y good friend and sometime CP Sara Lindsey just sold her debut novel, Promise Me Always. This is just in time for her to get a pretty pink ribbon at Nationals (and to accept a lot of drinks from those of us who are buying).

NAL is going to publish her trilogy in 2010. Those of you who have read Sara’s work before know that she writes funny and sassy, and she’s definitely going to go far!

oday, I was forced to think about methods of authentication. I have a scene or two in my book in which my heroine heads to a bank to make a withdrawal from an account. When I originally wrote them, I did a little bit of research to see where banks were and what interest they paid and that sort of thing, but the research I found did not give me any details about the actual practice of banking in London in 1836. Feeling to lazy to delve further, I made a mental note to do Actual Research (namely, hoping someone on the Beaumonde knew better) later, and I made the rest up. (For those of you who are cringing at this lackadaisical attitude, I have to say that there are some historical details I find endlessly fascinating–like, when did the courts of law and equity merge? And what happened to cases pending in Chancery when they did? There are others, like, say, everything to do with finance that I find immeasurably boring.

This, I thought, fell in to the latter category. It turns out I was wrong. Well, wrong about some of the details I’d made up, but also wrong that the details would be boring. It turns out–and this is oh-so-topical–that problems of authenticating identity have always existed. My biggest problem in thinking about banking in 1836 London was this. By the time 1836 rolled around, London was a large enough metropolitan region, and the larger banks had sufficient clientele, that authentication by recognition was simply not much of an option. That is, the banks had lots of clients, and while they probably knew the wealthier ones (or, more like, the solicitors of the wealthier ones), they probably didn’t know Farmer Jones and Grocer Bob. How did Farmer Jones and Grocer Bob go about keeping a banker? In other words, even setting aside questions of bank failure, how could Farmer Jones walk into a bank and trust them not only to keep his money, but to give it up to Jones–and only Jones–on request? And these mundane details that were of actual plot-significance for me–who would actually bother to write them down?

After all, there are so many aspects of our life today–how an ATM card works, for instance, and the manner in which checks function, and the financial web that allows us to walk up to a bank in the Netherlands and withdraw Euros from the American Dollar salary direct-deposited by our employer–I mean, all of those words today, if you had no idea what they meant, wouldn’t even explain how the system works. Enter this incredibly detailed description of how banking works. It is essentially a comprehensive manual, describing exactly how to run a bank, with everything discussed in both minute detail, with a running commentary about the purpose of all the things that are required. It discusses things I would never even have thought of researching, but that I got wrong, including the method in which debits and credits were entered into an account (I shoulda known that they did double-ledgered accounting–of course they did double-ledgered accounting–my brother taught me better than that!), and the manner in which debits and credits were entered (they were not, as I had thought, entered as 3l 5s 2d, as sums were so often written–that takes too long. Instead they were £ 3-5-2.

I also learned that when people talked about a holographic draft, they meant a draft in the account owner’s own handwriting–a historical detail that I suspect can’t be used since the word “holograph” would only confuse the modern reader who attributes a very different meaning to the word. They also had a signature registry, which they used to match signatures on drafts. In any event, I feel suitably chastened. I thought I was going to be searching after arcane details, but it turns out that I was actually searching after intelligent solutions to an extremely hard problem.

I had dreaded it for so long, and it was fun! It was like going to the dentist and getting a book instead of a teeth-cleaning!

  don’t demand perfection from my books; I read because there are enough truly magical books–transportive and transcendent–out there that one out of ten or twenty really rocks my world.  At the rate that I read, that means I get one or two a month.  And of the books that don’t hit the magical mark, well more than half of them are enjoyable and interesting.  So reading is a lovely lottery; I almost always win, and sometimes I win big.

But there is a level of book beyond the magical.  These are the books that don’t just take over my conscious mind.  Once I pick them up, they seem to conquer the farthest reaches of my nervous system, from my brain stem down to the nerves in my toes.  They go beyond mere transport.  And the amazing thing, afterwards, is that I cannot figure out one thing that is wrong with the book.  Not a single thing.  This is a perfect book, and there are not so many of those in this world.  I think I find one once every three or four years.

To give you an idea how picky I am about applying this label, I want to talk about a book that I think is utterly magical, brilliant, incredible . . . and not perfect.  Loretta Chase’s “Lord of Scoundrels”:  Not perfect.  Almost, but that bit at the end with the fight for the Macguffin is just a little over the top, and while I think Jessica is a fantastic heroine, she has almost no character arc.  All the growth is Dain’s.  Or Susan Elizabeth Phillip’s “Ain’t She Sweet?”  Smart, sassy, funny, clever, heart-warming . . . but Sugar Beth wanting the painting for the mentally-challenged daughter of her former husband always struck me as just a tad too saccharine for the rest of the book.  I’m not trying to criticize either of these books–I’m just saying that in my nomenclature, even the books at the very highest pinnacle usually miss the mark of perfection.

