Confessions of a RITA Judge

Did you watch the Oscars last night? So did I. And since I am simultaneously wrestling with an awards-judging process of my own, I found myself feeling unexpected sympathy for the much-maligned Academy.

Every year, there’s a certain amount of fist-shaking and eye rolling over Oscar nominations. Every year, someone is overlooked who totally should have been included. Every year, someone is nominated based on having been overlooked in the past. (“So-and-so should have been nominated last year, so let’s nominate them now even though their work this year was pretty mediocre.”)

Actually, of course, I have no idea how the nomination process works. But that’s how it seems.

And if you think people get passionate about the Oscars, you should see the brouhaha that goes on over Romance Writers of America’s annual RITA awards.

The RWA Board struggles mightily to be responsive to its large and fractious membership. So each year, the judging rules change, in an attempt to fix whatever people complained about the year before.

Which leads to a chaotic process — and even lousier, less fair nominations than the Oscars deliver.

Romance fiction is the 800-pound gorilla in the publishing world, much the way Hollywood is the 800-pound gorilla in the movie world. Of course there are other books being written and sold, just as there are movies being made elsewhere on Planet Earth. And romance novels, like Hollywood movies, receive their share of sneers — sneers from those who are jealous and sneers from those who are genuinely concerned about artistic quality. And actually, for many of the same reasons. Whenever an art form is really, really popular, commercial success is likely to occur. Once that happens, those who are making money seek to continue making money. And presto, the dreaded “cookie cutter” effect kicks in.

Nevertheless, the RITA is the most prestigious, most coveted award in genre fiction. Like the Oscars, the RITA represents the consensus of one’s peers. It bestows upon its recipient a heady illusion: you, gentle author, have written the best book of its kind among a huge field of contenders.

Have you? Have you really? Maybe. In the final analysis, who cares? You certainly wrote a good book. And now you have a wicked cool golden statuette to prove it.

But I would like to say, to the authors I am not allowed to contact — the ones whose books I am judging this year — you will probably not receive a nomination. At least two of you wrote fantastic books. I loved them. But I disqualified them.

And here is where the RITAs and the Oscars painfully diverge. The RITAs are intended to recognize romance novels. That’s the whole purpose of their existence. But they have become such coveted objects that lately — for the past two years, maybe longer — they attract authors who are not writing romance. I envy the Academy judges, who know, at a minimum, that they are judging a movie. We RITA judges are wrestling with the very definition of the art form.

The heroine of Book A has a boyfriend. This does not make Book A a romance.

The couple at the center of Book B face terrible dangers together. They seem quite devoted to each other, but the book is about facing terrible dangers, not the growth of a relationship. Book B is not a romance.

You’re killing me, people. Either stop writing great books that are not romances, or stop entering them in the RITA contest, I beg of you. Out there, somewhere, are romance authors whose books failed to get through the door because yours arrived first.

But thanks for the terrific reads.

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The Next Big Thing

I’ve been “tagged” in something called (I believe) a “blog hop.” I’m supposed to answer a few questions about the book I am currently working on, then “tag” the next author — who will post her answers to the same questions next Wednesday and tag someone else. And so on. It’s rather like the white elephant game many of you are playing at your office Christmas party, only without the gifts. Or the option to swap your white elephant with someone else’s if you get something you don’t want. Or the ability to sneak out and go home, or at least check your Facebook page, while everyone else is preoccupied. Or —

Okay, it’s nothing like the white elephant game. Forget it.

Anyway, these are the questions … and my answers.

What is the working title of your book?

It will be a two-word title and the last word will be “Cool.” The first book in the series is WICKED COOL. The second book is SCARY COOL. So this book, the third one, will be, um, “[something] Cool.” The “cools” I am toying with at the moment are WAY COOL, TOO COOL, and WAY PAST COOL. Oh, wait, that’s three words. But it fits better than the others. On the other hand, it’s kind of lame. What about HALF-PAST COOL? Nah, that stinks. Maybe I’ll just call the book BITE ME. Ha, ha! No, I’m not serious. For one thing, somebody’s probably already snagged that title for a vampire book. Hmm. So what is the working title of my book? Let’s go with TOO COOL. For now.   

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Actually, I don’t have “an” idea for the book at this stage. I have a bunch of ideas, and am choosing which to use and which to toss. Then I have to comb through the ideas I’m keeping and decide which are central and which are secondary. Then I must place them in order of what happens when. Right now, I don’t know what happens in the book. I can’t hazard even a guess as to what the book is about. Frankly, I have no business answering any questions about this book yet and I can’t believe I agreed to do this blog hop.

