November Afternoon has been added to the artwork page. It's a painting about big skies. The color shifted a little in the image. It comes from a time when I was doing a lot of painting and was experimenting. I think it is one of those lingering warm days in early winter when the trees have lost all their leaves, but the sun is still warm.

Check the Artwork tab for sizes and prices.

Coming Soon!

I just got the draft back from my readers. I haven't even looked through it all yet. But I'm really excited! The feedback was mostly favorable. Now I need to get my head out of the current WIP and go back to this one.

It's good to take a break from a story. It's been about two weeks since I messed with UC. That will give me some distance. And now that my head is in a totally different world, I may be able to read UC with a little more objectivity.

I'm close to the deadlines I set myself. I wanted to publish it in March. Not sure if I will be able to finish up the tweaking and get it out to a second round of readers then run it through a line edit by the end of the month. It might get pushed back to early April.

I have to say that I am resistant to putting the current WIP aside. That's a good thing for that story. But I only have so much time in the day for writing and that means one of them has to go the back burner. And the weather is turning milder...the garden is calling.

Sheesh. I really need to achieve rich and famous status soon!

Too many crises makes a story dull

I just gave up on reading a book. I was about two thirds of the way through and couldn't put up with it any more. It wasn't a novel. It might have been a television show. The characters stumbled along falling into various misadventures and floundered their way out again, only to get back into trouble. That's not a story.

None of the characters had any goals beyond not wanting to be doing what they were presently doing. There were plenty of possibilities there. But I guess they never made it out of the author's head.

Each time a character got in trouble they trembled and shook and sobbed with fear and pain. Hmm. Aside from questioning whether the author understood the limits of the human body when it comes to pain, it made me dislike the characters. It might have been realistic for them to fail utterly in the face of overpowering odds, but that's not what I want to read. It can happen once, perhaps, as an epiphany. Then the character needs to get stronger and smarter and squeeze out of the next spot of trouble just in the nick of time. And using skills or information that they gleaned from the previous failure works even better.

That didn't happen. The bad guys were just egotistical sadists, not sure why, that seemed remarkably easy to dupe. And tolerant and rigid at the same time. Because they kept arresting the same people and letting them escape again. Hmm. Why not just shoot em?

Another thing that happened that really didn't work - the author had one of the protagonists (because I think there were 4) kill a child. Nope, not gonna help me like her. That's a scene that should have been the epiphany, or a major twist/reversal. The protagonist (M) is facing the bad guys who caught a bunch of them escaping. M turns into a puddle of quivering goo. She's scared, she's failed, she doesn't know what to do (again!). Bad guys give her an ultimatum - kill the child or we will. So she throws the little boy off the cliff and watches him fall to his death. Wow. All kinds of wrong there.

Every scene has the characters reacting to the most recent trouble. There's no planning, no direction, no tasks that need to be done. They just flail around in whatever arrives on their doorstep. So they are furious or terrified and almost always confused. There were a few scenes of flirting that were so out of place I skimmed them. But again they were blushing and giggling and generally over the top.

Now don't think I want scenes of laundry and cooking dinner. But where's the roller coaster? It doesn't work if it's all up with no downs. Some of those quieter scenes can anchor the world, which definitely needed some work. Or backstory, or maybe a hint of what these people want?

Everything in moderation.

A new story in the works

I'm flying along!

This may be the first novel that I've written entirely from scratch. White Lies was rewritten many times and it started as a screenplay. The same is true for Unintended Consequences. Both were torn apart and rewritten each time I learned a little more about writing and storytelling.

So it's been a good long time since I just wrote. Just put words on the page to get the story out of my head.

This is based on some characters from a story that wasn't working. I didn't know why it wasn't working and I rewrote it a couple times. When I looked through my folder I had all kinds of plots for these people, but nothing finished. Nothing even halfway done. It all just petered out. Even the outlines.

But then I tackled the setting. It's a near future distopia. It always was, but I hadn't taken a good look at the world. Then a few things clicked. The world must influence how the characters act, react and think. If the world has changed, how does that affect them?

Once my world was nailed down, my characters changed. I knew them better, and how they fit into this world. I knew how they saw the world and what hopes they had for the future.

And then I just wrote. I didn't try to rewrite the older pieces and squeeze them into the shape of the discarded stories. I started fresh. And it's so exciting. I'm managing more that 1,000 words a day! I even wrote out a simple outline.

I'm having a blast with this!

Setting

When I first started writing, I didn't think setting mattered that much. I had a few stories that were set in a city. Did it matter what city? I didn't think so. Somehow those stories never really worked out. I knew they weren't working and I just couldn't nail the reason.

Unintended Consequences was one of those stories. I admit that I've changed it a lot in its final incarnation, but the biggest change is setting. Once I anchored it somewhere, it started to work better. The setting crept into everything.

The story is sent in a fictional south Jersey town squeezed between the Pine Barrens and the salt marshes. The smell of the marshes, the damp salt air, a cold rainy October. All those things appeared as soon as I added real estate. There are a lot of Irish and Italians in that area. Suddenly I had a pizzeria with all the aromas of oregano and garlic, cannolis and strong black coffee.

Another story is a near future distopia. It was always sort of in NY City, but not really. Again, the story wasn't working. Part of that was because I had written it before I understood storytelling. The rambling adventures of various characters does not make a novel. But in trying to sort that out I realized I needed to deal with the setting.

To create the setting, I needed to take a look at my world. One of the criticisms I had gotten on a different story was that the technology I had mentioned was already outmoded. I'm not a techno geek, so that can't be an important part of my story. That means I need to build the world in other ways. I had to look at things that did make sense to me. What is the climate in the future? How has transportation changed? It's starting to come together and in building the world, I'm building the setting, and it is flavoring my characters.

So I finally understand how important setting is.

Audiobook update

A producer finally found me!

I'm really excited. The guy has a great voice and a professional sound. He's an actor, so I know he'll do well. The audition was nearly perfect. I liked his voice and intonation right away.

I OK'd the audition.

Then there was some rather intimidating paperwork...a long contract. I actually read it. And made notes. A contract that long makes me nervous. What do all those little paragraphs mean? But they were pretty understandable. Like the paragraph that basically says if the narrator gets the flu or is hit by a bus, he may request an extension of deadlines. Reasonable.

I scribbled little notes next to each one with a shorthand of what the paragraph covered. That helped me understand it. All the advice columns warn you to read everything. I'm getting better at it. For me, it helps if I print it out. I'm still a paper person.

So I sent off the contract.

The next step was for him to record the 1st 15 minutes. Wow. What a bizarre feeling to listen to someone else read my words. It was very cool. I had a couple questions about it. Waiting to hear back from him now.

We hope to have the book completed by the end of March. I will be making announcements!

Unintended Consequences

The most recent draft is out to a few readers. I won't say final draft because I already know it needs a smidge of something else. Rose gave me some good ideas for that. I am eager to hear back from my other readers to see if they feel the same way.

I don't want to start the rewrite until all opinions are in. I think it's a pretty solid story. The rewrite shouldn't take too long. So I think I am still on target for publishing in March...probably late in March.