Do The Thing! Everyone Wants To Be Me or Do Me

Posted on June 30, 2014 by erincmcrae

Do the thingWriting novels deconstructing the fantasy of celebrity means spending time on websites devoted to the fashion of and gossip about actual celebrities. It’s primary-source research into the way people treat and view movie stars, musicians, and everyone else famous.

One of those sites is Tom & Lorenzo who wrote a post (and a book) about what “normal” people can learn from celebrities’ self-confidence:

“If you must look up to [celebrities],  then at least look up to them for their self-confidence, and the ways in which they use it to craft a seemingly invulnerable persona and then force the world around them to accept it.”

They go on to offer this advice:

“Darling, every day before you leave the house, look in the mirror and tell yourself, everybody wants to do me or be me.”

Given that so much of the Love in Los Angeles series is about the construction of persona, that post really jumped out at us.

It’s Monday. I haven’t slept more than five hours a night for the last week. I’ve got a ton of editing work to do on Starling — as soon as I’m done with my day job.

So when I got dressed this morning, I put on one of my sharper dresses. Once I got to work, I got coffee because a cup of coffee, even just from the pot in the back of the office, makes me feel like a professional.

It's Monday morning. Of course it's already empty.

It’s Monday morning. Of course it’s already empty.

Some days, all of that works better than others. Today, for the most part, it’s being effective. At least, I’m plowing through the pretty epic list of things that absolutely need to get done.

How’s your persona work going? Are you giving yourself permission to think highly of yourself? To know that you are awesome in order to be awesome?

What do you struggle with faking? Or what are you really fucking high-achieving at faking and how do you do it?

We’re always here to offer a boost and assure you that yo, we totally would love to be/do you.

Posted in Do the thing!, Love in Los Angeles, Starling | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Story Process Sunday: Dubious italics, and why not looking at your novel for nine months is a really good idea

Posted on June 29, 2014 by erincmcrae

No Sneak Peek this week, because we don’t have anything currently going that we can talk about in detail that we haven’t already shared with you. But we are going to do a Story Process Sunday instead, so we can talk a little more about our process, motivate ourselves to get stuff done, and pass along some of what works for us.

This week we’ve been in the deep weeds of edits on Starling. We did the bigger changes our editor asked for, and now we’re going through the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb. We’ve written several books since we wrote Starling together, and we’ve learned a lot about writing since then. A lot of the work is going back and applying what we know now to the work we did then.

One of our biggest sins is what Racheline has started to call “dubious italics,” which I really think we should make a drinking game out of, except that if we did, there are so many words we’re de-italicizing that I would be phenomenally drunk by the third page of the manuscript.

We’re leaving in a few, for emphasis in dialogue when someone’s being particularly catty or whiny. For the most part, though, they’re coming out.

Putting the italics in to note emphasis is, for the most part, directing from the page, which is not good. We can give the reader these characters, but we have to leave room for the reader to bring them to life too.

When a screenwriter finishes a script, it eventually goes from his hands into the hands of the actors and the director, who add their own interpretation to the words on the page. It’s their job, like it’s the scriptwriter’s job to give them words and setting in the first place. And if the writer has written well, it should be either evident where the emphasis falls and what the emotional options are from the dialogue alone, or there should be a range of amazing possibilities present that is the job of these other professionals to figure out and choose between.

It’s the same with books. If we’re writing well, we don’t need to hit the readers over the head with what words are important. The readers should be able to tell from the words themselves.

This whole exercise, as miserable and headache inducing as it is, is also a really good example of why, once you finish a piece, you really should stick it in a drawer and leave it there for a good long while before you come back to it.

We submitted Starling to Torquere last October. I’d looked at it a few times since then, to check continuity details for subsequent books. Racheline hadn’t looked at it at all until last Saturday when we opened the document from our editor.

When you go back to a piece after so long away, you see stuff you’d missed the first two or eight or thirty times you’d edited it before. And yes, this is the advice you get everywhere, but just today we found a sentence and had a horrified email exchange because WAIT THIS SENTENCE THAT WE’VE READ EIGHTEEN TIMES IS NOT ACTUALLY TRUE OH GOD.

