Sunday, October 09, 2005
Read Lydia's post at RTB.
Her post states the exact reasons why I'm going to write my historical romances the way I want them--angsty,funny,sprawling,exciting,violent,morbid,etc! I'm just here to write a damn good story, period. When a reader closes a romance they've really enjoyed, they really weren't looking for the Regency setting, or the virginal heroine, or the dashingly rakish hero and their sexual acrobatics--they were looking for a damn good romance that tugged their heartstrings and made them root for the protagonists to get together.
I'm writing fearless now because I've rubbed away the foggy exterior to see the interior of the romance genre. I think that a lot of people have forgotten the main goal of a romance because of the pressures everyone has unknowingly put on each other to perform: announcing each rejection, each acceptance letter, knowing the latest market news, sharing a new venue of getting published, and the mother of all good news--the first sale. I've withdrawn from the writing community somewhat because it seemed that writers ceased getting together to encourage and support each other as "co-workers" and instead began to gather to obsess over why one isn't published, what one is doing wrong, how Author X finally sold, why they've been overlooked, and so on and so on.
Geez louise, no wonder I was so stressed out from the summer of last year until the summer of this year. In the beginning I was content to sit at the feet of published authors, to devour every single morsel of "insider tips" they were content to toss to me, to spend hours on end trying to dig info on the publishing business, and other inane,time consuming activities. I was inspired by reading "How I finally sold" stories, but it's gets to the point where one is obsessing over trying to covertly emulate Author X and Co. and spends too much time worrying about what everyone else is doing, what everyone else is accomplishing instead of focusing on what I needed to do and what I needed to write.
It's hard to stand out. I'm going to be opening myself up to ridicule or subtle snubbings and painful separations from people I considered to be good acquaintances or even a friend of. Part of me wants to hide from that stark reality, to keep it at bay by remaining inside of the box, but the other part of me knows that I'd only end up hating myself, which in the end would also result in alienation from a myriad of situations and people. It's even risky to put this in print because it could be misconstrued in a multitude of ways. I just have to have faith in what I know I need to do, and that the chips will fall where they were meant to fall.
i can be. anything.
9.10.05
