Of Carrots and Sticks — and Cake

~ Margaret Lucke ~ 2 Comments
Margaret Lucke and her books

By Margaret Lucke

I’ve been staring at the blank page on my computer screen for what seems like hours when my Muse finally slouches into my office. She plops herself onto the soft chair in the corner. “Here I am,” she says. “Where’s my reward?”

“Reward!” I turn from the computer to face her. “What are you talking about? You just arrived. You haven’t given me anything yet. Not the first word of a sentence. Not even the glimmer of an idea. You don’t get a reward just for showing up.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Pay for work that hasn’t happened? What kind of business model is that?”

“Ooh, I didn’t know what we do is a business.” She gets up, walks across the room, and peers at the screen. “Where’s the profit-and-loss statement? Are we making money? What’s my cut?”

“Never mind. We need to get busy on chapter 18.” I position my fingers on the keyboard, ready to type something brilliant. “When we left off, Jocelyn was waiting for Luke to show up in the empty house. She doesn’t know he’s the one who killed Gretchen. How shall we open the scene?”

My Muse crosses her arms over her chest. “I’m still waiting for my reward.”

“Later,” I say firmly. “We don’t get rewards until we’ve accomplished something.”

“What’s that then?” She points to my tea mug.

“Fuel.” I pick up the mug and take a big swig.

“Uh-huh. And this? Looks like a reward to me.”

Next to the mug is a plate with a tiny morsel (it’s a very small piece, honest) of dessert left over from last night.

“My breakfast,” I explain as I take a delicious bite. “Carrot cake.”

“Ah … carrot.” She nods knowingly. “The proverbial donkey’s reward. The farmer gives the donkey a carrot, and the donkey takes the farmer to the market. A fair arrangement, but you can see that the reward comes first.”

“No, no. The farmer dangles the carrot in front of the donkey. The donkey moves toward it, but the carrot stays just out of reach until they reach their destination. Only then does the donkey get its reward.”

“Can I have some of your cake?” she asks, just as I pop the last tidbit into my mouth.

I lift my hands in a gesture of apology. “Sorry.”

She rolls her eyes. “Poor donkey. It must feel as frustrated as I do.”

“Remember, the farmer also carries a stick, so he can swat the donkey’s behind if it doesn’t cooperate. The carrot is a positive motivator and the stick is a negative motivator. The idea is—”

“Motivate, schmotivate. If I were the donkey, I’d tell that farmer where to stick his carrot.”

She goes back to the soft chair to pout.

“Come on now,” I say. She doesn’t move.

I wheedle. I cajole. No response. I look around for something to use as a stick.

But I know that won’t work. Instead, I take the plate to the kitchen and refill it, this time with two slices of cake. I return to my office and set the plate beside the computer.

“Pull up your chair,” I say to my Muse. “The big piece is yours.”

She smiles as she scooches her chair forward and picks up the extra fork I brought. “Speaking of sticks, did you know Luke is bringing his hockey stick to the house with him? To use as a weapon against Jocelyn. No, wait, not a stick, a knife. That way he can hide it under his coat. Mmm, yummy cake!”

“Hey, he can’t kill Jocelyn. We need her for the rest of the story.”

“Don’t worry, she’ll save herself. A little more of this reward and I’ll figure out how. Make sure the next piece has plenty of frosting!”

Work, Craft and Frivolity

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 5 Comments


by Janis Patterson

I honestly don’t know whether to be flattered, or insulted, or sorry.

Right now I’m fighting a tight deadline for a book, and it is fighting back tooth and nail. I’m way short of where I should be with characters who, despite pre-planned expected actions/reactions/events, are stubbornly refusing to cooperate. It’s an unsettling feeling.

Looking for moral (or immoral, depending on how you might view it) support I called a writer friend expecting commiseration and encouragement.

Instead I got a breathless little laugh and a frivolous “Oh, that’s nothing. You’ll get something together to get it done. You always do” before she went on to talk at length about this party she was giving for her granddaughter’s wedding.

Now I have known and loved her granddaughter since her toddler days, and am delighted she is getting married… but at that moment I needed some support and encouragement, not punch recipes.

