I’m not a big fan of reality TV, but one show I love and never miss is Project Runway. I get such a kick out of the artistic personalities and seeing real talent ultimately rise to the top. More than anything, though, I’m fascinated by the process of creation. If you haven’t seen Project Runway, it goes something like this: the contestants are given an assignment, such as “make an outfit appropriate for a Times Square billboard out of things you can buy in a pet store.” Then they’re given, perhaps, ten hours to complete the task. Around hour five, Tim Gunn (who is impossible not to adore!) visits the workroom to check out what everyone is doing and offer helpful comments. Then around hour six, they throw a last-minute wrench in the works, such as: “You also need to add an accessory to your outfit and it must be in the color of Heidi Klum’s lipstick,” or something equally ludicrous. (Heidi is a pip. Seriously, how does a woman keep having babies and look like that? It’s utterly beyond me).

So what does this have to do with writing? It occurred to me as I was watching Project Runway the other night that the process of creating an outfit under a tight deadline is very much like writing a book under a tight deadline. There is the “make something from nothing” element, followed by the creation of the design or in the case of a book, the structure. Then there is the execution. Then there is Tim Gunn. When Tim spent time with the designers the other night, critiquing their half-finished projects, one of them said something like “We need you because we’re too close to our work and can’t see the forest for the trees.” Tim is very good at seeing the forest, and that comment reminded me of the reason writers need editors. (Listen up, self-pubbed people! Hire one if you don’t have one).

My editor is really earning her salary as she works with me on The Midwife’s Confession. What draft am I on now? I’ve lost track. Doesn’t matter. This is the one that counts. I’d mentioned that after my editor read my complete manuscript, she wanted me to add the point of view of the late midwife herself. I knew she was right, but that required rewriting the entire book, introducing a storyline  that added layers of depth to an already packed tale. I thought I was done then. I knew I’d have some tweaking to do, but I wasn’t quite prepared for my editor’s last-minute suggestion: “Now that the focus is more on the midwife, we no longer need Grace’s (the teenaged girl) point-of-view.” Ack! Once again, I knew she was right. I was so immersed in my creation that, like those Project Runway designers,  I hadn’t been able to see the forest for the trees.

So that is my task for this week. It will be the final major overhaul of this book, and it’s about as easy as creating an evening gown out of rawhide chips and dog food bags. See my computer screen above? The full manuscript is on the right, the new mansucript is in the middle. And on the left are the scenes from Grace’s point of view. I am going through them to see what information she gave the reader that the reader simply must know and which I’ll therefore have to seamlessly incorporate into other characters’ points of view. Even more crucial is the need to allow Grace to remain a whole and significant character in the story without allowing her to tell the story herself. Trust me, I have quite a challenge ahead of me!

I’m getting a kick out of it, though. Whenever a book feels like a puzzle to me, it gets my juices flowing. I feel as though Tim Gunn’s paid me a visit, shaken me up a bit, and then told me to “Make it work!” So that’s what I’m up to this week. I want The Midwife’s Confession to knock ‘em dead on the runway. You won’t even be able to see where I stitched the dog food bags together.

I’m so tired of always having fur on my carpets! I’m even more tired of vacuuming, so I decided to try a Roomba. Here’s the first few seconds of its inaugural voyage across my living room floor (the clumps of dog fur were planted by me, I hasten to add, but there are days when my carpet does look like that all on its own). Keeper was a little freaked out, while Jet was mildly curious. After this initial reaction, they completely ignored the thing. I wish they would be so mellow about the mail carrier and the UPS guy.

Now that I’ve had my Roomba for two days, what do I think?

The Good: Wow, does it clean! I’m shocked and appalled at all it’s picked up from what I thought was a clean carpet. It zips under furniture to sweep areas that haven’t seen a vacuum in, well, a very long time. It sucks up big stuff and small. It covers the entire floor and has these little bristly things that reach into corners and along walls. It’s quite impressive.

The Bad: When a machine picks up so much stuff, the stuff has to go somewhere, and there’s the problem. I’ll be in my office while the Roomba’s in the living room, for example. As the Roomba zooms around the room, its bristle brush gets full of dog hair and other debris and the Roomba stops. A nice woman calls out to me from the living room: “Clean the brushes!” and the dogs begin to bark at the stranger in the house. Cleaning the brushes is not difficult but it takes about ten minutes and is going to get old fast. Roomba hasn’t made it through a single room without asking for my help. Now, maybe this is just a testament to the fact that the carpet was in desperate need of cleaning, but I have a feeling in my two-dog house, this will be the norm.

So I need to make a decision about whether to keep this little guy or not. I’m curious about the new Neato, but it’s significantly more expensive, especially since I purchased the Roomba at Bed, Bath and Beyond with one of their 20% coupons. As I walk around my house tonight, though, and see carpets that are very nearly spotless, knowing they can be that way every single day without me having to drag out the vacuum. . . well think of all the extra time I’ll have to write. Except for those ten-minute brushing-cleaning breaks. Hmm.

