Welcome

Adrienne Giordano,

author of MAN LAW!

Adrienne Giordano writes romantic suspense, contemporary romance and women’s fiction.

She is a Jersey girl at heart, but now lives in the Midwest with her work-a-holic husband, sports obsessed son and Buddy the Wheaten Terrorist (Terrier). She is a co-founder of Romance University blog, is a member of Romance Writers of America, Windy City RWA, Kiss of Death, and RWA’s Women’s Fiction chapter.

Adrienne's debut romantic suspense, Man Law, is available from Carina Press. Her second book, A Just Deception, was released from Carina Press on September 5, 2011. For more information please visit www.AdrienneGiordano.com.

Check out that smile. It's always a joy to interact with Adrienne!

I enjoyed connecting with Adrienne when she took one of my first online classes in 2005. I had more fun when we met face-to-face when she attended one of my Master Classes in Indianapolis -- in 2006 (I think it was '06). I had the best time working with her in an Immersion Master Class in my home in 2010.

First off, a big thank you to Margie for having me on her blog.  Margie’s classes have been a wonderful part of my writing journey and I love, love, love the techniques I’ve learned.

Now, on to my process.  I’m finding this is changing. I generally like to have a basic outline of my story before I begin writing.  At the very least, I like to have all my turning points and pinch points determined. Once I have that, I start writing and the remaining scenes come organically. I find having the outline keeps my story focused and my word count in check. With the outline, I know my midpoint shift/twist needs to come at around 50% of the book. I aim for a word count of 90-100,000 words for a single title manuscript. If I don’t hit the midpoint shift by around 45-50,000 words, I know I need to check all my scenes and make sure they are needed.  I once wrote a book that was 135,000 words. So, yes, the outline keeps me from going on and on and on.

Pantser? Plotter?

I’m a tweener. I’m more concerned about the actual structure of the story and making sure the turning points are all where they need to be.  For me, not following three-act structure means my story will certainly die a slow death. Cliché alert! Sorry, Margie.

Dirty first draft? Edit as you go?

I used to edit as I went along.  I’d get each individual chapter as polished as I could and then send them to my critique partners one at a time.  The only problem with this method was my CP’s lost the continuity of the story and couldn’t necessarily find the plot holes.   Now I find it’s more beneficial to send them 100 not-so-perfect pages.  They find a lot more problems when I send batches!

Do you strive to complete a first draft in a certain time frame?

Yes, but the timeframe varies.  For instance, this past summer, I had my son home with me, I was in the final edits of my November release and I had a book releasing in July and September.  I had to figure out how many new pages I could produce based on that schedule.  I set myself a goal of getting the first draft done by September 1. That meant I needed to write roughly 1,500 words per day.  I almost made it!  I was 5,000 words short. Mainly because I decided to take a vacation in August. I desperately needed to recharge and, for me, sometimes it’s better to step away for a few days rather than trying to push through when exhausted.

How long do you allow for deep editing a complete manuscript?

This is hard for me to put a timeframe on, but I spend a lot of time deep editing. I worked on one paragraph for about 40 minutes yesterday. Obviously, I don’t do this with every paragraph or I’d never get done, but when I know I have a high emotion scene, I spend the time to move sentences, rework phrases, backload, etc.

KUDOS TO ADRIENNE! Sometimes it takes 40 minutes to deep edit a paragraph and make it soar. I bet Adrienne took it to an NYT level.  :-)

2.  Adrienne’s writing is so strong, so smooth, so engaging. Her deep editing makes each page flow and carry tension and power. She created such compelling stimulus-response patterns that the reader has to keep reading and reading and reading.

Enjoy this passage. My deep edit analysis, and my question for Adrienne, are below.

“Your guy has a warrant in Virginia for failure to appear. Joel Benson is an alias. His real name is Joel Baldridge. He fled on a rape and sodomy charge.”

Vic’s legs wobbled and he backed against the house before he crashed to the ground. A rape charge. This was the guy that shoved Gina against a wall. What would have happened if he hadn’t walked up? A vision of that fucker slamming himself into Gina had Vic bending over and sucking air into his failing lungs.

No air.

Mike bent over, touched his shoulder. “Just breathe, buddy. Concentrate on small breaths. You’ll be all right. You need a chair?”

A fucking chair? Was he a geriatric patient now? Oh, man, he had to get it together. He bolted up, nearly knocking Mike’s head off, and leaned against the house. He counted to three, thought about a good sail and let his heart rate settle. A minute later, his breathing leveled off.

Deep Editing Analysis:

First Paragraph: Huge stimulus.

Second Paragraph: Empowered ideomotoric shift. Legs wobbled. Off balance, he backs up, falls to ground. Power Internalizations, including a rhetorical question, pull info together for the reader. A vision of the rapist attacking Gina is a stimulus for Vic’s visceral response.

Third Paragraph: Two words stand alone: No air.  Perfect!  Love the power of that white space!

Fourth Paragraph: Mike touches Vic and talks to him.

Fifth Paragraph: Power Internalizations are stimulus for Vic to stand. Adrienne did a beautiful job showing The Recovery:  1) counted to three, 2) thought of something calming, 3) heart rate settled, 4) breathing returned to normal.  Awesome!

BLOG GUESTS: I developed that scene analysis dynamic, The Recovery. It’s one of the points I introduce in my Deep Editing course. I cover it in-depth in my Advanced Deep Editing course offered in November.

