What an exciting time to be an artist, writer, film maker.  Not to mention all those other professions or hobbies where imagination reigns.

This afternoon a friend and I regaled each other with stories about the way our beloved publishing profession has changed.  Even though publishers don’t always acknowledge this, no longer do authors listen and nod when they’re told what to write, how to write it and for what audience.  While most of us continue to respect the publishing houses and professionals we’ve worked with, we know there are other viable ways to publish our work.  Some people even believe “better” ways.  We’re watching closely.

But that’s not the point of this blog.  I want to talk about one of my favorite television shows, Veronica Mars, and an exceptional, powerful new idea called Kickstarter, which is really a symptom of change and an outcome.

Here’s Kickstarter’s own definition of who they are and what they do:

Kickstarter is a funding platform for creative projects. Everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Kickstarter is full of ambitious, innovative, and imaginative projects that are brought to life through the direct support of others.  Since our launch on April 28, 2009, over $500 million has been pledged by more than 3 million people, funding more than 35,000 creative projects. If you like stats, there’s lots more.

So what does this mean and where does the money come from?  Well, anybody with a truly wonderful idea can try to raise money to fund it on Kickstarter.  The money?  Well, that comes from you and me.  It’s called crowdfunding.  That’s right.  If you believe in a project and want it to become a living, breathing entity, then you pledge money to see that dream come true.  A little, most likely.  Sometimes a whole lot.

Crazy, right?  Crazy fabulous. (more…)

Every ten years or so I’m faced with a big decision. That’s about how often I move and must, out of necessity, fix up a room to work in. Which invariably means a new coat of paint. Which invariably means choosing a color for the walls.

My first study was located in the corner of a bedroom in New Orleans. The room itself was a rental apartment attached to our house, created from a carport by the previous owners. Eventually we took over the apartment and I began my writing career. The walls were dark paneling, but I was so exhilarated, I hardly noticed  After awhile my husband and I traded spaces with our older sons and I moved my study into a small bedroom which had been painted a soft yellow. The room seemed happy and lively when I sat down to work, so, of course, the next time we moved I painted my new study a lavender-gray. The emphasis being on gray. I mean, if yellow inspires creativity and boosts energy, let’s do the exact opposite just for the heck of it.

When I had a chance to move out of that gloomy space, I took it gladly, moving into an upstairs bedroom. By then I’d learned my lesson. After an enormous amount of research into color psychology, I settled on. . . yellow. Again and with great relief.

The next time we moved, I didn’t even give the matter any thought. I painted the walls yellow. Having experimented and lost, I wasn’t willing to take chances.

Then we moved to Florida a few weeks ago, and it was time for the study-color discussion once more.  The room I decided to take as my study was formerly a media room. The walls were dark cocoa brown, which was quite lovely with the built-in cherry cabinetry. But did I want to write in a dark brown room?  Would you?

So the quest for a new color began. This study isn’t tucked away. It’s right off the lanai and the kitchen.  More important it looks over the waterway behind our house. I was afraid that yellow, even a soft yellow, would fight with the scenery and the cabinets. So I took another gamble. As of today the walls are now Sea Salt by Sherwin Williams, a pale blue-green-gray. I’ve seen Sea Salt or its comrades on other walls in other houses. The color changes with the light, and it’s difficult to describe. What I know for sure is that the room now seems three times larger, and the blue-green rug that graced our Virginia dining room looks happily at home on the bamboo floors, adding a richness to the color of the walls. The view beyond the walls seems to pop, which couldn’t make me happier.

Will a blue/green/gray room stimulate creativity? My thimble full of research this evening (conducted after the paint dried) says that blue brings down the heart rate and blood pressure, and green is the most restful color in the spectrum. Does this mean I’ll write quieter books?

