Serial, Pt 2

Sam shouldn't have trusted herself to pass by the bank of computers before leaving. A child of the dotcom age, her drug of choice had always been the internet. While her friends had spent Saturday nights out at some lake, sparking up, she'd been carefully ensconced in her room, tapping at her keyboard in search of something… truth, knowledge—the great Nirvana, perhaps.

Email. Search engines. Chat rooms. Databases. It all just…made sense to her. In front of a computer, she was home.

As though by some OCD compulsion, she shifted her coat and purse into her left hand and grabbed the mouse with her right. She hadn't meant to stop, but no big deal. It wouldn't kill Frank to wait the couple of extra minutes it would take for her to check her email. He had outlawed her getting a smart phone after all, stating she'd never put the thing down. If she had to hazard a guess, he was probably worried she might feel the need to reach over and check her email during sex. Not likely.

Just the thought of such activities curved her lips into a smile. Beer was great, but she expected Frank to express his thanks in an altogether different way that night.

The computer came to life under her light touch, with just the barest buzz of static electricity as the monitor awoke from sleep mode. On auto-pilot, she pulled up her email, not surprised, but nevertheless disappointed to see there were no new messages. She clicked over to her google reader. Nope. No new posts there either.

"Hmmm," she said, lowering her coat and purse to the stool beside her. Her fingers were a blur of motion as she made a quick circuit of her favorite websites. Nothing new or exciting to see. It was rather late, but still.

She rested part of her weight on the stool and opened a spider. The fat black widow appeared center screen, its cursor blinking and casting a faint pulsing light through the room. She hesitated, pushing a thick strand of hair behind her ear and darting a glance at the clock above the door.

"Blast it," she muttered, sitting down fully. "He can wait."

Perhaps it was the high of her earlier discovery, but she wasn't ready to leave off the trail she'd finally unearthed. Slow at first, her fingers sped up as she pressed on, plugging in search terms she thought might pull up more information. Soon the spider's belly was spilling over with words.

Francis Tumblety. M.O. Police. Killings. Motive. Disguise. Knife. Doctor. Capture. Alias. Ritual.

Anything she could think to add about Tumblety.

The click of keys echoed through the quiet room.

At last, she paused and read through the list of terms to see if she'd missed anything obvious. With a few more taps, she added Jack the Ripper. How that one had slipped by her, she didn't want to ponder. Finished, she hit the search button, which was in the shape of a red hourglass in the center of the spider's belly.

"I have you in my web now, Tumblety," she said, her voice surprisingly hard. A jolt of something went through her. Excitement. Anticipation. The thrill of the hunt. Sherlock Holmes may have been the greatest detective in all of history, but he hadn't had her tools at his disposal.

She watched the hourglass turn slowly, her fingers balled together in her lap as she hummed 'the itsy bitsy spider'. Frank liked to call it her theme song.

Shifting to ease an ache in her lower back, she managed to knock her purse off the stool beside her. It hit the ground with a loud plunk, jerking her out of her reverie. Frank.

"Shit." She pushed off the stool. How long had she been sitting there, waiting for what was the equivalent of a large pot of water to boil? It could take hours for her spider to troll the web. All with Frank waiting. She scrambled down on to all fours to collect the coins that had spilled from her purse. With everything back inside, she pulled her jacket on and made for the door.

A loud belch stopped her short. She whirled around.

"No way." She hurried back to the computer. The hourglass was static now, nothing but a slowly blinking icon just waiting to be pushed. The belch had been Frank's idea. Not exactly the most appropriate alert, but she had to admit it got one's attention.

She tapped a fingernail to her teeth and studied the clock again. "No biggie," she said with a shrug. "I'll just owe him."

With that, she clicked on the hourglass. Hit after hit scrolled down the screen, ranked in order of importance. Standing, she scanned them quickly, waiting for something to jump out from the rest. Nothing looked all that promising. Just the usual conspiracy theories about Jack the Ripper. Perhaps she should've left that term off the list.

She tapped her foot impatiently, half of her out the door already. But then something caught her eye that made her breath catch. Scrolling through the pages, she had nearly missed it and thought perhaps she had been mistaken. But no, when she hit the page up button, there it was, bold as day.

"What the fu.." she said, easing down on to the stool again. The website was nothing special. Just another one of the Ripper sites with pages upon pages about the canonical victims, and otherwise. One which left no man in the vicinity of London during the period of the murders unscathed by public scrutiny. Likely all bullshit anyway. Some guy with a mom fetish probably did it.

But this…this was something she hadn't expected.

Without thinking, she dialed her cell phone and pressed it to her ear, skimming the article all the while. Eventually the line clicked over to Frank's voice mail. She hung up without leaving a message, her mouth dropping open to a soft O as she reached the end of the page.