Margie Asks Adrienne:  How did you create that passage? Did you see this piece of the scene unfold as it’s written above? Or did you go back and add specificity? Details like Mike touching Vic, and The Recovery?

I did see it unfolding as it is above, but I did try to power it up with his internalizations. I also had to add his recovery.

Part of the challenge with this passage is that Vic has two problems. The first one being that Gina is Mike's younger sister and Vic never told Mike about the bad guy approaching her. So, in this scene, Mike doesn't know this Baldridge guy approached his sister. I imagined Vic would not only be struggling with the fact that he has lied to his closest friend, but also that he put his friend's beloved sister in danger by exposing her to a rapist. In this scene, Mike thinks Vic is falling apart solely because the guy they are chasing is a rapist. Not necessarily because the guy had contact with Gina. The way I envisioned it, Vic's reaction needed to be powerful, but not over the top.

3.  The opening of Chapter 26 touched my heart. It reads like bestselling women’s fiction. New York Times bestselling women’s fiction.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Man Law: Always hide the pain.

Sunny summer days and blue skies were meant for sailing and baseball. Hot dogs and watermelon.

Not funerals.

The Louisiana humidity hung thick and Vic’s shirt stuck to him, confined him. He’d long since taken off his suit jacket but experienced little relief from the stifling heat. He leaned against a tree in the cemetery where Tiny’s body would soon be lowered into the ground. Mourners stepped to the casket, one by one, tossing blood-red roses as a final farewell.

Vic had already tossed his flower and walked his aunt and uncle to the car. Somehow, he wound up leaning against this fucking tree in this fucking place where he didn’t want to be. Saying goodbye to a man he didn’t want to say goodbye to.

He drove his heel into the ground, steadied himself against the wave of emotion that had been threatening all morning. Goddammit.

Margie Asked Adrienne:  Share anything about how you wrote this scene. How you captured the emotion and captured me.

These scenes were tough to write. I would work on them and have to step away from the computer for a day or two because they exhausted me. Out of my characters so far, Vic was the hardest to break. The guy just wouldn't go down. :)

Killing off a much loved character is never fun and I'm still getting some grief from readers over it, but for Vic, it was the thing that brought him to the place I needed him to be. I tried to imagine him standing by the tree, being angry and internalizing all that rage. Once I got into that mindset, I was able to feel how every little detail (the heat, the dress clothes, etc.) would bug him. He's at his worst in this scene and nothing would make him happy.

4.  I loved the way Adrienne presented Vic’s mother.  He hadn’t seen her in five years, and hadn’t missed the contact.

Margie Asks Adrienne:  I’m curious regarding what triggered those three “not as” descriptors.  It plays off one of the teaching points in Deep Editing, showing what’s not happening. They present a strong contrast. Excellent description.

Here’s the passage where she walks up to him at the funeral.

“Hey, sugar,” his mother said in that deep drawl of hers.

“Mama.” He didn’t move from his spot against the tree, but he touched Gina’s shoulder. “This is Gina. Gina, my mother.”

The crack head.

“Gloria Andrews,” she said, holding her hand to Gina. “Nice to meet you.”

He had to admit Gloria’s appearance was different. Her skin not as leathered, her hair not as blond and her frame not as thin. The eyes, though. They had a sharpness to them he didn’t remember.

This is what I call a "Margie-ism" because it's right out of Margie's classes. Vic's mother was a drug addict who abandoned him when he was eleven. He has seen her only a handful of times in 25 years. His most vivid memories of her are what she looked like on drugs. In this scene, for the first time in his life, he's seeing her clean.

When writing this, I imagined he would immediately revert to those memories of what she looked like when he was a child and compare them with what he's seeing now. Plus, he's still at the funeral watching that casket go into the ground and he's completely miserable. Why not throw his drug addict mother at him to add to the conflict? :-) Nothing like kicking a man when he's down.

The EDITS system changed the way I look at my writing. I can honestly say EDITS brought my writing to another level. I used to print every page and highlight them. Now I find it comes to me naturally and I don’t need to highlight. I do, however, eyeball every page when the manuscript is complete to make sure everything is in balance. In fact, let’s test me. Margie, pick a number between 1 and 172. I’ll go to my WIP (which is still in draft mode) and pick that page out to see how well I did. This should be interesting. Interesting in a way that will teach me not to be spontaneous. J But, I’m up for the challenge.

Other devices I use are dialogue cues, backloading, rhetorical devices (I love Anaphora.) and cadence. Before submitting a manuscript, I read the entire thing out loud. I’m always amazed at the changes I can make to punch up the pace, to make the passage more powerful, to really feel the character’s pain.

A couple of days ago, I received a review from Fresh Fiction that said the following:

With the publication of A JUST DECEPTION, the follow up to Man Law and the second book in the Private Protectors series, Adrienne Giordano has cemented her place on my list of must read authors. The emotional and psychological tension grabs you on page one and doesn't let go until the truth is revealed.

I’m thrilled to say I’ve gotten some good reviews, but what I love about this one is the reviewer noticed how hard I worked on the emotional tension in the book. A Just Deception has a heroine who is emotionally damaged from events in her childhood. It wasn’t an easy book to write, and I spent a lot of time researching the character. I think I put every lesson Margie taught me on amplifying emotion into that book.