I’m trying to form some Really Deep Thoughts on plotting, but the trouble is, my thoughts on the subject amount to this:

One: What does your character want?
Two: What prevents your character from getting what he wants?

This is in my notes from the last few days while I’ve been pondering and plotting: What a character wants most is also what they most fear. Also It is an act of courage to show someone who you really are.

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Current Mood:  contemplative

Because apparently I can never have too many side projects, I’ve started something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time: started an e-zine. Rumbullion Magazine is a non-genre-specific literary magazine, and is now accepting submissions for the first edition.

Details are at Rumbullion and feel free to ask questions, as I’m figuring things out as I go.

If you’ll kindly look to the right of the layout, you’ll see my blogroll. Among the expected writer, editor and review sites, there’s a section called “My Places.” I thought it would be helpful to explain these a bit.

I Am Not a Foodie is a recipe collection site. As the name says, I’m not a foodie: I eat far too many burgers for that. But I do like experimenting now and again and collecting interesting (and simple!) recipes, so that’s the primary function of that site. I’ve also got a lot of family favorites added (with more to come when I get around to it) to preserve recipes that you can’t find in books and to share recipes I love (like Afton’s chocolate sauce. It is the best stuff ever.) I also accept contributions of other people’s recipes, because variety is fun.

Jenna Jones @ Livejournal doesn’t get updated as much as this blog does, because I am lazy. I mostly use it when I host the torquere_social community blog.

MissLucyJane.com is my fanfiction/free fiction. I’ve been writing fanfic since 1997 (longer offline–I’ve got a couple ST:TNG stories on paper somewhere) and I’ve put up most of my old favorites and all my newer stuff. If you’ve ever wondered how I learned to write, the answer is there: by writing a lot.

My del.icio.us is a bookmarks service. My interests and research at-a-glance.

Project Wiki is a personal wiki where I’m planning to collect all the background information for my stories, so I have a centralized location for them. There’s not a lot of information there currently. Most of it is open to editing by anyone, as with other wikis, though of course I reserve the right to reject irrelevant/erroneous information.

Shop @ CafePress, should you ever have a burning need for a Gallaghers bakery t-shirt or barbecue apron.

There you have it: the other stuff I do online.

First, an FYI: I’m redoing the categories and tags for the site, trying to neaten them up. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Now, for the Deep Thoughts:

When I’m writing a first draft, I prefer to write it straight through rather than skip around in the timeline. I look on a first draft as a draft of discovery: this is where the characters tell you what’s going on with them, and I usually have good luck with this. I’ll discover things or think of things that I never would if I were following a strictly rigid outline. (All of my outlines, when I make them, always have a portion that says “some stuff happens here.” There’ll be plot before and plot after, but there’s always a nebulous space where I have to figure out how the characters get from Point A to Point C.)

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My current project is a screenplay, and it’s not coming very easily. This is due to a lot of factors, I think, the two biggest being subject matter and form.

Subject matter: it’s a biopic, about a solider named Bill Aalto, who grew up in the Bronx, fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and knew poets and writers like Alan Ginsberg, Truman Capote and Ernest Hemingway. He was gay and a communist at a time when being either would make life difficult, and he paid a high price for being both. However, I find him heroic for the simple reason that he never took the easy road. Of all the things he could have done, all the compromises he could have made, he never did: he chose integrity instead. That’s powerful to me: that’s a life worth celebrating, even if in the end it was not triumphant in any traditional Hollywood sense.

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• The general attitude in society that characteristics traditionally defined as “female” are so looked-down-upon. Things like nurturing, compassion, gentleness. God forbid a man ever be gentle–he must be a sissy if he is! Even many vocal feminists deride traditional female attributes, and as a feminist, I find this very disappointing. I’ve always had the opinion that being kind and gentle and supportive of people was the ideal, not something to be mocked. But then I’m a starry-eyed optimist. And a hippie. And various other labels.
• The attitude of the general reading public that a romance novel is the refuge of the semi-literate. Granted, some lines are geared towards a fifth-grade reading level. But most aren’t. And you do actually need more than half a brain to read a romance novel, let alone to write one. Romance novels are a form of escapism, just like, say, anything by Tom Clancy or John Grishom or any other popular novelist you’ll see at the local Barnes & Noble. I’m as guilty of it as any other person, I suppose: I call my books “little romance novels.” That’s all they are: they’re not going to change the world or start a revolution. But that’s not what they’re for: they’re just to pass a few hours in a pleasant way with a good (*knocks wood*) story. I have no pretensions about what I write. But at least I’m working on having no embarrassment about them, either.
• The attitude among many romance readers and publishers that m/m stories aren’t romance. Yeah . . . because men never fall in love, of course. *eyerolls* There used to be a “writer’s guide for the beginning slasher” by a fellow named Minotaur, and he had a section on why he liked slash fic: because you get to see men being romantic with each other, which at the time (I think he started the site in 1998 or so) you didn’t see in any other gay literature. And if you’ve ever checked out my own fanfiction, you can see I have a serious jones for the romantic. Everybody deserves some sweetness in their lives.
• That the only “great” love stories are the ones that end tragically. Okay, so “Brokeback Mountain” is held as the end-all-be-all of gay literature, but it’s a tragedy. There are love stories that end well: the complete works of Jane Austen, Maurice by E.M. Forster, “Moonstruck”, most musicals (including my favorite, “Guys and Dolls”), Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, “Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands.” Even Dickens has some happy endings, in between all the dying of tuberculosis and social injustices. Of course, the only difference between a romance and a tragedy is where the writer stopped, but still. I hate the notion that things are only deep if they’re sad.

It’s been a very irritating day. Makes me want to break out the pokin’ stick.

Today is CSS Naked Day.

Web design, when I first started getting interested (back in the early 90s and get off my lawn, ya damn kids), was about tables and ornate graphics and slices; and web standards was something that only concerned the W3. (Which is not to say it wasn’t a lot of fun. It was, and it was really beautiful, too.) But it wasn’t practical by any stretch; and I’ve enjoyed the move away from what web design was to what it has become: sleek, clean, and simple, with an emphasis on usability.

But no matter how obsessed I get with making things pretty (and I do get a little wiggy about it sometimes) the basis of the web is information. The prettiest site is completely useless if you can’t find the content you’re looking for—and this is where CSS Naked Day comes in. A well-designed site will still be useful even without the pictures and colors.

So today, the site will be naked.

Torquere Press is not a vanity press. I (ETA: or any other author on their roster that I’ve heard from or talked to) have not given them a cent to publish my work.

They have been nothing but helpful and supportive for the year I’ve been with them, and I’m immensely happy with all we’ve accomplished and all that’s to come.

Angela Benedetti’s post on plot is prompting me to write a little bit about it myself. (Tremble with fear when I get on my soapbox. Though, disclaimer: I don’t know everything, and I know I don’t know everything.)

There are a lot of theories about how many different kinds of plots there are and how they break down (I have a book called Twenty Master Plots, for example, which I think is as much as you can refine them), but I think they’re all basically elaborations on these two plots: man vs. internal and man vs. external. And the best written stories combine the two, so there’s an A plot and a B plot.
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This entry at Smart Bitches about why happy endings are considered inferior has reminded me of the struggle I’m having with The Movie, and I thought I’d repost something I wrote in another blog here.

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(This probably won’t be a regular thing, actually, but I had to call this post something.)

Because this has come up a time or two in conversation with readers, it feels like time to explain what chiaroscuro is and why I chose it as the title for my first novel. Bear with me: I was a humanities major in college and can ramble on about the things I love for quite some time.

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