With a mystery, the question of how to end the story begins with which character did the crime. I no longer start with a specific villain in mind. The story often changes so much in the writing that a pre-planned ending has no choice but to change as well, or it wouldn’t make much sense.

In the last couple of mysteries I’ve written, I was as surprised as anyone by who the villain turned out to be once I got to the second draft or later. That’s okay, and it has a lot to do with how I develop characters. If I know who the villain is too early, I’m in danger of giving it away, offering hints I’m not even aware of because of my judgments about that character.

If I start out thinking the villain isn’t a villain, I can get to the heart of that character sooner in my own mind. I can get to know him, let him grow and round out on the page. I’m an idealist, and I really like to see the best in people, so there needs to be that spark of sympathy first, without letting on even to myself that he or she is a killer in the making. I guess in that regard my characterization is as organic as raising a child. What mother imagines her infant would harm anyone?

This process forces me to explore the shadows, my characters’ shadows as well as my own, to see possible motivations, both conscious and unconscious.

I first encountered the shadow, as a human concept, in stories I read. I confess that I didn’t understand the concept very well when I was young and still in denial that I had a shadow or that any good person did. But one encounters this idea many times, if one reads at all widely, and the reason for that is it’s a universal truth about human nature.

In exploring the shadows, I’ve come to see that a fully rounded character, even if he’s the good guy, has a shadow, whether that shadow is clear on the page or not, whether that shadow is negative or positive. I want to know each major character’s background as well as possible, so I start with the positives and work my way into the negatives. Though it hurts me to watch a character I’ve come to like or sympathize with cross the line into murder, at least the biggest puzzle of the mystery isn’t lost on me, and I’m not giving the killer away up front. If I decide the murderer needs to be someone else, not the person I thought it was going to be, I don’t have to cast about too far for someone else who could have done it. In truth, any one of the characters might be capable of killing, given the right circumstances and motivation. They all have their shadows. By the time I get to my final draft, I usually have a few characters that, with nudges into poor choices and flawed rationalization, could become much darker individuals. That’s usually a key to how I end the story. Which character, which nudges, and which choices? Which fits this need best? What motivates the villain to do the awful deed and also causes him or her to get caught in the end? How will the reader be surprised and at the same time see that this person and the clues leading there were present all along? (Foreshadowing will have to wait for another post.)

My exploration of the shadows has made me think a lot about the choices we make in life, and how important each one is, especially when we stack one choice on top of another in the way that we sometimes come to think of as inevitable. We don’t have a choice in everything, certainly, but sometimes when we look back over our lives or a course of events, we can see the turnings we’ve made, and many of them were choices, that brought each of us to be who, where, and what we are today. When we’re accountable for those choices, I think we improve our ability to move forward and make better ones.

If there’s one positive effect fiction can have, perhaps it’s to get us to take a look at the cause and effect of choices. What are we capable of? What would we do in the same situation, and where might that take us or what might it make of us, and our world with us? The stories that get me to think in those terms are the stories that stay with me.

As I understand it, most writers hate them. It’s difficult to pare down to a few pages the story that took you many hundred more to write in the way you think readers will best understand. It’s especially difficult for me while all the minute details and nuances are still very much alive in my mind. But agents want to see a synopsis first.

Some writers say a synopsis is easier to write before one writes the story, but I’ve always found that tricky, since my stories change as I write them. I outline the story that it turns out I didn’t want to write after all. The real story reveals itself as I go along.

But this synopsis may turn out to be a good thing, because it’s helped me see more that I want to cut. Maybe that’s what the agents really have up their sleeves, getting writers to analyze their stories from a different perspective. I’m heading back into editing mode. Good grief, this novel’s been through a lot of drafts. This will be the 9th, and it’s wearing me down. I’ll be glad to see the end of it.

All that panic because I was too dumb to know my backup program stored an archive of deleted files, and because I had allowed too much other garbage to backlog on my hard drive. (The glitch occurred when that particular hard drive filled up.)

I could sit here and ask why me, or rather ask why I do this to myself, but I’m too busy getting back to normal and on with work. Still, it seems that I go through this sort of panic on a regular basis. It happened two years ago when my old laptop gave out and I lost work that I hadn’t yet backed up. This time it resulted from the backup process itself.

Once I’m finished with this book and it’s off getting a look by some agents, I plan to spend a few weeks getting my life in better order, including both paper and digital files, to prevent future panic episodes.

