aurorawatcherak "I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."
When I was a kid, my hometown Fairbanks suffered a devastating flood, fittingly called the ’67 Flood. All my stuff was in my parents’ trailer which was just a block from the Chena River–the culprit that month. After a hot summer that had the glacial rivers full with glacial runoff, a typhoon stormed in from the Pacific and hit the Chatanika headwaters, filling all the spring-fed rivers to overflowing. When the water of the normaly placid river came up over the banks, it met the waters of the muddy Tanana River, caused the town sewer system to overflow and people’s winter heatinf fuel tanks to float up out of the ground, and make a mess. And, it was August, which was barely 6 weeks before winter typically starts here.
The flood lasted about two weeks while we lived in refugee camps, then everyone went home to their waterlogged houses, their home furnaces that no longer were attached to their fuel tanks (which floated away down the river), their appliances filled with silt, their cars that had been underwater, their moldy furniture, and ruined pantries.
Almost everything we owned got soaked and doused in sewage and diesel fuel. The three photos I have from when I was a baby survived because my father worked remotely at an Air Force base about 70 miles from Fairbanks, and those were in his room. Most of my toys had to be thrown away.
So, I can think of a lot of things I’d like to retrieve from that long ago disaster. Pretty much my entire childhood. But you asked for one thing, so….
I had a copy of “The Pokey Little Puppy” that I wish I still had. I bought another one when my kids were little (because it’s worth having), but it’s not the same. I learned to read using that book. The printing date for the one I have is 1989. I’m pretty sure the printing date for the one I lost was way earlier. So, if I can only claim one item–that would be it.
I don’t typically give a lot of money to distant charities because my church designates funds to the Southern Baptist Cooperative Program, and I trust the portion of those funds that is my tithe is well-spent, but I do give extra to Baptist Disaster Relief because I know what it feels like to be eating World War 2 K-rations from a flooding bomb shelter in the local school while you wait for anyone to come and rescue you. The US government finally built a levy to prevent another flood like that, but in the immediate aftermath of that flood — except for the local Army base — it took them about two weeks to even respond and by that time, we were cleaning up the mess ourselves. There was no FEMA back then, and from what I hear from folks I know who lived through Helene’s devastation of Appalachia just two years ago, FEMA is pretty useless even now. Meanwhile Baptist Disaster Relief showed up as soon as the storm stopped. I know what it feels like to hear the adults say “nobody is coming and we’ve got a month before freeze up”. For this reason, I give accordingly.
That’s an interesting question. I do use an author name now, so creating a new one would be par for the course. And some of my favorite authors used more than one name, branding different series or defining different genres.
My current name is a combination of a family name with ties to a distant cousin, the poet Edwin Markham, whose poem graces the foundation of the Lincoln Memorial) and my real first name butchered by an international student friend in college who couldn’t say my name. To my American friends, it sounded like she was calling me Lela.
So how would I choose another pen name if I needed to?
I think I’d probably use my real “nickname” — which is another variation of my legal first name. You can probably guess it starts with an L. For a last name, I’d probably use some version of my fathers’ last names. Yes, there’s a plural there. As an adult, I learned the man who raised me — who is still and always will be my daddy — wasn’t my biological father. His name went through some transformations when his father came through Ellis Island, so I might resurrect the actual name. Or I might borrow my biological father’s last name. Since none of these names would be my real legal name, I would still have a screen of anonymity with my alternative nom de plume.
Yay, I managed to get away without telling you either my legal name or my alternative name. I think I’d rather keep that for some future time and a big reveal.
As those who follow me know, I was born and continue to live in Alaska, which styles itself as the Last Frontier. There are places in Alaska where no human has ever tread. It’s less of a frontier than it was when I was a kid. There’s still a lot of wild out there, but it’s being explored quickly.
So, if I was looking for a frontier, where would I head…the stars or the ocean?
I think we know how Richard will answer, though I’m sure he’ll do it with some fine commentary. Although… he writes about space, you’d think he’d be curious about the world he spent decades gliding over, so I might be misjudging him.
