Big stakes make for big excitement.

How do you start building a rich paranormal world from scratch? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? The external plot or the characters?

For me personally, I start with the kind of creatures I want to populate my world. Do I need vampires? Mages? Demons?

I ask myself who will be their natural enemies. For this, I might accept common lore (Hollywood or myth) to start my list.

Then I choose my hero or heroine’s particular paranormal persuasion, starting with the main protagonist of the story. Whatever he or she is, I look for the one thing they shouldn’t fall in love with. Think about a vampire who falls in love with her natural enemy, a werewolf, for opposites. A mage-priest who falls in love with a demon.

If I know my character well enough at the start of my planning/dreaming, I might choose a being that should be compatible, but use the same sorts of “human” conflicts to build their opposition. A Born vampire who won’t let herself fall in love with her “turned” lover because she’s already faced devastating personal loss. Because even an immortal lover might be killed.

Then I crawl inside their skins for a while and see the world through their eyes. What’s their every day life like? Where do they live? What do they eat? What do they need to exist? Blood? Sex? Psychic energy?

How might their lives be challenged? Their existence threatened? If they are colonists on a new world who think they’ve found Eden, what’s the worst that could happen? Is there a serpent in the forest? A dragon in a cave that preys on them at night? A Hell Mouth opening to release demons?

Paint the world you build with details of their ordinary lives as well as the extraordinary sights and experiences.

Create a Legend.

Paranormal stories, whether erotic or vanilla-flavored romances, that stand the test of time often have a legend behind the core of the external plot.

Think of Buffy and her “In every generation, there is only one…” slayer legend.
Or how about the legend of the Aztec Gold in the first Pirates of the Caribbean?

One legend was presented at the start of every episode of Buffy through the first couple of seasons, then dropped because every one knew it by then.

The other was presented throughout Pirates, a piece at a time to intrigue the audience.

Both set the stage for how the story would unfold.

I don’t think every paranormal story has to have a legend, but if it fits with the type of tale (especially any quest story or a coming-into-powers story), it can make your novel that much richer.

If you are a true plotter, you will want to nail your legend up front to make sure it resonates throughout. If you are a pantser, you may discover your legend as you write. At some point, if you will use a legend as a plot device, you will want to articulate it.

What should a legend include? An element of fated duty, a hint of some horrible apocalypse if the journey is never started, or a reward when the quest is won.

LEGEND IS NOT HISTORY. So don’t confuse the evolution of your creatures or the apocalypse that forced your aliens to flee their home world with any legend.

How do you come up with your own legend?

You can steal. Think of the “In every generation there is only one” legend and make your heroine The One who guards the portal to another dimension rather than a slayer.

Or as the events in your book begin to unfold, think about what a bard might say to some future generation listening to the tale of your quest. What elements might be put into the legend groove?

When writers talk about building a “world”—what is a world?

A world isn’t necessarily a “where”. It’s the congregated circumstances your characters work inside. So, what the heck does that mean?

For the TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy’s world is set in Sunnydale, California. At the start of her journey, she’s in high school and the most important activities she’s involved in are her cheerleading, passing her classes, and of course, boys. All by itself that can be pretty interesting stuff, right?

Joss Whedon added the whole “You are the One” role that Buffy is forced into accepting as THE Vampire Slayer, and suddenly, there’s a whole new texture to her world. Monsters come out of the woodwork, a Hell Mouth opens to release demons on the world, and she’s the only thing standing between the innocent human world and The Big Bad.

She comes into her “weapons”, her powers, which include her super-human speed, strength and fast healing. She’s a natural with cross-bows, pointy stakes and knows instinctually how to kill many of the beasties she encounters.

All the pieces fit together like a tapestry, and her journey convinces us this world exists, just as she must be convinced every step of the way.

Now her problems are bigger, her conflicts are bigger, and the antagonists that she must face in each episode of her total journey are bigger. The external plot really forces the growth of her character.

What was Buffy’s world? Every aspect of her life.

Her home life where she hides her role from her mother while trying to explain why she sneaks out at night, why her grades suffer, and why she keeps getting into fights.

Her inner life which she hadn’t really thought much about until she had to “dust” a vamp or two. Even then, she was never convinced she had the spiritual strength of conviction or the intelligence necessary to be the last hope of the world—not until the very last episode when she comes up with the plan to share her “power” with her “slayers-in-waiting”.

Her romantic life which gets pretty complicated when she falls in love with the very creature she’s destined to kill—and where making love with him can turn him into a soulless creature if he experiences that one moment of true happiness.

So, the world you build contains all the aspects of your character’s existence.

Why does it matter that every conflict, every hero, every villain, every resolution has to be bigger in a paranormal story?

1) You can have a true “super” hero. And don’t we all want guys who can leap tall buildings in a single bound, are stronger than Popeye, and better in bed than Casanova? When we suspend belief while reading a work of fantasy, it doesn’t seem too silly at all!

