A to Z Challenge: Y is for You, Only You

This year, I'm participating in the insane awesome A to Z blogging challenge, which entails posting EVERY SINGLE DAY during the month of April, except for Sundays. Each day's theme corresponds to a different day of the alphabet: 26 days, 26 posts. I'll be blogging each day this month on some aspect of my current work in progress (WIP).

Y is for You, Only You

Updated with new addendum at the end...

I know I may have stretched a little for yesterday's post, but today's is better. Not much better, mind you, but better.

At its heart, this novel I'm working on - and blogging about incessantly - is about love. I can't call it romance, since it doesn't really fit that genre, but it certainly has romance in it. Above all, it's about the long, as in millennia long, journey two souls undergo together.

In every lifetime, these same souls find each other, over and over and over again. And in each lifetime, they find themselves inexplicably drawn to one another, no matter how many seemingly insurmountable obstacles stand in their way, their own fears very much included. They couldn't be more different, and yet they can't find happiness without each other.

So that's today's theme, in its essence: that gut-deep feeling that the person standing in front of you is vitally important; that you are somehow connected, in ways you may never fully understand; that this person, despite all of their faults and weaknesses, belongs in your life. This person is your person, for better or worse.

It's the feeling that each soul will have, over and over again, as they look at the other soul standing in front of them: "You, only you."

The feeling exists, strong and sure, in each lifetime, but the human capacity for ignoring these feelings is endless, until at last the pain caused by this avoidance is worse than the danger of true intimacy. And there is the story.

Now, this is where the original post ended, but blogger Stephanie Faris helped me realize that this post is a bit misleading: the message of the book isn't that these souls are each other's "one and only". As I noted in a response to her excellent comment, the overall message is about overcoming fears and obstacles to be true to who we are. In this story, that's about being brave enough to love. My concept is that we get second and third and tenth and more chances, from life to life, to grow and change, and that's part of why these two souls keep ending up in a romantic situation together. I imagine that these souls always turn up in each other's lives, but not always as lovers. I hope that makes sense...

A to Z Challenge: L is for Love

This year, I'm participating in the insane awesome A to Z blogging challenge, which entails posting EVERY SINGLE DAY during the month of April, except for Sundays. Each day's theme corresponds to a different day of the alphabet: 26 days, 26 posts. I'll be blogging each day this month on some aspect of my current work in progress (WIP).

L is for Love

Note: The excerpt here is definitely PG-13. Nothing explicit, but quite a lot suggested. Not appropriate for younger audiences! 

There are so many different kinds of love: even romantic love takes so many forms. Infatuation (as some of you recognized from that snippet I posted); obsessive love; young love; falling out of love; mature, generous love. My WIP is going to move through some of these different kinds, from Apollo's dramatic crushes in the Ancient Greek lifetime to, eventually, a truer, deeper, braver love between Nat and Taylor in the modern Australian lifetime.

That deeper love takes quite a lot of time and effort to get to, though, and there are a lot of bumps in the road along the way. Many times both of them are sure they'll never make it; in fact, they're shocked when they realize they even want to make it. Both Nat and Taylor have scars and baggage in their histories, and neither of them trusts easily.

Remember, Nat is a wanderer; she spends most of her time on the road on her motorcycle, and her affair with Taylor evolves during many visits over a long period of time. The format is always the same: she shows up at Taylor's farm without warning, stays for a while, and leaves again, without warning, over and over. Here's a snippet about one of her visits, told from Taylor's POV. In many ways, it's about the strange things we do and say when we love but are afraid, especially as our pasts get in the way. I know, it's ridiculously out of context and too long. Oh well...what are snippets for?? As always, I make no foolish promises about quality, and all standard disclaimers apply:

I was fixing fences the next time Nat showed up, months later. She rolled into the yard early one morning in a racket of rattling metal and whining gears, and took the bike right into the barn without saying a word. I heard the clatter but I was fields away, patching a rotting fence, and by the time I made it back she already had parts scattered across the floor. 

I leaned against the door and watched her work. “What’s broken this time?”

She flashed me a smile, and as always it was like squinting into the sun. “Everything,” she answered. “Of course. Stupid bloody thing.” She gave the chrome frame an affectionate pat, and then went back to work. Nothing else.

