Category Archives: #writerslife

The Valley of Elah

Posted on by

 

“Skill and confidence are an unconquered army.” –George Herbert

* * *

My husband and I hired a private guide to take us on a one-day tour since we were pressed for time. When our guide stopped her car by the side of the road next to a desolate field between two hills, we thought she must have made a mistake. There were no tour busses and no other people around. The three of us got out, walked into the valley, and stopped by a dry creek bed filled with smooth stones.

It was hard to believe the undistinguished field in which we were standing was the location of one of the most famous battles in the history of the world. This was the Valley of Elah, the site where David fought Goliath.

We’re all familiar with the story. Goliath wasn’t just some big guy. He was a giant who taunted his enemies and called them cowards. They were understandably terrified of him. All except David, the young shepherd boy who had no experience in warfare but  convinced King Saul that he (David) could defeat the Philistine giant with only his sling.

“Then he took his staff in his hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in the pouch of his shepherd’s bag and, with his sling in his hand, approached the Philistine.” 1 Samuel 17:40

I’m not sure I appreciated the magnitude of David’s accomplishment until I picked up a stone from that same creek bed and realized how small it was. And yet one of those stones, slung more than three thousand years ago, saved the young nation of Israel and changed the world.

* * *

Many parents share the story of David and Goliath with their children to instill courage and faith in their offspring. They want them to know they will face giants in their lives, but they can overcome. However, one thing we don’t often talk about when we relate the story is the skill young David had with a sling.

David was a shepherd, certainly a lonely occupation. He must have spent many months alone, looking after his father’s flocks and protecting them from wild animals. David even explained this to King Saul who had doubted his abilities:

“Your servant used to keep sheep for his father. And when there came a lion, or a bear, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after him and struck him and delivered it out of his mouth.” ! Samuel 17:34-35

I’m guessing David got very good with his sling during those months and years. Besides fighting wild animals, I can envision him setting a tin cup on a tree branch and practicing his slinging expertise day after day.

In contrast to the slow-moving, armor-burdened Goliath, David was quick and agile. His stone wouldn’t be effective against Goliath’s armor, but he had a target that would bring down his opponent: Goliath’s unprotected forehead. It only took one shot, and the giant was dead.

* * *

Developing skill is obviously important in any field. I recently read an article on this subject on the Personal Excellence website. A couple of sentences stood out to me.

“… people are often impressed by what others have accomplished without realizing what they went through to get there. We see their accolades and victories, and make gross assumptions about what it takes to succeed.”

I think this is especially true of writers. We all know how to string words together to make sentences, and we’ve read lots of good books. How hard can it be to write one of our own? But TKZ regulars know it is oh, so much more than that.

I was looking for some straightforward guidance about the development of skills when I stumbled on the site of the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences that enumerated the necessary ingredients. Here are the basics they listed:

  1. Get training.
  2. Practice.
  3. Get feedback.

That looks pretty simple, but we know each one of those items is a world of its own.

So, TKZers: Do any of your books have a David vs. Goliath theme? How did your hero defeat the giant? (Or did he?)

How do you train for your writing? 

How much time to you spend practicing? What kind of practice do you recommend?

How do you get feedback?

Editor/Janitor

Posted on by

By Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

From 1965 to 1985, the Kalispell Weekly News was great regional paper in northwest Montana. It was owned and operated by George Ostrom, a colorful character who’d been a smokejumper, mountain climber, journalist, author, radio personality, and legendary raconteur. His stories and op-eds were always entertaining and full of folksy, rustic humor.

The masthead of his newspaper read:

George Ostrom, Editor/Janitor.

That masthead always made me smile because it perfectly sums up the life of a small business owner. The title “owner” may sound impressive but that’s also the poor schlub who gets called in the middle of the night when the plumbing stops up.

Indie authors are small business owners and monarchs over their writing realm. My kingdom consists of a messy dining room table, littered with sticky notes, piled with draft manuscripts, cluttered with invoices, ISBN records, etc. My throne is a secretary chair on casters with a donut cushion. The royal duties are a to-do list that grows longer every day. As fast as I cross off one task, five more are added, each requiring a different skillset.

Today is launch day for Deep Fake Double Down, # 8 in my Tawny Lindholm Thriller series. By the eighth book, the publication process should be polished, refined, and trouble-free, right?

Wrong, dead wrong.

Each new book presents its own set of unforeseen and unforeseeable problems.

Deep Fake Double Down had its fair share of (mis)adventures.

Here’s a synopsis: A corrupt prison warden covers up the murder of an inmate by creating deep fake “evidence” against an innocent female corrections officer. The videos go viral on social media and soon every cop in Montana is gunning for her. 

Initial drafts went well with encouraging comments from critique groups.

Target release date was January, 2023. Notice the past tense.

The story was on a roll, about 75% done. Then in December, my beloved Windows 7 computer died. Here is the obituary.

Now I had to learn a new Mac computer with unfamiliar commands. At the same time, the all-important third-act climax of the story needed to be written. The process forced me to reach deep inside my creative soul…

…to come up with adequate curse words to express my frustration!

The working title “Deep Fake” was dramatic, punchy, and hinted at the story conflict. My initial research found only a few books using “Deep Fake” in the title. All were several years old, and one was categorized as “humorous erotica.” Whatever that is, it wasn’t a comparable for my story.

My talented cover artist Brian Hoffman designed an excellent cover here:

I checked off those tasks on the to-do list…or so I thought.

Now to research. Artificial intelligence and deep fakes are complex and rapidly changing. The more research I did, the more I knew I was over my head. I had to find experts to guide me. The story needed enough detail to give readers a taste of technology but without slowing down the momentum of a fast-paced thriller.

With seven previous books, I’d been fortunate to find experts easily. From drones to elder fraud watchdogs to fire lookout towers, specialists were willing and generous about sharing their knowledge.

Not this time.

I reached out to authors, engineers, and software designers whose articles I’d studied. I explained I was writing a thriller about deep fakes and asked if they’d review passages for accuracy and authenticity.

Two initially agreed. A month later, the first one ghosted me. Two months later, the other one, from a major university, unexpectedly had to clear it with the “compliance department.” She wrote back that the compliance department told her manuscript review was not permissible because they were an “FFRD center.”

What’s FFRD? I had to look it up.

Turns out it’s “federally funded research and development.” Not sure what that has to do with a fictional story but no means no. Scratch that source.

Contacted more experts in the field. No responses. Clock ticking.

Back to the title. If my book had launched in January as originally planned, the title Deep Fake would have been fine. But…

…in March, bestseller Ward Larsen released his new political thriller entitled…Deep Fake. With deep fakes prominent in the news, obviously I wasn’t the only writer eager to tackle the subject. Ward beat me to the punch and I’m glad he’s doing well with his book.

However, now my book needed a new title. I enlisted help from a focus group of trusted writing colleagues. They came up with a slew of good alternatives. Brian created a new cover with the new title, Deep Fake Double Down.

A month before release, I put the book up for pre-order, certain I could finish the remaining items on the to-do list before the deadline to upload the final manuscript.

Some parts of the process fell into perfect alignment. Steve Hooley came up with a terrific marketing idea. Recently he wrote about side hustles for writers, including his own hand-crafted legacy wood pens.

The McGuffin in my story is a secret mine of rare Montana Yogo sapphires, a treasure that’s worth killing for.

