Tag: writing

Once upon a time…

by Jackie Houchin

Once upon a time, in a WAY long time ago, before I had a smartphone, a computer, an online presence, or even a typewriter, I wrote with a pencil, on lined school paper.  I wrote letters (to pen pals and cousins), stories (mostly tragically romantic vignettes in far-off places), and I wrote in small daily diaries.

You know those little books, about four by five inches, with a strap that wrapped across the pages and fit into a lock on the front, and had a half-inch, flat key to secure it. I mean, even a fork or a good slap could open them! 

The pages were dated, but you had to fill in the year. And you had to write quite small if you had a lot to say, like I did.  Wow, did they hold secrets!  And souvenirs – another good reason for that little strap and key. I wrote about feelings, events, boys, teachers, embarrassments, fights, dreams, disappointments, and things or people who made me mad, jealous, or envious.

One day, I found and opened a thirty-five-year-old diary like that. Oh, my goodness!  I slammed it shut and looked around me. Then I carried it to a small chair in a corner of the bedroom and opened it again.

I wrote THAT?  And that? Oh, my!

I laughed. I cringed. I even cried a little. A couple of times, I gazed off into space, seeing and reliving a sweet incident.  I’d smile and sigh.

How would my life be different if THAT had happened? Or hadn’t happened? Or if I’d said something else? Or acted quickly, nicely, or at least not selfishly? What if….?

What if? 

That’s the way fiction writers often dredge up a story idea or outline. What if such and such happened, or someone said or did THAT?  

I glanced down at the diary and thumbed through the pages, stopping now and then to read a heavily underlined passage.  WHOA!

I eventually put the little book back into the cardboard box with maybe eight others like it.  I’ll read them all, I promised myself.  I’ll write a story or two.  Is there enough for a book, I wondered?  

I stretched the duct tape tightly across the flaps and penciled “diaries” on the front. Tomorrow we will take the last of these attic finds to our new house.  After all the unpacking and settling in, I will dig out these diaries and sit at my computer, and type, “What if….?”

Halfway down the busy freeway to the new house, traveling at 65 mph, our heavily packed pick-up truck hit a pothole. In the passenger side mirror, I saw a small box jump and pitch itself over the truck’s railing. When it landed, the box split apart.  Small square objects flew out and bounced into the bushes growing close along the side.

“OH!” I cried.

“What?” my hubby asked.

“My diaries!  Didn’t you tie the boxes down?”

“I did!”

“But…”

There was no place to pull over. No going around. No going back, either along the freeway… or to that youthful time long ago.

I sat stunned.  Then I laughed, imagining some homeless dude living in the bushes finding and being entertained by my teenage drama and angst. Or maybe a gang of miscreants wearing orange vests and carrying plastic bags would come by to clean up the roadside trash, and find them. 

Hey, my stories could be read in jail! Perhaps even traded among the inmates for snacks or phone calls. Juicy sections could be copied on the backs of old envelopes and reread a hundred times. Pages might be torn out and passed on to new inductees as the old timers were released. My audience would grow! I might become “a best-selling author!”  

Well, maybe not.

Anyway, that’s why I never wrote the “Great American Novel.” 

Did you ever write in diaries?  Do you keep a journal now?  If so, is what you write  “stream-of-consciousness” or does it have a specific purpose?  Have you ever reread your previous ones from a year ago, or many years past?

Free Write Your Way Out of Writer’s Block

By Maggie King

Writer’s block. Many writers suffer from this condition. I used to scoff at the very idea of writer’s block, regarding it as another way for writers to procrastinate. But the creative slowdown I’ve experienced for several months has humbled me.

I’m not blocked for ideas, I have them by the dozen. The problem lies in creating a story, one people would actually want to read. My writing skills have gone on hiatus.

My solution: free writing. According to Matt Ellis in his post in Grammarly.com, “How Freewriting Can Boost Your Creativity,” freewriting is a technique in which the author writes their thoughts quickly and continuously, without worrying about form, style, or even grammar.

Mr. Ellis extols the benefits of this practice: “The benefits of free writing revolve around organization, brainstorming, and inspiration, as well as beating writer’s block and relieving certain anxieties. Just getting anything written, even if it is imperfect, can jump-start creativity.”

