Of lost hair and body parts

They say stress will kill you. So far I’m losing only my hair and my mind, but when limbs begin to fall off, I’ll let you know.

It’s times like these that having a writing partner is a blessing. You don’t have to carry the load alone—remembering all the details of the story, where you are, what you’ve changed, and what still needs to be done.

            As I sat counting my blessings and had reached my left pinky finger, I received this e-mail from Larry:

“Where are we at? I think we are at chapter 32 part 1 in the book but on my computer I have 3 different chapter 33s and one of those is 32 part 1. Didn't we just finish chapter 31 ending with, "Bella blacked out?" My 32 part 1 in the book starts out, "Svinster hated feeling helpless." I'm dazed and confused, wore out? Burnt out? I'm trying to cut back on Coke. Let me know where I need to start up again.”

Surprisingly, my scattered brain remembered. We had so dramatically revised chapters 29-31 that he needed to go over those again before we declared them finished.

Even so, we’re still ahead of schedule, and it’s thanks to him. I’ve had trouble with migraines my whole life and started dealing with chronic adrenal fatigue five years ago, which makes the migraines worse. I’m lucky to go even a week without having to take prescription medication for pain. I produce when I can, and sometimes my memory is better than others. Having Larry there for support as not only a writing partner, but also as a friend, makes more difference than anyone can know. I hope to eventually pull my act together and make him proud of me.

Right now, though, I’m dealing with migraines and hair loss, but when I start losing body parts, it may become more difficult to

ho y Cra ! there g es a fin er!

Redneck Mule

“Go someplace you feel most like yourself.”      

That’s a quote from The Lake House with Sandra Bullock. When I first heard it, I wondered, “Where do I feel most like myself?”

In spite of what I might lead people to believe, it’s not in a college classroom or a corporate conference room. I’m good at those things, but that’s not who I am. I’m a farm girl who plays those roles as an end to a means—paying the mortgage. Most of my job is customer service and I’m required to smile when I might prefer to scowl and tell people to bite me.

I grew up hooking weeds from beans, scooping manure from stalls, bucking hay bales, and riding horses and dirt bikes. I was a bit of a mule. Corn fed, as my husband likes to put it.

So now, to balance the goody-goody stuff of my everyday life, I write comedy and grit. I never grew out of being a redneck mule, and I don’t want to. That’s why Larry and I write alike. Because deep down inside, we are a lot alike.

Writing humor is fun. I can make the characters respond to a situation differently from how I normally would—they don’t have to smile and say, “Yes, of course!” when they can respond, “That makes zero sense!” For me, that’s what makes writing fun. The comedy. The action. The grit.

In those things, I feel most like myself.

Smart vs Smart Ass

Liar, liar, pants on fire! When I was a kid, that’s what we used to chant when someone told a fib.

That’s what you must be thinkin’ about Becky and me. We claim that our writing styles are so similar that after a while even we can’t tell who wrote which scene in our story.

But our blogs are nothing alike. I write like I’d be talking to you, face to face. I’m far from eloquent. Forty-one years in the construction trades kinda steers your speech in a different direction from someone in a corporate conference room. I lean toward plain talk bordering on redneck. It’s too late for me to pretend to be smart.

Now Becky—she is smart! That girl’s got smarts, a corporate job, and a couple of college degrees to boot. The degrees don’t impress me at all—I’ve known plenty of educated idiots—but she truly is smart, and it shows in her blogs. They’re far different and a hell of a lot better than mine, if you’re looking for intelligence, and I’m assuming you would. Becky’s smart, and I’m just a smart ass. Sometimes she gets carried away and her “egg-head” side shows, or she comes across too corporate (gag me with a spoon), but in our story, she’s different.

So… how can we be such different people and write our blogs so differently, yet the scenes in our story come out so much alike?

I’ve come full circle again, and usually when someone talks in circles it’s because they’re hiding something, or they don’t know what the hell they’re talkin’ about. Well… it beats the shit out of me. I don’t know the answer. Let’s ask the brainiac.

Well, Becky, how about it?

The Moon Pool

Reading tends to affect my writing in one of two ways:

1)    Wow, this is great! I wonder if I can learn something.

2)    Wow, this sucks! I can do better than that.

Right now I’m reading a #1. It’s The Moon Pool by Abraham Merritt, an early classic of science fiction. I couldn’t find an exact date, but it was first published as a novella in 1918, and has that old-fashioned writing style that generally sends me screaming into the streets. This one, however, may be able to teach me something. I’m not sure what yet, but I’m fascinated by how he can keep me reading in spite of a first person narrative from a scientist’s point of view. Generally, those for me are a big snore.

I am all about action and dialogue. If Larry and I have more than three lines of description in our novel, I break it up with something. I can’t abide long narratives. So how Merritt keeps me turning the pages, I have no idea. It’s definitely worth some study.

How did I even stumble across something that old? When I got my Kindle, I couldn’t afford a bunch of books, so I looked for everything free that I could find. I like sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, all sorts of books, so of the 80 novels that I have on my Kindle, I think I actually paid for maybe four.

This has taken my reading in different directions than I would have expected. Had I been browsing in the bookstore, I probably wouldn’t have picked this one up. Had I picked it up, I’d have flipped through the pages, saw that it was written in an Edgar Rice Burroughs type style and put it back down.

