Two nights ago my writing group workshopped the first couple of scenes.  And we wound up having a long conversation about sex.

I have known for a long time that the chronic issue in Book 2 will be the resolution of Kitty and Gallo’s relationship.  It will be about them coming together in that final way that people do.  It will be about the transition from that youthful love that says “I want you” to that more mature love that says “I want you to be happy.”  It will be partially, but certainly not entirely, about sex.

As Book 2 opens, they have been dating for a year.  And they are not yet doing the nasty.  My writing group found this sort of implausible.    They thought it would be torture for my male lead, and just not reasonable.  They’re a great bunch, and I don’t intend to discount their collective opinion lightly.  But there’s a certain piling on that can take place in a workshop, where Reader A says something bothered him, and that sounds like a reasonable complaint to Reader B, who echoes it even though it didn’t actually bother him during his read-through.  And regardless of whether that happened in this case, it’s my name on the book.  And I’m just not sure I agree.

Here are my points:Point #1: We’re talking about 1929.  I’m sure people had normal sexual desires in the twenties, but I’m not entirely persuaded that their sexual expectations were similar to today’s.  I think women found sexual advances more threatening once upon a time.  Because they were more threatening.  Condoms weren’t really in popular use until WWII (they were widely distributed in an effort to keep down V.D. among the troops).  And yes, people always had ways of preventing pregnancy, but they weren’t necessarily as safe and reliable as today’s.

And Point #2: There’s real time, and then there’s story time, and the same rules don’t necessarily apply to both.  My readers will be aware, when they pick up Book 2, that a year has passed since Book 1.  But they won’t have felt it pass.  I think this makes a difference.  I don’t think the first three or four years of Ross and Rachel putting each other through the ringer on Friends bothered me, even though I found their inability to communicate maturely about their relationship at least as bizarre as my group found my characters’ sexual abstinence (and yes, after five or six years, it did get old).  The way I see it, it’s a story.  It really only exists when we’re observing it.  You can say that those first seasons of Friends took three years, or you can say that they took thirty-six hours.  The real answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

All of this is to say that I am not quite sure whether to follow my writing group’s advice and either (1) compress the timeline between books, or (2) move my characters into a sexual relationship before the start of Book 2.  Currently I am leaning toward No, but I would welcome any opinions on the matter.

4:41 PM: What I need, I think, is a good overview of Book 2.  I have 3 ideas for significant storylines, and bandwidth for about two.  Which means it’s time to flesh them all out and see which one to cut.

5:37 PM: A lot of what I do when I’m planning, or trying to work out problems in a story, is a kind of stream of consciousness writing.  It’s all stuff like, “Ok, so I no longer like the ending where she kills her husband, I need another twist.”  Basically, this is my way of forcing myself to think.  I try to keep it going as rapidly as possible, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last hour or so.  I am getting close to trying to shoehorn all three stories in.  If I do cut one, I think it’s going to be the one I introduced to my writing group on Tuesday.

6:02 PM: Distracting myself with chat.

6:05 PM: I now have a very good intersection for Plotlines #1 and #3.  Which means things aren’t looking so hot for plotline #2.

7:48 PM: Still mostly bits and pieces.  But time for dinner anyway.

With my writing group, Wednesday night.  My summation: “I think it’s a path to publication that is opening up for some people, like bloggers and celebrities and other people with existing platforms.  But I personally would not do it.”

With Mark, last night.  My summation: “It’s not the worst idea.”

All this is to say that my attitude toward self-pubbing is rapidly opening up.  Which I don’t think is because I’m crazy, or because I haven’t found an agent yet.  I think it’s because between the blogs and the e-readers and the bestselling books based on Twitter feeds, we’re reaching a sort of inflection point.  Things are changing.  For some writers, they already have.

Now, I am not anywhere near ready to comb through the Lulu terms of service yet.  But, Mark and I did have another “what would we do if the book didn’t sell” conversation last night.  It seemed to me that there were two possible paths: (1) write another book, and hope that when it sold, it would pull this one along with it in a package deal and (2) self-pub.

