Choosing Character Names Can be Fun or Frustrating.

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 What's in a name?  Sometimes Character names are easy: sometimes not. Since I've had books set in Germany, South Florida, Burning Man Festival, and my current WIP is set in 1953 Kansas, I feel like an expert on names.

 What I do when I began a novel is create a Word table name chart.  First name, Last name, page  first mentioned, who this character is.  I can sort the table by first name or last name.  The trick is not to have character names that look or sound alike.  You don't want Wayne, Warren, and Warner. Or Mary, Maria and Marilyn.  Nope. Don't do it. If you have ethnic characters they should have appropriate names.  Rich people often have different kind of names than poor ones. Bob Jones vs. Robert Richmond Jones, III.  

 

 In Festival Madness, I had lots of fun making up Burning Man names (everyone needs one) and hacker names  One. of my main male characters was Wayne. His hacker name is the Locksmith.  He can break into any computer. Makes sense. My female POV character is Emma, who calls herself Dust Bunny at Burning Man.Indian characters are Reena and Raj.  I worked with a very techie guy named Wayne, and Reena and Raj's true story got into the book, too. But these people are all long ago and far away.  Must confess I stole of lot of people and places for that book.

 

In my German romantic suspense novel, World of Mirrors, I had Americans (good and bad) Germans, naturally, Russians, and even a Vietnamese man.  I called a glamorous woman Romy, after the actress Romy Schneider.  The name must fit the character.  I used the physical attributes of a couple of men where I worked. Name, description, character:  everything should fit together. 

 My recent challenge is my latest book, a mystery although it seems to be turning into a romance but that is a different story. In the novel, tentative title Lizzie Bender Ledoux, I had to find typical Mennonite names, French names, "regular" names, and even names for the pets.

When I begin to write, I start a Word Table to use as a character chart with a column for each topic below.

Since  it's a word table, it can be sorted by first name or last name.

   First Name  Last Name  Who  Page Introduced  Incidentals    

Research may be necessary.  For instance, to Google Mennonite last names. 

                  <Mennonite Names in Pennsylvania>. 

 Right away I hit pay dirt. 

 Something else you need to do is take a look at the most popular names from the period in which you are writing.  Pick a few way down the list, too.  Even animal names can be trendy.  I called the three pointer dogs in my book, "Spot," "Mike", and "Freckles."  The cat is "Callie."  

 These are things that work for me.  Check out the other writers on this blog roll to see what creative ideas they have. 

 

Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea

Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/

Anne Stenhouse http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com

Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com

Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/

Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog

Dr. Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-2i7

Marci Baun http://www.marcibaun.com/blog/

Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/

Fiona McGier http://www.fionamcgier.com/

 

Where Do My Ideas Come From? Here and There and Everywhere

What inspires a writer and gives her ideas?  Good questions for this month's bloggers.  I bet we'll get a slew of interesting answers. 

I can only tell you where my ideas comes from.  Shall we start from the beginning?  

 

Poetry was a genre that intrigued me when I first began writing,  A series of poems from the point of view of creatures who live in the Sonora desert were my first published poemss My parents lived in the Phoenix area, and we often visited the Sonora Desert. 

Here 's a poem from the point of view of the Diamond Back Rattlesnake.  For some reason, I liked writing from the viewpoint of many desert critters.

 

 The Diamond Back

 My view is of the low things: 

The leaf-cutting ant bearing a spear of green,

The faint imprint of fearful feet,

Red jasper in a dry stream.  

The Navajo weaves a harmony of diamond shapes,

But none so striking as my patterned back. 

Coiling on my rock I prize my symmetry.

The savage sun of summer drives me

To wary sleep under the mesquite. 

The gritty caliche earth against my belly

Is the feel of here. 

The sharp aroma of the creosote bush,

The scent of sun on yucca blossoms

Is the smell of here. 

I wait for the taste of here: 

The timid skittering mouse,

The nervous cottontail,

The old lizard dragging her tail.

Respect is mine. 

The shying panicked horse bucks and screams.

I observe the one in leather boots

Hiking carefully with his stick. 

The humble horned toad,

The bold scorpion avoid me. 

I get respect. 

Sleek, I slither down the gulch

In a rush of silence. 

Above the hum of bees and insects,

A snaky sound,

The gourd rhythm of my rattles disturbs the air.

 

 

 I wrote about the Charles River in Boston - My job was an easy walk from  the rivet, and when our offices were suddenly moved to the Boonies, I wrote about saying goodbye to the Charles.

