Ginger Voight's Blog, page 12

#Nanowrimo Day Six: Embracing the Suckatude

One of the greatest gifts my husband Steven ever gave to me was a hardbound copy of one of my books. The reason it was one of the greatest gifts was because I knew what was coming and I was relatively certain that I was going to hate it.

Back then the idea of becoming a published writer was still fairly abstract. It was a dream only, something I hoped would happen someday in my future, but I knew without any shadow of a doubt I wasn’t prepared for it by Christmas of 2005.

Granted, I had written quite a bit by then, with five books and six screenplays under my belt, including the one I had optioned. But it was clear that having anything published or produced was still pretty far into the future. (Six years to be exact.) I had a lot to learn. And I had a lot more work to do.

Steven decided I shouldn’t have to wait to see my name in print, and decided that for Christmas, he’d have one of my books professionally bound. Normally this would be a killer present for an unpublished author. And it would have been, had it not been for one teeny tiny problem.

The reason I just knew I would hate it was because of the version of the book he chose to–pardon the pun–immortalize. He decided he wanted to use the first draft of my novel, MY IMMORTAL, which I had written the year before for Nano.

This was how I managed to figure out what he was up to, no matter how sly he thought he was being. He had to get this draft from me somehow, and, like most writers, I was quite unwilling to give it up.

This made me 100% certain I’d hate the gift when he finally presented it to me.

By then I had worked through subsequent drafts, so I knew just how badly written that first draft was. You never realize that at the end of the draft, when you crawl, bloody and broken, over the finish line, with just enough stamina to thrust your fist in the air like you're stuck in a John Hughes movie.

I told him, ever so gently, in my sweet Southern way, that a snowball had a better chance in hell than he did getting that first draft. It, like every other first draft in existence, sucked way too much to be published as it was.

But he was insistent. He didn’t seem to care that this draft sucked the big one, and how much it would physically pain me to revisit it even if it was hardbound in leather. He wanted to honor my accomplishment of writing a book, any book, even a sucky one.

One thing you should know about my husband. When he decides he wants to do something a certain way, he’s fairly obnoxious about it. Personally I think that’s why we get along so well. We’re both the kind of people that, when we dig our heels in, it’s because we really, really, really believe in what we are doing, making us impossible to deter.

Long story short: he badgered me until I caved.

Finally I just plugged my nose and handed over that stinky, cruddy, awful, error-filled, verbose, overwritten, hastily written piece of suckatude and let him do his thing. It clearly meant more to him than it would to me, and letting him do what he wanted was kind of my Christmas gift to him.

I was certain I’d have to feign any kind of enthusiasm for the gift all the way up until I opened the box and saw the book for the first time.

I didn’t know how badly I wanted to see my name in print until the first time I did. I promptly burst into tears, deciding in about a second that this was the best gift ever.

That book has had a special place on our bookshelf every year since.



Now ask me how many times I’ve cracked it open to read it. Ask me how many times anyone has read it. I’ll give you a hint; it’s the same number.

It’s also the same number of people will be able to read it going into the future.

You’re basically going to have to pry the book out of my cold, dead hands, because no one gets to read it while there is still breath in my body. Nope. Nada. Can’t help you. No one is ever going to read it. Ever, ever, ever.

Why?

It sucked.

Even though it was book #4, written 23 years after that first Halloween writing assignment, it sucked. Even though I live-blogged it as I wrote it, publishing a chapter a day with minimal editing for a wide MySpace audience, who read along enthusiastically, enthralled by the sophomoric attempt, as well as my ambitious endeavor to write a book in a month, it sucked.

It sucked, it sucked, it sucked.



It sucked because it was a first draft. It sucked because, even with those 23 years, four novels and six screenplays under my belt, I was still figuring out who I was as a writer. It sucked because I was feeling my way along, trying and discarding new ideas, experimenting, and, more often than not, falling right on my face.

Fortunately that’s what those first few books are for. They exist for the sole purpose of learning how not to suck. It’s a gauntlet, if you will. An obstacle course you must navigate in order to get better.

Ironically, that’s also the reason that so many people never turn “I wish,” into “I did.”

Too many writers are afraid to suck.

Worse, we like to give them a gold star for it. We nod in agreement that writing a bad book is a waste of time. Too many bad books exist already, written and even published by those who clearly aren’t as self-aware as these careful, thoughtful writers who respect the process way too much to do something as heinous as write a bad book. On purpose. Anyone who would willingly write a sucky book is obviously a hack looking to make a fast buck, someone who doesn’t take the process seriously. Somewhere along the line we decided it showed disciplined when a writer recognized his or her limitations and curbed their enthusiasm to write accordingly.

Funny thing about writing within such limitations. It doesn’t give you much room to grow.

The best gift that Steven gave me that year was the permission to suck. It was okay. It was necessary.

No matter what you do in life, you're usually not going to ace it on the first try. In my book BACK FOR SECONDS, my heroine had to start her life over after a bitter, unexpected divorce. She threw herself into her cooking, where she used the challenge of creating delectable treats that were iced to perfection to renew her confidence. She didn't succeed the first try. In fact there was one notable scene where she had a minor meltdown, crushing those cookies into a fine powder because she couldn't get it right, not the way she wanted it.

The bigger your dream, the higher your standards.

Like anyone else who has accomplished anything great, she didn't use that suckatude as an excuse to stop. She saw it as an opportunity to get better, to learn from her mistakes. She didn't stop just because she sucked. She kept going, because perfecting this task meant more to her.

Writing a sucky book doesn't mean you don't care about or respect the process. It means you're not about to let something as temporary as sucking stop you from doing what it is you want to do.

And it didn’t stop me, at all, from seeing my dream realized. In fact, it inspired me to work a lot harder on the next book, just so it would suck less. It was the only way I’d see my name in print “for real.”

Writing a great book starts with writing rotten ones, and that’s just the truth. The first book you write will always be the worst book you write, even if you’re a writing prodigy. Raw talent likely got you into the game, but only skill can take you from a wide-eyed wannabe to an accomplished author. The only way you gain that skill is through experience. Lots and lots of experience. To learn how to write you must write… and you must write a lot. Even if it’s bad. Even if it sucks. You have to crawl before you learn how to walk and all that.

Don't take my word for it. The great Stephen King has said there are only two things you need to do to become a writer. Read a lot and write a lot.

Most of us can handle the reading part. A wordsmith typically starts as a bibliophile. We love everything about the written word. We consume all types of books and absorb all sorts of things from all types of stories and storytellers, even when we’re not aware that’s what we are doing.

Indeed, many writers start their journey assimilating what they’ve read and trying to duplicate it, which is one of the reasons so many of those first few attempts suck so badly. It’s not completely genuine or authentic. You’re simply rehashing what you’ve read in the past, forcing it through your own inexperienced filter until it resembles anything even remotely bookish.

That’s how it happened for me, anyway.

It’s kind of inevitable, really. When you’re a new writer, you’re still figuring out who you are. You have an idea what you want to say, and you lean on all the books you’ve ever read to show you how to say it.

And that’s great. You should read a ton of books. Lots and lots.

The more you read, the better you’ll write. It’s inevitable.

But here’s the part about that lesson we all miss. We are often spared all the yucky, sucky parts. We don’t get to see the first fledgling drafts of these novels, the ones that the publishers or agents said, “Yeah… it’s a’ight, but we’re going to have to put some work into it before it can go to market.”

Every great book has gone through some sort of editing process, which exists solely to minimize the suckatude. What you hold in your hand is a finished product. It is not where that writer started, not by a long shot.

We’ve all been judging our first efforts by the finished product of others as if they are the same thing, and they’re just not.

This sets up an unrealistic expectation for your own work. When you produce your first draft and you realize yourself that it doesn’t stand up to all the books you’ve read, it can be a real killjoy that will strike you right in the heart of your insecurities. This can make you shelve your projects, hidden away in some dark drawer, never to see the light of day, because you’d be mortified if anyone knew just how badly you suck. You need to be aware of and recognize your limitations, and amend yourself accordingly.

That’s how I always approached it, anyway.

Maybe that was why I could write five books and six screenplays and still be horribly mortified by the suckatude. I valued perfection over progress, and really didn’t get anywhere as a result.

It’s a sobering discovery when you learn that no matter how badly you want that gold star, or to be recognized for your spark, that bright creative genius we’ve talked about time and again, that thing that makes you special and sets you apart from everyone else, you start out sucking every bit as much as everyone else.

Every creative type will struggle with this at some point, particularly at the beginning of their careers. This is when you suck harder than you will ever suck.

At some point your inexperience will frustrate you, because you will not be able to do your brilliant ideas justice.

Yeah. That happened to me.

Nothing shuts your dreams down faster. Many writers are unwilling, and often discouraged, from writing a bad book, even when it’s a necessary part of writing a great one.

Ray Bradbury once advised writers to write 52 stories over 52 weeks, contending that it is impossible to write 52 bad stories in a row. Like any underdeveloped muscle, you have to work it out in order to get the kind of results you want. No one wakes up with a six-pack just because they really, really want them. You have to put in the time. You have to do the work.

It is in the suckatude that you learn how not to suck. And every single writer has gone through this process, whether you got to see it or not.

Even the great Harper Lee, whose book “To Kill a Mockingbird” was an award-winning classic that sustained her entire career on only one novel, sucked at first. When she sent in the book that would become TKAM, it wasn’t ready for publication at all. It had a spark of genius, but it was mired in just enough suckatude to throw the brakes on the whole thing until they could fix it.

You didn’t get to see that part. You don’t get to see the long hours of sitting in front of a typewriter, toiling over each word choice. You don’t get to see the back and forth with the editors, where Ms. Lee worked over the period of two years to turn that sow's ear into a silk purse. All you see is the polished, award-winning classic sitting on the bookshelf. Every word she wrote was not, as it turns out, pure gold, and she needed a little help from other people to learn how to shake off the suckatude.

As we all do.

Every new writer will ultimately face this. You’re going to suck. I sucked. Stephen King sucked. Harper Lee sucked. We all had to start somewhere in order to learn how not to suck.

Since everyone assumes that anything written in 30 days must suck by default, I say use Nanowrimo as your excuse to suck… with style.



Since you can't avoid it, you might as well learn to embrace the suckatude. Go into each writing session knowing that you might suck that day, but that’s okay. If you keep at it, day by day, word by word, you’re going to suck a little less by month’s end, simply because you’re working out that muscle.

Not every word you write will drip with honey. My typical book runs anywhere from 80,000 – 100,000 words, and of those words, there are probably ten to twenty really great passages, the kind that are so good they actually make me question whether I could have written it. When I edit the work, however, I’m ready to throw about 70% of it back, endlessly tweaking and fidgeting to get it just so.



In fact, much of your output will frustrate you. It is not an easy thing to arrange words on a page. Often they will feel inadequate in the sheer scope of what you're trying to do. Writing a book is hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise most likely hasn’t written one, particularly one that doesn’t suck. (Because that's even harder.)

Writing anything is hard, short format, long format, doesn’t matter. Every word you cast onto the page is like a piece of spaghetti flung on a wall. You never know what is going to stick until it does. It is a learning experience as you struggle to find “the right” word, or the right combination of words. You’ll find yourself scowling every single time you write the word “said,” because it won’t properly convey the emotion of the scene, which you feel should be transcribed to the letter. You’ll refer to your thesaurus more than once, to find a prettier word, a more writer-y word, to say what you want to say with style, ultimately exhausting every synonym for said in the space of a chapter. You’ll stare at a paragraph for an hour, thinking it’s clunky and confusing, but unsure how to whittle it down into something more succinct and concise. You’ll change sentence order, you’ll fiddle with sentence structure; you’ll delete words and insert words, only to wipe away the whole passage entirely in a fit of impotent despair.

In fact, this chapter itself feels sucky to me. Thanks to real life stuff, I’m up earlier than usual. Since I have a deadline to meet, I decided to get my daily writing requirement out of the way early. This forces me to write when I don’t feel my brain is firing on all cylinders. Each word feels inadequate. Nothing is flowing like I want it to flow.*

Believe me, as a writer you’re every bit as aware of when you get it right as when you get it wrong. You’ll feel it down to your bones.

You’ll be painfully aware when you suck, even decades into your writing career. Some days you just need to write through the suckatude, knowing that no matter how bad it is, it doesn’t have to stay that way.

That’s what the rewrite process is for.

That this is happening on the day I had outlined to talk about sucking actually works out perfectly, so you can see that yes… it can suck… but you will both move past it and learn from it. I may feel like I’m forcing every word this morning, but it’s not stopping me from getting the words onto the page. Deadlines don’t go away just because you can’t find the right word. Use “said,” and move on. Put the pieces in place. You can fiddle with getting them perfect later. It’s your job to keep plodding along, installing the space for your chapter, knowing that when you go back through it later, you can address whatever weaknesses you felt were there and make it stronger, even if it’s rewriting the thing entirely.

Suckatude is no excuse to stop. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to complete your first draft, regardless of if it sucks.

Spoiler: it’s going to. Like I said, first is always worst, even within specific projects.

Here’s the thing, though. You have permission to suck. It’s okay. It’s necessary. Once you learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff by doing it on a regular basis, you’re going to suck a whole lot less.

You just need to muster the courage to be imperfect for a while.

Writers who are afraid of sucking usually never write their way out from under it. Writers who realize that sucking is an inherent part of the process will inevitably use each and every failure to climb out of the suckatude, building a skillset that will take them wherever they need to go. This comes from learning what not to do every bit as learning what to do.

The best education I ever got in screenwriting came from joining websites where other newbies like me could share our work and engage in peer-to-peer reviews to polish our screenplays. This started with Zoetrope, a virtual studio for Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope, one where writers can both give and receive feedback to refine their craft.

Back when I started, you had to review something like three screenplays in order to submit one of your own. Sounds simple enough, right?

That’s what I thought too, until I realized that these were not the polished screenplays that actually made it to the screen, not by a long shot. These were early drafts from clueless, new writers, many of whom were at different developmental stages of their career, which often made it a chore to get through.

In a very real way, you stop reading for pleasure when you start writing professionally. You start picking things apart. You’re more critical. You can spot where things hit the mark and when they fall flat. You’ll do this all the time, even when you don’t realize you’re doing it. You’ll do it for published/produced material, things that were deemed OK to release to the masses. And you’ll most definitely do it in peer-to-peer reviews, where you are tasked with helping your fellow writer get one step closer to that ultimate goal of being sold.

If you’ve never done this, I highly recommend finding a writer group and adding this to your to-do list. By reading only published/produced material, you’re only getting half the picture. You need to see what doesn’t work every bit as what does. This way you’ll more easily spot the flaws and the problems in your own writing.

That wasn’t the real challenge, though. The real challenge was finding a positive and constructive way to break down the screenplay and tell the writer what didn’t work as well as what did. This requires knowledge of what makes a sucky book or screenplay suck so hard, and you can’t really identify those things without being familiar with both good material and bad material.

You must educate yourself about those things, especially if you’re a new writer yourself. It’s not enough just to decide you don’t like something, which might work for a casual reader but is never excusable for someone who wants to be a professional. You need to identify why you didn’t like it. You have to break it down. You have to solve it, kind of like a riddle. Maybe the first and only thing you can think of is, “Well. It sucked.” But that writer can’t do too much with that. Did it suck because you have personal biases you took into it? Maybe it was juvenile humor and you don’t like juvenile humor. Maybe the main character is unlikable. This often boils down to personal preference, but technical execution can also play a part. Did it suck because it was improperly formatted? Did it suck because it bored you, indicating there might be something wrong with the pacing?

Be specific. Why did it suck? What went wrong?

When you learn to answer these questions, you’ll learn how to avoid these pitfalls in your own writing.

This is why it’s kind of necessary to suck.

The challenge, then, is learning how not to suck. This comes from fearless experimentation and relentless repetition. Every writing session is a workout, flexing and training your creative muscle so that one day, over time, it becomes toned and refined. Just like going to the gym to train your body, some days you just have to grin and bear it as you write word after inferior word, no matter how frustrated you might be that you’re not quite communicating the message the way you want to. You can’t see the progress because you’re mired down in the swamp of suckatude, wading through the muck every single time you have to write a bunch of crappy paragraphs you just know you’re going to have to whittle down later into something more palatable. And, just like the gym, you’ll discover that the more you flex that muscle, the more confidence you will develop over time. After a month, or six months, or a year, you’ll finally see the progress in your body, turning it into the masterpiece you always knew it could be.

