Updates

Since I last wrote in this blog, I have been busy working toward a writing career without yet breaking into print.  However, I have been ramping up to move in that direction. 

Last summer, I spent several months getting feedback on my short stories (I have roughly 10 or so, many of which have won prizes), so I can start submitting them for publication.  I sent a few of them out, one of them to magazine after magazine with no success, even though it won a first prize from League of Utah Writers and an honorable mention from the Writer's Digest contest.  I've since learned that a fraction of a percent of short stories actually make it into the top publications.  My focus has turned elsewhere, but I'm still determined that they see print. 

I also sent the first of my chapter book series for 7-10-year-olds, Doomimals book 1: CockadoodleDOOM (about kids and their super-powered pets saving the world from the Dog of War), out to a few of the handful of agents who work with this age group and genre, also coming up empty.  I decided at that point to back up and get the feedback of a freelance editor, as I did with my first romance novel.  I am now working through that feedback. 

Just in the last couple of weeks, I started listening to the free webinars that have been sent through various sources to my email.  I figured a free webinar may enlighten me as to something I may be missing.  The first made it clear that I need to do a lot of marketing, myself, no matter how I break into print, self-publishing or otherwise, and gave me some clues about how to do it.  I totally recommend such webinars, even though they all end in a sales pitch. 

Another of these webinars, given by The Write Practice, offered to take me through the process of writing, networking and marketing, and actually publishing a book either through conventional or self-publication.  This seems an offer I could not pass up.  I have just started following its instructions in assembling a webpage, linking to my extant and future writing.  I will forward the link as soon as it's done. 

Another most exciting development in my life is, after struggling with the conventional publication process and balking at the prices companies want to help you get self-published, I may have hit upon something in between, a new kind of publication that features the best of both worlds.  It is in its fledgling stages, but I will write about this in the future as well if it comes to fruition. 

In other words, it finally feels like I'm very close to breaking in print besides local presses and my theses on Amazon.  I'm not sure where, how, and what will come first, but I'll keep you posted as it happens. 

Character Change

So I started writing my current book, Pigs Fly, with a fairly clear idea of the main characters but only a vague idea of the side characters.  Now that I have most of the plotline written in disorganized bits and pieces, I've started to look for holes and places that could be fleshed out.  I realized I needed to truly develop some of the side characters, especially those that will star in the books to come.  The next book will be all about Connor's mentor in a community theater, Gayle.  When I started the book, I had a vague idea of a white older lady in a wheelchair, some matronly sort who was all put together and professional.

But Gayle runs a community theater, and I haven't been able to convince the character to get a real job.  She's only 61, and I keep trying to talk her into a profession.  Today, I sat down and spent some bonding time with her.  I realized everything about my prior vision was wrong.  Her voice sounded way too much like my other side characters.

First off, she's not white.  She's ethnically Japanese with no emotional connection to her culture, which frustrates her.  So many main characters, particularly in romance novels, are just white.  White is treated as normal even though more and more people have some minority blood in them or identify as other.

Second off, the wheelchair never really fit with my vision of her character.  No, Clark, the male main character, will be wheelchair-bound.  Gayle's going to be diabetic.  You see, a lot of people like to think that disabilities are rare.  To read fiction, you'd think they NEVER or almost never happened.  But in my experience, if you don't see a person's disabilities, it's probably because you don't know them as well as you think.  I rarely meet a person without at least a minor disability.  One of mine is insomnia.  That isn't an obvious disability like blindness or being wheelchair-bound, but it can make for some really bad days.  So many people I meet seem "normal" at first, but then they turn out to have dyslexia or OCD or auto-immune disorder or ADD or depression or anxiety or deafness in one ear or something.  Some of these issues are disabling while some are merely inconvenient.   It is, from my experience, a rare person that is TRULY free of ALL disabilities.  We are just culturally trained to avoid showing it, sometimes even to ourselves.  So many of us want to be seen as normal without realizing normal isn't the norm if it exists at all.

So as Gayle introduced herself, I realized her mom and grandparents had to become super Americans during WWII, thereby turning their backs on all things Japanese.  Here she is, several decades later with a rebellious hippie streak, a crazy fashion sense, and no idea what it even means to be Japanese.  She is culturally lost and in search of her roots as she tries to be a Japanese hippie artist, working through the symptoms of the same type of diabetes that took her father and expressing herself through art and community theater.  She zips around everywhere on her 70's bike, trying to brighten the world one play, one canvas at a time. I've read romances--not many but a few--centering on a middle-aged white matron.  But I haven't read this story.  And like all stories that intrigue me of late, it starts to get at the human condition.