"My dear, Watson," she said, trying to collect herself. "This has truly turned into a three-pipe problem."

<end>

When routine becomes a rut

When I read Jen’s most excellent post this week, I had to smile. I’d already started on my own post, and what Jen wrote about so passionately – and truthfully - is the flip-side of what my post is about – when writing becomes such an all-consuming part of your life that you get stuck in a big old, creativity-squishing rut. (ETA – and I’ve just read Kristen’s post. LOL! What can I say? Great minds ….)

When my youngest child started school in August, I decided the time had come to get serious about writing; to roll up my sleeves and put in as much time as I could muster, just to see what I could actually do. I figured it’d also be good to test whether I could handle writing to a deadline, and so I self-imposed a December 31^st finish date for my MS. If – no, be positive Rachel - when I am published, deadlines will become a part of my writing life, the “I don’t feel like writing today” refrain just won’t cut it any more, and I had to see whether I could do it.

With all this in mind (and with the overwhelming need to just be finished with my bloody SFD) I began to devote every spare moment I could to writing (but note – “every spare moment” in reality translates to the windows of time when my kids are in school or asleep; the times when I’m not dashing to the shop because there’s nothing left to eat in the house; the times when I’m not reluctantly doing the cleaning so we don’t all die of some horrible bacterial infection ... that sort of thing. Oh, and I also have to sleep!)

So, since August my time has been allocated in this order of priorities – family, then writing, then exercise, and lastly (where it firmly belongs IMO), housework. On a rough average, I’d say that I’ve clocked about three hours of writing a day. Not stellar, but still, it’s a solid effort.

So, all’s good, right?

Erm, no.

The trouble is, I’ve become a bit of a hermit. No, a LOT of a hermit. If I didn’t go to the shops and make small talk with the cashier or have a five-minute chat with the other mums when collecting the offspring from school, I seriously would not speak to another adult all day. And the trouble with all this, as far as writing is concerned, is that while the imaginary world in my book may be fun to live in, not having a real life has led to a bit of a creative burn out. I’m close to being done with my SFD, but man, are these last few scenes coming hard. True, I’m writing some of the most difficult, climactic scenes in my book; but still, I’m sure that all this closeting away of myself has drained my creative well.

I hadn’t quite realised I’d got to this stage until last weekend, when my DH and I took off for a couple of days away in the Barossa Valley, one of Australia’s most beautiful wine growing regions. Ah, the hills covered with neatly ordered vines, the golden shimmer of just-browned-off grass, the strangers (some lovely, some kooky) we struck up conversations with in the wine tasting rooms, the smell of the cellars, like musty, wine-soaked cork … a chunk of my book is set in a wine growing region of France, and with all this real-life stimulation, my synapses were a-firing! Ideas for some of these harder scenes started to flow, and though time will tell whether they’re actually any good, the experience made me realize – man, I gotta get a life.

Now, a getaway like that is a rare occurrence, but it started me thinking about all the things I’d given up to focus on my writing, and whether I’d been a little too ruthless.

For example, I cut out my daily walks in favour of sessions in the gym, and at home on the exercise bike from hell (oh, how I loathe thee, damn bike!). The latter give me the same level of exercise as a walk, but much quicker, leaving more time free for writing … however, there’s something about being out in the fresh air and taking note of the world around me that would always fire off a zillion ideas for plot twists and character development in my head. This never happens when I’m flogging myself on that bloody bike, or in the gym.

TV is another activity that’s gone by the wayside. I virtually never watch it these days. But I remember how something like a really well-structured episode of Dr Who could inspire me to think about the shape of my own book, or how a really interesting and off the wall character in a movie would get me thinking “hmmm,” in a good way.

And then I started thinking about all the other things I could do, but I don't – like catching up with my girlfriends for coffee more than twice a year, ambling around the art gallery without the kids in tow for a change, exploring bits of my city I’ve never been to before … anything to feed my mind, so I have something to draw on for inspiration other than the four walls of my study. Because really, if we don’t get out in the real world and mix with all sorts of real people and have new adventures and experiences, how on earth can we, as writers, expect to fuel our creativity?

So that’s my challenge - to get back out in the world. Maybe not until the week after next, though. I still really *really* want to finish my SFD before the kids start their long summer holidays, but after that – watch out world!

What about you? What do you do to top up your well of creativity when it’s running dry?

I Got Nothing

So here I am, ready to do my blog post. Ah, what to blog about?

I throw my penny into the well of inspiration and hear…clink! Empty. (You can’t see this, but my cursor is blinking at me. Blinking. Come on, Kristen! I’m wai-ting…blink. Blink. Blink.)

It happens. Some may be more prolific than others, but all writers at some point or another find that their well has run dry. And what to do when it happens?

There is a theory (no, I don’t have the energy today to look up its origins, sorry) … a theory that says that by adapting to an hourly schedule, creating standardized time, we as a race severely quashed our creative energies. True? Debatable.