Author Natalie Goldberg also encourages free writing, or “first thoughts” in her parlance. In this excerpt from her classic Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within she explains how to write first thoughts (#6 is a tough one!):

  1. Keep your hand moving. Don’t pause to read what you’ve just written.
    That’s stalling and trying to get control of what you’re saying.
  2. Don’t cross out. That is editing as you write. Even if you write something
    you didn’t mean to write, leave it.
  3. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. Don’t even care about
    staying in the margins and lines on the page.
  4. Lose control.
  5. Don’t think. Don’t get logical.
  6. Go for the jugular. If something comes up in your writing that is scary or
    naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.

Sometimes I write from a prompt (maybe not technically free writing, but who’s nitpicking?); at other times I simply write whatever comes forth. I set a timer on my smart watch for thirty minutes and go, without stopping. At first I went for ten minute sprints, but soon found that half an hour worked best. My thoughts and words flow. When the timer goes off, I pause, then go for another thirty minutes. At that point my hand needs a rest!

My free writing is turning into a memoir. Nothing organized or even chronological—whatever occurs to me ends up on the page. What occurs are often experiences from my past: family, people I’ve known, jobs held, schools attended, challenges faced. I’ve devoted pages and pages to my summers spent with relatives in a rural part of upstate New York.

It’s been an enlightening process, especially as I discover how my perspectives have changed over the years. Frankly, there are memories I’d like to keep buried, but I’ve found it liberating to get them down on paper (See #6 of Natalie Goldberg’s list above).

Since I started this process in July, I now look forward to writing each day. I can’t yet report much creative writing activity, but last week I was invited to submit a short story to an anthology. I have a great idea for a story (remember, I have no dearth of ideas) and now feel up to the challenge of actually writing it.

And now, please excuse me … it’s time to free write!

Handmade Software, Inc. Image Alchemy v1.14

Telling Your Story

by Gayle Bartos-Pool

Whether you’re self-published or have the backing of a big publisher, a writer still needs to get a short version of their own life story in shape for that occasional interview they might do for publication or even a live broadcast. If the person doing the interview knows his job, he will have handed the author a set of questions ahead of time, so the writer isn’t blindsided by a question. That’s professional. Sometimes the person doing the interview will ask if there are questions the writer wants asked because often the writer has a story to tell that the person doing the interview will have no idea exists. This will make the interview unique. That’s good for everybody, even the audience who will get to meet somebody with an interesting story. For the writer, that doesn’t mean only the story in the book he just wrote.

Recently I had the opportunity to do both a written interview and a live talk for a local show where I live in Ohio. The first interview was done by a fellow writer, Jill Amadio, who started out as a journalist for a British magazine before she wrote her first mystery featuring a gal who was a gossip columnist back in Britain who has to leave the country because she did too good of a job digging up dirt only to trip over a body or two here in the States. Obviously, Jill knows a lot about writing for a magazine. That book is Digging Too Deep. A great read.

https://promotingcrime.blogspot.com/2025/06/jill-amadio-in-conversation-with-gayle.html

She asked if she could interview me for a mystery magazine, Mystery People, published in the United Kingdom.  This was fun. Working with the questions she first provided and adding a few of my own in order to tell my story, we came up with a good interview.

As writers, we need to get out in front of people and tell them not only about the book we wrote, but also a little bit about ourselves to let our potential readers know where we came from and maybe how we got the idea for our novel.

I have been doing this for a while, but it was only recently that I wrote my autobiography to tell people who I am. I learned a lot about myself. That’s why I recommend that everyone write their own story whether you write novels or do something normal…Sorry, I digress.

Having gotten to know myself doing my autobiography sure helped when I did these two new interviews. Not that I didn’t know who I was, but I needed to get organized. First, I wrote out basically what I wanted to say about my life and writing career. Then I wrote out a script like doing a movie. I had taken acting classes back in California when I wanted to write for television and/or the movies because I thought knowing what the actor needed from the writer would be a good idea. It was.

