Sappy Movies That I Love

I just finished watching Sabrina, the new version with Harrison Ford not the original with Humphrey Bogart. Both versions are wonderful but the one with Harrison Fords hits closer to home (because I have the hots for him!). Older man falls for younger woman is an age old love story. There are other equally popular old love stories but this one is my favorite.

I don't watch many romance based movies, maybe because my romantic life has been less than perfect so watching someone else (albeit fantasy) find true love and eternal happiness is difficult to take. But, every once in a while I just have to have a good cry so I rent a DVD or find it on the TV and sit down with a box of Kleenex and sob my heart out over lost love and love never realized.

So, are you curious about the other movies I love? OK, they are Casablanca (Bogart & Bergman at her teary best!), Dirty Dancing (I like this one better than Ghost!), The Philadelphia Story (Love Hepburn and Grant!), Moonstruck (Cher and Cage!), Working Girl, Somewhere In Time (Christopher Reeve tear jerker!), Bull Durham (oh boy Costner is just dreamy in this one! Slow wet kisses that last all day, yum.), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (the ending is a real tear jerker, she dies and is united with her love! Ah.). That's the list. Of course there are a few marginal ones I like but these are the ones I would fight for the remote to watch.

That brings me to written romances, especially since I'm writing one of my own. I think just about every one will put Gone With the Wind on top of their list, not me. I am more apt to read romances like Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series or maybe something from Barbara Erskine who wrote The Lady of Hay and Joyce Verrette's Egyptian romances.

So it comes back to my writing, always does you know, will my book live up to what has come before it? I hope so, I intend for it to, OK, I know it will. Wish me luck!

A Dollar A Page

When you are broke and a "real" job is out of the question what do writers do to pay the bills? Anaïs Nin wrote pornography for a "patron" and he paid her $1 per page.

"Faced with a desperate need for money, Nin and [Henry] Miller began in the 1940s to write erotic and pornographic narratives for an anonymous "collector" for a dollar a page, somewhat as a joke. Nin considered the characters in her erotica to be extreme caricatures and never intended the work to be published, but changed her mind in the early 1970s and allowed them to be published as Delta of Venus and Little Birds." Wikipedia

So I am faced with just such a dilemma, bills and no cash. I enjoy writing erotica, almost as much as I enjoy reading it. It's exciting, come on admit it, it's exciting to you too. Forbidden fruit is always exciting.

I googled erotic anthologies and wow, what a list! On Amazon alone I didn't go past the first page of 15 books and it went on and on. So, this tells me that readers of erotica are as voracious as readers of romance novels. I am writing a romance novel but it's far easier to write erotica. Faster too! So, do I drag on and finish the romance novel or do I whip up an anthology of erotica? The mind boggles. Unlike Nin, I do not have a "collector" who is willing to pay me for the writing.

In fact, if I remember correctly, the "collector" would tell Nin and her partner Arthur Miller "less prose more sex!" So remember, if you are called to write for your daily bread get to the juicy parts fast!

The Smell of Memories

The smell of roasting garlic is heavy in the air. I love roasted garlic. I squish it on fresh sourdough bread with lots of goat cheese. I make a meal of it, OK, I add a glass of wine. One glass is good for the digestion.
Smells are the memories that we keep with us forever. They are strong memories. The smell of a Christmas tree, the smell of a babies neck, a puppies breath, and of course food aromas. These create those little synapsis that fire each time we come across something that matches what we have already experienced.
I am firing those synapsis today. Memories of touch and taste and scent keep jumping in to my fore brain. I'm tingling with past experiences. These are good things to use when I write. I conjure up those strong memories and focus on them real hard, remembering every detail so that I can write about them with accuracy. I want my writing to be believable so by using the past I can create the future in my stories.
The timer is clicking down the last few seconds. When it goes off I can have my roasted garlic, and crusty sourdough bread and creamy goat cheese... oh yes, and my cool glass of Chardonnay. Hmmm, sounds good doesn't it?

The Willows Have Buds

I live in the desert. Well, technically it is the desert but if you look out my front window you will see palm trees, green grass, fountains shooting water into the air and rosemary bushes lining the pathways. I live in Las Vegas where fantasy is king and we spend all our water on keeping the nasty dry desert at bay.

So yesterday as I walked my collie around a closed golf course I passed a naked willow tree. I paused and looked closer. Yep, little green buds of what will be graceful long willow leaves! Yippee! Spring is just around the corner and it is only the middle of February. This made me feel really good. I love spring. It is my favorite time of year. Still cool in the morning and evening yet the sun heats up just enough during the day to wake up all the living and growing things, like willow trees!

Now I have to wake up my writing. I did write a few small pieces, just as exercises, nothing on my novels. Which is what I am going to focus on today. My romance is in need of more action so I am going to add a sword fight scene between my hero and a baddie yet to be identified.

Writing a fight scene will be new for me so I have asked for help. A wonderful person on my Panhistoria writing site has given me marvelous pointers on how to accomplish this daunting feat. She has provided me with cause and effect, telling me what to look for and how to discribe it with believability. So armed with her information I am going to sit down and write.

