November 2007 Archives

My brother Rob's latest novel, SUCH A KILLING CRIME, was just translated into Italian and he emailed my sibs and myself a computer translation of the first paragraph to see how it looked. Well, those of you who have used the internet translation programs know they are imperfect, and his first paragraph was pretty funny. I often use Babelfish to translate email I receive in other languages (most often, French, Finnish, or Italian). The translations are so poor they make me laugh, but they at least give me the gist of what the writers are trying to tell me. The translation allows me to respond to them in an English email, which they no doubt translate and laugh over in their own language. Rob's experience prompted me to translate the first paragraph of my La Baia a Mezzanotte (THE BAY AT MIDNIGHT) from the Italian to English. Of course, a good translator never makes a word-for-word translation, but it's still fun to see how Babelfish interpreted the start of chapter one.   For reference, here is the first paragraph of THE BAY AT MIDNIGHT in English:

All children make mistakes. Most of those errors in judgment are easily forgotten but some of them are too enormous, too devastating, to ever fully disappear from memory. The mistake I made when I was twelve still haunted me at fifty-three. Most of the time, I didn't think about it, but there were days when something happened that brought it all back to me in a rush, that filled me with the guilt of a twelve-year-old who had known better and that made me wish I could return to the summer of 1962 and live it over again.

And Babelfish's translation: All the children commit of the mistakes. The greater part of these comes easy forgotten, but some are too much large, too much devastatni in order to disappear never of all from the memory. The error that I had store clerk to twelve years still tormented me to cinquantatre. For the greater part of the time I did not think to us. But there were days in which capitava something that in a flash brought back me all to the mind, than it overwhelmed me of the sense of guilt of a dodicenne aware of to have mistaken and it made to wish me of being able to return indetro to the summer of 1962 and to live again it an other time. I think it will be a while before machines take the place of human interpretors!

I'm being facetious. A romance writing acquaintance, Brenda Hiatt, gathered information on the advances and royalties paid to romance writers she surveyed over the past seven years. If you're curious, click here. It's quite an eye opener. With a very few exceptions, it's clear that these women (and men) write for the love of writing! It's not much different--if at all--in the rest of the writing world. If you're working on a novel, don't quit your day job. At least not yet.

I can't count how many of you have asked me about the dedication in my book, KISS RIVER, over the years. The dedication reads "For Haseena and the other waiting children." You wanted to know who Haseena was. I told you that she was a little girl in India whom my writer friend Sharon and her husband were trying to adopt. It was Sharon and Haseena's story that inspired the international adoption struggle in KISS RIVER, as Gina fought to adopt Rani. I always hoped that Sharon and Haseena's story would have the happy ending I envisioned for Gina and Rani, but it wasn't to be.  Sharon and John's trip to India to bring Haseena home coincided with an anti-adoption movement in that country. Sharon remained in India for more than a year, seeing Haseena every day at the orphanage, as she fought in the courts to bring her home. Finally, Haseena was moved to another orphanage and Sharon's access to her was cut off. To this day, she doesn't know what became of the little girl she'd come to think of as her daughter. But Sharon and John's story doesn't end there. This week, Sharon sent me a link to an article in the San Jose Mercury News. The article was about "Adoption Day" in the Santa Clara courthouse, where Sharon and John were able to finalize the adoption of three children--a brother and sister from Ethiopia and a little girl from India. Sharon gave me permission to share the link to this video with you. She didn't even realize the video was being made, but what a wonderful keepsake she has now! I am so happy for all five of them. So for those of you who've asked me whatever became of Haseena, I have to say that I don't know but I hope that she is thriving and happy. But I do know that these three other children are no longer "waiting."   

Well, my dogsitter Brenda had yet another BAY AT MIDNIGHT surprise for me. She noted that one of the characters in the book drives a white beetle convertible. So, since she happened to have one lying around her house (her husband reburbishes cars), she came over to take me for a spin. That's Brenda in the driver's seat. We bundled up and she took me on a tour of the neighborhoods north of me -- neighborhoods I didn't even know were there. I really must get out more! We drove by a bunch of hockey players' houses as well as Clay Aiken's gated community. Brenda gave me a history lesson about the land as well. It was great fun! Today (Sunday) I finished putting together the reader discussion questions that will go in the back of BEFORE THE STORM.  Tomorrow, it's back to work on AFTER THE STORM. Hope y'all have had a great weekend.  

Here are the scenes for my Work-in-Progress, spread out on my dining room table. Three main characters each have a point of view (the white, purple and blue cards). The hot pink cards are scenes from the point of view of a fourth, less significant, character. The green cards represent a first person account of the past from yet a fifth character. Hmm, as I describe it, this  book is looking like quite the ambitious undertaking! However, I think it will be seamless once it's written. At least, that will be my goal. One of the great things about using different colors for each character's POV is that I can see in a heartbeat when one character or another is hijacking the story. I can also see if I have too much of one character's POV in a row, so that the other characters get lost. And I can see who's missing. It's quite obvious that Hot Pink's POV has "gone missing" in the second half of the book. I don't want that, so I will take a look at the scenes and see if any of them would work better from her POV.  At the same time, I don't want to manipulate the story simply to make the color pattern prettier! That's a slippery slope. I need to work very quickly on this book. With a looming deadline and the inevitable interruption of holidays, it's going to be rough, but I'm enjoying writing the continuation of BEFORE THE STORM in this new story. I'm off to book club this evening to feed the creative well. We read LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE. What a delight!

