Getting Christmassy

I started feeling a little Christmassy yesterday when I put up the garlands on my loft and stair rails. This year, I got clever and plugged them into a remote-control outlet (that I normally have a lamp on so I can turn it on from the front door, since my light switches are in the back of the living room). Now I can click the lights on and off without having to go upstairs and grope around behind the chaise and the antenna.

I also went to the neighborhood tree lighting last night, which counted as exercise, since I walked over there (though I think the cocoa I had there might have undone the effect of the exercise). It’s fun watching the kids run around and play together before they light the tree. My neighborhood is in one of the most diverse zip codes in the country, so there are kids from just about every race and multiple nationalities all playing together, and it does the heart good to see that. I enjoy seeing the people of the neighborhood come together, and then I like looking at all the lights along the way as I walk home.

Today is a shopping day, but it’s an excursion for supplies. It’s my last Wednesday of children’s choir until after the holidays, so it’s also the last Wednesday night dinner at church. I figure that makes it a good opportunity for an Ikea run, since the church is on the way home from the Ikea, and there are a number of other stores in the general area of Ikea that I need to visit. I think I may do my actual Christmas shopping tomorrow in a big mall day, maybe even with lunch out and a movie.

And then I need to dig back into writing, though I’m tentatively planning a Christmas movies on the couch day next week since there’s supposed to be a cold, rainy day.

My Books

Coming Attractions

Early next year is going to be busy with publishing activity.

My first Audible Original book will be released in January, and it’s available now for pre-order. Here’s the Audible page with all the details. This is a contemporary fantasy with a touch of romance, so along the lines of Enchanted, Inc., but in a different fictional universe (if the same real-world setting).

There may be a print version of this coming, but that will have to wait for a year later.

Early next year there will also be a Kickstarter campaign for an anthology I’m involved with, but I don’t have all the details yet. I will share when I do.

Meanwhile, in case you weren’t aware, I wrote a Christmas novella a couple of years ago. It’s basically a Lifetime or Freeform Christmas movie in book form, with a touch of magic and romance. It’s a short read, about the right length for sitting down to relax in the evening.

I hope to have a number of new things out in the world next year.

December Already?

I’m sort of treating today as a holiday, since I worked throughout the Thanksgiving holiday and I finished my draft. I let myself sleep in, and I’m still hanging around the house in my fleece pajamas with a cup of hot tea. When I get up and going, I’m going to devote most of the day to cleaning house and catching up on the stuff that didn’t get done while I was frantically writing a book.

I may also get around to putting up some Christmas decorations. I don’t know if I’ll do a tree this year, since the place I would put a tree is right where they’ll have to do work on my baseboard and wall, and the contractor has already come out to take pictures and give the HOA an estimate on repairs. I figure if I don’t put up a tree because I don’t want to have to take it down if they schedule the work, the work won’t happen until January. If I put up a tree, they’ll contact me the next day about doing the work. I have some wheeled dollies of the sort you put under large potted plants, so I wonder if putting the tree up on one of them might be cheating. I could roll it out of the way if they need to work (probably removing the most fragile/valuable ornaments first) but still have a tree — but would that summon the carpenters or count as not putting up the tree, so it delays work until January?

I think I really like the book I just wrote. The heroine’s voice is a lot of fun because she’s really snarky, and one of her character traits is a tendency to blurt out something inappropriate when she’s stressed — she says the thing she’s thinking, and only realizes too late that she said it out loud. I like the town I created, and I’m intrigued by the supporting cast and the relationships that might develop along the way. I’m already figuring out ideas for the next book in the series. The plan is to have the second book just about ready to go before I launch book 1, so as soon as you finish reading book one, you can already pre-order book 2, with a teaser for book 2 at the end of book 1.

It seems my writing holiday may not last too long because the ideas are already spinning, but I do want to make it to the movies because there are several out right now that I want to see in theaters. And I’m rewatching the Star Wars movies to build up to the new one.

Meanwhile, I’m leading into the crazy time of the holiday season. Neighborhood tree lighting festival tomorrow night, choir rehearsal and children’s choir Wednesday, choir rehearsal Saturday mid-day, party Saturday night, cookie jamboree at church Sunday morning (for which I’ll have to bake cookies, probably Friday), two concerts I’m singing in on Sunday afternoon and evening, then a party Monday night. After that, things slow down a little. And then I’ll start revising the book, though I might start before then if I get ideas. And I’m kind of thinking of taking a mini vacation sometime during all this.

