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Yesterday I spent 4 1/2 hours at the roller skating rink with my second grade daughter and her friend.  They were absolutely delighted to spend the afternoon skating and I got a lot done.  I also I learned a lot during this time.  Here are some of my observations:

People don’t look as curiously at you if you have notebooks and pencils at the skate rink instead of your laptop.  I had my laptop last weekend and felt like an exhibit in the zoo.  No problem with the spiral notebooks, though.

It is possible to block out disco lights and blaring pop music.  The pop music was completely foreign to me.  If they’d been playing 70s and 80s stuff it might have been harder to stay focused. I did get distracted when they played the Hokey Pokey.  In fact, I think I still have it going through my head…

When your daughter says, “Mom! Look at me!”, you must look.  Look and smile and wave.  Otherwise, she’ll look behind her as she skates to see if you’re looking, and she’ll fall down like a block tower. 

Put your feet up in the plastic booth you’re sitting in.  Because you can get hurt by rollerblades, even if you’re not on the skating rink.  Trust me.  I still don’t understand how this one child’s spectacular fall (he wasn’t hurt, but brother, I was), caused him to end up under my booth. Somehow I could hear his rollerblades connecting resonantly with my shins over the rock music.

Bring lots of change.  My daughter and her friend went through about $10 worth of drinks, chips, and candy at the concession stand.  I finally just put a pile of ones and change on the edge of the table so I could continue writing instead of being a human ATM.

People at the roller skating rink are excellent extras for your novel.  I saw this mom with the most incredible tan.  Now, I know I live in North Carolina, USA.  I know it’s been 80 degrees the last few days. But honey, that tan wasn’t normal.  She was probably just that dark in January.  I’m sensing a tanning bed fanatic….just the lady I need for some local color in my current mystery. 

So to all the parents out there who are looking for a large block of writing time on Memorial Day weekend, consider taking your kid and their friend roller skating.  I got 3200 words written and some outlining and editing done.  Give it a go.

Yesterday was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 150th birthday and Conan Doyle’s greatest creation, Sherlock Holmes, is nearly as popular today as he was in the 19th century.

Conan Doyle was a master at character creation.  Although readers became extremely affectionate towards Holmes, there was nothing innately loveable about him. He was frequently described as cold (although he became very passionate when on a case.) He was a habitual user of both cocaine and morphine. He was rude and arrogant.  But he was gifted, and continually amazed readers with his powers of observation and deduction.

Conan Doyle eventually tired of his famous detective and decided to kill him off to work on his historical novels.  Holmes and his arch enemy, Professor Moriarty, fall to their deaths over a waterfall in “The Final Problem.”  The public would hear nothing of it.  First Conan Doyle tried to satisfy the public by producing The Hounds of the Baskervilles, set before Holmes’ death.  Readers, however, weren’t happy with this solution and Conan Doyle eventually brought Holmes back (as many soap operas today bring back popular characters from death.)  Conan Doyle’s publishers were, of course, delighted. 

I’m a big Sherlock fan myself and enjoy reading Conan Doyle as well as watching adaptations on television.  I love that Holmes is so popular despite his shortcomings…and maybe because of them.  I write a character that also has plenty of failings,  but try to balance them out with positive traits.  I enjoy brusque characters with hearts of gold.  Or characters that are tough on the outside but who stand beside their friends through thick and thin.

Do you enjoy reading about protagonists that have obvious faults?  Do you write these protagonists?  How do you make them interesting without making them unsympathetic to the reader?

Right now I’m under a couple of tight deadlines and a little less clingy to my works-in-progress. But last year, I fiddled with my manuscript just about every waking hour (this would be the book that’s being released in August.) I couldn’t decide when it was done. I mean, editing and rewriting are completely necessary and a vital part of writing. But when do you know that you’re done? When do you know when you’ve finally dotted your i’s and crossed your t’s and are ready to send your baby off into the big, bad world?

I don’t really have an answer to that question. Now I think that when my deadline day comes then, obviously, I need to have something ready to send in that is as perfect as I can possibly make it.

