Judith Post's Blog, page 131

Summer Reading

One of the things that I look forward to in the summer is the chance to stay up later than usual, read more, and sleep later in the mornings.  It’s been a slow start on my reading this year.  Summer’s been busier than usual.  My daughter’s been picking up extra hours as a nurse.  My grandson got a job in construction.  He comes home for lunch every day–hot, sweaty, and covered in dust.   Teenagers have been bopping in and out of our house.  But we’re finally settling into a routine.  And I can snatch time in the evenings to read.

I belong to Goodreads on the internet.  These girls can whip through a book in a day.  Their reading goals are almost all over one hundred books a year, some over two hundred, whereas I’m a slow reader.  If I push myself, I can finish a novel in a few days, two books a week at warp speed.  I’d like to think it’s because I savor every word.  I suspect it’s because I dawdle and ponder as I go.  I turn things over in my mind, consider plotting and pacing instead of just enjoying the ride.  I’m going to try to change that about myself, to just say Whoopee and turn pages, to go with the flow.  But it hasn’t happened yet.

Goodreads has introduced me to more series and writers than I ever knew existed.  And the readers debate what they liked or didn’t like about the books they read.  I’ve learned a lot from them, but by the time a few different people write glowing endorsements for a novel with an interesting premise, it ends up on my to-be-read list.  At the  moment, I have so many books on that list that someone will probably have to bury it with me when I pass, but that doesn’t discourage me.   Unfortunately, it doesn’t even deter me from walking into bookstores and browsing.  Okay, buying.  I have a terrible time leaving a bookstore empty-handed.  Meaning, I have piles and piles of novels to read….

But there’s hope, because summer is officially upon us.  The solstice came and went.  Warm evenings stretch before me, and I’ll have more time to read–one of my favorite parts of the long days of summer.

Summer

Summer’s three days away, but the heat’s here already.  And I’m feeling sort of like the flowers in my garden bed.  I’m drooping.  Heat makes me want to melt, to sag into a chair and not move any more than I have to.  I don’t want meals.  I think of salads and sandwiches.  I don’t want to mow or weed or even sort laundry.  But life doesn’t stop just because I’m feeling lazy.

This is a short blog, because my fingers are getting tired.  So is my brain.  I intend to enjoy the labors of others and to read what they’ve already written.  The temperatures are climbing all week and won’t dip until Sunday.  Finally, no nineties predicted.   The world can carry on without me until then.  But I know myself.   I can only relax for so long, and then I get antsy.  Chores will stockpile, ready to crush me beneath them.  I’ll push myself into work mode again.  But until then…the couch beckons.  So does a book.

I Feed People

It used to annoy me that every time I took a personality quiz or had my palm read, I came out as a caregiver.  Now, to me, that wasn’t the glamorous, amazing personality that I wanted to portray to the world.  But what’s a girl to do?  When I went to a sci/fi-fantasy convention and had a photo of my aura taken, and it came out with a huge streak of white around my head, and blue and green around my upper body, I knew I was doomed to be a nurturer.

I can’t really argue with any of the test results.  I mean, after all, I’m the one who wanted to be an elementary school teacher.  I’m the one who loves having kids clutter my house.  I even have a tree full of birdfeeders, a shelf on my Chinese elm to feed the flying squirrels that come at night, and I feed stray cats that won’t even let me touch them.  What can I say?  The quizzes might be right.  The thing is, I really enjoy feeding things, especially people.

There’s something about food.  There’s the creative process of making it, and there’s the nurturing process of sharing it.  I’d be a FoodTV addict if they didn’t have so darned many reruns.  I can’t stand watching the same show twice.  But I love cooking for people, and I love finding and trying out new recipes.

When the neighborhood kids were growing up and stayed at our house for supper, I used to tease them that if they were nice to me, I’d give them my recipes when they grew up and moved away.  It’s no joke anymore.  They call for them when they’re ready to make one of their favorites.  It’s a huge compliment.  A friend even asked me to help her organize some kind of cooking routine, so I made her a printout of easy recipes–7 chicken recipes to choose from for Mondays, pork recipes for Tuesdays, ethnic on Wednesdays, etc.  She still uses it, and I’ve e-mailed it to many more people.

