Update

So I finished my first read-through late-late last night.

While I still love this story, I'm no longer in the honeymoon phase. Dang. I really thought that would last longer. My perfect story is showing some cracks. My perfect story is requiring me to stand by it even though, since it's not perfect, I'm suddenly filled with doubt. It's pushing my buttons. You know which ones... those Uncomfortable Buttons.

Today I made it to about the half-way mark to incorporate those revisions, reject them, and find more.  Finally I had to stop. There's only so much badgering a writer can take, even when it's coming from the writer.

For me, while there is some structure, writing is an inherently messy process. I put the words down and then need to figure out how to fix them. Make them come close to what I meant. It doesn't matter how well I've planned them in advance, in some cases they're wrong.

Like a visual artist who does her best to transfer her vision to canvass, I try to transfer mine to the page. There are bound to be disconnects. The editing and revision process is designed to try and find as many new "connections" as possible.

I keep telling myself that it's okay. I've been here before. That between now and x-number of revisions later, the story will pull itself out of my ineptitude. That finally, when readers get to decide for themselves, they'll find something worthy.


It's all better with friends.

ONE DOWN

Wow, it's been a while.

Tonight I wrote the final words for the first draft of my new book.

It created a crazy confluence of emotions: relief, victory, excitement, fear, responsibility (really?), you name it, I'm feeling it.

Suddenly I'm committed. Suddenly I have this entity to mold and massage and make into something readers will enjoy.  Maybe that's where the responsibility piece comes in.

Thank goodness for beta readers and editors. It's not all on me.


But...


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Ramping Up to The End

I'm feeling like all the elements of my story on trafficking are coming together. I can taste the end. It's not here, but the nearness of it is making me edgy.

Even though it's just the first draft and there will be many revisions to come, I'm anxious. Fretful. For a whole lot of reasons.

Paramount, is the story good enough? Does it hold together? Do I do the subject matter justice? Do I push it forward? Are people who read this book going to look around their lives and see things in a different light?

The end of every book I've written has almost paralized me, created that feeling of edginess. For a lot of reasons. First, I fall in love with the characters. Even beyond my continuing characters, there are those who I'm not likely to see again.

This book especially.

I will miss Jayla. She's brilliant and compassionate and inspiring. She's wise beyond her fifteen years. Even with the harsh cruelty she experiences, I know she'll come out a victor. And retain her core. She's the young girl who, in reality, has gone missing from Aurora in the last few weeks. She breaks my heart.

I will miss Alexis. She's the brash, 17-year old rich girl from the suburbs. Probably more than any of my girls in this book, she's learned the most. Money isn't the answer, and her attitude of entitlement isn't going to get her out of the mess she's in. She's gonna struggle and have years of therapy. None of it her fault.

And finally there's Olivia. She's twelve. Wants to be a veterinarian. Livvy is the kid who lives next door to you. I'm not sure yet how she's going to come out, but I do know she has a family who loves her.


It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"If most writers were honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before they were not noticed; now they are." —Tom Wolfe



It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space." —Orson Scott Card

It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase." —Martin Luther King


It's also stepping off the roof of a high-rise and trusting you'll figure out your wings on the way down.



It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"When you're making a film, you have an obligation to fill the frame with life."—Joss Whedon


It's the same with making a book. You have an obligation to fill each page with life.



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Process: When I Must Pretend

I'm at a fairly recognizable place in my manuscript.  I've been here before. It's the place where I'm suddenly unsure about the direction this manuscript is heading. It doesn't quite match up with what I'd planned, and I only know two things: it will either be better or it will be worse.

But in order to find out, I have to write it. I have to finish this first draft.

And here's where the pretending comes in. I need, right now, to pretend I'm a writer who knows what she's doing. I need to plow ahead with all the confidence of a Stephen King or a John Sandford or a Karin Slaughter or a J.K. Rowling.

Right now it's important not to let missing research pieces hold me up. Write the story, then fill in the holes and make the changes later. Trust the process.

Do you have stumbling places with your work? Places where you have to fake it until you make it?



It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting!"—Marie Windsor

It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"I am irritated by my writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within." —Gustave Flaubert


When I write, I often see the scene playing out in front of me on a movie screen. I want to reproduce what I see and hear.

Donald Maass teaches writers that if it's not on the page, it doesn't exist. That's so true! On the other hand, too many details bog the story down. The trick, in my view, is to bring just enough to the page leaving the rest to the imagination of your reader.





It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape." —Ray Bradbury

Sounds like a good diet to me.

It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper." —Steve Martin



I like his confidence.





It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"I know. I'm lazy. But I made myself a New Years resolution that I would write myself something really special. Which means I have 'til December, right?" —Catherine O'Hara



I can safely declare I'm behind on my goals for the year. But I'm equally certain I would not have accomplished what I have without them.

How about you?



It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary in ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary. —Boris Pasternak



It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

As my artist's statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance. —Calvin & Hobbs

It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. —Neil Gaiman

Which is one reason writing for a living can be very confusing.



It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. —James Baldwin


This brought tears to my eyes. I have nothing to add. Except maybe to recommend you read it again.





It's all better with friends.

