Tag Archives: plot elements

Near the end-end

14 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized, Wisdom Court, Writing

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Portrait of crazy stressed young business woman screaming and pulling her hair over white background

No lick and a promise this time. I’ve sent All In Bad Time (Wisdom Court Book III) to beta readers for reactions and commentaries. Until I get feedback, I’m trying to clean up my work area and find and file all the scraps of paper decorating my study.
And how’s your summer going?

The problem with being sort of done with a book is the limbo left behind. I’m still thinking about plot points, still dreaming about scenes, and definitely still waiting to see what kind of comments I get. That’s the scariest part. During all the times I feel I was delusional to become a writer, I’m most convinced when I first show the tender shoots of my prose to someone else. (Can you tell I don’t work with a critique group?) Then I start dreaming about specific words to replace others, curse the plot points I didn’t stress in the “final” draft, and up the amount of antacid to deal with the ball of lead in my gut. Good times.

So, why do I continue to write? I have reasons, most psychiatric, but secretly I yearn for the moments when the world of my book gets several pieces from the universe, all at once. I love the joy of figuring out plot snarls, even as I peer over the edge of the abyss called Stuck In Space. I’m a total sucker for the rare and beautiful moments when characters talk and I just record what they say. I’ve never found any other way but writing to stumble into those highs.

Now, as I have to pretend I live in the real world, my hopes for you writers out there are these: may your words flow smoothly; may you enjoy your work in progress; may you finish with real satisfaction; and, of course, may your work hit the bestseller lists.

Cheers!

 

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Is my brain big enough? Why can’t I concentrate–squirrel!

19 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by in Writing

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portrait of beautiful young woman sitting at dark reflecting table touching head temples with handsHuman intelligence puzzle represented by a blue glowing maze and labyrinth in the shape of a human head representing the concept and symbol of the complexity of brain thinking and thought patterns as a challenging problem to solve by medical doctors.

Twice I have written the second novel in a series. The second Finny Aletter book, Obstacle Course, was a creature from hell to write for several reasons, primary among them that I was still a novice writer and was flung about like feathers in a fan factory. A Signal Shown, the second Wisdom Court book, was simultaneously the most difficult and most personal book I’ve ever written. One of the characters in it died of Alzheimer’s Disease, as did my mother. Enough said.

Now I am swinging a machete through the jungle of the third Wisdom Court book, All In Bad Time. While I have had glorious moments of communion with my characters, I also have a yard sale’s worth of details from the two previous books to braid along with the new and improved elements of this one. My haunted house is filled with wonderful women who have back stories, dreams and ambitions, complaints and attitude. They’ve also dropped a shitload of info along the way. I have a large flow chart (thanks again, Christine Jorgensen) but I’m staggering about, tripping over plot devices. Sacre dieu! (I say this as I shake my fist at the sky. French classes up frustration and the garret could use some class.)

But today a couple of different questions occurred to me: Is my brain big enough for this? Why has my concentration span shrunk to the size of a rare Rumanian stamp?

These are philosophical questions and don’t belong in a rant about writing. But…some legitimacy lies in asking them. Brain size is an important issue and I modestly point out that I have written a bunch of words, some of them arranged into novels. The arranging itself required a great deal of concentration. Thus past history would indicate both sufficient brain size and adequate attention span.

So why am I sprawled on the jungle path? Could it be the huge, crouching plot element that keeps tripping me? The one I keep hacking at with my dulling machete? Possibly. Do I long to succumb to the lures of gardening if it would, for just one day, stop raining? (Sacre dieu!) More than likely. Have large earth-moving machines and leaf blowers been singing the Hallelujah Chorus outside my window everyday for at least two weeks, accompanied by the whine of radial saws at the construction site down the block? Definitely. Do I have control over any of these things except the hulking plot element? In a word, no.

I have come to a conclusion. I must befriend my gargantuan plot element. I must love and care for it. Then, when I’ve lulled it into a false sense of security, I will gently prune its more irritating branches, enabling it to fit snugly into the existing–SQUIRREL!

