Happy Christmas and Giveaway Winner

Well, this year has been a pretty fantastic year for me. Six sold books and one agent is a pretty good effort huh?

But I wouldn't have got this far if it hadn't been for the wonderful network of friends and family who have given me so much support.

To all of you who read my blog, who've left me messages of support and encouragement, thank you so much. I've managed to achieve my dream this year, which means so can you. 

The answer is simply this:

Write. Submit. And write and submit again. 

And never, ever give up. 

Happy Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!! *balloons* *streamers* *confetti* *chocolate martinis*

P.S. Kimberlyindy, congrats! Thanks for commenting on the blog, you've won a copy of Finn for Christmas. Either leave me your email address in the comments or contact me via the form, and I'll send you a copy.

 

The Next Big Thing - And a Christmas Giveaway

Well, I've been tagged to do a Next Big Thing post by three fabulous people. First up is my awesome friend and CP  Maisey Yates! Check out her post about her amazing new cowboy story - it's....OMG, I can't even.... Second and third are two wonderful fellow Entangled authors and Kiwis, Michelle deWinton and Bronwen Evans. Both these fine ladies have Indulgences out (Bronwen's imminent I think) so if you're after a bit of Xmas indulgence, you can't go wrong...


Firstly I know this post should go up next week but it's Christmas and I want to do a giveaway so I'm doing it now. If you would like a copy of my debut book Falling for Finn to test the Ashenden waters (so to speak) before you decide on whether you may like the below ms, I'm giving away a copy to one commenter. And just to make it fairer, the more comments I get the more books I'll give away. Will draw the winner(s) on Sunday night.

To enter just leave a comment saying 'yo'.  :-)

Where did the idea for the book come from?

My Samhain editor tweeted that she wanted to see more virgin heroes and Maisey nudged me. I got thinking about why a guy would remain a virgin...et voila. 

 What is the working title of your Book?
 
Working title is Dirty Virgin Hero. Hehe. Or if you're on Twitter #dirtyeffingvirginhero. ;--)

What genre does your book fall under?

Contemporary romance.

What actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I wouldn't. No actors are ever right for my characters. Lame huh? However I do have a Pinterest board here.

What is the one sentence synopsis for your book?

Ugh. Sorry but I'm going to cheat.  Taking Him - Game designer Ellie's last mission before she leaves the country is to seduce her older brother's best friend, the man she's loved for years. But little does she know that construction company owner Hunter has a past darker than the black feathers tattooed on his back and a secret he'll do anything to keep.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It'll be published by Samhain in November 2013 and is represented by Helen Breitweiser from Cornerstone Literary.

How long did it take you write the first draft of your manuscript?

Probably about 3-4 weeks.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Um. I don't really know to be honest. I guess I would compare the screwed-upedness of the hero and the emotional intensity of it with Sylvia Day's Bared to You.  Except the hero isn't quite as screwed up as Gideon Cross.

Who or what inspired you to to write this book?

Well, the idea of the virgin hero is something I wanted to write about because you don't see many books about male sexual shame. It's an interesting issue and a challenging one to write.

What else about your book might pique a reader's interest?

A geeky girl game designer, a man with wings on his back, motorcycles, hot construction workers, cosplay, hookers, tattoo parlours, and some hot how's your father. How's that for starters?

I'm supposed to tag people now but I'm not sure who has been tagged and who hasn't so if you haven't, consider yourself tagged!

 And if you want a copy of Finn in your stocking, don't forget to yo me! 

Monday Morning Inspiration - Or Not

In the quest for blogging inspiration, I've been going over my old posts from December last year to see what was happening in terms of writing back then and I came across a post about my chess player.  At that stage I was in the process of rewriting him for SYTYCW, planning to submit the whole manuscript for feedback. I'd done a few stats for the ms:

*Number of times entire ms rewritten - 3
*Number of times beginning rewritten - 6
*Size of 'deleted scenes' folder - 227k
*Number of times hero/heroine conflict changed - 3
*Number of times I wanted to kill hero/heroine - 20
*Number of tantrums pulled while writing - 50
*Number of times I wanted to give up in disgust - 100
*Number of times I DID give up in disgust - 100
*Number of times cried while writing - 5
*Number of working versions of present ms - 8
*Number of titles decided on - 0

That was in December last year.  After I'd finished that post and finished rewriting the story, I sent him off to SYTYCW, plus entered him into the Aussie Emerald competition.

He got precisely nowhere.

Didn't get ANY feedback at all from SYTYCW and because one judge in the Emerald absolutely loathed him, I didn't get anywhere with that either.

Here's some stats for my Talking Dirty book from around the same time:

*Number of times entire ms rewritten - 5 - 6
*Number of times beginning rewritten - 4
*Size of 'deleted scenes folder' - Rewrite folder 37k, Original folder, 20k
*Number of times hero/heroine conflict changed - 6
*Number of times I wanted to kill hero/heroine - 100
*Number of tantrums pulled while writing - too many to count
*Number of times I wanted to give up in disgust - too many to count
*Number of times I DID give up in disgust - too many to count
*Number of times cried while writing - too many to count
*Number of working versions of present ms -50 million
*Number of titles decided on - 3

Oh and I should add one more line.


*Number of times rejected - 3

As you can see, both of these books nearly did me in. For the chess player I berated myself daily for the fact that I'd decided on a chess playing hero who everyone CLEARLY hated. For Talking Dirty, I berated myself daily for the fact that I knew I had a good story there, yet I couldn't seem to find it.

BUT

I am a stubborn-ass b*tch sometimes. And I'd be damned if I let these stories - one of which got to the 2nd revision stage with M&B - languish.