So I went back out into the fields and hammered planks into the fence with so much force that I splintered the wood, and had to go back to the shed and cut myself some new pieces, so that the whole thing took three times as long as it should have. By the time I’d finished putting away my tools, and was washing up for supper, I knew what I had to say, down to the last word. It didn't involve her staying. 

I went inside the house. “Nat?” I called, “I need to talk to you.” The whole house, though, was filled with the smell of herbs and the sizzle of fat; I walked into the kitchen to find Nat pulling a well-browned roast out of the oven. 

She blew her hair out of her eyes and gave me another brilliant smile, and said, “Perfect timing. Come and sit.”

I followed her into the dining room. There was salad and mashed potatoes and this still-sizzling roast, and glasses filled with red wine, and two places set. “I got the meat out of your freezer; I hope you don’t mind?” she asked, settling the steaming platter onto the table. “I wasn't sure if I’d have time to thaw and cook it before supper, but I managed.” 

I shook my head, and picked up a wine glass. “Ah,” she said, her eyes laughing at me, “That I brought with me. I know you don’t drink during the week but I thought I might convince you to make an exception.”

“What’s the occasion?” I asked.

“No occasion,” she said, sitting down at the table and spreading a napkin over her lap, and avoiding my eyes, “I just wanted some wine. Are you going to sit down or what?”

I did sit, and even though I knew better, I drank the wine, which was rich and strong and full of smoke, and set my head spinning. 

Nat started spooning food onto my plate. “What did you want to talk to me about?” she asked, dropping a mound of potatoes next to the giant slice of mutton in front of me. 

I watched her fill her own plate; it was the first chance I had to get a good look at her. She was thinner, too thin, her cheekbones standing out in her face, and there were heavy shadows under her eyes. “Oh. Nothing important,” I said. 

She looked up and caught me staring, and then looked back down at her plate, and she didn't ask me again. Instead, she started eating in silence, so I followed suit. I was about five bites in when she dropped her fork and gave me a look so bright I could feel the heat of it across the table, and then she grabbed my chin and kissed me. Before I knew what was happening, she was in my lap, unbuttoning my shirt. We did eat, later, but we had to reheat the food. I didn't get a chance to tell her how good it all tasted until the next day.   

The rest of those three days were just the same. She would disappear into the barn for hours at a time and couldn't spare me two words strung together, no matter what I said or asked, and then she’d come up behind me in the field, or suddenly get up from working on the bike, and have her hands inside my clothes so fast I didn't have time to blink. One time, just before supper on the third night, she came up behind me while I was washing my hands at the outdoor sink, and shoved her hand down my pants. I jumped about five feet in the air and grabbed her wrist, and turned around to face her, expecting to see her laughing, but her face was so intent and so full of naked desire that I ended up making love to her right there, where anyone driving by might have seen us. 

A to Z Challenge: K is for Kiss

This year, I'm participating in the insane awesome A to Z blogging challenge, which entails posting EVERY SINGLE DAY during the month of April, except for Sundays. Each day's theme corresponds to a different day of the alphabet: 26 days, 26 posts. I'll be blogging each day this month on some aspect of my current work in progress (WIP).

K is for Kiss

As my fellow blogger Leandra Wallace once wisely noted, kisses are one of the most common acts you'll find in a love story - and yet they're one of the hardest things to write. This seems counter-intuitive - what's so hard about describing two people pressing their lips together? - but as soon as you think about it, you realize that it's true.

The first problem is that you can only say, "they kissed," or ""she kissed me," or even "he pressed his lips to hers" so many times before you start to feel like a broken record (am I dating myself by using that metaphor??) It gets hard to be creative after a while, and there's always a danger of getting, well, weird when trying to creatively describe two people touching their body parts to each other (and that previous sentence is a great example of that creepiness. *shudders*)

The second problem, though, and the bigger one for this WIP, is that you also need to infuse each kiss with meaning, especially that all-important first kiss... And I have six lifetimes going, with six or more different love affairs, which means at least four first kisses, and boy is it going to be challenging to make them all sound, not to mention be, as important, and as different, as they need to be.

So I'm practicing writing kisses these days. I'll spare you and won't post any examples, but let's just say most of them are fairly awful. It also occurs to me that writing is a really, really weird job sometimes...

