Just Ginger

Several years ago I was involved in a community drive to convince our local city council to add a dog park to the city park. I created the logo, researched dog park facts, wrote up a media packet, and set up a website. During my research, I discovered that not all dogs are a good fit for dog parks. Sadie, our Catahoula Hound, pretty much failed the test because she’s a fearful dog who reacts with aggressive behavior in many situations. (We adopted her when she was about a year old and have no idea what shaped those first months of her life.) Here I was volunteering to help get a dog park built and I probably couldn’t use it unless we took Sadie at oh-dark-thirty, before any other canines showed up. What’s this got to do with writing? Glad you asked. Stories come in all sizes and shapes, but sometimes a perfectly good story idea isn’t a good fit for a book. It may work well as flash fiction, a short story, or even a novella, but there isn’t enough there to warrant wri...

I once read a manuscript for an aspiring writer who introduced 40 characters in the first three chapters. She wasn’t happy when my critique suggested she pare down the number of characters she named. She felt my suggestion, if she followed it, would ruin the story because all these characters were part of the story. Not really. She had named and described every character as they appeared in her story. Giving a name, description, and back story to Mary Jane the cashier who appears on page  two because the protagonist is buying groceries and she’s his cashier doesn’t bequeath name status on Mary Jane. She need to be “the cashier.” Bombarding the reader with a sports arena full of named characters is no way to build a bond between the main characters of your story and the reader.  In most stories there are characters who need to be named and those who don’t. Minor characters who exist to people your story world can be identified by their job, their hair color, ...

Last spring, the grass in one section of our yard failed to turn green. What we thought was dormant ended up being dead. Unable to figure out what happened, we called in an expert who explained that grass needs a balance of 50% soil, 25% water, and 25% air to thrive. The repeated heavy rain falls of the preceding months had suffocated the grass roots in this area, killing the grass.   We live on a hill, have invested a small fortune in retaining walls, drainage systems, and sod, but the rains had been heavy and frequent, saturating that particular portion of the yard.   Again and again.  Lesson learned: Grass needs a healthy balance of soil, water, and air to thrive.  Being a writer, I made the mental jump to writing. I realized that sometimes writers forget that stories also need a healthy balance of ingredients. It’s easy to suffocate a story. Too much dialogue, you have a screenplay. Too much narrative, you have a snoozing reader. Too...

  Where have I been lately ? Well, three rounds of physical therapy in less than 12 months and the pain associated with the problem ate up a lot of time and energy. On the bright side, the third time was a charm. The” last resort” physical therapist watched me walk and immediately diagnosed the problem. My gait was flawed.  Now to look at me, you would never guess any of this. I didn’t limp or anything. And two medical doctors and two physical therapists who worked with me missed it. Their consensus opinion pointed to my IT band being inflamed.  Yeah, like I’m a runner.  Anyway, I was lucky and someone told me about a nontraditional type of physical therapy. One visit with someone who specializes in whole body movement and I was on the road to recovery. I learned that my off kilter walking stressed my right side, which torqued my back, which then sent burning nerve signals to my left leg.  Weird, right? What Was Happening? My...

Oddly enough, not everyone has the same definition of what a historical novel is. Some people say a story set 25 years ago is historical enough, while others say 50 years is the benchmark. And then there are those of us who say, what’s so historical about 50 years ago? You need to go farther back in time! I didn’t know there was such a wide divergence on what constituted historical fiction until I decided to write about what makes a novel historical. All I knew was I had read an e-book purporting to be both historical and a novel, yet couldn’t see elements of either in the story. The e-book I read fell into the category of a memoir because it was based on personal experience and lacked the structure of a novel. To me, the story also lacked the feel of a historical because the characters used the Internet and flew around in jets. The contemporary feel of the story conflicted with my vision of a historical novel. A vision based on writing four historical novels. Defi...

As an indie publisher you get to call the shots as to how to label your beloved manuscript. If you hang the word “novel” on your published opus, be sure it is a novel. The act of printing “Historical Fiction Novel” on the title page when the story is not a novel and probably not historical only serves to alienate the reader. You do not want the reader to feel he or she has been tricked into buying a mislabeled book. How Do You Know If You’ve Written A Novel?   Writing comes in all shapes and sizes from a short story to a personal memoir, but each type of writing has a structure or framework peculiar to it. A short story is not a personal memoir even though they are both forms of written communications. A novel has its own structure. If your story doesn’t adhere to this basic structure, it isn’t a novel. All too often, an author will write a “slice of life” narrative, a  meandering story that  lacks the fundamental elements of a novel. Readers expect to...

We owned a computer testing company about fifteen years ago that specialized in giving Federal Aviation Administration tests and other commercial tests. Customers took the computer exams under our supervision using secure computers linked to a test database. The test database was provided by a nationally known education company who built their reputation on after school tutoring and test preparation. They had taken their pencil and paper knowledge and slapped it into some software programming. The end product proved to be a cumbersome and frustrating system for test administrators, as well as test takers, to use. One day a “from the ground up” testing software company approached us about using their test database. Once we learned about their program, we jumped at the chance to use their software to provide computer tests for our customers. The software was designed to provide digital tests, not to provide pencil and paper tests digitally. Say That Again Le...