Mood, Setting, Graffiti & No Eagles

Today I met a friend in Festus for lunch. We chatted for a long time in a pair of easy chairs next to a fire at a Bread Company store. Then we roamed the aisles at a Walmart so I could replace a microwave and buy a block of cheese. Then I chose not to take the interstate home.

I followed a two lane road that somehow managed to made me feel like Sunday with me having been transported far from the city without a care in the world.

Black cows in one field wallowed close to a black bearded billy goat. A silver stream reflected back light dividing the scenic overlook briefly into two hazy blue-green equal parts south and north.

South of Bloomsdale a multicolored flock of chickens meandered up from the ditch just feet from the road. A blue heron in a pond stretched its neck distorting a graceful gesture so that it conjured images of lake monsters or dragons for a fraction of a moment. The toppling grey barn that I wish I could capture visually in paint or on film seemed less erect than it did last week.

Yesterday I drove east over the levee past the burnt out marina to the end of the flat parking lot at the top of the muddy hill leading to the bank of the Mississippi River where the dog discovered a corpse in Stuck in the Mud. I wasn't doing research for the book, though.

I was hoping to see some eagles but there weren't any - not in the area where some were wading up to their knees fishing this time last year - not even a blue heron in the deeper pond west of where the tug boats and ferries moored during the high water last spring.

Where the road curves is pretty treacherous especially in the sections that are missing concrete. You have to slow down to less than a crawl to protect your tires and the underside of your car but if you don't know that the road has sharp hungry teeth you are probably in trouble.

The marina is not a place to go alone without at least a dog for company. Its wildness does not feel safe thanks not to the deep tracks made by heavy deer nor to the prospect of venomous snakes.

It feels dangerous to me because at my core I am a city girl. Graffiti, discarded piles of trash piles, and leftover fire rings make me worry about what human predators might possibly lurk there.

The mood created by the setting in Stuck in the Mud has everything to do with the emotional connections that each character brings to each place.

Weaving sans loom

The dog sniffed out the corpse wedged against the west bank of the Mississippi River and temporarily took possession away from a pair of vultures but Mat regained the leash, got violently sick and went to help Aileen get up from where she was stuck in the mud. Finally the friends got to a spot where there was cell phone reception and called the police - there's the summary of the next section of the book I'm writing now. I put out about 400 words this evening. Not a quota. Not something worth bragging about. But think about it! When I was writing Pastor's Ex-Wife it was the main priority of my work day. Stuck in the Mud is my current after-work evening pastime. It makes for a different energy- especially on a day when a key employee turned in her two week notice. Both books required me to weave several story threads together - I have always wanted to own a loom....

Why Fiction?

Have you ever analyzed what makes a speech or a sermon boring? In my opinion boredom often springs from the lack of a story to glue the speaker's ideas together. Even Jesus' preferred teaching style was to use short easy-to-grasp stories. Somehow a story has the power to sneak into a person's heart and penetrate through calluses to bring healing, a smile, a new strategy or perspective. Humor works the same way, right? So my fiction tackles big controversial topics hopefully in ways that make the readers smile and turn pages through bouts of tears. At least that's my plan....my readers need to say whether or not it works.

Btw: I have now reformatted Pastor's Ex-Wife several times and uploaded the hopefully really clean version to smashwords. If I succeeded it gets included in a catalog and made available to many ebook publishers. I also replaced the version on sale in Amazon's Kindle Store with the newly edited format.

Now for the dog to find that body.....

Frustrating

I spent the last four or five hours reformatting the paragraph indents for Pastor's Ex-Wife so it could match the format for Smashwords and become included in their catalog. So, guess what? I did it wrong.

The frustrating conclusion must be that writing, like everything else worth doing, requires work.... So I'll try again another evening.

Meanwhile.....the dog is about to find a corpse in the river....but I have to get back to working on writing Stuck in the Mud.

