Molly O'Keefe's Blog, page 66

Celebrating the good stuff

I feel like this is a life goal as much as a writing goal, but Molly reminded me one day last week that I should get better at celebrating the good stuff. She scolded me a little. And I deserved it.

In this business, more than most, we get enough opportunities to learn how to accept criticism and disappointment. And over time, for me anyway, it's become harder to celebrate the good stuff, because it starts to feel like it's just a matter of time until the other shoe drops.  Which makes me feel like such a negative person. And that's not who I want to be.

So, the good stuff!

CINDERELLA: NINJA WARRIOR

I have TWO books coming out in just over two months. They are building a little buzz in the book blogger world and on goodreads. Close to 200 people have added the books to their shelves, I get several google alerts every week that people have mentioned one or the other book on their blog, and for a book that's not even out yet, from a small publisher, I think that's great. And most of the people who've reviewed or rated the books so far have actually liked them! Total strangers read and liked my books!


SLEEPING BEAUTY: VAMPIRE SLAYER





And more good stuff:

Molly and I had a workshop accepted for RWA Nationals! (Thanks Molly for writing a fabulous proposal.)  This is fabulous for me for at least two reasons. 1) My books will be out, so an opportunity to get in front of other authors (who also read and have kids who read) and 2) I really want to go to RWA Nationals. I love the national conference, but was having a lot of trouble justifying the cost this year, especially since I'm not writing in the genre. But now I HAVE to go. So, yay!!

Again with Molly, I did a Romance 101 workshop for Toronto Romance Writers in early January and a producer from CBC Radio's books department was there and did a nice podcast on the event. Yay.

And finally, I've recently been reminded by how generous and fabulous other writers are. How willing some are to offer advice and help to a complete stranger. Most recently for me, this was demonstrated by NYT Bestselling YA author Cynthia Leitich Smith, whose latest book BLESSED was released yesterday. And yet, during what must be a busy week for her,  she was kind enough to tell that she was excited about my books (based on the titles) and offered to interview me on her blog. (Plus, she might come and do an interview here, too. Yay. No pressure Cynthia.)

I hereby promise to remember at least one good thing every day. Amen.

What's your good news? Please share. :)

The Rom Com Man and Porn

I was at the gym on Sunday and without a trashy magazine to keep my brain from realizing how tired I was, I watched the last part of Two Weeks Notice with Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant. And I liked that movie - the chemistry was a lot of fun between those two and I thought the set up was fantastic. But it made me think about what I've heard about Porn - that it's all about the women. And I think to some extent the Rom Com is the same thing - it's all about the female lead's character and comic timing and overall appeal. I think women in most Rom Com's get paid more - I'm probably wrong, but that's how it seems to me.

But for me - the effectiveness of the story arc and the romance, totally hinges on the guy. Hugh Grant in this case. That moment when they see the girl in a new light, their utter caddishness before - their black moment and grovel - for the story to really work - it's got to be about the guy. Matthew McConaghey is a total failure as a rom com lead because I don't believe anything about him but his chest. He is awful.

On the other hand, I watched a weird one this weekend (I need to be writing - I know) with Dane Cook called His Best Friend's Girl - and this guy is a huge a-hole, but watching him fall for Goldie Hawn's daughter whose name I can't remember - totally worked. Totally believable.

So, who works for you? I think it's pretty hard to beat Hugh Grant. That English reservedness coupled with the chemistry he usually has with his co actors - Love it. But who do you love? The Rom Com man - discuss...

Fear

I am trying to embrace fear. Normally, I am not a fan. I'm not a big watcher of horror movies despite having written an urban fantasy with werewolves and vampires and other nasties. I do not like being startled. I read the ends of books before I get there because I need to know that characters are okay at the end. Yes. Even when I'm reading romance and should just trust. I fear for them and it's unpleasant for me.

I have written a book proposal that is scaring the hell out of me. Two writers that I admire very much have recently (within the last six months or so) talked about how the book you're afraid to write is probably the one you should be working on. The fear means you care enough about it to get it right. The fear means you're stretching. The fear means you're doing something important.

So . . . fear is good. It's not the mind-killer (that's for all you Dune fans out there). It's the mind-grower. Okay. I'm embracing fear.

I'm also trying to embrace vulnerability. I'm not so crazy about vulnerability either. Sometimes being vulnerable is just asking to be hurt and I don't care for pain. If I could spend my entire life encased by the Tempurpedic topper on my bed, I totally would.