For myself, I’d choose the ocean…primarily because it’s the last frontier on Earth and I think we should explore our entire planet before venturing out into the cosmos. I think we’re more likely to find life there as life on Earth was a very unlikely venture, so I don’t know that life on other planets is likely. What’s more, the planets are a long way away and we don’t really have technology that can get us anywhere beyond our solar system just get, so the ocean seems more accessible. And, I don’t know. Seeing a giant squid might be kind of fun…or terrifying, depending on the size of the vessel we’d be riding in.
Exploring the ocean would be like traveling to an alien world, offering a shift from the familiar air environment we know, through vibrant coral reefs teeming with life into the crushing, pitch-black silence of the deep abyss. That would be a visit to a realm of extreme contrasts, blending immense natural beauty with freezing temperatures, crushing pressures, and total isolation.
Okay, now I feel a bit claustrophobic. Maybe I don’t want to go deeper than the continental shelves. Of course, wouldn’t I feel the same way in a ship launching out into the stars? The problem there isn’t pressure so much as vacuum, and either way, if your vessel fails, you freeze to death in the dark…something Alaskans know all too much about.
This week, I googled something a kid at work said and I learned about the Girardoni air rifle. Developed in 1779, it was capable of effectively shooting up to 125 meters (400 feet) with a muzzle velocity of 600 feet per second (fps). It held a 20-round magazine and an internal air reservoir that was good for up to 30 shots before needing to be refilled.
The Lewis and Clark Expedition took Girardonis with them on their journey westward, but it was actually used in war by the Austrian Army.
So, that kind of turns the anti-gun narritive on its head. This was a pellet rifle (firing lead balls) operating in fashion very similar to today’s semi-automatic rifles — one pull of the trigger for one round which reloads the next round to await the next pull of the trigger.
The Kentucky rifle was as accurate at about the same distance with much more robust muzzle velocity (1200 fps), but it fired one shot at a time and then had to be reloaded–okay for a sniper hiding in the forest, not great if you’re under mass attack. A 22 long rifle today fires at about 900 fps and the semi-auto one I have holds a 20-round magazine. My brother’s 22 from when he was 9 (1956) holds five rounds in the breach, but it is a bolt action.
So much for that narrative of the founders only knew about muzzle-loading single-shot muskets and would not have condoned repeating rifles with effective range. They used the Kentucky rifle to win the Revolutionary War and, then in 1800, then-President Thomas Jefferson issued these repeating pellet rifles to the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
I knew there were repeating arms available around the time of the ratification of the United States Constitution, but I didn’t know the details. I can thank a 20-year-old construction tech for expanding my knowledge base this week. This was only one example and it was here in the United States within a decade of the Framing.
I wonder what my fellow bloghoppers learned recently.
I prefer things I don’t pay for…especially if I’ve already paid for them. A lot of my images are from Unsplash which is often “free”, posted by photographers who hope for a greater reputation. I”m pleased to give them “free” advertising and I insert a copyright notice in the book.
Many more of my images started out on government websites. A lot of people don’t know that the United States governments (in all their entities) can’t legally copyright images on their websites. They’re “free” (otherwise paid for by your tax dollars, if you’re an American) for anyone to use, although you have to watch for the photographer’s copyright because some of the images they use actually do belong to non-government employees who licensed their images to the government. But if there’s no stated copyright, they’re in the public domain. And, we’re talking MILLIONS of images on federal, state, and local websites.
Most of the time, I’m using images for cover design and my cover designer uses a collage method to create what you see in the finished book, so you’d never find the whole image anywhere on line. They’re heavily edited before I or my cover designer use them. I still pay for them if they’re not in the public domain, but most of the time, they came from Unsplash (with or without payment) or from a government website. I also take some of my own photos and incorporate them into images. For instance, the cover of Objects in View is 90% my own images heavily edited. The drone was a purchased image, the mirror image came from Life As We Knew It‘s cover, the sign is a photo my daughter took, but the rest of the images were just random cars and other images I photographed pulled together to tell a story, and then run through software to make it seem they might have all been stopped along a highway at the same time.
