Alison Kent's Blah Blog

From Publisher’s Marketplace:

Screenwriting guru and author of the worldwide bestselling STORY: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, Robert McKee’s LOVE STORY and HORROR STORY, the first two in Robert McKee’s Genre Series, based on his comprehensive seminars dedicated to specific storytelling genres, to Sean Desmond at Crown, in a major deal, by Shawn Coyne at Genre Management (NA).

In no particular order:

1) It’s the first day of autumn!
2) I’m having lunch downtown with friends!
3) I have a new autumn blog theme!
4) I’m getting my hair cut!
5) I got my first review in a major publication!

A huge big ol’ box of lovey dovey to Lauren Dane for telling me WITH EXTREME PLEASURE had been reviewed in Publishers Weekly. This should not be such a big deal, but it is. It’s my first PW review. I’m excited:

With Extreme Pleasure Alison Kent. Kensington/Brava, $14 paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-7582-1758-5

Kent’s 11th erotic SG-5 thriller (after 2009’s No Limits) doesn’t feature that crime-fighting organization directly, but does showcase a related character, Kingdom “King” Trahan, a rich Louisiana model and ex-con who rescues wan makeup artist Cady Kowalski. King first meets Cady when the battered girl climbs into his Hummer, pleading for a ride out of town. When they stop by Cadie’s apartment to pick up her things, Cady’s roommate tries to shoot her, setting off King’s protective instincts. Not surprisingly, a passionate attraction develops between them, and the suspense heats up similarly; as King and Cady avoid hit men and car bombs, King learns that Cady carries a heavy secret—the part she played in her brother’s death eight years earlier. Before long, the pair is recruited by a mysterious agent to catch one of their pursuers, who also had a hand in Cady’s brother’s death. As always, Kent’s mix of thrills and romance is familiar but satisfying. (Dec.)

From Wikipedia:

Kseniya Simonova (born 1985) is a sand animator from Ukraine. She was the 2009 Winner of Ukraine’s Got Talent[1], constructing an animation that portrayed life during Ukraine’s Great Patriotic War against the Germans in World War II.

After her beloved father dies, the sassy Precious Ramotswe (Jill Scott) sells an inheritance of 180 cows to start a detective agency and becomes the first female sleuth in the history of Botswana.

I knew about this series of Alexander McCall Smith books but never read them, but I rented the DVDs from Netflix and watched the pilot last night. Has anyone else seen this HBO production? Oh, it was great! The husband came in at the end and enjoyed the few minutes of what he saw, so I’ll have to insist he watch the 2nd episode with me tonight. Anyone else watched it? Anyone else have a crush on Idris Elba, even when he’s playing a very bad man . . . though Stringer Bell wasn’t exactly an angel.

Random.org tells me that the winner of the WITH EXTREME PLEASURE arc is:

Sara Winters!

I have a quick funny. No. 1 Daughter FINALLY went to the campus police to get her parking permit. She needed her driver’s license, auto insurance card, and proof of school enrollment. Had everything but the last. Went to registration to get a copy. They asked how she’d paid for the semester. Financial aid. Because of that, they couldn’t print it; she would have to go to the library and do it herself. She went to the library. Their printer wasn’t working. They sent her to the computer lab. She goes there. Twenty cents please. She only has a ten. Goes to the bookstore as instructed for change. Her ten is a NEW ten. They won’t take it because the machine only recognizes the old tens. She comes home to print her own damn registration for free.

I’m not really showing them, but I am talking about the number of books I own at Lee Hyat’s Tote Bags ‘n’ Blogs site today. Pop over and visit. (And ignore the heinously bad grammar. I swear I fixed that sentence. Now I swear I sent the wrong file, gah.)

As an adjunct to the poll question below, if you don’t necessarily want to communicate with an author but are interested in what she has going on, what she’s writing, what she has releasing, when to expect something new, etc., what do you do?

What DO you DO?

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Updated to add: I’m a moron and, without thinking, put the same poll in both this post and the one below, meaning the information is combined, so my non-scientific poll is now extra non-scientific. Perhaps a full night’s sleep will help, sigh. Still fun to see that author websites are overwhelmingly where readers go for information. It makes me happy because I hate MySpace, I don’t get Facebook, I can only say so much on Twitter, and I don’t know anything about the other services but their names.

You want to ask an author a question about an upcoming book or backlist title. You want to bitch about what happened to a character. You want to rave over a hot and steamy kissing scene. You want to invite an author to guest blog. You want to find out if an author is signing in your area. You want to know if an author was smokin’ crack when she paired off two unlikely characters. What do you do? What do you do?

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Seriously. Four thousand tweets. Mouthy much? I can guesstimate how many characters that is, at 140 per, but I wonder how many words, if I’ve perhaps written a book by now. I figured it’s time to give away an ARC of King Trahan’s book, WITH EXTREME PLEASURE. This one comes out in December, or November 24 if we want to be exact, just in time to pick up while doing your Black Friday shopping. Me, I’ll be home that day, cuddled up under a quilt, eating Thanksgiving leftovers and reading.