My dogsitter was up in New Jersey and took a side trip to see my old family bungalow, the setting in THE BAY AT MIDNIGHT. She was sweet enough to take pictures for me. As my sister said when I emailed her the pictures: "it makes me both happy and sad." The bungalow and canal behind it were very special parts of our childhoods.                    

I'm going to miss my favorite TV shows as much as the next person, but I support the writers' strike. Why? Because I'm a writer and the same issues that affect screenwriters also affect--or will in the near future--all writers. If you're interested in understanding what the screenwriters are fighting for, this simple YouTube video provides a good explanation. Just as the vast majority of novelists don't make the income of Nora Roberts or Stephen King, the vast majority of screenwriters don't make the income of the writers of Lost or Desperate Housewives. The Internet is incredible. I'm not sure how I survived without it. But it's very quickly thrown all of the creative arts into a new world that's both full of promise and danger. Unless we figure out now how to protect our rights, none of us will be able to afford to "create" any longer.

If you're not a novelist, I bet the subject heading looks like Greek to you! Those who've read my blog for a while know that WIP means Work-in-Progress, but what is a Pantser? Novelists fall into two general camps: Pantsers and Plotters. Pantsers write "by the seat of their pants." They avoid outlines and anything else that--for them--takes the magic out of creating a story. They trust in the process and go with the flow. How I envy them! Plotters outline. They also know their characters inside out and backwards before they even type the words Chapter One. They use a calendar to keep track of the action in their stories. They cut out pictures that remind them of their characters. If you've followed my blog for any length of time, you know I'm a plotter. I'm not as obsessive as I used to be in the days when I created pictorial storyboards and filled notebooks with character sketches. (Probably my most over-the-top plotting activity occurred during the writing of my second novel. To begin with, I waaaay over-researched that book; I still had a lot to learn about storytelling. The story involved primatologists studying a fictional type of tiny monkey (like this irresistable pygmy marmoset) in the Amazon Jungle. I learned everything there was to know about the species, and tried to cram every fact into the story. And not only did I plot out every relationship between the characters, but all the relationships between the monkeys as well! Guess what? My readers really didn't care about which monkey was attached to which. This wasn't my best book, although I did discover how to create suspense by slowly revealing information to my reader, and that discovery has served me well over the years.)  But I digress. My point here is that, in my current WIP, AFTER THE STORM, I'd hoped to be more of a pantser. I wrote a very brief outline--about 10 pages. For me, that's very brief--and it was very difficult for me to write. Instead of spelling out every single scene as I usually do in an outline, I was more general in describing the action of the story. When I sat down to actually write, though, I only made it through four chapters before I had to stop. My plotter nature simply couldn't take the loosey-goosey approach any longer. So I spent yesterday and today returning to my old ways, writing scenes on index cards (color coded for each character's point of view, of course). Ah, relief! Now I'm arranging the cards in order on my dining room table. It's great to be back in familiar territory even if it means I have to slow down the actual writing. How on earth do pansters do it? I suppose if I had no deadline, it might work, but that's never the case. Funny thing is, aside from writing, I'm quite disorganized. Although I struggle to keep my house neat, my office is always a wreck. I have post-it notes stuck on every surface and I can't read most of what I've written on them. My car is full of old magazines and water bottles and jackets and crumbs. But when it comes to writing, I need my charts and calendars and character pictures. And I need to know where I'm going and how I plan to get there. This doesn't mean my characters don't "take on a life of their own." They surely do, and I love seeing where they lead me. I'm like their parent: I give them guidelines to live by, then let them have their freedom, standing by to bail them out if they go too far astray. That's enough magic for me. If you're a writer, are you a pantser or a plotter? If you're a creative person in another arena, does the pantser/plotter analogy apply to you as well? I'd love to know. Pygmy Marmoset Photo by SrimanAravin  

We just got back from a quick trip to Baltimore. Here's a look inside my imaginative (others might say "sick") mind: -the man riding in the hotel elevator with us was on his way up to meet his illicit lover for a tryst -The body of a suicidal woman dropped past our hotel room window while we were watching CNN -our taxi driver was a spy who was only pretending not to understand English -A bomb exploded on the tall ship we were admiring in the Inner Harbor -The two preppy-looking girls sitting on the bench at the Inner Harbor were actually dealing drugs -I dropped a little piece of paper on the ground and was attacked by pigeons -An engine, or perhaps an entire wing, fell off our plane on our return home All of the above, and much more, played on the screen of my mind over the course of four or five hours. Sometimes it's exhausting being me, even when I'm only thinking. If your day reads something like mine, you might want to take a stab at writing fiction yourself!