Best wishes to all those out there who like Halloween as much as I do. It’s a gorgeous morning, the Demon Lord of Kitty Badness is curled up next to the laptop, watching the birds play in the birch tree. I have fresh coffee. My laundry is already started, which means I’ll finish up in time to do more than just chores today. All in all, I’m content.

I’ve been working on an As Yet Untitled for a book proposal. It dragged its sorry backside throughout yesterday, only to get a burst of oomph at about 10:00 pm last night and I burned through to the end of the chapter. Yes, it’s rough, but it’s something I can work with.

It’s a hard chapter, because it’s the set-up, nuts-and-bolts boring stuff that has to get out there so the reader knows what’s going on. In the Victorian novel, no one blinked if an author included whole chapters that were sidebars designed to explain all that stuff. In current fiction, no one has the patience to wade through the facts. So, authors proceed like harried mothers trying to disguise vegetables so that their kids will consume them. Enough cheese sauce will hopefully do the trick.

Personally, I think we should be allowed to put an FAQ in the back of the book and go from there.

So you’re a fiction writer looking for a support group. Here is a short questionnaire that should help you find the kind of people you’re looking for:

1. If you go on a holiday, do you pick:

a. A convention featuring people wearing antennae
b. A Mediterranean cruise giving people the opportunity to gaze at you while sunbathe and contemplate your next best-seller
c. A convention featuring handcuffs and people in teddy bear suits
d. An African safari

2. When you go shopping for entertainment, do you visit:

a. The comic book store
b. The spa to enhance your godlike physique with a gold sparkle tan
c. The leather shop
d. The gym to watch a hand-to-hand fight to the death

3. Your typical lunch companions are:

a. Romulans
b. Your entourage
c. You think his name was Mossimo, but it was hard to tell around the gag
d. Not sure, but he drank a lot of Bushmills and talked about riding elephants

4. From friendship, you seek

a. A close and meaningful bond, kind of like a mind meld
b. Unconditional adulation
c. Benefits and occasionally pain
d. Someone willing to walk into the jungle and blow up tigers with you. It’s a guy thing.

5. In terms of writing, the kind of support you need is:

a. Someone who will undertake the translation of your latest work into Klingon in time for the Con
b. Someone who will post a five-star review on every review site, even if your book sucks
c. Someone who knows exactly what button to push to get your mind off a bad review
d. Someone willing and able to boil the reviewer in a large pot, and then eat him

If you answered mostly “a”, you might have had a great support group, but they’ve all been abducted and taken to Roswell.

If you answered “b”, remember to tip well.

If you answered “c”, you already have interesting friends. Gil Grissom will be investigating your cadre during his guest spot return to CSI next season.

If you answered “d”, you must like Hemingway a lot.

Ah, yes, those subjects one should never touch. They glow in the dark, radiating with a white-hot intensity, daring the author to slip them into her story. There should be a warning alarm that sounds during these moments, with an automatic computer shut-down that forces the writer to rethink her plans.

There is the risk of offending readers. There is also the risk of climbing on a soap box, where it’s all too easy to sound preachy. There’s nothing worse than being offensive AND boring.

So why not skirt the difficult questions altogether? Because fiction has a plot, and a plot has conflict. Depending on who your characters are, that will often come back to hot button issues like sex, politics, and religion. If an author doesn’t have the honesty to dig to the bottom of their character’s issues, the book will come out as compelling as cream of wheat. So what to do?

There is a trade-off when it comes to addressing “tough” subjects in fiction. I look at it like I would the spice cupboard. A teaspoon is good; dumping in the whole jar is too much. For this reason, I skirt the best-sellers dealing with chronic child abuse and head for the pulp fiction featuring demon abuse. Somehow it’s more okay in a fantasy setting.

Yes, that’s weird and perhaps hypocritical, but taking hot topics one step out of the here and now and putting them in the realm of the fantastic allows us to look at them more dispassionately. After all, much science fiction successfully deals with power struggles (often political ones), environmental issues, and ethics. That’s one of the things I love about the genre—it makes me think, engaging my mind as well as my heart, but it does so in a subtle and entertaining way.

