Tag: writing novels

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Latest From High Reaches

My Ozark Creek

After two days dealing with baling and putting hay in the barn, I was tired. The day was warm and overcast so a walk down to visit the goats and explore my Ozark creek seemed a good idea.

This idea had another appeal to it. As I write about the Ship Nineteen Carduans, their creek, which they consider a river, is a place they go to often.

a section of my Ozark creek
This section of my Ozark creek is wider than I can jump, but it’s definitely a creek. But then, I’m five feet tall. If I were four inches tall like the Carduans I’m writing about, this same creek would seem very wide and deep and look much more like a river.

My Ozark Creek

Most of the creek banks are steep drops where high water and flood waters have scoured out the dirt. Roots hang out of these cuts. When enough of a tree’s roots are undercut, the tree begins to lean, then falls.

Once you are down the bank, the creek bottom stretches out. Much of this area is paved with gravel left behind as the water carries the soil away.

Water levels vary according to the rain. As I look over this part of the creek, it is more a series of pools with small streams of running water flowing between them than what might normally be considered a creek.

Some pools are broad and less than a foot deep. Other pools are deep cuts often where trees have been uprooted. Fish and crawdads inhabit the pools.

A wide variety of plants live along the creek. The trees are mostly sycamores with their white trunks studded with brown puzzle pieces and willows, black and Carolina. Underneath the trees is a mix. I notice jewelweed with its orange earring flowers dangling, a pink swamp milkweed, purple self heal and hog peanut vines draped over much of it.

my Ozark creek forms pools
Gravel moved into this area of my Ozark creek during the last flood. The young tree in the bank is undercut and a pool has formed under it. Broad Head Minnows swim back and forth through the pool. It’s deep enough for some of them to reach six inches long.

The Carduans

Food is a constant need for the Carduans of Ship Nineteen. The creek they find is a place to catch fish and crawdads.

There are stones to use for building. Honey locust trees supply thorns. Willows supply slender canes for making chairs.

When I wear boots, the creek is easy to cross. The Carduans, at four inches tall, find the creek is often deeper than they are tall. All of us think it is a great place to spend an afternoon.

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Latest From High Reaches

My Carduan World

Sitting at my computer now I am being serenaded by gray tree frogs. In the distance are several different birds settling on their roosts. Later on the whip-poor-will will call. This will be the Carduan world.

A thunderstorm went through earlier this evening. Storms are common during an Ozark spring. Ice and snow fall in February, maybe March. Rain in March and April. Thunderstorms mark the change from spring to summer in late April and May. This will be the Carduan world.

Being Complacent

There are lots of interactions going on between the nine Carduans. It is easy to focus my writing on these and toss in a storm now and then. But that isn’t real. It’s being lazy, being complacent, not thinking about the natural world.

Putting the natural world into the Carduan world will take outlining the various weeks. They do have approximate dates assigned in the outline I already have. Now I need to do a second outline with the weather, plant blooming, animal appearances, sounds that might occur during each of those weeks.

Dandelions food on Carduan world
One of the first edible plants easy to find in the spring is the dandelion. Although it is an import from Europe and occasional near creeks and pasture edges, it could be found by the Carduans. Both the flowers and leaves are edible. The root can be roasted and used for a coffee substitute.

How do I Know These?

That is the good thing about setting Cardua in an Ozark ravine. I’ve walked ravines, pastures, explored creeks, watched various storms and their aftermaths for thirty years.

No, I don’t know everything that happens. No one does. But I can add enough of these to make the Carduan world seem real. And that matters to me and, I hope, to readers of this massive work once it gets done.

When will “The Carduan Chronicles” be done?

I am impatient to see this story finally get written. It has been several years in the planning, drafting, rewriting and editing. I want to move on to other projects.

However, I want these books, and I find there will be four of them, to be right. That takes time. I’m hoping the first one about Ship Nineteen will be done and out this fall. The one on Ship Eighteen should be ready about the same time.

This depends on my writing time and getting the Carduan world right.

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Creating the Carduan Characters

The Carduan Chronicles is a nature study masquerading as science fiction, at least it is supposed to be. That leaves me creating the Carduan characters as science fiction to fit into real nature as the novel is set in an Ozark ravine and old, abandoned pasture with a creek.

However, the Carduan characters are pure imagination. I’m trying to create them as plausible beings from another planet. It’s a lot harder than I expected it to be.

First Consideration

Although an Ozark ravine can be fairly large, it isn’t large enough for a big space ship to land and remain unnoticed for long. That means the ship must be fairly small.

If the ship is small, the Carduans must be small as well. How big are they?

