Carrie Moore's Blog: Musings and thoughts from my little desk

So around the time the first Fifty Shades movie my Facebook feed was pretty divided about the novel and movie. Now opinions aside, one thing I had noticed is how popular the erotic romance genre had become, however, they all seemed to follow the same pattern. Rich dominant man and a strong yet passive woman. Even the few I found where the woman was a dominant she became submissive with “the right guy” and it was kind of driving me nuts. So one day driving between Omaha and Lincoln I started thinking about how a female dominate/ male submissive relationship would work. I’d seen TV shows feature female dominates but they hadn’t really shown anything outside a stereotype in leather corsets, heeled boots and a whip. (Knowing what I know now this could just be a personal choice of the dominant, but again that’s after research.) Then Michael appeared in my passengers’ seat and said: “I’d like to know how that works.” When I got home started researching female dominants—harder to find than you’d think—the main thing I found was descriptions of the issues both the dominate and submissive have to overcome in the relationship. The main issue being that society tells us the man should not be submissive and the woman should not be dominate.
Then Olivia turned up, and I realized I would have an opportunity to say something with this book. I have seen documentaries and read articles bringing to light several issues society places on men and women and how their experiences are further shaped by society and media’s influences. So while Michael and Olivia explore the sexual relationship (which was a lot of fun in its’ own way) I also started pointing out some of the societal issues they faced in their jobs. Olivia is a lot of fun for me, honestly, because she is such a strong woman and a badass business owner. While Michael is not the typical man you see in these types of novels he still shows how a real man is sexy without being a sexual dynamo with unrealistic stamina and arrogance.
Check out “Power Play” to see how the whole story unfolds and start a dialogue with those in your life. Talk about different aspects of your relationships, question if you really enjoy something or just think you’re supposed to, and maybe just be a little more aware of why and what you’re saying because as a writer I know how powerful words can be.
Happy reading.

So it’s been a while since I’ve written a post, partially because life keeps popping up and part because I have been working on something new…don’t worry I’ll fill you in about it once I’m finished.
So excuses aside, here’s my newest musing. I found several old essays I wrote in high school and I was a bit disappointed I didn’t keep one in particular. The beginning of sophomore year we had to do this life timeline and then write three different essays about different events. I don’t remember the essays except the third one; write one event from a third person point of view.
Simple enough right?
Well I apparently thought it meant we were supposed to write one of the events from the point of view of a completely unrelated person. I wrote it from the perspective of a woman who was in the twin towers on September 11th. Mind you this was in 2002 barely a year after, and yet I remember that story as clearly as I remember the actual day. My protagonist was a mother whose boss tried to help her out of the buildings when they collapsed. She witnessed his final call to his wife to tell her he loved her and she was eventually saved from the rubble.
I can still visualize everything I visualized the day I wrote it and my heart bleeds the same way.
Even though the essay wasn’t at all what it was supposed to be I still got a “B” on the essay.
Now the reason I bring this up is because every time I don’t feel like writing a particular scene or even at all, I don’t; I remember this story. I wrote it when everything I felt was raw and vivid and it reflected in my writing. Years later I would find the Robert Frost quotation: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
The whole point of art, whether writing, sculpture, painting or whatever medium you love, is to share a feeling. Good, bad, painful or absolutely hilarious we need to share it and hope that we connect with that need in someone else.
Most of all, we hope to connect with that feeling in ourselves.