Deep Fake Sapphire Pen by Steve Hooley

Steve kindly offered to create a custom design as a marketing premium: the “Deep Fake Sapphire pen.” What a thrill when these arrived in the mail! For a chance to win a beautiful pen and a signed paperback, please visit my website.

Other marketing opportunities arose, including several speaking invitations, a magazine interview, and a radio chat with TKZ’s own John Gilstrap and his cohorts, retired Admiral Bill Stubblefield and Rob Mario.  Many thanks, John!

Meanwhile, the clock was ticking but I still hadn’t connected with any deep fake/AI experts.

Finally, an astrophysicist friend connected me with TED fellow Peter Haas, but he wasn’t available to talk until a week before the deadline. Gulp.

Peter’s input was worth the wait. He corrected info that was outdated because of new developments. He taught me cool new jargon like NerF (neural radiance field, not to be confused with those squishy game balls), Tor (a web browser that makes you anonymous), and exit node (a relay to anonymously send and receive traffic on the net).

The explosion of deep fakes has understandably led to increasing distrust of news sources. Peter talked about two groups with the mission to protect provenance of information. Content Authenticity Initiative and Project Origin are supported by Adobe and Microsoft/EDC/New York Times respectively, using digital watermarks to verify that videos, photos, and other digital data do indeed come from the sources they are purported to be from.

Don’t worry—the above won’t be on the test!

Needless to say, Peter’s input required frantic rewrites of several scenes.

At the dizzying rate that AI is changing, it’s impossible to stay current. The best a writer can do is choose a moment in time and set the story at that moment.

Remaining tasks on the to-do list:

  1. Read the entire book out loud.
  2. Final, final, final proofread (this occurs after copyeditor proofreads).
  3. Format the ebook. Here are screen shots of two formatting styles offered by Draft2Digital and Kindle Create.

Side note: you can format with D2D then upload the epub or pdf to Kindle. Although I prefer the appearance of D2D templates (this example is called “Grime”), the Amazon process goes smoother if you use Create to format the Kindle version.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4 Final, final, final read-through of the preview.

5. Upload to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).

6. Upload to other markets through D2D (using the Grime template).

Another side note: In a perfect world, the ebook and paperback would go on sale the same day. Rather than delay release until the paperback was ready, I decided it was more important to meet the April 25 launch date for the ebook.

  1. Format the paperback (formatting for ebook and print book are different).
  2. Upload the paperback to KDP.
  3. Order a proof copy, which is scheduled to arrive in a few days.

Two days before the deadline, I crossed off the remaining items on the to-do list except for:

10, After reviewing the paperback proof, hit the final “Publish paperback” button.

11. Order a box of author copies.

12. Stock the warehouse (otherwise known as the fireplace hearth in our home).

Yes, I proudly wear the crown of Queen in this Publishing Empire. My masthead reads: Author/editor/researcher/spell-checker/formatter/publisher/marketer/inventory control/warehouse stocker/bookkeeper/janitor.

Excuse me, Her Highness must now go vacuum.

~~~

TKZers: what are your various job titles? Which is your favorite? Which is the one you dread?

~~~

 

 

For a chance to win the Deep Fake Sapphire pen and a signed copy of Deep Fake Double Down, please join my mailing list here.

Buy links for Amazon      Other online booksellers

 

Prologue or Chapter One?

Posted on by

By Elaine Viets

TKZ has had many discussions about whether you should start your novel with a prologue. Readers and editors both have mixed feelings about prologues. My editor prefers first chapters, so that’s how I write my mysteries.
For my new novel, The Dead of Night, the first chapter could have been prologue. It was about the Legend of the Cursed Crypt. The entire book is built on this story.
Please note: I am NOT saying all prologues are bad, just that I made this prologue work as my first chapter.


To start, here’s how the legend would have been as my novel’s prologue:

The Dead of Night Prologue
The Cursed Crypt was a story of love gone wrong. What started as ordinary adultery unleashed two hundred years of plague, fire, floods and, finally, murder at Chouteau Forest University. The school was founded in 1820. The first president, Hiram Thaddeus Davis, was a grim, grave man with a grizzled beard and unforgiving eyes. He promised a well-rounded education in Latin, Greek, history, the Classics, mathematics and “moral philosophy.” Nobody knew what that was, but it didn’t seem to matter. The school was immediately successful. By 1822, the fledgling university was housed in a fine red-brick building and needed another professor.
Davis hired a brilliant scholar with a European pedigree, Eugene Franco Cortini, to teach Latin, Greek and biology. Cortini was devastatingly handsome, with thick black hair and sculpted features. He spoke five languages. He discovered two new species of American wild flowers – and named both after himself.
Cortini championed the theory of evolution long before Darwin. He wrote that Native Americans were really the lost tribes of Israel. And he preached that monogamy was “not a natural or healthy state for the animal kingdom.”
Cortini demonstrated his theory by having a passionate affair with Dolly, President Davis’s eighteen-year-old wife. Poor, balding Davis caught his curvy blonde wife in flagrante with Cortini, running her fingers through the professor’s thick black curls. Never mind where his hands were.
Cortini was fired on the spot, and banished from the campus. Before he left, he cursed the school on a dark windy night. Cortini stood in a circle of stones in front of the school, his hair wild and his black coat flaring, and shouted over the wind, “My Italian grandmother was a strega – a witch – and I inherited her powers. I am a streghone, a warlock. As long as I am banished from this school, death and disaster will fall upon it. As long as I am on the school grounds, it shall be safe.”
President Hiram Davis laughed while the pregnant Dolly Davis, imprisoned in her room, wept bitter tears. After cursing the school, the romantically handsome Cortini left for St. Louis, some forty miles east.
Two days after Cortini left, yellow fever struck the campus, carrying off six of its twenty students. Each month, another disaster hit the campus: lightning destroyed the huge oak in front of the school building. Disease killed the school’s milk cows. Chouteau Forest Creek flooded the fields where the school grew its crops.
Each time, President Davis dismissed these occurrences as unfortunate events and proudly declared that he “refused to give in to superstition.” He was a man of reason – until a fire broke out in the stables and killed his favorite black stallion.
That’s when President Davis invited Eugene Cortini to return to the campus. Cortini could no longer teach, but he was given a brick house to live in and conduct his research. The school flourished for seven years, and expanded to two buildings and a new dormitory.
Then Cortini died suddenly at age thirty-seven in 1845.
President Hiram Davis was taking no chances. He decreed that Cortini must be buried on campus, but he didn’t want the man’s grave on display. Cortini was buried in a crypt under the steps of the Main Building. His final resting place was hidden by a heavy iron door, but Cortini wasn’t forgotten. Students and staff whispered about the late Eugene Cortini, and noticed that Hiram Davis’s oldest son had thick black hair. Both his parents were blond.
Shortly after Cortini was in his crypt, President Davis died. But his school lived on, and so did the legend of Mean Gene Cortini. Every seven years, a disaster struck the school. The school tried to placate Cortini’s restless spirit by lining his crypt with marble. In 1857, a Victorian administration added a marble divan with a tasseled marble pillow, guarded by two weeping angels. A marble slab on the wall proclaimed the tomb was “Sacred to the memory of Eugene Franco Cortini, scholar, teacher, and researcher.”
These improvements didn’t work. The seven-year disaster cycle continued. While the school prospered, the legend lingered like a cloud over the campus.

