Nadia Lee :: Romance Writer

status: I'm reading Fire in Fiction. It's actually better than I expected, much more readable than Writing the Breakout Novel.

Yesterday Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (which BTW is neither liberal nor democratic) finally lost its grip on Japanese politics. Mind you, it's taken...something like fifty years, but who's counting?

Of course not everyone's happy about it. There have been sightings of angry drunken old Japanese men screaming, "Change in bad! Any country will tell you that!"

Gad, I love this country.

P.S. I'm loving the post-election silence. No more annoying sound cars, just the dulcet tones of construction drills at 9:00 in the morning.

status: I'm feeling more positive since I realized that I can salvage about thirty pages or so out of the eighty plus I've written on the earlier pre-writing draft (WIP).

music: "It's a Fight" by Three 6 Mafia

On today's #askagent, someone asked if agents check a potential client's blog before offering. Colleen Lindsay responded:

Always. And I don't want to see whining about how many times you've been rejected. A huge turn-off.

I'm always amazed at the kind of information people put on their websites/blogs and other public places. Nobody wants to work with someone who is high maintenance or crazy or just doesn't know how to act professionally. Would you put the following on your blog while job hunting?

It's been five months since I sent my résumé to fifty companies. Only ten wanted to interview me. I went to all of them, but they all said no. I hope I get a better result from the other forty.

Writing feels like "art" and therefore some may feel that they're entitled to act like artistes. That's a huge mistake. Creating a story is art. The other aspects are anything but. Treat getting published like a business and you'll have more success.

P.S. My agent read my blog before offering. I was amazed at the amount of information she was able to garner from my posts, including where I lived, my quirks, etc. So beware!

status: I'm still jet-lagged and having a very nasty reaction to Oil of Olay Quench soap. This makes me sad since the soap does make my skin soft, but my arms and legs aren't happy.

I just had an epiphany about my WIP as I was fast-drafting. Some part of me knew I had all the right events in the draft so far, but another part of me knew something was totally messed up. I just didn't know exactly what.

Well, as I was working through another scene and another stilted and awkward interaction between my h/H, I realized that I had the dynamics between h/H all wrong. No wonder their romance is going nowhere more than eighty pages into the story.

Now I have to go back and toss out most of the story. Though it's going to be a lot of work to rewrite it, I'm totally excited now. Plus, I'm only on my first draft. Better now than later.

I :wub: my Muse.

I'm back in Japan. The flight was long but relatively painless (thanks to JAL's incredibly dedicated and uber-friendly agents and cabin attendants!), and Hero Material and I arrived home a little after 10:00 p.m. yesterday.

Hero Material's secretary had come by before our arrival and turned on the air conditioner. :wub: We were grateful since it was ridiculously hot and humid. She also left our hamsters in our living room. So we got to greet our little critters. Yay!

But bad thing is...my cell phone is more or less useless now. Well, I get my calls and stuff -- I think -- but for whatever reason, its memory went bad, and I lost my contact list. That means I can't call anyone because I don't know their number. Argh! (Hero Material tells me that back before they had cell phones people actually used to remember their friends' phone numbers, but I don't believe it.)

This morning I got woken up by a sound car blasting some candidate's names over and over again: "Vote for me! Don't forget my name XYZ! Vote for me! Don't forget my name XYZ!" Believe it or not, creating ungodly amount of noise pollution from 8:00 a.m. on Saturday (and every other day of the week) is how they conduct political campaigns in Japan.

Now I know I'm truly back.

Since August 16, I've written over sixty pages. That's a good thing. Today was hard particularly because I was tired -- sleep-deprived from cat allergy, traveling, packing, etc. -- and the part I was working on felt wrong and I had to stop to think it over. The blocked scene is entirely from the hero's POV, but I'm still not getting any sense of his voice or character yet. Another thing is that I'm waffling between 1st person present POV and 3nd person past POV. I'm hoping to figure it out before I finish this draft.

I'm leaving the States tomorrow, bright and early, and I plan to work on the project on my flight to Japan. Can't wait to see everyone in Japan again, including my hamsters!