Bring on the leaves!

I’m getting excited for fall, and not just because my sprinkler system is broken and needs to be completely replaced. I’ve always liked fall – I was one of those kids who liked going back to school every year. Don’t get me wrong – I loved the end of the school year too. But there were lots of fun things about fall. I got to start a new grade, get new school supplies, new clothes, and new shoes, and every school year meant I learned new things. Plus the weather changed, I had trick-or-treat to look forward to, and the leaves turned colors and you got to jump in big piles of leaves.

I don’t jump in piles of leaves anymore – I’m on the other end of the rake now, making piles for the dogs to play in. I’m not going back to school – I have one week left in the online class I’ve been taking, then I’m done until I head to Oregon in February. But I still like the change in weather, and I still get excited about fall even though I have to pay for my own new clothes. I think what I really liked was the change, and there’s still plenty of that to make me still get excited when fall rolls around.

I’ve spent the summer trying out new approaches to writing. I’ve experimented with several different outlining approaches, and while I’m sure I’ll continue to fiddle with this I’m much happier with how I’m outlining now than I was back in May. I recognized an issue I tend to have when I write a story with multiple viewpoint characters – I seem to always have one character who’s critical to the story, but who doesn’t feel real enough. I figured out that these problematic characters tend to not have enough issues – and by ‘issue’ I don’t mean ‘problem’ because I have no trouble putting them in challenging situations. 🙂 What I finally realized was these characters tended to be pretty boring, and putting a boring character in a perilous situation doesn’t make them any less boring … so now I know what to work on when I find myself running into this. I’ve also learned some tricks to help me figure out where to take a story when I’m in the planning stage and am not clear on what I want to have happen, and that taught me a few tricks about how to come up with richer characters.

The one thing I did not do well at was time management. I had weeks where I felt super efficient and productive, but most weeks weren’t like that. Sure, I accomplished plenty of things, but I have a day job and two high-energy dogs, so to get as much done as I want means I need to be really on the ball. So … my goal for the fall is to make my own seasonal change by bumping up my productivity and start putting all the things I learned over the summer to use.

Rosie and Jasper, my super productive role models
Rosie and Jasper, my super productive role models

Growing characters

More exciting than any writing updates … yesterday there was a bear in a tree in the yard across the street!!!

Bear!!!
Bear!!!

Okay, so it’s a little hard to see … but there’s a black blob in the middle of that photo that’s actually a bear. About thirty minutes later he came down from the tree and we all skedaddled – bears are big!!!

I’m about to start week 5 of the character development class I’ve been taking, which means I’m thinking a lot about characters. This bear reminded me of a novel a friend of mine is working on. In it there’s a bear character who is utterly horrifying at first, but by the end of the novel I wanted to hug it. This probably doesn’t sound like a big deal, but take my word on this one – to go from nightmare-inducing to endearing is a drastic change.

Part of what’s fun about writing is figuring out how your characters learn and grow. Sometimes it’s totally by chance, and sometimes you’re architecting it behind the scenes. With my first novel, a writer friend of mine once said “this is what Emma thinks she wants, but what does she really want?” As soon as he said that I realized that Emma – like all of us – had both conscious and unconscious desires, and in her case the two were very much not in sync. So I modified the story to have Emma realize what her unconscious wanted, and that brought some conflict to the surface that made the story much richer.

One of the stories I’m working on right now has a similar issue. There’s a bad guy, who clearly is doing bad things, but underneath it he’s not entirely bad. My task is to figure out how to make him feel – well, maybe not likable, but understandable. It’s definitely a challenge, but it’s a fun challenge.

And speaking of character growth, here’s a photo of Rosie jumping at the agility field. This is a dog who spent most of her first year with us hiding behind the couch. Yay, Rosie! 🙂

Yay, Rosie!!!
Yay, Rosie!!!

Just peachy

The past week has been super busy. I had a party, so my house – and the dogs! – were clean and sparkly for a few days. I finished one writing class and am in the middle of the second. Jasper and I practiced our turns (as in dog agility turns), I planted more flowers and herbs, and I froze 135 peaches.

2015-08-17-peaches

If you think those look yummy now, imagine how much better they’ll taste in the dead of winter in a sauce with cardamom and vanilla bean… 🙂

Freezing that many peaches on top of everything else I’ve had going on was a little time-consuming, so I’m not quite as far as I’d hoped to be writing-wise. But the good part about doing a task like that, or hiking with the dogs in the morning, is that it gives me time to work out what I want to write. This sometimes backfires, like a few weeks ago I took the dogs hiking and by the end of the trail I’d sketched out a brand new novel. (I made notes so I won’t forget the details since I have plenty to work on already.) Usually, though, this works out quite well. I often find that doing some activity while thinking about a hole in one of my stories helps me figure out details of the plot or ways to enrich my characters.

I don’t know how much of this is the activity and how much is just giving my brain time to wander off on its own, but I suspect it’s the combination of the two. Many, many years ago I accidentally took a mini slinky to a meeting at work and found I was able to concentrate significantly better on what was happening if I was playing with my slinky. Sudoku puzzles work just as well, if not better (as long as I’m not doing a crazy hard one), but for some reason people consider it rude to do puzzles during meetings, whereas playing with a slinky is considered perfectly acceptable. (A tip: playing with a slinky will also help keep you awake if the meeting is super boring.) Since I’m conscious of how well this type of thing works for me, I’ll sometimes plan to think about a problem when I hike with the dogs.

So this week I didn’t write much, but I did work through a few story details. I sure hope I wrote them all down…but I guess I won’t know if I didn’t if I don’t remember them. 🙂 I’ve started carrying a pad of paper in my car so I can make notes when I’m at a stoplight or something, so hopefully that will help because lately I feel like ideas are practically spilling out of my mind and I don’t have enough writing time to catch up.

One idea I had ago came from my hairdresser, Laura Cornish, who is a very talented photographer. At the time one of Laura’s photos of a famous cistern built in 1514 in El Jadida, Morocco, was hanging in the hair salon. Here’s an image of the cistern from Wikipedia – Laura’s looked even more intriguing because of the angle and the light.

Portugese cistern in El Jadida, Morocco (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Jadida)
Portugese cistern in El Jadida, Morocco (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Jadida)

I was so taken by Laura’s photo of this cistern that I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and quickly realized I need to use it in my water novel. I’ll actually use a cistern based on this one, since my novel isn’t set in Morocco. I’ve had this setting in my head for a while, but I didn’t know enough about what was going to take place in this scene. I wanted to have something important tie back to another part of the story, but I didn’t know what the important thing was, nor did I know what it would tie back to. So I made a point of thinking about it while hiking, or in the middle of the night while I was trying to get back to sleep after letting the dogs out. And then voilà! There it was! Now I just have to wait for tomorrow to finally write this scene because we’re taking a cooking class with my family tonight…

My idea buddies.
My idea buddies.