What’s next?  Crazy!  You won’t believe it!

My first book, FIND EDSELL! was published in 2014.  It won a few awards (most notably, the Writer’s Digest Mark of Quality) and had good reviews in newspapers here in the Carolinas, in New Jersey and in Maryland.    

Since then, I wrote a golf course murder mystery called Footes Creek.  It is now available in electronic form at Inkitt.  Just click on the following and you will go directly to my novel.  http://inkitt.com/stories/thriller/199014. 

In the meantime, I’m working on book #3, a cross-country thriller about a woman who must become homeless to escape a brutal killer.

Now, the craziest news of all:  out of the blue, a company called Voyage Media contacted me about my first book, FIND EDSELL!.  They think it might make a good movie.  I’ve had several phone conversations with Nat Mundell, the CEO; Daniel Schneider, a writer, producer and director; and now I’m working with Mike Chamoy, a producer.  We are creating something called a “Treatment”.  This is a present-tense narration of the proposed movie, scene by scene.  No dialogue or other instructions, just a bare-boned storyline of what happens.    

I am learning so much through this process:  For example:  how do you show a flashback in a movie?  You cannot have as many characters in a movie as a book.  A 300-page book has much more detail.  But then a movie has sound and light and action that you only see in your mind when you read a book.  These are two very different means of communication.  And that’s why we need a Treatment before a script can be written.   

When the treatment and the script are done, Voyage will begin the process of selling it to film companies, financiers, etc.  It’s all so exciting.  And I’m learning new things every day.

Funny thing is, several folks who read FIND EDSELL! said it would make a great movie or TV series.  It has all the ingredients:  teens in trouble, a medical sci-fi angle, an international plot, a raging forest fire, and both adult and teen heroes. 

There’s something new happening every week if you’re a writer.  New opportunities arrive and you run with them.  The life of a writer is truly exciting.  Stay tuned for more adventures. 

Public Appearances

You’ve always wanted to write a book.  You got the idea for it, you plot it in your mind, create characters, mouth dialogue in the car while running errands.  Soon your story has a beginning, a middle and an end. 

Whether it’s a historical romance, a sci-fi thriller, a murder mystery, a memoir, or a western, the process is the same.  You research, you outline, write a rough draft, edit, edit, edit and soon it’s done.  Your pals in the writer’s group critique it, more re-writing happens and soon it is ready. 

A few months later, a book emerges and you are so very proud.  You are a published author; a dream has come true.

You thought it was over, but the work is just beginning.  Libraries and book stores ask you to speak.  You are featured at a women’s luncheon.  Book signings all over, press releases, and (if you are lucky) awards for your efforts. 

Wait a minute, you say.  I’m a writer, not a public speaker.  I don’t like getting up in front of people and talking.  I get nervous in front of crowds.  I like to stay in my office, glued to my keyboard.  I write; I don’t make personal appearances.    

Whoa!  Please understand there can be sheer joy in interacting with the public.  First all, most of the people in your audience will be in awe of you.  Some are jealous as hell because you’ve done something they’ve only dreamed about.  You put in the hours, the late nights.  Page after page, you created your story.  Then you worried and wondered if anyone would read your book and if they did, would they like it? 

Get over it.  Writing is an art, a passion, a calling, but it’s also a business.  You have a product and you’ve worked hard to create it.  Now sell it!

If you’ve ever sang a solo or played the piano in public, you’re ready.  If you’ve ever pitched a baseball game or ran the football down the field while the crowd cheered, you’re ready.  Anything done in the public eye brings confidence in later life. 

So, enjoy the day.  Rejoice in the fact that you’ve created something new and wonderful and, go ahead, tell everyone about it!

Writing is my passion. Time flies when I’m at my computer or scribbling notes on a legal pad. Minutes turn into hours and I often look up and realize that three or four hours have gone by. It’s way past lunch time and I’m hungry. That is how engrossed I get when I’m in the midst of a story.