You write enough words, you’ll find that they suck less and less. Like Mr. Bradbury said, it’s impossible that they’re all bad, or that they will all suck, if you just keep going.

But you’ll never get to that place as long as you use the fear of sucking as an excuse not to try.

Leaning a bit harder on the fitness analogy, I’ll put it this way. I am a big girl. My body is not where I want it to be. In order to get where I want to be, I know I’m going to have to put in a whole lot of work. This isn’t something I can finish in 30 days, or even six months, maybe even one year. To get to where I want to go, I’ll have to exercise when I don’t feel like it. I’ll have to say no to yummy food when I really want it. I’ll have to use enormous amounts of discipline I currently don’t possess, or at least utilize for that particular task. If I want something different, I’m going to have to do something different. It’s the only way to get in fighting shape as it were.

Because this task is so overwhelming, and the demands of which are daunting, my first human instinct is to make excuses not to try. This irrational fear is wagers my success against how likely it is I will fail. The odds are not stacked in my favor. Most people have been perpetually dieting in some form or another for decades and still struggle with it. I know that the road ahead of me is not an easy one, and it’s inevitable that I will suck at meeting this challenge.

This past year, I dedicated myself to a fitness journey. I had hoped to make a huge dent in the weight I had to lose, but I only lost 23 pounds. I have plenty of excuses on why I sucked at transforming my body. I don’t want to join a gym. I don’t like working out in front of anyone, much less the kind of people who have already mastered the kind of discipline I haven’t yet developed. Even in my own house, I have to have absolute privacy to work out, which I often don’t have.

But I want that privacy because I don’t want to feel inadequate. No one does.

Whether I worked at this goal or not, the time passed regardless. Here it is a year later and I’m not all that much closer to my goal than I was when I started.

If in another year I’m still in the same exact spot I am now, I have no one to blame but myself. I could have dared to fail, dared to suck, dared to be inadequate and work through it, or I could choose not to. (Like every OTHER year of my life.)

In other words, if I’m not where I want to be, it’s kind of my choice.

To do anything of any importance, from the time you learn to walk to the time you dare to fly, you have to be willing to suck.

And if you want to do something big, you have to be willing to suck just as epically.

My son Timothy once said to me, “Your discipline must match your ambition.” This is absolutely 100% true. If you want to write a great book, you need the discipline to churn out a few stinkers along the way. You have to hold your nose and power through those books that will never sell in order to get to the ones that will.

The more you write, the more you’ll be able to tell the difference.

It’s going to take some time, but that’s okay. The time is going to pass either way. It’s up to you how you use it. You can develop that creative muscle and get yourself in fighting shape, or you can shrug it off and let the time pass without doing one damn thing to improve. The bad news is that we all suck at the beginning.

The better news is that we can improve drastically if we dare to write anyway.

The best news it that there’s no downside to writing books that suck. So your book sucks. So what? Shelve it and start on the next one, which I can guarantee you will suck a little less.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever use the suckatude as an excuse to stop writing. Only writing itself will get you past this awkward, ugly, inadequate phase that every single writer before you has found themselves in.

Not everyone will get past it.

But you can.

And you should.

So go forth and suck, my lovelies. Write stinkers of sentences, paragraphs, chapters and books. Line your walls with the page after inadequate page. Let every awkward word mock you from the screen, challenging you–daring you–to work through the crap in order to reach your full potential.

And one day, when you’re a huge success, and people are clamoring to know your secret, you can just smile wide and tell them, “I wasn’t afraid to suck.”

*As you can see from the time taken to revise this chapter, as well as the jump in the word count, I did fidget with this one a little more than the rest, simply because it sucked, and I didn't care to post it live in the condition it was in. It still isn't perfect, but I'll be able to move on to my next chapter tomorrow. In the rewrite process, who knows what might happen? I might scrap it entirely.

Odds are, however, I'll just tighten it up and sharpen the message of the content. At least the basic ideas are in place, and that's all I needed to move forward.

It still kinda sucks, but that's okay. Most of what we write is not carved in stone, so suckatude is a temporary state at best.

But that's a lesson for another day.



Started First Draft: November 6, 2015 8:31am PST
Completed First draft: November 6, 2015 10:57am PST
Word Count of first draft: 3,503
Completed revisions: November 6, 2015 1:15pm PST
Updated WC: 4,776/22,300

When the Bad Guy is a Bad Boy. Have y'all met Caz?

Yeah... I don't know where he came from, but I managed to unearth yet another douche bag that I should have hated, but I kind of loved.

If you've already read MASTERS FOR HIRE, prepare to meet Devlin's nemesis, Caz Bixby, in MASTERS FOR LIFE, who gets thrust into Coralie's fairy tale existence as her cocky, obnoxious personal trainer.

TEASER FROM MASTERS FOR LIFE

He appraised me thoughtfully. “Guess we better hit the gym then... New Year’s Eve will be here before you know it.”

“I’ve been ready for a half-hour.”

He glanced down at his suit. “Oh yeah,” he said with a grin. He put his champagne flute onto the table before he stood. He crossed the distance between us in two steps, before hovering over me with a different kind of smoldering glance all his own. I watched as he tugged free his tie, which snapped from around his neck before he trailed it across one of my wrists. My fists balled tightly, so he tossed the tie away. With that despicable smirk, he ran his hands up his sculpted chest until his fingers circled that top button. Slowly he released them, one at a time, revealing his sculpted bare chest underneath, which caught me off guard. His bold tattoos on both arms appeared to breathe thanks to his rippling muscles.

He took off the shirt and tossed it onto the sofa next to me, before angling his pelvis towards my face. “Help me with my pants?” he said as he held his hands out to the sides of his hips, like he was presenting me with pure gold. I practically breathed fire, but I didn’t move one muscle. “No? I guess I can do it then.”

His strong fingers unfastened his dress slacks, slowly unzipping them. His slacks fell to the floor, revealing snug compression workout shorts that hugged his defined bulge proudly. As he stepped out of his pants, I realized that he still wore his dress shoes. “Looks like you forgot something,” I sneered.

He chuckled as he kicked off his shoes. He reached for one sock. “I guess I’ll have to go bare. Do you mind?”

I scowled at his innuendo. “You’re such a pig.”

He leaned over me, backing me up against the cushion of the sofa, one arm on either side of me. “We’re all animals deep down, baby.” His gaze liberally drifted towards my mouth. “So what do you say? Wanna burn some calories?”

With a growl I scooted out from under his arm and rounded the other side of the sofa. He straightened with an even wider smile before he followed, trailing his laughter behind.

******

You will not BELIEVE where these two men take us all in book three, MASTERS FOREVER, a tempting little treat provided below... which will probably scare the shit out of everyone still cursing my name for how Book Two ended.

#sorrynotsorry #itsgonnabegood

TEASER FROM MASTERS FOREVER, (MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS BUT DAYUM, IT MIGHT BE WORTH IT...)

Devlin leaned back against the sofa as he studied my face. “Not how I pictured this night going,” he murmured. “How about you?”

My eyes hardened. “Not how I pictured the year going.”

He brushed a stray strand of my hair from my eyes. “Me either.”

“Jesus,” Caz exhaled as he rolled his eyes. He grabbed the remote and turned to a music channel that played pulsating dance music. He dragged me up by the hand. “This is a party, for fuck’s sake.”

“Caz, I don’t want to,” I tried to protest as he pulled me to the center of my living room. Still holding the remote, he turned down all the lights courtesy of the dimmer.

“Come on, pussycat. If you wanted to stay here and feel sorry for yourself, you’d have never left.”

A dance tune by Madonna began to play, the aptly titled “Hung Up.” Caz pulled me close, his hands on my hips, to guide me through the sensual movements as we began to undulate to the music. I stole glances at Dev, who watched us from his spot in the corner of my couch.

It was the very same corner where he had been that first night, when he commanded that I strip for him. He had seduced me that night, confidently and well. My flesh responded instantly to the memory. I shuddered and looked way, focusing on Caz, who danced closely to me, grinding his hips against me, his eyes locked with mine. “Only a couple of hours left, baby,” he said. “Do you really want to spend it sad?”

The music pulsated around me, a rolling beat that made the entire room felt like it was spinning and tumbling through space. Of course, that might have been the pot. My brain had taken off somewhere around Pluto. That, combined with the alcohol I had consumed, helped me submit to the dance. I closed my eyes and just allowed myself to ride the music.

“That’s it,” Caz murmured. “Let yourself go. You know you want to.”

Again my eyes sought Dev. Maybe I was waiting for permission. Maybe I just wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to lose his shit again. My eyes snapped open when I realized he was no longer sitting on the sofa.

I nearly jumped out of my skin when I felt him fall into step behind me, pinning me between both of them.

“Dev,” I started, but his mouth landed right next to my ear.

“Shh,” he shushed, and it sent an involuntary shudder all the way through my body.

I found myself responding to the beat, braced between them. Devlin, whose mouth rested right near my ear, dragged his lips along the sensitive line of my neck. “Ever had two men at once, Coralie?” he murmured.

I practically evaporated on the spot. After everything I’d been through, after everything they had both done, I knew I was at their mercy. I was too high. I was too drunk. I was too bitter after such a crappy, crappy few months. There had been so many moments that I just wanted to turn the clock back... so I just enjoy my fantasy for one minute more.

And here Dev was, like a mirage, offering me another one. A new one. A naughty one. It was one where I could be with him again, no matter how high the cost, which had always been really high, like $25,000. Like a broken heart. Like shattered dreams. Like loving a man who might just be incapable of loving me back.

And yet… dear God, help me… it was still everything I wanted.

******

Are you scared yet?

Just wait till November 27....O_O

My boys will be back, and they're going to be badder than ever.

I. Cannot. Wait.

#Nanowrimo Day Five: To Outline or Not to Outline; That is the Question.

When it comes to prep work, writers typically segregate themselves into two camps: those who outline and those who don’t.

Those who outline prefer to have all their ducks in a row before they get started. Those who don’t outline prefer a more flying-by-the-seat-of-one’s-pants approach.

I have belonged to both of these camps. Ironically enough it was Nanowrimo that had me defecting to the other side.

I started squarely and defiantly in the “seat-of-one’s-pants” camp for my first few novels. I preferred to let the story take me where it was going to take me. There’s a lot of freedom in that, because let’s face it, our stories are living entities. Every strike of your keys or swoop of your pen brings these little darlings to life, and they often have minds of their own.

When I try to explain this to a non-writer, I typically get a skeptical side-eye glare, assessing to see if I’m insane. (Hint: I’m a writer… it’s implied.)



“How can your characters surprise you, Ginger? They’re coming from you.”

Well, yes. And no.

Back when I wrote DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS originally, it was as a screenplay, and I had very definite ideas of what I wanted to do with the story. It started as the tale of a lesbian who was a PK (or preacher’s kid,) and, after a disastrous sequence of events, fell in love with the one person in the whole town that she shouldn’t.

That’s the story idea that planted my butt in the chair anyway.

As I bounced this idea off of my husband, Steven, like I am prone to do, he explained that there should be another character in her life, a friend even. He contended that I couldn’t just have her influenced by her horrible, fanatical family.

I agreed, so I took my main character Grace to a liquor store, where she met a guy named Mike.

I should probably insert here that Grace has a lot of problems, one of the biggest of which is that she is a full-fledged addict who self-medicates with drugs and alcohol even though she’s barely nineteen years old.

So of course she’d go to a liquor store, right? That’s a completely organic thing for her to do. *Insert smug writer-type sense of self-importance here.*

All I typed were the words, “Hey, Gracie,” and suddenly Mike didn’t feel so friendly. Since I didn't "meet" this character until he inserted himself in the story, I really didn't know him from Adam. Because he was so new to me and to the story itself, he could do whatever the hell he wanted to do. He was a blank slate. I wanted to create one thing, and all of a sudden my fingers were tapping me in a whole other direction.

I spoke briefly about my first writing assignment. This truly was where I got my first taste of the story guiding the writer. I was given a picture of a house and told to write a story to go along with. Since this was Halloween, I knew that the teacher probably wanted a haunted house story, though the picture in and of itself wasn’t especially scary. It was just a picture of an old house, one that looked like it could have been built in the 1800s or early 1900s.

I had no idea what I was going to write about when I sat in front of that beautiful blank piece of paper to create a story for the first time.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I knew that I wanted the house to be sad. To me, that’s where most hauntings start. I think it would be terribly sad to be bound to an earthbound plane, ignored and invisible to the world around you. How lonely that must be. It's no wonder a ghost would want to reach out, make noise, be seen... be acknowledged.

It just wants what we all want.

So the origin to my story was a sad one. A man loves his beautiful bride so much that he builds her a grand house full of many rooms that they fill with as many children. Instead, they both die childless years and years later, because life has its own plans.

(And yes, I realize that UP got the jump on me on this one. But to be fair, it had been 28 years and I hadn’t done anything with this story, so … it was kinda fair game.)

Making this sad origin scary just didn’t seem right to me after that, but I couldn’t just leave the story like this. It was just too darned sad.

Instead of ending it as a haunted house, I ended the story as a story of hope, by turning the sad, old home into an orphanage into a happy home filled with love for all those kids who had no parents.

(I like to do stuff like that. Recently a reader responded to a promo blog for MASTERS FOR HIRE by saying, "Ginger Voight sure likes to take the norm and toss it on its head." #truestory.)

Of course by the time I was through, I knew I no longer had a Halloween story. There wasn’t anything even remotely scary about it. It was actually kind of uplifting instead. I colored in the picture of the house using happy, bright colors with nary a cobweb in sight.

(Once again, you’re welcome, UP.)

When I turned in the assignment, I was only slightly concerned that I had gone so completely off script with my first story. I am a people pleaser deep down, and I knew I didn’t do what was expected of me. For a chronic Good Girl, whose neurosis to be all things to all people began years before, the idea of invoking my teacher’s wrath, or worse – enduring her disappointment – began to gnaw at me as each day passed and I waited for my grade.

I had confidence that I was a good student, particularly in Language Arts, but the instant I didn’t get my paper back when everyone else did, I fended off an anxiety attack of near epic proportions. Could I have *gulp* failed for the first time ever?

I was a good student. Such a thing was unthinkable.

When I finally found the nerve to walk up to the front of the class and ask Mrs. Adams where my paper was, she gestured behind her to the Wall of Honor, where all the truly important things go, where my paper now hung with a giant red “A.”

I. Was. Flabbergasted.

Not only had my teacher liked the fact I went off script, she praised me for it. It wasn’t just a good paper. It was a great one.

After that, I was passionate about letting my stories guide me, confident that they would know oh so much better than I did about what was good, and what was exceptional.

Fast-forward to 2002, when I wrote the screenplay for DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS over the course of a week, churning out 40 pages in one day alone, and I could tell right away that Mike was seriously about to go off script. He felt creepy. And sinister. I could hear this character’s voice in my ear and it instantly gave me a full-bodied shudder.

This wasn’t her friend at all. This was the exact opposite of her friend. I knew within two teeny tiny words. I think my exact reaction to this was, “Ohhhh. So you’re THAT guy.”

I had a plan for Mike, but as it turned out, he had a plan for me, too–one that would change my whole storyline. This one little change, where my Muse nudged me in one direction and not the other, reshaped the plot entirely.

Later, when Grace informed me that she wasn’t really a lesbian at all, who was I to argue? I was essentially sitting in the first row of my mind’s theater, chowing on popcorn, watching my actors do improv, curious to see where, exactly, they were about to take me.

Because I didn’t outline, I was allowed to do this. I had the freedom to do this. And people who have a lot of freedom don’t typically want to surrender it, especially with the tedious work of writing out an outline. No stallion wants to be confined in the starting gate. We want that gate to open so we can gallop wherever our little hearts will take us.

Therefore I rejected the process quite emphatically and piously, even when I painted myself into quite a few corners doing it the other way. Let's face it, when you're all over the map trying to write a concise, cohesive story, there's a lot of mess to clean up after you make it through Draft One. And while writing is rewriting, it's not a fun or easy process to discard those words you practically had to pull out of your butt with needle-nose pliers in the first place.

