Guest Muse: Stephanie Queen

The Throwbacks by Stephanie Queen

Today we're pleased to introduce Stephanie Queen, a friend to the Muses and author of two new contemporary romances, BETWEEN A ROCK AND A MAD WOMAN (love that title!) and THE THROWBACKS. 

She's here today to talk about her writing process and her latest book...which recently received 4 and 1/2 stars from RT Bookreviews:

"Resplendent in rich detail, laugh-out-loud moments, a fast-paced plot and spellbinding characters, THE THROWBACKS is a stellar not-to-be-missed standout!"  Way to go, Stephanie!

Q&A for Stephanie Queen:

How long have you been writing?

At least ten minutes. Soon I’ll need to jump up from my chair and pace a while. To think. And to wear off some of the chocolate I’ve been eating…while writing. What? I’m a multi-tasker.

Oh, wait… you didn’t mean how long have I been writing today? You were talking about how long since I was born? I don’t have an answer for that. My memory doesn’t go back as far as my writing apparently.

What made you start writing? Did anyone inspire or encourage you to write?

The nuns made me start writing. You could call it inspiration… Sure. Let’s go with that.

Plotter? Pantser? Or something in between?

(I refuse to answer this question on the grounds that it sounds too obscene when I try. Especially the in between option.)

Please tell us about your current release.

I love my latest release, The Throwbacks. I’d call it the book of my heart, but it’s more like the book of my funny-bone.  No, I can’t really say that either.  (You’d think I’d be able to say something about the book, wouldn’t you?)

How about if I let the story speak for itself – here’s an excerpt:

Chapter 1

Grace tip-toed along the brick path, trying not to get her party heels stuck in the cracks. She heard the cab pull away from the curb and looked back. Sophia bounced behind her, wearing sensible party boots.

“Do you realize you gave that taxi driver twenty dollars for a two dollar fare?” her friend said.

“Oh—just like in the song.” She smiled and climbed the steps leading to Mabel’s back door, then stopped. Sophia stopped behind her.

“What?”

“You know. The Harry Chapin song where…”

“Quit stalling, Grace. This is not a surprise birthday party. Open the door.”

“Are we sure about that? Today is my birthday.” Or at least she’d always celebrated her birthday on October fifteenth as a close approximation. No one had ever come up with a more likely date.

“No kidding?  Not your thirtieth birthday is it?” Sophia stood on the step below her, making her even shorter than she already was. She looked like an updated version of Lucille Ball with an attitude and a bob. That thought made her smile.

“Wait until you turn thirty and see. You’ll have palpitations too.” Grace turned and pushed through the door into the back hall of Mabel’s Beacon Hill townhouse, willing away that intruder sensation she always got. Mabel was as good as family. She almost said it out loud. Mabel was like the eccentric old aunt she used to dream up for herself back when she used to dream about those things.

Becca's Musing: Sharing Food for Thought

I am doing some recycling today, as I am away and have not had the chance to create some original content for my post. I apologize and hope to be back to form next week. For now, I want to leave you with some of the food for thought that has been weighing heavily on my mind since the New Year started:

From Susan Meier's workshop on goal setting: "...I analyzed which of my goals were accomplished and compared them to the goals I had which were not accomplished to see if I could figure out why one goal comes to fruition yet the one right beside it, maybe even one that should have been simpler, doesn’t. And I made an odd discovery.

The goals I accomplished “fit” my life. The goals I did not accomplish did not fit my life... In other words… We will find a way to reach any goal with a compelling “reason” behind it. And that means success or failure in goal setting all boils down to motivation."

From a blog interview with Mary Buckham and Dianna Love in which Mary said, "The great news for writers everywhere is they have the choices daily to commit and work toward their goal of publication or not. They have the power. Many times as unpublished writers we think all the power is in the hands of editors or agents, but it’s not. It’s in your hands and the day you decide that nothing will stop you from being published is the day you’ll never turn back. You’ll make different choices as to how you spend your time, who you will associate with, how you will invest in your career. The greatest power to break into fiction publication rests with you and we’re here today to let you know that."

When I listen to the advice given by these really smart, helpful, and amazing writers and ladies, I am reminded that I need to make a greater effort to align my actions with my goals. I spend so much of my day just trying to get through it that I have stopped acting with intention. It feels yucky not to feel like I am making the right choices, taking the right actions, or directing the right efforts that will take me closer to realizing these dreams. I am not sure how to get all those things back on track but it's my new job to figure it out.

