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I always enjoy hearing from my readers. In fact, my readers’ comments can really influence my writing.

I’ve heard from a couple of readers since Pretty is as Pretty Dies was released in 2009 that they disagreed with a character’s actions in one scene. I’ll try to be a little vague here, since I don’t want to write in any spoilers.

My protagonist, octogenarian Myrtle Clover, was attacked and was rescued by a new neighbor who was, basically, a stranger to her because he’d recently moved in.

Myrtle and her police officer son, Red, have a little bit of a prickly relationship. They love each other, but they get on each others’ nerves. Badly. Myrtle is irritated by her son’s meddling. She insists on her independence and some respect. Red is irritated that Myrtle puts herself in bad situations and interferes in things he’d rather see her leave alone.

The new neighbor, after rescuing Myrtle, calls her son. It’s very late at night and Red is awakened by the call. He comes over, hears her story, fusses over her. They nettle each other a little. Myrtle stubbornly decides to stay with her neighbor who has fixed them coffees. Red goes back home and goes back to bed.

He shouldn’t have left her, say these readers.

It wasn’t a case of character motivation—if it was, then I’d definitely be paying attention. These two have something of a contentious relationship. The main reason for the tension is Myrtle’s desire to be taken seriously. She wants respect and independence. She wouldn’t have appreciated being carted back to her home by Red unless she wanted to go there.

But the readers disagreed with Red’s actions. They thought he was being thoughtless. That he wasn’t being a good son by not protecting her…regardless of whether she wanted that protection or not.

Both times the readers asked me about this, it was in person. Which is unfortunate because both times my automatic response was, “Oh, I totally understand what you’re saying. But that was the character’s choice. That’s what he chose to do. He was being thoughtless.”

Acting like our characters are alive is probably one of those things that gives writers a reputation for being a little crazy.

But I knew that this was a thoughtless, inattentive thing that this particular character would do in that circumstance.

I’ve thought about this a little lately, mainly because I’m about to address a book club in South Carolina in a couple of weeks for this book, and want to be prepared with something a little better to say than, “But that’s what the character did.”

I still really believe this nice guy would be thoughtless in this circumstance. Here it is, the middle of the night and he’s been pulled out of bed. He’s irritated, scared for his mother’s safety, and she’s still harping at him about how she’s completely fine and he needs to stop his fussing. I think I laid the groundwork in the early part of the book for him to behave that way. It doesn’t seem to be to be out of character, but it seems like something he’d do when tired, grouchy, and generally out of sorts.

When he was having a bad day.

What I think I would do if I wrote the book over again, is that even though I set up the motivation and the groundwork, I needed to have some sort of repercussion or consequence for that behavior.

My readers were outraged for Myrtle. I’m glad they liked her enough to want to protect her. They were quite fierce, both times, when they brought it up. I appreciated it.

I listen carefully to my editors’ ideas. I listen really carefully to my readers’.

I think there’s sometimes an urge when we’re reading books, or maybe in life too, to see someone pay for a mistake. Even just a mild one. Or at least to get told off for it.

If I had to write it again, I’d have Red’s wife take him down a notch, when he got back home: “You did what? Left her over with some new neighbor she’s never met? After she’s been attacked? What?”

Because vengeance can be sweet.

So, summing up, I think the better approach for having a nice guy (not, in this case, the protagonist, but an important character) behave thoughtlessly is to not only lay the groundwork for this type of behavior, but to have some sort of repercussion/consequence for this behavior or some sort of dressing down for it later.

Have you ever had a good guy do something thoughtless or imprudent? How did you approach it?

I think I’ve mentioned before that my writing is a fairly solo process up until my deadline.

I really do look at my books as collaborative efforts between me, my agent, and the editorial staffs at my publishers. I’m open to suggestions, I’m happy to make changes or substitutions. Want to send the plot off in another direction? I’m game. Want me to write in a character or kill one off? I’m your writer. If you have an idea, I can write it and we can see what happens. Try me!

But I don’t really have the beta readers in on the drafting process. I should. It would definitely help me out.

