A clean page
Isn't that what a new year is about? Isn't that what writing is about? Filling up all of those blank pages with words, words, words until a narrative forms. Only my pages are not so blank. My current work sits at halfway. Talk about a metaphor. If I look at my timespan on earth, I’m at about halfway. I might not be. My life might turn out to be more a novella than a grand, epic novel. If I look at the pages already written, there is plenty of drama, intrigue, pain, sorrow, and occasional joy bursts. One thing’s for sure, it doesn't have enough actual romance in it. Writing romance is one thing, finding romance another. I have a theory, so it has yet to be tested in scientific settings for reliability and validity, but I have a theory nonetheless, that never-married women sit rather low down on the social ladder. Oddly enough, if you’ve divorced once or more times, your status is elevated - the notion that you had been selected at some point, sufficient to carry you through the rest of your years. There even seems to be a number of workshops etc specifically for the plight of the divorcee. But for the never married? The ‘clean pages’ when it comes to all things matrimonial? Ten things you’re most likely to hear as a never married/permanently single/clearly ridiculously impossible to please person:
The truth is, no-one knows when and how you might meet someone. I don't know how and when that particular narrative will form. For some of my characters, they don't meet people on the internet, are picky and choosy with all of their decisions, and have given up hope. They still find love. With every blank sheet, there’s still the possibility of romance forming. Happy New Year, 2017.
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Lynne Tendai is gorgeous, brilliant and ohso awesome, so how come she's still single?
If you haven't done so yet, you can download The Joy of Crash Dating free, yes free, from my website! Check it out under Shorts. Read it? Liked it? Hated it? Please let me know what you think or better yet, write up a review on Goodreads. Happy Monday! What's better than spending an afternoon doodling? (Okay, a couple of things, but let's go with this here). Have a look at the link here, great idea! johannesburg.1000drawings.org These are my efforts! Romance movies are not always that romantic. That bit in The Notebook when he threatens to commit suicide if she doesn't agree to go out with him is more emotional blackmail than anything else. But there are other movies, not your obvious choices (okay, some are obvious) that have some of the most romantic scenes I’ve ever seen (haha for homophones).
My top ten most romantic scenes:
2) The Empire Strikes Back How can I ever forget Han and Leia? In this film the bantering is set to fever pitch (thank you Lawrence Kasdan, no-one does it better, thinking of Body Heat and the scene on the pier). It looks like these two will never give in, and then they’re taken prisoner, Han is bound, seconds away from being frozen into carbonite, she looks at him, he looks at her, bantering gone, this is it, they kiss. Finally. “I love you,” she says. “I know,” he responds. Best. Scene. Ever. 3) Waiting to Exhale Wesley Snipes (where’s he these days?) and the magnificent Angela Bassett meet at a bar. She’s pissed as a hell with her cheating, lying ex-husband, he’s exhausted from caring for his terminal wife. They trade stories, there’s chemistry. Obviously, they’ll end up in bed together. They do. Spooning fully clothed. Something about the Snipes’s vulnerability as he asks to hold her all night long. Beautiful. 4) The Notebook Apart from that horribly not-cool start, there is a lovely bit when the older Noah looks at his Alzheimer-ridden wife Allie, and declares “she is my home.” All of the feels, all of the time. 5) The Piano Ah, where to start, though I’m noticing a pattern here, that merely being seen and accepted goes a long way in terms of my idea of romance. And how Baines sees the mute Ada. That scene when he’s taken her and her daughter to the beach so that she can play. He’s spellbound. It sets in motion the rest of the movie. So much of his love for her changes her outlook, that she chooses life (what a surprise, as she says later), and begins to speak again. The small things as well - the exchange of land, the creation of a new finger. The fact that he realises that he’s no better than her arranged husband, and asks for her to love him as is. There. That. Vulnerable. Wild. Beautiful. 6) Lincoln I know, you’re thinking, there was no romance scene in this film. Yes, yes there was. Tommy Lee Jones’s character is a fervent abolitionist, a Radical Republican fighting for emancipation of slaves. He’s bold, impassioned, a man committed. Then in one scene way later in the film when he’s found success, we find out why. He comes home late, dons his nightgown and slides into bed alongside his coloured partner, and takes her hand. They’ve clearly been in love, together, forever. What he wouldn't do. 7) Practical Magic So sue me if both the movie and the book are on my fave lists. In this scene, Sally (I remember her name) and Gary give in to their mutual attraction for a whole two seconds before she tears off again. To her, he’s just a spell. But to him, it’s the real deal. As he says, “I wished for you too.” Oh, the thought that the love you’ve been looking for, is actually looking for you too. Not playing poker on the other end of the world with a tortoise who keeps halting the game for extended bathroom breaks or something. 8) The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas Hear me out. Miss Mona, amply played by Dolly Parton has lost her business, a thriving whorehouse in Texas (as the name suggests), and she’s in love with the sheriff, a grinning Burt Reynolds. He asks her to marry him. But damn she’s a madam, he's a law enforcer who has big dreams of running for senate. Ain’t gonna happen. Then she sings I’ll always love you. And she says this little speech which is just so gorgeous, about how his dreams are more important. Well, he ain’t having that, he don't give a damn, and he carries her off into the sunset. 9) Up The movie that introduced me to the ‘cone of shame’. First up is the montage of grumpy old fart and his recently deceased wife. I didn't know that all of three animated minutes could have me in a tear puddle. Just a regular couple having a regular life. But then, when he realises in her ‘adventure book’, that she considered her life with him, her ‘adventures’, the puddle turned into a small dam. 10) Cousins Kind of an obscure movie. But I so love this scene. Isabella Rossini’s husband is having an affair with Ted Danson’s wife. Therefore, they become kind of shoulders-to-cry-on friends. They catch feelings. She’s standing on the train platform waiting for her train to come in, he appears on the opposite platform. A train rushes past. She dashes off to meet him at the platform, only when she gets there, he’s not there. As her face drops, he reappears, at the platform she was originally standing on. “Don’t move’, he yells. The expression of sheer joy, delight, wonder on her face. There are some other noteworthy additions: True Romance (you’re so cool, you’re so cool, you’re so cool), Love Actually’s Colin Firth learning Portuguese to woo his lady love, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel when the ageing womaniser admits he’s lonely to the lady at the bar, The Reader when he sends her tapes of his readings. What are your favourites?