   

 There's a small herd of HIghland Scottish cattle down the street from us, and one summer I wrote a poem about the calves.  

 

Calves Together

  That summer, we were calves together in the tall grass.

You came first to brown Mary Anne.

Golden Iris is my mother.

They dropped us in the tall grass.

 We grew together, gamboled together,

Licked each other, slept together,

Lay flank to flank in the tall grass.

The milk we suckled tasted of summer and green apples.

 In the heat of the day we found shade

The rain kept the flies at bay.

We frolicked in the pasture, bleating and kicking our heels,

Calves without a care.

 Glad animal spirits, nursing and nibbling the tall grass.

Drinking from the creek.

Seeking the green shade.

Calves together.

 

 

Now we segue to the novels:  What inspired them?  Mostly places:   

The Shadow Warriors: Singapore, Goettingen, Germany,

 World of Mirrors:  the Baltic Island of Ruegen, 

Festival Madness: The Burning Man Festival: and high-tech Boston

Chased By Death:  Southern Florida, Massachusetts, driving cross county,  the Nevada Desert  

Murder in the North Woods: many trips to the North Woods in Wisconsin

A sense of place always informs my work, whether it is the pasture down the road or the exoticism of Singapore. Places inspire me.   Characters come to inhabit the places, and then the characters do stuff that gets them in trouble in that place.  We're off to the races.

 

 

 

Let's see what my fellow bloggers have been up to  this week.  What inspires us may inspire you. 

Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea

Anne Stenhouse http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com

Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/

Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/

Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/

Dr. Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-2eA

Fiona McGier http://www.fionamcgier.com/

Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog

Marci Baun http://www.marcibaun.com/blog/

Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com

Judith Copek http://lynx-sis.blogspot.com/

Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobincourtright.com

 

 

 

Humor in Writing: Do we use it? Do we steal it?

Rhobin's April question really made me think.  Are my novels funny, or do they at least have humor?  Have I incorporated true-life humorous events into my books or people I know?

Let's start with my debut novel, The Shadow Warriors.  I used some of my life in the novel: the trip to Singapore, and the university town of Goettingen Germany.  Was anything funny?  Perhaps.  The main character (Emma's)  walk through the dung heap, her cleaning up in a fountain and then squishing through town, joining a demo and subsequently getting on the wrong train.  The character of Peter Weber (based on someone in my writing group) always had a (funny) quip.  I would say the humor was throughout the novel and fairly subtle, not laugh out loud.

World of Mirrors, a suspense novel, also had even more subtle humor and the character of Chuck was funny although he didn't mean to be.  He was a sailor (among other things) and a sailboat was an important part of the plot.  I gave a friend's humor and bossiness on his boat to Chuck.  His ex-wife even recognized it.  Ooops!  Again there is lots of subtle humor--nothing laugh out loud, but it's there, often by showing the good and the bad in former East Germany. 

Festival Madness, set at the Burning Man Festival and  in Boston's high tech world, has a lot of humor.  The hacker camp at "the Man" is loaded with funny characters,  all original.  Hackers have a zany sense of humor. The trans-gender character, Daze, had  lovely self-mocking  humor.  I found her at the Norfolk County Jail in protective custody. One of our writers' organization used to tour the jail occasionally. You never know when you'll find a good character, humorous or otherwise.

My latest work, Chased By Death, is a tense story without overt  humor. Not much is funny if you're running for your life from bad guys.

However, my upcoming novel, Murder In the Northwoods (publication delayed by the coronavirus) is loaded with humor.  Because  people are funny in the North Woods.  One of my sons went from  camper to counselor in training and eventually to manage the kitchen  in a camp.  He inspired the entire book (not the murder) with funny stories from the North Woods.  I used a woman priest I knew well in knew in the Northwoods .  She was funny, too.     

In sum, I use many real life locales in all of my books.  A sense of place is always important to me.  The humor falls where it falls, perhaps inspired by an event, or just concocted to fit the scene or a character.  It is inherent in the scene or the character.  You can't really force humor. A pompous character or one too full or him or herself can always be funny.  It's good to laugh.

These writers will give you their own take on humor in their novels:

Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
Dr. Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-1Tb
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Anne Stenhouse  http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com/
Margaret Fieland http://margaretfieland.wordpress.com
A.J. Maguire  http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com
Judith Copek http://lynx-sis.blogspot.com/
Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright.com

                                                                      

The Writing Group Rules

 The blogger's topic for October is this:
 What unique situations have occurred in the writingprocess of any of your novels? Perhaps, but not limited to,things like where what you planned changed, or the direction you thought
the story was on deviated or transmuted?

