H is for Helen: A to Z blogging challenge

Helen Braeburn isn't a very happy woman when you meet her at the beginning of Going Through the Change. She's 63 years old, fairly recently divorced, mildly estranged from her grown daughter, overweight, lonely, and her feet hurt. On top of that, she's having hot flashes that make her physically miserable. 

"Sometimes, Helen felt like she had spent her whole life waiting to be “old enough” and then had crossed over into “too old” without finding out what it was she had been waiting for."

Then, something strange happened.  Helen found that she could project her internal heat outwards. She could make fire. At first, she didn't even believe it herself. That condo fire was not her fault! Then she was excited by what she could do. When she met up with Dr. Liu …well, let's just say that Dr. Liu was gasoline to her fire.

Helen, as drawn by +Charles C. Dowd

Helen was the first character I created for this book, and she was also the one who surprised me the most. You know when writers talk about their characters "taking over"?  This was one of those characters. She had definite ideas about where her story should go.

I'm glad I followed her, because she took me on quite a ride. I hope my readers enjoy reading her as much as I enjoyed writing her.

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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!
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click the image to preorder on Amazon!

G is for Goals: A to Z blogging challenge

Goals are vital in writing, both for the writer and the characters. I've written on other occasions about the Magic Spreadsheet, a gamification tool I use to track my word count goals and keep myself moving forward and making progress on my project goals. I've been using it for around two years now and it has completely changed my mindset about writing. I no longer allow my writing to get shoved to the bottom of the to-do list (last on the list is a dangerous position--it's easy to fall off the list altogether).

Now that my first book is being published (15 more days!), setting specific writing goals has become that much more important. In the hour or two I can find each day for writing tasks, I have to decide how best to use them. Which project gets the priority today? I answer that question based on the "big picture" of balancing finishing things, creating new things, keeping up social media contacts, etc. Now more than ever, my life is a balancing act.

Turns out, setting goals works for fictional people, too. In any particular scene, if I got stuck in the writing, I just asked myself what the character's goals were. What does she want? What's in her way? How will she try and get around that obstacle?  What will she do if she fails? Nine times out of ten, that helped me find the conflict that would guide me through the next bend in the river of narrative.

The women in Going Through the Change want a lot of things, and sometimes their obstacles were each other, or even themselves.  Sometimes, I felt like a sadist torturing my poor characters, but the end result is a good story. I hope my readers agree!

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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!
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click the image to preorder on Amazon!

F is for Family: A to Z blogging challenge

Family, in one sense or another, is one of the most important aspects of human life. Whether we mean our parents, our children, our significant others, our pets, our friends, or something else entirely. Family was a vital part of writing Going Through the Change, both for me as the writer and for my characters.

For me, writing this novel represented a change in our family dynamic. If I was going to take myself seriously as a writer, I needed to finish things and submit things. That meant I needed a shift in home life. I needed my children to respect my writing time, and my husband and children to help balance home responsibilities to free me for some writing time. I definitely could not have written this book without the loving support of my family.

http://www.shannonscustomcreations.net/images/products/detail/FamilyWordArt.1.jpg

For my main characters, family was a major theme. Linda Alvarez was a forty-eight year old grandmother when her life took a super-heroic turn.  Adjusting to the changes in her life was no small feat! Helen Braeburn's family had recently gone through changes of another sort--divorce and estrangement. So, she was vulnerable, without the support she might once have relied upon when her changes came. Patricia O'Neill had always been a lone wolf, but her best friend, Cindy Liu, was her sister under the skin. When Cindy betrayed her trust, it hurt to the core. Jessica Roark's children saw her fly, and it changed their world and hers.

Family shapes who we are. How the people closest to you react can change your life, for the better or the worse. Lucky for me, I've got a good one.

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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!

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click the image to preorder on Amazon!

E is for Emeralds: A to Z blogging challenge

In Going Through the Change, I got to play with that comic book mixture of science, mysticism, and magic to explain why the crazy stuff that happens happens. The origin story of each woman's power involves a highly individual combination of factors. Good golly but this stuff was fun!

