The new little prune-plum orchard came into bloom, heralding spring on the farm. About a month late, given the late spring we’re having in western Oregon. We just went from frosty mornings to summery afternoons. With warm sunny days now the fruit should set well. It’ll be interesting to see. My kids and I planted this small orchard below the hazelnuts soon after we moved to the farm.
In my other life, my writing life, the new book blooms too. The rough draft’s complete. Beta readers reading. I can’t seem to leave it alone. I think of a change I want to make in one of the scenes. I fix that. Read a little farther because–well the words are on the screen right in front of me. The next thing I know an hour has passed, or two, and I have read many more pages. The story has captured me. I’m immersed in the world of my characters in faraway lands, deep in the past, caught in their overwhelming dilemmas. The joys. The sorrows. The anger. The triumphs. I believe that bodes well.
Feedback is good so far. Some constructive critiquing and suggesting. But overall positive.
I still need to do several more straight-through readings myself for fine tuning, once the initial revisions are made.
A show of promises came in doubles yesterday when a rainbow formed over my emerging daffodils–an ancient symbol of promise for better days along with my own floral symbol of promise for spring light pushing back the darkness of winter.
The daffodils haven’t quite opened yet, but these brave flowers have stood tall through a lot of unusually cold days. I’m at 600 feet above sea level so I’m a little colder than the valley floor, but mine are on their way.
Here come the first ones today on a balmy afternoon. Almost there.
By next week I expect they’ll be in full bloom as I sit down to begin writing my new book. I’ll take that for a promise. May the book be a good one. The actual writing is always exciting for me. I appreciate the show of hope nature provides.
Waiting for winter to go. Waiting for snow to melt. Waiting for spring.
Waiting for that important email. Waiting for that vital phone call.
Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
Now, I realize that those of us in western Oregon know nothing of snow the way our friends or family in, say, Maine or Montana do. But it’s already March 5 and my daffodils are usually opening their faces by now. They’re my flowers of promise. They remind me that after the dark winter the light of spring will emerge. Oh yes, we get plenty of dark winter skies in the rainy Pacific Northwest. And snow is bright and beautiful. But I’m ready for spring’s light.
Below you see these same daffodils on February 28, 2022. February 28!
Of course winter offers one positive feature. It’s a good time to delve into indoor projects, like writing. I’m happy to say I just finished the outline for my next book. I’m ready to start the best part of creating a new story–the first draft when I immerse myself in another world and that world comes alive. May it bloom no matter how late the world outside my door.
First light on snowy western hills always thrills me. I wake in the dark early hours, thoughts spinning, as my new book comes to life. I know I should be sleeping, but I’m just beginning to see how that next scene will take shape. It grips me, won’t let go.
Finally the room fills with light and I rise from my bed to see this. How can I not stop to share it?
For my followers who may not realize, snow rarely comes to these Oregon hills. Not like the mountains of Montana where I lived for a few years. These foothills of the coast range usually stay green with Douglas Fir forests, even in winter. The middle ground is Pleasant Plain, so called by the pioneers who settled it, the foreground my own oaks. All more accustomed to green. The deep-green river wraps around Pleasant Plain on its snaking journey to the sea.
I step out onto my deck for the early picture. A quick shot. It’s cold out there. In the 20s. We’re not used to that either.
It’s also the view from my office where my stories grow.
The sun lifts higher. I’m just past the three-quarter mark on the outline. Time to turn those waking thoughts into story.
Writers wonder these kinds of things–perhaps most often when they face a blank screen.
With my last project pretty well wrapped up it’s time for me to start a new book. I’ve had some ideas already. Took some notes. Worked out a potential storyline. Named some characters. I put all that away over the holidays and had other things to do. Now it’s time and procrastination begins.
How do I make the story live? Yesterday I spent all day renaming my protagonist’s little brother. I like the new name, and it stirred other thoughts. I began to envision scenes. Today I opened the window blinds and noticed the fog rising on the river, like dreams, like story. By afternoon a feeble sun broke through, and I grabbed a coat to head out for my walk.
