Amie Stuart ~ On the Back Porch

After spending 5 years in a small Texas town, this really resonated with me.

The tomboy daughter of the town banker from tiny Indiana, Pa., in the Allegheny Mountains southwest of Pittsburgh couldn’t wait to bust loose from the coal-town mentality that had many of her classmates married or pregnant by high school graduation. It’s the neighborhood of “All the Right Moves” or “The Deer Hunter.”

It’s not just coal-town mentality I think, but small town mentality. This is what I had to convey in TBGG (and all the Boudreaux stories but esp. that one). And it took a lot to convince one of my CP’s that I wasn’t making it up! Women aspire to do nothing more than get married and arent above using their bodies to get there (or to practice with willing participants until they get there :-P). Even Bad Betti says “get a reputation in a small town and it sticks.”

The movie, Varsity Blues captures small town Texas mentality so well.

We’ve been chatting on Sylvia Day’s blog about when you know your manuscript is done. When do you “kill the monster”?

I made the comment that my writing was solid, then later realized it sounded kinda conceited and that wasn’t my point. Lots of writers have solid writing, but solid writing alone doesn’t get you published (Or get you an agent). Yes, I wrote and edited TBGG in 9 weeks. I knew it was solid, I knew nitpicky shit wasn’t going to get me rejected. And in a way I felt it was the right story at the right time. I wrote CDC in about the same amount of time.

When is a manuscript right? When is it wrong? And when do you stop playing with it
I had SO much fun last night working on CDC, tightening, chopping, making 3 sentences one, playing with Ty’s character–keeping him beta but making him MORE, I rewrote a whole chapter from his perspective and it left me smiling. I didn’t want to stop. There’s been none of that gut feeling that this is right or this is wrong or that I had a nearly impossible task in front of me like with TCRA–where I did a lot of second guessing. I take an idea and run with it. There are a million different ways to tell a story. If you get too caught up in which way is best, which angle to present every scene from, I think you run the risk of losing perspective of the big picture–telling the story. And that’s what happened with my rewrite of TCRA >When you get too caught up in the craft of writing, you risk losing sight of the storytelling.

Susan E. Phillips , who is my idol, says to “protect the work.” And I didn’t. And it came back to bite me in the ass. =( Maybe I’m naieve but I think writing should be fun. Obviously if you’re going to give up the time to crank out 400 pages (Or so) you better enjoy it, but there should be joy in creating something, in molding it into something that leaves you smiling, or makes you laugh or turns you on or makes you cry.

As a writer, I want more nights like last night, where I want to keep going and see what’s next (even in an edit!). After all if you don’t enjoy creating it, then how can a reader enjoy reading it?

Sandy Squirrel from SpongeBob Squarepants is NOT from Texas.

I’m terribly sorry to disillusion those of you who thought so but I can no longer keep the truth to myself. How do I know this? No Texas squirrel would be STUPID enough to LIVE at the BOTTOM of the OCEAN!!!!