Thanksgiving Week

I’ll be taking the rest of the week off from posting, since it’s a holiday week and I’m trying to wrap up a book. Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers.

I’m close to the end, but I realized that I put something in a scene that makes it too obvious who the villain has to be. I need to move that scene later in the story because I think it’s going to be the heroine’s aha! moment. On the other hand, I figured out something about another character that makes her make more sense, so I need to add that.

I suppose I don’t have to meet my self-imposed deadline of a first draft by the end of the month, and I never officially signed up for National Novel Writing Month. But it is good discipline to force myself to keep up steady production. Oddly enough, it’s almost a break for me to do the 50,000 words in a month thing, since the daily quota to do that is about half what I usually write when I’m really into a book. I spend less time writing each day than I normally do during this push. The difference is that it forces me to make writing a priority and do it every day even when I don’t have a deadline. It serves as a reset of sorts to get me back into good working habits.

And I have about 1,700 words to get written today.

writing life

Needing Variety

I’ve made it to the point where my daily target word count has dropped below 2,000 words a day. I’m going to keep going over my target, so that count should drop a little bit every day. The real question now is whether I’ll get to the end of the story by the end of the month. I suspect it’s going to be a bit longer than I originally planned. And then I will end up cutting a lot of rambling in the middle.

I’m hoping to get a few books in this series written before I start releasing them, so I can get them out with some momentum and make more of a splash. But I’m not sure I can deal with writing the same characters and place back-to-back, and I don’t yet have a planned plot for the next book. So I guess we’ll see what strikes me as the next thing to work on. My problem is that I need variety. Writing the same thing all the time would drive me crazy. I have so many stories I want to tell. But the way to get momentum and build a following is to have a series.

That’s why I’m contemplating a series that’s more of a world series, with overlapping standalone stories. Then I could write book after book without getting too bored. But I need to get the current one launched and on its way before I get distracted by a different series.

I’ll be writing another scene set in my fictional Mexican restaurant today, but this time I’m prepared. I have ingredients for making enchiladas for dinner tonight.

writing

Hiding and Revealing Clues

I’ve been chugging along on this book, but now I’ve reached the point where I have to start moving toward solving this thing. I’ve spent so long trying to hide clues, and now I have to reveal them. This is where it gets tricky, trying to make things hard for my sleuth (and for readers) while still needing my sleuth to uncover things. One challenge I have is that the situation makes it hard for her to find and interview suspects, so I have to come up with ways for her to meet up with them.

Mysteries are a lot harder than they seem to write. It’s strange, the Enchanted, Inc. books were essentially mysteries, just without the dead bodies, but I don’t seem able to move what I was doing there over to this structure. I think there was less pressure to make things tricky there because the story wasn’t really about the “case.” It was about the magic and all the other stuff that was going on with the characters. I think, to some extent, that in a mystery series, readers follow it more because they like the characters and situation than for the actual mysteries, but to get readers to that point, the case in the first book has to be good. I just read the first book in a mystery series in which I liked the sleuth and the concept, but the case was handled so badly that I don’t think I’ll be reading any other books in the series.

What I’m having fun with is building a new “world” and creating new characters. That’s always been my favorite part of writing. The actual story and the plot have always been my challenge. It took me a long time to figure out what to do after I came up with a situation, a setting, and the characters.

I’m afraid Thanksgiving is going to kill my momentum, just as I’m getting close to the end. I guess I’ll just hole up in the guest room while everyone else is watching football.

Living in Magazine World

I’ve recently rediscovered the joy of magazines. I was a weird kid who, even as a very small child, loved reading my mother’s homemaking-type magazines, things like Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, etc. I could sit for hours, looking at the spreads of food, gardens, and interior decor. I imagined my dream home, planned imaginary parties, thought of how I’d decorate for Christmas when I had my own home.

When I became an adult, I used to have several magazine subscriptions, mostly from those deals where you can use your frequent flier miles to get magazines. I had miles from an airline I seldom used, so I used them for magazines. I ended up letting all the subscriptions lapse because I realized I wasn’t reading them and they just turned into clutter.

