A break from the dark...

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 Sometimes I need a break from the dark, creepy stuff in my head and in other books. My family always gives me a hard time because I won’t watch scary movies. “It’s not going to be as scary as the stuff you write about,” they say.

And they’re probably correct. My stuff is pretty dark. But it’s MY dark. It grows inside ME. I can handle it. Perhaps writing it is my way of letting that darkness out. And I can read dark books, too. Although I don’t do super scary ones.

But, watching a movie feels totally different. It’s so many levels scarier for me. People compared my first book, Savage Art, to Silence of the Lambs… but I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t read it. And I only stayed in the theater about 20 minutes before I had to leave the movie…

What is that all about? Wish I could tell you. But, today I took a break from the dark and read Pumpkin Heads by Rainbow Rowell . It was perfect… and a graphic novel to boot.

Q&A with Yours Truly

The first hundred pages are the hardest. Everything is set up in those chapters—the protagonist, the supporting cast, the mystery, the dynamics. These first pages take the majority of my time. I do a lot of staring out the window.

The painful process of moving backward...

…that is possibly the most painful part of writing a novel—the times when you realize it’s wrong. And you’re alone, no editor (yet) telling you how it’s wrong and suggesting ways to fix it. It’s just wrong in your head and you know in your gut that you have to go back.

Midnight Musings...

I wrote down the snippets of what the characters said, what I saw when Liv Asher drove her old Ram truck with its Wyoming plates and its layers of dust into downtown Denver. I wrote how her dog, Ranger, paced uncomfortably along the truck’s bench seat, whining—perhaps at the unfamiliar sight of bright city lights against the dark sky.

The end's laser focus...

Even on a wonderful girls’ holiday, I still found myself coming back to the green notebook, making notes on final scenes, on the big reveal(s), and on those reflective moments that will close the novel.

Plotter or Pantser

They say there are two types of writers, those who make a long outline and plan it all out and those who write by the seat of their pants.

I have to admit, I’ve tried—and failed—at both.

Tips of the Slung... or Slips of the Tongue

Definition of spoonerism

: a transposition of usually initial sounds of two or more words (as in tons of soil for sons of toil)

What I’ve got isn’t exactly a spoonerism problem although I have yet to find the correct diagnostic term for my particular verbal ailment.