May 2007 Archives

One of my characters in my work-in-progress drinks Coke and salted peanuts. Not having ever made this southern treat myself, I Googled it and found this video. I don't think this guy is from the south, but he's kinda cute. I swear, you can find anything on the Internet! Coke And Peanuts

I know I'm in countdown phase now because I am living, drinking and eating this story. I have pages in front of me at mealtime, it's my before-sleep reading material, and I've set up permanent residence at the computer. Yesterday I was in front of the desktop from sun-up (slight exaggeration--I'm never anywhere at sun-up) until about 7, at which time I realized that if I continue re-writing this draft as I have been, adding details and deepening the characters, the book is going to be too long.  I'm contracted to write books of 100,000 + words. That roughly translates into 400 manuscript pages.  My books usually run 425-500 manuscript pages.  If I continue as I have been on this one, it will easily top 500 and I think that's too long. Sometimes a story demands that length, but I don't think this one does and I need to be more judicious in my editing. Easier said than done. At the same time that I realized I was going over length, I hit a place in the story that wasn't working for me structurally. It made me panic. I expect to have numerous mini-panic attacks during these few weeks before the July 1 deadline, but knowing I will have them and enduring them are two different things. I reminded myself this is the challenge I love--figuring out how to make a story work. I took the 180 pages I've re-written so far onto the porch to read as a reader would so I could see the flow. (An aside: I know I've mentioned this a zillion times, but I adore finally having a porch! It has a ceiling fan and I stretched out on the faux-wicker sofa and read until midnight, listening to the barred owl hooting in the woods behind my house and the deer [at least I hope they were deer] snapping twigs as they nibbled their way through my yard. By then a lot of itty bitty critters had found their way through the gap in the screen door and were flying around, but I didn't care. It was soooo lovely out there!)                     As I read, I discovered a few things: the pace, structure and characterization of those first 180 pages work; some of the writing is excellent; a couple of things made me laugh (rare in my books); and some of the writing was wretched. I had a pen in my hand and wrote blechhhh! next to those parts, which was my reaction to reading them and which will let me know where I still have work to do.  After reading that chunk of the book, I have a good sense of how to tweak the structure, and that's what I'll work on today. Now, for any guys who have read this long post looking for the information promised in the subject line: size really doesn't matter.  Not to the sort of women who read my books, anyway.

Since I've started reporting on my work-in-progress as I head toward deadline, I realize I'm blogging later and later at night and rambling more and more. Hope you don't mind. Tonight's subject, which I know i'll be revisiting from time to time is Men. When friends read the early drafts of my first novel, PRIVATE RELATIONS, there was one common theme to their comments: my women characters sounded like women social workers (duh. . . i wonder why) and my male characters sounded like women social workers, too.  Hmm. I was probably letting my "fantasy man" come out in my writing. You know that guy--he's incredibly handsome, sexy, sensual, strong and masculine, and he's also deeply in touch with his feelings and can express them openly and insightfully. Yeah, right. It's an unrealistic and unfair expectation and sets both men and women up for disappointment. This is on my mind tonight because I was writing from Marcus's point of view. I try to be careful to be more realistic about my male characters now (though I admit my guys are still pretty darn nice.) Marcus is kind of macho and not so comfortable talking about feelings. And that's fine. He'd also give you the shirt off his back, risk his own life for that of a stranger and knows the meaning of the word integrity. I like him quite a lot. So, continuing in my rambling vein, here's why I'm worried about men: I believe that we've gone so far to raise women up that we've knocked men down. Before you throw tomatoes at me, I am a feminist, in that I care deeply about women's rights and in some arenas (pay, for one example. I could cite many more) women still have a long way to go. But I care about men, too. I'm not talking about power; men still have it and women are still fighting for it. But from a sociological perspective, men are on the way down. Go to your local Hallmark store and look at the light-hearted cards. Count up how many make men look like buffoons versus how many make women look like buffoons. Check out commercials on TV; it seems to be fashionable to make the women look knowledgable and strong at the expense of their doddering hubbies or love interests. What message does this send to little boys (and girls)? Why does one gender have to lose for the other to win? So bringing this back to writing. . . . I like that I can create worlds where men and women struggle with life's challenges together, where I can express both realism and idealism in creating those worlds, and where happy endings are not dependent on someone losing so someone else can win. If only real life could be so simple.  