I wrote a script. I cut out stuff and added stuff until I had a fairly clear idea where I came from and how I got to be who I am. Then I rehearsed it. Two or three times a day. Even when I got into bed at night, I went over the script. As I walked around the house, I timed it. The televised event would be no longer than an hour. I made sure I could do all the aspects I wanted to cover in those sixty minutes. Then I rehearsed it a few more times.

The 54 minute interview is on the Avon Lake Library website: https://www.avonlake.org/communications-technology/videos?action=show&video=MjkwNg==

It was a challenge, but writers have to try new things in order to get our name out there so people know who we are and what we do. And, frankly, this was fun.

The written version for the British interview covered the highlights. The televised version was longer with some hand gestures thrown in to make a point and even photographs to add to the story. Those acting lessons allowed me to do the event without standing there like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz before Dorothy came around. You cannot imagine the confidence those acting lessons gave me.

So, you writers might want to work on several versions of your story in case you’re asked to do an interview. Short ones and longer ones. It gives you a head start. And something else, it might get you interested in writing your own autobiography. You do have a story to tell.

Continue reading “Telling Your Story”

Characters: Real and Imagined

by Gayle Bartos-Pool

Writers create characters. Often, we use people from our own lives, or at least snatches of their personality, as the basis of those people. A favorite relative or friend might form the background for one or two main characters or pop up as a bit player here and there in your story, but if we’re smart, we won’t use someone we don’t like as the villain. Lawsuits can be so messy.

But What if we use real people such as celebrities or legendary individuals who changed the world in one way or another? You know, someone from a movie, a history book or the nightly news.

Would that method work?

Oh, yeah… But with limitations.

For instance, in my spy novels I use many real people like presidents and military generals and famous politicians who helped win World War II and changed the world in other ways through several decades. But my main character is totally fictional. He’s a master spy in my books, but he “knew” a lot of those real folks, “spoke” to them, and his story intertwines with what really happened back then. It took me ten years to research things that went on from WWII though part of the Cold War, because that was when those three novels took place. I read a lot of history books and even watched movies made during those times and some later movies made about those eras. The visuals alone let me “see” what it was like back then.

I have my characters “talk” with real people like Ian Fleming, the guy who wrote the James Bond novels. He was really part of the British government and one of the reasons we got in the war when our country was reluctant. He and my spy hero knew each other…fictionally, at least. But it made for a fun encounter.

I used historical figures who were our allies as good guys in the books. The bad guys like Stalin or Hitler were bad then and that’s the way they were written. I’m not changing history. The other bad guys I created came from my fertile imagination.

Even some of my contemporary books have characters that might be based on a real celebrity. I might not use their actual name, but a clever reader might figure out who it is. But these are the good guys. I come up with the bad guys from whole cloth. I watch the news and know basically what a bad guy does. I prefer to add my own twists to the villain’s personality, so I know how my guy thinks. After all, I’m telling the story. I don’t know what a real killer is thinking.

Mixing fact with fiction gives me that extra layer of reality that makes the story seem…plausible. Why not? Even Science Fiction has reality in it, mostly because the writer is guessing what the future might look like.

But here’s something fun. Take a look at old Star Trek episodes from 1966-1969. Lots of the gadgets the Enterprise crew members used are things we use now like cell phones and tablets. They didn’t have those things when the show was running. And something else. Their time frame was supposed to be in the 22nd, 24th and 32nd Centuries. We’re only in the 21st Century now, and we have those things…

So, when you write, create the world you want and put in characters with those touches of reality gotten from people you actually know and then toss in some character traits you’d like to see in contemporary folks or those coming up after us. You never know, maybe your characters will be the guide and inspiration to a whole new world.  Write On!

IT WAS THE DEAD BODY IN THE LADIES’ ROOM…

by Rosemary Lord

She was enjoying such a lovely holiday exploring the English Devon Coast, the charming fishing village and the cream-teas that were to die for. But it was the dead body she found in the Ladies’ Room of the church hall that made her pause. It was most inconvenient…

How come my mind goes to those bizarre ideas – and gruesome murders – or at least a simple dead body… I mean, it’s not like I am a mass-murderer – or that I even killed just one person – not that I recall….

Maybe I should have continued that opening as a sweet and charming Cozy. I do write Cozies, too. I’m not always weird.

