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….

his morning, I mailed my first Golden Heart entry ever off.  I spent way too much time on the synopsis, and I never would have been able to get even the final version–which I dubbed “doesn’t harm me”–right without numerous other people to help me out.  Goodbye, Legalese!

 Stupidly, I have decided to also enter my first novel, which means I am going to spend Thanksgiving frantically rewriting–when I’m not cooking.  And writing another darned synopsis.  Drat.

 May all of you have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!  Travel safely, eat well, and–if, like me, you’re ramping up for the Golden Heart–revise like the wind!

lthough not. By “done” I mean that the bones of the story are in place. There is a lot of work to be done in those final pages–both in trimming some portions, expanding others, clarifying key emotions in important points.

And that doesn’t count the inevitable rewrite or three. But for now, I’m popping open a bottle of wine. I deserve it!

ne of my earliest childhood memories is clutching my brother’s hand as we crouched under a desk, hoping the police wouldn’t find us.

Okay. That will give you a distorted view of the neighborhood I grew up in, and so let me give some context. One of the neighbor girls routinely teased me. On this particular day, she had told me my dress was ugly. Then she stole my chalk. Since I was about four years old, I burst into tears. My brother saw this, and being older, he dealt with the situation as only a mature boy of fourteen can: He picked up a piece of decorative bark and hurled it at our neighbor’s forehead. It split her scalp and she bled like the dickens. She had to get three stitches.

Did I mention her dad was a cop?

“CM,” you are saying, “that’s all well and good. But what does this have to do with Legalese?”

I’ll tell you. My original version of Legalese had the stupendous title of “Dower Corrupts.” Which, incidentally, I still love even though it is an absolutely horrible title for a romance novel. In any event, Dower Corrupts was a book about money–specifically, an heiress who could buy herself everything she wanted, except for the things that money can’t buy. And she met a man who also had pots and pots of money, and together they figured out that money sucked and then got rid of most of it.

“CM,” you protest, “you have not yet got to the throwing of decorative bark.”

Right. I’m getting there. That version lasted about 3000 words, and it was axed when a critique partner asked some very pointed questions and I shamefacedly mumbled and said, “But–but–but if I don’t do it this way, everyone’s going to look at her and say, ‘You are stupendously wealthy. Get over yourself.’” And she rolled her eyes and said, “You know, I’m still thinking that.” And I cursed her silently–or not so silently, as the case may be–because she was right, and I started again.

The next version of the book that I wrote was about money. It was about a girl who had a stupendous amount of money and could buy anything she wanted, except the things money didn’t buy. And then she met a man who had all the things that money couldn’t buy, but was a little short on the money parts himself. And sparks flew because they were totally outside each other’s experience.

This is the version that I’ve been writing for lo these last seven months. For seven months, I have deluded myself into thinking that I am writing a book about money, but on a rescan of the pages I’ve written, “money” itself has cropped up, say, twice, and other things drive the emotions, the plot, and the characters.

And here we get to the decorative bark. I am not writing a book about money. I am writing a book about the most important thing money can’t buy: family. And so my proposed finale, which was supposed to be all about how they get rid of the money, no longer actually works. Because money has no emotional weight in my book. What does have emotional weight is that damned piece of decorative bark. You see, I have always known that my brother loves me, no matter how prickly he may be. When I cast my heroine’s brother as the villain in this little play about money, I have never been satisfied. He’s gotten dark–very dark. I planned to have him do all sorts of nefarious things, but halfway through the book, he up and quit doing those dark things in a scene that I still have to rewrite because it doesn’t quite work yet. Still.

At some point, I realized that the money had nothing to do with the happily ever after. My problem was that I could envision a happily ever after with any amount of money–but I couldn’t see a happily ever after with her villainous brother clutching all the decorative bark and laughing maniacally. Once I realized that, I found my black moment. It was blacker than anything I had imagined. It had my hero doing something that still makes my skin crawl, and doing it for the only reason I can imagine he would do it. And then, he had to dig himself out of the deep, deep hole he dug for himself.

Naturally, there’s only one way for him to do it.