I do know this. I’m happy with my choice, but I couldn’t let go of yellow entirely. My sewing room, formerly cocoa-brown, as well,  is now yellow.   A lovely, happy yellow that will, I hope, inspire happy quilts. And if I feel my energy flagging in my quiet blue room, I can always visit my sewing room for a quick pep-me-up.

What colors inspire you? What colors give you energy? Do you like to take chances, or do you stick with what works?  What was the last paint color you chose and why?  I hope you’ll tell us.

Nothing beats the internet when you’re recuperating.  I discovered this during the past week when I was largely immobile after surgery on my knee.  The iPad I’d  wondered if I’d ever really need proved to be a godsend.  I did mail, surfed and played Word with my family and my former assistant friend now living across the pond.  Since our time zones are hours apart, I could always count on her to have a word waiting for me when I woke up. That brightened my morning.

I also discovered the real joys of illustration.  There were moments I didn’t want to read.  I just wanted to look at beautiful things, and Pinterest fit the bill perfectly. I had time to scroll through the gorgeous choices of people I “follow,” and wallow in the beauty of rooms, quilts, seaside abodes, desserts, and Asheville, North Carolina, scene of my next book.  It was a welcome diversion.  It was healing. (more…)

Last week’s Novelists Inc. conference was fabulous. I came home with so much information, but unfortunately no suntan to go with it.  I was inside the hotel at workshops madly scribbling notes almost the entire time.  When I wasn’t, I was investigating Sarasota with friends, which might well turn out to be our Florida home someday.  The photo is my husband and I at the amazing Ringling Museum.  We only saw the outside, but inside beckons for the next trip.

So what did I learn?   And what might you find surprising?  Some teasers:

1. Tweet (which I do) between 1 and 20 (!) times a day (which I don’t.)
2. YouTube is my friend and a video a week is not too much.  (Not too much for whom?)
3. Join Linked-In (so people I don’t know can connect for reasons I don’t yet understand.)
4. Consider tweeting for a character.  (Can you imagine what Wanda might say?)
5. “Publishers are the bouncers at the pearly gates.” (Mark Coker, epublisher of Smashwords, talking about traditional publishing.)
6. “Publishers purchase today what was popular yesterday to publish in 18 months.”  (Mark again.)
7. “Amazon is eating publishers for lunch.”  (See 5 and 6)
8. Amazon sells 105 ebooks for every 100 print books. 
9. Ebook pluses: changeable fonts, portable, compact, convenient sampling and purchasing. (Plus ereaders are getting cheaper.)
10. Nothing you can do to promote yourself will help unless you write a good book.

It was fun to learn new ways to  find readers and keep my faithful ones happy, too, but everyone there agreed that the last item, writing a good book, has to be the most important.   The trick in coming years, when writers will take more and more of publishing into their own hands, will be to make certain that good books rise, like cream, to the top of the bookselling world.

And speaking of that?  Back to One Mountain Away!

Okay, who remembers Tom Paxton?  Remember his song Daily News?  “Daily news, daily blues, pick up a copy every time you choose.  Seven little pennies in the newsboy’s hand. . .“  Seven little pennies?  Newsboy?  How old is this song, anyway?

Apparently it’s this old: “Civil rights leaders are a pain in the neck, can’t hold a candle to Chiang Kai-shek.”  Ask your children or grandchildren who Chiang Kai-shek was and gauge accordingly.  Or for a real eye-opener, ask them about civil rights.

Vintage or not, I find myself humming Daily News sometimes when I see an article or headline in the newspaper that sounds like an idea for a book.  While I have access to many newspapers online, my book ideas usually come from the Washington Post, which is delivered straight to my sidewalk.  For this purpose a newspaper in the hand is worth two on the iPad.  It’s the little articles, the ones you’d never notice online or that wouldn’t even make it there, that often have the best story ideas hidden inside.  Local crimes and gossip.  Obituaries.  Letters to the editor. Advice columns–always good for romances and family drama. (more…)

Although I have never started a novel I didn’t finish, I have a host of quilts I’ve begun that are still waiting for their final stitch.  I quilt because it’s fun.  Not because I need warm covers on my bed or bright patches of color on my walls.  The real reason I quilt is because it brings me pleasure to try new things.  Apparently it brings me less to finish them.

