My husband, Steven Barnes, and I were thrilled in 2010 when our partner Blair Underwood directed and produced The Best Book Trailer Ever Made (in our opinion) as part of the Vook (video ebook) for our mystery collaboration From Cape Town with Love, which I have written about on this blog.  But Blair had a $5,000 promotional budget from our publisher to produce several video vignettes that were woven together into a trailer…and most of us won’t have that kind of money to invest.

Fresh from my experience on From Cape Town with Love, I decided to shoot a short promotional video for my upcoming novel.   And I wanted to do it with no budget, no cast and (virtually) no film experience.  Years ago, I remember watching what I thought was one of the scariest movie promos I’d ever seen–a trailer for the movie Se7en that was brilliant in its simplicity: If I’m remembering right, director David Fincher simply stared into a camera and talked about how he’d just made the scariest movie of his career.   He was so convincing that I had goosebumps by the time he finished, and I couldn’t wait to see his film.

Coming Sept. 6th

My upcoming novel is a supernatural thriller, My Soul to Take, to be published Sept. 6th.  It’s part of a series I launched in 1997 with the novel My Soul to Keep, about a woman who discovers that her husband, Dawit, is a 500-year-old immortal.  The Living Blood that created his immortality has sustained three other novels, and is the core of a fictitious underground drug called Glow that can heal any ailment.  I decided against the Fincher staring-into-the-camera idea because my first take didn’t work for me.  Not enough mood.   Ultimately, my own face bored me.

So I decided to do what countless other horror filmmakers have done when they want to produce cheap movies:  I went the mock documentary route.   All I would need was a video camera,  a dark room and a premise.  The premise was easy:  I’d already established an illegal network to transport the Glow in my previous novel, so I decided to shoot a video tutorial for “conductors” on the Underground Railroad.  (I’d similarly posted “rules” for conductors on the Facebook fan page for my fictitious character Fana-Glow Healer.)    All I needed was images and my voice, and I’d find a fun way to promote the book directly at the end.

Of course, equipment was a limitation, since my favorite video camera is on my iPhone.  I knew it would look cheap, so I used the effects from a $1.99 iPhone app called 8mm Vintage Camera to make the video quality look even worse.  (“That’s right, folks–I meant for it to look like this!”)   And by doing it all in one take–actually three takes, since my flashlight didn’t work once and I flubbed lines in another try–I didn’t even have to learn video editing.  Heck, I didn’t even insert credits.  It’s all on the screen.

And it’s all in the script.  Try to use cleverness to compensate for your lack of cash.  To me, that’s the real lesson of this experience:  If you can bite off a tiny chunk of your novel’s premise and find a way to bring it to life, there’s no need to spend a lot of money.  A book trailer can be a series of quick video footage from man-on-the-street style interviews with people who love your work–or will pretend they do.  A book trailer can take any shape or form you can dream up…no matter how small.

I’m not saying this trailer will win any Oscars, or get a million hits.  But it was fun to shoot, and my readers got a glimpse of a world they love.

CLICK HERE to see what you think.  What are your ideas for making a book trailer on a budget?

Anyone who writes regularly knows that writing is a complex psychological and technical process, much more than coming up with an idea and happily typing on the page.  As writers, we trip ourselves up at so many stages:

• We want to write, but never find the time.
• We write, but we don’t finish what we write.
• We finish what we write, but we don’t submit for representation or publication.
• We don’t KEEP submitting until we find the right home.

And writing never gets any easier.  With every new project, I am besieged by voices that tell me my writing is terrible, my new  project won’t hold up to anything else I’ve written, and I’ll be laughed out of the industry.  Every project.

Recently, when I mentioned this on Twitter, one of my followers confessed that her internal editor has prevented her from writing any fiction since January.  That’s no joke.  For some writers, fearful voices might mean a project is never written.  A dream is deferred.

Here’s another secret: I have to fight to find time to write too.  I once knew a poet who disappeared to a cabin in the woods each summer to do his writing, but I never learned the art of the complete-peace-and-solitude model—the closest I get to that is a closed door and a deadline.  The less time I have to write, the less time I have to search for a magical state of “flow.”   Because of my career in journalism, I’ve trained my Muse to show up on a schedule, more or less, whether she likes it or not.

How do I do it?  By editing my freshest pages on the project, or my most polished.  And lots of music.

Because writers often work alone, too often we feel like we must suffer alone.  That’s why it’s so important for writers to seek out each other’s fellowship, and to hear writers they enjoy confess that they grapple with the same struggles.  I have had great teachers, readers and advice along the way.

My single best piece of writing advice might have come from my 11^th grade English teacher, Mrs. Estaver.  “In order to be a writer,” she told me, “you must wallpaper your wall with rejection slips.”  While that advice may not hold as true in the era of instant publishing, it was the perfect advice for an insecure artist about to weather her storm of rejection.

That one simple statement told me that it wouldn’t be easy.  It wouldn’t come quickly.  It would be the battle of my life.

