Category: craft

Better Late Than Never!

And except for some scraps of dialogue here and there, my next revision is in the books. I do have one more scene I am tinkering with including–but it’s not a make-or-break thing if it doesn’t get in–I think the story would be better with it, but it’s fine without it, too.

It’s long. Like 345 pages long–much longer than Hurricane Baby. I may concentrate in the next revision on slimming it back down to 80,000 words. I can ask my next readers to look at repetitious passages, etc. We will see how it goes.

I still feel really accomplished. I want to be able to start shopping it in August 2025, and it looks like I’m on track to hit that goal. I have put a lot of words down on paper in this story. And these characters have really stuck with me for a long time. I just hope I keep doing the story justice.

In other news, I was at a lovely event in a small town in Alabama this past Saturday; I signed books and was in a good Q&A with the Friends of the Library organization there. I made a comment on how sometimes you can work on a project if you remind yourself that they characters aren’t real people and that it’s okay to kill them off. The moderator told me that for many of us, the characters become real people in our minds, and we get really upset when you kill one off. So lots of opinions were had and a lively discussion ensued.

So tonight I’m going to clean up loose threads and put this version of Looking for Home to bed. Wishing you all the best!

An Interesting Problem

One of my favorite writers is Alexandra Stoddard, who writes a great deal about home decoration, the art of living, architecture, beauty, and philosophy. She was mentored in the interior design business by Eleanor McMillen Brown, owner of a very fashionable decorating house in Manhattan, New York. In one of her books, Stoddard quotes Mrs. Brown as telling her, “If you change one thing, you will have to rethink and change everything.”

Such words not only apply to interior design, but for this manuscript, I’m discovering they apply to my writing journey at the moment as well.

I thought when I started editing based on the feedback I got that I would drop a new “chapter” in each section and make various other editing changes throughout, mostly deepening character motivations for minor characters.

So I wrote one of those new parts and dropped it into the first section that’s from Carlton’s point of view. And immediately realized that I needed to add several new pages to the ending of Carlton’s narration because of this new scene. It raised the stakes exponentially in that particular situation.

I’m starting to draft the new section for Cassie’s narration, and I’ve already figured out how it’s going to cause a huge ripple effect that will reverberate through the ending not only of Cassie’s section but of all the other characters’ narrative arcs.

And I haven’t given enough thought to the third new section I’m going to write, but I can imagine that Merrilyn’s narration will be altered as well.

But this is the best part–all of these changes are improving the story immeasurably. And I am having the time of my life drafting them and making the puzzle pieces fit to make it look like the story has always existed in this form and events could not happen in any other way.

So remember changing just one thing has the power to change everything. What change have you been afraid of making in your work-in-progress? What are you afraid of? Overcome the fear and make the change–and surprise yourself!

Search Engine Fun

One of the ways that technology has changed the writing game–writers used to have to spend time in libraries paging through volumes of books, encyclopedias, and magazines to find the particular facts needed to bring verisimilitude to their work. Having just the right details could bring a story to life.

(Or you could, you know, just make everything up. That’s why they called it fiction.)

But now we have a wealth of information at our fingertips–the World Wide Web (except for the parts corrupted with propaganda, AI, and misinformation. But that’s a rant for another day.)

So writers love to trade stories on the weirdest things they’ve ever looked up on a search engine and to joke about how some of those searches, especially from the crime writers, likely land us on various and sundry watch lists at law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world.

Which brings me to what I know has been my oddest search engine request that I’ve ever done. This past week, I typed into the search bar the words “Klan rallies” with much trepidation. What would I actually find?

I was doing research for a scene in my work-in-progress, set in 1970’s east Tennessee. It was after much of the worst of the 1960’s terror of the Klan was broken, but pockets of Kluckers were still active in some communities. So I imagined my protagonists stumbling into a rally by accident.

Almost immediately I found a press account of an initiation in 2004 (yikes) in Tennessee documented in a local newspaper article indexed by the Southern Poverty and Law Center. I scanned it and figured out exactly how the scene would go down.

I tell this story to show how sometimes it takes staring into the abyss for us humans to understand how to bring justice and fairness to our worlds. I took information about a dark spot in America’s history and transmuted it into a scene that says something about how ordinary people cope in the face of this kind of evil. And sometimes that means us writers must do things that make us uncomfortable for our art.

Including looking up weird topics on the internet.

Happy writing!

Storyboarding Fiction

I went to the Southern Literary Festival in Blue Mountain, Mississippi at Blue Mountain Christian University this weekend. What I did was give a talk on how I constructed most of the stories in Hurricane Baby. It was often not as neat a process as this pattern makes it seem, but I did apply it to most of the new stories I wrote for this version of the book. I used the story “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” to illustrate the moving parts of the story.

