Blog-Hop “Pick 4”
Well posts two days in a row? The idea is to pick 4 from the list and write about how they affect you as a writer. 
1. What are you working on right now?
2. How does it differ from other works in its genre?
3. What experiences have influenced you?
4. Why do you write what you do?
5. How does your writing process work?
6. What is the hardest part about writing?
7. What would you like to try as a writer that you haven’t yet?
8. Who are the authors you most admire?
9. What scares you
1.I am ‘cleaning up’/editing/publishing manuscripts from all the different years I’ve been writing. So there is no one book I’m looking at in particular. With self-publishing through the internet and Amazon, life is much different for a writer than when I started somewhere in the 1990’s.
3. I think I’ve always had daydreams, but when my mother started writing in the late 1980’s I figured, why not me too? Living abroad for many years(30+) and experiencing various cultures day-to-day, not just on a fleeting trip, gave me ideas for places, characters and ways to build a culture/society different than the culture I grew up in. “Travel is broadening.”
5. A lot of my time is spent ‘daydreaming’ about the story. If it is in a historical context I will do research online and in hardcover books. I like to have concrete facts for the period. If it is a fantasy I may look at Pinterest and build a board of character traits and costumes. (I also make a board for the historical fictions.) Then I think about it and try to carry the story along in my head from point A to the end. I’ll do this multiple times. When I have ‘downtime’ from what is going on around me, I’ll think of where I left off and continue the story mentally. There are times I think I create some great dialogue, and others that dialogue gets lost, but something new comes along. I feel that by ‘running’ it several times through my head, the most important elements of the story get stronger. It works for me.
7. Not sure about this one. I can answer about one book I did write that was different. It was a historical fiction mystery in the first person where the protagonist was blind. I really liked the challenge of finding senses other than sight to move the story along from her point of view. The clues to what was happening were subtle but there, just not ‘in view’. I might like to try that again, but it was specific to that character and story, so I think it would feel forced a second time.
Okay, so there are my choices and answers. Hope your Ides of March went better than Julius Caesar’s. “Et tu, Brutus?”
