A recent Washington Post column queried Bloggers on the Reasons Behind Their Daily Words. Reading it got me to thinking yet again about why I blog.

I started my website back in 2000, when Shadows Fall was first published, for the same reason most writers do, to promote my work. Four years later I started this blog as a way to provide up-to-date content on my website and let visitors know what I was working on—basically as a way to keep the website from stagnating when too much time passed between novels. Little did I know at the time that the blog would engage so much of my attention.

The immediacy of this format holds a certain attraction. Type, click a button, and what you’ve written is published. But that has its drawbacks. As easy as email, which carries its own risks, a blog can suck you out into public view in a way that’s scary and in some ways deceiving. It’s easy to forget you’re putting yourself “out there” to the degree we do online. After all, I’m seated here alone at my home computer as I type this into a little window on my screen. It doesn’t feel public at all, at the time I write. (more…)

There are times when dialogue seems to come by means of mental torture and pretzel twisting, and to be the most difficult writing I do. I continue to learn. In reading through my second draft, a few weeks ago, I checked for those places where the story dragged or faltered, and I found those were often the same places where dialogue stumbled or rambled on too long. Nothing much seemed to be happening, even though something was, because I’d buried it inside too many words.

I got lost in the accompanying narrative, the setting, the characters’ activities, movements, body language, or overwrought cleverness. Sometimes I bogged down in the minutiae of sighing, nodding and eye gazing. Writers can get so caught up visualizing each detail of character interaction they rob readers of their mental interplay, their own visualizations based on common human experience. We presume readers don’t know how a character might deliver a line in a given situation. The stream of dialogue reads as dammed up where it should flow. It loses its surface tension, its sparkle, and its undercurrent. It becomes stagnant.
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Yesterday brought news of a death in the family, of a beloved aunt—actually my mom’s cousin. She lived in Oregon, and I hadn’t seen her much since I was a kid. But all my memories of her are fond ones, and I miss her, and I know her two daughters and son and grandchildren miss her an awful lot. I hope she, her husband, my mom, and all the other relatives who’ve gone on before are having a happy reunion on the other side. I can almost hear them, and I like that thought. It brings back memories of family get togethers when I was a kid and would sometimes sit and listen to all the grownups talk and tell stories.

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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.
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Linking the past days together— It’s Super Bowl Sunday, and I didn’t know. Isn’t that usually in January? I don’t pay attention to professional sports, and some years my only clue about when that event occurs is the date they tell you the winner of the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes will be announced, which doesn’t apply to me, since I don’t enter. If Ed McMahon shows up at my door it’s more likely to be about Neighborhood Watch, or because he just spoke to Johnny Carson and he’s heard I have an interest in contact with the other side. (more…)

in the privacy of my bedroom, as a teenager, with funky colored pens. This involved lots of doodling as well as writing. Little hearts, daisies (shudder). I’m better at drawing the daisies now.

Later I taught myself to type on an old Smith Corona typewriter my mother or her mother purchased when Mom was in her teens or early twenties. She was born in 1923, if that gives you a clue to its age. It’s one of those typewriters that could be used to trace a murder suspect because of the way it slightly superscripts certain characters. I used it while seated on the floor of my bedroom beside my bed. Sometimes the typewriter rested on the floor, sometimes on a little castoff maple end table.
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Everyone’s blogging about James Frey, whose book I haven’t read. The Smoking Gun calls it A Million Little Lies. I found my favorite comments on the subject over at Duane Swierczynski’s Secret Dead Blog, in An Open Letter to James Frey. They’re my favorite because Duane made me laugh, and I wish I could dismiss the whole subject as laughable. But as Lee Goldberg pointed out in his post, Lies are the new Truth, we seem to live in a world that devalues truth.

Is that the way you like it? (more…)

Susan, at Spinning, posed this question to writers, in her post on Reading & Writing, after she answered it on another blog. It’s a writing question on the surface only. It can apply to a lot of things people do, mostly creative. It only starts out in a context of writing. I suppose it has a lot to do with our ability to multi-task. I guess I tend to have more of a one-track mind.

When I’m writing fiction, I tend to read mostly nonfiction, often research related to what I’m writing, or a good book on writing, creativity, or personal growth. Anything that helps understand people and their motivations better is helpful to fiction writers, as well as anything that improves our story building skills and instincts—which isn’t necessarily limited to books on writing. I don’t go for the type of self-help books that offer quick fixes to personal problems. I classify most of those with fad diet books. But I’m drawn to books that help me understand human nature and the human experience on a deeper level.
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Writing takes courage. Submitting work is in many ways the most courageous act a writer commits. I don’t know of any aspiring novelist who looks forward to the task of synopsizing his or her own novel and then waiting around for rejection after rejection.

The synopsis itself is often a major hurdle. If a story could be rendered in that short a form, you’d have written a short story instead of a novel, right? I’d rather have a tooth extracted than attempt to synopsize mine. In fact I’m in danger of running out of teeth before I find the right agent, because of my personal loathing for synopsis. Still, it’s necessary to get the idea across in a form agents can absorb and understand quickly on their way through a gazillion other queries. A good, crisp synopsis makes an agent eager to read the entire manuscript.

Can one learn this skill by example? By reading examples, along with an agent’s reasons why they’re good or not? More likely example and practice are necessary. But examples sure help. So put on your synopsis-writing cap and read through the recent series of “Crapometer” posts at Miss Snark, the literary agent. Thanks to Miss Snark for her time sharing her insider views, and thanks to the writers who braved the Crapometer’s challenge.

When I first hoped to see Snow Angels in print, I decided to come up with a concept for the cover, and I drew this sketch. Actually I drew more than one, but this was the one that made me happiest at the time. I’m not much of an artist. Sometimes I impress myself—but then I’m easily impressed. Anyway, it seems appropriate to the season.

Snow Angels is available as a free e-book on my website. My multi-talented husband, Ken, created the cover art you see there.

NOTE: Please only comment on this post if you’ve read Snow Angels. Off-topic comments will be moved or deleted. The comments on Snow Angels are sometimes snipped due to content that may give away the ending of the story (thus the term “spoiler”) to others who haven’t yet read the story.

If a fiction writer ever needed inspiration, Post Secret has to be one of the most likely places to find it. But I suspect most fiction writers are like me, with so many ideas they can’t sleep at night for fear they’ll never have time to use even the best of them.

View the blog, or read Post Secret the book, available at Amazon.