Author: dzchurch

Coloring in Characters

~ dzchurch ~ 3 Comments

I woke up in a cold sweat, dreaming that all the main male characters in my books were raven-haired and blue-eyed. Why raven hair; why blue-blue eyes? With a toss in bed, I divined that it was because my eyes are like cesspools. I envied every blue-eyed person I saw. I even married one. Reassured, I went back to sleep.

A few hours later, a vision of Grieg Washburn, from Saving Calypso, all five foot eleven, dark brown hair and blue eyes of him made me sit straight up in bed. I began inventorying .

Perfidia, one café au lait with brown hair and gray eyes and another with brown hair and deep blue eyes, so blue they appear black. Booth Island. Dark hair, dark eyes. “Beneath the black horn-rims, his eyes, noir, schwarz, beltza, svart, black in any language, absorbed the light in the room.” Glasses, too. Two wins.

The Cooper brothers of the Cooper Quartet, one tall, dark and blue-eyed, one red-headed with amber eyes. 50/50.

Doc and Kanady in the Wanee Mysteries, one with brown hair and gentle, soft brown eyes, the other with hair “the color of a shrew’s back” and sharp blue eyes. 50/50.

So, what was the crazy dream all about? Invention of character, I suspect.

As writers plot, we envision the emotional and physical strength the protagonists and antagonists will need. Should they stand out in a crowd or disappear? Does self-loathing or self-love color their world. Who are they ethnically, from where do they hale, what made them them? We see them in living color, dark, light, shadowed and paint them through their actions, other characters’ perceptions, or self-observation. To me, a character’s hair, eyes, complexion are tells that create an image and a touchstone for the reader, leaving the reader with a bias for the good or bad.

And off we go with a spot of good guy, bad guy:

Booth Island. Sturdevant’s eyes roved over my shirt and down my shorts to my sandals. Meanwhile, I studied the jagged scar over his left eye that continued into his hairline. It was new since he was cuffed and taken into custody, as were the glasses he now wore. Horn-rims. The left lens was as thick as my little finger. His black hair was shorn short on the sides, unmasking a thickly scarred depression above his left ear. Dark stubble stained his strong jawline and accented the hard lines of his mouth.  ☐ Good guy   ☐ Bad guy   ☐ Both

Saving Calypso. Rafe was tall, broad-shouldered and powerful from living off the grid or perhaps from his years in the U.S. Army. He had a generous nose, an engaging mouth, sweet blue eyes, and a square chin. He wore his dusty blond hair in a thick braid, uncut since he had hiked into the mountains.  ☐ Good guy  ☐ Bad guy  ☐ Both

Perfidia. He not only smelled male; he smelled like money, lots of it, as though he had been rubbed in it since childhood. His too-close-together eyes were a deep, dark blue with black corona. His umber hair would have been in ringlets if not for the expensive, stylish cut that left it long in the back and waving over his ears.  ☐ Good guy   ☐ Bad guy  ☐ Both

Dead Legend. Mike Bowen hadn’t changed in the twelve years since Byron had last seen him, still stocky, his sandy blond hair still in a butch. He had one of those faces that had battled its way through school. His nose had a slight drift to the left. He had a scar through the blond of his right eyebrow.  ☐ Good guy   ☐ Bad guy  ☐ Both

A Confluence of Enemies. Thime hunkered down on his wagon and offered his right hand, palm up, for the shake. A welted scar disfigured the soft side of his right forearm. Mr. Kanady glanced at it, his shoulders squared, his head bobbed back until he stared into Thime’s blue eyes. At that moment, Cora noted, the two men might pass for brothers. Except Thime was years older and inches shorter. It was their shared coloring and a certain sharpness in their eyes. ☐ Good guy   ☐ Bad guy  ☐ Both

For more on visit my website dzchurch.com where you can order a book, sign up for my newsletter, and learn more about each book.

We All Have One

~ dzchurch ~ 4 Comments

You know what I mean, the one review that just sits in your brain and ferments. It doesn’t even have to be a negative review. In fact, there is almost always a grain of growth in the bad ones, that comment that helps one become a better writer or calls attention to a technique you use that can be annoying. That sort of thing.

Mine is a recommendation, no less. But talk about damning with faint praise. OMG. Yet, that’s not what bothers me about it — well, yes, it is, in part. It seems to me that if you are recommending a read, you might emphasize the good parts, you know, the stuff you liked.

I get that some people think all critiques (reviews) are critical; after all, the word alone conjures criticism. Right! But according to the dictionary people, review means a critical appraisal of a book, play, movie, exhibition, etc., published in a newspaper or magazine or on any number of websites. There is that word critical, again. Interestingly enough, the example is: “She released her debut solo album to rave reviews.”