A friend asked me why I’m doing this? Why am I trying to publish either through traditional means or through self publishing? Isn’t it enough just to write for myself. I told her it’s a yes or no answer. Now the rest of this is going to be more eloquent than what I told her because I’ve had more time to process and writing an answer is ten times easier than thinking on your feet and blurting it out.
The reason it’s “yes” is because as the writer and creator you really have to enjoy the story otherwise, why are you doing it? What’s the point? Go and find something you love. I write for so many reasons and most of them bring me joy or reprieve from my everyday life and even, occasionally, a break from myself. I honestly don’t know how uncreative people cope with everyday life, I really don’t. I can’t imagine going the rest of my life without being able to escape into a character and their life... I would go insane.
Now as for the “no” part of that answer, this gets a little more complicated. There’s a saying that if a writer has a story within them they have to get it out, otherwise it’s painful. To me, simply transferring the story from my mind to paper or a computer screen is not enough. That story is still solely with me unless I can share it. Being an avid reader I am immensely grateful (especially after going through the trials of publication myself) to the authors who have shared their stories with me and given me new worlds and characters to foster and grow my imagination. I want nothing more than for another person to feel the same way about one of my stories, or for them to love it as much as I do. It’s also not enough because, while I like and appreciate my day job, it takes up the bulk of my days and my energy so even if I’m dying to write, I’m at work and that demands my focus. I want to be able to spend eight, nine, twelve hours a day getting my stories out of my head, onto a page and into a readers hands and not worry that the water’s going to be shut off because I didn’t pay a bill or that the dog’s going to starve because I can’t afford food. I’ve talked about this speech before, but when Ursula K. LeGuin talked about how a writer’s true reward is freedom, I thought: “I want to live in that freedom, not just visit when I can find time.”

So yes it is enough to write what I love, but it’s not enough to keep them to myself.

While in my last post I talked about the great people in my life that support me, I feel the need to discuss the other side of the coin; the skeptics and the critics. I promise this is not going to be a rant about how horrible these people are. I'm going to take about why I find them necessary to my writing process...okay necessary might be a bit strong, but when you know there are always going to be critics and skeptics you might as well find a productive way to intergrate them or else you're just plugging your ears and pretending they aren't there has never been my style.
So how do I keep them from bringing me down and believing that I need to tone down my dream or just forget about it? I have developed a bit of an inner lioness. Now she's a scary little creature if you give her too much fuel, like saying "Oh, you're still trying that?" She is a form of determination that I have found quite useful when a pep talk just won't do because I can't be Patty Positive every day. (Trust me, if I was my dramatic scenes wouldn't work because if the writer's not feeling the emotion, the reader certainly won't.) Sometimes a criticism will hurt if I'm not expecting it or who it came from, but that's what the lioness is for. On the days when I’m unmotivated or just don’t want to put in any more time in front of a computer after work, I remember there are people who think this is a phase or that the odds of me succeeding are too slim, and the lioness growls "Are you really gonna take that?"
I'm not saying I love that there are people who think this is a pipe dream but I don’t begrudge their skepticism. On the days when support just won’t do, their skepticism will awaken the lioness and I will press on.

So a quotation I love, and find extremely applicable to my life, is by Althea Gibson, “I always wanted to be somebody. If I made it, it’s half because I was game enough to take a lot of punishment along the way and half because there were a lot of people who cared enough to help me.”
Whenever you listen to an author’s story, minus a few lucky individuals, you hear about the seemingly endless rejection they’ve taken. I’m no different but I refuse to give up. After years of trying to get a book agent (something I’ve likened to yelling “pick me!” in Times Square on New Year’s Eve) I decided to go the self-published route and giving myself a different path to achieving my dream. Additionally, I am very conscientious when I read anymore, asking what the author did that worked or didn’t work, how was their story different than others like it, and what may have been missing so that I can be more aware in my own writing. I’ve also gotten very good about taking criticism and seeking it out so that I can grow and learn.
All of that being said, my skin is tough not bullet proof.
Thankfully I have a great support network made up of family and friends that understand and listen during moments of self-doubt, worry and embrace my ideas about what I could do as a full time author. Now I talk about both aspects of the support because, you’d think, finding someone to support you during the happy, excited, “I’m going to travel the world on my book profit moments” would be easier than someone who’d support you during the moments of crippling self-doubt.
It’s not. I have a few friends that I won’t even talk to about my books or being a full time writer because they give a condescending “be realistic” attitude towards it, which is really more harmful than anything. Don’t get me wrong, they don’t blatantly put me down, but they aren’t very enthusiastic or blatantly supportive as others are. Whether you’re a writer or artist of any medium, or even just someone putting their true self out into the world, you need a tough skin, but you also need that safety blanket of people who have unwavering belief in you. I count myself very fortunate that I only have a few friends I won’t talk to about the books and that’s okay, they don’t see it the way others in my life do.
Until then, I’ll talk to the friends who listen to me talk about my stories all through dinner and who tell me when I worry how people will react to a new story, forget other people; they’ll be there to support me. Until then, I’ll call my mother in the middle of the night (I was a great baby so she can make up the sleepless nights I spared her when I was an infant) when I can’t get the wording right or need to hash out a scene. Until then, I will keep growing, licking my wounds in private, and getting back in that ring for another fight because my dream is worth it.
My dream is worth every single struggle because in the words of Jimmy Dugan: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard everyone would do it. The hard…is what makes it great.”

