writing

I Want

I thought I was just about done with this book, aside from one final proofread before sending it to a copyeditor, but I had an epiphany this weekend spurred by a Disney movie.

I’d recorded Moana when ABC showed it a couple of months ago, and this weekend I finally got around to watching it. When the movie got to the big “I want” musical number, I realized what was missing from my book.

Just about every Disney musical has a big musical number near the beginning in which the main character sings about what they want out of life. I don’t know if they did this deliberately in the early days, but modern Disney is well aware of this and has codified the “I Want” song into their process. This isn’t about the story goal — in fact, the character usually sings this song before the story kicks in. It’s about what the character wants out of life, what her deepest desires are. The story provides a way of getting this.

Going back to the beginning, Snow White sings “I’m Wishing,” which is about wanting to find someone who’ll love her. Cinderella sings “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” but it’s not too specific about what she wants, just that she wants something she can’t allow herself to express. Sleeping Beauty has the “I Wonder” song, which is about wanting to find someone to love her.

During the Classic era, we get our first hint of the kind of song that became popular during the revival, with Alice singing “In a World of My Own,” about the place she’d create if she could make a world that would get her away from where she was.

That expanding of horizons became the main theme of the “I Want” songs in the modern era. Ariel sings about wanting to be part of the human world. Belle sings of wanting “adventure in the great wide somewhere.” Rapunzel wants her life to begin. Anna gets the “I Want” song in Frozen, wanting to get outside the palace.

Note that these all take place before they’re caught up in the story. Ariel doesn’t yet know about Ursula’s spell to give her legs (and I don’t think she’s even rescued Eric yet before she sings). Belle doesn’t know anything about the Beast when she sings about what she wants.

And that’s what my book was missing. I didn’t know what my heroine wanted deep down inside, the need that was within her before she stumbled across a mystery she had to solve. I think it was there, to some extent, but making it more explicit and weaving that into the story really adds to the book. There’s more going on with her emotionally. I may have to add that to my process, figuring out what my characters would sing about in their “I Want” song if they were in a Disney musical.

I think the “I Want” bit is also in the Pixar movies, but it’s less obvious because they don’t stop to sing about it. I’m pondering rewatching a couple today for research. I saw the doctor yesterday and got the first shingles shot, so now I’m feeling the aftereffects and I’m not sure I’m up to doing much today. It feels kind of like a mild case of flu (without the respiratory symptoms), but I understand this is far preferable to actually having shingles. I never had chicken pox — that I know of — so this will protect me from that, and if I had a subclinical infection (a case so mild it went unnoticed, but that would explain why I was generally the only kid in the neighborhood who didn’t get chicken pox) then it will protect me from shingles. I guess it’s one benefit of all the medical craziness going on right now that the shingles shots are available when they used to have a waiting list.

Isolating Times

I had a nice little holiday, though it ended up being fairly busy, as my new refrigerator was delivered Friday, and that meant spending Thursday preparing and Friday putting everything back in order. Now I’m going to dive back in to work before I take my next holiday around my birthday in early August. I did a lot of cooking, listened to a lot of classical patriotic music on the radio and on TV, and watched a livestreamed fireworks show.

Now, though, I’m determined to wrap up these mystery books and get them out into the world, and then get the next one written. Three books should establish the series, and then I can space them out a bit more and write a few other things in between those books. I know most of the advice is to have one series with a lot of books, but I already know that’s a recipe for burnout for me. Maybe I can get by with juggling a few different things. July isn’t good for much around here other than huddling indoors, so I might as well spend the time productively. Then maybe in the fall when it’s cooler (and possibly safer to be around people) I can ease up and let myself play some. Right now, there’s no travel from around here to the rest of the country or to most of the rest of the world because I live in a hot zone and I’d have to quarantine for two weeks. I just hope that comes under better control within the next month or so. Even I’m starting to miss people. Not necessarily large groups or people in general, but there are specific people I would like to see in person again. Though it is nice to not have to come up with excuses not to have to go to social events I’m not super keen on.

