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!

Hey, blog readers, thanks for hanging out with me this week! We’re sitting in our hotel room tonight and John just gave me a thumbs up and said “Good week!” and he’s so right. It’s been quite an experience in many ways, and I’ll never again baste a turkey without thinking of “the oven” (I’m still finding splotches of purple on my skin).  I fell in love with Rochester and the Minnesotans I’ve met and I’m so impressed with the Mayo Clinic.   Best of all, of course, was getting good news–a diagnosis I can most definitely live with and one that hadn’t before been mentioned to me as a possibility, despite the various docs I’ve seen for the symptoms. I’m very, very glad we made this trip.

On another note, I’ve been working on a difficult and crucial chapter in The Midwife’s Confession while we’ve been here. My concentration’s been a little off (understatement!) and it’s been slow going, but I’ve had this scene beautifully rendered in my mind for weeks. Tonight, though, I did a bit of research to help me flesh out the scene and learned something that totally destroyed my plans for the action. It has to do with how maternity units have changed since I worked in one. I keep picturing the unit I worked in back in the day. For the sake of moms and babies, I’m delighted so much progress has been made in supporting that post partum bond. For the sake of my story, though, bring back the old days! 

But every setback has a silver lining and the research opened up another approach to the scene–one that I think will be even better. So now I’m rewriting. Or re-re-rewriting. This is the book that just doesn’t want to end!

Have a great weekend, everyone. I can’t wait to get home to my pups!

It’s so strange to be able to show you the cover of a book I’m still revising, but here it is! It will be in your hands May 2011. I hope!

Can we talk about sleep?

I’d love to know your falling asleep tricks, because I need some!

The first problem is that I’m a natural nightowl and always have been. As a little kid, I couldn’t wait to go to bed so I could lay awake making up stories. It probably took me two hours to fall asleep every night because I was busy weaving tales that would have curled my mother’s hair, had she known what was going on in my strange little head. When the alarm went off in the morning I was, naturally, exhausted. I had a bunch of pillows on my bed and I kept adding one to the pile behind my back until I was fully vertical. I’m not kidding. It was the only way I could make getting up bearable.

This pattern lasted well into adulthood, the only difference being I was now getting paid for making up stories, so at least my nightowlishness had monetary value. But in the mid-nineties, I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. One of the symptoms of RA is fatigue. Soon, all day felt like first-thing-in-the-morning to me. Only people who have suffered from some version of chronic fatigue really understand how debilitating this can be. It’s a sucking down, overwhelming tiredness and the only cure is to climb back into bed. I slept for about ten hours each night and added a couple of naps during the daytime. Then the drug researchers invented the good stuff and I got my life back. Ever since then (about ten years now), I feel as though I’m making up for all the time I lost to fatigue. I may nap twice a month, if that, and I hate losing the time when I could be doing something more productive. I also am once again a nightowl, staying up until one or two . . . or three. . . working or reading for pleasure. I get up around eight, so that’s not too bad. And I don’t get tired during the day, so I must be getting enough sleep.

So what am I complaining about? I want to be tired at night, like normal people. I want to turn out the light at midnight and fall asleep instead of thinking about my book or my life or my loved ones or everything on my to-do list. I’ve tried the typical relaxation techniques. I’ve tried meditating. Listening to soft music. Counting backwards from 100. Listing the states in alphabetical order. You name it, I’ve tried it.

Am I alone in this? Are you one of those lucky people who falls asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow? Or are you a nightowl who’s found the secret to beating your internal clock? How’s your sleep?

I turned in The Midwife’s Confession, my May 2011 book,  about a month ago and then waited a few weeks to hear what my editor thought about it. That’s always a nerve-wracking time.  A writer’s career is full of waiting to hear what other  people think — agents, editors, reviewers, and most importantly, readers.

I finally heard from my editor, and although she loved the book, she had some ideas. She always does, and they’re invariably good ones. Her idea regarding TMC was particularly good. The midwife, Noelle, is central to the story, of course, but she remains quite a mystery to the reader because she is not a point of view character. My editor’s suggestion (suggestion being an under-exaggeration of her feelings on the subject!) was to give Noelle more of a presence in the story. That should be easy, right? Just add one more point of view? Well, it would be easy if only Noelle didn’t kill herself in the first scene.

