RemembeRED

Here's the prompt that Yuliya and CDG have come with you for RemembeRED this week:

We just spent some time thinking about how to write funny.

Know what's NOT funny? People laughing at you.

Take us back to an embarrassing moment in your life.

Did someone embarrass you, your parents perhaps? Or did you bring it upon yourself?

Are you still embarrassed or can you laugh at it now?

Let's keep these to 600 words.

Come back and link up your most embarrassing moment on Tuesday, July 12th.

Red Writing Hood

This week, CDG and Yuliya tasked you to push yourselves out of your comfort zone, to shake things up a bit.

We've been looking forward to watching you stretch and experiment and grow.

So, let's cut to the chase!

Show us what you've come up with!

We promise to be gentle with you. ;)

Cheryl took a much older point of view in Wrong Room

Red Writing Hood

Our guest hosts this week are CDG and Yuliya.

Here's the Red Writing Hood prompt that they are challenging you with:

The most frequent advice I come across for amateur writers is, "Write what you know."

"What you know" doesn't necessarily always mean "your comfort zone." For this week, take what you know out of your comfort zone. Try a new genre, a new time period, a geography you've only dreamed of, fantasy or historical instead of contemporary fiction, try the male POV if you usually write women. Or vice versa.

Switch it up. See where it takes you.

Let's keep the word count to 600.
Come back and link up on Friday, July 8th.

Filth and Flowers

This week, the amazing CDG, from Move Over Mary Poppins, is here to share her experience and advice with us about walking a particular fine line when writing a romance novel.

Thank you so very much, CDG!

We don’t all aspire to works of important literary fiction, to writing The Great American Novel. I, for one, am writing a single title romance novel. Think Nora Roberts in hard cover. That said, I do want it to be literate. I want characters who reach out and take you by the hand and pull you into the story, just like any author of fiction. I want a story that resonates with my readers.

But romance has a peculiar challenge.

There’s a certain expectation in romance novels: the physical side of the love story. Yes. The sex scenes. If you’ve ever picked up a paperback romance, a good old fashioned bodice-ripper, you find a lot of references to throbbing members and quivering womanhood, but really? Really? That just doesn’t resonate with me.

And yet, I’m not entirely satisfied with chaste, closing the bedroom door, end-scene love scenes, either.

I want to be turned on. I want to fall in love - dare I say in lust? - along with the characters, but I don’t want to feel icky reading it.

So, where is the fine line between filth and flowers? As George Michael so aptly phrased it, “What’s your definition of dirty, baby? What do you consider pornography?”

This is what I have struggled with in writing my first draft.

How to tap into sensuality and sexuality without cliché or ridiculous euphemism or clinical onlooking.

So, here are my own personal guidelines, the ones I’ve used, for the most part, in crafting my story:

Sex scenes should both complement and progress the plot. If we’re going to be in the room with them, there needs to be a reason.

Emotions, reactions, and sensory experiences can tell it like blunt physical description never can. More touch, taste, scent, less size and shape and motion.

Unless you’re going for outright humor, if writing it makes you giggle like a thirteen year old? Chances are it’s not that sexy. (Caveat: funny can be incredibly sexy, so by all means, go for that!)

In reality, sex can be serious or playful, sweet or angry, intense, spontaneous, premeditated, and sometimes it doesn’t go as planned. Let all of that into the story.

Allow for anticipation. As in real life, sometimes the journey is more fun than the destination. Let a scene get hot and steamy, build up the moment gradually, and maybe make them wait. Let life intrude, as it so often does. The characters will find a way to get back there, and won’t that be fun to write!

If you feel uncomfortable or awkward writing it, your readers will clue into that pretty quickly, and you lose the moment.

Obviously, no one has a perfect sex life like the characters in a romance novel, but, unless you actually are Prince? No one’s going to buy into twenty two positions in a one night stand.

Of course, in the end, what’s sexy to one might be dirty to another, or, on the flip side, too tame. What turns you on?

Featured Blogger -- CDG

This week, we're featuring CDG* and her lovely, whimsical blog, Move Over Mary Poppins!

Tell us about yourself: You don't start with the easy questions, do you? I'm a thirty something Mama, a wife, a nanny. I'm an aspiring romance novelist. I've studied culinary arts, music, writing. I'm passionate about all of them, though I do none of them professionally. I knit. I read. I'm by turns shy and extroverted. I'm irreverent and sarcastic, fierce and loyal. I am an Aries.

Give us a 30-second elevator pitch about your blog: Move Over Mary Poppins! began nearly five years ago as a place for me to ponder life as a nanny in the days of Louise Woodward and The Nanny Diaries. My nannying life was nothing like that. It was more like being a SAHM - in someone else's home. Over the years, the blog has evolved with me into a place to share a glimpse of my work life (names changed, of course), my home life, and for the last few months, my writerly life. It's equal parts fiction, haiku, memoir, food, parenting/nannying, moments with my two year old son, and the slow renovation of our home.

What literary character would you be and why?: Kind of an obscure one. Her name is Mireille, and she is at the center of Katherine Neville's The Eight, which is my favorite novel in the history of ever. She lives a remarkable and challenging life amidst adventure and danger and loss, loves passionately and without regret, and is a redhead! I really want to be a redhead.

If you could carve your initials on a tree, which tree would it be and why?: When I was a dreamy teenager, there was a beech tree in the woods behind our house that was all knobbly and twisted at the roots, a really huge, old tree. I used to wish for a boyfriend to kiss me under that tree. It never happened, but still. That would be the tree.

What animal does your husband look like and why?: I'm not sure he'd like the comparison, but a Bullmastiff. He's solid and warm. He's big and fierce looking, but in truth? Strong, gentle, loyal, protective. He has a serious face that just lights up when he smiles.

If you could only save one of your existing posts in a fire, which would you choose and why?: Oh no... No. No. No. I have well over seven hundred posts. I've been blogging for five years. One post? Right now, it would be Swamped at the Library because it's such a perfect snapshot of my son captured in time.

*To retain her privacy, she chooses to go by CDG.