This summer has reminded me of a summer I had as a kid. The summer between fifth and sixth grades, my mom had a job and my little brother was in nursery school. I was too old for the nursery, and my parents figured I was mature enough to stay home alone. I did have some rules about not having anyone else in the house and needing advance permission to go to anyone else’s house or to leave the neighborhood, but otherwise I was pretty free, and I recall riding my bike to the next village to go to the swimming pool with a friend quite often, so I don’t think permission was denied. And this was in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language! I have fond memories of that summer. While I did go out and do things with friends, I also spent a lot of quiet time at home (since we were in Germany and the weather wasn’t always ideal for going outside). We had one TV channel in English. During the mornings, they showed old TV series like Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies and (my favorite that summer) Daktari. Then there was a block of soap operas, and that’s when I’d go outside or do something else. In the late afternoon, they tended to show British science fiction things, and I believe that was where I first encountered Doctor Who. We went to the library a lot and I had a good supply of books. I also created an entire city for my Barbie dolls in the basement playroom. I completely remodeled the Dream House and built on additional things, and I sewed clothes for my dolls.That was long before the Internet, and even the phone wasn’t an option because they charged by the minute even for local calls. The phone was only for emergencies.

Although I did get a lot of social interaction when I played outside with friends, and my family was home in the evenings and on weekends, that was a lot like the current lockdown. But now at least I have the luxury of Internet access and phone calls. Although the daytime television programming on broadcast TV isn’t as good as the one channel we got then, there’s so much streaming (even though I don’t watch much). In addition to getting books from the library, I can get just about anything I want electronically.

That summer made me very self-sufficient. I learned how to manage my time without any kind of externally imposed structure, and I got good at amusing myself. It was good training for being self-employed and working at home, and it prepared me for this time.

Life

Time Off

It turns out that book 1 in this series is in reasonably good shape. I should manage to finish this round of revisions tomorrow, and then since there’s a holiday this weekend, I’m going to take a bit of a vacation. Not that I’m going anywhere. But I think I need a mental vacation. I may do some brainstorming and work-related reading, but I won’t try to write. So, I probably won’t be posting here the rest of the week.

My kitchen seems determined to annoy me. Last week, there was the refrigerator saga (still no word about it being delivered). Then over the weekend my toaster oven died. The top element stopped working, so it wouldn’t toast or broil, and having it on “bake” meant the lower element overachieved to try to reach the right temperature, so the bottom of things burned. But Target had the current equivalent of this one, which was at least ten years old, so all is well and I’ll be able to have toast again. Really, during the summer I do a lot of my cooking in the toaster oven so I don’t have to heat up the big oven. I use it for broiling fish, baking potatoes, heating up things that I want to be crisp. I thought about getting something really fancy, but I decided I don’t really have the room for that, and I’d want to do more research. It sounds like when you get one that does too many things, it doesn’t do any of them well. Right now, I just want to be able to make toast, heat up baked goods, and broil fish.

My weekend fun was learning all about the Black Death. Amazon was offering the Great Courses program about that as a free preview this month, so it’s expiring Tuesday, and I realized after I got started that there are 24 episodes. They’re only half an hour each, but that’s still a lot. I really liked the lecturer. She even mentioned that The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis is one of her favorite novels (me too!) and confessed that she has a contingency plan for if she gets sent back in time to that time. So I was binge-watching the Black Death this weekend. These were all filmed several years ago, so she had no idea what would be happening now, but it’s interesting how little human behavior has changed in all that time, even though we know a lot more about how disease works now. I am looking forward to moving on to cheerier topics once I finish this. Some of my friends are watching it, too, so we were discussing it on Facebook. This is probably one of those “you know you’re a nerd when …” things.

I’m going to have to figure out what I want to write next — do I do the third book in this mystery series, start working on this fantasy series I’m developing, take another look at the book I wrote last year that needs to be rewritten, play with the women’s fiction idea I’ve had brewing? That’s part of what I’ll be figuring out this week.

Romanticizing Small Towns

I’ve been looking at more women’s fiction, and in addition to the “when her husband left her …” plot, it seems another common thread is small towns.

In the days of chick lit, in the early 2000s, urban settings were the big thing — the single career girl in the big city. Now everything seems to be leaning toward the small town. The woman whose husband dumps her or cheats on her may already be in a small town and has to deal with the social fallout. Or when she leaves, she heads to her small hometown, the small town where a relative lives, the small town where she went on vacation as a child. Even the single woman books, the ones written by authors who got their start in chick lit, seem to be focused on small towns. They’re all about women who leave London to go to a village and open a bookstore/bakery/cafe/shop. Then there are all the Hallmark movies about successful career women in big cities who end up chucking it all to go live in a small town with a down-to-earth guy.

