Here’s what’s so awesome: One of my nonfiction pieces has been nominated for the Dead Mule Best of the Net 2011 awards!

I LOVE the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and am deeply honored – especially after reading    [Continue reading]]]> I’ve just come back from Boston, so I can say/write wicked awesome when I mean totally, completely-and-in-a-good-way awesome.

Here’s what’s so awesome: One of my nonfiction pieces has been nominated for the Dead Mule Best of the Net 2011 awards!

I LOVE the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and am deeply honored – especially after reading the other works that have been nominated. Good stuff – wicked good stuff.

You can check out Alton the tree guy’s story here: Make It About The Money.

Natasha Drew = Natasha Alexander. I had a change of heart over my pen name earlier this year. But it’s still me!

The tourists are gone; the locals and eccentrics are out in force once again.

Phew. I’d begun to think the world was made up solely of People From Away slathered with sunblock and lugging beach chairs, cabanas, umbrellas, coolers, boogie boards, corn hole games, plastic shovels, radios, cheese curls, small children and high expectations to    [Continue reading]]]> I’m back.

The tourists are gone; the locals and eccentrics are out in force once again.

Phew. I’d begun to think the world was made up solely of People From Away slathered with sunblock and lugging beach chairs, cabanas, umbrellas, coolers, boogie boards, corn hole games, plastic shovels, radios, cheese curls, small children and high expectations to the beach, too intent on having a fun vacation to talk with anyone around them.

So it was a relief to meet Diane on the beach a couple of days ago. Diane’s from around here, but she’s lived in a lot of different places in her sixty-one years. We were talking about the McMansions built right smack on the shoreline that bite the dust – or sand – during a hurricane when she launched into this story.

Diane talked a lot, and I tried to capture the essence of what she said while leaving out extraneous details. I did make a couple of edits, especially after The Man said, “She didn’t say ‘condom,’ she said ‘rubber’ and when you said ‘What?’ I thought to myself, ‘Oh, God, do we have to spell it out for you?’”

Hmmph.

Anyway, here’s Diane’s story:

“You are not your stuff – I was lucky enough to learn that more than 20 years ago. I was a single mom, my kids were grown and so I sold my house, sold everything I couldn’t fit in my car. I packed it to the gills and headed for Los Angeles.

“Somewhere in New Mexico, I was driving along and listening to music, loud, singing along with the radio and not really paying any attention to the noises the car was making. Then the car started shaking and smoke started coming out of the engine. I pulled off the road just as the car died.

“It was a Friday afternoon – it’s always a Friday afternoon when these things happen – and there I was, alone by the side of the road with a dead car in the middle of nowhere New Mexico. And I had to be in Los Angeles to start my new job first thing Monday morning.

“Eventually some guys stopped and offered to drive me to the closest town. I looked at my car – every damn thing I owned in this world was in it. My mom’s jewelry, my diamonds, everything. I couldn’t even remember where in the car I’d hidden that stuff and didn’t have time to look for it anyway.

“I looked at my car and thought, it’s okay. It’s just stuff. So I got into this pick-up truck with a couple of strangers and left everything I owned by the side of the road in nowhere New Mexico. They dropped me off at a service station and I walked in and the place was full of – men.”

She said ‘men’ in a way that made me know Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp were not among those present.

“I gave them the keys to everything I owned in my life. Then I got a ride to Albuquerque and managed to get a flight to L.A. in time for my first day of work.

“A week later, I flew back to Albuquerque so I could pick up the car. I’d arranged to get a ride back to the service station with this guy – I had this weird feeling about getting in his car with him but I did…

“I can’t believe I’m telling you this stuff – once we got on the road I looked down and saw there was a rubber on the floor of the front seat. He’d just gone on about how he’d cleaned up the car special for me. And I’m thinking, you cleaned up the car and left that thing there? I had no idea what would happen next and I was really uncomfortable when he pulled off at a rest stop. I didn’t know if I should jump out or what.

