Miranda Phipps

I’ve been tinkering here with the website and my twitter settings to see if I can integrate things a bit.  Apologies to all five of my Twitter followers for spamming you!

My posting here should (in theory) translate into a little message over on Twitter noting that I’ve posted a new blog.  Wish me luck.

In more exciting news, I informed my DH that I was taking much of the day to work on (1) mirandaphipps.com (including, I hope, a snazzy update of the header image), (2) writing, and (3) a bit of RWA packing and other prep.  It’s like a little spa day for my writing life.  Whee!

I wanted in on those free Harlequin eBooks, so I downloaded Stanza onto my iPhone and converted myself into an eBook dovotee. I read three books in two days. My reading time is FAST on the iPhone, I tell you.

I missed turning in my chapter last week, but I am aspiring to turn in two this week, so I can stay caught up. It feels good to be making progress and giving myself permission to write a bad first draft. My inner perfectionist remains relatively subdued. It’s amazing that despite being handcuffed, gagged and stuffed into the corner of my mental closet she still manages to show up at breakfast every once in a while. I ignore her and apply myself to my Greek yogurt with granola.

I’m excited about my new online writing class for using historical detail in novels–should be fun!

I’m in a patient mode. It took me a year and a half to change some habits around exercise to the point where I finally feel like I’ve integrated exercise into my lifestyle without having to fight it all the time. Writing is up next (and I’m hoping to tackle that in tandem with eating better).

So far, so good on reforming those habits. My crit partner and I have come up with a new world order where we are required to deliver work to each other on a weekly basis. I’m not necessarily writing every day, or even for very long on the days when I do write, but there is progress being made. And progress is . . . progress.

2009 promises to be a good year for writing. For one, the global economic meltdown translates into a much lighter workload in my day job. I’m also, at long last and after much physical therapy/working out, in a really good place from a physical standpoint–my back, you see, it had a bit of a meltdown in the summer of 2007.

So here I sit with time and a solid sense of direction for The Keeper, a story I’ve been working on for two years.

Nevertheless, anxiety eats at me while I wonder if I have it in me to finish this book. I’m afraid I’m no good at this and that I should just stick to the day job, which I am good at and which makes money. I’m afraid that even if I do pour myself into this novel and polish it to my sense of perfection, no agent will want to represent it and no one will want to buy it.

Truthfully, I’m not usually this insecure about things in life. I’ve achieved a lot in my career, which is downright stressful and a profession which many people can’t hack. I’m smart, and I know it. I can read craft books and integrate the learning into my writing. I can brainstorm plotlines like nobody’s business. Ideas for romance novels flow through my brain like someone has turned on the firehose. But it’s not enough to give me an innate sense that becoming a writer is something I can achieve. Perhaps the problem is that the stakes really matter on an emotional level for me. I care about being good at my day job, but writing is about being good at something that’s part of my soul. Dangerous territory indeed. We’ll see how it goes.

Another branch of my craft reading has been glomming onto all things Helen Fields has written. Jenny Crusie turned me onto her back during the 2007 novel writing workshop. Dr. Fields studies the brain chemistry of love, and she has so many good things to say I can’t begin to summarize them here. But one of her discoveries is just pins down the essence of love for me, so I’ll describe it here. She identifies romantic love, that euphoric, obsessive, soul-drenching experience when you first fall in love, as a primal human drive for mate selection. It’s like thirst or hunger. Once you fall in love, that’s it. That’s all you can think about or do until you realize that relationship. And when that relationship isn’t consummated or worse, the object of your affection rejects you, your brain pretty much freaks out because it’s been so used to the “high” that being in love has given you.

My WIP features a relationship where the heroine rejected the hero ten years earlier, and Fields’ observations about what actually happens to a person in this circumstance ring are incredible. To find out, you’ll have to read what I do to my poor hero.

I usually only actually read, in full, a couple of my book club’s choices each year. There’s so much that I want to read for myself, and so few hours in which to read those books, that I have a hard time working in book choices that aren’t my own. I’ve wanted to read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro since Jane Espenson gave it a rave review on her website a couple of months ago. (I discovered Jane’s very helpful writing blog via Jane’s guest blog on Jennifer Crusie’s Argh Ink.) Given what I know of Jane’s writing through Buffy and Battlestar I can very much see how the book would resonate with her.

As someone who loves romance, I struggled with the relationships in the book, which have typical literary fiction style endings (read: bad). But more fundamentally, I had a hard time accepting the idea that the donors and the carers would so fundamentally accept their roles within society—particularly the donors and carers who were as well educated as the protagonist. Part of me also wants to believe that other people would not allow a world with carers and donors to exist. But when you read the news and you get your head around the evil that can exist in the world, I have to wonder whether it is possible.

I’ve just wrapped up the Voice II class with Barbara Samuel (soon to be Barbara O’Neal apparently—name changes are so fascinating). The past couple of weeks were hard for me in terms of being able to dedicate focused time on the class. I did come away with a notion of voice as a sacred space though, which I like.

Dear Hubby and I were in Vegas this past weekend—amazing people watching, which almost goes without being said. I borrowed my sister-in-law’s AlphaSmart Neo and wrote both on Saturday and on Sunday. Woohoo for me! I’m going to try typing on this thing when I workout in the morning. We’ll see how it goes.