Revisiting the prequel

I've had a lot of projects, a daughter with ear issues, my own dental care, work hours and economics to contend with... It burnt me out on writing, with productivity in mind, so I let my mind wander and returned to my circa 1978 "prequel" of Étienne's youth and love story.

I've drafted the new first chapter and I like it. I don't feel it's perfect but it's a start. I'll share page one:

Chapter One


Heat consumed Étienne from multiple angles; the sun from Ghislaine’s window soothed his nude flesh and his aching thrust erupted inside her with a rippling whirlpool that chased away the Paris dampness. He offered a tired grunt and savored that moment when his muscles dissolved. She gasped and collapsed against his chest, her body still quivering against his.

He cried. Her cheek pressed against the metal of his identification plaque. The slight tickle of Ghislaine’s long bleached blond hair blanketing him and the soft yet firm push of her breasts pressed against him had punctured the cigar smoke. The telltale earthy scent of Montecristo #4 had fallen when his commanding officer reported that Étienne’s father had died. That was more than a week ago. With the aftershocks of the sex the only barrier between him and his new found grief, Étienne wrapped his arms around Ghislaine and braced for the tears.

His father smoked Montecristo #4 cigars. The cigar smoke had filled the barracks like a protective cloud. It stayed with him as he packed, during the eight-hour, red-eye flight to Paris, and through his brisk walk to Ghislaine’s apartment.

Pondering

I'm supposed to be doing homework.

But I haven't written in this blog for a while and I have something brief that's been on my mind.

Do you give yourself permission to free write?

Every once in a while, when I have the urge to write and either my current projects aren't turning out or I don't have a project (like now), I write something random. And these pieces all start with random questions.

They always end up being pertinent, either in a new or an existing story.

A couple days ago I wrote two pages on the early days of marriage between Basilie and Étienne. I was thinking about their sex life 20 years ago, but it turned out that I wrote a nugget that showed me his feelings when he found out she was pregnant the first time. I felt something for these two I had never felt before.

I have two more questions running around in my brain:

1. If Étienne and Basilie had met before they met as I say they did, when he was 18 and she was 20, what would the encounter be and where? As if they ran into each other as strangers but never knew... what happened? Was it in a museum? A store? What did they think of each other?
2. My secondary character of Jules the Chef... Need to explore his backstory. What was his life like in the immediate months before he enters my story?

Tension

Donald Maass listed action scenes and sex scenes as scenes people skim. Part of this has to do with tension, and heightening the tension and pacing it. Part of it has to do with the expected nature of what unfolds.

I have a process for sex scenes. I write them, and about half way through I decide it stinks and I don't want to go on and I force myself to finish. Next, I read it and cut about 3/4 of the action out. Then I read it again and put other action and some thoughts back in. And usually a finally round of edits for ease of reading language.

But action. UGH.

Those are big battle scenes that we can't model quite so accurately off our real lives. I have sex, but I don't often slay villains or sacrifice young girls to pagan gods.

It's part imagination, part physics, and part creative editing so you don't provide every detail but enough to keep the reader informed and interested.

And lots of danger. I'm working on a big scene right now and there will be more on this when I finally get it right... because right now... it's not

Logistics

When certain moods strike, I love to write the naughty parts in manuscripts.

They always start WAY too long, going through every motion of the encounter and get hacked to pieces. These scenes often research (or merely thought), and not necessarily the "is this position physically possible?" kind (although that happens). Things like if she's 5' 2" and he's 5' 8" does she have to stand on tip toe to kiss him? Can your hand physically bend that way?

The other important part of a love scene is to make sure you edit ALL IN ONE SITTING. Because otherwise, you can miss important details.

For example, I have this:

"Confusion flashed in Zélie’s eyes and her lips parted. She released him, her hand falling to her side. Étienne brought his kiss to her clavicle and then closer to her breast. He spun her..."

Now in the original version that line about her hand falling away was not there, nor was the release. This doesn't seem like a big problem until you realize her hand was in his pants, holding something important for this scene, and he spins her around without letting go.

The reader can assume she let go, but since she's confused, maybe she didn't... and depending, that could be painful or merely lead to some getting twisted up and falling over... You get the idea.

And after you hack the scene down to its essence and have what you like, read it out loud. You may blush, but it's the only way to check how smooth it is.

The Reunion / The Hanged Man

I'm working out of sequence as I have been frequently because of how I keep getting stuck. A friend had a bad day yesterday, and she read the first draft of Courting Apparitions and laments the fact that Basilie and Étienne don't have sex except for one in the entire book.

That is a bad, bad sentence. But let's move on.

