past a sulky man in ostentatious clothing.

armour/amour

The very basis of a romance novel is this: Two people have each experienced certain things in their lives. In reaction, they have armed themselves, so that said things never happen to them again. Then love comes along, and it requires that the armour be removed just long enough for their lover to touch a finger to their skin, directly over their beating heart.

It’s a hugely romantic idea – but not unrealistic, I think. Part of loving special k is that I trust him so completely, he’s the one place I can fully set my burdens down and feel the curious tenderness of being exposed, and know that I’m not about to be hurt.

Not that this armour, these defences, are bad. They’re part of what makes people interesting, and unique. But they tend to be terrifying to let down. And, contrary to most romance out there, unless you’ve been through years of therapy, you probably couldn’t articulate exactly what those defences are.

I did a self-development course a couple of years ago, and I came to the realisation that I don’t share myself. So the challenge was to call people who are important to me and share that information with them. See the problem there?

My experience at that moment was not a thought like, “I am being emotionally challenged by the idea of sharing. I can’t do this.” It was a visceral certainty that the world would end as soon as I opened my mouth.

So every time I read a heroine thinking, “My parents died, and then my first husband was an emotionally cold bastard, so as lovely as this man is, I can’t afford to love him,” it rings false.

Much truer to have a character simply experience the world as a place where love can never happen again. And when love begins to happen, it feels like a world breaking.

throwing stones at the stars

My book is out of my hands for the next couple of weeks, being read by people whose opinions I admire. Let me tell you, that has been a nerve-wrecking (more wrecking than wracking) experience. The first round of feedback was the worst. It was almost unanimously positive, and I still wanted to vomit when I opened every email.

I’m pretty sure that much adrenaline is no good for the body. It certainly confuses it enough, and my poor body had no idea what to tell my brain about the state of my emotions. So it settled on “Wants to vomit”.

While I wait for feedback, I’ve been delving into two new activities:

1) writing a business plan. I find this impossibly, horribly confronting. Mostly because I’m the kind of perfectionist who always got top marks at school. My poor brain doesn’t know what to tell my body, because it can’t write something perfectly that it doesn’t know how to write. It mostly settles on, “Have irresistible urge to check twitter. Again.”

2) starting research for my next book. This is fun. Too much fun, actually. How do you put a time limit on research when history is so relentlessly fascinating?

As I read, I occasionally become conscious of the pompousness of telling history. I can’t help imagining reading in that same voice, “They were greatly consumed with ‘being connected’ and would spend hours every day on what was referred to as ‘social media’. By the early 21st century the laptop computer had become a common household item, and the average household had as many computers as people.”

It’s a sham, always, to try and tell the lives of people by the shrapnel they left behind. A delicious, fun sham, though, otherwise I wouldn’t do what I do.

I’m currently researching the history of deafness. I came across a transcription of the first deaf teacher of the deaf, Jean Massieu, being interviewed. The interviewees were often obsessed with abstract concepts – not being able to conceive, themselves, how a person “without language” would understand them.

It seems that once, when his mother was ill, he used to go out every evening and pray to a particular star, which he had selected for its beauty, entreating it to bring about her recovery. Finding that she became worse, however, he was enraged and threw stones at the star.

- Were you cursing the sky?

- Yes.

- Why?

- Because I thought that I could not get at it to give it a thrashing, to kill it for causing all those disasters and for not healing my sick relatives.

- Weren’t you afraid of provoking it and being punished?

- I didn’t know that it was merely the sky. It was only after a year of education that I was afraid of being punished by it.

From When the mind hears by Harlan Lane.

whatever you do, DO NOT GET ON THE HIGHWAY!!!

There’s a scene in the second Matrix movie where Trinity and Morpheus are trying to escape the bad dudes, having just stolen a very important player from them – the Keymaker.

I don’t have the movie here, so you’ll have to forgive the detail-less account – but they’re in some kind of vehicle, being hounded through the city, and the guys who are after them are a program they’ve never fought before.

It’s getting desperate, and Trinity says: “Don’t go on the highway! Whatever you do, do not get on the highway!”

No one ever explains what’s so awful about the highway, but you know: If they go there, they’re fucked. And then, of course, they go there.

It was so tense to watch, that it took me longer than it should have to realise: They were just driving down a highway. It was no more or less dangerous than any regular high-speed chase, but it felt absolutely critical.