I'm cookin', y'all! I finally made it past that backstory chapter that was really holding me up. I managed to cut four pages from twenty. It probably needs even more tightening, but I'll catch it on the next draft. I reworked two chapters over the weekend and by the time I go to bed tonight, I should have two more finished. What I've been thinking about today are my characters' voices and the challenge of making sure each voice is unique to that character.  My four central characters are all in first person in my work-in-progress. In the past few days, I've written from Laurel's point-of-view, then Maggie's, then Marcus's and now Laurel's again. In a couple more chapters, I'll be writing from Andy's voice once more. This is both fun and hard work. I want a reader to be able to read a page or two from any chapter and know which character's POV they're in because the voice is that distinctive. Let me introduce you to them. Laurel is 41 and well-educated. Here's a paragraph from one of her chapters: There was only one stoplight on the twenty-six miles of Topsail Island. It sat a block from the beach in the heart of Surf City and it glowed red when my car approached it and was still red when I left it behind. If there'd been a dozen red lights, they wouldn't have stopped me. People always told me I was a determined woman and I was never more so than the night of the fire. Maggie is 17 and will soon graduate from high school. Here's her voice:  I’d talked Mom into letting Andy go to the lock-in that night. He was fifteen; she had to let go a little and besides, Emily’s mother was one of the chaperones. I hoped he was having a good time and remembering his manners. His grip on social etiquette was pretty lame. Would they have dancing at the lock-in? It cracked me up to imagine Andy and Emily dancing together. Marcus is 38, and a career firefighter: I sort of understood arson. I was the kind of kid who played with matches and I once set our shed on fire when we lived in Wilmington. I tried to blame it on Jamie, but my parents knew their saintly older son was incapable of such stupidity. I don't remember my punishment. Just the initial thrill of watching Dad's oily rags explode into flame on his work bench, then my terror as the fire began to spread. So I got it – the thrill, the excitement. But damn it, if some asshole had to start a fire, why a church filled with kids? And finally, my darling Andy, 15, with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Me and Emily were in the same special reading class two days a week. I'd known her my whole life almost, and she was my best friend. People said she was funny looking because she had white hair and one of her eyes didn’t look at you and she had a scar on her lip from an operation when she was a baby, but I thought she was pretty. Mom said I saw the whole world through the eyes of love. Next to Mom and Maggie, I loved Emily best. But she wasn’t my girlfriend. Definitely not. So there you have it. Four different voices. At least I hope they sound different to you. And now I'd better get back to one of them if I have any hope of making it to bed tonight.     

I thought I'd continue in the murderous vein, since that's how I'm feeling at the moment. I'm still working on the blankety-blank backstory chapter. That's because, after two solid hours of rewriting, I hit "close file," the computer asked if it should "save changes?" and some sadistic spirit took hold of my fingers and clicked "no." I thought I was safe because I have WordPerfect set up to save once every minute, but apparently that's only good if your computer accidentally shuts down. If you're dumb enough to click "no" to the "save changes?" question, it decides you're not worth the effort to back up your file.  I back up everything onto a flash drive at the end of each day. At three am every morning, my entire C drive is saved to an external hard drive. All this in addition to saving my work-in-progress every minute as I work on it.  Nothing, though, can save me from myself. Of course, what I wrote during those two hours was simply the most brilliant prose I'll every write! I've tried to recreate it, but it will never be as good. I finally took a break and babysat my grandsons for a couple of hours this evening, which was exactly what I needed. Before my stepdaughter and son-in-law left, my stepdaughter took the baby inside to nurse, while I pushed NJ, the three-year-old on the swing. He kept saying "Grammy Di, bump your head!" So I jumped around in my gimpy way, hitting my head with my knuckles and making him laugh. It took me about 30 minutes to realize he was really saying "Grammy Di, pump your breasts!" Cracked me up. So it's 10:35. I will not go to bed until this chapter is finished or I'll have one of those "can't find my classroom and I'm late and haven't studied for the exam" dreams again tonight. Hugs, all. Sleep tight.