But the premise is this: creativity does not run on a clock. Nor is it constant. It ebbs and flows; ergo there are surges and dry spells. We, as creative beings, are not machines. Creativity is an organic thing. To try and tame it, force it to adhere to our industrialized schedule, is going against the tide. Of course, we as a human race just love that challenge and often try to bend nature as we like.

But what does it mean? Well, that there will be days like today when I won’t be at 100 per cent. Maybe not even 20 per cent. Yet the guilt that comes with that, the feeling of failure is brutal. Never mind that there are spells were I can churn out an average of 10,000 words a day for months on end. Here, on this day, when this stupid blinking cursor is yelling at me, is my shame.

An excellent piece of advice is to write every day. Regardless. You are a writer, so write. But what if I don’t want to? What if I only write once every two months? Am I not a writer? (This is the madness that goes on in my head –aren’t you happy to be here? (g) )

And just exactly what is it that makes one a writer anyway? [Work with me here, I tend to philosophize when dry]

When that inevitable small-talk question arises, “What do you do?” At what point do you find yourself able to say, with your head held high, “I am a writer.” ??

Is it when you’ve completed a book? I can’t imagine so. Some of the best writers I know haven’t yet finished their books. Conversely, some of the worst writing I’ve read has been in published books…

Is it when you have an agent? Published? Published multiple times?

I suspect this answer will be different for all of us. It’s too tied into our own insecurities. But I have to believe that there is a moment for all of us when a switch flicks in our soul, when we feel, know with complete confidence: yes! I am a writer.

And perhaps that is the point. Perhaps being a writer isn’t simply about the act itself, but the declaration as well. I think, therefore I am. Well, I am.

What about you? Have you reached that moment of knowing? And if so, what did it for you? Do you feel guilt about your dry days? Must you write every day to feel valid? Has my crazy-ass post confused you enough that you’ve missed that I’ve written about essentially nothing?

Please, talk amongst yourselves, I’ll be having some coffee.*



*Edited to add that as we do live in a schedulized world, I say we make the best of it. Writing every day with out fail is definitely one of the best ways to combat the dreaded dry spells. I'm just sayin' is all...

Walk the Walk

Many of you probably know that I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes last winter. For those of you who didn't know…Surprise! Ain't life grand? J

That said, I'm doing very well – and whatever shock the diagnosis brought about has pretty much worn off by now. Mostly. I'm still trying to get used to drinking diet soda (ick!), but if that's the least of my worries, life will be ALL good.

With the diagnosis came a huge wake-up call that I really needed to make some lifestyle changes. You see, even in my lowest moment of "why me's" I heard a firm voice of resolve from inside, constantly chanting: YOU WILL NOT SETTLE. Meaning, I would not settle for, nor rely upon my medication to do the work for me. If I had to drag myself out of bed each morning to exercise…if I had to avoid all fast food restaurants…if I had to guzzle down a gallon of water in order to quench my need for sugary goodness, then by God I would do it. It wasn't easy. Heck, it still isn't easy.

What I learned—very quickly—is that I couldn't rely on anyone but myself. I had choices—I could go on living/eating the way I was and risk future and/or worse health problems. I could play the blame game. I could cry and whine and bemoan the unfairness of it all. Or I could get off my duff and do something about it. Make changes that would see me on the road to better health. I chose the latter. It may be an uphill battle that I'll never win, but dang it…I'm going up that hill with fists raised and one snarky attitude that no one wants to mess with.

So, how does this relate to writing? Bear with me for a little while longer…I'm getting there.

One of the key ingredients to a life with diabetes is: ROUTINE.

Oh, gawd. I almost break into hives at the mere thought. But yes, routine. It's that simple…and that difficult.

Like a good diabetic (as one of my diabetic friends likes to call me), I try to eat right (craving fast food? Go somewhere that offers a side salad instead of French fries), exercise (the key to controlling blood sugars, imho. I walk every day, after every meal, and boy do I see it on my meter results), TRY to get plenty of rest (the one I'm most likely to fail at…on a daily basis), and track any changes I see in my readings over time—and adjust accordingly. The good news is that I'm having a VERY difficult time keeping my blood sugars UP at this point. Hopefully that means I can ditch the meds! WHOOT.

So, what happens when I have a bad day/few hours? Well, I don't call it a crap day and give up, that's fo sho. Doing that means high sugars that leave me with headaches, swollen feet, blurry vision, and just an overall case of ICKS that I do not want to deal with. When I feel like that, I don't slack, I push myself even harder. I get my butt moving, eat a completely carb-free meal, and/or guzzle a bunch of water. Because if one thing is true – no matter how high my blood sugars may spike sometimes, they WILL come down eventually.

Okay, I'm getting to how this relates to writing. You ready for it?

