I got quite a surprise when writing today. One of my characters is gay. I didn’t set out to write him that way. It seems he had a lover who has left him. A personal betrayal, it’s also a betrayal that affects the larger story. There was only one problem. I had no idea how […]
Choices define us. They direct the paths we build on our journeys through life. Even if the choices of others affect us, we still choose our reaction to those choices. Imagine then, that someone makes a deliberate choice to covertly shape our lives. That choice, unbeknownst to us, constrains all of our future choices. We […]
It apparently isn’t enough to keep up with all the drama the characters in my new story are creating for themselves. Now I am muddying the waters by interweaving their dramas and making each of them instruments in each other’s dilemma. Insanity. I don’t know why the writing is taking me in that direction, but […]
My characters are not based on real people. Sometimes I wish that they were. But then, I would have to fictionalize them, which would make them not at all the same. Since that’s so, it’s probably best that they live only in my imagination. I love inventing people. If I were a gamer, I would […]
My new work in progress (wip) is on a hit list. In the story, the heroine chases and pins down especially slippery pieces of information. I know who the assassins are – search engines. They have become so ubiquitous that the name of one of them is now the verb for using them all (“Google […]
I started to share another rant about my characters, but Zzzz…. – boring! They’re still misbehaving, but so what? They’re revealing a number of sources of conflict and forcing dramatic irony to materialize. After eighteen months of learning that I needed to rewrite, then learning how to rewrite and finally – actually doing it, I […]
This is probably the third or fourth time I’ve whined about my characters, but I truly do wish they would behave. It’s extremely rude, I think, that while being intricately painted, they should snatch the brush out of my hand and proceed to paint themselves. I’ve even had a few paint themselves out of the […]
It’s impossible to know everything about a person. But we’ve been friends for the past few years and I thought I knew her fairly well. We’d spent so much time together; evenings, weekends, and those very rare days off. Very accomplished in her career, she was the one whose opinion was respected by her peers above […]
November 16, 2010. The day I began the revision outline for the novel that is becoming Sparks. By the very next week I knew that while an outline is a must, it doesn’t give me the level of detail that I need. So I added a storyboard to my revision artifacts, and was still confident […]
More bloody red ink, spewing endlessly while I cut, chop, whack. This time I’m attacking the characters. After all the gore, about forty fictional people have survived. They are the community of the heroine and hero; the other protagonists, the antagonists, and folks that don’t have a clue about what’s going on – but are nevertheless […]
