Irene Peterson's Blog

It is after 6 pm. Outside the wind is blustering and the temperature is dropping precipitously, though not nearly as low as Buffalo, NY. Nothing is that low, except maybe Antarctica.
Anyway, I'm writing this here because I ought to be doing an episode of Silver, but I find I can't think at night as well as I can in the morning.
Yes.
It is not the cancer speaking this time, it is me.
I don't write at night.
Oh, I might be so moved to grab a legal pad and go downstairs and write something out, but I can't sit here at the computer and write when it is dark. Also, since it is in our bedroom and Herb would probably wake up if I turned it on though he can sleep through his incessant snoring, I don't do it.
Maybe I should.

He made this delicous bread pudding out of pannetone, served with some sort of Amaretto sauce. We had some for dessert. It is really good. Almost makes up for my complete lack of sleep.

Whilst looking through my pictures, I found this one of my long hair. I'm going to try to get it on here. Patience. Got it!!! Oh, the cleverness of me!!!!!

Liberty States Fiction Writers.
Wow, what a fabulous group of people.

When I was feeling slightly better, two weeks after my last chemo session, I attended a meeting and felt welcomed and soaked up the information of the guest speaker like a sponge...what else soaks up stuff? Bounty paper towels?
Sorry, but that's all I can manage now.

Anyway, shortly after that meeting, still feeling better and all, the second disaster happened and I missed meetings all summer and early autumn. So today my fantastic friend The Gilroy drives me to Edison and we enter the meeting room and a wave of love washed over me.
It was so great to be back.
Even people I didn't know said hello. Perhaps they've read my stuff online, I don't know, but it was so very good to be with like minds...all different, but all focused on the exact same thing.

This is what writers need. They need to be with other writers. Nobody else in the universe understands us but our fellows. Believe me, we're not the usual sort of person, we're highly imaginative and creative as all hell and often difficult to understand when we're in the throes of visualizing and writing a whole new world, time and place, people who could never exist and their pets.
But other writers understand this.
They also understand the need we have to be appreciated.

Well, Liberty States writers, I do so appreciate you!

(And my dear friend The Gilroy, you are the best.)

"I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."
                                                                                                                                                                               -----Agatha Christie

Hello?  There is somebody out there who knows exactly how I feel?
Yes, yes, yes.

But just reading this quote this morning put me in a better mood.  And my kids are home from university and I have someone to talk to, so I'm not as blue as I have been.

One of them has some chocolate hidden away somewhere.  I intend to ask for a teensy taste.

E.L. Doctorow is pretty famous.  According to the interview on CBS this morning, he's one of "America's most successful fiction authors" or something like that.
Nice.  He writes a book about the two reclusive brothers who were found dead in their mansion back in 1947 and it instantly shoots to the top of the NYT bestseller list.  Now, that is famous and successful.  I don't know how good it actually is, but the story it is based on is fascinating and ought to be an interesting read if you like the idea of someone fictionalizing the thoughts and actions of real people.

These two brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer, were rich.  They lived in Harlem, I think, in a huge four story mansion.  Harlem was fashionable at the time and lots of rich people lived there.
Only these guys were whacked in the head.  One, Homer, was blind.  There were no photos of him alive.  Langley had a couple of photographs but you could tell he wasn't happy to have his likeness taken.  In fact, he didn't want anything taken from him.  So, something snapped in his pea brain and he started hoarding.  Papers.  Garbage.  Books.  Magazines.  Garbage, mostly.  Then, in his increasing paranoia, he made boobytraps out of the garbage stacks so that anybody trying to break in on him and Homer would fall victim to a ton of crap falling on top of them.
Swell.  Only, his little plan backfired and Langley (I gotta look up how that is spelled) died buried in a ton of garbage from one of his own booby traps.  Homer died thereafter of starvation because his brother was dead and couldn't help him.

Now, there are two things I gotta comment on here.  First, these poor old guys were totally sick.  When police broke into the mansion because neighbors complained of the stink, they were confronted with all this trash and two dead bodies.  The public got a real charge out of watching the police and garbage people tossing through the crap.  That's sick, that's horrid, that's exactly what would happen now, only the two old guys would be on a television show, they'd be interviewed on Oprah, they'd be on the news for weeks, they'd have Dr. Phil helping them readjust to life among the hordes of people they had grown to hate.  We could have sorted 'em out just fine.

