I admit it. I’m bad news as far as being an e-author goes. I write slow. Well, that’s not quite entirely true. I draft fast, but I revise and rewrite slow. I have to think about it, ponder themes and subtexts, and weed out all the extraneous stuff I like to write that fleshes out worldbuilding.  Much of this stuff comes intrinsically and I’ve been doing it subconsciously up to now.  But as I like to grow as a writer and not rest on my laurels (such as they are), I’ve been paying more attention to what I do unconsciously and finding ways that I can consciously improve it.

A few years ago, when I realized that writing was actually my capital-D Dream–that  it was the force driving me, keeping me going through life’s ups and downs, and one of the reasons I wake up in the morning (the others are six and almost-three and have breakfast demands), I realized that if it wasn’t going to remain an unrecognized, unfulfilled, someday kind of dream, that I’d need to work at it.  To take the natural instincts that I have and understand them well enough to make them grow and refine them into the best manifestation they can be.  I’d have to prune the bad habits and encourage the tender shoots and hardy blossoms until they bore fruit, and then manage the growth to keep the harvest coming.

I have been glutting myself with the fertilizer of writing courses, techniques, articles, and lectures, and after a germination period that felt so long getting through, I’m emerging again to put what I’ve learned to pixels again.  It’s a daunting task, once you understand just how little you know.  But like any big step, sometimes you just have to close your eyes and do it.

I admit it. I’m bad news as far as being an e-author goes. I write slow. Well, that’s not quite entirely true. I draft fast, but I revise and rewrite slow. I have to think and noodle and re-think and brainstorm…writing for me is a very messy process, and one that’s often done while multitasking something else.

Right now, I’m working on something that my critique partner calls “Big-Time Sci-Fi.” It’s a story that takes place in a distant future, space opera setting. It goes beyond world-building and into universe-building, and the sheer volume of just–stuff–that I’ve created as background is kinda getting overwhelming. Not that it’s not fun, but it’s got to be bad when you could conceivably create a lexicon about the same size as the book, it’s kinda troubling to wonder just how you’re going to fit all that deliciously detailed information into a story. More than a little so when you realize you can’t stop the action to detail the intricacies of pricing on the galactic food markets.

I love my worldbuilding. Love it with the passion of a thousand burning suns. However, it’s my strong point (relatively speaking). But it can be distracting from the main building blocks of good story, epecially when you’re avoiding said building blocks because you don’t like seeing your hero and heroine fighting, or failing at what they’re trying to do. Yet conflict maketh the story.

Today, my good friend and critique partner Roxy Harte asked me point-blank, “Who is Xandra and what does she want to write?”

My first thought was, “Well, that’s a big Duh.”  Followed by, “I write…” and then some silence.  Thick silence.  Silence that had been placed on a strict diet of lard, turkey gravy, and cheetos until it was so thick it needed a triple bypass to even exist.

I realized that making a declaration like that was something that shouldn’t be done lightly.  Uniformly, the advice from more experienced writers, industry professionals, and writing career how-to books has been solidly in the “pick a lane and stay in it” camp.  There are reasons ranging from the marketing-oriented to reader expectation which combine to make a great case for finding a tone and (sub)genre to call your own.  Not to mention playing to your strengths.

But here’s where I came up short.  Alien Communion pretty much wrote itself to a certain extent.  I had so much fun creating the Alcaini and sexually liberating my heroine that the rest just sort of fell into place.  I just finished a draft of a really scorching hot M/M that did the same–I just took dictation from the characters.   And I’m letting my big, sprawling space opera WIP take a breather while I work on something that’s distinctly paranormal in nature.  Not to mention the urban fantasy I have in the archives, or the six romantic comedies I wrote several years back.  Granted, not all of these stories were birthed fully formed from a crack in my head, but they all are representative of me.  Of what makes me a writer.  How do I limit myself to just one aspect of that?

So late on a Saturday night when most people are partying their little bunz off, I’m sitting in bed, blogging and thinking (of course, if I wasn’t blogging and thinking, I’d still be in bed–I have kids and therefore no social life).  I should probably pick a lane, and stay in it…at least long enough to get to the next exit.