So I started rewriting Talking Dirty for the 7th time and pitched it in a competition. It got a request for a full - which I wrote in a week (from chapter 3) - and then four months later, it sold to Entangled. It's going to be out sometime in 2013 (May tentatively).

And then with my chess player, I rewrote it for the 4th time and submitted it to my editor at Samhain and that sold too.  Black Knight, White Queen, will be out in July 2013.

Why am I telling you this? Well, sometimes it's a good thing to give up on a story. Sometimes you don't have the experience at the time to be able to make it better. Or sometimes you're too close to it to see it objectively. I first wrote Talking Dirty back in 2008, but it wasn't until 2012 that I finally had the experience and knowledge to turn it into a book that sold. The chessplayer I started at the beginning of 2011 but didn't sell it until a year and a half later. Again, it wasn't the fact that my hero was a chessplayer that didn't work, it was the fact that I still hadn't got a handle on conflict or character.

But some stories you can't let go of. Nor should you. Some stories deserve to have their time in the sun. I don't know if this inspiration or not, but for those of you who have stories that you just can't let go of, keep going. Keep working on them. Keep learning your craft. And one day, a year and a half, or four years, or even ten years later, eventually someone's going to say yes.

And then you can shock everyone with your stats too. :-)

Monday Morning Freak-Out

I'm having a bit of a freak-out at the moment. Nothing new for me I guess but a 'thing' has happened and it's left me feeling all weirded out.

I've had this idea for a series in my head for at least a year now and I always thought I'd write it as category length. However, since I've written my Dirty Virgin Hero, I've been wondering if I couldn't take it longer. The DVH was 63k and I have to say I enjoyed writing long, so I kind of thought this idea could maybe stretch to Single Title length.  I've always had it in my head that I'd like to give ST a go but I've never had a really good enough idea that would make me want to write it. Until it occurred to me that this series idea could be an ST.

I've kind of been put off ST till now because over the various conferences I've been to, agents and publishers were saying that ST Contemporary was a hard sell and that readers wanted sweet, small-town stories. Which annoyed me cos I don't write sweet, small-town stories.  So I steered clear of it, wrote what I wanted to write which was angsty urban contemporaries.

And then 50 Shades hit. And angsty urban alphas were suddenly in again. And the CPs were telling me to run the idea past the agent to see what she said. I kind of thought the agent would probably say no and I prevaricated a lot - mainly because I liked my idea and didn't want it to be rejected before I'd even got a chance to write a word. But in the end I sent her the idea and dammit, she liked it! And so now I have to write a series outline, a synopsis and a partial of the first book!

This is geat news - I'm thrilled about it honestly - but I'm also freaking out because I've never written an ST (we will not speak of my 320k opus) and the idea I have is complicated, dark and extremely angsty, and I'm really, really hoping I can pull it off. I'm going to be majorly writing out of my comfort zone and that's kind of scary.

But I guess challenging yourself is all part of growing as a writer isn't it?

Who else is writing out of their comfort zone at the moment? Anyone want to join me in the freak-out??

Being a Speed Demon - My Last Minute Nano Project

You'll have to forgive me if I haven't been online much in the past week but that's because I've been writing. I decided to take on a last minute Nano project in the last two weeks of November and in order to meet the deadline, I had to write fast. Very, very fast.

I've always been a fast writer but as I've learned new skills my speed slowed down over the past year or so and I admit I got worried I'd lost my speediness forever.  Which is really, really overdramatic of me but as most of you already know, it's not unheard of for Jackie A to be totally overdramatic. 

Anyway, turns out I haven't lost it. A deadline can make me a speed demon.

I'm not going to tell you what my word count was in a week and a half cos actually, I'm a little bit embarrassed and Kiwi about it. But I HAD to do a small boast somewhere so I put it on FB if you're interested.


So how did I do it so fast? Here's a few tips. 

1. I can type exceptionally fast. This is HUGE. Being a hunt and peck typist limits your speed. So if you don't know how to touch-type, now is the time to learn.

2. I spent at least a week thinking about the story before I wrote a word. Not the plot - I'm a pantser - but because my stories are totally character driven,  I HAD to know the characters and their conflicts intimately, otherwise my story would collapse. I had already written 5k to start with and as beginnings take me the most time since that's when I'm finding my way into the characters, I already had a pretty good idea about the hero and heroine.
 
3. I didn't do anything else other than write. I'm lucky in that my day job is writing and my kids are at school so once they were out the door, that's what I did.

4. The times I wasn't writing (in the evenings) or when I had to stop to get the family food (instant meals you can do in 10 minutes) I thought about my story and what I was going to do next with it.

5. I stayed off Twitter (mostly) and the rest of the net. I kept my emails to a minimum.

6. I didn't reread what I'd written. I didn't fuss over my words. I just kept on writing.

7. When the words started to get hard, I would stop and go and do something else for ten minutes while I worked out what was wrong. I know my process and I know that when something is difficult to write it's usually because I'm not sure about something. Thinking about what I'm missing helps.

8. My husband was a godsend over the weekends, letting me write while he did kid-stuff to keep them out of my hair.

9. The times my husband wasn't there, television was. And takeout.  I feel no guilt about this. None at all. :-)

10. Housework? You're kidding me right?

Now some people might think that fast writing equals crap writing. But that, quite frankly, is bullsh*t. I've written books waaaay slower and they've been just as big a heap of crap as ones I write really fast. ;-) Seriously though, just because you write fast does NOT mean you don't write quality. Sometimes the things I write faster are better because I'm not overthinking everything. Oh and you know Falling for Finn? I wrote that in 2.5 weeks and it sold. So there.

Anyway, those are some of the ways I managed to get it done. But really, I think the biggest part of getting it done so fast for me was having a deadline. I need them in order to push myself. Without them I'm a faffer.

So, does anyone else write fast? What are your tips?