Since my friend had a bad day, and I'm very close to that big sex scene, I thought I'd go ahead and write that scene to cheer her up.

In the tarot, there's a card called the Hanged Man. It's not the well-hung man, so get your mind out of the gutter. The hanged man is the guy who always looks at a situation differently from everyone else. If you watched Project Runway last night, he would be Casanova (who thought WAY out of the box) or even Ivy H. (her approach to the project was the opposite of everyone else).

A good sex scene has to have an element of the Hanged Man. If it's merely presenting what happened, it's not enough. If it's merely erotic and graphic, it's not enough.

I've talked in the past about every sex scene doing its job to move the plot, and enhance the character and show us about the relationship we're seeing. But it should also have that special quirkiness that makes it real.

In real life, this happens.

Like the time I asked my husband in the middle of things if he remembered whether or not I turned the oven off.

Or the time things went incredible and my husband thought something was wrong based on an unusual noise I made.

I already have a very powerful surprise for the revision to book three that shows how quickly "the other woman" picked up on a secret fantasy of the male character that his wife never noticed in 25 years together.

And don't even ask about the Tufula Tufts.

The iPhone Cure

After my house guest left last night, and I couldn't bring myself to end my recent streak with writers block, I read most of "The Education of Madeline," a western historical romance thanks to the daily book snippets emailed to me via Suzanne at "Dear Reader" book clubs.

I enjoyed it, and it had a bit of unsuspected intrigue. By the end, I was tired of all the attempts to have "different" sex. The premise was a spinster asks someone to educate her in intimate matters, and they fall in love. (My problem was that nothing her tutor suggested ended up making her uncomfortable. In any way, physical or emotional. But anyway...)

So after finishing that and enjoying the rain storm, I found myself inspired but I was away from all the computers and didn't feel like searching out a pen/paper. I used my iPhone to write a few random paragraphs, and although they didn't fit any of my projects, they felt good.

Now I want to write more, but what?

In Character

WARNING: This blog post may contain colloquial language, vulgarity and discussion of different sex acts.

2ND WARNING: Author has had three cups of coffee

Sometimes, as authors, we view our stories and our plots with the detachment of an outsider. I'm not saying we don't get lost/caught up in our stories, because we do. What happens is more like worrying about making sure we get the road to lead where we want it to that we don't pay attention to the actual path.

I was editing a chapter today. In that chapter, Galen the bad guy is coping poorly with the fact that the now-dead ingenue from the previous book (Adelaide) has possessed him. To add insult to injury-- to use a cliché-- Adelaide has noticed a young man her age and her lust has left Galen with an erection. Galen gets into his car where his mate and fellow witch, Flidais, laughs at him for his predicament.

Now the basic road map for this scene required that Galen and Flidais drive from Point A to Point B. I got the sense upon reading it, that Flidais would do more than laugh at him. I spent the next 24 hours contemplating whether Flidais would give him a hand job or a blow job.

Yes, seriously.

One of my friends suggested a little bit of both. But that didn't seem right. As a writer, I typically can write through big problems. Little problems like this, or even smaller ones like what the characters had for dinner, can halt my progress for hours.

Today, I labeled why these things often stump me. It's not because of the sex acts. It stems from not thinking inside the character's head. The chapter I'm writing comes from Galen's third person limited point of view. I pondered the problem as if Galen had a say in which sex act Flidais performed. Which, he could ask, but he doesn't.

As soon as I considered the conundrum from Flidais' point of view, I had to weigh the magical consequences. In that case, a hand-job seemed vulgar and like a waste of male essence. She might try that if she wanted to weaken him or merely distract him. I think she would perform a sex act for her own gain. In that case, what can she receive?

In my series, any sex act has a supernatural weight to it and it all means something. Feminine power must be given, not taken. Masculine power must be taken. Sex, in the male/female intercourse variety, adds something to the universe and provides energy that can fuel rituals.

The answer became obvious, Flidais had to give Galen a blow job because she needed a shot of masculine power and that was an easy way to take it.

The moral of the story:
If you're stuck at a point where characters have to make a choice, make sure the characters reason out the problem and chose according to their motivations, not yours. Don't confuse the POV character's preferences with the character who is actually the one in control of the choice.

The power of smell

One of the reasons I like the end of the day is collapsing in bed. Even if nothing happens in bed but sleep, I love the familiar texture of the sheets, the sense of relief as you put your body down, and the smell.

There's nothing better than the smell of clean sheets, but the smell of "gently-used" sheets can be comforting. I don't mean anything raunchy, but your partner's pillow tends to smell like that person, or maybe you smell the perfume you wore the day before still left behind.

