A Hero (or Heroine) Rises to the Occasion

We all have our favorite heroes and heroines in romance. Something about them is dashing, daring, kind and caring, intriguing enough to keep us reading page after page. They grasp their fate in both hands and dare destiny to defy them. Force the villain to his/her knees and wrest happiness from the gates of hell.

 Yeah. That's fiction. But in real life, what makes a hero or heroine? I have an example for you. Someone unexpectedly close to me ... my daughter-in-law Candice. She's married to my oldest son Brandon, and just now, she's the nation's darling. The epitome of romance, romance.

You may have heard of the Wedding Belle Blues? The 911 operator who this last week saved a bride's wedding from being a disaster by sharing not just reassurance that law enforcement was on the way, but also a precious and valued memento of her own wedding - her gown.

When she received a call at her post from a shattered bride-to-be that her gown had been stolen right out of her open car in her driveway, the day of her wedding, the first thought Candice had (after doing her official duty and dispatching the police to the scene) was to turn to her supervisor and say 'I have a gown. May I call her and offer it to her?'

 Her supervisor agreed, and a sort of comedy of Keystone Cops proportions ensued. Candice spoke thru the officer at the scene, who showed the bride a photo of the wedding dress from Candice's phone, via his phone (I love that part). Then, Candice called my son, who was supposed to be camping but had not felt well so stayed home. He drove thru Seattle traffic to get the key to Candice' parents' home from her brother, drove to their home, found it was the wrong key, waited there for her brother to drive thru Seattle traffic, retrieved the dress, and drove to meet the prospective groom, who delivered the dress to his bride. Whew! 

Candice called me that afternoon to say that she was going to be interviewed on local Seattle/Tacoma area radio stations and we could listen on the internet if we wished. We did, and were shocked by the 'local fame' achieved by our son's sweet bride.

 The next day, the story exploded onto the national scene. Good Morning America, Diane Sawyer, Entertainment Tonight ... the list goes on and on.

Google '911 Operator Wedding Dress' and you get pages of links to the story. Candice and her act of kindness captured the heart of America. We remain shocked by the breadth of this.

What we are not, no one who knows Candice is, is surprised by her act. That's the kind of person she is. And i will add her gown is beautiful, and I'm sure costly. She was a fairy tale bride.

 Me? I would have had the thought, all right. But would I have acted on it? Offered my precious gown to a stranger who might spill wine on it, or rip it dancing with the groom, or ... well, you get the picture.

It's easy to have the self-less thought. But it takes a heroine to rise to the occasion and follow through.

And come to think of it, those kind of people make some of the best romantic heroes and heroines, too. Ordinary people who go above and beyond, force themselves beyond the boundaries of courage and compassion to do great things.

 And end up inspiring the rest of us.

 best, Cathryn Cade Best-selling author of sci fi romance
... it's hot in space, red hot!

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Love's Labors Lost? Not to Worry...

Tragedy strikes every writer’s work-in-progress sooner or later. In spite of all your efforts to be careful and to back up your work daily, you will (take your pick):

• hit the delete key by accident and the autosave function will save the accidental version before your fingers, paralyzed with shock and horror, can click undo.
• somehow save your just-revised Act 2 as Act 1, leaving you with two copies of Act 2 (although one copy is named Act 1) and overwriting Act 1 (which you also revised today, or maybe last week and forgot to back it up.) Self-flagellation begins (“I wouldda, couldda, shouldda...”)
• have no idea what you did, but the chapter you wrote yesterday has totally disappeared. Trying to suppress the panic swarming in your chest like a cloud of angry bees, you look in nearby folders and at the bottom of the document library list, but the whole chapter has gone into a black hole, apparently never to return. The Search function can’t even find it. Doom looms, as inevitable as winter.
• have no idea why, but your computer tells you your short story file is corrupted and can’t be recovered. You run to the bathroom and throw up the leftover Chinese take-out you had for breakfast.

What’s a heartbroken writer to do? 

Write the paragraph/Act/chapter/story a second time.

 

I hear sobs in Alaska, wails in Australia, sniffles in Alabama—even moans coming from the fourth planet circling Aldereen in the Dragonfly Nebula. (Okay, I invented that last place to make my point.) This is not what a writer mourning her lost labor-of-love wants to be told. 

So go ahead and cry, scream into your pillow, whine to your writer friends, take a walk, dig out some chocolate, shake it off, suck it up. Then don your Super Writer panties and write the passage again. 

Believe it or not, you can do this. And the end result will be surprisingly similar, if not identical, to the original. I know this from personal experience.

When I lost an entire chapter right after I polished my work of art, I was devastated. I so did not want to write that chapter again! I’d labored over this part of my manuscript for eleven days to make it as close to perfect as I possibly could. How could I create anything that good again?

But what choice did I have? Trash the whole book? Unthinkable! So I wrote my lost chapter again. I was positive this new version was not as good as the one I had lost, but it would have to do.

Three months later, a miracle happened. I found the original chapter. I believe Computer Gremlins stole my chapter, then returned it for reasons unfathomable to mortal men. 

Imagine my shock when I compared the two versions of my chapter side-by-side and discovered they were nearly identical. Word-for-word identical. For most of twenty-three pages, identical.

This didn’t happen because I remembered what I’d written. I didn’t, except in a general, synopsis-like sense. I wrote the chapter the same way the second time because my creative cauldron, Girls in the Basement, Muse, subconscious, or whatever-you-want to call it is a creature of habit. There may be  many roads to Oz, but my mind likes the path of least resistance, be it yellow brick or black asphalt.

 So when something like this happens to you (and it will; it’s as inevitable as human fallibility and bad computer magic), take heart. Chances are, you’ll write your lost words a second time with only very minor changes. Heck, you may even improve on the original version.

Have you lost chunks of your writing? If so, what did you do?