I had the privilege of spending some time with the mysterious, beautiful, and elusive Shannon McKenna this weekend, wandering around Little Italy in New York and then Chinatown for dinner, with her husband, who is kind, brilliant, and charming, and their two children, a new baby son and young daughter. Fun fact about Shannon: she is passionate about fat little wiggly shrimp dumplings and has the fastest chopsticks at the table, so watch it. Fun fact about her husband: he can make a Chinese lion puppet tapdance in a restaurant and make it talk in Italian-accented English. Fun fact about her daughter: she is insatiably curious and as much fun as her mother just to be with. Fun fact about her infant son: he looks like a miniature movie star! And yes, Shannon PROMISES in giant capital letters to update her website.

RWA conference in San Francisco was truly enjoyable—among other lulls in the whirlwind, I met with Jami Alden there for over an hour to go over revisions on KEPT, her second romantic suspense for Brava. I talked, she took notes on a laptop (and I have to say she types faster than I talk, which is remarkable, considering how I go on sometimes). But it was great to have sit-down, face to face time with an author—nearly all editor/author interaction is online these days and, swift as it is, there’s no substitute for really being with someone (cf. THE VELVETEEN RABBIT and similar child-oriented sniffle-fests on wear and tear of actual interaction, transcendence of the soul resulting from. Split seams that leak stuffing, a missing button eye, shabby patches are an editor’s uniform more than often not. No time to shop, uncertain grasp of concept of accessorizing, sartorial gene lacking. Just don’t step on my blue suede shoes when and if I can afford them. But I’m there for ya otherwise.).

Anyway, back to what I was talking about, the creative process of writing is largely solitary and that’s not always a good thing. You know what I mean. The late night brooding over the model on your new cover—is his hair just too weird and can it be changed two weeks prior to pub date, just in case there is a clause in my contract that protects me from 1970s hairstyles on a book set in Tudor England? (Answer: no. Just be grateful we didn’t call your book THE LORDS OF MULLET) The pointless, somewhat furtive obsession with Amazon rankings and peculiar statistics, such as 46% of the people who bought this book also bought 29% of this other book that you didn’t write! What does it meannnnnnnnnn???? (Answer: nothing.)

Hope there’s a great turnout for the Washington DC conference next year. Most everything is free, and the Metro gets you almost everywhere you’ll want to go for next to nothing. One of my favorite memories of the city (I spent every other weekend there for several years) was, once, taking a family’s photo in front of the statue of Lincoln. Click, click, I handed their camera back, and realized a short line had formed. Whatever! So spent an hour or more taking pictures for people of every ethnicity and age you could imagine. They were smiling but also solemn. Let freedom ring.

P.S. Plus when you walk up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial it feels exactly like you are walking into the back of a penny, only gigantic and dreamlike. Anyway, come if you can.

Why is it so important? Because you have only a few seconds to get a reader’s attention in a bookstore or online. Writing a historical? Beware the overly lyrical opener. A lonely bird warbled in a glade, its piercing notes a cry of longing inchoate. The dark-shrouded sky was suffused with dreamy pink as the gentle sun peeked shyly over the rugged mountains that scratched the low-hanging belly of the clouds above … Um, better get the rugged hero into the glade and skip the mountains. Skip the sound effects and stage lighting too. Try not to use words like inchoate. Scratched a low-hanging belly? Reminds me of a pregnant alley cat. And it goes without saying that clouds will be above it all. Can the proliferating adjectives while you’re at it and get to the action right away. Writing a scary contemporary thriller? If you start off with a prologue that begins the dream was always the same, in which the heroine or hero foresees most of the book, thus guaranteeing a browsing reader will put it back on the bookstore shelf, I will personally come to your house and shoot you. Dreams are never the same, but that sentence sure as hell is, word for word. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen it as the first line of mysteries, thrillers, romantic suspense, paranormals, and more.

Get to the point. It’s easy to fall in love with your own lovely, lovely words but readers won’t. They want to be entertained. Unless you are writing fiction that is so hopelessly “literary” no one will ever read it, you are writing entertainment. Here’s what readers want…

Emotion! Power! Blood! Sex! Death! Cheap thrills! Big laughs! Brave dogs! Plump tits! Huge dicks! Hidden treasure! Weird aliens! Justice with no damn blindfold! Popular and successful writers deal in extremes and they serve them up fast. Never forget that. Yes, an occasional bestselling book meanders. Mostly not, though. Some writers seem to be born knowing how to keep up a breakneck pace, many more learn by doing. Some never learn and languish in the slush pile. However, slow pace can be a common problem with midlist writers in mid-career. Once the first two or three books are done and published, complacency can set in, and a going-through-the-motions tone is the result. Getting your butt in the chair to write is only part of staying the course in your career. But don’t just sit there. The Hounds of Plot should be snapping at your butt and keeping you on the edge of your seat, and snapping at the hero and heroine’s butts too. By the way, the wise writer always bestows a beautiful manly muscular butt on the hero, of course, for reasons that have nothing to do with pace—and you can give him long, strong legs—and dimples–and, um, other stuff. Just in case the pace slows down.

Rushed or crushed? The pressure’s on. Maybe you set a two-book-per-year goal, maybe your agent did, maybe agreeing to overlapping commitments with three different publishers seemed like a great idea at the time…but writing even one book a year can be tough enough with a zillion other claims on your time. Those adorable children want sandwiches, that horny husband wants you, the boss would like to know where the freaking report on Widgetinator sales is, and your editor wants revisions done yesterday. Feel like you’re losing your mind?

You are.

Writing at its best has more in common with slow, fermentative processes like winemaking or breadbaking or peaceful contemplation of the world, like the hero of Ferdinand. He is one of my all-time favorite literary characters, for his radiant serenity and the lovely description of “his mother, who was a cow…” Such elegant brevity takes time.

So, okay, the world is what it is, and we can’t sit around in a meadow and smell the flowers. Busy writers are a lot more likely to sit around echoing, sixteen-story atriums at conferences, talk shop, and smell hotel carpets. Which smell bad, very bad, like cigarette butts and shoe goo. Give me a goddamned meadow. (That’s from a new book, Ferdinand in New York. Okay, just kidding.)

It amazes me how writers nearly always manage to do it all—hold down demanding jobs, raise young (or not—the childfree are no less busy), get advanced degrees, run businesses, and, tra la, whip up whole new worlds and populate them in their spare time. If you’re writing romance and adventure and paranormals, maybe the populating part is a little easier, given all the heaving and throbbing and crashing around and taking chances. Disillusionment and its evil twin, ironic detachment, so often found in books deemed literary, don’t seem to have the same energizing effect on prose and plot lines. Anyway, you find a safe place to go crazy and you do, producing 300 pages or so of great stuff. Then you get that sucker in on deadline, fluff up the website, return e-mails, and…lie down? I don’t think so.

How do you do it? Shout out. Or whimper. This editor would like to know.