Fall...

September and October, sometimes even into November...

The fall, when school is exciting and pencils are still sharpened, their erasers in tact.

The summer's heat submits to autumn's cooler weather, taking pesky mosquitoes to their graves. Sweaters find their way to the front of my closet, like reemerging memories. 
 

The leaves begin to change – a new canvas of colors, various hues to catch the eye. Red. Orange. Yellow. Cooler winds pluck leaves from high perches. They fall, crisp glitter in the air, and we see them more clearly as the decorate the ground.

Amaranths debut pink blooms. Birds arrive around our lake again, entertaining us with their songs and excited activity. The stresses of the holidays are not yet upon me, it is the calm before the storm. 

 

Autumn is my favorite season and most inspires me to write. Maybe it is the ebbing heat that makes the mind more crisp or merely the colorful changing surroundings - the sights, smells, and sounds of fall. Sitting outside in our lanai (Florida's pretentious term for screened in back porches), my senses are aroused by the season, motivating my fingers to capture the experience of fall.

(A special thank you to my sister-in-law, Holly, for her amazing photography.)

Using music, for getting in the mood...

Music! I have loved it since I was born. (Seriously, my uncle's piano music is apparently the first thing I heard when I entered this world!) If I wanted to use this entire blog for my musical history, performance and otherwise, it would be a long one - but this post is not for that - it is about getting in the mood for writing…with music.

Life is either noisy or quiet - and I don't mean that to be a deep thought. As a mother, if my kids are noisy, I am distracted, but when they are too quiet, something is obviously wrong! Maybe the sound of silence in your home is relaxing, but in mine, someone is either flooding the upstairs bathroom, experimenting with ketchup squeeze bottles, coloring the floorboards pink, or doing something else that will require a minimum of 30 minutes to clean-up! Once they are in bed, logically I know none of the above should be happening, but, even so I found myself having a problem getting into the writing mood. It was just too quiet!

My solution was to create playlists of music for my iPhone and laptop.  Guilty admission - I have more fun making character/scene playlists than I do actually using them. Yep! And I am downright OCD about them, as well. I make playlists for action scenes, sad love, romantic love, happy scenes, angry scenes, intense scenes…then there are the playlists for individual characters that mirror their personalities. Actually, all this seemingly ridiculous amount of effort in creating music to listen to while writing truly does pay off - it is like the power button of my creative mind's remote control - the "on switch" that gets me writing a scene and into the mood.

And here it is now - the kids are in bed, hubby's working, and the writing window begins. I put in my ear pods and select the "action scenes" music (much of which is instrumental and soundtracks for movies to avoid additional chaos of loud lyrics). My laptop is flipped open and I begin to write. I enter the scene with the appropriate musical nudge away from school books, laundry piles, and finger smudged windows... and into the woods, where lightning flickers in the ominous clouds above and the crackling thunder announces the coming storm...a chase scene.

Intensity...

The kids are all finally out - the kind of sleep that guarantees at least an hour of quiet. Armed with my second over-sized mug of coffee, my glazed eyes stare at the blank wall.
Over the music pumping into my ear pods, I hear his muffled words. "You have that look, Beth."
Somewhat irritated, I am jerked back into an unwelcomed reality. "Huh?"
He looks at the glowing light of my laptop. "Oh, writing?"
Avoiding slipping any snarky responses, I want to be back in the scene… so, I merely nod.
"Must be intense," he states with a smile before leaving.
He has no idea.

Intensity...
It is an accurate description of where I go when writing some scenes. More than a feeling, it is a place.
Closing my eyes, I return to it - somewhere in Europe, the 1940s. The swells of the music flooding my ears trap me there, in the farmhouse, at dusk. Him, sweat drenched and unsteadily aiming a gun...and her, in the corner, bluish black marks emerging on her left cheekbone, stifling sobs. It is more than seeing and hearing, it's the touch - the texture of the dirty wood floor she sits on...the cold metal he holds too tightly in his hand. It's smell - a mixture of burning meat and wild orchids that drifts in the open door. And I am there, the invisible observer, watching it all unfold, my fingers documenting the drama on the unseen letters of my keyboard.
I am emotionally and physically entangled in another century and location, captured, in a captivity of my own choosing. True, it is intense, but I don't want to leave that room until they both do...and I wont.

Penning a scene, whether intense as the one above or benign as two little girls giggling with their cookies, requires the writer to be there. We are the CSI of the book - having to observe and record everything we see, smell, hear, feel…every minute detail that we may or may not use in the final product. Close your eyes and be there - look around, take a deep breath, listen…and write it all down. How else are we to bring a reader there to truly experience what we are trying to portray?

The history major in me...

