Some stories....

Some stories write themselves, the words and ideas flowing effortlessly onto the page, and I've been fortunate in that respect. Others attract every form of disaster known to mankind and the current one is a perfect example.
It's troubles began in mid ocean, when it morphed from romance to general fiction and doubled in length. This required going back to the beginning and recasting the introduction of additional characters to provide subplots etc. Then the impending arrival of another grandchild was confirmed and tasks which had been pending became urgent and our babysitting racked up a level, especially when another daughter went back to university. Then personal medical problems for both of us intervened and had to be dealt with and adjusted to in the middle of the temporary insanity that set me seeking an agent.
The latest calamity came when my sister suffered a TIA (mini-stroke) that escalated to the point where her entire personality was wiped. (It was heartbreaking, sitting at her bedside, being recognized time and time again, her knowledge of me never lasting for more than a second) Thankfully, she has taken the first tentative steps on the road to recovery with the partial recovery of her power of speech (single words so far, but every one sounds great!)

It's a great life...sometimes

Amy

Wherefore art thou....?

No posts for a while because of family dramas etc., and initializing the search for an agent to represent my writing in the US.

I began writing seriously in 2000, having played at it since 1997 and have published six print books and seven e-books, all, more or less, category romances of sixty thousand words. The reviews have improved more than the sales and I've had three publishers fold on me--which highlights my lack of expertize in this area, even if I've learnt to write publishable prose.

Succumbing to the blandishments of a fellow writer, I began my search for a suitable agent and quickly learnt this is almost as difficult as finding your first publisher, especially as I'd like to shift from romance to general fiction with the story about privateers/pirates in 1802. Fortunately, my insanity (the only excuse I have for wanting to write) has progressed to the obsessive stage and I am persisting. The general longevity of my family gives me hope that I will succeed eventually--after all, I'm only seventy.

It's a great life (I think...)

Amy

Out of the Writing Cave

In our house, cooking is a rostered activity. We take turns, each of us cooking three nights of the week and we go out on the seventh and dine with friends.

Thursday, we pick up one of our granddaughters from her kindergarten and is one of my nights, so I decided to try a slow cooker we'd inherited and never used to produce corned beef (with no cabbage!). The instruction book was written by a dyslexic with writer's cramp and consisted primarily of recipes in a sparse, masculine style designed to conceal rather than reveal their secrets, so my first task was to decipher from these some concept of the function of the four position switch on the side of the cooker. The next was to adapt my tried and true recipe for corned beef to this new implement.

I wasn't sure I believed the instruction book's claim that it was impossible to overcook anything in this appliance and the cooking time recommended seemed impossibly long (12-24 hours), but there'd be six hungry mouths to feed and under done corn beef is not desirable so I accepted it and decided to check the condition along the way.

I was wise. Four hours before the meal, the meat was cooked!

I switched off the cooker and prepared the rest of the meal on time, switching on the cooker half an hour before. Surprisingly, it was a great success. The bay leaf, two cloves, brown sugar and malt vinegar had been intensified by the lesser liquid quantity, and, if carving required the delicacy of a brain surgeon, the white sauce hid most of the results and every plate was cleaned.

I've typed some notes and pasted them on the inside of the instruction book for future reference and am looking at their recipe for Irish Stew as an encore in a month or two.

The weather is good, so I have a day's work in the garden, a collection run for a charity and a bike ride planned for the weekend, then it's back into the cave and into the acrid gun smoke of a naval battle in 1803 as the story nears its climax.

It's a great life.

Amy

Back on an even keel and full steam ahead.

I could extend the nautical allusion further, but won't.

I'm still waiting for some of the responses, but they are no longer at the forefront of my mind, which is focused once more on my writing. I'm still not sure what distracted me from writing to waiting, but, whatever it was, has passed now and I'm back to my routine of checking my inbox only in the morning when I start writing and last thing at night.

I've a further submission to polish and send off before next week and the end of the 1802 story is just over the horizon, figuratively as well as actually. That will leave only the epilogue, where one of the main characters gets his final comeuppance. (The scene is based on a real event and I'm looking forward to writing it.)

Beyond that, I've a list of jobs to complete around the house, some furniture to make for one of my grand-daughters and my long anticipated return to playing golf--a torn shoulder tendon from traipsing around Europe with too much luggage has taken a long time to heal.

It's a great life!

Amy

Waiting

When I first considered writing professionally, I foresaw my impatience as the greatest problem.

