WIP

Sordid is once again regulated to the shelf. I feel terrible for the characters who probably don't understand why they aren't fleshed out and written about, but I can't help the way my brain works. Really! It's not my fault!

Another Victorian-set story. I love and adore the era, so it's probably only natural. :) This one takes place in 1851 during The Great Exposition and the vaulted Crystal Palace. The research has sucked me in and I'm all excited about it. The first couple pages are flowing nicely, but I really can't wait to get to the meat of the story.

Focus

I didn't mean to, honest! I meant to focus on my contemporary, Sordid Little Games. Something happened. Not sure what, but I do believe I'm firmly entrenched in the Victorian era. It's a log era, but I've come to love and adore it. So much happened then! So many changes and progress.

Birthrite - Raven is polished to a gleam. Seriously, it's cut and primped and pinned and shiny new.
Birthrite - Morganna has been outlined, scratched, re-outlined, scowled at, and once more. I'm pretty happen with it now, but am positive it'll revise sooner or later during the actual writing stage.
Sordid Little Games is outlined until it, too, gleams, those previous versions scratched in favor of this latest edition.
Untitled happened only last night. And then the research began. This takes place much earlier than Birthrite, probably the 1850s. It's only in the research stage, but it had to be done. Stinkin' thing wouldn't leave me alone! It made me write it!

Standards

I haven't read a lot of romances since writing them. Don't want to accidentally steal from them , yes, but that's is only one reason. The other is that I find myself unable to enjoy the story. I constantly edit sentence structure, rearrange how they're saying things, and adding or subtracting from the plot. It's annoying, I really want to enjoy the story!

However, this has had the advantage of allowing me to rediscover my love for historical fiction. Fiction not romance. And in doing so I've noticed a double standard. In so-called literary fiction the author gets away with a hell of a lot more that we mere romance writers. The dreaded head hopping, several plot holes never revised, and worst of all, lack of coherency.

Sure, the writing is decent, good, sometimes even great, but the story itself doesn't gel. It shifts POV, it grinds on with a plot that needs to be seriously shortened. Not always, of course, and not even with all books by a single author.

Generally speaking, though, fiction writers aren't held to such an exacting standard as romance writers. Why is that? Are our stories any less because we involve man/woman emotion and sex?

Print vs E

Publishers that is. I've bee focusing manly on E-publishers, but this morning, for no real reason, thought maybe I should expand into print. There's also no real reason why i hadn't thought of this before, either, except for a vague notion that they would take longer to get back to me. I've since realized that that's a foolish thought...all publishers take a while to get back to a author. It's the nature of the game.

My plan, therefore, is to spend tonight going through print publishers for query, tomorrow editing my synopsis (yikes!) and Sunday sending queries out. It's the start of a new week, no time like then for submitting, is there?

April?

So it's another month, eh. These things keep sneaking up on me no matter how I try to keep to a schedule and write, write, write, next thing I know another month has passed and I'm no closer to my goals than I was the beginning of the previous month.

I have 2 goals for April:
Write whenever I can
Submit at least once a week

And there it is. Simplicity at its best.