I was an English major in college...for a while...before changing to history. After exhausting the creative writing portions of the requirements list, I found myself far less interested in English as a major. Reading what some obscure writer wrote in the 1800s, then trying to dissect it with a bunch of bull crap just got old...quickly. I changed my major to history because I liked to research and write - Yep, you guessed it - I am a research geek. Forty page thesis papers actually excite me…research geek, completely a research geek! What can I say- writing about the time frame and culture, as well as the life, of Shakespeare was more interesting to me than the words he penned. I did get my English minor, which was at least, something to show for having to read Chaucer in olde English. :O

I do love history (which might me a duel geek - history and research geek?)! One of the things I wanted to be while growing up (other than a ballerina, singer, teacher, marine biologist, writer, architect and the list goes on) was an archaeologist. Uncovering history in far off, exotic lands was a nice fantasy. The sand up my butt and it grinding in my teeth, though - complete killers of that dream. Still, I could explore history, some of which the greater population is completely clueless about. Being a writer and having those strong English skills did give me an advantage, however. I suppose it is a bragging right, of sorts, to almost always have the highest grade on any given paper. (Please ignore the fact that my red pen could slaughter this blog and all its incorrect grammar and sentence structure. The irony is not lost on me.) I am also competitive...but that is a different topic all together.

So, it only took me two full paragraphs to get to my point.?! The History major in me...
I love to read historical fiction and most everything I write has at least a small dose of the past laced into the lines. I started a historical fiction book that has a few completed chapters and a strong outline (someone else could take all my notes and write it at this point), but the historical accuracy is killing the completion. I despise novels that are so far off the reality of the time frame, that truth is completely discarded to fit a story. Of course, taking liberties with conversations and such are required when working around actual historical people, but not when it comes to culture and era. Much of my book it is set in World War II, in both the Pacific and European fronts, as well as here in the States. I found myself researching more than writing, though. If I am going to have an American Army troupe liberating a German concentration camp, it better be one that the American Army liberated and not British or Russian troupes. Or if a Serbian man serving in the Yugoslavian Royal Army is captured - I need to make sure he is in a POW camp that Yugoslavian Royal Army members were being held and I certainly can't have him fighting in 1944 - they were long defeated and captured by that point. Those are the broad strokes. The details of what foods were being rationed in a specific area of Europe or whether or not French farmers in a written area were moved from their land or allowed to stay - these are all things that I would have to stop and research. I can't have a poor tradesman character sipping on coffee in an area where it would require a lot of money, connections, or black market purchases to actually buy it. Maybe that is just me being too OCD with the details or the complete research geek in me, but it is what slows me down. So, with my desire to create fiction pushing me into procrastination, I have set the actual writing of that one aside, at least until I can pour what I truly want to into that book. Let's just face it - until all my kids can feed themselves without making a colossal mess in the kitchen or setting it on fire, this isn't entirely practical, but I am still researching.  (An aside, a friend took 15 years of research before finally penning and publishing one of her novels. So, I feel a little less self critical of myself as I continue to research for the book, without actually writing it yet.) There are too many characters based on people I know/have known not to give it the effort it deserves.

I knew that the only way around being dragged down with researching details when beginning the novel I am writing now was to set it in an "unknown place" in Europe (albeit, a true history geek will figure out that it would have to be somewhere in Eastern France). Although all the eras are set in the same unnamed location, they touch into the 1500s, 1700s, 1940s, and present. Removing all references to specific countries when it concerned my character's exact whereabouts, freed me from that. Of course, mannerisms and speech of those eras, generally technology, clothing, etc. have been well researched, but the specifics of whether or not bourbon or ale were sold in any exact location in whatever era? Not so much.  So…before it is time to start math class with my kiddos, I will hit publish! Until next time...

Coffee and chronological order...

Coffee!!

Let's just start there - with this writer's beverage of choice! I don't know about you, but I could really use one of these little havens in my pantry! Coffee!! It is my "focus juice," the ADHD medication that doesn't raise my blood pressure to the point of needing a higher dose of those BP drugs. :O Hanging in my closet is a shirt that reads: "Instant writer, just add coffee." It really should read - "Instant writer, just add coffee and full time nanny/housecleaner." Seriously. I believe the first blog covered why "just adding coffee" just isn't enough for this momma! However inspiring it is to don that cute shirt, it just isn't true.

Coffee. I think I need another cup of it to remember why I opted to start today's writing blog with that topic instead of the one I am really getting to…writing in chronological order! Oh! It is said that the personality of the writer can be seen in at least one of the characters they write - and this is very true when it comes to the love of coffee. The main character in my first book drinks coffee. A lot!

Now to the topic at hand - chronological order and why I just can't seem to write in that way!

Limiting myself by writing in chronological order - that was my both my chain and stumbling block. 