It had been different in my "real" life. There, logical step succeeded logical step, the time-frame fixed and dependable. Obstacles were overcome as they arose, a simple matter of identifying the required steps and then taking them as I rose to the top. I could even chose the point at which I stopped.

Writing is a little different, but I developed strategies to cope with its uncertainties and they work-most of the time.

This is not one of them.

There's no particular reason why. The responses I'm waiting for have potential, but are not life-changing, yet I am struggling to maintain my focus on the work in hand and find excuses to check the inbox and relevant websites obsessively.

Like everything, it will pass and I will settle down again to my working routine, but it would be nice to understand why?

It's a great life (I think)

Amy

Out into the sunshine once more

The approaching release of The Widow-Maker has dragged me out of my writer's cave and I'm blinking owlishly as I consider how to promote it. The failure of Shadowrose imposed a hiatus on my releases and I'm a little our of practice.


Our grandchildren are not happy. I was away a lot when our children were young and compensated by writing an ongoing story with each child the hero of succeeding chapters and their children are old enough now to demand their own chapters and I was in the midst of the latest.


Simply Romance Reviews are reviewing The Widow-Maker and I am guest blogging there on May 28th and there are the opening excerpts at Yahoo's Romance Excerpts Only and The Romance Room. (The latter are runing a membership drive and contest with a swag of downloads etc as a prize)

It's a great life.

Amy

Shadowrose

I sent off the final round of emails to all the contact points I had for Shadowrose, setting out a cutoff date for May 1st, 2008 with a heavy heart, not because of my personal disappointment, but because I like Patricia Fuller and wish her well. It was fortunate that we only got to the intent of exchanging contracts and events prevented it from happening, because it makes what follows simpler.

There are other irons in the fire and I'm back to waiting for responses and the advent of The Widow-Maker at Whiskey Creek Press.

In 1802, my four adventurers have encountered a small fleet of dories making their way to the Azores after the sinking of their Portuguese nau (a small vessel of the type that carried the Portuguese to every corner of the world) mother ship by a Right Whale blundering south to breed. (there were still a lot of them in those days)
The Portuguese were challenging two hundred years of Spanish control of the off-shore fishing, so both sides of the encounter were very wary and I've had to brush up on my spattering of Portuguese.

It's a great life

Amy

New England Whalers

One of my characters in 1802 is a New England whaler, something of a prodigal, separated from his family by an unhappy love affair. Researching his background has been fascinating, particularly the practice of calling in at the Azores outward bound to pick up a cheap crew of hard-working Portuguese in preference to American seamen. (It seems the philosophy behind Flags of Convenience have been around for a long time.)

Jedediah Pike began life as an example in a writing class I teach in the local adult education system. His first name changed to Zebulon, he was part of an alternate beginning to the infamous "It was a dark and stormy night..." that Snoopy found so addictive. He's grown a lot since then, gained his master's certificate and sailed a blockade-runner through the English Fleet four times. Captured by the British, he's been released to captain the same ship on a voyage to Jamaica, evading if he can, a fleet of privateers turned pirates.

Jed is not the main character, but I've grown to like him and he provides me with an outside perspective of my Half-pay Lieutenant and his Countess-the hero and heroine.

It's a great life.

Amy

Thoughts on mortality.

I am not naturally morbid, even a heart attack in an isolated location hardly troubled me in that sense, but a memory ambushed me yesterday and made me think on the subject.

My uncle survived the Kamikaze attack on the HMAS Australia at Leyte with a broken neck undiagnosed for several months. He later broke it again diving into shallow water at St Kilda pier and then contracted, and recovered from, tuberculosis. Years later, he told my aunt he was feeling a little off-color in the afternoon and laid down to rest. When she went to wake him for tea, he was dead.

I was feeling a little off-color myself yesterday and decided to give writing away for a while and lie down to rest. Standing by the bed, the memory of my uncle's demise came unbidden--I'd not thought of it for many years--and I paused.

I'm not afraid of death, I disposed of that old bogey many years ago, but it would be damned inconvenient!

It's a great life.

Amy

Another one gone into the world

The Widow-Maker galley proof is finished and the Errata sent back to Whiskey Creek Press, with it goes my last chance to change even a single punctuation mark.

I remember reading some comparison between books and children and thinking at the time that the writer must be childless. Ours come back for help and advice continually, but books, once the galley is done, remain immutable. Something I learnt when I started writing seriously and the first one was published.

