Colorado Gold with Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers! I laughed! I cried! I drank! I met lots of really cool people!
Including an editor! WHO WANTS ME TO SEND HIM THE BOOK!
So that was pretty exciting, but…let’s just say the rest of the weekend my interactions with him suggested that he wouldn’t like the book I was sending. He told me that he didn’t see a lot of New Adult that wasn’t romance but he was intrigued by the sorority girls being the heroes. So, after a whole lot of soul-searching and existential questions, like “Is it still art if everyone’s structures are the same?” and “Was it even art in the first place?” and a talk by William Kent Krueger who said that he was a much better writer when he stopped trying to be Ernest Hemingway…
I’ve decided that I’m a romance writer. Or that this is a romance story, anyway. Which I have to be if I want to write about this age group–and get the book into the hands of readers. Because honestly, in the first drafts of this book the romantic story kept trying to take over. Which doesn’t mean that I was falling into plot traps, or that I wasn’t as good with my characters as I should be. It just means that I wanted to write the romance all along.
All my musings led me back to the question of why I wanted to be a writer at all, and why I wanted to write this particular story. It was to tell the story, and it was to talk to young women. Not in a preachy sort of way, but in a meeting of equals way. The same way I parent, you know? Parenting is a two-way street; it’s not something I do to them, it’s something parent and kid do together. It’s not about imposing my needs on them; it’s about recognizing their needs and teaching them to be civilized people too. I used to be a young woman. And now that I’m a less-young woman, I want to explore the themes of making mistakes, and learning to trust again (including yourself), and in the end being who you really are.
So that means for the next few weeks I’m restructuring this manuscript, adding back scenes that I thought were too romance-oriented, and writing two serious (gulp!) sex scenes. I’ve already written some serious foreplay scenes with these two, so how hard can it be to get everyone’s clothes off?
I know. I just have to jump in and do it.
At least my shoes were comfortable this time.
ellen mcbee 
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