I'm in a hotel in downtown Chicago, and will have a few days here to work on HOW THEY SCORED. It's a version of the retreats I've taken in past years -- almost always in December or right before or after New Year's -- to work on or finish books. The difference here is that I'm staying in the hotel room of A., who is in Chicago to attend a conference. ...
Since I finished the first draft 12 days ago, I haven't worked on the book at all, except for a couple of hours yesterday. Christmas intervened, and before that it was the tech manual project that refused to die, so that my initial plan of taking much of the week before Christmas to goof off and work on this book was a complete bust. It was a good thing I finished it on the 15th, because I sure didn't get a chance to even look at it between the 15th and the 26th. Well, the break was good.
It occurs to me that one of the weaknesses of the book is that the whole theme of privacy and security is not integrated with the sex stuff at all. I guess if it were, it would be a really different book -- it would be impossible to have all the sex scenes from a variety of perspectives wind up somehow being about security and privacy.
Still, I want to make the book as smart as possible. While I'm here -- and I should have a good three days to work -- one of the main things I want to do is polish and possibly enhance each sex scene, make them hotter and more pornographic, give them more of a wow factor like my previous books. Right now I think they risk seeming rather vanilla, and I don’t want to disappoint people who are familiar with my other work.
Sometimes instead of thinking about the content of the book, I think about what it means in my career. It will be my first published novel, and I'm keen to get the [erstwhile] publisher to classify it as fiction first and erotica second -- if at all. I don't want it to be pigeonholed. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if instead of fighting it, I shouldn't just be embracing the fact that my genre work has succeeded, thanks in large part to the same publisher, where my other work has not. Plenty of writers make a career out of doing genre work; I shouldn't look down on it. On the other hand, I really do want to write books of general interest.
Well, perhaps Bangalored will open that door for me, once this book is put to bed and I have a chance to give my India book another go.
Since I finished the first draft 12 days ago, I haven't worked on the book at all, except for a couple of hours yesterday. Christmas intervened, and before that it was the tech manual project that refused to die, so that my initial plan of taking much of the week before Christmas to goof off and work on this book was a complete bust. It was a good thing I finished it on the 15th, because I sure didn't get a chance to even look at it between the 15th and the 26th. Well, the break was good.
It occurs to me that one of the weaknesses of the book is that the whole theme of privacy and security is not integrated with the sex stuff at all. I guess if it were, it would be a really different book -- it would be impossible to have all the sex scenes from a variety of perspectives wind up somehow being about security and privacy.
Still, I want to make the book as smart as possible. While I'm here -- and I should have a good three days to work -- one of the main things I want to do is polish and possibly enhance each sex scene, make them hotter and more pornographic, give them more of a wow factor like my previous books. Right now I think they risk seeming rather vanilla, and I don’t want to disappoint people who are familiar with my other work.
Sometimes instead of thinking about the content of the book, I think about what it means in my career. It will be my first published novel, and I'm keen to get the [erstwhile] publisher to classify it as fiction first and erotica second -- if at all. I don't want it to be pigeonholed. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if instead of fighting it, I shouldn't just be embracing the fact that my genre work has succeeded, thanks in large part to the same publisher, where my other work has not. Plenty of writers make a career out of doing genre work; I shouldn't look down on it. On the other hand, I really do want to write books of general interest.
Well, perhaps Bangalored will open that door for me, once this book is put to bed and I have a chance to give my India book another go.
