Where Does It Come From?

Today was one of those wondrous writing days.
I was really not feeling well, tired (even coffee wasn't helping). My house had a pipe burst last night, so it was flooded and nightmarish. In other words, nothing that pointed to having a constructive writing day. In fact, my home is in such a disarray (carpets getting cleaned, closets emptied out thanks to the "flood") , that I assumed I'd get nothing done because my usual tranquil, spiritual creative place was . . . a friggin' shambles.
But there came a time today when three of my four kids were out . . . and I fired up my laptop, and started writing. It was a chapter in my paranormal--which I have a fairly clear idea of where I'm going with. But somehow it was languishing between "okay" or "acceptable" and something really goose-bumpy.
And then it happened. Out of nowhere, a dream sequence for my heroine. And then a thought . . . there somewhere . . . yes . . . she is afraid of insanity . . . and suddenly, her back story fell into place. Her brother's back story fell into place. Her fears, her motivations. I nailed the chapter.
And like every time this happens, I am amazed. Where does it come from? I remember in Knockout, my character, Sovo, was not supposed to be anything more than a boxer in the gym. I mentioned in passing in chapter two or somewhere that he was from Kosovo. Jump ahead 10 chapters and he was front and center as a former sniper. I hadn't planned it, but it all fell into place.
Serendipity. The muse. Luck. Too much wine. Whatever it is . . . I was yet again reminded that sometimes it all just falls into place. You're gifted with a cool twist, with something that makes even you wonder where it came from.
Anyone else?

Talismans and Rituals

One of my best friends used to play football. And he told me a lot of wildly amusing (to me) stories of rituals of ballplayers. The quarterback who touched his lucky rabbit's foot precisely three times before every game. The guys who never washed their game socks or their underwear (a gross-out quotient I do not care to discuss), and the one who chewed the exact same kind of gum and number of sticks each quarter. Frankly, I thought these tales were funny . . . and nuts.
Ahh, but now that I am pals with a bunch of writers, I see a lot of people have their rituals. Their talismans. I might even make a case that my more obsessive friends who HAVE to write a set number of pages or words per day have a bit of a quirk there.
I will settle in to write after lighting candles to set the mood. I have some set music that I pretty much always or often listen to. I have a TON of little talismans around (having nothing to do with writing, but just funky art and so on that I collect). But I don't have any rituals per se. However, if I have to say I have one quirk as a writer that drives ME nuts, it's my inability--complete and total--to move on unless I resolve every detail first. For example, I have friends who will write, "Joe walked into ________ and ordered a beer." Then they will decide on the name of the bar later. They will do the same thing for characters' last names, places, all sorts of stuff.
I can't do that.
I have this total and pathetic inability to insert blanks and fill in later. I have been known to sit for an HOUR just trying to be sure I have a character's name "right." Somehow, if it's not the right name . . . I can't write.
However, don't go sending me to a shrink just yet. I am sure plenty of my fellow writers have their own quirks and oddities, talismans and rituals. Anyone care to share?

Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the "Secret" to Selling Your Novel

There is no magic formula for selling your first novel.
Period.
As elusive as Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Tooth Fairy.
I love "first sale" stories as much as the next person. But I love them because I delight in hearing about someone else achieving this dream. It's fun. Sort of like, if you're happily married, going to a wedding and feeling close to your spouse. A reminder a good marriage can be done, or why you said 'I do" in the first place. I will never again have a "first sale" and all the emotions that go with it, so it's fun to vicariously read about other people's journey.
But what I don't do is expect that their first sale story is going to have any "top secret" formula only pubbed writers know. And I have felt myself get irritated over what I see are some "scam"-seeming come-ons by authors to "let me tell you the secret to getting published; I know what editors want." Because they don't.
Look, I was a book doctor and editor and ghost writer before I became a full-time novelist. If anyone knows what editors want, it's probably me because I have been fixing other people's books for a long time. And I know there are some things you have to do:

• Turn in a typo-free, clean, polished manuscript
• Know your genre
• Propel your story

And so on. There are some basics. But beyond that, it's a crap shoot. And anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Spanish Disco sold in under three months from my agent's desk to sale. He sent it to maybe five editors in the first round. Two fell in love with it right off the bat. One said, and I QUOTE, "I have no doubt Ms. Orloff will be a best-selling novelist one day, but I don't think this is the right first-novel vehicle." And one said my heroine was too bitchy. I think one rejected it outright with "not right for me." Five editors, five totally different takes. The novel was clean, well-written, funny . . . so there were some basics I had right, but what editors WANT is subjective. Elusive.
No one wants to hear it's luck.
It's not. Not totally. It's luck, tenacity, and a lot of hard work polishing your craft. But there is no magic formula, no yellow brick road to Oz, no golden ticket into the chocolate factory.
Anyone feel differently? Got any cool first-sale stories?

