Kerry Allen

I went into the filing cabinet to scavenge for paperclips (because the 5000 I bought a month ago seem to have vacated the premises, as paperclips are wont to do).

Which filing cabinet? That filing cabinet that has such sensitive stuff in it, I keep it not only locked but barricaded with an enormous, overpriced, gutted computer that started blue-screening right out of the box but Dell lied about the return deadline and kept me in tech-support hell until it was too late and…

But I digress. Does this filing cabinet contain vital documents, birth records, fake IDs? Uncensored government reports pertaining to Roswell? Severed body parts of former boyfriends? No, no, and no (well, maybe one).

It’s the WIP cabinet. And not just any WIPs: the ones I can say with absolute certainty will never be finished and will never allow anyone to lay eyes upon without personally ensuring that they take my shameful secrets to the grave with them. (That muddy shovel is just for decoration, honest. I got it from the Toscano catalog.)

This stuff really needs to be shredded and then burned and then scattered in various remote locations to eliminate any possibility of reconstitution, but it’s kind of like a monstrously deformed baby in a gothic novel: you might lock it in a tower and conceal its existence from the townsfolk, but you don’t kill it.

Unfortunately for me, I am unable to touch paper with words on it and not look, so I ended up engrossed for hours in some of the most hackneyed tripe you can possibly imagine.

I am referring, of course, to ye olde regency family saga. (Yeah. The historical hater writing regency. This was a loooooong time ago.) I had a dissipated second son, the responsible firstborn (who had the most mindblowing sex scenes—it’s always the quiet ones), and yes, of course, a pirate! A feisty independent American heroine, a victimized heroine, and a plucky younger sister heroine. A meddling curmudgeon of a grandmother. Misconstrued contact with other women. Ebil kidnapping pirates! Greedy father arranging compromising position to trap rich lord into marriage!

A veritable cornucopia of cliche! I may have neglected to mention one or two, but I assure you, every single one of them is in the material. It’s very 80s. No chance it would fly with even the most indiscriminate reader today.

Why don’t I do the world a favor and dispose of this drivel? Well, it may be a huge stinking pile of manure, but I found, as I was shoveling through it and alternately giggling and gagging, that the livestock had been grazing in a pasture strewn with rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and even the occasional diamond.

Yes, Virginia, there are gems buried in the crap. Little snippets of snappy dialogue. Some high-quality sex. The guys? I still like the guys. (The gals kind of annoy me, though. You know, if they’d let their men out of the dog house long enough to explain, they could get on with the happy, but there’s another hundred pages to go, so we must remain stubborn and bitchy.) Some of that icky emotional stuff that I really suck at but occasionally manage to pull off, so I definitely need to preserve those passages.

Mining out the gems is a monumental task, and I freely admit to being lazy. So I packed everything back in the drawer, hoping it will eventually decompose to a more manageable size. Until then, I am compelled to hold onto the shit.

No, no, that’s the wrong attitude.

It’s not shit. It’s fertilizer, from whence verdant fields of evocative prose shall one day sprout and flourish.

*snort*

‘Twas three months before the night before Christmas and all through the house,
Every creature was stirring, probably even (with my luck) a mouse.
Six partial/synopsis packages by starry-eyed novelist were assem-bled
While visions of Golden Heart glory danced in her head,
When what to her wondering eyes should appear
But a sneaky little typo overlooked by many a peer!
“Son of a bitch!” she cried, distraught.
“I’ve sent this out there,” she wailed, reaching for a shot
of bourbon to numb the excruciating pain
And singing that song from The Wedding Singer begging someone to “put a bullet in my brain.”

A few minutes later, booze and nerves interacting,
She decided perhaps she was overreacting.
“Phonetically, there’s not much difference between a T and a D.
Maybe no one will notice,” she said hopefully.
Who is she kidding? Is she out of her head?
There’s a huge freaking difference between a safe bet and a safe bed.
The decision-makers seize any excuse to reject.
Overlooking stupid little errors is a fine way to get no respect.
“Maybe they’ll be so engrossed in the story,
Their eyes will skim over like all those befory.”
She read it again, then released a great sigh.
Once seen, ’twas subtle as a fish hook in the eye.

“Well,” she thought, “so much for that illusion.
My dreams of being published were only a delusion.
I have a better chance of winning the lottery
Or being struck by lightning when I take the dog out to pee.”
Then she glanced to the left and her eyes lit upon
A tower of books filled with writing just wron(g).
“Hey, I’m better than that,” she said with relief.
“I’ve snarked most of those on The Editing Polief.”
And so she returned to her contest collating,
Heartened by all of those books she’d been hating.

