Thursday, 1 November 2007

my mood today

There are so many people annoying me today that I don't even want to begin to list them. I'm in one of my moods of general poisonous resentfulness and ill humour... but fortunately I have one or two nice things that will lift me out of it presently...
  • out to lunch tomorrow with fabulous buddy Saskia Walker!
  • hair looking splendidly blonde now, due to the ministrations of Anne, my hairdresser supreme
  • I still have 20 Eppesodes of Season Three of Numb3rs to watch... mmm Charlie goodness!
  • mmm too for mini choc chip brioches
Not sure if I'll achieve my writing goal today, or tomorrow, but I'm nicely in hand and hey, writing isn't everything in life.

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Telly: see above
Choc/Yummy: see above
Mood: see above
Writing: not yet
Reading: not in the mood
RSI/FMS: sore and tired


Don't forget Portia's Promos - new stuff being added all the time!

Wednesday, 31 October 2007

HOTBED - out now in the US!


This was not what Natalie had expected. The angry thing she held in her hand didn't seem to belong to the mild, shy man she'd believed she was sitting next to. He felt powerful. Primal. Dominant in a way that bypassed all words. She wanted to get down on her knees and...

Pride comes before a fall... but what if the descent becomes the wildest ride of your life? Two sisters - Natalie and Patti - become rivals when they challenge each other's daring on a dark, downward spiral where nobody is quite who or what they seem, and where transgressing sexual boundaries is the norm.


"Hotbed is a perfect showcase for Portia Da Costa’s inestimable talent." ~ Ashley Lister, Erotica Readers and Writers Association

Read Excerpt

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk


--
Telly: Numb3rs Season 3
Choc/Yummy: Lindor Dark
Mood: harassed
Writing: IN TOO DEEP 350 words so far
Reading: in between books
RSI/FMS: very tired and achy


Don't forget Portia's Promos - new stuff being added all the time!

Monday, 29 October 2007

not too much to report...

Despite making heavy weather of it, I've managed to maintain my thousand words a day. Just. I'm not saying how much use a lot of the words are, but at least I'm laying stuff down to be edited... and if my WIP is supposed to be 70K words in total, I've actually done a quarter of that already!!!

Now this would be good news if anything of note had actually happened in the book yet, but it's another of my slow builders/starters and as yet, it's only really meandering along. I'm still at the stage where I think, how the blue blazes is this book going to be long enough? But I always think that, and I mostly reach some sort of tipping point before long where worrying whether I'm going to make the word count switches to... omigod, how am I going to get it all in??? I've a fair bit of a way to go with this one before that happens though.

This, I think, is one of the problems with pantsing. Which is what I mostly do nowadays. I used to write very detailed synopsis/outlines and send them to my editor. These were far longer than a synopsis ought to be, but not as long as a detailed chapter outline usually is... but I managed them somehow, even though synopsis writing is the work of the devil. But lately, I've just stopped doing them... which makes for a much more scary writing experience!

But, I was thinking about some plot bits in the bathroom this morning - again - and I'm wondering if I should make a plan for the rest of the book, based on these notes and a bunch of other stuff I've got jotted in my notebook...

Do you think I should? Would it make me fret less about the way this book is going? Or not going?

p.s. thanks to a blogging buddy, I found a great new site for procrastinating! It's just another excuse for me not writing, but at least this is in a good cause and it builds your vocab too! :)

FREE RICE

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Saturday, 27 October 2007

it's a struggle...

to get into my writing today. I've been putting it off and putting it off because I've got what feels like a tricky bit coming up next and I'm not sure how to tackle it. I've done a couple of hundred words... but I'm really resisting getting to the meat of the scene. I'm rather afraid of it. :(

However, Mr Blue, Professor Hottie and Kuffer are respectively menacing me, cajolling me, and waving their claws at me from the sidelines... so I'd better shape up, hadn't I?

In better news, I've recently discovered that my very first Black Lace novel is to be reprinted next year, with a brand new and apparently very spiffing cover! No idea what it'll look like yet, but here's the link:

Gemini Heat

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Friday, 26 October 2007

weak bulbs...

I'm still grappling with motivation and tone... and the underlying 'whys' behind my characters' actions and attitudes. And it's tough. I keep getting slight light bulbs of inspiration, but they seem weak and not as compelling as they should.

Thing is, it used to be enough for me in my earlier books for people to just 'be' the way they are ie. sex maniacs a lot of the time, just because... But now, I need to know what made them that way, and what drives them, and what's affected them. They need to be more fully characterised so that they make sense to me, and thus make sense to the reader. I think this is important in erotic romance, more so than in straight erotica. And only confirms I'm writing [or trying to write] now what I should be writing... A proper believable romance with fully developed even if slightly twisted characters, rather than just sex for sex' sake stories.

But me being me, I've made things hard for myself by going for a first person viewpoint again with my WIP. Clearly, this makes for very rich characterisation of Gwen, the heroine, but it's bloody tricky to see what's driving the two hero/anti-heroes, Daniel and Nemesis. Nemesis can speak through his letters and perhaps other media like emails and IM, but Daniel's going to be a tougher nut to crack. But, I had one of my weak bulbs about him this morning. One which sort of works okay, due to a facet of him that's already in the story... bit of happy serendipity, really. It's not really a glimpse into his mind, but it's a way of showing things that have happened to him that casts a bit of a lightbulb glow on why he does the things he does and acts the way he does...

