This is not a bad thing. It just takes discipline. Determination.

Today I watched a documentary about Harlan Ellison, who was one of the first writers whose prose knocked me on my butt and showed me what being a writer meant. Listening to him, reading his words is much like being sucked into an irresistible vortex. He may sometimes set my teeth on edge, but I still find it virtually impossible to look away. He scrapes my writer’s nerves to the rawest envy, desire . . . and encouragement.

He once said the line that I’ve adopted almost as a mantra when I talk to new writers, when I try to explain that there are no shortcuts just because you’re talented, no easy path when you write from the heart: “Any writer who CAN be discouraged, SHOULD be.”

If you are a writer, you will write, no matter who says otherwise. And in the next two weeks, I am most determined to edit what needs to be edited and write what needs to be written – and meet those blasted deadlines.

Over the next few Wednesdays, I’m going to preview the topic here, with a few side notes about books. This is not just to promote my speaking (although I’m a lot of fun as a speaker). It’s also to keep me on track.

I have a book due March 1. A Good Day for Murder. And I don’t intend to miss that deadline. You, my friends, will be my accountability.

I’ll be posting my weekly totals here.
Goal: at least 60,000.
To date: 7,795 words.
Official start date: January 11th.
So, allowing a week for a good review and proofing, and to meet my 30-Day goal, I need to be finished by February 11th.

Although my goal is 60,000, my speech is actually geared toward achieving 50,000 words. Since I already have 7,795, I need 52,205, so the math is similar.

30 days. That works out to be approximately 1,750 words per day, or 12,250 per week. By next Wednesday, my first draft should have at least 20,045 words.

Intimidating? It really shouldn’t be. This past Sunday, I wrote 1,047 words in two hours, leaving plenty of time for PetSmart, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Target, KMart, and a half-mile walk in the park with the dog and a movie with the sitter when I got back. It is possible to write 50,000 words in a month and still have a life.

But you have to prepare. You don’t run a Boston marathon by going out and buying a new pair of shoes when you haven’t been off the couch in 5 years.

So, in “Top Ten” countdown style . . .

#10 PLAN AND PREPARE

I scuba dive, and every dive instructor I’ve known has this mantra ingrained on the brain: Plan the dive, and dive the plan. It’ll keep you from getting lost, among other things.

So don’t start your writing marathon with a loose idea and a few character sketches in your head. Here are a few “warm-up” ideas to get you launched to a successful “run” of writing.

• Warn your friends and family – vital for all those missed television programs, ignored text messages, and dinners in a box
• Clean your space – don’t start in a spot that’s going to distract you with stuff that should be filed, read, paid, or put in the dishwasher
• Spend several days “planning your dive” – write 2-page sketches of your major characters and a 5-page outline (including the major plot points and the ending). KNOW WHERE YOU’RE GOING! There are several guidelines out there that can help with this. One of my favorites is Randy Ingermanson‘s Snowflake Method.
• If you write with music, plan your book’s soundtrack. If you’re not sure, a music sample source such as Pandora can help.
• Plan your time. You know your life best. Know when and how you’re going to find those 30-minute or 1-hour sprints. Block them out as dedicated to writing.

Finally, put into your mind that this is not a fluke or a test. This is not a hobby. This is a serious step in developing a writing career.

Marathoning isn’t for everyone, and there are plenty of successful writers who take six months or a year (or more) to finish a first draft. But if you are blocked, you need a challenge to get you off your duff, or you’re like me and want to write 3 books a year, then you can use a marathon stretch to jumpstart all your writing goals.

After all, there’s a reason that NaNoWriMo has been one of the most successful writing movements in history.

Join me. Let’s write!

Recently, a friend asked me about the use of prologues in the Love Inspired books. My answer wasn’t encouraging to her: in my experience, the editors discourage prologues in favor of the story jumping into action right away. The LI books are short (around 60K words), and a prologue takes up room needed to build the current story.

