Romantic Suspense anyone?

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gcsalamon

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I'll chime in on all three subjects.

In response to Jazen, yes, please join in, and as to your story, if you're going to consider it to be romance (or wonder if it should be considered as such) in any form, then you've got to have the HEA as noted above. But if your romance (although there is still an HEA involved) is more secondary to the story, and by that I mean, more of a back story, then perhaps you should consider it general fiction, or a mystery, or thriller. We would have to know more about it to get a better idea, I think.

As for organization, my day job requires so much of it that I've brought it into every other aspect of my life, and yes, it sometimes spills into my writing. However, I find myself rarely feeling organized in my thoughts as I write. I may start out with an outline but that outline is more A and Z, as opposed to A through Z, if you know what I mean. Like someone said above, I know where I'm going but the way I get there evolves as I write.

With regard to the "blinking" - LOL - Why is it my best lines and/or scenes seem to always come to me when I'm in the shower and can't write it down? (*she asks shaking her head*) But the scariest thing about the "blinking" is when it happens while you're driving! Always when I'm on my way to work in the morning it seems. I leave the radio off so I can think and my mind starts to wander. The next thing I know, I've run an entire scene through my head, I blink and find myself a few miles up the road from where I was last I remember. And I have no idea how I got there! Did I stop at that stop sign? Was that light green when I went through it? How the heck did I get from there to here?

Frightening!
 

Jazen

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Thanks for the welcome.

Pen and Calle, the ending that I have in mind could be considered happy-ish depending on how one views the outcome and it is sort of that only she hold the key to his redemption sorta thing.

Gina I don't know what HEA means. The story is a twisted fairytale of sorts. It was born from a challenge posed to us in a writing group I'm part of. The idea was to take a fairytale and give it an adult twist. Since it is a fairytale in nature a happy-ish ending is needed and the romance is the main part of the story to watch the characters grow and transform over the course of the relationship.

on the 'blinking' I usually have those moments right as I'm going to sleep and I'm too lazy to get up and write them down or when I'm out walking my doggies and are still unable to write down what comes to me.
 

The Pen Is Mightier

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HEA is just "Happily Ever After."

When you end the book, what "place" are the characters in? Have they gone through their journey together and come out at the end at a satisfying place? It's not always marriage and forever, I've seen "Happy For Now" endings. They've resolved their issues, they've fought the big bad, and are content/happy with their relationship that progressed through the book. That kind of thing.
 

Jazen

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HEA is just "Happily Ever After."

When you end the book, what "place" are the characters in? Have they gone through their journey together and come out at the end at a satisfying place? It's not always marriage and forever, I've seen "Happy For Now" endings. They've resolved their issues, they've fought the big bad, and are content/happy with their relationship that progressed through the book. That kind of thing.

ah thanks for letting me know what it meant.

The end would be a content/surviving for now type of ending I supposed.
 

Batspan

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Hi everyone,

Gina -- You might like Scrivener. I'm using the free trial and it's the best organizing tool I've ever had for writing.

Yesterday I blasted out a 3k scene-by-scene outline of, you guessed, a romantic suspense.

I grew up reading my mom's, found Gaywick years later -- yes, a gay gothic -- and then Barbara Michaels/Elizabeth Peters. Although not romances, on the suspense side I'm also fond of Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell and her Barbara Vine alter-ego and Martha Grimes.

So last week I went through a how-to book from Romance Writers of America. It took days until something finally hit me. Now I know who the characters are, what their problems are and how I'm going to work the plot and subplots.

I browsed the thread on markets, and I've been searching online, and I'm curious how the rest of you evaluate the options. Chances are there's some basic threads on choosing between percent of list and percent of net vs. publishing on Amazon and so forth. Aside from one blog, I haven't seen much on advances for romance.

Any resources on these 'comparing the bottom-line' issues?

The other burning question is response times--as in, publisher A takes 6 months to respond to a query and another 3 months to respond to a partial and publisher B takes a year. Of course there are many x-factors, I'm just trying to get a time line on how long it all takes, and which publishers respond and pay the fastest.

Hope that's not considered off-topic. I'm self-employed so I always try to do the numbers.

Happy writing, all.
 

Ann_Mayburn

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Guarding Hope, my romantic suspense, is off to the formatter with an expected publication date of August 6th. I've bitten all my nails off and have moved onto my dogs nails. I'd try biting my cat's nails but he won't let me. ;)
 

Jazen

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Guarding Hope, my romantic suspense, is off to the formatter with an expected publication date of August 6th. I've bitten all my nails off and have moved onto my dogs nails. I'd try biting my cat's nails but he won't let me. ;)

Congrats! (not on the nail biting but on the book LOL)
 

aus10phile

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I used to lurk in this thread :D

Dug it up now. No more activity?

I've never seen this thread, but it's possible that my current WIP could be classified as romantic suspense. Currently, I've labeled it as mystery--in part because I'm genre-challenge and that label seems easier for some reason. Additionally, I can't seem to fit the romance and the mystery in the same query letter. I'm thinking my book probably falls too short of sexpectations to be considered romantic suspense, but it definitely has a strong romantic subplot.
 

Kathl33n

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Ok, "bumping" this thread in hopes to resurrect it.

I'm also going to resurrect a prior post to this thread, about betas. I've not had a beta that particularly reads RS. I've had one great one who was interested in Romance in a broad genre sense, but not RS. My other beta was a guy (yes!), who helped me considerably with plotting.

So, I was wondering, do you think it's at utmost importance to have a beta who would be reading in the RS genre, or do you think there's merit with a beta who just knows good writing when they see it? Thoughts on that?

And I know this is the wrong place to ask to/for a writing buddy/critique partner in the RS genre, but if anybody is looking for one, who reads the same genre, feel free to sent me a pm.
 
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Kathl33n

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Bumping thread.

Been on a very long break from writing. Major life-changing event. Now, I'm getting back into writing again. Anybody still writing Romantic Suspense? I'm looking for publishers while I dust off my writing files. Does anybody have an agent? Or do you work with publishers directly?
 
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