How about you? Do any of you use a robotic cleaner? I’d love to hear your experiences.

Actually, these are my second impressions. My first weren’t so good, but that was because: a) I have no Mac experience; b) I wanted to learn to do many complicated things at once, and preferably by osmosis; and c) I am impatient. Oh, and d) I neglected to notice the User’s Guide, which really is a pretty handy little thing! But I’ve had my iPad for a couple of weeks now and I’m falling in love with it. I know I’ve only scratched the surface of what I can do with it. I’m a true novice. Still, for those of you who’d like a novice-eye view from a decidely un-techie person, I thought I’d share. 

One of the things I love best about the iPad is that I can type a document on the screen. I bought an external wireless keyboard thinking I would need it, but I may just take it back. The screen is so much fun and easy to use. It’s especially great for typing a draft. I’ll probably never use it for major editing since I love a mouse for that, but I’m impressed with all I can do with this little keyboard alone. I use an ergonomic keyboard with my desktop because of rheumatoid arthritis, but the pressure needed to type on the screen is so effortless that–so far–it’s not causing me any problems.  The keyboard also changes according to my needs. Trying to go to a website? The keyboard automatically offers me a  ”.com” button. Very cool.

I use the Pages application for creating documents, as I’m doing right now. It’s correcting my mistakes as I type. There are zillions of applications you can download for free or very little money, and I’m only getting started exploring them. I have a calculator app to help when I’m balancing my checkbook online. I have Passport Wallet to help me remember all my passwords. . . as long as I can remember the password I used to lock the wallet. Hmmm. What was that password?

The apps I will never download are the games, and I’m making that statement here publicly. Games are my weakness. Years ago I blogged about my Freecell addiction. Back then, you needed a password to get to Freecell.  I finally made up a long, complicated password that I knew I’d be unable to memorize. I jotted it down and gave it to my stepdaughter when she came to visit, telling her never to allow me to have it. But I called her before she’d even reached her own front door, pleading for the password like the addict I was. I’ve taken all games off my computer and I hope I have the strength to keep them off my iPad.

The iPad doesn’t take the place of a computer. You can’t use it to save a bunch of files, but you can email them to yourself or to a “cloud account” like MobileMe, then pick them up on your desktop or laptop. MobileMe is also busy syncing my calendar and contacts at all times, a huge convenience. I never did master the calendar sync function on my Blackberry, but so far it’s worked seamlessly with the iPad.

Surfing the web and managing email are easy and I love that I can change the size of a web image with a pinch of my fingers. I went with the 3G model, which means I can connect to the Internet even if there’s no WiFi connection available. I opted for this feature because I recently stayed in a couple of hotels (good ones, mind you) where I ended up needing to use a cord connection (ethernet? what do I know?) to physically connect my laptop to the ‘net. What a hassle, and with the iPad I would have been out of luck. Getting 3G  turned out to be a good thing, because our household WiFi connection is apparently not all that strong in my home office and having 3G allows me to connect in my office as needed. But the 3G is a luxury. If you don’t mind being disconnected when you’re out and about until you can find a Starbucks or Panera with free WiFi, then don’t bother paying the extra money for 3G.

I love the airplane mode feature! By flicking this little toggle, you disconnect from the Internet, thereby extending your battery life. Whether you could still use the iPad to read on a plane during take-off and landing, I’m not sure. I think that’s the theory, but when I last flew we were told to turn off anything with an on-off switch, so that would include the iPad. That’s the negative about using an e-reader. Those around you on the plane are turning pages and you’re staring out the window at the runway. Still, the page-turners have five books in their suitcases while you have one little e-reader, so it all works out in the end.

Back to reading. How does the iPad fare? Well, it’s fantastic. . . but you can get other e-readers for far less money, so I’d only go the iPad route if you’ll be making good use of its other features. I’ve had a Kindle for a couple of years and I love it, but I never knew what the book covers looked like because they don’t show up on the Kindle. By installing the free Kindle app on the iPad, suddenly all my Kindle books appeared in front of me in all their colorful, graphic glory. Wow! I’d had no idea! I also love the backlight and the ability to adjust the brightness, but if you’re the type to suffer eyestrain from computer use, the Kindle or another more page-like e-reader might be a better choice. I do miss the dictionary feature of the Kindle. There may be something similar on the iPad, but it’s not intuitive and I haven’t checked the user’s guide to find out where it exists. With Kindle, if you put the cursor in front of a word you don’t know, you instantly get the definition. Beautiful.

Battery life. Well, it’s not the Kindle, which kept on ticking for a week or two on one charge, but that’s because the iPad is doing so much more than simply displaying books. I’ve been charging it about every other night. Not a big deal, but the Kindle spoiled me there.

