What a Year...

 I haven't blogged much in a while. Sorry about that. This year has just been so rough. 

I'm writing my novels-- Forever Festive is up past 41,000 words, but there's still a lot to do. I might not have it out in time for Christmas, and it is very much a holiday book. If it isn't ready, what I will do is spend some time working on some short stories about the W.I.T.C.H. Hunters group and Rafael Jones for an anthology... and I hope to have one to post on my blog as a present to you and a teaser of things to come. 

I've had bronchitis, a warning of layoffs in my job category at work, smoke layering over my city. There's just a lot of anxiety and fatigue that makes major creativity hard. I keep sane partly through little acts of creativity like this Halloween tree. But as long as I'm alive, there will be more tales of Rafael Jones and his friends. 

Writing in the Time of COVID

I don't get extra time to write in. I save maybe 20 minutes of commute per day, but I'm desperate to get up and stretch after a 9 hour shift telecommuting. I work for local government, and the work I do keeps the money for vital services flowing. I'm glad I can do this-- it feels like I'm helping the community get through this and having something to do keeps my anxiety under control.

But I am anxious. I have severe asthma, as does my husband. Some other conditions that bump our risk, too, but since inability to breathe is the main killer with this disease, that's where my mind goes. This isn't the first time my health has forced me to be bound up indoors for over a month, but it is the first time I felt so endangered. A bad asthma run usually just leaves me feeling half-dead... which is part of how write the inside view of a vampire's physical existence as being uncomfortable.

Beyond time management and distraction, editing my most recent manuscript, Forever in Deep, pushed me to reveal something sooner than I'd planned about Nicola Durante's family. The 1918 flu pandemic and aftermath had not been something I expected to be so relevant to today when I was working on his background.

Allan's been unable to work from home, but he is working hard. Currently, he's working on the cover for Forever in Deep. (The painting above wasn't done by him, but me. I thought it just seemed seasonal, and it has a book in it.) And he's recording Forever Haunted. 

I hope you are all staying well and safe. This is one strange virus and we still don't know the long term effects on the survivors. Flattening the curve is buying society time to deal with it.

Happy Easter if you celebrate it. Try and enjoy the spring whatever what you can, even if it's just opening some windows and hearing the birds sing.

A woman's place is as the author

Even though my books are genre novels, not feminist writings, and even though the main character is male, being a feminist has had a lot of influence on them. 

One reviewer mentioned for Forever's Too Long, "I especially appreciated the way that the female characters (both heroes and villains) were fully formed, intelligent, and autonomous - delightfully atypical of the genre." I've kept that going with women who have their own sense of purpose, their own careers (including uncommon ones), references to problems both historical and ongoing, etc. That won't go away. 

And there won't be any nonsense of having strong women just so the man can prove himself even stronger by conquering them/putting them in their place. Rafael won't slap a woman to cure her hysterics. He's not weak enough to need that. 

No, my hero gets to have real, meaningful, supportive friendships. He experiences fear and disappointment, wistfulness and hope, affection and joy. He sees beauty as well as darkness in the world. He has time for introspection as well as action. You wouldn't think it would take feminism to write a well-rounded male character, but a lot of male writers are steered by growing up with toxic masculinity. 

But he is emotionally vulnerable-- that's another side to feminism. Allowing men to have a full range of emotions, not just anger, resentment, and pride (wait, wrath, envy and pride are almost half the deadly sins right there). Why do men hate men so much? 

Finally, feminism has been intersectional for most of its history. Seneca Falls meetings dealt with abolitionism and feminism both. Abolition took priority for feminists in terms of action, because of the severity, but once the Civil War was won, women's suffrage was the next big thing for many activists. Social work began because of women with education and influence becoming involved with immigrant and impoverished communities and seeing a need for political policies and trained workers to pave paths to a better life for the marginalized. 

