Snapshot of a Writer

I like to be educated about the writing business, but, like any business, the bullshit can get you down.

The other day, there was the usual debate and argument over at Miss Snark's blog - I love that blog, but the desperados in the comment trails that like to eviscerate each other and frantically try to get noticed can be rather wearing. Then someone calling herself boo boo (she did not leave a link) posted this:

Everyone seems a bit harsh towards folks who have a hard time being critiqued/edited/disembowled (is that spelled right? No don't tell me.) Writing is something that your soul must work up to. Your resolve must develop, your skin toughen, your desire grow, your love of words grow, and your insecurities slowly shrink.

I carried around an add for a distence course in writing for 18 months and didn't do a thing. It took my husband finding the same add and his devotion and encouragement before I was willing to even try a class. It took a two year class before I got to the point that I wanted a helpful critique of my work wrather then blind praise, and it took five years of regular writing before I realized that I am a writer published or not I am because I have finally gotten to the point where it is so important to me, so much a part of who I am, that I the night owl and lover of sleep am willing to arise at 5:00am so that I can write before my beautiful sons open their eyes and jump start the day into high gear.

So a gently reminder. You don't know where a writer is in theier journey. You might be talking to that tender soul who just got up the nerve for a critique after years of dreaming. Help them learn, help them grow, be honest, but also kind.

The spelling is hers, and it's just fine by me. The bolds are mine. I didn't edit.

This is something I believe in to my core. Maybe it's because I'm so recently a beginning writer myself - but if I ever forget what it's like to carry around an ad for a writing course and stare at it hundreds of times (yes, I've done it), then may I put away my pen.

Last week I volunteered to judge a contest for beginning writers, and got turned down because I'm Canadian and the organizers didn't want to pay the postage. I was disappointed (not to mention puzzled that the concept of "e-mail" is still foreign to some people.) I wanted to help out some beginners.

So, to those of you writing at 5 a.m. - you're not alone. Think of the hundreds of us scribbling away the same time you are, and keep going.

Cover Week 3: Models and more pics

Look, I'm a geeky writer-girl. I'm one of the peons who rarely deals with someone like a model.

One tries to be open-minded, genuinely interested in people (hence the writer thing), and unwilling to buy into steretypes.

But honestly - models are from another planet. They really are.

"I need to be picked up and driven to the shoot because I don't know how to take transit."

They haggle over money after being paid $150 per hour.

They take their tops off in front of strangers if they're asked. Just... take them off.

After four hours of work, they will turn to a crew working a 16-hour day and say: "Modelling is so hard. People think it's easy, but it's so hard. I'm hungry. My neck hurts."

Writers aren't like that. We obsess about strange things (stamps, fonts, margins...) but models make us look normal.

Really - wacked in the head. Quite extraordinary.

Not these two, though. These two were all right:

Cover Week 2: Before and After

The shots taken for a romance cover are the barest of bare bones.

Before:


After:





Everything's dropped in. Heads go on different bodies; clothes and hair are created out of nothing. Those awful pirate ships and beaches and silly desert plains are made up.

I haven't written anything called Inferno - this was a mockup - but now I'd like to. It would be about a call girl who discovers her psychic powers are brought to life when she is enraged by her sadistic, disgusting cients. She goes on to wreak revenge on the male sex until she is tamed by one man, and one man only, a rugged dock worker who is scarred by the loss of his wife. His grief gives him the psychic ability to reach into others' minds.

Working title is "One Stag Party Too Far."

Time to get to work!

Cover Week 1: Why So Many Covers Suck

As readers, we love to snark covers. It's true, many covers outright suck, but covers are expensive.

How expensive?