Secondly, but just as importantly, is the story of this writer.
He does at least 500 words per day.  He says that the characters just speak to them in their own voices and he writes it down.  His wife who is his first reader, says she never finds anything to change in his work.  It comes out perfectly.  He's 78, has been published since the early 60s when he was working in Hollywood as a script reader/writer.  His first book was a western that was made into a movie "Welcome to Hard Times".  I think I may have seen it on tv, I don't particularly like westerns because I had enough of them thanks to Warner Brothers television, Roy Rogers and Gene Autrey and Annie Oakley.  They were clean westerns.  They were unrealistic, perhaps, but they were fine by me as a kid.  I don't need my mythos dirtied up by ugly truth.  I like to think of dance hall girls as dancers, not whores.  Thank you very much.
But E. L. Doctorow wrote a "real" western.
He also wrote "Ragtime", which I did read.  It was interwoven truths with a fictional story.  I did read this one at the time it came out and I was most unhappy with it.  Too many things going on, too many historical figures interacting with the paltry characters he created that once again dirtied up reality.  He shoved in some weird Eskimo sex and African-American sex and lesbian sex and communists and Wobblies and race into a melange of too much stuff that was pretty meaningless, but long and researched and, well, long.

Books don't sell by the pound.
They sell by promotion and name and reviews.
They don't have to be good, really.  They don't have to entertain.  They have to be researched
and slogged through and woven into some sort of tale that has to be checked for accuracy and may prompt research on behalf of the reader, just to see if what Doctorow has written is true or fantasy.  Or any writer who puts out a heavy book.

We who wrote genre fiction have it so much easier.  We come up with an idea and we create characters who never lived and are probably too messed up or too wonderful to possibly exist on this earth.  We seek to entertain.  We love the happy ending.  We want our readers to enjoy the world we have created.  And we want them to be able to hold our books in their hands when they're on the subway or in the bathroom or just snuggled down on the couch in a corner of the house where there isn't much noise and there is good light.

Big difference.  We research the hell out our locations, we research the jobs our characters have, we look into possibilities for adventure and the plausability of what takes place in the story.  We do our bit, possibly more because we don't base our stories on actual events or people.  Oh, some kings might get thrown in, but they're minor characters at best.  We use our minds to make worlds.  We don't impinge on real people, real events, though we might get ideas from both.  I think our minds are far more creative and our books aren't too "heavy".
And we certainly don't get paid by the pound.

We hardly get paid at all.

Some of us will never see a dime for our thoughts, and therein lies the pity and shame.

I'm all for Mr. Doctorow writing his thick books.  He tells long, drawn out tales that are full of details and ideas.  Do they change the world?  Nope.  Do our stories?  Nope.  Are we in the same boat?
Not hardly.

This is the dilemma we face as writers and authors.  You get an idea and you pour your brains out on paper and screens.  Sometimes our words sell.  Most of the time, they don't bring in one penny.  Most of us never get interviewed by CBS.  Sigh. Another pity, for sure. 
But nobody can say that anything E.L. writes is any better than anything any of us who pound away at the machine day after day writes. 

Somewhere out here in the vast television viewing audience, CBS, there is at least one writer who is better than E.L. Unfortunately, he or she will never get interviewed by anybody.

More is the pity.
Keep sending out your stuff, people.  That somebody might be you and the world needs your thoughts and characters. 

You just gotta promote.

Thank you, Bill Higbie!
I don't even know who this guy is, somebody famous in the poetry world, I imagine, but this is funny and oh, so true!

Of course, he's out for the laughs, but in such an intellectual way.

One of the writers' organizations I belong to posted this question on their loop and the writers (all of whom write romance, hot or warm) have been posting their ideas for the past couple of days.

Some like a warm, sensitive man with a great body. Ripped, as the expression goes. You'd expect this from writers who have such incredible bods on their book covers, and yes, I admit, a ripped body does catch the eye of the beholder first.

Then there were replies of liking MacGuyver types--men who are handy and can fix things and get stuff off high shelves or work around the house so plumbers or electricians don't have to be called. Guys who can make the toilet stop running by means other than "jiggling the handle". There is a great deal to be said about this kind of guy and it is sort of cool watching a man work who actually knows what he is doing. Running wires and sealing together pipes--that thing with solder makes me shiver--is pretty sexy and economical to boot.

