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My husband spent five years working at Microsoft (the North Carolina division) before switching to his current corporation. It’s easy to get burned out at Microsoft.

I’d drive out there once a week or more for lunch with him. They actually had a food court in the building with real chefs.

The interesting thing about Microsoft was that nearly everyone there was genius material. And…different in appearance and demeanor (lots of long beards, flip flops, unusual clothing choices…quite a few nerds), but very nice. My IQ jumped just from being in the same building with them.

And when the Microsofties all got together—the ideas they bounced off each other and the information they exchanged was incredible. They fed off each other. I didn’t know what the heck they were talking about, but I was the good spouse and nodded along and said, “Right!” every once and a while in agreement.

At the time (2003-ish) I thought how nice it was to have professional peers to bounce ideas off of. I was struggling to find critique groups and writing organizations that fit my needs. And, five or six years ago, the online community of writers really wasn’t out there. I was online, looking for it—but, beside a few forums, there wasn’t too much there. And I was primarily housebound with my then-two year old daughter—I needed something online.

Now, of course, with the advent of social media and real-time conversations, we benefit from a worldwide network of writers. And the writing community is incredibly generous with its time. I can match my development as a writer to the point when the online community took off.

More difficult for me are face-to-face meetings. I’m a wretched club member. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m not a follower. I’m crummy at meetings, I don’t remember names well, I have absolutely no time. And I’m reluctant to socialize. My modus operandi has been to join writing organizations, pay my dues faithfully, and then become a lapsed member.

The one exception has been the Carolina Conspiracy, a group of mystery writers here in the Carolinas. They’ve all written much longer than I have and I love getting together with them and exchanging ideas about writing, publishing, and marketing. We all had lunch on Saturday and I’m sure the restaurant was fed up with us by the time we left three hours later.

I’m a lapsed member of several different organizations—and there are three or four I know I should belong to (Mystery Writers of America being one of them.) But I feel so much support from the online community that I don’t really feel the need to reach out.

But I’m beginning to reconsider the local writing groups. I’m waffling. I remember how much my husband benefited from his in-person exchanges at Microsoft. And how much I enjoy hanging out with writers in the Carolina Conspiracy. My children are older and it’s easier for me to get away.

If I belong to a group, would they be okay with me not leading? With not following? With just taking lots of notes and sometimes piping up a contribution? But then I feel guilty because it’s really me taking and not giving as much. (Yes, I overthink things.)

I like to learn. I’m all about learning. I’m wondering if I’m missing out, somehow.

How about you? Besides sitting down every day and practicing the craft, how are you learning? Critique groups? Online? Are there places where you lurk online or do you get more out of an exchange? Do you belong to any local writing organizations?

Saturday evening, my daughter’s Brownie scout troop drove to Huntersville (about 45 minutes away) to tour a historic home dating back to 1797. Latta Plantation was having a Christmas celebration, so we were learning how Christmas was celebrated long ago.

Since I’m the Brownie leader, I was put in the position of leading. You wouldn’t think this would be a problem for someone who somehow found herself in a leadership role (I was conscripted), but I’m used to leading children.

I don’t like leading adults. I’d rather they be responsible for themselves. They were all asking me which building we were going to next (the kitchen? the blacksmith?) and I just wanted to wander around. They also expected me to know my way around the property. I didn’t and asked them to refer to their map. Would there be costumed recreation? At what time? I had no idea off the top of my head…but it was on the program they were given, if they wanted to read their program.

The children, thankfully, are much less-demanding of their leader each week. I was delighted when the adults decided to form small groups and do a self-tour with their children. Excellent! No leading of adults. I’d gotten myself fired. :)

I’ll admit I don’t enjoy being a leader. I don’t enjoy being a follower, actually, either. I like being an observer.

But…my protagonists are both natural leaders. When they’re put in difficult situations, they jump into action.

I think that most protagonists are that way. That’s what makes them interesting. I would never write a protagonist like me—nothing interesting would ever happen! They’d sit around watching people and taking notes instead of tackling the world head-on. In fact, in my books, someone like me would likely be the next murder victim.

I like writing leaders. Strong, self-assured, take-charge. They think their way through their challenges. Even protagonists who aren’t natural leaders are interesting if they rise to the occasion when challenged.

Do you write leaders? Or followers? If you write a protagonist who is a follower, how do you portray them? Which are you?

I’ve had a couple of questions about revisions, so I thought I’d share my revision process for a problem that was really getting on my nerves. (Boring post here! Most of us don’t really like revision.)

I want to add that this was my third or fourth draft–I don’t do any revisions as I write the first draft because it really slows me down. I like to get the whole thing on paper before I start editing.

