Tag: writing

The Writer’s Retreat

~ susanoleksiw ~ 2 Comments

Last evening I attended a small theater production on the grounds of what had once been a dairy farm and is now a location for modern dance and other events, owned by the late Ida Hahn, an “icon of the modern dance world.” The setting of Windhover, her Performing Arts Center that grew from a summer program for girls in the arts into a well-known center for modern dance and other mediums. After Ida Hahn’s death in 2016, her daughter, Lisa, has carried on the work.

I’m thinking about this now, despite many visits to Windhover over the years, because my companion and I both had the same thought. The scattering of small shingled buildings in a rocky pasture surrounded by woods and only a short walk from the ocean would be the perfect location for a writers’ retreat. The buildings are rustic, but their lights glow through the windows in the late summer evenings as artists and dancers wind down from the day. This is the time for creatives to get together to talk about their work and plans for the day.

The idea found a warm reception in both our minds, since we had both attended writers’ retreats in the past. My friend had experienced more than I have, but our feelings about them are the same. A good retreat lets the writer set aside the usual thoughts about managing life during the day and focus solely on work that too often gets shunted aside for more pressing, usually mundane matters.

In a short memoir about spending a week in a Provincetown dune shake, Thalassa (Haley’s, Athol MA, 2011), the author Allen Young describes his week in an isolated, rustic shack, his preparations and plans for coping and how he spent his days. I’ve long been intrigued by the dune shacks and the idea of spending a week in one, but the National Park Service recently announced that it was no longer going to allow this, and so memoirs like Young’s will be an historical record rather than a call to others for adventure. (The eight historic dune shacks are now being leased for a ten-year period, with the lessee responsible for all care and maintenance. I don’t know if subleasing is allowed; if it is, the dune shack experience may remain an option for others.)

Another writer invited to MacDowell went with his new, incomplete manuscript, eager to work and write what he assumed would be pages and pages every day. Instead, he found the hours alone with his WIP opening up doors he hadn’t expected, doors into rethinking his entire project and its direction. He shuffled pages, rewrote outlines, and although he would have felt this a poor use of his time at home he reported feeling he had come away with something fresh and new. I remember this story so well because he could have ignored the ideas and doubts taking form in the back of his mind and continued on with a perfectly acceptable story for an editor already interested in his work. 

We gain different things from a writer’s retreat. For some it’s the essential time to write. But for others it can be the opportunity to sit quietly with ourselves and listen to inchoate thoughts take form and gain clarity, leading us in a new more fruitful direction. And sometimes, it’s just the experience of being with like-minded people that can give us the energy we need to continue with a novel that is challenging. 

The season is ending in October for Windhover. The buildings lack central heat, so there’s no chance of gathering writers there this year. But I plan to write the director, Lisa, and invite her to consider adding this opportunity for writers to her schedule for the coming year or beyond. And I’ll continue to visit Windhover to enjoy other creative productions.

Let It Go by Karen Shughart

~ kshughart47 ~ 6 Comments

There’s a certain amount of pressure for all authors, regardless of how they’re published, that’s self-imposed. We set out to write a book and determine the time frame for finishing it, and therefore must adhere to some sort of schedule. And for those of us who are with traditional publishers, there’s the added pressure of submitting our book at an agreed upon deadline,

When I started writing my Edmund DeCleryk cozy mystery series, I wrote every day. I didn’t set a specific number of hours but instead spent time at the computer until I was either so exhausted that I literally couldn’t see straight or was happy with the advancement of the plot. In the past this has worked well for me, but this summer it didn’t.

Let me explain.  We live in a resort village that is a bustling hive of activity during summer months. Our beautiful scenery, gorgeous waterways, pristine beaches, and a multitude of activities centered around what we call Summerfest results in visits from family and friends, picnics, cookouts, concerts, festivals, outdoor movies, yoga classes, boating excursions and, on cool nights, time spent with friends drinking wine around a blazing fire pit watching the stars.

This year in particular, I was also happily bombarded with invitations to do book talks and signings, sometimes more than one a week. In addition, we took three short trips: to visit family; for a couple’s getaway; and when I participated as a panelist at a  mystery lovers’ conference in another state.

I must admit, at first I felt anxious about my inability to carve out time to continue writing my fourth novel, Murder at Chimney Bluffs, after making good headway last winter and spring.  Then I took a deep breath and thought. ‘It will be done, and isn’t a big part of life enjoying experiences that could help make my writing be even better? Let it go.’

And I did. When my publisher emailed me to get a sense of when she could expect my next book, I responded that I thought I could submit it to her a year from this coming November or maybe even December, but not before. She thanked me and said no problem. When I gave talks and attended signings, which I really do enjoy, I wasn’t the least bit anxious about not writing.

At the entrance to a town a little west of us there’s a huge sign that announces “Where Life is Worth Living”.   And that’s certainly true about this place we call home.  I finally conceded to the pressure to write and allowed myself to enjoy every minute of every day and relax about not keeping to a schedule. I’ll get it done, I know. There’s something to be said for letting go.