A to Z Challenge: J is for Jealousy

This year, I'm participating in the insane awesome A to Z blogging challenge, which entails posting EVERY SINGLE DAY during the month of April, except for Sundays. Each day's theme corresponds to a different day of the alphabet: 26 days, 26 posts. I'll be blogging each day this month on some aspect of my current work in progress (WIP).

J is for Jealousy

Ah yes, jealousy: that green-eyed monster. What kind of love story would I be telling if jealousy didn't factor in at all?

A pretty dull one, I think.

After all, jealousy is one of those strange, precious literary gems: a vicious, corrosive emotion we hate to feel in our own lives, but one that we love to read about our characters struggling with. Because it's human, and so very real, and highly incendiary when tossed on a pile of blazing love-denied/love-forbidden/love-rejected plot embers.

I haven't worked out all of the details yet - or, ok, fine, most of the details; this is a work in progress, after all - but I already know that jealousy is going to be the death (perhaps literally, at least as far as the participants are concerned) of one love affair, and the reason another one never happens at all - and therefore a reason for the characters to suffer from yet another corrosive literary gem: regret.

Creepy, isn't it? Thanks to http://cher-homespun.blogspot.com/2011/10/firewater-friday-jealousy-is-all-fun.html for the image...

I love that image: it's just as tangled and fierce and even diseased as jealousy often feels. I might have to keep it on my desktop as I write...

A to Z Challenge: H is for Heartbreak

This year, I'm participating in the insane awesome A to Z blogging challenge, which entails posting EVERY SINGLE DAY during the month of April, except for Sundays. Each day's theme corresponds to a different day of the alphabet: 26 days, 26 posts. I'll be blogging each day this month on some aspect of my current work in progress (WIP).

H is for Heartbreak

Ah, heartbreak: that terribly awfully perfect piece of a love story. Most of us love happy endings, but if we're honest, we also love to see some heartbreak before our heroes and heroines get what they want. After all, happiness is all the more precious when it's hard-won, and to set aside humor for a moment, we all know what it's like to suffer, and feel like we won't survive it. It's part of being human, that awful grief - as is the rush of light when we come out on the other side, and find that somehow, miraculously, we're still alive. But I already wrote about that in Cloudland.

In this novel, I get the delicious fun of adding heartbreak into six different stories, and of subjecting my two souls to a variety of different forms of heartbreak. I mentioned this at length in an earlier post, but I'm planning on using quite a few of the love story plots at my disposal.

So I'll have heartbreak because someone isn't loved; heartbreak because someone is and the love isn't reciprocated; heartbreak because love is forbidden; heartbreak at being rejected, not once, not twice, but three times, by the same person; heartbreak at once-perfect love being destroyed; and quite a bit more.

I'm not just being sadistic, here, although that is fun. I'm trying to build a story arc through six different lifetimes - which means, really, that things can't work out perfectly until the last story. What a pity, right? ;)

A to Z Challenge: D is for Damon

This year, I'm participating in the insane awesome A to Z blogging challenge, which entails posting EVERY SINGLE DAY during the month of April, except for Sundays. Each day's theme corresponds to a different day of the alphabet: 26 days, 26 posts. I'll be blogging each day this month on some aspect of my current work in progress (WIP).

D is for Damon 

Damon is the second soul, or character, in my Ancient Greek lifetime, and he also happens to be Apollo's love interest (and for those who are curious, homosexual male relationships - usually between an older and a younger man - were actually very common in Ancient Greece; Apollo himself had a large number of male lovers.)

Damon isn't the sort of guy you'd expect a god - much less the god of music, medicine, truth, and light, among other things - to fall in love with: he's a shepherd, living in near-isolation for most of  the year with his father in a tiny hut on a remote mountain, and he spends his days tending their flock of sheep. As a result, he's poor, uneducated, and naive...but he's also determined. Add that to the beauty he grows into as he reaches the edges of manhood, and you have an excellent recipe for disrupting Apollo's self-imposed celibacy.