Just for the hell of it, we talked about how to chart a course down Path #2.  “What if I released it as a blog?” I asked.  “A chapter a week, for about a year.  And if you want to read the whole thing right now, you can buy a self-pubbed copy?”

Mark liked it.  It tied into that whole giving-your-stuff-away-for-free ethos that is such a big part of the web.  “You could be, like, the Jonathan Coulton of cozy mysteries.”

“But my audience isn’t all that webby,” I pointed out.  “It’s entirely female, and I’m not really sure it’s necessarily the youngest, most tech savvy females.  My audience properly includes my mom.  My mom is never going to read a book online.”

“And here’s the real kicker.  I’d be risking not just this book, I’d be risking the entire series.  If my book didn’t take off for any reason, I’d never get it, or any of the sequels I intend to write, picked up by a traditional publisher.  I’m not saying I can’t come up with another idea.  I’m just saying, I’ve got plans I don’t want to torpedo on a whim.”

And yet… the idea still held some appeal.  It was new, it was sexy, and it involved higher royalties.  So when I got home, I looked up “serialized online novels.”  And it turns out that, yes, this is a thing that is done.  And is it successful?  Sometimes.

The really successful serialized books I found were in the horror genre, i.e., they had a primarily young, primarily male audience.  And it’s hard, honestly, for me to know how successful they really were.  Which brings up the whole question: what is success?  How do you define it?

I used to define it as having a book published that was critically acclaimed.  Now I couldn’t care less about that last clause (well, I could care less, just not a lot). But I think that for me success still entails a presence on a bookstore shelf.  Which probably means publication, traditional publication.

So that is what I’m pursuing.  But I’ll be honest: the idea of self-publication still does have its appeal.  On the one hand, everything would be on me: the editing, the marketing, et al.  And on the other hand, everything would be on me.  It would be my baby, start to finish.  I could get started today, and if I didn’t get my feet under me immediately that would be ok, because there’s no one I’d ever have to get approval from.

I wound up getting a lot of praise for this story, which surprised me, because I still thought it was kinda marshy and weak in the middle. People loved the concept. The Poetess said something about how I always find an element of hopefulness no matter what dark tale I’m telling, which I thought was a truly lovely compliment. In short, it was a nice night.

Major comments included the fact that relevant info could have been seeded earlier, and also that some of my red herrings and false suspects were, uh, not so hot. Newshound pointed out that the interesting thing about the final reveal was not who did it, but why. So, maybe I can do without some of those weak suspects. They are, in all honesty, not the most interesting thing the story has going on.

Despite the positive feedback, I really feel that this story is not where I want it to be. I’ve started thinking of it as almost a mini-masterwork, something I really want to be hitting on all cylinders all the time. I am willing to put some more effort into this story to get it to match up with what’s in my head.

In other news, I sent off the remainder of my Boot Camp tuition yesterday. I could have (and probably would have) put this off for another week, but I woke up yesterday from a horrible dream in which it was the very last day for payment, and I was on the phone with Orson Scott Card, trying desperately to give him my credit card number. The Discover card in my wallet belonged to my mom for some reason, the one in Mark’s wallet had two conflicting numbers, and when I went looking for my Visa card I discovered all that was left in my wallet was a bunch of old receipts. And meanwhile Orson Scott Card is all like, “Um, ok…I guess I’ll wait,” and no doubt twirling his finger beside his ear.

Not a good dream. Oh, and in other other news, I’m writing this blog post on my iPad.

“Really?” said Outlander.  “I didn’t know genre writers cared about prose.”

“Of course we do,” I said.

So, yes, hr hmm, awkward.  But we breezed right past it, because really I understand. There’s a huge rift between literary writers and genre writers, and although I’m now on the genre side, I wasn’t always.

When I was in college, I bought into the idea that in order to write anything worthwhile, I had to write something literary. It was the idea espoused by all around me, all my professors — the very first grown-up, professional authors I had met. And I was too young and naive to understand that the view they were putting forth was not the view of the Community of Grown Up and Professional Authors. It was the view of the Academic Community.

