Kristen Brockmeyer's Blog, page 6

Happy Labor Day Weekend!

Woohoo - three-day weekend! Perfect time to grill up some brats, start a new novel or work on your blacksmithing skills. Have a great one, everyone.

Image Credit: Ms. Dow Antiques

Today's Excerpt from Lucky in Love

Image Credit: XfinityI prowled through the room, looking for air vents, deadly weapons, or escape hatches, and tried to keep Chance and the others out of my head. The all had to be alive. I was sure that Dominick would want to toy with everyone a bit more before his big dénouement, and if they were here, which I desperately hoped, they were probably in other rooms nearby. I'd hit my fists as hard as I could against all of the walls in the room, hoping at the least to get some kind of a response and at best to suddenly find superhuman strength and knock a me-sized hole in the wall, but from the dull thumps and sore fists that resulted, I figured the walls were heavily soundproofed and reinforced.

My inventory left me with nothing more deadly than a toothbrush, a bottle of expensive French perfume and the vase on the table. If I were MacGuyver, I'd already be out of here, but since I was just plain old Lucky MacFarlane, I was shit out of luck. I did, however, have the means to smell good and keep my teeth clean while I was confined. 

Fun with Formatting

Image Credit: PaperinkSorry about the sparse posting. I'm still eyeballs-deep in Lucky in Love edits, but plan to be done this week! I'm in the process of hooking up with a couple of critique partners, too, so I hope to get some more feedback soon.
I'm also formatting my ms for Smashwords. Anyone have experience with that? I'm using the Smashwords Style Guide, following it step-by-step with hopes of getting into the Premium Catalog on my first shot, and it's going pretty quickly. Except for linking my bookmarks backward so that you click on a chapter heading and it goes to the table of contents. That wasn't helpful...
Also got the Twitter fired back up again today. Hear the sound of hammering and cursing? 
That's just me, trying to build a social media platform. 

Big Belated WOOHOO!

Lucky in Love is done!

Image Credit: Pinterest
Well, the first draft, anyway. But instead of singing the news from the housetops last month when I finished it, I put it aside and took a break. Okay, I sang just a little, to the sweet supportive girls of the MMRWA and my sweet, supportive husband, but otherwise, I kept it pretty much on the down-low.

Now, a couple weeks later, I'm ready to move on to the next steps.

Crud, what are those again?

Oh, right:

1. Revise.
2. Revise.
3. Revise.
4. Make a decision: agent, contest, self-publish, or submit.
5. Do that.
6. Finish another book.

I started writing my first novel at 13. With concentrated effort, it took me three months to complete my first novel (different one, of course) at the age of almost 33. Had I known what an awesome feeling finishing a book was, I'd have done it a lot sooner.

By the way, I'm going to ignore hindsight here and not even do the math on how many novels I could have finished in the last 20 years. My mom always said I just needed to apply myself! How come we have to be in our thirties before we realize we should always listen to our mothers?

How's your book going? Do you listen to your mom?

Approaching the Finish Line...

It's been a wild couple of weeks in the camper. I've been writing just about every night and, while I was on vacation last week, I even snuck out for an hour or two during the day while my littlest napped. I'm at page 240 (about 56,000 words) and the end of my first novel is in sight. Get that champagne chilling, because it's nearly time to celebrate...

Image Credit: Brush and Pail
So that's all I have for now: just this quick update. This scatterbrain is actually managing to focus with a pretty single-minded intensity. Rawr!

Sophistication and an Excerpt

Last night, it was just me, my laptop, and a half-jelly jar of iced-down, cheap white wine. And a small wolf spider, but I showed him the door pretty quickly.
I was polite, though. I do have some class.
And since I need to get back to it, still having 25 pages to go and only three days to write them in, I'll just leave you with another random excerpt from last night's writing.


Right at noon, there was another knock at the door, and I flung it open, expecting Angela. Instead, Chance was standing on the other side. 
The bruises on the left side of his face had started their fade from purple to a sickish greenish-brown, but his right eye was still swelled nearly shut and sported an impressive a shiner. There was also a piece of tape on the bridge of what was probably a painful broken nose. He smelled like new clothes and there were still fold creases in his jeans and black t-shirt.
He gave me a little half-smile. “How’s it going?”
I was shocked to see him and my heart automatically did a happy little leap in my chest. But wait, that was wrong. I was also mad. I mean, really, here I’d rescued the guy and he hadn’t even swept me up in his arms and carried me out to the getaway car, much less said “thank you” or “I’m sorry I almost killed you with a lamp.” 
And now he had the nerve to just swing by and ask me how it was going?
“Fine.” I deliberately kept my response cool and his attempt at a smile dropped away.
“Can I come in?”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself.” I stepped back and let him walk past me into the room. 





What happens next? Well, I know about the next five pages or so, and after that, I'm not sure. But there's only one way to find out...
Back to it!

Faster, faster!

Image Credit: Etsy (drcarrot)I'm coming up on my self-imposed deadline quickly. The next MMRWA meeting is on Saturday, June 15th, and the goal I set last time was to have 100 pages written by then. I'm now at 159 pages, with 31 more to hit 190... so that averages around eight pages per night.

"I can do this, right?" she asks tentatively.

Thirty-one pages? Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

But just in case do I run into problems meeting my goal, I've spent a valuable half-hour doing some speed-writing research. If you're struggling with a sluggish writing pace, here are a few articles that might help:

The Snowflake Method (Too late for my current book, but maybe for the next?)
How Many Words in a Day? (I thought this was really interesting!)
Writing Secrets of Prolific Authors
Write Fast Enough to Stay Ahead of the Doubts

Image Credit: The Selvedge YardWant to go even faster? Try:

What I Learned from doing NaNoWriMo
How to Write a Book in Three Days (Note to self: revisit this article!)