I've made HUGE adjustments to my lifestyle over the past year. I've developed a routine. Not because I HAD to. (You could say I had to, but ultimately that isn't what motivates a lot of people. Not me at any rate.) I did it because I want to live a LONG, healthy life…and I didn't want to feel like utter crap anymore. I did—for a long time. And as hard as it was to be diagnosed, it was also a HUGE blessing because I feel better than I have in YEARS.

So, the thing I'm realizing as I come out of this sort of funk, is that I need to take what I learned and apply it to my writing. My health was worth the changes I made, and you can sure as heck bet my writing is worth it too.

I've had to ask the really tough question: Am I doing everything I can to achieve my publication dreams?

Eh….NOT REALLY.

I fall prey to fast food FAR too many times. Instead of making sensible choices and sitting down to write when I have 10 minutes, I'll choose TV instead…or maybe a book. Whatever's quick and easy.

Instead of writing, I'll putter around on the net, checking blogs and sitting on my duff. All of that inactivity isn't getting my book written, though it's doing a great deal for my writer's spread.

I don't check in with myself enough. Am I writing at the optimum time of day/in the optimum place—when/where I can avoid distractions and am at my most alert? Probably not.

Am I scheduling time to write? NOPE. Am I writing each and every day? NOPE NOPE NOPE. If I have a crap morning, do I let it affect the rest of my day? YOU BETCHA.

Am I SETTLING? Yes. Yes, I am.

GAH.

My name is Jennifer Hendren and I am a slacker.

Phew. Glad that's out. I've felt like such a fraud!

So, bearing all of this in mind, I've done a little self-assessment:

1. My nifty little office is not the place to write. My neighbors are far too loud, and it's really the only room where I get a decent internet connection. If I go elsewhere, I'm more likely to actually write when I turn on the computer. Plus I won't be boiling mad at my neighbors all of the time. (Sigh, and my bookshelves are soooo pretty.)
   
2. I don't have much time to write at work—I'm walking during my breaks, etc. That said, I CAN read while I'm walking. If I plan ahead, I can bring in scenes to go over. Even if I'm unable to make changes/write during this time, I can at least get my head in the right space.
   
3. I must get out of the mind frame that I need a huge chunk of time to accomplish anything. I used to turn out 30K a month writing a couple of hours a day – a few minutes here, a few minutes there. Must relearn this! And I must learn not to hold myself to that standard for the rest of my life. It boils down to this: What time I have, I need to use.
   
4. Like my health, I need to make writing a PRIORITY. I need to schedule times to write…get into a routine of making time EVERY day. And I need to remember that even if I only manage 10 minutes of writing after a really crap day, it's still ten minutes. Still words I didn't have before.
   
5. I need to remember that moaning about my busy schedule is NOT going to fix things or make this book spring magically from my forehead—fully formed and ready for publication. I have to deal with the cards I've been dealt. Things will change eventually. Must remember that.
   
6. Slow and steady WILL get the job done. Maybe not as soon as you hope, but eventually. Major life changes don't happen overnight. When I was first diagnosed with diabetes, my blood sugars were through the roof. It took a LONG time for them to come down – they did so slowly, with lots of adjustments on my part, and even now, will flare up occasionally. But the important thing is that I'm now in a very healthy range. If I work toward my writing goals—even at a slow and steady pace--my book WILL be finished. IT WILL. Say it with me…IT WILL.
   

ROUTINE. I'm convinced this is the key. Let's all get in the habit, shall we?

My challenge to all of you is to figure out what's stopping you from reaching your writing goals? Feel free to share your issues and/or solutions here. Never know—you just might help someone struggling with the same problem.

Hearing voices (part 2)

This week I'm talking about the single most useful exercise I've ever done to get closer to my characters. I've tried it all- from interviewing them, to "taking" them with me when I'm driving long distances, to extensive answering of questions about their life.

As I mentioned last week, though, I really feel that the only way to get to know your characters better is to write about them. Lots. Nothing is wasted- if it helps you get to know your character better, then it contributes to the story, even if it doesn't appear in the final product.

The same benefit applies to this exercise: stream of consciousness writing.

I first happened across stream of consciousness in an exercise run by the marvellous Jo Bourne at CompuServe. As a matter of fact, I was brand spanking new to the place, lured there by a mention of it in Diana Gabaldon's acknowledgements. I signed up, found the writers exercises folder, read the December exercise, and did it right there and then- and posted it, too, before I could think twice. If (no, let's say when) I get published, it will be in large part thanks to the support I received when I posted that exercise.

I was writing in Meredith's point of view, and she was just what Jen talked about in her excellent post last week- far, far too nice. I didn't like her one bit. Here's a paragraph of the exercise in which prose is mixed with what I thought was all right SOC. And yes, I did think I was very clever writing the actual story in present tense. Briefly.

