When Life Gets in the Way

What happened to April?

I swear an hour ago it was April 1 and I was making a list of all the things I had to do before the end of the month:

     do the taxes

     get the Hub's trucking business invoices out and get the March books on the computer

     Schedule time for a major yard clean up

     turn the clocks ahead - all of them this time

     change the sheets

     recharge the Clarisonic and the toothbrushes

     refill the prescriptions
     car is due for inspection
     make a list of people needing greeting cards sent to them in April and try not to forget to mail them
     YIKES - Easter is in April - the family brouhaha approaches
     schedule a hair appointmen - gray is showing
     Lose weight - in other words, begin your 4th diet this year

And don;t forget the usual  - job (two night meetings a month normally, but this month I have 4 becasue we have to adopt a budget for 2014), laundry - wash the clothes, dry the clothes, fold the cloths. (note - there is no iron the clothes.  If it wrinkles, it does not live here), food shopping (Question - why is the food market with the best organic produce so far away?  Answer - Becasue it is.  Quit whining and drive), load the dishwasher, unload the dishwasher, clean, cook, reserve Sunday night for Game of Thrones

And the unexpected.  Sis said the Newsboys are in town for a concert.  Let's see now - hear Michael Tait and company sing and lift my spirits or clean the dead leaves out of the mulch?  No contest.  Michael, here I come.  And I do hope he does hit the Restart so I can get back on track..      

So what am I forgetting?  I know there's something - Oh yeah -  make time to write.

For me, that last entry is getting harder and harder ro do, the older I get.  When I was  a child, a year lasted forever.  Now it's over in a blink.  By the time I get home from work and do what needs to be done before I can relax, it's 9PM.  I rationalize away the writing by asking myself something like "Who can be creative when she is this tired?" But I know the answer.  We all know the answer.  The successful multi-published, award winning, NY Tiemes best selling authors can be creative anytime day or night.  It is the only answer that makes sense and brings success.

There is one of those authors inside each one of us.  I know that becasue it can feel her trying to claw her way through the guilt when I realize that a month has gone by and I haven't made a dent in my WIP.

I met Janet Evanoxich at a writers conference many years back and we talked about just this sort of thing.  Her advice was to write at least 3 pages a day.  3 pages a day is about 100 pages (give or take) a month.  In three months you have a book.  Brilliant!!!  If one would only listen, that is.

So it's now May (give or take).  I will write 3 pages a day and in 3 months I will have the book that the editor from Berkely wants to see thanks to the New Jersey Fiction Writers Conference in March.    That will be July.  One month to self edit - August.  Then a contract by the end of the year (give or take).

3 pags a day.  I can do that.

     

Oh and I did go to the Newsboys concert.  Here's proof.

Music and Writing

  

When I first thought about submitting a sweet romance manuscript, I knew the emotions of the characters had to be  felt deeply by the reader. This was the challenge; make the reader feel every emotion we wanted them to feel using only words. 

Love, hate, fear, passion, sadness. I think I can safely say we all have gone through something in life and have felt these basic emotions to some degree to be able to express them in our writing.  But we write about so much more – Revenge, betrayal, terror, unrequited love, abandonment, ecstasy, rapture. How can we experience these at the time we need to write about them?

Enter music.

Music is an easily overlooked, yet incredibly important tool to help us write.  Music is so fundamental to us we often don’t even consciously acknowledge how much it actually affects us.  Music is sticky.  From a simple, but catchy jingle to a brilliant musical movie score, music surrounds us and gets locked in our minds to be recalled over and over again.

Would JAWS be as scary without the tension created by the theme song that signaled impending doom?  Do you immediately picture Indiana Jones running through cobwebs holding the crystal skull in his hand when you hear the theme song from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK?  Do you feel the pain when Lancelot seals his fate and Guinevere’s when he sings If Ever I would Leave You  in CAMELOT?

Yes to all of the above.  Because of the music.

Using music, we can experience emotion almost on an as-needed basis.
Music is a powerful medium to express and experience emotion. It recreates aspects of lives that are recognizable and can be experience to some degree just by listening. By recreating patterns associated with human emotion, it recreates the emotion. Then listening, we are able to grasp the emotional content, and react emotionally to it. As an embodiment of the emotion, we are able to perceive it directly.
 
For instance, a piece of music may be quick moving, expressing energy, purposefulness, or excitement. When we listen to a piece like that, more often than not, we can feel it.  When we feel the emotion, we are more able to put it down on paper in a way that can be felt and experienced bu our readers  through our writing.

I know you all have a particular song that makes you cry, or gets you to remember certain periods in your life. Take those songs and stash them in the USB drive in your mind. When necessary, hit the play button and use them next time you get stuck in a scene that is flat and lacking the emotional response you need to get the reader to turns those pages.

I’ve listed a few of my favorite songs that help get me from blank page to emotional genius. Well, maybe not genius; maybe just not one dimensional.

Here goes –
Abandonment - ­I Who Have Nothing by Tom Jones
Loving someone from afar – Invisible by Clay Aiken
Pain of Loss – Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton
Love – Let Me Love You –Tim McGraw
Passion – Keep Coming Back - Richard Marx
Intense Attraction – Touch of Heaven – Richard Marx
Despair – Unbreak my Heart – Toni Braxton
Lost Love - Even Now - – Barry Manilow
Questioning your Heart – Measure of a Man – Clay Aiken
Losing a Love – Somewhere Down The Road – Barry Manilow
The First Time – Somewhere in the Night – Barry Manilow
Unrequited Love - – Melody for a Memory – Hall and Oates
Hopelessness – What About Now – Daughtry (Chris Daughtry)
Regret – I Go Crazy – Paul Davis

All oldies, but all I need sometimes to remind me what one of my characters need to feel.