Last night before going to bed, I imagined the scene in my third book (now remember, I'm working on book two) where one of the main characters disappears without a trace. I contemplated what his wife must have felt when faced with their bed at night.

And this is what I wrote:

"She rolled to his side of the bed, her face buried in his pillow, wallowing in the familiar scent of him that seemed so distant since his disappearance. Fruity yet heavy with jasmine like his Chanel cologne, she clamped her eyes tight as she tried to remember the name... Her eyes ached despite closing them. Two weeks, she thought, two weeks without word of him and everything had disintegrated.

She finally understood how it hurt to be “left.”

She finally understood why he resented her for doing it to him all those years ago.

She flipped onto her side, the heady cologne smell fading and mixing with the aroma of his body, not the pure saltiness of sweat and the muskiness that accompanies it, but the lingering something masculine... because she had wrapped herself in their sheets after all... that something not quite male or female that hung in the room after...

The heat exploded in her face. How could a woman her age blush at the thought... The warmth spread through her body and she hugged her legs to her chest to ignore it.

Our bed smells like us, she thought, like sex."

So what does love smell like to you?

The emotional side of writing

My husband always says I'm happiest when I'm writing. My husband's happy when I'm writing the naughty scenes. On Wednesday, I was having one of those days where I was in a good mood (a very good, excitable mood) and I was still working on my outline and I got to a scene that recalled one of the male POV character's pivotal experiences in his youth that helped construct his sexual identity.

Doesn't that sound way more academic than I meant it to.

It was a scene that signaled the beginning of the end, the denouement if you will. The bad guys and the good guys get tangled a bit. Étienne and the female witch Flidais end up... well, having a special sort of battle. Flidais enters Étienne's mind and reads his memories and discovers that he harbors a bit of an interest in his mother-in-law. Nothing serious, nothing he'd act on, merely the impressions of a 12-year-old boy.

Violà:

"Circa 1971, the 12-year-old boy sewed with his father, waiting for the coveted moments when Marthe-Georgine came into the shop. Her Chanel purse quickly opened to offer expensive bittersweet chocolates. Her bosom pert and her body an hourglass unlike the soft and undefined shape of his mother or the budding promise of the girls at school. She would step behind the screen to try her garments and he would hope for a stray glimpse of her silk and lace undergarments, so unlike the white cotton things his mother hung in the bathroom. Young Etienne loved the camisoles, the slips, and the seamed stockings of a lady who remained a lady even beneath her clothes."

I also have a line in there about him realizing years later that the smell that seemed attached to her skin was actually Chanel No. 5 (which his wife also wears).

This passage, which I merely reread and refined that day, had me on edge ALL day. I came home still excitable, and while my husband put my daughter to bed I continued the outlining project. That was my mistake. Because the chapter after the one that excerpt comes from has Étienne and Basilie getting into the worst fight of their relationship, followed by a life-threatening tragedy and a kidnapping. So, I was a tad depressed after reading that.

And for some reason, the next day, I realized I could make a small edit to the first volume of the manuscript and have a cameo from a very important character. Étienne's first love. I have a scene where all the guys go out drinking and end up at a jazz club and I thought, wow, since Arlette is a singer, they could go hear her sing, and her brief (800 words) appearance could cement Étienne's typical behavior (I've billed him as a flirt with a rich history with the girls) and serve as a link for later volumes in the series.

But I didn't have time to write. My job needed my attention, as did my family, but I managed to carve 15 minutes out before my daughter went to school and another 15 while she was in school. The results thrilled me. Because it also helped Étienne's relationship with his brother. Here's the culminating end of the scene.

“As soon as that girl opens her mouth,” J.P. said to Edmond, “he’s drooling like a teenager.”

“Our relationship ended thirty years ago,” Étienne replied. “Why can’t I appreciate her?”

“Appreciate?” Edmond responded. “Is that what it’s called? Where are your hands? Keep them on the table where I can see them. My first love won’t speak to me. Étienne’s sits on his lap. I hate my brother.”

On Conflict

A good friend of mine said to me last night, "sounds like a great conflict."

Another good friend several year's ago reminded me that each character needs an external and an internal conflict.

As writers, we must torture our characters.

I never intended to write a series. I hate series. Typically, stories that run in series read like one great big story with very slow pacing. Or perhaps, more so, pacing that feels the same in all the books. And after several books the rhythm becomes predictable.

The friend who reminded me about internal and external conflict wanted a sequel to my manuscript, the one I'm marketing to agents now. I knew in my head what happened next, and in telling her, she became captivated and asked me to write it. So I did. The third volume came purely as therapy when I lost a job and needed to distract my own brain from my troubles.