I have a couple of tales of when my writing group objected to something I wrote and I changed my story because they said, "You can't do that! 

The first instance of this was in World of MIrrors (set in then East Germany) where a couple wanted to snoop around someone's house.  The owner wasn't home, but his watch dog (a dog who formerly patrolled the Death Zone around East Germany) was.  The dog pinned the couple down  in the driveway.  Didn't bite; didn't bark, but growled and threatened. The couple's so-called friend, arrived,  saw their dilemma, and  hauled off and shot the dog.
In the first iteration of the story, the dog died, and the friend told them to dump the dog in the harbor.
My writing group said: "You can't do that!  You can't kill a dog!"
"But he's a mean dog".
Didn't matter.  So, I changed the story.  The dog was still shot and  wrapped up in a tarp weighted down the rocks.  In the new version of the story, the dog whined when the tarp was opened, and the couple realized he was only wounded.  They had qualms. This presented a problem, because trying to explain to anyone about the dog would give them away.  It was the middle of the night and they were parked  on a sort of bridge by the harbor.  A car stopped and asked if they needed help.  They asked for the name of a vet.  The driver passed on that information and they took the dog to the vet and rang the bell, leaving a wad of West Marks and the dog.  Ran like hell.  This led to some interesting further complications in the story.

2nd Verse.  Another novel, this one Chased By Death, just published this month.  Another dire   situation.  In the desert, the heroine, trying to protect two kids, faces a man with a knife. He is a very bad man who has killed many people and he has held her hostage for an entire day. He doesn't know she has a gun. In the first version, he threatens her  and she shoots into the air because a helicopter is (maybe) about to land. The bad guy turns and  runs  toward the woman.  
My writing group said, "No, she has to shoot him.  He' could take them all hostage." So she shoots him. Stone cold dead. Helicoptet lands.  Yada Yada.  More satisfying because heroine has saved herself and the kids. Always better if the main character saves herself.  In this day and age.

Suspense and a woman in jeopardy.

My writing group would not let me kill a fierce dog, but had no qualms about my killing the evil man with the knife.  Crazy happenings on the writing front.  Both times, they were right.

The authors below no doubt have interesting tales.  Read on.
 
 A.J. Maguire  http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Margaret Fieland http://margaretfieland.wordpress.com
Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog
Dr. Bob Rich  https://wp.me/p3Xihq-1JS
Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/
Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobincourtright.com

Season of Our Discontent or Maybe our Content

Does the season ever play a part in your setting? How do you think seasons affect setting & plot either physically or metaphorically?

Ah, yes, seasons.  In my writing it is always summer, my favorite season.  Only my first book was set in the fall and it had many issues and is stuck forever in the hard drive of my computer.

I never meant to write The Shadow Warriors, World of Mirrors, Festival Madness, The Meth House, and (scheduled for publication) Chased by Death and Murder in the North Woods to be set in summer.  An as yet unpublished novel (not a mystery) is set in 1928 Southern California.  In summer, of course. My WIP (work in process) is set in two periods in South Central Kansas.  Both periods take place during the wheat harvest, which is __summer.

How did all these summer books transpire? I have loved summer since I was a little kid.  No walking to school during snowstorms in summer.  No snowstorms in summer!  This winter we were both snowed in and iced in.  New England winters are awful.  Did I ever like winter sports?  No.  Swimming and tennis are summer sports.  Kick the can on a hot summer evening.  Riding bikes to the Platte River.  Swimming in the sand pit (a no-no).  Always summertime activities.

So how does summer as a season function in my books?  Let's take World of Mirrors, set in East Germany the year after the wall came down.  In the Baltic, where the novel takes place, the sun doesn't set until late.  The sailboats ply the waters off the island.  Tourists and locals crowd the nude beaches.  The little train takes visitors around the island.  My characters are posing as tourists, so they do touristy things.  Summer helps create their disguise.

The isle of Ruegen is peaceful in any season.  But the bad guys are there in summer.

Festival Madness is set at Burning Man which takes place the week before Labor Day.  Summer!  That was a no brainer.  The hot desert functions as a backdrop for a bad guy intent on mayhem. Half-naked people.  People in costumes.  Craziness.  Who can you trust?  In winter the Black Rock Desert is deserted. That wouldn't be any fun. The festival is a phantasmogoric scene of heat, dust, techno, costumes, art, craziness.  A perfect place for a novel.  A summer novel.

