This week, I’m participating in a challenge with several writer friends. My goal is to finally finish the rough draft of mess-in-progress, which, incidentally, looks about as good right now as the embryo pictured here.

I know better than to worry about it. My first drafts are always incredibly clunky and they always clean up nicely by the fourth round of revisions or so.

But just because I know better doesn’t mean I don’t hate this part of the process. And I really shouldn’t. Anna DeStefano taught a workshop at the NJRW conference where she likened drafting a novel to dumpster-diving. You have to sift through a lot of garbage to find the pearls.

And it should be fun.

But I have a lot of trouble cutting loose and having fun. Maybe it’s the Catholic upbringing. Maybe it’s the lack of childhood pets! 🙂 In any case, I’d like to get over this. I’m frankly tired of the fear and self loathing. Why should I feel guilty about writing bad first draft?

An idea I’m toying with right now is taking part in the National Novel Writing Month challenge. NaNoWriMo is, accordingly to the website, “a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.”

So if I do this, I would put the completed draft of m-i-p on the backburner and try to blast through another story that’s been niggling at me. Maybe the break from m-i-p will help me approach the rewrites with a fresh mindset. Maybe I’ll end up with a good chunk of a new story.

Is it my muse talking or the procrastination devil? My inner critic (who rather alarmingly speaks with the voice of my elementary school principal) says this is a creative way to procrastinate on the rewrites for m-i-p. She thinks I’m just going to waste time hanging out on the message boards at NaNoWriMo. But I wouldn’t do that. Would I?

My friends at Writer Unboxed are mulling similar questions. (Also, there’s a lovely essay on the Death of the Muse by the winner of their Alphasmart contest.)

Am I nuts to think about doing this? Readers, what do you think of writers churning out 50,000+ words in a month? Writers, any of you planning to take the challenge?

The good thing is apparently they will take scrambled manuscripts for the wordcount verification. So if I do this, no one has to read my drecky draft!

Elena, who prefers not to die of shame

LADY DEARING’S MASQUERADE, RT Reviewers’ Choice, Best Regency Romance of 2005
www.elenagreene.com

What is it about cats and books? Why do cats love books so much? Are they really the most comfortable beds around? Or are the cats actually reading on the sly?

Or do cats perhaps grow jealous of the attention we pay our books, and conspire to stop us from reading them? (Or, in a related theory, do they see where our attention is focused, and opt to lie there?)

Why do I ask? Well, after Lois won the biography of the Prince Regent here a couple weeks ago, she found she had to share the book with her cat — as you can see in the above picture!

Very cute cat. I love cats. And books.

Hmm… Is there a link somewhere here?

Is it possible that we’re dealing with more than just the love cats have for books?

Might it be possible that book people tend to be cat people? (Or is that a lie perpetuated by cat-lovers to bolster their own egos?)

What do you think? Are you a cat person? do you think readers tend to be cat people? If so, why? Or are all those cats in bookstores merely a coincidence, or evidence of yet another cat conspiracy?

And what’s your theory about why cats love to lie on books???

All opinions welcome!

Cara
Cara King — author of MY LADY GAMESTER, in which there is a brief mention of a kitten, but sadly little else in the feline line

Last week I was researching my current WIP (work-in-progress), part of which will take place in Scotland and I was looking up information about the Clearances in Scotland, when the land was taken from the crofters and consolidated for bigger profits. Not that my story has anything to do with the Clearances, certainly not the Highland Clearances or anything Highland, but I needed to know just for a throwaway line.

I came upon this in a History of Scotland page:

In 1810 Scott publishes The Lady of the Lake, a stirring historical poem of love and adventure. Loch Katrine, in a rugged gorge of the Trossachs, is the home of the heroine, Ellen Douglas. The beatiful Ellen’s Isle commemorates her, nestling in the loch against a background of high hills.

The poem is an immediate success. A new hotel is built to accomodate the rush of tourists, who wander through the landscape with their copies of the book, finding the exact spots in which to declaim the relevant passages. The Highlands acquire an aura for tourists which they have never lost.

The more things change the more they stay the same! I immediately thought of today’s tourists scampering about Europe and the UK on Da Vinci Code tours! It is rather comforting to me that people are the same in so many ways, even if they lived a long time ago.

Here for a taste of what our Regency ladies and gentlemen read in that poem is the beginning of Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake:

Harp of the North! that mouldering long hast hung
On the witch-elm that shades Saint Fillan’s spring
And down the fitful breeze thy numbers flung,
Till envious ivy did around thee cling,
Muffling with verdant ringlet every string,–
O Minstrel Harp, still must thine accents sleep?
Mid rustling leaves and fountains murmuring,
Still must thy sweeter sounds their silence keep,
Nor bid a warrior smile, nor teach a maid to weep?

