Happy New Year!

Photo by Antonio Gabola on Unsplash

Although Covid-19 is far from over, the dreaded year of 2020 is over and we start today with a new chapter.

Vaccines have been and are still being created and, despite the high toll the winter season celebrations will have on the spread of the virus in the weeks and months to come, we have every reason to look ahead with optimism. And it is exactly that, a virus. It’s not a supervillain bent on the ruination of or total domination of the world. It’s just a virus like so many others, only it’s new so we have no long-acquired immunity to it.

Hopefully our beloved local businesses will be able to open again and start picking up the pieces soon, people laid off and furloughed will be able to go back to work, and our lives will be able to return to something resembling normal.

 

I’ve never been a New Year Resolution kind of person. But, I am about promising myself new starts and doing better going forward, and that can happen randomly at any time throughout the year. Of course, we all know the saying about best laid plans.

Since March I’ve promised myself to blog more, write more, edit more, and read more. That despite being among the lucky few still able to be working the ‘pays the bills’ job full time and other commitments to family and the writing community.

 

Like so many others, I’ve been in a funk since our first shutdown in March. In roughly 2 ½ months I’ll have been working from home for a full year. It would be a dream if not for the near total isolation of seeing the world through the front window and in-person social contact being relegated only to a pair of teenagers, my partner, and two dogs. One of those dogs lives to be an asshole, but she’s still cute, cuddly, and lovable; and can cover your entire body like a blanket if she lays across you.

 

As socially distanced (aka physically apart) as we are, we are all in this trying time together. Let’s be together (apart), help each other, and most importantly be kind and forgiving towards each other.

Simplify your life by rehoming things of valuable use to others that you have no need of. Those out of work are struggling and have no means to buy these things.

Share a smile and a wave with a neighbor or a stranger from a distance.

Pay forward or commit an act of kindness to a stranger.

Be extra kind to those serving us daily in the stores, delivering our parcels and groceries, looking after our loved ones in hospitals and care homes, and all our first responders. They are going through an unbelievable amount of stress right now.

Give a little something of yourself, safely, to help others.

 

I do promise myself, again, to blog more, write, edit, and read more. And to share that to help others.

We will explore character development and story arcs, formatting and editing, platforms and self-promotion, and more. The world of writing and being a writer is as vast as the worlds we build in our stories.

 

You can sign up for my infrequent Author of Darkness newsletter or follow my fan blogs for my two pen names: L. V. Gaudet (adult fiction) and Vivian Munnoch (youth and YA fiction).

 

Let’s continue to meet (virtually) in the new year and grow together as writers, because that’s what being a writer is all about.

Every Character Is Somebody

I get incredibly lazy about character development in my first draft. This especially happens when it comes to secondary and background characters.


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When I’m in the throes of pounding at that keyboard, the words flowing through my fingertips as the story flourishes, or banging my head on the contraption in frustration, my focus is on the story. The big question of what happens next is what drives that first draft.

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In most of my stories I have no better idea than the reader does about what is going to happen next or even who the characters are. The story often changes from that initial hunch of what it will be about as the events play out. Hell, I’m just along for the ride, wherever my imagination decides to take us.

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Just like the reader I’m experiencing the story and meeting the characters as the events unfold.

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This is why it is perhaps even more important for someone who writes like I do to never forget that every character is somebody, no matter how small a bit part they play.

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What is more memorable? The story where everyone is a faceless nameless blank except the three or four main characters? Or one where old Mrs. Appleblossom down the street always wears a white flower either in her hat or tucked into her button hole, the absence of which could be a hidden (subliminal) hint of trouble to come?

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What about Mr. Commely, who’s only purpose in the story is to deliver the letter that gives your character the bad news? Does the reader need to know that Mr. Commely has returned to work after retiring because he’s lonely after his wife passed away, that he always has a gentle pat on the head waiting for even the most fiercest of mailman hating dogs on his route, or that his behavior is sometimes strange and erratic? It doesn’t drive the story forward, so some would argue this is just extra words that should be cut.

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The girl serving coffee through the drive through window probably doesn’t need to tell you that she’s having a bad morning. You can see it in her face. You don’t know her name and you probably don’t need to. But you can make the reader wonder why she’s having a bad day. Did she have a fight with her boyfriend? Was she reprimanded at work for being late again when she’s dealing with a serious crisis at home? Maybe she has a parent or child who is deathly ill. Why she looks unhappy isn’t important to the story. But just making the reader notice her sadness and wonder about it because your character did draws the reader further into becoming one with and sympathizing with your main character.

