OK.  'Member when I said that writing mysteries differed from writing my 
"regular" novels, and Pamela and I had a good discussion about it, about 
how my left brain first had to plan out the mystery (have three possible 
ways this crime could've happened, decide which it really was, then plant 
clues and red herrings to lead the sleuth down two or more wrong paths and 
then down the right path, sometimes without realizing it, and clue in the 
murderer some of the time so that the sleuth can be in danger, etc.)  My 
regular books just come struggling or spewing out, all character-driven as 
they have been.

Well, I thought maybe you'd like to hear some blather about how ChickLit 
differs from the genre novels that I've been struggling to learn to write 
over the past, what, fifteen years, ever since I couldn't even get an agent 
or editor to let me send Starla (the waitress novel) to them because I said 
it was "a literary Southern gothic."  

In the meantime, of course, I learned that in category romance, your chars 
have to be obsessed with one another and totally interested in sex as the 
body functions relate (they have to meet and start looking at each other as 
edibles or exercise boards, just about--that's how it comes across to me, 
so I discovered I couldn't write the stuff, unfortunately for my marketing 
plans); in inspirational romance, you can preach a little or hit them over 
the head with the philosophy, but you have to have a certain kind of ending 
that I couldn't quite hit on the head, and besides the editors there 
sometimes ask you to change the setting of your novel, and that can ruin a 
Texas-flavored book that gets moved out of state; in fantasy, it's awfully 
easy for me to fall into a young adult type of voice because for some 
reason my magickers are always Coming of Age and Coming Into Their Powers, 
and the books are funny besides, which USED to make them rejected on the 
basis of "that's tough to sell"; in mystery, you have that different 
plotting scheme.  Whew!  You'd never have learned this in school.  Even if 
somebody TOLD you.  In all these genres, I have had to cut out much of the 
introspection and internal monologue that I tend toward.  The little 
statements of insight and whatever just  didn't go with the flow.  I could 
do SOME of it, but not the volume that was natural to me.  Now I can just 
SEE when it's coming on, and I just know I'll have to move it or break it 
up in a later draft.  Else it does something to the forward motion.  (Think 
Philip Roth, John Updike, and to some extent John Irving.  They have this 
kind of interlude.  In fact, some of Roth's novels are nothing BUT this 
interlude with a sex act or two stuck in here and there, IMHO.)

So now with ChickLit.  It looks like I actually get to leave all that stuff 
in!  In fact, it seems that the readers read it for this kind of 
stuff!  The catch is that your character can't be an intellectual or a 
professor, the way Roth's heroes always are, and the character can't 
overthink or be too powerful.  The character wants something that she can't 
get or seems not to be able to reach, and you take her through the book 
almost reaching it, but if she does reach it at the end, she realizes that 
wasn't what she wanted, that what she needed was to be content or it was in 
her backyard the whole time.  Some ChickLit novels end with the boyfriend 
proposing and that rescues the character and makes it all worthwhile 
(Bridget Jones and Confessions of a Shopaholic seemed that way to me), but 
mine won't. I believe the audience has gone past that.  The bubble will 
burst if authors don't give more thought to these plots, I think.

Anyhow, this is more fun to write.  I just throw all sorts of crap at her 
and she sees rituals everywhere she looks, and finally realizes her problem 
is that she's lost her faith in everything, become cynical.  Her solution 
is to start trusting again. . . kind of.  We'll see if I can make it 
work.  No man or woman or boyfriend is going to "give" her this faith 
again.  She has to find it within.

If I can swing it.  Wish me luck . . . I'm going down for the last 
time.  If this fails, I'll probably take a break from serious marketing for 
at least a while.  I mean, this seems so close to what's makin' it out 
there in the Red Dress Ink line, the Avon line, all those books. . . .

- - -
The only thing that flies faster than an F-16 is your guardian angel
- - - -
Nine out of ten doctors recommend reading my books.  The tenth is a quack.
Shalanna Collins   http://home.attbi.com/~shalanna/>
_Dulcinea: or Wizardry A-Flute_  (e-mail me 4 excerpt)  ISBN 0-7388-5388-7
New!  I'm trying out a blog/jrnl http://www.livejournal.com/users/shalanna/>

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