The reason I don’t, I think, is because I’m frequently working on more than one project at once and my drafts are disasters. Right now I’m editing two different manuscripts and writing a requested synopsis for the second book of the new series. I’m under several deadlines.

I know what’s going on in my draft. I make cryptic notes to myself with Track Changes in the margins. I know that there are huge sections that are out of place. I know that there are unintentional cliffhangers that lead off into nothingness. It all makes sense…to me. And I know in my head exactly how I’m going to fix it.

It wouldn’t make sense to anyone else though. My cryptic notes in the margins don’t even make sense unless you can get inside my head. And that’s why I’m really reluctant to share it out.

My next deadline is June 1. When I was in Anderson, SC, last weekend, I gave my mother the manuscript. She needs to edit on paper, so I carefully printed it out for her.

This time I actually thought ahead and tried to be considerate. Ordinarily, there are no page numbers on the document, and no chapter breaks. :) And this time, the manuscript was even sort of in order.

But… “Mama?” I said. “The only thing is that the ending won’t make sense.”

“Oh, it’s one of those endings where you have to think about it and figure it out?” she asked.

“No, I mean it’s really just an incomplete ending. Like—not finished. But no worries! It’s all under control!”

You can only do something like this to your mother. Here’s a book. Please read it very carefully from start to finish, the sooner the better. But you’ll have to make up your own ending because it’s not included.

If I gave that mess to my agent, I can only imagine what she’d say. She’s a little more worried about endings that don’t make sense or endings that are completely AWOL. Since our livelihoods are somewhat tied together, I can understand why she’d be concerned.

I’ve had some great offers from beta readers and I really do mean to take advantage of them…when my manuscripts are a little more orderly. The only problem is that by the time they’re orderly, I’m right up on the deadline. And it’s not very nice to ask someone to critique a book in three days time. :)

So…I’m dumping it all on my poor mother. Because mothers take on stuff like that! She’s a special kind of first reader.

So this is my question for you—if you use a beta/first reader, what kind of condition is your manuscript in when you hand it over? Do you have different kinds of beta readers—some who you could dump a messy manuscript on, some who get a more finished product? If you don’t have a beta reader, why not? Is it just a matter of not finding one, not having time to return critiques, or another reason altogether?

My daughter missed a week of school last week because she had a mysterious fever virus that wouldn’t go away.

Most unfortunately, her 4th grade class learned how to simplify, compare, and order fractions during that time. Sans her.

Even more unfortunately, there is a new way to do this math.

Not that I was even great at doing it the old way.

On Monday, when she came home with her fractions homework, I attempted to show her how to simplify fractions…the only way I knew how.

It wasn’t the way the teacher wanted the class to simplify fractions. She was supposed to do something to do with fact families maybe? And finding multipliers? Something like that? Or factors? Something?

At any rate, it boiled down to the fact that I was approaching the task in a completely different way from her teacher. This made her feel both frustrated (with the assignment, her teacher, and me) and worried about solving the problems.

I could get the right answer (amazingly) when I simplified 24/108. But she needed to arrive at the answer differently.

When writing a book, you can choose to outline…or not. You can edit as you go…or not. You can research at the beginning of your project, at the end, or not at all. You can favor writing plot-focused books or character-focused ones.

The different approaches don’t stop there. Let’s say that you finally chose the methods that worked for you and now you’ve got a finished manuscript. Do you query it? Do you consider self-publishing it? Do you put it out as an e-book?

It’s enough to make your head spin.

I read an article a couple of days ago on Jane Friedman’s Writer’s Digest blog , There Are No Rules, about NYT Bestselling author Barry Eisler’s decision to turn down a $500k deal from St. Martin’s to self-publish his book.

Now that’s a different approach. But it’s the kind of thing I’m hearing more and more about.

Sometimes I’m tempted to feel like my daughter with the different approaches for simplifying fractions—bewildered and frustrated and uncertain of the right way to continue.

But then I remind myself that our books all end up at the same place—in the hands of our readers. What’s important, ultimately, isn’t how we got there but the quality of the books that we’re giving them.

What matters is the end-product: whether it’s a correct math problem or a page-turning novel.