Seize the day!
Becca

Katy's Musing: Sources and Tributaries

When I was 15 years old, I read a novel about Lucy Walter, the first of Charles II of England's many mistresses. The book was called The Child from the Sea and I picked it up because I loved the cover, the paper it was printed on and the typeface used to print it. I read it in great gulps because I loved the way the author, Elizabeth Goudge, wrote. Not just her prose appealed to me; I was also entranced by her clear vision of life and by the liveliness of her characterization. Every person in the story was vivid and real to me.
 

So real, in fact, that I cried steadily, reading the last 100+ pages of the book. Lucy dies alone and friendless in Paris, a city she hates, betrayed by those she trusted, bereft of her child and of the Welsh countryside that had fed her soul. Even now, thinking of the ending chokes me up.

I knew The Child from the Sea had had a tremendous impact on me, but it took me years to realize that part of what I was doing with my first romance, Prince of Hearts, was rewriting Lucy's sad, sad story, her tragic collision with royalty. I was telling the same story, but this time, it was going to have a happy ending.
 

It sometimes seems to me that stories are like rivers, gathering force from many sources. Some of those sources are rivers themselves, but others are little creeks and brooks, hardly noticeable in themselves, but changing the rivers they feed. Countless things make impressions on us and all those impressions feed our imaginations. I think part of our jobs as writers is to keep ourselves open to those impressions, to let the little brooks and creeks we don't notice run free. You never know what story you read, what TV show or movie you watch, is the first little trickle of a new story of your own.

Barb's Musing: Greeting the Dragon

Be kind to dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

According to the Chinese calendar, yesterday marked the beginning of the Year of the Dragon.  So Happy New Year (again!)

The dragon has special significance for this blog.  Our own Katy C is writing about dragons.  And one of my favorite writing lectures of all time is Jane Porter's "Playing Nice with Your Dragon".  Jane, incidentally, is a favorite author of several Muses.

In Chinese astrology, the dragon is a symbol of good fortune, mystical and unpredictable.  It's year is marked by achievement, wealth, virtue, harmony and longevity.  Big things are to come.  The 2012 Dragon is called the Black Dragon or Water Dragon.  This means that the energy will be continually flowing.  Supposedly water calms the Dragon, making it less unpredictable.  On the other hand,  because the energy is flowing, things will happen quickly, especially at the beginning of the year. 

Dragons are also the symbol of creativity.  This makes sense.  After all, on our best days, our creativity can, like a dragon, be large and awe-inspiring.  On the other hand, on a bad days, it can feel like a nasty, fire-breathing creature bent on destruction.  As I learned from Jane Porter's talk, writers all have dragons living inside of them.  Our dragons must be nurtured so they don't turn into those fire-breathing, evil creatures, but rather spread their wings and fly with the best of them.  I suppose this same philosophy applies to the Year of the Dragon.  Say big changes are coming - and Lord knows just in our own little industry, changes are happening every day -  we can either embrace them or we can let them burn us to a crisp.  Unfortunately, I know too many people who choose the latter.  Like villagers with pitchforks, they fight with the dragon until he breathes his fire-breath straight at them.  Sad thing is, if they'd simply let the dragon be, they'd find the change wasn't so bad.  In fact, the very change they dreaded might bring good fortune on the other side.

So happy year of the dragon!  I hope you avoid the fire, and embrace the good fortune!

PS:  For a terrific summary of Jane Porter's Dragon workshop, click here.

Cathryn’s Musing: Five Great Things

…about writing away from home:

1)      The refrigerator doesn’t beckon

2)      Housework, chores, and errands don’t call

3)      No Wi-Fi, no distractions

4)      All meals are prepared for you, out

5)      Heat, which my home currently doesn’t have

Can you add any more? 

(Yes, I've been writing all week from a hotel room.  I miss the kitty, but not the other distractions of home.  Wherever you are next week...Happy Writing!)

Guest Muse - Jane Sevier and the Art of NaNoWriMo

Today we are so very fortunate to have a special guest join us at the Moody Muses: Jane Sevier, author of Fortune's Fool. Jane wrote this book during one year's NaNoWriMo sprint, fleshed it out, edited it, and rewrote some more . . . and the book went on to reward Jane as a Golden Heart finalist and became her first published book. We know lots of you log those NaNoWriMo words each year, and we are delighted to welcome Jane and her success story to the Muses. So . . . without further adieu, we give you Jane Sevier:

You made it through NaNoWriMo with your 50K or however many words. Then the holidays came along to distract you and let you recover a little while those words lay fallow for six weeks.

So, now what? If you’re like me, you’re itching to look back at what poured out of you in November. Or what you extracted with forceps and one foot braced against the desk. However those words arrived on the page, enough time has passed to give you a fresh perspective.

I spent this last NaNo working on the second book in my Psychic Socialite series that I launched in the fall with Fortune’s Fool. Fool was my first NaNo win and great experience for what faces me now with the new book.