When I turned the prologue into Chapter 1, the legend became an efficient part of the mystery. It introduced my character, death investigator Angela Richman, and told readers about where she lived and worked, Chouteau County, Mo., home of the one-percent. The last few paragraphs showed readers how the fat cats made money off two hundred years of tragedy. Thanks to this first chapter, the novel was ready to unfold in Chapter 2.
The parts I added to the prologue to make it into Chapter 1 are boldface. The first bold paragraphs introduce the young Angela Richman and show you her place in local society. She’s an outsider, and will stay that way.
At the end of the chapter, the bold paragraphs bring the legend back to the present day and tease what’s going to happen.
See what you think.

 

The Dead of Night Chapter 1

Like everyone who grew up in Chouteau Forest, Missouri, I knew the legend of the Cursed Crypt. The crypt was at Chouteau Forest University, one of the oldest academies in Missouri. The stories claimed that the restless spirit of a professor nicknamed Mean Gene Cortini had been causing death and destruction in the Forest for two centuries.
I’m Angela Richman, and I learned the legend of Mean Gene and the Cursed Crypt the same way many local teens did: around a campfire in the woods that gave the town of Chouteau Forest its name. When I first heard the tale, I was a gawky fifteen-year-old, the daughter of servants who worked on the Du Pres estate. I didn’t get many invitations to mingle with the cool kids, so when I was asked to join them, I sneaked out of the house one Saturday night to drink beer in a secluded part of the Forest.
It was a chilly March night, and the bare tree branches scraped together like old bones. I hated the bitter taste of the beer, but I wanted to adore my crush, high-school linebacker Danny Jacobs. The firelight turned Danny’s blond hair molten gold and highlighted his six-pack – the one under his tight T-shirt.
Alas, the only sparks that flew that night were from the crackling fire. Danny was devoted to the glamorous head cheerleader. He told us an ancient tale of adultery and betrayal, and we shivered in fear. All except the cheerleader, who was snuggled in Danny’s strong arms.
Here’s the tale, distilled from a thousand nights around local campfires:
The Cursed Crypt was a story of love gone wrong. What started as ordinary adultery unleashed two hundred years of plague, fire, floods and, finally, murder at Chouteau Forest University. The school was founded in 1820. The first president, Hiram Thaddeus Davis, was a grim, grave man with a grizzled beard and unforgiving eyes. He promised a well-rounded education in Latin, Greek, history, the Classics, mathematics and “moral philosophy.” Nobody knew what that was, but it didn’t seem to matter. The school was immediately successful. By 1822, the fledgling university was housed in a fine red-brick building and needed another professor.
Davis hired a brilliant scholar with a European pedigree, Eugene Franco Cortini, to teach Latin, Greek and biology. Cortini was devastatingly handsome, with thick black hair and sculpted features. He spoke five languages. He discovered two new species of American wild flowers – and named both after himself.
Cortini championed the theory of evolution long before Darwin. He wrote that Native Americans were really the lost tribes of Israel. And he preached that monogamy was “not a natural or healthy state for the animal kingdom.”
Cortini demonstrated his theory by having a passionate affair with Dolly, President Davis’s eighteen-year-old wife. Poor, balding Davis caught his curvy blonde wife in flagrante with Cortini, running her fingers through the professor’s thick black curls. Never mind where his hands were.
Cortini was fired on the spot, and banished from the campus. Before he left, he cursed the school on a dark windy night. Cortini stood in a circle of stones in front of the school, his hair wild and his black coat flaring, and shouted over the wind, “My Italian grandmother was a strega – a witch – and I inherited her powers. I am a streghone, a warlock. As long as I am banished from this school, death and disaster will fall upon it. As long as I am on the school grounds, it shall be safe.”
President Hiram Davis laughed while the pregnant Dolly Davis, imprisoned in her room, wept bitter tears. After cursing the school, the romantically handsome Cortini left for St. Louis, some forty miles east.
Two days after Cortini left, yellow fever struck the campus, carrying off six of its twenty students. Each month, another disaster hit the campus: lightning destroyed the huge oak in front of the school building. Disease killed the school’s milk cows. Chouteau Forest Creek flooded the fields where the school grew its crops.
Each time, President Davis dismissed these occurrences as unfortunate events and proudly declared that he “refused to give in to superstition.” He was a man of reason – until a fire broke out in the stables and killed his favorite black stallion.
That’s when President Davis invited Eugene Cortini to return to the campus. Cortini could no longer teach, but he was given a brick house to live in and conduct his research. The school flourished for seven years, and expanded to two buildings and a new dormitory.
Then Cortini died suddenly at age thirty-seven in 1845.
President Hiram Davis was taking no chances. He decreed that Cortini must be buried on campus, but he didn’t want the man’s grave on display. Cortini was buried in a crypt under the steps of the Main Building. His final resting place was hidden by a heavy iron door, but Cortini wasn’t forgotten. Students and staff whispered about the late Eugene Cortini, and noticed that Hiram Davis’s oldest son had thick black hair. Both his parents were blond.
Shortly after Cortini was in his crypt, President Davis died. But his school lived on, and so did the legend of Mean Gene Cortini. Every seven years, a disaster struck the school. The school tried to placate Cortini’s restless spirit by lining his crypt with marble. In 1857, a Victorian administration added a marble divan with a tasseled marble pillow, guarded by two weeping angels. A marble slab on the wall proclaimed the tomb was “Sacred to the memory of Eugene Franco Cortini, scholar, teacher, and researcher.”
These improvements didn’t work. The seven-year disaster cycle continued. While the school prospered, the legend lingered like a cloud over the campus.
More than a hundred years later, Chouteau Forest’s crafty one percent figured out how to make money out of the ancient tragedy. In the 1980s, the University Benefactors’ Club started auctioning off “A Night in Mean Gene’s Cursed Crypt.”
The money went to benefit Chouteau Forest University, which soon had a fat endowment.
The prize was a big one: if any auction winner could stay the full night in the Cursed Crypt, they would be granted membership in the elite Chouteau Founders Club, which ran the Forest. The winners’ future in the Forest would be guaranteed.
So far, only one person had stayed the night in the gloomy crypt.
I was forty-one now, long past drinking beer while listening to ghost stories. I worked for the Chouteau County Medical Examiner’s office as a death investigator. That meant I was in charge of the body at the scene of a murder, an accident or an unexplained death. It had been more than a quarter of a century since I’d first heard the legend of Cursed Crypt in the night-struck woods, and I didn’t believe a word of it.
Until I saw the bodies.
© Elaine Viets and Severn House

The Dead of Night is hot off the presses as an ebook and a hardcover. Here are three ways to buy it:
(1) AMAZON. https://tinyurl.com/4846s7jr
(2) BARNES & NOBLE. http://tiny.cc/a876vz

(3) BOOKSHOP.ORG. Save $2 on The Dead of Night at Bookshop.org and support independent bookstores: https://tinyurl.com/2p8p9ze4

I’d love for you to buy my books, but please check the e-book and hardcover prices at each bookseller. Prices for both change.

 

 

Landing the Novel – The Story of the Gimli Glider

Posted on by

“If you can walk away from a landing, it’s a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it’s an outstanding landing.” – Chuck Yeager

* * *

In July 1983, Air Canada Flight 143, a Boeing 767 airliner, took off from Montreal to fly to Edmonton with an intermediate stop in Ottawa. The trip ended somewhat prematurely.