Years ago, I always traveled with my personal computer. My husband would drive and I would write and not see the mountains and rivers, farms and villages just outside my window. When I played golf at Pebble Beach, I anticipated getting back to my PC even as I teed up my ball on the famous 17th hole. I was stupid.

After several years of non-stop creativity, my writing became stale. New and original ideas and plot lines dried up. I had taken a good thing and pushed it too far. I needed a break.

Whether you love or hate your job, you occasionally need to get away from it. Go somewhere for a weekend. See new things, meet new people, get a fresh outlook on life and work. It doesn’t have to be a fancy, expensive cruise. Simply take a walk on the beach or at a nearby park. Turn off the PC and read a good murder mystery.  Spend a weekend with all your devices turned off.

Today, I write during the week, usually several hours a day. On the weekends, I play.  My husband and I love college sports and we’ve adopted Coastal Carolina University. For the last two weekends, we’ve gone down to Myrtle Beach (the University is in Conway, a nearby suburb) to watch a baseball tournament. We go to the games and cheer on our team; we walk the beach; we go to the Boardwalk and eat lunch at a waterfront restaurant. We play games at the Arcade. We have fun!

On the ride home (one hour), my head throbs with new dialogue and plot twists, character sketches, and scenes. I am refreshed renewed and ready to write again.

So, no matter what your job (raising a family, teaching, carpentry, farming, police work, accounting or writing), you will function better with the occasional break. Try it.

I just got some big news about FOOTES CREEK, my second novel.  I sent it out to a bunch of agents/publishers.  In this business, you send agents a proposal for your book. You give them a cover letter and whatever else they request: a one-page synopsis or a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline; a few pages of the manuscript or the first 50 or 100 pages.  Your biography and writing experience.  Each agent is different.

FOOTES CREEK is a golf course murder mystery that takes place at prestigious old boy club in New Jersey. There’s a series of grisly murders at the club and Police Chief Ed McSorley must solve the crimes asap.  He meets a female member and a romance begins.  Soon he is up to his eyeballs in murder and intrigue.  

I love the game of golf and writing a novel with a golf course setting excited me. Our whole family plays: my husband won 10 championships at three different clubs; I was chair of several ladies 18-hole groups. I was a founding board member of The First Tee of Brunswick County (now The First Tee of Coastal Carolina). I’ve played golf at courses all over the country including Baltusrol, Firestone, Pebble Beach, and TPC Florida.

I’ve attended many charity or guest day events at prestigious clubs. My husband and I have friends and family in the golf business.  In addition, I wrote an award-winning golf column (Golf Gab) for the Brunswick Beacon for 14 years and ran the county championship for them.

Recently, I was approached by a company called Inkitt, a new online publisher/agency. They wanted me to send FOOTES CREEK to them. I did, and my book was approved for online publishing. It is now free at https://www.inkitt.com/stories/thriller/199014.  Click on that link and you’ll see my book.

Inkitt was listed last year as Writer’s Digest 101 Best Websites for Writers. If I get enough readers and online reviewers like it, my novel will then be published in book form. This is a new way to market a book before the expense of publishing it. Pretty cool. Sort of test marketing a book.

If you read it and like it, please let Inkitt know. Also, if you have friends and or family who might be interested, please pass on the link (https://www.inkitt.com/stories/thriller/199014).  Thanks a bunch!

You Gotta Have a Dream

One of my life’s mantras is a saying first attributed to Walt Disney. It goes like this: If you never have a dream, you’ll never have a dream come true.

I dream of writing a best-selling novel that is made into a movie that wins an Oscar. I dream of winning the Pulitzer and/or the Nobel Prize for Literature. Why not? Anything is possible if I try. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will happen if I give up before I start.

This philosophy applies to musicians, song-writers, athletes, scientists, and to almost every career from accounting to construction.  

Singers dream of having a hit that morphs into a Grammy; athletes dream of playing in the NFL, the NBA, the NHL or the Olympic Games.