So I was sitting outside yesterday in my asbestos two-piece, trying to get a little sun on my tummy, since everyone knows that tan fat is more attractive than fishbelly white fat. Well, I was cooking some hotdogs on the sidewalk, listening to the sizzle, and in the 2.4 seconds it took to cook each side before I had to turn, I thought about heat.

What makes a story hot?

I’ve been asking myself that almost since I started writing (bearing in mind that I started writing when I was old enough to pick up a pencil, but didn’t start thinking about heat and sexual tension until I started writing romance with a career in it in mind).  I haven’t been able to articulate a definitive answer, and in digging through my older stories and my current works in progress, I  wonder if I’m any closer to an answer than I was ten years ago.  It seems the correct answer is, like a lot that centers around sex–I’ll know it when I see it.

There seems to be a fluid standard when it comes to heat.  At least for me.  I know, for example, that what turns me on is not always what is hot.  And something that is hot doesn’t always turn me on.  Yes, I know it makes sense in my head.  It’s got everything to do with different senses of heat.  To give you a f’rex - one of the hottest scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie wasn’t in Body Heat, or 9 1/2 Weeks, or even the GBS in Basic Instinct, or anything in Boogie Nights.  No.  It was Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn in Terminator.  Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese had been on the run , she was just coming to understand how important she was to the future.  The sexiest moment isn’t filled with the usual pr0n-fare.  The shot is simple.  Two hands, intertwined, on bedsheets.  That image, more than naked, sweaty bodies, or cries of, “Oh, hell yeah, baby!” projected the sensuality of the moment.  I totally bought both the reason they climbed into the sack and the potential for happily-for-now they could have.

And yet, in other movies or books, the whole “holding-hands” thing doesn’t fly.  Even to the point of–if I don’t follow them into the bedroom and know exactly what they’re up to, I feel cheated.  It’s harder to buy the HEA (or the HFN).

The best theory as to why this is that I can come up with is that the sex is part of the relationship.  I know, news from the land of Duh there, huh?  You’d think it would be obvious–and easy.  Because who hasn’t, at some point in their lives, let or wanted to let pure physical lust make their relationship decisions, eh?  And just like the rainbow that is human sexuality, each relationship places its own weight and emphasis on sex.  Some relationships–some characters–have to have their sex lives expressed for me to understand their relationship.  If you are a writer, and you’ve gotten used to the average level of heat you find yourself putting in your stories, have you ever been struck when a character or set of characters in a particular work in progress knock you out of that zone?  It’s surprising to find yourself writing something erotica-level when you formerly wrote light romantic comedies that shut the bedroom door.  Equally surprising is to find yourself comfortably immersed in writing scenes of such frank boldness that they make dockside whores lower their eyes and blush, only to wind up with a sudden broken nose when your characters, in no uncertain terms, slam the bedroom door in your face and against your will.

Oh no.  Oh no.  Oh no they di’in’t.

Oh yes they did.

So why?  And is that where the line between erotica and erotic romance lives?  Or the other line between spicy romance and erotic romance?  Yes, I’m asking you.

Writing careers are for crazy people. My new theory is that when the Reagan administration closed down all the state mental hospitals, it was in response to a dramatic upswing in fiction publishing. The people who should be in mental hospitals would find themselves a nice comfy spot somewhere on the shelves of bookstores across America and all would be well. Yes, there are several (thousand) holes in this theory and what else did you expect from a nutbag?

The other day, I remarked to one of my friends (who is sane enough to choose a career outside the fiction world) that I was “learning it all all over again” when she asked how my writing was going. She looked puzzled, and then there was a loud bang from the toy room and the subject (like so many of our conversations, being two mothers of small children) went into momspace (you know all those sentences your mother couldn’t ever finish from being spitting mad, or all those times she called you by all your siblings’ and two uncles’ names before she hit on yours? They go into momspace, just like all those extra brain-cells during pregnancy). Forgotten by us until later that night (much later), and I thought about why she’d looked so puzzled. Then I realized that from the outside, once you’re published, you’re “there.” It’s a perception that’s very logical–the assumption is that a person in a field trains, tests, and achieves competence in a field. For writers, people naturally assume that publication is the standard by which competence is measured.

To some extent, this is true–you have to demonstrate competence in technical aspects of writing and coherent storytelling to get past an editor at a publishing house, but there is no set point in writing when you can say you’ve “arrived.” Not if you want to keep doing it.