Now, when you get ready to take a road trip, how do you handle the fuel? I’m guessing you go to the gas station and fill your car up, even if it’s a short trip, right? But airlines don’t do that. It’s common practice to load enough fuel into the plane to get it to its destination, and then on for another 45 minutes or so, to take care of any unforeseen circumstances. The reasoning is that filling the fuel tanks all the way adds a lot of weight to the plane, thereby making it more expensive to fly. There are tools to determine the amount of fuel to add to the plane before take-off.

That’s where the problem for Flight 143 began.

The fuel quantity indicator on the Canadian airplane was found to be defective, but there was no replacement available, so the crew manually determined the amount of fuel needed to fly all the way to Edmonton. This involved measuring the amount of fuel with a floatstick and doing some mathematical calculations and conversions. Mistakes were made. The plane took off on its journey and made the intermediate stop in Ottawa. As it departed Ottawa, no one knew that it didn’t have enough fuel onboard to make it to Edmonton.

The Boeing 767 is a two-engine aircraft. Flying toward Edmonton, it was at an altitude of about 41,000 feet when the left engine fuel pressure alarm sounded. The cockpit crew assumed it was a fuel pump problem and silenced the alarm, knowing the system was gravity-fed in flight. A few seconds later, the right engine fuel pressure alarm sounded. The crew decided to divert the flight to Winnipeg, but still had no idea about the real problem they were facing.

As they began their descent, the left engine stopped functioning. The crew began procedures for a single engine landing, but almost immediately, the right engine also failed. Air Canada Flight 143 was now a glider with a crew that had never been trained on a total engine-out emergency. The 767 emergency manual had no information on an unpowered landing.

Giving out of fuel in an aircraft at 35,000 feet is a problem. You can’t just pull over onto the nearest cloud and think things through. You have to land the plane. Whatever it takes, wherever you are, you have to put the plane on the ground, preferably in one piece.

Fortunately, an aircraft that has lost all power will not just fall out of the sky like a rock.  Even in a heavy airliner, the wings will provide enough lift for the plane to glide, however clumsily. Fortunately, the pilot of Flight 143 was also an experienced glider pilot, and he calculated what he thought was the best glide speed at 220 knots. That would give the plane a glide ratio of around 12:1, meaning the plane would fly forward about twelve miles for each mile it lost in altitude. Flying at 35,000 feet, they had a radius of around 80 miles to find a place to land.

The pilot instructed the first officer to locate the nearest airport.  They decided on the Royal Canadian Air Force base at Gimli. The base was closed, and the runway had been decommissioned, but the runway still existed. What the crew didn’t know was that the runway was used by car enthusiasts for racing, and there was an event in progress.

As the plane approached Gimli, the pilot realized they were coming in too high and too fast. One way to handle that in a normal airplane is to go around the field and approach at a lower altitude, but without power in the aircraft, the pilot didn’t think he had enough altitude to execute a complete turn, so he opted to perform a forward slip to land. This maneuver requires the pilot to cross-control by turning the rudder in one direction while the ailerons are turned the other way. The result is the aircraft continues its forward trajectory, but the nose is pointed at an angle to the side. The air hitting the fuselage will slow the plane and cause it to descend rapidly. The pilot will undo the cross control just before landing so the plane will be back in its correct configuration. It’s a maneuver that’s well-known to pilots of gliders or light aircraft, but is rarely to never performed in a passenger jet.

Fortunately, the people on the ground saw the 132-ton silent behemoth bearing down on them and were able to scramble clear of the runway in time.

Although the crew managed to get the landing gear down, the nose wheel did not lock in place. That turned out to be a bit of luck because, when the plane touched down, the nose wheel collapsed, and the friction helped slow the plane to a halt. It did not run off the end of the runway, and there were no serious injuries.

The aircraft was repaired and put back into service where it flew until its retirement in 2008. That airplane would forever be known as the Gimli Glider.

That was one awesome bit of flying by Captain Bob Pearson and First Officer Maurice Quintal. They deserved a medal for their piloting skill and calm in the face of imminent disaster, and they got one. In 1985, they received the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Diploma for Outstanding Airmanship.

* * *

There are similarities between flying an airplane and writing a novel. In order to fly an airplane, there are two things you have to do:

#1 – You must take off

#2 – You must land

According to Heinlein’s Business Rules (and I hope Harvey Stanbrough is reading this) there are certain things you must do when writing a novel. The first two are:

#1 – You must write

#2 – You must finish what you write

But whether you’re flying or writing, there can be some turbulence and maybe even a few surprises in between those two steps.

The writing journey will certainly include a months-long effort of plotting, drafting, outlining (or not), editing, revising, and getting feedback. But eventually, the writer has to bring the novel in for a landing.

The checklist for putting it down safely may be long. There are final edits, cover design, formatting, endorsements, copyright, ISBN, Library of Congress, and so on. It may be stressful, but at some point, you just have to let go and land the thing.

Several of us are on final approach or have recently landed our novels. Terry Odell just published Deadly Relations and Debbie Burke’s Deep Fake Double Down is available on pre-order now. My novel Lady Pilot-in-Command is in the hands of the copy editor, and beta readers are sending me feedback. Other TKZ authors have recently touched down or are approaching the runway.

Whatever the status of your work, I wish you a good journey and a happy landing.

* * *

So TKZers: Have you ever run into problems with a novel in mid-flight? How did you solve them in order to land the book? Are you on final approach or have you landed a novel recently? Tell us about it.

Writing Etiquette Redux

Posted on by
I’m republishing this post for three reasons:

1) I mentioned I bought back my rights to the Mayhem Series. Without fellow writers lending advice and sharing their experience with me, I’d probably still be tryin’ to figure out how to Indie pub the first five books, never mind be ready to publish book 6. I have a new editor, whom I adore, and my favorite cover designer jumped on board, too. Wait till you see my new cover. So exciting!

2) I had the misfortune of reading an author’s “bad behavior” list on Twitter. This woman tweets out an ever-growing list of bad behavior by authors. Some of the things on that list of 100 is downright shocking. So, a redux seemed like a good idea.

3) I’m reading book 6 one last time before creating my ARCs. This is my neurotic stage, nitpicking every single word, and ignoring any compliments from my editor. Almost done, so I can probably shelve the crazy long enough to respond to comments. 😉

Writing Community Etiquette

One of the most amazing things about being an author is mingling within the writing community. Writers, as I’m sure you’ll agree, are some of the most generous, supportive, and kind humans on the planet.

That said, there are a few unwritten rules within the community. Let’s discuss to enlighten the newer members of our family.

Other Writers are NOT Competition.

They are our people, our tribe. The longer we’re in this business the more it becomes a kinship. I can’t even imagine working without other writers by my side. We share successes, as Joe so beautifully demonstrated last Saturday. We also share failures (privately, btw, never rant on social media). We lift each other up and try to help where we can.

Without other writers, imagine how lonely this profession would be? As it is, we spend countless hours alone at the keyboard, hanging with our fictional homies or burrowing down one research rabbit hole after another. What if we had no one to share our discoveries with? Or to bounce ideas off of? Or to help us celebrate a new release? Or to knock some sense into us when nothing seems to go right?

We’re better because of, not in spite of, our relationships with other writers.

Lose the Ego

If this business hasn’t taught you humility, you haven’t been part of the publishing industry long enough. You might be soaring now, but you will fall one day. It’s inevitable. Yes, celebrate your successes. Don’t let it go to your head, though. A reality check now and then is an important exercise. Chances are there’s plenty of writers who sell more books than you, who are more loved by readers, who has rocketed to heights you (or I) might never reach.