Here's a little snippet about Damon:

Damon was only seven years old, a dark-eyed slip of a boy with knees like bruised fruit, and hollow cheeks only a mother could love, when he decided he would one day become Apollo’s favorite consort. The fact that he had no mother to love the confusion of limbs and scrapes that were his mortal frame did not deter him; nor did the fact that the god had foresworn all mortal lovers since the untimely deaths of his most recent seventeen in a row, the last of which had died in the god’s arms, cross-eyed and bloodied, after being struck in the head by a rebounding discus. As a result of this unfortunate series of violent and sudden losses, Apollo was so consumed by grief that not even the most smooth-skinned, well-endowed lads and maidens of the realm could shift his resolved celibacy. Damon, however, was a determined child; he’d found very early on in his quiet life that achieving a goal was simply a matter of doing it. 

He lived with his father in a tiny cottage, barely more than a hut, on an isolated hilltop hours outside the nearest village, tending his father’s sheep and dreaming of the gods who lived high on the remote, misted blue peak that loomed at the very edge of his vision...

Writing Love Stories For Dummies (Like Me)

This week's blog-post-brainstorming started with a good, old-fashioned dither. I'm still researching Tibet, you see, so - hmm, how to say this nicely - my current process is REALLY EFFING BORING.

Not that the research is boring; not at all. As I've mentioned, I love research (most of the time). It's just that telling you about that process is rather akin to forcing you to sit through a dull lecture by a professor who sounds like the teacher from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

So, I dithered. And then I thought: WAIT! I'm not just researching Tibet; I've also been researching love stories!

Why? Well, part of my advice to people when they're struggling with plot (besides go back to your characters, of course) is to look for some way to frame the plot; some plot-skeleton to hang your story-flesh off of, if you'll excuse the unsettling metaphor. This can be literal - when I was writing Cloudland, I used Joseph Campbell's monomyth - or it can be thematic. You know, some kind of writing prompt, or jumping-off point, like, in the month of April I'll write blog posts for every letter of the alphabet. Or something.

For this WIP, since a) it's about love, and b) it follows souls through multiple lifetimes, I thought I might be able to structure each lifetime around one of the Great Love Story Plots.

Except, erm, I didn't know what they were. What?? I've never claimed to be an expert on writing romance. Far from it, actually. This is where all of you romance writers point at me, and laugh, as well you should. But I really did do some research on it.

So, for all of you non-romance writers, who, like me, freeze in panic when they have to write a love story, I want to share the most helpful thing I found in my research thus far: a fantastic old blog post by one Margo Berendson, listing her idea of the 13 standard love story plots, with examples for each.

For those who don't have time to click on the link, here's a little user's guide to the love plots I'm going to mention, quoted from her blog:

• Reluctant love: "where two people are forced by circumstances into a betrothal or marriage. Sometimes both are reluctant partners; sometimes one is willing, the other reluctant. As the reluctant one comes to know her partner better, they genuinely fall in love"
• Love Torn Apart: "the opposite of a happily-ever after, where love reigns for a while, but then is torn apart by circumstances" 
• Love Forsaken: "a pair of lovers where one rejects the other (usually because of unequal status or to honor the family), and then regrets it"
• You're the Last Person I'd Ever Love: "two characters start out disliking each other, often quite intensely, and then fall in love as they get to know each other better"
• Forbidden Love: "Romeo and Juliet, Lancelot and Guinevere, Paris and Helen" and so on. 

If you found those helpful, I highly recommend checking out the original post. Just sayin'.

Anyway, thanks to that post, I'm off and running, and GOD does it feel good to have a sense of the overall structure of this monstrosity that I'm working on. And because I'm me, and I am incapable of doing anything simply, I want to combine these plots to make new stories. Yes, one lover might be headed towards an arranged marriage, and therefore a reluctant love plot, but suddenly another character arrives in the story, of the wrong race or gender or social class (or all of the above), and now we have a forbidden love story, with a dash of love triangle and great potential for love torn apart. And THAT is fun to write.

For example, I'm thinking my Ancient Greek story will combine jealous love and love torn apart (yes, I made the first one up, but I like it. Think crazy jealousy ruining everything, like in Othello), and my modern London story will be an amalgamation of you're the last person I'd ever love and love forsaken, with a possible, unusual, modern twist on forbidden love.

Silly? Maybe, but it's working, and I'll take that over dignity any time.