So, my women's history course dealt with a lot of racial concerns, too. I've researched it and read widely outside of feminist writing on race, but there are a lot of connections.

Where do you get your ideas?

It's one of the oldest questions a writer gets.

Well, my style is based on detective classics. So some of my ideas are working with archetypes from there: the wise-cracking but romantic detective, the femme fatale, the bullying cop, the goon, etc.
But it's also influenced by old fashioned creepy fiction. Maybe not horror, as the vibe is more adventure, the heroes have the chance to take useful action, for instance. But Dracula, for instance, was a strong influence.
Mythology and folklore. True crime. And a lot of actual history. A lot of what I do is built on traditional ideas, just working them in new ways.

I also listen to what people say they'd like to see. Toss it around, see if it can fit into my plans.

Then maybe something really weird strikes me out of the blue from my own head.

Or. Tonight. A friend shared this on Facebook. This strange upcycled art doll. It's weird. It makes people uneasy. But it seems oddly connected to the natural world, too. I think it might be more mischievous than evil.

I feel like it's going to be in a W.I.T.C.H. Hunters story-- I intend to do an anthology with them at some point so you can get to know all of them much better.

Genre fiction

I've always been a keen reader with a strong imagination. I've been drawn a lot to fantasy, science fiction, and paranormal storylines. But I also am an analytical thinker, which is usually more appealed to with science fiction, nonfiction, and mysteries. 

My first published works were as co-author on Allan's Para-Earth books, where I've helped with character interactions, the science behind the stories, and dialogue on the first two, and for the third and fourth wrote part of them myself. I insisted that there be a science fiction grounding for the monsters, because I found such monsters scarier, being potentially real, whereas the supernatural creatures never really scared me. 

Yet here I am, writing my own, and my love of fantasy has resurfaced and my detective has to deal with supernatural problems. Some of my friends don't like horror, and originally I assured them that it wouldn't be too scary-- but then I found out that one friend considers Harry Dresden too much of a horror story (a wizard detective in urban fantasy), and I had to tell her not to read my books. 

So what genre am I in? I consider Rafael Jones to be primarily in the detective novel category, sometimes being true mystery, sometimes more pulp fiction adventure. Yet the supernatural elements will be strong in every story. His base is in New York City, making urban fantasy a good description. Whether it should be considered to cross into horror depends, I guess, on what you think horror is. I don't feel it is that, myself, because the books are hopeful, philosophical, and funny. But when there's murder, there's an element of horror. 

One of my beta readers said she felt like she was reading a Philip Marlowe story, only to have it twist into Kolchak: The Nightstalker. I wonder what you will find in my writing... 

Music, Music, Music

Because Raphael was a musician before he was a detective, specific songs are referenced in the books. In the second book, he's working to solve the murder of a mysterious ghost, and in order to determine what year she died in, he plays music to get her reactions.

If you like music, I recommend reading on or near a device that will allow you to pull up the songs-- they will give you a sense of setting, character, and can serve as a bit of a soundtrack to the adventure. I do love the jazz era sound and I think you will, too.

Writing in a different time period.

The internet makes doing basic research so much easier for many things.

I was going to use the phrase "coloring inside the lines" and then had to ask myself-- would a guy in his 30's in the 40's use that phrase? When were coloring books invented? They seem like something that's just been around forever. Well, it only took about a minute to do the research to find out they'd been around about 100 years by then, so yes, it was fine to use.

Likewise, I needed to see if a fire-axe back then fit my mental image of one... even though I don't describe it in detail, there was a possibility I would use it on the cover. Another question I had was if a passport problem would legitimately be used to delay someone leaving the country.

Back before the internet, I'd have needed to look for very, very specific history books for images of fire axes, an encyclopedia for the coloring book history, and as for the passport issue, I'd probably need to look into procedural handbooks from the New York-New Jersey Port Authority from 1948. Finding those sources would all have been difficult.

There's something wonderful about having so much information at our fingertips.