Whuh-Wednesday

So, since last week's wackiness in the blogosphere and writing/reading/reviewing world, I've had to slowly pry myself away from the trainwreck fascination.

The internet can be such an incredible tool, yet such a time-suck. And for a newling like me (new to being an author on the internet, not being-on-the-internet. God, no. I've been an addict since before the web had images.), it's especially dangerous. So easy to procrastinate screaming into the void writing by gawking and/or snarking at industry-related drama. Especially since the only deadlines I have at the moment are self-imposed. It's taken some practice to look at all that and say, "gee, it must be nice to have all that spare time. Well, gotta get back to work."

On a similar note, I kind of tilt my head and squint at this whole blog thing. Particularly the part where I'm posting something every Wednesday about writing, like I know what the fuck I'm doing and someone out there is actually interested in reading it. Am I just procrastinating some more? No, I have to remind myself that I am "building a platform." And no one expects me to be an expert. At least, they'd better not - they're in for a rude disappointment if they are!

In short, I don't fucking know, y'all. But I'm here, blogging this crap. And here's what's going on with me, the writer, CC Denham (or Christine, but I'm kind of diggin' the CC version of my name, to tell the truth):

-According to Kristen Lamb, and Idunno, probably some other people in the know out there, it takes a minimum of three books to get the ball rolling. I've got one completed, and it's a paltry short story. Okay, I'm not going to call it "paltry." It's steamy, sexy, sweet and not that short, especially considering the price tag. (BTW, if I can help it, I will always price my works the way I buy. It's rare that I'm willing to spend more than $2 for something under 20k in wordcount.)

Point is, The Ball is definitely not rolling in that context. Sure, I might have had my little moment of squee over my first 100 copies sold, but that's barely a drop in a huge bucket. And it's OKAY that the ball isn't rolling - it normally isn't at this point. But it's up to me to make it roll.

-I have a day job. One that's slow right now, but my husband also just got let go from his job, so I have to amp up my contract work and start pulling in more money.

Normally, one would use this as an excuse from writerly expectations. Not so, little pumpkins. I used to blaze through NaNoWriMo; there's no fucking excuse whatsoever for not getting some wordcount in every day. I have multiple WIPs - stories that haven't even been backburner'ed, but are still right here in front of me. At any given time, I have at least three Word documents open on my desktop. They will grow every day from here on out.

I'm thinking of getting a wordcount widget for those, actually. Not that they mean anything to anyone but me, but that's the point.

-I need to remember to read.

Seriously, I took probably a month or two off from reading any kind of fiction, because I couldn't find anything that grabbed me. What I've found is that when I stop reading, my writing slows down considerably. Granted, I was doing a lot of editing and formatting and blog-building and crap for those months, but you know what? The big boys and girls do all of that and they keep writing.

But back to the reading thing. We all know this - in order to be a good writer, you need to be a good reader. Read outside your genre, blah blah blah yackity shmackity. Of course, I happen to like my genre. But I also have some Max Barry to catch up on, and Wendig's Blackbirds, and the rest of the Mistborn Series by Brandon Sanderson, and the second Kalix book by Martin Millar. To name a few. I love my e-reader, btw.

...Have I mentioned that I probably have ADD/ADHD? Yeah. What was I saying, again?

OH, now I remember.
I was going to just randomly wrap this all up with a "what I've done" list, because those "to-do" lists and resolutions and shit always get depressing and overwhelming.

-In the last week, dear readers, I have finally managed to get through the first-pass of revamping of the plot set-up for my BDSM novella. Now I'm working on filling out the smut. It's already got a lot of smut. But my writing beastie wanted to throttle me because I skipped over the hot male submission parts. Plus, if I don't fill that stuff in, it'll wind up a short-story instead of a novella, and I'd really like my readers to see more of the complex and plotty smuts that I'm doing.

-I also opened up my fairytale-retelling novella that I'd set aside a few months ago. That one's a romance more than erotic-romance so far. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's going to be fairly low on the smut-scale. I'm excited about it, though. Love the hero in it. He's got that kind of sexy-geek-growing-into-his-badass-trousers thing going on (either that, or I've been watching too much Primeval lately. Mmm. Connor.

-I kept up with blog posts, even though I still haven't built up a backlog (that'll be a project for this weekend, I think!).

-I started reading again. Currently gnawing on The Breaker's Concubine by Ann Mayburn. *fans self*

Okay, then. Got all my "I"s and "me"s out of my system. Onward!

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "to talk of many things..."

TIME TRAVEL!

I always thought my first real spark of love for time travel happened when I was eleven. I remember walking out of the movie theater with my parents, a huge grin on my face, babbling nonstop about all the possibilities, and how it wasn’t completely out of the question that someone could someday really build a flux capacitor. (The whole teenage-crush-on-Michael-J.-Fox thing came a year or two later.)

