Jacqueline C. Thomas - Romance Novelist

Archives for October 2019

NaNoWriMo 2019 Eve

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To most people October 31st. is celebrated for Halloween. For the writers in your life this day is known as NaNoWriMo Eve. This magical day is the eve of one of the largest collective novel-writing programs to kick off in the United States. NaNoWriMo, or Nano as I call it, stands for National Novel Writing Month. The idea is you dedicate one month to write a novel, at least fifty-thousand words. When my husband and I met, he was the prolific writer in our relationship. I dreaded November because I know I became a “book widow,” as he feverishly typed away in his home office. I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

After I wrote my first book, a couple of years back, my husband challenged me to do Nano. I believe it went something like this, “you’re a writer now, I bet you have another book in you. Do you think you can do it?” Never one to back down to a challenge, I committed to completing my first Nano ever. I wrote The Lake Michigan Affair in three weeks. At the time I was working for a local organization that threw a massive Christmas celebration for the town and I knew that I would not have the bandwidth to organize that event and write. I had the idea, a devout Catholic woman who falls in love with the new Catholic Bishop of Chicago, but little else. I set off and working under pressure, the story grew before me. I look back at it in awe. Two years later after several re-writes and copy edits, I am seeing representation for The Lake Michigan Affair. It amazes me, I still can’t believe I had that story in me.

Last year for Nano, I wrote another novel. It was the story of friends who work together. They go through a horrific tragedy and are brought together in grief. There’s only one catch, she’s married, he isn’t. What drew me to this story is that the characters had always had a “thing” for each other, an attraction that neither had ever acted upon until this turning point in both of their lives. What I loved about this project is the main character Emily, is flawed, she breaks Gabe, her love interest’s heart, not once but twice! This was a challenge to write and still make her likeable. I started this book with an idea of unrequited love between two friends that blossoms into something more, spurred on by tragedy.

There is one scene in this book that I especially love. It is where Emily has hurt Gabe badly, and she comes to him to reconcile, not even realizing that is why she is there. Gabe has just lost his mother and is back home to sign over the keys for the sale of his childhood home. She comes over to be supportive of Gabe and they end up sleeping together. I love this scene because it is so intimate. They end up getting stuck at Gabe’s childhood due to a snowstorm. Together they build a fire in the fireplace in the living room to stay warm when the power goes out. However, they have no trouble staying warm, making love to each other all night. I love this scene!

This year as I gear up for another Nano, once again I have my idea in mind. I feel like I have my main character loosely configured and her love interest or interests. This time there is no marital affair, other matters of the heart are afoot though. I am so excited to be able to start Nano this year. I love this program so much. Life is busy, and finding time to write is a struggle but for me, knowing there is a deadline, that the first draft should be done by the end of the month is exhilarating. What excites me, even more, is the story that is yet to come. I guess I am easily entertained because I am always in awe when I complete a work, that I came up with that story.

The one thing I am not looking forward to is the halfway point. It is usually at the end of the first act, or before the climax that I have a crisis of confidence and am tempted to scrap the entire thing. I have done this with everything I have ever written, with the exception of Come Sail Away with Me. Here’s hoping that this year’s doubts are manageable and I won’t give up. My personal motto has always been one word, “relentless.” Be relentless in goals, that means not giving up and telling myself, even if the book turns out to be garbage, I didn’t give up. I have never finished a book and thought it was trash, by the time I got to the end. Sure, it might need a massive amount of work, but the story is there. So if I can give one piece of advice for those of you who are doing Nano this year it would be this, DON’T GIVE UP… KEEP GOING!

See you all at the end of the month with our books in hand!

 

If you’d like to learn more about NaNoWriMo, click here.

Back to Half Moon Bay

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It’s official, I have my writer’s groove back! Hallelujah!!! I wrote a very honest post a few weeks back about having difficulties returning to writing after going through a traumatic surgery. I couldn’t seem to focus, but more importantly the creative muscle just wasn’t flexing. I wrote about how dishearting and terrifying this was. I had made the plan to return to my first completed novel to rewrite it. I chose the project because I didn’t have to build the world, or the characters, the groundwork was already done. All I had to do was enhance, organize, and tell their story. Simple right? HA!

I learned through this process that rewriting so so much harder than writing from scratch. When you write from scratch, you have the freedom to create, when you rewrite there are limitations, you have to write in the world already built. The story is a romance between a woman visiting her brother in Silicon Valley for the summer, and she falls for her brother’s boss, a tech giant. I loved revisiting this steamy love story, which takes place in Half Moon Bay, California. My thought process for choosing this to help me get my groove back was that I loved this story, it was the work that wooed me to love writing.

There were parts of this process that were so much fun, especially adding rich detail into the story. Describing the feeling of his hair as she ran her fingers through it, how he thought she smelled to him, these seemingly small details made such a massive difference when I wrote them out. All the while I had to be careful to keep in mind the framework I was supposed to be working in, keeping with the narrative of the story. I loved doing this part of this rewrite, it made the characters so much more….more everything!

For as fun as it was, it was difficult too. There were entire chapters that didn’t make it into the new version. Have you ever killed an entire chapter? It’s brutal but necessary. Then there were the chapters that had all of the components to move the narrative forward but they were in the wrong order, a full chapter rewrite, ouch. I found chapter rewrites to be the most challenging and the most rewarding. The work was gruelling, and as cliche, as it sounds, I did have to kill my darlings, the things I loved in the book, in order to streamline the story and make it tight.