Do you find the different choices and approaches in writing and publishing confusing? How do you find the right path?

Today I’m over at “A Good Blog is Hard to Find,” blogging on some ways to keep motivated when you’d rather be looking out the window.

Hope you’ll join me (and that you’re having some nice weather where you are.)

Last weekend I was heading to Anderson, SC, to visit my parents and have a radio interview with a local radio personality there. He’d told me just to contact him whenever I planned a trip to see my folks and he’d tape an interview.

My daughter was sick all last week with a fever, so I emailed him at the last minute, “Sorry for the last-minute email, but I’m going to be in Anderson this weekend. Would you like to schedule an interview?”

He emailed me back, and asked me to call him at a particular number—different from the one I had on file for him.

“Could you come to the hospital for our interview?” he asked. “I’ve been here for a week now and I don’t have next week’s show booked—actually, your visit is working out perfectly.”

“Can you even do an interview at the hospital?” I asked. I was feeling a little uncertain about the whole thing.

“Sure I can. I’ve already done one this week for the show that’s running tomorrow. If you don’t mind, it would work out great for me.”

So we did. The interview went great—we just passed the microphone back and forth between each other. I’ve never actually done a face to face radio interview before and I was pleased at how well it went. Usually when I do a radio interview, I’m on the phone and not even in the same state as the interviewer.

In some ways, the in-person radio interview was easier than the phone interviews I’ve usually done. On the phone, I’m always listening hard for any clues that I need to shush up and move on to the next subject. When you’re face to face with your radio interviewer, you get visual clues to wrap up a particular train of thought. (Hurry up motions).

At one point in the interview, I was asked about how I’d ended up writing for both Midnight Ink and Penguin Berkley. I started talking about slush piles and the interviewer held up his hands and mouthed, “Tell them what a slush pile is!” That’s something that wouldn’t have happened in a phone-in radio interview—it wouldn’t have occurred to me that I was using jargon. So I quickly interjected an explanation.

The interview wrapped up well and afterward the interviewer told me to let him know when I was back in town for a signing and he’d get some local TV coverage for it. I might have gulped a little, but told him that sounded great.

I’m not really a great spur-of-the-moment, go-with-the-flow type of person. I like to organize and plan and apply my Type A self to the process. I like everything to be very orderly.

But I’m learning to go with the flow. One thing that’s helping me is a book I downloaded on my Kindle last week. In fact, it was the book that helped me tell the interviewer we’d go ahead with the interview instead of rescheduling it for another time.

While I was reading blogs last week, I came across a post on Tribal Writer that mentioned the book Improv Wisdom by Stanford professor Patricia Ryan Madson.

The Tribal Writer post mentioned the book as a way to combat procrastination. I don’t need help with that, but I do think I need help with being a little more flexible. Madson recommends that we say “yes” more often in life and see what happens.

From the Publishers Weekly review:

If you improvise, she says, you “will make more mistakes” but you’ll also “laugh more often, and have some adventures.” Here she offers 13 maxims to guide the fledgling improviser. “Say yes” … it will open up new worlds. “Don’t prepare”: in focusing on the future, you might miss the present. “Start anywhere”: take any entry into a problem, and once you get inside you’ll have a better perspective.

I think that I’ve got a very cautious voice inside me that wants to say “no” until I have a chance to absorb what I’m facing. I’ve noticed that I’m a lot more flexible when it comes to my writing—and it always works out really well. When I let characters propel my story in surprising ways, I’m usually pleased with the results.

And I’m discovering that I’m also making new discoveries whenever I step outside my comfort zone with life, too. That might be stretching myself with promo (book tour, interviews, etc.) but it might be just growing as a writer by saying yes to a variety of new experiences and people.

I liked this approach for a variety of stumbling blocks—whether it’s procrastination or uncertainty about how to approach a difficult scene…or being more outgoing with marketing. Saying yes, focusing on the present, and jumping in to tackle our obstacles sounds like a good way to move forward. And we might end up with more opportunities along the way—opportunities to network and find inspiration with people and situations that we come across.

How often do you step outside your comfort zone? Are you more flexible in your life and writing, or a little more cautious?