And here I thought I knew everything…

25 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in NaNoWriMo, Writing

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Well, it’s been an interesting November so far. I’ve learned several things by trying NaNoWriMo for the first time. Biggest one is that it doesn’t work for me. I do have thousands of words written but I discovered a basic truth about the way I write: I go nuts if I don’t start each session with a brief edit of what I wrote the day before.

That may seem a small thing, but when I finally gave in to the desire to go back, take another look–rewrite, for God’s sake–my forward momentum died an ugly death. I was becalmed in my little sailboat of a writing routine and couldn’t catch any wind to return to the race. My focus had become fixed on piling up words, not discovering the heart of them. I kept finding half-thoughts tripping over each other, the kind of plot issues that don’t become a problem if you find them and deal with them every day. (Well, sometimes they sure as hell do, we all know that, but if your ears are filled with the ticking of the clock, it’s harder to deal with.) I floundered around for a while, fell into a pit of despair over an unsolvable plot snarl, and threw up my hands…and nearly my lunch. Ugly, my friends, ugly.

And then came the dawn. I would do what I always do (no, not try to take over the world, Pinky and the Brain fans.) I’d continue writing, I’d try to speed up a bit, but not at the expense of the incremental editing that appears to jump-start my brain. At the end of November I will add up all the words (and post them on Twitter and/or here, since I never actually signed up for NaNoWriMo.) And I’ll keep going until I’ve finished the book. And then I’ll go through the manuscript again and again until I’m ready to show it to readers.

I was really hoping the pressure of NaNoWriMo would bulldoze me through the slow patches. Came to find out the slow patches are where my writing happens.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Hair-tearing insanity in NaNoWriMo

10 Monday Nov 2014

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Okay, remember how I tweeted that you should never look back at the earlier pages? I have a very mother of a plot snarl & my tired brain is scurrying around like a trapped badger trying to figure a way out. I’ve got words written on three different chapters but the totals don’t mean anything until I get a coherent narrative strung together. I think I’ve found a way, but I’m going to sleep on it to be sure.

The biggest difficulty is that what I’m working on is the third book of the series–three dimensional chess in fiction form. The details come from all three books and I’m struggling to braid everything together. The first two books are published so I can’t change anything in them. So I’m eyeball to eyeball with a couple of plot points that must be manicured a bit. And I’m mixing metaphors like a Fiction 101 Cuisinart.

I will sleep, perchance to dream up some answers to these highly irritating questions. And then I’ll preen at my genius. Right? (Cricket chirping.) RIGHT?

You know those words I was talking about…?

06 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by in Ghosts, Gothic, Hauntings, Mysteries, Wisdom Court, Writing

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Gentle readers, today I’ve been in a swirl of words, not all of them having to do with NaNoWriMo. Not only am I writing Wisdom Court Book 3, All In Bad Time, but I’m also marketing and publicizing the first two Wisdom Court Books: Edge of the Shadow, and A Signal Shown. (This while falling short in the promotion of my two mysteries, Scavenger Hunt, and Obstacle Course. My bad.)

This is the day Edge of the Shadow has been featured on EReader News Today, and I’ve been sharing that fact through Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin. Once again I’ve noted that my Wisdom Court books carry a lot of labels. There are a lot of different elements in my books and they come from different genres.

All of the books I’ve written have been categorized as cross-genre. That means several things, some complimentary, some not. Historically books have been sold by genre, meaning bookshelf space given to them is ideally in a specific bookstore location. Mysteries with mysteries, romances with romances, paranormal with paranormal, etc. It gets murkier with mainstream novels, which get away with including various aspects under the umbrella of mainstream. Whatever that means.

The stories I like to tell myself involve more than one template. In the case of the Wisdom Court books the two things that intrigued me in the initial phases were first, the idea of a woman getting what she’d always wanted most, the chance to be totally supported for a year while she worked to make her biggest dream come true. Second, to observe the relationship among the five or six women living at Wisdom Court while they all got to be stars. The protagonist meets a lovely man. So, women’s fiction with an element of romance.