The thing is, I’ve always said that if someone carves “She was a nice person” on my tombstone, I’ll rise from the grave and haunt them.  I don’t mind being nice, but I don’t want to be known for it.  I want to be known for my writing, or my wit, or my humor.  Something other than a blue and green aura.  I felt better when I took Mike Well’s quiz on Twitter for “which famous female author are you most like,” and I tested out as Agatha Christie.  Equally adept at ferreting out dirt as serving cocktails and entrees.

 

 

Five Books That Matter To You

I read a blog post yesterday that stuck with me.  The author listed five books he thought people should read.  When I was younger, I read my share of classics (mostly British, not American).  Fell in love with Pride & Prejudice, fought my way through Dickens (his wordiness was a struggle for me), became enamored of James Fenimore Cooper.  Took a class on Shakespeare, read Vanity Fair, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the d’ Urbervilles, among others.  All worthy reads, and I’m sure they made me a better writer.  But when the time came, and I actually put pen to paper (all right, fingers to keys) years later, they were dim memories.  The books that influenced my writing the most were the ones that made me crave the next novel in the series, the ones whose characters lived in my mind, and whose plots made me keep turning the pages.  I have a sad feeling that I’m a genre junkie, and this list will prove it.  (These writers are listed in the sequence I discovered them, not in order of preference, and if I staggered between 2 authors in the same time period, I listed both–sort of a cheat, but there you have it).

1.  Agatha Christie.  For me, no one can compete with Agatha’s complicated, convoluted plots, red herrings, hidden clues, and complex puzzles.  It was fun to strive to match wits with her, hard to beat Poirot or Miss Marple to a conclusion.

2.  Nancy Pickard and Carolyn Hart.  These two women both wrote brilliant, traditional mysteries.  Nancy Pickard’s Jenny Cain had depth of character that I strove to achieve in my own writing.  Her short stories were extraordinary.  Carolyn Hart’s Max and Annie series mixed a playfulness with serious plotting ability that I admired.

3.  Elizabeth George.  When I read Great Deliverance, it blew me away.  Elizabeth George writes literary mysteries, and her writing bedazzles me.  I can burrow into her language for the long haul and return to the light a happy girl.

4.  Martha Grimes.  I have to warn people that it’s better to start at the beginning of Martha Grimes’ novels, because occasionally, her characters have become almost caricatures of themselves in her later books.  Each of her titles is the name of a pub in England.  Her writing can go from poignant to hilarious in the turn of a page.  Few authors do children as well as she does.  And quirks and eccentricities and all, I thoroughly enjoy her.

5.  Patricia Briggs.  I have to admit, I’ve only read her Mercy Thompson series and a few of her earlier novels.  I was charmed by When Demons Walk.  It felt like a fun and witty romp.  But I fell in love with Mercy Thompson.  She’s a heroine who feels REAL.  And the interplay between Briggs’ characters of all varieties seems genuine.  Briggs is the author who hooked me on urban fantasy.

My bookshelves are crammed with many more books, many more authors whom I can’t bring myself to part with.  So this is only a bare-bones list of the writers I love to read.  I chose these five because they influenced the direction of my writing.  If you had to pick a top five–of your own making–who’d be on your list?

 

 

 

More Memories Than Usual

My grandson graduated from high school on Friday, May 25th, and on Saturday, we had an Open House to celebrate the event.  John’s brother flew in from Oakland, California on Tuesday, so that we could visit and enjoy ourselves before things got too busy.  Our daughter, Robyn, and her husband, Scott, drove up from Florida (they live near Clearwater Beach) on Thursday.   My daughter, Holly, and her two boys live with us, so our cozy bungalow bulged at the seams,  full of people, and a magical thing happened.  Kids who’d grown up in the houses behind us or across the street or around the corner showed up to join in.  And I found our house filled with laughter and memories.