When the man burns, the summer sky is lit with flames and fireworks.

 My most recent publication is a novelette, The Meth House. What inspired the story was a news item about homeless people living off the grid in a national forest in Colorado.  Someone accidentally set a fire that burned a forest.  I didn't write about the fire, rather I wrote about an older woman who delivered food to the homeless from her church.  Naturally nobody would be living in a forest in the mountains in the winter.  Well, maybe rangers.   She is delivering food and other items and runs across an old cabin that someone says used to be a meth house.  She finds a child in the cabin and then the fun begins.  Estes Park, a summer resort figures in the story as does a trip to the hot plains of Northeastern Colorado where a meth house blows up and many further adventures insue.  In the good old summertime.

We associate memories and activities with all four seasons.  Summer is warm (maybe hot) with beaches, swimming, cookouts, rafting, mountain cabins, harvests, travel, picnics, long days and fun. But it's not all fun.  Bad stuff happens in any season.  In my books, bad stuff happens in summer.

Here are some good writers who will have a different take on the seasons and their writing.

   Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
  Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com
  Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/
   Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
  Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
  Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog
  Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobincourtright.com

HOW I STARTED TO WRITE AND KEPT WRITING

Writer's Desk After BIg-time Cleanup

I have always been a writer, beginning in fifth grade with a western novel:  Sun Up At Sundown, or was it Sundown at Sun Up?  I can never remember.
In high school and college I wrote for the school newspapers.  In college I also wrote a lot of creative papers and took a writing course.  The professor had published a somewhat scandalous novel, The Blind Bull, which made the course even more interesting.  He used to say, "I can teach you to write not badly, but not well."  Think about that for a while.
I enjoyed the course, but never wrote much afterward. Marriage, children, and volunteer work pushed writing into the future.  The next writing I did, well, it was writing computer programs for big IBM mainframes.  Remember them?

Flash back to over twenty years ago. I became, from time to time, disillusioned with high tech.  Programming for business could be a real hassle.  One evening I came home and ranted  to myself, "Why am I writing computer programs?  I should be writing novels. I like to read mysteries.  Writing a mystery should be easy, that's what I'll do.

Dumb and dumber, but that's what I did.  On a kludgy word processor.  Predating Word Perfect. 

My novel's title was The Password Is Death. I was stumbling around like a blind dog in a meat house. No idea what I was doing.  Did not understand motivation to say nothing of plotting.  The weird thing was, this all happened so long ago that agents responded to queries in writing.  Sometimes with advice.  I realized that the book had major flaws.  In an attempt to learn what I should be doing, I enrolled in a Writing Your Novel course at Harvard Extension.  Some excellent writers were in that course. I was inspired. Right after the course was over my husband had a business meeting in Singapore, and I went along for the ride which was, by the way, 22 hours long.
 The Password was Death, had some characters I wanted to hang around with because I liked them. On the return flight from Singapore, I read a tiny blurb in the airline magazine.  "The Fifth Annual Computer Security Conference will be held in May at Raffles Center in Singapore." Lights flashed.  Bells rang. Ye Gods, my characters could go to that meeting in Singapore! In my new novel.

In Singapore where The Shadow Warriors begins

 Yes, I found the  germ of my plot in the Singapore Airlines magazine.  Not that I knew the ending or what would happen but I did have people and settings and some ideas of action.  I used Goettingen, Germany, my husband's former hometown for the scenes in the  rest of the book. But everything began in Singapore.  I returned to Goettingen for on-site research.  Pub crawls, restaurants, library research, walking around the town and then walking some more. Ideas came like kamikazes. I think that was when I became a real writer.  I had been to Goettingen many times, but not with a writer's gaze. Research was fun and did it ever bring forth ideas. And I found other parts of the plot at my workplace in some technical journals with far out technology.  Ideas are everywhere.

This book became The Shadow Warriors.  I had no idea that this was also a computer game, and it was really dumb not to Google it.  Well, this was before Google, but not before Amazon. Always Google your book title, and check for books with identical names on Amazon. 

The Shadow Warriors went through many iterations and I found a writing group that helped enormously.I discovered writer's. conventions, writer's camps, other writers.

Then came my publishing fisasco.  Remember, this was before technology as we know it existed.  I found an internet publisher who was creating e-books and planning on doing POD, in its infancy then.  Suddenly, the company announced they weren't doing POD.  There was a palace revolt and 80% of the writers bolted for a newly formed company.  I waited too long.  Publisher went belly up.  Out in the cold with my nose pressed against the window.  Traditional publishers wanted nothing to do with a book with my kind of high tech plot.  Plus, it was  long.  Not long-long, but long. 120,000 words.  Too long.