So many ideas emerge on those walks. Fog still rising. Rolling down the river between the oak hills and timbered slopes. The story will come. I just have to let it in.
(Photos taken with my new iPhone on the family farm.)
As my followers know, I’ve been writing a series—epic historical novels set primarily in ancient Minoan Crete. The series started as one standalone, now called Beyond the Waning Moon. But I couldn’t leave my people so I just kept going. It became an intergenerational family saga. While each story has its own protagonist and story arc, the overall series also has an arc. A quest. A purpose. The haunting fear of a final destruction. The desperate fight to hold on. The glimmer of hope.
The photos here show the reconstructed hub of Crete, the temple (or palace) of Knossos which was dug out of the earth a hundred years ago after being buried for some 3,000 years. After seeing it and learning of the strong women depicted there, I wanted to immerse myself in that world. And so it began.
The fresco of the charging bull, part of the reconstructed ruins of Knossos, replicates some of the amazing art left by the Minoans of ancient Crete, one of many images that inspired me to write about the people who once lived on thisremarkable Mediterranean island, now one of the beautiful Greek Isles.
I named the overall saga the Distant Glimmer Series to reflect the distant light shining into our own times. The stories take place long ago, but they speak to our own lives today.
I’m putting finishing touches on Book Seven.
Up until now I had the impression that in marketing the work, all emphasis should go on the first book. Maybe mention that there are more to come, but don’t stress it. So I haven’t stressed the series aspect.
The columns of the temple of Knossos line corridors and staircases and, as here, one of the many stairwells. The most common columns were a bold red and extended from floor to ceiling, but some like these stood shorter above low walls and were painted black with red capitals at the top and a red band at the bottom.
This September I attended a virtual writers conference, the annual conference of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association headquartered in Seattle. During workshops I kept hearing about the power of a series.
I attended a pitch fest because I planned to pitch the opening book of my saga. Gerri Russell, award-winning, bestselling author of stacks of books, led the session, and when we broke out into smaller groups I felt fortunate to have her as coach for my group. We all gave our pitches for the agents, publishers, or producers we hoped to convince to take a look at our work. I hoped to lead the listener into the world pictured on this post and to bring the Cretan characters alive who walk through my thoughts and dreams in these fabulous places.
Gerri immediately got what I was doing with the book from the pitch I gave. But from that she began to question me to ferret out ways to better present it. Who are my characters? What are their goals, their conflicts? Could I be more personal about their dilemmas? I don’t remember all her specific questions but I quickly saw I needed to dig much deeper if I was to reveal the book’s strengths to the listener.
The throne room has been reconstructed with its frescoed griffins and small alabaster throne. It appears the throne would more likely fit a woman than a man, which led some to believe the leader of the people was a woman, achoice I made when I portrayed the leader as the high priestess. However, in my story she does accept a king, a warrior to help protect her people from threatening invaders.
The group members had a chance to try once more, and I bumbled through mine as I tried to rethink it in the moment. Gerri kept going back and forth with me, quizzing me, plucking out salient points. Those salient points gave the pitch new life. Then I hesitantly asked if I should say I have seven in the series written. She burst out with surprise. Yes! Of course! Yes!
So there it was. Emphasize the series. Each book has to stand alone, true. But its place in a series gives it much greater impact. Perhaps the market has changed. Maybe readers are wanting a series more than they did before. Something they can really get their teeth into. In any case that’s what I have. That’s what I’ll promote to those who hold the keys to entry into publication.
The story waits, ready to be written from a skeletal document inside the computer, a hard copy of that framework in the blue notebook shown below. The outline.
In my mind I see not the words but the people and places, like the wondrous temple of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete. And the green fields of Ireland that resemble my own green knolls on this soft May afternoon in Oregon.
The grand pillars of Knossos.Green fields of Ireland.
