Author Archives: jtagliere

All My World’s A Stage

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ImageIt’s time for another peek into my work-in-progress. Last week, I introduced you to the members of the Barnes family, the folks at the center of my new novel. You may have noticed their names are a bit unusual. Just as with my cover, there’s a story behind that, too:

Their mother, Ellie, had been convinced that within her children lay the seeds of greatness. This belief had manifested itself in her choice of names, and so, each child bore the name of a great and powerful leader: Elizabeth, Hannibal, and Alexander.

Portentous though they may have been, the boys’ names were decidedly difficult for young Miss Elizabeth Barnes to pronounce properly (immediately upon learning to babble, she’d shortened her own name). Bibi formally christened her brothers early on: “Dis Nibble,” she’d proclaimed, ruthlessly jabbing the sleeping Hannibal in the head, “an’ dis Lex,” giving little Alexander an equally enthusiastic thumb to the eye. Much to Ellie’s enduring chagrin, Bibi’s names for her brothers stuck fast.

Less than fond of the twins’ tiresome company to begin with, Bibi crowed with glee upon later discovering more fitting (in her mind, anyway) namesakes for her brothers: Superman’s evil arch nemesis Lex Luthor and the fictional mass murderer Hannibal Lecter. (Bibi’s prodigious appetite for books led her more toward the macabre and violent than to the fluffy and pink.)

A friend asked me last week what, if any, feedback I was desiring as I share these bits and pieces. I guess I’m not really looking for any–yet. You see, this stage of writing a book is magical. It is the stage where anything can happen: characters can live or die, be heroes or villains; voyages can be made or forgotten; plots can drive themselves right off a cliff or reach right into my chest and grab hold of my pounding heart. It’s the moment of anything-is-possible.

At this stage, I’m not worrying about feedback; I’m reveling. Feel free to lay your comments on me, but as far as formal feedback goes, I’ll wait and ask for that when I hit the editing stage and feel less like I’m flying and more like I’m drowning.

Keeping Your Work Safe

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When I was a little girl, my younger sister often tagged along behind me. It seemed as though she copied everything I did, which was a source of constant irritation to me. My mother often responded by saying, “Oh, honey, it’s okay; imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

Yeah, that didn’t float with me either, back then–I still wanted to beat her up. [If you’re reading this, baby sis, you know I love ya.]

I think there’s some truth to that saying though–don’t you feel good when you see somebody want to borrow your special recipe, or ask where you bought your very tasteful drapes, or where you get your awesomely stylish haircut? It feels good to have people acknowledge the worth of your decisions by emulating them.

For writers, however, too much imitation is a bad thing. After all, who wants to keep reading the same tired plots and story lines over and over again? It gets dull. (And who wants to write them, for that matter?)

Yes, originality is critical, but for some writers, The New can often be hard to come by and they resort to a little bit more imitation than they should (i.e., plagiarism.) There’ve been some big cases of plagiarism in the news in recent years, and by some pretty big names, too. That’s got some writers feeling queasy about sharing even rough excerpts (as I did last week).

But here’s the thing (in case you didn’t know):

The U.S. Copyright Office basically states that your work is protected [for the most part] from the moment you create it and “fix it in a tangible form,” whether it is published or unpublished, although it still recommends that you register your copyright with them, anyway, due to differences in copyright laws abroad. That way, if someone does “imitate” any of your work too closely, you have the right to bring a suit of infringement, something the unregistered copyrights or “poor man’s copyrights” (sending a copy to yourself and dating it) don’t provide.

It’s certainly something to ponder when you’re trying to build your platform by sharing works in progress, but I guess my take on sharing excerpts is that it’s more important for me to get the word out there about what I’m doing, knowing that I’m mostly protected, than to hide my progress under a rock of fear of imitators. I think I’d be flattered someone thought my work good enough to imitate.

On the other hand, maybe those thinking about “borrowing” my stuff too liberally might want to talk with my little sister first to find out what other kinds of things I like to do with rocks…

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Just something I was thinking about on this slow Monday. Look for more excerpts to come.

New Year, New Book

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1362968_forest_pond_reflectionsOne of the great things about finishing Widow Woman is that now I can start working on other projects. I have two new novels in progress, and, thanks to no small amount of nagging–I mean, encouragement–from my children, who are in the target audience age group, I have chosen to focus on my YA novel. The working title is The Water Bearers, which my kids (a.k.a. my beta readers and toughest critics) really love. I’ve got a few others in mind, but I’m content to leave well enough alone at this point and see if any of them are better fits as the novel takes shape.

I just finished Chapter 10 today, and it was wonderful. I didn’t intend to finish it–there are, after all, other projects unrelated to writing that sit waiting for my attention. But, as always happens, I walked through my portal and I was gone. When I looked up again, two hours had evaporated.

I’m really excited about this new book, and I want you to be excited, too, so I’m going to start sharing short excerpts with you from time to time. I want you to get to know the characters a little bit, as they come to life in my head and on my laptop.

So here it is: the first excerpt. Consider it an introduction to some of the main characters. You may find a couple of them suspiciously familiar, but I assure you: this is an original work of fiction (though there may be just a teensy weensy “inspiration” from real life…I’ll leave you to figure out where. And yes, they’ve read it already).