So, Back To My One

It makes me crazy. Remember, it is a recommendation. Though the reader finds my protagonist silly, it is the rest of the sentence that makes me gnash my teeth, stutter, and obsess. Why? Because of the presumption of it. I tell myself it is okay, because the reviewer didn’t know to make the week in week’s laundry possessive. But it is not. It is because the individual presumed I know nothing about the time and energy required to do a week’s worth of laundry, baking or housecleaning!

I guess I am so very rich from my writing that I have a domestic doing my housework. Not! Here’s the issue: I have used a washing machine with a mangle on it and, yes, gotten wrung. I’ve risen as the sun tinged the horizon to do chores including; feeding chickens, gathering eggs, feeding pigs and hogs, and bringing milk cows in from the pasture. I have hung laundry on a line, ironed sheets, helped bake bread for a week, and cleaned a house from top to bottom. I do know the time and labor it takes.

Why Can’t I Let It Go?

Because it is so unfair. And unmerited. And because of this (from Unbecoming a Lady):

Drawing heated water from the boiler on the stove, she scrubbed using the washboard and her mother’s technique: swipe the bar soap over the item, dip, soap again, scrub, dip, soap, scrub, rinse. Red blotches rose on her hands from the harsh soap and hot water.

When the wicker basket was full of wet, washed clothes, Cora ran the sopping items through a hand-cranked mangle, a nasty piece of business with two rollers to wring the clothes. A barrel positioned under the mangle captured the rinse water from the flattened, wrung-out clothes. Cora would dilute it with some fresh and use it to water the garden.

Her back and arms ached by the time she had the week’s laundry hung out to dry on lines strung from a crossbar nailed to the base of the windmill to a pole with a crossbar fifteen feet away. Cora rested her red, scaly hands on her hips, watching as a soft, warm breeze ruffled the items on the line, swaying them into a kaleidoscope of color, and dreamed of a washing machine like the one advertised in a Chicago Tribune she had thumbed through while waiting for the cashier to total her purchases and debt at Blewett’s Green Grocers on Chestnut Street.

You Decide

Did the reviewer read the book? Don’t you just wonder sometimes? But we learn something from all our reviews; from this one, I learned when writing a review, don’t presume you know anything at all about the background of the author of a book. Just don’t.

visit my website dzchurch.com for more information about all of my books.

Audiobooks, AI and Me

~ dzchurch ~ 12 Comments

I am participating in a Beta test using AI voices to generate audiobooks. Interesting. And not altogether a bad experience, but a time-consuming one. Most audiobooks run about 20-26 hours, so there you go. But if it works, it makes the creation of audiobooks available to authors without the loss of an arm and/or a leg.

So, things I’m learning.

Choosing a Voice

Listen to all the voice options: male, female, American or British, then pick the narrator your reader would expect. Right now, the options are limited. I chose a twenty-something female for one book and a late-twenties-sounding male for another.

A real plus is that you can change narrators mid-stream without losing your edits.

Don’t watch the screen — Listen

The AI I’m trying out has a marker on the screen that moves from word to word with the narration. If you watch the screen while listening, the paced rhythm of the marker takes all meaning out of the sentence – dah dah dah dah. So shut your eyes and listen for the modulation in each phrase and where inflection changes the intended meaning of a sentence.

As you listen to the very human voice, it is easy to forget it is machine-produced. Yet, it can’t interpret the narrative like a voice actor or a reader would. So, you will need to intercede. Currently, choices are limited: speed a word up, slow it down, or add long or short pauses. Speeding up and slowing down words can affect modulation in unexpected ways, requiring several passes to get the inflection just right. It would be nice to be able to modulate the timbre of the voice for those occasions when a question needs to end other than on an upbeat, but it is not available.

Adding long and short pauses is critical to pacing and understanding. For instance, rapid banter, easily understood on the printed page, needs pauses between speakers to assist the listener. Without a pause, the exchanged dialog becomes a jumble, losing its spice as the listener struggles to figure out who said what to whom.

Listen to each word — Carefully.

The voice replicates standard English; is there such a thing? So, homophones are an issue. For instance, bow (beau) consistently being pronounced bow (as in bowed before the king) no matter the context. And the verb does pronounced as though it were more than one female deer.

The pronunciation pop-up doesn’t translate diacritical markings, which means you have to find a set of letters that creates the correct sound. For instance, duz gets you does and avoids a herd of deer roaming your book. The good news is you can apply pronunciation changes to all instances of the word in the text. The bad news, well, read on.