Cheers!
Diane

My post this week is going to be a bit of a mish-mash (I know–what else is new??). Like Megan, I’ve been working on a new proposal, and have expended a lot of energy at the day job pretending to be entering sales data into the computer while actually revising my synopsis or looking at websites on Imperial Russia and Go Fug Yourself (shhh! Don’t tell). I’ve also spent a lot of time watching Project Runway and Dancing With the Stars, my current obsessions in life. My thoughts are always occupied with things like “Is Laura right–did Jeffrey have help sewing his collection? And wow, that past drug addiction thing really explains those tattoos. And how can I end chapter two on a cliffhanger?” And, after reading Janet’s post, “I must eliminate all ‘manroot’ from my WIP! And ‘petals of passion.’ And stop beginning sentences with ‘and’.”

Anyway, to get off the Irrelevancy Train and onto my post. My topics this week are inspired by Elena’s post on the forthcoming Persuasion movie, and by Janet’s post on language (sort of). I love costume films, and I’m not really terribly picky about what I watch. Good, bad, horrible, bizarre–if it has long dresses and accents of some sort, I’m there. On Megan’s ‘guilty pleasures’ post, I could have listed a dozen. Not that I don’t sometimes gripe about them afterward, or pick apart the details of the costume design and the sets, but that’s all part of the fun.

And one thing I found to be a great deal of fun this past week was Masterpiece Theater’s new version of Casanova (part two airing tomorrow night). I was wary after that dumb Heath Ledger/Sienna Miller movie a few months ago, which totally wasted the glories of Venice and some not–bad costumes on a film far too dull even to be a guilty pleasure. I’m also usually not much for the ‘modernist’ approach to costume drama–Moulin Rouge gave me a headache. But Casanova is charming and so full of giddy fun I totally enjoyed it. There’s also genuine emotion, and a sense of exhiliration in some of the scenes (like Casanova’s engagement ball with the former castrato Bellino–it’s a long story, involving unexpected revelations of the sausage variety. The clothes are a swirl of reds, golds, and bright blues, with soaring music and unrealized love). It’s not perfect–nothing ever is. I’m not entirely convinced that David Tennant (pictured above–he’s also the new Dr. Who!) grows up to be Peter O’Toole. And Henritte’s hairdo is VERY distracting. It must take hours to tie in all those bows just so she looks like she forgot to take her curlers out before she left the house. But it’s all great fun. I can’t wait to see what happens in Part Two!

The other part of my post has to do with language. Every year the Washington Post sponsors a neologism contest, where they ask readers to send in alternate meanings to common words. The results are always entertaining! Here are a few of my favorites from this year:
Flabbergasted: appalled over how much weight you have gained
Abdicate: to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach (sadly applied to me!)
Esplanade: to attempt an explanation while drunk
Negligent: describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown
Gargoyle: olive-flavored mouthwash
Balderdash: a rapidly receding hairline
Pokemon: a Rastafarian proctologist
(There was also a Style Invitational, where readers were asked to take a word, alter it by adding, subtracting, or adding one letter, and supply a new definition. Some favorites:)
Bozone: the substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating
Cashtration: the act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period
Sarchasm: the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it
Osteopornosis: a degenerate disease (this one got extra credit!)
Karmageddon: it’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the earth explodes and it’s like a serious bummer

So, now it’s your turn. Any new costume films you like? Or hate? Or any ideas for your own neologisms? I would try and supply one myself, but I’m afraid my mind is affected by the bozone layer at the moment, and entirely taken up with constructing my dreaded synopsis. Plus, wondering if Mario and Karina on Dancing With the Stars actually ARE an item off the dance floor, or if that’s just a D-listed rumor. Plus, wondering if I have now spent far too much time reading D-listed.

Have a great weekend!

Oh, no, it’s Friday morning, and I’ve already had two cups of coffee, and I’m dressed and everything, and the house is quiet, since the son is at school and the spouse is at work, and things should be percolating (not just the coffee) in my brain because it’s the only time I have to be creative, not counting the times I have to make up Adventure Stories For Pokemon and explain How I Managed to Make Lasagna Without Lasagna Noodles or just WHY I have so many books.

And I got nothing. I am still toiling away on my three chapters and synopsis, they’re both almost done, but I am fried. Not good-fried, like a french fry or a deep-fried Milky Way bar (yes, a local restaurant offers those. No, I have never been so confident or depressed to order one). Bad-fried, like ‘where is my head?’ fried.

So now what? Hm. Of course I’ve got some writing triggers, like sitting at the computer and turning OFF the overhead light and turning ON the little desk lamp so there’s only a small circular glow of light on the keyboard. And lighting a candle, somehow that makes me be able to pretend I’m a Real Writer, so I Really Write when I smell the candle.

But still. It’s the end of the long week, I’m fried, and really, I got nothing.

When I get really desperate (like, um, now), I look at pictures of Clive Owen, and not just because I think he’s totally foxy. See, he’s what my hero Alisdair looks like in the chapters I’m writing. And the heroine looks like Maggie Gyllenhaal (who, coincidentally, just moved into my Brooklyn neighborhood).

And then I imagine them distrusting each other and then growing to love each other. You know–they meet, they have adventures, they fall in love and live happily ever after.

Hey, it’s not so hard after all! Thanks for the help!

Megan
www.meganframpton.com