Need to get stuck in and write more of the mutha now..


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Thursday, 25 October 2007

Wowee, I'm posting at Sven's Gym today!

Go here today to read my thoughts on why writing is like cats... or summink.

Meanwhile back at base, despite the best efforts of Team Portia [Mr Blue, Professor Hottie and Kuffer's Claws of Death] I only managed to get around 1K of words done yesterday. Yes, I know that's meeting my target, but after several over-target days, it feels like a letdown. But I had so many bits of jobs to deal with, not least of all weird stuff with my bank account. Not bad stuff - in fact it might be good! - but it still takes time ringing up places to find out what's going on.

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Tuesday, 23 October 2007

Monitoring my progress

Here's a photo of Genghis Khat aka Kuffer, pictured with the high tech recording device that I use to log my Sweat70 progress.

Thankfully, I managed 2K words yesterday, and 1.5K so far today, so my lip is safe for the time being...


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If you love you some Portia click here and VOTE, VOTE, VOTE every day until 31st October!

Monday, 22 October 2007

And we start again!

Agh, for the third time, I'm starting again at the beginning of IN TOO DEEP and reworking it! I know I ought to just move forward and fix afterwards, but in this case, it's got to feel right before I can be confident in it.

It's still the 'tone' issue. The book's not quite sure what it wants to be, and neither are the characters. I think the problem is that - and I may have mentioned this before - the book idea stems from a time *before* was was 'officially' writing erotic romance. Long before... It's one of a number of ideas I submitted to my editor, and he's expressed an interest in it several times, even though we slotted GOTHIC HEAT in before it finally became the time to actually write it. Basically, and originally, it was a 'women's erotica' concept, a woman's voyage of sexual discovery... but that's not so much what I want to write any more. I really want to write a romantic love story with a lot of sex, and marrying these two concepts is like the proverbial square peg/round hole [oooer] dilemma. I can see a way to do it, but getting the voice and everything right is a very delicate balance... and the damn thing is also a menage of sorts, where the heroine, Gwen, is involved with two different blokes at the same time. One of them, Nemesis, an anonymous correspondent she plays games of sexual daring with, is proving particularly tricky to get right. He's benignly wicked and writes the most outrageous things, but I need to convey him as a teasing, extremely rude but sometimes lyrical sensualist, rather than just a dirty mack pervo guy. When I started, he sounded like pervo guy, then he sounded like ridiculous lovelorn twit with a hard-on, and only now, on attempt #3, is he starting to come out right...

Eeh, it's a tough old game, this writing business...

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Sunday, 21 October 2007

In view of Kuffer's recent activities...

I thought this might amuse...



Courtesy of the lovely folk at Cute Overload...

I have loads and loads to do today, including 1K of In Too Deep, and having got up late, and with me going out earlyish this evening for carvery, time is short.

However, here's an interesting article at the Dear Author blog, that caught my eye this morning via Google Reader. See what you think...

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Saturday, 20 October 2007

Thought for the day...




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Friday, 19 October 2007

Wounded in Inaction...

These aren't Kuffer's claws, but they're quite like them. And the reason I post this picture is because claws like the above inflicted quite an unpleasant wound on me last night!!!

I was lying in bed, watching the telly, with Kuffer at my side, when he suddenly decided to flip into one of his 'rough play' fits and before I knew what had happened he'd split my lower lip open with his claw! Ouch!!! I was a bit frightened and had visions of stitches and scars and everything, but when I'd stopped panicking, I realised it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. It's still a little sore this morning, but it seems to be healing okay, no thanks to that furry mutthead... who is as affectionate and friendly as ever, having no idea of the damage he's inflicted.

In other news, I did manage to finally get to my writing yesterday, and managed to achieve my 1k after all. It's not the greatest of stuff, and the plot is crawling at a mindbendingly slow pace, but at least it's words, innit? Words that can be edited. This morning I've tried a trick suggested by my fellow Sweat70 sponsor, Diana Peterfreund. She describes a strategy of hers to start the day with a small 15 minute chunk of writing, so that when you go into a more serious and prolonged work session, you're not going in stone cold, because you've already laid down a couple of hundred words or so at the beginning of the day. I've tried this, and have a tidy little chunk of around 250 words to build on later. Thanks, Diana! It's a good tip!

Something lovely happened yesterday... a bit of serendipity type stuff that made me feel very happy and good about myself. I posted the name of the winner of a prize draw of mine, over at Lustbites... and I discovered that before she'd even realised she was a winner, Dakota Rebel had already written a lovely post about me, over on her blog! Seems that a MySpace bulletin I sent out was instrumental in her getting her first book accepted for publication! Now, I often feel guilty that I don't help other writers enough, but it sounds as if inadvertently I've done some good for Dakota! And she also said some lovely things about my work... :)

Read about her story here
.


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Thursday, 18 October 2007

Mr Blue is vexed!

It's almost two o'clock and I've not written any of my WIP yet... His Blueship is not best pleased!


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