Fool started as just a premise. I knew the protagonist would be a 1930s Memphis socialite whose husband dies and leaves her penniless. She becomes a fortuneteller, only to discover that she has the true sight. I wanted the love interest to be a fake medium who bears a striking resemblance to Simon Baker of “The Mentalist.” And I knew Nell, my socialite, would be faced with providing for a household that included her mother-in-law and her cook and lifelong friend.

That was it. I didn’t know the ending or even the mystery that Nell would have to unravel. Because Fool is the origin story for the series, I trusted that all would be revealed as I felt my way. I’m an organic writer who doesn’t plot much, so I wasn’t uncomfortable with that. It really helped that NaNo is the kind of hell-for-leather, don’t-look-down ride that doesn’t give you time to stop for doubt. And when the time came, the mystery showed up, as did the final scene.

After that NaNo, I put Fortune’s Fool aside for several months while I worked on other projects. When I came back to it for the first read-through to get a feel for the story and what it needed, I was thrilled to find that the bones of a pretty good mystery were definitely there, although in a several places, the thigh bone was not necessarily connected to the hip bone. I had to figure out how to reassemble the skeleton so that it fit together in the best way for the story.

And I had to put flesh on those bones because 50,000 does not a novel make unless you’re writing Young Adult.

The next read-through, I looked for major scenes and turning points and compiled a scene list so I could see what I had and be able to move the pieces around. I also write screenplays, and studying their structure has helped me not plot exactly but organize what I’ve written after it’s on the page. So, I made a chart dividing the story into Act I, Act II-Part I, Midpoint, Act II-Part II, and Act III based loosely on Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat system. It would be some time and several reads before I decided those pieces were in the right place.

The next read was to be sure my characters were distinct, well-motivated individuals. Nell, Joseph Calendar, Miss Bess, and Hattie are so real to me that they practically wrote themselves. Having them as anchors made it easier to motivate the other cast members.

At first, I wanted a sort of uber-villain who would be Moriarty to Nell’s Sherlock throughout the series, but the scene and character-emotion reads told me that wasn’t going to work with the way the story—and ultimately the series—were unfolding. So out with that idea. The mystery that showed up gave me several possibilities for the villain of this particular book. Then I just had to figure out why anyone would do such a thing.

I tend to write dialogue before anything else and lots of it, so once the characters and structure were in place, I went through to be sure that I had action and description to help drive the story and evoke emotion without having a bunch of talking heads on every page.

Then, I read for style, remembering that Mark Twain said that the difference between the right word and almost the right word was the difference between lightening and lightening bug. And I love language so much that it’s fun for me to play with words.

Along the way, I had wonderful beta readers go through the manuscript a couple of times. Their feedback gave me wonderful insights into what worked and what didn’t. A final revision with all the pieces in mind, and I was ready to publish Fortune’s Fool.

This all sounds a lot more organized than it was when I was actually revising Fortune’s Fool. Having muddled through that, though, revising A Billy Sunday Kind of Love should be a piece of cake. Or at least less daunting. Right?

Thank you so much for being here with us today, Jane! We are so happy for the success of Fortune's Fool and are rooting for your next success in A Billy Sunday Kind of Love. We know lots of people out there have these NaNo projects and are not sure where to go from here, so we hope you will ask questions! Jane will be here with us all day to answer them. Thanks again, Jane!

Katy's Musing: Quitting. Again.

Last Sunday, standing in the shower, I quit writing. I gave up. I decided I wasn't going to do this any more.

Again.

Apparently, I do this with great regularity. When I told my RWA chapter of my decision, my fellow Muse, Barb Wallace, said, “If you read our blog, you know Katy quits every week.”

Like all those other times, the quit didn't take. I figured out a way to get myself out the pickle I'd landed myself in, and on I went.

However, in the moment of discovering my solution, I found another problem, one that I thought my chapter sisters could help me with. So I asked, and was helped.

The one thing I got out of it is that I think too much. I have a strong analytical side, one so determined that it kicks in even when I need to just roll with it. I keep thinking myself to a standstill; I think myself into my pickles, and then I can't think my way out.

This is disheartening and boring. I get really tired of the same old problems. They're not very interesting, plus I can't help wondering why I don't learn. I mean, if I'd learned anything, I wouldn't make the same mistake, right?

Sadly, it's not that simple for any of us. Like many flaws, this one is the dark side of a gift. I think my analytical side helps me develop my stories and build my worlds. I think it helps me learn, since it's the part of my mind that finds holes in things and then needs to find out how to fill them.

And it's not as if I'd have no problems if I didn't have this one. I'd have others, instead. And they might be harder to manage. They might actually prevent me writing altogether, instead of making it an adventure.

I just wish I could stop quitting.