So I’ve been spending some time trying to figure out how to give Noelle more of a presence. I thought about the fourth book I wrote, Keeper of the Light*, in which Annie O’Neill dies in chapter one yet is undeniably the central character of the story. She had no point of view, but I made sure the reader knew her very well through the eyes of the other characters. Maybe I could make Noelle more central to the story through the eyes of others as I did with Annie? That wasn’t good enough for my editor, though. She really wanted Noelle’s voice in the story.

Then I thought about Kate in Secret Lives**. Kate is also dead in the beginning of the book, but she becomes a central character through her journal. Could I give Noelle a diary, perhaps? While it worked beautifully in Kate’s case, I thought it would have felt too contrived in Noelle’s.

Finally, I bit the bullet and did the only thing possible: I’m giving Noelle a point of view through her own chapters as I–and the reader–dig back into her past. As her creator, I knew her intriguing past and what led up to her confession,  but now the reader will get to be intrigued along with me.  As I write, I can’t believe I didn’t think of giving Noelle a more powerful presence myself. Sometimes we’re too close to our stories to see what’s obvious. This is what a good editor is all about. 

So now, it’s back to the storyboard (inspired in its current three act form above by my writing bud, Alexandra Sokoloff.) Changing a novel always reminds me of my days as a family therapist. When you change one part of the family system, it changes everything else. It’s no different with a story. To make room for Noelle’s voice, I first needed to cut some other threads and subplots. If you’ve been reading my blog for a long time, you might remember there were four Galloway Girls in The Midwife’s Confession–four women who lived together in the Galloway Dormitory at UNC-Wilmington. Well, now there are only two. I’m still in the process of killing the extraneous two off (figuratively speaking). Frankly, they were not serving nearly as good a purpose as Noelle’s story is going to serve. Yet it always hurts a little to cut off the heads of people you’ve nurtured and gotten to know, even if they are getting in the way.

At the same time as I’m ditching those subplots, I’m developing Noelle’s backstory. She’s in third person because I need to make some concession to the fact that she’s dead. I’m enjoying getting to know her even better. I’ve always liked her and now I like her more. Of course, she’s going to do something not very likeable eventually. Will I be able to keep the sympathy flowing for her? I can’t wait to find out!

* Keeper of the Light will be reissued in 2011

** Secret Lives is now available as an e-book for Kindle and all other e-readers.

I had a blast last night at the official book launch for The Lies We Told at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. Here are some pix.

1. Chatting about the book.

2. Yum!

3. my writing buds, Sarah Shaber, Brenda Witchger, Margaret Maron, Alexandra Sokoloff, and Quail Ridge Books owner, Nancy Olson, who brought us together.

4. I don’t know what I said but it must have been funny!

5. One of my very favorite book clubs! Thanks for coming out!

6. With faithful reader, Doreen.

It’s back! Now that The Lies We Told is officially available, I wanted to share the trailer John and I created again. Enjoy!

             A.

     B.

     C.

I’m experimenting! I plan to release my third book, Secret Lives, as an e-book. When people ask me which of my twenty books is my favorite, I invariably say Secret Lives for a number of reasons. I felt as though I’d truly learned how to tell a story as I wrote Secret Lives. I’d learned how to dig deep into my characters, how to create tension and suspense, and how to juggle many layers at once. Plus, the story is unique and I just flat out love it.

Secret Lives was published in 1991 and I’ve had the rights back to it forever, so I’ll be putting this e-book out on my own rather than through a publisher. I’m frankly curious to see what happens when I set it free once again. I had five or six readers back then; now I have many more than that and I want them to be able to read this book. I plan to let my readers know through my blog and Facebook what the process is like as I work my way to making the book available. I’ll start with a Kindle edition and will see where to go from there.

The first step I needed to take was to have the book scanned into an editable Word document, since I long ago ditched the floppy disk it was on. Now I’m reading the document, catching the minor errors in the formatting and seeing if I want to change anything. I don’t think I will. I like the story just as it is. Today, I created these three bookcovers, which was so much fun! I love fooling around with graphics. I’d love you to vote for A, B or C. Which one would draw you in the most? They all fit the story in various ways, but each has a very different “feel.” I’ll pick one of your comments at random to win one of my recently reissued books, and I’ll keep you posted every step of the way. Thanks in advance for your help!