And, as a reader, I’ve found that writers often use prologues as a way to dump a lot of backstory on the reader – backstory that only slows down the reader’s entrance into the main story and would have been better used in slow reveals to build character and tension. Even best-selling authors sometimes do this, to the point that I can find myself annoyed by them. I just want to get on to the story.

I, too, have been guilty of this. When I submitted The Face of Deceit, it had a prologue. A good one (if I do say so myself). It was not so much backstory as character reveals for the villain, hero, and the heroine’s art. Yet when I received the list of revisions from my editor, the first thing on the list was “lose the prologue.” (If you’d like to read the original prologue, go here.)

I nattered for almost a week. I LIKED that prologue, felt it was essential to the book. Yet, it had to go.

And . . . I have to admit the book is stronger without it. Snarl. I hate it when they’re right.

Yet I love it when they’re right. This is the book that received 4 ½ stars and a TOP PICK status from Romantic Times magazine, and it’s now up for their 2008 Reviewer’s Choice award.

So here’s my advice if you have a prologue in your story. Take a REALLY close look at what it does and why. Don’t fall in love with it. If you’re aiming for a short or category market, find a way to get rid of it now. If it’s backstory or a character reveal and involves details that could be used later to build suspense and character depth, don’t use it.

If it does anything to prevent you from grabbing the reader by the throat and hanging on for the ride – lose it.

Prologues have a place, but are best used in literary novels and plays. Shakespeare used them to prime effect – but try to remember that he wrote for the Elizabethan theater, and his audience had specific expectations about the plays they were going to see.

So do our readers. Don’t disappoint them by dragging them through material that could be better used in another way. They may not hang around for the rest of the story.

First, however, I want to, once again, thank everyone who has sent prayers and good wishes for Rachel’s illness and Phyllis’s back problems. Phyllis is improving; Rachel has stalled in a place of low-level and occasional wheezing, with congestion we just don’t seem to be able to break loose. So we’re off to the doctor tomorrow. Will keep everyone posted.

Now, to the final stage of my creation of a hero, which I think of as the movement from intrigued fascination to creative fruit. The beginning, of course, is the “raw material.” And to borrow a phrase from a recently enjoyed show . . . .

I think Trevor Eve is bloody brilliant.

And not just because I thought Jonathan Harker and Denys Finch Hatton were sexy beyond belief or that Peter Boyd is one of the more fascinating characters on tv. It goes much deeper than that, and over the past few weeks, I’ve been studying Mr. Eve’s acting technique with the same intensity of a scholar with a newly discovered Shakespearean folio.

Most viewers don’t think about (nor should they) the choices that go into every frame of film. Not only is the scenery, each prop, and every camera angle an intentional choice, but so is every twitch of muscle, raised eyebrow, or twiddled thumb. A line’s delivery is rehearsed more than once, with different inflections, until it fits the character just so.

What has caught my attention with Mr. Eve is how remarkably he alters his choices, even within a similar range of emotions – thus the fury of Duncan Matlock at the end of The Politician’s Wife is quite different from any of Peter Boyd’s explosive outbursts in Waking the Dead.

And if you really want a treat, take a look at these clips of his performance as Hughie Green, where he has captured a whole new level of smarmy creepiness.

What this does for me as a writer is to provide a visual smorgasbord of hand and facial gestures, hand movements, body slumps and stretches, struts and strolls, vocal inflections and emotional ranges. And, unlike people watching at the mall, I can freeze, rewind, and watch them again. All without the security guard at the mall thinking I’m creepy because I’ve been watching the McDonald’s counter for an hour.

As I created the plotline for The Bones of Gregory Miller, as I wrote more about my hero and heroine, the more I realized the hero was beginning to look like Trevor Eve. So some of his body movements and voice inflections (although not accent) will resemble Mr. Eve’s. But my Detective Carpenter will not be Peter Boyd or Albert Tyburn or Jonathan Harker.

He will be my own. That’s where “study” leaves off and “creation” takes over. He’s older and is a rare native Nashvillian, so he has childhood memories of the Parthenon at Christmas . . .

the Ryman when it was still the home of Opry. . .

and Opryland when it was still a park.