If you’re not a seasoned storyteller, this is your early training ground, learning, usually, what not to do. Repetition gives birth to efficiency, particularly if you're learning to write professionally and on a deadline.

What any screenwriter builds is essentially a three-act play, where certain things must happen to drive the story forward. There are beats and inciting incidents and all kinds of expectations that need to be met or your screenplay will falter. And many a screenwriter has found themselves stuck in Second Act hell because they hadn’t really properly laid their foundation for their story in Act One.

Whereas Act One sets up your story, introduces you to the characters, their goals and their obstacles, Act Two is an obstacle course that demands your character is pulled along by the momentum of the story towards their inevitable “moment of truth” or “point of no return.” This is what will vault them into Act Three, your resolution, which includes any epic showdown to see whether or not your character will achieve his or her goal. This essentially boils down to answering whatever questions you posed in Act One.

Because Act Two is twice the size of Acts One and Three, it can be a little daunting. This is particularly true for new writers, who aren’t all that comfortable with turning the monsters loose to chase their beloved characters through the hellish maze one needs to survive in order to get to Act Three.

For many non-outliners, Act Two slows them down, and that’s exactly how it worked for me. Getting past page 25 in any script felt a bit like entering The Fire Swamp from “ The Princess Bride .” It can be every bit as dark and treacherous.

Still, I successfully wrote three books and four screenplays this way, so I held fast to my “seat-of-my-pants” status, even after I turned one of my novels, PICTURE POSTCARDS, into a screenplay as well, and realized it was a lot easier to craft a screenplay when all the little ducks were in a row.

Then along came Nano 2004, when I had the beyond brilliant idea to turn one of my screenplays into a novel.

It sounds kind of like cheating, but it’s really not. Since screenplays and novels are two completely different animals, there’s a lot of work involved in adapting one medium to the other.

In screenplays, one is discouraged from writing anything unnecessary to move the story forward. You are tasked with only one thing: telling whomever might be reading what they would be seeing on screen. This whacks away at all the flowery prose we often indulge for descriptions. Instead, you’re expected to be a lot more technical.

Your scene setting is reduced to a neatly condensed Scene Heading, and they want you to KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid.) You’re supposed to let them know if it’s an interior or exterior shot, where it is, specifically, and what type of day. You can add in special stuff, like if it’s a flashback, dream sequence or montage, but typically all scene headings are bland data, not good writing.

Here’s an example:

INT. VOIGHT HOUSEHOLD/MASTER BEDROOM – DAY

The purpose of this scene heading is to tell the filmmakers we’re starting a new scene, and where that happens to take place. That’s it. You are able to describe the scene somewhat in the “action” part of the script, broken up with actual dialogue, but you are discouraged from using much space to do this. You only have 100 pages, remember. And readers want to move as quickly as possible down the page. This discourages the use of “too much black,” which bogs down the read.

Unless your description is pertinent to the scene, it’s wasting space to get overly fixated on it.

It’s also not your job.

Screenplays are collaborative. You hand over a basic skeleton that others are then free to fill in, people like directors and set designers and costumers and makeup artists and even the actors themselves will take the basic guide you’ve given them and flesh it out into something bigger.

Whereas I can set the scene for a book by typing:

It was a cool morning, with a slight nip in the air, forcing Ginger’s feet under the covers as she balances the computer across her lap. Despite the chill in the room, a fan runs just a few feet away. There is always a fan running whenever Ginger turns her bedroom into her office, where she can write in peace. She finds the white noise soothing. Its major purpose, however, is buffering and muting any noises from other parts of the house. These noises, the sounds of her beloved family just precious feet from her closed door, are both reassuring and distracting. They yank her out of her creative zone, like being ripped out of a super suit. One minute, she’s GINGER: WRITER EXTRAORDINAIRE, fighting for truth and justice with the rat-a-tat-tat of her keyboard. The next? She’s an ordinary human. Plain ol Ginger. The wife and mother who worries about groceries and bills and what her family might need from her that day.

As such, she has filled her personal space with those things she loves, those things that further shape her eclectic personality, things in purple and black, with a nod to the 60s with lava lamps and peace signs. Things to make her happy. Things to make her comfortable. Things to motivate her and kick start her muse. An exercise bike sits nearby, calling to her, but she shakes her head. There’s time for that. Later. Much later. She has a deadline to meet.

Such a passage would frustrate a reader of screenplays, who just wants to know exactly what they can see on screen, not a whole lot of flowery description. I can define the character going in and out of their heads in a book.

Since there’s no way for the audience to know what’s going on in a character’s head, you can only describe what people can see.

For a screenplay, the above would look a little like this:

INT: VOIGHT HOUSEHOLD/MASTER BEDROOM – DAY

GINGER VOIGHT (40s, plain) tucks her feet under her comforter as a fan hums nearby. She tugs the colorful bedding up a little closer over rumpled pajamas, using the sheets smattered with peace signs to cover the goose bumps on her bare skin.

She reaches for the half-full bottle of Diet Coke sitting on her nightstand. With a swig she attempts to chase away the bags that gather under her eyes before turning her attention to the keyboard sitting on her lap.

She types something, then uses the delete key in equal measure, with a lot more force.

STEVEN VOIGHT (40s, handsome, but wary,) opens the door slowly. Ginger glares his direction.

GINGER
What?

STEVEN
I was going to go get breakfast. Need anything?

GINGER
I’m fine.

STEVEN
You can’t live on Diet Coke alone, hon.

GINGER
I said I’m fine!

STEVEN
(to himself)
Run away... run away...

Once he closes the door behind him, Ginger turns her attention back to her computer. With a snarl, she pounds the delete key five more times.

The cursor blinks on a blank page.

As you can see, I convey the same information in a brand new way, focusing on what can be seen by the audience in the theater. I don’t need to set the stage fully. It’s up to a set designer to do that. I don’t have to worry about minor details. I only need to worry about what defines the character, sets the scene, or moves the story forward.

Therefore converting a screenplay to a novel is basically fleshing out the bits I would have outsourced to other collaborators, even the actors themselves. Everything changes because the perception has changed, which affects everything down to the dialog. I can add stuff. I can direct my characters on the page (a big No No if you're a screenwriter.) I don’t have to worry about concentrating only what people “see.” Granted, “Show Don’t Tell” remains as true as ever no matter what medium you happen to write, though it’s really become the writer version of Randy Jackson’s “It was a little pitchy, dawg,” pat criticism that isn’t particularly constructive.

We’ll probably get to that later, too.

Regardless, you have a lot of room to explore things you didn’t have the space or luxury to explore before. In my novelized version, I included a brand new character, which led to another subplot that still came as a surprise to me, even though I had about the best outline ever thanks to a completed screenplay.

Which brings us back on point. Because I had already done all the prep work to craft the story, there was nothing left to do but write the book. As a result, I finished that first draft of MY IMMORTAL within five weeks, which was a new record for me. I didn’t meander around in Act Two, lost in a confusing labyrinth, without the benefit of any Jim Henson creatures to help me find my way out again.

This was what ultimately converted me to Team Outliner. Not only was it efficient, but it was also liberating. Because I knew what I had to write every day, I could concentrate on all the other stuff, the stuff I didn’t know yet, the stuff that the characters had not yet revealed to me, and let that creative juice flow.

I became an Outliner/Pantser Hybrid.

As such, it hasn’t taken me longer than about four months to write a first draft of a novel since 2004, and that was only because the books in question were darker and/or more emotionally draining. I still have the same benefit of creative discovery I always did, because the thing I learned about outlines is that they are living, breathing entities, just like the characters themselves. They can change and adapt. None of the outlines I’ve written have ever made it exactly to the page, even those that were written as screenplays first. Once the story starts in motion, it will spark to life, creating opportunities to build from all the details you fill in as you write. These are the things you could never predict by crafting an outline, which is why that's not what your outline is for.

An outline simply gives you an overall idea where you’re going. It can be as detailed or cryptic as it needs to be, just to keep the process moving. I prefer to complete an outline all in one sitting, which can be a daunting task in and of itself. I have to run the entire story through my head, putting it together like a puzzle so that I can get from Point A to Point B. For novels, I do this chapter by chapter, with some hints to how the dialog will go, sometimes, if the dialog comes to me, I note it right in the outline.

Here’s an example from FIERCE.



For screenplays, I organize it by act breaks, using page numbers as my guideline. Though the typical wisdom is a three-act structure, I go a step further and break it down into four acts, roughly 25 pages each. Act One: Setup, pages 1-25. Act Two: Conflict leading to midpoint act break, pages 25-50. Act Three: Conflict leading to point of no return/moment of truth, pages 51-75. Act Three: Climax and Resolution, pages 76-100.

Here’s an outline to my most recent screenplay, A LOVELY HAUNTING.



The approaches are different because the means of telling the story are different. But in each scenario, I play the movie (and yes, both mediums I use mental movies) completely out in my head before I ever write one word. This gives me definitive writing goals, broken down in manageable pieces, that make the process of writing a book a lot less daunting.

Like the old saying goes, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

The other benefit of laying out your whole story in front of you is that it allows you to pinpoint wherever there are any plot holes or kinks to fix–or abandon entirely. And like I said, this will change as you write, when you trade what you thought might work to what truly does, and you’ll never really know which is which until you’re pantsing your way through your manuscript,outline or no. An outline gives you a harness to wear, so you don’t fall from your precarious perch on the trapeze, but you still have to perform the stunts.

All an outline really does is ensure that you don’t plummet to a painful death, crushed under the weight of Act Two Maladies you would have seen coming had you peeked ahead. Instead of walking up a darkened staircase where you anticipate where your foot will fall guided by instinct alone, an outline simply gives you a flashlight, so you can see where you're going, even if it's only the next step. This means you can outline as you go as well. There are no hard and fast rules, just whatever works for you as an individual. There is no need for extreme points of view either direction. As long as your method gets you were you need to go, you're good.

So... yes. I get that there are two definitive camps of writers, neither side really enticed to bend towards the other. Every time I bring up outlining to a Pantser, I met with the same vehement resistance I used to use when I was a Pantser myself. I'm not trying to wreck your groove, really. This is just me saying I’ve done both, I’ve seen the value of both.

And I'll tell you this: the more skilled you become completing your projects, the less you need that flashlight. Like I said before, writing a lot means you are learning a lot, and you become a lot more adept in knowing what works and what doesn't before you even put it on the page. Which means that outlines can and do work like training wheels. My last three books were barely outlined at all, I didn't have time to prepare for Devlin Masters. He demanded my immediate, and full, attention from the get-go.

But if you’re a new writer on some crazy-ass deadline, like writing a book from scratch in 30 days, I strongly recommend going into it with an outline of some sort. Spend the entire month of October on it if you have to. Take copious notes. Use index cards for days.

By giving yourself a road map of where to go, I truly believe you will maximize your chances of getting there on time, on schedule and barely bruised at all.

Started First Draft: November 5, 2015 9:35am PST
Paused First Draft: November 5, 2015 10:53am PST
***STEVEN BREAK***
Resumed First Draft: November 5, 2015 11:21am PST
Completed First draft: November 5, 2015 12:11pm PST
Word Count of first draft: 3,495
Completed revisions: November 5, 2015 1:34pm PST
Updated WC: 3,966/17,441

#Nanowrimo Day Four: Mining for Ideas

One of the questions we often get asked as writers is where we come up with our ideas. It’s an important question, because it’s where the root of your story begins. Let’s face it, the reason you write at all is because you have something to say, about the world, about life, about people, about feelings in general. In order to get from the first page of a book to the last, you have to have something driving you.

This starts with your story idea, that little nugget that itches your brain until you have to write just to get it off your back.

It’s a romantic notion, isn’t it? The writer at the mercy of her muse, chased down and tackled every single day until she is forced to write something–anything–just so she can rid all the extra voices in her head.

Not all story ideas are like this, and if professional writers waited around for this particular phenomenon, we’d never get anything done.

Truth is you often have to mine for ideas, carefully picking and choosing where to put your passion. You have to force yourself to fall in love with your ideas and your characters, to train yourself how to race to the computer day after day just to see what they’re up to.

I grew up reading very prolific authors like Stephen King, Danielle Steel, Janet Dailey and V.C. Andrews. They spit out new books on a yearly basis, and it always astounded me how they could come up with so many stories. When I was a young writer, I was still waiting on the Muse to come calling, which she did a couple of notable times, turning my ideas immediately into a passion that I needed to, and wanted to, indulge. The rest of the time my Muse was MIA, which worried me that I might not have what it takes to join the ranks of my favorite writers, whose livelihood depended on writing book after book.

What I didn’t realize then was that the creative muscle is one that grows stronger by flexing. The more ideas you entertain and discard, the more chances you have to land on something that will motivate you enough to invest hours/days/weeks/months–years–of your life on. It’s up to you to bring the passion to your project, by first finding what you’re passionate about.

For me, back then especially, this often started with another passion of mine. Music.

Like I mentioned before, my first book was a novella based on the Barry Manilow song, "Ships." I remember very vividly lying in my single bed that one afternoon, listening to my record player (yes, I said record player,) and really listening to the words in the song.



For those unfamiliar, the song tells the story of an adult male and the complex relationship he had with what appears to be an estranged father. Because I had already seen this play out in my own family, where an adult child meets a parent for the first time, my mind just sort of ran with the idea. It all comes down to one simple question: “What if?” So I asked myself, “What if a man shows up on an adult son’s doorstep, wanting to reconnect after years of absence and silence, and the man wants absolutely nothing to do with him?”

Emotion + conflict = the birth of a story idea. I wanted to answer that question so much, it made me reach immediately for a spiral-bound notebook where I jumped in, both feet, to do exactly that.

I don’t recall exactly how much time it took me to write the story. Some days were harder than other days, because even with this novella written longhand in a notebook, I knew it had to reach a certain number of words to be considered “a real book,” and that involves a lot of skill to build the story and craft the plot. Since these were the days before Google to learn such things, I decided to use the size of the notebook as my goal to complete the story. It was going to be however long the notebook was, and that's the time frame I had to get from asking the question to finally answering it. When I was fourteen, this was what amounted to plotting a story.

Before long I had the complete "book" in my hot little hands, filling that notebook from the first place to the last, with a story that sprang from one simple question.

I didn’t write another novel until five years later, when I was homeless and living out of my car in Los Angeles at the age of nineteen. Once again, music was my motivator.

I was listening to the radio as I sat in the driver’s seat of my then-boyfriend’s (and ultimately first husband’s) old Buick LeSabre.* (*See note at the end.) We used to park behind a Ralph’s* grocery store in Van Nuys, where the forgotten road ran alongside the train tracks. It was not a busy street in the least, which is why we chose it. We could park there without any hassle and no one bothered us, even overnight when we had to put towels in the windows just for a little privacy so we could sleep.

These were the considerations we had to make, rewiring our brains for survival, taking nothing for granted. The thing about homelessness is that you feel absolutely vulnerable 100% of the time. In our world, having money is what makes you have value – what gives you the right to exist, with a place to stay, all your needs met so you can turn your attention from pure survival to actually living.

Not a lot of people really, truly get this, mostly because they’re blessed enough not to live through it.

But when you have no money and no home, you virtually become invisible to the world around you; one that is so preoccupied what you might ask of them that they’d rather not see you at all. (Kind of like certain members of my family, who told me that offering me a place to stay would “encourage dependency.”)

And perhaps that is why when “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses came on the radio that afternoon in 1989, I listened with new ears. Like almost everyone else in 1987, I had listened to Appetite for Destruction until I wore out the grooves in the record (yes, I said record.) I had seen the video more than once, the one where Axl shows up on the mean streets of Los Angeles, playing the character of a clueless kid from the Midwest who was in store for a rude, effin’ awakening the minute he stepped off the bus.



I knew a little bit more about this rude awakening, so my mind began to churn again with, “What If?” If nothing else, it gave me a sense of control when I had none, and that's a very empowering place to be.

What if a young girl runs away from her awful past and lands in Los Angeles because there is nowhere else she could think to go? What if she, too, was some clueless kid, who shows up in the ironically named City of Angels, fresh-faced, naïve, and vulnerable? Someone who faced the terrifying LA streets alone as another nameless, faceless runaway because going back home was the much scarier alternative?

And what if someone crossed her path to help her, to save her, that didn’t look anything at all like what a savior should look like? What if it was a biker, who looked to the world like a rebel at best and a criminal at worst? And what if this biker used that ambiguity to fight both the criminals and the cops, just to protect the innocent and squash the evil that simmers just below the surface in any city?

