Writing with My Voice by Heather Haven

~ Heather Haven ~ 15 Comments

A few days ago, I took a tumble in the parking lot of the San Jose Kaiser Permanente. While I don’t advise it, if you have to take a fall, try to do it in the parking lot of a hospital. Within seconds about 12 doctors, nurses, and orderlies came running. They were all very concerned about me. I, on the other hand, sat there wondering how I was going to get up. Getting up from the ground at my age is not always the easiest thing to do and it certainly isn’t the most graceful. It may have taken four nurses and orderlies to do it, but they hauled me up and took me to ER where I was diagnosed with a broken wrist. Not only did I have a broken wrist, but it was my dominant wrist, which is the left. I’m left-handed. And a writer. Yikes!

 This presented some problems, not the least of which was being in the middle of my latest WIP, Cleopatra slept here. Aside from the fact that I am completely dependent upon my husband to do nearly everything and will be for the next six weeks, what bothers me the most is I can’t type any of my work into the computer. What to do?

Big Decision born of necessity: go rogue and use the dictation program in Word for Windows. I gave it a whirl, but it didn’t work. Where was this stupid microphone? I spent the better part of two hours searching for it on my computer only to discover I didn’t have one. There’s always a glitch.  

But undaunted, I bought a microphone from Amazon, a plug and play. A plug and play does all the necessary setup work such as drivers for your computer and was the way to go for this wounded-wing writer. I’m using Microsoft Word’s AI now to dictate this post.

Using the AI dictation program in Word is akin to having a really dumb secretary. Maybe I shouldn’t say dumb. Maybe unseasoned. And stubborn. Unlike human secretaries, this one doesn’t try to fit in with your work practices. When you tell this AI what not to do, it simply doesn’t listen and continues to make the same mistakes again and again. OK, I thought, the program is free and better than nothing. Why not try to deal with its idiosyncrasies? So, I am.

Remember the Three Stooges? I call the AI on my phone Moe. Moe knew early on I used the word ain’t every now and then. It no longer tells me it’s a misspelling or I should put in something else. Microsoft Word’s AI, who I call Curly, is not so smart. It will put a period or capitalize a word in the middle of a sentence for I know not why. Or add an extra space in between words. Really, Curly? Also, if I leave the microphone on and say nothing, it takes my breathing to be the words bye-bye. And if I clear my throat? It puts in the word Oh. With my allergies, I’m always clearing my throat. At the end of the day, I find a plethora of Ohs scattered around my manuscript. And do not talk to the mailman or a passing dog while it’s on. There’s no telling what it will write. Flergon deherden flup??

As I read this back, I must say I come off like an ungrateful cow. Moo. Maybe I’m being a little like Larry, the third member of the Three Stooges. Or maybe I’m just taking out my frustrations about my broken wrist on an inanimate object that acts a lot like a person, but isn’t. After all, these are very useful tools we have now. AI has really come up with some things that makes our lives better. Not perfect, but better. Nothing is perfect in this world. I remember once at about 23 years old, I thought I might be perfect. I was mistaken. Even my mother had a good laugh over that one.

So, until my wrist heals up, I will continue to use this free dictation program, glad I don’t have to type with my nose to get my work done. Or hire a real secretary. And if this secretary knows the eight parts of speech, it could be up to 40 bucks an hour. To recap, if the iPhone is Moe, and Microsoft Word is Curly, then I guess I’m Larry.

 I can go there.

Family Pictures

~ Janet Dawson ~ 3 Comments

Mom would have been 100 years old this summer. The year she was born, Calvin Coolidge was president, having taken that office on the death of Warren G. Harding. Seventeen presidents later, Mom was still hanging in there. We hoped she would make it to that centenary celebration. We were planning a hell of a party! But she didn’t. Her mind and wit were still sharp—her body was wearing out.

Though Mom didn’t get a 100th birthday party, Aunt Flo did. Mom was the baby of the family and Aunt Flo was seven years older. They were the only two siblings remaining of six brothers and sisters. That year, plans were in the works for a big celebration down in Texas. Mom wanted to go but she hesitated. She was on oxygen then, requiring an oxygen concentrator and all the stuff that goes with it. The thought of traveling, let alone flying, was daunting. She told Aunt Flo she wouldn’t be there.

I finally called my brother and said, I don’t want Mom to regret not seeing her sister one more time. He agreed. We bought the tickets and told Mom she was going. He flew with her, and I met them at the airport. Money spent and lots of logistics to deal with. But the look on Aunt Flo’s face when her baby sister walked into the room was worth all the effort. I have pictures!