Plus, it is almost insulting to my craft to believe that I’ll get it done just as I would a cake or a floral decoration or any other mechanical project. Writing is an art. It is something to be taken seriously instead of a frivolous chore that can be dashed off on a whim.

In the bad old early days of romance writing, there was a popular belief held by far too many that writing was easy, that romance writers just reclined on a chaise longue, occasionally munching on a bon-bon while effortlessly spewing out another best seller between their morning horseback ride and a ball at the mansion down the road that evening.

Now that is an exaggeration (although less than you might think) but the kernel of that idea, that writing is an easy cinch which takes no time and less thought and no work at all, is still lurking about our industry like a wraith that cannot be exorcised.

In case you ever thought that, take my word – it is not true. Writing is work. Even writing a bad book is work. Writing a good book is difficult and a lot of work. To denigrate the process by saying with flip dismissal “That’s nothing, you’ll get it done” when you are asking for help and encouragement and support is not only insulting to the writer, but to the craft itself.

Writing is more than pulling words out of the air and putting them into a line. A chimpanzee can do that. The words have to make at least some sort of sense and create some sort of vaguely cohesive story; most writers – even the very bad ones can do that, though there are some I would put the chimps up against any day.

To create a real book, though, you have to work. You have to take a thousand ideas and melt them together into a seamless, interesting whole. You have to choose the right words to create the world of your book with just the ambiance and subtext you want. And most important of all, you have to make this book into something that people you have never met, people who have never heard of you, want to read.

That’s not easy, and it should not be frivolously dismissed as if it were.

End of rant. I have a book to write.

Under House Arrest, Kinda, by Heather Haven

~ Heather Haven ~ 10 Comments

I recently recovered from an illness caused by a stone in one of my salivary glands. This is akin to having a kidney stone but without the glamor. Instead of sympathetic friends and family saying, “Oh, no! You poor thing,” they tended to say, “huh?” I even did that myself. Before this happened, I hadn’t heard of the condition. The name of it is Sialolithiasis, but I never once tried to pronounce it. I was in enough pain as it was.

So what are the symptoms of this strange malady besides pain? My lower jaw and neck swelled up within hours and turned bright red. I looked like one of those blow-up Thanksgiving Day balloons only not as cute. I would have been the balloon everybody over the age of 12 asked who or what it represented, right before it crashed into a streetlight. I decided not to include a picture of me during this time because this is the stuff of nightmares.

After I was diagnosed, the emergency doctors decided I was a good candidate for a fairly new program that, under certain conditions, sends a patient home for care instead of being hospitalized. The hospital saves money, the patient is less likely to pick up something else in the hospital and in my case, the patient can be home with loving husband, warm fur balls, and an unlimited supply of ice cream.

Advanced Home Care is the term they use when they turn your house into a hospital. I even had to sign an affidavit swearing I wouldn’t leave the house during the allotted time. That’s the house arrest part. Once they’d set up, there was equipment everywhere. Nurses and technicians showed up whenever, drawing blood, taking my temperature, etc. I zoomed with a doctor every day on their loaned-out iPad. I had to take all required medications in front of a 24/7 “virtual nurse,” who was actually a real nurse, stationed in Texas. As I was in California, this was pretty far away. But her face was in front of me, scrutinizing my every move. I got away with nothing, not even taking my pills with coffee. “No, no, no,” she said shaking her head. “Use water, please.” It was a regimented program but a successful one.

What has this got to do with writing? Well, as we all know, we writers are never far from our craft. Or don’t like to be. My latest book, Cleopatra Almost Slept Here, debuted mid-August. Since that time, I’ve been sitting on my hands. Nothing to write. I had an idea for a new novel but couldn’t get it started. Sometimes the new story is too fresh. Sometimes you can’t let go of the previous novel, not just its creation, but the later job of getting it out there to the readers. Such was the case with me.

But back to my little stone. Whenever I’m being taken care of by healthcare workers, overworked and underpaid as they often are, one of the first things I do is learn their names. It’s not just a form of respect but yelling “hey you” when your I.V. comes loose is a little gauche. When I asked my virtual nurse’s name, she had to pronounce it several times for me and then spell it. This was because it’s a made-up family name passed on from mother to daughter. Iejoma, pronounced E- jo-ma.

