Please Welcome Author...Terry Spear

Writing Bloopers

Thanks so much to the Deadly Vixens for having me as a guest author blogger! Ironically, I looked up the term “vixen” this morning in the thesaurus because to me it means someone who’s impish, tease, troublesome, but in a playful way and I was going to use it to describe my heroine in my latest book, Allure of the Wolf. But the thesaurus showed it as shrewish, harpish. Huh? Okay, so I looked it up in the dictionary, hoping to find something closer to what I thought it was—a woman with a fierce temper, and a fox.

All right, so I chose siren instead to describe my heroine. :) Which brings me to bloopers in our stories. What happens to all the stuff I’ve revised? The stuff I’ve cut out? I hear about other authors who have several versions of their manuscripts stockpiled and they wonder when is the time to get rid of them? After the book is contracted? Once it’s published? Ten years after publication?

Hmm, will we become famous and the edited or totally unedited versions will sell for millions of dollars?

My best childhood girlfriend kept all her slippers from the time she was an infant to adulthood because she thought some day she might become famous and sell them for a fortune. :) But if she became famous, why would she need to sell them? **note, she never became famous and she finally ditched them.

For stuff I’ve cut, I keep it in a separate file, and then once the book is out, I put the “cut outs” in my hard drive recycle bin. Which is always full of neat stuff if I ever need to retrieve any of it. And I do, sometimes.

I even got really lucky one time because I’d saved the wrong version of a novel, the one without the end!!! And one of my critique partners had critiqued it months earlier and still had it in her recycle bin! This tells me two things, critique partners can be absolutely invaluable, like the friend who has a picture of your kid in their wallet when you can’t find one, and recycle bins are great places to save stuff you thought you might never need again. **note, and yes, I was so happy to have my ending to the book, which turned out to be two whole chapters and an epilogue, I sent her one of my world famous teddy bears!

The reason I keep a file of cutouts is the obvious, I might want to use them after all, but also, do you know how hard it is to cut your baby up? So, by making a file of cut outs, I can get on with the business of writing, and it doesn’t hurt quite as much.

I must have deleted my bloopers, but I remember my editor questioning something about the guns Bella had in Heart of the Wolf…it’s like an important prop, one minute it’s in the movie, the next, it isn’t. :)

So here’s a snippet from Heart of the Wolf when Devlyn is in rescue mode, headed to the zoo to free Bella:

A police siren wailed behind him, shattering the otherwise quiet and forced a shard of anger to rip through him.
Everyone turned around to see what was wrong. Frowning, Devlyn pulled the vehicle to the shoulder, spitting gravel out of its path.
“Speeding a little, Devlyn?” Argos asked, his voice amused.
Speeding a lot. Devlyn tightened his grip on the steering wheel, not wanting to leave Bella in the zoo’s pen one more minute. He glanced at the rearview mirror to see a policeman approaching. If Devlyn tore off now, he could probably lose the cop. The officer would never guess Devlyn would hightail it to the zoo.
He slipped his foot off the brake.
© Terry Spear, 2007

Currently, I’m writing Allure of the Wolf, and I kept feeling the opening, 12,000 words, wasn’t right. So yep, it’s in my cut out file. But I’ve since written a new 22,000 words, and when the heroine and hero get back to town, I hope to use some of what I cut.

The beginning is never the beginning, someone once said. It’s always a work in progress.

So if you are intrigued by a sexy shapeshifter story that is full of suspense, adventure, and humor, check out Heart of the Wolf!

And thanks, Deadly Vixens, you foxes you, for having me!

Terry Spear
Heart of the Wolf, Don’t Cry Wolf, The Vampire…In My Dreams (coming August 26!), Winning the Highlander’s Heart, www.terryspear.com

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Disclaimer (because we don't have a choice): The views expressed by the guest blogger do not necessarily reflect those of The Deadly Vixens.