Vulnerability means putting out there something tender and fragile that's important to me. This book that I'm trying to write is important to me. I care about what I'm trying to show people in this novel. Exposing the ideals that I want to live by is a little scary because I'm also showing why it's so very hard to do that. It's what will make this book interesting and not preachy and not pedantic.

Anybody else have a project like that out there? Something that's scaring the pants off you, but feels imperative at the same time?

The balance

I'm working my way through Season 1 of Breaking Bad, a show that gets a ton of press and not enough people watching. It's great, made more so, by the two central performances and as a character study, this show is up there with Mad Men. Bryan Cranston's character Walt is perfection.

He is an ordinary man with chemistry skills who is driven to make crystal meth to support his family. He has other options, options the audience is shown, but none that will allow Walt to sustain his pride, and so he really feels this is his only choice. The show does an amazing job of making us care for this man and completely understanding his choices.

Where the show doesn't completely succeed for me, is in the balance of the different subplots. Walt is maintaining two lives, one where he creates and sells drugs, and another where he is trying to maintain his family, and keep them from finding out about his new career.

One is literally life and death as Walt interacts with violent drug runners and the other, while intensely important to Walt, is whether or not his marriage will survive, and when it comes down to it, the drug interactions are so much more interesting and dramatic that I get impatient when the show focuses on anything else.

They haven't perfected the balance of plot and subplot yet, but I'm interested enough in the main plot to keep watching and see what happens when the two plots colide.

Anyone else watching Breaking Bad?

When It's Time to Let Go...

I am having a really hard time right now. I recently bought a book by a favorite author that I'm nearly finished with and no lie it's bringing me to tears… and not in the good way.

Of course I'm not going to name this author directly - I mean who am I to cause a Google alert to pop up somewhere and that says someone diss'ed your work. What I will say is that the author is successful, well respected in the industry and even if I did name her I know my comments won't matter to her current fans. But the truth is she's breaking my heart a little.

I have loved this author for years. A personal triumph of mine is that I have every single category book she ever wrote under every name she wrote them even the ones that NO one knows about. I have this four book continuing romance series that might as well be gold sitting on my keeper shelf – I'm sure it's that rare. When she took chances I was there. When she switched genres I was there.

When I pass her in the halls at RWA conferences… I have this tendency to want to bow.

But lately it's just been harder and harder to read her newest releases. Her most recent – I'm sorry but it is a hot mess.

The story is all over the place, the sex is boring and you can tell she just wants to get through the scene rather than really explore what's happening emotionally and physically. Emotion – heck there is no real emotional development between the characters at all. They're just suddenly in love. The dialogue is clunky and while these should be contemporary characters they do not sound like anything remotely resembling a contemporary person living in 2011.

This woman was my inspiration. She's the reason why I wanted to write romance. This author in particular for me I put ahead of Nora because I found her first. I felt like the smartest person alive when I picked her off a shelf of all the other "red" books and then she went on to become famous. I said… "That's right… I know talent when I read it."

But now my heart is broken because I don't know how I can keep reading her. These last books of hers that I've read… well, they are just not for me anymore. Maybe you get to a point where you can't read an author anymore. That tipping point where they've told you every story they have as many times as you can handle it.

She was my comfort read. My go to buy. My never let me down author. And now I feel like if I read her anymore I'll start to forget how great those older books were.

I think I need to let go. I feel strangely bereft. Yes, there are new authors out there to find but this woman is my reading history. And just once more I would love to capture the thrill of what it was like to read her best work. I guess that's why I keep going back. Maybe this time will be different…

Does that happen to all of us? Are we all headed to a period in time where some innocuous blogger somewhere might say… "Yeah that last Stephanie Doyle booked sucked. It's the same story over and over again. I'm done with her."

Of course… this means someone would actually have to read a Stephanie Doyle book.

Anybody else have this kind of experience?

Avoiding the obvious

Avoiding the obvious is so hard, especially when you're writing genre fiction, and tonight I saw two films that made me think about this and want to try harder.

The first was a great film I was seeing for the second time and the other was a really, really disappointing one.

The great one was Blue Valentine.

As a group of young woman said on the way out, "Boy was that a downer!" And it is. Um, what did you expect? The good kind of valentines aren't blue. But it's also pretty wonderful and it never goes the obvious route. While it's about the end of a relationship, it doesn't paint either character as the good guy or the bad guy. I read a review that said that the Ryan Gosling character is the more sympathetic of the two, but I really think it depends on your perspective. I think I related to her side of it more even though she's the one who wants out.

And the screenplay is so smart about how and when we learn things about the couple. Some heartbreaking things. The small miracle of the story, which I didn't really notice until the second viewing, is that while it starts off almost feeling like a character sketch kind of thing, with little vignettes about the two main characters, every detail ends up being important.