When we celebrated Mom’s 90th birthday, we had several tables displaying photos of Mom at various stages of her life. I recall sitting on the floor in the basement, going through photo albums. I found pictures that I could tell were taken in the 1930s, based on the clothing and hairstyles the people in the photos were wearing, as well as the cars in the background.  hairstyles and autos. But I didn’t recognize any of those people and no one had written anything on the back to identify them. People, write stuff on the back of your pictures!

I found plenty of photos of Mom, though. It was a treat to see her as a little girl and a young bride. Since Mom passed, we did it again, going through albums, slides and framed photos all over the house. One find was a tintype from 1892. I’d never seen it before. According to the note from Aunt Flo written on the back, the woman in the photo was my great-grandmother and the two children with her were my grandmother, at age six, and her younger brother, who would have been three years old. My grandmother’s sister, a baby at the time, is not pictured. It’s only the second photo I’ve seen of my great-grandmother, who died that same year at the age of 30.

During our recent labors to clear out Mom’s house, we discovered a video of Mom and Dad’s 50th anniversary and we watched it before taking it to be digitized. What a treat it was to see aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends who were still alive then—and now no longer with us.

Those of us who write fiction create families in our books and stories. Jeri Howard isn’t just a lone private eye who has an office and a home in Oakland. She has a father, a mother, and a brother. Each in turn has been featured in books—her father in Till The Old Men Die, her mother in Don’t Turn Your Back on the Ocean, which also features appearances from cousins on the maternal side of things. And Jeri searches for her missing brother in Cold Trail. Jeri’s grandmother is a major character in Bit Player, which touches on her experiences working as an actress in Hollywood in 1941, just before the start of World War II. Aunts and cousins show up in that one, as well.

I also write a historical mystery series set in the early 1950s, featuring Zephyrette Jill McLeod, who lives at home in Alameda, California with her father, mother, and siblings. In my Kay Dexter series, featuring a geriatric care manager, Kay Dexter lives just down the street from her elderly mother.

So family pictures inhabit our fiction as well as our real lives. With words we photograph these people and enable our readers to see them. It makes our stories so much better.

Guest Blogger ~ Alice Fitzpatrick

~ patyjag ~ 5 Comments

THE MYSTERY IN MY LIFE

            I grew up reading my mother’s Agatha Christie novels, losing myself in idyllic English villages where everyone knows each other, sprawling manor houses with hidden passageways, and luxurious seaside hotels that reminded me of the England I’d left behind when we’d immigrated to Canada.  With each book, I took on the challenge of matching wits with Miss Christie, ever hopeful that this time I would identify the murderer.  However, the real mystery in my life was my own family.

            My Polish relatives lived behind the Iron Curtain which might explain my father’s secretive nature.  He spoke little about his past, but when he did, he told a different tale to each of us.  Once he confessed to me that as White Russians, we’d been forced to flee to Poland during the revolution where we’d adopted a Polish variation of our name.  But even so, he assured me, everyone would recognize our royal connection.  

            For several years, I revelled in the fantasy that I was descended from the House of Romanov.  Once I saw the film Anastasia, it became obvious who my grandmother truly was.  The grainy black and white photograph of the squat Slavic woman my father claimed was his mother was obviously part of the deception my aristocratic relations had been forced to perpetrate in order to remain safe.  Sadly years later, DNA analysis proved this to be false.

The Romanovs
Uncle Terry

            Like my protagonist’s Aunt Emma in Secrets in the Water, people in my British family had a habit of disappearing from my life—my Uncle Terry, my cousin Terry, and my great-aunt Marie.  I was a third of the way through the first draft of the book when I realized I’d unconsciously patterned the death of Emma on that of my uncle.  Only one month after the birth of his son, Terry fell asleep at the wheel, rolled his car down an embankment, and bled to death.  As you’d expect, his death devastated the family. 

            But even a seemingly straightforward car accident was problematic.  The family had always suspected Terry was a hemophiliac since he suffered uncontrollable nose bleeds whenever he became excited.  While it’s highly improbable he had this disease, the story was kept alive.  The family couldn’t accept that their only son, with his whole life ahead of him, could die such a senseless death.  As no one wanted to hold Terry responsible, the hemophilia myth allowed us to blame the disease for killing him, rather than his own carelessness. 

            In my book, with no evidence to the contrary and a suicide note, the coroner ruled that the responsibility for Emma’s death was hers alone, a judgement her family and friends have struggled to accept for fifty years.  Like Terry, Emma was about to start an exciting new phase of her life, having just been accepted into Cambridge University.  Part of what my protagonist Kate is up against as she searches for the truth of her aunt’s death is that over the years, the islanders have idealized Emma, choosing to ignore her weaknesses and failings.  But if Kate is to get to the truth, she must be open to every aspect of her aunt’s character, no matter how unpleasant.  When asked if she would like to know something about Emma, even if it wasn’t nice,  she replies, “It’s not the nice things that get you killed, is it?”            

