A good day of writing. Managed a nice long bout of screwing around too. But now it's late and I need to give the cats their treats and head for bed, so this is going to be short....
Today's Progress: 2064 words on In Flight.
I had to cut some too. I skipped ahead of some of the difficult parts and tomorrow or Sunday I might just end up knitting together what I've got. (This mostly fills in some blank areas from what I think is Chapter 3.)
I realize that a part of my problem is that romantic suspense is a naturally emotional and angsty genre. That isn't my natural style. And I've been reading all this hard-boiled noir stuff -- all terse and no emotions admitted (only shown obliquely).
I need to read some Daphne DuMaurier or something. (When will the DuMaurier estate get on the stick and release ebooks of her stuff? Oh wait, it looks like they did finally release some, but they're awfully expensive.) Maybe some Mary Stewart. (When will her estate get on the stick and release something other than the Merlin trilogy on ebook?)
Actually what I should read is Murder and Blueberry Pie. That was one of my favorite early Woman-in-Jeopardy mysteries. It's a Lt. Shapiro story by Frances and Richard Lockridge. It is not available on ebook, but I do have a rare paper copy of it. Stylewise, it may give me more bad habits than good, though. Another in the same not-quite-gothic vein: The Family Vault by Charlotte MacLeod. It was the first of her Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn series, which became kind of silly and cozy, but that first one had a lot of the kind of emotional angst I'm going for. And I think I might have already picked up the ebook.
Or heck, read some Baroness Orczy. She definitely did some gothic stuff some of her Pimpernel books.
Eating, Watching, Reading:
I mostly wrote and plotted and dealt with kerfuffle and played solitaire today. We went out to get Syrian food. I had the chicken combo (chicken shwarma, kabob and roasted chicken) which is pretty close to the most garlicky thing on the planet. But it had a really good sear on it, and the roasted veggies and the lentil soup was so nice too.
I may put the rest of Murder Must Advertise on hold until I reread something more gothic....
See you in the funny papers.
Daring to live life as a full time writer, with or without success.
2 comments:
Narrative style has changed drastically in recent years so you'd do better to read current romantic suspense novels rather than classics. So has subject matter.
Go to a site like RTBookclub.com and read a bunch of reviews of romantic suspense, find some books that will interest you, and read them.
Thanks for dropping by. You're probably new to this blog, so I'll just let you know: I have absolutely zero interest in writing to suit the market. (Been there, done that, ran screaming away with the t-shirt.) I write only what I want to read.
As it happens I have read quite a lot of more up to date romantic suspense and related genres. What I'm talking about is in pretty much all romance these days. (And from what I can, even more so than ever before.) I'm not talking about the florid narrative style (why I said Lockridge was probably a bad idea) but rather the subject matter.
Feel free, though, to mention any specific authors or titles you like.
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