SET THE SCENE: Answer the questions who, what, where, how, and why your characters are in whatever situation they find themselves in at the start. Always include action to bring the reader in. The reader sees Tommy wake up the morning after Hurricane Katrina, gets a sense of what he’s been through and where his head is at, and learns a bit about the character as well.

RISING ACTION: Get the characters moving. Show the reader what is happening in the world of the book. This piece of the story needs to set the events in the story in motion. Tommy Hebert gets a text message asking for people to come help a family in Mandeville. So he goes out on his boat and meets other men, his best friend Mark, and Mandeville cops who take them to the destruction.

MEAT OF THE STORY: You relay the most important part of the story here. This event should have the potential to cause a change in the characters who experience it. This is where the action is: this is where the heat is. In this story, Tommy and the other volunteers work to dig out Amy Thompson and her baby, Avery Thompson, out of the destroyed house. Tommy and a fireman are able to rescue the baby and get him to the hospital to be helped. But Amy Thompson has a heavy beam on her legs, crushing them–and Tommy finds out later that she didn’t make it.

CLIMAX: For me, the climax is not when there’s a big reveal of information to the characters and the reader. It comes when it’s revealed how the characters react to the big event/the meat of the story. In this story, Tommy is sitting in his house waiting on Mark, and a thirst for something to drown out Amy Thompson’s screams comes on him–and he succumbs to it.

DENOUMENT: The denoument is the fallout of the characters’ reaction to the climax. Tommy drinks three beers before Mark can get to him and starts a fourth as he comes in. They talk and decide Tommy’s in no shape to do the cleanup they had planned–neither physically nor emotionally. Mark leaves, and the reader is left with Tommy continuing to drink and the question of what happens next.

So this process is just one way to organize a story, but it’s been a very effective way for me to think about how to make all the events in a story/book fit together and flow naturally in a cause-and-effect manner.

No more book events in April as it’s usually a busy one for family in our house. Keep writing!

Revision Finished!

So last night I finished the last few issues I had discovered in Looking for Home at the first of January! I managed most of the revisions and took two sections out of the book–they were short scenes, and while I knew what I had meant to do when I first wrote them, when I came back around to them, the story was cleaner for me having taken those sections out. All done!

So now it’s the waiting game. I sent it out to six beta readers, which sounds like a lot. But I had many, many more people read Hurricane Baby through the years than that. And each person had expressed a desire to read it when I got finished. So there you go!

So what’s next?

Some papers for conferences are next in the writing queue. I’m thinking about trying to write a few craft articles, which I’ve never done, and shop them around a bit. I want to read more. Maybe think about the next book? Too soon? 🙂

I feel very satisfied with this draft as a draft–there are areas that need work, especially in the first section. So we will see what suggestions come across the transom! Have a great week!

MORE GOOD NEWS!

I found out this week that Hurricane Baby: Stories has been nominated for a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters 2025 Fiction Award! I had heard of this award but didn’t know much about it; you can look up more information about it here.

I asked who the other nominees in my category were, and I was blown away. Only a few small press books were on the list–the rest were all with the big New York presses. Almost all of them I had heard of except two that were debut authors like me. To be included in such company with my first fiction work was astounding to me. It’s still blowing my mind.

So that was that.

In other news, I have podcasts, interviews, talks, and conferences to get going on in the rest of the month and in February. I need to write out my talks to present them, and that’s going to be interesting. One is a talk on how to go after your goals and dreams, and the other is how I figured out why I write and what I write. I have the basics of that one already typed out–it will just need a good bit of tweaking.

Aaaand I finished revising the first section of my work-in-progress, aaaand I realized I had too many fight scenes in it. Four one right after the other and one in the next to the last chapter. %$#@#$%. I don’t want the character in that many fights. So I’m definitely going to cut one scene and rearrange the others so it’s not one right after the other. I still can’t believe I did that.

So a really really high high, a middling low, and the rest business as usual. Except a year ago I could not imagine such a life for myself. Praise be!

Book Club Meeting

I went to Ridgeland to a meeting for the What Would Cathy Read? Book Club at a nice restaurant in a mixed-use development, featuring shopping, hotels, offices, townhomes, and restaurants. My very good writing friend Marlo was a member of this club and host for the night, so everyone read Hurricane Baby, and I came to discuss it with them–eighteen people including me and Marlo.

I talked about how I wrote the book, then Marlo asked me to share how I got it published. Another lady asked if the stories were based off of real people I knew or read about. I get that question a lot, and I think it’s because I’ve tried to hew to the humanity of the characters and so readers feel like they have to be real people. I took another craft question, then since I had talked about my experience of Hurricane Katrina, everyone else felt safe to share theirs.