And what if… that savior was a woman?

This was what made me reach for an ever-present notebook to figure these things out longhand. Not only could I authentically embody the young, clueless girl, but I could also embody the strong, fearless road warrior who decided to protect her.

It, essentially, became a book about salvation. What could possibly be more inspirational to someone who desperately needed saving?

At the time I was attending some classes at a business school. After every lesson was done, I would put in my spare floppy disk (yes, I said floppy disk,) that I used for notes and just fired up the word processor program to fill in any down time I had getting to know these characters who would ultimately become so real to me that they felt like actual friends and family. Actually they were better than friends and family, because they were there for me when I had almost literally been abandoned by most everyone. Aside from my mother, my best friend and my then boyfriend, these fictional people were really the only people in the world who wanted to save me.

I cared about these characters so I cared about their story, so much so that I did take quite a long time to tell it. The bar was set so high I knew I couldn't grab it on the first jump. Granted, I was in the midst of surviving on the mean streets of Los Angeles at the time. Real life interfered all over the place. My mother finally road to the rescue, like she was prone to do, and we all escaped Los Angeles for Fresno, where a whole new set of concerns kept me preoccupied, especially after I found out I was pregnant.

I didn’t finish this book until 1990, where I promptly sent it off for representation only to find out I wasn’t quite ready for that part yet. I didn’t quite reach the bar I had set for myself, evidenced by the heavily edited version the agent sent back to me with a “Thanks but no thanks.”

Just because you finish a book doesn’t mean you’re ready for the big leagues, particularly when it’s your first. No one told me that, so to say I was disappointed to learn that is a whopper of an understatement.

Unlike today, back then I needed to find an agent or publisher to grant me permission to join the ranks of professional writers. I didn’t just get to hit a button and voila… there I was, sitting alongside my idols.

Needless to say, one of the biggest ways to get hung up back then was writing a story idea that wasn’t marketable. Fortunately for me, my story was, as evidenced by the heavily edited manuscript the agent sent back to me. She wouldn't have wasted her time doing that if she didn't think it had merit. It was the execution that failed. I was so embarrassed and ashamed that I had failed my beloved characters that I shelved that project and wouldn’t touch it again until I had proven to myself that I had the goods to write it.

It was 2014 before I completed a whole new draft of CHASING THUNDER, which ultimately got me what I had always wanted most: an agent who was as passionate about the project as I was. She had a buyer for it within a month after I signed with her.

Some ideas land in your brain before you have the ability to do them justice. You have to earn the right to write them. This isn’t an excuse to stop or stall, by the way. It should motivate you to develop the skills that your story deserves, and the only way you’re going to do that is writing. How much you need to write depends on how epic you want your story to be. In between the first draft of CHASING THUNDER and the one that got it sold, I wrote twenty books.

Like my dear friend Hal Sparks says about virginity, “You don’t save yourself for the one. You practice for the one."

Of course, I didn't know all that in the 1990s, when I used my inability to tell the story I wanted to tell as an excuse not to write anything at all ever. I set aside my passion for storytelling to concentrate on being a young mother and new wife. I honestly didn’t have the energy to chase the muse, even if I had known that was what I had to do.

Instead I waited for inspiration to strike. It finally did in 1995, when I ran across an ad for Harlequin or Silhouette, one of those romance publishers, who wanted stories based on the written word. It could be any kind of romance story (suspense, romantic comedy, etc.,) and it could be any kind of written correspondence.

What a great opportunity to ask some questions!

The one that got me motivated to write? “What if a woman moved into a new place and she kept getting the mail of the occupant before her? What if they were postcards, which meant she could read them without violating any privacy? And what if they were romantic postcards that were never signed? What if she fell in love with this man without ever meeting him?”

Because this was an actual publisher who was looking for material, this time I had a word-count goal. These romance novels generally fell around 50,000-65,000 words, which is shorter format than most mainstream fiction.

To my mind, these seemed easier to meet, so I sat at my computer and got going. I had a good idea what needed to happen when, so I was able to finish this particular book within a couple of months.

Of course, I was also going through some personal trauma at the time I first wrote PICTURE POSTCARDS, which had me escaping into my fictional world as a way to cope, to take control in a very powerless situation, but we’ll talk about that more during my “No Excuses” installment.

Because of this trauma, I also wrote what would eventually become THE FULLERTON FAMILY SAGA, based on more depressing and complex questions, like coping with loss and loving two very different men at the same time. These were the questions that haunted into my darkened brain in 1995.

I wouldn’t write another book till years later, when I took a project I had begun in my teens and novelized it. It was the first book I wasn't driven to write, instead it was one I very much decided to write, just to get another completed book under my belt. I didn't wait for inspiration to strike. I very purposefully sat down to craft a marketable idea that would fit neatly into the genre so that I could shop it around.

Passion still played a part, however. Like so much of my material when I was young, UNDER TEXAS SKIES was inspired by music, specifically the Eagles “Desperado” album. For those who know me, the Eagles are one of my favorite bands, landing squarely and securely in the #2 position since I discovered their music in 1983, thanks to a friend of mine.

Though I love their flawless harmonies and their musicianship, what I’ve always admired in particular is Don Henley’s and Glenn Frey’s songwriting skill. They often tell pretty complex stories in a completely poetic and beautiful way. “Lyin’ Eyes,” “The Last Resort,” “Life in the Fast Lane,” “Hotel California,” – all of these songs were self-contained novels in a way, which is why I fell in love with their music so much. My mind was allowed to run free for a few minutes and fill in the worlds that they introduced.

For the “Desperado” album, the guys were darned near operatic, telling a story over the course of all their songs, not just contained within one. I personally thought it should be a musical and set out to write it when I was only sixteen years old.

My fantasy was that one day I’d meet them when the show opened on Broadway, and how cool that would be. (Still would be, frankly.) But after I was done, writing a stage play without any idea how to do that, I knew it wasn’t good enough to show the likes of Don and Glenn. I shelved it and gave up writing for the stage before I could even get started.

Years later, when I wanted to write a book but really didn’t have any new ideas picking at my brain, I decided to revisit that story I wrote around this album. It was, at its core, a romance between a land owner and a drifter, so I had everything I needed to craft a shorter format romance novel. Since I believed that was where I had the best shot to launch my career, I figured it was a good place to start.

This project ultimately became UNDER TEXAS SKIES. (Thank you, Don and Glenn.)

By the time I discovered Nanowrimo in 2004, I had already abandoned novel writing for screenwriting. Well, maybe abandoned isn’t the right word. I hadn’t made much progress breaking down the gates to publication, so I simply decided to throw my energy into trying another angle. Screenwriting has always appealed to me because it’s more minimalist in nature. Since I tend to be a bit more verbose, writing a 100-page screenplay that says everything I need and want to say is the biggest challenge of all. It sounds so much simpler than what it is. The rules are much more defined. The format is a lot more rigid. You don’t get to meander through page after page; you run into place markers every five or ten pages that force you to stay on track.

When I first decided to answer Nanowrimo’s enticing call, I figured there was no better outline anywhere than a screenplay that I had already completed. This is an important part of selecting a story idea for Nanowrimo. To successfully complete a book in 30 days, you kind of need those place markers to keep you on track. These will keep you motivated to keep going, giving you tasks to complete one at a time until you find yourself typing “The End.”

Since this was a love story, I knew I could complete it in the shorter format of 50,000 words.

I keep bringing up word counts because that’s something you need to consider whenever you sit down to write a book. Different genres have different rules. Granted a story isn’t done until it’s done, and you should never bulk up shorter stories into bloated novels just to satisfy a word count.

But if you’re going to market your book, you need to be aware of the accepted standards. Per the Writer’s Digest and Romance Writers of America, some of these work out as follows:

Young Adult: 55,000 – 70,000
Romance: 40,000 – 100,000
Science Fiction/Fantas: 100,000 – 110,000
Mainstream: 80,000 – 90,000
Westerns: 50,000 – 80,000
Middle Grade: 20,000 – 55,000

This gives you a number of options. You can either mine for a story in specific genres that would easily satisfy the 50,000-word requirement of Nano, or you can write whatever the hell you want to write, and if your book isn’t done at the end of November, at least you will have met the word count requirement.

This was how it worked out for me with MY IMMORTAL, which I live-blogged much like I am doing now. I met the 50,000-word count before I finished the book. One I did by November 30. One I didn’t. And it’s okay either way. The objective of Nano isn’t so much to complete the book as much as it is to show you that you can complete 50,000 words in 30 days, which means you could write a solid first draft of more mainstream books within two.

Where people get most hung up is that they think they’re going to have a completed project in a month, and that’s much more daunting. Writing a first draft is just the itty bitty tip of the iceberg. This merely moves you along the game board so you’re a little closer than you would have been otherwise. It's a step in the right direction, but it's still only a step.

Can you complete a solid first draft within a month or two? Yes.

Is it ready to market?

No.

That’s not the point of Nanowrimo. It never was. The point is to get you in the habit of writing so that you can complete a project. You can turn "I wish," into "I did." You can get one step further to your goal of being a published writer, but it's still only going to be one step.

As such, you can keep the marketing aspect in the back of your head, but it shouldn’t be your sole focus, unless you’re an experienced writer who participates in Nano more for the fun and community of it, rather than the educational, skill-building aspect of it. Like we’ve discussed before, it is highly unlikely you’ll have written a polished, completed, publishable bestseller by the end of 30 days. What you’re assembling, really, is a skeleton on which to build, one that will motivate you enough to keep going day after day, so that one book becomes two. Completed projects become careers.

(This can, by the way, lead to a bestselling book. If you can’t wait to see what happens next, imagine how that will work with your readers.)

This is why I recommend picking a project where your passion sustains you. Ask the questions that drive you to the computer so you can figure out the answers. Some will get you over the finish line. Others won’t. The only time I “lost” Nano was when my story ran out before I reached the final word count.

I still finished the first draft within a month, so I personally consider that a win.

Even if it’s your own story that motivates you (memoirs = 80,000 words,) one that you would never sell in a million years because it is a little too raw and a little too real (Fatty: Nanowrimo Project 2006,) you need something to inspire your muse to keep coming around. It’s not a one-way street between the two of you. If you get in the habit of writing, she’ll show up just to see what kind of hijinks you’re getting into.

So choose wisely. You’re going to be eating/drinking/sleeping/talking/writing/obsessing about this idea for the next 30 days. Make it one that inspires you. You’re the first reader of this book, so make it one you’ve always wanted to read but never did, because it could only come from you.

This is the reason you write in the first place. Now get your fanny in that chair and make it happen.

*This asterisk represents a placeholder. I’m not 100% sure that the car in question was a Buick LeSabre or that the grocery store was Ralph's. I'll need to research to get that right, but it doesn't need to be right right now. I’m a stickler for getting things as accurate as possible, I know I’ll have to dig around through my photographs to compare the car in question in order to get this part correct, but those are loose ends I can tie up in the second draft I nitpick for consistency. Instead of using this as an excuse to stop, thus destroying the momentum and getting me out of the writing groove, I’m simply notating it so I can come back to it in the editing process. Nano is all about moving forward. There are plenty of things to fix and repair, but now is not really the time to do it. If I weren’t live-blogging this book, I’d likely not even read the passages after I write them, just so I can keep my focus where it belongs: that very next word that needs to be written. We’ll talk more about this later on; I just wanted to use this opportunity to show you how it works in practice.

Started First Draft: November 4, 2015 12:20pm PST
Completed First draft: November 4, 2015 2:01pm PST
Word Count of first draft: 3,245
Completed revisions: November 4, 2015 3:50pm PST
Updated WC: 3,975/13,429

#Nanowrimo Day Three: Write Like You're Getting Paid for It

From the time I was eleven years old, I wanted to be a professional writer. For those of you who do not know the story, it started as a Halloween assignment, when my very first creative writing assignment was selected for the Wall of Honor. This surprised me at the time, even though I had a history of being an exceptional student, one who was regularly honored at year’s end for my academic performance. As I grew older, these accolades became fewer and fewer, so by the time I was eleven years old, it was a huge freaking deal to be singled out and praised in such a way.

It was such a huge deal that my previous plan, to go to school to become a lawyer, to fight for truth, justice and the American way, flew right out the window.

I wanted that feeling for the rest of my life, where I presented something that I had created from scratch and it was treated it like it was truly special.

Where I was treated like I was truly special.

Since I was a voracious reader at the time, the idea of joining some of my heroes, which, when I was twelve, included such romance icons as Janet Dailey, seemed like the ultimate dream come true. By the time I was fourteen, I completed my first novella, a story titled “My Father and Me,” inspired by Barry Manilow’s song “Ships.” This made the idea of writing for a living even more intoxicating. I regularly created for fun, developing my own soap opera around a randy bunch of Barbies that lived the lives I could only dream of living. (There may or may not have been a character named Ginger, who may or may not have married a character named Steve Perry.)

I had this idea that I could play for a living. I could craft these wonderful stories into books, sell them far and wide and become a huge success, famous of course, but the kind of famous where I could still go to the grocery store without being stopped, photographed or recognized. (The fictional me may or may not have been plagued by the paparazzi.)

I held fast to this dream all the way through my early twenties, when I started to shop around my ever so genius material, only to learn that cracking open the gate to a professional writing career wasn’t quite as easy as I had planned. I thought for sure that I was special enough to make it happen; everyone I had ever shown my work to beforehand had reinforced this belief.

Though it was hard, both to finish a book worthy of representation/publication and finding anyone who was willing to stick their necks out for me to buy (or sell) my work, I held fast to my dream of one day being a professional writer, who could make a living doing what I wanted to do.

That making a living part is the key. Like I told you before, the odds are stacked against both traditionally published and independently published authors, a majority of whom barely make enough to keep themselves stocked in caffeine, liquor and one bullet... just in case... much less enough to pay for groceries, rent or one freaking electric bill. What I dreamed for years on end, to write at my leisure, to produce books that fans clamored for, to travel far and wide to exciting places as part of my glamorous career as a renowned author, is basically a fairy tale for most writers, myself included.

I began to see the cracks in the veneer when I hit my thirties, and I decided, in the dawn of this new millennium, to dip my toe in the shark-infested waters of screenwriting.

The idea had been presented to me in the 1990s by a former agent, who was told again and again that my writing style was more visual and might be better suited to the screen. At the time, I was perfectly content to write romance novels. I thought that was something I could definitely pull off. Writing a screenplay, a hundred or so pages that someone would want to invest millions of dollars to bring to life, was daunting to me.

Basically I didn't believe I could do it.

In 1999, I met my second husband, Steven. He was a total movie buff, who generally saw all new releases when they hit the theater. He had racked up more than 500 points on his AMC card, so much of our courtship was spent inside a darkened theater. This was a new experience for me. From the time my father passed away in 1980, my life had been devoid of frills like this. I grew up in the 1980s without my MTV simply because we couldn't afford cable. Needless to say, I can count the number of movies I saw in the theater in those 29 years on two hands, with several fingers left over.

So, after meeting Steven and living in his world for a bit, I began to embrace the excitement of movies in a whole new way. I loved going to movies on opening night, sharing the experience with total strangers, and somehow always having the experience enhanced as a result.

I told Steven then what the agent had said, and he was totally for it. He had read my stuff beforehand and thought I was talented enough to pull it off, even when I wasn’t so sure. For the next few years, until I wrote my first screenplay in 2002, he was a constant voice in my ear telling me not only could I do it, but that I totally should.

Unbeknownst to him, he was the first person to shatter some of the illusions I harbored about being a professional writer.

He was the one who told me that even if I sold a script to Hollywood, there was a pretty good chance that they would change it from what I wanted. A screenplay is one part of a bigger collaboration, where directors and actors use what is on the page as a guide to the story they want to tell.

In other words, someone else wanted to play with my Barbies, and I wasn’t entirely sure I was comfortable with that. Would they take my beloved characters, like MJ from CHASING THUNDER, and make her some bimbo, when she was supposed to be an icon of feminine badassery?

Hence why it took so long to write my first spec script. There are two basic types of scripts; those you are hired to write and those you write because you have a brilliant story to tell. If you're writing on “spec,” you aren't going to get paid unless you can find someone willing to invest to bring it to life. The odds of selling one are not in your favor. Even a conservative estimate of 50,000 spec scripts written a year only yields a success rate of 50 or so selling each year, and of those, the number shrinks even more how many actually are filmed, much less make it to a theater.