Jared is in the water, swimming broad circles, splashing- I turn back and find him watching at me with those curious blue eyes. “Come in,” he calls, “the water’s fine.” I find my hands clutching automatically around my skirt- I can’t do it, I just can’t. There are things down there, I know, because Jared told me about them, the gilgies, those little lobsters with the big claws. There are things out here as well, of course… “Come on,” he’s saying, “there’s nothing to worry about. I’ll look after you.” His arms are big, quite bulging with strength as he sweeps them back and forth through the molten blue-green; in fact his whole body is strong, except for that one leg that doesn’t exist any more. I wonder idly where it went, that part of him? What do they do with your leg when they chop it off? It must still be in France somewhere, I suppose. Maybe they have a graveyard just for legs.

I show you my early writing endeavours because they illustrate an important point- as writers, a lot of us are also control freaks. We want things just so. But this is the antithesis of true stream of consciousness writing. True SOC is about letting is all hang out. No punctuation. No capital letters. No pausing. Just writing, writing, writing, without thinking. Opening the valve between your creative brain and your fingertips without fear or self-censure.

You may be able to see from my December 2006 exercise that I couldn't convince myself to let go like that. I felt the need to keep control.

And in reality, that meant I didn't trust my character, and I didn't understand her. I wasn't hearing her voice- I was hearing my own inner voice, "playing" at being somebody else.

I'll say that again, because it's super important:

What you really want on the page is your character's voice, not your own inner voice wearing a costume.

With a lot of practice, I got better at stream of consciousness. I did a lot of it. The more I wrote, the more I got to know my characters.

So, here's the principle:

To do a stream of consciousness exercise, sit down in front of your piece of paper or your keyboard. Take a deep breath, relax, block out everything else. Decide which character you'll be inhabiting and where they are at that point in time. And then it's as simple as slipping inside *their* head for a visit (not the other way around). Put yourself in their shoes; let yourself see the world through their eyes. Don't let your own thoughts, especially your self-critical inner editor, intrude.

And just write.

Write without punctuation, without pausing, until you run out of steam. You're recording your character's innermost thoughts- how they feel about their particular situation at that particular time. We all have an inner monologue (some deny it, like my husband, but I think perhaps it's just a little quieter for him).

Here's an SOC example- eating breakfast, just for illustration.

Late again five minutes what am I going to eat no time for toast cereal only weetbix left in the cupboard hate those things like eating shredded cardboard fine i'll have weetbix hope there's some milk left forgot to get more yesterday

That's what I was thinking this morning. Needless to say I wouldn't make a good story character, since my actual life is so very mundane. Ha. But even in that small snip you could learn a few things about me- I'm often late; I may not have the healthiest of eating habits, since I don't love shredded wheat biscuits; and I'm somewhat harried since I'm always forgetting to buy milk. These are small tidbits that, if I were your character, would weave a richer background for your story. They might not be directly important in the long run, but that's where you come in- deciding what's relevant to the story and what's not.

Let's look at some of my actual stream of consciousness for Between the Lines. I tend to start each scene I'm writing in SOC, and after a few paragraphs I fall into normal prose writing. Occasionally I'll write the whole scene in SOC and go back later to "convert" it to prose. My SOC now *does* contain a little punctuation and paragraph breaks but it always flows without thought or pause. A lot of people find it easier to write longhand than type, but I've learned to let my fingers fly over the keys without it taking me out of the zone.

In this scene, Bill, who has refused to go away and fight in World War I, is about to learn that his best friend Tom has been killed in action. SOC is written, by the immediate nature of the thoughts, in first person present tense.

#

I’m heading for the post office today when I see him standing on the road outside, staring at nothing. There’s a piece of paper in his hand he could be a statue just standing like that the wind is blowing his clothes but otherwise it’s like he’s made from stone. Tom’s dad. Old Cyril Barnes.

Right away there’s a sinking feeling running down through me and I stop walking I turn around it’s not too late to get back on the horse and go home and I won’t know a thing but it’s too late something’s up something’s happened and if I go home now it’ll kill me wondering

I turn back and he’s still there the paper slips out of his fingers and drifts to the ground like a leaf but he just keeps staring I take a few more steps, slow, and a few more, and then I’m up next to him

Mr Barnes? He doesn’t look up I wonder if it’s possible for someone to die standing up that’s how he looks grey in the face and stiff

I bend down and pick up the paper there’s black around the outside and the paper is smudged with red dirt I don’t want to read it I can’t the thought makes my throat prickle please don’t let it be so please maybe they’ve given him a medal maybe he’s been mentioned in despatches
My fingers are trembling I turn it over the words are bare only two lines down the middle of the telegram Regret to inform it begins I think I’m going to faint the whole world is spinning the only thing staying in one place is the paper Your son- aw, Christ, I can’t do this I can’t even breathe there’s only one more line it’s like reading the newspaper just words I tell myself

Regret to inform your son Pte Thomas Barnes 11Bn…

Maybe it’s Tom Barnes from Victoria, maybe they’ve got the wrong man?