The characters are almost as real to me as my neighbors—because I move inside them as I show their story. I laughed with delight when I heard travel guide Rick Steves comment about the ancient Romans. They “were just people, like you and me, without electricity.”
True, they had different customs, but they felt joy and sadness and love and fury just as we do. For me it has always been exciting to imagine what life was like in ancient times—or will be in the future. I love Star Trek too. But these ancient times in these two unique islands caught my heart.
To outline or not to outline?
Authors often hold strong views on that question. Non-outline writers may insist they’d be hemmed in by an outline. Outliners like me can’t imagine drawing all those threads together without one. I would never let the outline stop me from taking new directions. But I’m not just keeping threads together for one book.
This is a series that follows two great families through the generations—the high priestesses and kings of Crete, the clan mothers and chiefs of Éire. This new story begins about 100 years after the opening scenes of Book One in the series. I have to keep track of them all.
Besides consistency, each story requires new research. Scholars keep digging and adding more information. Sometimes I find details—either new or new to me—that affect other stories in the series. For instance when I first started writing about voyages from Crete to Ireland I assumed it would take many months to make the journey. But I found a website where you could enter names of modern ports, designate the speed of travel, and voila. They give you the overall trip time. I had to cut the time dramatically. Of course I had to determine from other sources how fast the ancient ships might go with their single square sails and ranks of oarsmen. I found estimates for similar Viking ships, other estimates for simple rowing, prevailing winds that would increase or decrease the speed.
In other instances when you’re writing a tight storyline where you want a lot to happen in a day you have to figure out what you can fit into that day and roughly what hour events can happen—even though I can’t express time in hours for people who lived by the sun, moon, and stars, not the clock. Another website tells exactly when dawn and dusk happen on any given day in any given setting. It’s not just how fast a ship can go, but a horse, a man, a woman. All these details take time to calculate. I don’t want to stop in the middle of a fast-moving scene to figure it out. So that goes into the outline. From that the rough draft can move swiftly.
Now this new one is ready for me to plunge in and live it as the words flow.
One of my Montana writer friends, Debbie Burke, just drew me into a role I’ve seldom played–the role of beta reader for her upcoming novella, Crowded Hearts (brand new cover by Brian Hoffman shown below).
Beta readers, those generous people who are willing to slog through an author’s rough drafts and offer critiquing, are vital members of the writing craft.
I’ve been depending on these readers from the beginning of my long years as a writer, usually three or so per book. But while I have occasionally read for fellow critique group members and other friends, I have never fancied myself a beta reader.
It’s not an easy task. You may be looking at the work of someone with a different voice than your own, a different style.
And I’m sensitive to an author’s feelings.
When I lived in Montana some twenty years ago and first joined a critique group there they called me the comma queen because that’s all I felt competent to mark on the scenes members presented each week. Of course when a professional editor got hold of my first to-be-published book I decided I knew nothing about commas. Even so, as a writer I have a fairly solid sense of grammar and can do line editing. Or scour for typos. But reading for content and substance? That’s another thing.
Fast forward to now. I have been in editing mode, trying to get my own ancient historical series polished, but decided it was time to rest for a while and go on a reading binge.
I soon got wrapped up in Debbie’s series of thrillers, having met her during my Montana years. She was in one of those critique groups I joined there. Most of her series is set in the remarkable beauties of that mountainous state. She calls them “thrillers with heart.”
Not only do they take you on exciting and perilous adventures, but there’s some intriguing romantic tension as well. Her protagonist, Tawny Lindholm, is a saucy redhead who gets mixed up with a sinister fellow while she’s grieving over the loss of her husband. And she finds help from Tillman Rosenbaum, an arrogant high-powered attorney with plenty of issues of his own. The sexual tension between her and the attorney becomes a sizzling feature of the series.
