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I’ve been trying to write a love scene for about a week now. (At least.) I know that a love scene is the next thing that happens. I know that it will happen eventually. But my characters are being amazingly difficult about the whole thing. It’s kind of like trying to lead a critter that doesn’t want to be led. Which has me thinking about my process, and wondering whether non-writer people would understand. (Probably not.)

See, I’m not one of those writers who sits down and just starts writing, flying by the seat of my pants into the mist to see where the story takes me.

Conversely, I’m not one of those writers who plans out the story scene by scene, chapter by chapter. I don’t know where my chapter breaks will fall until the second draft, at least.

I’m something of a hybrid between the two. I have to have some structure–a plot skeleton to hang the story’s flesh on, and often, a list of scenes I think I want to write. (Though that list is often not developed until I reach the roadmap’s turning points, to mix my metaphors.) But I can’t have too much.

Basically, what happens when I write: I have my roadmap, or skeleton, or beat sheet–whatever term you want to use. I have turning points and Major Scenes written down. I might also have a list of things that need to happen after This turning point, in order to reach That turning point. Beyond that, I really don’t know much.

I line my characters up–put them on their marks, to use acting jargon. She is here, doing this, wearing these clothes (or not, as the case may be). He is over there, doing this other thing. There are people outside, or in the room around them, or maybe the characters are alone. Then I tell them–this is the situation, this is what has just happened, and this is what is going to happen in this scene.

The one I’m trying to write is a love scene, but it could be anything. I could tell them: “This is the scene where He tells Her about his dead child,” or “In this scene, She gets His shirt off to look at an injury and is mortified by her attraction to him.” Or whatever the scene might be. I tell them what the scene is, and then I say, “Okay, Ready? Go!”

And I write down what they do. (It’s kind of like improv, that way.) I write down what they think and what they feel, how they react to what the other person says. And quite often, they surprise me.

This particular love scene comes fairly late in this book. I know my characters well by this time. I know how they’ll react to things. Which is where the stubborn comes in. I know good and well these two people are going to do it. But I am having the dickens of a time getting them to the point, because of who they are. I can’t say it’s because of who I’ve made them, because I’m not sure I can claim that. I tend to get acquainted with my characters more than I invent them. My hero is a good guy and he’s damn proud of that. He’s a little rigid on the point, which is what will make his fracture so delicious. And my heroine is crazy. But she’s not as crazy as she’d like to be. I’m hoping that tomorrow I may be able to move beyond the talk into some action. I hope. (Please, people!)

I know already that I’m going to have to go back and thin out some of the repetition, and probably shorten it, because it feels long. (Though it may not be as long as it feels, because I haven’t written that many pages over the week of trying to get them started.) But I had to write all that to know what actually happens. To turn my characters loose and let them lead. Because for me, that’s when I know the story is going to be what I want it to be. If the characters have taken over, that’s when it’s working.

So while I’m frustrated that they’re taking their own sweet time about this, I’m also content to let them do it the way they want.

And how are things going for You?

We are still waiting to hear from the loan company. We want to know if we can do this the way we want to before we really start getting seriously serious in the house hunting. So we’re just going to open houses and such. This past weekend, there weren’t many houses open–not houses we wanted to look at anyway. One was on the street where we rented for 6 weeks when we first moved to the island–where Ike flooded everything about 12 feet or more–and it floods often, even without major hurricanes. Nope, not going to move over there…

Anyway, this house was also in the historic district, which looks VERY different with all the trees gone (Hurricane Ike killed them). When we drove up, the fella was already going “Nope, nope, don’t like it, don’t even want to go in.”

It looks pretty good in the picture, doesn’t it. But that paint job is starting to peel on the sides, and the roof’s bad, and those balusters on the porch? They’re the style that bulges out. (You can kind of see it on the non-stair side.) I think it looks seriously funny. Plus the porch sags to the front.

Inside, it looks a lot better than outside. They’ve done a lot of nice things–first floor master bedroom, new kitchen cabinets, etc. But the dining room is also the walkway through to the kitchen, there’s no den, and it’s a little pricey for what still needs doing. There’s a huge garage with a garage apartment out back–3 cars’ worth (one for the apartment)–but it hasn’t been touched since the storm. There’s still Ike water in the outside light fixtures.

It’s one of those deals where–if you offer the full price, you’ll get a new roof and the apartment redone and all, but if you don’t–well, there’s the house–You fix it. Like I said, the interior re-do looks very nice, but the floors slope, and the doors stick, and the outside doesn’t look so great. So I don’t think we’re going to go with this slant-roofed Victorian. (Even though it is just a few blocks away from The Original Mexican Cafe.)