My grandson Connor has always loved baseball. He’s a southpaw pitcher and first baseman; he excelled in several elementary school and middle school baseball leagues. One day, he told his friends that he wanted to play in the major leagues someday.  They laughed and mocked him.  His feeling were hurt.

When he told me about it, we had a long talk about dreams. I said that most of the guys playing for the Pirates, the Mets, the Phillies, the Yankees or any other Major League Baseball team probably went through the same thing. People laughed at them, but they worked hard anyway and didn’t lose their dream. They keep moving forward.

“You may not make it into the majors, Connor, but if you don’t try, you surely won’t,” I said. “The best thing is to work as hard as you can to realize your dream and maybe, just maybe, it will come true.”

Connor is on his way and will be playing Baseball for the University of Maryland next year. Fingers crossed his dream comes true. Whether it does or not, he will always know he gave it his best shot.

Dialogue:  As I’ve said before, interviews with real people are the essence of creating a believable work of fiction.  You learn more from talking with living, breathing human beings than you could ever learn from books, articles and internet searches. 

Now, translate that into dialogue.  Your readers will follow the plot so much better if you can move it along with believable dialogue.  If night is falling, you can let your reader know the time of day by having your character say, “Gosh it gets dark early these days.  It’s only eight o’clock.” 

Or “Stay close, I can’t see you in this fog.” 

Or “This road gets steeper each time I climb it.  Here, give me your hand.” 

In each of those cases, you could have described the setting:  It was eight o’clock, it was foggy, or the road was steep.  But narrating fact after fact is boring and soon your novel will sound like a lecture.  You want your story to live.  Use dialogue for information and color. 

Don’t worry about complete sentences.  I had to unlearn this from my days as a journalist.  Newspaper and magazine articles are written in complete, grammatically correct sentences.  People don’t talk like that.  They might use one word or a string of words, or even a grunt.  No grammatical rules.  For example: 

“Help!” she yelled from her overturned car.  “Someone, now!”

“Coming,” shouted the deputy, holstering his gun.

Even casual conversations are rarely spoken in complete sentences.  Just listen next time you’re with some friends.  The conversation is casual, not grammatical, with pauses and phrases and comments and exclamations. 

I’ve found that when writing dialogue, it’s helpful to speak it as you write it, assuming the roles of the players and adding inflection.  You will quickly find that what you thought was real dialogue is stilted and fake-sounding.  Take out some words, add some facial descriptions or intonations in the narrative and soon you will have real people speaking, complaining, screaming for help, making love or telling jokes. 

In FIND EDSELL, there’s a big forest fire. In this sequence, the fire chief is talking with Joshua, one of the firefighters” 

“One of the pilots spotted a 1024 yesterday.”  The chief interrupted Joshua’s reverie. “A body lying next to a burned-out vehicle under the high wires.”

“Yeah?  What kind of car?”

“Looks like a four-by-four of some kind.  Bronco, Suburban, maybe a Cherokee>’ 

“The body probably belongs to Vogel,” Joshua said.

In that whole exchange, there are only three complete sentences.  Keep it short, keep it crisp, write like people talk.  And, read it out loud to prove it sounds good. 

Think about it, with the proper tools, anyone can write a book.  I firmly believe that inside each person, there is a story that others would want to read. 

So, what are you waiting for?   

In researching “Losing It”, my husband and I traveled from New Jersey to Hartford, CT to Scranton PA to Bozeman MT.  While in Scranton, our dear friend and family member Glenn Khoury arranged for us to interview several people at a trailer park he owns.  We spent most of the day there and learned so much, just talking with people.  Glen is in the red shirt.

One of my basic beliefs in writing a novel is the importance of interviews, of speaking to real people face to face. Internet research, reading books, attending seminars or listening to podcasts; all of that helps, but nothing will substitute for a face to face encounter.

