Already, I expect you all are flocking to xandragregory.com to see what new and exciting tidbits I post every week. Or at least, you’re showing up to see what my blog looks like this week, and maybe find out what the story was with the lemon, or why Neptune was up on the masthead for awhile (and maybe make a crack or two about Uranus).

Well, if you’re pressed for time, and can’t spend the entire day hitting the Reload button on your browser, you now have the option to have a slice of the Xandraverse served up to you, direct to your Inbox, in the form of a yahoo newsgroup. Why join the newsletter when this wonderful blog is present? Because you get the info quicker. You get the “DVD extras” first, the excerpts, and the news right there in your email. You’ll get word of Xandra-sightings and other X-files, and maybe even get my French toast recipe. All without having to lift a finger. All you have to do is put your email in the box below, and click. Or you could go to my brand spankin’ new Newsletter page, which will always be in the list of pages in the sidebar.

I love starting out on something new. The “in potentia” stage of developing a story always seems to fill me with this excitement. Like the first day of school, when all your pencils were new, all your paper was smooth and blank, and your notebooks hadn’t yet been chewed up or had the spiral rings squished in your backpack. Anything could happen.

And so far, it has. Most of my ideas start out with a single element, around which I craft the rest of the story. Back when I was writing romantic comedies, they’d often start out with a wacky event. A punchy opener along with a “cute meet” (cut me a break here, I was targeting a Certain Publisher, and I honed my ability to pique their interests. Unfortunately–or fortunately, as I’m coming to think in retrospect–I never could abandon the quirkiness that made me essentially not worth the risk for them). Sometimes, it’s a strong character, who, like Athena, springs fully formed from the head of her creator, complete with backstory, GMC, flaws, and character arc. Other times, I’ll get a sense of scene–a scene between the main characters that isn’t the beginning scene, but nevertheless contains all the qualities that grab me by the throat and make me burn to find out more about these people and why they’re in the situation they’re in, and what they’re going to do to get out of it.

This particular throat-ornament sprung from a writing challenge. It was a sex scene, and likely suggested as a joke, since the challenge was not in a community where ero-rom writers are exactly thick on the ground. Well, I took it up, thinking it’d be a hoot to see if I could do it, and the idea came to me at a weird moment. I wrote the scene, and it ended up being a 12,000-word novella. All sex, but enough story to be intriguing. And boy, was I intrigued!

After the challenge, I put it on the backburner, because I’d just gotten word from Liquid Silver that they wanted “Alien Communion,” and I completely had to squee about that. Well, while the squee still hasn’t completely worn off, it’s been mitigated by the “omgwtf is next” reality that says, “Okay, hotshot. Now you’ve sold one…what are you gonna do about two?”

My first thought was, “hey, I liked this challenge piece–maybe I can expand it a little and make a true short story out of it.”  The e-markets have a place for shorts, and I’d have an advantage if I could get something else in the pipeline right away.  Plus, I could actually turn my “Books” page into something that truly merited a plural.

So, I started working on this thing.  Or rather, I opened myself to the ideas.  And boy, did they come.  I found myself plotting a “ten years later” scenario for the characters and realized that this little world they lived in was an entire universe.  And things were happening there.  Lots of things.  So my project turned into “a trio of interconnected novellas.”  But in the middle of plotting out my novella featuring the first two characters, I’m coming to wonder if they aren’t going to miss the novella mark and turn into full-blown novels.

That’s something I love about the writing process.  The potential there.  The feeling that I’ve peeled back a strip of wallpaper and am staring into a whole ‘nother universe.  And the incredibly fiddly urge to peel back another strip.

…but it got eaten by stupid Windows security updates that oh-so-helpfully restart your computer when you’re not looking. This is the third time this has happened to me. Fortunately, this time, I’d saved the truly important stuff–my writing–so I didn’t lose much. Still, I had a really interesting post that went into my first experience with the editing process, and how familiar-yet-strange it seems. But it’s like messing up the punch line to a joke and then trying to retell it. It just doesn’t work the second time around.

So…long story short, I was amazingly surprised at how easy the edits for Alien Communion went. And exceedingly grateful that my own efforts led to it being a very clean story before being initially submitted. I was able to make my corrections, and even continue tightening in the vein suggested by the editor, and send them back to her in a week. Which, considering what my home life has been like, is kind of a feat.

Losing a blog post isn’t as narsty as losing a day and a half’s worth of writing–and yes I know, save early, save often is a mantra worth chanting. But having anklebiters underfoot means a lot of the time, that silence between the crash and the scream has to be spent running to the scene rather than clicking “save.” But you know, it’s not the saving or not that gets me. It’s the fact that random updates will seize control of my computer and either nag me until I bow to their will, or sabotage my authority. All because their software/platform is highly exploitable.