Writing brings me pleasure, too.  Rarely does a day go by when I forget that being paid to do something I love is a priceless treasure. I have, for the most part, been able to write what I want to.  I have written family sagas and romances, friendship novels and mysteries.  I’ve added paranormal elements, suspense, melodrama, humor.  I’ve darted here and there, tried this and that.  I’ve prided myself on the variety of my work.  Were I a student today, some concerned teacher might suggest I have mild ADD.  Since many of my most talented colleagues admit that they, too, daydream at the darndest times, I find this a blessing.

Sometimes, though, it is necessary to plan.  Usually I have to be dragged kicking and screaming into a session that begins: “Let’s talk about the future.”  Lately though, I’ve been faced with decisions that require thoughtful analysis.  I have two publishers.  They have other authors and sales figures.  And publishing is changing so quickly that anything written about it today is no longer relevant tomorrow.

While I have never  left a novel unfinished, I have not “completed” two series.  One is the Shenandoah Album series, set in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.  Each book has a relationship (a different relationship) to a traditional quilt, but the novels are about the lives of women in the area around Toms Brook. The first novel, Wedding Ring, was supposed to stand alone.  Instead that novel expanded to five books and spawned audio versions and quilt pattern books.  I planned a sixth, but my publisher planned otherwise.  At this time Summer Winds is still unwritten.

At the same time I was writing the Shenandoah Album series, I began a cozy mystery series we called Ministry is Murder, about a free-spirited minister’s wife in a small Ohio town who solves murders.  These books, too, were such fun to write.  I love Aggie and her family and the situations she gets herself into.  I love her harmless flirtation with Detective Roussos, her crazy real estate agent friend Lucy, her aging flower child mother Junie.   I wrote these just because I wanted to.  They are five books I will always be proud I authored, but for now Aggie is in limbo.  When my contract was completed, I didn’t suggest more.

I have submitted a proposal for a new series, because after carefully crafted letters explaining why NOW is the time to finish the Shenandoah Album series, the answer was “no.”  Not “no” as in, “never.”  But “no” as in “not now.”  And while that door may still be cracked, I’m afraid that “not now,” is the same “not now” we parents use when a wheedling child wants us to go outside and play, and we have no intention of leaving our nice warm house.

Still a day doesn’t go by when someone on my Facebook page or in an email asks when the next Shenandoah Album will be released.  Today I have no answer except “not now.”  But here’s what I can say.  I am still working on this, and publishing IS changing.  Who knows what the future will bring for my quilter friends in Toms Brook, or for Aggie and her family?  I haven’t deserted them.  I am just waiting to see what unfolds and exactly how.  Then I can decide.

In the meantime, please come along with me on the next ride.  We took a whirlwind trip to Happiness Key and it was great fun.  I’m not sure what the future will bring, but I can only guarantee I will write the best book, the best series I can, and I hope whenever you read it, you will think so, too.

On Monday I explained the reasons I was destined not to become a writer.  Other talents and activities.  Strange educational decisions.  No scholarly examinations of the written word.  And while all of those were factors, I saved the most important.  Like so many of us, particularly those of us of the female persuasion, I was told that nobody makes a living in the arts.  Unless we wanted to teach (fill in the blank here), then there was no point in pursuing an education in that field.  So while I had always loved writing fiction, on the rare occasions I was given the opportunity, I knew writing was not an avenue to follow. 

Forget that the short story class I took just for fun was the single most exciting class I’d ever taken.  Forget that later, as a therapist, the sheer joy of writing up my case notes should have been carefully explored.  Forget that I put myself to sleep at night with wild, exotic tales of other times and other people.  Nobody makes a living. . .

