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How are your books related? They all occur in the same world. Many characters overlap. The order is:
How do I know when your books come out? Check my website periodically or, even better, join my newsletter mailing list. How can I write to you? You can use my contact page. How do you come up with your ideas? This the question that I am asked the most often, and it is also the most difficult to answer. I simply tell stories; I always have. Asking me the process is much like asking a detailed description of how one talks. I can give you a very long answer, but it would still do little to give a questioner any decent understanding of what is really going on. No, I do not write my sexual fantasies into my novels. I write none of my personal life into my novels. I "try out" my love scenes in exactly the same way that murder mystery writers try out their murders. What is your writing method? Other writers have charts, forms, worksheets, collages, dioramas, and all sorts of other techniques to get in touch with their inner muses. I just sit down, preferably near a window with a lot of light, and write. I've found the most effective way for me to write is in timed bursts. Right now, I do two hours of writing in the morning and one in the afternoon. I hope do do four hours a day, every day. I do not allow myself to write at all outside of those times, no matter what, so that I can sufficiently recharge for the next day. This keeps up speed, quality, and my energy, because I can leave writing at "the office," which is a problem that haunts many writers. Writing is different from other occupations in the sheer amount of sustained effort that it takes and the lack of routine activities, unless they are artificially manufactured, to break it up. A very, very few authors can actually spend six or more hours a day really writing. I much prefer to limit my time working and spend the rest of my time on other activities than to pretend to write for more hours a day that I'm really writing! I've discovered that I can reliably write two hours a day on any particular book--any more, and my fingers get ahead of my brain! In writing speed, I range from a rare low of 2.5 manuscript pages an hour to an equally rare 7 pages an hour for raw drafts. I tend to average about four. It takes me approximately 80-120 hours to write a first draft and about equally long to edit it. It takes me roughly 250-280 hours total to complete a book with all stages of editing, another good 20 hours of basic overhead, and typically 30 to 100 hours to research. Working in the same world is nice because research is additive rather than having to be restarted with each book. What is the publishing process? I write under a contract with deadlines. The contract specifies an advance against royalties, money I get right away that counts against the percentage of each book that is "mine." If it earns out--that is, if it sells enough copies that it earns more than my advance--I get the extra money once every six months or so. First I turn in three chapters and a synopsis into my editor. She approves it or asks for changes, and then I get the first portion of my advance. I write the rest of my book and turn it in. My books are supposed to be 95,000 words, or 380 manuscript pages. When I go above 400 manuscript pages, my editor begins to sound a little strained since the book must fit within a certain final printed page count--these days, I think it's around 315 book pages. Around this time, my editor, the publisher, my agent, and I all discuss book titles and settle on one. My editor sends back line edits, or changes that she'd like, and I make them or address her concerns in some other way. She approves my line edits and releases the next portion of my advance. About this time, I get to look at the cover copy (the text on the front and back of the final book), and my suggestions and that of my agent are all taken into account. I get a look at the proposed cover a while later. My input is quite limited but can have some effect--for example, the color of the title on SHADOWS OF THE NIGHT got changed from pink to red at my suggestion. Then the copy editor looks at my manuscript for misspellings, factual mistakes, and grammar and punctuation errors, and I either approve or deny the changes and make my own. Then the manuscript goes to the typesetter or compositor, a subcontractor who puts it in the right layout and fits it within the page restrictions, typically by making the print really tiny, in my case! I get copies of the page proofs, which is a flat version of the final book. I read it, looking for mispellings and typos, as does a proof reader. I can't make any substantial changes at this point, and anything we miss goes to press. Galleys are printed up and bound--these uncorrected proofs are used for publicity and reviews. The book itself is printed up two to three months before release and is shipped--and then it is released! The final portion of my advance is released, as well. Behind the scenes are all sorts of meetings and marketing activities, of course. How did you get published? Read all about this in My Cinderella Story. How can I overcome my writer's block to get down this idea that I have for a book? Don't try. If you don't write compulsively and continuously, writing isn't worth it, really. Getting published is expensive (I spent a good $500 on mailing costs over the years), it is low-paid for over 90% of writers, it is high-pressure, and it is generally thankless. There is no glamour If you don't have a passion for it, why get into it at all, then? If you do have a real passion, you would write. Writer's block is something you get after you have already written when a story's going astray or your personal life is in the toilet. It isn't something that is overcome for writing to begin. If you feel you have an urge to write but you don't--or can't--write, you don't really want to write, after all. What you want is to have written, which is a very different thing. I'd recommend finding some other, more rewarding hobby! I want to write a book, and I do write! That wasn't really a question, but I know what you mean. The only way to write a book is to just do it. Do not read books about writing--to a good writer, most of the advice is self-evident or pointless, and for a bad writer, the advice can do nothing but make you mechanical before you have the chance to get good. But before you even start, if it's a novel, ask yourself if you just "want to write a book" or if you want to spend the rest of your life developing a career in fiction. If it's the former, don't bother. I'm serious. It's not worth the time, trouble, expense, or heartache just because you think it would be sort of nice to write "a book." And editors and agents won't want to deal with you, either, because taking on an author for the sake of a single book really isn't worth it 999 times out of 1000. Now, if you want a career, do some market research first before you start writing. That way, you won't spend however many months of your life on a book that has no prayer of getting published. (This is the voice of experience speaking, by the way...) Romance Writers of America is a good place to start if you're interested in romance, and other genres have their own sources of info. Once you've finished your first book, run it through a good, honest critique group. There are several online. Remember: coddling won't get you published. Do you want to feel good, or do you want to have a book on the shelves that will hopefully be the start of a beautiful career? Next, change it to the proper manuscript format, and then it's time to start querying agents or editors. Right now, it's a Catch-22 situation. If you don't have an agent, you can't submit to most publishing houses. And most good agents rarely take on anyone who is unpublished. But remember, there are other ways to get in, and a bad agent is worse than no agent at all. Who is your editor? Anne Bohner of Signet/NAL. Who is your agent? Nancy Yost of the Lowenstein-Yost Literary Agency. I like your work. Would you read my manuscript/listen to my writing idea? No. I'm not trying to be mean, but in the past, authors have been accused of stealing ideas from unpublished writers and have been sued. Now, anyone who actually does write knows that the writing itself is worth everything and ideas are worthless--and that any author worth her salt has far, far more ideas than she can ever use. But it doesn't prevent the lawsuits, and so to protect myself, I must decline.
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