This morning at Starbucks, I saw my friend Maureen Sherbondy. She and her laptop are a fixture at the local Opium Den. She's a poet and a short story writer, and she is really cranking on a novel. She makes me feel like a slacker, she works so hard. We had one of our usual conversations: Maureen: I had to kill her. Me: Yeah, I know what you mean. How did you do it? Maureen: She bled to death. I think it was because she once had a polyp removed. Me: Good one. Mine had placenta previa and since I'd kidnaped her and stuck her in a cabin with a teenaged girl who had no idea how to help her, she bled to death, too. We continued in that vein for a while, while nearby customers  quietly gathered their things and moved to seats far away from us. I guess we should be glad no one called the police. So, I'm still working on this backstory chapter. I've cut some parts, but I also realized I needed to add a scene during which Laurel bonds with Jamie's brother, Marcus. That's what I'm working on tonight. I did take a break to watch a cute movie with John, who returned this evening from Kansas where he was directing a trade show film about ethanol plants. (I'm learning more than I ever wanted to know about ethanol). Anyway, the movie was Kinky Boots, a British flick about a shoe factory that's about to go under until the owner decides to make boots for transvestites. Can you just imagine a screenwriter pitching that idea to a producer? LOL. It's one of those tame little movies with a feel-good ending and some gently delivered moral messages, but it went off in a few unpredictable directions which made it fun and, at one or two points, poignant. I give it three lighthouses. Now, back to my bonding scene.

Since I had a doc's appointment this morning, I went to my second favorite Opium Den to work, which is closer to the doctor's office. I spent a couple of hours there working on some of the backstory of my WIP, and three people I know from my local Opium Den (Starbucks, to the uninitiated) popped in, one at a time, throughout the morning. It's like a sickness. An addiction. We roam from Starbucks to Starbucks throughout the town. Anyhow, that means I spent too much time talking and not enough time working. Once I got home, I got down to business. I love backstory. Always have. I think it comes from having been a therapist--knowing someone's psychological and social background is sometimes essential to understanding what's going on with him or her now. (I have to add, because this is a pet argument of mine, that it is not always necessary in therapy to know the origin of a problem. Sometimes delving into the past can be a waste of time and money and completely unecessary to affect change. But I digress). As I was saying, I'm working on the first section of the backstory, when the mother in my story, Laurel, meets her now deceased husband, Jamie. The chapter's too long and needs to be tightened, but I feel as though I'm trying to fit a king-sized quilt into a a bag designed for a twin. I get one end in, but the other end pops out. So now it's 11:33pm, and I'm still working on it. I like it though. I adore Jamie. He's a good guy. Too bad I have to kill him. I'm afraid I'm a little punchy from working on this chapter so long today! It's very hot in my office, but I have the AC turned off and the windows open because I love listening to the frogs outside. They have so many different songs. Together, they sound like an old man snoring in a deep and peaceful sleep.  I think I'm going to take the knife to this chapter one more time before going to bed. Maybe an axe. More tomorrow. . . .

Okay, now this is either very courageous of me or very stupid. Time will tell which. My deadline for BEFORE THE STORM is July 1, so I plan to post my progress here to keep me on task. Here's where I stand as of this moment: I have a complete (well, almost) draft of the manuscript and am working on the second (in some cases, third) draft. The reason I say almost is because there are still a few scenes that I simply can't get down without more research. As a matter of fact, right now research seems to be my big stumbling block. Hard to believe, because I've already done so much! But it's one thing, for example, to talk with the Fire Marshal  in Surf City, madly scribbling notes as he gives me information. It's another thing to work that information into a cohesive scene. When I hit a place where I have to do more research, I leave two asterisks behind: **  Then I plow ahead so I don't get stuck. (A slightly more sophisticated version of the "Pass" maneuver I posted about a while back.) Later, when I'm ready to pull my questions together, I just do a "search" on all the **s. And there are a lot of them in the two chapters I worked on today! I may ask Fire Marshal Bogan to actually read those chapters at some point because no matter how carefully I write them, I'm going to screw up the fire fighting material. Another personal trick of the trade I employed tonight was my favorite: when stuck, go to Goodberry's Frozen Custard and get a double chocolate cone! It was a perfect night for it. Half the universe was there, enjoying the gorgeous spring night air, devouring their concretes and cones. I came back refreshed and renewed and finished the chapter I was working on. Now it's closing in on midnight. I'm going to turn in and read a little. I'm currently reading Lionel Shriver's WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. Wow, she's a good writer. It's very dense, though. Not for every taste. I'm engrossed, though. Night all.  