I was in my early thirties before I was mature enough to question why I believed something so silly.  I had fallen back on my years of piano, and was teaching twenty lively children while taking care of my own menagerie of three-going-on-four.  One of the moms told me that she’d submitted the first three chapters of a mystery novel and had gotten a nod to send the rest.

She had submitted chapters and someone in New York City was interested?  That happened?  I was as excited as she was, for slightly different reasons. 

Months later my husband came home and mentioned he’d met a woman who made her living as a writer.  Okay, she wrote fantasy game scenarios, but she wrote!  They paid her.  And suddenly, all the red lights I’d patiently accepted turned green, and I was speeding toward a new destination.

Sometimes change is that simple and that complicated.  I was finally old enough to question the wisdom of words spoken to me years before. Too,  I was finally old enough to say, so who cares?  I had nothing to lose.  What were a few rejections or even a thousand compared to the joy, the bliss, of sitting down at a computer and putting words, MY words, on the screen?  By then we were living in a strange new city (New Orleans is indeed stranger than most), and I had a new baby to care for.  But all that suddenly seemed like nothing.  I could find time.  I could find a way.  I could write.  And I did.

I started, as I’d learned to in graduate school, with research.  I read every relevant how-to book in my local library.  Short stories?  I wrote them.  Confessions?  Ditto.  A children’s story sold.  The $25 dollars I received in payment was my validation.  I could write.  Someone besides my husband thought so. 

I did the math.  At that rate I would need to publish at least a thousand stories per child in the family to get them to college.  And by then, I wasn’t going to stop writing, even if I had to move the family to the proverbial garret.  So it was on to novels.  At almost the moment I realized this, Kathryn Falk of Romantic Times Magazine came out with How to Write A Romance And Get It Published.  For me.  I was sure of it.  After all, that irrelevant education I mentioned before?  I’d studied what?  People, relationships, marriages, families, psychology, sociology, the American psyche, American culture.  Was there ever a better background for what I really wanted to do?

I wrote a romance, then another.  I found an agent (too good a story to tell quickly).  They sent the book off, and the next thing I knew an editor in New York was calling to tell me how delighted she was to have bought my manuscript. The skies expanded.  Angels sang.  I still remember exactly where I was standing when the call came.

Sixty-something novels later, the angels still sing, and I am so grateful that I finally questioned the axioms of good-hearted people determined to make sure I had bread on my table and a roof over my head.  But what did I learn when I finally realized I could and should write for a living?  I learned that we as parents, as teachers, as adults, should never question or tamper with the dreams of a child.  I told my own children that of course, they should pursue anything they loved.  That, of course, they could become astronauts or composers or Arctic explorers.  Even more?  I believed it.

I still do. Why wouldn’t I?

Some months ago I asked my Facebook fans to suggest ideas for future blogs.  What did they want to know that I could possibly tell them?  I received wonderful ideas, and today I’m using one from Denise who said: “I’m interested in how you started out, all the details of how you became a writer.”  Since it’s not that often we’re asked to recount our personal history, I’m going to jump right in and savor the opportunity.

First of all, forget “I always knew I wanted to write.”  Also toss out “I prepared myself from the moment I read my first Bobbsey Twins thriller.”  And while you’re tossing, get rid of, “I majored in Russian literature with an emphasis on the pre-prison fiction of Dostoevsky.”  I didn’t.  I showed promise as a pianist early in life, and since that happened to run in my mother’s family, I was immediately destined to become, if not a concert pianist, a teacher–or later, after my first horrifying music education class, a music therapist.  I accompanied choirs all through secondary school, performed in a show choir called Baker’s Dozen, and won a small piano scholarship to Florida State University, with its truly excellent school of music.  My path was set.