Perhaps, I should be writing some ladylike Regency, Jane Austen style romance, or a simple bodice-ripper. Or a sci-fi marvel. Or a very clever spy thriller or possibly a police procedural. Or perhaps not.

But my writer’s mind just goes there. My sister thought it was because our grandpa was a police detective. Could be…  So, it’s probably a good thing grandpa wasn’t an insurance salesman. I mean, even a door-to-door salesman would have more interesting tales to inspire a writer.  

But where would we be without our writing, without our amazing world of imagination to escape in to. I often think how lucky we writers are. When life gets really tough, when things around us are going haywire, (like today!) when we’ve had more than just a ‘bad-hair-day,’ when we think that Life has given up on us – we have our writing to retreat to.

Make a nice mug of coffee or tea, settle down in our comfy office chair, a blank page in front of us and away we go. Whether it’s with pencil and pad or the familiar clacking of the computer keys – we are transported to another world. Our Writer’s World.

Tough to explain to anyone who doesn’t write. But suddenly we’re galloping across the Sahara Desert or sneaking through the back streets of Charles Dickens’ London or stretching out lazily aboard a luxurious yacht.  How about enjoying a gourmet meal in a super-posh Paris restaurant, swimming in the Mediterranean – or walking across Regent’s Park, hearing the elephants at London Zoo in the background. Or climbing Mount Everest – if that’s where your mind goes…

You see how endless a writer’s imagination can be? And what a wonderful diversion from the tough times in the Life-of-Hard-Knocks, a distraction from everyday humdrum, or just a brief diversion from today’s offering.

Mark Twain said, “write what you know.” Which is sometimes very useful. But I find it much more fun to write about a world that I never inhabited. Besides, I absolutely love researching. I devour all the books, articles, newspaper clipping to do with whatever I am writing about. I especially love reading the 1910 or 1918 Sears & Roebuck Catalogues. Just like the adverts in old magazines, one can tell so much about life in those times when you see what they wore, household items they used and the hobbies they had. There are endless opportunities for stories in those pages. Even looking at the world around us today. The Farmers’ Almanac in Kentucky will have advertisements that spark an idea, or a fishing magazine in Finland, a local paper in New Zealand or the Scottish Highland Times – all sources of tidbits of ideas that, like Topsy, will grow. I find the Obituaries in these far-off places fascinating – apart from providing me with a cornucopia of character names to use.

What other profession gives one the opportunity to snoop, eavesdrop and blatantly plagiarize another’s life? The snooping is most fun!

And we get to add historical figures into our mix. Where else could one throw in a vision of the evil sinner Sisyphus, condemned to an eternity of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to be thwarted once he got to the top, when the weight of the boulder forced it to start rolling downhill. So, he had to start again. And again. Or how about our use of oft-quoted characters from Shakespeare? You see – we get to use it all if we want.

So, after an extremely busy, stressful day at work, I retreat into my world of writing – this Blog being way overdue. And somewhere in my brain I am now thinking of taking that opening paragraph and running with it. Murder and mayhem in Devon anyone?

            Whatever odd twists and turns my writer’s brain takes, I always feel so relaxed and satisfied when I can print out a new page or three. So maybe it’s a good thing to have that weird streak? I just know how lucky we writers are to have that Writers’ Place to go to.

Do You Really Want to Be a Writer?

by Jacqueline Vick

Lots of people dream about writing. And writing for yourself and your family is great. Recording memories. Journaling for fun and self-awareness. These are all wonderful, creative pastimes that I encourage. In fact, if you write, you are a writer.

I suspect what most people mean when they say they want to be writers is that they want to make a lot of money doing something they enjoy. And that’s an honorable goal. But there will be challenges.

One thing that stands out from my time with the Sisters in Crime Los Angeles Speakers Bureau is the number of people in the audience who asked published writers for tips and then rejected them.

Audience Member: How do you find time to write a book?

Writer: You need to write every chance to get. On the train or bus if you commute. During your lunch hour. Or get up early.

AM: I drive to work. My lunch hour is too short. I have enough trouble getting up for work. I have no time.

Audience Member 2: How do I sell my book?

