Category: GKP Writing News

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GKP Writing News

Writing Dialogue

I like using dialogue in my writing. It seems to move the story along well and reveal lots about the characters. But writing dialogue has challenges.

My new novel, tentatively titled “Hopes, Dreams and Reality”, has a couple of dialogue challenges.

Only One Character

The entire novel revolves around Mindy. For much of the novel she is alone. Her phone is dead and she is in a dead zone for cells. That leaves only her cat and the animals to talk to. And they have no answers.

That leaves me floundering. She can remember things others have said. She can make up conversations with absent characters. If all else fails, she can talk to herself. This last can reveal a lot about her attitudes and inner conflicts.

Language

My biggest challenge is language. Cussing and swearing are commonplace in today’s books and media. I do know quite a few of these words.

However, I grew up at a time when such language was not commonly used in public. And I find its ubiquitous use annoying. It robs these words of their impact and language of its richness by reducing the vocabulary used.

When writing dialogue, I avoid using these words.

cover for "Capri Capers" by Karen GoatKeeper
“Capri Capers” has some dastardly villains in it as well as some would-be villains. The decision to use no cussing was easier for this book as it was a take off on a 1930s movie serial. Such language would have been inappropriate here.

Should I Use Some?

One of the novel scenes is a big argument. Both characters are upset, furious. I’ve written it without using any cussing or swearing. Does this rob the scene of impact? Would it be more realistic to use some of these words?

The decision is mine. I don’t want to use this language, so I have chosen not to. This is my personal choice due to my background.

Finishing the Novel

As I edit the novel draft, now complete, writing dialogue will be part of that edit. It will be a challenge as this novel has been a challenge.

Will my choices work? I rarely have others read my novels as drafts. This one will be an exception. Their opinions will hopefully answer this question.

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GKP Writing News

Author Website

When I finished my first book, “Goat Games”, I wanted very much to sell a few to help pay for the time and printing costs. I was assured that the key was to have an author website.

Having tried to play by the rules all my life, I dutifully started an author website. I didn’t know much about having one, wasn’t online at home (still aren’t) and I made lots of mistakes.

As the number of books increased, the number of pages increased. The backlist of blog posts went up. The number of visitors crept up. Book sales didn’t.

cover for "Goat Games" by Karen GoatKeeper
When writing this book, my first one, I traveled in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri to meet goat owners of different breeds to write breed pages. It took months to devise all of the puzzles. And the information pages and trivia had to be researched and added. I queried publishers and was turned down as goats are a niche topic, one that doesn’t make a lot of money. So I published and printed the book myself, something that is expensive to do.

Getting Noticed

It seems I am woefully behind the times as this is most of my online presence. The only social media I’m on are Pinterest and Goodreads. I do have author pages there and on Smashwords and try to update these monthly.

All these various accounts take a lot of time I don’t have. Since I am not online at home, my internet time is about five hours a week at the library. It doesn’t go very far.

So Get Online

That’s not simple here in rural Missouri. My home is surrounded by hills blocking signals. Therefore, the nearest cell service is a quarter mile hike away.

Internet service from the phone company or satellite services is barely above dial up. There’s lots of talk about better service, but every notice I’ve seen indicates it will be expensive for service inadequate for running a website.

My Author Website

Maybe this site will attract some of the visitors I used to have before my last hosting service had so many problems with my site. I am slowly getting the site organized.

I’ve had contact with computers since they ran on stacks of punch cards. That doesn’t mean I know much about them. I don’t. And learning about new things with so little time is difficult.

The new Contact Page is a case in point. Each week I negotiated my way through another step. It has left me with an account for running email campaigns I don’t do, a cloud account I don’t use and spam cluttering up my email. It would help if I could limit my contacts to English.

At least I do have an author website. And I will be adding a new book page soon as my new novel has a complete draft and is in edit.

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Writing Endings

Sooner or later a writer comes to the end. Writing endings should be easy.

However, a story needs to have the right finale. That isn’t easy.

Different Genres, Different Endings

In a romance, the couple gets together at the end. In a mystery, the problem gets solved. For a thriller the ending is exciting.

Readers of each genre know what type of ending their story should have. If it doesn’t, the reader is disappointed.

Because a reader expects a certain type of ending, doesn’t mean the reader wants to know what the ending is. A story must be very, very good to make a reader not mind having a predictable ending.

How Does a Writer Know When to Stop?

There are two endings in a novel. One is the end of the action. The other is the end of the story.

For the first, the plot builds up to those last exciting moments. Often a dangerous situation rises to a climax. Will the main character survive?

Once the climax passes, all the pieces of the plot must be tied up. How did the detective arrive at the answer? What happens now?

