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I think I must be a masochist.

Here I have a perfectly good manuscript (that, I might add, is due to Berkley September 1.)

It’s completely finished.  I’ve completed two revision sweeps for grammar, typos, content problems.

It looks good.

Plus, I have Pretty is as Pretty Dies coming out August 1. I’m in the middle of phone interviews, setting up blog hosts for my blog tour, and all sorts of mayhem.  As my son said yesterday: “Your book is messing up my life!”

I shouldn’t be doing anything but continuing my revisions by tightening up my writing and finding more errors to erase.  But…

I just can’t seem to help myself.  So I have an alternate document in my computer for my WIP. It’s my ‘what if’ document.

In that document, I explore different outcomes for events.  What if a different suspect committed the murder?  What if there were an additional victim?  What if I added a character and had them do ___________—what would this mean for my sleuth?  And the investigation?

Right now, only small scenes from my what-if additions have made it into the real manuscript. But if one of the storylines I explore is really good, it’ll make it into the main doc. That will mean a lot of revising, but if it works, it’s worth it.

It’s almost as if I’ve created an alternate, parallel universe for my characters.  This alt/doc helps me keep my creative juices going during the dry revision and marketing process, and may provide some additional content for my book.

I’m still in the point of my life where I’m reading a lot of Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Sometimes I even feel like I’m continuing the storytelling tradition by retelling the tales to my kids sans books.

No matter how often I read and tell these stories, the kids are caught up in them.

What I’ve learned from fairy tales:

Start out right in the middle of the action: Jack and his mother are out of food at the beginning of Jack and the Beanstalk. So Jack goes off to sell the old cow, the last saleable asset, for their very survival.

If you start out with an ordinary day, it should abruptly veer off course (and pretty quickly.) Red Riding Hood was on a run-of-the-mill trip to Grandma’s house before ill-advisedly chatting with a wolf. In Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the bears had some hot food that needed to cool–and the need to walk off a few pounds. It was a normal morning for the bears until that naughty Goldilocks broke into their cottage and started destroying their furniture.

Limit the number of characters: Fairy tales have only a handful, suitable for easy retelling through the generations. And, yes, the stories are super-short. But think how memorable these characters are.

Characters’ shortcomings can contribute to their downfalls: Yes, the wolf was a terrible antagonist for the Three Little Pigs. But two of the pigs were brought down just as much by their own failure—laziness. Obviously, brick building matter was available, but they decided to go the easy route with twigs and straw. Little Red Riding Hood shouldn’t have talked to strangers. The poor villager should never have bragged to the king that his daughter could spin straw into gold. Peter’s habit of lying nearly caused him to be devoured by a wolf.

Greed is a powerful motivator: The people of Hamelin didn’t pay the Pied Piper for ridding them of their rats; he lured off their children in retaliation. Jack’s greed (he went back up the beanstalk several times to steal additional items from the giant) nearly killed him.

Before an attack, have tension build steadily. We know something that Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t know—she’s in the room with a ravenous wolf. The tension builds as Red comes slowly toward the bed. “Grandma! What big eyes you have!” Jack hides in an oven while the giant bellows, “Fee-fi-fo-fum!” It’s not a jumping-out-at-you kind of fear. We hear the giant’s heavy steps, see Red come closer to the wolf to peer at her ‘grandma.’ Waiting for the inevitable attack creates painstaking tension.

Have the protagonist save himself by using his wits. Now this isn’t always the case in fairy tales. Yes, the woodsman saved Red and Grandma. And Bluebeard’s wife was saved by her brothers. But in many cases, there wasn’t some last-minute savior. In Three Billy Goats Gruff, the goats outwitted the troll by repeatedly promising him that a better meal was on its way to the bridge. In Hansel and Gretel, Hansel tricked the nearsighted witch by sticking out a small bone leftover from a meal to prove to the witch he wasn’t fat enough for her to eat. The pig with the brick house was one step ahead of the wolf: realizing he was going to try to enter via the chimney, he anticipated the attack and boiled a large pot of water.

When the characters save themselves, the result is much more satisfying.

When I’m reading fairy tales to the kids, I sometimes think I’m getting more out of it than they are. Sharing the stories is a good experience for both of us.

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It’s a snap to market yourself online. There are taglines, links, promo photos, blogs, etc. that make it incredibly simple.

Then there’s real-time marketing. For me, it’s the real-time promoting that poses a problem. Here are my issues:

Phones: Life falls apart when Mom gets on the phone. As I mentioned to my author friend Galen Kindley yesterday, the local press called me to set up an interview for my August 1 release. At that very moment, the smoke detector went off because I was cooking pasta and it always goes off when I’m cooking pasta. Then the dog (pictured) started barking hysterically to alert me to the alarm (as if I were deaf to the alarm, but had functional hearing when it came to her.)

My kids have a rule—when Mom is on the phone, there must be an emergency. No one throws up, makes the toilet or bathtub overflow, or needs me desperately in any way until I’m on the phone.

Face to Face Promoting: I feel uncomfortable mentioning my book when people ask what I do.

Conferences: I’m a stay-at-home mom. It’s complicated.