You can probably tell from my title that my sense of smell is not great. I suffer from chronic sinusitus but just in one nostril, so I don’t rely on my sense of smell much.
Little Known Fact
Did you know most people only smell from one nostril at a time?
Your body is a truly amazing thing. You have one eye that is stronger than the other (almost always), but you need both eyes working together for best vision, especially for depth perception. You have one ear that hears better than the other, but you need both ears working togther to localize the source of a sound. Different parts of your tongue perceive different kinds of taste and without your whole tongue working together, you might have distorted taste sensation.
But your nose is exceptionally weird. Most people’s nostrils cycle throughout the day so that you smell far better from one nostril for a portion of the day and then from the other nostril in another part of the day.
So when I smell something, only my left nostril works (most of the time) and if it’s that part of the day when my left nostril is not on duty (so to speak), I’m not going to experience a scent in the same way other people do.
It’s a blessing for cleaning up things that smell bad. The other day at my money job I volunteered to clean up a crockpot someone had abandaoned after a portluck the week before. I know the mold and slime on those baked beans must have smelled bad, but I timed it for when neither nostril was working well and managed to dump the biohazard without retching. See, blessing!
It’s not that I don’t have ways to “smell”, by the way. I do have a good sense of taste, so if you give me roses or want me to smell a nice perfume, I can suck in a breath through my mouth and “taste” the fragrance. The secret to the beans was that I kept my mouth shut and let my nose do its normally inadequate job.
In that sense, sinusitis is like a super power!
Maybe there’s a Marvel movie in that. What do you think?
Doing Right by My Characters
But not having a great sense of smell means when it comes to portraying scents in my writing, I struggle to portray what my characters (who don’t have this disability) are smelling. Sometimes I’ll smell my world and learn what the smell is like. In Hawaii, my sinuses open up and I can recognize the salt, the plumeria, etc. But I’m not smelling the wheat harvest or birch season here. My husband used to describe what he smelled, but I don’t have that option now, so I admitttedly use AI. I don’t use AI for much. I’m kind of an AI skeptic. But I never would have known how to describe the smells of the Texas Panhandle in June because, even though I’ve been there, I have no memory of smelling anything while I was there. In other cases, I let AI provide me with descriptive words and then I verify by breathing in through my mouth.
I know, it’s kind of a weird problem. I don’t really experience it as a disability in my day-to-day life until I sit down to write, and then I’ve found a way to adapt to it.
I wonder what my fellow authors have to say on this subject.
Writers should love words and employ a massive vocabulary to entertain their readers. But not all words are created equal, and there’s some words I avoid using. I’ll deal with those below but first I’ll admit I use some of these words occasionally…or even a lot. Not every use of these words should be immediately deleted. They might be okay in certain uses, but not in others. If you were looking for some advice on easy editing, you’re probably not going to rely on me.
Writers should avoid filter words, and I try to. I want to fully immerse my readers in my stories. I want them to feel my characters’ emotions and imagine the scenes unfolding. Filter words stand in the way of the reader/storyteller relationship. They appear when the reader’s experience is filtered through a character’s point of view. It’s really common when writing in third-person, which my most popular series is written in.
I used to be uncomfortable writing in first person, but after I found third-person to slow down the plot in short stories, I switched to first person present and I enjoy writing in it now. But I’d already started Transformation Project and feel it might be off-putting to fans if I switched perspectives now halfway through a series.
When I’m editing, I search for some common filter words and try to eliminate them when possible. What are these words? See, look, hear, know, realize, wonder, decide, notice, feel, remember, think,…. There are others, but I hope you get the idea.
Consider these examples:
Jazz felt the cold air against her skin and decided she needed to find Shane quickly. She could see the snow as it fell. She wondered why Shane hadn’t turned back as soon as the weather turned. She felt afraid.
Now, compare the above to the following:
The cold air pressed against Jazz’s skin as falling snow glittered in the afternoon light. Shane could freeze to death out in the coming storm. Her heart fluttered with anxiety as she reached for her outerwear. She must find him.