Are you a speed demon writer or a slow-and-steady kind of gal? Do you have any tips on getting that word count to skyrocket or are you of the school that believes watching your numbers go up is a surefire creativity killer?

Help a sistah out - share what works for you!

June 6: Progress Report

Ahh, the camper: my home away from home.I'm back to the daily grind after having Thursday through Tuesday away from the day job. While I didn't get the garden planted like I wanted, I did buy my plants and spend time with the family and get a few other things done. It was a wonderful stretch of time off.

Best of all, my husband kept me motivated, mostly by calling a halt to my cleaning projects by 9:00 PM at the latest, and sending me out to write.

Last night was kind of scary, since I forgot my flashlight, the camper is a little bit of a jaunt across the very, very dark barnyard, and less than a mile or so away, I heard coyotes howling. It's too bad my romance is a contemporary one and not a historical western, because their "mood music" would have been perfect for background noise. As it was, though, it just gave me the creeps.

My sunset view.After reading some discussion on the MMRWA list today, I've signed up for a 30 day trial of the writing software program, Scrivener. I used to use yWriter, which was great (and free!), but something about the interface didn't speak enough to my creative side for novel writing. Worked wonderfully for keeping all of my freelance articles in order, though! After I play around with Scrivener a little more, I'll post a review on it in case anyone else is interested in what looks to be a nifty organizing tool.

I've spent a good part of the afternoon copying and pasting my current 32K words of Lucky in Love into Scrivener, which, as any good procrastinator knows, is just another excuse to not actually write. But despite my delays, I'm plugging along just fine on my book and have cranked out another 35 pages since Memorial Day.

My goal was to do 100 pages between the last MMRWA meeting and the next, which is on June 15, so that leaves me with 45 pages to go before next Saturday. I'm currently averaging 4.3 pages a night (for real -  I used a calculator!). So, to make my goal, I'll have to ramp it up to about six pages a night, since I'm going to be at a bonfire on Saturday night without my laptop.

I'm feeling positive, though!

*Blush* Writing the Love Scenes

Image Credit: Red Legs in SohoSo far, the most difficult part of my manuscript has not been pacing or plotting or character development. It's been the first bedroom scene.

Why is it that I literally turn red and get all embarrassed just typing out a physical expression of love between my beloved fictional characters?

I mean, I know I'm new at this. But does it get easier? I never thought I'd say that a non-fiction business management textbook would be less difficult to write than a romance, research and all, but that just shows what I know.

Once I'm over that initial blushing virgin behavior (silly, since I've been married for nine years and have a great sex life), those scenes are kind of fun to write. I'm just so awkward, and I'm afraid I'll come across that way on paper! Well, a little awkwardness is okay, since my heroine has a streak of that in her personality, but you know what I mean. But closing the bedroom door on things in this story would, I think, weaken the relationship development of my characters and wouldn't fit the no-holds-barred, rapid fire pace of the book itself.

Any ideas on how I can get over my case of the prims and prisses? Ha, drink a beer and play some Barry White? Or does the thought of giving me advice on how to write a love scene make you horridly uncomfortable? That would at least make me feel better!

Here's an excerpt from yesterday's writing progress on Lucky in Love. Not the whole scene, though, since my mom might be reading.


Maybe when this was all over, I’d tour the country and stay in fancy hotel rooms for a month, just because. I could take Addy, since I was sure she’d be tired of Jack in a month or less, and we could stay in a Hilton, a Waldorf, a Hyatt… I was trying to think of more extravagant hotels when the bathroom door opened and I almost choked on my brownie.

Chance stepped out, wrapped only in a towel. All of his old awkward planes and angles and had been chiseled away and hardened in the last decade and he looked like a battle-scarred warrior, which I guess wasn't too far off the mark, really. Skin burnished bronze, probably in an Afghani desert somewhere, stretched over the taut muscles in his chest, powerful shoulders and forearms, and tight abdominal muscles – in six-pack formation, no less. All of that mouthwatering maleness was dusted over lightly with dark hair that arrowed down to disappear into the snowy white towel that was tucked around his hips and thighs. Which, of course, drew my attention to the sizeable bulge beneath that towel that got more intriguing the longer I looked at it. A flush burned in my cheeks as I quickly looked up at his face and all of a sudden, it was really hard to catch my breath.

This couldn't be Chance. This was some pinup that fell out of the pages of a hot firefighter calendar. He was a conglomeration of all the things women fantasized over: that body, those thick-lashed eyes that gleamed deep green with a hot glow, smooth-shaven cheeks, firm lips that could twist in a cocky grin as easily as they pressed together in determination, and that short, dark hair that I already knew was silky to the touch. This man was the stuff dreams were made of.

I wanted to make a snarky comment or look back toward Fred and Ginger, still twirling around on TV - anything to break the charged moment - but my sarcasm skills had temporarily failed me and I couldn’t look away. And then he was coming toward me with lithe steps, despite his size, his feet making no sound on the carpet. That brought my eyes level with his navel, an interesting little dip that I abruptly wanted to lap my tongue into. Instead, I looked up.

“Dessert?” Chance reached up and brushed his thumb across the corner of my mouth.

“Brownie,” I replied stupidly, my tongue darting out to catch any frosting he might have missed. I definitely did not want to be sitting in front of this gorgeous man looking like a toddler that had just gone buckwild on a birthday cake.


See, just posting that excerpt got my armpits all sweaty with nervousness. Probably erotica's not in my future... I'd give myself an mortification-induced heart attack first.