Karen Shughart is the author of the Edmund DeCleryk cozy mystery series published by Cozy Cat Press. She lives on the south shore of Lake Ontario in a village in New York state that’s the prototype for Lighthouse Cove, the s fictional setting for her books.

So Happy to Be Here

~ Margaret Lucke ~ 5 Comments

by Margaret Lucke

Hello, everyone! I’m thrilled and honored to be joining the ranks of the Ladies of Mystery. So let’s get acquainted. Allow me to introduce myself.

I fling words around as an author, editor, and teacher of writing classes in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve always been fascinated by the power of stories and the magic of creativity.

My beginning as a writer came when I was four years old. For my dad’s birthday I decided to give him a book of my own creation, entitled We Are Going to a Birthday Party. I wrote the story—well, dictated it to my mom—and drew the illustrations. I cut a cover out of oilcloth and Mom helped me bind my book with yarn. I could not have been more excited. My first book! Nothing beats the thrill of holding your first book in your hands.

Okay, it was a bit short on plot and the character development left something to be desired. But a story had emerged from my imagination and been captured in this set of pages. And the most important literary critic in the world, my dad, said it was wonderful. I was hooked. I decided I was going to spend my life writing stories.

As a child I imagined myself sitting at a desk by a window that looked out on flowers and trees. I would sip tea as wonderful tales flowed effortlessly onto the paper. I would send them off to a publisher who’d send me fat checks, and eager fans would grab my novels off the bookstore shelves. I‘d do research in glamorous places. Dad, a stockbroker, had a client who spent three months of the year in some exotic locale—the Caribbean, southern France, a castle in Scotland—and the other nine months writing a novel that used that place as a setting and figuring out where to go next. That sounded like exactly the life I wanted to have.

The reality hasn’t quite turned out that way. But I do have a desk in front of a window, and I drink gallons of tea. And while the stories don’t flow effortlessly and the fat checks remain elusive, I can’t imagine anything I could do that would reward me more.

Beginning a new story is an adventure, an exciting and slightly scary journey into unknown territory. Fortunately I’m accompanied by my sidekick, the Muse. That is, sometimes the Muse comes with me. All too often, she’s reluctant or rebellious, and despite my urging, she refuses to pack up her duffel bag and set forth on the path. Instead she gives me a raspberry (not the edible kind), rolls over, and goes back to sleep. And I’m left by myself, staring at the blank page. Some sidekick. More like a kick in the pants. But eventually, between us we get the work done.

I write tales of love, ghosts, and murder, sometimes all three in one book. I’ve published four novels and more than 60 short stories, feature articles, book reviews, and scripts for mystery weekends. I’m the editor of Fault Lines, an anthology of short crime fiction published by the Northern California chapter of Sisters in Crime. I teach fiction writing classes and write nonfiction books on the craft of writing. As a writing coach and developmental editor, I enjoy helping writers move forward toward their writing goals.

All in all, I think the four-year-old aspiring author is pleased with how things have turned out.

A summer of surprises

~ susanoleksiw ~ 4 Comments

In the summer I’m usually deep into editing an anthology, and this year is no different. I’ve been doing this for most summers since 1989, when a friend and I started The Larcom Review. This summer I’m working on the third anthology from Crime Spell Books, which I co-founded with Leslie Wheeler and Ang Pompano, and have continued with Leslie and Christine Bagley. Our third anthology is Wolfsbane, which comes after Bloodroot and Deadly Nightshade,. in the annual series of Best New England Crime Stories.

This wasn’t going to be my topic for today but I find myself thinking about the sixth Anita Ray mystery I’m working on somewhat desultorily. And this is a surprise because when I sit down to write my thousand words for the day, sometimes after having skipped a few days, the characters keep surprising me. The setting in a resort in South India is the same but nothing else is quite so.

One of my walk-ons got himself killed, though I don’t know why or exactly how; I just know he’s very dead, at the bottom of a cliff in the Kovalam resort. I’ll have to figure that one out. And the expected main character has morphed so many times that he may morph himself right out of the plot, even though that’s not my intent. Meanwhile the counter to Anita Ray has turned out to be more fatuous than anticipated but has thrown one of the best spanners into the plot. And I finally figured out why an elderly woman was able to leave India, without a husband to support her, and move to the States with her young son. None of this is in the synopsis I roughed out several weeks ago, and none of it tickled my brain while I was writing it. It seems to have been hidden in my fingers or the keyboard.

But the most amazing discovery is Anita Ray’s perspective on her own work as a photographer. She has been adopted as a mentor by a young man who is clearly gifted and comes to her for advice. She’s willing to help and enthusiastic about his work, recognizing his distinctive use of color, texture, pattern. He has some gaps in his technical knowledge, and limitations financially; he can’t afford to have every image printed out for examination and critiquing. But he obviously has a bright, perhaps significant future if he can hold on under difficult circumstances. His work and trust in her judgment set Anita thinking, and she enters a phase of an artist’s career that can be deadly or transformative. 