Most screenwriters use their spec scripts as calling cards to get hired for jobs, where producers already have an idea they think is worth investing in, they just need to find the one hungry writer who is willing to work efficiently and well to give them that initial blueprint to follow.

Indeed, this is how it happened for me. By 2005, I had written four spec scripts, one of which would eventually turn into my novel, MY IMMORTAL. I was told by another screenwriter that a director he knew wanted a vampire story they could set in Romania, where this particular director was from. Since I had used a fictional place in my story, I figured we could easily adapt it if need be, so I sent it over. The producer wasn’t that turned on by the Gothic landscape for my tragic love story, but he really loved my main character, a reincarnated vampire who was born with psychic ability.

He asked me instead to write something more urban, something that could be set in Romania, with a similar character. He pitched the idea to me as “Se7en” meets “Interview with a Vampire,” and explained he already had a producer and a studio interested. It was a low-budget affair, but I didn’t care. This was my big break to actually get paid for what I wrote.

I began my research into Romania, Bucharest and vampire lore. Within a relatively short period of time, I had a first draft for this new project, TASTE OF BLOOD, where some tabloid reporters head to Romania to “investigate” (i.e., exploit,) a serial killer who drains his or her victims of blood, to simulate a vampire kill.

Since my research indicated that Romania had been known to wake up psychic abilities, thanks to where it sits on the planet, I decided to make my heroine, Reese Mackenzie, clairvoyant. And I decided to kick that up a few thousand notches the minute she stepped off the plane.

The director loved it. The producer loved it. Even the studios loved it. I was on my way!

Or… so I thought.

In writing this screenplay, I got a crash course on what it means to write for a living. If someone is paying you money for what you write, you kinda have to let them play around with your Barbies, even if they are doing something completely unexpected with them.

The first lesson? Budget restraints. You don’t really factor that in when you’re writing a spec script. You create the world you want to portray and just assume the Powers That Be will make all these scenes happen. But when you’re writing a small-budget screenplay, you have to keep that in the forefront of your mind.

For instance, I crafted a pretty intense scene in the subway only to be told that adding a subway scene in the movie would rack up the cost, since it comes with very specific shooting challenges. Out that scene went. Same with one of the fire scenes and the car chase. I had to pick and choose which scenes would be worth the cost paid to bring them to life, which teaches you all you need to know about efficient storytelling. I had to cut all extraneous characters from the script, because every speaking role is another actor you have to pay, which adds to the bill. If a character says anything, it has to mean everything.

And I was expected to roll with these punches, producing new drafts very quickly, while the interest was hot in the project. Whenever the studio wanted to cut cost and reduce the budget, I had to amend the screenplay yet again. Overall I wrote five drafts in as many months, which may explain why the breakneck pace of Nanowrimo has never really intimidated me.

Ultimately that story, though optioned, was shelved when the studio decided to pull the funding. Despite all that work I did, virtually for free, I was no closer to adding “professional” to my resume than I was before. (I ended up writing TASTE OF BLOOD as a novel, during the 2010 Nano ironically enough. I published it in 2011, because girlfriend is gonna get paid. Trust.)

The wealth of information I learned from the experience, however, was priceless.

In 2010, after a chronic illness left me unable to work a traditional 9-5 job in a brick-and-mortar business, I had a life-changing conversation with a friend of mine who just so happens to be a writer herself.

I met her in 1996 or thereabouts, when we both worked for the same company. She became my steadfast cheerleader, who encouraged me to write more, write a lot, try to sell it, even tackle screenplays. She believed I could do it.

By 2010, she had carved herself a writing career by writing non-fiction, which is a hustle all its own. But the hustle was necessary. Like me, she couldn’t work a traditional 9-5 job. Her son needed intensive medical care, which meant she had to be around for him as much as possible. This became her impetus to become a professional writer: she had no choice. There was no plan B.

“No Plan B” stayed with me for the next few months. When the opportunity to apply to become a freelance writer passed my way in June of that year, I took it. I was even more jazzed when I was accepted. At long last I could get paid to write.

Granted it was non-fiction. I didn’t really get to play around in the sandbox. But I got to write and I got paid for it, which was the first step in the right direction.

Freelance work was much like working in the film industry. I was expected to produce complete projects quickly. Whenever I selected an article to write, I had five days to produce a finished product, which would then go to an editor. If they found nothing wrong with it, it was published immediately and I got paid. If they found errors or wanted to tweak it to make it publication worthy, I got two passes before the article was released back into the pool for another writer to grab. If that happened, I got paid bupkis.

Thus created the real need to get it right the first time, and as quick as I could. As a new writer for this company, I was allowed to pull ten articles at a time, which meant I could virtually write my own paycheck if I was willing to put in the work.

After years and years of writing for free, I was so willing to put in the work.

And it was work. I pumped out articles, some without even having any interest at all in the topic. When you have bills to pay, you don’t get to choose. And you most certainly don’t get to play. I finally got to write for a living only to realize that it really was work. It was a job just like any other job. When I worked at an insurance company, I was expected to work overtime, processing as many claims as possible as quickly and correctly as possible. The better I did this, the more I got paid with bonuses, OT pay, and raises. It was all about quality and volume.

This would suit me well when I decided to self-publish in 2011, where I took all these lessons with me.

Let me be the first to tell you that there is no hustle like that of a self-publisher. You’re not just a mere writer anymore. You wear two hats now. You’re also a publisher, which means what you do is a business. This has nothing to do with being greedy or opportunistic or – that dreaded four-letter-word – a hack. You have your eye on the bottom line because you have to. The buck stops with you, literally. That’s your job. And if you’re successful, you can bring in an income. You just have to be ready to hustle along every other publisher selling their books in the same convoluted market.

Not too long ago, a writer published a piece, offering some advice for new indies, suggesting that you have to publish four books a year to stay relevant. There are thousands upon thousands of books released every year, and for many genres, like the romance genre, a lot of unknowns get a big bump around the time of the release, only to get buried under more successful authors who have already run the gauntlet and cultivated a staunch, devoted fan base. To compete with them, you need to publish new material. Fans of romance won’t wait around for you. There are too many books to be excited about, to gush and swoon over, and if you want to keep up, you better werk. *Snap*

Another author found this advice distressing. This author, whose primary income does NOT come from her writing, suggested what so many often do: that quick writing is crap, and, essentially, you’d be better of writing nothing at all than write a “bad book.”

If you really want to take the process seriously, anyway.

I already took issue with this in previous entries, so I won’t rehash why I think that’s complete and total bullshit. All I will say is that this author doesn’t understand the profession of writing, and most certainly doesn’t understand the business of publishing. When you claim to be a self-published writer, you’re not just some romantic vision of creative brilliance, waiting oh so longingly for your Muse to hand-deliver your next masterpiece on her schedule. You’re a publisher. You have your own schedule. And while there is room for creative genius, there are also more practical concerns, like keeping up with an ever-changing industry where the only rule that counts is that what worked last year won’t work this year.

You’re constantly changing and adapting, and, if you’re making any money at all doing it, you’re writing. All. The. Time.

That’s what it means to be a professional writer. This is a job. If you’re self-published, it’s two. If you’re talented, dedicated and lucky, you can break into that top 20% of writers who make over a grand a year. You can even sustain yourself, like I was very fortunate to do for several years. But this is fundamentally a sales job, where it is feast or famine. You have to be willing to hustle. You have to embrace it. You have to work hard, long hours for which you will never be truly compensated. When you hit publish on your new book, it’s going to take a lot of sales to compensate you after the fact for all the work you put into it, and whether you do or don’t is a crap shoot even if you’ve been successful in the past.

I mentioned the film business earlier. I watched a documentary many years ago that really drove the idea home that show business is still a business. And, much like publishing, it is one that fails more often than it succeeds. Per this documentary, out of every ten movies, only four make any money, and only one is a blockbuster.

That means that half of your darts will miss the bull's eye, no matter how finely you sharpen them.

This is why publishing and show business is a numbers game. Whether your release is successful or flops hard, you don't have time either to rest on your laurels or bask in the praise and success, or wallow in the pity. You need to turn your attention to your next project, so you can keep the momentum going - or recoup the losses.

I’m pretty sure you can see now why I happened to bring this topic up in relation to Nanowrimo. Like we discussed yesterday, Nano gets a lot of flak for setting up “unrealistic” expectations for writers, one that you can write a book at all in a month, and two, that it would be worth the time and effort it took to write it.

Honestly, if you want to be a working writer, I think there’s nothing that prepares you better for the hustle ahead, particularly if you need to sell your work to a publisher. You’re going to get edits and input from people who will virtually withhold your paycheck until you concede a little creative control. You’re going to be expected to roll with those changes and produce subsequent drafts, and you’re not going to be given a whole lot of time to do it. When there’s money on the line, nobody has the time to wait for you to pull a lightning bolt out of your keister. You may have to confer directly with the gods to channel your brilliance, but they have deadlines.

If you want to get paid, you’re going to have to meet them.

My advice? Write like you’re getting paid for it, even when you’re not.

I’ve known many bloggers who have dipped their toes in the self-publishing pool. To my mind, they are better prepared than anyone to turn their “hobby” into a career. Many readers are frustrated writers deep down, and bloggers find their own way to express themselves, constantly on crazy deadlines where they have to read dozens of books just to keep themselves relevant. They read quick. They write quick. They move on to the next project. This, in a nutshell, is what it means to be a working writer.

They likely get paid peanuts to do so, too, if anything at all. Many writers find themselves in the same boat, advised to blog and build community within their fan base so that they can sell more books. And we fit it in wherever we can, even when we have paid writing to do. That's what it means to be a working writer. You write to work, and you work All. The. Time. This is whether you're paid or not or whether you feel like it or not. Deadlines are deadlines and your integrity to meet them is part of your brand. Your fans believe in you, they have faith in you, and you have to deliver your best every single time you sit down to write for them.

It. Is. A. Job. There's a lot of hard work involved, and some of it actually feels like work. When you're first starting out, all of it does.

If you really want to make this your career, you gotta cowboy up. There are far too many hungry writers fighting for every single dollar. (Actually, that’s a generous description… they’re fighting for every penny.) When that producer tells you that he wants a draft within a week, you say “No problem,” and you deliver. You have to, because if you don’t, someone else will. Someone down in the mines, all dirty, grungy and starving, who knows that in order to get anywhere they don’t wait around for “goodness” to happen or lightning to strike. They reach for a hammer and call lightning from the sky, because they have to.

Because they can.

This is your chance to dress for the job you want, not the job you have. Embrace the whole of the experience, not just the good bits where you’re sitting on some beach somewhere sipping a Mai Tai. (At least, if the ads on Facebook to become a best-selling author are to be believed anyway.)

Learning how to work with deadlines gets you ever closer to making your dream to become a professional writer come true. Setting time apart in your day to write, and giving yourself a set goal to get to, teaches you the discipline you’re going to need to turn a hobby into a career, one that weeds out the meek and the timid just by virtue of the gauntlet you must run in order to earn your place at a very crowded table.

Only career-minded folks will cross that finish line November 30. Hobbyists have the luxury of waiting for inspiration to strike. They write for the sheer joy, and there's nothing at all wrong with that. Some people don't want to pervert their art by turning into something as base as mundane as a commercial product. They want to play in the sandbox, on their terms.

Nano is not really built for them. Nano is all about crossing that definitive finish line with a finished product in your hand, which trains you, ultimately, to produce content on a deadline. There’s nothing all that joyful about a looming deadline where you’re expected to produce a lot of content really quickly. It's stressful and daunting and frustrating and exhausting.

It's also totally worth it. There is value in seeing how far you can push yourself, and just how much you can accomplish.

If you want to take this and make it work for you, you absolutely can. A first draft in a month isn’t some miraculous feat. Good books can and have been written in short periods of time. Since it's been done before, this means it can be done again. If your livelihood depends on a solid, completed project, you will make it so, whether it’s a blog, a 100-page screenplay, a 2500-word article or a 50,000k-book. This is business as usual for most people who are lucky enough to claim that they do this for a living. Remember: the key words there are “for a living." That means it’s not your hobby. It’s not some random windfall you occasionally enjoy. It means you have bills to pay and the wolf is at the door, so you better plant your ass in the seat and write like your life depends on it.

Because it kinda does.

This is your training ground for that.

Pick up your hammer. Call down the thunder. Make it so.

Started First Draft: November 3, 2015 8:38am PST
Completed First draft: November 3, 2015 10:16am PST
Word Count of first draft: 3,493
Completed revisions: November 3, 2015 11:21am PST
Updated WC: 4,156/9,356

#NaNoWriMo Day Two: Great Expectations

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced when it comes to Nanowrimo has nothing to do with producing a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. I’m not saying that to be pompous, by the way. Each writer is different, some take longer than others and I’m blessed to be one of those who can produce content quickly. One, I’m a fast typist. Two, my brain operates at accelerated speeds on a good day, much less when I’m creating. Three, I’m a tad obsessive-compulsive when it comes to reaching specific daily goals. I’m a bit like Dr. Sheldon Cooper when I can’t “finish” something. It just tickles my brain until I have to get it done so I can check it off.



I'm the kind of writer who will obsessively sit at a computer for twelve hours straight, typing until my hands curl, never stopping to eat, barely stopping to use the bathroom, to race my way towards the finish line, a caffeine-riddled, delirious mess. There have been days my family hasn't even seen me until I emerge from the bedroom/office, a bleary-eyed zombie with half her brain oozing from her ears.



I accept the time it takes to do the task. And I know that the only way I can get things done is by taking that time and just doing the work. None of that has ever, really, been the issue.

What bothers me most about Nano is that people who know nothing about the process hijack it in order to shame writers for employing different tactics to do the very same work. Most of the time the shamers aren’t even novelists, which makes the criticism even more unfair. It really chaps my hide when people who don’t really do anything criticize those brave souls who dare to do anything.

Therefore a necessary chapter in this Nano experiment has to address the expectations we all bring to the table. You need to know what Nano is every bit as much as you need to know what it isn’t.

Like I said yesterday, Nanowrimo has drawn quite a bit of criticism over the years by those who believe that a great book simply cannot be written in a short period of time. It's just impossible. Each precious word we brilliant writers write must be hand-delivered to us from the gods, transcribed with a magical golden pen that only seems to spit out a handful or so perfect words per day, if that.

Per the detractors, the evidence doesn't lie.

“Harper Lee’s entire career was based on one masterpiece, not some prolific churning out of inferior material. One beautiful book is worth so much more than dozens of mediocre ones. What’s WRONG with you?”

Okay, I'm exaggerating (kinda.) But it doesn't matter anyway because like most blanket statements, this ridiculous assumption basically judges all writers and their content in the same way, as if we were all the same, which we’re not. We’re not supposed to be. To create a wealth of interesting, diverse, beautifully individualistic works of art, we all need to be interesting, diverse, beautifully individualistic people. Such assertions always try to color us with the same brush. Like all stereotypes, this is as inaccurate as it is unfair.

The only truth that can be said about a great book is that it is written one word at a time, kind of like every other book that has ever been written… even the bad ones. Some writers are so afraid of writing a bad book that they never write anything at all, which is one of the reasons that Nano exists. You have to be willing to wade through the crap in order to discover the brilliance.

Does this work for every writer? Of course not. It’s not supposed to. This is why I don’t go around telling people that they should do Nano. If they want to, then great. My motto has always been to find what works for you and just go for it, no hesitation - no apology.

Only you get to decide what type of writer you want to be. (And that's a good thing.)

Yes, Harper Lee had one or two books in her soul to publish, which she likely mined thoughtfully to build her brick wall slowly, carefully, to stand the test of time. Or, that's the accepted wisdom, anyway. Because she dared only to publish the one book, clearly it must have been gold from the get-go. Yet oddly, when it first fell into the hands of an editor, it was considered unfit for publication, despite the sparks of brilliance they could see peaking from behind every line.

It’s a romantic notion to believe that she knew every single word was gold as she wrote them, chosen purposefully for that reason. I would imagine that she had no idea her book would go on to win a Pulitzer, regarded as a classic through the ages. She simply had a story to tell and she decided to tell it. Like every other book, even the greats still have to be crafted and molded to turn them into the masterpieces we ultimately revere.

