Tag Archive for: Linda Rodriguez

Moving from One Life to Another

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
I am currently in the final, panic-driven stages of downsizing before our final walk-through with the buyers of our house. I feel guilty even taking time to write this blog post because I know I don’t have enough time left, and we’ll be pulling all-nighters to make it. Those are a lot harder when you’re in your late fifties and sixties than they were in your teens and twenties, believe me.

I have packed up boxes of books to give to my sister and my friends, and that’s not too hard. It doesn’t hurt so much to give them away to people I care about. It’s the other boxes, packed to sell, that hurt my heart.

The same thing goes for the fabric for my art quilting. It’s all beautiful, and though I cannily bought much of it on sale, it’s expensive, high-quality fabric and will cost a bundle to replace. But I have reached the limit I set myself for taking to the new house, which is slightly less than half the square footage of our current home but without its copious storage (attics, basement, two-car garage, many built-in cupboards). It was agonizing to choose which to keep and which to let go. I know I should have sold it, but I feel so much better about the bags and bags of gorgeous fabric going to my friends and to an organization I’m deeply involved with.

I’ve already done this hard work with the glassware and china and silver–and with clothes and linens. I’ve been fighting the papers-and-books battle all along, and I suspect they’ll go on to the end. There’s just so much of both categories. I’ve finally finished the fabric and sewing supplies and am now in the midst of the knitting-and-weaving-yarns-and-needles stash, another heartbreaker. Fortunately, a lot of it will go to my daughter and son, and that will make letting go of half of it so much easier. I don’t even want to think about the spinning fibers yet. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

I’m a quadruple Scorpio, and one of the symbols for Scorpio is the phoenix, mythical creature that rebirths itself out of destruction over and over. I’ve always felt that I lived many lives in this lifetime. There was the life that I call Queen of the PTA while I raised my oldest two kids and a foster son. Then there was the life of the divorce years where I went back for degrees and frantically worked multiple jobs to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads. Then there was the life of university administrator, running a women’s center and teaching. Etc., etc. I feel now that I’m coming out of the life of cancer patient and getting ready to move into another with this move from my home of 42 years, so here’s a poem for that process.


A PHOENIX, SHE MOVES FROM
LIFE TO LIFE

and leaves only the ashes
of her old self
behind. She plunges into
the dark
future from the glare of
her funeral pyre
that brightens the sky of
her past
for miles and years and
leaves a legend
told to generations of
children
of a vast golden one
whose gleaming
body rose from the
burning corpse,
blotting out the moon
with huge wings beating
against
the burning air to lift
the dead
ground to the living
night sky
and fly through the moon
to a new place with new
people
where she could be new
herself—
until the destroyer
strikes again.

Like a hunting eagle,
she lands, claws
outstretched,
golden crest and feathers
lost
in transit, her wings
already disappearing.
She grows backward,
smaller.
Now she can only crawl
into and out of shallow
holes
in the ground of this new
life.
Still, the wise avoid
trampling her
for they know
she drags death behind
her.

Published in
Heart’s Migration (Tia Chucha, 2009)

Linda Rodriguez’s Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and
The
World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East,
an anthology she co-edited, are her newest books. Every Family
Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear December 19, 2017. Her three
earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken
Trust, and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s
Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International
Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices
& Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and
Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good
Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has
been optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP
Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter
of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers
Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International
Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and
Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at
http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

Examining the Past

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
We are preparing for the early-August
final walk-through prior to selling our big house and moving to our
new, drastically smaller home in early September. I’ve been
decluttering and downsizing my home of 42 years for months now—in
the midst of final cancer treatments, multitudes of writing/ editing/
teaching deadlines, and the vicissitudes of daily life. So it’s no
surprise that I’ve been revisiting the past lately as I sort through
family belongings and oh-so-many papers.

The first thing that catches my eye is
that I used to do so much. It feels like I’m constantly busy now, but
I’ve had to learn to slow down and say, “no,” because of
autoimmune disease and cancer. My schedule now, packed with deadlines
as it is, is nothing compared to the schedules I used to keep twenty
years ago with a demanding full-time job in higher education
administration, lucrative fiberart and writing commissions on the
side, almost a full-time job as a community volunteer (at one point,
I sat on almost 30 boards), and a grade-schooler, two young adults,
and a husband to take care of at home.