Once I knew that, I could relax and get started.

What was your best writing advice?  What secrets get you through your writing day?

*****

Tananarive Due has won an American Book Award and an NAACP Image Award.  Her audio MP3, “Secrets to a Writer’s Life:  From Inspiration to Publication” is available for instant download.  CLICK HERE for more information.

Paul Laurence Dunbar: 1872-1906

          Dear Mr. Reynolds, 

           A merry Christmas and a happy New Year.  Both should be abolished.  I am broke!

Once the thrill of seeing a century-old letter from Dunbar wore off, its message was ominous.  I had the security of being a novelist (not a poet, for Pete’s sake!), but I never forgot the cautionary tale framed on my agent’s wall.

That was in about 2001, and I was riding high in my fledgling career.  The advance for my first novel, The Between, had been slightly higher than my annual salary as a reporter for The Miami Herald.  My next, for My Soul to Keep, was higher still.  In both black fiction and horror fiction, the book circuit was a thriving village of new writers, ambitious editors, courageous booksellers and readers starved for more.  Terry McMillan had taught publishers that black folks did read, and we were stoking their appetite.

I left my job at the Miami Herald after a decade in 1998, when I married fellow novelist Steven Barnes.  We had met at a 1997 conference at Clark Atlanta University entitled “The African-American Fantastic Imagination:  Explorations in Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror,” alongside Octavia E. Butler, Jewelle Gomez and Samuel R. Delany.

Heady times.

But if I had sat Octavia down for a frank conversation about writing and finances, she could have told me a grim tale of struggle.  “Celebrated author” and “rich author” are not synonymous—and never have been.  (Octavia achieved a level of financial security she’d never known when she was awarded her MacArthur Genius Grant in 1995.)

Steve supplemented his income as a novelist with television writing on “The Outer Limits,” “The Twilight Zone”…even “Baywatch.”  More recently, he has written for Cartoon Network and BET, and launched a life coaching and internet sales business.  Most novelists you read and admire have day jobs, often as college English or writing professors.  I have been teaching part-time in an M.F.A. program at Antioch University Los Angeles since 2007, and I have private writing clients.  Writers also earn income through speaking engagements and writing workshops.

But it’s a piecemeal and unpredictable living.

The only writers I know who get health care strictly through their writing are those who earn the qualifying minimum of more than $30,000 a year through Hollywood’s Writers’ Guild of America (WGA)—but it’s not easy to earn, especially year after year.  Screenplays are tough to sell.  Television jobs come and go—one year you’re the story editor on a hit series, and the next year you could be unemployed.  C’est la vie.

When I quit my day job in 1998, I couldn’t imagine a better existence than setting my own hours and spinning fiction all day.  I still sometimes feel guilty when I’m writing in the middle of the day, as if there’s something else I should be doing.  (Well, nowadays that something is called “grading papers.”)  Liberation never gets old.

But unpredictability gets old.  Fast.

In my novel Joplin’s Ghost, an up-and-coming R&B singer who fears she is “selling out” has ghost encounters with the spirit of turn-of-the-century ragtime composer Scott Joplin, who died virtually penniless and bitter trying to mount an opera.  That novel’s conversation about art and commerce was a message to me, and to all artists.

Often, art and commerce must take divergent paths, one setting the other free.

I’m proud of everything I’ve published that bears my name, but I’m not happy with lashing a whip over my muse.  I was trained on deadlines as a journalist, but rushing to finish a project because of financial need feels like sending my inner child out to work while I sit at home eating Bon Bons, yelling, “Faster, faster!”

I wrote both The Between (1995) and My Soul to Keep (1997) as an unpublished fiction writer holding down a full-time newspaper job.  Neither book was under contract; I wrote them strictly because they were stories I wanted to tell, even if no one else ever read them.  Most writers I know juggle fiction, their day jobs and their families.

Can my outer grownup relieve my inner child?

I’ve been blessed so far to feel like I’m writing exactly what I want to be writing—except for that short story collection I’ve dreamed of, perhaps—but one question now nags me:  What would I be writing if I didn’t support myself with my fiction?

What would my muse give me if I let her run outside and play?

TIPS FOR BALANCING ART & COMMERCE:

1.)     So you’d like to leave your job to concentrate on your fiction!  Great, but be realistic. Unless a supportive partner/family with a steady job is there to help your dream come true, you should have two years’ worth of savings first.  You might spend your first year of freedom writing—and your second year looking for a new job. Don’t wait until your money runs out to figure out where you will land next. If your employer offers a leave of absence, that’s probably better than starting fresh.  This is a tough economy to leave a job without careful planning.

2.)    Even if you have what seems like a secure respite from the workplace, remember that you can’t predict the future.  Circumstances change.  Keep your job skills current in case a partner’s job loss or family member’s illness force you back to work sooner than expected.  When I left journalism in 1998, there were few blogs, no Blackberrys, no Facebook, no Twitter.  Google was a start-up.  If I hadn’t learned internet marketing through my books and my husband’s internet sales business, I would be a complete dinosaur in the job market today.  If you’re a lawyer, pay your Bar dues.  If you were in medicine, keep up with advances.  Don’t assume you’ll be writing at home forever.