"Well, that's just the point, Ginger. She needed time to process, to cultivate. She couldn't produce a great book quickly. Again. What is WRONG with you?"

Absolutely nothing at all. I understand the difference between writing a book and publishing a book, since I kinda happen to do both. I have never once uploaded a first draft, even in blog posts, which often go through a dozen revisions before I ever publish them for the world to see.

One thing I've noticed: Nobody gives a flying fig how long it takes me to complete a first draft, as long as the end product is good. Nano never promised to give you a polished, publishable draft after 30 days. I think most writers understand this, particularly if we're not new to it. To assume we don't, that we're all somehow new and clueless because we can do it faster, is ridiculous.

The only thing you can expect from Nano is to produce the first draft of a book, which you will learn is done one word at a time, just like any other book. Putting a time limit on the first draft only means that there is a time limit on the first draft. Prolific writers who have more books to write complete this process a little faster than other writers. It doesn’t mean they’re better. It doesn’t mean they’re worse. It just means they feel they can get it done within a specific time frame. That's all.

Who the hell can determine one is better than the other unless they actually read the books once they've been made fit for publication? And if the readers enjoy it… who gets to tell them otherwise?

Yes, it ticks me off. Unfair things usually do.

It’s also unfair to assume just because someone writes a book in 30 days that they’re going to immediately upload said first draft for the masses and contribute to the overwhelming glut of material already available, which grows by the day. This is both short-sighted and ridiculous, and honestly I find it insulting.

They assume, also unfairly, that just because a book is written quickly that it is somehow easier to write than a book that took years to produce, which automatically makes any of us who do it cheaters and hacks who don't fully honor the process. Remember, the process of putting each word on the page is pretty much the same for every single writer. To force or wedge those words out of your soul on a regular basis doesn’t mean it comes any easier for the prolific writer than it does the writer who decides only to write nothing but pure gold from the start – as if there are any writers out there that make that decision.

The thing about brilliance is that it happens like a lightning strike. Have you ever tried to take a photo of a lightning strike? Next time you’re in a thunderstorm, I suggest you give it a shot. Sit there in the safety of your home or car as you wait out both good timing and instinct to capture this elusive photograph. Try to anticipate when it will come. What you’ll find instead is that you’re going to take a lot of “fail” shots way before you “accidentally” land upon the perfect shot, and you wouldn’t catch it at all if you weren’t snapping away all duds.

Show me the person who uploads every single selfie they take, without going through and “editing” the ones that make them look the best.

You really think we treat our books, our babies, any differently?

We’re waiting for the lightning, same as you.

I’ll go you one further. I’ll bet if you attempt to take lightning photos more than once, you’ll get a lot better at anticipating when that strike might actually come, so that you can anticipate how to use your particular camera to capture it.

See, that’s the thing about instinct. It is a skill you can hone through repetition, like muscle memory.



The more you try to capture that lightning strike, the more successful you’ll inevitably be. You master something by doing something, and for writers, this means planting your butt in the seat and writing one little ol’ word after the other. Nano simply provides incentive for writers to do that, so I’m not entirely sure why the process is so derided.

If you want to write a book, and you think you can produce 50,000 words in a month, I say more power to you. I’m not going to stand in your way. A writer writes. I’d much rather you participate in the craziness of Nano and actually produce a book than tell me for years on end about your precious masterpiece that is no closer to done years after you started it. Remember, a writer writes. The only true hacks I've ever seen are the ones who get off on just talking about it.

And I say that generally with no judgment. You do you. Each writer is different so their process is different, and I’m not one to judge the process. Like I already told you, I began my career much in the same way as the critics of Nano did. I waited on perfection to somehow strike. Without having done the hard work to make it so, I expected to be skilled enough to shoot lightning out of my ass somehow – though I never really made a true habit of writing and producing.

I depended on chance so much that I might has well have been playing the lottery. To succeed at anything you have to risk failure. You have to be ready and willing to face plant every once and a while.

I'll give you an example.

In the summer of 1979, when I was nine years old, there was one thing I wanted above all else. I wanted to learn how to ride a bicycle. My sister’s old discarded Schwinn sat in the garage, pretty, purple and unused, which I personally considered a sin. At nine, that bike looked like a ticket to freedom. I had seen all the other kids in the neighborhood cruising around on their bikes, free as little birds to explore, to discover, to be independent.

I wanted this.

Unfortunately for me, there were a couple of barriers in my way. One, my mother had never learned to ride a bike, so she would be unable to teach me. She also worked a full-time job to support the family, so even if she had known how to, it wouldn’t have benefited me much.

Likewise my dad, who was much older than my mom, was retired and on disability, so he wasn’t able to teach me either.

Never one to accept such limitations, I finally took that bike out back to our alley, where I could teach my own darn self how to ride it. I decided at the grand ol’ age of nine that waiting for independence was about the stupidest thing ever. So I didn’t.

I got on that bike and I stayed on until I could figure out how to ride it, without the benefit of training wheels. I don’t remember everything about those training sessions, but I think it’s safe to assume I didn’t just hop on and mosey down the road with the perfect skill that comes only by learning what not to do first. I think it’s fair to say that I fell. A lot.

Funny how I don't remember that part. The one part that we're all afraid of, of failing, of looking like a fool, of being anything less than perfect, doesn't even jog my memory at all. Instead I treated those imperfections like the stair steps they were. I learned from that failure, and by the end of the summer of 1979, I was tooling all over the neighborhood on my sister’s old purple bike, independent, free… successful.

To succeed greatly, you have to be willing to risk greatly. Because of this, there will be many people who will tell you that what you’re doing is insanity, and that you can’t do it, or you shouldn’t. The way I see it, if you really, truly want to do anything, you should do it even if people try to stand in your way. (This, of course, excludes criminal or hurtful behavior.) But if you want to write a book, write the dang book. If you want to capture lightning in a photograph, snap away. Do what they tell you cannot be done, because their bogus rules were meant to be challenged. It’s called human ingenuity, which is the root of all progress. It’s a pretty great thing.

Can you write a book in 30 days? Yes. You can. Should you? YES! You should! Why? Because that is just one more attempt to capture brilliance the same way you photograph lightning. You have to be willing to do the work.

You'll never write a brilliant book unless you're actually writing.

This is what Nano is there to show you. It’s not teaching you how to be a best-selling success; like I told you before, there’s no one can promise you that. It’s teaching you how to be a working writer by producing content and lots of it on a deadline, and that’s a helluva lot harder. One is outside of your control. The other is completely within it. That means there’s nothing stopping you but you.

It’s a scary thing to kick off the training wheels of excuses and accept full responsibility of what you can do. By no coincidence, it’s also the most liberating.

This challenge helps you hone that skill, whether you successfully complete it or not. You’re still learning to place one word after the other. The more you do this, the better at this you will get. It’s inevitable. This is your training ground. This is where you go to grow. This is where, “I want to be a writer,” or “I want to write a book,” turns into, “I freaking am a writer,” and, “Look at this book. I wrote this!”

Again, why people deride the process is beyond me.

Talent can take you far as a writer, but the rubber doesn’t meet the road until you apply skill and sheer will. There’s nothing to it but to do it. As mystical and magical as we writers make the process sound, writing is no different than anything else. You master it by doing it. Not thinking about it. Not wishing for it. Not waiting around for your Muse like a powerless conduit. You can sink a basketball on the first shot, but that doesn’t make you an athlete. To repeat that magic trick, you have to train.

You have to write a lot to learn how to write well. Doing the work, putting in the time, honing your skill, training your mind… these are the things that will make you a writer, and – if we treated writing like any other occupation on planet earth – it would suggest that you’re a damned good one, too. If I’m going to have brain surgery, I’m going to want the one who has had some experience, not just the first guy out of medical school.

Though they will try to tell you otherwise, chasing impossible deadlines doesn’t mean you value the process any less. You treat writing like a job. If you really want to make it your job, that’s a good thing.

It’s a necessary thing.

Now, these critics do have a point about new writers who, excited now that they have actually completed a book, publish books before they’re ready. This phenomenon is not exclusive to Nanowrimo, but they like to use it as a scapegoat regardless. Again, it’s because for some reason, treating writing like a job shades you in the minds of many as a “hack,” or someone who simply wants to get rich quick by publishing a book.

Anyone who thinks you will get rich quick simply by writing a book quick and publishing it even quicker is sadly, sadly mistaken. And deluded.

I'm not here to blow sunshine up your butt. I'll tell you the truth, even if it's not pretty. Of independently published writers, 80% make $1000 annually or less. (Note: that's about the same number of Nanowrimoers who don't complete the task yearly.) Of traditionally published writers, about half make $1000 annually or less. Any “overnight” success stories that you see are always, always, always the exception and not the norm. And of those rare success stories, I would gather very few did so on their very first book.

Not even cracking that list are the ones who did it on the unedited first draft of their first book.

I don’t consider these folks my “competition,” and neither should you. I’m not aiming to hang among the lowest fruit on the tree, which is why honing my skill is so freaking important to me.

This is the true merit of Nano, not some launch pad into instant fame and glory. If that’s what you’re looking for, then Nano is probably not the challenge for you. Suffice it to say, anyone who thinks writing and publishing a bestseller is an “easy way to get rich,” likely won’t be around at the end anyway.

As anyone who has actually participated will tell you, there’s nothing easy about it. Which is kind of the best Nanowrimo lesson of all. A lot of people want to write, as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of eager participants that sign up for Nanowrimo. But, on average, only around 20% or less of participants actually complete the challenge.

Of those, I would think that the number of starry-eyed newbies and the opportunistic hacks would be exceptionally low in number.

Anyone who thinks Nano teaches you some sort of shortcut to the process has clearly never done it, though I would definitely encourage them to try. Maybe then they wouldn’t rain all over our parade like they had any right to do so.

So it’s Day Two. We’re all a little starry-eyed and optimistic at this point, because the possibilities are endless, which is what I love most about Nanowrimo.

But here’s what you can truly expect for the rest of the month. You’re going to work hard. You’re going to get frustrated. You’re going to run up against all kinds of obstacles to complete the task, the main one being, “Did I really think I could write a book in a month?”

The good news is that you can do it, even if – especially if – it hurts. The bad news is it probably won’t make you rich and famous. You won’t be able to publish your newborn baby on December 1st and be a millionaire by Christmas. In fact, all you’ll really have to show for your November is a completed first draft. This may or may not turn into a published book, which some snobs won't even touch because it's tainted with Nanowrimo anyway.

Spoiler alert: It’s still worth it.

Now let’s do this.

Started First Draft: November 2, 2015 10:00am PST
Completed First draft: November 1, 2015 11:26am PST
Word Count of first draft: 2,701
Completed revisions: November 2, 2015 12:56pm
Updated WC: 3,349/5,111

It's November 1, which can only mean one thing... #NaNoWriMo

Good morning, kids, and welcome to November 1! For many writers, this date is a pretty exciting one, because they’re about to embark on their own hero’s journey, where they turn “I wish,” into “I did.”

This is the magic of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, as it’s more affectionately dubbed.

Why we share such affection for this crazy month is a mystery. To pull off such a remarkable feat, we must complete a book, from scratch, in the limited time frame of 30 days. That it comes smack dab in the middle of a holiday month and, for me at least, a birthday month, means that most of us will cram whatever writing we can wherever we can, amidst all the real-world distractions.

The objective for NaNoWriMo sounds simple enough. Write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Broken down, that’s about 1667 words per day towards your goal. For writers like Stephen King, who recommend a set number of words we should be writing daily anyway, this pace isn’t all that break-neck… until you actually have to sit down at your computer and write the words. Some days the words don’t come. Some days, you have to carve them out with a dull butter knife just to form a coherent sentence. Some days, it’s daunting enough to write a grocery list. So what sounds like a simple thing, adding a few hours to your day to write 1667 words, often is quite the struggle.

Of the hundreds of thousands of intrepid writers who begin this journey, only a small percentage ever “win,” which is to say they finished at least 50,000 words by November’s end. Per Wikipedia, in 2014, 325,142 people participated in the event, but only 58,917 completed it, which is a little over 18%.

This is not a journey for the fainthearted.

I have participated in NaNoWriMo since 2004, where I wrote my novel via my MySpace blog, just to see if I could pull it off. I did, which was a huge accomplishment for me. Back then, when I wasn’t writing full-time, I had only written about four full-length novels over the course of thirteen years, thanks to full-time jobs, raising a family, falling in and out of love, and managing life in general.

This is the way a lot of people think it should work. They think that novels must simmer and percolate, each word chosen carefully by the steadfast wordsmith who would never, in her wildest dreams or worst nightmares, dare write the sheer and utter crap that must be mined in order to complete a book on such a breakneck deadline.

But the truth is that nothing prepared me for my career as a full-time writer quite like Nanowrimo.

The truth is, when you’re an author who depends on what you write to live, to survive… to eat… you learn how to write per the seemingly outrageous deadlines given to you by people who don’t have to sit down at that computer and carve each carefully chosen word out of their arse with a dull butter knife. Editors, publishers, producers and fans all want the same thing – a completed project in their hand.

If you’re one of the 18% who can pull it off, Nanowrimo teaches you how to get from the starting gate to the finish line.

Over the past eleven years, I have participated in Nanowrimo nine times. I “won” eight times. The only time I didn’t cross the finish line was when the book I was writing ended five thousand words before the cut-off. (It was middle-grade book.) Thanks to Nanowrimo, I no longer waited for a wild hair to start a book; I hit the ground running with a definite goal and a battle plan to make it happen. We’re hard-wired to want to win things, which is why the way Nano works is so genius. Because what it takes to win is so simple, that’s even more genius.

Simply write 1667 words a day. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.

No matter what process a writer uses to complete a book, the basic work to do so is rather universal. Just put one word in front of the other. We’re building a brick wall, essentially, and every word is a brick to use. If you give yourself a goal of how many bricks you’re going to lay per day, eventually, when enough time has elapsed, you’re going to be able to stand back and see the bigger picture. For Nano, this is a book with your name on it.

It’s going to take some work; I am not going to lie. There are going to be some days when you’re exhausted and everything in the world that can go wrong in your life will, but your incomplete manuscript will whisper in your ear all month long, “We can do this. Just sit down and write.” Whether you will or are even able to answer that call remains to be seen. But having that deadline looming on November 30 like a bright neon Vegas sign that can be seen from outer space often forces you to make those harder decisions just to get the job done.

This is an amazing education of what will be expected of you when you become a full-time, professional writer. If that’s your ultimate goal, I really can think of no better training ground.

Now, there are those who disparage this writing marathon, who believe that a few hundred thousand writers typing like crazy to meet such a deadline only adds to the pile of sludge we all have to navigate since the birth of self-publishing (which, let’s be honest, was a tricky minefield even before self-publishing became the “norm.”) These people miss the point entirely. If you think you’re going to have a marketable book within thirty days, you’re deluding yourself, particularly if you’re a brand new writer.

All Nano sets out to show you is that you can complete a writing goal. This is only the very first little baby step to get you on your way.

But it is a very necessary baby step. You’re never going to launch your career as a writer if you can’t finish a book. You can have ideas for days on what kinds of stories you’d tell, but until you actually do what it takes to tell them, you’re nothing but someone with a bunch of ideas.

To be a writer, you must write. To be a professional author, you must have completed books to sell. Otherwise you’re just paid to talk about how you’d like to be a writer, and that’s not the same thing, no matter what some authors might try to do to circumvent the process. (Looking at you, James Frey.)

So here we are, November 1st, the starting gate. You have an idea. You’ve always wanted to write a book, and 50,000 words isn’t all that daunting when you consider that most mainstream novels are 80,000 words or more.

All you have to do to “win” Nano is to write 50,000. That’s 1667 words a day.

I’ll make a bold claim here. I think you can do it. I don’t know you. I don’t know your particular skill or where you are as a writer. I don’t know what your idea is for a book, or what your life looks like in order to carve out the time to write it. All of that is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that if you put one word in front of the other, with a goal of 1667 words a day, you can “win” this challenge. I believe in you so much that I have decided to use my entire November to write a book on how to navigate the murky, treacherous waters of Nanowrimo and come out the other side, a little battered and sleep-deprived maybe, but a winner nonetheless.