I’m probably not going to win any prestigious awards with that rewrite, but by eliminating the unnecessary storyteller, I allowed my readers to experience the coming storm with Jazz. The side benefit is the word count went down, even though I used more descriptive language to describe snowflakes.
Probably my most hated words are was and that. Was because it signifies a passive-voice sentence where the action operates on the actor rather than the actor initiating the action.
Shane was slogging through the snow, aware of the grey clouds bringing the blizzard upon him. (Passive)
compared to:
Shane slogged through the snow as grey clouds blasted icy snow down his neck. (Active)
The word “was” is sometimes necessary (I just used the present form of it), but most of my sentences should be active voice and “was” is a signifier that I might be able to rewrite the sentence, make it stronger, shorter, and more action-oriented.
That. I learned this in news-wrting class in journalism school. “That” is the #1 most commonly used wasted word in American writing. If the sentence makes sense without this word (and there are sometimes that it won’t, so don’t go Zelda on this one!), then cut it!
It was easy to see that the dog was hurt.
It was easy to see the dog was hurt.
Of, as in “All of the.” This is number two on my wasted words list. I’m sure some adult in my childhood used the phrase all the time, but “of” isn’t needed here, so I delete it.
Really, Very, Just. These words weaken otherwise compelling storytelling. Mark Twain said we should find a word to replace it. He suggested “damn”, pointing out your editor will delete it and make the sentence as it should be. Since I have the word processor Twain lacked, I try to eliminate this word before I send a manuscript to my editor…except it does sometimes crop up in dialogue, where–depending on the character–I leave it because people say “really”, “just” and “very” all the time when they’re talking. It would sound weird if they didn’t exist in dialogue. In the narrative, if I still want a modifier, I try “excited” or a handful of other thesaurus words on for size.
Redundant phrases. These can be a little trickier to find, and many popular figures of speech are redundant phrases. For 200 examples of redundant phrases, clickhere. Here are a few of my own examples:
Final outcome
Actual fact
Added bonus
Close proximity
Protest against
Repeat again
Armed gunman
These are, usually, two-word phrases we habitually use together even though one of the words is not necessary. The outcome is final, so the word “final” isn’t needed. A gunman is, by definition, armed, so the word “armed” isn’t needed.
However, sometimes, these doubled phrases have their place, so I pause before I hit DELETE. In article writing, I occasionally use the term “actual facts” because it stands out from the manufactured “factoids” often passing for news in today’s media.
The. When I first saw this in a book on editing, I viewed it with skepticism. The word rarely pops up in its delete-able form. Being aware of its existence made me more vigilant for those times when it can be eliminated.
The rain pattered on the sky light.
Rain pattered on the sky light.
Editing these useless words out of my manuscripts takes time, but I don’t regret a moment of it because it improves my novels. And, no, I don’t leave it for my editor to do. I don’t want those words in my manuscript, so why would I let her make the decision for me? Sometimes she puts them back in, and I pause and decide which one of us is right, and in those cases, she usually is.
When I was 13 my stepfather gave me a diary–one of those cheap leather locking things that give you about three lines to say what you did that day. He meant well. He’d noticed I liked to write and he thought he was encouraging that–in 3-4 lines a day.
I think writers understand that’s not nearly enough.
I think I kept it for a half-year. Summer came, and I got busy, and I stopped. I wrote some things in it years later when I found it in a drawer, but I didn’t really understand the purpose of jotting down three lines of what I did that day.
Maybe it’s a shade of difference, but I think it’s a distinction that matters. I typically keep journals with a little bit of diary on the side. I track my workout routine. That’s a diary. That’s about the only diary I keep. A diary is a chronological record of daily events, activities and personal experiences.
A journal is more flexible–a reflective space for exploring emotions, ideas, and personal growth. A diary is more like a reporter cencentrating on what happened, while a journal is more like a therapist focusing on why events happened and how you feel about it.