He’s a little bit obsessive, and has a thing about . . .

You get the idea.

Recently, I mentioned to a friend that I missed Tyler and Dee, the hero and heroine of The Taking of Carly Bradford. She looked at me quizzically and said, “You know they aren’t real, don’t you?”

Well, yes. Sort of.

But when you start with real people and all their foibles, you build real characters.

And that’s the goal of every good novelist.

So good night, Mr. Eve and Detective Carpenter. I know you’ll be waiting when I finally get to Chapter One of The Bones of Gregory Miller.

After yesterday’s post, someone asked if I always developed the hero from a celebrity crush. Actually, it’s usually the other way around. The hero is built, then I cast him. For instance, Fletcher MacAllister, the hero of A Murder Among Friends, came into existence in about 1982 (and I still have the first rejection letter to prove it). He was always tall and lanky, of Scottish-Thai descent, and had a quiet determination about him, calm and strong. It wasn’t until about 2003 that he started to look like this guy:

The character definitely came first. After all, in 1982, Mr. Reeves was still a spritely young’un hanging out in Canada. (Although I did lift Fletcher’s first name from Mr. Knight’s character in The Immortal.) Likewise, Mason DuBroc, my half-Cajun, slightly hyper, art crime investigator in The Face of Deceit bounced around in my head for almost a year before starting to resemble this young man:

I suspect most writers work in that direction. As Marti and Jen pointed out previously, other characteristics tend to blossom first: their hero’s integrity, an intriguing past, or some physical aspect. A voice, heard in the night, or the movement of the head. Words or phrases that linger, telling you a lot about a man . . .

I, for instance, have a weakness for intelligent men with a twisted sense of humor. Also a weakness for floppy hair. And strong forearms. And a bright, unexpected smile that reaches into the eyes and lights up a face. And light hair.

*ahem*

Back to the hero at hand, who will take up residence in The Bones of Gregory Miller. Set in Nashville, it’s actually four books away (I hope), following three I’m proposing to Steeple Hill, and Reclaiming Daisy Doe, which I plan to finish by November 1. Although the plot is new, my hero has been growing in my head for a long time. Take, for instance, this slight side trip through the 80s, when one of my celebrity “crushes” was on a woman (and, no, it’s not THAT kind of crush).

I became fascinated with Beryl Markham, a remarkable woman.

When the announcement of her death made the news, along with a number of brief bio sketches, it set me off on a whirlwind of research. Among other details about this fascinating woman was the tidbit that one of the great loves of her life was Denys Finch Hatton, who had previously been in a hot affair with Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) – an affair richly portrayed in the movie Out of Africa, with Robert Redford (a blond!) taking the role of Denys, to great acclaim.

I read everything I could on Beryl Markham and Denys Finch Hatton. Then, in 1988, there came a television bio pic starring Stefanie Powers.

I was glued to the screen, discovering that the guy playing Denys looked an awful lot like 1979′s Jonathan Harker.

Well, yeah. Same guy. But, again, this was the 80s. British character actor not seen in the US much. Had to shelve the interest. Just not a lot out there.

But that was about to change . . .

Do you believe that God is involved in every minute aspect of your life? Because of my faith, I don’t really believe in coincidences. I do believe He plants tiny seeds that take years to germinate. I do believe He puts mile markers in our passings to say, “Pay attention, this will come around again.”

I do believe He did everything He could to make me a writer. Among other gifts (and He’s showered me at times), He gave me an insatiable curiosity about people, a love of research and knowledge, a passion for a good story, and a whole series of teachers who turned me on to words, including one who gave a 12 year old rein to do her book reports about Shakespearean plays.

He also gave me a mother who tolerated a daughter papering the bedroom walls with photos of men. Lots of men.

My first celebrity crush was Robin, the Boy Wonder. (Don’t snicker; I was eight.) And not, mind you, the deliciously campy version as portrayed by Burt Ward on prime time TV. Nope, I went head over grammar school heels for the guy in the comic books that I pilfered from my brother’s closet. The stage was thus set for me to “bond” to a hero with some pretty classic traits: good looks, tragic past, strong morals and sense of honor and integrity, ready for action, intelligence, good looks . . .