At the end of October I was revising the latest Myrtle Clover (my personal revisions, not the editor’s.) I thought the beginning was ‘okay.’ But the more I looked at it, the more it really started bothering me.

I tried approaching it from a couple of different directions. I switched one scene with another as a lead-in.

Then I revised a long scene and made it much shorter.

I took out a phone conversation that I realized was unnecessary and instead started the next scene with the person doing the action they’d discussed on the phone.

Some of the sentences seemed longer than needed, so I broke them up into shorter ones, which made them read a lot smoother.

After all these changes, it was much better. But it still wasn’t the beginning I knew it could be.

I decided to pretend that I hadn’t written the beginning at all—that it didn’t exist.

I rewrote the entire first chapter, using a different approach. The nice thing about word processing is that we can easily see which one works better and cut and paste the different beginnings in.

The first beginning had a lot of set-up written in. I incorporated it with humor, but a duck is a duck. It was set-up. And set-up slows down the pace—and is boring.

With the second beginning, I ditched the set-up. Instead I included foreshadowing to let the reader know to keep an eye on a particular character.

I completely removed, in my rewrite, several passages that were unnecessary. For example: I needed to have a particular character at another character’s house. In the original beginning, I’d had a whole sequence to set that visit up. Boring.

In the second version, I just opened the scene with the visit and put in a passing reference to it in dialogue, “I’m glad you could come by, Jill, and help me out…”

Looking back at what I did, I’m thinking now that I should just immediately have done a total rewrite of the entire first chapter. Instead I spent a lot of time doing surface work on something that had a deeper problem. Yes, it did read better when I changed scenes around and toyed with my sentence structure. But, for this instance anyway, I got much better results with the radical rewrite.

There’s an interesting phenomenon that happens at the pool or the playground.

One child calls, “Mom!” and about ten women swing around.

Not a good thing to have in our books, though. It’s really distracting when I’m reading a book and wonder who the character is because there’s a Sam and a Sid. And sometimes the author doesn’t give little helpful hints to help me know which character he’s referring to (“Sam the accountant. Sid, who works at the barbershop.) I try not to have names starting with the same letter in my books.

I also try to find appropriate names for my characters. Right or wrong, there’s definitely baggage that comes along with certain names. If I were going to write a beauty queen, I probably wouldn’t choose the name ‘Gertrude’ unless I was trying to be funny. I wouldn’t name my intellectual Biff…again, unless I was trying to make a point. It would be too much work to try to undo the readers’ quick leap to stereotype.

Every book I seem to change a character name at least once. After eight chapters, they may not be the same person I thought they were in chapter two. By chapter eighteen, they might have changed again.

The last book I submitted needed a character name change in the 11th hour—the name was already taken by a real person…an actual author at another publishing house.

I’ve had fun playing around with names with my Myrtle Clover series. Some characters’ names have literary or historical references.

Name generators are also useful. The one I usually use is Seventh Sanctum.

Some names just fit particular characters beautifully. My favorite is Voldemort. Have you got any favorite character names? How does your character naming process work?

After I write this (right now it’s Wednesday morning), I’m going to knock out revisions on two separate books, then get back to writing my second book of the Memphis Barbeque series.

This will be my 5th book. I’ve got two books on the shelves (one of them is out of print but still out there, mainly in libraries), two books in production, and one just starting out on a Word document.

Each time I start the process I feel a little at a loss. How do I do this? How did I do it last time? Because each time I’ve written a book, the process has been slightly different.

I try different approaches to see what I like best. The only problem is that sometimes I can’t remember what worked.

I’ve written books all the way straight through (A Dyeing Shame, Pretty is as Pretty Dies, Delicious and Suspicious). I didn’t even stop for chapter breaks—just put them in during revisions.

For Progressively Dead (in production), I wrote every chapter separately –I numbered out 18 chapters and just randomly picked one and wrote in it for that day. This was an odd and disjointed process and I’m not sure why I chose it. It took forever to work out the transitions between scenes and chapters.

For two books, if I got stuck at any point, I started writing a different part of the book until I was ready to tackle the part that stumped me.

The other two books, I just marked *** where I got stuck and picked up at the next scene and continued writing.

I always have a “random” file to put in all the disjointed ideas that I have when I’m writing a book. Many of them I’ll weave into the manuscript at some point.

Outlines never work for me. I have a half-finished 6th book that I’ve just put in the graveyard. Too pat when I’d outlined it. I’ll never outline again (except for my little mini-outlines where I sketch out the next scene, chapter, etc.)

I’m going to ignore my lost feeling. There’s nothing like getting words on the page to get rid of it—whatever the method is.

What works for you? Do you experiment with your process? Do you remember what worked?