Well, I loved the name. Not only was her story of how it came about fascinating, but it sprouted all kinds of ideas within me. I’d had the wisp of a character floating around in my head and this name helped solidify it. I asked Iejoma if she minded if I used her name for one of my characters and she gave me permission. Now I am unstuck. All I have to do is sit down and write an eighty-five-thousand-word novel.

Hmmm. I wish I’d phrased that last sentence better.

How Many Writers Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb?

~ Nancy Lynn Jarvis ~ 7 Comments

Or more relevantly, how many people does it take to make a book? I suppose it might take only one, but I doubt it. The words of Hillary Clinton “It takes a Village…” seem more appropriate. If one writer could produce a book unaided, it would mean they would have to not only write the book, but edit it, proofread it, format it, design a cover and put those ideas onto a graphic formatted to work for a book cover, print it, distribute it, publicize it, develop a social media presence and a brand…it’s exhausting just to think about all it takes to produce a book and I’ve probably left out a few steps.

If a writer publishes traditionally, add an agent but leave formatting, cover creation, printing, and distribution to the publisher. It used to be that writers could turn over editing and publicity to the publisher, too, but increasingly even a traditionally published author has to present an edited and proofread copy to the publisher and is expected to take on a great deal of the publicizing of their book. If a writer publishes themselves or goes with a small press, they can look forward to being hands-on for the whole process.

I write, and have ideas about the cover design I want, but that’s as far as my skills go, so I rely on my village. Producing my books starts with a content editor who tells me if what I’ve written makes sense or if there are holes in the story. He looks for inconsistencies, too. I remember him asking why the final chapter of “What Lucy Heard” didn’t match the rest of the book. That was a shocker, but one I corrected before the book went to my copy editor who can’ t understand why I never get the spelling of Mercedes correct, important since my protagonist drives a sunshine yellow Mercedes. She even had a close call in it in “The Corpse’s Secret Life.” You’d think that after typing about the car so many times, I’d have the spelling down, but you’d be mistaken.

While my copy editor is correcting my misspellings and improper or lacking punctuation, my formatter makes sure thing like gutters are placed correctly so the wide one is in the book’s center insuring readers don’t have to pry books open to read them and that page numbers are accurate and flow.

Where I really need help is with covers. I usually have a cover in mind before I start writing, but the gap between my hand-drawn sketch and a book cover is vast. Thank you, Isabella and Julie, for taking my barely understandable ideas and making them into proper-looking and dimensionally-correct covers that my printer can use.

I have discovered that, even with all that effort, the best way to spot a typo is to proudly send a copy of a new book off to the Library of Congress, their “fee” for an LLC number, which guarantees you or a reader will spot it.

For distribution, I rely on Amazon and local bookstores and beg readers to ask their local libraries to purchase the books, which they will do if a book is requested often enough.

Then the getting-the -word-out work begins and seems to never end. When I published my first book, “The Death Contingency,” it seemed all I needed to do for publicity was find a hook and put the book up on Goodreads offering some sort of incentive for readers and reviewers to find it. My hook was that I was the only working realtor writing real estate mysteries. I was interviewed by CNN, made Costco Magazine, had featured stories about my book in local newspapers, was interviewed on local radio and TV stations, and hit several other big promotional channels. That was before 11,500 books were published every day in the United States. Competition from AI generated books is increasing dramatically, too, so much so that, Amazon has just put a limit of no more than two book submissions per week from any author to try and limit them.

So, with “A Faire to Remember” coming out today in print and e-book format on Amazon, I’m beginning publicity step one by letting you know it’s available and asking you to consider adding it to your TBR pile. You can find it and all my other books at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Nancy+Lynn+Jarvis&i=stripbooks&x=0&y=0&ref=nb_ss_b

UNCHARTED WATERS

~ Kimila Kay ~ 3 Comments

Hello, Ladies ~

Hi, my name is Kimila, and I’m a “dark and twisty” writer. So, what on earth possessed me to think I could write a middle-grade fantasy book? Well, I’m sure you all like me have no control over your imaginations!

