My Writing Process Blog Hop

by Susan Ward

My Writing Process is an ongoing blog hop where a writer answers four basic questions about their writing process and then is asked to pass the baton to two more authors. I was invited by Tricia Sankey. Please visit her page and discover a fresh new voice at  http://milspouseprose.com/

My Writing Process in 4 Answers

What am I working on?

This year is a crazy busy year for me. After writing romance novels for 25 years and completing 26 books, I’ve decided to release all 26 within 24 months. I’ve just released the first two, The Girl on the Half Shell and The Signature. The Girl on the Half Shell is the first book in the 4 book Half Shell Series, about rich girls from California trying to find their way in the 1980s and 1990s. The Signature is a contemporary romance novel that is appropriate for all steam levels of romance readers. It’s the story of a singer turned fugitive ex-wife charged with kidnapping, her superstar boyfriend who wants to bring her back home, and a reporter sent to deliver the message. It’s fun romance and part of my Perfect Forever Collection. There are 5 books in the Perfect forever collection, they are standalone novels, but there is a twist. They play into the plotlines of my 3 series-Half Shell, Sand and Fog, and Spruce and Ebony. My next release will be in September 2014, with the first of the Deverells, When the Perfect Comes, a historical romance series set during the War of 1812.

In addition to working on the edits and uploads of my completed work, I am finishing the Half Shell Series. Book 2, The Girl of Tokens and Tears will be released in December 2014. Book 3, The Girl of Diamonds and Rust, will be released May 2015. Book 4, The Girl in the Comfortable Quiet, will be released December 2015.

I’m also working to complete my first novella, something from the world of erotic romance, and finalizing the first book in the Sand and Fog Series.

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

Me: the voice of the writer bringing you the story. Each writer’s voice is unique, their history and their life experience are unique. We all put pieces of ourselves into each of our characters and our individual writer DNA, so to speak, in there in how we move our plot lines and the choices our characters make.

 The Perfect Forever Collection is more in the traditional model of the romance novel. My first person Half Shell Series is not. I took the best parts of the romance novel model, kept them, and basically smashed everything else. Self-publishing gives me the freedom to do that: to write books that push the envelope, that are outside of the box, and full of twists and elements that readers don’t expect.

I love it when I get notes from my readers telling me that they love my books, but they got so angry with my characters for doing X because they totally didn’t expect them to behave that way. I kept the best parts of the romance novel model and then broke the rest.

Why do I write what I do? 

I’ve been writing romance novels since I slapped shut the covers of Gone with the Wind at the age of ten. I fell in love with the love story that day, and then I found a Kathleen Woodiwiss book and fell in love with the romance novel. I devour books. I read all night. I love following the journey of love tucked between the covers of a great romance novel. Writing is the natural companion process to the love of the written word. And I can’t think of anything more challenging, more fulfilling, providing more enjoyment to readers than to write romance novels. People who read romance novels are loyal and selective fans. They put a very high bar up for a writer to try to achieve. It is a challenge, and I do love a challenge.

Romance novels are a more sophisticated form of writing than people give them credit for. A good novelist has to tap into the emotions, the femaleness (or maleness since a lot more men are reading romance), the heartaches we all have experienced and the joy of love, breathe it into a living form so that the reader can connect with the journey you are taking them on. It’s an awesome job and an amazing feeling when someone tells you that you’ve done that for them!

How does my writing process work?

It would be nice to say I have a process, but for all that I am a very structured person, I don’t have a process when I write. I am writing 24/7 whether I’m at the computer or not. I make notes of every random snippet that flows through my head: pieces of dialogue, sometimes just a sentence, sometimes something I’ve seen or heard that I think might work into a character later, and I’ll dump them into my open notes log on my computer, but if I’m out of the house I’ll write on a paper napkin, pretty much anything, if I have to. I am a pile of teeny, tiny little scraps of paper, holding thoughts from throughout the day waiting for me to get to them.

