Alison Kent's Blah Blog

The Icing on the Cake is up for pre-order at Amazon, woot!

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match . . . dot.com. An on-line dating service is not Michelle Snow’s idea of how to find love but when the Big 3-0 hits, Michelle decides she has nothing to lose since she hasn’t brought a date home in ten years, she’s professionally burned out, and her climb up the corporate ladder has come at the expense of abandoning her sweet dream: to own a boutique cupcakery.

Todd Bracken, early thirties and a successful technology consultant, isn’t exactly a player after being off the market for ten years, and pours himself into his dual passions of martial arts and home-sweet-home renovations. Only there’s no one to come home to so he decides to give Match.com a try. Todd isn’t so sure the Internet dating scene is his thing – until a message pops up in the wee hours on a weekend night: “I like your smile.” Todd likes – a lot – the whole package that glides into a French bistro in Washington, D.C.

It’s serious mojo-at-first-sight but there’s a glitch: Todd and Michelle live in different cities. Will love find its way in the digital age with a You’ve Got Mail courtship when video cam kisses just aren’t enough? And when Todd challenges Michelle to not only go for her dream but also let him share it, will they be able to make it happen together despite obstacles more plentiful than a shower of rainbow sprinkles?

Not sure how that happened, but I was drinking coffee in bed, wearing my sleeping Tshirt, my sweats, and one sock, thinking I’d spend the day there writing because I’m bored doing the 2.5 mile loop through our neighborhood, when I remembered I could go walk elsewhere! See new sights! Get out of the house! I got up, dressed, and headed to the soccer park where I’ve written a bazillion words and walked a few laps with many a dog. When there last week with Takumi and Snickers, I noticed a new walking path at the back of the park and decided to check it out. It was overcast, near drizzly, and very windy. I quickly realized the path connected to a green belt behind a subdivision, so kept going. And going. And going. I told myself I would not turn around and go back along the same path, but would walk until I either hit a dead end or could cross to the other side of the ditch where the path looped back. I knew it had to.

It reminded me of something in Jack Kerley’s book, The Hundredth Man, where Carson Ryder swims in the Gulf of Mexico. He goes out as far as he can until he feels on the verge of collapse, and then he has to go back. It’s that going back where he builds his stamina and muscle. I figured, if it worked for Carson, it should work for me. And, yes, I did have my cell phone. The loop ended up being about 40 minutes, which I guess is about a mile and a half. It was a meandering path rather than a straight shot, several small dips and inclines, and I wasn’t in any hurry. I’d taken my Alphasmart to write when done, but I came home to shower and curl back up with my Tshirt, sweats, and sock instead. I didn’t think about my book at all, but just listened to music, to the wind, and walked. Now, of course, I’m tired, but am counting on the shower to perk me up!

1) I’ve updated my Scribometer to reflect that instead of 70K words, I will be writing approximately 68K. This was one of those page count vs word count issues, and we three launch authors learned we were all writing long. Better than writing short!

2) I’ve started a new spreadsheet changing my self-imposed deadline from 4/13 to 4/11. This allows me three full days to do a final read through and edit of the finished book to turn in 4/15.

3) Starting a new spreadsheet adds an extra 102 words to my daily count, which now needs to be 1592. Considering how many words some authors write, I feel like a slacker, but it’s a good pace for me.

4) On Saturday, I went over my needed count by 90 words. On Sunday, I fell under by 190 words. A net of 100 words behind for the weekend, which isn’t bad.

5) Yesterday, I only wrote 900 instead of my needed 1490 words. It was a kind of crazy day, and I was writing on scenes where I needed more information. I took a 2.5 mile walk in the afternoon hoping to jar loose what was stuck, but just listened to music and didn’t think about the story at all. #walkfail

6) Today, until noon thirty or so (when the sun hits the patio and I can go outside without a sweater; it’s 53 degrees as of this writing), I’m going to edit in focused 30 minute stretches. More than 30 minutes of editing makes me want to get up and do anything, dishes, laundry, vacuuming. I hate editing. Seriously.

Watch this all the way through. ALLLL the way through. You’ll thank me.

Today is an editing day. I’ve been up for two and a half hours, and all I’ve done so far is pull up my manuscript and my timeline. I really don’t need the spreadsheet as I’m not writing fresh content. I want to write fresh content. I want to sit with my Alphasmart on my lap and let the story unfold. Here’s what happens when it does:

“Last month I had my girlfriends over for brunch. One of them insisted I sign up, and they all made a big deal about it. They’re the ones I went to the symphony with on Friday.”

“Ah, so you did tell them about running away from my kiss.”

“No, I did not. I didn’t tell them much about you at all except that I’d enjoyed our evening.”

“So I’m your secret.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Tell me more about this brunch.”

“Why? What do you want to know? It was just a girls day in.”

“My favorite kind.”

“Oh, so that’s it. You’re looking for prurient details.”

“The only kind worth hearing about.”

“Well, the only kind you’ll get from me will bore you to tears. Or put you on the defensive.”