I know a few of the British authors actually do live in small villages, but with the rest of them, as someone who’s actually from a small town, I have to wonder if any of these people have actually lived in a small town. Because starting over in a small town is incredibly difficult. The social circles are generally closed. There aren’t a lot of single men, since most of the men get snagged in sixth grade. There’s not much to do unless you like high school sports.

Mind you, most of these fictional “small” towns aren’t what I’d think of as truly small. They tend to use “small” to refer to populations under about 50,000. A lot of the small towns are in the 20,000 range, which might have more going on. When my family moved to the small town I’m from just before I started high school, the sign at the city limits said the population was 2,180. It might be closer to 5,000 now, but it’s grown rather dramatically, and they expanded the city limits. When we moved there, your dining options were limited to Dairy Queen, a small cafe, a local barbecue place, and a fried chicken place. While I was in high school, we got first a McDonald’s, then a Burger King, and then there was a locally owned restaurant that kept changing, with nothing in that building staying in business for as long as a year. I think the Pizza Inn came after I was out of high school because we had to drive to another town about 14 miles away to go to Pizza Hut when I was in school. It wasn’t at all like the idyllic fictional towns with all their bustling downtown areas with local cafes and coffee shops and romantic date restaurants, and a busy social calendar of festivals, fairs, concerts, and other arts events. There is more of a nightlife there now because a major country music star is from that town and has opened some performance venues that draw big acts, but that was far into the future when I lived there (and I’m not sure how successful it’s been).

Most of my books have been about people who’ve left small towns. I think people from big cities daydream about a romanticized version of small town life, a simpler, quieter place with less traffic, less stress, where everyone knows everyone. If you’ve lived in a small town, you know that’s not necessarily true. The mystery series I’m developing does take place in a small town and involves a heroine who moved from a city, and it probably is closer to the idyllic fictional version than anything real, but for a cozy mystery that’s a genre trope, and I am trying to insert a bit of small-town reality even while making it a place where I wouldn’t mind living.

But it does make me wonder if I could get away with a women’s fiction book about a woman who goes to the small town, learns something about herself, and then takes that lesson back to the city rather than finding love and a close circle of friends and a new home in a small town.

Customer Service

My big distraction this week has been customer service issues.

I noticed that something funny was going on either with one of the electrical circuits in my kitchen or the refrigerator. I looked it up, and after doing some testing, it seems like the problem is with the refrigerator. This is something that’s known to happen with older refrigerators, and this one is nearly 16 years old. It’s working, and I’ve got a workaround going, but it probably needs to be replaced. With the likely issue and with the age of it, this repair would not be worth it.

So I went to order a new refrigerator. Home Depot said they couldn’t deliver anything before mid July, but I found what I needed at Best Buy, and they said they could deliver as soon as Monday. So I placed the order and took the Monday morning delivery slot they offered. Then last night, I got an e-mail saying I needed to set a delivery appointment. I followed their link, and they had the appointment I’d chosen as my second choice and said I needed to choose a first choice before that date, but none were available. I tried doing the online help chat thing, but nothing happened other than it sitting there for two hours saying it would connect me to an agent. I called this morning, used the callback feature, and eventually talked to someone. It turned out that the problem was that they didn’t have that unit in inventory and couldn’t even set a delivery date. I don’t know why they didn’t just say that instead of letting me order and set a delivery date, then telling me I needed to set a new date. So I cancelled that order.

I found almost the same thing at the same price at Lowe’s, and they said they could deliver in 3-7 days, but said they’d be in touch to schedule delivery. I’m waiting on that now. We’ll see if they actually have something. The order confirmation e-mail just says they’ll call with a delivery appointment, but says there may be “delays.” It would be nice if they built the delays into the information they give you when you order. If it’s going to be 4-6 weeks, then put that in up front. Don’t promise 3-7 days.

It seems that this is a combo problem between the pandemic and the trade war. There were already issues from the trade war with China, and then they shut down manufacturing. Plus, people sheltering at home are buying home stuff. I just hope my fridge holds out, since it’s pretty full. The freezer is my main concern. The stuff currently in the fridge will probably be eaten over the weekend, but I’ve got about a month worth of food in the freezer. If I get really desperate, I’ll pick up a dorm fridge and cook the meat in the freezer.

But I did not need this distraction. I’m trying to revise a book, and with having to buy a new refrigerator, I definitely need to get some books out there so I can bring in some money.