Maybe my attitude toward description is evolving. Maybe I’m going through a phase. Or maybe I’m stubborn and give every book on my Kindle 100 pages to grip me before I hit delete.

What I do know is that the man was on to something, and I will seek out more of his work, and maybe by osmosis (I mean, who really wants to study!), I can absorb the knack it takes to develop description without zombifying the reader.

Or maybe I’ll just read him for entertainment. The Moon Pool. Free from Amazon. Check it out.

Energy, Passion, and Debate

"Nothing keeps a relationship on its toes so much as lively debate.” I saw this quote here, and I fully agree. What’s different about me now from a decade ago is the desire for debate—debates take energy and passion, and I'm too old to drum up much of either.

But that’s what keeps my writing partnership with Larry on its toes. Our novel is one of only a few things (including my husband of course J) that I have the energy to be truly passionate about, and we have a great degree of lively debate. It’s lessened a bit now that we’re down to the fine tuning, yet debates still crop up.

There was a scene where the surfer cop dressed as a woman and hitchhiked to his destination. Somebody was supposed to leave him clothes to change into but forgot to leave shoes, so the cop—wearing jeans, flannel, and hooker heels—raced through the hilly woods to the hideout.

Then there was the porch-swing scene where a transient shows up at the hideout. It really was one of my favorite scenes, but it had to be sacrificed for word count. My description was so spot on you could smell him!

I didn’t want to take either of them out, and I spat a bit while defending them. But in the bigger picture, they really didn’t contribute. We had to get the cop to the destination faster and hitchhiking wouldn’t work. We had to get to the end scene faster, and the transient slowed plot development.

Larry and I are now coming up on some of the more problematic chapters, and I’m sure there’s plenty of debate left. We both know changes have to be made, and we just need to agree on them.

That’s what keeps our writing partnership fresh!

 

Camouflaged Commas

            An egg lay frying merrily in my skillet as I frantically raced around the kitchen looking for the salt. “Where the heck’s the salt? Maybe the living room.” I dash in there. Nope. “Dining room?” I dash back. Nope.

The egg crackled loudly, overcooking my yolk. “Why can’t I keep track of the flipping salt?!”

            Stepping back into the kitchen I see a rotund figure crouched beside the white KitchenAid mixer, the shaker’s clear glass body half full of salt. White salt. White mixer. Camouflage!

            That’s what’s happened to our story as well, but the subject being camouflaged is the endlessly debatable comma, about which debates always begin, “Which style are you using?”

            We have apparently made up our own style. I want a pause, I put in a comma. (Wait. Wasn’t that a run-on sentence? Should I use a comma? Where’s my damned book?!”)

            Going through our group’s revisions, including those from a professional editor who can quote usage rules, I apparently don’t know how to use a comma properly. When in doubt, put it in. See what I did there? No idea if it’s accurate, but it felt right.

            I comma by feel.

            It didn’t used to be that way. When I was working on my degree, just a few years ago, I was never charged with dodgy punctuation. Now commas hide themselves in the mosaic tapestry of unforgettable prose, well camouflaged, and undetectable by all but the most seasoned grammarist.

            I also used to be able to keep track of my salt shaker. It was always on the back of the stove. Sometimes there were two, each begging to be the one chosen.

            Maybe it’s age—or laziness—making me less than organized and accurate.  Or maybe commas cleverly camouflage themselves as pauses, and I’m overlooking them, because they sound right when I read the sentence out loud. Therefore, many commas have met their demise during this revision process, thanks to our resident editor.

            On the upside, at least I don’t have to race around the house looking for them.

           

Coke ain't small stuff

Small stuff.

            This weekend Justin and I were out shopping, and we had worked up a thirst. He disappeared while I waited in line, and he brought back a real Coke—sugar and caffeine and cold and bubbly and delicious...my own personal happy juice!

            He knows I love Coke Classic. So with me in mind, he selected it instead of his usual Pepsi. I’m telling you folks, it’s all about the small stuff.

Details.

I’m reading Elmore Leonard, and that man has a way with the small stuff. Although we don’t get a great deal of detail and description, what he does include is impactful. A well bred woman on the run with a bank robber carries the gun he gave her in a crocheted purse that her mother made. The bad guy steals an ice cream cone from a young man, takes a few licks, leaving ice-cream clinging to his mustache.

Those details help define the characters.

Are details small stuff?

Details are enormous. I may forget which book it’s written in, but I can tell you the detail that made it real and dragged me into the story. Last summer I read a book in which a man was naked and walking around on a sail boat. That’s when I was introduced to the term “hanging hog.”

I couldn’t tell you the name of the book or the author either one, but that detail has stayed with me.

Sweating the details is exhausting.

It’s because details are so important that we have—and will continue to spend—

so much time and energy rewriting and re-rewriting. Larry and I had written our story, and then revised it before we ever took it to the critique group. It’s been through group, and we’re revising again. Then there’ll be Beta readers, we’ll revise, then there’ll be more Beta readers and more revision. Then it has to pass through both of us again before we hawk our wares to agents and editors who will most assuredly ask for…you got it, more revision.

Yes, the small stuff is enormous

Yes, we’re sweating the small stuff.

Yes, I need to start keeping Coke in the fridge instead of Pepsi.

It’s all about the details.