Here's the budget for the cover we did on the absolute cheap:

Models: $150/hour, 2 models per cover = $300 per cover if you're lucky
Photographer: $400
Stylist: $200 (we lucked into one who does hair/makeup as well)
Costume rental: $70
Makeup assistant: Free because we got a student
Props: Borrowed
Graphic Design and Photo Post: 2 days @ $300=$600

Total: $1570

Here is the stuff we already own:
Camera: $3000
Laptop: $1400
Software: $2000
Studio Space: $500/month
Lighting equipment: $3000
Total investment before one shot is even taken: $9900

I could pro-rate that stuff with what's called amortization but I'm not an accountant so let's just say the up-front investment is the photographer's problem, and the publisher is only paying for the cover.

So - $1570 per cover. Harlequin pays many times that - their models and photographers cost a lot more, plus they pay art directors, plus they pay separately for makeup, hair, and stylist. So $1570 is really a dirt cheap number.

Now - I've just gone to New Concepts Publishing's website and counted the covers on just their front page. There are 24. At the $1570 rate, they are out $37,680 just for their front page covers alone.

If they're selling the average ebook for $5, they have to sell 314 ebooks just to break even on the cover alone. Before they've paid for anything else, before anyone has made a dime.

Obviously, no small publisher has these kinds of bucks. So here is what is done to save money:

1. Combine several shoots into one day. If you're going to have the space rented, the photographer there, and the makeup person hired, you may as well shoot your ass off and use the pictures wherever you can. Sucky cover result: People on the covers who look nothing like the characters/Re-used cover images.

2. Computer-generated people. Why pay models or photographers at all? Hence the Poser plague. Sucky cover result: To paraphrase Charlton Heston, "Poser is... not... people..." Witness:

Pic snatched from Smart Bitches.

3. No people on the cover at all. This is where you get landscapes, butterflies, roses, lace, or what have you on the cover. Sucky cover result: bland boringness, though most readers prefer this over the Poser embarrassments.

And, even if you're Harlequin with the big budget, you can still make a sucky cover, like the infamous "bored handjob" masterpiece:

Don't get too cocky.

Tomorrow: Before and afters.

Next week is cover week

Recently, in one of my many lives, I've been involved with creating book covers for romance novels. Real ones.

I got the chance to participate all the way from the planning stage, through the photo shoot, through the design to the final release, with all the bumps in between. I think maybe a few of you would be interested to hear about it.

But I have to write all this stuff up first and put pictures and all that together. So next week will be Cover Week here at Abby's blog, with lots of behind-the-scenes stuff on what it's really like to make a romance cover.

Usually, bloggers who do an Event Week go all-out and give shit away and stuff, but not me. I don't have any books to sell to any of you so I'm not going to do all that promotional crap. No prizes because a) I don't have anything anyone would want and b) I can't be arsed to go to the post office. I promise pictures and some T&A and some gossipy stuff. OK? Starting Monday.

In the meantime, here's one of my favourite covers of all time, and no, I don't know why:



I like the pose, and she looks exactly like I pictured the heroine. I love the cheesy clinch covers, and I don't care who knows it. They're a blast.

It's a good book, too, though sadly out of print. Nab a copy if you find it!

Romance for men

If you watch Walk the Line for a second time, several things will jump out at you:

1. It's really, really well-written.
2. The acting is even better than you thought the first time around, especially the Folsom Prison scene for Joaquin Phoenix, and - well, pretty much every scene she's in for Reese Witherspoon.
   
3. It's a romance.

Okay, so it has drugs and cheating and mental breakdowns and stuff in it, and it's really one man's story. But it's a romance. From the moment he hears June's voice on the radio, it's meant to be. He spends a lot of the film trying to be worthy of her, really. Trying to grow up enough to get her to say yes.

And that last scene just gets better every time you watch it.



Really, see that last scene a few times. He sings "Ring of Fire", then gives June the credit for writing it, and they exchange looks - it takes a second viewing before you realize she wrote a song about being in love with him and they both know it. Then he proposes to her on stage, and she tries to laugh it off, but he won't let it go. He gets serious, and that look he gives her - all intense passion and, yes, love - is amazing. He says, "I know I've hurt you and done lots of terrible things.." and her face crumples for that brief second, you know she's been putting up a front all this time.