The were thissing and thatting, some mentioned a deep voice. Sam Elliot has a deep voice and is incredibly sexy. Someone pointed out that Tom Selleck had too high a voice, really, but all in all, he was pretty sexy because he was tall and smart. I don't know Tom Selleck. He could be dumb as a doorknob but good at reading lines, which brings up another quality women find sexy--brains.

Let's face it. Brains aren't everything. For example, Albert Einstein. Ever get a loot at that guy? Scary, no? Brilliant, maybe, but no matter what, even when he was young, he was not sexy. Henry Kissinger--there's another brilliant man, supposedly (how he could be brilliant and work for Richard Nixon has me wondering) and the thought of him being sexy on me or any other woman is creepy. But then, power comes into play. Some women find power the sexiest turn on in the world.

Kissinger had power.
Presidents have power.

Groupies who chase after diplomats and senators and presidents aren't after a good ride, they're after power because often with power comes money. And other people fawning over the power holders. And expensive suits and champagne and glass houses and yachts and race horses and real estate. Lots of money gives a man power. Now, if you think of lots of money, think of what Anna Nicole Smith married, some ancient guy with oodles of money and no hair and age spots, probably all over his body and wrinkles galore. That's money, that's a sort of power, but that is NOT sexy.

So, while reading through all these things, deciding which I agreed with and which I did not agree with, (the lady who loved bikers I could not agree with at all) I decided I had to write something. Only one line, but it came from my heart and essentially says it all. I wrote that I found a man who wants me as much as I want him was sexy.

Think about it.
I won't dissect the statement. I won't explain anything. I'll leave it at that.

Faye clawed her way through the dream. It was a dream. A nightmare. She killed some guy. She sucked out all his blood and left his body in a filthy alley somewhere she'd never been before. The unmistakable taste of rust filled her mouth.
She wanted to, needed to vomit.

Brush teeth. Gargle. Brush teeth again. Floss. Rinse and spit. Down a full glass of bathroom water. Spit again.

That awful taste lingered and on top of that, her skin crawled with disgust.

Why was it that those early morning nightmares lingered while pleasant dreams vanished so quickly?

She bared her teeth in the mirror, checked to see if there really was anything there. Nothing. Nada. Okay. Good.
Sunday mornings she usually went back to sleep but she hadn't made it to mass last night. Catholic guilt layered over the remnant of her dream. It would probably do her good to go to mass. Maybe that would wipe out the horror and dream guilt.

Maybe it would take away some of the guilt she felt for having had the same dream, taking place in different strange locales, several times over the last month. It had been that long since she'd last been to church. Maybe it was some bizarre conscience thing leading her down these dingy alleyways, causing her to think she'd murdered someone.

The guy had been good-looking.
She remembered that as she dressed and walked the block to the church.
Once inside, her fingers still damp with holy water, she crossed herself and knelt in the pew.
And prayed her usual "God bless" prayer, making sure to include all her dead relatives and her missing twin.

Jaye. Jaye, where are you?

copyright 2008, Irene Peterson

Well, if you go to my website, in the "writing tips" section, there's an essay about these things I've read in romance novels that annoy the hell out of me. Stupid common mistakes that have been used to the point of triteness. Also, there are things in there that are just awful...things that are impossible or things that make no sense. Maybe they make sense to lots of people, and I'm the oddball here, but I find I have to sort of retract my opinion on one of the "impossibilities" I tore into there.

Go here first to find it:

http://www.irenepeterson.com

Then look in the Writing Tips section. You'll have to use the archive link, it is #2 in the Tips section.

You'll see it, and then read through all the annoying things so you get an idea of where I'm coming from. And how much these little repetitions annoy me, really bug me to the point of distraction. Once I find a character doing one of these things, I usually end up tossing the book. Even in these hard economic times when I am so loathe to spend money on new books and I bug my friends for books or buy them discounted, I will toss the book, unless there are more compelling reasons for me to finish it, once I come across one of these stupidities.

But, now, here's where the big retraction comes in. Yes, I do not think of myself as so wonderful or high and mighty that I am above changing my mind and admitting I may have to change my opinion about something. I'm way bigger than that. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong and that's that and I won't argue any longer.

Okay, here goes.

I have learned how to nibble.

