Every time I read a Donna Leon mystery I get hungry. In her Commissario Brunetti books, the clever detective is always grabbing a quick snack of little sandwiches washed down with prosecco or heading home to the lavish multi-course midday meals prepared by his loving wife. How she manages this while teaching at a university is a secondary mystery. Why I love reading the food descriptions is not mysterious at all —the menus are just short of food porn. I was bemused when I read a book by Donna Leon that did not feature Brunetti and had a principal character
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It’s the Cat’s Meow!
Nothing dates the period of a conversation like slang. ‘Feeling groovy’ in 2015 is a challenge. Although a few notes of the classic Simon & Garfunkel recording (The 59th Street Bridge Song) and I have to sing along and, well, feel groovy, if a bit goofy, too. There’s a funny discordance between a dated slang expression and current sensibilities. This creates an opportunity for writers interested in playing with dialog. A character can be “stuck” in the time of his youth —or be an actual time traveler— and reveal this in the expressions that pepper his conversational style. I have
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Naming Characters
Because I’m attempting to be a planner and not a pantser (writing by the seat of my pants), I created a couple of family trees and a chart with all the important characters hovering around the protagonist in my current novel-in-progress. This meant I had to come up with everyone’s names quickly. I take creating character names seriously and it can drive me a little crazy. I know that I can always change a name later, but, as they tend to stick, I try to get the name right from the start. Coming up with a whole bunch at one
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Short-Term Time Travel
I’ll admit it up front, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of traveling through time. I grew with stories about going into the past and “mucking” with the historical timeline AND stories about taking an unauthorized peek into the future. There are tons of great books, movies and television shows that play with variations on that theme. Short-term time travel is also a viable storytelling conceit. I’m working on a project with a protagonist looking back on the events of the last six months from her hospital bed. If I manage to pull it off, the first two thirds
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Mystified & Confused
There are many phenomena that leave me completely mystified and confused. I’m not talking about fashion trends that I’ve passed on or kale —I like spinach so the whole kale thing just makes me sigh— I’m talking about weird passions, obsessions and cultural experiences that make me scratch my head in wonder. These phenomena often make good fiction fodder so I’m asking for input from Candy’s Monsters followers, fans & friends. What things just strike you as impossibly weird? Here are a few of my head-scratchers to get you started…. Women who fall in love with death row inmate
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Stretching Writer Muscles
Sometimes I just give myself a weird assignment. I write something outside my usual frame of reference, try a new genre, shift the perspective or simply try something that shakes things up. I call it stretching my writer muscles. And, just like muscles that grow stiff from lack of use or fail to grow because you’re doing the same workout every day, these exercises are just for the experience and not necessarily geared toward creating something worth sharing. Last week I was feeling a little stuck in the mud. The novel I spent the better part of last year working
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Model T-5 — What’s a Robot to do?
“Unit 121H, Model T-5 please report to Maintenance Desk 120.” Unit 121H was bemused, or as close to bemused as his programming allowed. The announcements on the factory floor were for the humans on the other side of the glass. The residents of the observation room had ears and eyes and functional noses. A Model T-5 could, and was, called in for maintenance without an exchange of auditory communications. Unit 121H rolled past the glass wall and down the hall. A senior technician stood at a workbench with racks of spare parts filling the wall behind him. Unit 121H halted
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Time & Place — Cue the Music!
We all have songs that remind us of a person, place or particular event in our lives. Filmmakers and the creative geniuses behind TV shows and TV commercials are obviously aware of this, too. Some authors, including the mystery writer Peter Robinson, have created characters that are passionate about music so the songs that are meaningful to his fictional characters are threaded into his novels. This is not new. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously did this with jazz tunes in THE GREAT GATSBY —much to the dismay of literary purists of the time. I was surprised when I saw the recent
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(Un)-Happily Ever After
Once upon a time they lived happily ever after. Slamming the cliché opening and final lines of classic fairy tales together makes what comes in-between feel very silly, but there is something to be said for the satisfaction a reader experiences when things “work out” in the end. Readers want an ending to make sense. It may not be HAPPY, but it has to be a logical outcome of the series of events. This is not to say that surprise endings are unwelcome —quite the opposite. It’s just that the surprise ending must rely on an internal logic and simultaneously
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Can a Pantser Become a Planner?
I’m naturally a pantser —writing by the seat of my pants— but I’m coming to the conclusion that this is working a whole lot better for short stories than for longer works of fiction. It’s time for this improviser to make a (shudder) plan! Yes, I’m attempting an actual outline. This is more frightening than the scariest horror story! Step One: Take a Deep Breath Step Two: Figure Out the Overall Story Arc (aka What is the protagonist’s journey?) Step Three: Panic That’s as far as I’ve gotten as of right now. I’m in full out writer panic mode!
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