In other news… there isn’t much. I had a blister, or swollen vein or something in my mouth that made my teeth hurt for a week. It finally burst and feels much better–I can eat now–but it has turned into one of those mouth ulcers. Ugh. Still, when it was really hurting, I couldn’t sleep and sat up in the recliner dozing to the Weather Channel all night. So I’m really glad it’s over, mostly.

If I’m going to get anything written today, it will have to be tonight. Spent the morning getting the oil, the power steering fluid, the gas filter and some other kind of fluid that goes to the universal joints changed, and some other thing cleaned out on my massive beast of a vehicle. Now I am at the paper, getting stuff done here. Back to work.

We are finally doing some serious looking for a house. This may all change if we don’t get the answer we expect from the mortgage company, but we have started the process and have been to some open houses and gone driving through neighborhoods, as well as doing a lot of cruising on line. Some houses look better in person than they do on line. Some look worse, especially after you drive by the neighbor’s houses.

Anyway, because I get a kick out of watching House Hunters on HGTV, I’m going to do my own little version of House Hunters here on my blog. We will have more than 3 houses to pick from here, because I have infinite (sort of) space to post stuff. I probably won’t post Every house we look at, just the ones that are possible.

So, that said, we went to some open houses on Sunday. One of them moved directly from our “possible” list to our “no” list–the house had been damaged in Hurricane Ike (all the ones we looked at on Sunday took on water during the hurricane–75% of the houses on the island flooded) and hadn’t been put back together well. The other two–one of them moved from the “probably not” list to the “might work” list, and the other from not even on the list to the “liked it-but there are issues” list.

So, the house we liked is a historic home across the street from the medical school on the island. The current owner works there. We do not, but it’s a quick hop to Harborside which is a mostly straight shot to the newspaper, and a pretty quick jaunt to the fella’s work.

It’s a pretty house, with essentially no yard whatsoever. There is a small flower-bed-type area in front of the house. The back of the house is a patio. No room for trees–except maybe a palm tree, and given that they mostly survived the hurricane and the freeze this winter, that might not be a bad idea. There is also a small deck on back of the house. It is much larger inside than it looks from the outside. And those 14 foot ceilings (or maybe higher–they are Very High) make the rooms look even larger.

It did take on about two feet of water in the hurricane (Everything in Galveston is divided into “before Ike” and “after Ike”), but the remediation job is gorgeous. The original wood floors were completely refinished, the walls redone–the job was done Right. (And 2 feet of water is nothing, considering downtown businesses mostly got 8 to 10 feet of water, and houses near us took on 4 feet.)

The rooms are large–except for a tiny little den-type room they have set up with a TV. I think it’s too little for our den furniture. There’s a sunporch-type room that might fit our stuff and be usable as a den, and I would take the den room (with the laundry room right off it) for my office, but the fella makes a face when I say that.

The bedrooms upstairs are huge. There are two full baths upstairs, and there are actually closets (which can be an issue in an older home-this one dates to 1897 or so, which means it survived the massive 1900 storm too). And there is a garage. Two cars with storage. Those are the pros.

The cons–those 14-foot ceilings mean the staircase is Very Long and kinda steep. (This is the view from the top of the stairs, looking toward the front door.) I have bad knees. The idea of carrying a laundry basket down those stairs gives me the heeby-jeebies. And the den/study issue is problematic.

Also, the exterior is wood siding. This is an island on the Gulf of Mexico. The weather is Hard on paint. Things that would require re-painting inland in 10 years tend to need painting in 5 years here. And the fella isn’t wild about that idea–having to paint frequently. You saw in the picture just how much there is to paint on the outside of this house. (Even those 30-year paints only last about half as long in this climate.)

The missing yard is an issue too, given that part of the reason I want my own house is that I want my own dog. A small dog would be all right, but the fella isn’t wild about small dogs. (He scowls at the idea of a dog at all…)

So–this is on the “liked it” list. It has all the requirements. The location is decent, though it’s not in a neighborhood, per se, being across the street from the hospital. It has a separate den/TV room, or a room that could be used that way. It has a garage. I could see myself living here (except for that laundry-basket-on-the-stairs issue).

The other house that’s on the “might do” list was on the other end of the city. We did drive out past the end of the seawall to look at houses in the closest bayside subdivision, but–besides not caring for the houses–the fella decided it would take too long to get to work in the mornings. So we’re pretty much looking in the city, behind the seawall.

This second house was much newer (by about 100 years). It took on several feet of water–somewhere between 2 and 4 feet. The repair was done well in some places, and not so well in others.