But one thing I noticed during all of this was that I don’t tend to print out what I’ve written as often as I used to. In spite of what might’ve been lost, overall I consider that a good thing, a good sign that I’m making my personal transition from paper to a digital world.

I admit to some affection for the paper world. It’s what I grew up with, and where I found my love of books and the written word. There is still something sensual to me about the feeling of pen and paper or a book in my hands. I like the shape of the book, the weight of it, the toothy or smooth texture of paper, even the smell of ink, paper, and binding materials. I still recall with nostalgia the particular smell of the book I was handed in third or fourth grade when we studied the culture and geography of Japan. Ever since, I’ve looked for similar qualities each time I open a new book. All these things make letting go of the paper world a clingy process.

At the same time, I love trees. Because of that, I’ve always been troubled that my chosen form of expression — writing — has a history of felling so many trees. So when I went through my computer files and some paper files over the past few days, I was pleased to realize that I recently have less tendency to print as I write. I used to feel a need to print out what I’d written more frequently, to edit or proofread on paper rather than onscreen, or just to get a sense of what the printed story would look like.

Maybe it’s so many years of writing on a computer that’s changed this. Maybe it’s the laptop’s portability and reduced glare being easier on my eyes. Maybe it’s no longer having a job that requires me to stare at a screen all day and then do the same all my evenings and weekends for my fiction writing.

Maybe it’s blogging. The immediacy of blogging tends to encourage me to edit onscreen. My blog is even set up now so I can view what I write in two or three different fonts before I post it, which I think aids the onscreen editing and proofreading process.

Maybe it’s a combination of all those factors. It’s interesting to note that more publishing venues have opened up to electronic submissions just since the CRT monitor has begun to vanish. Hopefully the less glaring monitors that are replacing them will be much easier on all our eyes, and continue to save more trees.

I still write a good half of my personal journal pages by hand, and I still use handwriting to jump-start or unblock my writing process. This blog post is in fact a segue from my morning pages. But my journal pages don’t get reproduced, except by typing them into a digital format, and they’re unlikely ever to be published in book form. The paper is eventually recycled if they do become digital, so I’m not as concerned about my journal pages killing trees. At least that’s what I like to tell myself.

Now if we can get the ebook technology to the point where fewer paper books have to be printed, at least for popular fiction, then we’ll have made real progress in taking publishing from deforestation for profit to a more pure form of edification, expression, and entertainment. Of course there will always be uses for paper. I can’t think of a better way to keep certain legal documents or accounting records, right now, though that’s not a world I work or have much expertise in. There are also some types of books that just work better, for now, on paper. One that comes to mind is the coffee table variety, with color plates of artwork or photography. But the less trees cut down for paper and books, the better.

Even if what this Guardian Unlimited article says is true, that planting more trees in temperate latitudes won’t help assuage global warming, it also states that destroying more trees isn’t the answer, that the greater need, and indeed our motivation for attempting to slow global warming, is to preserve ecosystems, including but certainly not limited to our own.

Perhaps my panic over my files had some value. It got me not only to change what I file away on my computer and how I back it up, but also to take a hard look at how I use paper, to keep heading along the road I’ve started down, of conserving wherever it’s reasonable, and wherever I can.

I loved to read, as a girl and a young adult. I still do, but I often wish I could read the same way I did back then. Once you’ve been a writer, editor, or proofreader (and I’ve been all of those), it becomes nearly impossible to just read, without editing or analyzing or noticing parts of speech. I can barely make it through almost anyone else’s writing anymore without wanting to stop and edit, or at least correct a typo here and there, or think about some aspect of it besides the story being told, the information or advice being relayed. Plot structure, characterization. Wondering why the author did that, or admiring a description rather than staying in the story.

It’s even worse with my own writing. No matter how many times I’ve been through it, no matter how good anyone else thinks it is, I find it impossible to just read what I’ve written. I’ve heard that near the end of his life Ernest Hemmingway could barely compose a single sentence, he’d become such a perfectionist about his writing. But, I wonder, how was he at reading? That’s the thing that kills me.

It’s a mad dance with myself, trying to read this book. But I hope that as I read through this draft, if I can distance myself enough from it, I’ll see it more the way other readers will. I also hope to come to a final decision about a title for this book. Finally I hope to see the big picture of the story, and notice any gaping flaws or errors in logic, rather than the little nit-picky things I’ll focus on the final time through.

Funny how we go through times like this. Lots going on inside, not much coming out (in the blog).