I love kids.  Always have.  My sister, Mary, is 12 years younger than I am, and I think it started with her.  My parents looked shell shocked when they got the news there was an unexpected surprise on the way, but they quickly looked forward to having a baby.  I was thrilled.  My sister, Patty, and I are exactly ten months apart.  Cohorts in crime.  But Mary was someone to read stories to, to drag to the ice cream parlor, and to play with.  So when it came time to choose a career, I went for elementary education.

I taught for six years before I had my daughters.  I’m sort of a nerdy brain, and lots of professors tried to talk me out of “wasting my talent” on teaching reading and arithmetic.  But my question to them was, “If you don’t have dedicated teachers in first and second grade, what kind of students do you think you’ll get by the time they reach you?”  Teaching was a lot of hard work, but it was every bit as fulfilling as I thought it would be.  I meant to go back to it once Robyn started first grade, but the rules changed while I stayed home with my girls.  A Master’s Degree became a death sentence to my career.  No one would hire a teacher with a Master’s because they had to pay us more money.  So I stayed home, and Life had other plans for me.  John’s father got sick and died.  His mother didn’t do well on her own.  My dad got blood cancer, and I took my turn sitting with him at the hospital in the afternoons.  And I filled my house with kids.

We became the “neighborhood house.”  We made our basement into a kid zone.  My husband built a craft table and kids hung paintings to dry on a clothesline that stretched across a side wall.  We mixed salt clay and used cookie cutters to make Christmas ornaments.  John and I laid indoor/outdoor carpet, perfect for roller skating, and bought fold-out seats for kids to stretch on while watching the TV down there.   One Halloween, the kids beheaded every Barbie doll in the house to hang from the basement rafters to make a haunted room.  We bought a dehydrator to dry fruits.  I baked after school snacks.  And we enjoyed.  The kids gave more to us than we ever gave to them.

If Holly’s boys needed something, growing up, one or another of those kids have been there to help.  Jerod took Ty to hunting school and Jason taught him how to fish.  Heidi and her husband, his godparents, faithfully contributed to sending him to St. Therese and Bishop Luers.  Nicky took Ty out to supper when he needed some “guy” talk.

When I put kids in my writing, like Reece’s step-brother and sister in Wolf’s Bane, a young son in the novel Empty Altars, or Thea’s cocky niece in Fabric of Life, I hope I make them as special as I think kids should be.  Because I’ve been lucky.  I have wonderful daughters.  Awesome grandsons.  But I have more.  I have wonderful neighborhood kids.  And it was great to see them at Ty’s Open House, because they’ve been a part of his life.  And mine.

My John was in the Vietnam War, and I usually think of soldiers when I watch the parade that marches past our house each year.  But this Monday, I had so much more to think about.  Floods of memories.  All of them good.

 

Broken’s still Beautiful

Company was coming, so things that are often neglected got cleaned at our house.  My nicknack  box with lots of small slots is tedious to dust.  So are the little figurines that fill it.  I carried them to the kitchen sink to give them a quick dip and rinse, and that’s when I realized how many of them are broken.

My mom bought me the nicknack of a small elephant with big ears like Dumbo and a thin trunk held up to say hello.  Trouble is, the elephant only has half a trunk now.  Nate was helping me when he was little.  He was thrilled to be able to handle each fragile piece.  The trunk, unfortunately, was TOO fragile.  It didn’t survive an excited boy.  I should have pitched the elephant, but every time I look at it, I remember that day.  So it still sits in its small space in the lower left corner of the shadow box.

My husband bought me a collection of mice figurines.  One’s a mother mouse rocking a cradle with her baby inside it, another’s a mouse cooking at an old-fashioned black stove, there’s a tooth fairy mouse, etc.  Ty was helping me clean these.  He put them in a bowl of warm water to get them extra shiny.  The glue that held the cradle on the painted “rag rug” melted.  I tried gluing the pieces back together, with no luck.  Now, I rinse them separately and balance them back in place–no one the wiser.

