Archive for April, 2009

Words written: 747
Setting: Seattle
Perspective: Renata’s Narrative

Favorite line (#wipfavline on twitter):

Julia was staring out the window, her champagne flute rested gently against her cheek, and I could tell she was deep in thought. I knew that look on her face from my own personal experience. It was longing for something more. I felt comfortable enough, and maybe even buzzed from the champagne, to engage Julia about what I had witnessed, “So I don’t know if you caught on but I think Mr. Spencer has a crush on you.”

© 2009 Rochelle Michael

Words written: 989
Setting: Seattle
Perspective: Renata’s Narrative

Favorite line (#wipfavline on twitter):

My frivolous swim through the shallow end of the pool was interrupted when Julia snuck up beside me and looked over my shoulder. “Who’s the hunk?” she teased.

© 2009 Rochelle Michael

Once upon a time I was married. He proposed four years ago, and we spent the next year of our lives planning a wedding that became larger than us. The wedding was beautiful and filled with good intentions, but when we decided to move apart after only one year of marriage we both knew it was best for us and that we should have never gotten married in the first place. I knew then that I would someday be able to see how our breakup was the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s a year and a half later and I’ve made a lot of progress toward that enlightenment, but I still feel a serious sense of failure that I broke my marriage vows and especially in such a short period of time.

Some promises are hard to keep, especially the ones that should have never been made in the first place. But I find that the most difficult promises to keep are then ones that start with, “I will never again…” because repeating past behavior is hard to resist in particular situations. Lately I’ve been thinking about how breaking promises can turn out to be a good thing. It can be the best thing that ever happened to someone when she dives right back into a behavior that she once promised herself she would never repeat again. And that’s what I’m exploring in my WIP. Renata is constantly making promises to herself that she cannot keep, because she shouldn’t be making such ridiculous promises in the first place. Why limit the heart? Why limit your experiences just because the first time around it brought you to utter hurt and total failure? Resistance should be futile when someone like Renata is much too hard on herself.

So the moral of this blog post is that ideally promises should be made and kept only when it’s right, which is admittedly easier said than done, and that we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves when we don’t get it right. I should have never promised to be with my ex-husband forever when I knew that we weren’t really meant for each other, but it happened and I should give myself a break about it. I shouldn’t promise myself that I will never get married again, because there’s no telling what’s in store for me. And Renata…she too will break a lot of promises to herself when she meets Ryan, and it will be the best thing that ever happened to her.

Here’s one promise that I don’t mind making publicly and that I plan on keeping. I promise that I will finish my novel and share it with whoever wishes to read it.

Words written: 2,726
Setting: Seattle
Perspective: Renata’s Narrative

Favorite line (#wipfavline on twitter):

More like a paragraph, and it just so happens that this paragraph opens Renata’s narrative.

I watched the time count up as I ran faster than usual on one of my gym’s many treadmills. 29:46. 29:47. 29:48. Before I could see 29:49, my cell phone vibrated harshly against the built-in water bottle holder. My ex-husband Patrick’s smiling face popped up on the display for the second time during my work out. I ignored it and increased the speed on the treadmill for the last ten seconds, hoping that if I ran even faster I would feel less frustrated with him. 29:58. 29:59. 30:00. Cool down. But running faster hadn’t made me feel better, it only made me trip over my own feet. As my body fell toward the horrifying conveyer belt, I thanked my lucky stars that I had remembered to adhere the emergency stop cord to my t-shirt. I hit the rubber surface hard and heard the women around me yelp at the sight of my fall and the sound of my thud. I pulled myself up, red with embarrassment and sore all over. I told myself right then and there I would never again act so stupid because my ex-husband was giving me grief. Never.

© 2009 Rochelle Michael

Words written: 2,756
Setting: Oxford
Perspective: Renata and Ryan’s Narratives
Milestone: Connected two major plot points of my story!

Favorite line (#wipfavline on twitter):

“Don’t bother with your rubbish,” she hissed and pushed past us to get into the house, her little dog following close behind. Ryan knocked back into me accidentally making me lose my balance and hit the kitchen table, which consequently knocked over an open bottle of red wine. It gushed over the tabletop and onto the floor. When the aroma reached my nostrils I rushed to the sink to make the ultimate first impression by throwing up all over Susan’s dishrags. Everyone froze behind me, except for Lynne’s dog Tommy, who went to work investigating the spilled wine.

© 2009 Rochelle Michael

I can’t believe I wrote a vomit scene! I never would have imagined that would be part of my story, but it fit so perfectly and provided the perfect set up.

Words written: 1,336
Setting: London and Oxford
Perspective: Renata’s narrative

Favorite line (#wipfavline on twitter):

The framed photograph in Ryan’s room had not done her justice. I thought that I knew her face so well since I had studied it so many times, but this face was fresh and vibrant. Her full lips were mauve and just like Ryan’s, they turned up at the corners ever so slightly. Unlike in the photo, her auburn hair was now long and pulled back in a ponytail. She reminded me more of a cheerleader than a classics professor. She was stunning. Seeing her now in person made me worry that I wasn’t nearly beautiful enough to be with her heart throb son.

© 2009 Rochelle Michael

I’m writing a love story that could probably be classified as women’s fiction. I don’t feel like my work is targeted at women specifically, because so much of it is about Ryan and from his perspective, but if it had to be categorized it would fit into women’s fiction, chick lit, whatever you want to call it.

What it’s not…an erotic romance. There are some sexual situations, but things never get hot and heavy on the page. That being said, who doesn’t love a little “romance”, right?