All because Trinity told me – she drew a line in the sand.

It’s so simple, but I can’t wait to use it. Set up a boundary that cannot be crossed, no matter what – and then cross it.

(Oh – and make sure there are consequences, otherwise that’s just cheating.)

opinionated is a *pauses to count* eleven-letter word

I find expressing a strong opinion difficult, and scary. For the same reason, I think, that I can sing my heart out in a choir and choke up the moment I come to sing a solo. An opinion is a definitive thing. It invites people to see you clearly. Or maybe clearly’s the wrong word. Maybe it’s that it invites people to see you as one thing – and as definitively not other things. An opinion places and disambiguates you.

The other day on the tram a young man engaged with an old homeless dude. The homeless dude was going off on a rant against the privatised public transport system – and instead of placating him with meaningless “Uh-huh”s, as I would have done had I not outright ignored him, the young guy agreed, disagreed, gave his own opinion.

He very decidedly talked about how the social welfare system doesn’t work, and why. I found it excruciating just to be stuck on the tram, while his voice carried his opinion clearly in the otherwise-quiet. I had this cringing need to say, Don’t you realise all these people will think you’re a paranoid lefty? Don’t you realise you’re diminishing yourself in their eyes?

The problem with definitive opinions, of course, is that nothing is definitive. Every human thing is subjective, and can be seen, always, from all sides. We decide that one side is better based on things like morality, but morality is just as shifting as the concepts it attempts to illuminate.

For a long time this seemed to me like a good reason to remain undecided about things. I felt quite enlightened, being someone who could see all sides of an issue. In the last little while it’s come to seem more like cowardice.

The way you make your place in the world is to declare what you think. And the way you do that is to…think.

I know I talk a lot about the wonder of actually thinking about things, as though it’s this marvellous new concept. Which may seem weird. But I believe people truly stop and think something through far less often than we imagine. I know it’s true for me, anyway. Much easier to take a quick, mental survey of something, come up with a good-enough answer, and run with that. And let’s face it – most of the time that does the job.

I only had one lecturer in my whole university degree who said to me, “Stop. Look at the question. Now think about the question.” I wish all my lecturers had bothered to say it, and encouraged me to bother to discover what I truly thought rather than performing the mental gymnastics that draw interesting conclusions. (Which are fun in their own way, don’t get me wrong!)

When you voice a decided opinion, you become definite. You become someone that other people can grasp. You become, I think, admirable.

Last year on the Gruen Transfer a panel of advertising executives were asked what single piece of advice they’d give Julia Gillard to give her the best chance of winning the election. Only one answer seemed to me like it had the power to change public opinion: Come out strongly in favour of gay marriage. If you want to see just how admirable having an opinion makes someone, look at Obama’s public statement of support.

His whole job is to represent the differing view points of millions of people. There is no collective right answer to this issue (just to be clear, I have an opinion on this point, and I think there most certainly is a right answer – but I’m talking about the subjective nature of “right”). He could easily have remained wishy-washy, but he comes into bold focus – he seems incredibly human – when he tells us where he stands.

The tricky part is, of course, that people who freely and definitively express opinions can often be incredibly obnoxious. Opinionated. So I’m adding the caveat that I admire strong opinion – in someone who remains open to argument and persuasion. Obama admitted that he wasn’t initially in favour of gay marriage, but that talking to friends and family had changed his mind.

It takes a certain strength to admit to an opinion. It takes grace and courage to admit you were wrong.

You may be wondering whether this diatribe has anything to do with writing. The answer to that is a predictable Why yes, it does.

It’s not only characters who are more interesting when they are definitively one thing and not other things – and even more interesting when they come to see how their opinions might have been wrongly-held, or limiting. People write better books when they boldly declare an opinion.

The erotic romance writer Tiffany Reisz said on twitter the other night, “I’m editing this book, and I love it. And I’ll probably get arrested.” It made me cheer inside, and I thought, If you don’t fear you might get arrested for what you write, you’re probably not reaching deep enough. That may sound extreme, but her most recent book is electrifying to read.

And as I may or may not have mentioned here before: My only fixed dream for the future is that someday a reviewer will say of my book, “Reading it made me go electric.”

eyes open is better

I wrote a while ago about the Big Misunderstanding – that romance trope by which identities are mistaken, kisses are seen and misunderstood, words are overheard out of context, etc. Any circumstance, basically, which could be rectified with a conversation, and isn’t.

