Diane Chamberlain's Blog, page 14

Story Weekend: Afterlife?

Kicking Story Weekend off again with a light and whimsical topic–not! Okay, here is your challenge: tell us your afterlife story (or lack thereof) IN 100 WORDS OR LESS. Can you?

I just received my authors’ copies of the reissued Her Mother’s Shadow (Book 3 of the Keeper of the Light trilogy) and I’m in a prize- giving mood so one of you will be randomly selected to receive a copy prior to its mid October release date. I’ll pick a winner Monday at 10pm EST. Good luck!

If  you’re new to Story Weekend, here’s how it works: I pick a theme and you share something from your life that relates to that theme, however you interpret it. Thanks to all of you who’ve been contributing. As always, there are a few “rules”:

▪   The story must be true

▪   Try to keep it under 100 words. Embrace the challenge! That’s about six or seven lines in the comment form. I want others to read your story, and most people tend to skip if it’s too long. I know how tough it is to “write tight” but I hope you’ll accept this as a challenge.

 

 

Story Weekend takes a Break

This has been a hard week. We lost our beautiful little Jet to cancer on Monday; he’d never even seemed sick until Sunday. A great shock for us, and Keeper is a little lost soul without his brother. I’m still in that painful “I can’t believe it” stage.

Then Tuesday night, my email account was hacked so thoroughly that I couldn’t prove to AOL that I was who I said I was. (“what’s your first pet’s name?” “Kona.” “No that’s not right.” “Yes it is!”) I felt like I was in one of those movies where the hero can’t prove he really is himself. Shudder.

I did have a good trip to High Point to speak to 300 lovely women from the High Point Literary League, and it was good to have a small break from the sadness and craziness of the week.

Anyhow, my heart’s not in Story Weekend this week, so I hope you’ll understand. Story Weekend will be back next week, God willing and the crick don’t rise.

Story Weekend: Six Months to Do Whatever You Want

This is pure fantasy, but if you didn’t have to worry about money or losing a job, how would you spend the next six months? It’s hard to free our brains that much from the constraints of our current lives, but I think this exercise can get to our real passions. I look forward to hearing your dreams!

If  you’re new to Story Weekend, here’s how it works: I pick a theme and you share something from your life that relates to that theme, however you interpret it. Thanks to all of you who’ve been contributing. As always, there are a few “rules”:

▪   The story must be true

▪   Try to keep it under 100 words. Embrace the challenge! That’s about six or seven lines in the comment form. I want others to read your story, and most people tend to skip if it’s too long. I know how tough it is to “write tight” but I hope you’ll accept this as a challenge.

Dream on!

My ‘Keeper of the Light’ Wall

We just had new hardwood floors installed (yay!), so I’ve been spiffing up my office a bit and thought I’d share my ‘Keeper of the Light Wall’ with you.  I used to have my book covers framed until there were so many covers that it was getting out of hand. I had a bunch of them on this wall, but I decided to take them down and, instead, create a wall dedicated to the Keeper of the Light trilogy, which were some of my most popular early books and which are becoming popular all over again. On the top row are the three original hardcover covers of Keeper of the Light, Kiss River and Her Mother’s Shadow. To the right of the covers is a painting of the Corolla Lighthouse in Corolla, North Carolina, which is the lighthouse that inspired the first book in the trilogy. (My walls are actually a light peach. I have to ask John how to get truer colors with my iPhone).

On the bottom, there is the unusual cover for the original paperback of Keeper of the Light. It’s a little confusing unless you’ve seen the book in person. The front of the cover is the pink profile of a woman (Annie). When you open it up, you see the woman herself (on the left), with a peacock feather (that figures into the story). You also see a “clinch” shot of Olivia and Alec in the sea. This particular scene never occurs in the book, but it sure did bring in the romance readers. This was definitely the most popular cover of my early books.

Finally, next to that cover is a photo (originally of the Hatteras lighthouse) that I doctored using Photoshop to represent the fictional partly destroyed Kiss River lighthouse as it is in the second two books of the trilogy. I love this picture. It’s hard to tell, but the steps jut up above the top of the lighthouse and that’s where my characters often spend their time.