          I finished The Midwife’s Confession  yesterday and John and I are going to see Wicked this evening to celebrate. Yeah! The last month of writing a book is sheer torture; there seems to be no way around it. Every time, I tell myself I’ll figure out a way to prevent that last month from being such a killer, but I have yet to find the cure. Something miraculous always happens during that last month, though: the characters grow into themselves, the details fill out the story, and most significantly, I finally start to think I’ve written a really good book. Up until that last month, I’m never sure.

          As I did when I finished The Lies We Told, I thought I’d share a paragraph or two from the first draft as well as from the final (fifth) draft so you can see the transformation. I do this to encourage those new writers among you. While  you may be writing a pile of garbage in the beginning, you can eventually end up with a real book!

          This book had two major challenges in addition to the usual task of telling a good story. One, I decided halfway through to change the four points of view from third person to first. You’ll notice below that Emerson changes to first person in the final draft. I hope you’ll feel closer to her that way–I certainly did. But making that sort of change in a 400+ page manuscript was exhausting and tedious! Whew. Second, three of the characters are women around 40 years of age with similar backgrounds and values, which made it difficult to give them distinctive voices. I think I succeeded, but that is one thing I’ll still be working on in revisions.

          Speaking of revisions, what happens next is that my editor and agent will read the book. They will then make their suggestions, which will force me to take to my bed for about twenty-four hours before I pull myself together and start fixing whatever they think needs fixing. But for now, I’m going to sit back and enjoy the sense of accomplishment.

          So here are the two examples. I am not giving anything away by telling you that the midwife in the story, Noelle, kills herself very early in the book. Emerson is her sister, who hasn’t heard from Noelle in a couple of days and is worried about her. Enjoy!

—

Old Draft:

          Emerson unlocked the door and walked into the kitchen.

          “Noelle?” She shut the door behind her, hitting the lock for no reason she could name. Just unnerved. She walked toward the bathroom. A slip in the shower maybe. But then why would she have told Lizzie to take care of Patches? The bathroom was small, spotless and empty. From the hallway, through the open door of the bedroom, she saw her. She lay on her back, her hands folded across her ribcage, still and quiet as though she were meditating. But her waxen face, the line of pill bottles, told her something different. It was impossible. Impossible. Emerson fell to her knees at the side of the bed, grabbing Noelle’s cold lifeless hand. “Noelle,” she whispered. “Why? Why?”

—

New Draft:

          The key was caked with dirt and I wiped it off on my t-shirt, a sure sign I didn’t care about a thing except finding out what was going on with Noelle. I unlocked the door and walked into the kitchen. “Noelle?” I shut the door behind me, turning the lock because I was starting to feel paranoid. Her purse lay like a floppy pile of leather on the table and her car keys rested on the counter between the sink and the stove. Patches’ food and water bowls were upside down on the counter on top of a dishtowel. The sink was clean and empty. The kitchen was way too neat for my sister. Noelle could mess up a room just by passing through it.

          I walked into the postage stamp of a living room, past the crammed bookshelves and the old TV we’d given her a few years ago when we bought the big screen. Past the threadbare brown sofa. A couple of strollers sat on the floor in front of the TV and three car seats were piled on top of some cartons, which were most likely filled with Stork Village donations. More boxes teetered on top of an armchair. I was definitely in my sister’s world. On the wall above the sofa were framed pictures of Jenny and Jack, Gracie and Cleve and Leo. The kids of the Galloway Girls. Noelle’s family.

          I walked past the first of the two bedrooms, the one she used as her office. Like the living room, it was bursting with boxes and bags and her desk was littered with papers and books . . . and a big salad bowl filled with lettuce and tomatoes.

          “Noelle?” The silence in the house was creeping me out. A slip in the shower? But why would she have told Libby to take care of Patches? I reached her bedroom, and through the open door, I saw her. She lay on her back, her hands folded across her ribcage, still and quiet as though she were meditating, but her waxen face and the line of pill bottles on the night table told me something different. My breath caught behind my breastbone, and I couldn’t move. I wasn’t getting it. I refused to get it. Impossible, I thought. This is impossible.

(PS Margo, thank you for reminding me of this “I’m finished!!!” photograph of Keeper and myself!)

The Lies We Told is now available for preorder.  Watch for my online booksigning the first week of June!