M.L. Barrs's Blog, page 2

Three Days to Go

I was lucky enough to meet in person with the narrator of my audiobook (coming out in October 2023). Susanna Burney is an actor who has narrated and produced multiple books for ACX, the audiobook arm of Amazon-Audible. It was fascinating to talk with someone who read my book so closely.

Among her many observations: it was challenging at times to make her voice differentiate between Vicky’s dialogue and her internal thoughts; it was fun to narrate when multiple characters were speaking together; and she liked Vicky as a strong female protagonist, whose feelings toward Pete were a different take on most romances. I am eager to hear the entire book! I’ve had the voices of Vicky, Pete, Sam, Mike, and other characters in my mind for so long it will be enlightening to hear Susanna’s take on them. From what I’ve heard so far, she absolutely ‘gets’ them all. I hope you’ll enjoy the audiobook version of Parallel Secrets. 

Four Days to Go

Writing fiction is, for me, a very different challenge than writing and editing television news. By that I mean the actual process of writing, not everything else that goes into journalism. All those years in newsrooms I assumed fiction would be easy compared to news. 

News stories generally start when something happened or is about to happen.  (Yes, there’s much more to it, but your attention span is probably as short as mine, so…) External factors usually shape the basic framework and developments of the reporting. The facts of a news story evolve, depending on when it’s told or who’s telling it. News reports themselves can shape events and opinions and affect people’s lives. Writing and producing news is a huge responsibility. 

Writing fiction is all internal, all me (except, of course, for my editors, publisher, online research, early readers, random people I’ve trapped into conversation, etc.). There is no external set of facts and developments that determine the story. I do get to just make stuff up! It’s liberating, but it’s all on me to make the story work. Creating characters and developing the plot was fun and exciting but weaving those elements together (I have an aversion to outlining) was akin to herding cats. Writing fiction is personal. My name is on it. I made it up. I picked where it started and where it ends. For now.  

Five Days To Go

Five Days until my first mystery, Parallel Secrets is released, a few thoughts about starting a new career later in life. 

Like Vicky in Parallel Secrets, a few years ago I was at a crossroads in my career, my life. Vicky is deciding whether to take another job in TV news or try her hand as a true crime travel writer. My first TV job was as a small-town news reporter; my last was General Manager of a major market TV station. In between my family and I moved several times for career reasons. When I retired, I started writing for myself for the first time. I began by writing about my life—by most objective standards I’ve had an interesting one—but for personal reasons set that project aside and turned to fiction.  

It was an eye-opener, to say the least, to go from a field in which I was experienced and knowledgeable to one that was largely foreign to me, where my television credentials counted for little. I didn’t know the vocabulary, the hierarchy, the practices of writing books, much less how to get one published. I’d never before focused on point of view and internal narrative and correct dialogue punctuation. Agents? Query letters? Synopses? Pitching? What an education!  

A few years ago, my husband and I moved for the first time for ourselves, not our jobs. We relocated to the Pacific Northwest to be closer to our grown kids. Now, living near our granddaughters and their parents, and my first mystery about to be published, I couldn’t be happier in this phase of my life, though I’ll always be grateful for the experience that came before. Oh, and what did Vicky decide? You’ll have to read Parallel Secrets to find out.