(Note: In the US, Keeper of the Light and Kiss River are already available and Her Mother’s Shadow will be out in mid October. In the UK and Australia, Keeper of the Light is available, while Kiss River will be published in January and Her Mother’s Shadow next summer. The Printable Booklist on the BOOKS page of my website always has this information).

Story Weekend: Nostalgia

I recently had to clean out my closets in preparation for installing hardwood floors, and I came across a box of old slides. I sent them to an online company for digitizing. Wow, what a bunch of memories they brought back! Some painfully sad (people I’ve lost), some hysterically funny (my younger brother was a ham), some wistful  (I had a slender, healthy body I didn’t appreciate at all back then), and most just fun to see after many years. Nostalgia is such a complicated emotion, isn’t it? How does it come into play in your life? (That’s me, my mom, and me beloved grandmom at my sister’s wedding, by the way).

If  you’re new to Story Weekend, here’s how it works: I pick a theme and you share something from your life that relates to that theme, however you interpret it. Thanks to all of you who’ve been contributing. As always, there are a few “rules”:

▪   The story must be true

▪   Try to keep it under 100 words. Embrace the challenge! That’s about six or seven lines in the comment form. I want others to read your story, and most people tend to skip if it’s too long. I know how tough it is to “write tight” but I hope you’ll accept this as a challenge.

Have fun!

Story Weekend is Back! “I Feel Rich When. . . “

Story Weekend fans, thanks for your patience while I finished my as-yet-to-be-titled 2013 book. I made my deadline and after this weekend, I’ll have finished my revisions. I have to say, I love this book! I hope you will, too.

We’re on Topsail Island right now. The past couple of evenings, I’ve been writing on my deck with the reflection of the blue moon in the water. I snapped this little pic with my iPhone as I worked. Sitting there, I feel as rich as if I had millions in the bank. How about you? When do you feel rich?

 

 

Letting My Hair Down

For the past couple of years, nearly every time I put a picture of myself on my blog or Facebook, I get compliments on my hair.  That’s been so nice, but I’ve been waiting for the right time to tell you all that it’s not my hair at all. I mean, I own it, but I didn’t grow it. So today is the day I’m officially coming clean:

My name is Diane and I’m a wigaholic.

I’ve always had difficult hair. It’s curly (not in a good way), frizzy, and impossible to control. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, eight or so years ago, it started thinning. I made the usual round of doctor’s visits to find the cause and came up with a few non-specific answers and even fewer potential solutions. No one mentioned the best solution of all: wigs.

I tiptoed into the world of wigs. Literally. I was so hesitant on my first visit to the local wig salon that I sort of slinked in the door trying to be invisible. I assumed human hair would be the best solution and that it would be very, very expensive. The salon owner (so incredibly nice) suggested I start with (and maybe end with) synthetics. She educated me and I realized I knew zip about wearing wigs. Here are a few things I learned that first visit:

-Synthetic wigs come in a zillion really cute styles…and they hold their styles through multiple washings—and washing them once a month is generally plenty.

-They have names! (I can walk through the airport and spot a Reese or a Samantha or an Amy, but I hasten to add, only because I know what I’m looking for. The average person will rarely spot a wig wearer if the wig is a good one).

-The colors are amazing! I’m constantly complimented by total strangers on the highlights in my hair.

-They are not very expensive. You can easily find a well-made synthetic wig for under $100.

-They tend to have an unnatural shine, and that’s been the hardest part of wearing hair for me. Day to day, it’s not a big deal, but when that camera flash goes off, the hair can be blinding. There are solutions, none of them perfect.

-Human hair wigs may be beautiful, but they are expensive and need the same care any human hair needs, meaning they will frizz in humidity and need to be styled regularly.

Since that salon visit, I’ve learned so much more, particularly from an online support group I joined. I discovered how many different hair issues lead women (and men) to wear hair. Online, I’ve “met” women with illness or treatments that caused them to lose all or some of their hair, women who hate their hair and want to cover it up, and increasingly, women (and men) who just want to have fun, trying out new styles and colors.