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When you go through the drive through yourself, that girl behind the window touches your life when she hands you your coffee and takes your money. It may only be a thirty-second moment, but those thirty seconds still touch your life.

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None of these bits about small characters drive the story and most of it can be left unsaid, back-story for these people who make only brief appearances. But dropping these little observations can add a depth of understanding and reality to the world your characters live in.

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If you write with a sense of familiarity will all your characters lives, the reader will pick up on it. Like watching someone waving to someone walking by from across the parking lot, you can get a sense if they are familiar with each other or just passing a friendly wave to an acquainted stranger.

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Some characters develop through the writing of that first draft. The main characters mostly get a lot of their character traits and flaws because their reactions and needs are what push the story forward. But with the rest they are lucky if they get dubbed as “frontdeskguy” or “girl2” as I write. Sometimes they are nothing more than a mention of “the other guy”.

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As the story unfolds, so do little hints into the characters that show up for repeat appearances. And as I learn more about where these bit players fall into the story, I also get a better understanding of how each of them can bring more life to the story.

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Like the young man in Men of Twelve (working name of a W.I.P.). The young man is an unimportant player, like the Start Trek guy who wears red to beam down to the planet. I know he’s going to die and the reader may get a sense of it too. That the trees mock him for being a nameless bastard without a father moments before his death does not drive the story, but it does add a layer of depth to the scene and the world the characters live in.

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It’s in the editing, when I go back over the story to re-write, revise, develop more, and delete than I put the emphasis on picking out each character from the biggest to the smallest and give them a little touch of personality.

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Bringing your characters to life brings the story to life. And, remembering that behind that blank nameless place holder in the story every character is somebody adds a touch of real life to your work. Behind the blank nameless face every person you see today is somebody too.

Rambling about Job Hunting

If there is one thing that I learned about job hunting, is that you don’t realize how it can affect a person (specifically yourself) until you are doing it yourself.



Sure, I should know all this already. Right? After all, it’s not like this is the first time I’ve ever job hunted. In fact, I’ve job hunted no less than six times. Closer to ten really, since you don’t include every job you’ve ever had on your resume.



I’m sure that at my age and experience employers won’t care to read through the details of the one day I worked at the indoor miniature golf place when I was sixteen and got fired the same day for having an accident with the drink machine. You know the kind, those purple, red, and orange fluids forever turning in a machine that looks like they should be slushies but are really just a poor imitation of flat soda pops.



It’s your first day of your first job ever as an inexperienced and very nervous (and outrageously shy) sixteen year old kid. And yes, the simplest of tasks, working a lever to drain liquid into a cup has suddenly become as difficult to your terror stricken mind as rocket science would be to a sea slug. A fumble and to your abject horror you are sprayed and your white blouse that you had to buy just for this job is now soaking wet with sticky purple juice. You want to crawl under that drink machine and hide forever. Instead, you put on your bravest face, clean up the mess (and yourself as best you can), face the manager’s wrath, and finish out your shift trying to act like nothing happened while the customers snicker and make comments about your wet and sticky purple condition. When your shift is finally done, you hold onto that sigh of relief that you can finally skulk off home to shower and hide under the blankets in miserable embarrassment, wondering how you are possibly going to face your boss and co-workers again – only to be told on the way out the door not to bother coming back. You slink home in a ruined shirt that cost more than you made and thinking that this is the end of your chances of ever having a job.



Is it one of life’s most embarrassing moments? Absolutely. In the long term do employers really care or need to read about that job in your resume? Only if you are going back to that same employer in the following weeks to ask for another job.



Ok, so enough reminiscing about ‘the good old days’ and flash back to today.



There are two type of job hunting really. Most of the times I job hunted it was of the more passive job hunting. You look at the job ads once or twice a week, maybe less, and you send out resumes. If someone bites then great, but if they don’t then it’s no biggie. You’re not in any hurry anyway.



But this times it’s pulling out all stops, full-time aggressively job hunting. This time the clock is ticking, the calendar is turning, and the daycare is devouring the savings like a Least Shrew the size of the empire state building (a tiny animal that has to eat non-stop). And let us not forget those gas prices that make you cringe every time you start your car these days.