But because of the order in which the story is told, nothing seems obvious. There's a moment in this film, near the beginning, where the Ryan Gosling character does something that made me cry both times I saw the movie. He's a mover, new at his job, and they're moving a very elderly man into an old-folks home. His boss tells him to empty the boxes, flatten them and get out of there fast. But he doesn't. Instead he carefully unpacks and thoughtfully organizes the man's possessions so he'll feel slightly at home when he comes in. It's so sweet it made me cry. Twice. And completely defines the character. And we know that the Michelle Williams character is across the hall in her Grandmother's room at the time. And they haven't met yet. So it's not a leap to jump to the conclusion that the plot reason for this scene will be their meeting. And from there assume that his sweet gesture is how he wins the girl over and gets that first date. But that's not what happens. At all. It's just so real and sweet. I don't think she ever finds out what he did... (Instead, she thinks he did something horrible.)

Another thing I noticed on second viewing was a line that seemed like idle conversation the first time. Tonight I realized that it was "the statement of the theme". The screenwriting gurus say that you should state the theme of your movie on page 10 or something... and while this so didn't feel like a movie that followed those kind of rules,  it did follow that one. Ryan Gosling tells his work mates that he thinks men are the real romantics. They act like they don't care about love or settling down, until they meet the right girl, then she's all they want. Whereas women, with all their talk about prince charming make practical choices when it comes to choosing a mate. (That's not exactly, but the gist of what he said.) And it totally sums up the movie... or at least their two characters.

Great movie. Sad. Not a date movie (in spite of the sex). But so well done.

Then, I went to see Country Strong. If you've seen the trailer and, like me, thought it looked great... Stick with the trailer. Whoever edited that trailer together was a genius and made it look like the movie would actually be about something. Whoever wrote the script? Not so much. Trite and predictable and corny and cliched, and although sad stuff happens you don't care. At all. Because you don't care about the characters and the things they do and the choices they make aren't well motivated. I knew the reviews were really bad, but had to see for myself...

Just realized that, in some ways, it tries to be like a sports movie, with the big game at the end... but because there are no character arcs in the story, at all, we don't even care whether she wins the big game gets through the concert at the end. And certainly don't care enough about what happens after...

Love that Garrett Hedlund dude, though. Boy, he can sing to me with that sexy baritone voice anywhere, anytime. Looks mighty fine in a pair of jeans, too.

Demographics

So the other day, my sweetie was watching a Buffy rerun. He's a big Joss Whedon fan and, bless his heart, thinks strong smart women are sexy. I happened to walk in the kitchen as he was watching and that's when the ad came on. It was for Ru Paul's Drag Race. That's cuz Buffy reruns air on Logo, apparently. 
My first thought was, "Babe, you are SO not their demographic." 
Last night, we were watching the premier of Being Human. An ad came on for Life Alert. You know, the "Help me. I've fallen and I can't get up." thingie? My sweetheart wondered out loud why Life Alert would be buying ad time on SyFy on a show about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost trying to live normal human lives. He thought it was probably a waste of their money.
I've got a book coming out in a few weeks and am trying to decide what to do to promote it. How do I reach my demographic?
RWA does all kinds of surveys about who reads romance and I know that my demographic is probably married, college-educated women between the ages of 31 and 49. So how do I find them? RWA says that most romance readers pick books based on ads in other romance novels. Ain't nothin' I can do about that. 
What about social networking? I played around with Facebook and Twitter, but I feel like I'm preaching to the choir. A lot of my FB friends are other writers. Ditto with people who were following me on Twitter for the brief time I was willing to tweet. 
Advertising is pricey. I've run ads in RWR. They're wonderfully affordable, but again, who am I reaching? Other writers. Romance writers and definitely romance readers, too, but I still feel like I'm preaching to the choir. There's RT, but their rates are a little our of my price range. 
So I'll probably do what I always do. Blog here and there. Send out some press releases. Have a book release party. Wish me luck.

The Fighter: Plot/Subplot

We saw The Fighter this weekend and it's strange that I love boxing movies so much, but I do. The underdog thing...the stakes...the bare chests, I don't know, but boxing movies work. And The Fighter was amazing. Really and truly amazing. And the negative feedback I've heard is largely that the movie seems unfocused, torn between the main plot of Micky (Whalberg) getting back in the ring and away from his controlling family, and his brother Dickie (Bale) and his crack habit and self-destructive life.

In Bale's Golden Globe acceptance speech, he thanked Whalberg for the strength of his quiet performance, because without the anchor, the loud performances don't work. And this was the movie in a nutshell for me.