2) Doesn’t a reader want to escape into fantasy and join the quest to find The Holy Grail rather than looking for matching socks coming out of the dryer?

3) When our heroine faces pure rip-your-eyeballs-out evil, we don’t really want to believe the characteristics embodied by that villain truly exist. We can be scared, revolted, fascinated, but because it’s a good paranormal tale, we don’t have to close the book and wonder what the world’s coming to.

4) Don’t we all want to save the world?

“Take a blow torch to your belly fat!” That was the subject of a spam mail I deleted this morning. It’s a pretty effective sentence. Gives the reader an instant image and the theme of the spammer’s message. Whoever wrote it has real talent.

So does whoever wrote “V is for Vampire” for Powerman 5000.

“Nobody loves you when you’re skin is so pale,
and your teeth are gettin’ sharpened and your black friggin’ nails.
Nobody needs you when your eyes turn wide
and the light of day can keep you up all night,
because V is for Vampire, V is for blood…”

Maria Mena’s song “Sorry” paints a picture and grabs your emotions.

“He grabs my wrists
as my fingers turn into angry fists
and I whisper, ‘Why can’t you love me?
I’ll change for you’…”

Don’t you feel her anguish?

When the singer whispers these words, don’t you feel his?

“He said, ‘I’m sorry, so sorry,
I’m sorry, I am sorry’…”

All these writers paint a picture in a few well-chosen words, and we novelists have a hard time telling a story in a whole friggin’ book. We all use words. We all sweat over them. They have to convey a single message, a single vision, a single scene in a person’s life. A novelist tries to drop a reader into another world and transport them into another person’s life in 400 pages.

I’m not saying a novelist’s job is harder. I’m just thinking I would have sucked as a spammer or a songwriter.

Some authors love the revision process, but I have to think they love it like people love exercise or spinach—they have to do it, so why not make the best of it? I’ll admit right up front, I HATE revisions.

I’m in the middle of that process right now with a short novella. I don’t often get to the end of a novella unsatisfied with what I’ve done, but this time I attempted to write something a little more hardcore erotica than my usual fare. Okay, so some of you will be asking how the hell can she do that? Do you remember the scene in Saddled?!

Well, this one is more hardcore (even if the sex is still my smutty brand of unrepentent porn) because it’s more heavily invested in BDSM. While I slammed away pages of what my main couple were doing, I failed to show their growth as people and their growing affection for each other. I may write some raunchy stuff, but I don’t ever forget that these characters have to feel real and most real people have emotions that complicate their individual journeys.

I’m trying to go about this methodically so that I don’t get overwhelmed or discouraged by the work needed to spank this puppy into shape.

1) I handed the story off to Beta Readers (test readers) who know how I flow. These readers knew I needed them to be very honest about whether they liked it or not, and the fact that I knew there was a problem. I asked for them to tell me if they could put their finger on what was missing because at that point I was too close to the work and couldn’t see it .

2) I took their comments, ruminated on them for a while, then passed the story to my crit partner for her thoughts. She came back with “a Dom wouldn’t do this” and “this was too much narrative” along with some very clever suggestions for rewrites.

3) I opened a fresh document, starting again with that pristine white page, and cut and pasted what I felt could stay in the that first scene, and then began to craft new words around that flawed bit of narrative, working at layering in more dialogue, more of the emotional reactions of the characters, and looking for the humor I’d sadly forgotten completely.

I have a very long way to go to make this one publishable, but I will take one chapter at a time through this process until I get to the end. Then I will send it once again to my Betas for a sanity check, and to my critique partner for her thoughts. Who said writing had to be a solitary effort. For me, it often works better if I have that frigging awesome village at my back.

I’ll admit I have a fondness for writing short stories. I’m an author who enjoys a challenge. Calls for submissions for erotic collections offer me an outlet for my competitive spirit. I’m known as a novelist of erotic romance—not so known in the erotica world. So when I receive acceptance for a short erotic work I feel validated as a writer.

I’ve been lucky to appear in the following collections so far: Zane’s Purple Panties, Black Lace’s Sexy Little Numbers, Cleis Press’s Lesbian Cowboys, and Harlequin Spice’s Naughty Bits.

I also will appear in the following Cleis collections this year: Girl Crush, Fairy Tale Lust, and Lesbian Lust.

Something I’ve done in the past with my local RWA chapter and with the Rose’s Colored Glasses loop, when I find a call that interests me, is offer a challenge to other writers to write a short for that collection. We share ideas and critiques. Writing the shorts can offer an experienced writer a quick-win and sharpen flabby skills. For the unpublished author, it provides a supervised challenge to improve budding skills.