Yes, yes, I wrote about how real people don't nibble their food. Heroines are perpetually nibbling a bit of cheese, or biscuits (cookies to us in the US) or eggs that the hero has made for them, and I stated that I for one did not know how to nibble. I'm a real woman and real women do not nibble at anything. They take bites! Big bites! They enjoy their food and they actually eat it with gusto.

Well, not so for me any more.

I'm dieting. I'm paying this money to a company to send me boxes of food and I'm eating it, yes, this is the stuff that has cellulose in it and tastes sorta blah most of the time. I hate dieting, but, well, I'm fat. Fat isn't exactly wonderful and healthy, so I figured I'd give it one more try, this time investing in myself so I didn't have to think too hard about cooking and that that would make things easier. The cellulose helps me not be hungry, too, so even though it tastes like cardboard, I eat it. All of it.

So. Part of the diet calls for a protein portion. Now, I figured out that that could be one of those wedges of cheese with the cow on the box, or one of those cute little squashed balls wrapped in red or yellow wax. Just about the right portion (actually weighing less but nothing is perfect) and satisfying that need for protein that you eventually feel when eating cardboard and weird food from boxes and bags.
And I find that I can unwrap one of those little squashed balls of cheese, peel off the red wax, and hold the precious cheese protein in my hand. I'm starving. I put it to my mouth and want to inhale it, but I don't. I take a tiny, mouse-sized bite.

I've nibbled.

I'm so ashamed.

I've turned into a rodent.

People often ask me where I get the unique ideas I have included in my stories.
The answer is easy.
Most of the ideas I incorporate in my stories have happened to me or people I know or is something that's been lurking in my brain that needs expression.

I have tons of friends. I spend hours every day online, writing back and forth to them. They give me snippets of their lives. They call me on the telephone and we talk. They give me more snippets of their lives. I remember some of the incidents of my own life that are so peculiar I have to write them.

Take my friend Pauline. She's a tall, willowy blond from North Jersey. Her dad was a plumber. Their last name was Weeks. The motto of his company, painted on the trucks and in the Yellow Pages was "if it leaks, call Weeks". With a slight name change, that is in Carly's story. Since that has yet to see the light of day, it may be hidden for a long time, but I promise, it will be in print.

Everybody by now knows about my 48 year friendship with Sandy. There's enough of her life to keep me writing forever. I have a book in mind about the Black Widow (may she rot in hell) and someday, that's going to be written, too.

Then there is Charity. Oh, my, she's told me parts of her life that SHE ought to write and I wish she would. Her life story is just about awe inspiring. But it's her story.
I know I can get help on legal stuff if I ask her, though. For books. She once confided in me that, as the kind of lawyer she is, I would not want to hire her to argue a traffic ticket. (I wonder whether she'd defend herself, though...hmm, have to ask.)

The critique group ladies...oh, man, we've all shared some incredible stories. Most, you wouldn't believe, actually. But little snips and bits have already appeared in my books.

My family...oh, my girls! They give me slang words to use. They give me situations. They help me choose names. They let me look at them, hard, so that I can describe things. They both have these lovely long eyelashes that a heroine needs. I couldn't get it by looking in the mirror.

And then there is my husband. God love him, he is a constant source of inspiration. I watch how he moves. He has long legs and is (now, I don't mean this negatively) rather graceful for a man. Shall I use the term "panther-like" when he is moving with a purpose? And his currently long hair...it is quite fantastic to run fingers through....
Oh, boy, here I go again.
Back to earth, Irene.

My secret font of information, however, comes from other men and boys I have observed in my lifetime. Men. Such peculiar animals. So different from women. So hard and silky and unlogical. Believe me, I know men. I know how they act and I know how they think. I may not appreciate how they act or think, but I know why they do it, most of the time.

And then there are the casual observances I make every day. The ladies in line at the grocery check out. The cashiers. The crazy drivers. People on the street, in malls, in beauty salons. Fans at concerts, movies, race tracks, jeep meets, swimming pools.
All my kids' friends and acquaintances.

You're all in books somewhere.

And, if anybody wants to write a book, one of the first things you have to do is learn how to observe other people. Watch 'em. Think about 'em. What prompts others to do or say things you wouldn't say or do? Or you would say or do, but in a different way?
Remember this. Remember all the personal tics people have. Remember habits that drive you crazy in other people. Listen to speech patterns.
Make your story characters come alive with these attributes.