You won’t be a winner because you’ll write a masterpiece in thirty days, one that will immediately launch your epic, enviable career as a best-selling writer. No one can promise you that, and you should regard anyone suspiciously who tells you otherwise.

But I can tell you how to finish a book. Since my first Nano in 2004, I’ve written 27 full-length novels. As a self-publisher, I impose my own deadlines, and I’m a bit of a sadist. Unfortunately I have to be, as I am a slave to book sales as much as any other full-time writer. This is my job and I approach it as such.

Thanks to Nano, I got off to a roaring start. I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one.

So here’s how the month is going to go. I will write installments daily or semi-daily, allowing for life and all that, to complete my first non-fiction book, “NaNoWriMo: A Passion, A Vision, A Cautionary Tale,” where I will share what I’ve learned over the years on how to take an idea to a completed project. I will give you a starting time, an ending time, my word count, etc, so you can see the nuts and bolts it takes to complete a project.

To honor my first Nano, I’ll be doing it right here in the blog, right before your very eyes. I ain’t scared.

This is a first draft, so it will not be fastidiously edited. This book will emphasize progress over perfection. You will have time to bathe and dress your baby for the world to see. But Nano is almost exactly like giving birth. Your “baby” will come out all covered with goo, not yet ready for the world yet, and that’s okay. In fact that’s necessary.

It’s also a topic for another day.

Normally I go into Nano with an outline, with a lot of my prep work already done. I find this the most expedient way to get from point A to point B, but unfortunately, thanks once again to life, I was unable to do a lot of that beforehand. We’ll get into that later, too.

Right now, I’m just diving right in because I can’t imagine a November without Nanowrimo. Once you start, you can’t stop, especially if you’re obsessive-compulsive like me and like to check things off in the “completed” column. This year we’re going to do that together, one little ol’ word at a time.

Welcome to the mad house.

Welcome to November 1.

This is Nanowrimo.

Started: November 1, 2015 11:30am PST
Completed: November 1, 2015 12:19pm PST
Word Count: 1,762

Two guys have turned my world upside down for months. Lemme tell you about them.

Many of you are already familiar with the origin of my new Masters Saga, the story about a young woman and the escort she hires to fulfill every last naughty desire. This unconventional romance, a sort of "Pretty Woman" in reverse, started simply with a thought-provoking question from my bestie, which is also a little how my story MY IMMORTAL came to life, but we'll talk about that in a sec.

First, I need to tell you about Devlin Masters and Caz Bixby.

Many of you have already met Devlin. He's that sexy lil morsel who gets paid $400 an hour to fulfill the lascivious fantasies of those women who have the means to pay him. He was a LOT of fun to write... a blank slate if you will. Like Coralie, I could mold him into anything I wanted him to be.

Well, in the first book anyway. As it so happens, that rascal had a personality all his own, and he was determined to tell ME who he was, starting with the moment he sat down to play the piano. That's when I realized there was a lot more depth, and potential, to this gun for hire.

See, the thing is... I wrote Masters as sort of a... protest if you will. My bestie asked me if I would ever hire an escort, sort of a hypothetical question to test my boundaries about sex. The more I thought about it, the more value I saw in hiring a guy for sex.

Crazy, right? Absolutely scandalous. But I'm being completely sincere.

I found it both titillating and empowering to write a story where a man is committed to the idea of feminine pleasure, since, unfortunately, in our culture such things are usually prohibited. If a woman exhibits any kind of sexual liberation, like a man, she is regarded as a slut, one whose value diminishes the more liberties she takes.

I have a problem with this, so much so that I live my life in such a way that it is almost absolutely impossible to slut-shame me. I'm quite open about how I feel about sex. I mean, obviously, right? That's how I make my living. I seek to empower women to embrace their own sexuality without shame.



To say that I have a problem with how our society treats women and sex is putting it mildly. I could (and kind of have) written a book on most of the topics that I want to challenge, such as the whole "virgin/purity = value," myth, the "physical perfection = beauty = happiness" myth. In MASTERS, I go after female fulfillment in almost all its forms, using sex as the driving force mostly because that is where we are most discouraged from being empowered and fulfilled.

I'm not writing sex just to write sex. I never do. Ever. There's a point. There's a reason. And the reason in MASTERS is one of empowerment, even when it would seem that my character is powerless. Sometimes you have to learn how much you will bend to know where all those boundaries are. These are important to learn, which is why sexual exploration is such a vital part of the human experience - for both sexes.

Yet sadly, particularly in heterosexual sex, that exploration is often discouraged if you're female.

The statistics say only 40% of women in reach orgasm as the result of casual, heterosexual hookups, as compared to the 75% or higher that men and lesbian women average. I talked a bit about it on Facebook yesterday, where I posted a link about the sexual myths that we need to stop teaching our young girls, chief among them is that when it comes to sex, women are here solely for the pleasure of men. Our pleasure is an afterthought, because we don't care about it as much.



Needless to say, the Masters saga turned into a tale of sexual awakening that dares to defy convention AND permission. And there are just no men on this planet more suited to teach this lesson than Devlin Masters and Caz Bixby.

You haven't met Caz yet, he's in Book Two, MASTERS FOR LIFE, available NOW.

This is not your traditional GV triangle. In fact, I really didn't know what Caz had up his sleeve when he sauntered onto the scene in Book Two. He's arrogant. He's an unapologetic douche bag. He's openly opportunistic. He doesn't promise wine and roses, just dirty sex and lots of it. In the beginning, it isn't even sexual desire that puts Coralie on his radar. Theirs is a painfully honest relationship from the jump.

Well, as painfully honest as one can be when one is an unapologetic, cocky, opportunistic douche bag.

As Coralie peels back the layers on Devlin, Caz is right there to cast doubt on every romantic dream that Dev tries to make come true for her. He's the one who puts a time limit on her happiness, predicting that everything she wants will fall apart before the book's end.

Whether he's right or whether he's wrong... you'll either have to read the book or have someone who did spoil it for you. I shan't.

What I can tell you is that the book was a painful turn for me in many ways, kind of forcing me out of my own comfort zone regarding sex, relationships, fidelity and true intimacy.

Suffice it to say, MASTERS FOR HIRE was the fairy tale. MASTERS FOR LIFE is much more brutally honest and realistic. As realistic as I get anyway. It is one of my angstiest books by a MILE.

This angst is necessary to get you to Book Three, MASTERS FOREVER, which has now been released for pre-order. There's a reason for this, which you will discover when you hit the last page of MASTERS FOR LIFE, ready to throttle me with how it ends. Honestly I have never been more nervous for a book series to publish - and I'm not just talking about Book Two. The entire thing could either propel me forward or drop me on my ass. My stakes are every bit as high as Coralie's herself.

Again, that's your only warning.

"The author has written a very powerful and angst-filled book that I honestly have never seen from her. This feels like new territory for her and I couldn't be happier. There are so many layers and so much at stake for our heroine, I'm beyond cautious as to how it will all conclude." - Amazon review from MJLovestoRead

Indeed, it is all brand new territory. I take the liberties given to me by the Erotic Romance genre all the way to the end, mostly because I really didn't have any choice. Devlin in particular kept me twisted into knots the entire duration of writing this story. Many people who don't write don't understand how these characters often take on a life of their own. They do and say stuff to surprise you on a regular basis, even when you know - ultimately - where they're going. All the little details, and a few big ones, often don't make themselves known until you've breathed a little life into them, allowing them to whisper their words into your ear and tickle your brain with all the possibilities of what could be.

Well, Devlin was indeed Devlish the whole way through. And then Caz showed up, and I was knocked about like a pinball, as dizzy and confused as Coralie herself. They tested what I believe about sex and gratification and feminine empowerment all the while trying to take it away at every turn. Yes... it's that kind of story. Coralie has to fight for that very thing she wanted from page one of Book One: to live life on her terms.

Dev and Caz test how far she's willing to go to get it, which is further than I personally have ever gone with my heroines ... EVER.

Why am I telling you this? Well, because I feel I can. We've gone through a lot together, from the angsty, Kindle-breaking GROUPIE saga, to the bittersweet and emotional FULLERTON FAMILY SAGA. I feel like you'll understand where I'm coming from. Or, you'll need to, the minute you finish Book Two. Through it all, we peel back the colorful, blinding layers of Oz that Dev painted in Book One, to realize that things aren't quite as they appeared to be. You're going to need a friend for this, someone who understands the pain and disappointment you're going to feel.

Basically you're going to need a hug. Every bit as much as I do.

Where these guys came from, I don't even know. But what they had to teach me was eye-opening.

A bold passage from Book Two:

*****

I had made love with several men before him, but none had ever been able to make me come. They inserted Tab A into Slot B and if that was enough to get me there, great. If not, well that’s just how it worked for women. They accepted it. I accepted it.

Not Devlin. I came every single time we had sex. Every. Single. Time. Not just once or twice or randomly like a fluke. It wasn’t some mystery. It was biology. No one would ever think to touch every place on a man’s body but his penis and expect him to “get there.” Devlin knew just where to touch, just how to touch, and what the true objective for partnered sexual contact truly meant. The job simply wasn’t done until I reached the finish line, too.

He taught me to reach it. Expect it. Demand it. Just like a man. And now that I knew that was possible, I knew I’d never go back to settling again.

*****

Not to be outdone, here's some plain talk from Caz.

*****

“You know, you’re not half bad when you behave like a human being. Why do you have to be such a jerk, Caz?”

He huffed and puffed with exertion. “I have a reputation to maintain,” he replied with that shit-eating grin I loathed.

“Being an asshole work that well for you?”

He replaced the weights and sat up to look at me. “Look around you, CC. You tell me.” He grabbed my water bottle from my hand and unscrewed the cap, then guzzled it while his eyes studied my face. He handed it back to me with a grin, as if he knew what kind of intimate liberties he had just taken.

I shook my head. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”

“Nope,” he announced cheerfully. “Why should I? The way I figure it, we’re all hedonists deep down. We all constantly think about the stuff we’re not supposed to, those things you’d never admit in polite company. But we all have those moments when we pass a stranger on the street and instantly wonder what it would be like to fuck them. We all have those moments where we talk to someone, and suddenly we fixate on their lips, imaging what it would look like on our bodies, or taste like against our mouth. We’ve all had that moment when we wanted to just have fun without consequences, like fucking a stranger you don’t even know, in every raunchy way you could imagine. So why not just do it? Take no prisoners. Make no apologies.”

I didn’t say anything, so he went on. “Sure there are people who, when they think these thoughts, feel like they’re some kind of weirdo. An oddball. A deviant. And a few are. But most of us are just normal human beings, hardwired to enjoy sex for pleasure. We’re supposed to want it. We’re supposed to love it. The problems only arise when we’re told we shouldn’t want it, or that we shouldn’t have it. That there’s something wrong with us if we love it the way that we do. It’s everywhere all the time, yet our society wants to pretend like it doesn’t exist. That it’s improper, or obscene. It’s all bullshit, CC. All this perceived purity? I’ve seen the truth every time someone paid me to fuck them. And the things they want to do,” he crowed with a chuckle. “We’re not pure at all. We just lump lust behind other, more obscene sins like wrath, gluttony, envy or greed, simply because that helps us sleep at night. Like we can forget we’re all animals deep down, happiest when we’re allowed to roar. Look at what happened to you. You can’t honestly tell me that you were happier when you were following all those bogus rules of propriety.”

I didn’t want to admit it, but he was right. “No.”

“There you go. If there’s anything I teach you in these next few months, I hope it’s that. Because that means so much more than how much you weigh or how you look. Some of the best lays of my life have been ugly women who just knew how to take what they wanted.”

I scowled at him. “Way to ruin a moment, Caz. Why do you have to be such a pig?”

He shrugged. “Just being honest, pussycat. But I can see how you might not be used to that.”

*****

So... yeah. That's Caz. Like I said, he's a cocky, unapologetic jerk. It was truly weird having him in my head for months on end. It only helped somewhat that I could use this sexy guy as the inspiration...

But I added equal parts Brian Kinney from Queer as Folks... so - you get what you get.



Are you scared yet?

You should be.

We're going down the rabbit hole with Coralie. There's a lot of symbolism in play to subtly (and not so subtly) wedge Coralie out of that restrictive "Good Girl" archetype where she doesn't belong. NONE of us do, not really, not in the way society has defined it at least. If you're reading naughty books about sex, you've likely been, at the very least, teased about it.



And if I accomplish nothing more than this idea we can be both good and feminine without being confined to being a Good Girl (as in Good Girls Don't) with this series, then that will be a huge win for me, and well worth the time I spent with two of the most frustrating male characters my muse has ever introduced me to.

Frustrating, because I couldn't stay away from them... following wherever they led, even dark places unknown.

I hope at the end of it all, you can regard them as the teachers that they were to me, even when they had a lot to learn themselves.

That's what Book Three is for...

Until then, it's time to embrace a little darkness.



If you're in the mood for something even darker, nay, scary this Halloween weekend, MY IMMORTAL is available for FREE through the 31st. How do you find love when you're a reincarnated vampire?

You don't. It finds you...



Happy Halloween everybody!

MASTERS FOR LIFE. The water is about to boil... **This is your only warning.**

Anyone who has read my series books knows that I don't play around with Book Two. I'm kinda always just getting started with Book Two. Book Two is the ugliest of the trilogy because my three-book storytelling works a lot like a three-act play.

For those not familiar with the traditional three-act structure, it works kinda like this:

ACT I (Setup):

Introduce the characters and the world they inhabit. Give them clearly defined goals that will start them on their journey out of their comfort zone. Introduce the obstacles (including people, including themselves) that stand in the way of reaching those goals, underscoring how they will need to grow/change in order to get what they want.

In the case of WIZARD OF OZ, this was the B&W part of the story, pre-tornado, when all Dorothy wanted was to go somewhere else.



ACT II (Confrontation):

Release the monsters one at a time that prohibit your hero/heroine from getting what they want most. Complications = conflict, which motivates our character into action and keeps the story moving. Keep raising the stakes to the point where the protagonist can't go back to the way he or she was before. They are solidly on this new path, navigating this new world with all the new skills that they learn along the way, usually ending on a "point of no return," that demands the character has to take drastic action to achieve his or her goal.

For Dorothy, her fish-out-of-water story began the minute she got what she wanted - to be "over the rainbow." She stepped out into Oz and was given a brand new goal: To get back home. Along the way she met a slew of new friends in adventures that bring her to her "point of no return;" in order to return home, she has to kill the Wicked Witch.

ACT III (Resolution):

Protagonist faces off against antagonistic forces (whether people or events) in the ultimate showdown (i.e., climax) of the story. Whether the hero/heroine gets what he or she wants, this protagonist will ultimately get what he or she needs, fulfilled by the journey itself.

Flying monkeys. Wicked Witch. "I'm melting," "What a world," yadda yadda yadda. Dorothy does what she is supposed to do, and very nearly gets stuck in Oz with her new friends because as it turns out... that Wiz wasn't that much of a Wiz at all. But because of all she has learned, she is bestowed one final magic spell... that answers one last lingering question: will Dorothy ever make it home?



This is the natural flow of a story, whether a single plot told in one story, or an arc told over multiple installments. In fact, if you do write more than one book in a series, you have to pull off this three-act structure with every single book itself, with clearly defined goals (and conflict) for each and every one. This is what readers expect of you, even if they aren't aware of the specifics. And even if they can't say why, they'll definitely know when you've failed.

Every single story ever told answers certain questions in order of where they might prove most compelling. WHO are these people and WHY should I care? WHAT stands in their way? HOW do they overcome? WHEN those questions, and any new ones introduced along the way, are answered ultimately drives the story, demanding to know WHERE the payoff might be.

In stories executed well, it's the very next page after the one you're reading. This keeps you reading, even when you're forced every bit as much out of your comfort zone as the protagonist themselves.

The reader/audience, much like the protagonist, is basically a frog in a pot of water. We coax you into the pot gently, beguiling - seducing - you into the story, making you feel comfortable and safe until we start to turn up the heat in Act II. By Act III, the water is boiling and - if we're successful in how we have constructed our stories - you won't be able to hop out until you see how it all ends, despite how uncomfortable you are.