Decorative Bark. And that’s all I’m saying. You’ll notice that I’ve blown past the 384-page stopping point by a long margin, and I’ve upped my estimated point for “The End” somewhere to 420.
So you tell me. What’s the theme of your book? Is it better than “decorative bark”? Can it possibly be worse?

s it possible to write a synopsis without engaging in scurrilous lies?

  just received notice that my badly titled manuscript, better known as Legalese, finaled in the Golden Network’s Golden Pen contest.

More importantly, I got some great feedback that will help me get the manuscript ready for the mother of all contests, the Golden Heart.

This has really been a week of great news–feel free to share yours, too! The more, the merrier!

o, the little progress bar on the left very cheerily tells me I have 8% of this book left to finish.

Ha ha ha. By my estimation, I am at least 50 pages away from the end of the book. And that doesn’t even begin to consider the countless chapters that need to be shored up, the more countless chapters that need to be condensed, and the countless revisions I need to do to make motivations consistent. The closer I get to the end of the book, the more I feel like I’m playing whack-a-mole. And it becomes increasingly likely that I will feel like the mole.

What’s the biggest lie your pagemeter, or your wordmeter, or–for the sake of not excluding any other meters out there, your pedometer–has ever told you? Or what’s the biggest lie that you have ever told it?

  few months ago, I entered From the Heart Romance Writer’s Golden Gateway contest. And it wasn’t only me–with me were two of my beloved critique partners, Tessa Dare and India Carolina.

I have been waiting for them to put up the announcement, but they haven’t, and it’s been days. So you can’t see all three of our names up in pretty lights. But we’re there. It’s great to final among friends.

UPDATE: Here’s the list of finalists!

  just wrote a scene that took on a life of its own, in a rather frightening way. It wasn’t supposed to be a happy scene; it features my heroine and a rather unsavory character who we meet in the first chapter of the book. In my brief sketch of the chapter, I’d labeled the scene “J. confronts T.”
The scene was supposed to be a little frightening. But it turned incredibly squicky, and it almost horrified me to write it. This is not at all the kind of thing I want to think about. I kept thinking that I shouldn’t go down that path–but the fact of the matter is, I think I do need to go there. I can’t pull my punches on this one, and if I just settled for a mere threat of physical violence here, I don’t think I’d be properly escalating the tension.
Frustratingly, the scene’s not very good yet, because it is so squicky that I’m shying away from writing it well. I have to fight myself not to dial down the language; it’s probably the hardest three pages I have had to write all book. This is not the kind of scene I signed up to write when I said I wanted to be a romance author. And yet it is exactly the scene that’s demanded here. When I made a decision to raise the stakes and punch up my heroine’s conflict, I think I knew in the back of my mind that this is what I was doing to myself. And to her. This is so far outside of my comfort zone.
Without further ado, one sentence from the hardest scene I’ve ever written:

“Jacob,” Thalia said quietly, “I am your sister, not your wife.”

So what about you? How far outside your comfort zone have you had to push yourself? And how do you make yourself get there?

ust in case you were curious, there’s one other thing you need to know about entailed property. Remember how I told you that you could suffer a common recovery to break an entail?

One giant exception: Not in Scotland. In Scotland, you were pretty much stuck with an entail.

I haven’t verified Ireland, but I suspect the same is true. Why? For other reasons, completely unrelated, I was trying to figure out what crimes worked a corruption of the blood. (Translation: There are some crimes that were so bad, that you couldn’t pass your property on to your heirs if you were convicted. Treason, most notably. In the US, forfeiture of property by corruption of the blood is basically unconstitutional).

In any event, it turns out that corruption of the blood could be worked by conviction for sodomy. The Second Earl of Castlehaven screwed his male page and was convicted. His heir lost his english title, that of Baron Audley, but held onto the Irish title.

Update to add one thing:  Keep in mind that when I use words like “convicted” in connection with felonies, the end result is not something like, “you go to jail for a few years.”  It’s the noose.  Or the axe.  Corruption of blood is very, very bad.  It’s like the uber-death penalty.  Because not only do you die–and you do–and not only is your head placed on a pike for everyone to spit on–which it might well have been–but your crime not only dishonor s you; it dishonors your entire family to the point that you can’t pass anything on to them.