3.)    If you can’t afford to leave your job, don’t despair:  You CAN find the time to write.  Gather tools to help you create laser-like concentration so you can dive into flow state if you only have 30 minutes instead of four hours.  Write on your lunch break.  Turn off the TV at night and hide in the bathroom, if you must.  (I’ve written in hotel bathrooms many times to avoid disturbing a sleeping family.)  Even if you don’t have time to write temporarily, read over the last pages you wrote on a regular basis to keep characters fresh in your mind—that way, when you DO get unexpected writing time, you don’t have to waste your hour refreshing yourself.  If you don’t have a fiction project underway, journal or blog to keep your writing mind sharp.

4.)    Choose your projects carefully.  When I talk to my film agent, he cautions me not to even try writing certain scripts because the marketplace won’t support them.  That attitude can be taken to extremes. Most bestselling writers you know are writing exactly what they darn well please.  E. Lynn Harris didn’t gain fame jumping into the thriving bisexual black fiction market—he created his own market.  You’ll produce your best work if you’re writing your bliss.

But…

While you should listen to advice about what sells and what doesn’t with a grain of salt…DO listen.  Write your bliss…but see if you can steer your bliss.  Steve uses a great Venn Diagram (intersecting circles) to help students and clients determine what they should write.  One circle represents your dream projects.  The other represents projects you think you could actually sell.  Shade in the portion in the middle where those circles intersect, try to write THAT.  If you’re only imitating a successful writer or trying to follow a trend, beware: by the time your book is published or your screenplay is produced, readers and audiences will have moved on.

5.)    Don’t expect your writing to support you.  Even if you finally land that great contract, don’t expect a similar income flow next year, or the year after.  It’s better to be surprised by an income that’s higher than expected than disappointed by inevitable ebbs and flows.  If you somehow get rich through your writing—congratulations!  But baby, it ain’t the way to bet.  (See Paul Laurence Dunbar letter above.)

His story is almost as fascinating as his film.

I love that he is 73, working in a town where aging is considered a sin.  I love that he himself is a stutterer (“Once a stutterer, always a stutterer,” he said), although he never stuttered during his talk because, as he put it, “I know all the tricks.”  I love that King George VI was his childhood hero because of the king’s struggle to overcome his stuttering to rally his nation.

I love that Seidler waited 25 years to write his dream project because when he asked the Queen Mother’s permission, she said, “Not in my lifetime.”  (Can you even imagine?  She wasn’t a consultant on the film, but her permission was a condition of speech therapist Lionel Logue’s surviving son, who gave Seidler access to his father’s notes from the therapy sessions!)

Did I mention that I also love how well researched the film was?

It’s crucial to find ways to ask screenwriters how they achieved the magical act of getting a script written and produced.  That’s why I always encourage screenwriters to attend L.A.’s Screenwriting Expo each fall.

Here are the impressions I took from Seidler’s talk:

RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH. Far too many writers think writing screenplays will be easy because they love watching movies.  Please.  Cameron Crowe spent years writing Jerry Maguire.  Seidler researched his script meticulously, even for dialogue viewers might assume he made up.  Even if your screenplay is pure fiction, KNOW the world you are depicting inside and out.  That ring of truth is what makes scripts great.

PATIENCE IS EVERYTHING. It doesn’t always take 25 or 30 years to get a screenplay produced, but you can grow a tree in the time it can take to make a movie.  My novel My Soul to Keep has been in development at Fox Searchlight since before my 7-year-old son was born.  It’s always an exciting day when someone calls and wants to option your script or novel…but if you want to keep your sanity, consider that the first step on a very long, foggy, crooked road…that will probably disappear into a cliff at the end.

TRY, TRY AGAIN. If you haven’t learned by now that writing is rewriting, you are not truly a screenwriter.  There is no such thing as the perfect first draft.  When Seidler’s wife told him that his first draft had an unnecessary B story because he was trying to write a “movie,” she advised him to go back and write it as a play.  Get to the heart of the characters, she said—and your movie will come from that.  She was absolutely right.

BE BOLD. Shyness is not rewarded in Hollywood.  We might never have seen The King’s Speech if someone on Seidler’s team hadn’t slipped a copy of the play version in actor Geoffery Rush’s…er…personal mailbox because she lived nearby.  When Seidler objected to the plan, he was told it had already been done.  “Don’t ever do this,” Seidler told the audience.

Except that…Rush read the script.  After a delay—always expect delays—he informed Seidler that he wouldn’t commit to a stage version, but he would attach himself to a film version.  Feel free to use my name, he said.

And this is my favorite lesson from Seidler’s talk:

WHENEVER POSSIBLE, DO NOT WRITE FOR FREE. Even after Rush’s exciting commitment, did Seidler rush straight to his computer to start writing a new screenplay version?  No!  Why not?