I went walking up several ravines in my area looking at what was there with a view of landing a ship there. Ravines flood so the landing spot must be up off the floor of the ravine.

The ravines have bluff rocks along them. The ship can land on one of these.

I ended up with a ship eighteen inches wide and high and thirty inches long. That left the Carduan characters at four inches tall.

Carduans

To arrive at what the Carduan characters look like, I had to decide on what their home planet Arkosa was like. My conjecture was a hot, dry planet bombarded by ultraviolet radiation. It became this way when a previous civilization destroyed their ozone layer. This destroyed that civilization and allowed these Arkosans to evolve.

Withstanding UV radiation requires several adaptations. One is a third eyelid to shield the eye from intense light. They can see UV light. Another adaptation is skin color. Blue pigments convert UV into harmless wavelengths.

Small size limits hand size, especially digits like fingers. The Carduans have three digits giving them a number system based on six, not ten.

Their background is somewhat like that of a praying mantis making them upright and agile. They are also strong, quick and aggressive in defense. It gives them a strongly matriarchal society that is in the process of changing as males are now long lived like the females, but still smaller.

Perhaps I am now ready to sketch what I think a Carduan looks like. And that makes writing The Carduan Chronicles easier.

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GKP Writing News

Upper Middle Grade Writing

When I wrote “Old Promises”, I was writing for an upper middle grade reader. Over several years I found writing upper middle grade novels and science books was what I was comfortable with.

cover of "Old Promises" Hazel Whitmore #2 by Karen GoatKeeper

What Is Upper Middle Grade?

In school years this would be sixth to eighth grades. In age this covers ten to fourteen.

The main characters are in that age range. The plots are more complicated than in children’s novels, but not as adult as young adult is.

This was why I enjoyed writing upper middle grade novels. Although I touched on young adult themes, it was not edgy or specific or filled with teenage angst. These things didn’t interest me then or now.

Writing Series

“Old Promises” was the second novel about Hazel Whitmore. As I wrote it, I considered writing a series. All the possibilities are there.

Hazel is the namesake of another Hazel in the past. I based this on an old photograph of a lovely woman I know nothing about. Who was this woman?

picture for writing middle grade novels
Who is this woman? I don’t know. Someone probably died and this picture was hauled to the dump and thrown away. I remember my mother spending months identifying people and places in her mother’s pictures after my Grandmother died. They were our history, where our family came from. Something so many young and not so young people don’t seem to care about any more. That is a shame. We kept this picture as she looks like such a nice person, someone we would want to know. When I wrote “Old Promises”, she became the model for Hazel’s Great Aunt Hazel for whom she was named.

Crooked Creek lends itself to several ideas as well. Although the name is probably for a nearby creek that meanders, it could pertain to some less than honest inhabitants.

Then there is Hanging Rock. One interpretation is the bluff overhanging the creek at the edge of the school yard. Another hints at an unsavory past.

And there is Linda. But she is more part of the end of the trilogy than this second novel.

Series Problems

The biggest drawback to writing a series for me is being locked into a certain cast of characters, a certain place, a particular genre. Plots must revolve around these. Extensive notes must be kept so character names stay the same, setting names stay the same, plots don’t repeat.

I’m not that organized. There is one further consideration.

Writing upper middle grade novels is not where I want to be now. A number of things have changed in my life over the last few years. These have changed the focus of my writing as well.

Will I revisit Hazel? I don’t know. At present I am immersed in Life’s Rules and The Carduan Chronicles and plan to stay there for now.

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GKP Writing News

Breaking New Ground

There are times when writing what you know about just isn’t enough. When that happens, an author is left breaking new ground.

Unfortunately, research is never as good as experience. That lack of experience often shows up to anyone who has that experience.

Being Outdated

I grew up near Los Angeles learning to drive on the freeways and across the city. Yet, I would not try to write about the modern experience because what I remember is not what exists now.

That came home to me the last time I visited people and places in my home town. I had only been gone ten years, yet I almost needed a map to find the old neighborhood. The houses were still there, some remodeled, but the people weren’t. It was not home.

The same problem is coming up in Life’s Rules. Part of the action is based on things I remember from long ago. Except those things have changed a lot. That leaves me breaking new ground as I reach out to people to see how my memories and the new realities mesh.

cover of "For Love of Goats" by Karen GoatKeeper
These are Nubian dairy goats. They have long legs, Roman noses and long, pendulous ears. Boers have long ears too, but not the same and they are shorter and stouter. Other dairy goat breeds have upright ears or, in the case of LaManchas, very short ears. Their body shapes differ as well. Someone unfamiliar with goats will not know these differences and will probably not find them by doing research.

