Suspense versus Romance

My older daughter does not read romance. She prefers suspense novels, the kind with creepy stalkers and gruesome murders, the kind that give me nightmares. She finally broke down and read the first two chapters of GOALS FOR A SINNER offered on my web site, LYNNSHURR.com, and remarked that nothing much happened in the story. Well, the heroine is tackled by two football players, ends up in the hospital, and meets the man who had a crush on her in high school. That's quite a lot actually, but true, no bodies dropped from the ceiling. No one was stabbed, stalked or done away with in an original manner. I had to explain that romances are about relationships. Hopefully, the reader will like the characters enough to want to follow their story and see them get together in the end. My stories should make you smile or even laugh, chuckle or chortle. They are a source for good dreams. If I've done that, I've done my job.

Research

As a former reference librarian, I love to do research. I confess to having spent half a day searching for the origins of the chocolate sprinkles to put on ice cream. I thought I'd failed, and got diverted into the history of the lollipop. Then, lo and behold! The same man invented the sprinkles. All this time spent so I could allow a character to ask for sprinkles on his ice cream in my 1920's novel, QUEEN OF THE MARDI GRAS BALL. This was an easy detail to work into the novel. Many other marvelous tidbits had to be set aside least the book start sounding like a non-fiction account of life in the Twenties.

How much historical detail to add? What to leave out? Usually, I try to work signs of the times into the conversation. People took picnic baskets and went out to watch the levee protecting St. Bernard Parish being blown up to save New Orleans. Surely, people would have talked or written letters about this event. On the other hand, it is not necessary to describe the making of bathtub gin, no matter how fascinating, to say someone is drinking it in a scene. I wish I had a formula to offer like fifty percent fact, fifty percent fiction, but I don't. I still haven't figured this out for myself. Just yesterday, I learned how a wigwam is built, step-by-step. Will I use this? Probably not. But it is just so tempting.

A Writer's Day

I'd guess every writer's day is different, whatever works for you. Having had a job every year of my life since the age of seventeen, I cannot bring myself to work in my nightgown. Each day, I get up around seven, put on light makeup and clothes decent enough to answer the door, have breakfast, answer e-mail, and run any errands pending. By lunch time, my schedule is completely clear. I sit down and write for four or five hours with the aid of a large pot of hot tea for stimulation. My goal is around 1,000 words a day which usually comes to four or five pages. Neither pantser nor plotter, I am a plodder. I do this day after day, and at the end of three months have a 90,000 word fairly clean first draft. I don't spend time doing character sketches or spread sheets. The story is inside my head. I know my beginning, middle, and end before I start, but the details bring the book to life. I finish for the day around 6:00 pm., make dinner for my husband, enjoy his company, a good book, or a favorite TV program for the evening and turn in around eleven p.m. Not too exciting, but the end result is two books a year. I just keep plodding along.

Life Happens

I finished the galleys for GOALS and sent off two other manuscripts for consideration before leaving on a long-planned two week vacation to Yellowstone in mid-August. Back from that magnificent place, I went in for my annual checkup and ended up with a breast cancer scare that consumed another week with tests, all negative, thank heaven. Then, I had to supply all the copy for my new web site www.LYNNSHURR.com and make a few dozen decisions regarding that. Four weeks gone and not a word added to my WIP.
Then, the local Sugar Cane Festival started where I volunteered as a judge escort for the art show. School tours began at the ante-bellum home where I am guide. My copier broke. More decisions to make. My left rear tire blew out on the way home from a Heart of Louisiana, RWA meeting in Baton Rouge, thankfully not on the Atchafalaya causeway. A kind diesel mechanic at a truck stop/mini-casino in Grosse Tete changed it for me, even finding me a used tire in the scrap heap because my spare had a big hole in it. Tomorrow, I can look forward to buying tires and sitting around while they rotate and replace the old ones.
Six weeks gone and no work on a WIP that had been dropping off the pen or into the computer like mad before I left on vacation. Life happens. Maybe I'll write this week.

The Saints and the Sinners

My book, GOALS FOR A SINNER, revolves around an imaginary football team, the Sinners, that has replaced the Saints after they move to Salt Lake. However, it looks like the Saints might stay in New Orleans for a few more years. Their first two games of the 2009 season have been awesome. I might have to give up telling my favorite Saints/Cajun joke which goes like this:
A group of Cajuns skip confession and Mass in order to take the bus to the casino. On the way, the bus crashes and everyone aboard dies and goes straight to Hell. The Cajuns don't find the place much hotter than Louisiana, so they make themselves comfortable, setting up some bourre games and boiling water for crawfish. The Devil doesn't like seeing them so content. He turns up the heat. The Cajuns make up some tickets to sell for a gumbo dinner in order to air condition the place. This infuriates the Devil. He thinks and thinks. Ah-ha! He turns the heat down so low the place freezes over. Those Cajuns are miserable and shivering. Then, one looks at another and smiles. "You know what dis means, Boudreaux? The Saints done won the Super Bowl. Let's party!"
If the Saints keep doing so well, we might have snow again in Louisiana this year.

Why am I blogging?

After ten years of writing and five years of trying to get published, the incredible happened. I have a book coming out May 21, 2010, GOALS FOR A SINNER, the fifth of fourteen novels. I'm told authors must blog, so here goes. GOALS is a short contemporary football romance, sort of an appetizer to be consumed while waiting for the next Susan Elizabeth Phillip's novel to come out. She simply doesn't write fast enough for me, so I did two of my own out of admiration for her work, but not an imitation of it. We have very different styles. The idea for my book came to me as I watched the Panthers lose the Super Bowl back in 2004 with that darned two point conversion try. If only they had gone for the tie. A sad occasion in more than one way since my dad had just died, and being a Panthers fan, he would have loved seeing that game despite the sad ending. So, while sitting with my bereaved family eating strombolis and missing Janet's wardrobe malfunction since I went for a bathroom break during her performance, I made up another team struggling to get to the Super Bowl, the New Orleans Sinners.
The Sinners manage to win two imaginary Super Bowls, and GOALS was a finalist in two contests, Cleveland Rocks and CTRWA Connections, but when submitted to agents and editors of romance novels, the usual reply came back, "We do not do football novels and so have not read your work." Thank heaven for the open minds at The Wild Rose Press and my wonderful editor there, Cindy Davis, who loves and understands both football and romance. I hope the Panthers get another chance, too.

First Blog 9/14/09

My husband is an astronomer. He can pick out the little fuzzy balls of gobular clusters with a telescope or binoculars from among the brightest stars and reveal them to be a dense gathering of hundreds of stars. Out here in the blogosphere, I feel like one of those tiny fuzzy balls in space with a hundred unnoticed stars inside of me. At least, my husband knows I'm here. As I've said before, geeks make great husbands.