He wasn’t being paid to write it, and he wasn’t going to write it for free. After his initial investment of a first draft and play, his “practice” drafts, he needed to be paid to keep moving forward.

A screenplay is a huge commitment, and there is no such thing as a “sure thing.”  We all start out writing spec scripts in hopes of getting paid down the road, and I’m no exception:  In 2009, hubby Steven Barnes and I had a screenplay in development for months with a major production company in the hope that they could sell it to the studio where they had their deal.  I looked at it as a learning experience, knowing we might never see a dime.  We didn’t.

Are there scripts I would write out of love or practice?  Absolutely.  If you want to be a good screenwriter, you have to write a lot of scripts.  Period.

But here’s the thing:  Until I started working in Hollywood, I had never been asked to do so much work without pay.  Often, Hollywood internships don’t pay.  Studios are scaling back on their development money for screenplays, more interested in finished scripts than books that need adaptation.  I understand this:  The adaptation process can take years.

But that doesn’t mean you have to write for free.

“You’ll get paid when we get our financing.”

“You’ll get paid when we get our distribution.”

“You’ll get a piece of the back end.”

All of this may be true—but pretend there will never be financing, distribution or a back end…because, most likely, there won’t be.  That’s life in the film business.  Sorry.

In Seidler’s case, a commitment from a major actor helped him put together a deal.  Whether it was a matter of principle or simply because he couldn’t afford it, he waited he took the time to dive into yet another draft.

But you don’t need a major actor to get paid for writing a treatment or script.  Whether it’s a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars—with a commitment to defer the remainder of your Guild cut until there is other financing—you deserve payment for your time and work.

If you don’t speak up and ask to be paid, you won’t be.  Even if you end up walking away from what feels like a great opportunity, you can console yourself by producing income elsewhere with the time you would have spent working for free.  The King’s Speech was Seidler’s lifelong dream, and even with emotional stakes that high, he found a way to get paid for his time and talent.

Sure, there may be exceptions…but never make writing for free your rule. Steve and I had come to this conclusion on our own, and I loved hearing a similar story from a screenwriter who just became an overnight sensation at 73.

What was Seidler’s crowning moment on his journey?

According to him, it wasn’t the day he finally had the chance to begin writing the script.  Or the day Geoffrey Rush said he would attach himself—which was the key piece in getting the film made.  It wasn’t even this week’s screenwriting Oscar nomination, one of 12 for his film.

To him, the most amazing moment was at the end of the screening at the Toronto Film Festival, in a room of 2,000 viewers who gave the film rousing applause even before the end credits.  When he heard the audience response, tears streamed from his eyes.

“I had finally found my voice,” he said.

Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due will facilitate the 2011 Organization of Black Screenwriters Writers’ Retreat in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, November 7-13, 2011.  For more information, click HERE.

I try to sound sympathetic, but secretly   the stories are music to my ears.

I couldn’t sleep.  I had to put your book   down for a while.  The cover was so  scary that I had to take if off.  I can’t look at dead leaves the same way.  My husband dressed up like your character and scared me to death when he jumped out of the closet. (He’s a keeper!)

The great Harlan Ellison once advised me to avoid labels like the plague, and I know some readers are forced to argue my case at their book club meetings.  The scariest book I’ve ever read may be Toni Morrison’s Beloved, alongside novels like Pet Sematary by Stephen King.  Horror is just a label.

But I like to write scary stuff.  I don’t know why.  If I want to write about a woman in a difficult relationship, her lover is an immortal.  If I’m reuniting a character with her grandmother, Grandma has been dead for years.  I can’t help myself.  Sometimes I wish I could.

Often, the supernatural element is more gentle and metaphysical, but once in a while I set out to give readers nightmares.

Original hardcover: My Soul to Keep (1997)

It’s not an easy task.  Novelists have to compete with real-life headlines and everyday turmoil that are far scarier than anything we can dream up.  Haunted house—so what?  The bank just foreclosed on your house.  Your boss just laid you off.  Your parent is in a nursing home.

The challenge of writing scary fiction, I think, rests with the very thing that appeals to us as readers and writers:  We’re looking for an escape. No matter what else happens to us over the course of our lives, we won’t have to confront a demon that can possess us.  Most of us, anyway.    Horror fiction scares us in a safe context.  As both a writer and a reader, I look to characters unfortunate enough to land in these books for tools about how to behave when the world caves in on us.

My favorite experiences as a writer are when I can make myself cry…or scare myself.  The crying is easy—I’m a softie.  I can find myself bawling as I write a scene a reader might encounter without the blink of an eye.  Whatever pain I’ve pricked might be purely personal.

But if I scare myself…chances are, I’ll scare the reader too.

The scariest book I’ve written may be a novel called The Good House.  It’s my only book about characters facing a force that’s Evil through and through—so evil it had to be put to sleep hundreds of years ago, and my characters accidentally woke it up.