Dysfunctional Mice

You're wondering. The title of this entry.
Last week, in my secret life as Liza Conrad, YA writer, I spoke to a hundred-plus wonderful kids about being a novelist. And I related the very true story that the first thing I can ever recall writing was a story about a dysfunctional mouse family and the little mouse who ran away to live with his Big City Mouse cousin (far more well-adjusted) in the NY Public Library. The mouse story was written as soon as I could reasonably form sentences. And as I recall, I showed it to my family. I wanted other people to read my stuff.
So what sort of insanity is that? I mean, you're six and you want the world to read your writing?
Well, anyway, a hundred middle-school kids can ask a LOT of questions. We went along and I said something like a writer isn't something you become but something you are. It's like breathing. And I believe that is true. If I wasn't a working novelist, would I write just for me? Would I write dysfunctional mouse stories and share them with my family? Would I have a secret journal and just write thousands of stories to amuse myself?
Why do we feel the need to share? As a writer, does it matter if you have an audience?
I don't consider myself someone who has a big ego. In fact, I am one of the more private writers I know. For years, I would beg my significant other to tell people I was an actuary or life insurance saleperson at cocktail parties just so I wouldn't have to talk about what I do. I have crept out of my shell (hence speaking to a hundred kids with lots of questions), but still I don't know. When I got US Weekly the couple of times they picked my books as the "Hot Book Pick," I recall those weeks the magazine came out looking around the supermarket when I got my copy wondering if people knew it was me (which of course they did not) and feeling WEIRDED out by seeing my name there. In black and white. In a big magazine. It felt very naked. YET . . . here I am still writing. Still sharing.
So how about you guys? What is it? Some primal human need to communicate with each other? What? I am as puzzled by this as anyone. I always feel as if I innately understand myself. I don't come loaded up with a lot of emotional baggage. I "get" me. But this one I don't. Thanks to the middle schoolers, I now realize that as soon as I could hold a pen, I wanted people to read my art. WHAT?!?!?! WHY?!?!?!
How about you fellow pen-holders and creators?

Likably Flawed

Okay, so in my last blog entry, I admitted I was a "bundle of contradictions." I'm complicated. I like my characters in my books to be that way, too.
And now, I'm onto flaws.
Booklist said Skye McNalley, the heroine of DOUBLE DOWN, which I wrote as Tess Hudson, was "likably flawed" when it was released last year. And it seems when writing women's fiction or chick lit, that's the tightrope you have to walk. Make your heroine too bitchy, difficult, self-centered, and readers grow weary. Frankly, thinking of a movie I watched on DVD recently, "Hitch," I get it. By the end of that movie, I couldn't give a crap whether Will Smith ended up with the heroine at all. She was so ridiculously "closed" as a person, had so many walls, I didn't care one iota whether he won her over in the end. In fact, I was rooting for her to just get hit by a car mid-movie. So I get it. Flaws . . . but likable.
In Double Down, my heroine was a compulsive gambler. In a couple of years, she had never managed to get a thirty-day coin in Gamblers Anonymous. She just didn't get how deeply in denial she was. BUT, she was fiercely loyal and wise-cracking, and when she fell in love, she fell hard. I liked her. She seemed like someone I could hang out with.
Which brings me back again to real life and real characters. Likably flawed makes sense. I don't want to spend three hours with someone who ISN'T likable despite his or her flaws, so why would I ask readers to go on a journey with my characters and care about them for 300 pages if their flaws weren't somehow a little endearing? I know I'm flawed. I am ALWAYS crabby around 6:30 p.m. when the sum total of four kids and real-life coupled with trying to write novels catches up with me. I can't cook. I mean cannot. Not even to make Kraft Macaroni & Cheese out of a blue cardboard box (my kids deem my efforts too "crunchy"). I use the F-word way too much. I am impatient when it's against all tenets of my faith. BUT, for all that, I thrive on chaos and will always set an extra dinner plate on the table, throw a mean party, laugh a LOT, love to play poker . . . and somehow despite being flawed, I am loved, and damn if I don't love really passionately in return.
So I think that's where real life and fiction meet. The challenge is creating flaws that are real, but that you can live with. I mean, if a guy kicks his dog, it's a deal-breaker. If he leaves his dirty socks on the floor but brings roses just because . . . well, you can live with it.