John’s recent post is the perfect example of success and humility. It’s one of my favorite posts he’s written because of its honesty and realness.

Don’t be a Jerk

Do you really need to point out a typo in a tweet? We’re all fallible. Smile and move on.

Do you really need to say how much you disliked a fellow writer’s work?

What you put out in the universe has a way of boomeranging at the most inconvenient times. It may not be today, but eventually Karma will bite back. Count on it.

When you first join the writing community, it may seem endless. Here’s the thing about skewed impressions. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. Cross a fellow writer, and that circle can and will get downright claustrophobic. Why? Because writers protect other writers. It’s what we do; it’s who we are as a community. Just ask Disney.

Give More Than You Receive

Did a fellow writer blurb a book for you? Great! What did you do to help support them? I’m not saying you need to match the gesture by blurbing their next book. Maybe you’re not at that level yet. What should you do? Here are a few suggestions:

  • Review one of their books
  • Offer to beta read
  • Share their good news, new release, book cover(s), blog posts, interview, etc. on social media
  • Better yet, pay it forward to a writer farther down the rungs of the ladder—most writers will love knowing by helping Writer X, they also helped Writer Y.

The worst thing you can do is to ask for another helping hand when you’ve showed no appreciation for the last favor. And for the love of God, NEVER ask a fellow writer to fund your writing career because, in your eyes, they’re successful and you’re entitled enough to think you shouldn’t have to work a day job while you hone your craft. Yeah, those people exist. And they all seem to have my email address. Lucky me. 🙂

Common Courtesy

Treat fellow writers as you would like to be treated.

  1. Respond to blog comments. If someone has taken the time to comment on your article, don’t treat them like they’re invisible. Reciprocate with a response. Common courtesy is not rocket science. How would you feel if one day everyone stopped commenting on your blog posts? If you continue to ignore your audience, that can and will happen. If chatting with your audience isn’t important to you, then close the comment section. By leaving it open you’re obligated to respond.
  2. Share a fellow writer’s posts. Let’s take Twitter, for example. If someone retweets everything you share, or even if they only share one post, return the favor. They didn’t have to take the time to share your tweet with their audience, but they did. Do the same for them.

But Sue, what if their books have sex acts on the covers? If you don’t feel comfortable sharing their pinned post with your audience, then scroll through their timeline until you find a more appropriate post that you can share.

  1. Never hijack another writer’s social media timeline. We’ve all met the writer who thinks it’s acceptable to tag 90 authors in their book promos. It isn’t. If anything, said writer looks unprofessional and desperate. I have a few followers on Twitter who do it constantly, and it drives me crazy. The only ones I haven’t blocked (yet) are the writers who also RT my tweets. Does that make tagging okay? No. Unless you’re having a conversation with someone or sharing their work, pretend tagging doesn’t exist.

Lose the Automated Message

I admit, when I first joined Twitter, an automated message to greet my new followers seemed like a good idea. Let me set the record straight—they are never a good idea.

Nothing screams amateur more than an automated message. I once followed this writer whose automated message read: “I want to be your favorite author!” I wrote back: “I want to be your favorite author, too!”

Surprise, surprise, she unfollowed me. Good riddance.

I can think of only two possible exceptions for sending a private message.

  1. If you’re extending an offer that will benefit them, not you. And it’s free. You wouldn’t ask someone you just met at a party for money, right?
  2. If you’re having trouble finding their books and are asking for a link.

In both these non-automated scenarios, most writers won’t mind. But first try to find their email address. Email is less intrusive than private messaging.

Auto-Add Email to Newsletter

If a fellow writer accepts your friend request on Facebook or follows you on Twitter/Instagram or subscribes to your YouTube channel, that does NOT mean they’ve signed up to receive your newsletter. I’ve had friends add me to their list, but they’re actual friends who I chat with all the time. For everyone else, there’s a big difference between showing support for your fellow writers and signing up to receive their newsletters.

Think of it this way. I have over 12K followers on Twitter alone. Imagine if they all added me to their email list? My inbox would explode! The less-informed writer may be thinking: But Sue, you can unsubscribe at any time.

Oy. I hear that excuse all the time. Newsflash. Unsubscribing from a newsletter you never signed up for in the first place annoys most writers. Plus, it takes time away from writing, researching, marketing, or the gazillion other things we do daily.

Read the room, dear guppy (new writers a la MWA). A follow-back or an acceptance of a friend request is just that. Nothing more.

Final Thought

As I said at the beginning of this post, writers are some of the best people on the planet. Most of us would agree that without other writers, this profession would be a lonely one. But we’re never truly alone. There’s always another writer who’ll be there when we need them, just as we were there for them. We’re blessed, and that gift should never be taken for granted.

Over to you, TKZ family.

Did I miss anything? Add your tip! If you can’t think of anything to add, then share a story of a writer helping you or vice versa.

How To Read Body Language

Posted on by

As writers, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that even while silent, our bodies speak volumes. Nonverbal cues — body language — are the physical behavior, expressions, and mannerisms that communicate how we really feel.

Whether we’re aware of it or not, our bodies are sending nonverbal signals when we interact with others. By analyzing gestures, posture, tone of voice, level of eye contact, etc., we can learn many things. Body cues enhance dialogue between characters.

Are you reading those same signals in the real world?

Members of the Animal Kingdom rely on body language to warn each other of potential danger. Crows are especially attuned to their environment. Just sayin’. 😉 I believe animals are our greatest teachers. We can learn a lot by studying how they interact with their environment and with different species. Matters not if a squirrel doesn’t speak crow, raven, or blue jay. That squirrel still knows how the birds are feeling, and vice versa, by reading their body language.

When we say one thing, but our body language says the opposite, the listener may conclude we’re being dishonest. And rightfully so. For example, we may say “yes” while wagging our head from side to side. Because body language is a natural, subconscious act that broadcasts our true feelings and intentions, the nonverbal signal is more accurate than spoken words.

Being cognizant of our own body language and perfecting how to communicate more fully is a valuable skill to learn for interviews, sales, book signings, video marketing, etc…anywhere we interact with others. Profilers and investigators rely on body language to help them dig for the truth.

Face Facts

The human face is extremely expressive, able to convey countless emotions without saying a word. Unlike other forms of nonverbal communication, facial expressions are universal. Indistinguishable across cultures, facial expressions show happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust, to name a few.

Say Cheese

Not everyone smiles the same way. Some favor a close-lipped smile over a toothy grin. In general, when someone’s authentically happy, their whole face lights up and smile lines extend up to the corners of their eyes. On the flipside, a closed mouth smile may mean they’re masking their real emotion or appeasing their audience to avoid conflict.

Un-kissable Lips

Another mouth-related clue, pursed lips almost always indicate dissatisfaction or anger.

Eye of the Tiger

Since the visual sense is dominant for most people, eye contact is an important nonverbal body cue. The way we look at someone communicates many things, including interest, affection, hostility, or attraction. Eye contact is also important in maintaining the flow of conversation and for gauging the other person’s interest and response.

If you’re chatting with someone and they narrow their eyes, their body language portrays anger, confusion, or suspicion, and in some cases, deep concentration.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

When someone is being dishonest, they’ll look up to their upper right (your left when facing them). The right side of the brain is our creative side (as you probably know). That glance upward allows them to access that part of the brain, thus thinking more creatively while fabricating the truth. They may also pause—stall—to buy time while constructing a more convincing lie.