You get more than words when you speak with someone. You get intonations, hesitations, loudness, softness and excitement. You see sadness, gladness, fear, and joy when you look into their eyes.

What started out as a simple few questions can easily morph into hours of information. When I first met Libby Vance, a lady trucker, our basic lunch went on and on. We liked each other and I felt comfortable asking difficult questions and she was comfortable answering them. Now I have a friend in the trucking business who is supporting my efforts to research my next book.

This has happened to me time and time again. When I was a correspondent for the Asbury Park Press, I frequently connected with the subjects of my interviews and sometimes what began as a single feature story grew into a series of articles.

Working here in North Carolina for the Brunswick Beacon, I was assigned to do an article on Hospice Care. As I researched the topic, it occurred to me that the best way to tell the story was to find an individual who was in Hospice care and to follow his progress from life to death. I found a gentleman who was willing to talk with me. I spent hours with him over a six week period as he slowly moved from this life to the next. My series, “One Man’s Life and Death” won an award from Landmark Publications that year.

The same thing happened when I researched FIND EDSELL! Several men in the New Jersey Forest Fire Service spent hours with me, taking me out to active fire scenes and arranging visits to fire towers and fire stations. One later moved on to be the head of the NJ Forest Fire Service. I’ll always be grateful because I could not possibly learn this stuff from books/manuals or the internet.

In my style of writing fact-based fiction, the interview is key!  Here’s a picture of a recently burned pine forest.

My next blog will explore “dialogue”. How it moves the story forward and why a writer must have keen ear in interviews.

Characters: As I have said many times before, I write “fact-based fiction”. That means my novels are based on facts, real places, and real people.

I do a lot of research. I read books, search the internet, take photos and actually visit the places where my stories take place. On September, my husband Gene and I drove from Princeton NJ to Hartford CT to Scranton PA to Bozeman MT because that is the route that my next thriller takes. It is a cross-country chase story.

When I wrote FIND EDSELL, my first book, the characters were patterned after folks I knew or got to know in the process. A good friend of mine was married to a former Army Commando. Joshua, the male protagonist in FIND EDSELL, is a version of Don. He is a former Commando; he knows weapons and hand-to-hand combat. He is also a bow hunter and an all-around tough guy with a heart of gold.

The teens in that book (Edsell, Borderline, Mark and Stacy) reflect the many teens I knew when I was a Girl Scout Leader, Softball Coach, Youth Group Leader, chair of the Junior Golf Program at our club in New Jersey and later on the Board of Directors of The First Tee of Brunswick County (now The First Tee of Coastal Carolina). I raised four daughters and our house was often a hangout for their friends. We usually had an extra place setting at our dinner table for whoever was visiting or spending the night.

Now, as I work on “Losing It”, the process is the same. Laura is a conglomerate of some of the women I knew while living in New Jersey. She has led a somewhat sheltered life, but now she must flee a killer.  Because he can trace her through her phone or credit cards, she must become homeless to get away.

Luckily, I am a farmer’s daughter from rural Maryland. I know how to handle firearms (my father taught me).  I roamed the woods, camped, fished on the Chesapeake Bay and in the creek behind our farm. I know what the forest sounds like at night. As I kid, I slept on the ground under a canvas strung between two trees with just a blanket around me.  I can write about Laura’s experience in the outdoors.

Stay tuned for more installments of “The Adventure of Writing a Book”. Now that the holidays are over, I promise to write at least once a week.

The picture is 12-year old me on the farm.

Writing a book is a big job, but it is also the most interesting, exciting, challenging task in the world. Just think: while you are writing, you are god. You create a universe populated with animals and people and events drawn from your own imagination and research.

You can imagine a cruel evil villain, a beautiful princess, a sweet baby, a scheming dishonest stockbroker or a witch. You decide how tall they are, how old, what color is their hair or skin. Are they educated or ignorant? Is your hero a genius or does he have Downs Syndrome? Is he addicted? Is he/she jealous, wicked, or kind and loving?

