I’ve been working on the first book of the Crystal Cove mystery series, Justice in January, for the past couple of months. I finally got all of the plotting done, and now I can work on writing the scenes. It should be a piece of cake.

But it isn’t.

I find myself constantly facing writer’s block. I can’t think of why this is happening, though I’ve toyed with the following theories.

Theory One: I am writing the story from the viewpoint of the the scene’s main character. Since there are about eight main character viewpoints, I have to constantly change the frame of reference for my writing. I personally find this rather fatiguing.

Theory Two: I feel guilty about not working on the Hot Dog Detective series. I thought , when I first contemplated this new project, that a change of stories would inspire me. But I find that I am constantly feeling guilt over not working on the original series.

Then, as the guilt flows over and buries me, I begin to wonder, why am I not working on the Vacillating Vigilante (the next book in the series)? Is it because I don’t have the plot figured out? That can’t be true. I often start a book without having all the details of the plot worked out. Is it because I’ve lost interest in the Hot Dog series? No, I’m pretty sure that’s not the reason.  Is it because I am afraid of the series coming to an end?

That’s when I pause. That’s when I realize that my desire to start a new series of stories is because I am afraid that when I finish The Hot Dog Detective, my writing days are over. I don’t want them to be over. I want to continue, but I am not sure how to accomplish that. You see, I do have a lot of other stories to write, but they are not my stories. They are the stories my alters want to tell.

I don’t know that they will let me tell those stories.

I exist as long as I have my stories to tell. I need the Hot Dog Detective in order to give my life purpose and meaning; I need Crystal Cove to continue giving my life purpose. But I don’t know that I can do that with other people’s stories.

And that fear keeps me paralyzed, unable to write, unable to finish the stories I want to tell.

I have finished the first draft of The Unselfish Uncle. I’m now going through the fsolirst rewrite of the book, then I will send it out to my reviewers for their input. It’s taken me a bit longer than I anticipated, mainly because I started working on the first novel of the Crystal Cove series. But I realized (especially after my editor read the riot act to me) that I need to finish the Hot Dog Detective series before I get too deeply into a second series.

After I publish The Unselfish Uncle, I have six more books to complete the entire Hot Dog Detective series. I can say now that the next trilogy in the series will focus on Rufus and his problems with PTSD.  The second series will focus on some unresolved issues between Pierson and MacFarland. I bet that few of the fans of the Hot Dog Detective series realize that MacFarland knew Pierson before he met Nicole…but there was another man in Pierson’s life.

Well, it’s time to get back to work. I have to get Unselfish Uncle done, then get to work on the last six books in the series.

 

There are times when I find it difficult to distinguish real life from the fictional lives I live in my stories. Yes, I admit it…I do live the lives of the characters in my stories. Not just the heroine or hero, but all of the characters. In a sense, a writer has to live as though those characters are not only real, but are also her.

In real life, I’ve been concerned with taxes, doctor’s visits, squabbles with my siblings, weight…a whole host of itchy problems that plague modern life. At the same time, I have to deal with MacFarland, who is going through some sort of midlife crisis as he tries to determine what he wants to do with his life and with whom he wants to do it. Add to that Pierson, who is becoming more and more frustrated with her own career choices.

The difficulty for me as a writer is, how do I separate my own frustrations from the frustrations my characters are feeling? Or do I use my own life as fodder for my character’s psyches? More importantly, if my personal life continues to sail in the doldrums, how do I ensure that my characters can evolve in their own fictional lives? At some point, real life influences fictional life, but at another point, fictional life must live on its own.

I didn’t write much last month. I guess you could say I took December off. Most of my time was spent glued to the television, binge-watching Hallmark Christmas movies. Ah, nothing is better than love in December!

I plan on changing my lethargic ways. Not only am I going to finish The Unselfish Uncle this month, I am also working on a new series, the Crystal Cove Mysteries. I will say more about that series in a later post.

I have lofty goals for 2019. I expect this to be a better year than 2018, in more ways than one. For one thing, I plan on getting new glasses, so looking at the computer screen (or the Hallmark channel) will be a lot easier.

Happy New Year, everyone!

November is over, NaNoWriMo is finished, and the Christmas season is upon us.  I wish I could tell you that I demolished NaNoWriMo, but the truth is I only wrote 21,000  I feel like a failure.

I know why I didn’t complete my writing goal for November.

I got distracted.

It’s my daughter’s fault. Yes, I can definitely blame her. She started showing me these house plans for her dream home.  Ah, the demon child! She knew I couldn’t resist designing and decorating a dream home. After all, I spend half my time watching the Home and Garden network (the other half is spent watching Hallmark Mysteries and Movies, and the other half is spent watching cable news).

Well, one day grew into two days, then three days, then more, as we searched floor plans, models, designs, and decoration ideas. Soon, we came up with the idea of building a model of the dream house.

This was our final undoing. A few days of light computer searches soon exploded into a week or more of buying hobby supplies, balsa wood, glue, paint, everything needed to create a fairly accurate HO scale model of the dream home.

It’s still not finished. We need to work on the landscaping, the interior paint schemes, the furnishings (yes, furnishings…what good is a house without furniture?). And of course people to put into the house. (Who knew that they had tiny figures that could be used on HO train boards…or in our dream home? It’s an amazing world out there.

So, instead of another novel, I have a model house. I’m still trying to decide if the trade-off was worth it.

But it is one damn nice dream home!

I recently got my first iPhone. Actually, I’ve had a smartphone in the past, but I hardly ever used it. My excuse was I couldn’t afford it, which turned out to be true, so for several years I used one of those pay-for-the-minutes phones that grannies use. (Wait a minute…I am a grannie!)

But I finally decided to update my phone. The decision was made easier when my son-in-law (bless his heart!) said he would add me to his account, just so long as I didn’t run up the bill the way his wife did.  There’s no chance of that.

Then I discovered this thing called The App Store. Wow, you can find everything in there. One of the things I found was a dictation app called Voice Recorder. I downloaded it, then discovered I had to upgrade to get the recording transcribed.  Okay, I sort of expected that. It wasn’t very expensive.

So now I’ve started dictating my chapters into the phone and transcribing them. I then send them to my email, cut and paste into a word document, and then edit.

Well, that’s the theory.

It turns out that I am not an oral story-teller. I usually sit at my computer for hours at a time, struggling to get first one sentence and then another sentence transferred from my mind to the memory circuits of this computer. It’s a slow, painful process, frequently interrupted with trips to the refrigerator, often channel surfing on the TV, switching to Pandora in the hopes that music will inspire me, then going back to TV to see if my favorite talking heads are talking.

My dictated foray was less than one paragraph. And of that paragraph, I had to edit/correct/re-interpret fully one half of what I dictated.

Needless to say, it was not the overwhelming first dip in the pool that I expected. Like any new skill, it is going to take practice…lots and lots of practice. But that is true for everything. And I have read that some writers who learn how to control their voice, think in terms of scenes, and understand the nuances of the app, will swear that it increases their productivity immensely.

So I’m going to keep practicing. And someday, I may be able to say, hey, this blog was entirely written through my phone’s dictation app.

For now, however, it was written the old-fashioned way. By sitting down in front of the computer and putting each letter up on the screen one at a time.