But then I began to wonder about paranormal events getting in the way of such an idyllic set-up. A problem that must be solved. Mystery, right? My belief that our memories and regrets are like ghosts haunting us as we age had me wanting those women forced to deal with scary supernatural stuff while they were supposed to be setting the world on fire during their year at Wisdom Court. Paranormal, supernatural, Gothic, horror, ghost story.

Thanks to the rise of independent publishing, I’ve been able to get the Wisdom Court books into print (POD) and on-line as ebooks. But as for promoting them, the old rules apply, because readers want to read what they like. So here’s my challenge to those of you who’ve read Edge of the Shadow and/or A Signal Shown. How would you describe them? How many genres would you have to mention to let readers know what they’re getting? I’d really be interested in having you weigh in. Thanks.

 

Book Beginnings: Plot threads, part one

12 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by in e-books, Ghosts, Hauntings, Uncategorized, Writing

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997995-097For me a book begins with a kernel of an idea I need to explore.  My soon-to-be published e-book, Edge of the Shadow, sparked into life when I read an article about the MacArthur Awards, the genius grants.  Six accomplished individuals had been chosen to receive a healthy chunk of money, though I don’t remember exactly how much.  A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand?  Whatever.  Point was, these people had been writing, creating, researching things the MacArthur Foundation considered interesting and worthy of encouragement.  No strings attached, no required reports of how the money was used, the foundation just gave them money.  I loved that idea.

Because I tend to write books with female protagonists, I thought how cool it would be to award similar grants to six not yet well-known women.  And because I’ve always liked what I call Grand Hotel books, (get a bunch of people in a place and observe their interactions, named after the movie of the same name), I decided to create a women’s institute where these characters could interact to their hearts’ content.  It eventually came to be called Wisdom Court, a play on the founder’s name–Wyntham–and its architecture–three structures with a fountain in the middle of a courtyard.

Then the characters started arriving, and they brought with them their luggage and back stories, and the details of the endeavors that had captured the attention of the Wisdom Court selection committee.  Noreen had recently retired from her job as the headmistress of a private girls school and was compiling a book of quotations strictly by women.  Dolores was a sculptor putting together an exhibition.  And the main protagonist, Andrea, was a forensic artist who wanted to paint.  (The others will get their due in another post.)

I liked the women, and the institute, which I placed in my home town, Boulder, Colorado.  But in my life the past and present dance together, and the story I wanted to tell myself had to include that element.  I wanted to know what would happen when a likeable, deserving woman had her chance to get what she really wanted but was stymied by a strange confluence of events.  What would happen if this wonderful institute was affected by the lingering traces of those who’d lived there before?  What if Wisdom Court was haunted?

Okay, we can throw some confetti around, but hold the flashmob

14 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by in Random Thoughts, Writing

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Yesterday–Friday the 13th–I crossed the finish line, slid into home plate, delivered the secret message to the troops–unfortunately the cliches keep coming.  I don’t know if anyone noticed, but I stopped writing posts, kept my FB appearances to a minimum, attached the electroencephalograph sensors to my head, and got to the end of the book.  (Throw confetti here.)

Yes, I have to wander backward to fix some bits here and there–set up a couple of plot elements that don’t show up until the middle, don’t you know–but I got to the last page.  I got to type THE END at the bottom, and sit here and think, “Is that all there is?”  (It’s been a long time since I finished a book by bursting into tears and calling all my friends.)  But I did Tweet & put a brief mention on FB.  Some attention must be paid.

It wasn’t till later that I poured a glass of wine and toasted the gods of writing.  And felt thankful for being a writer instead of a wealthy financier.  (I’m stupid that way.) Today I’m re-potting some plants and enjoying the warmth ahead of the storm headed our way.  I won’t look at the last chapter until Monday.  I’ll start putting in the set-ups and checking for mistakes. If the writing gods are merciful, it will be a quick run-through.  If they aren’t…I’ll jump off that bridge when I get there.