So why am I coming out? Some of my friends (particularly younger women) think it’s great that I’m doing so, while some of my older friends think I should keep it quiet. I think that has something to do with the stigma that’s always been associated with wig wearing. Younger women, who may wear extensions or experiment more with their hair, don’t have the same negative association. I’m going public because I wish I’d stumbled across a blog like this one when I first realized I needed “hair help.” I wish someone had told me that wearing a wig wasn’t scary or freakish or shameful. I would have started on this adventure long ago. As a matter of fact, if my hair suddenly “thickened up” again, I wouldn’t stop wearing wigs. It takes me 2 minutes to get my hair ready in the morning instead of 30. No contest.

My significant other really liked the first wig I embraced (Noriko’s ‘Sky’, which I’m wearing in the picture by the ocean).  And then another wig arrived for me to play with. And then another. “How many wigs do you need?” he asked. I told him about the support group and how these folks were dealing with their hair loss problems by turning something painful and depressing into something fun, and then he  understood. It’s like playing dress-up for grownups.

One of the topics that comes up often in the support group is whether or not to tell people that we wear wigs. Obviously, I do. I find it really difficult to receive a compliment on my hair and not tell, but that’s just me. There are others who are very, very private about it and that’s fine. It’s one of those things where there’s no right or wrong.

If you’re in need of “hair help” and want to get a sense of what’s out there, check out www.galleryofwigs.com or www.wigs.com or simply do a search for wigs and you’ll soon be overwhelmed by a world of great hair you may never have known existed. Watch for the new Luxe line by Sherri Shephard and Daisy Fuentes to be released really soon, too.  And here’s my favorite wig reviewer and her great wig videos.

If you have questions, send them my way. I’ll answer here and if you don’t want to identify yourself on the blog, email them to me (diane@dianechamberlain.com) and I’ll still put your Q and my A here in the comments without identifying you.

Have a good hair day!

 

 

 

Part Three: A Conversation with Diane and Emilie

Emilie Richards and I have been chatting back and forth on our blogs for the past week. This is the third of four installments. Hope you’re enjoying our conversation! Be sure to comment  for a chance to win one of our books. Emilie will give away Sunset Bridge and I’ll give away Summer’s Child to randomly selected commenters on each of our blogs. Good luck!

Emilie: Do you have a favorite way of making a character sympathetic, a way that draws the reader in immediately?

Diane: One surefire way to make an unsympathetic character more sympathetic is to give them someone they love deeply. Tim in The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes had a sister he would–and did–do anything for, so even though he is manipulative and breaks the law big time, most readers will understand him better because of that human emotion. Another way is to know they grapple with right and wrong. Savannah in The Good Father is torn between her hunger for money and her love of a little girl. Vulnerability is another great way to help readers fall for a character. In One Mountain Away, I remember being drawn in instantly by Harmony’s vulnerability. Everyone can identify with being vulnerable.

Taking our conversation in a slightly different direction, how real do your characters become to you? I like to go the geographic area where my character lives and pretend I’m in that character’s skin or at least hanging out with her there. After a couple of days of doing that, I feel like she’s a friend of mine, and when I finish the book, I don’t want to let her go. What’s it like for you?

Emilie: You’re asking at the right moment.  I just sent in my newest book after working steadily on it forever.  So after the initial elation, I realized I felt so lonely.  Where did my friends go?  I no longer have an inside track on their lives.  But it’s not always true.  Some characters, like some friends, are always a bit mysterious, a bit harder to fathom.  Even when the book’s on the shelf, I wish I knew them better, that I’d gotten them to “fess up” all their secrets.

Marjorie, one of our readers and commenters here asked several good questions.  One, on characters, was this:  “How do we choose which character should change and also choose the events that lead to it.  Care to offer any insight on that?

Diane: For me, it’s the character or characters I’m asking the reader to invest in the most. I don’t ever write from a formula and neither do you, but I can say I a) create a character with flaws and a dilemma b) make life so difficult for her (or him) that she is near the breaking point, and c) have her discover on her own not only how to survive and become a better person for the experience. So the events usually come to me organically from the character’s circumstances. In The Good Father, Erin has lost her little daughter in an accident. Now I’ve thrown a little girl her daughter’s age smack into her path. What she chooses to do helps her grow.

Meredith also asked a “non-character-specific” question I’ll turn over to you, Emilie: “How do you get started on a book?” Since you and I are nearly ready to start our next novels, that’s a good question!

