Some of you sharp-eyed readers will notice that this is an old blog, and you’re right. I apologize, but to be honest I’m not yet back up to my fighting weight after a pair of life-threatening surgeries and I didn’t want to desert you all completely. Please bear with me this month and next month I’ll have something fresh for you. Thank you.

by Janis Patterson

Mention hobbies/crafts and people generally think of needlecraft, or scrapbooking, or making things, or painting either on canvas or cloth or wood, or… the subject is endless, as everyone who has ever visited a Michael’s or Hobby Lobby knows.

I’m different. Still. My hobby is Ancient Egypt. Studying, visiting, crafting, writing about… anything that concerns Ancient Egypt. I’ve been that way since childhood. By the age of nine I had read every book the Dallas Public Library system had or could borrow on the subject of Egyptology. (Although in the interest of full disclosure I will admit that when I was nine there were a lot fewer books on Egyptology!) I met the man who would become my husband through Egyptology and it was in the moonlit English garden of the Mena House Hotel at the foot of the Pyramids (yes, those pyramids!) that he proposed to me. The North Texas Chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt was founded in the den where I now sit. Through this mania I have been fortunate enough to meet almost every Egyptologist of note in the last 30 or so years and am blessed to call several of them dear personal friends.

So how does this little bit of personal history aid my writing? Aid? Reshape and re-form is more like it. On my first trip to Egypt back in ’92 (before I even met my husband-to-be) my mother and I took a cheap tour to Egypt. It was like returning to a place I loved, even though I had never been there before. I took conspicuous note and pictures and wrote several stories about Egypt then and now. Some didn’t sell (trad pubbing only back then, when others decided what writers should write) but one did – a big time-travel romance called PASSION’S CHOICE. Thanks to the dictates of my then publisher it was what was considered at the time a ‘dirty’ book. Nowadays – meh. Time came the rights finally came back to me and I wanted to rewrite and take out the naughty bits, but the story was so tightly constructed it couldn’t be done, so I left it the way it was. By then I was self-publishing and decided just to let it ride.

Fast forward a couple of years, a marriage to a man as Egypt-obsessed as I, a couple of trips over there and then in ’10 we were on a group tour with some others from our ARCE chapter and on the way back to Luxor from the quarry at Geb el-Silsila the bus stopped on a whim at the necropolis of El Kab.

Out of such tiny incidents all kinds of things grow.

The necropolis is huge, but the centerpiece are four beautifully decorated tombs. They have been open since the Middle Ages, but the colors are still vivid and the statues of the deceased ones still alarmingly lifelike. In one of the tombs there is a painted graffito in a language no one could identify. Two of the scholars on our tour put their heads together and decided it was a debased form of Ancient Phoenician. Cool! I actually knew people who could read Ancient Phoenician! (Actually, years later the late great Eugene Cruz-Uribe (I think) did translate it, as it was proved to be a dialect of Ancient Egypt written in a weird form of demotic.)

Anyway, those lovely tombs gave me an idea and after a while I was working on the story of THE EGYPTIAN FILE, a modern romantic adventure. The only thing was I couldn’t remember in which tomb the graffito was, so, as a member of the EEF listserv, I put the question out. There’s a saying that when you ask five Egyptologists a question, you get eight answers and a fistfight. Not quite that bad, but I did get some very passionate answers.

Two of them were super special. One was from Jane Akshar, an Egyptologist and hotelier, and the other was Dr. Dirk Huyge, Curator of the Art and History Collection of the Brussels Royal Museum and Director of the Belgian Archaeological Mission to El Kab. They were both very helpful and both of them became dear friends. I named them both as ‘researchers in residence’ in the acknowledgements, because there are all kinds of little details you can’t find on the internet, such as how long it takes to get from Beni Suef to Luxor by train.

And that started something. Jane and I corresponded regularly and she, in another life an IT specialist, became not only a dear friend but my web-maven and looked after my website. Dirk was fascinated by the process of writing – and totally tickled to being in a book – so one day in early January 2015 he and I were chatting by email and he said, we’re going to the dig in March, why don’t you and your husband join us?

My jaw dropped. Civilians never get to stay in dig houses. Never. I told him I’d talk to the hubby and let him know. We were in budget mode and trips to Egypt are expensive, so the rest of the afternoon I tried to anticipate his objections and how to counter them. Finally he came home from work and I said, “Dirk wants us to come stay at the dig house and I think…” I got no further, because he said, “When do we leave?” That was January 5th, and on March 15th we were in Egypt. We got to stay close to a week in the dig house, sandwiched in between our dear friend Dr. Salima Ikram and a BBC film crew.

The result was a lovely little murder mystery called A KILLING AT EL KAB. It’s still one of my favorite books. And last September we took a Nile cruise for two weeks. I was just going to enjoy… I wasn’t going to work or anything. The Husband laughed and bought me a (refurbished) MacBookAir for a travel computer so I could do a trip diary… which I did and you can find on my website if you dig a little. He does know me… I came home with about half a new book, A FIRSTCLASS KILLING, set on a luxurious Nile cruise boat. So far it’s great fun!

