The elusive muse

With the holiday season upon us all, I'm finding it a little difficult to find time for writing. I had these big plans for getting a short story done inbetween edits of my latest novel, while preparing for the family holiday. My shopping is all done, my wrapping is nearly finished, I have all the necessary items for great stockingstuffers, and I'm all set for the cooking and baking for the actual meal on Sunday. Since I'll be working my night job at the hospital Christmas eve, I have it all orgainized so my husband isn't left doing it by himself. You would think I would have plenty of time to devote to my other job--writing.

But I don't know if it's the cold, or the snow, or the cozy family feeling of the season, but I'm having trouble focusing on what I want to write. I know what I want to say. I have it all outlined and thought out. I have the conflict and climax in the right places, I have the characters all fleshed out and waiting. Yet when I sit down to the keyboard and open the synopsis and outline, my mind wanders. I know I can't wait for the "muse" (whatever that is) to strike. I have deadlines, promises to keep, promoting and marketing plans all screaming for my attention, too.

I hope Santa brings a heaping helping of understanding and patience to my editors, all of them.
I'm going to need it, I think.

Laura

I'm back

Well I have finally learned how to use this darn thing. Kind of. I think. We'll have to see. I'm slowly, but surely, dragging my old-fashioned butt into the 21st century and learning how to do more than type(poorly) on this fancy computer I have in front of me. It's only taken four invitations and about fifty tries to get me this far. Cross your fingers I don't lose it all in my sleep tonight!

Laura

Returning to the First Love

I've been working on my novels again. I've done all I can with film projects for the moment. That's a relief. I really thought the next level would involve bloodletting. So I found myself writing things that would only involve me and the characters developing on my PC screen. I hadn't given much thought to how I was feeling about facing a novel again until I started writing the copy for my new author page.

I will digress now. Funny thing. Jon claims that I can't do anything without creating a web page. That may be why I thought of creating smackjoninthehead.com during that chat. At any rate, I've been plugging along as a non fanfic writer for a few years now and didn't have an author page. Laura had to point that out to me. I found myself weirded out by that for some reason. It took me a while to come up with something interesting to say beyond listing what I was up to.

Back to the point. I'm writing a mini bio of my last decade and how I came to writing the current works and realized something about the difference in writing screenplays and novels and why I prefer the latter to the former. While there is nothing quite like hearing words you've written spoken by people you envisioned and in the tone you imagined, there is a lot of compromise in putting a screenplay on film. Many times during rehearsals and shoots I've had well reasoned discussions with carefully chosen performers about how dialogue can be changed while I wonder how to diplomatically ask 'why the hell don't you say it as written?' Even when I've had many wonderful collaborations with actors over dialogue, I've had almost as many fights. And that's afterI don't know how many different department heads have told me what I've written isn't filmable this way or or snidely ask me why did I write it that way. Film making is by nature creativity by committee. Even in the first draft, the writer's mind is on budgets and schedules and who the lead will be. That's a lot of baggage before the first word is written.

It is sheer bliss to only listen to the characters in my head while I write. Mind you, right now the vampire from one novel is on a rampage against my elven fantasy folk from my romance novel and that's just a little weird. But all in all, I'm more peaceful writing at the moment.

And to my utter surprise, especially considering my ego, my efforts have been well recieved. The first three reviews posted on romance web sites have been great. A fourth is about to be posted. The reviewers liked the novel for different reasons which was wonderful. I now feel good about the 60,000 plus words sequel in progress.

Who said you can't return to that first love?