“You talked about men.”

“Of course.”

“Hmm.”

“As if you and your friends don’t talk about women.”

“Not in anyway you want to hear about.”

“Exactly.”

Now, see, all of that makes perfect sense to me, and if it were go in a book and I were reading it, I could picture where these two characters were, what they were wearing, their tone of voice, their facial expressions, their body language. Unfortunately, I’m the only one living in my head, so I have to take all of that and turn it into something that works for readers. That’s why today is an editing day. It’s stormy, getting cold, and there will be no outside writing until normal weather returns on Monday or so.

I don’t want to edit. Editing takes time. Involved thought rather than free flowing. I have to make sure I’m not being repetitive, redundant, boring . . . But obviously nothing will ever get done if I don’t turn off the Internet, so good-bye.

I’ve been working on something different for me. It’s kinda gory, bloody, maybe even gross . . . but I’m having a good time playing with it. What do you think?

Read the rest of this entry �

I’m just about halfway through THE ICING ON THE CAKE. Before doing today’s writing, I’ve got 148 pages, and 31,666 words. The first act is pretty much finished and polished, and I have chapters written in both the second and third acts. Yes, I write in acts. For me it makes sense to plot out a commercial novel in a screenplay format, with a clear beginning, middle and end. I have a spreadsheet in Google Docs with the events in my couple’s romantic story, and I’ve laid them out for best dramatic impact. At a glance I can see if I’ve balanced the action, or if the story is weighted on one end or the other. This keeps the pacing even, keeps the middle from sagging. (The bit of my spreadsheet on the right (click for details) shows how I also use the Hero’s Journey.) Anyhow, I’m finding it easier these days to start my writing around noon. The sun’s on the patio then, though the big backyard tree’s leaves are thick enough now to toss mottled shade all over my Alphasmart. As I was telling a friend the other day, I rarely write fresh text on my computer. I use my computer for editing, fleshing out, revising. Writing outdoors on the Alphasmart is pure creative heaven for me, and I have to take advantage now because in two months’ time it’s going to be too hot to even breath outside, much less write! Speaking of writing . . .

You’ll see if you enlarge the side section of my spreadsheet (the one that does NOT reveal plot points!) that I don’t start with the inciting incident. Never have. Learned where to place it when taking Jo Leigh’s fabulous class on plotting. In fact, the husband and I are so attuned to the Hero’s Journey, that we’ll lean over in the movie theater and whisper, “Inciting incident,” when we see it happen on film! Kait Nolan mentions this in her column on Bad Writing Advice.

And then along comes Larry Brooks and Storyfix and his fabulous explanation of why the advice of starting with the inciting incident is a load of crap. Because essentially you’re leaving off a quarter of the book. The entire set up. The part where you show the reader why s/he should give a flip about your hero/ine. All the stuff I was trying to do in the first place.

There’s more here on compellng openings, with a really great example of what is and isn’t significant action.

I still think my advice is dead on, and that agents/editors aren’t looking for action-oriented scenes as much as a compelling and interesting opening. But action does not automatically equal compelling and interesting.

I believe the author of this blog post is talking about writing articles, but what she says can easily be applied to fiction writing.

I am driven when it comes to deadlines. As long as I know when something is due and I know that there is a set time to get something completed by, I can make the deadline; however, I have noticed that if I don’t slow down enough, I tend to make a ton of mistakes. This has not only shown up in my personal life and at work but in my writing as well.

Author Elizabeth Craig (who tweets links to a lot of writing articles) talks about how she breaks up chapters. Like Tess Gerritsen, she writes through and only when she’s done does she put in chapters breaks. (Though, I’m not sure what writing program she uses that she doesn’t just use the word counter to see how many she has! I’m totally dependent on Word’s counter, and in the Office 2007 version, the number of words in the document is always displayed on the bottom taskbar.)

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I write the text straight through and then put the chapter breaks in later. Although this isn’t a technique that works for everybody, it helps keep me from worrying about the formatting of the novel until I’m done being creative.

Here are some links on concise writing. I really like this one: Are Vampire Words Sucking the Life out of Your Writing? The author does a great job SHOWING what words are necessary, and which ones MOST DEFINITELY are not. ;)

We writers are constantly challenged to find the right words–to be descriptive, but not verbose. To make our language leap from the page, but at the same time, control our word choice. One of the easiest ways to clean up your writing is to omit unnecessary words.

Today I ranted at Cuppacafe just for fun.

Should mention you can go here and win one of my books from Emily Cardinal. Don’t post here; I’m not doing the giveaway. Go to her blog!

Yes, that’s the title of an otherwise really great article in Macleans.ca about the new VOWS line of Reality Based Romances. It’s a pretty good article, and it mentions my couple by name. Here’s their story.

The Icing on the Cake, by Kent, is about Todd Bracken and Michelle Snow. HCI found their story in the Washington Post earlier this year. They met through a matchmaker website. The only hitch: they lived in different cities. From a distance, he supported her dream of opening a cupcakery. As the business experienced ups and downs, so did they.