It’s been a tough week for me at the Riskies. First I had to stave off the claims of canine ancestry — folks, this is not the blog where I talk about werewolves for crying out loud. Unless they’re hot Regency werewolves and that’s not what today’s post is about. Everyone else got cool ancestors and I get . . . a dog? Then Risky Janet implied in a comment that I’m not housebroken. Well, if no one Googled me before inviting me to join the Riskies, whose fault is that?

I’ve been working on The Next Historical and I keep forgetting how much I love/hate the early part of novel writing. Nothing sucks yet because I haven’t written it. The future is bright and shiny. THIS book will rock! It will be easy, I know exactly what’s going to happen. Yay!

And then I start writing and my hero and heroine typically spend an inordinate amount of time pretending they’re in different novels. I have to be very careful not to write too far ahead of myself because until the hero and heroine agree to be in the same book, I’ll just have to delete those scenes.

And the writing, oh, the writing is thin and weak and there’s either not enough dialogue which means there’s way too much boring narrative or there’s too much dialogue and no details. They’re all just talking heads floating around bumping into random things.

I end up freaking out over being behind on my word count and getting hives, and looking for anything that’s more fun than writing, which, lucky me, is just about everything.

Invariably, as I’m slogging through the early bits, deleting crap, trying to find the emotional core of the two characters, I’ll write a scene where I go, ooh. That’s it. And then my hero and heroine are in the same book in that scene and I adjust everywhere else and then I get to worry more about plot.

It doesn’t matter how detailed a synopsis I wrote– and I can tell you that the synopsis for this story is long out the window but for the hero and heroine’s names– until I get the characters on the page in actual writing I don’t know what the story will be about.

In happy news, I’m about to write the doorknob scene.

But I leave you with this, Werewolf-news.com
Because Janet is right. I’m not housebroken.