Has been confirmed killed in action this 15th May inst. In Turkey

The paper hits the floor again with a light little swish just words, just words, just words What was that rhyme Kit used to chant when I ran crying to her over Len and his mates? Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me

Oh, but they hurt now and look at old Barnes Jesus there are tears coming down his cheeks I grab his arm as much to stop myself falling over as him and finally he looks at me and I’ve never seen anything like it in another man’s eyes we connect and all his grief and all of mine just pours out there in the street and the next thing we’re hanging onto each other and he’s bawling in my ear only I’m too numb to bawl myself I just feel enclosed in my own little bubble like nothing else in the whole world exists and Tom is dead

Tom is dead

And his mother doesn’t know, yet, and here’s Cyril in pieces on Main Street and what are the two of them going to do? It’s all I can do to lead him back down the street, trying to put one foot in front of the other, and help him get up in the saddle. I walk next to Shadow all the way up to the Barnes farm, and when we get there Helen is waiting out on the porch and Cyril slides off the saddle like a sack of rocks and goes stumbling towards her with his hat in his hands, and she starts to scream.

#

To be honest, I've yet to convert that into "prose" version because I like it (for now) as it is. Every time I read it I still feel the power of those thoughts and I feel a crazily strong connection to my character.

In the future, when I *do* convert it, the first couple of paragraphs, for example, will look something like this:

#

It was midday by the time he sauntered into town, taking it nice and easy to enjoy the first breath of winter. He rode the whole way half-dreaming about her, and once in a while he caught himself grinning like a loon, glad there was no-one around to see.

Outside the Commercial, he slipped out of the saddle and hooked the reins a couple of times around the [thing you tie horses to] [please note use of square brackets :P]. The wind ripping up [Main] Street hit him in a flurry of rain-scented coolness, and he tugged his collar up higher and scuffed at the dry packed dirt of the road. Not long now and the drought would break. The whole year depended on how much water fell from the sky in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully they'd have a bumper crop ready for the boys to harvest when they all came home at the end of the year.

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a figure standing across the road at the door of the post office.

He squinted. Old Cyril Barnes. It was definitely him, with his ramrod straight back, all of five feet high in his boots. He was standing there still as a statue, the tails of his coat flapping in the breeze like a pack of swallows, a bright piece of paper fluttering in his hand.

As Bill watched, the piece of paper slid out of the man's fingers and floated back and forth until it hit the ground.

All of a sudden the temperature took a slide.

No. No, it couldn't be.

#

As you can see, things get mixed up and moved around; details get added and removed. The SOC isn't a blueprint for what you're writing; it's an inspiration for understanding your character's feelings. And you can do it and redo it as many times as you need to until you're happy- there's no law saying you have to nail it first time, or ever for that matter.

If you don't know where to start, I recommend doing a few "diary" entries for your character that cover an important period of your story. That's how I started to really understand Bill in the first place.

Give it a shot and see what happens when you inhabit someone else's mind completely for a little while. You might just be surprised to see what comes out, and I guarantee you'll know your character better at the end of it.

Introducing our serial... story...

It's my honour to kick off the first installment of what will be a weekly serial story. Week by week, you'll not only be along for the ride- you'll be able to take the wheel. At the end of each week, we'll ask our readers to vote between three directions for the next installment, and we'll follow whichever one wins.

For week one, however, we have a different challenge- we want you to find us a title. Have a read through part 1, and leave your idea for a title in the comments. The winner gets... well, we're all out of books, so the winner gets pride, fame, and warm fuzzy feelings beamed from two sides of the globe.

Pretty good deal, I think.

A little about the story so far- we're meeting Detective Frank Townsend, who is investigating a series of gruesome murders of prostitutes by a deranged killer dubbed the Rochester Ripper. He's about to discover something shocking about the evidence- and where we go from there is anyone's guess.

Mwa ha ha...

Enjoy!

c. 2009 All the World's Our Page

#

The witching hour was his favourite time to be alone in the office.

Most of the other cops cleared out by ten at the latest, and by midnight the whole station was dark and still, lit only by the glow of his lone desk lamp. He could hear clocks ticking, and the gurgle of the water cooler. And If he listened carefully enough, the dead began to rustle in the pages of his files. They stretched, the yawned, they sat up. They whispered in his ear.

There were more of them sitting on his desk now than ever before.

He pulled off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb. The latest file sat open in front of him, splashes of blood arcing across the crime-scene photographs, more like paintings in an overpriced gallery than the mortal remains of the latest Ripper victim. He flipped a couple of pages until he found her graduation photograph beaming up at him. Annaliese Rogers. Young, bright and beautiful.

