Today I’m guest blogging with 2012 RWA Golden Heart finalist Terri Osburn at Romance Writer’s Revenge. I talk about why I had to delete the entire first draft of “Song for Sophia” and start over. Find out why I spent months researching calculus and psychological disorders and emerged with an unconventional manuscript which finaled in the RWA Golden Heart contest.
“When I created Wilhelm Montegue, I bit off more than I could chew. An autistic savant with a photographic memory and a talent for mathematics and music, he was exploited by the army during the Crimean War as a spy and assassin before being captured and tortured by the Russians. He has PTSD on top of the autism―he’s a mess. It wouldn’t be difficult to have him committed to an asylum, and he has enemies.
Silly pantser me, I was having a ball with my unusual hero until I hit a wall, because A) I know squat about math, and, B) I was only portraying the upside of savant syndrome – the cool genius stuff, like composing brilliant music. Fortunately for me, music is my day job, but that’s where Easy Street ended . . . Read the article here.
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GIVEAWAY! Comment by 12 noon EST on 6/7/12 and enter to win a free digital copy of Song for Sophia for Kindle, Nook, or iOS.
- UPDATE 6/7/12: I just visited Romance Writer’s Revenge, and cheered out loud when I saw the winner: “Quantum,” known as “Q,” an honest-to-goodness quantum physicist whom I flirted shamelessly with [in the 11th dimension] all day yesterday on the RWR blog. Now I’ll find out if all my calculus research passes scrutiny with an expert. (Crossing fingers, toes, and stuff you don’t want to know about.)
Moriah Densley 
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