Writer: You have to put yourself out there to meet other writers and readers. Meet with book clubs. Do library or bookstore events.

AM2: I’m too shy. And I don’t have a car.

Writer: If in-person events are a problem, there are many online opportunities available.

AM2: I don’t have internet access.

Writer: You could do paid advertising.

AM2: I have no money.

Based on those conversations, I thought I’d give aspiring writers a reality check in the most loving way possible.

If you want to write for a living, you will run into obstacles. You will either find a way over them or around them, but, if you’re serious, you will move forward.

There are many paths to publication.

Online zines publish short stories, and some of them pay. Competition is high.

Traditional publishers will most likely require you to have an agent submit your book, which means having a clean, edited copy of your manuscript along with a polished query letter. Check with each agent for their requirements. (Or the publishers, for those who accept direct submissions.)

Self-publishing. You will need to have a professionally edited book and a professionally designed cover. After that, everything falls under your responsibility: submission to the markets, marketing the book, and handling all business decisions and finances.

My point is not to scare you but to prepare you.

I spend my typical day writing AND marketing. At this point, probably 40% of my time is working on marketing, whether that is appearances on websites or blogs, testing creatives for ads, testing headlines for ads, testing primary text for ads, keeping up with trends, watching my ads and making adjustments, such as killing the ones that aren’t working and adding ones I hope will work better. And so on.

I also spend hours each week in marketing groups as well as writer’s groups.

Part of my budget is spent on tools that help make me a better writer and marketer. ProWritingAid for grammar. Fictionary for story development. Unbounce, Mouseflow, and Shopify for marketing and direct sales. And the plugins to make Shopify perform better. Not to mention the thousands of dollars I spend on ads each month.

Usually, I come out ahead, but there are no guarantees. Some months, especially when Facebook makes a change that affects the algorithms, I don’t. But it’s a growing and learning process. You need to hang in there.

If that sounds like something that interests you, I suggest you join a writer’s group that focuses on your genre. Sisters in Crime, Romance Writers of America, and Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators are a few. They often have great resources.

Follow authors you like, especially those who write in the same genre, on social media. See what they’re doing. Study their Amazon book pages, author pages, or, more popular now, their direct sales shops.

And don’t expect overnight success.

If that sounds appealing to you—or at least it doesn’t scare you—good luck. May you have a long and fruitful career ahead of you.

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Litters of Letters

by Jill Amadio

Were there ten fewer consonants and only three vowels in the English alphabet, here’s how two of the Bard’s indelible lines would have been written:

“Fr n mr th het f th sn…”  

“Th ly’s th  thg…”

Much of our English is derived from other languages, including Latin, French, Greek,  Italian, German and the aliens for all we know. In fact, our precious alphabet initially descended from the Egyptian Pro-Sinaitic alphabet around 1,800 B.C. The Phoenicians took it up, followed by the Greeks, then the Romans, who brought it to the British Isles during their disgraceful occupation, only to be shunted aside by the bloodthirsty Anglo-Saxons.  By the 13th century, we are told, the “modern English alphabet had emerged from the Old English alphabet.”

Earlier, the Chinese, other Asians, and Russians had invented their own enigmatic images to represent words, adding to our confusion. The strokes used to appear to bear no relation to letters as we know them, but then the vice-versa is also true.

Some writers are rather taken by the French influence whereby we tend to add acute and grave accents over certain letters, and also by the German umlaut of two tiny dots placed over specific vowels.

My keyboard doesn’t provide any of these extra  elegant little marks although to the left of my number 1 in the top row there is a funny little squiggle that resembles a drunken letter N: ~. I am sure it has great significance but the meaning escapes me sand I have never felt compelled to use it, even as an April Fool’s Day joke.

So, by the 13th century the Normans generously presented the Brits with their very own alphabet, and many of the world’s most remarkable English writers went full-tilt into turning out their extraordinary literature.

In my Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, a 1,000-page tome, there is only a single reference to the alphabet. It is from Charles Dickens’  The Pickwick Papers. He had one of his characters, Samievel, being advised that although “there were many things you don’t understand now, but…as the charity boy said when he got to the end of the alphabet, it’s a matter of taste.“

I think Dickens was indicating that knowing the alphabet was a choice but something a poor person may not have the opportunity to learn, if, indeed, he could even read English.