But due to her fleeting dismay and despair,
She now has more bald spots than curly brown hair.

If you are a member of an Evil Organization (hypothetically speaking, of course…) and you betray the aforementioned Evil Organization, are you now considered:

a. One of the good guys.

b. Even more of a bad guy because in addition to whatever flaws led you to become a member of an Evil Organization to begin with, you’re now also a dirty, stinking traitor to your comrades.

c. Depends on your motivation for the betrayal.

d. What difference does it make? Some sick bastard will draw you into a dude-on-dude lovefest no matter what you do. (Links in order of increasing wrongness. And I didn’t even get into the OMG EYE BLEACH STAT ones.)

(My god, how I hate yaoi. The appeal has been explained to me: “Two yummy heroes for the price of one!” But frankly, one of them’s always kind of a girl anyway, so I still don’t understand the obsession with forcing homosexuality on characters created by others with no obvious homoerotic intent. And it’s usually forced by girls. **meperplexed** Yummy guys uninterested in girls and competing with us for the remaining yummy guys is a desirable thing? Does not compute.)

But back to the topic that got lost way long ago, at what point does the Really Bad Boy become Heroic, or do you never find it believable that a character previously portrayed as a rank bastard could have legitimate reasons for behaving badly and eventually redeem himself?

(In other words, I’m feeling sorry for my villain at this point and whipped out—even with my gimpy hand, I whipped—50 pages of notes for his own quest for twue wuv, and I’m afraid I’ve made him so loathsome in his villain role, he’ll get booed off the stage when he’s the star.)

(Edit: This is completely a rhetorical question, I’ve realized. I have to write what I have to write, and if everybody hates it, that’s the way it is. No one will ever be able to accuse me of selling out, simply because I’m not flexible enough to write to order!)

Charlotte Dillon, my new Xena Wonder Woman Buffy heroine, has demystified synopsis writing by providing examples of synopses of books that went on to be published. Romances, no less, which take a different touch than other types of fiction. Seeing it in practice is so much more effective than being told what you’re supposed to do. (”Map the emotional journey.” What the bloody hell…? Well, now I get it! Less detail about the event, more about what effect it has on the character, which doesn’t make any more sense than the frickin’ map thing, but you can see for yourself here.)

After days of much **headdesk** and hair pulling and being near tears, I think I finally have the hang of it. Thank you, Charlotte Dillon. You are the wind beneath my wings.

I’ve been a busy girl, savoring the awesomeness that is Meljean Brook’s Demon Angel (plug coming soon to a blog near you) and doing what I hope is the final merciless self-edit on The Manuscript, at this point entitled Wish List. (Don’t judge—I suck at titles. This one is better than the last one, trust me.) In honor of the occasion, I’ve fulfilled my promise to put an actual excerpt in the “click fake book cover for excerpt” spots on the web site, and to get it there in fantabulous .pdf format. (KNOWN ISSUES: Font issue resolved. Bloody miserable sneaky bastard typo resolved. Adobe crash issue fixed with installation of Adobe Reader 8. If you still can’t view it, leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail.)

(This is why we put this stuff up now. Can you imagine it’s countdown-to-publication time and everything is buggy? It may not bother other authors, judging by some of the sites I’ve seen, but I can’t do that to you. I’m not a perfectionist, but when it’s something I can fix, dammit, I’m going to fix it.)

When there’s an actual book to pimp, the excerpt will be considerably larger. No point giving you a lot now, only to have it be unrecognizable when the editor gets through with it, is there?

Which raises the question—How big should an excerpt be? Talk to me about pages, since chapters vary too widely in length to make a good yardstick (mine, for example, are huge). How big a slice do you need to convince you to buy the whole pie? Is it something you can tell on the first page because of the style or a great opening line? Or is it getting far enough involved in the action that you must find out what happens next that makes you run out and buy the rest? Do you want to start at the beginning to mimic the reading experience, or do you want an excerpt from another part of the story?

I want to be reader-friendly. So tell me, reader, how friendly you want me to be. Sorry, I’m not the kind of girl who goes all the way (as in entire book for free), although I did think it would be pretty cool to throw the whole thing out there for, say, a month before the subsequent book’s pub date as bait to attract readers to the new release. (Subsequent book? My, aren’t I ambitious…) I don’t even know if that would be allowed, but I don’t see how it could hurt. After a year or so, sales are going to have slowed on Book A. Might as well get a little more mileage out of it to promote Book B, right?

But that’s a back-burner issue. For now, let’s focus on bringing you the excerpt of your dreams. Tell me what you want, baby.