Stuff slips through the cracks. Your eyes glaze over rereading that scene about the thing for the sixth time. Stepping away and coming back fresh goes a long way to finding things you hadn’t even realized needed fixing.

 

Posted in books, Cowriting, lgbtq, Love in Los Angeles, Starling, Story Process Sunday, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sometimes we talk about…Skulls

Posted on June 28, 2014 by erincmcrae
Dinner in Philadelphia.

At dinner in Philadelphia.

Given that we live in different cities and only meet face to face twice a month to do work, most of Racheline’s and my communication is done via e-mail. We have efficient systems and it works really well, and what you can do with technology these days is amazing, etc.

But twice a month we do get together in the same physical space to work in our office in Philadelphia. And while our email exchanges can get hilarious and odd, our in-person experiences can get bizarre and also pretty magical.

This past Saturday, after an epic marathon session of edits on the Starling manuscript, we went out to get some fresh air, eat food that wasn’t cheese, and talk about something other than verb tenses, we ended up at a place that had amazing tacos and the strongest margaritas I have ever encountered. And they were served with paper straws!

We talked about Midsummer, the novella we’re working on about a summer stock company doing Shakespeare deep in the woods of Virginia. We were struggling with the b-plot, our major problem being that we didn’t have one.  And man did we toss around a lot of terrible ideas.

“What if there’s a skull?” Racheline eventually asked.

“What?”

“I don’t know, a skull.”

“Yeahhhh, but what does it do? Like, for the plot? Or at all?”

“Well, let’s figure it out.”

So we started talking skulls.

Also, that weekend, unbeknownst to me until I got to Philly that morning and was trying to find parking, Wizard World Comic Con was on. So we were having very strong margaritas and were talking very loudly about skulls while cosplaying people were strolling down the streets.

Soon we’d found out what the skull’s purpose was, but not hadn’t entirely figured out how to execute on it.

Every time one of us asked, “But what is the skull process?” the other would interrupt with “Oh my god look at that adorable lesbian couple cosplaying Steve and Bucky!”

You can do a lot with technology, and working the timezones is one of the best weapons in our arsenal. Sometimes, though, the in person stuff works better, with or without the magic of a world filled with other people’s narratives.

Posted in Love in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Sometimes We Talk About..., Starling, Summerstock, Writing, WRWDC | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Did the Thing!

Posted on June 27, 2014 by Racheline Maltese

didthethingIt’s time to celebrate what you got done this month!  Right now, I’m freaking out because of just how much more I have to get done this month, including answering some great Do the Thing comments here and on Tumblr, but it will get done, because I say so, because Erin says so, and because you’re all going to encourage me with your own achievement right now.

Yes?

Yes.

Ready. Set…. BRAG!

Posted in Do the thing! | Tagged | 6 Comments

Marriage equality, queer fiction, and Starling

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Racheline Maltese

The federal court in Indiana overturned that state’s ban on same-sex marriage today.  Some counties are already issuing licenses, and weddings have taken place.  In other, they are waiting to see if a stay is put in place in the next few days.

Alex, from Starling, is from Indiana, and the plot of the book begins in August 2014.  We know a tremendous amount about Alex’s life before that opening.  A lot of that is stuff you’ll learn about.  You’ll meet his mom in Starling, and his best friend, Gemma, that he found on the Internet and moved to L.A. with, although they never met in person until they both arrived there.  Alex also has a sister, and a lot of secrets.

But what we didn’t know until today, is when this moment would happen for him.  We worked hard, because of the rapidly shifting political landscape, not to talk about just where marriage stood on the national level at the time of the book.  With most of the action taking place in jurisdictions with marriage equality, it was easy for us to navigate around.

What to do about marriage equality in LGBTQ romance is a huge issue right now.  Does the march of marriage equality mean that people will expect a wedding at the end of our novels like they often do of many M/F novels?  Will addressing the issue date our work? Or place a veneer of heteronormativity over it that will make it unappealing to LGBTQ readers?  Is marriage part of our culture?  Will it be destructive of our culture? Can we really ignore politics when they are, so brutally, our landscape?