That should be the end of this saga but I became fascinated with my research. It turns out that we have been cheated. There were originally 29 letters in the English alphabet although three other letters were left out entirely: J, U, and W. I also  read that NATO  has its own phonetic alphabet to help members pronounce  English words during their lifelong luxury residence in America.

What’s so interesting now is how our words have come to mean something else entirely, such as “swatting,” “hacking,” and many others.

I wonder how these words translate into other languages, and if the message changes with the wind. Their double meanings will undoubtedly show up in dictionaries although the editors might want to wait a couple of years in case an even different and additional meaning pops up.

At least we still have our five vowels and 21 consonants with which to create characters, settings, plots, and strategies.

My Reading Life in Classics

by Maggie King

My love affair with the classics took off in 1989. Why 1989? That was when I started a job in downtown Los Angeles. One day at lunch a co-worker asked if I wanted to go to the library. Surprised, I said, “Sure!” I’d never worked with anyone who spent her lunch hour at the library.

We walked to the Los Angeles Public Library and I checked out Jane Eyre. I had a vague memory of reading Charlotte Bronte’s tome in high school and decided to try it again. Over the next few years, I read—in many cases revisiting my high school reading list—works by Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustav Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, D. H. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis, W. Somerset Maugham, Ayn Rand, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf, among others.

Many I loved, with a few being okay. Sad to say, I didn’t like Wuthering Heights any better in the early nineties than I had in high school. Heathcliff was just too dark (funny reaction from a crime writer, but there you have it). For many years, Jane Eyre topped my list of favorite classics. But a year ago, I picked it up for the third time and didn’t even finish it. Jane Eyre was given to monologues! Apparently that didn’t bother me thirty-plus years ago.

In 1993 I joined a mystery group and became obsessed with that genre, classic and contemporary. Up to that point, I’d read many Agatha Christie mysteries, but few by other authors. It wasn’t long before I started penning my own.

I try to read at least one classic a year, and sometimes it’s a mystery. A favorite is Wilkie Collins’s early example of detective fiction, Woman in White. I read the epics Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace from start to finish and lived to tell it! I finally got to Little Women a few years ago. I had seen countless film versions but never actually read the delightful autobiographical novel by Louisa May Alcott. David Copperfield was wonderful but populated with characters who, like Jane Eyre, spoke at great length.

Why do I love the classics? They have a timeless quality and universal appeal, essential traits that make a classic a classic. Little Women—despite the lack of texting and social media—could be a contemporary coming-of-age novel.

The classics are known for well-drawn characters and compelling storylines. That said, it can take time for a classic story to be compelling. Contemporary books have to grab the reader on page one; classics require more patience, but are worth the wait. My friend who took me to the LAPL and I started Middlemarch together. Several times I was ready to close the book for good but, being a faster reader, my friend assured me that the story would pick up. Sure enough, George Eliot’s masterpiece became a page turner.

What’s my next classic? Many of my author friends rave about The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. And I’ve had Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters on my TBR list for some time.

Would reading the classics benefit writers? Absolutely! Have they improved my writing? As an optimist, I want to think so—but such a belief is hard to verify. This post on KindredGrace, “5 Reasons Why Every Serious Writer Should Read Classic Literature”, is worth reading. I especially like #4: Classic literature expands our knowledge base for literary allusions.

Renowned author Joyce Carol Oates suggests that writers read Ulysses by James Joyce. According to her, our vocabulary will improve (or, if nothing else, we’ll want our vocabulary to improve). I take Ms. Oates’s point, but will pass on Ulysses (I managed to get through one chapter).

Back to where the classics began for me: here’s a photo of the beautiful and impressive Los Angeles Public Library. During my stint working downtown, this building was closed for renovations due to two fires, and the collection was temporarily housed on South Spring St. By the time the original building reopened in 1993, I was working elsewhere, but occasionally returned to visit this stunning structure. If you can visit, do so, but you can read about it here.

