I was awake a lot during the night since bands of rain kept slamming the bedroom windows.    [Continue reading]]]>
…perfect baking weather, in my mind. So I made apricot-orange oat scones and then, since the kitchen was already a mess, cranberry chocolate chip cookies. C’mon over. I just put on a pot of coffee.

I was awake a lot during the night since bands of rain kept slamming the bedroom windows. And of course while I was lying there in bed listening to the wind, voluptuous prose started flowing out of my mind.

Did I get up to write any of it down? Nah. Am I pissed at myself for being a slouch? You bet. Full disclosure: most of the time when I have gotten up to write down those middle-of-the-night pearls, I find they’re not quite so pearly in the light of day. Last night could have been a breakaway point, though. We’ll never know, will we?

I just finished reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. I carried it with me everywhere for the past couple of days so I could pop it open whenever anyone paused for longer than 2 seconds in conversation or I was waiting at a red light. Yeah, it definitely got under my skin.

I’m glad I didn’t see the movie, and I won’t. Too much really nasty stuff happens in the book, and I don’t want to see it replayed in color on the big screen. But it is making me think I’ll keep, maybe even expand on, some of what was making me a tad squeamish during my recent NaNo writing.

It probably goes without saying that NONE of my characters can hold a candle to Lisbeth Salander, the sociopathic main character in the Millennium trilogy. (Tattoo is the first book of the series.) That’s a problem – you’re boring – when you write what you know and you’ve led a fairly low-impact, neutral existence.

Larsson died before any of the books in his Millennium trilogy was even published. On Stieg Larsson came out last week. It includes a series of emails between him and his book editor, Eva Gedin, as they were editing the trilogy. A couple of those emails were printed in this Wall Street Journal article, The Man Who Launched a Blockbuster. I felt a little voyeuristic reading the emails, which of course adds to their appeal. I am looking forward to reading the entire book.

This exchange from the article stood out for me as I read it [possible spoilers but I don’t think they would stand in the way of your enjoyment if/when you got into the series]:

A rule of thumb has been never to romanticize crime and criminals, nor to stereotype victims of crime. I base my serial murderer in book I on a composite of three authentic cases. Everything described in the book can be found in actual police investigations.

The description of the rape of Lisbeth Salander is based on an incident that actually took place in the Ostermalm district of Stockholm three years ago. And so on.

The email went on to describe his thoughts about many of his characters, especially his so-called secondary characters who he believed were as important as his main characters in creating a “realistic universe”.

Larsson led a vastly more exciting personal life than most of us sitting at our kitchen tables pounding out whatever we’re pounding out while eating homemade scones. Even so, he got way outside his own skin to build his characters and his stories.

That’s part of the writer’s struggle, isn’t it, whether your life is exciting or mundane? To get outside your own skin and cast a wide net, troll around for those wrinkles and eccentricities, pick up the flotsam and jetsam of real lives that float in during a storm. Research. Listen. Get up in the middle of the night and write it down. Dream.

Getting outside your own skin. And then putting what you find there together in a way that will get under your readers’.

Still working on it.

DING! DING! DING! Yesterday I crossed the National Novel Writing Month finish line when I wrote the 50,000th word of Pelican Island, my NaNo murder mystery. I didn’t stop writing even though the flashing lights and buzzers went crazy and someone started pouring champagne while a brass band played.

oh. wait.    [Continue reading]]]>

DING! DING! DING! Yesterday I crossed the National Novel Writing Month finish line when I wrote the 50,000th word of Pelican Island, my NaNo murder mystery. I didn’t stop writing even though the flashing lights and buzzers went crazy and someone started pouring champagne while a brass band played.

oh. wait.

maybe it didn’t happen quite like that.

Maybe no one even noticed when I got to word 50,001. And that brass band must have been playing on a different island. I just kept on slogging, slogging, slogging until I got to the end of the scene I was writing and I noticed I’d made it to the finish line. The champagne was NOT flowing freely. I’d come up with a sort of okay ending and written it a few days earlier, but the road to the ending was and still is filled with gaping plot holes.

I’m going to keep on slogging forward, but I’ll tell you a secret:

I hated NaNo more days than I felt the love.

I felt chained to this process that brought out the very worst of my writing capabilities. I was so bent on coming up with plot points that I forgot to tell a story. I killed my most interesting characters. I used clunky and banal language. My only funny scene was a funeral, and that happened at the beginning of the book.

My family learned to tread softly when my word count was advancing too slowly for the calendar. I wondered what in hell ever made me think I could tell a story anyway, ’cause I sure wasn’t banging it out here.

Here’s another secret:

I already miss NaNo.

I miss the urgency that kept me glued to my chair and would. not. release. me. until I’d met my daily word quota. I miss competing (yes I do) with my writing buddies, and cheering them forward as well. I miss that single-minded focus and intensity on my writing, even my bad writing. I miss having a deadline that forced me to approach writing in a totally different way than I was comfortable with, and to crank out that many words that quickly, quality be damned.

I’m looking forward to putting Pelican Island to sleep for a while. And reading — I’ve already started The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And blogging again. And a host of other things that went on hold during NaNo.

And then, sometime in January, I’ll pick up Pelican Island again. Who knows what I’ll find in it then. Or in myself.

YES!

So here’s the link to today’s interview: Natasha Drew on mystery, muses, and Joyce Carol Oates.    [Continue reading]]]>
I was honored, flattered and just plain excited when the lovely and talented Paper Rats, Kris and R.J., invited me Inside the Writers’ Studio for an interview. ME? They wanted to interview me?

YES!

So here’s the link to today’s interview: Natasha Drew on mystery, muses, and Joyce Carol Oates. You’ll get to learn about my 5th grade writing disasters and what’s happening in my current NaNoWriMo novel, among other things.

Head on over and read the interview, and then check out some of the Paper Rats videos if you haven’t seen them yet. You’re in for a treat.

Right now — that’s it.

And then have a nice week-end, ya’ll.

Will I reach THE END of my novel by November 30? We’ll see. Right now    [Continue reading]]]> Today is the mid-point of National Novel Writing Month. I’m closing in on 30,000 words and should be able to hit my 50,000 word goal by the end of the month, lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.

Will I reach THE END of my novel by November 30? We’ll see. Right now I’m in the throes of the middle.  And it’s hard going here.

The supremely insightful Merrilee Faber and her post today, Middles are like macrame, showed up just in time. She put it so beautifully:

Middles, to me, are like a big macrame project. You get hold of this subplot in one finger, and then you grab that subplot and tie them off, then you pick up some character development and weave it through, and then you grab the main plot in your other hand, and don’t forget the theme, that needs to show up as a splash of colour, and then…

At this point I have a bunch of tangled strings in my hands and I’m hoping that I can pull them together into a more or less cohesive whole.  Getting through the middle is the trickiest part of writing for me now, but I think I can.

Last week I read an article on the 9 most subversive children’s books ever written. I don’t agree with the author’s choices, of course. Any list that leaves out Daniel Pinkwater is just plain wrong. Still, the author points out that in The Little Engine That Could, the little engine that ultimately Can and Does is female. I’m pretty sure if the story’s feminist little engine could hold a pen, she’d be doing NaNo, chugging ‘I think I can’ while racking up the word count.

So here’s to NaNo, here’s to W.I.N.O.S., and here’s to making it through the middle — whatever that middle may be.

Just say it: I think I can.