The first glorious reaction passed quickly and then I started to see the mistakes, partly because they existed and partly because my writing had developed in the twelve months between galley and publication. I found it difficult to read each of them after the first few times and this feeling persisted with each of my books until recently (C.S.Forester wrote of having the same problem, so I was in illustrious company). I can read even the earliest now without having the overpowering urge to correct them as I go.

I'm worming my way back into my current project (it's had more interruptions than most) and will soon be immersed in the world as it was in 1802.

It's a great life.

Amy

The rich tapestry of Edits

The edits for The Widow-Maker arrived in my computer inbox at 1:02 am, Good Friday morning, accompanied by a request I respond to them by 10:00 am. Fortunately, I was up at 6:30 am and opened the inbox, which gave me three and a half hours to the deadline.

Given the time out to trade authorities on capitalization, I made it by ten minutes (The edits were not onerous and I'm a fast reader) and remain satisfied by the results. I doubt the haste was the editor's fault and I have no doubts of the expertise applied to the manuscript, but I was extremely fortunate so little needed to be changed.

Usually, I like to enjoy edits, analyzing their thrust and storing the information for later use. I've done that since with these and have a few more tidbits to add to my store of knowledge.

I've been very fortunate in my editors and New Concepts abdication of that role means they are off my list of publishers - which is a pity.

It's still a great life.

Amy.

A leap of imagination

My writing cave is not air-conditioned and this is the fifth day above 37.8 C (100F) in a row and I am writing about January 1803 in the North Atlantic and the act of visualization that takes me there is getting a little more difficult each day.

It puts me in mind of a January in the North Sea, one of the rare days when we saw the sun, and I was walking aft from the foc'sle on a British crewed tanker. Photo-chromatic glasses were not common in those days and mine had reacted to the sunlight by turning dark and the men on the bridge were certain I was taking the mickey out of them by wearing sunglasses. At the time, I was wearing thermal underwear, a thick cotton track suit and three pairs of overalls under my wet weather gear and had just passed through the shivering stage to actually shuddering. The wind had been from the east for several days and the air temperature was around twenty below. (add to this, I'd flown from Xmas in Australia only days before) I spent another month on that ship, working on deck most of the time, and remembering what it was like to be warm was extraordinarily difficult.

Part of my military service was a snow survival course designed by sadists. We spent ten days clad only in working gear with only the normal ration packs for food and had to move twenty miles across bush country without maps (I seem to remember I actually volunteered (obviously very young and foolish at the time)). I can't remember being so cold for so long as those ten days, but our training must have been good, because there wasn't a single case of frostbite, other than chapped ears.

I'd hoped those two memories would help my visualization, but the sweat is still trickling down down my chin and dropping on the folded towel I use regularly to wipe my hands and protect the keyboard.

It's a great life.

Amy

A pause in time

The cover art for The Widowmaker made it to the Coming Soon page of Whiskey Creek Press and I stopped for a moment to reread the story, for the edits must come soon. It is fifteen months since I submitted the story and almost exactly a year since the contract came and I last read it from beginning to end. I found the usual number of overlooked errors, noted each of them and moved on, knowing they would be my part of the editing process if they were overlooked.



Still, with the apparent failure of Shadowrose continuing, it's nice to see movement on another story.

Writing a historical slanted more towards general fiction in challenging. It removes many barriers, but opens up new sources of criticism. I'm finding it very rewarding.

Amy

An act of love

A writer friend quoted an Australian survey about the length of coitus, published apparently to reasuure other Australian, or to quash any unreal expectations in others. Some of the findings were amusing.

I commented in her blog and think its worth repeating here:-

"What are we measuring here, the physical conjunction, or the thousand moments of tenderness that turn it into an act of love?"

I am a strong believer in the school that says 99% of great sex happens between the ears, particularly having had one partner for the last forty-seven years and taking the act out of its emotional context is impossible for me.

Thoughtfully

Amy

The Widowmaker - Front & Back

The "Widowmaker" is not due for release at Whiskey Creek Press until May and, as they are now splitting their monthly releases into two, one part at the beginning and one part at the middle, it may not even be until the middle of May. However, it now has a front and back cover.

I think they're both great and the aerial view of the Phillip Island circuit adds icing to the cake.

Thank you, Jinger.

Shoulder to the wheel and nose to the grindstone etc...

It felt odd, reverting to snail mail submissions, but I sent one off yesterday, complete with sae and irc's, and set my computer to remind me when a response is due. (the latter is a largely pointless exercise, but I always do it.)