Then, the stories and the characters come, and I put them on paper. I don’t do any of the traditional things. I don’t make an outline or a character workup. It wouldn’t work with my characters. They are going to do what they want to do in spite of me! So, I write the first page and the last page of each novel first, and, more often than not, I jump into the middle to start my work on a new book.

I do have writing rituals, though. My writing ritual these days is I have to put on my leopard PJ bottoms and my Ohio State t-shirt (Go Buckeyes! That’s a shout out for my daughter who graduated in August and I’m still proudly wearing the shirt I wore to the ceremony),  and force myself not to look out my windows at the sunny Santa Barbara days until I’ve put at least 1000 words on paper.

And always, my Cheshire cat coffee mug sitting on my desk!

So, those are my secrets…but I forgot the most important one: write what you love, love what you write, and be good to yourself because just being willing to share your work is success! Next, I hereby pass the baton to these accomplished writers:

HarperCollins Author Nic Tatano, he states: I'm a HarperCollins rom-com author who moonlights as a network TV news producer, but I enjoy fiction more because I don't have to deal with those pesky things called "facts." Alas, my TV experience has come in handy for my latest book "It Girl" which has been serialized into episodes much like a television show, complete with recaps and coming attractions. Episode one is free with the entire novel being released on June 26th. All my books are set in the world of TV news and every heroine is a spunky redhead.

I grew up in the New York City area and now live on the Gulf Coast where, as God is my witness, I will never shovel snow again. I'm married to a math teacher and we share a wonderful home with our cat Gypsy. thechannelingauthor.blogspot.com

And to…

Terri Lyndie, Author of Wolf Eye Sly http://www.terrilyndie.com.  Terri graduated from Central Michigan University with a Bachelor's degree in Psychology and worked as a social worker for Michigan's Department of Human Services. She writes romantic stories with humorous plot twists. Her debut novel is set at a lighthouse on the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. When Ms. Lyndie is not writing she is seldom seen without her Nikon.

This is the part of my life I call: living in silence...I haven't written so much as a sentence in over a week. The characters inside my head must be sleeping. But jeez, guys, can't we get our timing synchronized?

I'm trapped in Sacramento for awhile and it's like a gazillion degrees out. OK, not that hot. Only going to be about 100 today, but anything over ninety is a me indoors with air conditioning type day!  I only move from air conditioned to air conditioned space when it's over a hundred. My husband is out there on a jaunt with the darn dog who tossed me a look like lady save me, it's hot today! I have nothing to do today but write, but the characters inside my head are sleeping.

But I know when Monday rolls around and everyone is competing for my time, the characters inside my head will wake up. Of course, they've slept all weekend... me? I've stared at a blank page all weekend. Thankfully, indoors with air conditioning.

The Girl on the Half Shell

The Signature

Joan Baez never explained that. Never how she applied that term to herself.  If you do a Google search on the term "Girl on the Half Shell" you come up with two definitions. (1) A virgin: girl crossing over from innocence into womanhood. (2) raw and ready to be devoured.

Actually there are two more definitions: (3) It's slang for a rich girl. (4) Or getting the best of everything, but only in halves, never complete.

So what does it mean to you, Susan? What does it mean for this book? Actually, all the definitions apply to Chrissie. The late 80s and the 90s were a unique period of time to be a young woman. In someways, the women of this generation exemplify the paradox often created during a transitional period in history. It makes my poor little girl on the shell frustrating at times. I got a review yesterday where the reader said, she wanted to slap Chrissie and at times her reaction to things where 'What the?'

I didn't force Chrissie to be anything other than she was: a damaged, struggling, virgin crossing into womanhood, and trying to find her way in an often misunderstood difficult period for female identity in the US.  She doesn't always behave how we want her to. Her reactions to life are unpredictable. Her feelings at times aggravating. And she is often, her own worst enemy.