Once.

He flipped a couple more pages until he got to her last mugshot. Arrested for solicitation. Hollow eyes stared back at him. It only took two years for her to get from fresh-faced kid to haggard meth addict and street-walker.

And now murder victim.

Talk to me.

Her eyes were more dead in the mugshot than in her crime scene photo, by simple virtue of the fact that the killer had taken her eyeballs with him. That wasn't all he'd taken, either. This was the fifth Ripper victim, and they'd all been missing organs- hearts, kidneys. Sex organs. The kind of thing that made even the most experienced medical examiner turn away from the body and hurl.

Not Detective Frank Townsend, though. Not since the first one. Now he allowed himself only a moment of horror that struck him to the core, and then he forced himself to channel his rage into cold determination. He was going to catch this sonovabitch if it was the last thing he did.

He stared down into the drug-hungry eyes of Annaliese Rogers. Blue. She'd had blue eyes. Talk to me.

"Hello, Moto." Brrp, brrp.

Despite himself, he jumped as the cell phone kicked into life, robotic music tinkling out from somewhere beneath his piles of paperwork. "Godammit!" He scrabbled through the chaos until he found the thing and flipped it open.

"What?"

A girlish laugh rang out on the other end. "I thought you'd fallen asleep on the job for a minute."

He sighed and leaned back in his creaky chair. "Samantha. No, I was just... thinking."

"You're stuck, huh?"

He nodded. "Like a truck in a ditch. I can't figure out where to look next." It felt good to admit that to himself, somehow. His eyes strayed to the big clock on the far wall. Ten past two. "You still at work?"

"Of course. I'm your little night owl."

He could picture her sitting in her lab, her face washed in blue from her bank of computer screens, glasses perched on the tip of her perfect nose. Thank God they followed the same circadian rhythms. Impossible to think how their relationship could survive if they didn't. "Find anything interesting?" he asked.

"Now that you mention it..."

For the first time he noticed the pitch of excitement in her voice. "Oh yeah?"

"Remember that fingerprint you sent me? The one from the..."

"Yeah, yeah. Don't say it on the phone." He shuffled files until he got to Rosemary Sweeton. The Ripper's second victim. He'd sent it to Sam after she'd bet him a six-pack that she could find something outside the usual fingerprint databases, and against all regulations he'd decided he liked the odds. He pulled out the original print film and held it up to the desk lamp. A bold whorl filled the centre. They'd found it on the light switch in Sweeton's apartment. So obvious that it must have been deliberate. So far they'd seen no matches in any of the conventional databases. The Ripper was not on the record.

"Well, hold onto your hat, honey. You owe me beer."

He felt his mouth fall open. "You got a name? Holy shit. That's... that's..."

"I told you to hold onto your hat, Frank." There was a pause, and a lot of rustling down the line. "I hope you're sitting down."

His pulse was up to about three hundred beats a minute. "Name?"

"Francis Tumblety," she said.

The name set a little bell ringing in the back of his mind. "Who the hell is this freak?" By instinct he reached for the mouse and clicked open a search engine. As soon as he typed the name it tumbled down in a list- 23,000 results. He hit return.

"Wait, there's more," Sam was saying. "I matched the fingerprint to one on file with the NYPD."

He clicked through the screens, not seeing anything but history sites. "But we've searched the databases. We didn't get any hits."

"Not until I ha... I mean, opened up an experimental database being developed by the history department of NYU. They've been cataloguing forensic evidence from unsolved historic cases- blood samples, weapon impressions, fingerprints..."

"So our guy has offended before? When, in the 70s? 80s?"

She laughed. "Yeah, the eighties."

He opened up another couple of search windows and typed the name into the offenders registry. No results.

"What's funny about that?"

"It's an historical database, Frank. Your guy? This Francis Tumblety? His prints were taken by the NYPD at a time when they hardly knew what to do with that kind of evidence. The nineteenth century."

"What, like 1980? They knew fingerprints in..."

"The nineteenth century, Frank. This fingerprint was taken in 1892. He was under investigation for the Whitechapel Murders in London in 1888." She blew out a breath. "Jack the Ripper, Frank. They thought he was Jack the Ripper."

He sat for a long time listening to the quiet. He thought he could do with a bourbon, or maybe three. "What in the living hell does that mean?"

"It could mean this guy is taking you for a ride. It could be someone who has access to this information, who maybe planted that print for you to find so you'd have proof that this Ripper is trying to be like the original."

"Like Jack the Ripper?" He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "That's crazy talk. Crazy!"

"Not as crazy as the alternatives."

"What, that this Tumblety guy is doing some kind of time-travel voodoo? Or that he's still kicking around, only he's 150 years old? Maybe he's a frigging vampire."

