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 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.

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!

How many of you have ever lived with mystery symptoms? A bunch of you, I bet. (They are not all in your head. I believe you!) I have some mystery symptoms that have been going on for a few years now and my doctor and I finally made the decision that I should pay a little visit to the Mayo Clinic. I hope I’ll feel up to blogging about the experience, because one of the things I’ve found most helpful in the months leading up to this decision was reading online about other people’s experiences at the Clinic. The one thing I won’t be doing is sharing specifics, though, because I’d like the doctors rather than my readers to speculate about what’s going on with this crazy body!

I was hoping to type The End (once again) on The Midwife’s Confession today, but packing, installing the housesitter, and other general nuttiness got in the way, so the midwife and all her many vices will be going with me, making my suitcase extremely heavy. Seriously, I just plunked the fat manuscript in the middle of my folded clothing and I’m not sure I’ll be able to lift the suitcase off the bed. I have no idea if I’ll have any time to take a look at the midwife and her friends while I’m away, but she’s coming with me anyway.

Tomorrow (Monday) is a travel day. I’ve heard such travel horror stories lately that I hope we reach Minnesota (cooler weather. yeah!) without any major delays. We’ve booked a nice hotel, because I want to be comfy in between the poking and prodding. Since my favorite thing about traveling is eating, I was bummed to learn that I can’t have anything good for dinner tomorrow night (no dairy, salad dressing, fat, etc) in preparation, I assume, for a mega blood draw at my examination on Tuesday. I guess that examination will tell them what tests I’ll be having the rest of the week . . .and maybe into the following week. I’ve been told to expect to be there 4 to 7 working days, so making plane and hotel reservations was a little challenging.

I’ve got to get back to packing, but I’ll keep you posted on my big adventure. In the meantime, if you have mystery symptoms I hope you have compassionate doctors, a supportive family and a good dollop of inner peace to carry you through.

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?

Well, I’m bummed! I only now found out that today is National Ice Cream Day. It’s nearly 9 pm and I already had my Breyers light brownie ice cream sandwich for dessert, which frankly is no substitute for a bowl of Edy’s Slow-Churned French Silk. If I’d known it was National Ice Cream Day, I would have run down to the nearest store (which happens to be one of those little stores connected to a gas station. Not pretty.) and bought a couple of pints of Ben and Jerry’s and not felt guilty about it, but now I’m full and it’s too late. 

My curiosity was piqued. What other holidays are coming up? I checked out this week and here’s the lineup: Tomorrow is National Daquiri Day, but since I’m a non-imbiber, I’ll sit that one out. Tuesday is lollipop day. Did you know that lollipop machines make nearly 6,000 lollipops a minute? Wednesday I’m definitely going to celebrate! National Junk Food Day! I am unbelievably neurotic about food safety in my kitchen. I drive John nuts with the hand washing, the not-using-the-same-utensils-on-raw-and-cooked food, the sniffing of the milk, etc. But put me in a Taco Bell (burritos!) or Bojangles (biscuits!) or Wendy’s (taco salad!) and I’ll never give their kitchen a thought. (Please don’t tell me horror stories. Let me live in blissful ignorance!)

Thursday is National Hammock Day and I wish I had one. When I need to go to my Happy Place in my head, it’s in a hammock hanging under tall green trees. Instant relaxation. Friday is National Hot Dog Day, and I have to admit that’s another edible that I eat without thinking about what’s in it and how long it’s been rolling on those long, hot metal tubes at Target.

I just realized that Wednesday–National Junk Food Day–is the day I’ll be part of an event at the Silver Coast Winery near Ocean Isle, North Carolina, so I think I’ll be sipping club soda and nibbling something very non-junky there. You’re all invited to join me! I understand it’s a lovely location. There’s no cover charge, just a chance to meet and chat and sip. There will be a few other writers on hand and the Pelican Bookstore will supply books for a signing. If you’re anywhere near the area between 1-4 on Wednesday July 21st, I hope you’ll stop by.

Right now, I’d like to proclaim this evening “National What Are You Reading Evening”. As for me, I’m enjoying Karen White’s On Folly Beach. Now I know how to answer when people ask who I write like! I feel as though I’m reading one of my own books, probably because Karen and I both love mixing past and present and we love to keep our readers guessing. Also the beach setting, of course, and dipping back into coastal Carolina history during World War II. I think Karen and I must have been separated at birth. Obviously, I’m enjoying this book a great deal and highly recommend it.

How about you? What are you reading now?

It’s been fun having Secret Lives available as an e-book and I’ve enjoyed hearing from those of you who are reading it for the first time. Now I need to figure out which of my out-of-print books I should make available next. Whether you read e-books or not, I’d love your help in this decision. If you’ve read my early books, which was your favorite? Or if you haven’t read them, which sounds most intriguing to you? I apologize to those of you who only read print books and wish I could accommodate you as well. I hope they will be reissued some day by my publisher. Thanks so much for your help.

 The choices (with the original bookcovers) are:

 The Escape Artist: A young woman, about to lose custody of her eleven-month-old son, takes the toddler and escapes to Annapolis, Maryland to start a new life, leaving behind the man she loves. In Annapolis, she’s befriended by a mural artist with secrets of his own. When she stumbles into a dangerous situation that could cost people their lives, she’s unable to turn to the authorities because she’s on the run.

From Library Journal: “. . . a moving tale of parental love and desperation.” From Kirkus Reviews: “A sure-fire grabber.”

Reflection: Twenty years ago, a tragedy struck the Pennsylvania town of Reflection and everyone holds one woman, Rachel Huber, responsible for what happened. When Rachel returns to care for her elderly grandmother, she discovers she has only one person in her corner–a Mennonite minister who was her childhood friend. As the story shifts between past and present, secrets unfold, a romance blossoms, and both the town and Rachel are put to the test.  

From the Richmond Times Dispatch: “. . .  as the plots interlock, the reader is swept into the town’s emotion and suspense.”

Fire and Rain: The tiny southern California town, Valle Rosa, is withered by drought and ravaged by wildfires when a stranger appears, promising he can create rain. He asks only for total privacy while he works, but he becomes the center of two women’s worlds–Mia, who falls in love with him, and Carmen, who vows to learn his true identity at all costs. Neither woman realizes that their involvement with him can jeopardize far more than the future of Valle Rosa.

From Publishers Weekly: “Nearly every chapter finishes with the sort of emotional jolt that keeps the pages turning.”

Brass Ring: Claire Harte-Mathias tries unsuccessfully to save a woman who leaps from a bridge in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. As she tries to understand the reasons for the woman’s suicide,  Claire is jarred by frightening, half-hidden memories. Torn between the love and support of two men–her husband and the brother of the woman on the bridge–she tries to make sense of the images that haunt her, discovering that the past, present and future are intertwined in a way she is powerless to change.

From the Chicago Tribune: “You’d think there’s nowhere for a story to go after a distraught woman plunges to her death in an icy river, but Brass Ring will prove you wrong.”

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.