But there are perfect books.

The Chosen, by Chaim Potok.

Watership Down, by Richard Adams.

Memory, by Lois McMaster Bujold.

A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett.

Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay.

Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart.

And I am now delighted to be add another book to the list:  The Host, by Stephenie Meyer.  I was expecting this book to be interesting and engrossing.  I had hoped it would be magical.  I got perfection.  Absolute, utter perfection.  So go read this one.  It might not sound like something you want to read–it’s a semi-dystopian science fiction for adults, with something that is either a love triangle or a love quadrangle, depending on whether you count bodies (3) or souls (4).  And it is utterly, completely, heart-stoppingly brilliant.

he fabulous Brenda Novak runs an annual auction to raise money for juvenile diabetes. It’s a fantastic event, in which you can both get some great items and help out with a wonderful cause.

This year, the 2008 Golden Heart Finalists have gotten together to offer three separate auctions:

This is the perfect way to give your manuscript a test-run before the real Golden Heart competition. Just like in the real competition, five people will read a maximum of 55 pages of your manuscript plus synopsis. Just like in the real competition, you will receive a single numeric score somewhere between 1 and 9 from each judge–the exact score they would have given your manuscript if they judged it in the Golden Heart.

But unlike the real competition, they’ll also give you comments and criticism. They’ll try to help you identify your strengths and shore up your weaknesses. They’ll justify the score they give you, and explain how you can improve on it for the real thing. They’ll tell you where you’re losing points, and what you can do to maximize your chances. The critique won’t be for the faint of heart–but it will be for those who want to give the Golden Heart their best shot possible.

The three auctions have three different flavors: historical, contemporary, and suspense/paranormal/romantic elements. So if you’re interested in the Golden Heart for next year, you should definitely bid on these auctions–you’ll get five critiques from people who have both judged the Golden Heart and managed to final already.

I should mention that yours truly is one of the critiquers for the historical category. And one other thing–whatever the total is for the three auctions, I will match the donation to Juvenile Diabetes. Yup, you read that right. Right now, the auctions are sitting at 27, 18, and 9, so if the auction ended now, I’d write a check for $54 to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. I’m hoping the amounts will go up significantly! The only caveat I will add is that if the total goes over $1000–and wouldn’t that be lovely?–I may have to write two separate checks, with the balance being paid in August.

But there you have it: Three auctions. Fifteen Golden Heart finalists. And every dollar you spend gets matched. What more could you want?

he various: I updated my main website. I wanted colors that were less faded. Also more birds. Basically, I got bored of my other look and so I changed it. I shudder to think how that will work when I have something professionally done and cannot afford to change it regularly.
I do that a lot. Get bored, I mean. It occasionally costs me money. I will update the blog skin at some later point when I have time.
That is all.

Oh, what? Right. The sundry. Legalese finaled in the Golden Heart, in the Historical category. I’m very excited about this! Unfortunately I may only have dreamed it, so if I’m not on the list tomorrow it is because I have gone mad.

EDITED to add: Updated the main blog skin. Hopefully, I’ve fixed all the wonky stuff.

DOUBLE EDITED to add:  OMG, can you say stupid PHP hacks?  The PHP that converts the first character to a script is SO HACKY it’s not even funny, and it doesn’t play all too nicely with wordpress.  Until I actually get off my duff (which I probably never will) and put some reasonable error testing in place, I can’t start a blog post with a link.  Or, um, italics….

hus continues CM’s monthly blog-fest. Come July, I shall blog more. But for now, this rate is just fine.

As I am sure you know, we have come up on the Season of the Devil. Oh, come now. Don’t stare at your computer screen in coy surprise. You know what I’m talking about. Yes, you. It’s obvious.

Thin Mints. Samoas, too, but it’s really the Thin Mints that get me every time. Coworkers hawk them for their cute little girls. You see smiling faces bobbing above green uniforms outside every grocery store. Everywhere you turn, someone is selling Thin Mints. And they are so darned good. Plus, one fits into your mouth so easily, and it takes almost no time to chew it. One bite, and it crumbles into nothingness. And as we all know, nothingness cannot have calories.

Unless nothingness is a Thin Mint. Curse you, Girl Scouts of America.

So you tell me. Girl Scout Cookies: Evil? Or pure evil?

ou’ll notice that in my “goals” post for the year I did not mention “update blog regularly” as a goal. That is because there was no way to make it a goal (I originally typed “gaol”–how appropriate!) without interfering with two other goals–writing, and getting through my day job with a modicum of grace.

So here I am with the erratic posting. And today I’m just going to mention that Ornithology–which has been given the temporary title of “The Making of Jenny Keeble”–finaled in NTRWA’s Great Expectations contest.