I think, also, that I got to the point last year where my rewrites were actually making things worse and not better. Do you know what I’m talking about? It seemed like I’d just starched some darned scene and ironed it out flat. Grammatically beautiful but I’d lost the soul of what I’d originally written. That’s when I printed the manuscript and sent it off. But it would have been nice to have known before that point that I was done.

I was thinking today about how I broke my children of their pacifier habit. I know this seems like a complete non sequitur, but bear with me. They were determined little suckers (oooh, I’m punny today) and slept with the darned binkies. Actually, they did everything with them but eat with them in their mouths. So one day we went to the party supply store and got a bunch of helium balloons. A lot of helium balloons. I tied every one of their little binkies onto them and we went out to a park. There we stood in the middle of the park and I handed my children the balloons. They let them go and it was a spectacular sight, let me tell you. The balloons were a vivid splash against the blue skies and they soared off. My children waved at the balloons as they left. They didn’t ask for them that night at bedtime because they KNEW the pacifiers were gone. They were off in space, as far as they could tell. And they had a nice toy in their place.

I’m thinking this is how I need to approach my writing. I need still need to rewrite ad nauseum, but now I’m approaching it differently. I need to move on after I’ve submitted. When the edits come in, I’ll work on them, but then get back to my work-in-progress. I need to figuratively attach that submission to a bunch of balloons and move on. Work on the next story. Not have empty-nest syndrome over the end of that project or get too wound up in the reviews that come out later. To remember that I’ve done my best.

I’ve mentioned on my blog before that I’m generally a fan of happy endings.  The Brady Bunch always ended happily, too—Mom and Dad had a talk with the wayward Brady child about whatever mess they’d gotten into.  Maybe the kid had to mow the Astroturf lawn as restitution for their wrong.  Then everyone was cracking jokes for the final segment before the credits rolled.

The books I like to read have happy endings, loose ends tied up, and normalcy restored.  I think it’s a satisfying feeling.

But I have to wonder if the phenomenon of the happy ending is primarily a modern one and dictated by reader preference.  As an English major, many of the books I read didn’t have happy endings.  In fact, I want to say that most of the novels I read didn’t.  There’s Moby Dick, The Awakening, House of Mirth, Lord of the Flies, King Lear, Metamorphosis, Animal Farm, etc.

I think that most people view reading as an escape.  We want to take a little break from our lives and be transported somewhere else.  Somewhere maybe a little happier.

I’m not opposed to reading the occasional unhappy ending in modern books.  Oddly enough, the unhappy endings in classic literature doesn’t bother me as much—it may be because it takes place in another place and time and while I emphasize with the protagonist, I don’t identify quite as much or put myself in their shoes.  I’m an outsider, looking in.

Maybe with modern literature it hits too close to home to be able to maintain a sense of separateness.

Are there books with sad endings that you enjoyed? Do you write unhappy endings?

Today, I was put in a situation that I was not at all comfortable with.  In fact, I was stuck in a situation that I frequently have nightmares about.

I was back in middle school.

Well, today I was an adult volunteer at my son’s middle school and proctoring a state exam (the North Carolina EOGs).  But gosh, the flashbacks.  The lockers with unworkable combination locks.  The hormones.  The cliques.

When you proctor a test, you’re basically there to ensure that the teacher and the students aren’t cheating and that nothing funny is going on.  Yes, it’s hours long and borrrrring.  My mind wandered.

I started thinking that if I were writing a book about myself, this would be a fantastic conflict for the character representing myself.  Because middle school was miserable.  I mean, you could promise me eternal youth, but if I had to spend it as a middle schooler, I’d turn you down flat.

That’s the best way to create internal or external conflict for your characters.  What’s their worst nightmare?  What scares them the most?  That’s what needs to happen to them, for the best internal/external plot conflicts.  That’s what keeps us, as readers, interested. It’s an: “Oh Lord!  How are they gonna get out of this one?”

So make them rush into a burning building.  Make their child get kidnapped.  Have them lose their job or their home.  Torture them a little for the sake of the story and see what happens.  Riveting reading is usually the outcome.