Diana Rowland — Writing, Life, and the Stuff in between

Huge thanks to everyone who has posted congrats (and also to those of you who didn’t post it and who merely thought it, and even to those who gnashed their teeth in envy and shook their fist at the skies and shouted, “Why her and not me? Why her books and not mine?! WHY?!” because, you know, I’ve totally been there and I get it. Seriously.)

My to do list has suddenly changed for the next few months. A few days ago I was making great progress toward my goal of having the thriller draft finished up by the end of April, but now I have an honest-to-frickin-god deadline imposed by someone other than me to finish up the second book in the demon series. Backed up with the threat of money. How cool is that!! And the other cool thing is that book 2 is 90% done already! (Actually my first deadline is for the revisions to Book1, but until I get my editorial letter I’m going to jam on the sequel for a while.)

I’m also still trying to come up with a decent ‘name’ for the series. I’ve tried out The Demon Chronicles, but that really doesn’t capture the police-procedural aspect of it. Must. Ponder.

So, for those of you wondering about the books, here is the summary of Mark of the Demon that I put in my query letter to my agent:

Kara Gillian is a homicide detective with the rare ability to summon demons–a talent that becomes unexpectedly crucial to her investigation of a series of murders in the small town of Gallardo, Louisiana. Kara soon realizes that the killer is also a summoner, one who is seeking to gather enough arcane potential to summon and bind a Demonic Lord in order to gain nearly unlimited power. However, Kara has her own unexpected and intimate encounter with this Demonic Lord, and is–not so willingly–marked as the Lord’s own. With the aid of an FBI agent who might be more than he seems, Kara must stop the killer and keep the Demonic Lord from being summoned, all while defying the same Lord’s demands that she call him to this sphere–an act that would make the phrase, “Hell on Earth,” seem tame

I also need to do some major updating/improving of my website, though I did carve time out this morning to change my “Projects” page to show that MOTD had sold.

Yeah, I’m still swimming happily in the utter coolness of it all.

It’s official. Bantam is buying the first two books in my demon detective series: Mark of the Demon and Blood of the Demon.

Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The lair in progress;

I finally had the chance this weekend to start getting the Lair set up. I managed to get a fair amount of stuff up into it by virtue of the creaky and dangerous elevator (which I rode up once and then vowed to never do so again,) but more sizable items such as my desk and chair required a trip to the hardware store for a pulley. (I was hoping to buy a block and tackle, but damned if I can find a place that sells them locally.) Fortunately my desk is not heavy and the single pulley was sufficient. (I’ll hopefully get some pics up soon.)

So now I have a seriously cool writing space! This is an extra good thing since I started a new book a few days ago, something quite a bit different from my usual writing (and far more mainstream) but so far really cool and interesting and which definitely draws on my experiences in law enforcement. And to add to the coolness, I managed to put down almost 6k words over the weekend. Go me!

One of the things that I found the most depressing/stressing about the past ~3 months was the fact that everything was so hectic and busy and uncertain and sleep-deprived that writing ended up being pushed waaaay down on the list of priorities. Fortunately I’d finished up the crappy first draft of Demon book the second before all of the crap started, so it wasn’t as if everything was left hanging, but it was frustrating all the same.

But now we are moved! We are (almost) settled! I am not plagued with a gadzillion errands to run every frickin day! I am getting to bed by ten (well, not tonight, but most of the time)! I am exercising again (when it’s not too frickin’ cold to run)! And, I am writing again!

Okay, not as much writing as editing, but the three month break–however unintended it was–has made it easier to see the (massive number of) flaws and plot hitches in the latest book. My personal goal is to get the book into a readable state by the beginning of March, and then I want to dive into the Redneck Vampire book. And, since at the moment I’m (unfortunately) not laboring under any deadlines other than the self-imposed kind, I’d like to see if I can get a draft of Redneck done before summer.

In the meantime, I came across this paragraph I’d written in Demon book the second:

I walked to the fireplace and hitched myself up onto the table, oddly pleased that it had the added effect of allowing me to look down at him. Not that it made me feel superior in any way at all. He still radiated power and potency and sexiness that left my mouth dry and other parts of me wet. “What’s in it for me?”

Hee. I think I’ll keep it.

Here are some more pictures of the Lair:

Another view of the Lair, showing the side door and the doors on the end. The hoist at the end of the building is pretty much the only way to get anything larger than a person to the upstairs.

Yet another view.

This is the strange and probably quite dangerous elevator (at least to children.) I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with it, but I’m leaning quite heavily to taking it out completely. We have a tentative plan to build out some sort of “deck” where the hoist is, with proper stairs, but that sort of project would have to be approved by the homeowners association. If it’s denied, then I would probably have a spiral staircase put in where the elevator is.

And this is the only other way to get to the upstairs at this point. It definitely makes for privacy, but I wonder about getting
stuff up and down.

This is the downstairs, still, looking in from the side door. Since the place already has plumbing, I’d like to have a proper little bathroom put int.

More of the downstairs.

This is the upstairs, looking toward the hoist end from the ladder.

Another view of the strange and probably quite dangerous elevator, this time from the top.

Looking out toward the ‘front.’ There’s a fan set into the floor of the upstairs, so I’m guessing it gets pretty hot during the summer.