Closing thoughts: what contemporary novels will become classics? Any of our own? Perhaps works by Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates will stand the test of time. As for contemporary crime novels, would any make the cut? As much as I enjoy them, they lack the timeless quality—even the historical ones. I’d love to be proved wrong. In the meantime, we have Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Anna Katharine Green, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and many others.

A big thanks to Alison, my long ago library pal!

AI Can Make Mistakes Too

by Gayle Bartos-Pool

Editing is a major endeavor for any writer. Even if you hire it done or your publisher actually provides one, you need to go over your work a few times to make sure the story you thought you were telling made it to the page.

Before I published my first novel, I hired a professional editor. Back then, most publishers were dropping their editors at an alarming rate because they thought the writer would do a good enough job and the cost of an editor on staff was too much for the publisher, so they were let go.

The editor I hired had worked at a large publishing firm. She’s the one who told me about all the layoffs. I paid a tidy sum and expected her work to be good, if not excellent. I got back my manuscript and happened to ask my sister-in-law who worked as an editor on a large newspaper in Orange County California if she would mind going over the pages. She said yes, did the job, and found numerous errors the overrated editor hadn’t found. I paid my sister-in-law $50 just to be nice. I had paid the “professional” $1800.00. This was back in 1996, even though it took eight years before I got that book into print.

I did my own editing after that. I know there were errors in my subsequent books, but like I say: Only God is perfect.

Recently, I happened to pick up one of my spy novels and decided to read it. I wanted to send a copy to someone whose book I had read and wanted to make sure the book wasn’t too full of errors. I did find a few mistakes during that quick read, but they might be overlooked if the reader didn’t pay too close attention to every comma.

I enjoyed reading my book after all these years and decided to read one of the other books in the spygame series, but this time I let my computer read it aloud to me. I was still watching the screen as it was reading my words, but that’s when I started seeing Spell Check underline a word or two…then it wanted me to add a comma here or delete another comma there or change a phrase or use a different word. I actually agreed with a few of those changes, but I was having a problem with the computer wanting me to add way more commas than we were told to do back in 9th grade English. I didn’t remember old Mrs. York telling us not to use a comma before a “but” in a sentence,,, but the new Spell Check didn’t want the comma.

There were some words that had an obvious typo, but I was surprised I hadn’t caught them myself, but then again, when we read our own work, we know what we were going to say and we “read” it even if it’s not there. That’s why in my newer books I do have the computer read my work back to me so I can hear what I wrote. Many times, I would find a typo that I hadn’t seen when I read through the first draft of the book in actual printed form. When I wrote my first few books which included the three spy novels, I didn’t have the luxury of that audio editor to help me.

So, flash forward several decades and all those computer tools have made the editing somewhat better. I still have errors in my books, but hopefully fewer.

But wait! Sometimes the computer program might be a stickler for “correct English” when you want your words to have more of a regional accent or colorful flair. I continued letting the new Spell Check go over those old words and I started finding things it wanted me to change like in the phrase “everything was socked in” referring to the weather, but AI came up with “shocked in.” Then there was my word “noose,” and it wanted “nose.” Or “chicken coop” was changed to “chicken cop.” “Sliver” to “silver.” “Antiaircraft flak” to “flake.”

“Houston, we have a problem…”

There were dozens more of these stupid mistakes the AI “genius” was making. They weren’t just possible words you might want to use which more or less meant the same thing. These were totally incorrect.

Fortunately, the AI Spell Checker wasn’t making these changes without my Okay like it does on my cell phone or Kindle Tablet, so I didn’t let it have free reign. And as I was making the changes I thought were correct, I still had the WORD program read back my words because hearing them still allowed me to make sure that’s what I wanted to say. I re-edited those three spy books and reissued them this year. Hopefully most of the mistakes were corrected…even with all the blasted commas.

So, be aware of the little goblins hiding in your computer. They might have less education than you do. In fact, I never saw an AI sitting in one of my English classes in high school or college. But I certainly discovered that these AI creatures aren’t writers, because a computer program has no imagination. If you don’t believe me, sit in front of your computer without touching the keypad and tell it to write a novel. Without the human element, human imagination or human touch, or without Internet access to hundreds, if not thousands, of books already written by humans, that conglomeration of motherboard, CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD and HDD can create nothing. Try unplugging your computer with its AI capability and see what it can do by itself. I don’t need to be plugged in or have my batteries replaced in order to tell a story. And my stories are the ones I created, not by a machine that cobbles together bits and pieces of other work and then mashes it all together in an incoherent jumble.