I keep several journals. One is for Bible study — typically a new notebook for every Old Testament book (they’re bigger), and it depends for New Testament books, because some are really small and some aren’t..Another journal is for writing ideas. I’ve switched over writing completely on my laptop, but I can’t carry my laptop everywhere I go, so I carry a notebook almost everywhere so I can jot down ideas when I experience them. I describe scenes, I jot down plot points, I record turns of phrase, jokes, observations, even historical events I hear about.
I don’t keep my journals as a daily activity. Sometimes I write in them daily and sometimes I’ll write for several days on one subject and then take a break or a few days. When I start again, I might put a date on the entry just to keep myself grounded.
Now, when I go on a trip, I often start a new journal – which is really just a spiral-bound steno pad — for that trip, and I might date my journal entries then because it helps me keep straight what happened during my trip, but my daily entries read like journal entries.
I invite you to go see what my fellow authors think about this subject.
First, I want to say, I’m back to the blog hop, I think. There’s personal stuff that’s been getting in my way, including trying to get a handle on my next book in Transformation Project series, “Interesting Times”. At the end of every weekend, I’d find myself burned out from wrestling with my main project and running short of time to do the blog hop. But I finished a very rough draft this week. The image for the cover, sans typography, is to the left. Now that the rough draft is, well, the consistency of schist gravel (sharp and jagged), I should be able to pay attention to the blog for a while.
Setting as Character
Some writers claim every well-written setting is a character, but I would argue if every setting is a character, the words “setting” and “character” cease to be useful as categories because their meanings are conflated. It becomes difficult to talk about their very really differences.
According to the dictionary, a character is “a person portrayed in a work of fiction, drama, film or other entertainment media” or “a part played by an actor. Using the definition as a measure, the setting is not a character in most stories, including my own.
Don’t get me wrong. Settings can have a profound effect on the character’s emotions and even shape the themes of the story Settings should have character — a flavor where if the writer doesn’t tell you where you are, you can still sense the setting in the background because settings mean something to the characters and they impact the plot.
That doesn’t make them characters. Ultimately, a character is a person, and a setting is not. Yet sometimes, rarely, a setting does act with personhood.
Consider a “man vs. nature” story (disaster stories or survival tales like Hatchet). In these stories, the setting acts with a sense of metaphorical personhood. It’s an antagonist actively fighting against the protagonist and their goals. It plays an active part in the story, impacting multiple plot points. It carries a larger metaphorical role present throughout the narrative, not just in one particular scene or section. It is as vibrant as a living organism. Its role can potentially evolve with the story, and it receives the sort of attention from characters that is normally reserved for people.
A good example of this is the Yukon wilderness in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” Most Alaskans have to read it as part of our Alaska history course in high school, but I recognize you may be unfamiliar.
An unnamed miner spending his first winter in the Yukon ignores the advice of a more experienced man, leaving shelter in temperatures that, even by Alaska standards, aren’t survivable. The miner thinks he can overcome whatever nature throws at him until he cracks through ice and gets soaked in water. He builds a fire under a snow-covered tree, showing he doesn’t know what he’s doing. The snow falls on his first fire, and he is too cold to succeed in making a second fire. Even his unnamed dog deserts him because he’s an idiot–and maybe because the man never bothered to name him so the dog remains a part of nature. Nature is too brutal for the arrogant man to survive on his own.
Here, the setting acts as the primary antagonist–a cruel, indifferent character rather than just a backdrop. The Yukon wilderness (not unlike the Alaska wilderness I know so well) has temperatures of -75’F (that’s a hundred degrees below freezing), laying traps for the protagonist, punishing his arrogance with painful clumsiness, creeping loss of control, and inevitable death. London gives the landscape a sense of deepest darkness and quiet, making it feel ominous and watchful, almost predatory.
The fundamental conflict between the man and nature drives the narrative conflict, where the natural world represents an insurmountable force challenging human intelligence. The cold’s action against the protagonist reveals his character flaws (hubris and lack of imagination) as he fails to respect the severity of his surroundings. The desolate, silent, white landscape and eternal darkness builds suspense as the reader watches the setting slowly dominate the protagonist, exposing his human vulnerabilities in the face of a raw, indifferent force that the protagonist failed to treat with respect.