Users are warned to listen to the complete book before accepting the audiobook conversion; heed it. Else, this could happen. Crappie fish may be croppy to you and me, but not to the AI voice who happily asserted that crappy fish swam in a pond. And in what makes no sense, the voice insists that bass is pronounced base, as in bass violin, and will not say bass, as in fish. And the letters bass, which should produce the correct sound by all rules of the English language, don’t. Nor do b ass, baz, or bahz or, well, anything. English is a minefield of weirdness. But as it turns out, the AI voice is very good with French, thus beau.

Then there are em dashes? Well, imagine my surprise when the voice opined: yes, dash, she changed. Using the pronunciation feature, I tried substituting a fast uh, but that—uh — isn’t always appropriate. So, what do you do? Sometimes, I add a word to make a stutter. Sometimes, I fill in the blank with the missing word(s). It is a conundrum. If the dash is set off with spaces, the voice says dash and if it isn’t, it runs the wordstogether.

What I’ve learned — Mostly

Listen. Listen twice. Learn your options for editing, fast, slow, and pauses and how they affect pace and modulation. Watch out for homophones, some are truly unexpected – as the female deer attest. Watch also for possessives, as the voice tends to hesitate for apostrophes, Eliza s, and needs to be overridden. Watch foreign names and words, unless in French. Be chary with em-dashes, though this issue should be addressed by the programmers. For instance, the voice doesn’t have a problem with ellipses. I know. Weird, huh?

And finally, if you find errors in your manuscript while creating the audiobook, don’t be afraid to correct them. The AI I am tinkering with automatically updates the audio text along with the manuscript text. Not bad, that.

See all my books at dzchurch.com where you can also sign up for my newsletter.

Where Reading Leads: Misty of Chincoteague and Me

~ dzchurch ~ 5 Comments

I ask you to come along on a tale.

I first read Misty of Chincoteague when I was eight, which led me to consume Marguerite Henry’s books like a box of chocolates, one rich tale after another. Misty of Chincoteague; Stormy, Misty’s Foal; Sea Star; Misty’s Twilight. I moved right on like a vampire sucking the good bits out of each book. My older sister begged for horseback riding lessons, which later defined her life. We had plastic ponies. We were goners.

Of course, as my taste became more sophisticated, I moved on, my plastic pony forgotten on a shelf. I admit that my Skipper doll used it as a prop for a time. Fast forward, oh, say, thirty years.

I am in charge of a handscoring center in Maryland that employs 400 Maryland teachers and 50 staff from my company in California. We have two months to score multiple grades of student writing samples for all students in those grades. Each sample must be scored twice holistically, then analytically by multiple teams of scorers. I won’t go into further detail. Just know it was a colossal task.

Fast forward again. My second in command and I hadn’t had a break in weeks. We made it to our rented townhouse in Randallstown every night around eleven, drank wine, ate bread and butter pickles, cheese and crackers, and topped “dinner” off with ice cream. At six a.m., we drank coffee and then headed to Baltimore and the rented building that housed the scoring center.

After weeks of this, we had nothing to do one Sunday. On a lark, we went to the Double T Diner on Route 40, where ‘Diner’ was filmed. Over a Greek omelet, my coworker looks up at me, I at her, and our voices overlapping, as in what goes up a chimney, we both say, “Misty.”

We finished our omelets, got in our rental car and headed south for Assateague Island. No more thought. Well, we wondered why the bridge from Annapolis to the Eastern Shore was so crowded with cars going west. And once, as we turned onto a county two-lane, we saw a flashing sign. Something about a hurricane warning. A warning, nothing more.

The draw of Misty was such that we kept going, and going, until we crossed the bridge to the barrier island of Assateague. A 37-mile-long strip of land between Virginia and the Atlantic Ocean and home to Chincoteague ponies. The gates to the park were wide, and the booth unmanned. We did see signs explaining that the ponies were shy, and visitors often went home without sighting one.

Not us. Ponies were everywhere up the spine of the island. One was raiding a camper’s tent. Others stood in groups, foals between them, their backs to a growing wind. We tumbled out of the car in awe. Two well into their thirty-year-olds suddenly eight again, our mouths agape as illustrations from the books flashed by.

A park ranger pulled up next to us in his truck, and like eight-year-olds, we explained we were just looking. He shrugged, looked at his watch, and said, “The hurricane is due to make landfall in two hours. The park is closing. It looks like a bad one.”

The sky was slate. The wind whistled, clouds churned and boiled. It hit us then that we weren’t lucky to see the ponies; they sought high ground!

We got in the car, our hearts full of Misty, and drove like Hurricane Bob was on our tail. We took secondary roads, breaking into a long line of families evacuating, everything they cared about strapped to the top of their cars. It took hours, the wind increasing, the sky purple and dusk growing.

