Three hours of sleep and four cups of coffee later and I'm in A Mood.

And two of the music releases I was so looking forward to today are actually coming out next week.

How on earth could I have been off by a week on two releases?

Bah.

There are writing things that are annoying me.

I'm definitely not fit company for the human race today. I hope to high heaven no one crosses me today.

Everything really was hitting me wrong there, wasn't it? And that's considering I had New Shoes. Ah well, is what it is. Just goes to show that when the writing's a struggle, it has the potential to really color everything else. Not to mention, being cooped up in the house all week with sick children probably didn't do any great wonders for my mood either. *sigh*

And yes, while this new story is right there in my mind and I know exactly how I want it to go, the fact that I'm working in Third Person POV for the first time in years is making this a struggle. One thing I'm finding is that with Third, precise word choice seems to take on even more importance than it does in First. In some ways, there's infinitely more variety because in First, the language, both narrative and dialogue, is pretty firmly informed by the character and their circumstances. (One of my pet peeves in First Person POV YA is when a teen comes off sounding like a thirty-five year old divorcée.)

The pacing and POV shifts are giving me slight fits too, but I'm sure I'll figure it out. I'd really like to get another chunk of this story down over the weekend because I'm expecting a new revision letter for Carmen from Lovely Editor either sometime today or early next week. Yeah, just because I rocked the revisions this time around doesn't mean I don't have some more work to do. I really, really want to take this book to the next level and however many revisions it requires, that's what I'll do.

So let's make this a Good News Friday—tell me good stuff, y'all. I'll start. My darling pix_kristin is finally on the mend after a nasty bout of pneumonia. Now she just needs to take care of herself and not overdo it.

And did I mention I got New Shoes? *g* And I've lost three pounds since coming back from the Vacation of Excess. And this coming Tuesday brings all sorts of new release music including Jason Mraz, Josh Groban, Gavin DeGraw, and Duffy. All Good Things. Oh, and gaelbrady done slain the Class from Hell and got herself an A!! WOOT!

Now tell me more.

And I should probably quit looking at things. It would appear I'm getting a rep. What kind of rep, I'm not sure, but something of a rep. Over at Dear Author last week's crank was linked to, more than once in a post with respect to the furor. I suppose I should just let it go-- especially since Nora already commented and basically said the exact same thing I feel and have said-- although I guess the meaning of my words is sometimes lost amidst the snark. I should work on that.

However, since I was mentioned more than once, I felt the need to comment. This is what I said-- the first italicized quote is Nora's, the second is the author of the blog. Oh, and I find it vastly amusing that in naming me, Selah March, and Eva Gale, no one has mentioned a thing about how it's two erotic romance authors and a YA author (admittedly, one who also writes romance/women's fic) who are more or less saying the same thing about the freedom to write and isn't that interesting? (Invoking Bugs Bunny giving the monster a manicure in the inflection of the word.)

Rules, for me, aren’t meant to be broken just because they exist. That’s ego. They should be broken if the story demands it. That’s writing.

As usual, Ms. Roberts has put it succinctly and echoes precisely how I feel. I don't ever break rules simply to break them-- for the longest time, I was writing with the blissful unawareness of any rules even existing, until the first time I received a judge's comment saying, "You can't do that," with the excuse boiling down to, "That not how it's done in romance." And it wasn't about any one thing-- it was about when, precisely the hero and heroine should meet and feel attraction (by page five) and which POV is acceptable (never First Person-- didn't I know that NO editor would ever buy First Person POV?) and yes, whether or not a hero or heroine should be married at the outset or have a relationship with someone other than the hero or heroine in the course of the plot prior to committing themselves to their one true love. From those comments, I learned pretty quickly that unpublished contests weren't necessarily for me. I learned, too, that this attitude didn't just exist amongst contest judges (most of whom are writers, yes, but ultimately, also readers).

However, even though that's had the end result of creating a bit of a knee jerk reaction to being told what I can or can't do, I still maintain that people are free to write and/or read whatever they prefer.

I believe a reader can accept anything so long as there is a good reason for it, so long as it is integral to the story, so long as the reader buys into your premise and connects.

This. Exactly this. Let me say it, again, I have no beef with anyone choosing to write a story a certain way or with anyone's objecting to reading it. Please, please, please, though, don't tell me I can't. I know that as a writer, I work very hard to make all of my premises work, to make each scene count-- to have it blithely disregarded and reduced to, "you can't do that because then it's not romance," especially as it is often said, without context, is condescending in the extreme.

I guess my base feeling is, as again, Ms. Roberts said, there are so many wonderful stories out there and so many ways in which to tell them, why are there those who are so intent on shoving it all into one narrow box? There's more than enough to satisfy every reader's taste. And in the end, it's really the writer who's taking the risk, no? That the work we spend endless hours on, that we pour our hearts and souls into may be rejected on so many levels, from an agent, to an editor, to the reader. Ultimately, we have to be happy and at peace with what we write, because it's the only thing in the entire process we can control.