Pauline Ray's Blog

Hi darlings! My latest book, The Mind Haven, is about Nazi's efforts to obliterate vampires, and one woman's fight to find a solution that saves us all.

For the next couple days, the Kindle version is free.The Mind Haven

There's also a Goodreads giveaway for 10 print copies, which is running through the end of August. Sign up to win.

I have long believed I was not capable of writing fiction while engaged in something else, like, say, a job. I was the kind of writer who was seized by an idea, sat down, and poured out words as fast as I could. A “seat of my pantser” as they say.

This resulted in some epic crap. Really bad novels. No layers, no complexity, no interlocking story lines. Limited character and story arc. Just a headlong rush into chaos.

I am proud to say I knew this, even at the time, and these novels got properly filed away in boxes as soon as they were done.

Then I went to law school, and of all the random things to improve one’s ability to write fiction, well, it’s pretty random. I learned how to architect an entire semester’s information in my head in an accessible structure, as your entire grade for the semester is based on one 3 hour exam. By the time I graduated, I was suddenly capable of plotting a novel before I started writing it. I can architect novels now. I feel like it’s a new superpower.

I’m not claiming to have licked novel-writing, far from it. This is an endlessly awesome creative path because there’s no owning it. There’s no end to what one can learn. Like avoiding the passive voice. And sentence fragments. They’re on the list. Have been for a couple decades. I’ll get to it, I promise.

Anyway, I spent almost a year and a half doing a bunch of writing, and my novels were planned in most details before I did the actual drafting. But I still believed it had to be an immersive experience. I thought that in order to build a book in my head I had to not have any other distractions. Such as a job.

That was great until a job finally appeared. A job, with a predictable salary, and exciting challenges. I job I really like. I took the job, hoping I’d be okay. Hoping it would work out, somehow, that I could be employed and not writing and still be fine inside my head where the crazy lives.

No such luck. After only 3 months, I was having regular thoughts of quitting my job. My job which I really like and don’t want to quit. But the writing thing is a disease which cannot be run from.

I decided to try that thing that the dedicated writers do. Those insane people who write before work. Who write with discipline, even in the midst of a full life. I started getting up an hour early to write.

You know what? It worked. Unbelievably, it worked. I sneezed out some non-fiction (a palate cleanser), and then started brainstorming my next vampire novels. I have that delicious “novel eating my head” feeling. I awake in the morning thinking about the cool thing I just figured out about my heroine. And then I do my job, which I really like, and I’m excited about that all day.

I have this feeling this just might work out. Which leads me to the terror. I’m waiting for the sky to fall. This could be really amazing, if I can do it all the way through the writing process. It could be everything. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Recently a friend finished Book 5 of Game of Thrones, and expressed the sense of abandonment she was feeling. Abandonment is a strong feeling to have about a book. But I find that in my experience, abandonment, loneliness, and anger have all been feelings I’ve felt when I got to the end of something really, really good.

When I was six years old, I got to the end of a Peanuts book before I was ready for it to be over. I was so angry I bit the book. When I yanked the book out from between my teeth to throw it across the room, I pulled a tooth out with it. Six years old, and full of self-destructive fury that a pleasant visit to another world was finished. I kept the book for years, proud of my tiny rage.

Last month I listened to the Audible version of The Devil Wears Prada. It was a good book. I wouldn’t normally call it “great,” because it didn’t move me to tears or other deep emotions. But I think that might be selling it short. What it did do was have me in a state of anxiety for the entire 2+ weeks I was listening to it.

The heroine is in a slow downward spiral. Her demanding boss keeps consuming more and more of her time and energy. She loses her good relationships with her friends and family, and loses her boyfriend entirely.

I started a new job a couple months ago, and my time is very different than it was when I was writing full-time. I do worry from time to time that I’m not taking good enough care of my man because I’m away from home for so long. He tells me he’s fine and don’t be silly, but I still fret, occasionally. But while I was listening to Devil Wears Prada, I was in a LATHER the entire time.

I made him dinner. Nice dinner. And breakfast, every morning. I never make him breakfast. I don’t have time to make him breakfast. But somehow, while listening to our heroine destroy her life, for 2+ weeks I had a hot meal in front of my fiancé every single morning. Her destructive path bled anxiety into my world so pervasively I was on high-alert to express my love and attention.