Write a best seller and make lots of money.

Er...good luck.

While watching an episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations on some cable channel, he had me in Scotland, maybe Glasgow, I can't be sure. I was more interested in the scenery than where he (and I) actually was. He met up with a famous Scottish writer whose name escapes me (maybe Ian Rankin) and was sitting in a restaurant eating weird food and discussing how this writer included the underside of this town in all his works. I'm willing to bet it's some kind of mystery/cop/PI stuff, but I cannot be sure since I can't even remember the guy's name.
BUT, here's the point. Bourdain made such a big deal about how the author included all these seamy little bars and shops and small roads and alleyways in his novels. Bourdain loved the authenticity it gave to the books. He went on about how the characters were so much a part of the setting and the setting was so wonderful now that he (Anthony) had actually been in the town and seen for himself what was what.

It is very important to have the setting fit the story. You wouldn't be able to have a mystery in Disneyworld, but you sure could have a murder in Orlando, Florida. It has some really ugly old parts that would fit for a grisly murder. Disneyworld, eh, I sincerely doubt the Disney people would allow a murder to take place there. It really would spoil the fun and you wouldn't want to do that. Besides, they have ferocious lawyers.
But there are other places in Florida that would be terrific for a murder. Miami, any senior village, the Everglades, why not St. Augustine or Pensacola? That way you could bring in the military and they're always good for a murder or two. Spy stuff, also.

So, I got to thinking about writing what you know once again. I don't know seamy sides of anything. I deliberately avoid ugly stuff because I am rather delicate in nature and I detest violence. Well, I'll read it, but skip over the particularly gruesome parts.
I don't particularly like to imagine it, even. However, I do so like to have authenticity in my stories and I do place them in areas I have visited or frequented.
If I can remember what it was like to be there, I can put it into the story. If a place made me feel welcome or uneasy, it translates into the story and I use it.
For Glory Days, I actually spent time in Asbury Park to get the feel for the place. Just seeing it wasn't enough. I walked the boards, went up and down the streets and marked the locations of churches, of the beach to some of the old hotels, the width of the streets, the areas further away from the downtown and the ocean. And I used these in my story.
It helped that Asbury Park was rather run down and had been a beautiful place forty years ago. That added to the character of the city, for the city was a major character in the story.
England was another terrific setting and I'd been there. In fact, two of my stories take place in England and I could probably write a dozen more about the place. The countryside is vastly different from the US. Maybe New England comes a little close, but not by much. The size of the towns, the fields surrounding the towns, the smallness of the cities and the age of the buildings all had to be included in the story because it played an integral part in the plot. A good memory and lots of personal photographs also came into play...helped me remember the feel of the places I went and had my characters visit.

So, I live in Central Jersey. I live in the worst part of the township, normally referred to as the armpit of Bridgewater. Before we moved here, I'd had occasion to teach several students in the area in their homes and the homes were rather poor and neglected. This truly used to be the armpit of the town. But all things change. Young people who needed a home and had not enough money to move to a better area bought here and within two years had fixed up their small houses and the neighborhood got better, a tiny bit more affluent. The nature of the inhabitants might have changed from the types who lived here forty years ago. The roads still are crummy and the township has done little to fix the area, but eventually, they'll run out of hilltop streets to pave and they'll have to spend money here.
This used to be more fascinating. There were bikers riding up and down the streets all hours of the night. Fast cars zooming up the steep road and slamming on the brakes when the road stopped. The family who live at the top of the road had to put up reflectors to keep drunks from driving onto their property and into their house. That has happened a few times that I know of. And it's part of the character of this section of town.
Rough and ready. Gunshots in the middle of the night. A train whistle wailing to clear the tracks or to announce to the repair station half mile away that it was coming in for awhile. Who knows? But that sound in the night would be stunning for a heroine who hadn't a clue about the area to hear. And to worry her. Or to make her draw closer to the hero.

The setting should be a major part of the story. It should conjure up places in the minds of the reader, bring up memories if possible or be vivid enough to make memories for the reader. It should be dark and dreary at times, dusty and dry, steamy and intense if it applies and cool and refreshingly beautiful as a change of pace. It is as important to the story as the hero and heroine because they cannot exist in a vacuum.
None of us live in windowless rooms. There's a pulse to the outside world and that pulse should reverberate in where we put our characters. Let the outside world breathe, too.