Act II is where you're going to get uncomfortable, like most confrontation proves to be. In fact, just by your emotional reaction alone, you can easily pinpoint where Act II begins (and climaxes) simply by your level of discomfort. Where did the characters piss you off? Where did they break your heart? This is where your subconscious realized that the water had started to boil and you had to adjust your *own* expectations accordingly.

You didn't really think it was just the protagonist that had to change, did you?

Act II forces every single one of us to confront our comfort zones. That is its whole purpose for being, and its importance cannot be overstated. There's a reason that a lot of writers are intimidated by Act II, because as the creator, our first instinct is to protect ourselves, our characters and even you, the reader. We're afraid to go too far, even when our stories demand it. We don't want to piss anyone off. We don't want to hurt anyone. Most of us are really nice people deep down. So many writers back off from this challenge, myself included. We envision that line of what we can tolerate and dance right up to it, generally only sticking a toe (or toenail) across it and considering it a "win" when we do. Because fiction = conflict, our stories often suffer because of our timidity. The creation of art is a spiritually violent act, much like giving birth. If it doesn't hurt us, challenge us, change us, motivate US to keep moving forward, then it's never going to work for any of you.

The masters of the craft know this and wield this important storytelling weapon accordingly.



Since I take my craft very seriously I take this responsibility very seriously, especially the more seasoned I get as a writer. I trust you more. I trust me more. I trust my stories more. As a result, Book Two is usually my challenge to take us *all* past our comfort zones for the sake of a story well told. And if you are upset, if you're mad, if you're heartbroken over these fictional characters and crazy stories that started out as mere thoughts and ideas in my fevered brain... that's a story well told. You may give me a one-star rating because you hated my characters and what they did to each other, or what I did to them, but what is hate if not another emotion? I made you feel something - strongly - so I consider this a win. In fact the stronger you feel, the more successful I was at my job. I made you care about what used to be a blank page, as if these things, people and places were real. If my characters zigged when you thought they should have zagged, and you form very strong opinions on it as a result, based on *nothing* more than the way I arrange letters on a screen - thinking, feeling, debating, worrying, anxious about, curious over, heartsick because of kernels of thought born in pure imagination alone -

That.
Is.
Astounding.

Seriously. It's magic. As a reader myself, I love when I can feel something that powerful, especially when all I really wanted was to be entertained. Make me cry, make me angry, make me feel; I'll love you a hundred times more because of it. These are words on a page, and they're making me feel something? How fucking incredible is that?? This is why I have no problem turning up the heat just so that *I* can get the most out of my story. I need to feel it. I need to be consumed by it. Like Garth says, "Life is not tried it's just merely survived if you're standing outside the fire." I jump in both feet.

Make it burn, leave a scar, and people will remember you forever.

This is why my FULLERTON FAMILY SAGA, easily the series with the most #feelz of any of my books, is my most beloved. It sold the most. It's been reviewed the most. And of all the reader feedback, it's the one where I've heard the most amazing stories of connection between the reader, the writer and the characters.

*****5- Heartsick, Broken and Pissed off -Stars***** "Why?! That same question has been on repeat in my head over and over and over since I finished this book. Why?! Ginger, WHY?! I waited a full day after finishing the book before even attempting to write up this review and I'm still not sure how I'm gonna get through it without completely losing my shit. I should have know, I did know, that there was a real good chance this book was going to destroy me-between the blurbs leading up to this final installment and that terrifying little sneak peak at the end of Entangled....I wasn't wrong to be worried, typing this up days later and I'm still in an emotional tailspin. If I could hunt down Ms. Ginger Voight I would hug her, beat her with my pitchfork, then cry on her shoulder. I can't remember the last time a book has affected me like this, so I guess no matter how I feel about how it all went down at the end, there is no denying Ginger Voight is an amazing author for bring such strong emotions out of me through her pen alone." - Bookworm Betties

Because of this, I refuse to pull any punches. If you're going to hate me (or break your Kindle,) it's going to start in Book Two. Never has that been truer than with MASTERS FOR LIFE. It should come with it's own warning label, and that comes from someone who generally shuns all warning labels. A long time ago I took the stance that if anyone needed a warning label to read a book, they should steer far clear of mine. I have no problem tackling ugly topics, as fearlessly as I can muster at the time. You're either going to love me or hate me, or love to hate me, but the minute you finish Book Two, I don't consider it a success unless you absolutely, positively, undeniably need to start Book Three to see how it all resolves, even if - especially if - you're scared absolutely shitless to do it.

I take this to new extremes in MASTERS FOR LIFE. From one of my betas, upon finishing Book Two: "Oh my God it is so awesome. I can't believe how you ended it. I need number 3 like yesterday."

This, in my mind, is a slam dunk. My goal was to write a book so gripping that you HAVE to get all your friends to read it, just so you'll have someone to talk to about it. This is why I have - if you'll pardon the pun - "infected" everyone I know with The Walking Dead. I *need* someone to talk to about this story because it's so freaking good. This is why I tune into The Talking Dead every single week to work through all the feelz with C-Hard, the cast, the creators and the fans. The minute the story hurts a little bit, I'm ready to talk it out with people who understand. It's kinda the best part about it.

But let's be honest. In order to inspire that kind of passion, it's gotta hurt. Happy-go-lucky, sexysexysexy only gets you so far. What people remember is when they got smacked in the face or kicked in the gut.

Whereas MASTERS FOR HIRE was a little more fun, a little sexier, a little more romantic, MASTERS FOR LIFE turns up the heat on our little froggies, Devlin and CC, and all who might love them. (Myself included.) Two virtual strangers are trying to forge a relationship together after two idyllic weeks together, with all the baggage in their past standing in their way. For Devlin Masters, our blank slate, our chameleon, this could (and does) mean anything. A couple of new characters find their way into the story, who definitely make things more... interesting. My main goal throughout Book Two was to keep CC guessing all the way through the book. Who can she trust? Who should she believe? Can she trust herself, even, as she watches herself morph and change into someone she doesn't really know?

In other words, welcome to Oz, my friends.

If you want a story to meander through various versions of a HEA for this couple for the next two books, I ain't yer girl. That shit doesn't interest me. I don't write escapism porn as a rule. You can escape into my books, but you're generally always relieved to make it back out again. My roller coasters shake you around a little bit, and you will need a little time to recover, which I figure is what all those happier books are for, including a few of my own.

For my series books, however, you're locked in for the ride. And I don't mind flipping the switch, taking you backwards, racing you forwards, and keeping you arse over teakettle until we're through... particularly in Book Two.

I'm out to test my couples how much they want to be together, and in doing so pose the ongoing question whether or not they deserve to be together. By the time you get to the resolution of this unusual story I've spent all this time building, I want you to buy Book Three complete with a Costco pallet of tissue and wine just to get to the end. And then we can meet and you can hug me, yell at me, curse me, then hug me again and cry on my shoulder. I will have the utmost empathy for your pain, because I've already done all those things to myself.

Throughout my second edit of MASTERS FOR LIFE, I forced myself to jump way past the line of my own personal comfort. As a result, there are a couple of scenes in this book that crawl all over me like a dozen scorpions. My first impulse is to apologize... to you and to my characters... even though I know this is the way the story has to go down in order to be told well.

If you've read my books in the past, you have an idea of what's coming, and are likely scared shitless as a result (as you should be.) For many of you, it's what you love most about me. For the rest... well, consider this your one and only warning.

I'm turning up the heat. The pot is going to boil. You will curse me, and I will deserve it. In fact, I've set up a brand new discussion forum, GV CORNER, where we can share all the feels.

Welcome to the conflict and chaos of Act II, where the fairy tale I crafted in Book One begins to fray as early as the first chapter in Book Two. Settle in as I finally start to pull back the curtain a little bit on our mysterious hero, Devlin Masters.

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

Excerpt, Chapter One MASTERS FOR LIFE

Devlin already knew how much settling for anything pissed me the hell off. He also had appointed himself as my white knight, ensuring that I would never have to settle for anything again. He studied me for a long minute before he said, “Come on.”

I followed him from the bathroom back into the bedroom. He opened up the door to the huge walk-in closet, heading straight for the chest of drawers that sat right in the middle. On the top was a big cardboard box, where he began pulling out several pieces of clothing.

I could tell immediately that every single piece had been designed by his sister, Darcy. The way they flowed, the material she used; I could tell without even trying them on that they would fit to flatter in a way no other clothes I could find at Cabot’s could.

I didn’t have to ask him where he got them. Instead, I posed another, more curious question. “Why do you have a box full of your sister’s clothes?”

He sighed as he leaned against the drawers. “I fulfill my client’s fantasies, remember?”

I lifted up the sunny yellow top to my torso. “And it’s just a coincidence it’s in my size?”

His eyes never left mine. “No, Coralie. It’s not a coincidence.” I leaned back against the drawers as I waited for him to explain, which he did without on speck of apology. “I had Darcy send me a package of size-14 clothing within an hour of getting your first email.”

My mouth dried up instantly. “What? Why?”

He sighed as he turned back to the box to pull out more clothes. “I told you before. It’s my job to give women what they want most.”

“But how did you know that included clothes?” I persisted.

He flashed me that smirk. “All women love to feel pretty in their clothes, Coralie. You know that.”

“So… wait,” I said as my brain scrambled to compute this startling new data. “You knew who I was when I sent the email?”

He inhaled slowly and exhaled even slower. “I researched you the minute I had a first and last name,” he admitted at last. “I research everyone. It helps to start a few paces ahead. I scope out a potential client’s social media, dig up any relevant articles or information on my more notable clients. I gather all available information before I initiate contact, so I can develop a plan of attack from there.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Interesting choice of words.”

He shrugged. “Like I told you before, a lot is riding on that first date.”

I thought back to how insecure I felt when he had originally drilled me about my dress size, something he now admitted to knowing all along. “Why did you bother asking me my dress size if you already knew it?”

He shrugged. “There was more benefit in my knowing the information than letting you know that I knew it. Women tend to get creeped out if they think they’re being stalked or played. They find it far more romantic if a man instinctively anticipates what they need, but in order to do that, one has to take the time to figure it out. Since I don’t have the luxury of ‘dating,’ I had to find a more efficient way to do that. It’s the same game, just a different delivery. I can be prepared and you can be pleasantly surprised.”

I gulped hard as I realized how masterfully he had played the game. But it was what he said next that really took me by surprise.

“More importantly I wanted to see how you felt about your size, so I’d know which piece of clothing would make you feel the most beautiful.”

The way he said ‘your size,’ hit me like a brick to the face. “Two for two,” I gritted between clenched teeth before I turned away. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back.

“This is why I don’t talk about my job, Coralie. It doesn’t matter how we got there.”

“It does to me,” I snapped. “I don’t want a relationship built with smoke and mirrors.”

He released my arm. “Then don’t marry your gigolo.”

I threw the top on the box and spun on my heel to leave the closet, but he closed the distance between us in a heartbeat. He wrapped one strong arm around my waist, lifted me up off the ground and into the unrelenting vice of his embrace. “Let me go!”

“Never,” he said softly. My eyes sought his. Resistance beyond that was futile and I knew it. “I don’t apologize for anything that brought us together, Coralie. Not one damned thing. I love you. And that is worth everything.”

*********

Like Devlin himself, I can't apologize for how we get there. That we get there, together, is worth everything.

Having said that:

**Author Not Responsible for Broken Kindles**

Are you sure you're ready for Book Two?

Gonna entertain ya till ya scream...

Something to read while you bask in the warm afterglow of Devlin Masters

Hey, you know how it's SO ANNOYING to wait a year or better for your series to complete? You find characters you just love, and juicy story that just won't leave you alone, and you have to *wait*? It sucks. And it seems all our best series tend to keep us dangling on the line, making us wait for them.

Ahem.



Believe me I share your pain. It's hard for me to wait, too, which is why I write obsessively for hours at a time to watch my stories unfold. I'm the book's first reader, and I *can't wait* to see how it all comes together. Never has this been truer than with the Masters Saga.

Confession: I couldn't let go of Devlin.

Actually that's not true. Devlin wouldn't let go of me. It was like he was made of magic.

#DefinitelyMagic



That little stinker whispered into my ear day and night, urging - demanding - me to write his story, and I was all too eager to tell it.

Basically I had no choice in the matter. He took me well in hand.

N' I liked it. O_o



Truth be told, I kinda fell in love with him.

If you feel likewise, and are suffering a book hangover and Devlin withdrawals, I have GREAT NEWS...

You get Book Two - MASTERS FOR LIFE - on October 30, 2015!!!

Here's the cover...



Here's the blurb...

DISCLAIMER: This book is part of a series. Spoilers might be contained in the description. For new readers, start your journey with Devlin and Coralie in MASTERS FOR HIRE, now available everywhere!

They were two completely different people from two completely different worlds. Within two weeks they were married, for better or worse.

Their whirlwind romance did nothing to prepare Coralie Masters for what awaited the happy couple back home. Reality crushes the fairytale existence Devlin had created for her in Las Vegas. Ultimately his powerful seductive hold over her cannot protect her from new, powerful forces outside of their marriage that work nonstop to tear them asunder.

There is much more to fear than her family learning the truth of how and why they met, because there’s much more to Dev’s story that she could ever know. The mystery surrounding Devlin Masters quickly undermines their love story.

One thing becomes crystal clear. They may be married, but she doesn’t really know this sexy, alluring stranger at all.

They love each other. They want each other. They can’t stay away from each other.

But will it be enough?

The Groupie Saga titillated you. The Fullerton Family Saga broke your heart. We were only getting started. Book Two of the Masters Saga, MASTERS FOR LIFE, turns up all the Ginger Voight angst, drama and sex like never before.

**Author not responsible for broken Kindles.**

Intended for readers 18+ for graphic sexual content.

As you can see, it's about to get complicated! Dev was easy to love in Book One. He said all the right things and usually did all the right things. But as we return to "real life," Coralie realizes - as do we all - that Dev really was a blank slate in Book One, a chameleon who fit himself neatly into Coralie's fantasies. The truth? Devlin Masters harbors a lot of secrets. Worse, he doesn't appear especially eager to share them. He wants Coralie to trust him, even though he can't bring himself to share with her the dark details of his past.

How does he plan to make her trust him, then? Well, they don't call him a master for nothing. He uses his considerably skill as a lover - and his unbreakable seductive hold on her - to keep her blisscombobulated.

Here's a little taste...

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?”

I paused by the side of the bed. “It looks like you think you’re going to tie me to this bed.”

“I don’t think I’m going to tie you to the bed, Coralie,” he said. He turned to face me. “I know I am.”

My stomach dropped. “I don’t think so.”

He rounded the bed to approach me. “Why not? That’s what my good girl has always wanted, isn’t it? A walk on the wild side with an alpha male, who would take her in hand and make her submit.” He stood right in front of me. I could smell the booze on his breath. “A bad boy who would take all her choices away, so she doesn’t bear any responsibility for all her naughtiest desires. You need the baddest of the bad for a job like that, darlin.’ Someone a little…,” he trailed off as he leaned even closer, “unpredictable.”

I shivered in spite of myself. His fingers chased the goose bumps down my arm. “We didn’t cover everything in Vegas, did we? We left a few stones unturned. Let’s turn them over. You know nothing would turn you on more than to be tied to this bed, at my mercy.” Again I shivered. “Devlin.”

“For the rest of the night, until I tell you otherwise, you will call me sir,” he instructed as his eyes met mine. It was a potent look that welcomed no argument.

“Devlin,” I tried again, this time a little sharper. He responded by stepping closer.

“I said,” he repeated slowly, taking my chin in his hand, “you will call me sir.”

My eyes widened as his mouth descended on mine. Despite the light bondage and submission he was suggesting, the kiss was positively gentle. He teased my mouth apart with his lips, probing my mouth just lightly enough to make me melt against him. And he knew what kind of power he had over me the minute I kissed him back.

I was a junkie. And he was my fix.

He wound his hand in my hair and pulled my head back so he could explore my neck. “That’s my girl.”

***********

As you can see, Devlin was pushing me out of my comfort zone. He does that a lot during this series, alternately making making me swoon and breaking my heart. You will love to hate me for what happens next, and this book in particularly will make you curse me. Vanni and the Groupie Saga will seem like a walk in the park in comparison. If you're a fan of my brand of hyper-reality, particularly the way I deliver it, where you love to hate me for the angsty complicated messes I allow my characters to get into, THIS is SO the series for you.

If you think you're up for it... dare to fall in love with the Master...