But a month or so ago, I got in the mood to read a magazine. I wanted something semi-mindless that wouldn’t get me sucked into a narrative. I discovered that I can get to a bunch of online editions of magazines through my library. Now I can flip through them to my heart’s content without having any clutter in my home. If there’s something I want to save, I can take a screenshot. I find that it’s soothing to look at pretty meals, nice houses, and lovely gardens, like it’s a window into an orderly, peaceful world. I’m trying to figure out what I want to do if I ever get a new house or decide to remodel this house, so I try the magazine spreads on for size to see what I like and don’t like. It’s also fun to imagine how my various characters might live.

For bedtime reading, I’m finding that a magazine is just what I need for those last minutes before I turn out the light. There’s no worry of getting caught up in a book and reading just one more chapter, and then another, and then another, and then having a restless night while my brain tries to finish it. I can drift off to sleep with visions of gardens and curtains. But since I don’t like to read from a screen just before I go to sleep, I’ve been buying old issues from the Friends of the Library rack at the library, where they sell them for 25 cents an issue, or 5 for a dollar. That’s my bedtime reading. I figure it amounts to a contribution to the library. Then if I find something I really like, I can clip it to add to my idea file, or I can cut out the recipes.

I will admit to a certain amount of mockery because there are some things that get a bit silly, like the article on how to do a tailgate picnic at the pumpkin patch, which requires a vintage station wagon and vintage plaid Thermoses to do it properly. Still, when the world seems to be descending into chaos, reading about how to host the perfect backyard tea party is rather reassuring.

writing

Imaginary Places

I’m getting close to the halfway point on the book I’m working on, but I realized after yesterday’s very productive writing session that I did something wrong with that scene. Today I’ll have to backtrack and rework it to move things in the right direction. I’m trying to figure out when to introduce a particular element that will move the plot forward dramatically but also complicate things for the main character. I think I moved part of it up way too quickly and need to add the other part first.

Meanwhile, I think I’ve fallen in love with my setting, which is a problem because it doesn’t actually exist. I believe there’s a particular word in one language (that I don’t recall) that translates to homesickness for a place you’ve never been. This is like that, except it’s a place I can never go. I created a fictional small town that’s very loosely based on a couple of actual towns. I stole some geography from two places and put them together to get what I wanted. Then I started adding the elements I needed for the story, along with giving the town a background that explained some of the things. The result is a town I would like to visit, maybe even live in.

There’s a “downtown” area with a main street and a couple of side streets built in those turn-of-the-century downtown-style buildings you see in a lot of Texas towns. Sadly, in a lot of these towns, those buildings are now empty or torn down. People try to start businesses there, but they don’t last long. If a business is doing well there, the building no longer meets its needs, so they end up building a newer building on the edge of town. But in my town, they’ve found businesses to go in these buildings and have even built apartments on the upper floors. The town’s in the process of turning around and finding a new identity after it almost withered away.

One of the businesses in my old downtown is a Mexican restaurant. Either it used to actually be a saloon or it looks like it because that’s the vibe it has. It has wooden floors and a pressed tin ceiling, a big bar at the back that’s now counter seating, and the traditional mirror behind the bar. The food is excellent, and it’s the town hang-out. Late last week and over the weekend I was writing a scene set in this restaurant. My main character’s been stuck in this town after a lot of things happen, including one of those sudden cold fronts that takes it from a pleasant morning to sleet by evening, and she walks to this restaurant, where she meets a lot of the other characters, since it’s one of the few places still open and a lot of the people who were in the vicinity of the murder have come there for dinner. That meant I spent days craving Mexican food, but the problem was that I wanted to go to this restaurant, which doesn’t actually exist.

Fortunately, there were tacquitos at a party I went to over the weekend, which eased the craving somewhat. And I found a recipe for cheese enchiladas that sounds like what I like, so I’m going to try making that this weekend.

There’s also a diner in town that’s in a remodeled old train car. That one is based on a restaurant I went to in Oklahoma, which is in an old train car. I somewhat modified it, but I liked the idea, and it fits with the town’s story.

Today I need to decide what kind of library they have and what its building looks like.

TV

Returning to Haven

Since I was reading Stephen King’s book on writing and was planning to write a paranormal mystery set in an odd little town, I got in the mood to re-watch Haven. This was a series on SyFy starting in 2010 that was very loosely based on Stephen King’s book The Colorado Kid. A slightly different version of the events in the book is the backstory for the TV series.