So why do I write mysteries?  It’s because mystery has dominated my life.  Other authors write crime fiction because it allows them to set the world straight, to bring justice to victims, order to chaos.  But for me it’s the need to understand what happened and why.  It’s like finding the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle.  Only then is the picture complete.

Emma Galway’s suicide has haunted the Meredith Island for fifty years.

Back on the island to lay her grandmother to rest, Kate can’t avoid reflecting on the death of her aunt.  Learning that her late mother had believed Emma was murdered and had conducted her own investigation, she decides to track down her aunt’s killer. 

With the help of her neighbour, impetuous and hedonistic sculptor Siobhan Fitzgerald, Kate picks up where her mother had left off.  When the two women become the subject of threatening notes and violent incidents, it’s clear that one of their fellow islanders is warning them off. 

As they begin to look into Emma’s connection to the Sutherlands, a prominent Meredith Island family, another islander dies under suspicious circumstances, forcing Kate and Siobhan to confront the likelihood that Emma’s killer is still on the island.

Buy Links- https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Water-Alice-Fitzpatrick/dp/1988754607/

https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/secrets-in-the-water/9781988754604.html

Alice Fitzpatrick has contributed short stories to literary magazines and anthologies and has recently retired from teaching in order to devote herself to writing full-time.  She is a fearless champion of singing, cats, all things Welsh, and the Oxford comma.  Her summers spent with her Welsh family in Pembrokeshire inspired the creation of the Meredith Island Mysteries series.  Secrets in the Water is the first book in the series.  Alice lives in Toronto but dreams of a cottage on the Welsh coast. 

www.alicefitzpatrick.com/

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https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/10602521-alice-fitzpatrick

AI Cover Illustrations?

~ dzchurch ~ 5 Comments

Ever one to try something new, I leaped on the AI-generated illustration wagon. I chose an ethical provider, one who has asked permission from those owning the rights to their photographs and one who pays when those photos are used in a mashup (Note: I licensed all of the pictures used in this blog). As you may or may not know, depending on your relationship with your covers, finding the perfect illustration or photograph can take endless hours of wandering through providers and then sometimes settling or buying rights to multiple photos and cobbling them together to create the cover you envisioned if you can. Sometimes, close is as good as you get.

So why not try AI?

I’m not only a trier; I’m a plunger in that I just plunge in without a thought and see where it takes me. As a consequence, there are now an alarming number of AI-generated illustrations of tipped-over horses and three armed men on the service I used. The provider says that images created will be offered to others. Oh, my!

This is what I learned while plunging — mind your clauses:

  1. Don’t ask this: In 1870s a young woman dressed in men’s clothing galloping a horse with three men through a snowstorm at a distance. What I got was a woman in a skirt galloping a horse followed by three men in a snowstorm. (abandoned)
  2. Or this: Three armed cowboys on horseback side by side in a snowstorm. Some good illustrations, except for those with the three-armed cowboys, you know what I mean. Perhaps one should say armed with rifles or guns. (abandoned)
  3. Or this: A team of four horses hauling a freightwagon at a gallop in a blizzard. What I asked for in the world of AI is a galloping freight wagon hauled by a team of horses hauling four horses in a blizzard. (abandoned – see picture)
  4. Or this: A freight wagon with a broken wheel behind a team of four horses tipped over in an icy snowy stream. What I got, and rightly so, was tipped over horses under a freight wagon in an icy stream. Too gruesome to share. (abandoned)
  5. Close, but no cigar. Learning, I requested:  A 1870s brown-haired, clean-shaven man in a derby hat on a horse with a doctor’s bag in a snowstorm. A wonderful illustration came up. The man even had a distressed look on his face, which was perfect. I thought I had a live one until I realized the doctor’s bag was sitting unattached at the back of the horse.
  6. So, here is the evolution of prompts that led to two illustrations that met my needs. This isn’t to say there weren’t others that were good, just not right. Notice the order and precision of the description that resulted in my final choices (** indicates the two I kept for possible use).
    • An 1870s man reaching for black cowboy hat floating in nearly dry stream
    • An 1870s man in a white shirt reaching for black cowboy hat floating in nearly dry stream (picture 1 **).
    • An 1870s man in a white shirt reaching for black cowboy hat stuck in bushes on the banks of a stream
    • An 1870s man in a white shirt pulling a black cowboy hat from bushes on the banks of a stream (picture 2). Note weird dent in the crown of the hat.
    • A 1870s man in his twenties wearing a cowboy hat and a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up retrieving a Stetson caught in the brush along a slow flowing stream. Serious beefcake. Also, there is no hat on his head, and I’m not sure what he is retrieving. But he sure is pretty! (picture 3)
    • A 1870s man in his twenties wearing a white shirt with rolled up sleeves retrieving a Stetson by the brim caught in the brush along a slow flowing stream (picture 4 **).