Every writer of scary fiction has a different philosophy about how to scare the pants off of readers, but I’ll use The Good House as an example of what worked for me.  (And bear in mind that many of these tools are useful in creating engaging fiction across the board.)

1.)    Create characters your readers believe.

This is probably the most oft-ignored rule in bad horror movies and fiction.  You can create the most frightening concept imaginable, but if you don’t have real people to unleash it on, your readers will yawn.  Who would read a 300-plus page novel about a dog barking outside of a Pinto unless they really cared about the mother and son trapped inside?  (Cujo.) Ask Stephen King how important characterization is in creating horror fiction.

While I was writing, I tried to make the protagonist in The Good House especially vivid by pinning up a photo of Angela Bassett, after whom my lead character was named.  I tried to infuse my book’s Angela with the brittle strength Bassett conveys in so many of her movie roles.  The rest was just trying to imagine how I would behave if I found myself in her horrible predicament.

2.)    Delve into your own fears.

This might sound like a no-brainer, but sometimes writers do everything they can to avoid touching the heart of what frightens them.  The Good House was chock full of real-life horrors:  A friend’s sudden loss of her teenage son.  A story from a shaman about a demon gone wild.  A bizarre newspaper story about a man who drowned his son in front of his playmate.

Most of all, I was grappling with intense feelings of isolation during the six years I first moved away from my family, job and friends in Miami to live in the Pacific Northwest.  I expressed my own sense of rootlessness in a character with similar feelings, only amplified.   It’s no coincidence that I wrote my first supernatural novel, The Between, after experiencing 1992’s Hurricane Andrew.  (And that hurricane later showed up in my novel The Living Blood.)

3.)    Create a real world.

On one level, your readers are daring you to scare them.  They’ve hunkered down into a mindset that says I-know-this-isn’t-real-so-there.  A short prologue that introduces your supernatural element or gives them a tastes of the horror to come is a fine hook…but after that, slow down and take your time.  Ground your story in the mundane aspects of life we all know and recognize…and then slowly begin to show your supernatural hand.  By the time your readers realize you’ve roped them into believing the unbelievable, it’s too late.  They’re stuck on the ride.

Also, give your characters—and your readers—time to breathe.  One thrill-ride after another will desensitize them for the moments you really want to count.  Slow down.  Add some levity.  A quiet dinner.  A love scene.  Then…gotcha!

4.)    Steer clear of movie clichés.

The Good House has elements of both a traditional haunted house novel as well as an Exorcist-style demon…but I didn’t set out to imitate anything I had seen before.  My challenge was to try to re-imagine familiar concepts and make them my own.  In her last novel, Fledgling, Octavia E. Butler delved into vampire mythology with her own unique interpretation, drawing on her skills as a science fiction writer.  In my view, far too many writers set out to write horror fiction because they’re inspired by movies rather than the route any good writer should follow—reading a lot of good literature and developing a unique voice and perspective.

If you’ve seen it a million times before, so have your readers.

Don’t watch horror movies, except for fun.  Read, read, read.

Note for screenwriters:  This applies to you too.  If you want to write horror scripts, READ horror scripts.  And Oscar-nominated scripts.  And any quality scripts you can get your hands on.

I wrote three drafts of a screenplay adaptation of The Good House for Fox Searchlight with my husband and collaborator, Steven Barnes. My creative breakthroughs as a screenwriter during that time came after reading scripts like Josh Olson’s A History of Violence, Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later and 12 Monkeys, by Chris Maker & David and Janet Peoples.

Watching the films is cool too, but I learned far more from reading the screenplays before and while viewing the final product.

Where’s the movie version of The Good House?  So far, still on paper.  In my imagination.  Like most film projects, it fizzled out, awaiting a new home.

But meanwhile, Steve and I are collaborating on our first horror novel together—a zombie novel called Devil’s Wake.  (It originated as a short story, “Danger Word,” we published in an anthology called Dark Dreams, recently reprinted in The Living Dead 2.)

And yes, it’s going to be scary.

Once, I wrote a research-intensive novel in six months on a publisher’s deadline, start to finish.  The Between, my first novel, took a year.  My Soul to Keep took two.

Writing a novel is more than sitting at a computer to type words on a page:  It’s bringing a world, and the people who populate it, roaring to life.  Since I don’t have a beach house or a wintry mountain cabin retreat, I create soundtracks that help me fall into the world quickly, and that music truly does seem to take me somewhere far away.

When things are really working, it’s very much like Alice’s rabbit hole.

I see the scenes unfold.  I hear the characters talking to me, even when I wish they’d shut up and leave me alone.  I shed tears when I prick pain hidden in the imaginary world of my story.

I love my novels, or I wouldn’t have made the commitment to begin the journey—but there’s always a point when the project fills me with terror.  At any time, especially before the all-important midway point, a long project seems to threaten to disintegrate into nothing but lost months and a failed project.  (Since I’ve been a professional writer, I’ve only started one novel I never finished…100 pages that ended up forgotten in a drawer.  It can happen.  Luckily, it wasn’t under contract!)