Then he swears never to do it again, and gives her That Look. And she says yes.

This is the kind of thing that gets scoffed at in a romance novel, or even a film marketed as a "romance" or a "chick flick". Take the same scene, place it in an Important Serious Film About An Icon, and you win awards all over the place, and no one scoffs or even mentions the word romance. Suddenly, everyone's raving, because the story is good, and the writing and the acting is good, and it digs deep for real human emotion, and it's just so moving.

What's the difference? Men watched that film in droves, and they loved it. It spoke to them - not just the romance, but the whole thing.

So, let's keep this our female secret. No one tell them they loved a romance, okay?

Writing update

I've been writing gangbusters on the new novel, and it feels good. I'm back into my longhand groove again. I'm only at 22,000 words, but considering I got the original idea for the book on Easter Weekend and I have the rest of the book mapped out, that's pretty good for six months of work.

The delay was because I went back and revised my first few chapters more than once. Something was bugging me, but once I figured it out, I had a lot of fixing to do. Now I have a story that is way better than the one I started with and I'm SO keen to get it done.

Still, I'm not going to make my October 1 deadline, so I pushed it back to November 1. This is only the second novel I've finished and the first one took me two years, so it will be interesting to see how quickly I get this one done.

Then the other day as I was driving I heard a song on the radio and at the same time it made me think of a scene from an obscure movie I saw years ago, and bing! A new idea was born. I also have another idea for a contemporary but I don't know if I'll write it yet.

Such is the way-cool brain of the writer. You never know what's next.

Back to writing.

Why I've Been Busy

Part of the reason I've been scarce is because, for the first time in my life, I made a website.

It's finally finished. Here it is:

Toronto Romance Writers

If I had any champagne, I'd pop the cork. Second career, here I come!

An Ode to Sarah Conner

There was a post up at Romancing the Blog recently called, "I Wanna Be Joan Wilder!" Yes, I liked Romancing the Stone, too. I liked Kathleen Turner. I liked Joan Wilder a lot.

But when it comes to heroines, my favourite has always been Sarah Conner.




Oh, what short memories we have, when we forget that Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn't original. Do we really owe Joss Whedon our ovaries for making a strong female character? James Cameron did it first, and he did it in a mega-budget studio film, and he didn't have a hundred episodes to play with. Two hours to take Sarah from beaten-down waitress with bad hair to badass muttering "Die, mother fucker" as she presses the button to kill the robot. Two more hours to break her out of the insane asylum and avert World War Three. That's a story.

Sarah was kick-ass, but not just kick-ass. She was crazy, but not just crazy. In the second film, she's so flawed that she's the good guy and the bad guy in one. She falls in love, but when her lover dies she just soldiers on. She has a baby, but makes some mistakes in raising him that she never rectifies with a sappy, lovey reunion. She's haunted by visions of a nuclear holocaust (who can forget that playground dream sequence?) and that kind of thing can make a woman make a few mistakes. Name one cliche, one stereotype that fits Sarah Conner. Nope, neither can I.

This is original storytelling, the a completely original character, an original woman, real and good and bad and all of it. In the asylum sequence in Terminator 2 she's wearing just a tank top and cloth pants - not even a bra - and she's both menace and sexiness. She's in charge until the minute she sees the Terminator, at which point she stops nearly dead - frozen with fear, it's such a good shot that Cameron plays it in slow motion - and falls on her ass. (The scene where she one-handedly pumps the shotgun over and over is my second favourite in the movie.)





Heroines like that are hard to find. Elektra didn't really cut it, did she? The women in the X-Men films were angsty and self-sacrificing. Lois Lane was flat-out awful. Worst Heroine in Human Memory goes to Natalie Portman's character in the last Star Wars films, a woman so unreal I wondered if George Lucas has ever actually conversed with a human female. Meanwhile, James Cameron keeps on not making fiction films. Darn his eyes.

Meantime, I'll rent T2 again. It's been a Sarah kind of day.