Half-vampire Amelia Hartnady, Liberty’s vampire hunter, is on a mission to kill vamp leader Fedor, aka the vamp that wrecked her life. But after her last disastrous hunt, the council hired Delaney Delacouer, Europe’s legendary hunter, and that tall, green-eyed sweet-talker’s got the town mesmerized.
Amelia knows all too well how deadly Fedor can be—he’s the reason she’s a half-vamp, one who could be the legendary daywalker, in a backwoods town that doesn’t much like supernaturals, even ones who fight against vamps. And anyway, what’s a man like Delacouer doing in a small town like Liberty? He’s definitely not all he claims to be. As far as Amelia’s concerned, the town’s only big enough for one hunter, and that’s her. Forced to hunt together, Amelia and Delacouer fight their deadly attraction. She’s seeking redemption, he’s chasing revenge. But only one of them can claim the vamp leader as theirs. Now the pair have to work together to overcome their own demons. Journey of a writer
The ROSA Annual Conference is coming up in September. If you’re a romance writer, you should be there. Why? Because it covers so many of the aspects of the writer’s journey, including craft, marketing, and talks from heavyweights such as Mary-Jo Putney. All writers know this journey. Sure it varies here and there, but overall, there’s a certain commonality. Here’s what mine looks like: Step 1: Write, write, write, gargle copious amounts of coffee, write some more, have an attack of self-doubt, carry on writing, read something crap someone else wrote, hell-I-can-do-way-better-than-that, write like a maniac, finish novel, party, party, print it out and stroke it lovingly, leave it in a coffee shop (which they then throw out), make another copy, send it out, rejection, rejection, rejection, more rejection. Step 2: Head back to neglected love life, more rejection, read something brilliant, have pity party that involves red wine and the entire bag of Quality Street that you normally only devour at Christmas, read about writing courses. Step 3: Realise you know nothing about the craft of writing. Nothing. Shell out what feels like your entire life-savings to attend said writing course. Start writing next novel, write, write, write, attend another course, organiser waxes lyrical about your writing, feel invincible, hammer out rest of the next novel, this time will be different, yep, even more rejection, rejection, rejection. Step 4: Write, write, write, try out saying you’re a writer at parties, no-one cares unless you’re JK Rowling or that Game of Thrones guy, write, write, write, reject, reject, reject. Step 5: Repeat steps 1-4 Step 6: Minor success. Instead of getting rejections that run along the lines of “don’t ever send us this sad-arsed tripe again, stick to the day job corporate drone”, you start to get things like “I love your voice, I’d be happy to see anything else you’ve written,” or “such a great hero - he’s hot.” Step 7: Discover a writing mentor who writes scripts for Hollywood. Actual Hollywood. Structure takes on a whole new meaning. Write like maniac, write, write, write, revisions requested by publisher. Revisions? Revisions! Progress, yay. Step 8: Repeat steps 1-4, this time with more trips to the Lindt store. In fact, the write-reject pattern starts to become the soothing backdrop of your life. You do get warned - every writer gets rejected. Which makes you want to torch someone to death with a ghd when you hear of someone just whipping up their crime drama between the school runs, and then just happening to bump into a book editor at one of those tiresome little get-togethers where Word of Mouth should have been the caterers but weren’t, and gosh, what do you know, the editor just lurved the book idea, and well, you know the rest, you can read it as the women’s hobby-careers covered by Woman & Home. Invariably this person will never write another word. Step 9: Success. You win a writing competition. Yeah! You’re the recipient of a publishing contract. Woo. Hoo. There’s a popular misconception that this is where things get easy. You can kick back and quaff champagne and quit the day job. Ha! So not the case. Step 10: Realise from other published writers, that this is when you start refining your craft in a big way, and begin forging out a career as a writer. This is when publishing houses start considering your previous successes as part-and-parcel of their potential offer - I kid you not. Step 11: Repeat steps 1-10 ad infinitum, except with more wariness of the industry - not all agents and publishers are legit, sad to say. That’s it. No-one has to tell you to get off your expanding butt to pay homage to the word count goddess. Stories will keep appearing from the ether, characters will start with their jabber-jabbering, and ideas will knock a-knock on your consciousness. Where was I? Oh yes, write, write, write… |