When you have time, take one of your favorite songs and listen for the emotion. Tag it, bag it, and save it for an emergency. You’ll be glad you did.

Kathye Quick has been writing since the sister’s of St. Casmir’s School in Shenandoah, PA gave her a #2 pencil, ruled paper and taught her what vowels and consonants were.   Now she is the author of fifteen books with a lot more stories still stuck inside her head.

Visit her at www.kathrynquick.com .

Mark This Spot!

A "First Fridays" Artistic Interlude with Sofie Couch

It’s First Fridays, it’s February, and it’s my first official First Friday's post at Classic and Cozy!

So I thought I would lead you all in something pretty radical for a writer. Yes, today we dice and slice books. I mean, literally, we’re gonna dice-and-slice books. So get out your scissors, get out a couple of raggedy-taggedy books, and let’s get chopping and make some book marks.

First, remove the spines from a couple of old books. I promise, no books were harmed… well, actually, they were harmed. They were annihilated. But I didn’t pull anything off of the shelves of a rare books collection. In my hometown, we have an amazing recycle center and there is a special walk-in bin filled with books that local folks no longer want. They’re sad books. Books that are looking for a good home. Unfortunately, I got to them first.

Okay, so rip off those spines. If you’re a craft geek, like some of us, you have a laminator just laying around the crafting bench. Actually, book spines are a little thick for my baby laminator. They needed a little persuasion to squeeze through, so I took out the ol’ flat-iron – it doesn’t get out very often – and with a towel between laminate paper and iron, it works just fine! Don’t have laminate paper? No problem. Pull out a roll of packing tape (no heat).

With your trusty hole punch, put a little punch in the top of your book spine/ book mark.

Next, just add ribbon and voila! Now, you have only to grab a cup of tea and a good book, (might I suggest, KEEPING UP WITH MR. JONES?) and your trusty new book mark. Enjoy!

Sofie Couch (that's Sofie - with an "F"), has made a return to romantic comedy. If you were one of those readers who were looking for more books by that illusive writer, Annette Couch-Jareb, (CYBER BRIDE, 1999), she’s back… with a new writing name. 

SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BOOK!

            Although it seems like another lifetime ago, I remember vividly the moment I decided that  I was going to write a book.    I had just finished reading another romance novel and I thought I can do this   I mean, I had been editor-in-chief of my school paper, won a writing award from the Courier News, and was infamous among by friends and family for writing short, entertaining stories about people I imagined were real.  How hard could it be to turn all that talent into a 300 page book?

            Over the course of the next few months, I sat down at the word-processor and banged out a story that spanned about 320 pages.  With absolutely no idea of what I was doing, I opened up the front cover of one of my favorite books, copied the address of the publisher from the inside pages onto a manila envelope, stuffed in the manuscript  and sent it off to wait for fortune and glory.

           

            Well that was on a Thursday.  By Monday it was back in my mailbox.   I figured someone at the publisher’s had made a mistake, so I put it in another manila envelope and sent it back out.  That was Tuesday.  By Friday it was back.

            Now it was a mystery.

            That Saturday I was attending my first professional writers meeting with Barbara Brenton, now a NY Times Best-selling author, back then a Harlequin author.  I had met Barbara in a bank in Hillsborough a week or two earlier and, while standing in the teller line, we got to talking and she spoke about this wonderful writers’ group and thought I should join..

            For some reason, a little voice inside my head advised me not to say anything about my “submission..”  so in a rare moment of sanity, I listened to it.

            After the meeting I knew why my manuscript had come back in record time.

            It was not formatted correctly, had no page numbers, no chapters,  no synopsis, no query letter, everyone but the kitchen sink had a role in the story and both the hero and heroine ended up dead.  Some romance, huh?

            I NEVER told anyone what I did – until now.

            While we all have heard the story about a manuscript written on lined yellow legal paper, in pencil, with coffee stains on the bottom with an editor liking it so much that she just had to publish it, and then it sold a hundred cajillion copies, the reality is that it doesn’t happen very often.   Maybe once in a hundred cajillion submissions.

In today’s tight market and with the advent of independent publishing, the competition for the available publishing slots, especially for first books, is incredible.  To give your manuscript the best chance for one of them, even before your great story gets read, you need to know the submission guide lines.  Or at the very least – have page numbers and chapters!

Seriously, though, sometimes there is a question niggling in the back of your mind but you think it is not relevant enough to ask.  Not true.  Here’s you chance.  Ask away.

I’ll answer the one you probably want to ask of me.  Yes, I did eventually get the manuscript in proper format and submit it correctly.  While it did come back with a rejection  letter, not in a few days  but rather in a more respectable few months, I was told that my greatest strengths were plotting and pacing.  So I went to every writer’s meeting I could attend and soaked up the information like a sponge.  And although that particular manuscript occupies a place of honor in the bottom drawer of my desk, I did get fifteen others published and am working on a new venture called The Sons of Lost Civilizations, a romantic fantasy trilogy that I hope to submit to the very same publisher who sent my first manuscript back on the first UPS truck out of New York

It was other writers who helped me get my stories out of my head and into print.   Now I’d like to help the published and hopefully unpublished in any way I can.