Only, it wasn’t.  Because while I did well in classes, I saw the musical score on the wall right away.  I was surrounded by gifted students who really loved every part of what we were studying.  They practiced their instruments for hours.  They adored performing.  I could sightread like a whiz and accompany with enthusiasm, but those hours in a practice room bored me silly.  If I could play it once, why bother playing it twice, not to mention a million times?

In my sophomore year the truth caught up with me, as it too often does.  In order to continue, I really had to practice, and I really had to forget all those other classes outside the School of Music that I would never have time to take.  Classes in history, psychology, sociology, humanities. . .  I changed majors without looking back, and settled on that most saleable of degrees, American Studies.  Later, as a young mom fascinated by families, children, and marriage, I went on to get my Masters degree in yet another “you majored in what?” degree in Family Development.

Have you noticed I have yet to mention “English, writing, composition, literature?”  No mention, no background.  My high school English and composition classes were so excellent that I tested out of the college versions and filled my communication credits by taking French, a language for which I had no aptitude.  Plus, to add insult to injury, the boyfriend who spoke it so beautifully disappeared into the land of past loves and never knew I was striving to understand him better.  I took, in total, one American literature class and one class on writing the short story, just for fun.  I missed that clue.

Clearly, I was not training to write fiction.  Only, as it turned out, I was.    And that’s part two of this story, to be completed on Thursday.  But while I’m here right now?  Exactly what did I learn from this part of my saga?  Well, actually quite a lot.  First of all, that just because you do something well, you don’t have to do it forever, and you don’t have to do it professionally.  Second, that we, as a society, are too quick to slot our young people into jobs/professions they may never enjoy.  And third, that becoming a writer doesn’t hinge on reading and understanding the complete works of James Joyce, nor does it demand an academic understanding of the difference between a dangling participle and participial phrases serving as absolute clauses.  

Becoming a writer is all about falling in love.

You’re moving right along on your new project.  The characters are no longer one dimensional, the plot’s moving at just the right pace; then suddenly you sit down at the computer/typewriter/legal pad and nothing happens.  You’re stuck.

Nothing is more chilling to a writer than an empty page.  I outline extensively to avoid them, but even with that weapon in my arsenal, sometimes I still don’t know what comes next, or how to put it there.

Through the years I’ve developed coping strategies to get me moving again.  In hopes one of them will help you, here are some to choose from.

Blocking Background Noise:

While I can’t write to music as many of my colleagues can, I have discovered a few noise-blocking tricks to help me focus.  Background noise can pull us out of our stories and make it difficult to jump that abyss to a completed page.  Pandora’s “ambient” station plays New Age music, complete with environmental sound effects. Pandora is free, as well.   If that’s too “musical” to suit you, another good bet can be found here at Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast.  You’ll have to set it up to play on your system, but I followed the iTunes instructions easily.  Now I can turn the station on or off from iTunes without going online.  More options are available under set up. (more…)

While I’m out of town visiting family and waiting for the arrival of the new grandchild, I thought I’d share a blog I wrote for Fresh Fiction in June of 2009.  A search tells me it never appeared here, so enjoy now.  I’ll be back with new blogs next week.

Which comes first, the novel or the title?

There is no question that authors are odd. We hear voices in our heads. We stare blankly at walls for hours, leaving those around us to wonder if we have, without fanfare, passed away. We save things other people toss out or never possess in the first place. Real estate circulars. Missing children inserts. Photographs that show nothing except, perhaps, the curve of a cheek or the shape of an eye. We keep files. Oh yes, we keep lots and lots of files. Jotted notes of overheard conversations. Newspaper articles about mortgage fraud. Three word phrases that might vanish in the night.

Authors are almost always asked where our ideas come from. No matter how many times I’m asked, I’m not annoyed by this question. In fact I can relate. Myself, I wonder about architects, particularly those who design hotel lobbies and airports. Where did those ideas originate, and can we please extinguish the source? Or artists. Take Jackson Pollock. What possessed the man, other than an urge to pour lots of paint on lots of canvas? (more…)