Six light moments of the soul

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been following along with the romance publishing industry’s news-worthy moments for about two years now. I’ve been listening to stories from authors about the ups and downs of publishing. I’ve been prepping to send off my first queries. I’ve been immersing myself in as much romance, writing, and publishing related stuff as I can. I’m trying to do my homework.

I could go on and on for days about what I’ve learned, but I can also boil it down into just few short lines. Wanna see?

It all boils down to this. The writing and publishing business is full of ups and downs. Writers tend to be highly invested in their very creative and artistic expressions. When bad things happen (i.e., publisher closing, editor switching houses, rejection, massive rewrites, etc.) it can seem like a very dark moment of the soul. Because of this, I think you have to be able to find your own light moments of the soul. You have to be able to look both critically and optimistically at your own work and know what’s good about it and what you like. Sometimes this might be your only means of balancing the dark moments.

Having said that, I’m going to try to point six things I like about my two current MIPs – a novel targeted at Harlequin Intrigue and a novella targeted at Brava. I won’t even go into what I like about my currently forming series or the epic novel of understanding one’s own soul that are still in the planning stages. I’m just going to stick with what I like about the works that are currently under the knife in restructuring edits and happily in the middle muddle, respectively.

Things I like:

1. I like that when I reread what I have written, whether it works for the book or not, that I have big chunks of prose and dialogue that actually sound very writer-ish. I mean, sometimes I read it and I think, yeah that sounds good. I really like how I said that. I like those passages and I find the longer I write, the more I passages I have that fit this bill. Sometimes I even read them and look around and wonder who was messing with my MIP. I mean, really, I wrote that? It sounds pretty good.

2. I like my settings. They aren’t ordinary, and I tend to like things out of the ordinary. One setting is in post cold war Russia in the winter, and it’s also the deepest winter in both main characters’ souls, but neither realizes it because they’ve been there so long. In the novella, the setting surrounds a famous rock band and their concert tour and lavish parties – a setting that flows fast and hard and loud. And funny, both the hero and heroine have been living fast and hard and loud – loud enough to drown out the truth staring them in the face. I like that my settings are really so much more than location and time.

3. I like the metamorphosis of my novel. I’ve cut scenes I never thought I’d cut and can see how much stronger the story is because of allowing myself to amputate those useless scenes – no matter how much I liked them in the beginning. It’s not so much the process of cutting and editing that I like. (Actually, editing can be hell.) It’s the end result. It’s the only thing that moves me past the pain of slaving hours over pages that will never see the light of day.

4. I like my ever-emerging sense of voice. I like that I can see it in what I write. It fascinates me. In these two current works I’ve allowed my voice to infuse the story. In my first stories, I didn’t so much, but I like that as I write now, I trust my voice more. I realize this seems vague, but it’s one of those intangibles that make me smile.

5. I like my heroes. Both of them have rough edges that can never be filed into smoothness. But I’ve always like men in real life to be that way, too. It’s that roughness -- that little throw-back to a more primal being -- that gives them a sexy edge.

6. Finally, I like the stories. I like the twists I’ve thrown at the characters. I like their motivations, albeit misplaced sometimes. I like their metamorphosis.

I think in a world where getting published can often feel like repelling on an ice face with an unpredictable cliff up ahead, you need to make a list like this occasionally. You need it to create your little light moments of the writer’s soul.

Macy