I try to model my stories that way, and on a good day I get it right–I hope! My aim is to bring a complete world into being, with all the good and bad that goes along with it. The big difference is that all those difficult subjects, while present, are never the focus of the story. I write paranormal romance, not social commentary for vampires.

Though it would be interesting to hear what Dr. Phil would have to say about Dracula and his wives. Was locking up three wives in the castle basement the first clue that there was something funky on the domestic front?

I remember once upon a time Anne Rice came to town and the line-up snaked through the local mall and out the doors. I had two thoughts. First, I wanted to write books that people loved that much. Second, I was glad I’d phoned ahead and my signed copy would be waiting for me at the cash desk the next day and I could buy it sans line-up. Yes, I’m bad for not sticking it out for hours to meet Anne Rice, but patience never has been one of my virtues. I think I collected some bad signing karma that day.

Signings are odd events. From the author’s perspective, they’re fabulous, exhilarating, glorious romps when people show up. When they don’t, it’s mortifying. As far as I can tell, there’s little rhyme or reason as to whether it will be busy or dead, which makes every occasion a nail-biter.

How do “live” signings happen? Often the stores arrange them, or sometimes the authors do it themselves. When I was first published, I organized some events locally and then some a plane ride away in my “home” town. Setting up the events at a distance was an eye-opener. Out of about 5 stores, one actually remembered I was coming AND had the books available for sale. Another time, I drove all over Seattle looking for a store I never did find. I think it had disappeared into the gray, just like in Kat Richardson’s books. In other words, the logistics can be frustrating–and I’ve worked off every bit of that bad signing karma!

However, when the right magic strikes, a signing is a high-energy live performance. One or two of those events is all it takes to create an addiction. It’s wonderful to get an email from someone saying they like my work. It’s way, way better to have them tell that to my face. I love readers, I love meeting them, and I love that connection that comes from sharing the same imaginary world.

And fortunately, there are many people much more patient than I am about meeting authors!

Do you collect autographs? Is there a story about how you gone one?

The worst part of writing a proposal is that I’m sure I’m lying. I’m lying because my books never follow exactly the path I map out for them. If I already know all the twists and turns, what’s the point of writing it?

That being said, my poor editor needs something to go on. I’ll need to be in the business a lot longer before “trust me, it’ll be great” will be enough for the publisher to cut a cheque.

So, I have to apply seat to chair and type something up. Usually this means (for me—like Annette says, it’s different for each editor) a very detailed synopsis with all the internal and external plot arcs explained. It can also mean writing about the first fifty pages.

In order to do all that, I have to complete the absolute worst part of the book—the beginning. I hate, hate, hate slogging through those first few chapters. Getting them just right takes a healthy chunk of the total hours of book construction. So, by the time I’ve pulled a proposal together, I think they should absolutely buy the stupid book because I’ve already done 50% of the work of a bleepity whole novel. As you can tell, the whole process puts me in an intense mood.

Part of the process involves convincing my characters to play along. It’s a tough thing, because it’s a bit like saying: “C’mon, I know that you could be revised and end up as a border collie or a talking teapot, but for now just pretend you’re a Samurai warrior transported through the centuries to wreak vengeance on a major city.” But he knows that if the proposal’s rejected, it’s back into the ether with a resounding “poof.” With a deal like that, sometimes it’s a little hard to get your hero to assume the position. They keep snarling something about contract clauses.

So that’s what I’m doing right now:
• Bullying heroes and pleading with heroines to behave.
• Bashing at a synopsis in hopes that dumping enough words on the page will make it coherent.
• Drinking way too much coffee.
• Trying to remember how good it feels once the book is underway.

And that’s true. Once I get the green light, I’m in seven kinds of heaven and it’s all worthwhile.

What nasty job do you dread–but feel great once it’s done?

Okay, so I used to sew. A lot. It’s just with writing and stuff I don’t have much time anymore.

However, Readers ‘n Ritas is having a masquerade night, so I need a costume. I looked in the Halloween costume shops and, well, yuck. Once you’ve sewn yourself, those puppies don’t cut it, and they’re pretty expensive for what they are.

So then I wandered onto the Simplicity pattern site and found this. And I think I’m going to make it by mid-November. We’ll see!!