Splat.

The sound of Lex’s waffle landing on the kitchen floor snapped Richard out of his semi-comatose state over the coffee pot. An immediate machine-gun barrage of insults erupted.

“Dad! Look what Nibble did!”

“I did not! I was just minding my own business—”

“You liar! You knocked it on the floor on purpose! How do you like it, you jerk?”

Splat. Nibble’s waffle joined Lex’s on the floor.

“Boys!” Richard crossed the kitchen in two long strides and grabbed an ear in each hand. “Knock it off! Clean that up! Now!”

“If you’re interested, Dad, Lex is actually telling the truth for a change,” Bibi said mildly, peering over Richard’s copy of Red Dragon. “Nibble was being a jerk.”

“I was not!” the jerk in question hollered.

“Bibi, mind your own business. All of you go brush your teeth; the bus will be here in a couple minutes.” Richard began shoving files into his briefcase, noticing, belatedly, the maple syrup drizzled across the front of them. He muttered a curse under his breath and swiped at the sticky mess with a napkin.

“I heard that, Dad,” Bibi murmured.

As Bibi slid off her kitchen chair, Richard reached out and plucked his book from her hand.

“Ouch!” Bibi cried. “You gave me a paper cut.”

“Sorry. I thought we talked about this last night,” Richard sighed.

“You only said I shouldn’t be reading it, not that I couldn’t,” Bibi pointed out on her way up the stairs.

“Well, I’m saying it now,” he called after her.

Splat. Richard looked at the tip of his shoe, where there now rested a large, syrupy chunk of waffle. He looked from Nibble to Lex, trying to determine which one had dropped it on his shoe. In a typical show of brotherly loyalty, they each pointed at the other. “He did it.”

Richard shoved them both in the direction of the stairs. “Go comb your hair and get your jackets on.”

He was on his way to the sink when Bibi yelled from upstairs. “Dad, there’s no water pressure again.”

“Ours either, Dad,” Lex, or maybe it was Nibble, bellowed.

Richard turned on the kitchen faucet. It sputtered briefly then hosed the front of his suit. He sighed heavily. They’d been having problems with their water system ever since they’d moved in. Faucets either dribbled grudgingly or sprayed with the ferocity of a firehose; their new sprinkler system either failed to turn on completely or flooded the yard; toilets mysteriously clogged or wouldn’t flush at all. Richard did suspect that the latter phenomenon could be the work of Lex or Nibble; on several occasions, he’d found tiny pebbles lodged inside one faucet or the other.

Richard had stockpiled a large supply of bottled water against such problems; he grabbed a bottle now and lobbed it to Bibi, who was waiting at the top of the stairs. “You know the drill.”

All the while, the watcher observed the family’s morning chaos in silence from the spot where he remained hidden. He would have laughed, if he had known how, had even tried a couple of times, unsuccessfully, if only to see what it felt like.

Just then the bus honked at the end of the Barnes’ gravel drive, throwing everyone into a frenzy of last-minute backpack-stuffing, jamming of arms into jacket sleeves, and high-speed, nose-bumping kisses. When all three children had safely boarded, the driver tipped his hat to Richard as he did every morning and drove away. Richard hung his head in relief, only then noticing the chunk of waffle still sticking to the toe of his shoe. He shook it from his shoe into the grass.

Splat.

 

One Step At A Time

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196716_filesLast time I checked (five minutes ago), my email inbox had 5,299 messages in it. I confess: I’m a virtual hoarder. Maybe that should be one of my 2013 resolutions: cleaning out my inbox.

I save everything. I’ve got project files going back five years; photos of my children when they were babies (um, yeah, ten years ago); order confirmations for gifts given to folks with whom I’m no longer even on speaking terms. You name it; I’ve saved it.

Why so many, you might ask? Well, for one thing, you never know when one of those buried messages might turn out to be vitally important. It’s happened to me, that moment when a client or a family member says, “Does anyone still have this?” It’s a matter of twisted pride for me to be able to say, “Yes! Yes! I have it!”

I thought it was bad last year when the number soared to 3,000, but now that it’s over 5,000, I guess it’s time to do something about it. That brings me to the second reason why I have so many: I have so many! How am I ever supposed to tackle such a huge task?

The answer: one step at a time.

I’ve attempted this before, and obviously, I’ve failed. I start by doing searches for some of the mass-mailer culprits  and delete those as a group. That’s the easy part. The good news is that that empties out a lot of messages very quickly. But once I’ve eliminated all those groups, I start looking at the individual messages and the sheer volume of the task overwhelms me. I find myself paralyzed and rationalizing at an unhealthy pace.

“They’re paperless; it’s not like I’m killing trees or anything.”

“I got rid of 2,000; I bet most people have that many in their inboxes right now.”

“A clean inbox is the sign of a sick mind.”

I even have one of my favorite rationalizations on my mouse pad: “Out of clutter, find simplicity; from discord, find harmony…” Yep, that’s right: you may think my inbox looks messy, but I’m actually a paragon of simplicity and harmony. Stop laughing. God, I love Albert Einstein (that quote is his): the ultimate mad genius. I bet if he were alive today, his inbox messages would number five digits or more.