Books

Reading Slump

I hit a bit of a reading slump this weekend. I’d finished reading a big epic fantasy series, so I wanted something completely different. I dug through my to-be-read stash, looking for something along the lines of a romantic comedy, and I ran into an annoying trend.

I picked up one book that seemed to be a nice women’s fiction kind of story with a heroine close to my age, but the beginning of the blurb was along the lines of “She thought she had the perfect life, but then her husband left her for another woman and her teenage daughter got in trouble …” I wasn’t in the mood for a recovering from divorce and dealing with a troubled teenager book, so I picked up something more chick-litty. That one was about a 30-year-old who thought her life was over when her long-term boyfriend broke off their engagement, and now she has to deal with her cousin who’s getting married, and she’s realized she has nothing else going on in her life because she’s let her career and other interests slide. My reaction was along the lines of, “Oh, honey, no. Get a life.” I think I could have handled the book if it really had been about her finding her own life, but it seemed to mostly be about her juggling men.

Why does it seem to be that most of the changes in a woman’s life in books seem to be driven by men? There’s the whole subgenre of “my husband dumped me for a younger woman and now I have to find myself” in women’s fiction. There’s the subgenre popular in British books of “my boyfriend dumped me, so I’ll move to a village and run a bookstore/bakery/cafe.”

Not to mention, it’s nearly impossible to find a contemporary-set book about a heroine over 40 without a blurb that starts along the lines of “after her husband left her/cheated, she and her teenage daughter …” And it usually seems to be a romantic relationship that “fixes” her problems.

During all this dissatisfying reading this weekend (I tossed a couple of books after chapter 3), I realized that I’m having two different reading cravings, and my attempts to search for this sort of thing came up empty, so if it’s out there, I’m looking in the wrong categories or using the wrong search terms.

One is a light romantic comedy with some slight paranormal element — something along the lines of my Christmas book, but right now I don’t want it to be about Christmas. So, no full-on magical world like in my Enchanted, Inc., stories. More like one mystical element, like maybe the heroine’s wishes start coming true, or she gets the ability to read men’s thoughts (a la What Men Want), or a Groundhog Day kind of scenario in which she lives the same day over until she gets it right, or she gets to go back in time to fix one thing, etc. “Paranormal romance” mostly seems to get you a lot of shifter/witch/vampire, etc., books. “Fantasy romance” seems to be more of the full-blown fantasy world sort of thing. “Magical realism” is more literary and more about theme.

And I want women’s fiction that doesn’t center on romance — a woman who moves to a new place to start over, but it isn’t about a divorce or breakup. She gets her life together maybe by developing friendships or figuring out what she wants. Maybe she does fall in love along the way, but that’s not what “fixes” her. It might be a byproduct of getting her life together. Or maybe she goes on a grand tour to find herself, but not because she got dumped or broke up, and she finds herself through some experience other than sleeping with a hot, young foreign stud. And because it’s me, I wouldn’t mind some magical or mystical element.

I have read a few books like that, so I looked up one on the library web site to see what their “readalike” recommendations were. None really fit what I wanted, but then I found the “story elements” function, where there were tiles showing some of the key elements in that book. You selected the elements that you were looking for, and it would give you recommendations. I had to keep removing things I wanted before I finally got a recommendation, but I don’t think it’s very comprehensive because my Enchanted, Inc. books would have fit every tile I had selected, and they didn’t come up. I looked at the one book that came up. How did the blurb start? Along the lines of “after learning that her husband was cheating on her, she loaded up her teenage daughters and took off …”

Life

Enjoying Summer

I’ve really been trying to adjust my attitude toward summer, to not just look at it as something to endure, and it might be working.

I decided that I will celebrate the first 100-degree day of the summer by having ice cream, and I even bought a pint of ice cream. Wouldn’t you know, there isn’t a temperature over 95 in the 10-day forecast. Not that I’m complaining. I just find it amusing. Will that pint of ice cream sit uneaten in my freezer all summer? If we don’t get a 100-degree day by Labor Day, I’ll make a peach cobbler then and have ice cream. If we do get a 100-degree day, then I get ice cream, so win-win.

Because it hasn’t been too hot, I’ve been able to sit out on the patio and read in the evenings. I generally have enough light for reading until about 8:30. That’s something I can’t do the rest of the year.