My Works
I have used setting as character in limited instances. It’s an exacting technique, to use the world around your characters to act as a character without producing cliches. So, I don’t try to do it for entire books, just for selected portions.
In Winter’s Reckoning (part of the Transformation Project series), I used winter as a character as Shane has a “come to Jesus” moment with his past and future. Because I know cold weather so well, I was able to feel it acting on Shane even after he was supposedly unconscious, and I hope that carried through in the book.
In Mirklin Wood (second book of Daermad Cycle), Donal and Janara trek through what is essentially the Alaska wilderness in summer and it appears to oppose them, including a death-defying race through a forest fire.
Note, I’ve had these experiencing, though less dramatically, in my personal life, so I am able to use them in my writing. But I find it a rare circumstance when I can turn the setting into a character in a believable manner. I can write truly beautiful settings as in Empire of Dirt (part of What If Wasn’t series), but I find it difficult to imbue them with near-personhood without making it seem like I’m writing an allegory, which I don’t wish to do. Some writers are great at it. I recognize their genius. I know my personal limitations.
And, I just realized that each of these examples where I used setting as a character is about as long as London’s short story, so maybe that’s the appropriate length of such usage. Something to consider, I suppose.
Now you should go check out my fellow blog hoppers and see what they have to say on this subject.
I don’t think I’d ever heard you don’t use a name that starts with the same first letter as another character’s name. That would force you to only have 26 characters in your book. I’m clearly a rule-breaker, then.
But there’s also a rule (that I actually do know) where you never use the same name for two different characters and that’s completely bogus because there are five women who attend my church who have the same or similar names to me, and I once attended another church where 25% of the men had some version of the name James. Reality is that people have the same or similar names because names tend to appear in clusters at various times in history.
Yes, absolutely, don’t confuse your readers by having characters with the same name talking to one another, but it’s unrealistic to have a common name not be repeated somewhere in the same universe.
So, I do have rules, but I’m not slave to that one.
My Rules
All my main characters have carefully chosen names based on a few rules. I’m writing three series and have a couple of standalone novels, so I’m just going to look at Transformation Project for now.
The town of Emmaus is loosely based on a real-Kansas town, so I downloaded a copy of their telephone book so I’d have names I could use. I don’t ever use anyone’s real full name, but I especially care about the last names that reflect the ethnic makeup of the town. There’s a strong population of Irish-surnamed people and a slightly smaller population of German-surnamed people. And a town to the west that is a stand-in for Mara Wells has some Irish-surnamed people and some Slavic-surnamed people. Both towns have a minority of Hispanic surnames. The town that is stand-in for Emmaus has more than Hispanic names.
So when I pick names, I go to that telephone book and look through the names because it adds an air of authenticity to my characters’ names. Maybe a lot of readers don’t catch it, but that is the reality of small, Midwest towns.
Some main characters have similar first names — I think I have three minor characters whose full first name is Jason — but not all of them use their full names. There’s a Jason, a Jace, and a character who goes by his initials. And, since that’s real life — again, we have a similar situation at my church — I don’t sweat it.
When I Accidently Break the Rules
I’m currently writing the next book in the Transformation Project series and I realized I named a character in the first book who was never supposed to show up later in the series. An actual character refers to him, but he never appeared in the book and I never expected to use him. So I re-used his first name in the second or third book for a minor character who has shown up a few times throughout the series. But now, in the current yet-unpublished book, that first character is actually present with Shane in Texas, while the other character is also appearing in Emmaus. The two characters should never interaction (that’s good, right?) but when I looked up the first character’s name, I had a momentary conundrum.
They’re both named “Jon”. Oh, no! What to do?
I’m still working that out. I can’t have two characters in the same book with the exact same name. So I went to a couple of friends at work who are both named Jonathan and asked them what they do when they’re in the same meeting. They assured me they’re both known as Jonathan and they both think of themselves as Jonathan, but both answer to the name “Jon” if someone chooses to call them that. I’m researching to see which character is likely to mind being called “Jonathan” or prefe to be called “Jon” for short..
aurorawatcherak 