Playing it safe - not this girl

It snowed tonight - a measly two inches finished with sleet. So that means I will not have tomorrow to keep writing. Instead, I will walk the three blocks to the museum and work. Perhaps the week will make it up to me. Who knows. Today was productive. I revised my personal website: www.teamlesley.com so that it acts like an author's site. I changed the template so it looks cleaner. I published another e-book - a group Bible study guide - to Smashwords.com at a seriously reduced price but the site has been having issues loading ever since so I have yet to review how it looks in epub.

And I worked on my murder mystery which now has a title: Stuck in the Mud. The first three chapters are finished. Two of the three bodies have been introduced. The third will be discovered in the next chapter. I made potato, cheese, onion soup with bacon bits and cilantro on top.

Pastor's Ex-Wife tackles the clergy sex abuse crisis from the Protestant side. Stuck in the Mud takes on the issue of homosexuality - not from the theological point of view where the book takes a position on the subject, but from the human point of view. I don't usually play it safe....

Staying Motivated to Write & Accountable

I solved two problems related to my personal motivation to write - which is challenged by the energy it takes to do my full time responsibilities as a museum director well -not to mention that a chunk of every day at work is spent writing for work. My motivational problem deals with writing MY stuff!

This morning I realized that when I wrote Pastor's Ex-Wife I was assisted by Lisa and her husband, Gavin.
Whenever I finished a chapter, I emailed it to them. They read and responded and their issues and encouragement kept me enthused. So, my first task today was to identify an accountability partner a.k.a. reader/responder. Thanks Audrey.

My second task was to come up with a working title: Stuck in the Mud. Then I revisited the 5,000 words already written and integrated foreshadowing for the third corpse and also upgraded a character to a prospective boyfriend for Aileen.

That accomplished, I checked out and revised my website for the first time since last March. Now I'm waiting for homemade French onion soup to cook enough to put the bread and cheese on and throw the pot under the broiler for a few minutes. Yummmy.

You wanted to know what else I'm writing....

Suppose Aileen, a young college graduate with a history degree, got hired to develop children's programming for a history museum thanks to the interference of her very pushy, very affluent grandmother who is acting out of guilt for the drop-out dad her only son proved to have been. As far as Grandmother is concerned, his first offense had been to side-step attending a respectable seminary and go traveling rogue as a contemporary Christian singer/preacher with charismatic tendencies. She might not have intruded so directly into Aileen's life had her mother not died just before the girl started college or if her son had been man enough to pick up any of the parenting obligations. 

Neither Aileen nor her Grandmother would ever have guessed that one spring morning the body of this same son and father would wash against the same bank of the Mississippi River where his daughter and her dog just happened to be walking. Amazingly his was not the only dead body to end up in Aileen's way....

This will be my first murder mystery. It's pretty well plotted. I'm done with the first chapter at least for this first draft. Right now it does not have a working title, though.

I started working on it last spring.

Then the tourism season took over followed by a huge turnover of my museum staff and truly this is the first time I have had to do anything but muse over the story since its beginning.

My plan is to spend about 10 hours each week writing it beginning immediately.

When it is finished, I'll let it percolate while I write another story which has been brewing for at least ten years...research is mostly done, plotting is done, it just needs to be written. I'll tell you about that one another day. In addition, there is one more pretty well developed novel and about five nonfiction books in my mind. Hopefully in the meantime I will recruit enough of an audience for Pastor's Ex-Wife that women who share Terry Soldan's story will be willing to contribute their own in the forms of letters to Terry.... which letters will become the sequel to Pastor's Ex-Wife.

I have a friend who recruited his readership by playing Mafia Wars on social media. It worked for him and now he has some traditional publishing contracts for his sci-fi fiction. It makes me jealous but not enough to emulate his strategy....I'll just blog along so you all can watch what happens......

Btw, today Pastor's Ex-Wife became available for sale on any ebook platform you like via smashwords.com. It's been for sale as a Kindle book for almost a year. If you haven't read it yet....there are links to the right on this blog....just saying.....:)