azurelunatic | Current things:

Went and gave plasma. If I'm exposed to What Lies Beneath many more times, I may actually start liking it. It seems like a fairly decent movie, all told.

I managed to hack an earbud cellphone headset together with a dollar store headphone set into something wearable and workable. I extracted the speakers from the headphones, cut a slit into an existing slot, and was able to slip the earbud's cord through the slit into the slot. Then I put the spongy cover back on, and cut a hole in that for the earbud's speaker to stick out, which had the added value of holding it in place. The cord and microphone dangle as normal. I think I've fallen in love. [edited to add: Now with images!]

Last night I decided that it would be really nice to make some spare money by ~~whoring out my pen~~ writing romance novels, because the market for them is evidently endless, and the barriers to publication are reputedly low. Google found me this: http://www.passionatepen.com/romancepubs.htm

Poking around looking at the assorted things, and chatting with

reichiere, it seems that the hot new thing is the supernatural romance. And.

Suddenly Colleen and Mike started insisting that I write their story, to get it out and written for once and for all so they won't keep coming up every time I want to go and write a romance. Then Raven insisted on getting in with the action, since she was canon. Just to balance things out a bit, I created the cardboard Amber, who immediately took on a life of her own. Plot rapidly developed. I'm going to try and see if I can pump out the word count like it was NaNo time, while keeping the quality of the content up over the "OMG NaNo" quality level. As long as the muses stay with me...

I'm a little concerned, because this is romance rather than comedy. But I did a straight story for Necromancer's Prayer, and both romance and humor crept in. This is the story of Colleen and Mike, and it needs telling, or the era won't rest.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I managed to hack an earbud cellphone headset together with a dollar store headphone set into something wearable and workable. I extracted the speakers from the headphones, cut a slit into an existing slot, and was able to slip the earbud's cord through the slit into the slot. Then I put the spongy cover back on, and cut a hole in that for the earbud's speaker to stick out, which had the added value of holding it in place. The cord and microphone dangle as normal. I think I've fallen in love.

Ooooh, DIY! Any chance of a picture? Let us see your marvellous creation.

A series of them!

Hurrah for blurry pictures! And hurrah for innovation. Tell me, do they sound the same? Because earphones are intended to be inside the ear, whereas when you hack them like this, they sort of nestle just outside right? Can you hear as well?

They sound pretty good in a fairly quiet environment, though it might be an issue around more noise. The larger circle of foam rests outside the ear; the little earbud sticks a little more into the ear, within about a centimeter of the intented place.

http://www.ellorascave.com/writing.asp looks like it might be promising.

Wow...one whole post from you yesterday...almost amazing ;)

Interesting hack job...nifty keen Sounds like fun.

Romance is the genre that ends up in dimestores...have you heard of a "dimestore sci-fi"?

It was fun, and I'll be happily using it to talk on the phone when otherwise my poor ears would be giving out!

Yesterday I was either sleeping or working on the ads project or giving plasma or shopping or hacking or writing or chatting. So there wasn't much time for posting.

And the hack was totally fun. I also have fake hair for myself now. It is spiffy.

And right now I don't care if it ends up in dime stores. I want to get something written and out there, and that means something I don't think of as OMG My Life's Work, which means a "throwaway" romance, with a story I've told before/dreamed before a thousand times.

Romance can be very hack-work, or it can be amazing. Much like everything else. Very few romance authors make much money, but the ones who make money, *really* make money. It's a lot more extreme than SF.

Finish the story :) and then start submitting. IIRC most romance houses allow multiple submission.

I don't think Colleen and Raven and Amber and Mike are going to let me make the story hack-work. (I've read enough Heinlein etc. to know that a published story may not bear much resemblance to the original.) And if I can at least get it out there and get something for it, that'll be more than letting it sit there and not doing anything with it.

I'm writing this one in my spare time. Until I get something that sells, *all* of my writing is in my spare time. I may not notice it much because I was raised Quaker and I'm used to living very simply, but I do believe I am officially below the poverty line.

Ellora's Cave's royalties are 34.75% of cover price. If even 10 people off my friendslist buy a $6 book, that's in the neighborhood of $20 that I didn't have before. That's not much for however many hours it takes to create the novel and whip it into submittable form, but it's a lot more than nothing, and that's what I'm getting for writing now.

And if it's going to be published, you can expect a lot more than 10 people to buy it.

Well, yes.

Ellora's Cave is an erotica house, not romance. Sounds silly picky, but the "romance" label gets you a shot at space in grocery stores, drugstores, airports etc, and the erotica label doesn't. I'd expect paperback royalties on romance to be around 10%. The cover price would be around the same, but the broader distribution means more chance at making money. It's a marketing thing, just like the distinction between SF and fantasy :). None of this is really worth worrying about until it's finished anyway.

(and I hear ya on the money thing)

I'm figuring I can tweak the sex scenes either way. Given that I've been reading some pretty explicit fanfiction, I may have to tame it down if I want that broader audience.

Mmm... most fanfic is not substantially different in subject matter from a romance. It's just the sex is often more important than the story, and for a romance, the story should be more important. Average fanfic is also substantially shorter than novel length, and in short lengths, romance tends to look a lot more like fanfic.

*nods* But "churning valley of delight" does not feature much in the fic I read. There were *warnings* on the erotica website ratings page for "cock", "pussy", and "fuck".

*snerk*

Ok, quick breakdown of romance/erotica. It's the biggest selling genre in bookstores today, and it's also the one most deemed trash. Because it's consumed so widely, publishers have very tightly controlled subgenres, each with sub-subgenres. "Historical", "supernatural/futuristic", "contemporary", "category" and "erotica" are the main subgenres. Historical gets divided up by time period and is relatively straightforward. Supernatural/futuristic is where they stick anything that has a hint of vampires, space ships, or psychic powers. Contemporary is divvied up into humorous, serious etc, rather like mainstream fiction. Category is short titles, published as a monthly series. They try very hard to get readers to subscribe to a particular monthly series. Erotica is anything where the publisher expects that you will by god have more than ~5 sex scenes in the book, and sex scenes including anything other than vanilla sex are permitted.

Category has rules like you can't use cock, pussy etc. Historical romances come in the "you can't say that they didn't have that word back then" and the "yes I've read Chaucer thank you" varieties. Contemporary is pretty much the same (and apparently erotica also. who knew?). The reason is certain readers will throw a hissy fit if they run into one of "those words", so the publishers like to do CYA moves. Just write the story naturally, and don't worry about language rules and such until you're in the editing stage. Diana Gabaldon sold as romance, despite breaking pretty much every genre rule in the book.

This is definitely supernatural. Colleen says so.

Ok, so you know it's romantic and supernatural, so get writing :D. Pages! I like getting to buy books where I know the author a little.

I'm on page 3, at 1557 words within this first 24 hours.

(Paaaaaart of it is to clear the decks for [Darkside] and Naomi. Because their thing, whatever it is, while it has a lot of history, it isn't the history.)

Current things:

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject