Adventures in Writing

I'm going to try to get a bit 'bloggier' here. I'll still post promo stuff, but also musings on the state of the writing, etc. It still won't be truly personal stuff, but it will be my personal thoughts on how things are going.

So, to start the resolution off:

Jane over at Dear Author has a list of things she learned at RWA 2011. Some of the items were pretty interesting, I thought. (I know Jane has a somewhat tumultuous past (ooh, how romantic) with the RWA organization, but I think she's got a high level of respect for the membership, for what that's worth).

Anyway, Number 7 was interesting for me. ("Editors think that authors self-censor too much"). My first two books (the Dark Horse series) continue to be the ones that get the warmest response from readers, and they were definitely my rawest books. Loads of emotion, but not that much technique. I really worked on technique for my subsequent books, but possibly missed out on the emotion. I thought I'd found a good balance with Shying Away, and reader response has been solid, but critical response hasn't been good. I don't know what happened there. I reread it, and I still get sucked in to the story and the characters, and there are enough five star reviews floating around at Goodreads and Amazon to show that lots of other people got sucked in too, but it wasn't the universal favourite that I'd predicted. Maybe I need to give up on the pipe dream of writing a universal favourite and stick with writing what I love for the people who also love it...

I was also interested by Number 6. ("Family oriented sweet contemporaries, mostly set in some small town are hugely popular"). And when I say 'interested', I mean 'blown over with enthusiasm!' I love contemporary, I love writing small towns, I love family-oriented stuff, and I am getting REALLY tired of writing sex scenes (not that I want a full fade-to-black, but I'd rather focus on the dialogue and leave out some of the physical details). The problem, of course, is that m/m stories seem to be automatically disqualified from the 'sweet' category. I do have a small town, reasonably sweet het romance that I've submitted a few places, but it was set in small-town Canada. Maybe I need to switch it to small town USA, add a bit more family stuff, and see what happens...

And the state of the writer in general? I'm almost done a novella. It started off as Haley's Comet, and the first chapter is posted at my website under that name, but Haley isn't having nearly as much impact as I anticipated she would, so I'm thinking about renaming it. Something to do with chemistry, probably, although it's hard to find something that hasn't been done a million times. Hmmmm...

Anyway, I'll finish that today, and then I want to have another look at my YA story that's about to go out to agents, and then maybe I'll have a look at that small town het story. I still want to write Chris's story from Dark Horse, but as I've said before, the bastard is too stable and well-adjusted to produce any serious drama. I'm still thinking about it, though...