Research Isn’t Enough

When I was working on “For Love of Goats”, I knew every story needed an illustration. I also knew finding an illustrator was not going to be easy, not because there aren’t lots of good illustrators out there, but because few of those illustrators knew about goats.

Serious goat owners usually cringe at the “Billy Goats Gruff” caricatures. This is what many people think goats are like. They aren’t.

There are hundreds of goat breeds around the world as I found out doing research for “Goat Games”. Every breed is different both in looks and personality. So I did my own illustrations to make sure Alpines and Saanens have the correct ears, Nigerian Dwarfs have the correct stature. Nubians look friendly and beautiful (Yes, I’m biased.)

Don’t think this breaking new ground research doesn’t affect writing. We read a big name coffee table book on John Deere tractors. The author had obviously never owned or driven such a tractor.

We are very familiar with the local milkweeds. Some of the books we’ve read about them have obvious errors in them due to the authors knowing only what they looked up.

cover for "Goat Games" by Karen GoatKeeper
I visited many goat owners as I wrote this book. In talking with them, I found out a lot about how different breeds differ which is why an owner prefers one breed over another.

Breaking New Ground

There are many times experience isn’t enough. But research can only take an author wo far. Not realizing its limitations can really hurt a manuscript.

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GKP Writing News

Social Media Headache

My internet time is very limited and I’m not interested in joining the social media sites except for Pinterest. Unfortunately I now have a social media headache.

Life’s Rules Plotline

Stephanie Taylor, the main character, is estranged from her children. She would like to reconnect, but doesn’t know how.

Somehow I ended up with her finding their Facebook pages to find out more about her children’s lives and her grandchildren, the ones she’s only seen at Christmas for years. This is plausible as far as I know. I’ve heard many people say they keep up with their families through Facebook.

However, I am not on Facebook and do not wish to join. This is the basis of my social media headache.

Research

I vaguely remember I could visit Facebook pages, just look at them, by typing in the address or doing a search for the person. This works for the library Facebook page. It worked for a cousin with a business.

The big difficulty is the time it takes to blunder along trying to do this. The next step seems to be to ask someone with a Facebook page more about it.

That leaves me back with my social media headache. Whom do I know who would be willing to do this?

In the Meantime

After November, I tend to goof off for a week or two. I opened up my ebook revision for the Pumpkin Project.

cover of "The Pumpkin Project" by Karen GoatKeeper
This was one of my first books. I now have trouble finding where all the pictures, puzzles and other images are. Record keeping is very important in writing not only for writing a novel, but for writing a series or for doing later rewrites.

This takes me to a different set of headaches. The print file is huge, over 96 MB. It needs to come down to under 25 MB.

So far my line of attack is to resize all photographs, some of which are very difficult to find after many years. I’m also removing page breaks, page numbers, tabs, section breaks and extra spaces.

It is working a little. I’m down 10 MB. There are still 140 pages to go to keep me occupied while I solve my social media headache so I can complete Life’s Rules.

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GKP Writing News

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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GKP Writing News

Fast Novel Writing

I came across an article about writing novels for Kindle. It seems this author was turning out a book every nine weeks. That is fast novel writing time.

Now, I can write a novel draft in four weeks. NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) has taught me how to do that.

The steps are easy. I get an idea and think it through. Then I write down a bullet point list of plot ideas which may or may not appear in the draft. The last step is writing the draft of at least 50,000 words.

This is a rough draft. The characters aren’t really fully developed until half way through. Sometimes they even change names.

The plot has holes I can drive a semi through, if I drove a semi. There are side trips to places totally unrelated to the plot.

Facts are made up. I plan to check them out later.

In short, this is a draft, not a novel. It may be fast novel writing, but it isn’t ready for anyone to sit down and read.

cover for "Dora's Story" by Karen GoatKeeper
It took eight weeks to write “Dora’s Story”. It took a year to edit the novel. The draft timeline was wrong. The goat shows needed linking. I needed an illustrator. Then the grammar and spelling had to be checked. “Dora’s Story” was definitely not a product of fast novel writing.

Finishing Writing a Novel

Rewriting and editing can take months. All those facts need to be checked out. If I guessed wrong, the whole premise may fall apart leaving me writing an entirely new draft.

There is another reason I will never do fast novel writing for Kindle. I have a life outside of writing.

An author in my old writing group wanted to make it as an author. She raised sheep at the time. She sold all of them. Her husband joined her as they went to conferences.

The last I heard, she had made it as an author. All she did was research and write for her novel series.

I like my life. Going hiking and taking plant pictures. Milking the goats. Gardening. Watching the chickens.

Yes, I like writing. But fast novel writing consuming my life is not the way for me.