Can You Hear My Body Language?

Consider how you perceive others by the way they sit, walk, stand, or hold their head. The way we carry ourselves nonverbally communicates a wealth of information. This type of body language includes posture, stance, and more subtle movements (as shown below).

Hot Crossed Buns Arms

How someone holds themselves says a lot about what they’re thinking, especially when it comes to their arms. A closed-off position indicates self-protection and blocking out a negative source. When we’re comfortable or open to communication, we’re more likely to stand with relaxed arms.

Space Shot

Have you ever had someone invade your personal space? Made you uncomfortable, right? We all need physical space, though that distance differs depending on the culture, situation, or closeness of the relationship. We use physical space to communicate many different nonverbal messages, including intimacy, affection, aggression, or dominance.

If someone’s uncomfortable or disinterested, they may slightly turn away from the conversation—whether they realize it or not.

Footprints in the Sand

Take note of the feet. Subconsciously, we tend to point our toes in the direction of where we’d like to go. If someone’s enjoying your company, their feet should point toward you. But if they desperately want to bolt, their feet will likely point toward the nearest exit. One caveat to this research is pain. Hence why we need to consider the person we’re talking to as well as the context of the encounter.

Nervous Nellie

When someone is nervous, they’ll often sit with their ankles crossed. Surprising, right? One exception is when the rest of their body portrays openness. For example, lacing fingers behind their head, reclined, with ankles crossed straight out in front of them. But if they lean back with their arms crossed it signals objection. Hence why you may want to reconsider how the interaction is going. If you’re trying to win someone over, engage them with questions and see if they lean forward instead.

Pat-A-Cake, Pat-A-Cake, Baker’s Hands

Gestures are woven into the fabric of daily life. A wave, point, or animation of hands often express emotion. Interestingly, some gestures vary between cultures. For example, flashing the “okay” hand signal conveys a positive message, but it’s considered offensive in Germany, Russia, and Brazil, for example. Should we discuss raising the middle finger? Hand signals don’t get much clearer than that. 😉

Stroking the chin often indicates a high interest in the conversation. Likely that person will ask probing questions to learn more. If you spot this cue, you’ve piqued interest among a captive audience.

Reach Out & Touch Someone

We communicate a great deal through touch. Think about the message behind a weak handshake, or a warm bear hug, a patronizing pat on the head, or a controlling grip of the arm.

The Nose Knows

Many people touch their nose, sniff, or breathe heavier when stressed. Breathing regulates the body, eases tension while we communicate, and helps us to regain composure. If we pay attention to these behaviors in others, it’ll help unearth the truth. Again, context is key. If someone is ill or has a health issue, we can safely disregard sniffing. But repetitive sniffing or quickened breaths indicate the person feels unbalanced or is trying to remain composed.

Watch Your Tone of Voice

Never is it a matter of what we say, but how we say it. When we speak, others read our voice while listening to our words. Timing, pace, volume, tone, inflection, and utterances that convey understanding, such as “ahh” and “uh-ha” are all good indicators to watch for. Think about how your tone changes when you add sarcasm, anger, affection, or confidence.

One Size Does Not Fit All

Keep in mind, body language is not always 100% accurate. The context of the situation as well as the individual we’re speaking to are both key factors to consider.

Writing aside, are you aware of body language in the real world? Funny stories always welcome!

On a personal note, I regained full control over my Mayhem Series. Woohoo! Created my own imprint and Indie pubbed all five books. What an amazing feeling! Book 6 is with my editor and I’m working with my cover designer now. Gotta share my new logo. You’ll get a kick outta it. 😉 Still waiting for Amazon to transfer my reviews. Other than that, I’m having a blast with my newfound freedom.

 

Writers Beware: Here’s what readers really hate

Posted on by

By Elaine Viets

Does the novel you’re writing have a long dream sequence? And it’s in italics, to enhance the ethereal effect? How about sizzling sex scenes? And, for comic relief, a talking cat who solves crimes and a wisecracking kid who’s five going on forty?
Uh, you may want to rethink that work in progress.
Ron Charles, the Washington Post book critic, “asked readers of our Book Club newsletter to describe the things that most annoy them in books. The responses were a tsunami of bile.”
Here are some things that Ron salvaged from the tsunami.

(1) Readers hate dream sequences.
Yes, I know dream sequences are a staple of literature. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov has guilty dreams, including one about a whipped mare. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the Boy Who Lived is deceived by thoughts implanted by a bad guy. Winston in 1984 worries his dreams will get him in trouble with the Thought Police. A Christmas Carol is a long life-changing dream. And then there’s Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
So why should we be wary of dream sequences?
Raging readers told Ron Charles this:
“‘I absolutely hate dream sequences,’ writes Michael Ream. ‘They are always SO LITERAL,’ Jennifer Gaffney adds, ‘usually an example of lazy writing.’”
Aha! So readers hate lazy writing and literal dream sequences. Writing coaches caution writers to avoid cheap tricks, especially the old “and then I woke up” dodge. They say you can use dream sequences if the dreams are premonitions, illustrate an important inner conflict, or help a protagonist realize something major. In short, the dreams must advance the plot. So craft your dream sequences carefully.

(2) Readers hate historical anachronisms and factual inaccuracies.
The Washington Post says, “Karen Viglione Lauterwasser despairs over errors ‘like calling the divisions in a hockey game “quarters” or having a pentagon-shaped table with six chairs.’ Deborah Gravel warns authors that taking a cruise to Alaska is not enough to write a novel about the Last Frontier. Kristi Hart explains that when your characters are boiling maple sap to make syrup, they should not be stirring it. ‘You just boil it until the sugar content is correct, and then you’re done.’”
My pet peeve includes the treatment of black people in historical novels in the first half of the Twentieth Century. With some exceptions, until the late 1950s or 1960s, black people were not allowed to eat in most white restaurants or sit at lunch counters with whites. Nor could they stay at white hotels, go to white schools, use white toilets, or even drink out of white people’s water fountains.
In 1968, I encountered my first segregated water fountain, on a trip through Mississippi. In the local courthouse, the white people drank chilled water from a modern metal fountain. Black people had to drink warm water from a dinky white porcelain fountain. At a Catholic church in the same state, my family arrived late for the service, so we sat in the back. An usher told us that section was for black people (actually, he said “Negroes”) and we had to move.
Encountering this segregation was shocking, but it existed, and to deny it in novels is to deny the shame, hurt and humiliation black people suffered – and still do.
(3) Readers hate typos and grammatical errors.
This is also bugaboo for TKZ readers and writers, and we’ve written often about how to catch typos, while understanding those slippery little devils slip into the best books. But typos seem to be getting worse, especially since traditional publishers are cutting back on copy editors and some indie authors don’t hire them.
The Washington Post noted: “Patricia Tannian, a retired copy editor, writes, ‘It seems that few authors can spell “minuscule” or know the difference between ‘flout’ and ‘flaunt.’ Katherine A. Powers, Book World’s audiobook reviewer, laments that so many ‘authors don’t know the difference between “lie” and “lay.’” TKZ’s Terry Odell wrote a helpful blog on that subject. Read it and sin no more. https://killzoneblog.com/2023/03/are-you-lying-or-laying-around.html

Personally, I wish writers would know the difference between grizzly and grisly murders. While it’s true the Cocaine Bear and some bears in the wild do kill humans, in most mysteries humans performing those grisly murders.
And please realize that the South American country is spelled Colombia, not Columbia. There’s more, but it’s not a good idea to get me started.
“While we’re at it,” the Washington Post wrote, “let’s avoid ‘bemused.’ Bemused ‘doesn’t mean what you think it means,’ says Paula Willey.”
And please, please learn how to use “chute,” as in where you toss your dirty clothes. I’ve seen major writers call it a “laundry shoot,” which can put holes in clothes.