I’m sure that as soon as I’m done with this little fallow blogging period you’ll be hearing a lot more from me. Meanwhile, when I am online (haven’t been much lately) I will try to get around and visit you all more and make sure I comment. Happy blogging!

Meanwhile the cat wants dinner, it feels like spring today instead of winter, and we have a new neighbor, called Phainopepla, who is really quite awe inspiring and graceful.

I’m in the second category. I’m a wordy writer, and it frustrates me to see how many extra words I write. If I’d been able to keep my words in check, the story surely wouldn’t have taken so long to come together. Or would it? Why this need to expand so much on what can be said with so many less words?

Authors who write about writing sometimes tell us a writer trains himself eventually how to write to word count. I’ve found I can do this with non-fiction, but fiction is another creature altogether. It’s all in the editing phase for me, or should I say the cutting phase. That’s where I am now, at the end of the third draft, embarking on the endless cutting phase.

It’s a matter of getting to the right words, the way a sculptor chips away at stone or wood to get to the form inside. Some people do more of the chipping away of words in their heads, in advance. I spill mine onto the page. I write and write and find when I’m done that there’s some good stuff there hidden among lots of other stuff that I have to sort through, sweep away, and haul off to the word dump in truckloads.

I wonder about the similarity of the words “mind” and “mine.” Is my mind a not so rich mine, containing too much useless ore to be sifted through? Have I never really hit the mother lode in there? Is the creative vein too thin, is there too much tailing left behind to be worth all this effort?

Do you write long or short? Do you trim away or build up content in your edits?

***

After a quiet day yesterday, I woke early this morning (early for me, anyway), to sirens, thinking I’ve never lived in a place with so many sirens, even when we rented within a couple miles of Montgomery Field and one of the busiest intersections in San Diego. But here we’re right off the main road that runs through town. This morning the sirens were especially disconcerting, and I decided maybe I’d had too much coffee.

Then I realized yesterday began the fourth anniversary of the Gavilan Fire, which started in Fallbrook on February 10, 2002. During the course of that fire we were surrounded by flames, the air so full of smoke we had to keep all the windows closed. Wildfires came within a mile of our home on three sides—west, north, and south. For a few hours I sat with packed suitcases, the cat in her carrier, and the dog on a leash, so I could leave in a hurry if needed.

We avoided disaster then, but many others in town didn’t. An amateur radio repeater system went into use. People were evacuated. Forty-three homes were destroyed. A total of 5,000 acres burned, much of it on Camp Pendleton, as well as along De Luz Road, which runs through a beautiful stretch of the Santa Margarita River basin and includes a wildlife study area full of sycamores, live oaks, and other trees, as well as animal life. Hillsides were denuded of chaparral, transformed into brown, charred earth.

That fire wasn’t as large or nearly as devastating as the Cedar Fire, two years ago, but it struck so close to home it’s no wonder, after the past couple of weeks of dry, summer-like weather and an earlier forecast of wind for today and tomorrow, the sirens made me nervous this morning.

As of a year ago, the De Luz preserve has wireless wildfire sensors. Wildflowers bloomed profusely in the burned areas by spring of 2003. (Scroll down the linked page for wildflower photos.) And in fact, some of the plantlife in Southern California actually depends on our preponderance of wildfires.

***

Now that I’ve talked myself out of fire and siren anxiety, and gotten carried away again with online research, I’m headed back into the mystery novel. I’m on the third draft, and that’s nearly done. I’m happy with how this is going, feeling enthused about this book, and anxious to finish, to get on with the final edits—the minor, nit-picky stuff—then finish and send it off.

I’ll be off-line for a few days.

I’m looking forward to the Winter Olympics, though, and I plan to subject Ken to hours of figure skating on TV.

I was saddened this week to hear of the death of Betty Friedan, and I take comfort that the Mystique lives on. My condolences to those who knew and loved her.

Coretta Scott King will be deeply missed, and I’m heartened by the hope that she and her husband are enjoying a blessed reunion. Their messages and dedication to civil rights made this world an infinitely better place. I hope we can ensure their work continues here without them.

During the past few days I read an excellent post on Mark Coggins’ blog about the Frey fray. I liked Gore Vidal’s State of the Union message better than President Bush’s . I’ll be happy when solar power is available inexpensively to anyone who needs it (thanks Dave Pollard for those two links), and I’m glad I don’t live and drive in Kakadu, Australia, where the salties have taken to flying into cars. But then I guess anywhere you choose to live you’re bound to face the danger of some kind of natural disaster. If it isn’t hurricanes, volcanoes, or earthquakes, it’s flying supersized crocodiles.