My husband and I used to camp with family every year on Memorial Day Weekend, rain or shine, at Sunset Bay Park on the Southern Oregon coast, just south of Charleston. The campground is nestled in a beautiful woody setting, and the bay is just a short walk away. With the tree line as a backdrop, the bay is rimmed with towering bluffs. Rock formations at the bottom of the bluffs are dotted with tide pools filled with all manner of sea creatures.

But my favorite part of this beautiful spot is the island that sits at the mouth of the bay. From the moment I saw it, I thought the landmass looked like a pirate ship frozen in time. I should’ve said above that I have an “overactive” imagination!

Every time I visited the bay and walked the sandy beach, I would talk to the island as if it were a pirate ship. Comments like: “Oh, the stories you could tell.” “What year are you from?” “Were there pirates in the area in the 18th century?”

My sister, Mona, thought I was crazy when I said, “Someday, I’m going to write a kids’ book about three young friends who go to the island and wake up on a pirate ship.”

And hence the idea for “Midnight Sail” was born. As with any book idea, I dropped into the rabbit hole of research. The first thing I decided was to write this book under the pseudonym D. J. Henson to honor my son Derrick, who passed away. And of course, I knew I would include an autistic character among the three eleven-year-old friends. It took a few days of noodling, but I finally came up with my three characters. Now I have Cyrus, my protagonist, Alex, the brains of the group, and Jaxyn, the girl of logic.

I’ve compiled mounds of printed research about pirates sailing the Pacific Ocean in 1757, buried treasure, and time travel. I know I can’t bring my “dark and twisty” creativity to this book, so I made a list of “no-nos” to keep me from accidentally adding them to my manuscript.

My favorite writing style is three points of view, and it didn’t occur to me that I should research whether three POVs are acceptable for a middle-grade fantasy book. I also didn’t consider that a POV from a law-enforcement character who interacts with the missing kids’ moms might not fit within the parameters of this type of book.

But as luck would have it, I spent last weekend with Paty Jager, who stayed in my RV with me while we worked at the NIWA book booth at the Mt. Angel Oktoberfest. As you can imagine, during our downtime, Paty and I enjoyed talking about writing and our current projects.

If you’ve never had the opportunity to have Paty as your sounding board, you’re missing out. She listens, then asks great questions, weighs the answers, and … when you see a certain look cross her face, you know she’s about to offer valuable insight about your work in progress.

Paty shared her concern about me using the three POVs, and I countered with other children’s books I’ve read that use multiple POVs. When the conversation became about my law-enforcement character POV and the moms being front and center in those chapters, Paty carefully explained why she didn’t think kids would enjoy reading those chapters.

“Your middle-school readers want to go on the adventure by themselves,” Paty said. “And the characters, along with the readers, will assume the moms are worried, so I don’t think you need to show that in your book.”

Paty encouraged me to keep the pirate chapters, but to use the POV of a teenage pirate instead of the ship’s adult captain.

I’m sure the look on my face suggested I wasn’t thrilled with her assessment. I did say I would reconsider the law-enforcement POV and the addition of the moms. I promised I would do some more research into using three POVs in this genre.

As we worked the rest of the weekend, I tried to keep the idea that I would now have to rework and rewrite my almost-finished manuscript. One of the things I absolutely love about my creative brain is that it enjoys working a problem. With the distraction of selling books, I turned over this manuscript’s challenges to my subconscious, and by the time I woke up Monday morning … I knew what I needed to do.

First, I researched whether using three POVs in this book would be a good idea. To my surprise and relief, I found several articles saying this approach to telling the story is acceptable. I printed off some important guidelines and tackled my next hurdle: rewriting the law-enforcement POV chapters and using what I’d learned in my internet search to strengthen Cyrus’ chapters; then I focused on creating a new voice for the pirate chapters.

Drum roll please … I worked non-stop (a nasty coughing cold sidelined me to the couch) all week on rewrites, restructuring, and finished “Midnight Sail” yesterday afternoon. I celebrated for a few minutes, but know the real work begins as I do my first round of edits.

As I continue to navigate the uncharted waters of writing my middle-grade fantasy series and venture into the mystery genre with Sapphire Stone Mysteries, I won’t hesitate to run a concern by Paty. I can’t promise to be thrilled if my story ideas or writing style are questioned … but I do promise to listen and let my creative brain solve the problem.

Happy Writing ~ Kimila