Along with writing scenes for my novel I am also trying to keep up correspondence with my extended friends and family. This is another daunting task as I now have quite a few and most of them are Facebook members so I can't hide from them. They know I am on Facebook because they see all of the silly games I play to pass the time when I can't think of what to write.

So if you have a chance to get outside today, look for the willow buds.

Rainy Day Romance

I am writing a romance and I am in love with my hero but not my heroine. I want to empathize with my heroine but I am having a difficult time with it. You see, she is too much like me. I want her to be more like my female heros, good and kind and smart and witty and full of energy. She is to a point, like me, but not enough. She is too shallow, like me I guess. So I am in for a healthy rewrite.

It's raining today and I am in a melancholy mood. Rain does that to me so I am glad that I live where it seldom rains. One of the blogs I follow posted a short little piece on romance which got me thinking about my novel and my characters. They need more depth, more oomph to them. They seem to be too one dimensional, too cartoon cut-out for my taste. Stephanie mentions the Disney Cinderella movie and how her daughter just loves the ball where the hero and the heroine come together and fall in love. Sigh, how sweet, but Stephanie's daughter is a toddler and my audience is a tad bit older and a tad bit more jaded. My novel is at the "at-the-costume-ball-where-the-protagonists-fall-in-love-but-have-to-part" part and I don't know which branch of the road to go down: the gutsy realistic sexually hot! hot! hot! road or the gauzy romantic just barely see the love scene, you know, the PG version. I guess it all depends on my audience, doesn't it? I love both versions so this is a hard choice. Wait a minute! I just had an epiphany! Why not give my readers and me both versions? My heroine can fantasize about the gauzy romantic PG love scene and then I can give my readers the hot hot hot sexually explicit version when it actually happens! Wow, yeah... I guess I will just have to write it and present it to my writers group and see what they think.

Inspiration on a rainy day; just the ticket!

Where Does He Find The Time?

I just finished reading a thriller. I don't always read thrillers, but since I need a little bit of a thrill in my novel I thought what better source could I drink from than a thriller novel! I chose James Rollins and his story The Last Oracle. I must say that I found it very interesting and finished it rather rapidly. In fact, since I did finish reading it that has to say it was pretty good. You see, I don't waste my time on bad books. If it is boring to me (now, don't get me wrong, if a book is boring to me that doesn't make it a bad book, take the book the Shell Seekers. I absolutely hated that book. Why? Cause it was so slow and boring,: to me! Of course I have heard all kinds of good reviews of that book, so, see, just cause I don't like it doesn't make it bad.) I won't finish it. Sometimes I don't even get past the first chapter.

But that is not the point I am trying to make. Here is a man who has a veterinarian practice in the Sacramento area of California; that takes time out of his day; and he has published a book a year since 1999; that has to take some time too; and he is on Facebook, and he blogs. Are you getting the picture here? How does he do it? There are only 24 hours in a day and you have to sleep some of those hours, right? I do, don't you? So where does he find the time to write these books? These aren't just little thin one plot wonders. They are weighty tomes filled with a ton of research! Take the one I am going to read now (yes I'm going to read another one!) Map of Bones, it consists of 521 pages. It's a thriller based on religious relics, you know, bones of saints.

Anyway, I am very impressed with his time management skills and take my hat off to him. And since this is still January and I have not made any New Years Resolutions I am going to say it here and now: I will learn how to have excellent time management skills and finish one of my novels this year! Is that 2 resolutions? Oh well, what the hell, I'll probably break those too!

The Back of the Wardobe

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of "East, Love, Pray," gives a wonderful talk on the creative process and how modern society is injuring our writers by putting the burden of genius in them as opposed to having genius reside within a temple and only occasionally visiting the artist. She goes on to point out how the ancients were right in their belief system and modern man by putting godhead within us is killing off all of our talented people.

I, on the other hand, have finally realized that they are both wrong.

C.S. Lewis created a marvelous series of books entitled The Narnia Chronicles of which The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe is the first entry. To say that the four protagonists walk through a wardrobe into a world of fantasy is to make light of the story. It's not so much that they conquer evil and right a wrong and save this fantasy world. It's that they are safe and at peace and happy and free. Everything that we are not.

So, at the end of the story they have stayed in Narnia and grown up in the bosom of this fantasy world until one day they come across the grove that contains the back of the wardrobe. It's at this point in the story I realized that C.S. Lewis understood, that we artists (here I include myself) have all stepped through the back of the wardrobe and entered this life we are now living, away from what you normals call "fantasy." Each of us yearns for the return, stepping back through the front of the wardrobe and out the back, to return to what we have lost. And this other world, this fantasy, as we live here in the glare of reality, we can just see it out of the corner of our eye. We feel it in our heart, we see it in the beauty of nature, we hear it in the sigh of the breeze in the trees or the call of the birds or the low of the cattle. But it is just out of our reach and it drives us mad with desire. Desire to step through that wardrobe and go home.