Megan Hart

I scored at the liberry, y’all. I gorged a bit. Came home with five books (only five?!) and two DVD’s. Never mind the bazillion books I have on my TBR pile (literally, a pile, by my bed. Well, three piles.) I got some Orson Scott Card, some Scott Westerfield, some Charlaine Harris…wheee ha!

I got the movie Somewhere Tomorrow which…OMG. I must’ve watched that movie two million times as a teenager. I can’t wait to watch it again, haha, and see exactly where I got the idea for Second Verse and Sand Castle (because I’m sure I’ll say OMG, so THAT’S where those ideas came from!!!!)

M

PS– Megan Supernatural search on Google brings me up first. Wheee! Who was looking for it? And why? Also, you folks searching on broken penis…man, oh man…get that looked at. Srsly.

And word I love today: lugubrious

HAHA!

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Second Verse is officially done and sent off to my agent, who will take it on the next step of its journey!

DONE DONE DONE DONE

Ohhhhh, done!

M

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Oh, yes, a round or two more of edits, based on what my crit team says, but Second Verse is pretty much finished.

M

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There are songs I love and have loved forever. Songs that I can listen to a million times and never tire of hearing.

Here’s one that stays with me no matter where I am, where I go, how old I get, who I’m with, where’ve I’ve been or what I’m doing.

I need you,
To need me
I want to hold you
But you’re holdin’ someone else in your arms
When I close my eyes
I see your face
I’m just not sure
How much my heart can erase
Oh no
I can’t think ooh….
Oh no
I’m goin’ crazy with love
Over you

Because let’s face it, if you haven’t been crazy with love at least once in your life, you just haven’t lived.

First heard that song in the movie The Last American Virgin when I was about 15 years old. Fell in love with it then (as I was crazy in love for someone, I’m sure, who wasn’t crazy in love with me…that was sorta the way it worked for me back then) and have loved it ever since. Loved it so much I downloaded it TWICE from iTunes! Must have it on every play list I make.

*loves*

also: here you go, a little taste of Second Verse to keep you going since I know you’re dying to keep up with what I’m working on now…

It was wrong to want this. Bess stood on the edge of a cliff and stared into the murky waters of moral ambiguity, and she waited for Nick to push her. He didn’t.

So she jumped.

Yeah…funny how this book is going, huh? Dead dudes, ocean, lust, long, ache, moral ambiguity…I guess I’m just not full of glitter rainbows.

Which is odd, because I frigging love glitter.

M

PS — sometimes something funny still leaves you with something good to use:

A line I used today in a silly poem but I like it and will use it in the future:

This is the list I leave you with, when you wish I was leaving you with me.

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Today my goal is to clean off my desk and get back to my edits. I wonder how I’ll view Second Verse now, after some time away? Will I love it? Hate it? Is it going to resonate with me more now than it did before? Will I find it ridiculous? Will I finally put those parts of me that fill it away? And how will I feel if I no longer have them?

I put myself in every book I write. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Over the past year or so (maybe a little longer) I’ve been digging deeper into myself than ever before.

It hurts.

There are days I am nothing but a big, complicated mess of emotions — well, who isn’t? Thank god I have the time and ability to tap into them to create something, to put those emotions and experiences into something that gets them out so they don’t fester. I am the sum of my experiences but I refuse to let myself be constrained by them. So if you read my work, and something resonantes with you, that’s about the best compliment I can get. If I touch you, make you cry or laugh, or hug your children, then I’ve done what I wanted. (If I turn you on, that works, too. I do write erotic fiction, duh.) But ultimately, the parts I put into my work are only parts. Not the whole. I think the trick is to use enough of myself to trigger emotional reactions while leaving the story open enough for someone else to interpret based on their own experiences.

I cover a few themes in my books…I guess I do, anyway. Sometimes it’s not on purpose, at least not at first. I don’t know until the end what I’m trying to say. It just happens. It comes out a certain way and I realize, “oh, it’s a theme.” Control is one of those themes. Struggle with self another. Refusing to let the past negate the future yet another.

Second Verse is about second chances, about the chance to try again what didn’t work the first time. It’s about a girl/woman who falls for a boy so hard it makes her head spin. Is he the best choice for her? Nope. Does she want to fall for him? No way. But when she does, she embraces it whole heartedly — knowing that it’s probably not the right choice, that she “shouldn’t” embark on the affair. But shouldn’t doesn’t matter when the mallet of lust hits you in the back of the head, does it?

Let’s talk about flirting. There are layers to flirting. There’s the eye contact you hold for just a bit longer than necessary — or the cutting away of a glance at just the right moment, when it all becomes too much to look into the face of someone who’s melting your butter. There’s the gentle stroking of someone’s ego and there’s the full-on, flat-out, “I think you are about the hottest thing I’ve ever seen and I want to eat you up with a spoon.” There’s the electrical charge of meeting someone you find attractive — sometimes immediately, sometimes only after a while — and the back and forth of words and looks, a subtle touch. A step closer, the tilt of a head to listen more intimately to what the other person is saying (even if you have no trouble hearing.) There’s the touch of a hand and curl of fingers in a palm, or the casual placement of an arm around someone’s shoulders that could be as innocent as pie, but no…BAZAAAM, every nerve is tingling because you think that person is the hottest thing since jalapenos.