Having raised a herd of girls, I can tell you I've not met an 18 year old girl not like that. We rarely were ever arguing on the surface about what they were really upset about. From time to time, yes I wanted to slap my girls. Didn't do it, but heck they were frustrating. And how they view themselves and the world, and how I viewed them and their world were rarely consistent.

It was a tough decision not to tie Chrissie up in a neat formula bow that readers would like and easily identify with. It's left me with either readers who love her or readers who want to slap her. But I guess that's the point of her. She is, after all, The Girl on the Half Shell. She has a long journey ahead, through a critical period in female history.

That's what the Half Shell series is about. She's my favorite girl, because she is messy and raw, and a character I think a lot of readers may identify with because I didn't tie her up nicely in a bow of hearts and flowers. And she brings context to my next generation of girls, The Sand and Fog Series, which starts with her daughter in 2012. I have to say, I love writing the girls of the new millennium. The generation that follows Chrissie, well, these girls are so different. These girls are so amazing, and whenever I write about my Girl of Sand and Fog I often think...you've come a long way baby. This generation of women changed the world, without anyone seeing it.

But to understand them, you really have start at the beginning with the girls of the Half Shell Series.

Women love you!   I was reading the blog of my gal pal Rachel Blaufeld(Electrified) and she was talking about how people ask her what her husband thinks about her books. Jeez, she's a young woman. How non-new-millennium 'what does your husband think?' No one ever asks me that, maybe because I'm older or maybe because I have that look about me that women get as they age and have raised children that says 'my husband thinks what I tell him to think'. 

Not really! We're really  very new-millennium: I do what I want, he does what he wants( for the most part), we're best friends and equal voting partners. I started to release my books and told him after I did it. He hopped jobs into new location in So Cal and told me the day he did it. And everything is all good because we've been together too long to fight anything out and we really like each other, which is as important as really loving each other.

That's not to say that writing romance and the male personality are not a tough mix at times. My husband hasn't read any of my books. Not even The Girl on the Half Shell, though I am pleased about that. I did lift a few of my husbands best lines for Alan. Heck, they worked on me! So it was all good, until I shared an email with my husband from a reader and he saw one of his favorite phrases in it. His go to phrase when I'm being a very difficult queen of the universe, that one that always makes me smile and defuses the situation to the point where I laugh and all is good again.

He wasn't very pleased I used it for my character Alan. But then I told him, you are the best parts of all the heroes I write.
Honey, women love you!

Ok, don't send me bad mommy letters about  how terrible it is to be in competition with your kids. They're grown, they survived me and they are wonderful, and competition is unavoidable raising a house of girls! It just happens. They compete with each other over everything and somehow have sucked me into it. I think that happened the year we all wore the same size shirt and shoes and every morning getting dressed was an all out war--that's my shirt, those are my shoes, hey did you take that from my closet, I don't care if it looks better on you!

They are so competitive that when I shop, I can't just buy something for one. In Paris, I had to buy a stack of Luis V just not to feel badly about buying something for me, and then I had to double check and make sure there was something in the pile for the daughters not with me. Don't want to get sucked into the: You're mom's favorite argument. It doesn't work correctly in my house. The one they accuse of being my fave is suppose to modestly say, no it's not me, it's you! But she doesn't. To add gasoline to the wars she says: I know! Thanks a lot, bug, for making mom's life more difficult!

So, in typical Ward family fashion,  I started my Facebook page with the release of my first book, and a couple days later my daughter started one for her Vegan Cooking Recipes... and since then she's been kicking my butt with "Likes" and the competition is on. Now I know I won't ever keep up with them: they are faster, younger, smarter, more tech savvy, and incredible girls.

But the competition is good. Trying to keep up with them, keeps me young, forces me to learn new things, and every once in a while they take pity on Mom and slow down before they speed back up and leave me in the dust.

Though I am confused. Really? I'm getting my butt kicked by a Vegan Recipe Page? I write sex and love and heartache.  I've had some great vegan food with my girl, but heck, it can't compete with love or chocolate!