Podcast

I met Laura Brennan when I went to Hollywood for a special Sisters In Crime conference. She recently started a series of podcasts for mysteries. Here’s mine, but check out the others as well, and maybe sign up to receive free books: http://destinationmystery.com/episode-5-peg-brantley/



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Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"It's up to the author to intertwine the craft with the creative and find the balance that touches the soul of the reader." —Edie Melson


Damn.


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Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo." —Don Marquis

This is in honor of my mother-in-law, Inez Frances Brantley, who turns 100 on April 24th. Her volume of verse will be a special gift for every person at her celebration.  You can check out her book here.

And I, for one, can hear the echo.

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Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it is raining but the feeling of being rained upon." —E.L. Doctorow



While I love this, sometimes in a fast-moving scene, the fact that it's raining is only a small point that needs to be made. Sometimes it's best to tell rather than show, and move ahead with the story.




It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work."
—Gustave Flaubert



Without the balance and security I get from my family and close friends, a tether if you will, there's no way I could venture in to some of the dark places my stories demand.




It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"One doesn't stop seeing. One doesn't stop framing. It doesn't turn off and turn on. It's on all the time." —Annie Leibovitz, photographer


It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order." —P.D. James


It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

—30—    "A writer is someone who finishes." —Thomas Farber


                                Back to work.



                                It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page."—Eudora Welty



This is part of the magic of writing. One of the addictive parts. Agree?



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Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to." —Octavia  Butler

As both a reader and a writer the world is there for the taking... and the making.

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Readers, Writers, and Books... Wahoo!

Left Coast Crime is a book conference built around fans of Crime Fiction. It's probably my favorite event in the publishing world.

Attending doesn't guarantee any book sales (I often give them away), but it does guarantee an opportunity to meet readers, existing and new, many of whom become friends. In addition I'm thrilled to connect with writer friends and experience a rare opportunity to "talk shop" with people whose eyes don't glaze over after about five minutes.

This past weekend was no exception. People were welcoming and excited about being in a group of people who love to read cozies and suspense and mysteries and noir and thrillers of all kinds and... well, everything and anything that has to do with crime. I only wish I could have spent more time with more people.

As much as I love the event, I'm always glad to get home and decompress. And get back to the manuscript I'm working on.




It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken." —Jane Austen


But it doesn't stop us from endlessly searching for the truth.


It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it." —Jack London



Someone asked me the other day what my cure was for writer's block. My answer? Write.



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Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"Making people believe the unbelievable is not trick; it's work. ...Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for anything." —Stephen King


And Stephen King is a master at making his readers believe the unbelievable.



It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up." —Nancy Kress


Someone commented recently that researching the dark things must be terrible. She was right. It is terrible when you consider that research is based on reality.

Red Tide's research taught me about Human Remains Detection dogs and the difficult but magnificent job they do every day. In The Missings I learned about the vast number of people waiting for an organ transplant, and the fact that many of those people are removed from the list not because they received an organ, but because they died while waiting.

In The Sacrifice I learned more about Santeria than I ever wanted to know and I certainly would never want to embrace it in my private life. The book I'm working on now, tentatively titled Trafficked, deals with the horror of human trafficking. While Santeria is a choice, being trafficked is most certainly not—which makes the research that much more oppressive, frustrating, thought-provoking, and infuriating.

But here's where fiction comes in: I can make the bad guys pay. I can create a satisfactory outcome that sadly, reality just can't achieve on a regular basis. I can help a character find his or her personal strength. They don't always have to be the victim.

In fiction, I can share information that might help open others eyes as it did mine, without making readers feel completely depressed and unequipped.

And no animals are ever killed.



Just sayin'.



It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

Q: Why do you write strong female characters?

A: Because you're still asking me that question.    —Joss Whedon                                                        



I recently discovered a couple of shows with two things in common: kick-ass females and Joss Whedon. (The Dollhouse and Firefly, both streamed on my Kindle.)

Writing is a way to set wrongs right, to inspire, and to show what could be, or even better, what should be.

It's all better with friends.

Aack!

I've missed TWO Wednesdays!

Today, I'd love for you to forgive me by dropping by a new monthly gig I have at Mysteristas and commenting on the intro they did of me by way of an interview.

And I promise to get on the ball for our Wednesdays. I like 'em too.

It's all better with friends.

Wednesday Wisdom for Writers and Those Who Love Them

"It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth." — Gao Xingjian


I love this quote. (Happy birthday to me.)


It's all better with friends.

What I Want

Happy New Year!

Doesn't 2016 have a great ring to it?

Here's what I wish/want for each one of you:

First of all I want you to have the freedom to desire. So many, in other countries and even ours, don't. They can't imagine the option to imagine. To dream. I want that for you.

Then I want each of you to find the courage to step off the edge of the top floor of the high-rise and replace your fear with love. To trust you can knit your wings on the way down. Step out in faith.

And if that doesn't work, and you land with a splat, I want you to pick yourself up and climb those steps again. And while you walk up those steps, consider what you'll do differently this time. Failure is okay. Failure provides information that success doesn't. Which sort of means that failure is success. Use it.

I believe that each of you has a mission, a story to tell, other lives to impact. Trust the process. Trust yourself.

Be stubborn. Be focused. Be determined.

And I'll be right there wtih you.




It's all better with friends.