Aside from, uh, the Golden Heart, this is the first contest I’ve entered these pages in. Notice I do not say, the first contest in which I’ve entered Ornithology–I entered the much older version in one (or is it two? Honestly, I don’t remember because I’ve blocked out the results) contest before. The judges were really unimpressed. So it’s nice to know that the completely rewritten pages have made a difference. Whew. I did not just waste those many hundreds of hours on the rewrite. At some point in the future, I may actually end up posting a blurb and an excerpt. But–that will have to wait until I’m not completely overwhelmed.

Here’s hoping that everyone else has been having a wonderful and productive 2008 so far! I suck at posting, but I’m not really going to get better anytime in the next few months. Maybe later….

  little more than a year ago, I sat down and said, “Ho hum. I shall write a book.” And since everyone up until that point agreed I was a pretty good writer, this seemed like a fantastic idea to me. I mean, if I can put words on a page in a fashion that sounds pretty decent, all I had to do was put a lot of them on a lot of pages. Right? Right?Heh. Yeah, I know.

My first book–that would be Ornithology I–I learned how to write a scene. You can actually see it in the progression of the draft. I have a couple hundred pages of people sitting around and talking and dancing and stuff on a page and at the end I get to pages that start from a hook, go through a major event, and end on a hook. Yay, me!

Of course, you notice there’s that problem of the first 300 pages where nothing happens. Oops….

My second book–that would be Legalese–I learned how to write conflict and plot. I had to do some of those scenes over and over again to make them work, and it’s still far from perfect (I haven’t even thought about revising it yet!). “Ha ha,” I said. “I am a genius! Now I know how to write a book, and nothing will stop me, ever!”

That faint snorting sound you hear is me. Because I turned back to book #1. Now, I have to tell you. There is basically no way I should have revised Book #1. Nothing happened for 300 pages. There was little external conflict, and not a lot of internal conflict. This was a book that should have been kicked under the bed and chalked up to a learning experience. But I didn’t want to do it. I liked my hero. (Heroine, I realized–not so much. Note to self: “clever” is a character trait, not a character.) I really liked my heroine’s brother. And I wasn’t ready to give up this story.

I really should have given up. Last May, I wrote an intro that totally changed my heroine. It was fantabulous. It was perfect. It was something I sat on for two months before coming back to it and realizing that it sucked, too. I tried again in June. And September. By the time October had rolled around, I’d written maybe 30,000 words, here and there. New intros. Scenes in the middle. Just testing out ideas. None of them worked.

In mid-November, I got the idea. The perfect idea. I wrote five pages. They were the first five pages I sent to my critique partners, who said, “I love it!” I did, too. And so I started rewriting.

Of course I deleted those five pages, in case you were wondering. I kept . . . um . . . 300 words from the original version.

And rewriting this book was a huge breakthrough for me, too. Because I was forcing myself to do it fast enough that I could really feel the pace of the book. When it dragged, I dragged. And I finally figured out that pacing is not a rheostat, to be turned up and down by adding or removing words. Pacing is about connecting with the reader. Those first 300 pages I’d written in the first draft? The pace was slow, sure. But I couldn’t have deleted words to make it better. No way. Without fierce conflict, it’s hard to pace well. And if you have a section of your book where the conflict is slow, you need to either (a) punch it up significantly, or (b) drop in a paragraph of tell and move on, because nobody cares.

And sometimes, the way to make a scene pace faster is to slow it down. The conversation that’s critical to your black moment isn’t going to mean a damned thing to the reader if you delete all your heroine’s emotions to make it read faster.

Sure, words can slow you down. But as a general rule, if your words aren’t doing work, you delete them. Words are not a speed bump, put in to make your reader get to the story slower.

All this makes me wonder what I’m going to figure out on writing my next book.

Does anyone have any startling breakthroughs they’ve made? I’d love to hear them!

  lot of people are talking about goals. I have three lists of goals. One is my mid-year goals list–the things I want to accomplish by July of 2008. Then I have the 2008 goals list. And then I have my 10-year plan, for 2018.

The one thing I always keep in mind is that I cannot have everything I want (sadly), and so I don’t make goals lists so I can strike off every item on the list. I expect to not achieve all my goals. That means I have to know what trumps what. So, for instance, on the ten year plan, I have listed “build my own home.” Because that is a dream of mine, and it would be nice. And another thing on that list is “have at least a million dollars in liquid assets.” Which would also be nice. I think that either of these things are attainable. It’s probably going to be difficult to do both. A third item on that list is “Have sex on every continent (including Antarctica).” Which may not exactly be compatible with the million dollars, either.

