{dusting off the blog}. It’s been a while since my last entry. I was busy with moving back from New Zealand to Denver area, to prepare a life for me and my Sweetie, and we have of course been missing each other desperately, and spending lots of time online Skyping and Typing. And I had to get settled for a while, so I can work out the other plans on the horizon. I am currently residing in an extended stay suite and will probably be here for a while, so i have been trying to climb back on the writing-horse and get something done. To that end, let me share some thoughts about my writing and current project….

Those of you who keep up with me (please and thank you) know I’ve had a rough few years in the writing department. My Muse was beaten half to death, and then in a coma for a while. When she finally began to wake, she wasn’t the way she used to be. She needed to learn to walk and talk and feed herself again. That process has been difficult, but I think she’s on the road to recovery.

I forced her to participate in the 3rd and 4th of the AKA Investigations series, but it was rather nightmarish, as those two books were written simultaneously, their plots shared, but the two stories told from different points of view. I’d never done that before and it got quite complicated. But I kept pushing my Muse to trudge forward, and failing that, relied on my nonfiction-practical-technical brain to handle logistics, and work out plot issues.

I finally got those done and published, but then began floundering around again, wondering what project was next.  To keep the juices flowing–literally, literarily and figuratively–I started writing erotic stories. (So far, I have about 10 of them, and will probably publish them as an anthology). Anyway, I wrote erotic lesfic stories when I couldn’t get those juices going on the novels. I figured I might as well keep the flow going, keep pounding away until i got some results–(so many crude jokes in there, I’ll just have to leave it alone).  But erotica does have a way of improving your descriptive-writing skills–that is, if the erotica is good erotica. When you have to write scene after scene of sexual encounters, it’s easy to repeat yourself, run out of scenarios and ways to describe the actions, and let’s face it, there are only so many terms for the actions involved in intimate couplings. I don’t like using vulgarities, except for effect in certain places, where it’s warranted by character or tone. I have respect for women’s bodies, and so I don’t want anything to sound degrading. So when I am further limited by THAT vocabulary, it becomes a real challenge to find a new way to say something, and still make it sound alluring instead of repulsive. All of this, plus describing the myriad ways two women can do the Horizontal Hula, demands that a writer plumb the depths of her descriptive skills, and also develop new ones. In that regard, then, all this erotica writing has helped me reanimate my ability to be descriptive in my other writings. I do have a sort of inherent difficulty with description…I tend to write leaning toward the technical, and so descriptive prose is often a challenge for me. I have become suddenly terrible at it during my recent Muse Rehab.

In my most recent novel, Another Justice, my editor finally had to create a rubber stamp that said SHOW, because I was always telling instead of showing. This was disheartening to me, because the show-don’t-tell rule is fundamental to all veteran writers. Yet, here I was telling telling telling, and not showing at all. It was like I was a neophyte again. Quite humbling.

One very simple example was in this sentence:

“…Lucy, who worked in the male-dominated field of law enforcement, yet remained in touch with her womanly characteristics.”

The little purple comment box from the editor said SHOW! So the sentence then became:

“…Lucy, who worked in the male-dominated field of law enforcement, yet remained in touch with the relative merits of make-up and a great bra.”

In another example, the sentence “The forest was quiet, now” became:

The forest around her felt heavy, cradling itself in silence, the cacophony of the truck engine now gone, leaving her with a sensation that all sound had been sucked out of the air.

But my editor, bless her, was very thorough and patient and understanding, commenting for me to make it visceral, make the reader feel it, what was the character DOING? How did her body respond?  What do you MEAN by “quiet” or “womanly characteristics”? What are the sounds like, what are the characteristics? Etc. And it reminded me that I had somehow lost touch–or my MUSE had lost touch (because I have to blame her or I’ll hate myself) with the very basics of good writing.

I do understand my tendency to avoid the sensory details in passages that required it; since I am an HSP, I have Sensory Processing Sensitivity, and my whole life has been about blocking those sensations, so I’m not overwhelmed. This is fine in day to day life, but on the page, I have to be able to let go of that and see, smell, feel, hear everything, and impart that to the reader. It’s a skill I must resurrect again, and hopefully, I’ve made strides in that direction with this current book. I finally got to the REAL final draft, and it will hopefully be available in the next few days, at least in digital form.

But Another Justice was a very difficult book to write in many ways because of the theme and content. Not only were there ethical dilemmas and gray areas of right and wrong, but I had to delve into the psyche of some very bad men; into what I called in the text “Darker than the cavernous alcoves of their worthless souls.”  Some of the scenes were actually painful to write. But I felt the story was an important one to tell, and it was valuable information for women to know that while this world can be beautiful, and people can be good and kind, there are always, and have always been, beastly men out there who have lost touch with that humanity, and this means women and children are at risk, and should be aware of it, and take precautions.

Another Justice was also difficult to categorize in many ways. It does have a couple of gay characters, but the story is not about their orientation so much as about the fact that they are ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances. So I didn’t want to place this in the lesfic category, but it also wasn’t exactly the norm for mainstream fiction. It’s a crime novel, a revenge and vigilante novel, a novel about what happens when characters are pushed to the limit and what they do about it. It’s also about evil men, our system of justice, and how it often doesn’t address the very real problems we have in this society.

Ultimately, i hope it will be both edifying and engaging, as I try to make all my books.