DEADLINE'S LOOMING

My deadline's looming for Heart of the Matter. I hope to finish it tonight or tomorrow and send it off to my critique partner. It's always helpful to get a second set of eyes to read it. I've enjoyed writing this story immensely, though at times it was a struggle. I've recorded this struggle in previous posts. The struggle was, I had a hard time, at first, getting to know my characters. And if an author doesn't know her characters, the readers never will. So I had to dig very deeply. I brainstormed with my two daughters and my husband. Talking through the plot and getting some input from others is a tremendous help. Francine Rivers, the premiere Christian fiction author who wrote Redeeming Love (read it!), says when she's plotting a novel, she somtimes flies across the country to a be with a writer friend for several days to get input for the plot.

So, after I worked hard at plotting and coming to know my characters very deeply, I felt I had the story completely under control. And then I had to present the plot info in the best way.

For instance, my heroine's baggage (issues) is, she's 32, and when she was 20, she married a guy she'd known from church practically her whole life. He had a hard home life as the son of an alcoholic, had been brought to church on a church bus, but he was a Christian, so everything was okay, right? They started dating at 17, and as handsome as a movie star, he swept her off her feet from the get go, and they fell hard in love. She was too naive to know or recognize his true nature. When they married, he became controlling and domineering and harsh. He ridiculed her Plain Jane appearance and lack of education and career focus, to the point of cruelty. She tried talking to him about his treatment of her, but it didn't change things. So she cried out to God to help her, to give her a deep love for him, and God did. Then, after three years of marriage, he was killed in a small plane accident. His death was more painful to her than living with him, because God had given her such a strong love for him.

Then she enrolled in college courses. One of the first ones was psychology, and she knew she'd found her niche in life. She would be a psychologist and help people understand why they acted the way they did so they could change and become better. So she spent nine years earning degrees and gaining experience in her field. Then she moved to a new town and started her own practice as a child psychologist.

Here, the story starts. She has this baggage, these issues. Though she desires a good husband--she wants to share her life with a man, she wants to love and be loved--this baggage has caused her to be gunshy and prejudiced toward strong, handsome men. Give her a balding, bookish man any day, she thinks, because these men, in her opinion, are the only tender ones. Handsome men have egos as wide as the Gulf of Mexico. And she's not going to make the same mistake twice, to fall in love without really looking into the man's character. What's the old saying? Once burned, shame on them. Twice burned, shame on you? Something like that.

So she's in a new town in a new church in a new practice. And trying to serve God. She volunteers to start a children's church class because there's nothing for the less-than-a-handful of children at her little church.

Enter the hero. He has his own baggage, his own prejudices. He's a financial adviser and has a 6-year-old son. His late wife was an elegant beauty who charmed his clients. He's good-looking himself, and looks have always been important to him. So he wants a knockout wife. One who's a Christian is a given, because he's a devoted Christian. He won't look outside the walls of faith.

He's a deacon in his small, mostly elderly-peopled church. It was his wife's home church, and though his friends say he ought to attend a mega church so he can meet some single women, he's determined to be loyal to his church. God will bring along the perfect wife somehow.

When he meets the heroine at his church, it's almost as if he didn't meet her. She makes no impression on him. Oh, yes, she does. She's as bland as her bland gray suit. That's it. That's all he thinks.

You'll have to read the book to see how they get together. WINK

Why did I say I have to present this info, this baggage, in the best possible way? Because this novel will be published by Heartsong Presents of Barbour Publishing Company, and this line of books is characterized by its light, feel-good, happily-ever-after-endings-type stories (which I love; they're so much fun to read as you're drifting off to sleep; they make you feel good). I have to get this backstory in because its the central conflict to the story, but I can't present it in a heavy way. So it was a challenge.

I think this was part of the problem I was having.

Thankfully, I got it all worked out, and I'm very pleased with the story. I had to present the hero and heroine's baggage in small chunks interspersed throughout the first few chapters so it wouldn't come across as too heavy. I really love this story. It's to be published next year around this time, April, 2007, I believe.