Update – Made it through last week in far better shape than I did the week before. I still had to spend the weekend working in order to make deadline, but I took it easy, paced myself and made it through without stress or screwing off. This whole month has been a series of overlapping assignments with short deadlines. So of course for the last of the batch I get the shortest one with the longest lead time and (so far) nothing upcoming. Monday starts a new month, but that could change. Won’t matter, because I’ll probably have this one done by Monday. I may even get some time off next week. And a nice fat paycheck in July. I’m having pizza and Chinese takeout. Finally, I get to live big!
I was supposed to write a book this month. Due to a lot of paid work (which I really shouldn’t be complaining about) and a slipup into the game playing ( which I was able to get a handle on), the writing didn’t happen. I’m still making progress on the second draft of the detective book, but I really need to get my ass in gear.
So, try, try again. I will attempt to write an entire draft of a book in July. For sure this time. Unless I get a lot of work again. And if I can decide on a genre. Maybe I’d have better luck writing YA romantacy. I hear that’s hot right now. Best excuse ever to put off writing: reading other people’s books instead. My subconscious continues to trip me up in truly insidious ways.
My readership has taken a nosedive since I posted my “diversity” rants. Even the bots don’t like politics. Yeah well. Some of the books I’m planning will be coming out under pen names so nobody’s going to know it’s me anyway. As for YA romantacy, there’s no point in writing to trends because by the time you ID them and try to hop on the bandwagon the trend is already passé. I’ll just write whatever I want to and see if I can start a trend. Who knows, I could get lucky.
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Sometimes life is not fair. I felt that way when I learned that Mark Hamill never got an Emmy for his work as the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series. I have no idea how this travesty happened. His voice acting on there was legendary. To a lot of fans (including this one) Hamill is the definitive Joker, even beating out Heath Ledger. If you’ve seen the show, if you’ve heard Hamill’s performance, you know why. Hamill was a comic book fan, and Joker is an icon, the role of a lifetime. He threw himself into that part 210 percent; you can hear his enthusiasm coming out of your TV’s speakers. I was thrilled to learn, through an interview with Kevin Conroy (he voiced Batman), that Hamill was just as animated as his character during recording sessions. While everyone else just sat on the stools in the booth and recorded their parts, Hamill was up on his feet, physically acting out the part, providing the manic energy he felt the Joker would display. It didn’t win him an Emmy, but it earned him the respect and admiration of the fans, and a load of personal satisfaction. He was having a blast, and it showed.
A voice-acting Emmy was awarded to Eartha Kitt for her role as Yzma in The Emperor’s New School Disney TV show, a spinoff from The Emperor’s New Groove. The shows ran in different decades so they were never in competition, which is just as well. Kitt was a pro who gave her all and then some to the role, and clearly enjoyed the hell out of it. Like the Joker, Yzma was an over-the-top character she could just go wild with, and she rose to the challenge with gusto. Come to think of it, she brought that same energy to her role of Catwoman on the old Adam West Batman TV show. Eartha Kitt was a force of nature, a legend and deservedly so. Watch the show, or the movie, listen to how she delivers her dialogue, and you can tell she’s having a grand old time.
When you love what you’re doing, it shows in the finished product. On a TV show or movie, you can hear it. In a book, it comes through on the page. I’ve read otherwise well-written books that bored the hell out of me. They probably bored the writer too. Some books read like the author was cranking them out for the bucks, or contractual obligation. I think that’s what happened to Frank Herbert. Go check out Dune and its immediate sequel, Dune Messiah. Dune is an unquestioned classic of science fiction that draws you into its world and its characters and holds you spellbound for (in my edition) almost 500 pages and brings the story to a satisfying conclusion. Dune Messiah is…a sequel. It’s a competently-told story and all, but that’s it. That magic something that permeates the first book is absent from the second. I suspect Herbert was driven to write Dune due to some inner compulsion and poured his heart and all his skill as a writer into it. The drive to write Dune Messiah probably came from either publisher insistence, clamoring fans or the chance for another huge paycheck, something no writer with a functioning brain will ever turn down. You can’t blame writers for revisiting a well that’s flowing so freely. But after that first satisfying drink, the water doesn’t taste quite the same. The joy of discovery, of creating something new and exciting, simply isn’t there.
When it is present, though, you can tell. Those are the books you can’t put down. Those are the books that grab you by the throat and drag you into their world and won’t let you go until you reach the last page. For me, that was Lonesome Dove. That book ran over 1000 pages and kept me enthralled for every one of them. My only complaint was that it ended. Even after 1000 pages I still wanted more.
Or—and I’m being totally serious here—Twilight. It wasn’t my cup of hot chocolate, but I could understand why its target audience—and others—not only loved it but were rabid about it. Stephenie Meyer knew what she was doing when she created Bella and her dead boyfriend. She tapped a vein, so to speak, and the readers responded. The writing may not have been stellar, but the magic was there. It’s the magic, the writer’s joy in writing, that makes the difference.
Maybe that’s why I’m stuck and unable to work on my romance series. I did write one of them, but it was Book 3. I wanted to start with Book 1, like a normal person, but Book 3 called out to me. The characters demanded I tell their story first. So I did, and I had a blast. There were no real blocks while writing that book. I churned out pages like nobody’s business and got it done in record time. The detective book was the same way. I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning, grab my pen and notebook and go to town, even when I had no clear idea of what was coming next. Figuring that out was half the fun.
Series Book 1, on the other hand, just sat there. I had all the events in order, but the prose was flat. Devoid of magic. Even I couldn’t get myself interested in these people. If I can’t drum up interest in my own story, why should anyone else give a rat’s patoot?
This is why my career as a romance writer petered out. I can’t crank out a book a month, which is pretty much a requirement in epublishing. Not unless I’m feeling it. Sure, I could write something and call it a book. It might even be readable. People might like it and it might even sell. But I wouldn’t be happy. I want the books I write to have that magic in them. I want to feel joy in the story I’m writing, so I can share it with the readers. You guys will, hopefully, be forking over hard-earned cash for this. You deserve the best I can give you.
For July…let’s see what happens. One of my other romance series has started to nudge me again. Or maybe I need to switch genres, which is how the detective story happened. I’ll look through some notes, read through some pages, and see where the magic is hiding. If and when I find it, that’s the book that will get written. Though I may have to crank out the series on the side, because I’ve got bills to pay. That had magic in it at one time; it may stir once again. I’ll never know unless I explore. I’m off to hunt for happiness! See y’all next week.
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