In my office, the clock master on a bookshelf, busy at his work table, only has half an arm.  A rabbit has a chipped ear.  For me, the chips and imperfections don’t detract one bit from each piece’s beauty.  Our living room ceiling has a small, round hole in it where Nate experimented with a rocket propelled by a tire pump.  The rocket worked.  Our ceiling suffered.  In some odd way, I’m almost more fond of it now.

And just like my nicknacks and ceiling, the bumps in my life, though unwelcome at the time, have taken me in directions I’d have never explored on my own.  The same goes with my writing.  When an editor I’d sent a mystery manuscript to said, “I don’t do mysteries anymore.  I’m over paranormal romances now.  Do you have one to send me?”–I didn’t even know what a paranormal romance was.  But I replied, “If you tell me what it is, I’ll try to write it.” She sent me a list, bless her.  I didn’t get it right the first time, but I was closer on my second attempt.  On the third try, she wanted to buy it, but by then, she was ready to move on herself.  Everything fell through, but I was hooked on writing about witches and werewolves, goddesses and gargoyles.   It’s not what I planned to do.  I won’t be the world’s next Agatha Christie, as I intended, but life, as usual, suprised me.  The dream of being a writer is still there, just a little chipped and glued back together.

(http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5023544.Judith_Post)

 

Emotion in Writing

I’ve started to really look forward to a fellow blogger’s posts.  She’s a bird enthusiast, like me, but she’s also a wonderful writer and captures lots of emotion in very few words.  (http://jmgoyder.com/author/jmgoyder/)

It’s made me think about my own writing.  I draw character wheels to get my characters’ hair and eye color right, to understand what motivates them.  I scribble down a sketchy map of plot points to keep the story going in the right direction.  I worry about word choice and commas.  But I belong to Goodreads, and the books that people love the most aren’t always perfectly written.  They’re the ones that elicit a strong emotional reaction.    If the language is lyrical and the twists and turns are exciting, that’s an added plus.  But the emotional impact is the payoff for all of the pages turned.

So how does a writer create emotion?  An often repeated piece of advice comes to mind.  The protagonist’s stakes have be high, almost impossible, to achieve.  He has to work hard and suffer many failures to try to achieve his goal.  And he should never give up.  The goal has to matter.

The characters should be sympathetic.  Not the same as nice or smart or good looking, even though in urban fantasy, that doesn’t hurt.  But come to think of it, protagonists aren’t always nice.  They can be stubborn, frustrating, and flawed.  That actually makes them much more fun to follow, but it’s hard to care about a character who’s petty, selfish, or mean.  I have a problem with whiners.  Or characters who are shallow.  Why would we care if he/she achieves what he wants or needs?  But he might SEEM petty or act selfish sometimes, etc., as long as we know he’s actually a decent human being at the core.

The characters need to feel real, not just some personality traits on paper who follow the author’s script and lead the plot from point A to point B.  They have to have their own wants and desires, their own hangups and habits.  And once in a while, their reactions have to be totally honest, not what the author or reader would expect, not the proper way to respond, but something that makes them seem human.  They need to be flawed, to make mistakes, and have regrets.

Anyway, I’ve read lots of articles on POV, pacing, and voice, along with all of the other tools a writer needs in her author belt.  But I think checking our scenes and chapters for emotional impact should be one of the things at the top of the list.  Some people do this naturally, like JMGoyder does.  Some emotions are built into the story conflict.  They come with the territory.  But if we can add emotion to a scene, it makes it stronger.  It’s something to think about.

What are some of your all-time favorite books?  What made you like them?  Remember them?

 

 

 

What does your handwriting reveal about you?

My a’s, e’s and o’s are closed.  Not a good thing for a writer.

I bought a book on how to analyze handwriting and had a friend (who teaches about it) look at a page of my cursive squiggles.  The first thing she told me was that my vowels are closed.  She said that means that, even though my other letters show that I’m generous and friendly, I hold my true emotions in.  There’s a filter on how much I share.  She told me to open them, and I’d be able to express emotion better.