And, this is the view out the upstairs window. That’s actually the third fairway of the golf course. (No, I don’t play golf!)

We are in the new house. It was a hellish road getting here, which included moving and cleaning with the flu, plus three closings in four days. The last closing, which was the purchase of this house we’re in now, had to be relocated at the last minute to the other end of the parish (30 miles away) because a Mardi Gras parade had been rescheduled due to weather and was due to go right past the original closing location–which would have trapped us there until about 10pm. As it was we didn’t finish the closing until almost 8pm. I then had to race back across the parish to deliver the keys to my husband who–along with four hired strapping-young-lads–had unpacked two of the three trucks onto the front lawn and into the garage and the back patio. By midnight the trucks were empty, the house was full of stuff, and we were near dead from exhaustion.

As I mentioned before, this is not the house we were originally going to buy. That deal blew up in our face, which sent us scrambling for another option. However, the more we look at it, we think that this house is going to prove to be superior, especially since I NEVER WANT TO MOVE AGAIN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE.

Ahem.

Anyway, it’s nowhere near the bargain that the other house was (as far as the sheer dollar amount of equity we would have walked into upon closing,) but it’s still a really great deal and, frankly, a better house and better location.

But this is the feature that I am the most excited about:

This is a building behind the house. I have claimed the upstairs as MINE ALL MINE for my writing space. Exceedingly Awesome.

I just wrote a long paragraph about my writing goals for the coming year, and which books I want to write depending on what sells. A long boring paragraph of navel-gazing concerning my writing. Trust me, it was boring. You should thank me for deleting it.

So, instead I decided to jot down all of the possible ways that my book (the one on submission right now) could be changed to make it even more saleable than it is now:

1) Change the title to, The DaVinci Code, but with Demons.

2) Make the main character a big redheaded guy named Kvothe.

3) More sex.

4) More violence. But the good kind.

5) Change my name to Laurell Georgia R.R. Martin Nora Roberts Hamilton.

Anyway, I was over at my stepson’s house for Christmas, and the conversation turned to the pending sale of our house and how we’re crossing all possible digits that nothing will go wrong with the sale because then we’d just have to go ahead and kill ourselves. Several people mentioned burying a St. Joseph’s statue in the yard to bring good home-selling luck, at which point my step-daughter-in-law said, “We did it! And we sold our house two days later!” She then dug in a drawer and pulled out a St. Joseph statue and instructed us to bury it upside down in the front yard. We, being just superstitious enough, went home and did exactly that, because, hey, it sure as heck can’t hurt, right?

Now my question for the masses is this: Which saint do I need to bury to get my book to sell?

I’ve been mulling over whether to plan on going to Worldcon in Denver this year. I haven’t been to a Worldcon in… a long time, probably close to ten years. In the past few years my available time has been limited, and thus I’ve been forced to essentially pick THE best con for my wants/needs, which has ended up being World Fantasy Con. However, I’m sorely tempted to shoot for Worldcon and WFC this year, especially if my book sells.

Anyway, I went to the Denver Worldcon website and looked around at membership cost and hotel information, and then came across this nugget of information.

We will, however, be sharing facilities with the John Deere convention and the American Statistical Association.

I have this incredible mental image of a con-goer in full Klingon regalia standing next to a redneck in a flannel shirt and a ballcap.

Oh yeah, I have got to see this. I’m definitely going.

This morning I had to suffer through a seriously boring training session for a DNA software module that I will never use (yet I am somehow expected to write a manual for it even though I know absolutely ZILCH about processing DNA). I tried to pay attention and follow what was going on, but after about twenty minutes of listening to the analysts talk about quantifying something-or-others I finally gave up and succumbed to wandering-mind syndrome which led to me making a lot more notes for my Lucifer novel. At least I looked busy!

In the process of my quiet brainstorming I started thinking about the first novel I ever wrote. I ran across a hardcopy of it over the Thanksgiving holiday and sat down to read the thing. I wrote it about a dozen years ago, a Big Fat Fantasy novel which clocked in at about 170K words–and that was just “Book One.” It was very much a First Novel, a total wish-fulfillment piece with a main character who resembled myself to a degree that had me writhing in embarrassment as I reread it. However, I thought that perhaps it could be rewritten/edited to fix that and some of the other weaknesses. Perhaps take it apart and rework it, and make it better.

So, I took a day out and deconstructed it. (Deconstructing novels is pretty much how I learned how to write mysteries. I took several of my favorite mystery novels and took them apart, going through chapter by chapter. I essentially wrote out a synopsis for each one, then studied how the author worked in false trails and action and suspense and tension.) And in the process of tearing apart this first novel of mine I discovered something: It’s not… bad, but it sure as heck isn’t good. Lots of tropes, heavy-handed romantic overtones, cardboard characters, thin plots… you get the idea. But, the cool thing was that I could SEE this. I could see the weaknesses that I’d been oblivious to a decade ago. (Heck, even just a few years ago!) And, I could see ways that the book could be made Good, and Different, and–in my opinion–pretty darn Cool. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any realistic way to do this by just rewriting and editing the existing book. At the most I miiiiiight be able to salvage some scenes, but overall the darn thing would basically have to be rewritten from scratch.

Perhaps I’ll put that on my list of Books I Intend To Write.