It's Complicated

If you look over at my picture, it says I am a "bundle of contradictions." I am a woman who is unafraid to stand up for what's right and argue about politics, but who shuns confrontation in her personal life (Buddhists tend to look for the path of peace). I am a complete homebody and loner who loves to throw a party. I love Beethoven's Ninth along with Nine Inch Nails. I like martinis with a "sidecar" of a Coke. A woman of deep faith who cries--aloud--over every child abuse story that makes the newspapers, but who will go a year or more without ever crying over anything in her own life because she believes "it is what it is; suck it up and move on." You get the idea.

And when I write my characters, I search for those complications. The nuance of us as human beings is what elevates characters from the ordinary to the extraordinary. In something I am working on now, I have a priest who kills; I have a heroine who teeters between faith and atheism. I like the little details about a character. Their complicated baggage. In Invisible Girl, another book, and don't you LOVE this cover (the back of the cover is even better), the heroine and her family are the most complicated assortment of characters I have ever written about. Nothing is as it seems. They are a bundle of contradictions and right up to the last page, I don't think you know who's going to do what. Oddly enough, the tagline (which did not come from me, but marketing) is a contradiction itself. Sometimes being invisible is the only way to find the truth. In the context of the book, rife with members of the CIA, Air America, and Hell's Kitchen bad guys, it makes sense. But then there are elements of Buddhism, Catholicism, and ghost children. So invisibility is everywhere in the book.

It's complicated.
Just like me.
Just like my characters.

Bad Mother

I am a terrible mother. To my novels, that is.
This HAS to happen to other novelists. You're midway through a novel when you get the most FANTASTIC idea for a new novel. It's hot. You "see" it. You're passionate about the characters. And then suddenly what you're writing you feel . . . "eh" about.
That would be like a mother having one baby. And when the second and third (and in my case, fourth) came along, thinking, "This new one is MUCH better than the old ones. I can't believe I am even still SADDLED with those brats." :-)
Luckily, I know this about myself. I know this happens. I got a new book deal this week, and I am just so excited to start. But I do need to exercise a little discipline and work on a couple of projects I already have going, get them to a comfortable spot or finished, and then roll up my sleeves and dive in (which I can't wait to do).
Yup, it's like giving birth all over again. My novels. My babies.

The Lottery

My significant other asked me what I would do if I won the lottery (nearly impossible to begin with, doubly so since I don't play but maybe once a year). My list is really rather short: send my parents on a cruise to Europe on the QEII, buy them a new house and let them sell the old and keep the cash, buy my middle sister a house and same story, set up trusts for my kids and all my nieces and nephews, donate a bunch to charities of my choice, and buy some land and a few horses, but pretty much my same lifestyle. Return to university for a PhD in comparative religion.

"But would you keep writing?"

"Nah. I'd never write another word."

Of course, I was asked this during deadline hell week. To which, he said, "You're full of it. YOU, not write? Not write a word?"

And then I 'fessed up. Of course I'd keep writing nearly as much as I do now, only with longer periods of laziness and procrastination. I don't write because it's my job, but because it's who I am. I'm a writer.

From the first time I wrote a short story in second grade, through, I remember, Ms. Nussbaum (the first teacher I ever knew who used Ms., which I thought was fabulous), my English teacher, selecting one of my seventh-grade stories for the school literary magazine, on through college, and then beyond, I wrote because putting the stories I have in my head down on paper seemed to be the only way to shut my brain up. I write because I am.

Happily Ever After

Well, I just got off the phone with one of my editors and she said I did a "risky" thing with one of my new books (out later in the year . . . don't want to give away the title and spoil it), in that I didn't give the relationship a happily ever after. By a long shot. And she said she felt readers would be very invested in the couple. And I thought about it . . . .

And I realize my version of Happily Ever After (hereafter abbreviated HEA) is different from perhaps traditional ideas of what that entails. Whereas before in women's fiction and romance there was a riding off into the sunset, a wedding . . . something along those lines, I don't always do that. Sometimes I do. But very often there's a little twist. Like the wedding isn't to the person you THOUGHT the wedding was going to be. Or someone dies, but there is a tremendous beauty to their death, a bond that continues with the living after their death.

I wonder if some of this is my spiritual beliefs. Buddhists believe life is suffering. It is unavoidable. Logotherapists believe, in a nutshell, that human grace and dignity in the face of suffering is perhaps life's highest aspiration. So maybe I believe an ending that isn't quite ride off into the sunset, but does contain grace and dignity in the face of suffering is STILL an HEA. I don't know. I want readers to have a satisfying emotional conclusion.

Maybe THAT'S my real HEA.