Do you act on it?

What if you can’t?

What if you shouldn’t?

What if you really, really want to, and the wanting is as much a surprise to you as anything else? What if you started out just being silly, or funny, or just wanting to make someone blush…and you end up with that heart-sick, heavy weight in your stomach that tells you you’ve been up and smacked with the loss-of-all-logic stick. You know the one I mean.

It’s the electrical charge between two people that makes a relationship (an erotic relationship, in this case, since that’s what I’m writing) convincing. If you’re reading an erotic book, you want to read about how it feels for those people, don’t you? How it feels to want someone, maybe by surprise. Maybe how all it takes is one second for things to change from “hey, let’s joke around” to “oh, good god, I’m about to throw all caution and common sense to the wind and dive in without checking for rocks on the bottom.”

Making that move is risky. You can be rejected. You can make a mistake. You can end up hurt, or hurting someone, or you can end up finding the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. You never know unless you try…but sometimes…never knowing is probably better than finding out. Fantasy is better than reality. In fantasy, it all works out, right?

And what is writing a book but putting a fantasy down on the page?

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: I like making stuff up. I love the fact that I can make things happen the way I want them to — not the way the might have happened in real life, but the way they COULD HAVE happened.

Sometimes you meet someone who sets you back a couple steps and makes you examine the sort of person you are, and how far you’re willing to go.

I hope I can write a book that does the same thing.

M

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Finished round one of edits. Now have to input them and write the sections I missed the first time around.

Getting close to the end!!!

m

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Writing is much like giving birth.

One day, you’re not pregnant. One day, you haven’t started a book. The next, you’re knocked up. The next, you’ve typed the first word.

You’re pregnant for nine months and you can’t believe you’ll ever have this baby. You type and type and type and sweat and strain and groan and drain your brain for (however long it takes you…maybe less than nine months, maybe a helluva lot longer) and think you’ll never finish your book.

Then one day you go into labor. Then, one day, you’re starting the final chapter.

And you hold your baby for the first time. And you type, the end.

One minute you’re not a parent, and one minute, you haven’t finished a book. In the next, you’ve done both.

I didn’t know I would finish the first draft of Second Verse on Monday. I thought it would take me the rest of the week, IF I WAS LUCKY. And I finished it. I just…finished. It was done.

(Editing aside.)

And I raced toward the end, knowing it was coming and surprised, utterly and completely astounded, that it had come so soon.

M

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This is why it’s so difficult for me to write at my desk in the late afternoon…

THE SUN! THE SUN!

Oh, and here’s the face of a writer who’s just finished her NINETEENTH novel (not counting the short stories or the book that’s 2/3 finished and will never be finished if I don’t sell books 1 and 2)

NUMBER NINETEEN, suckas.

M

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70000 words
70% finished

line of the day:

The three, simple words that in the past had so easily fallen from her mouth like marbles didn’t seem adequate to describe the width and depth and breadth of her emotions when she was with him. Or without him.

And because ’tis my natal day, I shall leave off early instead of squeezing out a few more pages.

M

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Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same…Maybe you want her, maybe you need her, maybe you had her, maybe you lost her to another…

The book I’m working on now isn’t as hard as the one before it was and way easier than the one before that; but not quite as easy as the one before that.

It’s going to some places I didn’t expect.

How do you make someone loveable when he won’t act worthy of love? When he won’t, maybe, believe himself worthy of it? When he acts like an asshole over and over again, how do I convince you, the reader, that she, the heroine, could find something inside him to love without making her seem like an ass herself?

We all know people who love people who are buttheads, though, I mean, you don’t get to CHOOSE who you love. Do you? Do you think you can set yourself up to love someone, or not?

I know for a fact you can choose NOT to love someone. I think that’s easier than choosing to love someone. I’m not sure you can choose to love someone who doesn’t “do it” for you. But I know for damnsure you can choose not to love someone who does all of it for you, over and over, in every way possible but who, in the end, doesn’t make you happy…who makes you doubt yourself…who isn’t good for you, or you for that person. Loving someone doesn’t make everything else all better, or make it right. I really do not believe that love makes everything else all magically work out.

So that’s my challenge. Make you, the reader, believe and see why Bess could possibly love Nick even though he makes her doubt herself, without making her seem like the biggest dork and doormat, EVAR. And since you’re never in Nick’s POV all I have is Bess’s feelings to go on.

Sometimes lust overwhelms everything else and makes you forget everything else. It makes you act stupid. It really does.

I don’t want her to be stupid, but if someone who reads her has never experienced that overwhelming burn of yearning and ache and lust, they might think she is. Anyone who has ever felt it will understand.

I just have to hope there are a whole lot of lust-riddled readers out there. :)

M

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