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WinaHouseWritingContest

by SB Sarah Sunday, June 08, 2008 at 07:42 AM

A down market for real estate bugging you? Hold a writing contest and give away your house as the prize. Beach front property in Yachats, Oregon, no less.

Note to self: someday, hold a writing contest with a BIG HONKING PRIZE.

Of course, the 1099 of the house value will drive your taxes to levels that will make you wanna hide under a table, and I wonder if such booty is subject to capital gains, but nonetheless. Brilliant idea. And wow, gorgeous town. 

OpenMouth,InsertChickLitHighHeeledFoot

by SB Sarah Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 10:20 AM

Thanks to Jamie, who forwarded me this link that set my blood pressure up another notch. I’m home sick today and utterly cranky, so the less I say about this one the better.

From an interview with author Polly Williams on Yahoo! about her book, Yummy Mummy:

Q: Are the heroines in your three books similar?

A: “They are all the same age, 34, but at different stages of life. I wanted to make the books relevant to those issues that women really face today, otherwise they would be romances.”

Nice. Thanks, Polly. So my romances aren’t relevant to issues I’m currently facing? I’m currently facing an urge to journey to Australia and tell you to bite me. I should read a romance, huh?

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PWon“new”E-roticromance

by SB Sarah Monday, June 23, 2008 at 11:45 AM

I love how the article title calls it “the new E” - new? Are you kidding with the “new?” - but there’s a rather complimentary, if somewhat befuddling article in PW today about the ebook erotica industry titled The New E in Erotica.

I’m laughing mostly because I just finished writing about the “E” in romance for The Book, discussing erotic romance and epublishing and their respective ties to the genre. Is this reporter looking over my shoulder? Creepy!

Avon’s Red, EC, Aphrodisia and Wild Rose Press, as well as authors Cheyenne McCray, Noire, Lora Leigh, and Colette Gale are all featured, but the money quote that sent a mighty chortle to my lips was this one, from Raelene Gorlinsky at EC:

Things that were shocking five years ago—anal sex, ménage à trois—have now become vanilla.” Since, as Gorlinsky says, the human body can only do so many things, many writers have experimented with different types of adventure and fantasy—or a combination of the two.

“The human body can only do so many things?” Best tagline ever for an erotic romance publisher and my nominee for “phrase that best sums up the erotic romance market.” Bring on the multi-penes!

ETA: Hat tip to Lucinda Betts for the link!

WritingLessonswithJoannaBourne

by SB Sarah Wednesday, July 02, 2008 at 03:33 AM

My Lord and SpymasterIf you’re looking to tighten up your prose, or if you find that grammatical and structural lessons on the art of writing serve as fascinating leisure reading (I do, I do!) go check out Joanna Bourne’s growing series on the top 100 best of the worst writing mistakes.

So far there are four or five entries, but they reveal as much about the writer as they do about the craft and labor of writing itself. I find writing about writing, particularly examinations which pick apart structure to reveal meaning and vice versa, utterly addictive.  Well played, Ms. Bourne, well played.

BloggersatRWA

by SB Sarah Friday, July 04, 2008 at 04:25 AM

So you’re a blogger (hi there!). And you’ve registered for RWA in San Francisco. And you’re nervous about what to expect. Don’t be. It’s fun.

Samantha Graves said to me on the last day of RWA in Dallas, quoting, I believe, Mary Jo Putney, that the convention on the whole is a few thousand introverts pretending to be extroverts for four days. And at the end of the conference, expect to be exhausted. I was.

Now, last year, when I went, I was 8 months pregnant. I gave birth six weeks later. I was, to put it mildly, as big as the sun. So there were a lot of events I missed because I was focused on three things: finding a place to sit, finding food to eat, and finding (ahem) the ladies rooms. Since that’s the basis of my conference experience, I’ll start there.

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No,Seriously,StopThinkingAbouttheChildren

by SB Sarah Monday, July 07, 2008 at 03:39 AM

In the course of writing The Book, I’ve done a lot of thinking about why I read romance, and what it is that I’m looking for when I read romance. After spending way too much time contemplating my reaction to romances, I came to the conclusion that I love romance reading because I like being induced by a skilled writer to feel and empathize with the characters, to care about what happens to them, with the unwavering reassurance that no matter how bad it gets, how scary, how awful, how heartbreaking, it will all be ok in the end. There will be a happy ending.

However, a recent trend, and by trend I mean, ‘I’ve read this technique in a few books and it’s pissing me off,’ is profoundly upsetting me, and I am ranting about it.

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Categories: Ranty McRant
Tags: pathos, writing

RWALiteracySigningList:APenNamePrimer

by SB Sarah Tuesday, July 08, 2008 at 01:47 AM

Thanks to Katie, I have a link to the list of authors appearing at the RWA Literacy Signing in San Francisco. Every year the Literacy Signing raises Big Money for a local literacy organization, so bring your wallet and your comfy shoes.