It has a small parlor-type room right inside the front door, then opens out into a good-sized dining room with a den/living area beyond. The kitchen’s off to the right with a breakfast area, and a little courtyard right outside that is in pretty good shape. The tree is still deciding whether it’s going to live or not, but it’s a pretty area. There’s a good-sized covered deck off the den (needs paint) and a smallish yard–but it is a yard. And the master bedroom is downstairs. The re-do of the master bath is very nice. Slate floor, slate around the bathtub, separate shower, double sinks.

The not-so-good stuff–the kitchen re-do is not very good. You can’t see it in this picture, but the counter tops are pretty. Red-and-gray granite. I like the counter tops. But there’s not much counter space, that central hood thing is weird, and the oven and microwave are almost too tiny to cook in. And–see how the counter top on the island extends beyond the cabinet? There’s a gap like that next to the refrigerator. About a foot more counter top than there is cabinet. It looks weird. We would probably have to redo the kitchen again. The house is priced so we could do that, but it would be a pain.

Also, the stairs–they are not so good. I can’t get my whole foot on a stair tread. The stairs used to be open at the back–suspended–and now they aren’t. So they’re too short. Admittedly, I have big feet for a girl, but that means that almost no adult male alive can get his feet on the treads. There are two bedrooms upstairs, one of which would have to be my office. It would be a good thing to be able to fit my feet on the stairs. But at least there’s only about 10 feet worth of stairs, not 14 or more. And once the boy graduates (in May, we hope) there wouldn’t be laundry upstairs that needed bringing down.

This one is an “okay, but not wonderful” house.

We’re still waiting to see what the bank says, so we haven’t called any agents yet to get in to see some of these other houses we’ve found online. We’ll do more open houses this coming weekend. Maybe we’ll find some more houses to go on the “liked it” or “might do” lists.

I was going to blog about poetry and words and art and stuff, but I’m not feeling very poetic. Or wordy, or art-y, though I might be feeling somewhat stuffy. Anyway, I decided not to blog about that, but instead, to see if I could show you my spiffy new sorta-toy.

It’s not really a toy. It’s a beautimous cover for my toy. You can see the Sony e-book reader inside the open cover here.

See, I broke the cover the reader came with. I dropped it, and the plastic spine up the back cracked. I read it for several more days before the end cracked all the way through, but eventually, it broke in two pieces, and would no longer hold the book reader.

I still kept it in the original reader, for protection, when I wasn’t actually reading, but I took it out to read. Still, it would slip out when I put it in my bag, and slide around and annoy me. And I found this Place. Oberon Design had a PR post card at ApolloCon last year. They may have had jewelry and leather also, but I don’t remember. I went to the website to look at jewelry–which is very cool–and saw the Very Neat leather goods. With e-Reader Covers! They have them for Kindles too, but I don’t have one of those, do I?

Now I will let you look at the awesome design on the front. It is a Chinese river garden. They have many, many awesome designs, and I was sorely tempted by the dragon, and the raven, and the starry sky. But I wound up getting this one, because it was the one that kept drawing my eye first off. (The design continues onto the back.) And it’s red. Each design only comes in a couple of colors. I like red, though I didn’t get the red Sony reader.

Anyway, I think the cover is very spiffy. I like it whole bunches and have to show it off to everybody. And sooner or later, I will get around to writing about poetry and songs and art and words and stuff. When I’m feeling more arty.

I think the post date was Monday, and Monday I was at the parents going to the doctor with Daddy & gathering up all the tax stuff. (Ooooh, there’s a big lightning/thunder thing outside!)

So, I’m doing this one on Friday.

Silent on the Moor is the third book by Deanna Raybourn about Lady Julia Grey and the half-gypsy detective Brisbane. She goes to Yorkshire to stay at Brisbane’s house and “have it out” with him about their relationship–and winds up dropping into the midst of a bizarre family situation. Between the mummified infants she finds in the walls and the near-poisoning of one of the residents, Lady Julia has quite an adventure. The problem for me was that she mostly had it alone. While Brisbane is the love of her life, they spent far too much time apart for my preference, and what time they did spend together, she was usually spitting mad at him. Which made the happy ending a bit abrupt and awkward-feeling to me. I didn’t get quite why she was so keen on him.

But I still liked it. So… That’s the book report.

Several years ago–so long I don’t remember where it was, much less when–Jennifer Crusie spoke to RWA’s national conference as keynote, or one of the big speakers, she said “We need more storytellers and fewer writers.”

The whole ballroom full of published and aspiring writers burst into applause.

Genre writers understand that it’s about the story. Yes, language and craft is important, but without a story to tell, you might as well be writing poetry.

Not that there’s anything wrong with poetry. I like poetry just fine, but I have to admit that my favorite place to find poetry is in song lyrics. I don’t read a lot of it, and I don’t write it, because–well, I’m all about the story.