The happy couple embraces. The detective explains. Someone saves the day. And everyone goes back to their lives. This is The End.

cover for "Dora's Story" by Karen GoatKeeper
When I started writing this book, I had an ending in mind. As I wrote it, the ending seemed more and more not the right one. It’s important for a writer to recognize when a story has changed enough to make the best ending different from the one first in mind.

My Novel Is Ending

Writing endings is usually easy for me. I’ve created the story, the plot and know where it leads.

In the first draft the ending rolls onto the page. It doesn’t change much in other drafts because it fits the story.

This novel has problems. The rough draft has an ending. Fine. It sort of fit, but didn’t feel right. It felt contrived.

In this second, maybe third draft I found I had made a major mistake at the beginning of the third part of the story. No problem. I would correct the mistake and blend into the original draft.

There is now a completed new draft. And I am left writing endings for this new draft. And looking for a title.

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Looking For Her Story

March is Women’s History month. I’ve been looking for her story. It’s often not in the history (His Story) books.

There are two good places to go looking for her story. I’ve been reading books from each.

One place is historical fiction. “Something Worth Doing” by Jane Kirkpatrick is about the struggle for women’s suffrage in Oregon. One woman, Abigail Dunwithy, led the movement for over forty years trying to convince the men running the state that women, the women they depended on to provide homes, raise children, develop homesteads and businesses, deserved the right to vote. Even her own brother fought to keep women from voting.

Women went to jail and insane asylums trying to earn the right to vote. They wanted to be seen as real people with the right to earn a living and keep their wages, the right to own a business, the right to make decisions concerning their futures.

Telling Her Own Stories

Another good place to look is autobiography and biography. “I Am Malala” tells of the ongoing struggle for women’s rights in Pakistan. Her view of the rise of the Taliban and the present fight for the future of Pakistan explains so much of what we read about in the news. Her fight is for all children, regardless of who they are or where they live, to have the right to an education.

An unlikely book is “The Egg and I” by Betty MacDonald. Embedded in this book is the place of women in the 1930s in Washington state. One woman got married, was taken to a ranch and not been allowed to go even to town for twenty-seven years. Even the author was expected to help her husband achieve his dreams regardless of hardship, health or personal dreams.

After the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his wife Eleanor emerged from his shadow and became a world figure fighting for women’s and human rights and world peace. “Eleanor: The Years Alone” may be about her, but is a history course about the United Nations and post war U.S. politics as she was involved with both.

Personal Story

Even though these were interesting, they were long past. I’ve seen so many changes in my lifetime. I grew up at a time when women had few choices in life. Wife, mother, nurse, teacher, secretary were the acceptable ones. And those with jobs were expected to quit when they got married.

Women wore skirts. At my high school a teacher could make you kneel on the sidewalk to make sure your skirt was the proper length.

When a girl went to college or university, she was expected to get an mrs degree. All I got was a bachelor of arts and my grandma considered me a failure. No counselor or mentor had time for a girl.

Being Challenged

Today so many careers and opportunities have opened up for girls. But these opportunities are being challenged. Go looking for her story, find out where women’s rights came from and decide whether they are worth fighting for. Otherwise you may lose them.

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On Library Shelves

February is Black history month. Since Missouri is joining the rush to ban books by Black authors, I’m trying to read a few before they are yanked from the library shelves.

The local library is one of the main reasons we moved here. It has moved to a new, bigger facility, added DVDs, audio books and eBooks. It is part of a consortium of Missouri libraries so the range of materials available is huge.

Librarians and Books

This is a conservative town. When the librarians add books to the library shelves, they take this into consideration. The idea is to have books people want to check out to read.

Browsing down the aisles I see lots of mysteries, thrillers, historical fiction and romances. Westerns have their own section. The nonfiction area has books on religion, gardening, pets and livestock.

There are others, if you search. “I Am Malala” is there in the biography section along with John Wayne.

Young Adult Section

If the legislature has its way, this is where the purge will focus. “The Hate You Give” and “On the Come Up” are there along with books on suicide prevention, drugs and gender.

Such subjects might disturb some readers. The legislature wants to take them off the library shelves, burn them, make sure even those who want that information can’t see it.

That leaves those wanting information listening to people on the streets who may or may not know anything. It leaves people ignorant.

Perhaps that is the purpose. Controlling what is on library shelves controls what people know so they can be fed anything and have no way to know what is true and what isn’t. We deserve better. We deserve encouraging knowledge about our past and ourselves.

In the meantime, I will go back to my latest book “You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey” by two Black sisters, Amber and Lacey Ruffin, about some of the crazy things said to and done to Black people often in ignorance of how a Black person would perceive it.