But suppose you’re not going to be there, which is a big bummer. Consider alternate uses for the list: pen name selection! You don’t want to use a pen name that’s too similar to another author’s nom de plume. Granted, this list doesn’t encompass every romance author ever, but there’s plenty on there to give you ideas.

My pen name of choice would be a weird combo of my pet’s names and the porn-star name rule of “street I grew up on,” and I have so many pets I have a name for every subgenre. Ergo Grace Reynolds. Or Oliver Reynolds, if I write mysteries. Or Logan Reynolds if I write, say, Westerns. Or Fukui-san Reynolds if I were to write something Japanese. Or Ohta Reynolds if I write sports books or food commentary. The possibilities are endless!

How did you pick your pen name? What’s your preferred faux name, if you’re not using a writing moniker already? 

YourFirstDraft

by SB Sarah Friday, July 11, 2008 at 08:54 AM

Inspired by this interview with Nora Roberts, wherein she talks about her writing process, I have a question for y’all: what does your first draft look like?

In the interview with Clarissa Sansone, Roberts says,

“I’ll vomit out the first draft: bare-bones, get-the-story-down. I don’t edit and fiddle as I go, because I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Once I get the discovery draft down, then I’ll go back to page one, chapter one, and then I start worrying about how it sounds, where I’ve made mistakes, where I’ve gone right, what else I have to add, where’s the texture, where’s the emotion. I start fixing. And then, after I’ve done that all the way through again, I’ll go back one more time, and that’s when I’m really going to worry about the language.”

I’m so curious about what that bare-bones draft looks like and how it reads.

I don’t personally examine my own writing process closely because I don’t want to scare it or make it feel shy. But usually when I have an idea for an entry or an essay or whatever it is I’m writing, I open the nearest text editor and type whatever words are bubbling up in my brain. Sometimes that email from my Blackberry, or the text editor on my computer, but generally if I’ve had an idea for something, I have to write it down or it is gone, gone, gone. And if I’m not specific enough, I leave notes for myself that are mystifying. I have one that says, “Grate sidewalk sinktrap.” I can only assume I was about to write something really squicky, since there are few things more eeeeeyew-worthy in my world than the sink trap. I get the shivers just thinking about touching it.

Sometimes an entry of a few hundred words is born out of a note that consisted of five or six. Sometimes I can find a review in a two-word note in a margin (if I can read my handwriting). Sometimes I type out something in nonsensical order and then read later and wonder what I was smoking. But because this is a blog, unpublished entries don’t get better by sitting. They get stale. So my first draft is often one of only two, maybe the only one before I try to find any typos.

I’m sure this is relentlessly boring for you, but I’m meanwhile very curious about your drafting process, what your first draft looks like. Do you start at the beginning and seat-of-your-pants to the end? Do you outline and then draft? Do you ramble on and find the one good part and use that? Does it vary every time? How does it work for you?

FunwithSimilies

by SB Sarah Thursday, July 17, 2008 at 06:10 AM

I love those email forwards that talk about central clearing houses of the worst of writing. Aside from the Bulwer Lytton award, though, I don’t know that they really exist. The following allegedly comes from English teachers, but I don’t buy that for a moment. For one thing, if a student wrote any of the following in my class, I’d be laughing my ass off, not sending it in as an example of bad writing.

Either way - enjoy. Some are almost as good as ”he burst like a ripe melon within her.”

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ItWasaFishbowlAndBBQ

by SB Sarah Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at 09:08 AM

A list in no particular order to illustrate what happens with a bunch of romance fans, bloggers, readers and authors descend upon a Times Square BBQ place with big honking holy shit huge drinks.

1. I arrive late because I went home, took care of the fam, then drove back into Manhattan. This was bad idea jeans, because a few hundred other people had the same idea at the same time and I was taunted by sitting on the helix into the Lincoln Tunnel looking at New York but unable to get there. And, to make matters more embarrassing for me, the restaurant wouldn’t seat the party until we were all there. What the crap?!

Now I’m one embarrassed person. Sorry, y’all.

2. The drinks were huge.

3. No, really. The drinks were huge.

4. DO YOU SEE THE SIZE of the FISHBOWLS they serve the DRINKS in?!

5. See #1 re: driving. Hence I drank barely a quarter of the fishbowl, chugged water (which did NOT come in the fishbowl, damn them) and donated the rest of my margarita to a worthy cause: the inebriation of someone who didn’t have a drink. Yay!

6. I don’t go out much, really, which makes me lame, but I forget how funny it is that a table of 15 people with one major genre in common will always find something to talk about, and will undoubtedly have a kicking time. It’s like a book club on crack. With margaritas.Or beer. In fish bowls.

7. There are funny pictures of me circulating out there. I promise I am about 200% more funny-looking in real life.

8. Ann Aguirre was angelic and very cool, and if you ask her how she met her husband, the story will make you wet yourself with laughter.