So I'm working on my answers for my Blog Hop June 30th and one of the questions is: Describe your writing process? How do you explain to someone that there is no process. That it's just insanity.  I'm like that Kurt Cobain song, " I'm so happy because today I found my friends inside my head." Really, that's what it's been to my entire life. It decides to visit me. I don't look for it. And I write it down because...well, it makes room for new friends.

I once wrote the first three chapters of a book on those tiny little notepads you get in hotels, while I was traveling on a business trip. The best dialogue comes to me when I'm doing something else. For thirty years my kids have thought I talk to myself. No, it's not me. It's them. My friends inside my head.

And I drift off into space and end  up with story lines. I can't tell you how many times I've shifted my gaze to find husband watching me with a strange look in his eyes. What?! You have the oddest look on your face, Susan, what are you thinking. And my personal favorite is when my kids shout at me, "MOM YOU'RE NOT LISTENING." Sorry little bugs, the friends in my head are louder than you girls, if you can believe that!

I write because I have to. I can't make it go away. How do you explain that?

I have this theory: every romance writer, I don't care the steam level of their preferred writing choice, should write a clean romance once. It's the most difficult form of romance there is to write! I'm always amused when I run across someone who makes fun of clean romance, diminishes the value of being able to create love in a lyrical sense rather than the graphic. Think about it: you have to create moving and emotion charged sex scenes without writing about sex. You can't take short-cuts and use the P or the E or the F or the C word to get your point across(no pun intended).  You share how love should feel rather than show how they are using their bodies. And ultimately, you have to paint a thorough enough portrait that the reader gets an enjoyable dose of the passion in the romance of your characters that they can identify it with a feeling or need within themselves. This is not an easy task, when you have to think of endless substitutes for the correct words for human anatomy and suggest a position without letting your H say, "Yo babe, get your knees on the edge of the bed!"

If you can create as an author beautiful love scenes in the clean romance spirit, I have a firm belief that if you write romance with high heat levels and, I would say The Girl on the Half Shell qualifies as high heat level, then those scenes will be all the better, all the more emotion stirring because you've taken time to learn the discipline required to make a good sex scene a total experience for your characters on the page and your readers.

To write about sex to simply write about the sex act is easy. To write about sex without ever writing about sex is an art.

Seriously, a lot of it was from like 2 years ago. That isn't a flashback. A flashback is coming downstairs and finding your 20 year old daughter wearing Elvis Costello glasses and telling you that the 80s were cool. So, for my sweet girl who loves the 80s I started The Girl on the Half Shell series in the 80s. So here are a few FLASHBACKS:

1. When high-top Reeboks in pink or white were the rage and you wore them with everything!
2. Leg warmers--don't need to say anything else
3. When a red Celica was a cool car and you were lucky if you got one at graduation(Thanks Daddy!)
4. When the quarter pounder from McDonald's came in Styrofoam and you didn't think about the calories or the environment!
5. When Joe Jackson was hot--pretty women walking down the street with Gorillas at their side!
6. When every gym played Elvis Costello's Pump it Up during Aerobics and Jane Fonda was the queen of fitness--yep my girls remember those tapes from when they were in elementary school.
7. When basketball was all about the Lakers and the Celtics
8. When I didn't even know what immigration status was. Like seriously, I never even heard the term until Reagan's amnesty deal in the late 80s.
9. Dancing in a club to the B52's Private Idaho and thinking it would be cool to dress like those chicks.
10. When our only enemy was the Russians
11. The Soviet Union...Jeez,  now there is like a gazillion countries. The map is so complex and confusing!
12. Waiting in line all night to see Jaws 3d and thinking, wow, that was great technology.
13. When the portable computer was the IBM desktop because it was "luggable."
14. The floppy disk
15. It was more common to pay with cash rather than a credit card. Seriously, you had to carry cash because fastfood and a lot of places didn't take credit cards.
16. When the 60s were the flashback that was cool. Yep, I went to Toga Parties and listened to Dylan.
17. The side ponytail on the top of your head...if you are under 30 don't be mad if your mom did it to you in the 90s, she did it to herself first!
18. Billy Idol...White Wedding
19. Crossing the borders into Canada and Mexico without identification
20. smoking in bars and on airplanes! And no one thinking it was wrong!