Then Marlo asked what I was working on now, and I talked a bit about Looking For Home, the book I’m still revising on. I didn’t give away many details about it, so that was good.

I think for my next book club event, I’m going to have people write questions and put them in a container, and I’ll draw from it and answer. I possibly do have another upcoming one that a childhood friend is a member of–they put all in titles in a hat and whichever one they draw is what they read. I look forward to possibly going to that one if it happens.

Really looking forward to the writing life this week–more podcasts, interviews, events, and writing. We will see how it all goes! Until next time!

Tracking Progress

When New Years Day 2024 rolled around, I was about half-way through revising Cassie Beck’s story that ends Looking For Home–it was the most developed, so I began with it in November 2023. I decided to track my progress by writing my down what scene I had worked on and my word count for each day I wrote on it. I started on 1/3/24 with 1160 words. Very auspicious.

In February I hit a writing slump. All I could do was sit and stare at the computer. I was stuck on how to begin Carlton Dixon’s story and how to fill in the scenes I already had. Once the slump started in mid-February, I wrote one day from then to April–335 words on March 22. But I finally got my voice back on April 1 and wrote steadily from then until Thanksgiving 2024, when I finished Merrilyn Beck’s portion of the book.

So how am I going to track my progress with the revisions I already know need to be made?

Same notebook–I tallied up how many areas needed work in this revision. I came up with 22 spots. I highlighted the areas in yellow on the screen inside the document. So then I wrote down what needed to be done in each scene in a list in my notebook in list format. This January, I plan to go through the list, make the needed revision, then check it off my list in my notebook as I complete them.

Why am I doing this?

Because it helps me counter the lies that my critical mind tells itself of how I don’t know what I’m doing, how I’m not accomplishing anything, how there’s no point in even going on with the work. Each line of accomplishment in my notebook represents a promise I kept to myself to bring this story out and share it. Seeing the accumulation of progress spurs me on to continue. A simple system–but enough of a one for me.

How do you keep track of what you’re doing and how you are progressing? Drop a note in the comments!

Writing Differently

I have been doing something very interesting. I am writing differently than usual.

I started off writing Looking for Home in the same style I did Hurricane Baby. A lot of immediate action, twists, and turns. And it was working for me because I was writing the end of the story, and it needed a rush to the climactic moment, and it was told by an impetuous sixteen-year-old girl, Cassie Beck.

When I began writing the beginning of the book, incidents that had happened eighteen years earlier, I still avoided much narrative–Carlton Dixon was also sixteen years old, learning how to grow into being a man in Tennessee in the late 1960s. A lot of his story was pretty action-packed as well because he rarely had room to think before he had to handle a situation. But towards the end, it turned somewhat more contemplative–more narration, more time in Carlton’s head with his thoughts about what was happening to him.

Then to bridge the two stories together, I worked on telling Merrilyn Beck’s story. Right away I encountered trouble==she was a well-brought-up girl, trained to make some up-and-coming young businessman, lawyer, or planter a fine wife. Instead she had fallen for Carlton Dixon, was pregnant with his child, and Carlton had been drafted into the Army. Merrilyn had also been molested at the hands of her father–an open secret in the family.

Merrilyn turned my tendency towards action on its head; she was a planner and a thinker. She considered her words and chose them carefully before she said them, even as young as she was at sixteen. The abuse had made it where she didn’t live in her body but in her mind, so that’s where most of the action was in her story.

I fought this. I wanted the story to be the same as the others. But once I finally figured all this out about Merrilyn, writing her story became much easier. So today’s lesson is to listen to your characters when they tell you who they are. Sometimes there are surprises.

Next Saturday I will be in Hattiesburg, MS at the Author Shoppe in the downtown area from 2:00-3:30 pm. Wish me well!

Progress!

I finally feel like I have a handle on Merrilyn Beck, one of the two female main characters in Looking for Home. I’ve been writing steadily for about a week now. I usually don’t write over 500 words at a time, so progress is a little slower than I like. But it’s finally become fun again! How did this happen?

First I had to do some serious mental gymnastics to convince myself that choices I made that turned out to be wrong for the manuscript were not a crisis now and wouldn’t be a crisis in the future. I have to get words on the page before I can decide if they’re the correct words or not. I can’t fix what’s not there.

Then I really let myself live in Merrilyn’s head for a while. How would she react to the events I had planned for her in the book? What could her possible reactions be? What did those reactions and feelings say about her character?

Finally I convinced myself that ultimately, I was in control of what happened in the book right now, and I know what I’m doing. I know how to write; I know how to tell stories; I know how to craft a narrative. (It’s not always true; the characters often surprise me and carry the action in another direction!) But I told myself I know these characters now and could follow the path I had envisioned.

So that’s what’s been working for me this week. Tune in next week and see how my Natchez event goes next Thursday!