I love plot/subplot conversations. I think for a subplot to really influence and add to the plot it has to carry a whole lot of importance - we have to care. And it's a two edged sword, make us care too much and the throughline gets taken over. For me The Fighter was balanced. Writing wise it was perfection:

Dickie has to go to jail so Micky has a chance to get free of him.
Both of them have to watch the documentary so Dickie is inspired to stay clean. Micky has to be inspired to wipe his brother's embarrassment off the town he loves.
Dickie has to come home, desperate to do right by his brother so much so that he apologizes to the people Micky loves - he tries very hard to make things right.
Micky sees this, brings his brother back on his team.

Without the focus on all of those moments, the scene of them walking out into the arena for the title fight amongst the boos with Dickie's hand on his brother's head both of them mumbling his anthem the White Snake song "Here I Go Again" would not have made me feel like leaping to my feet, fists in the air, tears in my eyes.

The movie took it's time to tell all the stories and it worked. All the performances were spectacular. Nuanced and sad and funny. Social Network was good in a cerebral way. This movie was great in an all heart way. Go see it.

My character is strong and weak and it all somehow makes sense

I'm finally getting around to watching Breaking Bad. The main character plays a man that initially appears a little meek, and quiet and is desperately sick and cannot afford the payments for the treatment that may help him get better. And then through the course of the second episode, the audience learns that this quiet man has a fierce, unassailable pride, all played brilliantly by Brian Cranston.

Then you have Don Draper, who is so capable and assured in the office and a mess in his personal life, weak almost, and trying desperately to not show this weakness, which results in terrible personal decisions, a lovely contrast to how his confidence in business usually helps him make the right decision there.

Another show that always demonstrated this well, was Battlestar. Starbuck was a fascinating character, because she was so strong in battle, strong physically and completely weak within herself, whereas the physically weakest character on the show, the president, a woman crippled by illness could make the most cold, clinical, strong decision almost every time.

What I love about those shows is how they turn the audience's initial impression of a character upside down, without undermining that first impression.

I've been thinking about Maureen's post about the monster inside me in YA fiction. I'm writing a book where the main character is initially weak, both by circumstances and her own fear, but the monster in her, gives her both a physical strength and more confidence by the end of the book. But I want to do this transformation in such a way that the girl who existed at the beginning of the book is still very much present.

So that the changes build into the character who was at the beginning of the book and make her more complex, rather than a whole new person.

Sounds so easy, freakin' hard to do.

Other than that, I'm getting ready to watch the Golden Globes on the weekend. Anyone else interested in watching?

I made myself laugh...

Okay – that's not really that hard. Sometimes I get in these moods where I can giggle over nothing for hours… not even when I'm drinking. What made me laugh this time was that I was thinking about this week's blog and how I'm struggling to get started with my next project.

The word startabookaphobia immediately leapt to my mind and I thought… "I've heard that before. I think one of the other Drunk Writers wrote about this."

This was great! This was awesome! I could read this blog and figure out what the other writer said and struggled with. Then I would read all the great comments that gave answers on how to overcome this sometimes debilitating condition.

Only when I checked it was me who wrote the blog. Back in March of last year when I started the book I just submitted to my agent. (Jokes on me - I thought was I going to be done somewhere around June.)

I had the startabookaphobia. Damn!

So I read my own blog and realized all the fears I had about trying to merge two genres… still true. My fear of executing the book in my head on to the paper… I essentially realized that fear. I just don't feel like I went far enough. I know I have to be patient and see what the industry says… but in my gut I don't feel like I delivered. And I couldn't see my way through even with all the help I got (Thanks Molly! Thanks Karen!) to fixing it in a way that would make it right or better. I tried. Maybe I succeeded. But who knows.

Anyway here I am now in exactly the same place almost a year later. I have a book in my head.

I'm no longer afraid of genre crossing – because I'm not going to do it. Nanh aahh. Not me. I learned my lesson. Pigeonhole the *bleep* out of me please! This is good.

The fear to execute is still there. This time there will be less major POVS. (Yeah me! Way easier!) However in my infinite wisdom I decided to do two intersecting timelines that have to feed each element of the story.

That shouldn't be hard right? Even though I've never done anything remotely like this. Getting the past and present to weave together and culminate in a brilliant way so that you can see the mystery in the past getting revealed as you solve it in present tense…

Yeah… I have startabookaphobia again. And they don't make pills for this.

What is everyone else doing this winter? What's next for ya'all. (Says the girl from New Jersey… but don't you just love ya'all!)