I guess it may have been a great book after all. If it can create those kinds of behavior changes, just from the bleed-over, it was doing something right.

As a writer, I can only hope to become able to create worlds so consuming. Worlds that change you, that flavor everything you see during the time you live there. I’ll keep trying.

After finishing Emancipation (and the other two books), I’ve been reading a lot of paranormal novels. It’s so much fun to read what other people do! But I find I end up ranting quite a bit about one oft-recurring trope in particular: “I’m a good girl so I would never ever have hot steamy sex with this big alpha male except that dangerous supernatural stuff is forcing me to.”

Uh, what? Okay, yes. Anita Blake got away with this for a while (and yeah, I’ll admit I kept reading long after she stopped getting away with it – up until Micah, actually). But seriously, could we move away from the new rape?

I’m not complaining about the big alpha male throwing you up against a wall thing. That thing is good. Hot even. I’m just complaining about heroines who are too broken, too shut-down, or too full of self-loathing to enjoy it. It’s supposed to be fun.

Anyway, I love love, and sex. There’s less sex in the Ella Lantry books than there could be, mostly because Ella presented herself to me as a fairly dignified and shy sort of person. But what sex she had, she had because she wanted to. And I plan to keep it that way. No one I write is ever going to need to have sex to save the world/stop someone from dying/tame a raging preternatural beast, or because they’re getting raped but they kinda like it. I promise.

Anyone else have paranormal love/sex tropes that make them crazy? I love a good rant.

I’m very excited to be giving away free copies of Emancipation, Rebellion, and Search. If you’re a Goodreads member (or if you sign up to be one), you can enter to win the drawing for real live physical print books. The kind you hold in your hands. Not the e-book kind. No really, they still make those!

If you don’t want to wait for the drawing to end, all the books are available for purchase in print and Kindle format on Amazon.

I officially finished Ella’s story, Helena Gates Lantry Evans’s story, six days ago. It was exactly eight months from when I created the first file for Emancipation, Book One. It doesn’t even suck too badly.

How did I write and publish a trilogy in eight months? It required a lovely confluence of support. Self-publishing has grown up in the last few years, and is arguably a more-viable option than traditional publishing. I had some financial grace come my way. I have an amazing supportive partner who was willing to pinch pennies with me. And, well, every time I don’t have a job for five minutes books start to fall out of me.

The shortest definition I have for right livelihood is doing the thing you would do anyway, whether you get paid for it or not. For a long time psychic and healing work was that thing for me, but even then, whenever I stopped working for a bit I’d write a book about something psychic or healing.

Now it’s books. I love this. It feels like the one thing my life has always been about, through all the confusion and chaos of my employment paths. I’d work at something long enough to master it, and then quit. If it was an interesting enough thing, I’d write a book about it.

When I was a child, I never had an answer to the question about what I wanted to be when I grew up. In college, no answer. Later, well, no answer. The one and only memory I have of a desire for a later career happened when I was about seventeen. I was reading some author bio, perhaps Heinlein when he talks about owning a silver mine and being a cook in the Navy. The thought was, “I want an author bio like that.” The kind with the long, random, almost insane list of jobs. The kind of bio that says “I am a total failure at ‘career,’ but I rock at being an interesting person and collecting life experiences to inform my writing.”

Twenty-five years later, I sat down to write some vampire books, and I realized it was time. It was time for me to put all of me into my work: not a slice of me, writing about one profession or set of skills, but all of me. And it was finally time for me to have that author bio. The one that includes picking raspberries and being a shamanic healer, cleaning motel rooms and managing a software company. The bio that says life and learning have always been the most important things to me.

I’m proud of Ella’s story. It’s grim and dark and painful. It’s funny and full of love, too, at least in parts. I didn’t censor myself or my characters. If they had a horribly painful experience they wanted to share, I let them. If they were a sexual sadist or a victim of sexual abuse or whatever, I wrote that with as much of their truth as I could capture, and as little judgment. I let the whole story come together with as much realistic optimism and success as I could manage. I hope that has been communicated in the work.

Thank you for reading.