So I rarely talk about my day job, mainly because I believe in keeping that world separate from this one. However, today I had a meeting with a financial advisor to discuss my retirement fund and a plan for the next two years. (Yes, I’m pretty young, but I’m also a planner and, to my chagrin, a realist.) During the meeting I also mentioned the books and that I feel like this job and retirement plan are my safety nets, my back up plans. Don’t get me wrong, I like my day job, but when compared to being able to write full time, to spend all day with the characters I know and love and to get to the point where I can share the stories with others…the day job just doesn’t stand a chance.
Thanks to my realistic side, however, I wake up every day and go to my job, despite the days when I feel like writing or when I have to cut myself off at night so I can get at least a few hours of sleep before work the next day. I show up and I do my best, because the job and my coworkers deserve it. (Not to mention my coworkers are some of the quickest people to support my writing goals.)
So on my drive home today I got to thinking about this acceptance speech Ursula K. Le Guin gave. (I’ve posted it to my Facebook page or just YouTube her and you’ll come across it and I just love it.) During her six minute speech she talks about how publishers are telling writers what to write based on a market strategy versus creating an art. Her final line was:
“We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds, but the name of our beautiful reward is not profit, it’s name is freedom.”
I had posted it to the Facebook page because I felt it pointed out how my pursuit of self-publishing allowed me to write what I wanted, without dictation from another source and so on one level I’d achieved the freedom she talked about. During that drive home today, I realized that the achievement of that freedom was also due to the day job. While the day job takes up several hours of my day it still allows me to leave the job at the door, financial stability and the income to market the books. It’s amazing how several little ideas foster together to create a larger thought. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure that’s how books have come to be, weird how you don’t realize how creative you can be with reality.
So tomorrow when I’m hitting the snooze button and thinking that I really wish I could stay home and write I’ll remember the freedom the day job grants…and that even JK Rowling was told to keep her day job in the beginning.

Before anyone calls child services know that I don’t have any human, living, breathing children; I have characters. I’d written short stories and even tried a few short novels in high school, but those characters didn’t stick around long. They were more like family members that like to visit for a spell and then head back to their own lives. New characters visit from time to time, which is why I still have short stories pop up every now and then during bouts of writer’s block, but they always leave once their story is done.
Sophie showed up one day after a nightmare I had, 5’7” with her short blonde hair and green eyes blazing and said “This is what I would have done.” After that long conversation, I adopted her and the rest of the characters she brought with her. From there FOCAL POINT and The Balancing Acts series were born. Some of the characters I had adopted started to fall into place within the series very quickly and have even branched out and brought in more characters that I can’t wait to introduce you to. I don’t know all of the stories, yet, but I do know the order of the characters and they’re waiting patiently for their turn and their story.
Except for Emily, Jasper and Jamie.
These three showed up on my door around four years ago, but they were all very different from the characters I was meeting during the early pages of FOCAL POINT, but they were so much fun I kept trying to see if they’d fit in the series, but I couldn’t make it happen.
Finally one day it hit me, they wouldn’t fit because they were werewolves. This thought was accompanied by a flood of their folklore, traditions, rituals and lifestyle. So I thought I could find a way to work them into a historical fiction/fantasy novel I was playing around with. (Yes, I’m all over the genre map, but if you saw my bookshelves you’d understand that my taste is all over as well, and you write a story that you, above all else, want to read.)
But the trio wasn’t having it. They didn’t want to be in the past and they certainly didn’t want to wait until I’d had the time to research everything properly. One day I’d had enough so I sat down to give them their own story, I figured even if it wound up being a short story they’d finally give me a break. 30,000+ words later they did, but they also brought along a new cast of friends and the “Marked” novella series was born. As a lifelong reader I recognize the joy of finding a new world and group of friends I can escape with.
One major difference between a reader and a writer though is the characters and the worlds are no longer friends, but family. As frustrating as they can be at times I hope the kids never shut up and until they do, I’ll send them to your house once in a while to visit, because, man are they fun.
Happy Reading.