When I finished reading Debbie’s Book Four, Dead Man’s Bluff, which takes Tawny and Tillman on a side trip to Florida during Hurricane Irma, I wanted to plunge right into Book Five, but that isn’t out yet. I emailed Debbie and told her how much I liked the latest installments and asked when I could read Book Five—no pressure, of course.
Just happened she was putting the finishing touches on the novella, which is an interlude in the ongoing story. She asked if I would be a beta reader for it. Hungry for the next word in the series I said sure.
Not only did I experience the delight of knowing what happens next, I found I was able to offer some substantive suggestions. When Debbie gave me the copy to critique she told me to be brutal. I think that released me to the incisive response that could actually help her. And maybe because I’d been in editing mode with my own and had become more open to comprehensive changes there, I was better prepared to offer a few thoughts for Debbie’s work–which I must say was quite fine to start with but I think became even better. In fact I really enjoyed the role of beta reading.
In return, Debbie has agreed to be a beta reader for my upcoming one. I know she’s good at that. Some years ago she read one from my series and she offered plenty of unvarnished wisdom that kicked it up to a higher level. After all, we authors have to face the sometimes brutal truth if we’re to make our work shine.
Debbie Burke
So here’s to the beta readers we writers all need so much. It’s hard to see our own mistakes or our failures to communicate. We know what we mean, but the words may not convey what we intend. An extra pair of eyes becomes gold.
And here’s to Debbie’s Tawny Lindholm thrillers with heart. I happily recommend them.
Debbie’s new Crowded Hearts will be out soon on Kindle.
When we’re called to shelter the walls may feel tight. Yet I’m grateful to be able to shelter on our farm. Walks on the mountain have brought daily joy. Spring has come and gone. Summer’s here. The lavender’s in bloom.
I’m also grateful my work is here, and I can immerse myself in that. I’m working on the series, two trilogies, one centered in ancient Minoan Crete, the other in ancient Ireland. They’re complete now. But before my agent sent Book One to a new publishing house recently she suggested I review it.
Review it.
Two simple words. But it meant going through the whole thing. So in silence I entered that world once again–and found places to heighten the tension, smooth the flow. After she sent that off it occurred to me that if I found places to improve in Book One, maybe I’d better review Book Two–which led to reviewing Book Four, one I had recently revised dramatically. And once I read that I thought I’d better make sure the required changes in the opening of Book Five still worked. I got caught up in that story and didn’t really know where to stop, so I read it all. Book Six is a bit long and I think I should see if I could trim it a little–which will require a full read. But I got to thinking about Book Three, which I had skipped because it has always read so well, thanks to my muse who breathed so much of that story into my ear. What if I could make it just a bit better? I reviewed it. No big changes but worth the read.
Because I have been so deep into this, I haven’t been on social media much. It’s in the silence that I make progress.
Looking Toward Mount Youktas from the Cretan Ruins of Knossos
The opening scene of one book in my series starts here in this ancient pre-Greek setting, where protagonist Helaina looks out from the temple of Knossos to the sacred mountain of Youktas on the horizon. It’s a critical morning when she will have to leap a fierce bull in a perilous ritual for her people.
It’s a story of poignant desire and guilt, swordplay and valor on land and sea, passionate trysts that must never be told, and a love that won’t let go.
I have declared it finished I don’t know how many times. Every time it has come back wanting. And every time I have dug deeper to make it work. I’ve written five more in the series–taking us from Crete to Ireland and points in between. Those five stand waiting, virtually complete. I think this one is the most difficult because it’s the oldest, but it’s essential to the saga.
In late October my agent called me and we had a brainstorming session over the phone. Out of that, I opened my mind to dramatic changes. Once you start pulling at the threads of a tapestry, huge sections may unravel, leaving the possibility of weaving in new images you never thought would emerge. I threw out whole chapters and wrote new. I brought in new characters, took new pathways.
Creative juices flowed as they hadn’t since the muse whispered most of another to me.
Now I love it more than I ever have, and I’m declaring it ready one more time. Can Helaina leap that bull and carry this story on?
Janet fisher 