I found out which POD printing company would have been used to publish the books in the now belly-up company.  They published mine. They published anyone. Then Amazon bought the company and all it's books and enabled The Shadow Warriors to make a second debut as an e-book.

Of course I got NO RESPECT back in those days for self-publishing.  You could almost hear people whispering behind your back.  Nonetheless, I made a little money and did some speaking gigs and began a second novel with the same characters.  Again too, long. I rewrote it with different characters, got rid of the backstory and went from 120,000 words for 86,000. A small e-book publisher picked it up and they also did POD and published it in all formats. World of Mirrors, suspense, not mystery, made  a little money. More speaking gigs. Now retired, I assumed I could write faster.  Did not happen. Still bumbling along.

I wrote another book I had to rewrite  and shorten. Is this sounding familiar? I'm trying to find a publisher for it now. I wrote my Burning Man book, Festival Madness, which  had to be approved by Burning Man organization. That's another story. After trying for twenty years, I got an agent, but she did not sell my next two books. We parted company amicably.  I'm in the middle of another novel with three unsold books, but I am working on this. In the meantime, I sold several short stories, some poems, and a memoir piece.

A novel of high tech and Burning Man

I hate doing PR. Remember, I was a dweeb.  But I like to write, to talk about writing, and, like most writers,  I love to read. Writing is a great occupation, but you will not likely support yourself as a writer. That's okay.  I love my friends in the writing community.  Looking around my ungodly messy office with piles of books and papers everywhere, and the cat asleep in the rocking chair, I know that I am happy.  And that counts for a lot. I started writing and never stopped. 

The writers below will tell you their own stories.  Everyone has a story.  Read on. 
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Dr. Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-1ke
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
A.J. Maguire  http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Fiona McGier http://www.fionamcgier.com/
Margaret Fieland http://margaretfieland.wordpress.com
Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright.com

Real characters: you love them and want to protect them, but you can't keep them safe!

Are you ever emotionally drained by writing certain scenes, and how real are your characters to you?           

Wow!  As usual we have a topic with a lot of meat on it.  

When I first began to write I heard crazy stories about a character “taking over a novel.”  Preposterous?  Maybe not.  My initial experience with this was in my first (unpublished) novel my character didn’t do what I wanted her to do; she did something else.  How is this even possible?  I’m the one sitting here keying away.

The thing is, I’m in the character’s head, not my head, and she’s doing this crazy stuff.  Can’t I stop her?  Not really.  Not if the crazy stuff is right for that character. 

How real are my characters?  Very real to me.  I get to know them from writing, that is, they don’t spring full blown into the head. But I did have novel where a character just perched on my should and started to tell me her story.  About a quarter of the way through the book, she (more or less) said, “Okay, that’s it.  Now you figure out the rest.”  Hey, wait a minute!  I had to figure out the rest.  That was dirty pool.

The thing is, we love our characters, even the bad ones, and we don’t want terrible things to happen to them. We want to keep them safe. This is not possible and not good for the story.  Stuff has to happen, frequently bad stuff.  Which gets us to being emotionally drained by writing certain scenes.

It can be hard.

In World of Mirrors, the main male character is T.K. Drummond. He is an interesting guy, mostly a decent fellow, but at one point he became a colleague and even a friend of a sadist.  Now the sadist wants T.K. to ditch his girlfriend (my main female character) and throw her to the wolves, figuratively.  T.K. is reluctant to do this. The sadist drives them to an isolated spot and starts beating the hell out of him. 

T.K. tossed the keys at Putnam, who caught them in his right hand. Putnam’s left hand still touched my neck, making me crazy with fear.

T.K. opened the car door, then he took off his glasses and handed them to me, but he looked at Putnam. "Leave her alone."

Putnam took his hand away and opened the door on his side.

I just didn't understand what was happening. "What's going on? Where are you guys going?"

T.K.’s answer was full of careless bravado. "Oh, Billy Boy is going to administer his brand of tough love."

"Can't we be civilized?" I asked as they got out of the car. "Bill, please, can't we talk? Let's talk it over. O.K.?"

The car doors slammed shut.

"No! Wait! Please!"

They disappeared into the blackness, Putnam behind T.K. Then I could only see the white pillars rising out of the greenery, and in the foreground, the gray statue of the woman pulling her dress over her head. Some insects were buzzing in the thick silent night. Then I heard the smacking sound of a fist battering flesh followed by a muffled groan.