Then, one day, the magical day arrives…and you type the words THE END.

It’s an amazing feeling.  A whole section of my brain empties out.  Celebration!

Except….what fills up the hole my project made?

Last week, I sent my editor the fourth installment of my African Immortals series that began with My Soul to Keep—this one entitled My Soul to Take (Fall, 2011).

My Soul to Keep was published in 1997

The summer was a brutal rush.  The last two or three weeks were particularly hard, since I could see the finish line:  To bed late, up early.  Glazed eyes when I talked to my husband and 6-year-old son, since I was nowhere near them.  My soundtrack of operatic climax music blasting in the house all day long, and in my headphones until late at night.

Then…silence.  Waiting.  And a palpable sense of loss.

Now I miss the novel.  Badly.  I’ve been harassing my editor and advance readers, champing at the bit to jump in and start editing so I can visit the world again.  I’ll have a couple more chances to live in the novel before it goes to press…but one day soon, I’ll be cast out for good.  And no editing will replicate the feeling of creating the scenes for the first time.

I’ve been through this cycle again and again, and it never seems to get any easier.  The empty feeling always takes me a little bit by surprise.

I mean, sheesh, it’s not like they’re real people!

But to writers, our characters are absolutely real.  We can touch the worlds we create.  Screenplays are even worse, because so few movies make it to the screen—at least I’ll see my novel in a book store one day!  I could self-publish if I had to….but how many of us will go out and make our own movies?

As days go on, the ghosts in my head will be replaced by daily living concerns.  And I’m lucky to be co-authoring a zombie novel called Devil’s Wake with my husband, STEVEN BARNES, that is well underway…so at least I have a new creative home to move into.  All I need is a soundtrack.

But the only thing as hard as dreaming a world is leaving that world behind.

I wrote The Black Rose with research from the Alex Haley Estate

In one transcript, Haley was getting a pep talk from a relative, akin to “You can do it!”  I wondered if Haley had felt daunted by his success after Roots.  How do you follow up an international blockbuster?

That pep talk stuck with me.  There I was, a young writer trying to write my first historical novel on a tight deadline in partnership with a beloved author’s estate, and I felt gripped by fear each day.  I stared at Madam Walker’s photo for inspiration.  I thought about my parents’ civil rights battles in the 1960s.  Whatever it took.

You can do it, I told myself.   Haley’s pep talk could have been for me.

Fear touches all of us, and it can be crippling.  Fear is also sneaky; it whispers to us in a voice that sounds very much like our own.

I’ve wrestled with those voices nonstop while I’ve been working on my current writing project, tentatively entitled Blood Prophecy, the fourth book in my African Immortals series that began with My Soul to Keep.  Each new book feels like a lot to live up to.

Here’s what happened recently:  With an eye toward the deadline, I expanded my outlining process by creating index cards for my remaining scenes.  I was writing an especially difficult portion of the book—a reintroduction to the colony of immortals in Lalibela, Ethiopia, that first appeared in The Living Blood,  entering my fantasy realm more deeply.

And my writing was speeding up.  Considerably.  My page quotas from the early pages felt slim compared to my new marathon writing sessions.  I was on fire!

This is CRAP! my voice shouted to me.  You’ll have to throw it all out.   Slow down.

It was a Friday afternoon, and the inspiration seeped right out of my head.  The characters—who had felt real enough to hear and touch a moment before—morphed to mere symbols on a page.  It looked like a mess.  I still had two more hours before my son came home, but that brought the end of my writing day.

You can guess what happened next:  I read the Friday pages over the weekend, and they were fine.  First draft, of course, ripe for texture and tweaking, but the revisions came easily.  And quickly.  And I’ll have plenty of chances to revise it later.

I had psyched myself out of a stellar writing day because I got scared.

Fear has stopped me before.

After I wrote The Between, my first novel, it sat in a drawer for a year because it had been rejected exactly twice, by a contest and a mega-agent.  I convinced myself it had been only an exercise, that it wasn’t good enough.   A year later, when I got the confidence to begin submitting, I found an agent immediately…and she sold it in two weeks.

As a writer, my fear has manifested in many ways, always slowing me down.

And I’m not alone.  My husband and collaborator, Steven Barnes, surveyed 300 writers on what they most wanted to see in a writing course.  The top answer had to do with addressing fear.  (His free course, “The Seven Faces of F.E.A.R.,” is available at www.diamondhour.com.)

No matter how many times I undergo the cycle, once in a while my fear voices fool me.  In book after book, I have to remind myself to ignore the voice that says that whatever I’m writing won’t measure up to my previous work.  It’s so unfair to compare first drafts to finished books!

I can only imagine how Alex Haley felt.

But I’m happy with the progress of Blood Prophecy.   I’m having a reunion with old characters, and learning more about new ones.

And I’m writing it as fast as I can, without fear.