And it can be damn hard to separate the author from the writer, when that well-meaning friend (or not-so-well-meaning voice of self-doubt), “but you’ve already published a novel–don’t you already know how to do it?”

You have to re-learn it every time if you want to be a better writer. Every story is unique. There are shortcuts, and you can develop a writing process that allows you to consistently chart recognizable landmarks during your adventures in storytelling, but it’s a new thing every single time, and it can be scary to stand at that precipice and feel the deja vu yet still be confused about just where the hell you are and which end is up.

In my weekly cruises around the intert00bz, I came across this worrisome little gem, posted several places, but I found it here on PubRants. Apparently Simon and Schuster wants to take your rights and have them slowly digested over a…thousand years.

What do I find wrong with this as an author? Just about everything.

The majority of the time an author sells a story, it’s to a publisher who intends to put it into print and sell it for as long as they can, to the benefit of author and publisher (and reader, as well–books going out of print means they can’t reach audiences who may have missed them before). In most cases, a publisher releases the rights back to the author when sales fall below a certain level. It’s no longer worthwhile for the publisher to stock the title, and releasing it back to the author makes it the author’s choice as to whether to pursue a possible new/secondary market for the title.

What S&S wants to do is to keep your rights…forever.

The new contract would allow Simon & Schuster to consider a book in print, and under its exclusive control, so long as it’s available in any form, including through its own in-house database — even if no copies are available to be ordered by traditional bookstores.

So that’s it. S&S wants your book ’til death do you part.  And even afterwards.

And make no mistake, there will be authors who don’t have the benefit of knowledge from RWA or the Author’s Guild, whose books will live and die with this conglomerate.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m something of a maverick when it comes to publishing.  I’m published with a small e-press, I have no agent currently, and if I have a single unit of what’s considered “clout” in the publishing world, then I’d reckon “clout” is measured in atomic mass units, and still in the single digits.  But my publisher and I have an understanding–I will write a book to the best of my ability, and they will sell the book to the best of their ability.  If they can’t do this, or after a certain, finite period of time passes, then I can ask for my rights back and try to sell the book to another publisher, who will also try to sell it to the public to the best of their ability.  But if S&S has its way, then once I would sign a contract with them, they would be free to sit on my book and never allow it to see the light of day, and there would be nothing I could do to stop them.  Because technically the book would be “available.”

How are they supposed to make money if they don’t sell books?  Unless their only goal is to keep other people from making money on those books. Seems a bit daft, shooting yourself in the foot like that, but what do I know?  I’ll be paying attention.  I find their lack of threshold…disturbing.

PS - Bonus points for those who correctly guessed that it’s the Star Wars 30th Anniversary.  Hence the metaphors.  I am geek and I am proud.

This week, last year, my first full-length erotic romance, Alien Communion, was released from Liquid Silver Books.

The reception for Alien Communion surprised me. I was honestly pleased to receive very good reviews for it, and solid sales (which indicate people were interested in reading it). It still makes me smile to have the reality brought home that people are actually –gasp– interested in reading one of my stories.

I’ve always been one of those “writer’s writers” - I write because I love the structure and framework of story, of rooting around in the thesaurus to find just the right word, and of the thrill of stringing a story through from start to the high of typing the words “The End.” And for those special times when the characters take over and I’m just the stenographer (and not all my stories are like that, so I value very preciously the ones that are).

That I can share the products of my love affair with prose is an honor and a privilege. If you have read my stories, thank you. If you’ve just found your way here through a link or a whim and are reading these words here, thank you, too. You’re part of the world that allows me to live my dream. If you’ve reviewed one of my stories, I also thank you, deeply and from the bottom of my heart. No matter how you felt about the book or story, the fact that you took the time to share your opinion is a gift I value.

HAPPY “BIRTHDAY” XANDRA

You’re probably also aware, if you’ve been reading this blog, that ‘Xandra Gregory’ is a nom de pixel. Xandra is actually around three years old this week. When I submitted Alien Communion, I knew I couldn’t publish it under my own name for several reasons, the most pragmatic of which is that my name’s just not that sexy. So I “exoticised” some family middle names by running them by my critique partner. Xandra Gregory is the result.

