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Thinking about dreaming

The past few weeks I’ve been having a lot of stress dreams. Most likely because I am waiting for a lot of things to happen and they don’t happen for a while. Actually quite a few should be resolved this week so the dreams are getting more frequent and intense.

Fortunately, I’m one of those lucky people who has lucid dreams. Wikipedia makes it sound ubber cool and existential really it just means my dreams are extremely vivid, I remember them very well, and at some point in the dream I realize “hey this is a dream and I’m in control I can do ANYTHING I want because it’s not real and I am in control.”

So I do.

I take over my dream and make everyone and everything in it what I want. My mind wraps around the dream the minute I become aware of the fact that I’m dreaming and takes over.

But I have to be careful, sometimes if I realize I’m dreaming my body will throw me out of sleep and wake me up – which is a pain because it throws me right out of REM and I’m always tired the next day if that happens. Except, it ends the dream which is nice, there is one dream in particular I always wake myself up from, the driving stress dream. I hate that dream.  I am trying to drive from the wrong seat, either the passengers seat or the back seat, and one of my kids is in the car with me. I shiver just thinking about it.

Here’s the thing, I like being a lucid dreamer. It’s fun. I never know where my dreams are going to take me and even when my mind takes over sometimes my brain comes up with scenarios I would never imagine in reality.

That’s also where some of my  story ideas come from. Cat’s Revealing started as a lucid dream. I ended up changing a lot of details but the seed of the story started as a lucid dream.

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Follow Friday – The Smart Bitches

Yeah, I know, I’ve been MIA the past few days and I haven’t done a FF in weeks then I show up with a blog title like this.

What can I say, that life sometimes.

So why follow Smart Bitches, Trashy Books… oh so many reasons.

First off, their funny.

They tell it like it is. Ever looked at the cover of a novel and thought uhm what the… . Yup… so have they. Want to know who won, check it out here.

They follow the romance market in the business world and keep their readers informed, but keep it at a level that is understandable. I personally have never picked up Bloomberg Business Week or any other business publication. But thankfully, the Smart Bitches are paying attention, and I am paying attention to them.

They are also helpful, with frequent book reviews and their HABO (Help A Bitch Out) posts that help people track down books they read a long time ago and can’t remember the title and author of. I’m amazed how quickly their Blog readers come up with the title and author based on snippets of plot from a book, some of which were published 20 years ago.

I have to say reading the site has helped me learn a lot of what NOT to write in my romance novels. What people don’t want to read and what doesn’t work.  Reading some of the snippets of plots and some of the comments people make about certain phases I find myself thinking – are my plots that contrived? Do I use language that flowery and metaphors that are craptastic? I like Smart Bitches because it makes me think.

Mostly I enjoy the site because at heart I am a fan of the genre. I like romance and they handle the topic with a mixture of honesty and humor. I think the people writing for this Blog are intelligent, savvy and creative individuals who know the romance market and do a great job sharing their knowledge with an edge of wit.

So today my Follow Friday goes to the Smart Bitches.  Check them out at their blog, or follow them on Twitter @SmartBitches

Happy Friday everyone.

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One fourth of the way to enough

When I started the query process for Red and Grey I set a number.  It was the “enough is enough” number. In other words, this is where I draw the line and call it quits number.

Because, at some point a person has to realize that the manuscript they are pitching is not going to sell. I didn’t want to become one of those people who became blinded, tied to my project, and unable to move forward. Locked in a cycle they were unable to escape and chained to a manuscript that was long dead. So I needed to give myself an end date.

It wasn’t about giving up so much as about moving forward. Realizing this wasn’t the right project and choosing to keep making progress.

The number I set with the approval of my best friend and my husband was 100 rejections.

Today I received my 25th.

The rejections have varied greatly.

I’ve gotten:

- form rejections

- very kind personal rejections

- requests for pages that turned into rejections

So, it’s all good. But today I realized I was a fourth of the way to my “enough” number. 

How do I feel about this? 

My emotions are mixed to be honest. I’m proud of myself for having gotten this far, and not being ready to quit. I’m disappointed by my growing pile of rejections. At the same time, I know that one day when I’m published, I’ll be able to encourage some other aspiring writer(s) with my binder full of researched agents with notes about when I sent queries and when I received rejection. (The binder is beautifully decorated by my five and seven year old by the way.)

Finally, I’m excited.

Why, two reasons – first because in the midst of sending those 25 queries for Red and Grey I haven’t just sat around and waited to see what happens. I revised and submitted a short story to a magazine and I rewrote a novel and submitted it to a publisher. (The short story was rejected, but I’m still waiting for the verdict on the novel, keep your fingers crossed.)

The second reason – I still have 75 queries to submit – and that’s 75 chances for someone to say yes they want to read Red and Grey and with luck represent it.

Will I still stop when I reach 100, even though I have proved to myself I will keep pursuing other avenues and new stories? In all honesty, I don’t know.

I love Red and Grey (the character’s not the novel). I would hate to see them relegated to living under my bed (figuratively speaking) but I might let them sit for a while and come back to revisit them in a year or two after I have 100 rejections under my belt.

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“Just had that”

Nope, it’s not an expression, it’s how I remember the three words I most overuse and have to search and destroy when I finish writing.

In fact this is my fist line of revisions after I finish a story and do the initial read through for typos. I go to the Find/Replace feature in Word and start with “just” and work through the document starting at page one and eliminate all non essential uses of the word. Which, to be honest, is pretty much all of them.

Then I do “had” and then “that”.

Most times when I use these words they are unnecessary, so why do I use them? I have no idea. But I seem to be fond of them. It’s incredible helpful to do a hunt for them, especially when I’m on a word count limit and need to cut words. I love to see my word count go down by cutting unneeded uses of these words.

In fact as an exercise I wrote this entire blog post without using the words “just had that” except where they were encased in quotes. (As I read through it I ended up cutting a “that” and a “just” from this tiny little blog post how sad am I? )

I hope by eliminating these words it makes my writing tighter and flow better.

My phrase might grow with time as I  learn more of my problem words and start eliminating them from my writing.

What are your problem words? What do you hunt for and eliminate from your writing?

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Thinking of Summer Reading

or as they are often referred to Beach Reads.

I know what books I took on vacation, you can see my list here.  I didn’t make it through the whole list I finished Three Days till Dead and On the Edge. I’m currently working on Doppelganger and enjoying it when I can steal a few minutes to read it.

Out of curiosity where do you go to get your summer reading ideas. 

One of them is Flashlight Worthy books that just put out a whole list devoted to Beach Reads.

Another idea is to check out the blogs and websites of authors you enjoy and see what they are reading. What are your thoughts, feel free to share in the comments?

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