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!

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….

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!

  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!

s what FedEx says of Ornithology.

Yikes.  This last week has been crazy.  I’m hoping to sleep a little for once!

 But after that, it’s all revisions, all the time.  The good thing about entering the GH is it gives me a very firm deadline for when I want my revisions to be done–something I wouldn’t have otherwise.

What do you use for motivation?  And is anyone else as tired right now as I am? 

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!

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?