What genre does your book fall under?

Finally, an easy question! Thank you. Young adult paranormal romance.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I shall urge the director to cast whichever actors do the best job at the auditions.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

“A young man obsessed with death falls for an old woman obsessed with life.” Oh, sorry, that’s Harold & Maude. Crap. Guess I don’t have a synopsis yet.

Will your book be published, self-published or represented by an agency?

Yes.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I haven’t written a single word of it yet. But so far? Two months. And I only wish I were kidding.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

It reminds me a lot of WICKED COOL and SCARY COOL.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

The reviewers of SCARY COOL. So far, every reviewer has given it five stars. And every last one of ‘em seems to expect a “next book in the series.” It’s hard to withstand that sort of pressure, folks.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

If I knew the answer to that, believe me, I would tell you. You and everyone else in the English-speaking world.

Now for the good part: the tag for next week’s edition of  “The Next Big Thing!” I proudly refer you to Kate Rothwell, who also writes as Summer Devon. Her blog is here, and it’s great fun to read. So are some of her books. I can’t say ALL of her books, because I haven’t read them all — yet. She’s awfully prolific. And by “awfully” I mean I am in awe of her. So “awfully” in the nicest possible sense of the word.

Back-Burner Books

It’s definitely different to be an “indie” author. When I finish a book I must choose what to work on next. Choose! What a concept.

Perhaps that doesn’t sound momentous to most people, but trust me, it’s momentous. There is no one in New York telling me that I must deliver, say, a 75,000-word romance set in Regency England by such-and-such a date.  It’s liberating, naturally, but it’s also unsettling to find myself drifting, directionless — and having to make decisions that will affect the next couple of years of my life without the input of a team of interested experts.

Like most authors, I have a number of books knocking around in my brain, clamoring to be written. There’s Book 3 of my unfinished “star” trilogy, for example. Also a sweeping historical saga with lots of “sturm & drang” that my agent had me put together years ago— back in the days when we were trying to move me into, well, sweeping historical sagas with lots of sturm & drang. There’s a Christmas Regency that could be lots of fun, featuring two characters I love so much that I want to spread them out over four books and let everybody around them fall in love and marry off, one after the other, until FINALLY Gavin and Felicity get their happy ending in book 4. There’s at least one novella, which I’m drawn to as possibly easier to finish quickly and get out there. And then there’s the third book in my YA paranormal series, The Spellspinners.

So how to choose?

To my (mild) surprise, I find that a lot of my considerations are the same ones that a publisher would have. For example: Which, of all the possible books I could write, is the one most likely to find an audience? The difficulty with putting this consideration at the top of the list, of course, is that the question is unanswerable. Nobody knows what will sell. And the fact that publishers pretend to know, when in fact their guesses are wrong more often than they are right, has driven authors nuts for decades. So it’s ironic, to say the least, that I find this particular question pressing on me so—now that my fate is in my own hands!

I would love to write a Regency again. What’s stopping me? That darn YA series I foolishly started. Because it’s contemporary. Since the Regencies are set in the past (duh), they can be written any time. A book set in the here & now must be written in the here & now. Otherwise you end up with a Sue Grafton problem. She’s the brilliant author of those Kinsey Millhone “alphabet” mysteries, which started out contemporary but have gradually slid into the past … since Sue can’t write as quickly as Kinsey’s adventures happen. Now she’s stuck writing mysteries set in the 1980’s, and it’s not the 1980’s anymore, and it’s more and more difficult to remember exactly how life really was in the 1980’s (what was playing on the radio that year? Did everybody have a microwave oven or not? etc.). Sue Grafton’s writing historicals now, and I don’t think she intended that when she started out.

I had hoped that Scary Cool would be the end of the series, or at least this portion of the series, but alas, all the reviews seem to be expecting another book. Okay, I guess I did leave a few balls in the air at the end of Scary Cool. So Book 3 must be written. And it must be written next. Leaving all my Regencies still simmering away on the back burner. :sigh:

Fortunately, these Spellspinner books are a lot of fun to write.

The Natural-Born Writer (and other myths)

Saw this via a post on Patrick Ross’s blog: Want to be a writer? Have a literary parent – Science – News – The Independent. Apparently some researchers in Britain have unearthed, through a complicated study, evidence of a “writing gene.” And they support their theory by noting the existence of “writing families” — the Bronte sisters, for example.