At that time I had a two-year-old and I wrote 180,000 words in 31 days (July 2007). Whenever my daughter slept, I was at the keyboard.

This is what my experience with a series taught me:

• Each book needs to "up the ante." In other words, the bad things that happen to the characters/ their struggles need to increase significantly with each volume. To keep the reader interested, to keep them guessing, and to make sure they can't predict your writing.

• If the characters change, their internal conflicts must change with them.
• One character should be struggling with a conflict across the entire series. The end of this conflict should signal the end of the story.

If I look at my first book, the following items happen:

• One person dies, one person almost dies
• There is a car accident
• There is a medical emergency (not related to the person who dies or the person who almost dies)
• The reader witnesses two murders.

If I look at my favorite character, he experiences the following in the first book:

• Relationship issues (who doesn't?)
• He *gains* something he never expected he would
• He loses a friend
• He has health issues

In the second book, he:

• copes with losing his importance in his own company
• becomes impotent
• has a bad leg AND a bad heart
• hangs out with the wrong woman
• must rescue his wife and newborn son from a bad situation he caused
• survives a serious house fire

And in the third book, he:

• corrects #1,2 & 3 on the list above
• has an affair
• almost loses his wife
• ends up tortured (literally)

In the end, his wife is the hero(ine), and there is a "happily ever after" ending, but see what they must endure first? Oh, I am so evil.

Defining a character's sexuality

Yesterday, I started talking about the how I use sex in my writing. When we think sex and writing, normally people think of two things:

• Erotica (like good old Anais Nin, The Story of O, etc.)
• Romance novels (gotta have that perfect love scene where the characters climax in each other's arms after having that orgasm that made them come alive in new ways...)

Why?

As I mentioned yesterday, my characters have healthy libidos. I also talked about sex as a way to reveal how characters feel about each other. For the English major geeks out there, I see my main supernatural bad guy as a bully, and I see the woman who falls in love with him as a victim of domestic violence. This is intentional on my part, because if a mortal man *hurt* her in the ways he does, the reader would never finish the book. And when you look at their relationship, the bad guy only manipulates/hurts her in private. In public, they look like the perfect couple. Isn't that usually the way with domestic violence?

But this entry is not about that.

This entry is about the love of my life, Étienne, and his girls, Adelaide and Basilie. Étienne married Basilie in 1979. Basilie divorced Étienne in 1993, but she forgot to leave. They moved into separate domiciles, but life became a great big sleepover game of who would stay at who's house what night. To end it once and for all, Basilie moved to New York City in 2000 on a work visa. She assumed Étienne would stay in France. Instead, he applied for an O-1 visa followed her.

Now, Adelaide works for Étienne. She's worked for him since she was 13. (Actually she was 12-and-a-half but Étienne prefers that she round up, sounds better if she were 13 instead of 12.) She spent her school years modeling, then moved into the PR department after high school, and when Étienne moved to New York, he brought her along, figuring he'd need an American around to start his New York office.

None of that tells you how these characters feel about each other.

Chapters three and four of my first book involve a large party. Chapter three is the bad guy's perspective. Chapter four is Étienne's.

This is the first time we see Étienne and Basilie together:

Étienne kissed [her]. He angled for her lips, but she nudged away redirecting his effort to her cheek.

Without even delving into Étienne's POV, we hear this about him and his ex-wife:

"Mon jeune ami," Étienne said. "I have papers... papers say we are married, others say divorcés. Paper means nothing. Rien. Je ne crois pas les papiers.”

Now this is the very first paragraph from Étienne's POV. It's not sexual, per se, but it does set up a great deal of his sexuality:

In the farmhouse’s dark, cool basement, Étienne maintained his cellar. He fondled his 1921 Château d’Yquem Sauternes, brushing off the dust, turning the bottle, and leaving it. Nothing compared to a good woman or a quality wine. Since he no longer collected lovers, he shifted to fine vintages, almost as enjoyable a hobby.

And his first interaction with Basilie (or as he nicknames her 'Zélie') shows us something about each of them, even though it's his POV. I wanted a scene that would show his devotion to her without having him go through a diatribe of internal dialogue. I wanted to show you, not tell you:

Étienne placed his arm around Zélie’s waist. He moved a hand into the hair cascading past her shoulders, tumbling in tight curls. He pinched one. The spiral crackled under his touch, crispy with the hairspray from the stylist. He sniffed it.

L'ananas... The English challenged him… Pineapple and Chanel No. 5. The combination always signaled a celebration.

