As an author I always love to read, especially new authors. But time and time again I come back to my old favourites and luckily some of my favourite authors write trilogies which give me hours of glorious escapism. Best of all, about reading one of my old favourites, is the promise of knowing how much I’m going to enjoy the story a second (or third) time around, and if I’ve left a gap of a year or more since reading it I always discover new things to enjoy, too. I wonder why our brain is more receptive to some things on one read through, and others on the second. Do you think it’s because your brain automatically skims over the parts it knows, deep deep down in your subconscious, but actively responds to new reading stimulus in a book you already ‘know’? Or is it just that we speed/skim read sometimes and don’t give that first read the word by word attention it deserves?
My favourite return romance authors, my total comfort reads, are Linda Howard, Suzanne Brockmann and Nora Roberts. Who are yours?
There’s a certain comfort in routine, don’t you think? A sureness that when you do things a certain way the outcome is virtually guranteed to be what you’re expecting. Alot of people ask me whether or not I wait for inspiration to write. Honestly, if I waited for inspiration all of the time I’d be serious behind on deadlines. Writing is, for me, a five day a week job and I try to work around four hours for each of those five days. Obviously, that doesn’t always happen. New bookitis being a case in point. But generally, when I’m writing I need to ‘get into the right state’ and I find my own little preparation rituals invaluable for this.
First, I need to close my office door. If I don’t I find, even when I’m home alone, that I make myself ‘mentally’ available to everyone else. The second thing I do is choose some pure essential oils to vapourise in my oil burner. The scents are generally different depending on what stage of my manuscript I’m up to and whether I’m doing new work or revising existing work. Finally, I switch on my fountain. It’s a very pretty miniature water fountain that sits on the top of my computer desk and is shaped like a hollow flame, with a glass orb in the centre that spins on the water being pumped through the bottom of the flame. There’s a kaleidoscope of light that refracts from beneath the orb and whenever I hit a flat spot in my writing, or even just need to take a writing ‘breath’ my eyes are always drawn to the fountain and before I know it I’m off again.
I find these things work really well for me, in fact I need to knuckle down and get stuck in now! So what about the rest of you. Do you have routines or rituals that help you achieve the things you set out to do?
I started a new manuscript recently. This one is the sixth story in a six book continuity due for release next year. I usually find starting a new book really exciting and generally have quite a gap between the previous book and the new one of a couple of weeks to a month. This gap-time is usually really good ‘gel’ time for my muse. Y’know, the time where snippets of dialogue hit you when you least expect it, or scenes just pop into your head at any given time.
With the current manuscript, however, I have basically gone from one story straight into the next, and hit the proverbial brick wall. So far the writing has been slow and painstaking. After a week of excruciating word extraction I managed to do a collage of the book, and one of the problems I realised I had was that I couldn’t ’see’ my hero clearly enough. Scouting a few modelling websites soon solved that problem (ah, the things we do in the name of research) and hey presto, the words are starting to flow.
Another thing that helped me was reading a couple of scenes written by other authors in the continuity. Because their characters were suddenly real and breathing people mine progressively became so too.
I think the ‘new bookitis’ has been cured and I relish developing my story further. I’ll let you know, from time to time how it’s going.
Red being the colour of rubies, of course. The public announcements have finally gone out, I can stop squirming in my chair and can happily announce that I’m a finalist in the Romance Writers of Australia ROMANTIC BOOK OF THE YEAR Award. I feel totally honoured and thrilled to be nominated with my first book THE BOSS’S CHRISTMAS SEDUCTION, which was released last year (USA Oct 06, AUS/NZ Nov 06).
I’m keeping excellent company in the list of nominees, who are (in alphabetical order) as follows:
Short Romance
Marion Lennox The Doctor’s Proposal
Marion Lennox Rescue at Cradle Lake
Yvonne Lindsay The Boss’s Christmas Seduction
Fiona Lowe Her Miracle Baby
Carol Marinelli Needed: Full Time Father
Anne Oliver Behind Closed Doors
Long Romance
Karina Bliss Mr Imperfect
Fran Cusworth The Love Child
Anna Jacobs Bright Day Dawning
Anna Jacobs The Corrigan Legacy
Helen Kirkman A Fragile Trust
Margaret Way The Horseman
Finalists will be listed in the Australian Woman’s Day magazine dated 25 June (on sale 18 June) and the winner of each category will be announced at the Romance Writers of Australia Awards Dinner at their annual national conference in August.
I’d like to send my warmest congratulations to my fellow finalists. I’m so proud to be there with you all!
Ah, procrastination, thy name is (insert name here).
What is it about some human beings that no matter what the deadline or the importance (e.g. tax returns) of the paperwork we can always find something to distract us from our task? It’s not that we don’t enjoy the task once we set to it (except tax returns), so why do we (read, ‘I’) do it?
I kid myself I have a routine, y’know the type… read email first, visit bookmarked websites for industry news and other author news/blogs etc. then read the online newspaper to see what’s happening in my country and overseas. Theoretically, after covering those things I’m ready to start work, but I don’t. Yesterday I was totally out of routine. I had to get up about an hour and a half earlier than normal and I hit each of my ‘routine’ things long before the time I would normally get up in the morning. Hence, I actually started work far earlier than normal and colour me amazed when I achieved everything I’d set out to do for the day.
Which leaves me asking the question–at what point does routine become procrastination, and at what point does procrastination become routine?