9. We talked about any and all of the following: writing, books we’re reading, Magic Hoo-hoos, San Francisco, juicy pink velvet things, Twitter, and dial up modems. Also books. But you guessed that.

10. My camera phone takes grainy ass pictures in low light, but that doesn’t mean I can’t caption them. Enjoy - and thanks to everyone who came for creating a kickass evening.

ASmartBitchInterviewwithAngieFox

by SB Sarah Thursday, July 24, 2008 at 02:53 AM

Accidental Demon SlayerAngie Fox won an Smart Bitch Interview in the Brenda Novak Diabetes auction, prompting me to freak the hell out because dude, I don’t know of a single question that would adequately measure up to the bid she made to fight diabetes and be interviewed by yours truly. So first and foremost, thanks to Angie for supporting a great cause, and giving me an inferiority complex that is barely contained by my undershorts. Onward to the interview!

Sarah: Ok, the obvious part! Pimp your book in a handful of words!

Angie FoxAngie:Newly anointed with demon-fighting powers and suddenly able to hear the thoughts of her hilarious Jack Russell terrier, a preschool teacher finds a whole new world of dark and dangerous, including a sexy shape-shifting griffin she’s not entirely sure she can trust.

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GSv.STA:ThePlusSizeHeroine-TheOneWho’sWellAdjusted

by SB Sarah Saturday, July 26, 2008 at 08:38 AM

Oh, the plus size heroine. You may choose from the following options:

1. She diets her way to happy endingness, because nothings says “blissful sex and unlimited love forever after” like losing weight and having thin thighs.

2. She diets her way to happy endingness after seeing the visual holyshit that is her head photoshopped onto a thin body. Once this, she suffers from absolutely no misapprehensions as to what her body looks like and instantly adapts to a gym-centric, carrot-stick-loving life, because thin is so in. (No, Jemima J, I have still not gotten over that one).

3. She’s the plucky, plump sidekick of awesome, a sterling character inside a sexually unacceptable and therefore sexually unthreatening character who compliments but doesn’t compete with the heroine.

4. Like the heroine who is so very very accomplished but does nothing but fuck up left right and center, she’ll go on and on about how big and unattractive she is, how she’s larger than the other women she knows and it bothers her, yadda yadda - and then you find out she’s a size 10 or some shit like that.

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ChewonThis:FanfictionasLiteracy

by SB Sarah Thursday, July 31, 2008 at 02:30 AM

From Lucinda Betts comes an article I reread a few times: The Future of Reading - digital or print? It examines the different types of reading that young folks (whippersnappers! oh, wait...) do these days - and they don’t mean ebooks, either. Digital reading is different from print reading, and there’s not really a sufficient methodology to examine, quantify or even include it as a different element of literacy:

Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among education policymakers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

The example the article focuses on mostly is this young woman who is into reading and writing fanfic - and whether her activities are equal to reading, and all the benefits and superlative statistics thereunto pertaining.

Sidenote: That’s big enough of a question, but I have one more, which the article doesn’t really get into: what is it about fan fiction that is so alluring to so many people? Is it the community of active writers who are still involved in the narrative? Is it the participation in a group world that’s evolving and changing with each new text? Is it the critique and instant feedback from readers?

But dude, at what point does fanfic start earning some modicum of respect? Because gee whiz, the girl is reading and writing fiction, actively creating, you know, words and stuff, and that’s not quantifiable literacy? Damn. 

ThirteenThingsThatAreAwesomeAboutNational

by SB Sarah Monday, August 04, 2008 at 10:33 AM

Last night when I sat down to tell Hubby about the RWA Conference, I had to look at my calendar to remember where I was and at what time, because it was all one big exhausting blur. A big, exhausting, happy blur.

But there are a few things that are popping right in the front of my brain, and since I stinketh at writing comprehensive summaries of things, I want to note a few things.

Jill Shalvis said in the comments to the post I wrote about Jennifer Greene’s acceptance speech (which still makes me cry if I think about it) that “Moments like that are what make the Ritas for me.”

Agreed. And it’s larger than that. There is a lot of effort, exhaustion, and sometimes a small amount of drama surrounding RWA National, but moments like that one speak volumes about how extraordinary RWA as a community and an organization is. There are a lot of folks who have problems with it as a whole, and there are surely some things I would love to change or see addressed, but consider the amazing combination of elements that makes up the RWA National convention:

1. It’s a business conference
2. About writing
3. And demystifying the publishing process
4. And examining and educating writers and aspiring authors on writing techniques,
5. and business techniques
6. and marketing techniques
7. and how to schmooze successfully in the bar. (Very Important)
8. It’s a one-stop experience for a lot of aspiring folks, because there’s craft, sales, pitching, research, and marketing advice.
9. It’s a business conference dedicated to the business of writing.
10. Specifically, dedicated to the business of writing romance.
11. And it is—pay attention - this is the really crucial part.
12. Created, run, administrated, directed, supported, and attended by an audience of mostly
13. Women.

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