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Chemistry Equipment

I taught chemistry at small, rural schools. They didn’t have a lot of money for chemistry equipment. Still, I had the basic stuff.

It’s possible to buy beakers, flasks, balances and more online. Unless a student is really serious about a chemistry career or one involving a lot of chemistry, such an investment seems unnecessary to me.

Why Am I thinking About Chemistry Equipment?

I’m busy making up more puzzles for “The Chemistry Project” and wanted more word search types. That takes a list of words. So, I looked up things commonly found in a well-equipped chem lab.

Many of the names like Erlenmeyer flask, Florence flask and graduated cylinder are long. That makes such a puzzle challenging to create.

For those unfamiliar with these terms: Beakers are the cylindrical glass containers. Erlenmeyer flasks are the conical containers. Florence flasks have thin necks and a round bottom with a flat place so they sit on the lab bench. A graduated cylinder is a tall tube calibrated in milliliters (cubic centimeters) for measuring out liquids.

glass jars are homemade chemistry equipment
Glass peanut butter jars make good home substitutions for beakers. They, measuring cups and other containers doubling as chemistry equipment do need to be glass. Glass tends to not react, melt, dissolve, contaminate and is easy to look through. Spoons should be stainless steel.

Home Equivalents

Since I don’t have the professional equipment, I went looking for substitutes. Empty glass peanut butter jars work as beakers. Eyedroppers work as dropper pipets.

The scales I use were purchased. They aren’t as nice as the three-beam balances, but they do work for the Investigations I do.

Water can be massed to be more accurate for volumes. If I come up with a tall, thin jar, I can even mark it out as a graduated cylinder.

What About Chemicals?

It was so nice to walk into my supply closet and pick out various chemicals. There were various metallic nitrates for flame tests. Different acids for experiments.

Now I rely on the local markets and stores. It’s amazing how much you can do using sugar, salt, rubbing alcohol and Epsom salts.

Perhaps a good part of this making do for chemistry equipment, is having to examine each Investigation for its true purpose. And that is the point of chemistry: to understand how and why substances behave as they do.

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Encouraging Literacy

There’s a push in St. Louis encouraging literacy among students usually shoved aside. St. Louis schools have long been having problems trying to meet state standards and innovative approaches help.

Many of these students live in poverty. There are few, if any, books in their homes. Parents who read set an example for their children.

Why Promote Literacy?

Reading is basic. If a student can’t read, that student fails in every subject as all of them require reading.

In my area the schools rely on something called AR. This has a reading list and students are required to read books from it, take a comprehension test and go on to the next. It sounds good. It isn’t.

Teaching Reading

When I was in high school, my mother became involved with Laubach Literacy teaching illiterate adults to read and write. One out of five adults in the U.S. was statistically reading below a fourth grade level, unable to fill out an employment application.

One young man, just turned 16, was a student. My mother found he could read. He hated to. The only books he read were technical ones, difficult to understand. The key was finding books on topics he enjoyed. Reading was not drudgery, but fun.

Books come on all subjects, on all levels, in so many sizes. Somewhere there is a book to interest almost any student.

Love of Reading

Forcing students to read doesn’t encourage reading. It discourages it. That is what caught my eye about the St. Louis approach. It uses videos and comic books to interest students. It makes reading fun.

The material doesn’t shy away from vocabulary. It introduces new words, big words. My Laubach background says to repeat a new word five times and this program seems to do that.

cover of "For Love of Goats" by Karen GoatKeeper
A third piece of literacy is speaking. Just because you can talk, doesn’t mean you know how to speak clearly as when leaving phone messages or doing presentations. One way to promote good diction is saying tongue twisters. “For Love of Goats” is full of tongue twisters and alliterations, perfect for helping with pronunciation and growing vocabulary.

Reading and Writing

Reading is the beginning. It’s a great way to get information, explore the imagination. Writing lets students tell others about this and exercise their own imaginations.

So many students hate to write. School lessons are often tedious and, like with reading, forced assignments on given topics.

This is where an approach like NaNo’s Young Writer’s Program comes into play. You can check it out at www.nanowrimo.org.

We hear so much about making our country great again. The first step to acomplishing that is by encouraging literacy.

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Doing Digital and Print Versions

Normally I write my science activity books in a format for printing. “The Chemistry Project” is different as I’m doing digital and print versions at the same time.

There needs to be some clarification. “The City Water Project” does have an eBook version which can be considered digital. With “The Chemistry Project” there will be an eBook version, but the digital version is like a serial version where the separate parts are done as teaching units and offered as digital downloads.

cover for "The City Water Project" by Karen GoatKeeper
Unlike “The Pumpkin Project” or “Goat Games”, I tried to make this book more eBook friendly with my image placements. However, the pdf version is the best digital one.

