Wonderful post! So insightful and well-put. In the future, instead of trying to explain my motivations for writing difficult and/or unlikable heroines, I’m just going to link here.

Plenty of people out there are loved and they do not deserve to be. And plenty of people who deserve to be loved, aren’t.

This. This, exactly. And to add to it, the amazing, wonderful thing about love is that true love sees flaws and loves not despite, but because of those flaws. Love is diverse, love stories should be, too. There is no universal standard of lovability. The very qualities that make me hate a person could be the reason someone else is head-over-heels in love–and I think that’s awesome.

I know quite a few very nice men who are married to very mean women. For a long time I wondered what they saw in each other, until I realized that perhaps each saw in the other qualities that they, themselves, lacked. The reason those men are so nice is because they don’t have to be mean. Their wives are the ones who demand better seating in restaurants, and tell people talking in movies to shut the hell up, and bitch out people who don’t treat their husband right.

As cheesy as the phrase “you complete me” is, if we’re lucky, that’s just what we get when we love–we are complete. Not completely good, but whole and functioning and happy. And when I get to the end of a romance novel, that’s the way I want to see the hero and heroine–not shagging from sunrise to sunrise, not having scads of babies or fostering deserving orphans, just happy, whole, and better than they were before.

CAT'S TALE, Available June 27, 2011 from Carina Press

Wow. It’s a little more than a month before CAT’S TALE: A FAIRY TALE RETOLD will be available for purchase from Carina Press and many other fine e-tailers–I’d better get pimping.

To the left, you will see the lovely, lovely cover done by the fabulous Frauke of Croco Designs.  I’ve always loved Frauke’s work, but I’m just over-the-moon about this cover. Not only is it 100% Mantitty-Free, it captures the focus and mood of the story wonderfully.

Here’s the back-cover blurb:

Once upon a time there was a scheming, lying tart who cared for nothing but her own pleasures and her shoe collection.

Once the peerlessly beautiful Lady Catriona, consort to the king, Cat’s fortunes fall far when her aged husband dies. The king’s wizard turns her into a cat and tries to drown her in the mill pond. Fortunately Cat is a clever survivor and enlists the help of Julian, the miller’s youngest son, in her plan for revenge.

She originally sees Julian as a mere pawn for her plans to break her curse, but as they work together Cat comes to know and care for him. Even if the curse can be broken, can a good-hearted man love a woman who has been as vain and selfish as Cat?

34,000 words

CAT’S TALE will be available June 27, 2011. In the mean time, keep an eye on this blog for an excerpt or two.

Sad news: it appears that my beloved desktop is well and truly dead. My Darling Smart Ass has been working on it, but it refuses to recognize its new hard drive. He says we will have to wipe it and reload Windows, which I believe would make it something other than the grouchy machine I’ve been working with for the past five years. (And it would kill the scads and scads of software cracks I loaded on it back before I decided to be an upstanding citizen and pay for all my software–oh, the remnants of my reckless youth!)

Darling Smart-Ass put a comforting hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s eight years old, that’s a long, full life for a desktop. I think it’s time you put it out of its misery.”

Me: “I can’t! You don’t know what adventures we had, what stories I wrote on it, what lovely, lovely software it ran.”

Him: “Do you remember that movie, the one about the dog where the boy had to shoot it at the end?”

Me: “My desktop is NOT Old Yeller.”

Too late. Smart Ass has now christened it “Old Yeller” and is urging me to let it go. It’s sitting beside my desk right now, all hulking and ginormous, yet still outdone in processing power and efficiency by my slim little laptop. Sure, the laptop has most of the programs I need to do my thang, but it just isn’t the same. It doesn’t have the same soul. Me and Old Yeller, we were a team. We stuck together through power-supply issues, dust-bunnies, and tense, nail-biting sessions of anti-vir. I’ll miss it.

Some good news:… I passed my final. Whew! And, Yay. That was a couple of weeks ago, but I haven’t posted. To some extent, I’ve been busy writing. I narrowed my focus down to three WsIP, and then to two. I decided that just because you can write two distinct first person stories at the same time, doesn’t mean you should.

What have I been up to? Besides the evil math class, I signed up for a creative writing course on short stories because I have always wanted to take one. The teacher was good, but I feel sorry for him because he wrote Literature and talked about dream goals like selling a story to the New Yorker, and almost everyone in the class wrote genre fiction. He seemed at a loss for a way to judge genre fiction by literature standards.

I was fascinated by the sheer number of young people interested in writing sci-fi and horror (no one admitted to Romance). The class was interesting, and I liked the structure of assignments and due dates, but it started to get in the way of my math studying (that class took over my life) and my writing goals, so I dropped it. Maybe some other time.

I do, however, have a few assignments I did for the class, which I will post in pieces to make up for what would otherwise be a spare posting schedule in the run-up to conference.

So here’s me cheating on my blogging by posting the start of a story I started a while ago, and mean to finish once I get three or five other Works in Progress out of my head and into my hard drive (and thumb drive, and back-up disk. Save early and often, peoples.)

Nieves

When I was very young, I asked my mother what had happened to the smallest finger on her left hand.

“I cut it off,” she told me, miming the chop of a knife with the flat of her right hand. One swing, sure and swift. She’d smiled when she said it, no doubt meaning to keep the conversation light. She often told outrageous tales just to see my eyes grow big. And when I asked, “Truly?” she’d shake her head and we would giggle over my credulity like a pair of mean little girls.

I did not realize until I was much older that she spun those fanciful tales a purpose. She meant to teach me to tell a lie from the truth, and to distrust even the people I loved the most.

But how should I promote the novella? Maybe a contest? I wracked my brain, which took all of 2 seconds, and came up with these ideas:

• The “Guess Bettie’s Favorite Color Contest”
• The “Tell Bettie Why You Deserve a Free Book” Contest
• The “Guess How Many Fingers Bettie is Holding Up Behind her Back” Contest.

Maybe I’m not so good at this contest thing. Maybe I used up my one good idea on the Hard Boiled contest. No, wait, I have one more idea: I’ll let potential contest entrants make up their own contest.

So, here’s the deal. Post your single best idea for a contest in the comments of this post. If I pick that idea, you’ll win a free copy of Like a Thief in the Night and I’ll hold the contest in February, with a second copy of Like a Thief… as the prize. Entries must be submitted by 6 P.M. Pacific on Monday, January 14, 2008.

Because I’m a lazy slob, and because I think the realization I came to while reading that post are my new words to write by, I’m just going to repost the comment I left right here.

That old quote, “Kill your darlings,” is some of the best writing advice ever given. When we fall in love with our books, we lose sight of their flaws. I’ve noticed that the more I love a story I’m writing, the less likely I am to even like it a year later.

A couple years ago, I wrote a story that I adored. My critique group wasn’t so keen on it; nobody seemed to like it but me. I shelved it, ran across it a year later, and realized I had been so enthralled with my own ideas that I’d written an over-detailed, under-plotted, meandering mess.

I still like the world and the characters, though. One of these days, when I’ve sharpened my critical eye to a lethal edge, I’ll haul that story back onto my desktop and gut it like a sacrificial lamb.

I’m starting to think that you can either love writing, or you can love the things you write. If you love writing then you change, you grow, you hone your skills to better practice your craft. If you love what you write, you drag the same manuscript around for years wondering why nobody appreciates your baby the way you do.

So that’s my new motto, right after “Kill your darlings,” is “Love writing, not what you’ve written.”