Readin’ & Thinkin’

It’s better than wishin’ and hopin’, I guess.

I did spend more than an hour writing today, so “Operation Treat Writing Like a Day Job” is still going strong on Day 3. The bad news is, it took me more than an hour to write about 550 words. I’m definitely not on a roll at the moment.

As usual, the dialogue comes easiest for me. (I’m giving my first presentation on writing good dialogue in March, to my NARWA sisters. Time to start doing some research on what makes good dialogue so I sound like I know what I’m talking about!)

When I finished writing the 500 or so words, it was after 1 p.m. — time for a lunch break. After lunch, I started looking for a paper I wrote for my English novel class my senior year of college. It compared and contrasted the heroes of “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights,” and theorized about the effects the Bronte sisters’ brother, Branwell, had on both. The book club was reading “Jane Eyre” and I thought it’d make a good addition.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a hard copy. I think it’s on disk somewhere, if I can find a computer that reads small floppy disks anymore.

I did, however, run across something else: The first novel I wrote that I consciously tried to make NOT a romance. The “hero” — if you can call a drunken 20-year-old who occasionally slaps the heroine around  a hero — is dark and tormented; the heroine has her own demons.

What did my characters do? They ended up getting together anyway, but not necessarily in a good way. I never finished it, because I think to give it a satisfactory ending, I have to break them up and leave them broken because their relationship is so dysfunctional … but I can’t bring myself to do that. I want them to make it, and be happy.

The thing about it is, some of it’s pretty darn good. I have no idea where it would sell … parts are a mess. It tends to be superficial, and doesn’t do much more than scratch the surface of my characters.

There’s no head-hopping, though, because it’s told completely in first person, from the heroine’s point of view — until she goes into labor. Then I switch to his POV, and I think that’s part of the reason I’ve stopped writing. It’s much harder to be in Gareth’s head than it was to be in Kara’s — she was, as all my heroines are, somewhat like me.

It’s so different from what I normally write, too. I usually do lighthearted romantic comedy. This is much, much darker, with abuse on lots of levels, an incomplete trip to the abortion clinic and visits to see Gareth’s father in jail.

I’ve no idea what to do with it. Probably nothing. I don’t need to go back to the place I was when I was writing it. I don’t remember liking that place all that much.