I look at a week’s schedule printed
out, hour-by-hour, to send to my boss to show that I really couldn’t
take on the major project he wanted me to lead, and I shake my head
at days that run from 6:00 a.m. breakfast meetings to late-night
meetings after an evening event with every hour in between packed
with meetings, activities, and events. (Spoiler: I gave in and added
that requested project to my already bursting-at-the-seams calendar.)
What I can’t figure out is how I planned all the programs and wrote
all the speeches, reports, and articles with days like that. Then, I
read a note from one of my graduate interns, joking about a wee-hours
assignment email—“Do you ever sleep?”

Suddenly, I remember that feeling of
running constantly on just a couple of hours of sleep a night. That
feeling of being always a few steps short of complete collapse
whenever the adrenaline would run out. Those were crazy
times—immensely productive but absolutely mad. It’s probably no
wonder that I developed a couple of autoimmune diseases, which are
often triggered by constant stress for too long a period.

I’m locked in another stressful period
now, as I attempt to clear my house of its decades-long collection of
family heirlooms and detritus, so I can start packing for the move to
the new home. It has seemed a Sisyphean task, at moments, as I’ve
tried to fulfill other obligations at the same time, but I’ve made a
point of trying to ensure a decent night’s sleep along the way, and
now, the end is finally in sight. Age brings with it some basic sense
and the realization that we must take care of our bodies and minds if
we don’t want them to rebel against us. Now, I couldn’t handle a
schedule like that weekly one I found among my papers, and rather
than feeling sorry for that, I’m glad I’ve become smart enough not to
try.

Have you had crazy busy times in your
life? Do you find, as you grow older, that you are much more willing
to say, “no,” and set firm limits?


Linda Rodriguez’s Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The
World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East,
an anthology she co-edited, are her newest books. Every Family
Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear in autumn, 2017. Her three earlier
Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust,
and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s
Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International
Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices
& Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and
Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good
Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has
been optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP
Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter
of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers
Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International
Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and
Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at
http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

How to Get a Handle on Using Your Novel Research

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
Research
is vital for all fiction writers to a certain extent, and for those
writing novels such as historical or science fiction or
techno-thrillers, research can make or break their books. Yet
research has its pitfalls and needs to be kept under control.

It’s
always a mistake to allow research to consume the story you’re
trying to tell. You can’t allow your desire to show off all of your
great research to leave your narrative littered with details that
slow down your pacing and clog up the narrative drive of your book.
It’s often better to have something mentioned in passing and not
defined or explained because your characters would know what it was.
If you feel that some kind of explanation is needed for the readers,
put it in context with a conversation, often joking, about some
difficulty with the object or law or situation that uses the barest
minimum of detail.

Another
major issue—and probably the most important—in dealing with
research is organizing it so that you can lay your hands on the item
you need as you are writing that passage. There are several possible
ways to organize research, and which is best depends on how your mind
works and which you prefer to work with.

If
you prefer to work with notes you take by hand or have a lot of
physical documents to refer to, one or more portable file boxes with
folders for each category of information—or period of time or
whatever organizing principle you choose to use—will keep
everything where you can readily access it. Binders are also a good
way to keep track of notes, documents, printouts, and with enclosed
pocket pages, smaller pieces of research or items that don’t lend
themselves to lying flat or being hole-punched. You may even be a
hardcore 3×5 card user, and you can find card files with dividers
that allow you to organize these, as well.

If
you prefer to do everything on the computer, you can set up in your
word processer a master folder for the book full of lesser folders
organized the way you would organize the physical files we talked
about. You can also use a notes program, such as Evernote or One
Note, which can be organized in any way you choose and can store
photos, graphics, and videos, as well as allowing you to tag items
with sources or cross-references.

Another
good choice for technophiles is Scrivener or other similar
book-writing programs, such as yWriter. Each of these allows you to
add research notes to the actual chapter or scene where they will be
used and then move them around, if need be. Scrivener also has a
virtual 3×5 card function and a timeline function that can be a real
lifesaver for complex books. Scrivener, of course, has many other
functions, and a lot of my friends who are bestsellers swear by it. I
intend to try it soon, but currently I use One Note for virtual
information and a three-ring binder for physical items.

One
of the things I always try to do is to keep a simple Word document
going to which I add the names of everyone I’ve talked with to
research a book. Then, when I need to write my acknowledgements page,
I have that information at hand and don’t have to worry about
forgetting anyone who helped me.