So with the New Year comes a period of reflection, usually over the past year. My period, however, spanned a bit further as I found I was trying to come up with a second blog post and hitting a wall. So what do I do when I can’t think of something to write? I clean. During my latest cleaning extravaganza I came across my collection of essays from my senior year of high school. The teacher had us bind all of our drafts together and basically make it into a little book of all the things we had written that year. Being a natural procrastinator I sat down and began rereading my little archive which had a few additional essays from other classes tucked into it. After a few of them I started to realize how much different essays from high school and college shaped me as a writer. Most of them were non fiction too…still don’t quite understand how that works but non the less I have a blog post to share!
Not to sound arrogant but storytelling was never my problem. I even managed to get a 92 on a piece of writing that didn’t follow the assignment at all. (I misunderstood third person as someone else, not the writing style) Even my peer reviews stated how good the stories were. Mechanics, length and finesse seemed to elude me.
During senior year, Ms. K required us to write a “Process Log” detailing the changes we made on each draft and, most importantly, why we made the changes. This has had the biggest effect on my writing whether I realized it before today or not. While working on FOCAL POINT anytime I received criticism or went through to make edits I would reflect on why I made the change. Seems like it would be second nature right? But I remember having such an issue trying to write those logs and while I was never required to write one after Ms. K’s class the method stuck with me more than I realized.
While I had written two small books in high school they were solid plot, no real finesse or flow to them, so in comparing those books to FOCAL POINT I realized how much my college history classes shaped my writing. I know most people think that history is just regurgitating facts and events, but really it’s piecing together a story based on the information that has survived. Each class taught me about writing more and more on a more specific topic and increasing the amount of pages I could turn out. In High school writing 500 words was daunting, then college made 5 pages seem daunting, by the time my history senior seminar rolled around I could have sworn 25 pages on a very specific topic during a point in history I had shown no interest in was impossible.
It’s scary how teachers can push you into proving yourself wrong.

Beginnings have always been a struggle for me, whether they're in writing or in life I tend to have a hard time deciding how to begin when I already know how I want it to end. Each book or novella I've written (or plan on writing) I've started it knowing exactly how it was going to end...and struggled endlessly with how to begin in. FOCAL POINT had at least six different first chapters before I finally had the perfect one, my novella took at least a year to even come up with how to introduce the character's I had been getting to know for years before.
Given these struggles I really had no idea how to begin this blog, but it's something I've wanted to do for a few months. Like I said, I have a very hard time keeping good things to myself and writing is one of the best things in my life. So here it goes, I'll do my best to share what I've been working on (while avoiding spoilers) as well as news about up coming books and the musings and fears I have as I embark on this journey. While all writing, whether a blog, a book, or an article, gives insight into the author and their life in one way or another, I hope that this insight will be a little less veiled and maybe generate a little more hope into another writer.
The other reason this is so hard is because I'm not terribly used to talking about myself or about being the center of attention, thanks to my oldest brother being happy to take it at every point in my childhood. (I can say that because it's highly doubtful he'll ever read this.) As I'm finding out talking about yourself comes with the publishing territory, especially when you're doing it alone, so I'm working on getting better about it.
So that's my beginning...short, honest and raw probably like the rest of my posts will be...but then again, I have been told that keeping my writing concise isn't in my repertoire.
Happy Reading.