Among my non-writer friends who know who I am and what I write, at least two of them have asked if I have a different “persona” as Xandra. The answer to that is both yes and no. If you know me, you know that in person, I’m a lot more goofy than the image of an erotic romance writer whose first name begins with an X. Writing is my job (and I love my job), and when I’m Xandra, I’m “at work” so to speak. So when I’m Xandra, I’m a bit more…professional. So far that means I haven’t embarrassed myself in public. Here’s to hoping that streak continues. Other than that…I’m pretty much a WYSIWYG person, and I’m a lousy actress. The real me is hard to suppress for very long. I toyed with the idea of trying to cultivate the whole glamorous “erotica writer” persona–I remember reading something in my teens about Barbara Cartland lounging on a divan in a glamour gown and dictating her novels. Because primarily, I think it’d be kickass-cool to have a divan. Glamour gowns inevitably require pantyhose, and don’t respond well to small, often-sticky hands constantly touching. Plus, my life goes too fast for me to sit down during the day, much less lounge. But I wouldn’t make it five minutes without blowing it, so Internets, you get the real me, a little more polite, when you find Xandra.

Pseudonyms have their practical uses, too. I love making those sweeping ‘X’s at booksignings, and I’m comforted in knowing that folks aren’t walking around with bookmarks or CD cases that have the same name I sign my checks with.

They say on the Internets, you can be anybody. But sooner or later, you can’t help being who you are. Xandra and I, we’re pretty tight. So the least I can do for the old girl is give her a birthday wish. She and I, we’re a lot alike, except she has better manners. And flatter abs. Yeah, definitely flatter abs.

I’ve been asking myself genre-defining questions by the bucketload lately, in an attempt to better understand the stories I want to write and their place in the grander scheme of things, and one question that keeps popping up in my mind is one about Worldbuilding.

I’m not afraid to say that I lovelovelove worldbuilding. I love developing cultures, and spinning out the worldviews that become the lenses through which the characters experience the events of the story. I love threading through the evolution of the strange-to-us becoming the commonplace to the characters. I love exotic situations where the expected is turned on its head. I love making myself, as the author, shift my own worldview to adopt that of the character’s. I’ve always been a fan of the “walk a mile in another’s moccasins” philosophy, and it holds twice the meaning for a character in a world of my own making–I learn not only about the character, but about the world itself.

And the wackier the world, the better. I write futuristics, and I find the thought of a future world that’s pretty much the same as ours, only with more batteries, depressing (even if it is more probable than the ones I come up with). One of the reasons I first started reading SF back when I was a youngling was that the worlds were so exotic. So different and strange, and hella more exciting than living in Mundania, USA. But the books I liked weren’t what appealed to my romance-reading friends. Now I admit, back then we were just as interested in scouring the Johanna Lindseys and Janet Daileys and Penelope Neris (and loads of others) for the smutty parts as we were reading them for their story value (but we did read them eventually. After we’d dog-eared all the love scenes). We read the stories and we all liked the stories of handsome warriors and headstrong women with traitorous bodies betraying them (yes, it was the 80’s and yes, we were teenage girls).

At the same time we were googly over Raistlin Majere. and we all wanted golden Pern dragons of our own to ride. But while most of the other girls in our little gaggle wanted the dragons and the wizards to come here, some of us wanted to go there, wherever “there” happened to be. I spent hours imagining down to the last detail of what it would be like to wake up every morning and go feed a dragon, read a magic spell book, or clump along the corridors of an alien habitat composed entirely of sentient jelly that only responded to commands given in song.

What appeals to you in an SF story - the weirdness of it? The differences between the SF world and the contemporary world? Or the keys of commonality? The similarities?

In surfing some erotica-writing sites, and re-reading my copy of Susie Bright’s “How To Write a Dirty Story,” I keep coming across the idea that one of the purposes of writing and reading erotica is to stretch your boundaries. Erotica that is described as “edgy” or “pushes the envelope” seems to be the thing to strive for. When I really think about this, I’m puzzled and conflicted. Mostly because reading erotica stories that push the envelope often leave me wanting to send the thing back to the post office.

