Okay, I got thirty-three pages written this weekend on THE BLOODIEST QUEEN. *And* I found time to drag myself into the kitchen (and outside to the grill) and make Mama Jeanne's incredible BBQ chicken with from-scratch BBQ baked beans and sweet Southern cole slaw. (Hint: Used incredibly good white balsamic vinegar is one of Mama Jeanne's secret ingredients.)
I'll never get twenty-seven pages in a single morning, a la Laurell K. Hamilton, but I'm feeling a bit better about myself.
The term meme, coined thirty years ago by the scientist Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) refers to “a unit of cultural information.” I was surfing the web one evening and came across such a unit of cultural information on Carla Nayland’s Historical Fiction blog. I couldn’t resist. Carla chose to stick with strictly fictional characters instead of historical ones, but since I write historical fiction, I get to cheat.
Three historical or fictional characters I’d like to meet:
1. Nostradamus, aka Michel de Notredame. Yup, the guy with all the predictions. He’s a pivotal character in the book I’m writing about Catherine de’ Medici, THE BLOODIEST QUEEN. I figure he must have been a rather odd sort, but when he wasn’t off having visions, he was a phenomenal physician (for the time). He was famed for saving many from the plague (although, alas, he lost his wife and children to the disease).
2. Maude Lilly, the clever schemer from Sarah Waters’ beautifully Dickensian FINGERSMITH. Maude is smooth and witty and educated, especially in terms of Victorian erotica; she’d make an elegant and interesting dinner guest.
Go check out The Renaissance Connection, courtesy of the Allentown Art Museum. It's a fun educational site. The timeline is really cool.
Laurell K. Hamilton writes lovely, ghoulish novels; this weekend, I'm hoping to steal away a little time to tuck into the book that launched the Anita Blake, vampire hunter phenomenon, GUILTY PLEASURES.
So I visit her LKH Blog, right? And I come across this line:
Okay, I just did twenty-seven pages today. Twenty-seven pages on the Jason novel/novellite. I went back over my calender and found when I started the project. I have done 147 pages in ten days. Ten non-consecutive days, which for me is even more impressive. I usually have a fits if a project is interrupted even a little bit. But my muse is hitting me heavy on this one.
Twenty-seven pages? Twenty-seven pages?
On a good day, I'll have six or seven. Granted, that's writing a historical, where I have to fact-check every paragraph a dozen times, but even so...
I feel so very, very inadequate.
Everyone has her secret passion. Mine happens to be writing pens, and chastising those who leave the tops off of writing pens. I actually do a fair amount of writing by hand, especially in the early morning hours when I need my left hand free to clutch a cup of coffee.
So my new best friends are these. Aren't they great? I'm especially addicted to the purple (for my prose, har har, yes I know) and the turquoise.
...due to food poisoning. Blecch.
I so do not want to look another goat cheese/roasted garlic/prosciutto pizza in the face.
Suzy McKee Charnas' THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY.
Suzy is a Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning author, and THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY is a shining example of her elegant, lovely prose. When I first began to write, I studied TVP so that perhaps, some day, I might grow up to write like her. Trust me, and buy it.
Suzy is one of my writing idols. I met her at a Dracula convention once, and she was enormously gracious to me, even though I was reduced to a nervous, stuttering ball of hero worship. I've discovered she has a website and blog. Visit, and let her know who sent ya.
*Yes, I mean it. Even more than DRACULA.
I often hear the question: “How much of what you write in your historical novels is actually true?”*
A lot. At the beginning stages of a book, I sit down with all the reliable recorded information that I can find about my hero. I write a timeline of notable events in the woman’s life, then study up on the most important people in her life and how they interacted with her.
Then I meditate on those things, and using those events and people, come up with a dramatic overlay of a plot with a strong theme and gradually-building conflict. It’s usually pretty easy to spot the most crucial moment in my protagonist’s life, and the big pay-off centers around that moment. In most cases, I focus on a particularly dramatic time in my character’s life; right now, with THE BLOODIEST QUEEN, I’m tackling Catherine de’ Medici’s entire earthly existence.
...then you owe it to yourself to visit medievalmysteries.com. It's a site for readers who love books set in medieval times, and includes book reviews, an author index, articles, suggestions, links and more. Lots of good reading to be found here.
FINGERSMITH, by Sarah Waters.
A brilliant piece of historical fiction.
A book about Catherine de' Medici, actually. The U.S. title will be THE BLOODIEST QUEEN, and the U.K. title will be THE MEDICI QUEEN. (Understandably, "bloody" plus "queen" just really doesn't go over well in Britain...)
The great-granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Catherine became Queen of France through marriage. For centuries, she has been blamed for the horrific St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in which scores of thousands of French Protestants were slaughtered. Me, I'm thinkin' she got a bum rap.
STORY is all about how to write a screenplay. But it’s also useful to those in the novel-writing business. I have A Writer Friend who doesn’t much care for STORY, but I think that’s because she never really got past the first part about structure and genre. (She didn’t feel she really needed help trying to decide between writing a mockumentary or a social drama.) It contains so much information that I think it can be intimidating, perhaps, to someone who has never actually been through the writing process before. It might seem like a lot of theory, but it’s actually the result of a lot of practice, practice, practice.
So you wanna be a published author? Have a polished manuscript just quivering in readiness, but don’t know where to send it?
Then get yourself a copy of WRITER’S MARKET. It has everything you need to know about submitting your manuscript to a publisher: format, submission protocol, and contact information for all the editors who are dying to take a look at what you’ve written. And it’s updated yearly.
Her name is Suza Francina, and I am enormously lucky to have found her. She’s been teaching Iyengar yoga for some thirty years now, and is probably one of the best instructors in the world.
I was only thirty when I first began to suffer from sacroiliac pain. I used to take nine Advil a day, and was always in pain. I lived for my appointments with the chiropractor and the massage therapist. And they kept telling me how I needed to take up yoga.
Now, I am congenitally clumsy. Embarrassingly so. No way was I going to go to any class where I would be invited to stand on my head.
Check out Chuck Palahniuk's website.
Who is Chuck Palahniuk, you ask? Only the author of the awesome FIGHT CLUB, a novel I heartily endorse.
A lot of good stuff here: take a look at the Writers Workshop link.
Trick #1: The sympathetic character
Always make your protagonist the most sympathetic character in the story. Remember that the reader unconsciously judges her every action (and every word), and in order to care about what happens to her, must like her.
(excerpted from an e-mail to A Writer Friend) She -- the sympathetic character -- allows us to look at all the other nasty, crazy characters in the story from a safe space. That's why I wrote THE BORGIA BRIDE from Sancha's point of view instead of Lucrezia's.