But I digress.

The only thing for me to do, I suppose, is to try again. I’m nothing if not persistent. How to do it?

Well, breaking any task down into smaller, more manageable steps is the best strategy I know for overcoming task-specific paralysis. You can apply it to virtually any problem, too: household clutter; writing a book; managing your finances; improving your health. Those are all obstacles that can seem insurmountable simply because they just seem so big.

Break ‘em down! Maybe today, all I can do is trim 1,000 messages from my inbox via group search. Maybe today, all you can write is 1,000 words. Maybe today, all you can do is take 1,000 extra steps on your walk. Maybe today, all you can do is recycle all your old magazines from 2012.

Maybe after you’re done, you’ll still feel terrified at what a tremendous mountain still remains to be climbed. But if you only focus on the whole problem in all its terrifying entirety, you’ll never even get started.

So break it down, into the smallest steps possible, and then ask yourself: what can I accomplish today?

Go ahead, try it, it works—I’m already down to 4,613 messages! It’s still a ridiculous amount, but at least it’s one tiny step in the right direction.

Cover Story

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Widow-Woman-Kindlesized“You can’t judge a book by its cover.” We’ve all heard that expression, but unfortunately, for e-books, the cover may be as far as some potential readers ever get. If you can’t hook them with that, you may not have a chance to hook them at all.

I’m as guilty as the next reader. Over the holidays, I had a bounty of unexpected reading time. But when I scanned the covers on Amazon , nothing new caught my eye; I wound up rereading Gillian Flynn and Stieg Larsson instead. Maybe it was the flu; maybe it was the covers.

I had dandelions in mind for my cover from the very first draft of Widow Woman, when I wrote the following passage:

I realized how much I’d romanticized the concept of scattering Mom’s ashes: I’d envisioned her floating off into the sapphire sky, dissipating on the breeze, like a dandelion gone to seed.

Initially, it just seemed like a beautiful, wistful, sad image, a reminder of how fragile and ephemeral life can be. In a book that deals so much with death, it seemed like a fitting image.

But as the book began to take shape, another purpose for the use of the dandelion image began coalescing in my mind, a purpose I didn’t fully understand or articulate until I was already asking my trusted beta readers for feedback on the initial design.

One of them was blunt.

“Are you sure you want dandelions on your cover? I mean, you do realize they’re weeds, right?”

It was a legitimate question. Why were those stupid weeds calling to me so insistently? There had to be more to this than even I realized, and as I wrestled with a response for my very candid friend, I found I’d had the answer in my heart all along. Here is an excerpt of my actual response to her:

“Re [dandelion cover] concept–yes, dandelions are often thought of as weeds, but being gay has also historically been seen as something pernicious, to be weeded out. [Reading a fascinating book, Flagrant Conduct by Dale Carpenter; the first few chapters are a history of public opinion and the evolution of the law regarding homosexuality in the U.S. and specifically, in Texas. Incredible.]

Yet, for all that weed talk, dandelions are colorful, hardy, fragrant, even make great tea. But even if people are often quick to agree in principle with those assertions, they may still say “Sure, but not in my yard!” I think it’s a pretty good parallel for showing that whether you think something is good or bad, right or wrong, desirable or detested depends very much on where you’re standing. I just want people to start thinking…to plant a seed.”

That was all the response my friend required; dandelions it would be.

Yet even with the decision settled, I couldn’t stop thinking about them: dandelion images and reflections continued to pour into my brain.

How many mothers have received a dandelion bouquet clutched in a child’s plump little hand? Have any roses or orchids or gardenias ever smelled sweeter? And what of the stains the stems left on their tiny fingers—no amount of scrubbing seems to fade them, a days-long reminder of the love between mother and child.

Think of the anger, effort, and expense the battle to rid lawns of dandelions generates each year, the toxic chemicals and specialized dandelion tools that resemble medieval instruments of torture—all to eliminate something that our culture has randomly decided is bad, is wrong.

I don’t want to come off as some sort of hypocrite, so in the case of full disclosure, I confess: I, too, have used some of those chemicals and I’ve used some of those tools to try to get my own lawn to a dandelion-free state, one that conforms to society’s image of a well-kept home.

But—I’ve also tickled my children’s chins with dandelion blooms, just to see the golden glow on their skin. I’ve crawled around my yard with my children, searching for the perfect dandelion gone to seed. We’ve picked them carefully together, with tender care, so as not to disturb a single seed. We’ve squeezed our eyes tight, our faces to the sun, and made wishes as we blew those seeds into the breeze.

Our whimsical afternoons likely cancelled out the effect of any chemicals or tools employed (a fact which I’m sure did not escape our neighbors’ notice). But would I trade those magical moments for a pristine, spotlessly green lawn? Not for anything in the world.

How could something that brings so much beauty and such simple, sweet happiness, even if it’s not considered conventionally beautiful, or right, by our culture at large, be wrong?

As you look at my cover, that is my question, as you read Widow Woman, it is the seed I hope to plant in your mind.

Where do you stand?

dandelions cropped