Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 119

Sisyphus, Writing

I dug into my journal entries of six years ago for this post. I was working on, at the time, the first novel I ever actually completed.Looking back, I seem to have had much more anxiety over the process of writing back then, probably because I hadn't had nearly so much experience with my own process. Looking back, it really helps me to have records of what I did and how I felt about it.#August,

Stories in the Head

I used to make up stories before I went to sleep every night. Usually I didn't get very far. Sometimes I would barely arrange the scene before drifting off, and would start in approximately the same place on the following night. Serials, in a way, but I almost never finished one of those mental stories; certain moments of the story seemed to be enough to hold my attention, and I would even

An Experiment in Second-Person Present

This is an old essay I unearthed and from the depths of my laptop.#Point of view and tense have a dramatic effect on a story's tone.The following excerpt comes from the first typed draft of my short story "Camera," dated March 2001 (it was originally drafted by hand, in a notebook). The story was science fiction, and aimed at an anthology titled Tough Girls. The heroine needed to be emotionally

Moonlight Mistress excerpt - Dialogue

Moonlight Mistress is out December 2009 from Harlequin Spice. This scene takes place as Crispin's regiment is heading to France, in the early days of World War One.#Crispin mentally shook himself and joined a group of the men lounging on the deck, some of them smoking in tense silence, some talking with nervous energy, some alternating both activities. ... Crispin was surprised when Hailey sat

Nifty Stuff That Ought To Be In Romance Novels

Nifty Stuff That Ought To Be In Romance NovelsBored with billionaire heroes and heroines who own their own antique shops? Be bored no more! Include these elements in your romance, and watch it catch fire! (Keep extinguisher handy, and always make sure your smoke detector has batteries that work.)1. A Trebuchet.The Atomic Bomb of the Middle Ages.You don't even have to use it in a medieval

Raymond Chandler, on time to write

Today I'm a guest at fellow Spice author Amanda McIntyre's House of Muse Blog, for "Coffee Talk." Please stop by and chat if you have a chance!For a LiveJournal charity auction, I am offering your name as a character in The Duke and the Pirate Queen. You do not need a LiveJournal account to bid. How To Bid. Information about the auction itself and its purpose. Bidding closes October 10, 2009

Everyone should read the Temeraire books.

"Patrick O'Brian meets Jane Austen meets Dragons."Just in case you haven't read Naomi Novik's Temeraire series yet, I'm going to tell you why you should. And the chief reason to do so is not "because you don't have enough books already."Temeraire is a dragon. With his captain, William Laurence, and a vast number of other dragons, he serves the king of England in fighting Napoleon. The prose

Finish It. That's All.

Sometimes I think there's only one piece of writing advice. "Finish it." Finish the novel, finish the short story, finish something and then edit it or move on to the next thing and learn something new.I don't care if it's bad. You can't do anything with a story that's in scattered fragments. And if "finishing" means discarding a piece that's beyond repair, and starting on something new which

Maili McVane's Keeper Categories - Exploring Category Romance

Please welcome my guest, sometimes known as Maili and sometimes known as McVane.#I have a love-and-hate relationship with category romances. I love it because it has great diversity and I hate it because it lacks diversity. Either way, category romance novels are the spine of the Romance industry. It's so part of the industry that it doesn't get the respect it truly deserves. It's cheap. Readily

"She's So Unusual" - Exploring Category Romance

Category romances, contrary to many peoples' beliefs, are not at all the same. Sometimes, they push boundaries.I have not yet read Mallory Rush's Kiss of the Beast, a Harlequin Temptation that features an alien hero (the only alien hero I've heard of in a category), but it looks very interesting, and was recommended to me twice.In Judith Arnold's Barefoot in the Grass (1996), the heroine is a