You get the picture.

Also note that it was one of the few times that I went for the dark-haired one. I don’t know why, but I never totally understood the appeal of “tall, dark, and handsome.” My gaze almost always flitted to the not-as-tall blond in the picture. Possibly because I’m short and come from a family with a lot of blond men in it.

So while millions of women were sighing over Han Solo, I was moon-eyed over Luke. Robert Redford. (And to really show my age: David McCallum’s Illya Kuryakin.) But it didn’t have to be the lead in a movie or TV show. I went gaga over a whole series of character actors, such as Don Knight in The Immortal. Some of these gentlemen remained a mere shade on the screen back in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s because we didn’t have the Internet, just lots and lots of magazines. (I spent a lot of time in the archive section of my libraries . . . to say that I studied men would be a bit of an understatement . . . )

Then, in 1979, there came a film that was instrumental not only in the evolution of one of my 21st century heroes but a shift in the entire romance genre. It took more than a decade for tv and books to catch up, but there, in its little bat cave (again with the bats…), lay an image that would change the way we viewed vampires forever.

Look familiar?

BUT while women everywhere were dreaming of a sunset lover who could arrive in a mist and leave his women sated and breathless, my gaze wandered firmly toward Lucy’s erstwhile fiance and rescuer, the “not-exactly-blond-but…” Jonathan Harker . . .

Thanks, again, for everyone who’s asked, sent wishes, or good prayers for Rachel. She’s improving, bit by bit. I’ll post some pictures soon. With Rach, getting well always takes a long time because it occurs so slowly. But I do think she’s past any immediate danger, which is a huge step forward.

Finally, you remember all that dreaming I did on the 20th? Well, a lot of it was based around a new celebrity crush. The result was a 3,000 word synopsis that I wrote last weekend. Sometimes, I cast a book after the plot forms in my head – sometimes I start with the hero and work my way out. The time, the look came first, then a combination of characters, and finally my own twists on the hero resulted in the birth of a Nashville detective who’s temperamental, vulnerable, ambitious, and more than a bit driven about the one case he just can’t get out of his head.

How do you create yours?

And a touch of business. I submitted a news announcement about The Face of Deceit at Fresh Fiction, and it’s here. If you’re a reader, and aren’t checking FF on a regular basis, you’re missing out!

Finally (and you’ll see this posted again…), check out this entry at the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference Blog. Al Gansky is keeping the blog going thoroughout the year, and his blog about Orwell is a gem for new writers.

For many writers, a book is an organic creation. It grows as you write, evolving and changing as your words emerge. Sometimes, they go left when you expected a right turn. They evolve even more in the editing process. While some folks think a book emerges finished the first time, the truth is even million sellers go through a meticulous revision process before publication. The book is not WHOLE AND FINISHED until the printer gets the final files from the publisher.

When I was 19, I had a story stolen. Someone I trusted distributed it under their own name. It’s a blow I have NEVER forgotten. I first learned the word plagiarism when I was seven, and at 19 I learned it’s impact on the soul.

While what happened to Ms. Meyer isn’t technically plagiarism, it is a serious betrayal of friendship. It’s an attempt to be “one-up” on someone (“Look I have the latest Meyer manuscript”). While Ms. Meyer doesn’t think that was the intent of the original betrayal, we should all understand “the Law of Unintended Consequences.”

In this case, it may have cost a friendship and it’s denied her readers the true book she had in mind.

It’s amazing to me that many people have no respect for this intangible something we call “intellectual property,” as if ideas had no value, economic or otherwise. The bottom line goes something like this – if IP sharing makes it impossible for artist to make a living, then they will stop making art. They have to eat, pay bills, etc. So if the art won’t pay, they’ll do something else. And the books, films, and music you love will simply go away. And there will be no Stephanie Meyer manuscript to share.

If you’ve ever had a favorite writer or musician simply stop writing or recording, then you know what a gap can be left behind.