I think I agree with Stephen King. Yes, writers have a gift. If you don’t have it to begin with, no amount of training or education can give it to you. In that sense, writers are born, not made. But a gift for writing is not a particularly unusual gift. Lots of people have the knack. So what turns a possible-writer into a writer?

The indispensable trait in a writer is that you begin as a reader — a voracious reader. I have a strong suspicion that “writing families” are, in fact, reading families. Clearly, if there are writers in the family — and especially if the writers happen to be your parents — you are going to grow up in a household where books are revered, reading is taken for granted as a primary source of information and entertainment, and any writing you attempt is both encouraged and intelligently critiqued. The “writing seed” will fall on fertile soil.

I did not discover until several decades into my life that there are people — indeed, entire families — who frown on reading as a waste of time, call magazines and catalogs “books” (evidently discerning no difference between TV Guide and War and Peace), and equate a love of literature with snobbery. These people have a point — although it took me years to see it. I have spent a large portion of my life oblivious to my surroundings, for example. Would my childhood have been better spent in the “real” world – doing chores and riding bicycles, for example, instead of sitting motionless with my nose in the Chronicles of Narnia or Girl of the Limberlost? Because it wasn’t all great literature that kept me from my chores, you know. Sometimes it was Trixie Belden and Cherry Ames, Student Nurse. When you come from a family where reading is sacrosanct, whatever you are reading is, ipso facto, more important than fresh air, exercise or an uncluttered closet.

I’m guessing that Charlotte Bronte was excused from embroidery and piano lessons when she was writing or reading. I bet the Waughs lived in a dusty house and ate a lot of sandwiches. Mark my words, that “creativity gene” theory is going to be debunked. It ain’t nature — at least, not the lion’s share of it. It’s nurture!

Lazy Days in Kihei

Last week I experienced the Polynesian Paradox: A complete inability to work, or even to think about working, coupled with an absolute conviction that if I could only remain in that oceanfront condo for a month … or two, or three … I would be so inspired, so filled with creativity, so utterly open to the muse, that I would whip out a novel in record time.

And wouldn’t I just love to test that theory. :sigh:

R&M Fab Book Reviews: Spotlight: Diane Farr, The Spellspinners Series!!!

R&M Fab Book Reviews: Spotlight: Diane Farr, The Spellspinners Series!!!.

I had to share this. Had to.

My Smashwords Smooch

Gotta share this: Smashwords.

:blush:

Smashwords’ founder, Mark Coker, featured me … sort of … in the Smashwords blog!

More than Shoes

I wanted so badly to come back from RWA and confirm for you that yes, it was all about the shoes.

But no. Incredibly, it was about far more than shoes. And if I show you some of the shoes I’m talking about, you will understand how awesome this conference truly must have been:

Pretty freaking awesome.

I am still reeling from sensory overload, so forgive me if I’m a bit incoherent. I learned so much that I’m still struggling to process it all. Two of the biggest takeaways: (1) Publishing is changing – radically, and rapidly. (2) Storytelling is not.

It’s a great time to be a writer. It’s not such a great time to be a publisher. Nobody wants publishers to die, but they are thrashing and gasping like fish in a basket. It’s gruesome to behold. Kinda tugs at the old heartstrings, too. They are still the best at what they do, and everybody loves what they do. But they are no longer essential. They are “extra.” They are the frosting on your career’s cake, but they are no longer the cake.

So while we are all chewing on that mouthful, let me tell you what else I learned.

Blogging: I’m doing it wrong. Very few people care what happened at the Romance Writers of America 2012 National Conference. Those who care, care intensely, but never mind that. I simply must stop jabbering on and on about writerly stuff. :gasp!: :sob!: This is going to be a hard habit to break, so only time will tell how far I get with this one-!

Facebook: I’m doing it wrong. Okay, this really hurts. I thought I knew Facebook. But my knowledge extends only to being a person, not being a page. I gotta tackle that page from a new angle. (In my spare time.) This could get ugly. I bet it takes me a while to hit my stride, because I have no clue how to accomplish this — but it sounds like a really good idea: “Make your page a fun place to hang out.” Ohhhh-kaaaay.

I learned a lot of other stuff too, but it’s all writerly stuff. So I can feel my workshop leaders tugging on my sleeve and whispering, “Wrap it up! Quick!”

