Friday, May 30, 2008

What's your take on flash backs and spoilers?

My husband graciously shared his head cold, and I'm being a total wimp and taking the day off. It's not even a bad cold, but yesterday my head was too foggy to write anything new. And to make matters worse, I think most of what I wrote the day before falls too far into "info dump" category. I'll wait until my head clears enough to read it critically and decide if it's one of those scenes that would better be handled with a brief flashback. My problem is, I don't like flashing back, even a day or two. And since my hero and heroine are still unaware of each other, I'm trying to keep their timelines parallel. I might have inserted that Fozzie scene simply to avoid having too much Torie.

It's the story that matters, though, not how long the scenes are, or how long between POV changes. So that means the dreaded plotting, and my head can't wrap itself around that yet. I plan to finish Hit List, then watch some of the French Open. And try not to feel guilty.

The other thing that's been niggling at me is spoilers. I think I'm probably overly anal about not knowing what happens until it happens. But other people don't seem to mind. I'm astonished to learn that people actually read the end of the book first to see whodunit, or to make sure there's the right HEA. I can't do that. Most of the time, I'll stop reading a book once it's clear 'stuff happened' to those characters before and go back to book 1.

That being said, I wrote a funny fluff piece where my FINDING SARAH characters talked about me. Since I'm always throwing them into the fire, I let them tell me how they felt about it. "The Other Side" looks at me through their eyes.

If anyone wants it, send me an email (contact link to the right) with "Other Side, Please" in the subject line and I'll send it to you. I'm not posting it here, just in case there's anyone else out there who's as anal as I am about spoilers. If you've already read FINDING SARAH, it won't pose any problems.

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