Visit Emilie’s blog on Friday for the last installment of our chat!

 

 

 

 

Emilie and I Continue our Conversation on her Blog

Hop over to Emilie’s blog where we’ll continue our conversation and leave a comment there for a chance to win one of our books. We’ll be back here on my blog on Monday. Have a great weekend!

A Conversation with Emilie and Diane

Emilie Richards, one of my best friends as well as one of my favorite authors, is going to join me for a chat on our blogs. To celebrate Emilie’s new book, One Mountain Away, we decided to have a conversation about characters—specifically characters who might not be all that sympathetic, at least not at first blush. We’ll start our chat here on my blog and then move it to hers very soon. I hope you’ll enjoy our little give and take. We’ll be giving away copies of Sunset Bridge (Emilie’s) and Summer’s Child (Diane’s) to randomly selected commenters on each of our blogs. Good luck!

Diane: Emilie, I loved One Mountain Away and found it moving and uplifting. Before we start talking about our characters, can you tell my readers a little about the book?

Emilie: One Mountain Away is the first book of the Goddesses Anonymous series, set in Asheville, NC. The theme running subtly through all the stories is the way that women reach out to other women who need them. Friends, strangers, family. This is a tough time, and I strongly believe that the only way some people are going to get through it is with the help of others who reach out to them. I want to explore that in all its guises and disguises. One Mountain Away is the story of a woman who, after looking back at her own life, realizes she has valued all the wrong things. Charlotte Hale has lost her family and has never bothered to cultivate real friendships. Suddenly her life seems very bleak. Charlotte knows she can’t change everything she’s done or been, but she can choose the things that are most important and try to change them. And so she sets about doing so. The novel explores her past, but for the most part, it concentrates on what ensues when she opens her heart.

Diane: As you know, I absolutely loved One Mountain Away (and the whole Goddesses Anonymous concept) and thought it was a truly touching story. But Charlotte. . . wow, I wasn’t crazy about her in the beginning! The story was engaging enough that I kept reading, but I frankly didn’t like her. I’ve had unsympathetic characters in my novels and it’s a fine balancing act to keep the reader engaged while also keeping the character true to the story. How did you feel as you were writing about Charlotte?

Emilie: You and I share a desire for new writing challenges, don’t we? I’ve always known an unsympathetic character can send readers screaming into the night. However I love writing about the way people grow, and how can they grow if they don’t have any place to go? So all characters by necessity must have something about them that needs to change and hopefully does. There is, of course, more than one way to make that transition palatable for the reader.

In this case Charlotte has a lot of room for growth. She’s made a lot of mistakes in her life. After struggling with that, I decided that we should meet her when she’s already begun to change, when she’s already more sympathetic. Of course we also see her through the eyes of people who’ve known the unsympathetic Charlotte and don’t trust her. So we get a good look at that Charlotte, too. But I tried to make it clear that she was on a different path. I hope readers will wonder about both the old and the new woman and what brought about the changes.

Which of your characters was most unsympathetic, do you think, and how did you make them appealing to read about anyway? Because, of course you do. I’m thinking of Annie in Keeper of the Light and Noelle in The Midwife’s Confession.

Diane: What you said about growth really resonates with me. When I first think about a character, I ask myself, “How do I want this character to grow during the story? How do I want her to end up?” Then I have that end point as my goal. It does mean, though, that the character has to start from some not-so-wonderful place. I think the best thing we can do is help the reader see bits of herself in those characters, so they can truly cheer them on as they change and grow.

Annie and Noelle are unique cases, though, in that they’re both dead when the stories open. Thus, change is limited! I think then it’s important to understand why they are the way they are. It’s the same with living characters, too, like your Charlotte. Once we understand their life experiences, we feel for them. Very early in my schooling as a counselor, I worked in a halfway house for teens. It was my first experience working with teenagers and honestly, they got under my skin. My supervisor asked me one simple but profound question: “why do you think they are the way they are?” Once I thought about their lives and their upbringing, my sympathy for them increased, along with my tolerance and desire to help them. I’ve learned to ask that question of my characters as well.

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Thanks for reading. . . Emilie and I will be continuing our conversation on her blog on Friday. Be sure to watch for it there, and please leave a comment for a chance to win our books.