I’ve tried.  I still can’t do it.  My vowels are still pinched looking.  Maybe it’s my inner editor.  But feelings are what drives fiction.  What provides  motivation.  Scenes with emotional impact stay with us.  I’ve worked hard to put deep POV in my stories, more interplay between characters.  But romance?  That yin/yang of love/hate?  Boy, it’s hard for me.  I’m a nurturer, not a hearts and flowers type of girl, so courtship isn’t my strong point.  I’m not a natural at it.  Neither are my grandsons.

Tyler went to two proms this year.  He’s a senior in high school, close to graduating, and he attended the first prom at his own school.  He went with a pretty girl he didn’t know that well.  The second prom was with a girl he worked with, at her school.  His brother, Nate, two years younger and only a sophomore, teased him for renting a “monkey suit” two weekends in a row, but Ty didn’t care.  I listened to the boys talk about the intricate boy/girl back and forth, and realized all over again how tricky start ups are.  There’s lots of room for error.  Does she like me?  Doesn’t she?  When she laughed at me, was it because she thought I was funny or because she’s sure I’m clueless?

Novels are about relationships.  The plot drives the pace, but the characters– their interactions and motivations–provide the soul of the story.  I’ll read a mediocre novel if I love the characters, but I can put aside the most well-written book if I don’t care what happens to the people on the pages.  And romance?  I love it as a subplot in a mystery or urban fantasy, but it’s hard for me to write.  I’ll never capture the angst of the Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series.  Or the chemistry between MacKayla Lane and Jericho Barrens in Karen Marie Moning’s Fever series.  I guess, to this day, courtship and the “she loves me/she loves me not” type of chemistry is as much a challenge for me as it is for my boys.  And writing “intimate” scenes?  Lord, help me!

If you’re interested, this is a quick handwriting test for you try: http://quizstop.com/askhand.htm

And here’s a link for writing romance/love scenes: http://www.writing-world.com/romance/love.shtml

 

Aaarrrrgh!

Why is it as soon as I’m ready to dig in on my novel, I get a new idea for something shorter?  A rhetorical question.  I know the answer.  I’m stalling.  I’m in the middle of Spinners of Fortune (if I don’t change the title).  The big sag.  Even with plot points, character wheels (thank you, Shirley Jump.  Love the idea–), and a story I really like, the middle is WORK.  Start ups are exciting–like a new romance.  Middles are more like marriage–the everyday kind of stuff.  But for this month, writing will be choppy, at best.  Ty graduates on the 25th.  Out of town guests are coming and staying at our house.  I love guests.  Love cooking.  So why not make it a fun month all the way around?  I can cook and clean between novellas.  The murky middle can wait until June.  No fairies will come on magic wings and write scenes for me.  Tyr and Diana will still be there, waiting impatiently for me to get in gear.  And I will.  In June.

Writer friends

I met with 7 writer friends yesterday.  We had a NovelCon–an excuse for us to get together, read a chapter each, and talk shop. It was awesome.  Not just because my friends are great writers, but because they’re terrific people.  (And Paula happens to be a near-gourmet cook.  Lucky us).  We all belong to a writers’ group, The Summit City Scribes.  We meet twice a month, have 3 readers who get 20 minutes each to share pages with us, and then we go around the table to offer critiques.  We’re so different, we zero in on different things.   And that’s the strength of our group.  Somebody will catch almost any thing that’s gone astray.

The thing is, I’m lucky to have so many good friends who are so freakin’ talented.  And it’s nice to touch bases with them outside of Scribes.  At a NovelCon, we don’t just read.  We talk shop.  We throw out plot stumbles that have turned into black holes of “what-ifs” gone wrong.  We moan about characters who don’t listen to us and middles that turn to mush.  And none of the problems are as big as they look.  There’s a plot twist or a minor fix that somebody comes up with, and kazaam!, the book’s a whole again.

We’ve been together so long, we know each others’ strengths and weaknesses.  We make suggestions before the book reaches the spot we know it will.  We push each other, enjoy each other, and take off on tangents.  The bottom line is, we all want each other to write the best book possible.  And more than that, we have one heck of a good time in the process.