Four Stages of Romance Novel Writing
First Draft This is the baseline sketch. It all feels black and white, prose is wooden, characters flat. Second Draft The elements begin to merge. Ideas flow. The story starts to breathe. This is the place where you first start to weave a connection between the story world and the words. Third Draft Now we’re cooking! The characters have a voice and life on the pages. You disappear into the story while you write. Maybe at this stage it is good enough, but why stop there when you could go one level deeper? Fourth Draft You tweak for drama and page-turning emotion until the story consumes you. Then it’s ready.…
Where Art Thou Muse?
Snow Leopard by Midnight Butterfly aka Nara Malone Where out thou muse? It’s no wonder I have to ask. I buried you under busyness. Perhaps you’re behind the broken furnace there is no time to have repaired, or lurking between the boxes of promo items stacked by the door. Maybe you’re hiding in the suitcase, or burrowed into the nest of outfits stacked to pack. You could be sulking underneath the road map draped over the couch, or watching me from beneath the heap of manuscript pages that wait to be edited. You taunted me in my dreams last night, taking your favorite shape, a snow leopard’s body that blended…
Another solve for Romance Writer’s team
Kelly Jamieson and I have been dabbling with the Personal Effects: Dark Art ARG. The Gamer Geeks had a big head start on us and I don’t know how we managed to come out in front on this one. The clue was left on business cards distributed at the Game Developers Conference® in March. I never saw it until I visited the the Pixelvixen707 website yesterday afternoon. I cracked the code on the business card last night. I had a note in my email this morning that I was the first to get the answer. I really needed a solvable problem. Thanks Rachael and thanks to the Dark Art ARG…