We crossed to Annapolis in a phalanx of cars, horns honking, a sight not unlike any disaster movie. We made US 97 north amid falling trees, downed power lines, and rain like none we had ever seen. It hit the earth and bounced five feet back into the air, drenching everything on the way down and back up. Leaves torn off trees, their stems intact, got stuck in our windshield wipers. We detoured around downed trees and wires until we made Randallstown. Soaked through to our very selves, we clambered into the townhouse, laughing.

A half-gallon of rocky road ice cream with chocolate syrup later, we were still laughing at the Thelma and Louis of it all and those ponies! Oh, my!

And that, my friends, is where the evil of reading can lead you. To joy, adventure, and beyond!

History “swings like a pendulum do” *

~ dzchurch ~ 3 Comments

* to misquote Roger Miller’s “England Swings.”

When selecting a year in which to begin my Wanee Mystery Series, I landed on 1876 not by accident but by design. It was the U.S. Centennial year. The Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, partially powered by a massive steam engine, showcased Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, the first typewriter with a QWERTY keyboard (Remington 1), Edison’s automatic telegraph, new products such as popcorn, ketchup and root beer, and mass-produced wares including an improved sewing machine. Attending librarians founded the American Library Association. The women’s pavilion demonstrated women’s influence in philanthropy as well as philosophy, science, medicine, education, and literature, foreshadowing the woman’s movement. All while, Reconstruction was still a thing, Native Americans were battling for their land, the James brothers (and others) were robbing banks, and the country was fraught with the second worst depression in U.S. history, setting men adrift to join those already on the road due to the Civil War.

The War may have been over, but it wasn’t. The tides of belief were changing in the North to be less tolerant of the blacks they had just freed. The Southern Democrats fought a different sort of war using intimidation to ensure victory at the Southern polls. Lynchings were common, murders as well, all over the country, not just in the South. The country felt out of control to most. Yet the depression was easing, opportunities were appearing, and technology was booming. Does any of this sound familiar?

What I didn’t expect was how the next year, 1877, the setting for books four through six, would mirror the present. Newspapers predicted the fall of democracy. Public sentiment turned against “tramps” (homeless to us), immigrants, and Hispanics north and south of the border. Southern Democrats (some of whom, as seditionists, the 14th Amendment denied the right to vote or hold political office) took over statehouses by force and threw out duly elected Republican governors, reclaiming control of the south. The oligarchs of industry ruled the White House and most state houses. Graft was everywhere during President Grant’s just ended presidency, and the election of Rutherford B. Hayes considered fraudulent.

Fear crept through the cracks in doors and across the floor, coloring daily life. Small towns were no exception. Though generally not central to the angst, their newspapers, fed by the larger dailies, amplified the news and worries of the world, breeding distrust of the government and outsiders.

The West was still wild, the East tame (if you call murder, gangs and lynchings tame), and the Midwest a mess of mixed sentiments especially in the border states. Small towns like my fictitious Wanee, Illinois were at the nexus of all this change, rife with the disenfranchised, pressured by growth of outside industry, the railroad, and farmers. Glory be, it is my job to weave the discomfit, prejudice, worry, and change into the warp of each story. What a wonderful and frightening opportunity.

The words of one of my professors accompany me; you cannot truly know the tale Shakespeare tells without first understanding the context of the time in which he wrote. He wasn’t a Shakespearean scholar though he discovered the first draft of one of Shakespeare’s plays. Even so, he taught us far more than Shakespeare. He held our hands through the Elizabethan period, the church, the mores, and Shakespeare’s competitors. He made Shakespeare new to me with one question: what if Hamlet’s father wasn’t dead? I hope I do him honor in providing the context for my tales, these roiling years are the stage upon which Cora and her cohorts play. I ask myself with each page written and each plot devised how this disquiet affects the day-to-day dreams and strivings of Cora Countryman, Dr. Philip Shaw, and Sebastian Kanady, who owns and edits Wanee’s newspaper.

This tumultuous period will provide me with plots for a long time to come as Cora and her supporting cast wend their way through to the new century solving the crimes I present them. Yet, as I work on the fourth book, it feels as though 150 years on, we are fighting the Civil War all over again, while dealing with the same threats to our future, oligarchs, seditionists, and technology included. I for one do not wish another 1877 on this country, nor should you.

But I do love writing about the era and how the changes it forced still define us – for the good or the bad.

Unbecoming a Lady and A Confluence of Enemies are available from Amazon; https://www.amazon.com/Confluence-Enemies-Wanee-Mystery-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0CQJ5DW4W. Check my website: https://dzchurch.com for more information on the Wanee Mystery Series and my other books or to sign up for my newsletter.