Archive for the ‘Nick’ Category

Layering

Friday, July 1st, 2011

I’m doing revisions, as I said the other day.  And I recall one thing my editor said when we discussed them was, “I didn’t think Yiannis had had a relationship with Cat when I read his part of the first chapter.”

And I said, “He didn’t think so, either!”

Which was pretty much true when I wrote it.  Things were just beginning to come together and neither he nor I had a clue about the backstory at that point. Well, we had a few clues, but not much more. And certainly we didn’t know that.

It was when Cat started talking that I realized all this emotion had to come from something more than, ‘He bought my grandmother’s house.’

And, indeed it did.

But in the hurry to get it sent in, I didn’t go back and layer in the necessary recollections on Yiannis’s part. Getting to do so now is actually fun.  I know him so much better now. I can hear his voice whereas in the beginning I was just getting to know him.

These are fun revisions because they don’t change the book; they deepen it. They layer in more feelings, more emotions, more nuance. But the emotional arc itself doesn’t change. 

annegracieI am hoping to get them finished this week.  But I’m having a visitor as of tomorrow.  As RWA is ending, my dear friend and middle-of-the-night-because-it’s-afternoon-in-Australia support, Anne Gracie, is coming to visit for a few days!

As much as I’m actually enjoying the revisions, I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy Anne’s visit more!

Posted in Anne Gracie, Authors, Nick, Writing, Yiannis | 3 Comments »

Up to my neck!

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

I’ve been writing — and shoveling snow, and buying a house, and teaching a class and generally treading water as efficiently as I can.

The writing has been some of the most fun.  If you were here in January -or pretty much any time last year — you know that I was working on Nick and Edie.  And even when I finished Nick and Edie I had a couple of weeks of breathing space before they came winging back for revisions.

The revisions weren’t supposed to be much. They were about what one expects. Nothing major like the time I had to rethink a whole book.

But when I got into them, I realized I wanted to rethink this whole book.   So I did.  And it took a while.  And it kept me from working on the next book, which already had a due date.

So mid-January I decided that I needed, while I was finishing the final Nick and Edie, to get a jump-start on the new book about Yiannis Savas, the youngest Savas brother  (to Tallie, Elias, Demetrios and George).  So I signed up to do April Kihlstrom’s wonderful “Book in a Week” course online.

It was the best move I ever made.

While Nick and Edie wound to a close, I started thinking about Yiannis and Cat (Catriona actually).  And doing the exercises and thinking about them as I made my way through April’s course (which is 5 weeks long, though only one week is intensively writing) was a great way to get a jump on what I needed in the story.

When I started that first week I knew I had Yiannis as a hero — and that was all I knew.  By the time I started writing 3 weeks later I had a pretty good grasp of the story. So I wrote. And wrote. And wrote.  I didn’t get a whole book. I got about half a book. But I got a very good notion of what the story was about — and I am now putting the rest of it on the computer screen.

April said that writing so quickly freed her up to write things she might not have tried if she’d been working slowly, carving her book out of granite to get everything right.  Since obviously I needed a complete re-think of Nick and Edie, taking a headlong dash at Yiannis and Cat seemed like a good idea. And it was.

Now if I could just get this house closed and the class prepared, I could focus on the last half of Yiannis and Cat.  At least the snow is gone.  It’s almost time to mow the grass!

How have you been?  Well, I hope. Please comment and tell me what’s new with you.

I hope to turn up here more regularly now that things seem to be smoothing out.  And you will note that I am not writing this on April Fool’s Day, so I’m not joking!

Posted in Nick, Writing | 3 Comments »

Whew! Book Accepted!

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Nikolaswordle Way back when I wrote a book about Nick and Edie and I sent it in.

It is my Santa Barbara book.  It began at Demetrios and Anny’s wedding, at the end of The Virgin’s Proposition, with a single night that changed my hero’s and heroine’s world — and it moved from the tiny European almost fairy-tale kingdom of Mont Chamion to real life Santa Barbara, California. 

The heroine is actress Mona Tremayne’s daughter Edie, the hero, Demetrios’s cousin, Nicolas.  I knew pretty much exactly what was going to happen in their story right from the start.  And it did, though admittedly, given the chaos of life last year, it took a while to do so.  But it finally got written. And eventually I sent it off.

A couple of weeks later, my editor sent it back with some suggestions, things for me to think about and incorporate.  Or not.

I thought about them. And I started to revise the book.

And the more I read of the book over, the more I thought, this could be a lot better if only . . . and then I tore more apart and wrote new stuff.

Not essentially different stuff, but tighter stuff, stronger stuff, better stuff. Because now, among other things, I knew my characters better.  And they trusted me.

Edie, in fact, trusted me enough to finally tell me something that, if I were a less magnanimous kind benevolent sort of person, I’d have happily strangled her for not telling me before!  It did not amuse me to discover she hadn’t bothered to mention her first marriage and her dead husband. 

It is not, I told her, the sort of thing you don’t mention to the writer who is trying to get your story in print.

She apologized. She said she did not want to depress me.

said, thank you very much. But having to rewrite your book is quite depressing enough. If you had bothered to mention it, perhaps I would not be spending Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years and, for heaven’s sake, even Groundhog Day, writing what is essentially a whole new book.

Oops, she said.  And then she brought me a cup of tea and offered to type it for me.

So Friday I sent it in, and Monday my editor said she loved it. Whew.  They are going in the schedule, and they will be out in UK in October as a Mills & Boon Modern – Nick and Edie and Edie’s dead first husband.  I’ll post the title as soon as it’s firm.  They don’t have a pub date that I know of in the US, yet. But when they do, you’ll be the second to know.

Now, on to Yiannis.groomformal

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Don’t forget to check out the contest page and answer the questions to be in the drawing to win a copy of Hired by her Husband and two other great books by Kate Walker and Liz Fielding.  You’ve got a week left!

Posted in Books, Nick, Writing | 7 Comments »