Well I have two things to share…

First, I want to give props to a fellow writer and friend of mine, E. Jamie. She’s published through Amira Press and has some great work out there. I recently purchased her book Redemption, and was surprised just how much I could enjoy a western. She really does a great job and captures the old West in a super sexy way.

Second, I just finished watching this Nightline piece on the 60th Anniversary of Harlequin romance novels. This is truly a must-see. Not only do you learn a lot about Harlequin as a publishing company and how successful they are right now (sales up 32%), but you also get to hear some notable people (Seth Rogen, Martin Bashir, and others) reading naughty excerpts. I especially enjoyed hearing Paul Rudd do a reading, hubba hubba.

Check it out:

When it comes to writing I have good days and bad days. Not in the actual craft of writing, but in terms of confidence. There are some days where I feel great about what I’m doing, including my writing style, my pace, and my plot.

Other days, not so much. This past weekend while visiting my family for Easter, two things happened that rocked my confidence. To begin with, I let my mom read about ten pages of my WIP (when Ryan and Renata meet for the first time). Before she began, I gave her some background about what happened before that point, so she could have some context. While describing what amounts to the premise of my story, I felt very insecure. To me it sounded silly and utterly personal. I worried that she thought Renata was based off of me, and that perhaps it mirrored my own life too much. She read the pages and complimented me, but I ended up feeling… embarrassed.

The next day, I had a light-hearted conversation with my sister and her boyfriend about celebrity gossip blogs. My WIP involves a celebrity and the paparazzi, so I brought it up. Once again, I felt so incredibly insecure. My WIP sounds perfect in my head and on paper it’s even better, it really is, but when I talk about it I feel like I’m talking about some fanfic that I happen to be writing. I know that it is anything but a fanfic, but I still feel embarrassed. Not that there’s anything wrong with fan fiction, because I know some incredibly talented fan fiction writers and have read some amazing pieces that just so happen to be classified as “fanfic”.

So I was thinking that I could potentially overcome some of my insecurities by talking about my story a little bit more.

Ryan Collins is a world-famous celebrity. Renata Sanders is an average girl. They fall in love. It’s not exactly a Cinderella story, and Ryan isn’t exactly Prince Charming. Furthermore, Renata isn’t exactly in the mood to date a celebrity. It’s a complicated romance. Because I’m writing first person narratives from both Ryan and Renata’s perspective, the story belongs to both of them. It’s not about Renata getting the famous guy that every woman desires. It’s about overcoming issues of insecurity, breaking promises, and finding that one person who can be your ultimate partner. As an average girl, just like Renata, I think that my audience will feel like I’m writing myself into the story and this is just some sort of escape outlet or fantasy. I would argue that nearly every character I write has me in them. They are born out of my mind, and therefore each one is an extension of myself. As time goes on, I find that it’s Ryan I relate to the most. Writing for him is easier and much more fun.

So there it is. There’s obviously a big hook to the story and much more to it than I am describing here. Hopefully, putting it out there will help me overcome my insecurity.

Now, if I could just overcome a few of the other insecurities I have, like how long it is (too long) and the structure of it. But that will have to wait for another post.

Words written: 1,403
Setting: London, at the apartment.
Perspective: Ryan’s narrative

Favorite line (#wipfavline on twitter):

“I need help packing,” she requested.

My heart sunk. I finished my task and went to the bedroom where I found suitcases opened and her clothes scattered across the bed. It was the visual representation of my broken heart, scattered into pieces.

© 2009 Rochelle Michael

Does writing feel effortless to you?

This week I’m attending the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado. The panel that I’m primarily attending is called “Cinema Interruptus,” which is moderated by the one and only Roger Ebert and film critic Jim Emerson. It’s my seventh or eighth time attending, and I look forward to this event every year. Here’s how it works. Roger and/or Jim pick a film. On Monday we view the entire film, uninterrupted. Starting on Tuesday and continuing for the rest of the week, Roger, Jim and the audience go through the film scene by scene to analyze it.

This year, the chosen film is Chop Shop. As a very special treat, the film’s writer and director Ramin Bahrani is joining us, which is just incredible. In years past, members of the audience have fought each other over the meaning of a prop for half an hour. This time around we can ask Ramin what a prop might mean and get a direct answer that cannot be disputed.

It is a great gift to hear directly from the horse’s mouth about how the film was made. I’m consistently in awe of filmmakers because it seems so incredibly hard to make a film. It makes me tired to even think about it. It seems as if it would be completely overwhelming to me, and physically draining.

After my friend and I left the panel today we had a very interesting conversation about just how hard it would be to make a film, and he surprisingly lumped writing a novel into the same category. In his opinion, both require an immense amount of effort and extreme forethought. The execution, in his opinion, also requires a similar level of dedication and writing even has a physical component as well. He argued that sitting at a computer and typing is not natural for everybody.

All of this was really intriguing. I find that writing my novel feels nearly effortless. It’s like a natural extension of myself, and that more than anything I’m just getting the story in my head out on paper. It’s more like a relief than ever like a chore. To me, filmmakers probably have the same desire, to let their story out, but on film. I wonder how other writers feel about this. Do you write to get the story out? Does it feel natural?

For my friend, it feels impossibly hard to write a novel or make a film, yet he is a computer programmer by trade. He will have a vision of how an application should function, and then have the forethought and skills to translate that vision into code. It comes naturally to him, while to me it seems impossibly hard.

So I suppose that’s what doing what you love is really all about. In a way, we become graceful masters of our passion. It can be so personally rewarding that the effort involved is no effort at all.