L is for Linda: A to Z blogging challenge

I've got a crush on Linda Alvarez (Luckily for my husband, she's fictional). I'm in good company. More than one of the other characters has noticed her charms, too. Her name means beautiful, and she certainly is beautiful. Becoming a man didn't change that.

Here she is as drawn by +Charles C. Dowd See what I mean?

Besides being a beauty on the outside, Linda also possesses a heart of gold. She's a nurturer.  That's her gift, and her curse. She cares a lot, maybe too much. 

If all my characters are me, then Linda is the part of me that feels guilty anytime I take time for me that I could have given to someone I love. She's trying to balance her life, too.  She loves her children and grandchildren, and, most of all, her husband. When she was transformed into a man, she was sure the life she had loved was about to end. 

She was going to lose him. Her David. Her vida. This wasn’t just aging, a little sag, or another skin problem. It had been hard enough to talk to him about ordinary woman stuff. He was so old-fashioned. He thought of periods and childbirth and hormones as mysterious things just this side of magic. Things men were not meant to comprehend. 

I hope my readers will love and admire Linda the way I do. She's the kind of woman I want to be, even when she's a man.
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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!

K is for Knowledge: A to Z blogging challenge

It's a running joke in my writing critique group that the NSA or anyone else spying on us would think us very dangerous people indeed, if they looked at our search histories. Any large writing project involves looking up information about something or another, and this book had me researching some very interesting things! Here's some of the highlights from my search history during the writing of Going Through the Change: 

bioluminescence 

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/
65311000/jpg/_65311446_01349158.jpg

Chinese emeralds

crystals

diving weights

effects of smoke inhalation

explosive chemicals/lab materials

factors in flight

fire proof glass

how to fireproof clothing

lots of Mexican and Mexican-American foods

lucid dreaming

http://rippedmusclex.info/wp-content/uploads
/2014/05/benefits-of-testosterone.jpeg

metabolism

oophorectomy procedure and recovery

ovarian cancer

puberty

relaxation techniques

Spanish slang

testosterone in the female body, and the male body

traditional Chinese medicine

truth serum

why helium balloons float

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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!

J is for Jessica: A to Z blogging challenge.

I wanted to have a diverse group of women at the core of Going Through the Change. After all menopause comes to all the women of the world. It's hardly a homogenous group. 

The main characters range in age from 32-67. Some have married, some have children, others have neither. One is a grandmother. They have different backgrounds, different attitudes about life, different joys and disappointments. They have in common a geographical area (Springfield, a non-geographically-specific middle size city in the comic book tradition of Central City and Metropolis), menopause, and, it turns out, Cindy Liu. 

Jessica, as drawn by +Charles C. Dowd 

My youngest main character in Going Through the Change is Jessica Roark. She came to be, in part, because of a conversation I had with my friend +Elizabeth Hein , author of How to Climb the Eiffel Tower and Overlook. She reminded me that age is not the only factor that might cause a woman to go through menopause.

Jessica, at age 32, is atypically young to go through menopause. She still has small children at home (two boys, ages 5 and 3). She was tossed into hormonal chaos by ovarian cancer, which she survived. 

When the book begins, Jessica is depressed. She's still grieving for the loss of her reproductive options, and she and her husband aren't really on the same page anymore. 

Because he had known her before, known what she had been like, and loved the old her, he mourned the pre-cancer Jessica. Maybe that was the difference. That Jessica had been a lot of fun. She had hosted parties, volunteered in the right charities, represented her husband proudly at formal events.

She had been beautiful, too, glamorous, even. Jessica tugged at her worn yoga pants ruefully. It was hard to care about things like fashionable clothes anymore. It was even harder to listen to the inane chatter at dinner parties and events. It all felt so empty.

The girl in the movie didn’t lose the man she had once known; she met him when cancer already had him in its sights. Jessica supposed Nathan had lost the woman he used to love, even though she was sitting on the couch today. She wasn’t the same person. 

Jessica has quite a journey throughout this book and is continuing to impress and amaze me with her resilience in the sequel I'm currently writing. I hope readers will connect with and come to admire Jessica as I have.
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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!

I is for Impossible: A to Z blogging challenge

Part of the fun of writing a superhero novel is removing the limits on what's possible. Nothing is impossible! People can fly, throw fire, transform into creatures, and have incredible strength. 

The challenge then, is in making sure that in this "anything could happen" atmosphere your readers have the oxygen they need to breathe, that the world and the people in it feel real, even while they deal with impossible things. 

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023/0/6741910/il_570xN.485722460_b2od.jpg

I think that's why my favorite superhero characters are the ones that are the most human. I've never been drawn to Superman. Nothing can hurt this man. He's so overpowered they had to invent another impossible thing (Kryptonite) just to have a way to slow him down long enough to build a story around him.

Peter Parker, on the other hand, struggles. He doesn't have enough money. He's got girlfriend issues. He's got some serious guilt issues. He's a flawed human being. In other words, he's interesting. Even without Doc Ock or Venom, I'd still care about Spiderman. 

As I wrote Going Through the Change, I wanted to write real

http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080929044928/marveldatabase
/images/3/37/Peter_Parker_(Earth-58163)_0002.jpg

women facing impossible things. These women have husbands, children, jobs, and friends. They have real world issues that women face all the time: health concerns, work/life balance problems, marriages, body image worries, aging and ageism quandaries. 

One of the things that has always drawn me to speculative fiction in all its many forms is that its a great playground for deep thoughts. Sure, on the surface, it might seem like a superhero story is all about the powers, but the best ones are about the people. The extraordinary, impossible circumstances of their lives just give a broader landscape to explore their issues in. 

My hope for Going Through the Change is that my readers think and have fun at the same time as they read it. 

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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!

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!
____________________________________________

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!
____________________________________________

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!

____________________________________________

click the image to preorder on Amazon!