She snorted. "Crazy. Like I said."

He sighed. "Sorry. Thank you. You're amazing. And you're right, I owe you beer."

"I'll swing by the station and pick you up, okay? It's about time we both went home to bed."

"Okay. See you soon."

He shut the cell and tossed it back on the desk. What a mindfuck. He reached out, snatched a pencil, and snapped it in half, then sent the two pieces clattering to the table. The bastard was teasing him. Toying with him. And the worst part was, he didn't get the joke. Didn't have the first clue what he was supposed to be looking for. It made him feel stupid as hell.

He took one last look at the information on his computer screen, then shut it down. Too much to absorb right now. He'd pick it back up again in the morning.

He scrawled the name across a scrap of paper and tossed it on the growing pile of evidence. Tumblety.

Somewhere on his floor, he heard a door squeak open and shut.

"Sam?" he called. "I'll be right there."

He took one long last look at Annaliese Rogers before he shut her back in her manila prison- not the living corpse, and not the dead one, but the fresh young student.

"Talk to me," he murmured. "Tell me something."

"That's not my name."

He only had an instant to register the reflection of a man in his blank computer screen before a thick arm locked around his windpipe and yanked him off his feet. He struggled wildly, feet scrabbling for purchase on the linoleum, as a burning sensation ripped across his neck.

As stars exploded behind his eyes and the sound of chuckling in his ear began to fade, he only had one thought.

If that sonofabitch laid a finger on Samantha, he'd hunt the guy down, from hell or beyond.

Guilt by association

My daughter started school in August, and I’m gradually getting to meet the parents of the kids in her class. It’s a slower process this third time round, but I’m finding that they’re a lovely bunch of mainly mums, plus a couple of dads, who do the dropping-off and picking-up of their offspring each day. I’ve hit it off with one mum in particular. Like me, she has three kids and, like me, her husband is away a lot of the time, leaving her to run the show on her own.

But there’s a bit of a problem. She’s so lovely with her kids, so calm and unflappable, she makes me feel … well, guilty. For example – one morning, she was worried because she and her eldest daughter had argued just as the kids spilled out of the car, and she hadn’t had time to smooth things over with her.

“I think I’ll drop a note in her locker to say I hope she has a great day, and that I love her,” she said.

Well, didn’t I feel about two-inches tall. My kids routinely leave the car screaming/yelling/arguing/debating with me and/or each other. Nothing diabolical, but we’re a fiery lot, and that’s just how things run, chez Walsh. But her approach – well, I found myself nodding sagely, yet feeling kind of … guilty. And she manages to maintain this serenity with a husband who spends only one week out of every four at home. Like I said, she’s lovely; but I tend to feel like Charles Manson in her company.

Until yesterday. I arrived at school in time to witness her absolutely blow her stack at her son for forgetting his violin. She was going home to get it for him (I would have waved bye-bye and said “suffer the consequences” to my little darlings) but still, it was the first time I’d seen that serenity crack. And then, after the school bell went, and before she trekked home for the forgotten instrument, she unloaded for a moment, saying how hard it was keeping the show on the road on her own, and that she just couldn’t wait to get the kids in bed each night so she could have a few moments to herself.

That’s when the penny dropped. She wasn’t making me feel guilty; I was giving myself the guilts, by so stupidly measuring myself against her. Assuming she had everything down pat, that there were no bumps and potholes in her life, was what made me feel bad, when in reality, her struggles are the same as everyone else’s.

Measuring yourself against others is as much of a hazard in this writing life, too.

Why can’t I write as fast as him?

My dialogue sucks compared to hers.

Ah, why didn’t I think of that turn of phrase?

His characters are so much more alive than the boring wooden dummies that inhabit my story!

Sound familiar?

Some look at other writers and are jealous of their writing progress and success; I’m more the type to beat myself up for not keeping up, telling myself I’m too lazy, too slow, too untalented, too unmotivated, and that everyone else is doing way better than me.

How stupid.

Measuring myself against other writers, expecting that I should have the same writing journey as others, is as ridiculous as expecting everyone to love pad thai noodles, or to have brown hair, or to be willing to sell their first-borns for front row tickets to a U2 concert. (Ahem.)

How counter-productive it is, to expend all that energy on all that hand-wringing! Not to mention being a big, fat damper on one’s creativity. All I need to measure is how things are with me. And to realize that the pace at which I write is unique to me, that my learning curve is unique to me – that my writing journey is unique to me.

Bottom line, I have to accept “what is”, while always striving to do my best. It’s all a person can do, really.

But I just might try screaming at my kids a little less. (g)

What about you? Do you measure yourself against fellow writers? Do you feel guilty? Jealous? Sorry for the poor suckers who are so far behind you, it’s not funny? (g) Or have you reached Nirvana and none of this phases you one little bit?