I have a lot of travel coming up in the next few months and I’m wondering if I dare leave my laptop home. Right now, I couldn’t. I have too many documents and pictures on my laptop that I need. . . and that I can rarely predict I’m going to need. Promotional requests that require one certain buried image, for example. Or a document I’ve tucked away someplace on the laptop, never thinking I’d need again. But if I can get my act together well enough to upload the things I might need to MobileMe, I might just risk it. We’ll see.

I’d say I’ve discovered about 10% of what I will ultimately be able to do with the iPad. I still have a lot to learn and plan to take one of the free classes at the Apple store if I can ever find the time. If you’re using an iPad, I’d love to hear what you like–or don’t like–about it. Just don’t tell me about your favorite games!

A few nights ago when I was getting ready for bed, I had a nighty-night pill and my earplugs waiting for me on my nightstand. Not thinking, I reached for an earplug and my bottle of water, catching myself when I had the earplug an inch from my mouth (which is much better than the time I nearly swallowed my dog’s pill; I really need to pay attention to what I’m doing!).

As I realized my error, the following scenario took less than twenty seconds to run through my mind:

I swallow the earplug. It gets its soft, foamy mass stuck in my windpipe and I can’t breathe. I run into the dining room where John is working at his laptop and try to demonstrate that I need the Heimlich maneuver. How would I do it?? Omigod! Could I ever make him understand what I need? Would I have time to write down that I had an earplug stuck in my throat?? Would there be a pen nearby? Would I try to Heimlich myself, throwing my midsection across the back of one of the dining room chairs? Aren’t the chairs too tall? Would John think I was joking around? Would he be so absorbed in his work that he never looked up at all? Would I have to beat on his head to get him to notice my duress? Would I eventually collapse and die? Would the article in the paper read Local Author Chokes to Death on Earplug? How totally humiliating!

This is what it’s like to live inside my brain. If you are not a fiction writer, enjoy your sanity!

Counting all the votes on my blog and Facebook page, it looks like this cover is the winner for the e-book reissue of The Escape Artist. First, I’ll play with it a little–soften the focus and tweak a few other things to make it more to my liking. But I do love this little guy. He is perfect for Tyler in the book.

Second place was this one, which I love as well, but she needs to have a little boy holding her hand and I couldn’t find any great stock images that convey both the feeling of this image but also have a mom and a little boy–plus the wonderful colors of her dress and suitcase.

Most of us agreed that this cover was just plain inappropriate to the story and the character who is a young and scared mom, not a slut.  When I spotted this stock image with the paintbrushes, though, I was smitten. It’s wrong for the book, however, so I’m tossing it.

Finally, several of you liked this one, which was my favorite but again wrong for the book. A couple of you mentioned the Goth/Twilight look of it and that’s an accurate assessment. I saw the timelessness, the pensiveness, the romance and the artistry. I just think it’s a pretty cover. Again, though, it’s wrong for the book, so out it goes.

Therefore, the worried little boy is the winner. . . unless I find the perfect mom-and-son-on-the-open-road picture. Thanks for helping me make the decision!

I’m starting the process of making The Escape Artist available as an e-book. It will take a little while, as you can see by the process I went through to get Secret Lives up and running, but I’m already playing with cover ideas. Please help me by voting for your favorite. Which cover draws you in? In case you haven’t read The Escape Artist, it’s the story of a young woman–an artist–who’s about to lose custody of her year-old son, so she escapes across the country with him to Annapolis, Maryland where she finds herself in danger from an unlikely source. Like most of my books, it doesn’t fall neatly into any one category. It’s part intrigue, part romance, part suspense. Thanks for your help!

A.

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I just finished Elizabeth Berg’s Year of Pleasures, which was lovely, as all of her books are. Her values shine through without clobbering you over the head, and they are so similar to my own core values that I always find myself nodding along as I read. I think Elizabeth and I could be great friends. But there is one way her central character, Betta,  and I are very different. Betta cooks. A lot. Easily. Confidently. At the drop of a hat. The right groceries always seem to be on hand. She nurtures people through food. I wish this described me, but it so doesn’t.

I have to plan meals. I mean, sit down with a recipe, make my list of ingredients, go shopping, scrutinize the recipe as I cook and even then I often screw it up. I can’t bake well at all, although I really do think my 25 year old oven has to share the blame for that. I do blame it, all the time.

If someone stopped by unexpectedly, Betta would throw together a pork roast stuffed with somemthing exotic, surrounded by potatoes and veggies, and she would have enough to serve however many people showed up.  If someone stops by unexpectedly at my house, I pull out the take-out menus for the nearby restaurants.

So I’m curious. Is Betta more typical or am I? What kind of cook are you? (and if anyone has the recipe for that pork loin in the picture, send it my way. Yum!)

I believe this is draft #8 of The Midwife’s Confession.

Yes, all of you who are trying to write a book and believe that once you’ve typed The End you’ll have a publishable novel, you are 99 times out of 100, wrong. You have to do it again until you get it right. I think I now have TMC almost right. Because I made some huge and dramatic changes to the story, I know my editor will want some tweaking, so there will be a draft #9, no doubt about it. But here’s the good news: I loved the story before, and now I love it even more. Lots more. I also love my editor for zeroing in on exactly what the story needed, and that was more from the midwife herself, as I mentioned a few blog posts ago.

How could I have missed the need to make Noelle, the midwife, more central to the story? It was really a case of not seeing the forest for the trees and I think this happens often with novelists, which is why they need editors. (Even if you plan to self-publish, hire an editor, please. One who can see the big picture and not just the misplaced commas).

Writing Noelle’s backstory turned out to be the most enjoyable part of writing this entire book. I suddenly understood why she became a midwife, how complicated her connections were to the other characters, and just how many things she had to confess! She was a far richer character than I’d thought. She was also really annoyed with me for giving her short shrift in the original story, apparently, because just as the character Sam tormented me during one of the early drafts by changing all the character names to his, Noelle did the same thing to me a couple of days ago when I was down to the deadline wire. I was merrily typing along when suddenly I realized that every proper name in my Word document had been switched to “Noelle”. That included city names, high school names, and all capitalized “Buts.”  Example: “Noelle,” Noelle said. “We need to go to Noelle and pick up Noelle.” Yeah, that was fun to fix. Not. (Side note: if anyone knows why Word is doing this and how I can fix it, email me please!!)  It’s more than a little spooky that both Noelle and Sam are dead and they are the only characters who have pulled this stunt on me.

So I’ve turned in the book once again. I wept while writing it, and not just because Sam and Noelle were giving me a hard time, but because I found this story of mothers and daughters and best friends moving. I can’t wait till May to see if you all feel the same way.

I’m revising for a Monday deadline, so I’ve been a little neglectful of my blog this week. But I thought I’d take a minute to show you my wonderful roll top desk during the throw-everything-anywhere phase of the revision process. I saw this Winners Only desk about ten years ago, when I moved into my own house after a really difficult divorce. It was on the pricey for me, so I passed it by. But the house had this alcove in the family room and when I measured it, it exactly fit the dimensions of the desk. I called the store and asked how long it would take to get it. They said “Would this afternoon work?” So within a few hours, I had this magnificent and incredibly useful desk in my house, worth every penny I paid for it.

The twelve little drawers have labels (I see I’ve lost a few) for each month, so I can keep receipts in them. The lower drawers have big filing cabinets. There are all sorts of drawers and hidden compartments. Beneath the desk, right behind the dog bed, is a cupboard where I keep old manuscripts. And the desk has these two wonderful pull-out shelves (the yellow stack is my work in progress) that I use all the time. Another recognizable item on the desk are the two fat books toward the front with a cover theat resembles the cover on Secrets She Left Behind. It’s actually an Italian edition I just received, in which they packaged The Bay at Midnight together with The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes. That’s one fat book!

Of course the best thing about my roll top desk is that I can roll the top closed when company comes and no one has to know how sloppy I am.

Right now, I’m grabbing that work-in-progress and heading for the Opium Den. Have a great weekend, everyone. Hope you’re reading something fabulous!

As I’ve said so often on my blog, I love my readers!

I heard from one of them, Autumn Fenton, on Facebook today. Autumn told me that she named one of her dogs ‘Wilkes’ after CeeCee Wilkes! I think that’s a first. I’ve named a couple of my own dogs after my books (Chapel after the Chapel House in my first book, Private Relations, and Keeper after Keeper of the Light), but I’ve never before had the honor of a reader naming a pet after one of my characters. I love it!

Wilkes is the handsome Brittany Spaniel on the left, and the name of the Maltese on the right? Story. Don’t you love it?

Continuing the theme, here’s a picture of another one of Autumn’s Brittanies. Meet Ingalls. Yes, Ingalls. I’m sitting here with a big smile on my face as I type up this post.

Now, I think we need to meet Autumn herself. Here she is, decked out in a reproduction of the green drapery dress from Gone With the Wind. Autumn wrote to me, “Along with several other ‘Scarletts’, I wore the dress in 1989 in Atlanta and other places to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film.” She also told me about the six week camping trip she and her husband enjoyed, visiting all nine locations of the Little House books. “Since my husband never read the books as a boy, I read them aloud to him as we drove west.” I have to say, her husband sounds like quite a guy!

I’d love to hear how some of you come up with names for your pets. Are you inspired by literature when it comes to naming your pups and kitties?

Thank you, Autumn, for sharing your pictures and for your great sense of humor. I hope Wilkes lives a long and happy life.