"I’m sure your wife is here, Bob," Zélie said.

Her words sounded as crisp as her hair. The sentence slid off her tongue with ease, her English enunciation perfect. He couldn’t have said it, not like that, not even when sober. Yet she was as French as him and she could… Zélie flinched, swatting at his hand. He lowered his head toward her bare shoulder. His lips brushed her flesh...

"Étienne, stop it," she commanded.

He pulled away with a devilish smile.

But the very next line shows us his different attitude for his young employee:

Adelaide burst into the room, apologizing as she knocked into several guests. Her head jerked. Her gown shed feathers. In her clumsy distress, Adelaide’s lips puckered. Her eyes pleaded. Her cheeks and jaw hung with anxiousness. Even so, she remained the most beautiful fixture in the room.

The most beautiful fixture in the room. The phrase gives me chills. But wait, you say, how does this all relate to sex? Well, from here we progress to sexual tension.

Adelaide unzipped her boots. She stretched her legs across [Étienne's] lap. The weight of the beads pulled the dress away from her thighs. Her garters poked from beneath the fabric. Zélie never wore garters, no matter how much Étienne wished she would as his chouchou did. He rested a hand on Adelaide’s ankle.

But it isn't the magnificently beautiful Adelaide who truly captures Étienne's attention, but his ex-wife, as they dance:

“Chut,” he whispered.

He brought his lips to hers to quiet her, and they danced, tenderly tasting each other. In the final measures of the song, Étienne stepped away, twirled her to the end of his arm, then pulled her back, and dipped her across his thigh where he kissed her, this time long and thorough.

The black silk sash had fallen covering her breasts. Her creamy skin set off beautifully the strand of black pearls he had given her earlier. He liked how the pendant sparkled, though now it hung upside-down making a cloverleaf instead of a heart. He squeezed her hand and roamed her body with his eyes. His outlined her jaw and her cheekbone with his index finger.

"Étienne, let me up, chéri," she said, interrupting his visual consumption.

"I was just—"

"I know exactly what you’re doing," Zélie said. "Let me up."

She takes him to bed. As he is very drunk, he requires some assistance. But once his teeth are brushed and his clothes removed, they do tumble into bed. Every touch and every breath (I hope) shows their desperation for each other. In their care and their enjoyment, the familiarity of the moment shows how long they've been together. But as I mentioned yesterday, in a way, this is a "baseline sexual encounter" so that the reader can detect changes in their relationship later and also know later when Étienne gets accused of cheating, whether or not 'the other woman' is telling the truth...

Characters with a healthy libido

In my spare time, I serve on several non-profit boards. One I truly enjoy is my role as trustee at my local library. My family and I helped with the book fair this year, our big fund-raiser. My daughter even did her share.

At the book fair, one woman carefully looked through all the fiction in hopes that we might have an author recommended to her. She was a big fan of Nicholas Sparks and his love stories. (He makes me cringe.) Someone had told her this other author had similar stories of love "without all the intimate stuff."

I almost laughed. But then I bought the Anaias Nin books from the sale tables.

My characters have a healthy libido. There is a very good reason for this. Two fold.

1. My stories involve a supernatural element. This means magic. And whether you draw on magic or religion, the obvious and universal truth is sex = creation. My magical characters exploit this creative power. My mundane ones also manipulate it, though they know not what they do.
2. Each character's sexual relationships reinforce who they are. And their attitudes toward one another. Not a single one of my sex scenes is gratuitous. They all serve a specific purpose.
   

For example:

• The supermodel exudes sex and attracts men. Obvious on one level. But because she has this tendency to attract men, she also can't have a healthy relationship, because they seek her merely for sex. This destroys her self-esteem, despite the fact that she's a supermodel.
• Étienne and Basilie. The divorced couple who never stopped acting married. In the first book, they have sex. (In the office, at home, even a reference to conceiving their child in a car at the airport.) In the second book, they can't. This has been a central focus of their relationship for 25 years and suddenly it's gone. How do they reconnect?
• Étienne. For him, alcohol increases his desire for sex. Which actually plays into the plot line when alcohol plays into the confirmation or the dismissal of charges of his misconduct. Especially when you add the problem of the supermodel listed above.
• Flidais. My evil female witch, a smaller character, but an important one. When she conducts blood rituals, she uses the blood of an aroused male. More creative power.
  
• Galen, the main bad guy, manipulates desire to gain feminine power from his victims.

When you look at characters, they can hide so much of themselves in their actions. If you want to convey how two characters feel about each other or reveal something about their true natures, put them in bed. They won't be able to hide.