I love summer fruit. They had watermelon on sale last week, and I picked out one that had all the signs of being good — and, boy, was it. It’s so sweet that it’s like eating candy, and it’s huge, so I still have half of it to go. Then there are blueberries, strawberries, and peaches. I’ve got plenty of dessert stuff in my freezer, but with all this fruit, I haven’t wanted it.

Normally, I enjoy the swimming pool in the summer. We have a community pool that’s quite nice and usually not too crowded, depending on the time of day, but I’m not sure I’m going to use it this year. The kids don’t have a lot of other things to do, so they really need the pool, and I don’t want to be there while there are crowds. Maybe later in the summer it will quiet down some, and we’ll see whether they have in-person school in the fall. I tend to get the most use out of the pool after school starts in August, and it stays warm enough for swimming until late September.

Then there’s my patio garden. I didn’t plant anything this year, aside from planting a couple of morning glory seeds, but I’ve got a bunch of flowers. It seems that the packet of “annual cutting mix” seeds I thought were duds last year, when only a few things sprouted, really kicked off this summer. I’ve got all kinds of strange things growing. The one plant from that packet that did grow, the celosias (coxcomb), seems to have spread seeds like crazy. They sprouted from every pot on the patio. I’ve had a bit of a problem with squirrels digging things up or stepping on things and caterpillars eating everything in sight, so I’ve started bringing the pots in overnight (when the pests seem to cause problems). For the morning glory, I’ve been spraying it with garlic spray to discourage caterpillars and putting peppermint oil on cotton balls around the pot to discourage squirrels, and it’s put on some new leaves that haven’t been eaten. When I’m sitting out and reading, I like looking at my plants and noticing the little day-to-day changes. Since all the summer events have been cancelled, I won’t be traveling, so I won’t have to worry about how to make sure my plants don’t die without water while I’m gone.

So, those are some things I love about summer. I can get some of the fruit year-round, but the rest are things I can’t really do at other times of year, so I’ll enjoy them all while I can.

Cooking

Recipe Hoarding

While I’m stuck at home, I’ve been working on a massive organizing/optimizing project, going space-by-space in my house to sort through things and arrange them in a logical way to make it easier to find things. I’ve already sorted through my media racks to arrange my DVDs and CDs. Now I’m tackling my recipe collection.

I’ve come to the realization that I have a serious recipe problem. I collect so many recipes, and I end up using so few of them because I tend to repeat the usual favorites. I could make a new recipe a day every day and still never get through all the recipes I’ve saved from the Internet, and then there’s my clipping habit. I had whole folders, two recipe boxes, and a photo album full of recipes I’ve cut out of newspaper and magazines over the years. I have made a number of them. I have a fat file of recipes I’ve made and liked. But still, there’s a huge pile I’ve never even looked at after clipping them.

Over the past few days, I’ve been sorting through all the clippings. There are way too many recipes that fall into the “why did I ever think this would be good?” category. There are also cases of me collecting dozens of recipes for the same thing, and never making any of them. I seem to find the idea of tomato-basil soup, apple cake, and chocolate cake appealing. I’ve made some of the soup recipes, but I don’t think I’ve tried any of the apple or chocolate cake recipes. When I’ve made those things, I’ve used recipes from cookbooks.

Some of this has been an exercise in nostalgia, since there are whole newspaper food sections and magazine pages going back to the early 90s in this collection. I think of the 90s as being recent, but the graphic design and ad pictures now look really dated. Even the papers from the late 90s and early 2000s look old-fashioned.

After all this work, I have a trash bag full of newspaper and magazine clippings and newspaper food sections. All the recipes that I think I really might want to make are sorted by category in an accordion folder. I’ve also sorted the recipes I’ve made and actually use into another accordion folder, and the ones I use most often are in the photo album so the pages are protected by plastic. I’ve emptied one recipe box that I can now use for other things, and I’m in the process of putting the smaller clippings on notecards to go in my recipe box. This should save me a lot of time because a big part of my cooking process was digging through my recipe folders to find the recipe I needed.

Will I make any of all the recipes in my remaining stash? Looking through them has given me ideas. When the stores are a little more back to normal and I’m able to more easily get ingredients, I may start a routine of trying a new recipe every week. There is a summer (no-bake) cheesecake recipe I want to try that I may get ingredients for next time I go shopping, and there are a few salad recipes I’ll have to try. This fall, maybe I’ll actually bake one of those apple cakes.