So that’s it…I’ve made the decision and I’ve had enough. I’m gonna make the jump! I’m moving to Linux

Rita Rudner once said, “I know a woman who was in labor for thirty-six hours. I don’t even want to do anything that feels good for thirty-six hours.” I sympathize with her. And while I have some war stories about childbirth that would make your hair curl, I’ll spare you the gory details and instead talk about another kind of birth - the birth of a story.

As any midwife will tell you, labor should be productive. All that moaning and groaning and pushing ought to be doing work for you–work in birthing a baby. The same can be said for the labor a writer goes through when she’s giving life to her story. How much of your “story labor” seems to be unproductive? How much time do you spend avoiding writing when you’ve got prime time to do it? If you’re like me, when you get an uninterrupted stretch of two hours of writing-alone time, why do you suddenly recognize an all-consuming urge to reorganize the linen closet, or do you develop a sudden and powerful love for ironing clothes?

Rita Rudner had it right. Long stretches of doing anything will gradually reduce your productivity. And when it’s something as labor-intensive as crafting story, burnout comes quick.

Pacing is just as important in your writing habits as it is in your writing. While nothing thrills me more than the idea of a muse-driven all-nighter of furious, fast-paced writing, waking up the next morning hung-over from the adrenaline rush of writing twenty thousand words in a single session does not come without its price. Sooner or later, the time to push will come, and if you’ve already spent your energy reserves, what have you got left for the rest of the ride?

The answer is found in nature. In labor, contractions are intense, but controlled bursts of activity followed by short periods of rest, and get the work done with maximum efficiency. Try applying the same thing to your writing time. Choose a short amount of time - somewhere between ten and thirty minutes. Focus and write for that amount of time, and when the time’s up, lean back, get up, walk it off, go clean the oven, or whatever other pressing need emerged when you first sat down to write.

Short, controlled bursts of ten to thirty minutes of focused writing time will give you enough time to get into a single scene, move from one plot point to the next, or create a meaningful exchange of dialogue between two characters. After which, your inner five-year-old is free to bounce around, get her snack, or steam-clean the curtains. Accumulate enough of these “quickies” and you’ll be delighted to discover you’ve made real progress.

Then you can go do something that feels good for thirty six hours.

…and it’s “Queen of the Universe.”

No…really.

Okay, yeah, not so much. But hey, a girl’s gotta have ambitions. Liquid Silver has given the go ahead for the title of my upcoming book. “Alien Communion.”

And because I’m proud of the way I banged my head against the wall to come up with a half-decent blurb, here it is:

How far would a woman go to fulfill her deepest desires?

For researcher Dr. Rayne Warren, an illicit “experiment” with alien simulation technology opens the door. Then she discovers her “simulation” is a real-live Alcaini warrior with an out-of-this-world hunger of his own, who will stop at nothing to keep his human lover–even if it means interplanetary war.

I did a LOT of worldbuilding for this book when I sat down and started writing way back in 2003. One of the things I so loved about writing it was not just the incredibly liberating sense that I could feature really hot sex as a prominent plot thread in a cultural sense, but the development of the Alcaini, the race of aliens with whom a select few earthlings, among them my heroine, Rayne, are engaging in a cultural and scientific exchange. As I wrote, I peeled back the layers of what the Alcaini culture and people were like, and fell in love with them right along with my heroine. That’s part of the magic of writing that keeps me doing it.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m no big fan of dressing up. My usual uniform is jeans and t-shirt, or cargo pants and t-shirt. Unless, that is, I’m in the other extreme of wearing medieval garb or dressing as an alien. Then, of course, all bets are off. I’m a mother of young children, and anything I put on is going to get messy in the course of the day.

Dressing up on the web, however, is a completely different story. I think I’m a terminal fashion victim when it comes to website design. Perhaps it’s because for years, site design, like my writing (I was a tech writer) had to be functional before it had to be artful. Plus, it had to use a lot of corporate doublespeak and company logos, so the artistic side of it just couldn’t get creative. The mindset was that usable and pretty could never cohabitate functionally. I say nay (and did say nay at the time, too, but functional and pretty were both high-maintenance princesses, so the words “over” and “budget” were frequently the wacky sidekick pair.  Of course, that time in my life taught me a lot about clean writing, so I walked away from the old life with some valuable, if painful, lessons.
Now I’ve got my chance, though. I’m determined to make Xandragregory.com the functional and lovely site I know it can be in my heart. So the changing fonts, graphics, and layout may hurt a little…