(4) Readers hate bloated books.
According to the Washington Post, “Jean Murray says, ‘First books by best-selling authors are reasonable in length; then they start believing that every word they write is golden and shouldn’t be cut.’ She notes that Elizabeth George’s first novel, A Great Deliverance, was 432 pages. Her most recent, Something to Hide, is more than 700.
“But it’s not just the books that are too long,” the WashPo says. “Everything in them is too long, too. Readers complained about interminable prologues, introductions, expositions, chapters, explanations, descriptions, paragraphs, sentences, conversations, sex scenes, fistfights and italicized passages.”
(5) Readers hate long italicized passages.
“‘Long passages in italics drive me nuts,’ Susan Spénard told the Washington Post.
“‘Cormac McCarthy does entire chapters in italics,’ adds Nathan Pate. ‘Only the rest of his writing redeems that.’”
(6) Readers hate when writers don’t use quote marks.
“‘Sometimes you have to reread a passage to determine who is speaking,’ one reader said.
Quick now, a few more complaints:
(7) Readers hate “gratuitously confusing timelines.”
“‘Everything doesn’t have to be a linear timeline,’ concedes Kate Stevens, ‘but often authors seem to employ a structure that makes the book unreadable (or at least very difficult to follow). There seems to be no reason why this is done other than to show off how clever they are.’”
(8) Readers hate two kinds of show-offs.


“Unrealistically clever children or talking animals . . . are deeply irksome in novels — along with disabled characters who exist only to provide treacly inspiration.”
Some cozy readers adore talking animals who solve crimes, so this objection doesn’t apply to everyone.
(9) A few more things readers hate, according the Washington Post:
– “Susan C. Falbo is tired of ‘protagonists who have had a hard day, finally stagger home and take a scalding hot shower.’” My protagonists sometimes do that, so I guess the key here is to not overdo it.

– “Connie Ogle and Susan Dee have had it with ‘lip biting.’ Ogle explains, ‘If real people bit their lips with the frightening regularity of fictional characters, our mouths would be a bloody mess.’
– “Gianna LaMorte is tired of seeing ‘someone escape a small town and rent a large house, get a job at a local paper or make a living gardening.’” The person who flees to a small town and makes a living writing for a newspaper gets my goat. Especially if they have their own office and come and go as they please. Small town newspapers barely pay enough to keep reporters in cat food. And editors want to know where they can reach you at all times.

And I’m with Tobin Anderson, who wrote, “Vomiting is the new crying. I think it’s part of the whole hyper-valuation of trauma — and somehow tears seem too weak, too mundane. But imagine a funeral filled with upchuckers.” I’m seeing a lot of barfing on TV these days, and watching folks toss their cookies while I’m eating in front of the tube makes me want to . . . well, you get the point.
So, TKZ readers, what are your pet peeves?

Pre-order my new Angela Richman, Death Investigator mystery, The Dead of Night, to be published April 4. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1448310350/ref=ox_sc_saved_image_3?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1

 

 

Can Writing Heal Physical Pain?

Posted on by

Let me preface this post by saying, discussing my personal struggles with pain is my least favorite subject. The only reason I’m even broaching this subject is because I discovered a cool connection between writing and pain management, and I hope it’ll help those who need it.

Last week, New Hampshire got hammered with one snowstorm after another, the totality of which resulted in snowbanks taller than I am. With such unsettled barometric pressure and weather patterns, my RA and psoriatic arthritis kicked into overdrive. For me, writing has always been the best pain medicine. When I’m in the zone, I leave my fractured skeleton in the chair and escape into my fictional world. But something—email, social media, direct messages, marketing, blogging, phone calls, and texts—kept yanking me out of my fictive dreamland when I needed it most, and the moment it did, my body screamed in protest.

And so, for self-preservation, I climbed back into my writing cave, padlocked and soundproofed the door behind me. Hence why you didn’t see me in the comment section last week, or on social media. For once, I put my own wellbeing above everything else. By the time I emerged from the writing cave a week later, I’d added over 30K words to the WIP. Now, I only have one or two chapters left to reach The End of Mayhem Series #7. Yay!

Anywho…

The U.S. Pain Foundation describes chronic pain as the following:

When you try to put your hand over a hot burner on the stove, your brain signals to you that it’s hot and you quickly move your hand away. This acute pain center lights up circuits in the nociceptive area, the acute brain center, alerting you to move away. 

Imagine if you can’t move your hand away from the burner even though you know it’s going to hurt. You get that signal telling you it’s too hot, but you cannot move your hand away. How would you feel? Angry? Enraged? Fearful? Panicked? You can’t stop the pain even though you know it’s coming. These natural emotions set off chemicals and hormones like fight-or-flight adrenaline, cortisol, and histamines which sensitize the nervous system, raise anxiety levels, and amplify our sensation of pain.

Is it any wonder we’d seek an escape?

With chronic pain, the pain travels through the emotional area of the brain or sympathetic nervous system. The emotion and pain pathways are so closely linked that it’s only possible to experience meaningful pain relief when you break this connection. Separating our emotions from our pain pathway is a learned skill, and writing plays an important role.

When we write, our brains release chemicals that calm the nervous system. Daily writing creates new neural circuits in the brain, giving us new ways to respond to old pain triggers. The new, healthy circuits eventually grow stronger than the old pain circuits.

A 1986 study uncovered something extraordinary, something that inspired generations of researchers to conduct several hundred more studies.

The gist is this. Professor Pennebaker asked students to spend 15 minutes writing about the biggest trauma of their lives. Or, if they hadn’t experienced trauma, to write about a difficult time. Meanwhile, a control group spent the same number of sessions (4) writing a description of something neutral like a tree or their dorm room.

For the six months that followed the study, the professor monitored how often students visited the health center. Remarkably, the students who’d written about their trauma and real emotions made significantly fewer trips to the doctor. Ever since, the field of psychoneuroimmunology has been exploring the link between what’s now known as expressive writing, and the functioning of the immune system. Psychoneuroimmunology studies examine the effect of expressive writing on everything from asthma and arthritis to breast cancer and migraines, with surprising beneficial results.

Writing even heals physical wounds faster.

Brave volunteers engaged in expressive writing; a second group did not. Days later, they were all given a local anesthetic and a punch biopsy at the top of their inner arm. Researchers monitored the 4mm wounds. The volunteers who engaged in expressive writing healed faster than the others.

What does the act of committing words to paper do? Initially it was assumed this occurred through catharsis, that people felt better because they’d released pent-up emotions. But then Pennebaker dissected the language used by the two groups.

The fast healer’s point of view changed over the course of the four sessions. They began with 1st person, then moved to deep 3rd, suggesting they were looking at the event from different perspectives. They also used “because” and the like, implying they were making sense of the events and putting them into a narrative. The results proved the simple act of labeling your feelings and putting them into a story boosts the immune system.

Sounds a lot like crafting fiction steeped in real emotion, doesn’t it?