While I don’t believe my writing gay romance is going to change the world, or even any one individual’s mind, it isn’t apolitical, because nothing is apolitical.

I am 41 years old.  I have been involved with marriage equality activism since the early 1990s.  In the last several years things have happened I thought I would never live to see (that is both political pessimism and the result of growing up queer in the 1980s). I think marriage and military service are in some ways our least important issues, but ones that offer excellent legal and rhetorical gateways to getting the really critical stuff around housing and employment discrimination done.  And I’m both someone who loves a wedding, and has romantic feelings about the institution of marriage, but also worries about its impact on queer culture.

So I pay attention to what happens with marriage in every state.  Every state matters.  On a personal level, some states matter more than others.  I used to live in D.C., so I liked that one a lot.  New York, where I live and right before Pride a few years ago, was a biggie.  I didn’t realize Indiana was going to feel quite the way it has today.

Two months before Jasper Alexander Cook’s life changes forever, marriage equality apparently comes to Indiana.  His mother calls him to offer her congratulations.  But he doesn’t live in Indiana anymore and hopes he never does again.  He’s also not dating anyone. And other than the moment he whispered, “I’m gay,” in her ear before he got in his car and drove to Los Angeles three days after graduating high school, he and his mother have never spoken of this topic.

The whole conversation makes him a little miserable.  He works 14-hour days, doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be celebrating, and doesn’t know how to do this.  He doesn’t, in a lot of ways, know how to do anything.

Marriage equality, every time it happens, is thousands of tiny stories, not just of couples in love, but of individuals, trying to deal with the very weird experience of a world that doesn’t know them talking about them like collective nouns instead of individual people.

One day, this battle will be won, here, and hopefully, eventually, around the world.  Along the way, we might even figure out what it means to us as individuals and as a queer culture and the way in which we tell our stories, fictional and non.

For today, it’s just a big, big congratulations to Indiana, and Utah, which also got good news, and all the states governed by the 10th Circuit, which may also have marriage equality now in the wake of today’s Utah decision.

It’s not just the coasts anymore.  And it hasn’t been for a long time.

Posted in genre talk, lgbtq, Starling, Writing | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Interview with Starling’s hero, Paul Marion Keane

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Racheline Maltese

Starling CoverRWA-NYC‘s heroes and heroines of summer blog series continues.  Last month, they included an interview with the star of Starling, J. Alex Cook.  This month, the interview is with with the book’s hero, Paul Marion Keane.

Choosing to call Paul the book’s hero is complicated, and not just in the “that’s like asking which chopstick is the fork” sense that LGBT romance brings to the table.  The thing is, Paul is sort of a mess, although Paul’s awareness of that can be highly variable.  He’s not always exactly hero material.  When Alex faces peril, Paul’s ability to come to the rescue can, at times, be dubious.

When I go to events with authors of heterosexual romance, a big topic of conversation is always alpha heroes.  They’re really in right now.  Betas are so last year.  On some level, I totally understand what this means — I do watch, and write about, True Blood, after all.  On another level, I just don’t get it.  I’ve spent a lot of time making faces at Erin going “Is Paul an alpha?  Is anyone an alpha?”

We’re in edits for Starling right now.  We’ve done the bigger stuff requested by our publisher, and I’m now doing some incredibly fine-tooth comb stuff that’s largely about the fact that we’ve written several books since we wrote Starling and we know more now, and I want us to get everything right.

One of the more interesting things this has produced is that Paul, while still a complete mess, feels a lot more alpha on the page.  Alex, for the record, feels as strong and masculine as he always has, but a bit more mysterious and a lot more buffeted by the randomness of his circumstances.

So no one’s a fork (or everyone is), Paul’s totally alpha but still a mess, and, oh yeah, his boyfriend took his dog.  We hope you enjoy meeting him.