I have no idea what will happen to him. He could be a figure in the mystery itself, dropping clues or finding them, or another victim, or just someone who brings Anita to the fore in a different way, which would make him useful but little more than a background figure. I don’t know now and won’t know until I write again and pose the question.

All this began when I came across a post by Michele Dorsey challenging writers to write one thousand words a day without any plot outline or specific goals. A thousand words is far less than my usual daily goal when I’m working on a novel, so I thought I could fit that in easily while I was working on the anthology. And I did, for a while. Now I write three days in a row, for example, and two days doing something else. And there’s no reason for this except myself-discipling seems to be flagging.

Peter Dickinson, one of my favorite writers, was once asked if his characters took on a life of their own, a fairly standard question for a writer. He replied that there’s little room for surprises in his work once he starts writing because he develops an extremely detailed outline before he begins. I tried that once, and it didn’t work for me, so I admire anyone who can do that. Until that talent comes to me, I’ll continue discovering the world of my characters, and hope it all makes sense. It will be weeks before I know, so I’m learning patience—again.

ChatGPT and This Writer

~ susanoleksiw ~ 5 Comments

For the last several weeks much of my reading has been about AI and ChatGPT, learning as much as I can about this new technology. Thanks to a good friend from graduate school (back in the Dark Ages of landlines and library card files), I’ve learned a lot about AI and what it could mean in areas beyond writing, such as automotive, medicine, and hard science. But the only area I’m concerned with here is the AI directed toward producing word texts—articles, essays, stories, memos, ad copy, and the like. 

When ChatGPT appeared on the scene for the general audience, in 2022, most people were caught off guard and stunned at what it could do. Writers, understandably, and myself among them, were horrified that a machine would soon be producing texts. What would that mean for our futures? (The writers in California are striking over the same issue.) This anxiety has not declined; some even speculate that this new technology could soon make human efforts obsolete and even lead to our end. Like the dinosaurs. 

During a webinar held by the Authors Guild on Thursday, July 20, 2023, one of the participants made some important points about language, so that if nothing else, we understood what we were talking about. ChatGPT is one application of AI. It is called a large language model, borrowing some terminology from linguistics and the work of Noam Chomsky. But this is where it becomes misleading. ChatGPT requires large amounts of data—copies of the written word—in order to produce texts on demand. The designers of the application have scoured the Internet for documents to feed into their computer. Books are found on pirate sites that are often fending off take-down notices from writers (I’ve sent some of those notices). With these texts, the machine is trained to recognize acceptable sequences of words and when their use is most relevant to the question presented. Think “keywords” lined up.

The user of ChatGPT can type in a request, and the software will type out an answer. If you want an outline for a novel, type that request with some details to guide the machine such as setting, characters, and time period, and the machine will send back an outline in conformity with your guidance. The designers of ChatGPT describe the answer as being generated, as a generative text. But this isn’t accurate, as one of the webinar participants pointed out. The machine cannot generate. The machine cobbles together bits and pieces according to patterns, and spews out the result. The text is derivative; it is derived, taken from documents fed into the machine. As the participant went on to say, the result is plagiarism of someone’s work, and in fact of many works by many someones. 

Why does this matter?

We are writers. Accuracy matters. As George Orwell demonstrated only too clearly in 1984, words lead us and determine how we think (or don’t think), and so we as writers should always be accurate in how we present our ideas. 

The work that AI designers insist on describing as training is in fact copying, copying of a copyrighted text without permission, which is an infringement of that law and also known as plagiarism. The text derived and reproduced by the machine does not carry any acknowledgment of this fact.

The purpose of the Authors Guild webinar was to bring members up to date on their efforts to protect and maintain the rights of writers. They are lobbying for several goals: First, payments and damages for training/copying already done. Second, AI content clearly labeled as such (The White House meeting on AI this week includes a request for a watermark or something like it, to indicate an AI produced text). Third, disclosure by AI companies of what work has been used already. (A list of ISBNs used has been made available, but when I tried it there was no way to search it, though a tool is sometimes available.) Fourth, expanding the right of publicity law from name, image, etc., to include style (a writer’s or artist’s style). 

The Authors Guild is also talking with publishers about contract clauses that allow the writer to deny AI companies the right to copy the text or other contents of a publication for training or any other purpose without permission.

Some writers are already adding a clause to the standard copyright statement. “All rights reserved. No part of this book . . . ” To this, authors are adding “This work may not be used in AI training without written permission by the author,” or similar statements.

AI ChatGPT has many supporters as well as detractors, and I continue to learn about it. And no, I haven’t tried to use it for my work but a friend asked it for a summary of my first novel, Murder in Mellingham. The summary was atrocious, and included a character name I’ve never used. 

My firend also used ChatGPT to produce a letter requesting that OpenAI stop using my material in its training. I’ve sent the letter and am now waiting for a reply. I’ll post about it when I get one.