Print and eBooks are Different

Even print and ebook formats have differences. The most obvious one is the lack of page numbers in ebooks. What these do include are hyperlinks making it easy to move around within the book or even outside the book to internet sites related to the book.

Images concern me. My science activity books have lots of photographs in them. In a print version, those images can be placed singly or surrounded by text. In an ebook version the image must stand alone with the text preceding and following it.

Keeping Track

Doing digital and print versions at the same time can get confusing. I’m trying to minimize this by keeping them much alike, at least to start with. However, each has a different file name.

Both versions have the same Investigations, Activities, puzzles and chem notes. Each Part is being done separately with a title page and equipment list. The puzzle answers are at the end of each part.

When the print version is complete, I will move the puzzle answers to the back of the book. The only title page will be at the beginning as will the cumulative equipment list.

doing digital and print versions requires a title page
This is what I think will be the title page for “The Chemistry Project”. The print version will use this only once. The digital versions, as this one is, will have one for each Part.

Getting It Done

The biggest part of doing “The Chemistry Project” is going over all of the Investigations and Activities. Yes, I did them, even have pictures for them, from ten years ago.

Now I am going over each one, rewriting and editing them. So I get to redo them taking new pictures.

That means doing digital and print versions of this science activity book will take longer than expected.

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Reality Check

Living in the Ozark hills can be challenging. The last couple of days have been a reality check for my novel.

Storms, especially big ones, can knock out the electricity in the rural areas. A derecho went by one year soaking the ground, snapping off trees and power poles. The power was off for almost a week. Intercounty Electric moved the lines up from the creek bed then so we’ve had little trouble with outages since.

Until yesterday.

Four inches of wet snow fell overnight. That’s not much. It did sit on wires, branches, everywhere. And the electric power went off about 8 a.m.

In the novel Mindy loses her electricity. I’d dredged through my memory to fill in details like having no water, a quiet house etc.

Another result is loss of the refrigerator. Here I’d goofed. I’d thought things inside would gather condensation as they began to warm. My surprise reality check showed they don’t. Instead, everything gradually goes from cold to cool to room temperature. I didn’t get into the freezers as I had a lot of frozen food and preferred it to stay frozen as long as possible.

snow brings a reality check
The snow doesn’t look like much. Its weight on branches brought down trees and downing electric lines, my novel come to life. The green patch is watercress which stays green year round, even under ice.

Waiting

The day moved on. It’s a bit unsettling how dependent we’ve gotten on having electricity as we didn’t up north. No computer so no writing. No fans so no furnace letting the house slowly cool off.

We did have some heat. Living in the country with wooded property, we have a wood stove. A fan normally blows the heat out into the house, but convection air currents do that too, although more slowly.

As evening moved in, there were no lights and no movie. Cooking by candlelight is challenging. Evening time was spent reading by candlelight.

The electricity came back on a little before six the next morning. My reality check ended with the roar of furnace fans and refrigerator hum.

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Science Basics

One of my professors told his students that, if someone read all the scientific journals in only one field of science twenty-four hours a day, they could not keep up with all of the changes and discoveries in that single field. My Chemistry Project activity book tries to stick to science basics and ignore these rapid changes.

A reminder of this professor was in “Science News” this week. It seems the 27th Annual Conference on Weights and Measures have added four new metric measures: the ronna, quetta, ronno and quetto. These extend the prefixes for both larger and smaller measures needed for some of today’s discoveries.

Why does a change in metrics matter to my Chemistry Project? Although these units won’t, science, including chemistry, uses the metric system.

Why Have a Metric System?

There was a time a few hundred years ago when every town and village had their own system of measurement. When these became part of countries, a countrywide system was used.

Science is international. Scientists in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Africa need to use the same system to make exchanging ideas easier. That system is the metric system.

Every major country in the world except the U.S. uses the metric system. Unknown to most U.S. citizens, we do use it every day as our money is a metric system. Any business doing business overseas uses the it.

Metric Is Part of Science Basics

The first part of my Chemistry Project is on the metric system. The only requirements for using the metric system are knowing the prefixes and being able to count to ten.

One of the puzzles in this part is a word skeleton for the various metric prefixes. Perhaps I should add the new ones.

However, I won’t. Devising a new puzzle takes time. And very few of these prefixes will be used in the Chemistry Project. I will stick to the science basics and leave those students interested to look up these new ones on their own.

cover for "The City Water Project" by Karen GoatKeeper
This science activity book has many investigations and activites about water. These use the metric system for most measurements.