“‘Do you want something to drink? Eat?’ he asked me when he stopped the car.

“‘I just want to pick up my car – that’s it!’ I practically screamed it at him. I insisted that was all I wanted to do and he pulled back onto the road.

“He never touched me, never tried anything beyond stopping. I guess he thought it was worth a try though. Still, I was mighty glad when I could get out of his car back at the service station.

“And there was my car, all fixed up and ready to go. As far as I could tell, all my stuff was there, too, right where I’d packed it.

“Later I called my brother and told him my tale. He said to me, ‘Didn’t you get the car serviced right before you left?’

“I hadn’t thought of that, but he was right – I’d gotten it checked, gotten an oil change a week before I’d left for L.A. And then there wasn’t any oil in the engine – that’s why it died.

“So I called Toyota, told them what happened, told them I had all my receipts. And they ended up paying for the whole thing – the car repair, the plane ticket – all of it.

“But I got a whole lot more out of it. When I first drove away from my car and watched everything I owned grow smaller and smaller in the distance, I realized it was okay, that I didn’t really need any of that stuff, that I could get by with practically nothing. I still can.

“You are not your stuff.

“And knowing that is worth way more than all of it – my jewelry, my clothes, all my things – put together.”

I    [Continue reading]]]> Hi folks. I’d love some of your thoughts here. I’m interested in learning how clearly other writers see their characters when they’re writing them. Do you have strong visual pictures of them before or while writing? Some writers hang pictures of people they think their characters might look like near their writing desks, for example.

I didn’t do that for Just Desserts: Greed. Lust. Death. Tiramisu. I knew my characters pretty well when telling their stories, but I didn’t spend too much time describing them physically for readers – or for myself. I knew their general ages and the kinds of physical activity they might realistically pursue. Other than that, what the characters looked like on the outside was less important to me than what was going on inside their heads.

Shirley was an exception because much of the story depended on her, uh, physical assets. And I described Lizzie’s looks primarily to highlight how she downplayed them in contrast to Shirley (although I don’t think I developed that as well as I could have – mebbee in The Sequel).

When I was doing the final edits, I read a blog post that asked writers to name the actors they would want to play their main characters in the movie version of their latest book.

That got me thinking. I don’t watch television and I haven’t been a big movie goer lately, so my coterie of known actor candidates is fairly limited. I found out what Justin Bieber looked like just last week. (If that’s not reason enough to cancel cable, I don’t know what is.)

Still…

How could John Cusack NOT play Vince? Yes, definitely – John’s the man. The vision of a bemused John Cusack putting on the chicken suit makes me smile.

As soon as I saw John Cusack as Vince, though, my thinking shifted. Not in Just Desserts itself, but in the sequel-in-progress. Seeing Vince as John, John as Vince, opened up different, possibly conflicting, directions for the story and for Vince as an authentic character. What Would John Do? versus What Would Vince Do?

I’m not sure that’s a good thing, at least for me. I think I want Vince to be good ole’ Vince, not Vince wearing a John Cusack mask. So, difficult as it may be, I’m sending John back to Hollywood and recreating my old, fuzzy image of Vince.

How about you?

As a writer, do you have a clear-cut visual image of your characters as you’re writing? If you have a visual image, is it a real person or someone you see only in your mind’s eye? Do you know what your characters are wearing, how long their hair is, their BMI? If so, do you describe these features for your readers? How? Why? Does genre or time frame of the story influence you on this?

As a reader, do you enjoy reading detailed descriptions of what characters look like, how they’re dressed? Do you set up your own visual images of characters when the author doesn’t provide them? Do you get annoyed when an author doesn’t describe what his or her main characters look like?

I’d love to know what you think. Enquiring minds [still] want to know…
~~
Photo Credit: Free images from acobox.com

Hint Fiction (props to Merrilee Faber for the heads-up on    [Continue reading]]]> I obviously haven’t been in blog-land much lately. I’ve been editing my WIP and frankly, if I follow much more of the (good) writing advice/models I’ve been reading lately, there won’t be much of the damn thing left for anyone else to read.