Chronology
and timelines can be a real problem, not only for historical
novelists and fantasy saga writers, but for others, such as mystery
writers, who have to juggle the timeline of what really happened at
the same time they are dealing with the timeline of how the
protagonist solved the crime. For a simple timeline, you can keep
track of things in your writing software, but for more complex or
extensive timelines, you can either turn to Scrivener, which has a
useful timeline function, or many of the other programs available
online that deal with timelines only, such as Preceden, Aeon,
Smartdraw, etc.

Of
course, you can also go the old-fashioned way of constructing a
comprehensive timeline to tape to your office wall, if you have a
nice, long horizontal space available. If not, you can tape it in big
chunks to large pieces of poster board and set them up against your
wall or on a table or floor when you need to look at the entire
timeline and perhaps shift something around on it.

Fortunately,
there are many options for organizing research open to writers today.
It’s simply a matter of choosing one or a combination of them that
fits your mental style of working and using it religiously. That last
bit is vital. You can have the best, most up-to-date method of
organizing your research, but if you don’t use it consistently, it
won’t support the work you’re trying to do. So, if you find
yourself intimidated by the technological wonders, you might be
better off using an old-fashioned file-folder system or binders you
feel comfortable in using, rather than a state-of-the-art system
you’re too nervous to use regularly. Research organization is for
your benefit alone. You don’t have to impress anyone else, so use
what really works for you.

How do you use research, if you’re a writer? If you’re a reader, have you seen good and bad research use in the novels you’ve read?

Men Who Take on Other Men’s Children

/in /by
by
Linda Rodriguez
My stepfather coaches my little brother’s team
When
I look back on my life, I realize I’ve been lucky enough to be
closely involved with three men who had the ability to take on
children who weren’t their own genetic children and love and care
for them as fathers. It will be Father’s Day soon, and I want to
say a word or two about these kinds of unsung heroes.
My
birth father was a brutal, unpredictable man. I suspect he would now
be diagnosed as a clinical sociopath. After my parents’ scandalous,
highly contentious divorce and all of the violent, ugly fallout
afterward, my mother settled in a small college town in Kansas and
met a quiet man she married when I was fifteen.
My
stepfather immediately tried to be a good father to me, which meant,
among other things, setting limits and being protective. My birth
parents had both been irresponsible and sometimes dangerous children,
so from my earliest memories I was the pseudo-adult in the house, the
one who worried about all my younger siblings and tried to protect
them and care for them so they could have as normal a childhood as
possible. No one had ever looked after me or tried to take care of
me, so I resented my new stepfather’s efforts tremendously.
As
the next few years went by and I observed my stepfather’s treatment
of my younger siblings, for whom I still felt so responsible although
I’d left home at sixteen, I warmed to him. He was doing his best to
be a real dad to them, taking them camping and fishing, making them
toys, coaching Little League teams, etc. In time, like my younger
siblings, I came to call him Dad. When I gave my parents their first
grandchildren, he was a doting grandfather, and when he finally died,
he died in my sister’s and my arms with all my brothers and the
grandchildren around his bed.
At
the time I married my late first husband, I already had a baby, whose
father had died. My late first husband loved my oldest as much as
either of the two children we had together, and that was one of the
things I loved about him, that capacity to open his heart to a child
who wasn’t his own genetically just as much as to those who were.
Later
when I was a single mother of two teenagers in the final years of
high school and my youngest was only four years old, I met and
married a man who’d never been married or had children. He had
enough sense not to try to be a father to my teens, who would have
only resented him for it, but he loved and raised my youngest as his
own. This gentle, totally urban intellectual did the zoo safari, even
though he was embarrassed that everyone else had to help him put up
the huge tent he’d rented, and when our little one left the tent
open to the depredations of peacocks and collapsed the whole tent on
his stepfather when they were packing up to leave, he was so kind
that he earned a hand-printed, hand-drawn certificate of membership
in “The Loyal Order of Peacock Fathers.” My youngest and my
husband to this day have a close, loving father-son relationship, and
because he was so patient, he and my older two children have a warm
relationship as well.
My
sister has two sons. One father is a deadbeat, missing in action
because he’s never wanted to be financially responsible for his
child after the divorce (just as he hadn’t for all of the other
children he had that my sister didn’t know about when they
married). The father of the youngest paid support but simply refused
to see his own son. For these boys, my current husband has been a
father-figure. The younger one clung to my husband and waited eagerly
for our visits and his to us. My husband used to shake his head on
the way home and wonder at the idiocy of the men who refused to have
any contact with their gifted, charming boys. At Christmastime, these
two nephews, now grown, delight in finding eccentric books and other
gifts that will please my husband, often keeping an eye out for them
all year.
I’ve
seen firsthand what a difference men like this can and do make in the
lives of children whose fathers are gone, sometimes dead, sometimes
by choice. So here’s a toast to the men who take on other men’s
offspring and give them love and a true father’s care, even when it
isn’t easy, even when those other men have left emotional damage
behind. To Dad, to Michael, to Ben, and to all of the other men out
there like them, you are the true salt of the earth!


