Well, I’m finally recovering from RT 2008. By this I mean I’ve unpacked my suitcase, paid some bills and organized (though not cleaned off my desk,) and started to get back into the swing of family life. You know. Yelling at the kids, doing laundry, generally being the domestic diva I am.
I didn’t feel well at the convention, unfortunately, and I wasn’t alone. But even so, I came back energized, writing-wise. No, I didn’t come up with a brand-new, shiny, full-fledged idea the way I did last year when Lauren and I brainstormed Taking Care of Business while standing in line. (Though we did talk about a followup to that book!) But I did come home with inspiration and ideas for layering some themes into the edits for my current WIP, Switch.
I finished SWITCH before I left for RT and had planned to let it sit for awhile while I worked on some other things, but while there my mind kept turning back to it. Switch hasn’t been an easy book for me for many reasons. For one, it took me a lot longer to write than usual, partly because I stopped a few times to work on other things and partly because I struggled with the writing of it. I was really glad to have finished the first draft because it meant I could take a break from it, so to discover when I got back from RT that I really wanted to dive back in was…suprising.
Here’s the thing: I take a lot of my work from my life — not things that have happened to me, necessarily, but feelings and emotions and situations that make me THINK about “what if.” I don’t live everything I write about (my goodness, who has time?) but I do…FEEL it. I do feel what I write. Sometimes I feel it first and hold onto that and use it. Sometimes during the writing I start to feel the work, instead, which is also interesting.
I’d had an inkling about what Switch was meant to be for a few months, and it was pretty far from what I’d first anticipated the book to be. In its first incarnation it was a story about dominance and submission, a woman who finds misplaced notes in her mailbox meant for an anonymous person being given increasingly erotic commands. She discovers she likes the content of the notes — craves it, in fact. But when she discovers who the notes are really for, everything changes and she becomes the note WRITER instead of the note receiver.
The book is still “about” that — it’s what happens, anyway. But somewhere along the way a minor, throwaway character became more important, and now he’s an irreplaceable part of the story. I didn’t expect that.
And somewhere, somehow, the book became about choices. The ones we make, good or bad, right or wrong, and how sometimes no matter how much you think you want something, in the end you don’t take it because not having it is better for you. Sometimes, as Paige, the heroine says, you walk away.
So now I have to finish entering all my receipts and put some laundry away and take a shower and have some breakfast, and then I need to crank up the iTunes and get lost in this world again. But you know what?
I feel it.
M
PS — I was so happy to hang with my lurvely agent the glorious Laura Bradford (or LB as I like to call her) and Lauren Dane, Anya Bast and Ann Aguirre and Vivi Anna, and we missed Cynthia! NEXT YEAR IN ORLANDO!!!!!!!!!!!
Some of my favorite photos –