ONLY SOMETHING THIS DANGEROUS…

After three weeks in Manhattan, Kingdom Trahan is ready to get back to bayous, crawfish boils, and afternoons fishing on the Gulf. But before he can pull out of the parking garage, he meets a curvy detour. King noticed Cady Kowalski on the photo shoot he just endured—sexy and confident, with a waifish look that belies the way she corralled him into submission using only a can of hairspray. Yet Cady isn’t confident now. She’s bruised, edgy, and desperate to get out of town…

COULD FEEL THIS GOOD…

For years, Cady has been looking over her shoulder, wondering when the gang of drug-running criminals who killed her brother would make their move on her. She’s grown used to having no one to turn to, no one to trust. But King isn’t walking away—not even when their lives are threatened, again and again. Drawing Cady’s pursuers out of hiding is the only way to end this, and it’s also the most reckless thing they can do…short of diving into a red-hot affair from which there’s no turning back…

I’ll draw a winner on Friday, September 18, 2009, noon CDT from the pool of comments to this post. Just answer me this: Do you go out shopping on Black Friday?

I’ve been playing this one now for over a year, and it’s the first time I’ve done so in . . . nine years, I guess? Since selling the gIRL-gEAR books to Blaze, I’ve been steadily contracted with Harlequin and Kensington, and many of those contracts have been blind – as in, I’ve been paid to write a book I haven’t yet imagined. It’s a very common practice, especially at Harlequin and, yes, it has its pros and cons. The biggest pro is the guaranteed income. The biggest con is having to come up with an idea, often without even a germ, but then that’s what we do. We dream, we create, we write.

I told the story of my romantic suspense here. Since writing that post in May, I’ve heard back from the last two (three?) editors who had the idea and it’s a no go. That doesn’t mean that down the road I won’t take another look and revise it. Really, I love those characters, their stories. More than any other idea I’ve developed that hasn’t had its day in the sun, this one is going to haunt me. But enough about it for now.

Early this summer, my agent began marketing a new project. Just before Labor Day, I sent her a second. Both of these ideas had been months or years in the development process (as I mentioned on Monday) and both included BIG overviews of backstory. In fact, the one that’s already shopping? The backstory document was almost as long as the full proposal. The newer one is not quite as complicated, or maybe it’s just complicated in a whole different way. My point, and I do have one, is that these proposals are way different from the simpler selling synopses I’ve sent in the past to my Blaze and Brava editors. Now I’m selling myself as much as I’m selling new ideas.

Here’s my dilemma. I’ve been given advice from both camps. While I’m waiting to hear on these projects, I’ve been pondering whether to 1) write ahead on one or the other so I’ll be closer to The End should I get a call, or 2) write on something brand new in case neither snags an editor’s interest. It’s a conundrum many of us who’re already published face. As aspiring authors, we knew to get back on the horse while our manuscript shopped. There was no question about what to do. We had to write a whole book to sell. Sure, there are exceptions to that norm, but I’m talking about the common experience. Published authors most often sell on proposal. A synopsis and three chapters. Sometimes more, especially if trying a new genre and needing to prove to an editor – and to herself – that she’s got the chops to pull off the idea. Maybe she writes the whole book. (And a whole book will often sell HUGE when a proposal might sell but without the same wow factor.) We’re in a bit of a different position than authors trying to break in, though lately things are tough for everyone. What to do?

Writing ahead. This increases the author’s investment in the project, possibly making it harder to move on or put away should it not sell. If the project is a series, however, the investment deepens the author’s authority. She knows her world inside out. She knows exactly how her story people think. There’s no question as to what they’ll do in a given situation. And so she writes ahead on one . . . and the other sells instead. Now that she’s an expert in one world, she’s going to have to play catch up in the other. If enough time passes while waiting (see realistic image below), maybe she can write ahead on both, spending morning pages on one, afternoon pages on another.

To be honest, I haven’t written ahead on either of mine. I think about both often. I jot notes on things to research, on ways to strengthen what I’ve already done, but I hate adding to the proposals for one main reason: if an editor buys, she may want changes, and I’d rather change 75 pages than 400. Plus, an editor may have the sort of input that will add color and richness to the project in ways I hadn’t thought of. This happened with my agent. She made a suggestion, I ran with it, and the result gave the story an oomph I’d never imagined. If I’d written ahead, the revisions might have crippled the story. I’d already seen it unfolding; a huge change would undo my vision.

Writing something new. If one of the projects shopping sells, the author will have to retrain her focus from what she’s been writing in order to keep fresh to what she is now contracted to write. But if neither of the two projects shopping sells, she’ll have something else ready to send out. She won’t have to go back to the drawing board and spend additional weeks / months getting acquainted with a project in order to write it authentically. A new project can open new veins and draw forth new writing blood, especially if the project is in a different genre, offering a fresh challenge, giving the author a diversion, a way to look at story she hasn’t considered with her previous work. I have two such sandbox projects that play with structure and viewpoint.

One thing I never do is write for myself. I always write with an eye toward publication. I didn’t start writing until I was 30 or so, and don’t have scads of childhood notebooks with stories in them. To me, writing has always been about selling, but a very wise friend recently told me it’s okay to write for fun, for me. It’s hard for me to do. It feels like a waste of time. But I wrote a poem recently just because. And I’ve got a couple of stories going that aren’t specifically aimed for the market. Yes, they’re marketable, but I’m writing them to see what happens more than approaching them as money-makers.

There is a fourth option. Do nothing. Clean house. Cook. Watch movies. Cull clothes from closets. Organize file cabinets. Count your eleventy dozen pads of Post It Notes. I’ve been doing a WHOLE lot of the fourth the last few weeks. And it’s been awesome. I’ve run across old story notes I’d COMPLETELY forgotten about. I found the cap to my flash drive, the head to a Christmas Eskimo ornament, a Spiderman Pez dispenser, two dozen ink cartridges for my fountain pen I no longer use because it leaks.

What do you guys do? What option have you chosen? What seems smart?