Lockdown Self-Improvement

If you found my discussion of some of the panels from the Nebula conference intriguing, you can still retroactively attend the conference, and the conference will also be continuing online all year. If you register for the conference, you can see all the panels, and now there will also be other networking and learning events going on all year. You don’t have to be a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to participate, and there are scholarships available. All the information is here.

I’m afraid I’ve become That Person during lockdown, the annoying one who’s using the time for self-improvement rather than sloth. I’m studying a foreign language, attending online workshops, reading a lot, listening to classical music, watching Shakespeare productions online, trying new recipes, practicing the flute, and doing a massive home organization project. Sometimes I annoy even myself.

In addition to the Nebula conference, I’ve been watching some online seminars my university has made available to alumni, and I’ve been looking for educational videos on various topics on YouTube. I’ve really been enjoying the National Theatre productions that have been posted each week, along the the weekly musical. I’d thought I might need to get another streaming service, but so far I’ve hardly been watching the one I have. I might look into Netflix or Disney+ this fall, but during the summer I’ve been going outside in the evenings.

I did have actual social interaction last week when I ran into a friend from church while I was out walking, and we stood a safe distance apart and chatted for a while. I think that’s the first time I’d talked to a friend in person since March.

I’m getting close to the end of revisions on this book. I just need to rewrite the ending. What I’ve written is rather anticlimactic, so I need to write something entirely different. But first I have to figure out what that should be. That’s today’s challenge.

writing

Smart Characters, Stupid Characters

One of my biggest challenges in revising this book is that I seem to be making my characters too smart. They figure things out easily, and when they guess at something, they come to the proper conclusion. This is deadly in a mystery, where the path toward uncovering the culprit can’t be straightforward. You don’t have much of a story if your sleuth comes up with a theory, then finds the clues that verify that theory. I’m having to do a lot of revision to insert some red herrings or to make the sleuth go down the wrong path for a little while.

At the same time, one of my pet peeves as a reader is stupid characters or, worse, what I call Plot Stupidity, where the plot doesn’t work if the characters show an ounce of sense. The plot needs them to go alone into that dark basement when they hear a strange noise there and know a serial killer is on the loose because there’s no story if they’re smart enough to leave the house and get help, but the author doesn’t give the character any reason to go alone into the dark basement that makes their decision at least a little rational.

The old-school fantasy series I’m currently reading (and I’m almost done! Then I’ll be free and will have cleared a big chunk of shelf space because I know I won’t be keeping this one to re-read) is driving me nuts because there’s so much Plot Stupidity. A lot of it is in character, as the characters have been established as headstrong and impulsive, but it’s annoying to read about people who keep bumbling into danger because they refuse to listen to anyone else or practice even a bit of common sense—and then they don’t learn from their mistakes and do the same thing again. I really want to throttle a character who keeps charging off on their own because they think they can resolve everything, in spite of being warned that others have already tried that and it didn’t work, and they’re just heading into danger. And then they get into terrible danger, barely make it out alive, don’t accomplish what they set out to do, end up back where they started—and then do it all over again because they think it will work this time.

Or there’s a character who’s clearly shady. They’ve repeatedly shown that they’re not trustworthy. People who have reason to know have warned that this person can’t be trusted. But the other characters keep trusting them. And then, guess what? It turns out that character has been selling the others out to the villain all along.

It’s incredibly frustrating to read. (I’m using the singular “they” in an attempt to make it harder to identify the series I’m talking about so you don’t know the gender of the characters.)

As a writer, I’m trying to find a middle ground between a character who’s always right and a character who’s an utter idiot. Sometimes a character can make the wrong guess or assumption based on incomplete information. Sometimes the obvious, logical thing turns out to be wrong. There are times when emotions come into play, as even intelligent people have emotional biases. We all tend to side with people we identify with. You don’t want to think that a person who’s a lot like you would commit a crime. I think there’s also a difference between being given information or advice and refusing to listen and taking action based on faulty assumptions or information. I can tolerate someone doing something dumb because they’re misinformed and turn out to be wrong, but it’s more annoying when a character is specifically warned about something and completely disregards the warning.

A lot of my revision in this book has involved sending my sleuth down some wrong paths, sometimes because she jumps to an incorrect conclusion based on incomplete information and sometimes because her emotions get in the way and she doesn’t want to suspect someone she feels sorry for. I hope that’ll be enough to make the story work. And then I need to work to build that into the first draft so I don’t have to spend months rewriting the book.