Recently, however, I came across some old school papers and book reports my mom kept around. Apparently the time travel thing was a bit older than that, harkening back to elementary school and my childhood obsession with space and astronomy. I even illustrated my own “rainbow ring” for a book report on Tunnel Through Time by Lester Del Rey.

It’s such a huge topic and plot device. And really, what’s not to love? Well, other than the brain cramps and geeky arguments. Fortunately, there seems to be less of that in Romance - we’re too busy enjoying the results of time travel to fight over methods.

Even still, the fact that it hasn’t yet been accomplished in reality means that there are so many different ways we can accomplish it in fiction.

You’ve got your sci-fi time travel, and its variations - time machines built here on earth; space travel and wormholes and subsequent time travel there; mystery-time-travel, where someone from the future has the means and comes back to our present-time for whatever reason.

Then there’s the ‘magical’ time-travel - whether it’s accidental, a fluke of some kind of spelled-object; a Somewhere In Time kind of metaphysical trick; or completely fantastical and paranormal, where characters manage to willfully create the means to travel in time.

And those are just the means of time-travel. In fiction, what the characters and plot do with said time-travel is wonderfully and endlessly varied. Boil that down to romance-fiction, and you still get a delicious selection of methods. I’m not sure I can decide which romantic time-travel trope I love best:

-Modern character is thrust into a historical era and must function there. Inevitably, the lead character (okay, usually heroine), falls in love with someone in that era, and they must decide to sacrifice their entire world and choose to live out of their proper time for this new love.

This is often a nice, convenient way to write a historical romance without it being a typical historical romance. We can enjoy keeping one foot in each time, so to speak, and it feels like we’re ‘with’ the lead character, or they’re with us, in our wonderment of the world they’re experiencing.

Occasionally I’ve found stories where the heroine ultimately does return to present-time (usually unwillingly), only to discover her hero has materialized there in some form or another, say, via reincarnation or divine intervention. I absolutely love that idea, but I’m a sucker for that sort of thing!

-Character from historical era is thrust into present. Similar to above, but I don’t see it as frequently. Also, more room for hijinks with, say, a Viking wandering around Manhattan. Often, these feel less like the focus is on the time travel, and more like the focus is on the ‘modern’ woman falling for a crude, beast of a guy. Again, not so different from the previous example, but there is the advantage of the hero being taken down a notch because he has to be guided by the heroine through unfamiliar waters.

-There’s the more sci-fi form, with a character from the distant future coming to the present for whatever reason. I haven’t personally come across this in any romance novels, but have seen it in a few short stories that I liked.

-Just as rarely, but most appealing to me, is the notion of shorter-term time-travel. Maybe this goes back to the whole Back To The Future thing, but I like the concept of characters traveling and falling in love within a bare couple of generations of each other at most. Even better, I love the idea of actual consequences playing out, IE, the traveling character eventually returns and faces the older version of the man/woman they fell in love with in the past.

Obviously, this isn’t a comprehensive list, and I’m no expert on the topic. Just a fan and a writer! So, what are your favorite time travel tropes?

I Was Never Cool In School...

At the risk of bending some very wise rules about blogging (as explained by the great Kristen Lamb), I figured I'd go ahead and properly start things with an introduction and explanation of just what the hell I'm doing here. See, I have years (eep - more like a decade!) of experience with online journaling, spewing 'random musings' and pointless, narcissistic crap every day, several times a day, with little regard for what readers might have wanted.

Blogging is a different animal, apparently. And I'm a different person from those days. And, even though this is my blog, it's not really about me. It's about you and me - our common grounds, hanging out on those common grounds, shooting the shit about what interests us, all while drinking excellent coffee, consuming excellent chocolate, and admiring excellent eye- and ear-candy.

Therefore, I proclaim Mondays to be Common Grounds day. I'm an erotic-romance and paranormal-romance author. I would hope that if you've found your way here, it's because you and I have a common interest in the things that point to those types of reads. Things like magic, shifters, mythical creatures, afterlife, etc. But also things like yummy men and women, badass heroines and heroes, intelligent smut, and a proper touch of BDSM.

All the same, sometimes I'm going to want to get some things off my chest. I'm a writer, after all. Which means not only do I have Thoughts and Feels about the writing process, but the formatting process, the editing process, and the social process. Being a writer, whether self-published, or traditional, or somewhere in between, involves so much more than words on the screen. So, indulgent as it might be, I proclaim Wednesdays to be Writerly Wednesdays.

Fridays, well - it might not be the most original concept in the world, especially for a Friday, but damnit, it's fun - Friday Mash-ups. Random links I've found throughout the week that you should check out.

All that said, the title for this post does have a point:

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