A computer helps, but the human heart, brain and talent will always be better.

  Write On!

MAKING THINGS FIT….     

By Rosemary Lord

Whether it’s time or words – it’s an ongoing challenge for me.

Not having the luxury of a 30-hour day, I’m always trying to squeeze things in, so that, apart from ‘work’, I can have some sort of personal life, family time and of course writing time. As I struggle to transfer my workload at the Woman’s Club of Hollywood to a new dedicated crew, it’s taking a lot longer than I anticipated – and about 6 new people to do the work I’ve been doing on my own for so long!

But – I will make it all fit.

I designated Sunday as MY day, when I will not deal with any Woman’s Club work and only speak with family, friends, potter, catch up on housework and fit in some writing time, too. My ‘work phone’ is switched off. This is the only way I’ve been able to catch up on my personal life, finding serenity, make things fit – and even make time to paint my nails – a pale blue this week! I cherish my Sundays.

I envy some of my friends who retired early and travel all the time. I just can’t fit that in now!

 And then there’s making things fit in my writing. I have three major writing assignments at the moment.  A non-fiction, 144-page coffee-table history book, an historical novel and a memoir. So far, I’ve not had the time – or the mental focus – to sit for hour after hour, day after day, as I used to, to complete one of them. I tend to fit in the odd hour or two and peck away at one of my projects. Although my mind is always working overtime thinking about them.

First, in fiction, especially in mysteries, I have to get the right name for my characters.  I have to make the name fit.

I mean, you can’t really have an exotic, sultry siren called Mary or Jane, could you? Sophia or Camille, maybe. Or a tall, hunky, sun-bronzed hero called Arthur or Reginald, doesn’t really work, does it? The names have to fit the character, the story, the era, the background, in order to be believable.

Although one of my pet peeves as a reader is to have the characters all having a similar sounding name, especially in the same scene: Fin, Tim, Dick, Nick, Rick – or Jim, Jon, Jan, Jen, Janey, Jed and so on. I make a point of making sure the names differ in sound and length. You’re not going to get confused when characters names are specific for the storyline and sound different. Such as a Jim, Stephen, Montgomery, Drew and Samuel. Or Roberta, Annie, Pamela, Sue, Gwendoline and Florence. Different lengths and starting with different consonants. Easier for the reader (and me, the writer) to keep track of.

I always feel challenged with the word-counts we’re given. Tough to fit all I want to say within their limits. Should my work be a short-story, a novella, a novel – or a War and Peace tome? My storyline has to fit into the right category.

Then I (hopefully) unobtrusively, fit in the clues and red herrings. Remembering the villain needs to be seen, fleetingly, very early on in the story. Almost hidden, with no big flashing neon signs. So that at the end, when all is uncovered, I haven’t cheated my readers by suddenly announcing: “By the way, the Butler, whom you’ve never seen before, did it.” As a reader I like to think I know ‘Who Dunnit,’ but I’m not sure and I keep trying to work it out. Then the satisfaction at the end of saying “of course!” and retracing the steps to figure it all out for myself. So, I have to make sure that it all fits in.

And I have to fit in the adversity, the challenges, the processes my characters go through, without the reader aware of what I’m doing.  Static stories are boring. My characters need to lose something – or fear losing it. They must process crisis – large & small – then recover and carry on obliviously enjoying life, until another surprise stops them in their tracks from an unexpected source. Unseen forces. Another deadly trap.

It was Raymond Chandler who said, “there’s no trap so deadly as the trap you set yourself.”

Whatever that means. But then it was Mark Twain who said: “write what you know.”  So, between the two, I should have a story somewhere!

And somehow, I will fit in the time to make it all happen.

Writing anything is a challenge, but writing mysteries is a unique adventure, unraveling the human mind. It’s like designing a large jigsaw puzzle, making all the pieces fit.

So, I’ve become very proficient at making things – time and words – fit. How about you?