From Cape Town with Love turns up the steam (screenshot courtesy of Vook.com)

Sex is in the air.

I just saw a great post on sex scenes in novels by author L.A. Banks [link below], which nicely echoed some recent conversations of mine.  I teach in the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, and a male student approached me yesterday and asked me to recommend one of my novels with good sex scenes.

The Tennyson Hardwick novels, of course!  That’s the series I co-author with hubby Steven Barnes, in partnership with Blair Underwood, about an actor-turned-detective.

I recommended From Cape Town with Love or In the Night of the Heat, both of which get pret-ty steamy.  I’m always too shy to read the scenes aloud.  (The audio book version of their predecessor, Casanegra, taught me that words on a page sound even more intimate when they’re spoken. Whoa.)

Sex scenes can be controversial, pushing readers’ buttons.  Some readers complain that Tennyson is too sexual, and others wouldn’t have him any other way.

When Casanegra was first published in 2007, I was so excited that I wanted to have it announced at my church’s Sunday service.  But…well…

Ironically, though, when I was invited to a book club meeting by a church member, attended by highly religious church ladies, no one even mentioned the sex in the book, completely taking it for granted as a part of the story.  I’m embarrassed when older family members read the books, but they’re not complaining either.

The best sex scenes are the ones that deepen and reveal the characters or forward the plot.  What’s the key to writing good sex scenes?  It’s the same standard as any scenes in fiction:  Story logic (don’t ram them in, so to speak), emotional honesty and attention to detail.  I also try to walk a line between being too clinical and too coarse.

One of my favorite examples is “Bring on the Bombs: A Historical Interview” by the great Nikki Giovanni in Best Black Women’s Erotica, edited by Blanche Richardson ( Cleis Press, 2001), where the tumult of the civil rights movement drives a couple into each other’s arms to gain strength from their erotic encounter.

In the second Tennyson Hardwick novel, In the Night of the Heat, we show Ten’s emotional deterioration after a break-up when he seduces a woman who is highly vulnerable because she’s deep in mourning herself.  (A reader recently reminded us about this naughty behavior on his Facebook Fan page when “Ten” dished out his company line about never fooling around on the job.)

In the Tennyson novels, it’s not just sex for the sake of sex.  The novels are told in first person, so the character is the narrator.  He’s a former gigolo who serviced powerful women in Hollywood, and his past creeps up on him at unexpected moments.  He is sexually damaged, and his careful attention to sexual detail is a symptom of his struggles with sex and intimacy.

That’s out story, anyway, and we’re sticking to it.

Unlike Leslie, as she writes in her blog post “Is there such a thing as too much good sex?”, I’ve never had an editor ask me to ratchet the sex in a novel up or down—although I once decided to spice up the short story I wanted to submit to Blanche’s anthology.  The sexual content in my work has always been at my own discretion.

When Steve, Blair and I knew we were publishing a Vook (video e-book) version of From Cape Town with Love, we all agreed right away that we wanted to cut out the explicit content to make it more appropriate for younger readers.  (But trust me, it’s still hot.  That’s where the screenshot above is from.)

But there has been some form of sexual content in almost every novel I’ve published, starting with my first protagonist, Hilton, as he makes love to his wife in The Between.  In My Soul to Keep, my 500-year-old immortal has understandable sexual prowess. In Joplin’s Ghost, sex pretty much saves my protagonist’s life.  Literally.

Why?

Because sex is an important part of life—and it’s certainly a treasured part of mine.

With the Tennyson Hardwick novels, a sexually damaged character is also our way of urging readers to tread carefully.  Sex is powerful, and power can be good or bad.  The If-it-feels-good-do-it philosophy can lead down some of life’s thorniest paths.

Just ask Tennyson.

The Tennyson Hardwick series is published by Atria Books.  The Vook version of From Cape Town with Love is available for computer download at Vook.com, or as an iPhone or iPad app at iTunes.

But writing the screenplay for the webisodes that would replace some of the novel’s text in the new format was its own challenge—and a heck of a fun ride.

Both formats were published almost simultaneously in May—the hardcover is in bookstores now, and the Vook is on sale for download at Vook.com or as an iPhone and iPad app at iTunes.  (As for the latter, I really can’t get over the idea that our book is an app.  Trippy!)

Steve and I have written feature-length screenplays together—we sold three drafts of an adaptation of my novel The Good House to Fox Searchlight.  We’ve also written a TV animation scripts, and pitched TV series treatments.

But we were in brand new territory when Blair Underwood—who “produces” our NAACP Image Award-winning book series as the face of main character Tennyson Hardwick and gives us input at every step—was ready to direct and star in the Vook webisodes for From Cape Town with Love.

When Blair contacted us last fall with the notion of a Vook, I had never bought an iPhone app.  And what the heck was a video e-book?

By March, it was time to write the screenplay for the six video vignettes that help tell our story in the Vook.  Blair had found his producer, Cynthia Graner, and put together a crew and a cast that included Kellita Smith (“The Bernie Mac Show”).   It was starting to feel like a movie shoot…but without a script.

