Cooking things up... again.

There's a story brewing in the back of my head. okay, it's been shouting to be written for a while now. it involves cooking.
And guess what?

You Are an Excellent Cook

You're a top cook, but you weren't born that way. It's taken a lot of practice, a lot of experimenting, and a lot of learning. It's likely that you have what it takes to be a top chef, should you have the desire...

Are You A Good Cook?

So see? it's not poisonous, despite the smoke! ^_^

Now, back to the edits.

brain fry

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, and let me assure you, it hurts. ^_^
With the Blaze pitch coming up, I'm just a big bundle of chocolate-coated nerves. And did anyone say 'female problems'? Lalalalalala. not fun.

I'm sort of only half sleeping at the moment, and that's tiring me out even more. My characters, stories and general writing admin keep my brain acive at night. it's sort of like day dreaming, only at night, and less fun. Well, unless one of my gorgeous heroes makes an appearance, of course.

In general, I seem to have been giving my analytical side of the brain a strong workout. After the BIAW of using only the creative side (that one didn't get sore, just hungry. Hmmm....), I was due a good hard editing week. And I'm behind my editing already. Gah! I didn't do any editing on the weekend for my current WIP, instead I researched, studied and practiced pitches and synopses. I never studied this relentlessly at uni (which explains my marks, I suppose...).

I've spent all morning trailing the Blaze boards, digging for pearls and gems (yes, I know you can't dig for pearls, bear with me here). But the more I know, the more I'm afraid I just won't measure up. Oh well. At least it's only a week and a bit. Then I'll know more. And then I can say I pitched to a ral editor. Whee!
Great prep work for the conference. Which is paid for. And I've got a room with the lovely (if unknown to me safe for a few emails) Rhonda. Looking forward to it all!

But first, bring on the energy drink.

Pitching

I entered the BLAZE pitch challenge on eharlequin this month, and today I got an email saying I'm one of the finalists!
I'm going to pitch to an actual real-life editor!

Pardon my squealing, but I'm insanely excited. Even if nothing comes from this, I've got validation! Someone out there liked my story and my synopsis! Yay!

That just made my month.
It's been a very, very good month with lots of positive things happening. No. i'm not waiting for the other shoe.

Now to get on to actually recording my podcast though. it's been way too long again.

Keeing busy

I'm doing another BIAW with RWAus this week (don't you love acronyms?), and it's going well. of course it means pretty much nothing else gets done, but hey, that's the beauty of it. You just writ, write, then write some more.
I'm hoping to write a whole (short) first draft in this week, and it looks like I might juuuust be able to do it. I don't writ on weekends, so it's really a BIAMon-FriW, but hey, nothing like a tight challenge. And I might do *some* wqriting on Sunday. Saturday, I'll be out all day doing Mother's Day things (not with my mum. Our family doesn't believe in Mother's Day as a good thing. What with its Nazi heritage and all).

I've also been working on my pitches, and it's been ahrd going. But on the plus side, reading about pitching (mainly in the context of conferences) has made me really reeeaally excited about the conference in August. I can't wait to talk to eople about my various books! Too exciting. I've got almost exactly another week to fine-tune all my pitches into pithy few-liners. I'm getting there. I've always wanted to be an ad copy writer. And I love my works.

So there.

Now, back to the writing!

Hooks

Ally Blake has been blogging over at eHarlequin in April. her last entry was about hooks and got me thinking.
How important are hooks to the book and who reads it?

Traditional hooks are, for example, sheiks, cowboys, marriage of convenince, tycoons (especially Greek/Italian), outback, single fathers, vampires, brides, babies, amnesia etc.
They're not exactly the same as tried-and-true plots, but they're very close. And more often than not, these hooks make it into the book's title (and cover, if tehy can).

I consider myself not much for hooks, but that's not really true. i just don't care for a lot of the hooks currently out there. We all have auto-buy topics/characters when we look for in purchasing fiction.
For me, it just doesn't happen to be the "popular" romance hooks. being a convinced childless person myself, for example, anything baby/single parent is of extremely limited interest to me. I don't care for virginal brides/marriages of convenience either. And royalty, whether Western or the sheiky kind, leave me rather lukewarm.
And don't get me started on amnesia.

Having condemned all these hooks quite summarily, I was pondering what sorts of hooks/staples I do go for. And the list I came up with is stuff that is sorely lacking in recent Harlequin/M&B titles, as far as I could tell. Well, most of them anyway.
My auto-interest hooks would be pirates (gee, who saw that one coming?), martial arts (the real stuff, not the dribble written by people who've visited a dojo once and thought it would make an interesting hobby for their tough-as-nails heroine, yawn), food/cooking and cultures (not exotifying stereotypes, real "This world is different from your world" stories. Maybe that exlains the cowboy appeal?).
Secondary interest (the story still needs to convince me on its own) are from hooks I have seen out there and liked well enough. Those are much more common. Like outback/cowboy types, especially with an opposites-attract angle. best-friends-turned-lovers hold a special place in my heart of they're done very internally, especially as a Blaze (not so much as a Tender). And I'm an absolute sucker for comedy, even though that's hard to bring across in a title or even blurb. I wish they brought back a comedy line.

What about you? What are your auto-buys? What topic/premise/chraracter will get you interested every time?