I’d better take their advice. Wouldn’t want to spend all that time & money at RWA for nothing.

One last thought: Every time I plan to go to this conference, I fret about the expense. I think, “Do I really want to go?? How badly do I want to go? Is it really worth all that @#^%$!! money?”

So far, when I have decided to go, I have never regretted it. Never. It’s just SO much more than shoes.

Okay, Now I’m Nervous

Apparently it’s not possible to sail into RWA’s national conference without a care in the world. I keep trying to tell myself I’m really in the “sweet spot” this year, there’s nothing to worry about, it’s all good, it’s going to be a blast, et cetera. No good. I’m nervous.

Perhaps the nerves are contagious. I’ve been following the #RWA12 hashtag on Twitter and all the chatter about shoes may be getting to me. I am reflexively worrying about shoes now. Weighing the risks and rewards of fashion vs. comfort.  Poring over hotel maps and mentally calculating the probable distance between point A and point B. Is the comfortable pair too shabby? Does the “nice” pair have insufficient arch support? Must I rush to the shoe store and replace every pair presently nestled in my suitcase?

This is nuts. I have no one to impress this year – and if I did, would footwear be the best way to go? (“Wow, look at those strappy sandals and perfect pedicure. I bet that woman can really write.”)

I think I need to get off Twitter and get a grip.

Seriously, this is going to be a GREAT conference. I am thrilled by the workshop offerings, the setting, the weather forecast, and the fact that for the first time ever, I am going to be in a room of my own. (I may go back to the utter-strangers-as-roommates situation for future conferences, however — maybe the summer camp/slumber party vibe is part of the conference’s charm. I may be missing out, rolling in solitary luxury. Or not.)

I’ll be posting pictures and videos over on my Facebook page, probably starting Wednesday night. So if you like to live vicariously — or if you’re just curious — stop on by!

How to Jinx a Writers’ Conference

I am really looking forward to the Romance Writers of America conference in Anaheim. I mean, I am REALLY looking forward to it. Is that a Bad Sign? Should I temper my excitement by reminding myself of, say, that Mexican Riviera cruise — which I was confident would be a dream vacation … until Day Two, when the Norovirus hit?

Maybe there’s no such thing as a jinx, but I am typing this with my fingers crossed. Just in case. Because if I manage not to jinx it, this RWA conference is going to be fantastic. FANTASTIC! There; I’ve said it.

I’ve attended quite a few, over the years, and they have all been great. But I’ve never been in quite this position before: making money from my books without being beholden to a publisher. I have no editor. I have no agent. I am not up for any awards. In other words, I am feeling no performance anxiety of any kind. I have no meetings set up. No conversations to anticipate, fret about, and mentally rehearse. No acceptance speech to write. No “graceful loser” smile to practice. No tricky etiquette questions to mull (“Which of us is supposed to pay for this lunch? After all, she invited me – but I chose the restaurant. And she’s my editor/agent/reviewer/chapter president …so does that tip the balance? And if so, in which direction?”). For the first time in my career, I will be free as the proverbial bird.

And, as if my enviable position above the fray weren’t blissful enough, I also have a book contract with NAL (or Signet, or Intermix, or whatever it is calling itself these days) — a bona fide subsidiary of Penguin Putnam. An actual “Big Six” New York publisher. Ha! Yes, I am hugging myself. Forgive me. It’s just too, too perfect. Because the contract is just for an e-release of one of my old titles — so it’s really no big deal, right? But a contract is a contract is a contract — so I am officially a Contracted Author. With a book coming out in August. Which means that, unlike most of the other self-pubbing authors, I get to attend the Signet/Berkley/NAL party on Friday night.

If you’ve never been to an RWA conference, you are going to have to trust me on this. Friday night is the night when all the publishing houses host parties for their authors. And you do not want to be left in the lobby with the wannabes, pressing your nose against the glass and watching as all the published authors are swept off in limos to glamorous destinations that you can only dream of. (Okay, there aren’t always limos and it’s not usually that thrilling of a destination — in fact, often the parties are just receptions held on the conference hotel premises — but that doesn’t matter; being in with the in crowd feels great, and being left out hurts. That’s just human.)

So. I go to the conference needing nothing from anyone, expecting nothing, able to enjoy every minute to the full without the usual high-adrenaline plague of nerves. And yet I get to attend the party. How perfect is this?!

Too perfect. Excuse me while I go throw some salt over my left shoulder.