I’ve described this series as “Northern Exposure meets The X-Files.” An FBI agent gets sent to a small town in Maine on a case, and once she gets there, she discovers that the town is full of secrets, including people with odd abilities, and the town may be the key to learning about her own mysterious past. It starts as more of a paranormal procedural, with a case of the week involving the strange abilities, but it gradually becomes more arc-centric, as we learn more about the history and abilities of the FBI agent and what it has to do with the town, and there are also various factions in the town.

The budget for this show was apparently the change they found in their sofa cushions (when I met one of the writers and mentioned loving the series, he apologized), but it holds up pretty well, and I think they did really well with the resources they had. The writing is rather strong, and they managed to avoid a lot of tropes. The FBI agent doesn’t come into the small town with smug superiority, and the local cops work with her rather than treating her like an outsider, unlike almost any cop show in which a fed comes to a small town. She gets along really well with the local cop who ends up becoming her partner. They have disagreements at times, but they don’t fall into the obvious dualities, like her being the believer and him being the skeptic or him being by the books and her being a loose cannon. The positions they take in each case depend on the situation they’re dealing with, so any arguments are different in each episode rather than an ongoing retread of the same old thing.

It’s never really too intense or scary for wimpy me, though it can get creepy. I’d say it’s fun scary, the sort of thing to watch with the lights out and some candles for atmosphere. There’s a nice bit of humor and gorgeous scenery. Mostly, though, I love the characters. I’ve jokingly referred to it as “Katie and Owen become small-town cops in Maine” because the two main characters are similar to mine. Audrey, the main character, is snarky, mostly level-headed, has a lot of common sense, and seems to be immune to the freaky stuff that happens in the town. Nathan, the local guy who becomes her partner, is shy and a little nerdy while also being really bright and extremely capable.

It looks like it’s streaming on Netflix. I’ve got all the DVDs, but I haven’t watched them in ages and I’m having fun with this rewatch. I’m also getting ideas for what I want to do with the small town I’m creating. I’d love to be able to create a similar character vibe.

writing

Lessons from Stephen King

A book on writing and publishing I was reading mentioned a piece of Stephen King’s advice from his book On Writing, so I thought I’d check that out of the library and read the whole thing. I haven’t read a lot of Stephen King because I’m a massive weenie who can’t handle a lot of tension and who doesn’t like to be scared. I’ve read a collection of his short stories. I read The Dead Zone after starting to watch the TV series. Oddly, it wasn’t the spooky supernatural stuff that made that series too scary for me to watch all the way through. It was when the creepy politician became the focus that I got too freaked out. I guess it’s the same reason I can’t watch or read courtroom stories. I know vampires and monsters are fiction, but lawyers and politicians are real, and that’s truly scary. I also read The Colorado Kid, which was the (very loose) basis for the series Haven. He’s an incredibly talented writer, so even if I’m too chicken to read most of his work, I figured I had something to learn from him.

The first half of the book is essentially a memoir about how he came to be a writer. I came away from reading that with the sense that I’d actually like him a great deal if I met him. I might even need to give more of his books a shot because, from the sounds of things, I get what he’s trying to say, and it seems like the impression I have is more from the movies made from his books, which tend to take a very different perspective.

The second half gets into more how-to, at least how he approaches writing. I think my biggest practical takeaway is his advice that the second draft should be 10 percent shorter than the first draft, tightening it all up and getting rid of any flab. In my case, I would probably adapt that to say that after I think the book is done, I should do another pass to remove 10 percent. My first draft tends to be fairly bare bones, almost like a screenplay, so it’s mostly dialogue and action. There is some flab, certainly, since I tend to process things on paper, having the characters think about or talk about what they should do or have done, and once I’ve figured all that out, I can cut the process part. But I also have to add things like emotions and description. My second drafts usually involve cutting huge chunks and adding huge chunks. But after that, trying to trim 10 percent, whether it’s in whole passages or individual words, might be a really good exercise. He even has an example of how he edits a scene to show the kinds of things he cuts.

There’s also some good inspirational stuff that I need to keep in mind when I get discouraged about the business that comes with writing. The quote I probably need to embroider on a throw pillow is: “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.”

Now maybe I need to try more of his novels. Any suggestions for weenie-safe Stephen King books?