Why should authors consider writing shorts? For one thing they don’t require a huge investment of time so you can work on a short story on the side while writing the bigger book. In addition, writing short requires an author to choose every word carefully and make every one count. It sharpens your skills.

It’s been a while since I chimed in with a challenge to my writer’s groups, but looking at the calls for submission on the ERWA website has me stoked. The site lists many cool, different sorts of projects to dive into. I am going to challenge myself to write a story for four different calls. (Egads! Now you’ll be able to track how often I get rejected! :confused:)

I’d love some company while I write these. If you are an erotica or erotic romance writer, or have thought about taking the plunge, this is a cool way to try it out. If you’d like to join me, let me know. I’d love a partner or five. We could bounce ideas off each other and critique each other’s work. We might not sell, but the effort is never wasted. What you produce could be the start of a longer book, or something you could offer as a sample of your writing for free on your website.

These are the calls I’m interested in:

Due 6/1/10: Big Book of Quickies – No more than 1200 words
Due 6/1/10: Carnal Machines – Steampunk Erotica – 1500-4500 words
Due 7/15/10: Dream Lover: Erotic Paranormal Romance – 2000-4500 words
Due 8/1/10: Lesbian Cops – 2500-6000 words

If you took the “Write 50 Books a Year” workshop, which I teach for free every August, this will be really familiar! I do something like this at the start of every workshop for a very good reason! Putting your dreams down on paper sets an internal switch in your brain called the RAS (Reticular Activating System—the part of the brain that controls awareness/arousal). The way this works is you write down your goals, and then you read them aloud. You don’t even have to believe they’re going to happen, but your brain hears the words and resets its expectations. Magic happens.

You’ve probably heard that children will live down to their parent’s lowest expectations—that’s based on what they’ve heard their parents say about them. Sad to say, if they’d heard encouragement, their brain would have been “trained” to achieve greater things.

Define Your Goals

1) The Big Bang

This is the time to dream big. Imagine what you want to have accomplished after five years of dedicated effort. Write your back cover biography!

Here’s mine:

Delilah Devlin, author of oodles of erotic romances featuring hot gratuitous sex, spends her winters in southern France with her Argentinean polo player, and spends her summers in Alaska with her not-so-Gentle-Ben backwoodsman. A regular on the New York Times Bestseller List and the Howard Stern show, she is writing an adaptation of her My Immortal Knights series for a new Playgirl channel series with celebrated screenwriter Elle James.

Okay, so I had a bit of fun with mine. Got yours done? Now print it and tape it to the wall above your computer. Read it aloud to yourself. Try to make this your daily mantra as you sit down to write. Don’t underestimate the power of “setting” your brain’s internal switch to achieve your big dream.

2) Imagine what you have to accomplish to reach that Big Bang goal—then pare it down to your wish list of what you want to accomplish over the next year. For me, it’s writing the best books I can, having a terrific time doing it (because positive energy generates positive results!!), and doing a lot of it. But when I list incremental goals, it looks something like this:

#1 Write 2 single title books this year
#2 Prepare 4 new proposals this year
#3 Write 3 category/novella length novels for Ellora’s Cave
#4 Write 3 category/novella length novels for Samhain
#5 Write 4 short stories for Cleis collections

Don’t freak when you see this list. I always start with stars in my eyes and have to ratchet down my expectations once reality (and the real planning) begins. But this is what I wish I could accomplish over the next year.

So, it’s your turn to write your bio and your To Do list!

Oh yeah—I now have the little black dragon with the long tail. So it’s two dragons down! ~DD

This is for you writers out there…

When you’re on the go, you don’t have to carry the latest in digital gadgetry to get ahead on your Work-in-Progress (WIP).

What you might try doing for those short windows of time throughout your busy day, whether sitting in the dentist’s office or waiting for a school bus, is carry a stack of index cards in your purse. I like the colored ones (color inspires me all by itself). I keep them at the bottom of my bag with a rubber band around them. When I have those small windows, I pull them out and jot down notes—maybe a smattering of dialogue, notes about setting that I need to layer into a scene, the outline of a scene, whatever pops into my mind—on the card. It doesn’t matter where you might currently be in your WIP. You can lay out the cards later next to your plotting grid/outline to figure out where these snippets will fill in the blanks.

If you have your scenes plotted already, you can carry your grid/outline wrapped around your index cards. Number the scenes on the grid/outline and put the reference number at the top of the index card so that you can plop what you’ve jotted down into your manuscript at the appropriate place the next time you’re sitting in front of your computer.

If you need reminders of what your characters look like, jot down their descriptions on a card to keep permanently in the stack.

If you need a reminder where your were the last time you opened your document, and need to work sequentially through your manuscript (some of us are linear thinkers!), print that last page of your story, fold it in half lengthwise, and wrap it around your stack of cards.

Index cards can be a handy, transportable writing tool that won’t break your piggybank!