Would the tea have made Jessica weightless if she weren't a cancer survivor? Did Patricia's transformation have something to do with her red hair? Was it something in Linda's or Helen's family history?

Dr. Liu's experiments draw from traditional Western medical knowledge, Chinese medicine, astrology, herbology, chemistry, homeopathic remedies, and, my personal favorite: gemstones. In particular, Chinese emeralds.

http://sanchezinternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/shutterstock_104545856.jpg

As a child, when my class field trips or my family went to the Museum of Natural History and Science in Cincinnati, Ohio, one of my favorite parts was always the gemstones. I like that part in the museum more local to me now, too: The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

It's fascinating how things that are essentially just pretty rocks have become so valuable. Even more fascinating are the ones believed to be cursed or to have magical properties. I guess I never lost my childhood fascination with gems. It was cool that it showed up in my novel!

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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!

____________________________________________

click the image to preorder on Amazon!

D is for Dr. Liu: A to Z Blogging Challenge

Dr. Liu is my "villain" in Going Through the Change. "Villain" gets quote marks here because I'm not a big believer in black and white divisions of the world. My "bad guy" isn't all bad and my "good guys" aren't all good. Everyone I write is decidedly gray. It's just how I see the world.

Cindy Liu does some bad things, no question. She's responsible for more than her fair share of chaos. But it's not that she set out to hurt others. That wasn't her purpose.

Like many a mad scientist, she found that moral lines became blurred for her over time. She was so focused on the ends that she had trouble seeing what might be wrong with her means. That's what made her interesting to write.

Here she is as drawn by +Charles C. Dowd . I love what he did with that pedantic finger.

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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!

____________________________________________

click the image to preorder on Amazon!

C is for Curiosity Quills: A to Z Blogging Challenge

Curiosity Quills Press will publish Going Through the Change on April 23 (20 more days!).  Time

will tell, but I've got a very good feeling about my relationship with CQ. Everyone I've been associated with has been warm and kind and professional, from the acquisitions editor who first accepted my work, to the artist who designed my cover, to the editor who polished my words till they shone, to the marketing folks who are helping sell the darn thing, to the other Literary Marauders (house authors). Curiosity Quills is an example of why the "small press" is taking the traditional publishing world by storm.

I first heard of CQ through an online acquaintance who had published his book with them (Matthew Graybosch, author of Without Bloodshed). I was curious enough to check them out online, and knew I had found a potentially good home for my work when I read the CQ Literary Manifesto:

So, to my writer friends out there, I recommend looking to the small press. To my reader friends out there, tired of "safe" books, I recommend looking to the small press--in particular, mine! Thanks for taking a risk on me, Curiosity Quills!

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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!
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click the image to preorder on Amazon!

B is for Biology: A to Z Blogging Challenge

Biology, as they say, is a bitch.  Especially for women. So many of us feel as though we lose years to the caprices of deep-seated urges and desires that there is no logical support for. We cry when we don't want to. We feel unreasonably angry. We fight cravings for things that are bad for us. What woman hasn't felt betrayed by her own body at what time or another?

These ruminations about the role of biology in my own life were one of the threads that eventually became part of the tapestry of my novel Going Through the Change: A Superhero Novel. (22 more days till release!)

As the title should suggest, Going Through the Change is about women going through menopause. Of course, as the subtitle suggests, their symptoms and complaints are, well, a little unusual. You'll get to meet the characters more fully in other posts this month, but biology was cruel in her own way to all my main characters.

• Patricia is itching for a change, and boy does she get one!
• Jessica tried to lighten her mood and ended up weightless.
• Helen's internal fires burned so brightly they destroyed her condo.
• Linda's little hair problem wasn't going to be solved by a trip to the peluquería this time. 

Writing about my own anxieties about going through The Change through this superhero story was really cathartic for me and I hope it will be for my readers too!
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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!

__________________________________________________

click the image to preorder on Amazon!