That out the way, I returned to my WIP and started worming my way into the story again, following the voyage to the point where I left it, assuming the cloaks for the four disparate characters who carry the tale.

One of them reminds me of Toby Meares, from the "Callan" series long ago. It is fun imagining the circumstances that would produce a similar character in 1802, although he seems less of an anachronism than I expected.

The cover art for "The Widowmaker" is not yet finalized, although I know I'll be pleased with it, my last two cover artists have been great to work with, and the edits for the story should arrive soon(another interruption to the WIP).

It's a great life.

Amy(for the moment)

Fancy Free

A fellow Antipodean with an offbeat sense of humour and a very engaging writing style has a new release at Ellora's Cave. I'll let her tell you about it in her press release.

Responsible Romantic Heroes Use Condoms

Some readers prefer heroes to use condoms while others say the dose of reality kills all the spontaneity and romance. It’s a debate that repeats all over romance land—to use condoms or not to use condoms—since, after all, it is only fiction…

New Zealand erotic romance author, Shelley Munro took this a step further in her upcoming release Fancy Free, the story of an accountant who inherits a condom company. When Ms. Munro caught an Air New Zealand flight from San Francisco, she came across an advertising article about a new condom on the market. The ideas flowed and by the time she landed in Auckland, she’d outlined her plot for Fancy Free.

It’s not every day a girl inherits a condom company, and to say accountant, Alice Beasley is astonished and out of her depth is putting it mildly. For an almost virgin, she needs a quick education in all things condom because her inheritance is in danger. Someone is intent on sabotage and playing nasty, trying to destroy her new company.

Alice is suddenly getting down and dirty with charismatic James, the factory manager, all in the name of business, testing new condom designs. The sex is hot. Mind-blowing. It’s a dark thrill and an erotic journey. Yeah, it’s a hard job but a girl’s got to do what a girl’s gotta do.

The testing turns personal. Alice wants James. She craves his talented touch and sultry kisses, she desires passion and physical pleasure on a permanent basis but first she must convince bad boy James to give up his fancy free ways.

Note: condoms were tested and a few harmed during the writing of this story.

Fancy Free releases on 7 March 2008 from Ellora’s Cave www.ellorascave.com and is Ms. Munro’s eighteenth release from the pioneer erotic romance publisher.

From the time Shelley Munro was a little girl living in New Zealand, she wanted to be a detective. She read all the Famous Five mysteries by Enid Blyton before graduating to Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Her favorite television viewing was Scooby Doo where she, in her invisible guise, helped Scooby solve the crime.

As happens with children, Shelley grew up and boys distracted her from childhood dreams. She found one she really liked and married him, traveling the world at his side until returning to settle in New Zealand to write hot and spicy tales for Ellora’s Cave, some of which contain the odd body or two.

Publishing Notes:
Title: Fancy Free
Author: Shelley Munro
Publisher: Ellora’s Cave
ISBN: 9781419913341
Release Date: 7 March 2008
Genre: Contemporary erotic romance
Setting: Present day New Zealand

Adventure into Romance with Shelley Munro
http://www.shelleymunro.com
shelleymunro@gmail.com

It, and her blog, are well worth the time.

Amy

Anniversary Presents

It's our forty-fifth wedding anniversary and I am gloating over a personal present on the right, the initial run of the cover art for The Widowmaker at Whiskey Creek Press. The far background behind the motorcycles may change, but already the cover artist has done me proud.

The real anniversary present is the forty-five years we've already shared. Add three children we consider friends, five grandchildren (with the prospect of more) who've stolen our hearts all over again, and a relationship that has weathered life's storms remarkably well, considering our faults. (largely mine, of course)

We'll celebrate by baby-sitting one of our grandchildren while our younger daughter celebrates her own anniversary (our children have Machiavellian minds), and tomorrow we'll go out, just the two of us, and have afternoon tea at a favorite place.

In the meantime, I have edits, a WIP and a submission to prepare.

It's a great life.

Amy

The Final Ritual

Our friend has gone.

We attended the final ritual of her life last Thursday and it was no surprise to find how many lives she had touched with her grace and personality. A "Preps" teacher at a prestigious girl's school, she came into our lives when she became our neighbour, attended plays with us, became part of the "Birthday Girls".

They handed out jellybeans, an integral part of her classroom, and we all took one thankfully as her final reward for good behaviour.

As always, she gave generously.

Amy

Fare Thee Well

A very gracious lady left this place yesterday, putting aside a body that could no longer sustain her spirit.

She will be missed.