The characters in your book are in your head and they enter the world through your hands tapping the computer keyboard.  Maybe you write your rough draft in a notebook, but still your hands create your new world.  Maybe you dictate, but still it all comes down to words from your mind to the mind of the reader.

Then you manufacture the universe of your novel. Does your story unfold in the United States (city or farm or suburb)? Perhaps it all happens in a foreign country or distant planet? Is it winter, summer, hot or cold, dry or wet?  Present, past or future?

Now comes the plot: is your story an adventure, a thriller or a love story? Is it about war? Or the inner workings of an advertising agency? Perhaps your people inhabit a palace in the 14th Century or a ghetto in Nazi Germany.

Whatever you decide is fine.  YOU are in charge.    

Perhaps you want to create a three-book series like my daughter (Kim Campbell) did with her “Triple Crown Trilogy”. Her story takes place in and around the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont. She was quite ingenious in creating her world of Thoroughbred racing. The cast of characters is basically the same in each book, but the primary character changes with each one. Check it out at www.triplecrowndreams.com. Two books are out, the third will be published next year.

Many authors create a primary character and then design a whole series around him (her). Perhaps it’s a detective or an explorer or a spy. If the primary character (protagonist) is believable, folks will continue to buy the books to see his (her) next adventure.

Writing is truly and adventure. When I’m really into my research or writing a rough draft, a whole day will simply fly by. I can begin at 9:00 and discover that it’s now 2:00 p.m. and I’ve missed lunch. Not every day is like that for a novelist, but the best days are.

I’m taking a break for 10 days. I will resume “The Adventure of Writing a Book” on January 2. Stay tuned and have a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Kwanzaa, or Winter Solstice.

Happy New Year and continue to read and write.

Helping the Homeless

Last month, just before the wonder and excess of Thanksgiving weekend, I attended a Hunger & Homeless Banquet and Soup Luncheon in Leland NC.

The luncheon was put on by the Brunswick County Homeless Coalition. Several speakers from state and local agencies/organizations that work with homeless people gave short talks.  Also speaking were several former homeless people who now have jobs and homes. They confirmed everything I have learned in my last six months of talking with homeless people here and in other areas across the United States.

Homeless people are not necessarily lazy, alcoholic or addicted to drugs. They’re not homeless because they don’t want to work. Trust me, no one wants to sleep on a park bench, under the Myrtle Beach Boardwalk or in an abandoned house or barn. No one wants to live in their car for three years. No one wants to hold up a cardboard sign and beg for food next to a highway entrance.

Granted, there are homeless people who suffer from addiction, depression and/or mental illness and they need our help.  But, many of them are in this terrible situation due to circumstances beyond their control like a sudden illness, accident, loss of job or spouse, a fire. I have heard stories over the past six months that shocked and horrified me. As I listened, I thought: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

We live in a complex, detail-oriented world.  What do you do when you have no documentation?  No way to prove who you are?  No driver’s license, birth certificate,  cell phone, credit card, or bank account?  No Facebook, I-Pad, car, apartment or house?   

Many homeless children and adults are illiterate. How can they hold down a job or attend school if they cannot read or write? Even a waitress, cleaning woman, mechanic and dog sitter must fill out forms, write orders.

In addition, many homeless people are financially illiterate. They don’t understand how checkbooks, saving accounts and credit cards work. It they manage to get a cash-paying job, how do they pay rent, buy food, save for a rainy day? How can they qualify for a rental apartment or a mortgage? How can they buy a car to get to work?

These individuals are stuck in a precarious place where they must live from day to day, hour to hour, finding food in dumpsters or food pantries. When they get sick, they go to emergency rooms instead of a doctor’s office.

My next book, “Losing It”, will focus on a woman (Laura) who becomes homeless to escape a killer. This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever written.

Stay tuned from more installments of “The Adventure of Writing a Book”.