I realize that everybody’s boundaries are different, and I’m certainly no vanguard when it comes to adventurous sexual themes. But I find myself wondering at a piece of my writing and remembering how much passion I put into it and then realizing when I look at it that, well, it ain’t that new. But I read it, and if I’ve done it properly, when I read it again, I still feel the same heart coming through the writing.

Romance as a genre is partly predicated on the fact that there are certain conventions–reader expectations, so to speak, that need to be present in order to make the story more enjoyable. It creates a conundrum, then, when I look at what I’ve written and it doesn’t seem unsettling. It didn’t make me nervous, or challenge my sense of boundaries…but it made me feel content that those characters were in a better place from where they started out. I put the piece down and I’m happy that the characters have grown into something better, or happier.

But when I read some of that boundary-pushing erotica, I finish the piece without that happy, contented feeling about the characters. Like Story of O. I finished the piece wanting to rewrite the last half of the book to show O discovering mutant superpowers, kicking the boyfriend in the jaw, and burning the Chateau to the ground. And then finding a nice, respectful man who would worship her to settle down with. Or at least, stop being a damn dishrag. Oh, sure, later on, I thought, “Wow, what an amazing commentary on the psychology of submission, and how interesting it is that a person can feel fulfilled by allowing their self-determination to be subsumed by someone else’s desires. And wow, I think I used ’subsumed’ right but I’m not totally sure. Oh, look–shiny!”

So the question that begs for an answer is this–how do the expectations of romance intersect with the deliberate absence of expectations in erotica? What kind of balance does an author strive for between the emotionally comfortable and the thought-provoking squick?

Okay, that title’s probably a more provocative title that necessary. What can I say, though…it sounds dirty and since my brain is kinda cluttered today, it’s appropriate enough for the post.

What makes a good story good? Who do you write for? Where do you get your ideas?

These are all questions I get asked a lot, as an author. Simple questions, really. And they can be answered with nice, quotable sound-bytes, humor, or positive and encouraging expression. But they deserve to be answered with something more, at least when a writer asks herself these questions. They also need to be asked and answered repeatedly. Not doing so is an easy way for a writer to get sidetracked by outside influences…like rerun marathons of “Xena: Warrior Princess” or reading shoujo manga until your eyes bleed. But making the time and effort, freeing up the brain cells to really think about the answers, can mean an evolutionary growth spurt as a writer.
Around three-quarters of the way through a story, it’s not unknown for me to hit a bad patch. Much like “transition” is in childbirth–those last three centimeters between contractions and pushing, it’s the darkest dark right before the dawn. I lose track of the momentum I had in the first quarter of the book and the still-emerging discovery that got me through the halfway point, and end up sitting in front of my WIP, scratching my head, and going, “WTF was I thinking?”

Immediately the doubts and bad habits start coming out. I should change the heroine into the current incarnation of an archetype that’s popular (plucky wacko, kickass babe with a destiny, fashion-obsessed socialite, etc.). I should put the plot in a Yoga class so it can bend and twist around some element that some editor in some publishing house thinks is the Next Big Thing or a Perennial Hit (bride-baby-cowboy-etc.). Or I have to stop and put in yards and yards of exposition and backstory. Rambling tangents are the order of the day–anything to avoid the main story. It’s then that I know I’ve somehow lost the focus of the story, whether it’s from time passing, other elements of Life Intruding (TM), or something completely off-the-wall (like the fact that I recently discovered that having a B-vitamin deficiency makes me forget things that I shouldn’t forget).

I know from talking to other writers that I’m not alone in this. Quite a few of us seem to hit that crisis in confidence somewhere between the time we start noodling on a story and right around the time when we’re too invested in it to just put it aside. It’s then that asking hard questions comes in handy. Questions about the basics of the craft–not just “WTF was I thinking when I plotted a pitstop on a planet of sentient panda bears?” but the questions that ask, “Why am I doing this again, when I could be making a lot more, a lot easier doing something simple, like particle physics?”

The answer to this kind of question often triggers something about the themes in my stories–not just the one I’m working on, but the underscoring themes through all of the stuff I write. It reminds me of why I write and what I’m trying to express through story. Having that reminder of why we do what we do sets me back on track, and often prompts me to a deeper understanding of a specific story. The questions are still hard to ask, though, when I can’t accept a pat answer from myself. But I do it because I love what I do. If I remember that, I can get over any hump, any day.