Book Signings: When I do book signings, customers think I work at the bookstore. I guess I’m not very authorly-looking. Many of them ask me where the restrooms are.

My Solutions:

Phone: Tell my kids that unless they’re bleeding to death or the house is on fire, they should leave me alone when I’m on the phone. Or talk on the phone while sitting in my closet. Put the dog outside. Don’t cook pasta. :)

Face to Face promotion: Business cards. I don’t have to say much…the cards have my contact info on them, a pic of the book, even my pseudonym for the books next year. I can stuff it in their hand and run away.

Conferences: Online conferences are my new thing. If it’s online, I’m there. Oh…but I’ll probably make Malice in the spring. Think I need to go there for sure.

Book signings: I book signings where I’m one of a panel of writers. I’m much more comfortable and less self-conscious. But I do still learn where the restrooms are, since people are sure to ask me.

Does anyone else have promoting obstacles? How do you get past them?

What we have here is a failure to communicate. :Cool Hand Luke.

I don’t like to really sugarcoat my shortcomings.

When I’ve flunked at something, I’d rather acknowledge it and try something completely different.

As you can tell from the picture, I’m a lousy gardener.

Yes, it’s hot here in North Carolina. But I fry things on a regular basis. I should never be allowed to grow anything in a pot. It will die a horrid death because I’ll water it once a week.

I’m that way with reading and writing. I’m an impatient reader: if the author hasn’t connected with me after chapter two, I’m outta there.

If I’m failing to communicate with a scene, a bit of dialogue, a plot direction, I’ll scrap that, too. The longer I spend trying to write myself out of a box, the farther I seem to go into it.

Better to just jettison the weak part and bring in something new. I changed my murderer in mid-stream a couple of times last year. I kept wondering, “Now why did this person do it, again?” I kept fiddling with the manuscript and fiddling with it, trying to force this suspect to have committed the crime. A clear sign the person shouldn’t have done it at all. New killer! Nexttt!

Signs Something Isn’t Working:

• You can’t logically explain what motivates the protagonist’s behavior.
• Along the same lines, your character has completely changed with no reasonable explanation.
• You can’t get into the protagonist’s head. They seem flat. You can’t identify with them at all.
• The plot limps along with no discernable conflict.
• There’s too much conflict and it changes from one thing to another. There’s no primary focus. There’s no theme, just ‘the world vs. John Smith.’
• There’s only external conflict and no internal conflict for the main character.
• The protagonist is unlikeable.
• There’s no readily-identifiable antagonist. There’s just bad stuff that happens.
• Your content is a mess with flashbacks, backstory, telling instead of showing, too many dialogue tags, and point of view issues.
• Your characters aren’t original. They’re more like stock characters (the alcoholic cop, the snooty society lady, the shy librarian).

I think we’re raised to avoid failure at all costs. But I believe it’s better in writing to just recognize a failure to communicate quickly and ruthlessly revise the problems in our stories. The earlier we recognize the problem, the sooner we can eliminate it.

Because I don’t want my books to go off to the editor looking like my potted plants.

There are good things and bad things about long-term relationships.

On August 7, my husband and I will have been married 16 years.

There are very few surprises. For someone who likes predictability, this is a good thing. We have long-standing routines: he comes home from the office, we eat supper. The children tell him about their day. He and I watch “Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour” on PBS. He fusses about CEOs in large corporations and I fret about public education.

It’s predictable. It’s comforting. Is it…boring, though? And sometimes while we’re in our predictable, comforting routine…we get on each others’ nerves.

With series, we’re inviting our readers to join us in a long-term relationship. Here are my thoughts (mostly as an avid series reader) on series do’s and don’ts:

Don’t make your protagonist’s quirks too irritating.

If you use recurring characters, do have inside jokes from book to book. It’s fun to have a chatty character we know other characters will avoid. Or, when a character purchases a new appliance we know they won’t be able to figure out how to use it and will be cursing the thing in the next chapter. As a reader, it makes me feel very smug that I’m an insider.

Do show your character’s personal growth from book to book. If he doesn’t change at all, he’s just dead wood. If your character always falls in love with the wrong person, he might annoy your reader after a couple of books—“Hasn’t he learned anything?” Even if things happen to these characters, if they’re not developing as people, will the readers really care?

Do have an engaging setting that readers want to keep visiting. Louise Penny’s Three Pines, M.C. Beaton’s Scottish Lochdubh, Agatha Christe’s St. Mary Mead provide wonderful escapes for their readers.

Do introduce new characters. But not too many. I enjoy recurring characters, but if there’s no one new, I get tired of the old gang after a few books. On the other hand, if there are too many new characters, I lose track of who they all are.

Don’t assume your readers remember details from book to book. Sometimes I’m reading a series as it’s published so there might be a break of 9-12 months between reading them. A small tag for characters (Ben was the preacher’s son, etc.) is really appreciated.

Don’t assume your readers remember nothing from book to book. If the author goes over lots of backstory that I’m already well-acquainted with, that’s tiresome, too. I think it’s a delicate balance.

I try to keep my series pet peeves and preferences in my head as I write. Because I don’t want readers’ familiarity with my books to breed contempt.