Speaking of hurricanes, a synchronous event took place in the blogosphere when three of my favorite bloggers mentioned things in their posts that also occur in my current mystery. Reenie’s Reach compared a person to a hurricane, Jason at Wildhunt mentioned a woman who wears a pentagram in a coffee shop (only the woman in my mystery is there to read Tarot, not serve coffee), and Eric Mayer wrote about his male cat with a feminine name. I mention this because I don’t want you guys to think I’m swiping ideas from your blogs for my story. I won’t go into the details of those bits of my novel, because then you’d have less reason to read the book. I’m just saying—are you telepathic or something?

How does the emotional factor compare with my earlier mysteries? Shadows Fall was intensely emotional, since it dealt with Beth Gray’s PTSD and related phobia, as well as her dramatic family interactions. That was a different kind of story. It’s been called psychological suspense by some, and I think it tips in that direction. This story doesn’t go that far into psychological drama, but there’s a strong people element, as well as romance, and these characters have their histories, which to a great extent drive them to do the things they do, for good or ill. Instead of psychology, here I’m exploring one area of parapsychology—or at least paranormal experience. Nothing creepy or horrific about it, but I hope it will intrigue all the same.

If by emotion you mean romance, there is romance in this story. We’ll see how it stacks up. When I wrote Shadows Fall, I was listening to a lot of love songs—so maybe some of the credit goes to them and their ability to affect my mood. However, this is a series, so romance is trickier to deal with. In a standalone mystery with a romance you can get to a happily-ever-after scene and not worry about what to do with the romantic element in later books.

No characters have been carried over from my other books. I’ll do that again with more stories set in the Sierras. Shadows Fall and Snow Angels took place in sparsely populated towns in imaginary Wilder County in the Sierra Nevada, so it seemed natural to have some of the same characters show up—Sheriff Lester Kendall, his deputy Duane Prescott, and Peter Lloyd. This story, which I’m frustrated to say doesn’t yet have a working title, takes place on the Redwood Coast. Again, in an imaginary town. Costa Sequoia is larger than Wilder or Cedar Creek, though it retains a small town atmosphere, as many of our mid-sized coastal towns do. In the future, who knows? They all live in California. Anything could happen.

Writing this story has made me itch to take a trip up the coast, even though I know Costa Sequoia doesn’t exist there, exactly. I miss it. Of course I’ll get to visit during the editing phase, but that’s not the same as the kind of living-in-the-story we do while we write. But I’ll be back—if the series sells—and maybe next time I’ll get to spend more time in the woods, or by the ocean.

I have a few trusted readers who’ll go through the manuscript for me, but I’ll likely do at least one more major edit before then, with lots of trimming down to size. It feels great to have a whole story instead of chopped up bits, though, and a real ending instead of what I thought I wanted to call an ending in the first draft.

Point of view (POV) can be a bugaboo or a blessing. I enjoyed exploring the two POV characters in this novel. If Snow Angels had one weakness, other than being a backward-derivative (long story, for another post) of Shadows Fall, it was characterization. At least I see it that way, even if others don’t, which is why I’ve given it away as a free ebook.

I have some future stories for this series planned, in which I look forward to writing still more points of view. One I’m going to enjoy writing a lot is that of Iris Somerset’s sixteen-year-old half-brother, who’s only mentioned in the current book. Where do these characters come from? Are they inside of us? Are they composites of people we’ve known? Are we channeling? They become so real, it just amazes me sometimes.

Where I am now: I’m writing a scene-by-scene summary to help me with the big cuts and edits. I also have to come up with a title. When I titled Shadows Fall I had no idea there was a band by that name—in fact maybe there wasn’t yet when I first thought of the title. I wanted it to be unique, and learned it wasn’t at all, after publication, and that bothered me. So, although I know a publisher may re-title the book, I plan to spend some time ruminating over the working title I’ll use to submit this one.

With the trouble I have making decisions, it’s amazing I get anything done.

Some of the most recent comments here were disrupted by a MySQL database error, so one or two had to be reconstituted. If you made a comment or attempted to during that time, or if a comment you made appears with a different timestamp, my apologies.

I hope everyone is enjoying the gear up toward winter and the holidays. For me it’s refreshing just to have some cooler, moister weather. We were expecting rain tonight, but now it’s looking less likely. That’s how it goes most years. Welcome to Southern California, where we have drought or floods and nothing in between. If it’s not an El Nino year, rain is only a rumor.