Fall 2006

Greetings! Cover: Lady Dearing's Masquerade

LADY DEARING'S MASQUERADE continues to do me proud. As I mentioned earlier, it garnered the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Regency Romance of 2005 and the Desert Rose Golden Quill in the Best Historical Romance category. More recently, it hit the finals of the New Jersey Romance Writers’ Golden Leaf Award. I had a wonderful time at the NJRW conference, where the award was given to my friend and blog buddy Janet Mullany for her debut Regency, DEDICATION. I could not lose to a worthier opponent!

On the writing front, I have recently completed the first draft of my Regency historical romance featuring the balloonist hero. There’s a lot of polishing to do, but the hardest part of my process is DONE!

Now I’m taking the month of November off of that story, to let it rest while I strive to meet the challenge of National Novel Writing Month. Along with some 70,000 other writers, I’m trying write 50,000 or more words of a new novel by the end of the month.

But for me, the goal is more than wordcount. I blogged about this at the Risky Regencies. Here’s an excerpt:

I’m participating for a special reason of my own. After six books, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to tackle first drafts. I have put more pressure on myself to be brilliant, to be efficient, with the result that I self-censor too much. I’ve chosen not to follow up on intriguing ideas because I couldn’t understand the characters’ motivations, or they seemed historically implausible (not impossible), or because I was afraid readers wouldn’t like them, etc... The problem is, if you cut them off too many times, the girls in the basement (or the subconscious mind, or the muse, or whatever you call the dark, strange place where ideas come from) go on strike.

So for this month, I’m going to ignore all those worries and trust that strange dark place. I’m going to write what I feel like, for pleasure and for wordcount. I’m going to trust that if I write a scene I love, I’ll be able to figure out how to make it fit believably into a story. I’m going to relinquish control to the girls in the basement. Fly on the bat’s back and trust that I won’t fall.

Ariel on a Bats Back
(This amazing image is of “Ariel on a Bat’s Back”, by Henry Singleton, first exhibited in 1819.)

So far, it’s been crazy but even more fun than I hoped. For this month, you can watch my progress at my NaNoWriMo profile page. Even if I don’t reach the 50,000 word goal, I’m sure I’ll have a good chunk of a new story and also renewed energy to return to my balloonist.

Hope you are enjoying your fall and looking forward to the holidays!

Cheers,

Elena :)