My Writer Therapy

The lovely folks over at Writer Therapy are hosting a blog hop and have asked participants to write a blog about their 'writer therapy'. So here I am, one more contest, writing my blog - which is supposed to be posted this morning. I still need to get showered and dressed for the day, take my daughter to school, and head to my mammogram appointment, where I will be tortured examined sometime around nine-thirty this morning. I only tell you about the mammogram because it's Breast Cancer Awareness month and I want to do my part to remind all of you to take care of your bodies.

Needless to say, this post will probably be short, since I failed to do it over the weekend, as I should have, but instead was reading (yep, that reading thing got me again).

My manuscript is finished, so lately I've been working on edits and sending out queries.  However, when I was still in the thick of plotting and coming up with scenes, there were many times I'd get stuck or was too tired to trudge on toward my goal of a finished book.

Each time that happened I found it helpful to immerse myself in a movie with a theme similar to whatever scene I wanted to write. If I wanted to write a romantic scene, I'd watch Twilight - again - or some other romantic movie. The emotions from the movie would energize me to move forward with my manuscript. For battle scenes, if I didn't know where to go next or found myself lacking the excitement needed to get it done, I'd watch a movie with some action to get my blood pumping.

I also love to listen to music while I write (at this very moment, Madonna is crooning Lucky Star). Music can be so vibrant and inspiring. Creativity flows from the speakers like ribbons of rainbows wrapping me in their warmth, whispering inspiration into my soul.

It's not really the 'done thing', I know, but I wish I could use songs as comps in my query letters. It'd be so easy. Finding comp titles for my book has been my impossible task - and I really mean impossible, harder than query or synopsis writing. The few books I'd hoped to use just didn't work for me for one reason or another.

Songs, however, would make it so much easier. If I could only give them the title of movies crossed with songs, then they'd get a real feel for my story.

It'd go something like this:

DEVASTATION is Katy Perry's E.T. melded with Van Halen's Love Walks In, woven through the book I AM NUMBER FOUR blended with a handful of the movie ALIEN and a tiny bit of SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL(movie).

See how nicely that all came together? Do you get the sense of the teen love story between best friends that are aliens (mine are human-alien hybrids), who have special powers,  mixed with a scary-ass monster on a spaceship they're trying to escape? Let me know what you think. Perhaps we can get agents to accept songs as comps... it could be a fabulous new trend.

So those are my therapies, movies and music. I'll be hopping around the blogs later this afternoon to see what your therapies are  when I get back from the torture chamber doctor's office. See you soon!

Here are the links to the other blogs signed up for this blog-hop. So hop on over to some of them.




PLEASE NOTE: I made it back from having my mammogram... I want to say it wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected and certainly not bad enough that I won't go every year, as I should, to be screened. I went to the new Baylor Women's Imaging Center in McKinney, Texas. They got me in and out quickly. The Corporate Director, Ethel, who did my mammogram, was the perfect mix of compassionate medical caregiver and professionalism. Overall a great experience.