Cactus blossoms and romance

Cactus blossoms, although not relating to the story I am writing about below, are very relevant to the underpinnings of a romance. There is at first glance the beauty that is almost transcendent but around it are the thorns. No thorns, no story. A well-written romance story will be like romance itself. Grab it too tightly and it will be destroyed. There are always thorns. It doesn't last in the form it is no matter how one might wish. Lovers can try to hold onto it through words or photos but the only real place it can be held is in one's heart and through memories as it is a fleeting thing, not the forever kind.

Personally, I think, that someone who tries to hold onto romance through life is looking for a lot of disappointment as well as ignoring other things that are deeper. Now reading or writing one, that's a horse of a different color.


As I mentioned in the last blog, while in Tucson, I wanted to get typed onto the hard drive a story I had written first in the early 1970s (not sure of its initial date but it never made it onto the computer so definitely typewriter or maybe the first Atari).

What I had was text-- up to but not including the ending. I had had to look hard in Oregon to even find that much as it hadn't had a place of honor anywhere. It had never been sent to an editor to be accepted or rejected-- although as I began to read, clearly it would have been rejected two pages in if it made it that far.


Still, these characters were my creation, this manuscript was my baby, even if incomplete and shallow. I wanted all of my fiction to be on the computer as well as protected on jump drives. So I began the job of typing it while in Oregon and brought it to Tucson to finish. My writing work down here has mostly been it along with creating potential, digital eBook covers.

One question is what if, when I began to read it, the story had had absolutely no potential in my mind, would I still have done that much work? I am not sure, but I did feel the characters and the conflicts had validity. I also knew it would take a lot of digging to make it believable, to make it fit my criteria for stories I want to create today. The characters were young. Could I go that far back in my own emotional memory to make them deeper but realistic for their ages.

It's always interesting to me when I look back that far in my own fiction because I would have been not that many years older than the heroine when the story first came to me-- although I was in a very different place with two children and in a marriage. Now here I am working on it again potentially at the age of her grandmother.


The first big problem in the story was its time. With the rest of my stories, they were either historical or easily brought up to today, leaving them indefinite for when they happened. The only changes they have required related to adjustments in communication tools (boy, have those changed even in the last ten years especially for younger people).

The thing was that this particular story couldn't happen today. It reflects the attitudes of its time as well as the research I had done back then. It had to be set when I wrote it. That puts it in kind of a no-man's land as it's not historic by that criteria as they must be before 1900; but it's also not contemporary.

Still this is my story and I knew it had to be set in 1974. As I was typing it, I also was looking into what kind of music, what political events would have been part of that. Although, unless the characters are involved in politics, romances are not often political (want to start by turning off half your readers), there should be some reality to the setting, and in this country, Vietnam was a big part of the early '70s.

As I typed in the events, I saw places the characters didn't have depth nor enough interest to even keep me at it if I hadn't been the type of person who always finishes what I start. There were, however, other places I liked a lot. In this initial run-through, I enhanced the conflicts between the main protagonists, the struggles they had to face so they would have more barriers to being together than the obvious ones, and hopefully intrigue a reader, who didn't regard them as their children, for it to be worth their while to care about these people. Overall, I could relate to the events now when I am almost 68 as much as I had, and maybe even more so, than when I was around 28. There are some struggles that are classic-- okay, pretty much all of the main ones.


Down here it took me several long days at the keyboard; but I got it done, created an ending that I felt was true to the situation, created a digital eBook cover, and began to think how I could flesh this story out. I am of an opinion that a book of 62,000 words (its current length) just doesn't have enough depth, doesn't let the events unfold deeply enough, nor the characters to have the dimensions I like when I read someone else's book. It also will benefit from more development in the subplot. Right now I consider it a bit stereotyped. I think I can fix that.

At any rate, it's on the computer and that was my goal for now. Generally I like to leave stories for awhile before I work on them again. That is never a sterile time as the characters and events are always running around in the back of my mind. The next go round will be to expand the events and the character portrayals. It will require at least one more editing after that to get to where I think it flows.

In a way, it was a distraction from what I had been doing with trying to get the other stories into a place where I could see them being finished because they are much closer to that then I am. From another perspective though it was part of getting everything I had written in one place.

I am still trying to decide if eBooks is a good way to go. I do know now it's easy to get a book into eBook format. What I don't yet know is how you get anybody else to see it after it gets there...