Who Would You Rather Sleep With? (Week of 9-27)

Who would you rather sleep with? Eric of Bill from True Blood? Thanks for the great suggestion Debbie!!!

Eric

Bill

Friday Night Random Thought 9/24/10

Is it possible to be too popular?

You know the saying guys can lose weight just by thinking about it (so not true by the way). Well my sister can make friends without thinking about it.  Something about her makes everyone like her.  But I've noticed her phone rings off the hook...that, and she gets a ton of texts.  I, on the other hand, get very few calls or texts.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not a three-headed alien who repells people, but I don't have the certain magnetism my sister does.

So it got me to thinking: Which would be worse, having lots of friends but getting a lot calls or having fewer friends but not having as many calls and texts to respond to?

Need your Votes!!!

Hi everyone:

My book Wrestling With Desire is up for best YA intro of a character. The topic is:

September – First Meets, School Days

- See a boy across the hall, class room, quad…

To vote please visit http://naughtyinthebackseat.com/boysblog/ and click on Black (my entry)

Thanks so much guys.

Doug

My Characters are Teaching Me About Themselves?

I am working on a novella.  It's written, but I had put it aside for a while, drowing in Revisionland and wanting to get my contracted books off my to do list.  Anyway, the book is about two men, Devon and Lance.  Devon is a chapionship figure skater who has qualified for the Olympic trials.  Lance is his trainer.  There's way more to the characters than that, but just to give some background, this should suffice.

I've been struggling with Devon.  He's a little too serious.  He gives and gives, but believes its selfish of him if he allows himself to take every once in a while.  Like at the trials, he needs to allow those who love him to be his support, but can't get past his natural tendancy to shy away from accepting help.  Again, a summary not doing Devon justice, but enough to get the point across.

My real point here is, in disucssing Devon with others, I have discovered that he never really dealt with his mother's death and, as a result, suffers survivor's guilt.  He won't be able to let Lance truly be his lover and equal until he deals with that.  I'm beginning to realize that my concerns for my characters resemble the same types of concerns I have for my friends and family.  I mean, how did I just now figure out he has survivor's guilt and probably needs therapy? 

I find it both interesting and funny that my characters have grown and developed to the point where they teach me things about who they are as opposed to remaining the creations from my mind.  Seriously, when one of my critique partners said, "He sounds like he has survivor's guilt."  I was like, "Oh my God.  You're right.  He does.  How could I not have seen that?"

Then another friend said he needs to face his inner demons before he can truly love others.  Which I knew.  But we got into this back and forth and I felt like I was talking about Devon the same way I talk about my closest friends.

My take:  if our characters take on a life of their own, we did something right in our creation of them.

How do you like your M/M fiction

A friend from my writing group sent me a link to this article which I found to be fascinating and informative.  This comes from the wibsite Reviews by Jesse Wave. It reminded me of the blog post that Ryan Field wrote a few days ago about the debate over female m/m authors.  It seems m/m erotic romance is a hot topic lately.

How Do You Like Your M/M Erotic Romance
by Jesse Wave

Thank you all for commenting on the post.  As mentioned in the poll, this is a follow-up to an earlier poll done 18 months ago at the request of an author, to gauge the pulse of M/M readers. There were a couple of reasons for this new survey. One was: with the increasing number of male fans reading these books I thought it appropriate to see if opinions about this sub genre had shifted. Another reason was that other authors had asked me repeatedly when I was going to update the survey. Since I thought that a year and a half was a good span of time to give you the opportunity to recharge and see if you still liked M/M books I agreed that the time was right.                

For the full article, click here

Who would you rather sleep with?



McDreamy



McSteamy

Voice by Ali Katz

This is an extremely well written piece about author's voice.  I always find Ali's thought and musings to be extremely insightful, user-friendly, and of direct importance to writers.

My face-to-face crit group picked up a new member about a month ago. He’s fresh out of college, has been writing for a long time, but never tried to have anything published. The first chapter he presented for crit was a well-crafted bit of writing but typical for a beginner: lots of flowery descriptive passages, no action, no concept of character, not a clue to what the story was about.

One of our older members, who’s been around a while and has a few novels with a major print publisher, commented. “This voice might work for a literary piece, but it won’t fly in genre fiction.”
His reply, “What’s voice?”

People keep slinging that word around. I had to look it up.

Voice is a combination of a writer’s use of syntax, diction, punctuation, character development, dialogue, etc….Voice can also be referred to as the specific fingerprint of an author, as every author has a different writing style. ~~Wikipedia

OoooKaaaay.

One thing I know about voice is how elusive it can be.

Hard to find, easy to lose. Usually, when I feel myself slipping, or more often locked up, I pick up a piece of fiction by an author I enjoy reading and start analyzing paragraphs. Lately, I’ve been reading poetry.

O for the dropping of raindrops in a song!
O for the sunshine and motion of waves in a song!

~~Walt Whitman, A Song of Joys

In a half dozen articles, I kept reading these words: song, poetry, sound, rhythm, color. Color?

A writer’s voice is his song. The magic of words strung together to create an image only he can show us. It’s a living breathing thing that changes as characters, scene, emotions change, but beneath every line lies the unique voice of the individual telling his story.

Can we learn it? We can learn to do it right. Study syntax, accept the rules, learn to use them to your advantage, but your voice is within you waiting to be found. It forms from all you have experienced, all the people you’ve met, all you have read, all that makes you who you are.

So, how do you find it? By writing, and rewriting, and writing again. And, in my case, I write, and rewrite, write again and read poetry. At some point, the words fall into place and you see magic happen. Voila, exactly what you wanted to say, said clearly and beautifully.

I did not know how to differentiate
between volcanic desire,
anemones like
embers
and purple fire
of violets
like red heat,
and the
cold
silver
of her feet:
I had two loves separate;
God who loves
all
mountains,
alone knew why
and understood
and told the old
man
to
explain
the impossible,
which he did.

~~HD Doolittle, The Master

Thanks for reading.

ali