As I go deeper into the rewrite of my current Work-in-Progress, BEFORE THE STORM, I find myself thinking about the book I'll write when this one is finished. It's as though my brain needs to have two tracks going at one time: the rewrite uses the organizational, fine-tuning track, while the yet-to-be-written book uses the free-flowing creative track. I like both parts. Many years ago, I signed a $7,000 contract for my second book before I had a clue what it would be about. I thought: I'm being paid $7,000 for NOTHING! It was actually kind of scary. I'd already been given a chunk of the money. Could I produce the book? Could I create something from nothing? Clearly, I managed to do so and have done so fifteen times since then. I always have false starts when I begin thinking of ideas, but I seem to need those early attempts, as they ultimately lead me to the story I want to write and the characters I want to write about. The ideas I'm getting now may see the light of day at some point, or they may simply be my next false start. Either way, I like having them in the back of my mind as I work on the current WIP. They let me know I still have the ability to create something from nothing. I hope I always do.

First, I went to the crimewriters' dinner meeting, which was great.  Then I came home and was looking through some old pictures I want to hang up and found this pic, above. This is me on the deck of an old round oceanfront cottage in South Nags Head on the Outer Banks. The picture's from the late eighties. The house was on the market for 75K, low even at that time because it was doomed to be taken by the next storm or the one after that. The septic tanks were often the first to go in those old beachfront homes. Once that happened, the tank couldn't be replaced and the house would no longer be habitable. My ex and I toyed with the idea of buying it, gambling on how much rent we could collect from vacationers before the sea took it, but we were just fantasizing. Which was a good thing, because the house was gone the next time I made it to the Outer Banks. All that is to say that this is the house that inspired my Work-in-Progress. The Sea Tender, the old condemned oceanfront cottage that used to be home to my characters Andy, Maggie and their mom, Laurel, is based on the house above. So tonight I scanned the picture into Adobe Photoshop and turned the house into The Sea Tender! I'm no artist, so my perspective is not so hot, but I love having this picture to inspire me as I write. (This took me HOURS to do! My mouse hand is about to fall off, but it was a fun break from writing).      

. . . or how I spent my Saturday night. I can't complain. I'd already been to a baby shower and a Kentucky Derby party (at which I won $50!) by the time this charming pic was taken by my photographer in residence. I am half in my jammies. The dog blanket is a mess. I'm on my second bottle of water. I'm listening to the beautiful soundtrack from Les Choristes. And having a good time! Truly. I'm going through the messy draft of my Work-in-Progress, working on the order of scenes (particularly looking at the best places to insert backstory), putting the dates of every scene into a calendar for '06 (the year the story takes place), adding to my never-ending list of items needing further research, figuring out how old each character is in all the backstory pieces, etc. The zillion pieces of paper around me have the following headings: Research; Backtrack (this list is still very long, as I keep discovering ideas I want to plant earlier in the story, which is why I've never been one of those writers who can polish as she goes); What's Missing?; Revelations; Dates (of birth, death and significant events); Slang (of the geographic area, of teens); and finally, a separate sheet for each character so I keep his or her looks, interests, and deepest, darkest feelings straight. Have I already told you I snitch pictures from Match.com for my characters? That seems slightly . . . I don't know. . . creepy? Unethical? I hope not. It's a great way to get Real Faces as opposed to those I used to cut out of magazines. Reading people's Match.com profiles also helps me learn what, say, a thirty-year-old guy in a NC beach community might do for fun, or what kind of job a forty-year-old woman in the same community might have. John found it a bit worrisome that I was still checking out people on Match.com (where he and I met), until he realized what I was doing. I also snitch pictures of my characters' houses from Realtors.com. Now you know all my dirty little writing secrets!      

As most of you know, I've written several books set in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Now John (my significant other) and two other photographers are going to teach a photography workshop there in October, focusing on historic lighthouses of the Outer Banks. I can't wait to tag along. I'll be smack in the middle of another North Carolina beach book then, so while he and his fellow instructors, Margo and Arnie, are working with their students, I'll be curled up with my laptop, breathing in salt air and typing away. I'm mentioning this because many of my readers have told me how drawn they feel to the Outer Banks after reading my books set there. If you're one of those people and are also into digital photography, you might want to check out the website for the Barefoot Contessa Photo Adventures' Outer Banks lighthouse tour. I'll be there!

Mary Alice is here! Last night, John and I accompanied her to her booksigning at our local Borders. This week is the end of her tour for her latest book, SWIMMING LESSONS. She must be exhausted after weeks of travel, but you'd never know it by the energetic way she interacts with a bunch of fans.  Tonight, we'll do some brainstorming together on our latest Works-in-Progress. The first time we plotted together was at an Indian restaurant and it's a fond memory for both of us, so I'm going to find an Indian restaurant in Raleigh and see if we can re-create the magic.