Summary

In the final analysis, I was pleased with the results and glad I had chosen an ethical AI service for my plunge. As my character Cora Countryman (Unbecoming a Lady, A Confluence of Enemies, and the upcoming One Horse Too Many) would say, I do not truck with pirating the work of authors and illustrators without their knowledge or reward.

Find my books at https://dzchurch.com or on Amazon.

PERFECT IMPERFECTION

~ Kimila Kay ~ 12 Comments

On June 2nd my son Derrick would have turned 44. This year marks the 8th birthday I haven’t been able to celebrate with him. And, as you can imagine, this is a hard day for me. This year a few of my friends bought me a ticket to attend a Beattle’s cover band concert. It was a perfect distraction.

I remember being excited about my second child’s birth, dreaming about what it would be like to have a darling little girl to complete my family. My first born, Norman, was a fifteen month old inquisitive boy who loved motoring around our yard on his souped up tricycle.

When my second child was born, I asked the doctor, “Is she perfect?”

To which he replied, “He has ten fingers and toes.”

“He?” I tried to sit up so I could see. “Are you sure the baby’s not a girl?”

“Pretty sure since he’s peeing on me.”

And so, Brianna Denise became Derrick James, son number two. As a boy mom, I loved the idea that Norman and Derrick would be best friends growing up. When I noticed that Derrick wasn’t hitting the same age related benchmarks that Norman had, I consulted a pediatrician. Within a couple of months, Derrick had his first diagnosis of cerebral palsy. Over the course of the next few years, he would receive five other designations, finally being diagnosed with autism at the age of eight.

As Derrick’s first birthday approached I remember thinking: He was perfect until he was born.

Every year, this sentiment would haunt me right before Derrick’s birthday. Of course, other thoughts piggybacked on this main theme. What would “normal” Derrick have been like? Would he have been smart? Would he have chosen a car or a truck to drive? Would he have gotten married and had kids?

After Derrick died, I thought about my musings and realized that Derrick had been perfect all along. His sense of humor was spot on and always accompanied by a big belly laugh. He couldn’t drive, but his mind had a built in compass and he never hesitated to tell you if you made a wrong turn. And though Derrick couldn’t be a husband or father, he was an excellent Uncle.

Now that I spend my days writing the Stoneybrook Mystery Series, and developing Derrick’s alter ego, Deputy Derrick Stone, I’m once again caught up in delusions of perfection. When I write … anything … I have a deluded expectation that it will be perfect when my fingertips touch the keys and tap out my thoughts. That, unfortunately, is not the case!

I recently discovered that there are still errors in my first novel, “Peril in Paradise”. Seriously? After personally reading the manuscript ten times and listening to the novel five times? I also had four Beta Readers read the book, not to mention paying two editors … and there’s still errors?

My enlightenment came from my investment into Grammarly. The AI editing software had no trouble pointing out all the flaws in my masterpiece. At first, I was extremely annoyed by this revelation.

I shared my experience with one of my Beta readers and she was amazed. “There’s no way all of us combined didn’t catch errors in the book,” she said.

Spurred on by her doubt, and since I hadn’t actually made any of the changes suggested by Grammarly, I decided to take the AI’s recommended corrections one at a time. I discovered that “Alice” (my nickname for the artificial editor) didn’t always get what I was trying to say. Alice did, however, find a few minor things we missed. So, I went through the manuscript and made the necessary changes and corrected things that made sense to my creative brain.

Next, I used Alice while I re-listened to “Redneck Ranch”. I’m double-checking the book for errors or anomalies since I’m having it narrated for an audiobook. Once again Alice couldn’t wait to point out my mistakes. And this time … I found a few storyline problems that Alice wouldn’t catch.

I had another conversation with my Beta Reader friend, and she said, “I know how much of a perfectionist you are, but your stories are fabulous.” She flipped to a part of the book featuring Deputy Derrick Stone putting together clues that would eventually solve the crime. After reading a small snippet, she grinned at me and said, “If there were errors in this section, I didn’t see or hear them.” She hugged me. “For me, and I think all of your readers feel the same, the whole book is perfect.” She grinned. “Just like Derrick.”

When I take a breath and try to look at my work from a non-perfectionist point of view, I’m proud of the seven books I’ve written. My narrator, Dawn, called me a plotting genius and couldn’t stop gushing about how good “Peril in Paradise” is.

Nothing is ever completely perfect. I think when we love something, we massage the person, experience, book, painting, sunset … into perfection. But the true talent is seeing the perfection in the imperfection.

Happy “imperfect” writing, Ladies!!!