Hint Fiction (props to Merrilee Faber for the heads-up on this book, featuring one of her stories) arrived in the same Amazon shipment as Elizabeth George’s book on writing, which I promptly discarded in favor of this little gem. The book design and layout rock along with the content.

According to editor Robert Swartwood, hint fiction is built on the idea that “the very best storytelling was the kind where the writer and reader meet halfway, the writer only painting fifty percent of the picture and forcing the reader to fill in the rest. That way, the reader truly becomes engaged in the process.”

Each of the 125 Hint Fiction stories has, at most, 25 words. A lot of the stories are dark, and the best ones are very dark. I don’t know if that’s an artifact of the form itself or of the editor’s taste. But each one tells a full story and draws the reader in, sometimes farther than I wanted to go. There’s way more emotional depth than I thought possible with so few words.

Hint Fiction is a must-read if you want to see how some writers make every word count. Phew.

So I hit my manuscript with a red pen and started deleting those excess words.

Then, I read Every Word Matters on David Kazzie’s blog, The Corner. Basically he reminds you that every word matters, only he uses a couple more words than that and an example from the movie version of No Country for Old Men. David is the mastermind behind the So You Want to Write a Novel/So You Want to Go to Law School videos and he’s a pretty funny writer.

So I hit my manuscript again with a red pen and started deleting some more of those words that don’t matter.

And then I discovered Austin Kleon, author of Newspaper Blackout. He writes poems by starting with a newspaper and blacking out the words he doesn’t need with magic marker.

His blog post How to Steal Like an Artist (and 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me) is awesomely brilliant, so you should read it. I can’t pick a favorite part, so I’ll just go with the tenth thing that nobody told him:

10. Creativity is subtraction.

It’s often what an artist chooses to leave out that makes the art interesting. What isn’t shown vs. what is… Creativity isn’t just the things we chose to put in, it’s also the things we chose to leave out.

So I’m hitting my manuscript again, maybe with a black marker this time.

If there’s anything left.

Oh, good. The weather is getting warm, the sand is covered with bare foot prints, and folks have climbed out from under their winter rocks and are talking to each other again. That means I ought to have up-to-the-minute Character Reports from the Front Lines before too long. It’s almost time to    [Continue reading]]]>

Oh, good. The weather is getting warm, the sand is covered with bare foot prints, and folks have climbed out from under their winter rocks and are talking to each other again. That means I ought to have up-to-the-minute Character Reports from the Front Lines before too long. It’s almost time to head out for a walk on the beach to do some research.

[The Writer (that would be me), her Research Assistant (pictured on the left) and Resident Photographer/Technology Guru (behind the camera) leave the office for an hour to do basic field work.]

~~

Bingo. Back from the beach, where it was 80+ degrees with a brisk off-shore breeze. We were sitting on the sand when a woman, probably in her early 70′s, walked toward us in what appeared to be her nightgown.

Now, I’m not much of a fashion maven these days, but I’m thinking if this thing was marketed as a ‘beach cover-up’ it was supposed to be worn over a bathing suit and at least hint at covering it. It wasn’t, and it didn’t. (And did I mention it was windy?)

“Can I pet her?” She was already scratching Polly’s head.

“I got a miniature dachshund – that thing thinks he rules the world. We’ll be walking and some little girl will come up and ask if she can pet him. I say ‘yes’ but I know she’ll see God before that dog’ll ever let her touch him.”

Mostly the beach is fine smooth sand, but we had a lunar high tide this week-end and one section was littered with sharp pieces of broken shells. She picked her way through the rubble in bare feet, winced in pain and then grinned back at me:

“Just gotta think of it like it’s a cheap pedicure.”

She kept on walking, nightgown flapping in the breeze.