Beginning at the Beginning is a Stupid Thing To Do

I’m finally sitting down to start Bloody Charming, the third in the Garnet Lacey vampire chick-lit series, and I’m stymied. I can’t seem to figure out where this story starts.

The funny thing is that I have an outline that details the plot from beginning, middle, and end, so it’s not like I don’t have a handle on the story itself. I had, in point of fact, begun at the beginning, which is to say, sometime before the action starts. I’d had Garnet on a boring little bicycle ride home interrupted by the sudden appearance of a wolf. Cool though that image was, I realized that what followed was a lot of meandering as Garnet went though her day, essentially being happy.

Not cool.

So tonight, I restarted the novel at the first gathering of Garnet’s potential coven. I’m much happier with that because there’s action… though I realize the conflict is still not center stage. I’m going to have to rework that in revisions, because I’m also throwing a lot of new people at the reader all within the first ten pages. I think that I can make that onslaught of names work if there’s a core story for the reader to follow – which is going to be Garnet dealing with Blythe, the sexy comparative religions major, who is hitting on Sebastian.

It amazes me how bloody difficult writing is. I’ve been teaching writing for years now and I have any number of sort of “pat” phrases that I tell my students over and over. One of them is that they need to start their story at the moment of conflict. Start, I tell my students, with a problem statement, not unlike the thesis of a paper -- so that your reader knows what the hypothesis is going to be, what answers they should be looking for. State the novel’s core conflict in the first sentence (or thereabouts.)

Yet, when it comes time for ME to sit down and write, I flake. I get distracted by the pretty, by the fun.

Now I have to pay the price. I’m going to have to take my own advice.

How annoying is that?

Because It COULD Happen

(Cross posted to Fangs, Fur & Fey)

On of the questions asked of authors on the Fangs, Fur & Fey list was: "Why do you write urban fantasy?"

I have to first start by saying that I’m a huge fan of urban fantasy. I read a lot of it as a teen/young adult (which was some time ago now), probably for me the most memorable of which was Emma Bull’s WAR FOR THE OAKS. I still read a lot of it, in fact.

This is going to sound extremely fannish/Mary Sue, but what I love about urban fantasy, is that, well, that it could happen... to me.

When I was a kid, I loved to play pretend. I had the kind of overactive imagination that sent me into Hixon Forest every day of summer vacation with a wooden sword and a couple of willing friends. I’d still be there, except at some point it became somewhat socially inappropriate for me to tell people to call me “Zurg, Amazon Queen of Venus.” (Except maybe in the bedroom, but that’s another story.)

Urban Fantasy is an invitation to play again. Because the settings are contemporary, I can imagine that that unwashed looking guy talking to himself two seats in front of me on the city bus is, in fact, a werewolf. That’s the sort of stuff I like to play with in my own novels (and in the enjoyment of other people’s)... the taking of real things and added a supernatural or paranormal spin on them. I mean, what if all the guys/gals who talk to themselves are, in point of fact, talking to something real? What if those plastic bags blown around by the wind are messengers to some kind of new breed of urban faerie? My friend Kelly McCullough based a whole universe in an as-yet-unsold fey book called THE URBANA on that idea.

It makes walking to work more interesting, you know?

As If You Needed One More Blog To Read...

I was just invited to join a new LiveJournal community that might be of interest of readers of Tall, Dark & Dead. It’s a collection of paranormal romance writers called fangs_fur_fey/