A novel is a story–or it had better be. Otherwise, nobody much is going to want to read it. All the art must be in service to that–to the telling of the story. You can be just as pretty or writerly as you want, but if the pretty words don’t serve the story, you have to chuck them out.

Because There Are Only Two Rules in Fiction That You CANNOT Break. They are:

1. Do Not BORE Your Reader.

and

2. Do Not CONFUSE Your Reader.

An interesting Plot with interesting Characters takes care of Rule #1 (for the most part). Decent grammar and clarity of language helps with Rule #2. And sometimes, pretty words get in the way of Rule #2.

Every other rule out there that people tell you about–feel free to break them, once you know how and why they work. These two? If you break ’em, you won’t sell your book, because your first readers–your prospective agent or editor–will get bored and/or confused and they won’t buy or help you sell your book.

Art is great. I got nothin’ against art in any shape, form or fashion. (I know, resorting to cliches. Deal with it. It’s a blog.) But in fiction, storytelling comes first. Art must serve the function–which is story.

Ha! finally got the pictures downloaded off the camera. (The fella STILL hasn’t downloaded the San Francisco pics onto his computer, and that was back in October! Grr.) So, y’all are getting the whole shebang.

First, here is the princess wussy granddog with her tug-o-war rope. That spot on her nose is the bobo she got when she scraped a nickel-sized hunk of skin off her nose on the fence while jumping at a possum. It’s almost well now, but it made an icky scab.

I have posted about Mardi Gras, and here are some of our Mardi Gras pictures. This first one is of The Strand–Galveston’s main downtown street–just before the Knights of Momus parade on the second Saturday of Mardi Gras. The fella took all the pictures of the Aquarius parade on the first Saturday, and I don’t know any of the people in it, so I’m skipping to these pictures.

The son’s girlfriend came down for the weekend, which was Valentine’s as well as Mardi Gras, so for the big parade, we went downtown, had dinner at Bistro LeCroy (on The Strand) and then watched the parade on 21st Street.

This is us–me, the boy and the girl (kinda blurry–the fella took it)–on the street waiting for beads. I think we’re just between floats. I did catch a respectable number of beads at this parade, including some fancy gold ones with crowns.

There was a guy who wanted to trade me for some of those crown beads. He offered me a string of plain beads plus a drink of his vodka. Um–no thanks. I’ll pass.

The parade theme was “Treasures of the Sea.” Hence the shark float here. You can maybe see the beads in mid-air. Some of those people could really throw those suckers.

Okay, so then on Sunday, we went to the midafternoon parade of the Krewe of Barkus & Meoux–the pet parade, sponsored by the local Humane Society. Any pet could march, but aside from a few ferrets in a cage in a wagon, most were dogs. And Oh the Costumes! Here, you see the Elvis Dog. There were greyhounds in Mickey & Minnie costumes, a standard poodle dyed green and purple, and dogs in just bandannas. Lots and lots of greyhounds.

We met up with a friend of mine who went to Baylor too, several years after I graduated. She was a writer friend while she was in Baylor, and now, we both live in Galveston (though she’s now way out on the West End).

There was a children’s parade after the dog parade, and we got tired and sat down to wait for it to arrive.

She brought her toddler, who is massively cute, and warmed up to me enough to give me a hug, which totally warmed this Gigi’s heart. The Toddler also danced. No music, she just danced.

We got massively annoyed at the grownups who brought their beer cooler and snatched the beads away from the children at the Children’s parade. I didn’t actually Catch any beads at this parade, but I picked up a few–we gave all ours away to the kids. (The folks with the beer cooler didn’t.)

The last pictures I want to share with you are first: Orchy, the first grocery store orchid I have ever been able to get to bloom. It’s only the third one I’ve ever bought–the one I bought in the Panhandle dried up, poor thing. But the 1st one I bought in Galveston grew a baby on its flower stem I didn’t cut off. It survived the winter inside, and thrived, apparently, outside in our humidity and heat. So I bought another one. And look! It’s blooming! I’m all excited. I guess you can tell, huh? I mean, I named the plant. (sigh)

The little clay pot in the background is the baby orchid I cut off from its Mama, finally. It seems to be doing well. Growing a new leaf and everything.

And finally, another flower picture, just because I think they’re so pretty. After Valentine’s Day, the local Kroger put all its tulips on 2/3 off, so I bought Two bunches. (Hey, they were cheap, fresh and so pretty.)

Those are all the fella’s books. I have three bookcases in my office (2 huge), plus some built-ins and another big bookcase in the living room. This does not count all the books in boxes in the garage, or the e-books on the SD card.

Oh, and the basket? Corrals all the Wii-motes and Wii games. Mama likes to play.