Tag Archive for: barking

Book Fog

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by Sparkle Abbey

We’ve all experienced it, right? That feeling when you’ve been so immersed in a story that you come up for air and the real world seems a little foggy.

As a reader, those are the best books aren’t they? The author has succeeded at taking us on a journey. We’ve lived in the world they’ve created and spent time with characters who seem like real people.

What readers might not realize is that writers experience book fog, too, but in our creative role, in a slightly different way.

Writers have many different approaches to writing a book – some plot extensively, others just jump in and write, and some revise as they writer. But regardless of the process, when we complete a book, we have lived with these characters, in this world we’ve created, living their hopes and dreams and conflicts, for a very long time.

We’re often asked: How does it feel when a book is done? Are you excited? We have to say, we’re almost always in a book fog. We’re tired, we feel that writing “the end” euphoria, but mostly we feel that a part of us is still in that book world.

Writers, we’re sure you’ll recognize what that’s like. Readers, the best way for us to explain it is that it’s like the feeling you get when the story captures you so completely that, for a little while after you finish the book, you’re still in – 1920s Australia, 1740 Scotland, or modern day Laguna Beach.

So readers, we have to ask, what was the last book that gave you book fog?

Leave a comment and we’ll draw for a prize in the next week!

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Sparkle Abbey is the pseudonym of mystery authors Mary Lee Woods and Anita Carter. They write the national best-selling Pampered Pets cozy mystery series which combines murder, zany characters and the wacky world of pampered pets. Their latest book, Barking with the Stars, will be released November 17th and can be pre-ordered right now on Amazon, Kobo, and iBooks.

Careful Word Choices

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As a writer, a fiction writer, I’m always looking for the exact word or phrase that will telegraph immediately to the reader what is happening in a scene. Ideally, I want the reader to be enthralled by the action, not left scratching her head or reaching for the dictionary to check the definition of my choice.

Usually, with enough rewrites and tweaking back and forth between the two halves of Evelyn David, we settle on the perfect word for the situation.

Here’s the dilemma. Irish wolfhounds, like Whiskey, the adored and adorable character in Murder Off the Books and Murder Takes the Cake, don’t bark. Or at least, they don’t bark like Lassie. They rumble, they boof, they definitely communicate, but bark, like Benji or Beethoven, or any of the other big screen canine idols, nope, that’s not how an Irish wolfhound sounds.

But when we use the verb, bark, despite full knowledge that it’s not exactly accurate, we’re trying to use a common term that the reader will understand. Whiskey is talking – we’re less concerned about the sound she makes, than about her efforts to communicate. For example, in Murder Takes the Cake, we wrote:

“Whiskey?” Rachel sighed and stroked the dog’s head. “Okay, I know your first loyalties lie with him, but it doesn’t feel very good to always be an afterthought. Don’t you think I deserve to be more than a minor character in this little drama Mac calls his life? If he survives, we’re going to have a serious discussion.”

This time Whiskey’s bark sounded much more like agreement.

On the other hand, we want to acknowledge, as several wolfhound owners have pointed out to us, that these gentle giants sound different than other dogs. It would be as if we called the Chicago rapid transit system the Metro instead of the L. For most readers outside of Chicago, it probably wouldn’t matter. But for those who do know exactly what the train system in the Windy City is called – it breaks the action, takes the reader outside the story.

Our solution – we think – is, in the next book in the series, have Rachel comment to Mac about the timbre and tone of Whiskey’s “voice.”

Any other ideas?

Evelyn David

Murder Takes the Cake by Evelyn David
Murder Off the Books by Evelyn David
http://www.evelyndavid.com