This was hard to write, because, hey,T.K. was my guy and I didn’t like this one bit.  Seeing his bloody and bruised head was actually traumatic.  Fortunately, the girlfriend sneaked up and bashed the sadist on the head with a rock.  He didn’t die, but lived to cause trouble another day.  I was kind of sad when he did die (doing more bad stuff).    

Another scene that was hard to write is when the bad character (a woman) tried to drown my main character.  This went on for a few pages, and I felt that I was on that raft being conked on the head with a paddle during a ride through dangerous rapids.     

Up ahead the river looked quieter. I tried to shift my weight, preparing to flip over the side into the water. In the soft bottom of the raft, it took longer than I had estimated to get onto my knees.

Phyllis screamed, “Shit!” Instinct took over and I ducked. Her paddle missed my head and slapped me hard across the back, knocking the wind out of me and sending me sprawling across the bow of the raft.

“You bitch!”

 Prostrate, I clutched the lifeline rope. I felt us spinning out of control through the churning river. Phyllis grunted and swore as the raft failed to do her bidding. We were drenched by the cold spray and catapulted against a rock and held there by the river which defied its own force.

Phyllis slapped at me with her paddle again, catching the back of my head. I felt a sickening sharp pain. Saw a rainbow of colors. I clutched the lifeline in a death grip.  Cursing and grunting, she fought the water.  

When I glanced back at her, she had raised the paddle again. The river caught us in the force of its turbulence, agitating the raft in the chaotic waters. I didn’t see how I could survive much longer. 

  Another emotionally draining scene.  We love our characters but we have to set them free to get into trouble. To us they are real. Pretty weird, huh?

Here are some  excellent bloggers who are discussing this topic,  Take a look!  
Victoria Chatham http://victoriachatham.blogspot.ca
Marci Baun  http://www.marcibaun.com/blog/
Margaret Fieland http://margaretfieland.wordpress.com
A.J. Maguire  http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Rachael Kosinski http://rachaelkosinski.weebly.com/
Dr. Bob Rich htt  http://wp.me/p3Xihq-Wo 
Heather Haven http://heatherhavenstories.com/blog/
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
Kay Sisk http://www.kaysisk.com/blog
Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/
Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Rhobin Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright.com

Stormy Weather

 

My novels are all set in summertime, my favorite season. In Promiscuous Mode, (a computer term) my work in process, the protagonist, Laura, is consumed by problems and conflicts. Weather symbolizes her issues. Just after she finds out the man who hired her is dead, she encounters his funeral procession in the rain. More rain pours down when a lowlife character is snooping on her life. Another incident is a thunderstorm on a lake when Laura is fishing with a friend and his daughter. They find an old boathouse to shelter in and of course something happens. More conflict, more problems. During another storm, someone snoops around the house where Laura has gone to keep a frightened young woman company. My husband says the North Woods have never had such a rainy summer.

In Festival Madness, the heat and dust at the Burning Man Festival echo the problems for main character Emma. A pea soup early morning fog in the Adirondacks delays the characters from their floatplane trip. Weather worms its way into everything. 

I use fog in World of Mirrors, as well. A thick blanket of it fog hovers over the Baltic, and my characters must cross the shipping lanes in a tiny sailboat with no wind and a noisy motor. Bad guys are searching for them. Nothing good happens. I almost scared myself writing those scenes. 

My only novel with a winter scene is The Shadow Warriors. The protagonist passes information on a park bench in the Boston Public Garden on a frigid day. No swan boats, no flowers, just danger and drama. That’s good isn’t it? 

Characters freezing, sweating, wet, bedraggled, suffering.  That’s what we like in fiction. And the story can turn. Remember the thousands of daffodils that became the first sign of spring in Dr. Zhivago? What a welcome sight after a Russian winter.  

Make weather an antagonist in your fiction, and you have build-in drama and conflict. Man against nature. Hasn’t it always been that way?  

See what these bloggers have to say about weather and fiction. 

Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Rachael Kosinski http://rachaelkosinski.weebly.com/
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
Connie Vines http://connievines.blogspot.com/
Anne Stenhouse  http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com/
Helena Fairfax  http://helenafairfax.com/
Dr. Bob Rich http://wp.me/p3Xihq-EP
Victoria Chatham http://victoriachatham.blogspot.ca
Kay Sisk http://kaysisk.blogspot.com
Rhobin Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright.com