I started many novels, some of which I penned 50 - 100 or more pages before setting them aside. With an outline of where I was going, I would begin to write. Then, I would get to a section that I wasn't in the mood for and would would try and force through it. Sadly, I would eventually either give up or put the story aside so long that I forgot why I was ever interested in writing it in the first place!

When I began my first completed novel, I began as I had many times before. This time, I had more drive and more details. It wasn't merely a grouping of ideas and general plot I had knocked around enough to want to try and write, but a story that I needed to write. An entire story, full of colorful characters and purposeful meaning. After penning the first chapter, and then the second, I realized that they wouldn't be the first two of the book. Instead, they fell somewhere into the middle. Most likely, I was aware of that fact, but ignored it, still believing things needed to be in order. But it was the mood that I was in, the passion of that moment that possessed me, and caused me to disregard the fact that the section I was writing wasn't the beginning. I realized that I had been going about it all wrong - trying to write in chronological order was limiting me and any possible progress I had ever made in writing.

My advice in completing a book, whether with intentions of publishing or reaching a goal, write the part that matches your mood. If you are sad, write the sad part. When excited, pen that chapter. Of course, with desires of completion, there are connector parts that must be pushed through, regardless to mood. However, in my case, so much was done by that point that I was much more motivated to do the needed pushing! Consider where I wrote so much of my first book - in the carpool lane, with loud kids in the back seat. I can honestly say that no intimate scenes were penned in that car or witty dialogue, for that matter. But a couple of cranky toddlers arguing over a toy - that is perfect for an irritated mother scene, is it not?!

Even in the carpool lanes...

I was going to title this first blog "The ever-intimidating first blog…" but then decided I would skip the introductions - after all, if you want to know more about me, you can always look at the obviously titled, "About me," gadget on the right side of this blog - right? So, instead, I decided I would share the quirky places where I wrote much of my first novel.

Once upon a time...
In the Fairy Tale Kingdom of Ideal Writing - a girl sits with her hot cup of coffee and computer laptop at a large table in a quiet room. In case she is visited by the tactile need to write something down, a new legal pad and sharpened pencil lay beside her. The beauty of the serene scenery outside her large windows inspires her begin. Ah, what writing bliss, right?

Ha!
Let's start again…The girl might have coffee, but it is most likely lukewarm. The laptop's screen is covered with the greasy fingerprints of children who can't help but touch everything. The table is completely cluttered with school papers, bills, and empty wrappers. As for quiet - the only semi- quiet room in the house is the bathroom - and by quiet, I mean no one is inside making noise. Let's face it - the basket filled high with laundry and bathroom sink are hardly serene scenery!

So, as a mother of three - how was I supposed to achieve this ideal writing environment without any designated creative space? Bottom line, I wouldn't, quite frankly! One of my previous writing snares was believing that I needed a certain environment to getting into the writing zone - one much more like the fairy tale and a lot less like the reality!

When I wrote my first book, the plot was so solid that I really could break free of the "writing in sequential order" prison that had hindered me before then. (I will ramble more about that in another post.) So, whatever the mood I was in or part I wanted to dig into, I could write that part. Great! However, the when and where often escaped me.

At that time, my life consisted of being a taxi service for at least 3 hours a day. Some of this time included sitting in an idling car, squished into a long line of vehicles, waiting in the carpool lanes. Earlier in that school year, I found myself thinking about two of the characters and a specific scene. I had a pen in my purse, but no paper.  Sigh.  Looking around, I took a quick car inventory - diaper, wipes, extra pacifiers, some toy trucks…I could be creative and write on a diaper, but that would just invoke Murphy's Law and a stinky butt to stop and clean to avoid the asphyxiating odor on the way home. Nope. My husband often shoved receipts into the little box between the two front seats. Before that day, it had always irritated me that they never ended up in the receipt bin, where they were supposed to be. Instead, they cluttered my way to the gum or loose change that I would be seeking. However, on that day, I was grateful for his negligence! Receipts! I pulled out the crumpled wad, found one without printing on the back, and began to scribble out lines. I found that I could ignore whatever noises the younger two would be making in the back seat of the car and slip into the world of my characters.

Although a writing friend and I have joked about how much of my book was written on the backs of receipts in the carpool lane, there is some truth to that - receipts and scraps of paper. I still have the whole messy pile of them in a drawer, my sentimental mementos. Despite the chaos in the background, that carpool lane became my writing zone!  Now, I homeschool the three kids, but waiting for them at extra curricular activities still gives me some of that coveted time to scribble thoughts and scenes onto paper. It seems that I can write about anywhere now - waiting in the dr. office, while the kids are eating their lunch, in between flipping dinner burgers, and…yes, even in the carpool lanes.