In From Cape Town with Love, Blair’s character is an actor-turned-bodyguard and private detective bent on rescuing a celebrity’s adopted South African child after an abduction.

Vook screenshot: Ten and Nandi in From Cape Town with Love

Our budget, in Hollywood terms, was nada. (And even much of that went to insurance.)  Blair found free locations and pulled in favors.  We knew we could only write a limited number of vignettes on that budget, so we chose pivotal scenes.

The scripts started as emails back and forth between three of us as we brainstormed on a list of up to 10 scenes. As we cut down the number of scenes because of budget, we fleshed out more detailed sketches.  Next, dialogue.  (My favorite part:  when the characters come to life!)

Even in miniature, the scenes were a terrific lesson on the art of film adaptation.

First, we had to figure out what exactly what the scenes were supposed to look like in a format that was brand new.  Our first pass felt more like movie trailer clips, very short—and Blair told us to add more.  ”More like the book,” he said.  (A note screenwriters don’t often hear from the director, trust me.)

Some of our scenes were too steamy, and the dialogue was too forward.  “Make it more subtle.  Trust the actors,” Blair said.

ORIGINAL DIALOGUE:

Sofia Maitlin:

Sit down, I won’t bite. (Beat)  Not hard, anyway.  But you’re a big boy.  You could take it.

FINAL DIALOGUE:

Sofia Maitlin:

Sit down.  I’m not going to bite.

We needed both action and sex appeal to represent the Tennyson Hardwick series.  Steve, who is a fourth-degree black belt, choreographed a fight scene days before the shoot (which they had to modify on the set, so Blair and Steve ended up fighting while Blair was holding the child actress, Karli Llorens.)

Vook screenshot: Ten fights the bad guy (co-author Steven Barnes)

One of the scenes that never made it to film is when Tennyson is swarmed by paparazzi—and I would have had a speaking part as a reporter.  (Ah, well.  Kevin Costner’s part was cut out of The Big Chill.  It happens.)   We also lost a scene with Ten and a favorite character:  his father.

As the director, Blair added flourishes we didn’t anticipate, like typewriter sound effects and text bridges at the end of the scenes to help the videos flow back into the text.  The overall effect still has me grinning.  I even had a cameo as a jogger!

Vook screenshot: A puzzled jogger (co-author Tananarive Due)

Steve has written produced scripts for several TV shows, including “The Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits,” but until now my only experience with seeing my work translated to film had been a short story my film student friend shot in college.  Together, the six Vook vignettes are only about 15 minutes long.  The longest is about five minutes.

Fifteen minutes of footage is still a dream come true.

Vook screenshot: Can Ten trust Marsha (Kellita Smith)?

Recently, I heard Terry McMillan read from Getting to Happy, this fall’s forthcoming sequel to Waiting to Exhale—and she mentioned that she had to re-read her watershed novel to research the new one.  After all, we forget our characters’ voices, occupations and quirks.  (Heck, sometimes we forget their names!)

Writing Blood Prophecy is a particular challenge in that regard because it is the fourth book in my African Immortals series that began with My Soul to Keep in 1997.  The series follows the lives of mortals and immortals who have contact with Living Blood that can heal any ailment almost instantly, examining issues of life, loss and mortality.

What would it be like if we could live forever?

My Soul to Keep was followed by The Living Blood in 2001 and, finally, Blood Colony in 2008.  (OK, so it was a long wait.  I didn’t know the series was going to continue!)

Each novel is intended as a stand-alone novel for new readers, but as the author I have to continually check in to make sure I know who’s who and what’s what.  Just to make it interesting this time around, I’ve added a pop star named Phoenix I introduced in a completely unrelated novel entitled Joplin’s Ghost.

My African Immortals novels always challenge me because of the fantasy aspect, historical research and character quirks related to their incredible longevity. I’m also asking questions about human nature.

This time around, I’m also realizing that I have a bit more to learn about my African Immortals themselves.  The premise of My Soul to Keep was that 59 Ethiopian immortals live in an underground colony in Lalibela, Ethiopia.  They were mostly off-stage during the first book, but I actually took my characters to the colony in The Living Blood.

Even so, I’m realizing that I have a lot to learn about them.  I try never to retread old ground in a new book, which means I’m having to open up my world a bit.

And while much of the series has focused on a reader favorite named Dawit, he has dozens of Life Brothers I’m still learning about as I go.  With advice from my husband and soulmate, Steven Barnes, I’m now writing an essay to fill in some of the foggy aspects of who these men are and what makes them tick. I’ll be writing a similar essay about my antagonist, who was introduced in Blood Prophecy.

What is their history?  What are their desires?  How can I humanize them?  My essays will be very similar to the writing exercises I assign my MFA students and coaching clients.  And why not?

The longer I write, the more I have to learn.

Blood Prophecy will be published in 2011.