When I entered college, I wanted to write science fiction.  It took them about one year to convince me I had to write literary, and I spent about nine years (!) doing it.  I read Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Awards every year.  I subscribed to the New Yorker.  I met a lot of truly awesome friends in the literary scene, including the writing group I’m still part of today.  During this time I also wrote some decent stories, but there’s only about one I’d now proudly display to my friends.  Partly this is because, well, I was just a young writer.  But I think it is also partly because I was trying to write stuff that didn’t really get me jazzed.

What finally jolted me out of this literary mindset was NaNoWriMo, the online challenge where people sign up to write a novel (or 50,000 words) in a month.  Something about the excess and sheer wonderful craziness of the idea let me decide to try something genre.  After all, it was an insane challenge.  I wasn’t going to really produce something worthwhile.  And therefore I could try something fun.

That book became my first, unpublished novel, Murder 101: Introduction to Death.  Even after I finished it, I thought of my foray into genre work as a diversion, a way to jumpstart my career.  But not (no, never!) the real meat of my career.  No, that had to be literary.  It was probably another two years before I gave up on the idea of being a literary writer altogether.

And doing that made me happy.  Not wildly, ecstatically happy–just content.  At peace.

But I have been on the literary side of the fence for too long to expect all my friends to understand completely.  Outlander wasn’t being a jerk when he asked me whether genre writers cared about prose; he was just expressing the belief of his community.  Literary writers tend to believe that genre writers don’t care about good prose, that they don’t care about meaning or nuance or writing something “real.”  You can hear their attitude in the term they sometimes use to describe literary fiction:  “serious fiction.”  As though genre writing were inherently silly.

Similarly, genre writers tend to believe that literary writers don’t care about plot, or tension, or actually telling a cohesive story.  They believe that literary writers like to wade around in a marsh of emotion without giving the reader something they can hang onto and clearly understand.  In their own way, they believe that literary writers are not “serious –” serious about story, about structure, about scene.

I’ll tell you a little secret:  there’s some truth to both these sides.  Genre writers do care more about plot than prose, and literary writers do care more about prose than plot. But both groups do care about both things; both groups are earnestly trying to put out the best books, the very best books that they can.

And that is the way of things.  And though I am glad both kinds of fiction exist, I am happy to find myself on the genre side of the fence.  It’s the side that’s never going to get me access to the Nobel or the New Yorker.  It’s the side that’s not likely to pave my way into book clubs or high society galas.  But it’s the side, I guess, where I’m comfortable.  Frankly, it’s the side where I think I’ve always been meant to be.

And yes, I do care more about plot than prose.

We just have great chemistry. Even five years in I am routinely surprised and pleased by the quality of the feedback I get.

Maybe it helps that we’re all at a similar part of our careers. All four of us have just finished a novel — or almost finished it, or really-almost-finished-it-and-I-mean-it-this-time. And this month one of our members (I’ll call her the Poetess) had some big news. She has landed a literary agent, who is currently shopping her book around to publishers.

If you know me, you’ll know what my first reaction was — jealousy, and shame that I hadn’t gotten there first. Because as much as I believe in the Poetess and want her to succeed, jealousy is never far away when I consider the success of other writers. That is just one of the less-than-exactly-likable qualities of me.

“I’ve got to get that book out there,” I couldn’t stop myself from saying. Another member (I’ll call him Outlander) chimed in with “Yeah.” And I could hear that he was feeling it too: that left-behind feeling, that gotta-get-my-butt-in-gear feeling. Which I suppose, for both of us, is a good thing.

We went on to discuss queries and climaxes, flashbacks and denouements along with our fourth member (Newshound). And by the end of it all we had decided to kick ourselves into fifth gear by meeting twice as often: every two weeks instead of every month.

And this is one of the things I love about my group: we roll with the punches. We’re past the uninvested stage where everyone just goes with the original status quo. We accommodate each other, and we’re not afraid to speak up when we want something to change.

Meeting twice a month is a little scary for me. Much as I appreciate them, there are times when I need to forget about Outlander, Newshound, and the Poetess; there are times when an impending meeting begins to feel like someone reading over my shoulder while I write. But I think it’ll be, on balance, good for me. Because there’s one word for how I feel following this week’s meeting.

Motivated.