Posted in books, genre talk, Love in Los Angeles, RWA, Starling, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Torquere Twitter takeover tonight (and other news)

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Racheline Maltese

Tuesday night (June 24, 2014) from 8 – 10pm EST, Erin and I are taking over Torquere’s twitter account.  While you can always bother us at our individual Twitters (@erincmcrae & @racheline_m), please come play with us.  We’ll be tagging tweets with #rm or #em so it’s not just creepy hive-mind action. We’ll be talking “Lake Effect,” Starling, and our process, and we want your questions!

Meanwhile, there is still time to enter the contest to name the LGBT romance reading at Stonewall on October 7th. Please remember that the combined group of writers have been published at at least 5 different presses in the genre, so we may not want to include any reference to specific presses in the name.  I know, that makes it harder, because all the presses have great names to work with!  And yes, you can enter more than once.  Unless you’re Erin’s dad.  Because if you’re Erin’s dad you can’t win; blah blah blah demon porn.

Additionally, remember when we had that interview with Alex from Starling at the RWA-NYC blog?  An interview with Starling‘s other hero, Paul, should be up tomorrow!

We’ll also be announcing the winner of the Summer Lovin’ blog hop tour prize in the next couple of days, and this Friday the June Did the Thing! post will go up, so be sure to stop by and celebrate your accomplishments.

Finally, in non-romance news, Racheline has new pop-culture anthology news over of LettersFromTitan.com.

Posted in books, Do the thing!, events, Lake Effect, Love in Los Angeles, Starling, They Do, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Romance @ Random – True Blood Season 7 Episode 1 Recap

Posted on June 23, 2014 by Racheline Maltese

Death! Kidnapping! Sex on top of cars!  Oh True Blood you are back, and you’re crackier than ever.

Lots of fine, fine eye candy this episode, at least one shocker, and a whole bunch of spoilers from me over at Romance @ Random.  (Also, please note, there’s a key scene in this episode where someone recounts an experience of anti-gay violence that’s pretty shocking.  It’s the most emotionally effective scene in the episode, but just know what you’re getting into when you read the recap because I do quote from it).

All that said, however, as someone on Twitter rightfully noted yesterday: Needs more Pam.

Posted in tv | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Do the Thing! – Trust, Part 2

Posted on June 23, 2014 by Racheline Maltese

Do the thingTrust people who are nice to you.

That sounds ridiculous to say aloud, but it’s really hard for a lot of people.  It’s hard for me.

There are a few reasons for that.  One is that I’m from New York City, home of the “friendly fuck you” which is when a taxi almost hits you, and you curse the guy out, and he curses you out, but no one really sounds mean or scared, and you then sort of smile at each other, because you’ve engaged in one of the prime direct communication rituals of living in this city.  The way people in and from other places communicate often freaks me out. How do I know it’s sincere?

Also, my childhood, like everyone else’s, was filled with bullies. I had a lot of conversations that went

“Nice sweater.”

“Thank you.”

“Where’d you get it, KMart?”

“No.  No, I… my parents bought it for me.”

“You’re an idiot, why would you think we thought anything you would wear is nice?”

So between these two things, when people are nice to me, I tend to be very What is really going on here?

And it’s not just me. I hear from lots of other people who also have a hard time believing compliments, who are sure they’ve just fooled people into thinking they are competent and/or that every kindness they receive is part of some nefarious plan.

And, you know what? Let’s be fair.  It could be.  The girls who asked me where I got my sweater didn’t all grow up to become people who would never, ever do that.  You may also know some people who praise your stuff even when it’s half-baked, not just to you, but to everyone else. I know those people too.

But really who cares?

Energy spent trying to detect people with nefarious plans and bad taste is energy — and time — spent not doing the thing.

It’s also a bit rude.  How would people who are kind to you would feel good to know you think they are up to something or super gullible?  Generally speaking, they probably wouldn’t be that into it.

And this is where trust comes in.  When people are nice to you, trust them.  And trust yourself to be able to navigate those occasional weird moments when you’re actually dealing with sweater-insulters and sycophants.