The great thing about being an Indie author(The Girl on the Half Shell) is I get turned on to some really great Indie books I wouldn't know about any other way than word of mouth. So once a month I'm going to share my favorites. Here are the rules about my reviews:
1. I only review work I paid to read
2. I only share reviews for books I liked
3. I only post my 5 STAR reviews because I want to help others find the best that's in indie world!

So Here are my June Indie Books of the month. If you want to end up on my Sunday morning blog review next month, drop me an email. I still have 25 books to read for my 2014 reading challenge and 2014 is all about Indie Authors!

Loved this book. If you are looking for something fun and a good afternoon turning pages and laughing, Wolf Eye Sly is the book for you!

5 STARS: This is an absolutely delightful read. A bit of suspense, a bit of mystery, a bit of crazy small town folks, and delicious fun loving romance! The author has a wonderful writing style, that pays attention to subtle detail and savors the humor of life and love. I laughed pretty much through most of it. The eccentric characters in the city... I do know people like them. And James, James, James...what can I say. How about yummy? A wicked secretary, hooligans hunting for buried treasure, being imprisoned in a shed, and one missed wedding can't derail true love or the happily ever after. Somehow I get the feeling that in the next book things will not go so smoothly for Annie and James, and that is when the fun will begin.

I read this book cover to cover. The author had me at "a trip down nightmare lane" when Annie crosses paths those wonderful folks from high school. Exactly something I would think. Just loved it.

This is a different kind of read. Electrified is one of the novels where you get to sink your teeth in and understand the characters.

5 STARS:This book is a skillful blending of genres and a marvelous read. It is beautifully constructed: part detective novel/ part suspense/ and definitely part romance. It is a thoughtful, thorough, exceptionally well written study of the blend of personal history, life choices, our own frailties and how our need to survive can create a very different image in how the world see us. At its core it proves that even people damaged, unable to trust and protective cannot escape either sexual attraction or the most basic need to love and be loved. And there is plenty of sexual attraction between Sienna and Carson right from the start.

At the center of this story is Sienna, a masterfully constructed character with many layers. Blaufeld manages the daunting task of creating a woman of such contradictory parts until her unique fabric is logical in every way. Innocence can exist in absolute cruel circumstance.

Unusually introspective, this book is a full meal from beginning to end. A beautiful journey through the maze of human psychology, trauma, survival and love. The sex scenes are both tender and steamy and an intricate expression of who the characters are.

And somehow after the end of an intense journey, full of unexpected plot twist[I hate Eldon] it ends with the perfect happily every after.

A marvelous read I highly recommend.

This book is a classic romance tale and naughty, naughty naughty. Moondance in Red is a great read if you want a lot of steam with your love story.

5 STARS: This is not your average romance novel. It is so much more. I read it in one day because I had to know what happened to Maggie! The writer has a beautiful narrative voice, expresses the things we all think and don't admit, and a beautiful descriptive writing style.

Maggie may have been kicked by marriage, but this girl ain't down. She is spunky, independent, and definitely knows what she wants. Still, as feisty as she is, she's got to navigate through the brutal betrayal/disappointment of her first husband in order to fall in love with Mason. The author balances this tough journey wonderfully.

Authentic, spunky, and a thoroughly enjoyable read. If you want to walk the like between the classic romance style[and there are plenty of plot twists to make it unique]with thorough story, character and plot with absolutely wonderful descriptive style, and being just naughty enough; This will be a very satisfying read. Just one note: ok, really naughty but really well done sex scenes.