Job hunting has proven to be a bit of a roller coaster. One day you are sending out resumes to every employment agency you can find that deals in full time placements, finding all kinds of job ads in the paper and online to apply for, and you are thinking, “Wow! This is going great!” Flash forward a few days and the jobs seem to have completely dried up and you are wondering where all the jobs have gone.



Sure, there’s still plenty of jobs in the paper, but let’s face it, I really don’t know anything about operating a drill press, installing paving stones, or building windows. I probably wouldn’t be the best professional driver (just ask my seven year old about my parking skills), and I’m really not interested in becoming an apartment caretaker or professional pooper scooper. And let’s be honest with ourselves, those lowest paying entry level jobs are exactly that. It seems that all the jobs listed are either completely out of my comfort zone or well above or well below my experience and skills. So yeah, I won’t be applying for that job as a mechanic either. I’d be looking for something akin to a sink plug to change the oil. And I don’t think anyone would want to see me trying to park a forklift.



In the past, every time I job hunted, the paper seemed to be filled with ads for office work and accounting clerks of all levels. In fact, I’m pretty sure I remember the entire jobs section being much bigger, sometimes with pages of ads just for one section alone. Now, the entire jobs section seems to have shrunk drastically, fitting in less space than the ‘General Help’ used to. Of course, a lot of employers have moved into the technological age with online listings instead of the old tried and true dead-tree listings, but searches for those are coming up with pretty small lists too, and most of those aren’t even in the region I list in the search criteria.



At this point you’re thinking to yourself, “How am I ever going to get a job if there aren’t any jobs to get?”



And then the phone calls start. The employment agencies you sent resumes to are calling to interview you and they all seem to already have the perfect opportunity lined up for you. You do the meet and greets, do their tests, and some of them even call you back about that perfect opportunity. You even get some interest from the other job ads you applied for.



You go for interviews, you keep scouring the paper and internet for those elusive job opportunities, and you sit by the phone waiting for it to ring. Ok, I did the interview and thought it went all right, now will he call me back? It’s worse than waiting for that call after a first date.



Things are happening, people are showing interest, and you are hopping! This is going better than you ever imagined it would after staying home raising your kids for six years!



And then the phone calls stop. You’ve had interviews, you’re waiting to hear about possible interviews for those perfect opportunities from the agencies, and you’ve spent hours searching for every possible position you can send a resume for. It may have only been days, but in your mind it feels like weeks.



Now you’re wondering, “Where’d everybody go?”



When you do get those calls (or emails) it’s to give you the old “It’s not you, it’s me.” In job hunting it sounds a little more like this- “We decided to go with someone who was a better fit for the organization.” In other words, you’re nice and all, but the chemistry just wasn’t there.



Now you’re thinking, “I must be nuts. Who’s going to hire me after I’ve been unemployed this long?”



You know you can do the job, but how can you hope to convince someone else to at least read past the unemployed for six years bit, and actually look at the resume based on just your short impersonal cover letter?



Of course, taking upgrading courses would have helped, but it’s not easy to find free childcare and large sums of extra disposable money. Heck, if I had that I might almost be a CGA (Certified General Accountant), minus the required work experience while learning.



And just when your hopes are starting to slip, the phone rings again. The opportunities trickle in, interest in what you have to offer trickles in even more slowly, and sooner or later all of it ends in rejection because that’s just the way the it goes.



So you sit by the phone waiting for that call while scouring the ads, Googling random companies for addresses, and wondering just where all those pages of job ads from years ago have gone.



Sooner or later that right chemistry will happen.

The Woods - Random Ramblings

When I look out my back window and stare at those beautifully twisted, scraggly, and wretchedly ugly knobby old oak trees - I pretend they just go on and on forever. Then I consider what kinds of wonderfully sinister things those old trees might be up to out there, deep in the woods where brave souls dare not tread.



And that, my friends, is where some of my story ideas come from.


If I can see houses past the trees, what's left of them after they're done tearing my beautifully wicked looking old oaks out, that will all be ruined for me. I'll have to find a new muse.

Writing is like reading a book for the first time.

Writing is like reading a book for the first time. You can outline ahead and know how the story goes, or you can just sit down and write. Sure, outlining is more logical and will probably bring a tighter storyline, but it lacks spontaneity.


Writing without knowing what happens next is just more fun.