Flashback Friday--A New Feature

Okay, call me lazy. Or call me frugal. I've decided to recycle some old posts and call them Flashback Friday. Well, hey. I've been blogging here for eons (yes, much more frequently in the past), and there are GEMS in those posts, I tell ya, GEMS.

So I went to a random date generator (God bless the Internet), and the first Friday it spit out was September 5, 2008.

Click, click, click (fingers crossed there's something halfway decent on that date, and voila!) The following is an account of what was going on in Randyland September 5, 2008.

Writing Stuff

Contrary to recent posts, Randy DOES continue to write romance. Currently, I'm hacking away at a manuscript for which the full has been requested by an agent.

So, that's something, right?

Meanwhile, partials of various manuscripts remain in slush piles all across Manhattan. My favorite is the partial that's been "with an editor" for nearly two years. (Yep, no typo there. TWO YEARS.) Another one--this an actual REQUEST--is going on ten months. Suffice to say, there are others that I suspect are lost forever with no response, despite the SASE provided. Ditto for a couple of short stories submitted twice (not to True Romance, by the way).

In the department of new writing, well...I'm trying an approach which I think can best be summed up as "letting the story come to me" instead of forcing it. When I first began this journey of questionable wisdom, it seemed prudent to have a second manuscript ready in the event the first one garnered significant interest. So I feverishly went about completing Stealing Amy (and then sold down the river to an epub). Then I wrote Leftovers. These days, I'm not in the same kind of hurry. As a result, after completing Lights! Camera! Love! back in February (March?), I didn't rush to start something new. Did a lot of research, though. Sketched out some characters and snippets of ideas. Conjured up a few possible plot lines. Tossed them out to my critique partners who came back with all kinds of help.

Still, the story didn't take shape--it didn't fit the nebulous vision in my brain.

So I waited.

Yesterday, I admitted to myself that I've been avoiding the structure the book absolutely MUST have if I'm to succeed at what I set out to achieve. Truthfully, I'm not sure I have the chops to pull it off, but I have to try.

The cool thing is that I get a little tingle in my writing fingers when I think about rising to the challenge.

Wish me luck!