Category: Uncategorized

I’ve always been fascinated by different perspectives (like the optical illusion on the left. Do you see the young woman with her face turned away? Do you see the hag with her chin tucked into her fur coat?)

Whenever a plane crashes, the eyewitness accounts are usually radically different: “The plane banked to the left.” “The plane’s nose turned to the ground.” Even the eyewitness accounts of the Titanic differed: did the ship break in half? Did the ship descend into the sea fully intact and nose down?

I like the use of different perspectives with mysteries and think there may be other applications in both fiction and non-fiction. In mysteries, different eyewitnesses may have completely different versions of events. This means a sleuth may rely on the account of one witness: “When I heard the noise it was eleven o’clock. Woke me up out of a sound sleep and sent shivers up and down my spine…” but then discover from another witness: “Jim? No, he wasn’t awake at eleven o’clock. Snoring like a baby. But I did hear a ruckus around 11:45….scared the life out of me.”

What about in non-fiction? Journalists usually interview more than one witness to get information for a story. What if you were doing an in-depth report on the election debacle in Iran? You would hear one completely different account from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s supporters and another from Mir Hossein Mousavi’s. It’s always interesting to include opposing opinions. It may make the proponent of the wrong-sided opinion look ignorant, but it’s almost always entertaining.

In fiction, you could have a protagonist who seems to go from one conflict to another, fueled in part by their pigheadedness. What if they had a best friend who slapped some sense into them and started them on a completely different track? What might that do to your story?

I don’t know about you, but the site that I use most frequently is Google. I have it set as my home page now, since I bring it up so much.

There are some time-saving tips for use with Google, in case you’re like me (always searching for something in a hurry.) Check out the Google Guide. Here are some of the more-useful search tips (excerpted right from the guide):

salsa –dance
the word salsa but NOT the word dance (that’s a minus sign before the ‘dance.’)

castle ~glossary
glossaries about castles, as well as dictionaries, lists of terms, terminology

define:imbroglio
definitions of the word imbroglio (or whatever word you’re looking up) from the Web

site:
Search only one website or domain.
Halloween site:www.census.gov
(Search for information on Halloween gathered by the US Census Bureau.)

link:
Find linked pages, i.e., show pages that point to the URL.
link:warriorlibrarian.com
(Find pages that link to Warrior Librarian‘s website.)

phonebook:
Show all phonebook listings.
phonebook: Disney CA
(Search for Disney’s phone numbers in California – CA.)

info:
(or id:)
Find info about a page.
info:www.theonion.com
(Find information about The Onion website.)

related:
List web pages that are similar or related to the URL.
related:www.healthfinder.gov
(Find websites related to the Healthfinder website.)

intitle:
The terms must appear in the title of the page.
movies comedy intitle:top ten
(Search for pages with the words movie and comedy that include top ten in the title of the page.)

It can be really frustrating to Google something specific and have thousands of unrelated hits come up. These are tools to narrow down what we’re looking for and get our information quicker—and get back to writing.

Lately, my characters want to make disparaging comments on the state of their 401Ks, the economy in general, and rising gas prices.

I tell my characters to put a sock in it. If I mention the economy in the manuscript, there’s no promise that the crisis will still be happening at the May 2010 publication date. (Wouldn’t it be great if it wasn’t?)

And the crisis should definitely be over in a couple of years. So I could really date my book by mentioning current events.

I’m also careful to make only vague references to the type of technology my characters are using. While it’s fine to say my character is on the computer, I don’t want them to say they’re on Facebook or Twittering. Who knows what the cool social media application will be in five years?

Sometimes I’ll discover a new author and will check out their first book from the library. While I still enjoy books that make references to new-fangled VCRs and 8-tracks, it does pull me out of the novel for a few minutes.

With any luck, people will still be reading my books in libraries for years to come—I just want to make sure readers aren’t getting a blast from the past when they do.

I’m part of a panel of mystery writers that’s teaching a writing course next weekend. I usually don’t have any trouble talking about my assigned topic, but whenever I’m asked for advice on approaching the publishing world, I’m hesitant. There are so many different approaches and no real ‘right way’ to find a publisher.

The topics that I’m usually asked about (and my takes on them) are:

Agents: I was fortunate enough to obtain a nice publishing deal on my own, but that wasn’t for lack of trying to get an agent. Now I’ve got a great agent (Ellen Pepus with Signature Literary Agency) and feel that she’s been a tremendous help to me with my next project.

Conferences: They’re expensive. They’re a great place to network, but there are other, cheaper ways to network with people in the industry (Twitter, blog commenting, etc.)

Queries: I emailed them unless I was told not to in the agent’s/publisher’s guidelines. I never attached a query unless the guidelines said it was okay (lots of folks are worried about viruses.) I simultaneously submitted and mentioned it in the query…the process is just so slow.

Critique groups: Mixed bag. I think it’s like playing tennis: you don’t want a regular partner that blows you off the court with their skills and you don’t want to be the far-better one, either. I always enjoyed the folks in my groups, but had mixed success with them. I no longer belong to any critique groups.

But… everyone should have different opinions on these topics, based on their own personal experiences. Other thoughts?

The other day, my college roommate sent me an email.  She was going to the beach house on Sullivan’s Island, SC (near Charleston)—did I want to come?

Of course, I had no business going at all.  My broken laptop put me  behind on my WIP.  I need to connect my daughter with my parents this afternoon for a week at their house and I needed to do her laundry and pack her suitcases.   I’ve got stuff to do in the house and yard and … “YES!” I said.  “I’m coming!”

So I left my kids at home with my husband yesterday morning at 6:00 A.M. and drove the few hours there.  We had a wonderful day at the beach, wearing floppy straw hats, cackling over old jokes, and getting four and a half straight hours of sun (if my dermatologist is reading this—yes, I did have sunscreen. But no, I didn’t keep from getting burned somehow.)  We stayed up late and ate take-out and had a great time.

So…obviously I didn’t get any work done yesterday on my writing.  But the funny thing is that I woke up this morning and had all these fantastic ideas. And driving home this morning, the ideas kept flowing.

Maybe sometimes we need a little break from the ordinary to get our brains revved up again.  It must have been the stimulation of something different that generated my brainstorming (it sure wasn’t the junky food I ate or the wine I drank, or the late hour I stayed up until.)  I think sometimes it’s good to get out of our ruts, see different people, and get those rusty gears in our heads churning again.