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.

One of my fans surprised me a while back. She offered to correct a few of the errors in one of my books. I suspected that a few errors had slipped by, something that I actually dread, but really, how many could there be? Since my fan offered to do the edit for free, how could I turn her down?

I contacted my fan, Mary Anne, and let her know I was interested. Within a remarkably short period of time, she returned a detailed list of where and what the error was, what she recommended as a correction, and in some cases a note to explain why she thought it was an error.

I was surprised at the number of errors she had found. They were the kind of errors that spell-checker would never find, errors that were easy for someone who is way too familiar with the content to overlook. What wasn’t included were errors that I had deliberately made – manners of speech, dialect, words that a particular character might use, contractions that we use in speech but not in writing.

I was very pleased with the result.

I was pleased to learn that Mary Anne was pursuing the copy-editing career full time. She has a website – FourPennyPages.com – where you can learn  more about her services. I highly recommend her for your proof-reading needs. And trust me, even if you don’t think you need her help, you do.

 

Okay, I admit it.

I am a lousy blogger. I know that I should spend a lot more time on this effort than I do (just a couple of minutes a day would be a considerable improvement). I shouldn’t expect anyone to come here if I don’t come here. It’s a fact of life.

I also realize that compared to other bloggers, I don’t have a lot to say. I find that personally depressing, since it doesn’t match my over-inflated opinion of myself. I read other people’s blogs, and think, wow, where do they get all these ideas? I admit, I often have a lot of ideas, but I figure that everyone else has those ideas, so what is the point of sharing them? Not a very bold attitude, I have to admit.

I would like to say that I am going to change this, but the truth is, I am an old dog, and while I can be taught some new tricks, I have other priorities. I am about to publish book number 20 in the Hot Dog Detective series, The Truculent Trannie. I am working on plotting book number 21, The Unselfish Uncle. After that, I will have only six books left in the series. I have two more over-arching trilogy plots to work on. One focuses on Rufus and the last will focus on Cynthia Pierson. Both over-arching plots will help bring to fulfillment the stories of MacFarland’s closest friends. And finally, the series will end with MacFarland finally resolving his own personal issues, possibly eliminating forever the angst that taints his life.

I am getting close to the point in this series that corresponds with what I often experienced when doing projects for my many consulting clients. Towards the end of a project, there comes a point where you can tell that everything is wrapping up. There are only a few days or weeks left in the project, all the work has been done, and results are starting to come in.  It is at this point in a project that I almost always felt an impending sense of loss, that something I had worked intensely on for so long is going to come to an end. I would leave the client, leave the people I’ve worked with so intensely for three, four, or six months, and go on to another client. I wouldn’t know who that client would be. All I knew is that the people I did know would recede into the past, and it was unlikely that I would ever see them again.

It was on these days that I hated being a consultant.

I am reaching that point in writing the Hot Dog Detective series. I can see the end clearly in sight. I know that when the series comes to an end, I will probably never see MacFarland, Pierson, Headley, Lockwood, or any of the characters again. I will move on to another series or at least another novel, and the process will start all over again.

But I still have seven books to write. It’s too soon to get too depressed. MacFarland has to solve another seven murders!