Over the course of six days, we each produced six novel proposals in various mystery subgenres — cozy, PI/detective, police procedural, hardboiled, and noir. We also wrote two noir short stories. And we, of course, read all the work each other produced.

Peppered in among all this for me were good conversations with folks I don’t often spend much time with and walks on the beach — except for Tuesday, with its overlapping deadlines. No walk. I almost started killing people outside my fiction. So, lesson learned and applied on Friday, the other day of overlapping deadlines.

Bonus: On Saturday, Scott William Carter signed his debut novel The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys at North by Northwest. If you haven’t got a copy already, you want to buy one. It’s a riveting read, and often laugh out loud funny.

I learned a ton at the workshop. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to have taken the workshop from such an amazing teacher and with so many great writers.

The stories are already out in the wide world. Now to add chapters to all those novel proposals and get those out as well.

On your mark. Get set. Go!

Breathe in . . . breathe out . . . BUT WHAT IF X HAPPENS? . . . Breathe in . . . breathe out . . . THEN Y!?!

and so on.

I’ve had a lovely Yule season, and I hope you have, too. There have been some amazing gifts of the material kind and more valuable ones of the not-so-material kind. I am reminded to be grateful for all the people in my life, and for all the love. And also for movies that knock my socks off. I’m not so enterprising (nor do I have so much time; see above re: *almost* end, and the need to actually write it) as to attempt a 2009 gratitude list at this point. And I’ve occasionally written these sorts of lists at other times of the year. So to prevent a case of supreme redundancy and time eating, here’s today’s top eleven list.

1. The people in my life who I happen to know. I love you. You know who you are.

2. The people in my life who I have yet to meet. Same goes.

3. This morning’s walk in the cold rain with the Doggie Ranger, replete with morning prayers and connectedness.

4. An awesome wiki article on Kabbalah that I actually had time to read.

5. Avatar. Still heavily on my mind since I saw it on Sunday morning. I’m going to have to catch it again, this time preferably at the IMAX which will NOT be sold out the next time I want to go.

6. Tea. Preferably Barry’s Irish, Gold Blend.

7. Blueberries, fresh and huge and bursting with juicy flavor.

8. Surprises.

9. Calvin and Hobbes.

10. Plenty of time to write.

11. That I get to take my lunch hour at 9:15 tomorrow morning to go to Nia. There will be dancing! And Queen Latifah!

Best wishes, everyone.

I thought I had my problem narrowed down to emotion in structure.  Emotion is one of several author decision points in a story, and it must be balanced with other qualities in order for the story to work.  Writing a blazing hot action scene?  There’s not going to be a lot of emotion, and if it’s there it won’t be written in thick prose.  Otherwise it’d throw a splash of cold water on that blazing hot action and put out the fire.

The issue I thought I had with emotion is what I called “knowing the emotional thread of a story.”  A story’s emotional thread, the way the characters feel and their motivations, their emotional journey through whatever happens, and how they are changed in the end is what makes a story worthwhile.  It’s my holy grail.  If it’s not there in any particular book I’m reading, regardless of genre (and counting, of course, what’s appropriate for that genre), I don’t care.  I am officially Dark-Willow-bored-now and outta there.

I labored under the mistaken impression that I should know all that holy grail stuff before I ever start writing, or at least within the first 1,500 words.  (Cue sinister laugh.)  Because I never really have known it ahead of time (even if I thought I did) I would often write until 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through a story or to about page 100 of a novel and then the thread would reveal itself.  Problem was, I hadn’t laid the groundwork — all the little clues my subconcious would normally place in the front part of the work — to support it.

There is almost always no way to fix a situation like that.  Hence the stories that fell apart and Humpty-Dumptied themselves (they couldn’t be put back together again).  Or all those thrown-away novel pages and re-drafts.

I understand now that that emotional thread in stories always shows up on its own.  It can’t be manufactured.  It can’t be engineered toward.  When I try, it shifts on me like quicksand.

What does work, however, is writing the story one scene at a time or one 800-1,500 word segment at a time.  And in this segment, I concentrate on the emotion.  That way, instead of trying to eat the emotional elephant of the story or the book, I am laying that necessary groundwork for the emotion point of the story, whatever it turns out to be.

It took me all five days of one-on-one work to understand all this.  Literally, to the end of the working period — it all finally clicked into place at that last group lunch.  In those five days I plotted a short story, 800 to 1,500 words at a time, concentrating on the emotion.  And I started writing a new novel, jumping off a dark science fantasy YA short story I’d finished a few months before, that I’d never even contemplated writing.

(The writing was a trip if for no other reason than my roommate was busy writing a very funny romantic suspense in the back room, and whenever the kids in my book were at their most terrified, she would cackle because she’d just written something off-the-charts hilarious.)

I’m still working on the book fast and furious, with my focus on emotion, one scene at a time.  You know what?  I’ve never had so much fun writing anything in my life.