Kerry Allen

I had another trip to the post office yesterday, which wasn’t the nightmare it was last time.

However, I awoke from a sound sleep in the middle of the night, sitting up with a gasp and all that, having belatedly recognized an error in the thing I mailed.

It’s not a huge thing. It has no bearing whatsoever on the plot. It’s just one of those sneaky little inconsistencies that someone a little more observant than I could use to unravel all my world building.

Which is why I was up at 1:20 a.m. changing four words in a manuscript and contemplating breaking into the post office to see if my package was still there so I could replace this one page…

I had an actual face-to-face, use-your-inside-voice conversation with someone I don’t know very well (a rare event, and with good reason), and somebody threw my writing into it during an awkward lull, resulting in the token expression of interest and vague question about the subject matter.

I sometimes forget normal people don’t see words written out in their heads the way I do, so when I say I wrote a romance novel about djinn, they hear “gin” and think I tell tales of alcoholic love.

NEW HOT SUBGENRE ALERT!

I even have the tagline for my new Boozehounds in Love web site:

He likes you if he holds your hair while you puke, but if he kisses you after, you know it’s TRUE LOVE.

So today I wrote about a woman being tied up, beaten, and splooged on. Nonconsensually (clarified ’cause I realize that sounds like a good time to some people…).

I envisioned this mechanism in which the victim’s failure to hold on to a bar over her head would result in strangulation by noose. It was quite clear to me, but I wasn’t sure it would work in practice.

Obviously I needed a prototype. (Never let it be said I don’t do my research.)

Fortunately, I had company while I was running around the house rustling up extension cords to tie to my broom handle. The ensuing conversation went something like:

“You’re not wrapping anything around your neck!”

“Oh. Right. That would be dumb. Can I wrap it around your neck?”

We eventually agreed on lynching Barbie, and I’m pleased to report my torture device is logistically sound. Off to the patent office!

The scary part, to me, is that this scene came to me so easily. It took a month and a half to coax out the previous 7,000 words, but the torture-the-heroine scene was born with all its fingers and toes after just a couple hours of labor. I would walk out of a movie theater if I saw this onscreen, yet this thought has dwelled in my mind alongside my grocery list and Angelic Daughter’s baby pictures.

I was uncomfortably aware all day this is how psychos think.

At the same time, I was gleeful it was coming along so well.

My partner in Barbiecide reminded me that writing is intended to make an emotional impact, whether it be laughter or tears or the willies, in which case I’ve done my job and deserve a raise (from nothing).

Might be easier to write romance if it was the ushy-gushy lovey stuff that came easily, though…

Did anybody else get into those Which Way books long, long ago? Here’s the whole list, to refresh your memory. Yeah, 1982 to 1986 is long, long ago. I had a nostalgia moment while desperately trying to recall something good about those interminable car trips from Illinois to Florida to visit the grandparents—pa didn’t believe in stopping, so I relied on books to distract me from the irreparable damage being done to my bladder and kidneys…

My head is filled with all kinds of weird thoughts lately. Caffeine withdrawal? I cut way back on the Diet Pepsi Max with extra CAFFEEEEEINE and GINSENG and have felt a little funky ever since. *twitch*

Anyhoo, here’s how they worked: The story would begin, and then at some point the reader would have to make a choice. Take the path through the jungle, turn to page 27. Explore the dark cave, turn to page 68. Then there would be a few more pages of story, followed by another choice. Being the budding control freak I was around the ripe old age of 10, I loved dictating the direction the story took. Ninety percent of the fun was going back and trying to get all the story lines.

So I was thinking… Dang, the interwebs are made for interactive storytelling of that nature.

So you know what I’m doing, right? Nothing as ambitious as 20 different endings in some of the books. I was thinking two three (see, the ideas, they never stop when it comes to making a task more difficult for myself) with a multitude of tangents along the way. Something short, sexy, and fun, not aspiring to great literary heights.

Like I need another excuse to procrastinate about things I should be concentrating on. But yanno… my attention wanders when I hit a tough spot in the story. It becomes work. I become sullen, and then I take a nap or watch TV or some other time suck. This kind of time suck, at least, is writing. It keeps the gears turning while I’m in I hate you, you suck mode with the manuscript. And it will eventually produce something that will entertain the easily amused, such as myself, so it’s not a total waste of time.

(Or so I keep telling myself…)

I’m also writing it in 1st person, since the reader is making the decisions and “follow Max” feels more natural than “make Anna follow Max” at decision points. The handful of pages I’ve written have reinforced my stance that I will never write a book in 1st person. Whoadamn, does it ever require a complete rewiring of one’s brain. I find myself switching from 1st to 3rd midsentence quite often becuase it’s just not natural.

Edited to add: But then when I get stalled on that and go back to the manuscript, I sometimes lapse into 1st person. I really hope it’s mental exercise, leading toward greater memory and creativity, as opposed to the brain schism it feels like at this point.

It would probably help if I quit banging my head on the desk, yeah? 

I did a book purge, including a revisit of the Tower of Unfinishables (still unfinishable, even the two I forced myself to finish because I had quit more than halfway through them), and I believe I have discovered the source of my impatience with those books that frustrate, anger, and occasionally incite me to violent outbursts that damage the drywall.

At the beginning of 2007, which is when this heightened intolerance began, I turned a serious eye toward becoming published. This involved a lot of investigation into “What do they want?” and “What are they looking for?” and “What’s an instant turnoff?” and etc. (”They” being the agents and editors guarding the hallowed gates, and the answer to all those questions being “it varies, except when it doesn’t.”) Basically, I began trying to look at my own writing from more of an editor’s perspective.

Then followed a lot of cutting and tightening and reworking to strengthen those areas where my manuscript was clearly falling short. Not changing the story to make it fit a popular trend or to meet one particular person’s requirements, but ”this is a stronger starting point” and “less emphasis on this secondary character” and “this is unnecessary filler” kind of adjustments that made it even more the story I wanted to tell.

I can’t turn off the new reading style when reading for pleasure. Now when I read a book in which nothing happens in the first 50 pages or there’s idiotic chitchat (What year were you born?/1974./How old are you?—She can’t do the math? Why does she need his age, anyway? Is she filling out a freakin’ insurance form?) or there’s an intrusive amount of description or contradictory characterization (allegedly badass-warrior heroine stands around wringing her hands while her beloved sister is murdered five feet away) or any of the things I’ve had to work to weed out of my writing, I dismiss it as sloppy and lazy and don’t want to waste my time reading something the writer didn’t care enough about to shape up and the editor didn’t insist upon shaping up. I won’t invest my time when they didn’t, and I get grouchy that I invested my money.

It seems my enjoyment of reading has been permanently diminished. Which sucks, frankly. Used to be, every book I met was my friend, and now I view each one with distrust until it proves itself to me. But I feel better having Nancy Drewed the matter of one day at least liking 90 percent of what I read and the next day plummeting to half that, a threshold I can’t overcome.

It’s not you, Unfinishable Book That I Might Have Enjoyed Prior to 2007. It’s me.

But even though I may be judging you too harshly, I’ll still let the dog savage your carcass if you really piss me off, so watch your step…