As you may know (Bob), I also write science fiction and was invited to attend a local SF convention this weekend as a panelist. Deadlines do not stop for cons, however, so in between panels I plunked my butt down in the hotel’s breakfast room (I love how most hotels now have tall tables with outlets and comfy stools for people who have to work on laptops) and chunked out 2K, then added the final 1K when I got home.

Things I learned — writing sex scenes in a public place while people are walking behind me or coming up to give me a hugs is…challenging. Yes, let’s call it challenging. That being said, I wrote over 2,000 words and I didn’t even have a margarita. I RULE.

Today’s stats:

Started With: 15,102 words
Wrote: 3,019 words
Total word count: 18,109 words
What else did you do today, Nicola: cat chores, attended two panels, limped around a hotel a lot, held an adorable two-year-old on my lap, and stopped off at the drugstore for hair dye.

Writing Tips: Listening to music while writing can be hella useful — it helps you set the emotional tone of the section and can inspire anything from a super hot love scene to a ginormous battle scene straight out of 300 (yes, I put battle scenes in my erotic romance. I’m just that kind of writer). I know writers who can listen to vocal music when they write, but I find it extremely distracting so I tend to listen to soundtracks or other types of instrumental music when I’m working. Some of my favorite writing soundtracks are Sherlock Holmes (from the Downey Jr. movie) and Stage Beauty, and a lot of the fight scenes in the Olympic Cove books were written to the Pacific Rim soundtrack. Right now much of Empress is being written while listening to the soundtrack from Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V because it’s giving me the right temporal feel (I have a separate playlist for sex scenes).

And now, your faithful narrator needs to haul her butt off to bed. I think I’m reading the opening chapter of Empress of Storms tomorrow at my reading. This should be fun.