But don’t go looking for them. They probably don’t exist. And if they do, they aren’t worth your time, not because they’re terrible people (they’re not, they’re just struggling with their shit, just like you are struggling with yours), but because you’ve got to keep your head down and do your Thing, whether that’s for 15 minutes a day or 15 hours a day.

Trust yourself to go looking for people who want to support you and who you want to support. Trust yourself to go looking for people who understand that support doesn’t require unadulterated praise, and that constructive criticism provided in appropriate contexts isn’t betrayal. And trust yourself to think about yourself as a person who deserves a life filled with awesome people who inspire you to get crap done.

Also trust yourself not to be a criminal mastermind who is fooling everyone.  Because seriously, that outlook is just weird.

Got trust issues?  Want to confess your status as a secret criminal mastermind so that we can all tell you you’re not an imposter and you can go back to doing the awesome stuff you’ve already been doing?

We’re here for you.  And if we mention it, we are really, truly, sincerely into your sweater. No matter where you bought it.

Posted in Do the thing! | Tagged | 3 Comments

Sneak Peek Sunday: Midsummer

Posted on June 22, 2014 by erincmcrae

IMG_20140619_145027Sneak Peek Sunday, once again! Follow the link back to see what other authors are working on this week (please note that participating authors write in all genres and at all heat levels).

The Love in Los Angeles universe is expanding. With the way Racheline and I write this is hardly surprising: to brainstorm, we tell each other stories, and stories beget stories.

One such begotten story is Midsummer, which is set around a summerstock production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Backstage stories, they are our Thing.) And while later on the characters in this story will intersect a little more with the people from Starling and its sequels, for now we’ve got them more or less trapped for three months deep in the back woods of Virginia.

Eventually Love in Los Angeles ventures outside of the urban, but Starling is set in cities — L.A., New York, and Washington, DC — and is about people in the TV industry. The book clips along like a TV script does; spare prose and light on the description. Midsummer, though, is about a Shakespeare production, and it goes out in the deep green woods of summer and lingers there through long, humid evenings. In the woods, away from civilization, our paragraphs get longer and our prose gets lusher.

It also gets a little more magical. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the Shakespeare play) is about dreams and magic, and it questions what is real. In Midsummer, if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that things are not entirely mundane either.

It’s not fantasy (although we love a good fantasy and adore playing with the paranormal), but it is magical realism. And you should pay attention, because as Love in Los Angeles  advances, things are going to get a lot more magically real.

It’s a good audience, and a good first performance for everyone, but Michael absolutely steals the show. John is ridiculously proud, even as Michael disrupts the planned bows by climbing all over him and Rose, Puck to the immense laughter of the audience until he leaves the stage. If they’re lucky, Keith will have the good sense not to throw a fit.

There’s a party afterwards, because opening night, and there’s way more booze around the campfire than usual. John expects Michael to want to savor his triumph with their friends and burn off some of the performance high he’s still buzzing with, but after three minutes perched on John’s knees Michael jumps up again, takes John’s hand, and pulls him out of the circle without a word.

The noise of celebration, and the light of the campfire, fades away behind them as Michael leads them under the trees and then off the path into the woods. When they don’t stop immediately, and John is no longer sure they are even still on the theater’s property, he considers expressing concern — what if they get lost or shot by some crazy neighbor? — but Michael is so clearly certain of whatever it is he’s doing, it seems unnecessary. It’s not just John who will obey him.

Finally, Michael stops in a place that, to John at least, seems like every other patch of woods they’ve passed through. His eyes have adjusted to the dark by now, and the moon rising up over the tops of the trees makes Michael’s face, with smears of silver and green still around his eyes, shimmer.

John drops to his knees in front of him. It’s not just that he wants, desperately, to suck Michael off. He wants to worship him.

Michael makes a high, eerie sound in the back of his throat when John gets his shorts off and sinks his mouth down over him. He is otherwise unusually silent, panting amidst the rustle of leaves and the dark sounds of the forrest.

Posted in Cowriting, lgbtq, Love in Los Angeles, Sneak Peek Sunday, Starling, Summerstock, Virginia, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments