When writing fiction, I find it helpful to have pictures of my characters to inspire me. I used to find pictures in magazines, but in magazines, you tend to find the “pretty people”. The perfect, model-y people. My characters rarely look perfect; they look more like you and me. With the Internet, there are many ways to find pictures of Real People, and finding them can change everything.

Let me address the creepiness factor first. My picture’s on Facebook. It’s on MySpace. It used to be on Internet dating sites, which is how I met John. It’s probably on a bunch of other sites I can’t even remember uploading it to. I’ve chosen to make my picture public, and I realize that some writer somewhere might someday decide I look like his or her character and print my photo as inspiration. As long as that person doesn’t share my picture by commercial means, what do I care? I’m hoping the people I find on the Internet don’t mind being my inspiration as well.

So how do I find my characters? I search any of the many social networking sites available on the web, looking for say, my 38-year-old character Ellen who lives in Greensboro, NC. Through search filters, I’ll look for a woman Ellen’s age who lives in or near Greensboro. I’ll find one who strikes me as my Ellen and print out her image to keep near my computer as I work. Her profile or those of other women her age in Greensboro, will help me see what activities my character might enjoy in that region. 

Ironically, although I start out looking for a photo of a person who resembles my character, the photo itself often makes me change my character, sometimes dramatically. Let’s look at the picture in this blog, (I must quickly point out that this photo is not from a social networking site, but purchased through istock.com, which is where I often find my blog photos.) I see things in this woman’s face that I never imagined in Ellen’s. She’s beautiful, but she looks a little tired, don’t you think? She cares about her grooming (check out those eyebrows!) She has a little bit of modern-day hippie in her (the earrings). There’s something hard in her face–she’s tougher than I thought Ellen would be, and more determined. My character Ellen is up for a job against some much younger candidates, and the woman in this photo knows her age is showing and she’s not sure what to do about it.

See what I mean? I’m not writing about a character named Ellen right now (Ellen is a fictional fictional character. Ha!). But I am writing about a group of women in Wilmington, NC and my desk is littered with “their” pictures. I printed them all out a couple of days ago and as they came out of my printer, they became more real, with dimensions I never knew they possessed.

Next, I’ll find their homes on Realtor.com and their neighborhoods on the absolutely frighteningly invasive ”street view” feature on Googlemaps.com. But their story? The only place I can find that is in my imagination, and that site is slow!

Welcome UK readers!

 I was thrilled when my publisher released The Lost Daughter (known in the US as The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes) in the United Kingdom last year. It was embraced by so many new-to-me readers and made #1 on the Heatseekers’ Chart. The Heatseekers’ Chart in the UK contains books by up and coming authors who have yet to appear on the bestseller list there. I hope one day to climb  into that rarified atmosphere, but for now I’m excited to be exactly where I am.  My second book released in the UK is The Bay at Midnight, which was published in mid-December. After four weeks climbing the Heatseekers’ Chart, it too reached the top spot this week. I feel so lucky!

Those of you who’ve been reading my blog a long time know that The Bay at Midnight has a special place in my heart, since the setting was my childhood summer home. I wasn’t sure how the book would translate to a UK audience. Sure enough, one of the reviews mentioned certain  American  cultural references, such as Leave it to Beaver, 81 year-old Maria working at a McDonald’s, and the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore.  Yet the reviews have been great and my readers across the pond seem to enjoy the story even  if they’ve never heard of Wally and The Beave. The world feels so small sometimes, doesn’t it?

Before the Storm and Secrets She Left Behind will also be published in the UK this year.  It’s so much fun to see these books get a second life. Thanks, UK readers, for taking my stories into your hearts.

(Thank you, British reader Diane Beharrell for snapping this photo at the Gatwick London Airport!)

First, this is not a complaint! I’m actually quite happy about what’s going on, even though I don’t quite understand it.

The past couple of weeks, I seem to have gained a zillion new readers. At least, I’ve heard from a zillion new readers. Over the last couple of years, especially since Target selected The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes as a bookclub pick in 2008, I’ve gradually gained new readers and it’s been wonderful. I’ve heard from many of them via email and spoken to dozens of bookclubs via speakerphone. This last week, though, for some reason I haven’t been able to figure out, I’ve received more than fifty emails asking me what books I have coming up and which older books are available. I always receive a couple of those emails a day, but fifty in a week??  In addition, several readers have explored my list of books on Amazon, discovering titles they’d never heard of and emailing me to ask why. So I think, given this influx of similar questions, it’s time for me to offer a few answers.  

First, the Amazon query. There is another author named  Diane Chamberlain. She often uses her middle initial: Diane K. Chamberlain. She writes inspirational Christian non-fiction,  and she’s a lovely person. There’s nothing she or I can do about the fact that Amazon can’t keep us straight and puts my books on her page and vice versa. I’m sorry for the confusion, but if I have to be confused with someone, I’m glad it’s her.

Second, the Amazon query again. I’ve addressed this several times, but I’ll repeat it now for those new blog readers: different countries sometimes give my books different titles. Most notably, The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes is The Lost Daughter in the UK and A Beautiful Lie in Australia. If you see a book on Amazon (or anywhere else)  that you haven’t heard of before, check out the story description to be sure you haven’t read it.

Third, people have asked me if my books are linked. All of my books are written to stand alone, but several of them are linked:

• The Keeper Trilogy: Keeper of the Light, Kiss River and Her Mother’s Shadow
• The Topsail Island Books: Before the Storm and Secrets She Left Behind

Finally, readers sometimes have trouble keeping track of which books are available, which are reissues, when older books will be reissued and most importantly, when the next brand new book will be out. With so many people asking me these questions over the past couple of weeks, I decided to write a standard answer to plug into my otherwise personalized responses to their emails (I always answer my own email. You’re important to me!) Here’s what I said:

• Please check out the “books” page on my website to see what books are available. In the upper right hand corner of that page, there’s a link to a printable book list. I keep that list updated at all times and it will let you know the publication date of all my books, as well as which books are reissues and what books will be published in the near future.

I hope this helps those of you who are new (or even not so new) to my books. I’m delighted you’re enjoying my stories and look forward to entertaining you for many years to come!

One of the worst crimes a writer can commit is to be predictable in his or her storyline and characters. This holds true even in genre fiction, where a certain formula is generally followed: In a romance, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl reunite forever. In a mystery, a crime occurs, there are many suspects, the criminal is revealed. In a thriller we have an innocent victim, a tightening noose of terror, and ultimately, escape and release. Even in these formulaic examples, predictability makes for a boring, disappointing read. And as I’ve mentioned elsewhere on my blog, I am terrified of being boring.

I’ll be blogging off and on about my work-in-progress because it’s my world at the moment and will be even moreso  as I head toward my May 1 deadline. The working title is The Midwife’s Confession, and it’s about a group of old college friends and a fight for their families. I carefully outlined this story about a year and a half ago. My editor loved the outline, but I had to put the story aside because of a scheduling probem with the publisher. I then wrote The Lies We Told, which will be out this coming June. Now, though, I return to The Midwife’s Confession with a fresh eye, and here’s what I’m discovering.

It’s an excellent and engrossing story. However, I find myself hitting a couple of points as I write that are–dare I say it–trite or possibly even boring. These elements work just fine in the outline, but I feel dragged down by them in the story itself, and if I feel dragged down, so will my reader. So these elements need to change and that’s what I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. I’m pleased to say I’ve made great progress.

Since I don’t want to give anything away, I’ll make something up so you can understand what I’m talking about. Let’s say that my story, in outline form, has a 16-year-old girl who is rebellious, hates her parents, steals beer from the fridge, and has unprotected sex. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that–the description fits plenty of 16-year-old girls. But she’s so darn predictable. The reader knows this kid too well, and I’m yawning just thinking about her. When I would start to translate the story from outline to manuscript form, this girl would probably jump out at me as Trite with a capital T. I’d then brainstorm with friends, John, or myself, looking for ways to make her different and more interesting.

When I was working on my third novel, Secret Lives, I was discussing a scene  with some writer friends. The scene involved an argument between a father and his grown daughter, and one of my friends suggested I have the daughter  react in an outlandish manner. “She wouldn’t do that!” I resisted. Well, most people wouldn’t. Most people are predictable. As I played with the scene, though, I decided to give the suggestion a try. Suddenly, I had a scene that really came to life, was populated by fascinating people, and was guaranteed to make the reader sit up and take notice.

Without revealing too much, I can tell you one of the situations in The Midwife’s Confession that was bugging me because of its triteness. I wanted to get one of the women’s husband’s out of the way of the story because I needed the woman to deal with a certain situation on her own, so I had the husband leave her for another woman. It worked beautifully in the outline. I really put the woman through the mill as she dealt with her husband’s infidelity. Yet it seemed so trite when I started to actually write his affair into the book. So I changed the story, and now he’s dead. Not that death is any less trite, but killing him off opened up a new set of intriguing possibilities for me. Did he die of natural causes? We’ll see. Did he die with a secret, perhaps? (Indeed he did!)

I’m always thinking of my reader as I write.  Will she guess where I’m going? Maybe. Will she guess correctly? Heh heh. I hope not. That’s the most enjoyable part of writing a big fat novel for me: creating the puzzle, making it work, and avoiding the expected wherever I can.

Predictability in real life is a nice thing. In fiction, it’s a bore.

Ahoy Matey! Prepare for a curmudgeonly post!

You know, I really don’t know how pirates came by their cute, fun, and harmless image. Little kids (boys, especially) seem to love all things pirate these days. Just check out the toy aisle of your local Target or WalMart. But there’s nothing cute about piracy. Not on the high seas, and not on the Internet.

If you’re a writer, you probably know that your ability to make a living–never a sure thing to begin with–has taken some blows in recent years. Publishing is changing so quickly it’s impossible to keep up. Copyrights are under seige. Customers can buy your latest release for a buck used on Amazon. New authors hungry to be published are tempted by vanity presses operating under a variety of guises. E-book royalties are all over the map.  But one change is particularly galling because it is both illegal and almost impossible to stop: the piracy of e-books.

An article by Jim Milliot in the January 14th issue of Publishers Weekly addresses the extent of the problem. He states that Attibutor Inc, a company that monitors the Internet for illegally posted content, tracked 913 books in the last quarter of 2009 and estimated that over 9 million copies were illegally downloaded, and that was only from the  25 sites it was monitoring.  The cost to publishers and authors from piracy is staggering.

At this time, fiction titles are not the the biggest target of pirates; the majority of the downloaded books are professional or technical. Attributor did report finding nearly 8,000 illegal downloads of Angels and Demons, however. And the numbers are growing–rapidly.

What’s an author to do? At first, my published friends and I searched for our titles on piracy sites and requested that they be removed from the online ”catalogs.” Often they were. But now, the sites are so many that it’s become impossible to keep up. On one of my writers’ loops, an author reported having her assistant take over the job of finding her books on the piracy sites, but the assistant was quickly overwhelmed by the task and had no choice but to give up.

There is so little authors have control over. We are responsible for what goes between the covers of the book and that’s about it. We want that content to reach our readers, of course. That’s why we write. But we also deserve to be paid for our work, no matter how much a labor of love that work may be.

I don’t know how the publishing business is going to shake down in the next decade. It will be interesting to see. The one thing that seems very clear, though, is that the author is not going to come out a winner. It makes me wonder if, in ten years, there will be anything left to pirate.

People sometimes ask me how I deal with the isolation of writing. I’ve recently been in touch with a former co-worker from my days as a hospital social worker and communicating with her reminds me of what it was like to work with other people. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that! The hospital had a large social work department and my memory is of a deep bond between all of us.  We did some emotionally difficult work, but we had each other to turn to for advice, support and—often–laughter. The work was so rewarding,  and being part of a family of fellow social workers made it even more so.  Nevertheless,  during the years I worked there, I was writing my first novel in every speck of my free time.  I adored my job, but I had a passion for storytelling that wouldn’t leave me alone.  

Alone.  That word brings me back to the question of isolation. One writes alone. It’s certainly true that most writers tend to be more introverted than extroverted. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re shy or that they can’t be outgoing. Rather it means that their minds and spirits are fed by that precious time alone. They need it.  They can’t create without it.  That is certainly true of me, but I also need frequent doses of  other people in my life. On the Myers-Briggs Personality Type scale, I fall smack in the middle  between Introversion and Extraversion.  While great chunks of time alone are necessary for my writing, they’re also. . . well, lonely. 

I’m lucky that I live with someone who is also self-employed, so it is a bit like having a co-worker. John and I work in different parts of the house, but we stop to chitchat occasionally or to gripe with each other over computer problems or talk about our work. It also helps that we’re both in creative fields and seem to have similar requirements for alone and together time and that we’re both committed one hundred percent to what we’re doing. There is never the temptation to just goof off during the day.  

So while it’s great having John nearby, the thing that really saves me from a sense of isolation is having friends who are also published novelists and who are as serious about their careers as I am. I’ve been lucky to have always had this outlet. When I lived in Virginia, Emilie Richards and Patricial McLinn and I got together frequently to brainstorm and talk shop. And I’ve blogged often about the retreats I go on with my group of writer friends here in North Carolina. We stay in touch by email and between our getaways, we meet for lunch whenever we can.   I go home from those meet-ups renewed and ready to get back to work. When you work alone, it’s critical to find a way to connect with other people, not only to avoid insanity but to help you feed the creative well.

It’s hard for me to remember what it was like to have genuine co-workers. . . and to work for someone else. What I miss most about it is, frankly, the financial benefits of a “real” job:  The security of a regular paycheck,   help with the health insurance premiums, and most of all, an employer to pay half of that killer 15% FICA payment. (Do not quit your day job until you’ve thought all this through!)

Yes, it’s costly( and sometimes lonely) to work all by myself. But getting to work at something I love? Priceless.

Today I was twice reminded that I have a quirk.

This morning, I received a request to speak at an event and had to ask my standard question: “Can you describe the venue to me, please?” Here is my ideal venue in which to speak. It’s a large, low-ceilinged room, perhaps a meeting room or ballroom in a hotel, filled with chairs and/or tables (and of course, an audience of avid readers). Sure enough, the request was for just such a venue, and I breathed a sigh of relief for reasons I’ll get to soon enough.

Then this afternoon, John and I visited a new health club. As part of the tour, we were taken into the gym. John admired the hugeness of the place, the maple floors, the equipment stored against the walls, while I hung back in the doorway asking, “Uh, the yoga class isn’t held in here, is it?” (It’s not. Big sigh of relief).

It’s hard to explain how I feel about huge, open spaces (Like the train station above. Shudder). If you have any trepidation at all about heights, I can probably make you understand in this way: Imagine standing on the top of twenty story building, at the very edge of the roof, no railing between you and the abyss. That’s how I feel standing in the middle of a gym or Union Station or a giant auditorium. (Now, as you stand at the edge of that roof, try to give a speech. Ha!).

A couple of years ago I was discussing my speaking venue dilemma with a friend, poet and short story writer Maureen Sherbondy, and I told her how foolish I felt about my need to ascertain the venue before accepting an invitation to speak. Maureen said something like “But you’re a writer. People expect writers to have quirks.” So now I’m into embracing my inner quirk. I much prefer that word to “phobia.”

Where did this come from? I’ve already opened up in the blog about my selective mutism as a kid, and this may have been an extension of that in some way–the school phobia leading to the large space phobia. I had many fears when I was young, and with a fascination for all things psychological, I worked through them one by one as I got older. The fear I am most proud of conquering was my fear of hospitals. I wouldn’t visit hospitalized friends or family; I couldn’t even tolerate the lobbies. In my graduate social work program, I actively avoided classes where I knew there would be students whose focus was on medical social work because I didn’t want to hear them talk about their cases. Yet, an event in my life ultimately led me to want to be a medical social worker myself. I was familiar with desensitization and other ways of overcoming fears, so I created my own therapeutic approach to the problem. Six months after making my decision to switch from being a family therapist to a medical social worker, I was working in a hospital and loving it. What an amazing sense of accomplishment that was!

But no amount of desensitization or insight or therapy has ever put a dent in my discomfort with big spaces. I’ve spoken in a few of them, managing to find work-arounds that probably made me seem highly eccentric (an odd placement of the podium, perhaps), but I guess I’m just a quirky writer and that’s all there is to it. 

So how about you? Can you stand on the roof of a twenty-story building without freaking out? Ride in teeny tiny elevators? Marvel at the colors of the snake in your backyard? What’s your quirk?

I’m a believer in resolutions. I don’t always keep them, but there’s something about that “fresh start feeling” that has great appeal to me. I have a slew of resolutions this year. Here goes:

-Work at writing as though it’s a 9 to 5 job.  This may sound like a no-brainer, especially to those of you who are not self-employed, but I tend to let other things get in the way of writing during the day. Then I work late into the night and I’m usually freaking out in the weeks leading up to deadline. All right, I know I’ll still freak out shortly before deadline, but organizing my work schedule will make me feel more in control before the crunch hits. So I’m going to pretend I have a boss who will not allow me to spend hours on Facebook or run out for groceries or Starbucks when the urge pops into my mind. Which brings me to the second resolution.

-I will actually attend the gym where I have a membership, instead of merely paying them a fee each month, and I will go early in the morning so I can be at my computer at 9 am. Uh, this should be interesting. To be at the gym early in the morning means going to bed earlier at night. Which brings me to resolution number three.

-Lights out at midnight. Not sure how I’m going to do this, because my reading time is usually 11 pm to 1 am or later. I can’t give up reading, so I guess I’ll have to get an earlier start on it.   

-Attend mindfulness classes at a local yoga center. I’ve recently rediscovered my mindfulness and meditation practice, something I enjoyed when I lived in Virginia. It centers me and brings me peace and joy, but as with everything else on my list, I need to actually do it to reap the benefit. 

-Do a few hours of volunteer work each month. I am so blessed, and there’s so much need.

-Stay in better touch with my family and friends. This should really be number one on my list. It is number one. 

Looking over my resolutions, I can see the one thing that will trip me up is TIME. Like everyone else in the world, I don’t have enough of it. But I’m going to give this list my best shot.

 How about you? Are you a resolver?