What Pennebaker found curious but makes perfect sense to me (and you, probably) is that simply imagining a traumatic event and writing a story about it also made wounds heal faster, concluding that the writing has less to do with resolving past issues and more to do with finding a way of channeling real emotions.

Despite several decades of research showing that writing works to manage pain, it’s rarely used clinically. Also, the process works better for some people than others, depending on how well they engage with the process.

So, the next time you’re in pain, lock yourself away in your writing cave. Your body and WIP will both thank you. 😉

Do you have any personal experience to share? What do think about these studies? 

How To Adopt a Writing Mindset

Posted on by

The word “success” has various meanings. Some writers stay laser-focused on the end result, but I propose that we step back, slow down, and view success as footprints in the sand. Each footprint represents one day.

Will you step into that print or let it wash away in the tide?

Success is about adopting a growth mindset. Every morning I watch the sunrise. Why? Because it grounds me with a positive mindset for the day. If you roll over and slap the snooze button, dreading the day ahead, you’ll start the day with a negative mindset. Things tend to roll downhill from there.

Have you ever heard a writer complain that they’re just not any good at writing? That’s called a fixed mindset. Their mind is made up. They will never be a good writer. Period. End.

A growth mindset is positivity based. The writer with a growth mindset says, “I may not be the best writer today, but I will be.”

See the difference?

The writer with the growth mindset is stepping into the footprint to see where it leads. The writer with the fixed mindset would rather complain about writing on social media and let the footprint melt away in the tide.

Success is not about how many books you’ve sold, the amount of traffic to your blog, or even an article going viral. Instead, success is about progress, growth, and moving forward. That type of success is sustainable and filled with joy. We often say writing is a marathon, not a sprint, and there’s a reason for that. By celebrating small successes along the way to that big dream, we give ourselves positive reinforcement, we cheer ourselves on, we maintain a positive and joyous mindset.

Embrace your potential.

Understand that good writing is not a natural talent. It’s earned through study and practice and showing up every day.

If you struggle with a negative mindset, flip the script.

  • Where the negative writer sees a problem, the positive writer seizes the opportunity to grow and learn.
  • When the negative writer doesn’t know an answer and gives up, the positive writer researches the problem.
  • Where the negative writer sees criticism, the positive writer appreciates the feedback.
  • Where the negative writer might feel jealously, the positive writer feels admiration.
  • Where the negative writer might find something too hard, the positive writer knows the hard work will be worthwhile in the end.

People in general who believe that their efforts and strategies can lead to success are likely to engage in learning activities and take on challenges with enthusiasm, so they learn more, which reinforces their belief that they can learn to write well. In fact, according to some psychologists, this confidence, or self-efficacy, is central to motivation and learning.

What is a writing mindset?

It’s how we think about writing. Because I start the day with a positive mindset, I can’t wait to get to my keyboard. I know I’m gonna have a great day. Why? Because a writing mindset supports creative work.

How we approach and frame our writing problems lead to positive or negative outcomes. Working on developing a growth mindset will support your writing process.

So, for example, if you believe you can only write on Monday mornings from 8-10 a.m., you’re already making decisions about your ability to write on a Tuesday or a Wednesday or a Saturday, so if you slip behind the keyboard on any other day but Monday, it’ll be harder to write. You’ve handicapped your creativity with a fixed (negative) mindset.

How do we develop a writing mindset?

It’s about thinking that supports creativity, productivity, and persistence within our written work. It’s about reframing negative thought patterns. For example, I am not a poet, but I would never say I couldn’t write a poem. I would never say I couldn’t write anything. That’s not a self-serving statement. It stems from the knowledge that I can learn to write anything I want. And so can you!

A writing mindset challenges negativity and forces us to examine where negative thoughts stem from. Fear? Anxiety? Low self-esteem?

Writers with a growth mindset rarely, if ever, experience writer’s block. Why? Because we’ve harnessed the power of self-belief and positivity.

Benefits of a Writing/Growth Mindset

  • You will feel more in control of your writing.
  • Writing won’t feel so elusive and magical (magical meaning, to the point where you can’t replicate it).
  • You’ll be able to decide when and where you write rather than waiting for motivation or inspiration.
  • You’ll learn to show up and put in the hours.
  • You’ll step into the next footprint to see where it leads.

Okie doke, my beloved TKZers. There’s your Monday morning pep-talk. Now, go seize the day!

Cover Story

Posted on by

By Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

 

Recently, Jim Bell wrote about baseball legend Honus Wagner, a shortstop in the early 20th century, and one of the first inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Here’s a story for Valentine’s Day about how Honus played matchmaker between me and my wonderful cover artist, Brian Hoffman, right here at The Kill Zone.

I still get chills when I remember how Brian and I “met”.

In 2017, the first novel (Instrument of the Devil) in my Tawny Lindholm Thriller series was traditionally published. They provided a cover that was predominantly lizard green, not my favorite color. But they paid me, so I went along with it.

Original cover

 

Six months later, they closed their doors, leaving me orphaned. The second book in the series was ready to publish and a third was in the works. After considering options, I decided to self-publish the subsequent books.

But self-publishing meant providing my own covers.

A professional design company did several cover drafts but I didn’t like any of them. Being a DIYer, I tried creating covers myself and wrote a post for TKZ about the process.

 

At that time, the fourth book Dead Man’s Bluff was close to publication but had not yet been released. No one except my critique group and editor had read it.

After that post, I received a gracious email from TKZ regular, Brian Hoffman. He said he enjoyed my posts and had learned a lot from them. Then he added he hoped he wasn’t offending me but “Your cover for Dead Man’s Bluff looks amateurish.  I’ve made one you might like better.  It is my gift to you for all the help your columns have been to me.”

He attached this cover:

Wow, just wow!

Since the book had not yet been published, Brian had no way of knowing the McGuffin in the plot was the Honus Wagner 1909 baseball card. Yet, there on his cover was that very card!

Chills ran through me. The theme from The Twilight Zone played in my mind.

How had this complete stranger perfectly captured the essence of my story about a Florida hurricane and a stolen baseball card?

I immediately wrote back to Brian, with profuse thanks, saying of course he hadn’t offended me, far from it. He’d blown me away with the beautiful cover and his generosity.

Believing he was a professional who designed covers for a living, I asked him for a bid to redo all my books.

Bing, bang, boom. More emails arrived from him, each containing another great cover. They displayed a consistent style for the series that fitted the thriller/suspense genre. I was thrilled.

How much do I owe you? I wrote back.

Nothing. I enjoy doing them.

No way could I take his work without paying him.

If he wouldn’t give me an amount, I figured I’d send him a check for a fair market price. What’s your address?

 No answer.

After more back and forth emails—me offering to pay, him declining—we finally came to an agreement.

The Book of Ecclesiastes says: Cast thy bread upon the waters, for you shall find it after many days…

Brian and I continue to enjoy a great working relationship. I send him a synopsis of each new story. He sends several sample designs. We yak back and forth to fine-tune and decide on a final version. Here is his work:

Thank you, Brian!

Being member of TKZ’s community yields many rewards, both expected and unexpected.

Happy Valentine’s Day to TKZ’s family and friends from all over the globe who enrich my life as a writer and a human being.

~~~

TKZers: Have you ever received a gift you never anticipated? Have you ever given a gift the recipient didn’t expect?

~~~

 

Here’s a sneak peek at Brian’s cover for my upcoming thriller Deep Fake.

You can’t believe your eyes.

Sign up here at my website and I’ll let you know when Deep Fake is released.