And so I have to know where my priorities are. Of the the three, the one that is (obviously) highest priority is. . . . The third one. Obviously. And yes, I’m serious. Because at the end of my life, I am not going to lean back and say, “I had a million bucks when I was forty.” And while I might enjoy the process of acquiring a custom-built home, I know myself well enough to know that 90% of the time I spend there will consist of my ignoring my surroundings because I am enraptured in what I am reading or writing. I just don’t pay attention to what’s going on around me.
But the third one not only involves two of my favorite activities, it’s one that will make a lot of memories and bring me closer to Mr. Milan. And so if I have to sacrifice the other goals to get that one, I’ll do it.

Remember: Goals are dreams. Goals are not death sentences. Don’t pursue them just because you want to cross them off your list. If you stop wanting a goal, don’t be afraid to give it up.

With those cheery, encouraging words for 2008, I wish everyone all the best! Happy New Year!

  see I have not blogged once in December. That is because all of my writing words have been going into the sidebar. My head hurts with how far that progress bar has moved. I know it says “Ornithology Revisions,” implying that I have been revising pages. Ha ha ha. How I wish that were the case. Of those pages–written between 11/9 and today–zero have been revised, and all have been completely, one hundred percent new.

And these are not words written with my internal editor completely off, either. I have rules. I have page counts I have to hit every weekday, and then on the weekends, I have to stitch those counts together into actual scenes and chapters. Everything that I’ve stitched together I’ve gone over two or three times. I cannot explain how much this has hurt to do, day after day after day. On the other hand, it’s really amazing to see how productive I can be when I force myself to it. All the cool kids are blogging about their Golden Heart judging experiences, and so I thought I’d say a few words. I got the Young Adult category. Seven entries. Of those seven entries, three of them were what I’d call “not quite ready for prime time.” The writing was stilted or sloppy; there were obvious errors in the text, obvious motivational flaws. In one case, the entry was quite short–think under 1/3rd the required pages.Three of those entries had really great pages. The concepts were generally good, the conflict was there, and the writing was snappy. I gave these entries scores ranging from 7 to almost a 9. What was the difference? I had never imagined that this would be the case, but the difference was the synopsis. And by “the synopsis,” I mean that two out of these three entries had synopses that actively hurt them. The first one was fatally wounded by a synopsis that read like a hook from a query letter–and it was approximately that long. It was a great hook, too. But–what happens? Who runs away from home? What’s the black moment? What’s the resolution? I agonized about how to score this one. Ultimately, I decided I had to give it a lower score than I thought the pages might have merited. Without knowing if the author can really put together a decent story–with a heart-wrenching climax and a happily ever after–I can’t really give the author a score that says, “go ahead–final in the Golden Heart!” A great synopsis, one that really made me believe the author knew how to craft a great and exciting story, could have netted this entry as high as a 9.

The middle score I gave was for great, but not absolutely golden pages. Again, a great synopsis could have gotten this entry a 9. What I read was good. But the synopsis felt like a series of “and in this chapter, she does X.” There was no understanding of story structure, no emphasis of moments important to the internal or the romantic conflict. And so I was left with the feeling that the book was a bit of a hodge-podge.

The final entry I got I gave a score really close to a 9. The synopsis had a hint of voice and sparkle. It emphasized all the right moments. It made me understand what the black moment meant for each of the characters, and showed how the subplot played into the black moment’s resolution. Was it the best synopsis on earth? No, probably not. But a bad synopsis would have put this entry probably somewhere around the low 7s. The great one pushed it into the territory where, if other judges agree, it will final.

So that’s my golden heart advice for all you junkies out there: Spend more time on your synopsis. Remember that your synopsis tells a story; it doesn’t summarize your book. Yes, it’s the thirty-minute TV special of your book. But you’re still telling that story.

You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about one of my entries yet. The entry actually had a decent synopsis. The writing was not bad, although it was a little stilted in places. All things not considered, it should have been around a 6 or so. I thought about this one for a really long time. I know the guidelines said that it’s not fair to say “I don’t like such and such a story,” and to ask myself whether the story is a good story of that particular ilk.My problem–and remember, this is a supposedly young adult story–is that I would rather gouge the eyes out of any young adult than let thm think that this kind of story is a romance. The h/h relationship was child molestation–she was 14, he was twice that age, and their first sexual experience was an assault. The black moment was when she discovered he was married. And no, the HEA was not her chopping his balls off. It was their getting married–with no explanation of what happened to the prior wife. I am okay with reading stories about child molestation where older men marry much younger women. It’s just that usually I like the author to recognize that it is disturbing–like Kahlid Husseini’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns”–and to pay the bastard back in the end. I decided it was not horrible to say I did not like stories glorifying child rape, and I graded accordingly. That is a very different thing than saying “I do not like books about astronauts.” I thought about not posting this, because the author might recognize herself. But honestly, if you read this and you recognize what I am describing as your story, then GO GET COUNSELING!