I’ve thought more about it since then, and decided unequivocally: Give me characters who talk, any day.

That’s kinda an obvious thing to say – the whole romance community groans when a Big Mis just makes the characters look stupid. But I also mean – give me characters who go into a difficult circumstance, eyes open, and come out the other end changed.

The idea that birthed my novel was this: imagine a man hidden in a gaggle of women – made to sleep in their beds and gossip with them and become intimately acquainted with their female world. Not an entirely traditional Big Mis, because my hero was doing it on purpose, but certainly a circumstance that could have been rectified with one (very embarrassing) conversation.

In my original draft the big reveal – “I was the woman who shared your bed!” – was the thing that broke my couple apart, before they had to make their way back to each other. The closer I came to this moment in my second draft the worse I felt about it. It felt so disingenuous somehow – not to mention, as a reader I could feel it coming from miles off, which is a particular kind of awful. It made my hero look like a dick, and my heroine had to forgive a lot, for their Happily Ever After to be convincing.

Around the time I was considering getting rid of the big reveal, I read Julie Anne Long’s amazing What I Did For a Duke. It starts out with a revenge plot, then about a third of the way in the hero and heroine have a really honest discussion that not only outs the revenge plot, but makes their relationship about a hundred times more interesting.

I went well into despair, and started rewriting the whole book without the cross-dressing. Then Valerie, fairy-godmother extraordinaire, suggested my heroine could be in on my hero’s secret the whole time.

It left me without that one central source of angst between them – and gave them a whole world of crazy to navigate together. In draft one, my heroine captures a duke’s heart by accident, because she doesn’t know his real identity and can therefore be honest and genuine with him. How much more interesting is it though, to have a woman who knows exactly what he is, and speaks directly anyway? Who sees clearly the kind of man she’s dealing with – the kind of man who would shatter himself just to get what he wants from her – and finds her way to understanding him anyway?

The answer you’re looking for is “much”.

The best, most concise illustration I’ve seen of this idea was in a Vampire Diaries episode recap on iO9. One of the only solid, dependable adult characters on the show had just begun manifesting a dark side. He has no control over it, and it wants to kill the vampires who have become like family to him.

Charlie Jane Anders pin-points exactly why this isn’t interesting:

Alaric didn’t get to decide to start taking matters into his own hands, which would have been an interesting character arc. Instead, he just got controlled/possessed by a magic ring that already turned Elena’s ancestor into a serial killer. Seeing Alaric actually make a choice would have been way more interesting.

If someone chooses the difficult path, eyes open, there’s a whole internal world of choice and consequence that is endlessly fascinating. If someone is walking a difficult path unaware that they’re doing so, all you get is the annoyance of waiting for them to fall, and the one heart-stopping moment when they do.

husbands are insightful beasts

Special k has this remarkable ability to see narrative. I think it’s part of his assurance that things are as he understands them; if a story doesn’t match up to what he thinks it is, he can say quite clearly, “This is why it isn’t working.”

It’s pretty remarkable, and entirely enviable, though I suspect it’s the natural instinct we ruin when we study writing in-depth. We gain other skills, obviously, but that gut instinct, that surety, we lose. Er, I lose. I should stop generalising my own experience as the experience of all writers everywhere.

Last night we were watching the most recent episode of Game of Thrones. This is a tiny bit spoilery, so skip to the next paragraph if you watch the show. Arya, an important political hostage, is hiding in plain sight as the cup-bearer for her family’s enemy, Tywin. Another powerful political figure, Littlefinger, comes to take wine with Tywin. He has met Arya before, and might recognise her, but she is made to serve him wine while he and Tywin talk about the war and political machinations.

Special k paused the show when the scene ended (I don’t think I could watch normal TV anymore – we’re constantly pausing what we watch to chat about it. Especially when it’s a murder mystery.) and said, “That was a really tense scene.”

Well, yes. Obviously it was a tense scene – she might have been recognised AT ANY MOMENT.

But then he said, “It was tense, because I wanted to concentrate on what they were saying, and I couldn’t.” See? Uninterrupted narrative sense.

Of course that’s why it was tense. It wasn’t only working on the one level of Oh no, she might be found out. There was also an important, intricate political conversation going on that, as the viewer, we really need to pay attention to. But there’s this background static – this other layer of the scene happening with no dialogue at all – that makes it impossible to concentrate.

*tucks away for future use*