Being a full-time working mom and a graduate school student, to say that time is precious is an understatement. Another difference in a rewrite vs. a “regular” write is that I really had to pay attention to details. For each chapter I worked on, I would reread the chapter before it, before working on the next one, this helped keep continuity and move the narrative forward in a succinct manner. This means I spent as much time reading the book as I did writing it! On days where I was lucky enough to be able to write for a few hours, I would read large parts of the book. I was very strict with myself, knowing the importance of doing this. Re-reading the most recently completed chapter before writing the next one, made this process feel painfully slow. As someone who has limited time, this was an exercise in patience. It was important though, moving deliberately through the book in a slower way gave time to let ideas and plotlines “marinate.”

With NaNoWriMo coming up, I knew I needed to have this book done before I participated. I know I only have the bandwidth to work on one project at a time right now. I was so committed to getting this book done, I got up at 5 am. to write before work. This is a huge thing for me! I am not a morning person! If I didn’t have to be a functional person, I would be happy to write into the early hours. Life is quiet in the middle of the night. Each night before bed, I’d set my coffee pot to brew at 4:45 am, and my laptop on my nightstand. When my alarm would go off, I’d grab a cup of coffee and then sneak off to our spare bedroom, curl up on the bed and start writing. It was just me in the dark, with only the glow of the screen, and my characters. I fell in love with writing like this! If you haven’t tried it, I highly suggest it! There are very few things in life that will have me hopping out of bed in the morning happily, and this was one of them. What was even more amazing is that I found that my creative muscle would be in overdrive all day. I would come home from work, do homework, kids, dinner, bath etc. and race to get back to my computer.

Last night I “finished” the rewrite. I use quotations because as any true writer will tell you, a book is never finished, you just get it to a point where it is good enough. As I wrote my last sentence, tears welled in my eyes. I started this project as a lifeline back to writing. I needed these characters and a world already built, like writing training-wheels. My plan worked, I found my writing groove in such a strong, powerful way. As I stared at my computer screen looking at 106,000 words, I wiped tears from my cheeks and shut my computer. This book will always be incredibly special to me because it was the first thing I ever wrote, and it came flying out of me. Now, this book taught me how to rewrite but more importantly, it wooed me again.

So the plan for Come Sail Away With Me, as it is titled? I need to let it sit for a couple of months. I need to step away from it, it needs to rest. In the meantime I will be doing NaNoWriMo, the idea for this year’s project came while I was rewriting CSAW. Sometime this winter I will pull it back out and reread, editing and tweak along the way. From there, it is off to a professional copy editor and then….. query time! I’ve decided I am going to try to seek representation for it. Let’s see if this story shares it’s magic again and snags an agent.

What’s Next for McKinley Park

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I am assuming, hopefully that if you choose to read this blog post that you read some or all of McKinley Park. If my assumption is correct, THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart! I was overwhelmed in the best possible way by all of the constructive feedback I received while I was writing it and afterwards. Siting here “finished” with it, the flaws glare at me. It makes me think of my elementary school art teacher, Mr. Brignoni. He was an older Italian man who professed that the first mark you made on the paper was what was intended all along. I can see him now with his salt and pepper moustache, saying, “no, Jackie, that is how it was meant to be.”

While writing is an artistic expression, Mr. Brignoni’s ethos does not fit here. Revisions and rewrites are part of the process. I wrote and published McKinley Park pretty much as I went along, except for the last few chapters which were written in one sitting. The work as it stands now is rough, not just grammatically but developmentally as well. I am so grateful to those who reached out along the way to help me correct as I went, especially you Terry. To a certain extent, publishing a book a chapter at a time has its challenges, and as McKinley Park sits now, they are visible.

So what’s next? Well, last week I came across a tweet from the romance book reviewer, Jamie Green form the New York Times. She put a call out for indie authors who had published online to submit their books for possible review. I shared the tweet out right away to those fellow romance authors who had romance books out there. I didn’t think about it for myself. The Lake Michigan Affair, for which I am seeking representation is not self-published, I prefer to go the traditional route with it. Driving home Friday afternoon, an idea struck. What if I had McKinley Park copyedited and did a full revisional rewrite, self published it as a full book, and submitted it?

I really thought about this, much to my husband’s annoyance. I had always heard that if you were seeking the traditional publishing route that self-publishing was a no go. I don’t want to do anything to hurt my chances for The Lake Michigan Affair and the other works I have unpublished. My husband, who’s opinion I value, advised against it. The next day I asked my sister who is an author and an indie-published pro, what she thought of the idea. She said, “Do It!” Hmmm, complete opposite opinions. So what does any self-respecting Y’er do, ask the internet of course? So I posed the question to the Twitter Writing Community, publish or don’t. I was surprised that overwhelming responses that said to do it. I still continued to think about it.

With NanoWriMo approaching, which I have done for the past three years and love, and the thought of a rewrite for McKinley Park, the writing plate feels a bit heavy. So right now I am thinking about how to juggle a new project and McKinley Park. Or Nano or do I focus on my rewrite only? If I did a rewrite, I would most likely pull McKinley Park down from my site but that is also a lot of content gone off of the site. Hmmmm, more questions. I am not sure what the right answer is here. I know it is a long shot that McKinley park would be chosen to be reviewed, but on the miracle that it was, making its debut in the New York Times would be a life-changing moment for me. Like my sister said, “what do you have to lose? It’s the New York Times, Jack, your dream, go for it!”

So that is where this sits as of now. I am still unsure of taking the chance. What would you do reader? Let me know in the comments below.