So perhaps Ancient Egypt isn’t a ‘classic’ hobby, but it’s mine. I do needlepoint some Ancient Egyptian design pillow covers, and at the moment am working on a broad collar necklace with colored beads and opaque cabochons, but it is the land and the time itself which are my real hobby. And I love it!

The thing I am trying to tell you is that you can never tell from where a story will come. I never thought to write a book set in Ancient Egypt… and now I’ve written several. Don’t ever overlook something you love as fodder for a book. Look at all the needlework/knitting/whatever books there are. Or baking. Or singing. Or… well, you get the idea. When you can combine two passions the outcome just has to be something special.

by Janis Patterson

Don’t get me wrong – I love blogging. It’s wonderful to be able to chat with readers and fans and people who get lost on the internet. What I don’t like is schedules. Each time I check my calendar – and every blog and everything else I do is ruthlessly noted on my calendar – I swear this time I will get my next blog done well in time, pre-schedule it and the announcement to be sent in a timely manner and have no worries or last minute rushes.

Then Life happens. You know what I mean. All the writing gurus say that if you are a writer (or want to be a writer) writing should always come before anything other than dangerous illness or death. Well, that makes a good talking point for writing teachers to use to encourage you, but in practical life it’s not much good. Things come up that you didn’t expect. Things that are not life-threatening, but which really do need to be handled. Then there’s laundry, and cooking, and cleaning, and marketing, and…

And your time for writing gets shorter and shorter.

Now there are those who say writing is not done just at the keyboard, that no matter what your hands are doing your brain can still be plotting, so that time spent at the keyboard is really just transcribing. While that is true to a point, it can also be dangerous. Once I was driving from Dallas to Ft. Smith, Arkansas. While I drove I tried to work out a really knotty plotting problem on my work in progress. When I finally had it worked out I had no idea of where I was. Turns out it was Missouri, and I had a lot of backtracking to do. So one does need to be careful when using this technique.
Back to blogs. Blogs are short. Blogs are fairly localized in focus – in my case, a subject that can be wrangled by hook or by crook to the world of writing. The only trouble is, you have to have a reasonably cogent premise, or something informative, or at least interesting to say. Otherwise all you’re doing is stringing words in a line and hoping they say something at least minimally interesting.

Like this post. Well, negative examples can be a teaching tool too!

Before I go I must share that my new anthology (shared with the fabulous Sandy Steen, Penny Richards and James Gaskin) releases on June 14th and is currently available for pre-order on Amazon. It’s called The July Fourth Murders and features four different wars and four murders on the Fourth of July, written by four authors. My part is World War One. It’s a nifty book! Go take a look.

by Janis Patterson

Back years ago when I still worked in the corporate world I had a little placard on my desk. It had a cute cartoon drawing and the legend, “When you are up to your *ss in alligators, it is hard to remember that you were sent to drain the swamp.”

I’ve never forgotten that saying, though – wish I still had the little placard, but some stinking low-life stole it. The premise has stayed with me all these years, though and as my writing career has progressed, however, has become even more true.

Now those of you who have read my many blogs over the years know how strong I come down on the side of professionalism. Published or unpublished, hobby writer or NYT bestseller, if you’re a writer you have to realize – and act – like a professional. That means consistency, dedication and good behavior, i.e., delivering a product contractually promised on time and in good condition, and working well with your editors et al. And for most of us, some hobby writers excepted, that means discipline. You have X number of words to produce and Y amount of time to do it, which means a fairly demanding schedule.

Now I’m going to be contradictory, because I will admit that schedules are fragile things subject to the alarums and buffeting winds of life. Everyone has their own idea of a schedule – some do 1,000 or 2,500 words per day without fail, some work for X amount of time per day – whatever works for them. At least, we try. Unfortunately Life has a mind of its own – which means we do not have to be a slave to an unbending timeline. (Those of us not on a hard deadline, that is.)
A dear friend of mine, an NYT bestseller, had a large multi-generational family and a demanding job. Far too many times her writing had to take a remote third-place in her life and she fell further and further behind in her work. Finally she said “Enough!” and determined that she would write 30 minutes per day without fail. She said no matter how busy life was, she could scrape together 30 minutes. And she did – without fail. I remember her sitting on a gurney in the ER after a leg injury, scribbling away in the notebook she always had with her. Even as well as I knew her I was astonished at her dedication.

The older I get the more I believe that Life is more important than a rigid schedule. What do you do when someone dear to you dies, or a child is ill, or there is a horrible incident requiring your attention – a house fire, an accident or some other trauma? It would take a stronger person than I to ignore it completely just to meet my schedule. That does not, of course, include bridge games or luncheons or other basically frivolous pastimes. Then there are children – or grandchildren. They are young for such a fleeting time – don’t shut them out. And for those of you fortunate enough to still have your parents they must be considered too. There is more to life than writing, no matter how dedicated a writer you are. You can always do your ‘thirty minutes a day’ or whatever after they are asleep.

See? I told you I was being contradictory. We need discipline if we are going to have a career in writing, but we also need to be human. Choose your distractions and exemptions wisely – if you have a choice. Just remember anything can be an alligator!