(This post is a revisitation of one Linda wrote for this blog several years ago.)

Linda Rodriguez’s Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The
World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East,
an anthology she co-edited, are her newest books. Every Family
Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear in autumn, 2017. Her three earlier
Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust,
and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s
Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International
Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices
& Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and
Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good
Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has
been optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP
Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter
of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers
Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International
Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and
Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at
http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

Sparking Your Creativity

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
As
an artist and creative person, I can experience times when I reach
down for ideas, for creative excitement, for images, and come up
temporarily empty. These have usually been times that have combined
lots of creative overwork and lots of business work—taxes,
promotion, correspondence, contracts, freelance editing, etc. This
kind of emptiness and feeling creatively dry can be terrifying, but
I’m now used to it, and I know what to do to refill the well and
spark new creativity. In these circumstances, it’s necessary to
take time to do things to build up new creativity energy within you.
So here are ten ideas to get you started.

Journal
Writing—This is the backbone of the creative life, especially for
writers. I’m not necessarily talking about a daily diary. This is a
notebook in which you write about what you see and hear, turning it
into dialogue or sensory description. This is where you can work with
writing prompts from books, workshops, tapes, and DVDs, your version
of the pianist’s daily scales. Set a kitchen timer for a few
minutes and do some freewriting to unload some of the chattering of
your surface mind and move into deeper ideas.

Read
Poetry—I’m a poet, as well as a novelist, but I’ve been
surprised by how many commercially successful novelists I’ve met
who say they regularly or occasionally read poetry as a springboard
for their writing. It actually makes great sense because the poet
deals in imagery, which is the language of the right (creative)
brain.  I know that, whenever I read poetry, it sets my
mind whirling with tons of ideas and images. I have come up with
ideas for entire novels from reading a poem.

Read
Something Very Different for You—If you always read and write
poetry, check out a popular novel. If you’re a mystery reader, take
a look at what science fiction writers are coming up with. If you
read and write literary fiction, pick up a romance novel. Jog your
mind from its habitual ruts of thinking and imagining. Stretch out of
your comfort zone. Even if you don’t like what you read, it should
still shake up your mind enough to start generating ideas, images,
and characters.

Singlehanded
Brainstorming—Most of us have been taught how to do and forced to
sit through group brainstorming sessions before. Take those
techniques and a sheet of paper with pen (or iPad or laptop), get
comfortable, set a timer again, and start throwing out ideas at top
speed. Same rules as with the group process. You can’t disqualify
any idea, no matter how unrealistic. You want to generate as many
ideas as you can as quickly as you can. Just list them down the
page—or even use a voice recorder to capture them.  After
the timer goes off, you can go down the list considering the
possibilities you’ve listed. Look for possibilities to combine
aspects of ideas. Write down any new ideas that get sparked by your
consideration of the ideas already down on the page. Choose one or
two promising (or least abhorrent) ideas and freewrite about them in
your journal.

Making
Lists—I love listmaking. Make lists of ideas, of characters, of
backgrounds you’d like to use someday, of isolated bits of dialogue
or description, of actions you’d like to see a character to take.
My favorite is to write a list of scenes I’d like to read—exciting
scenes, action-filled scenes, emotional scenes, surprising scenes,
suspenseful scenes. They don’t have to have anything to do with any
project you’re working on or any character you are writing or have
written. They just need to be scenes you’d love to read—because
scenes you’d love to read are scenes you’d love to write.

Visit
a Museum, Gallery, Play, Film, Concert—We writers live and breathe
words. Sometimes we need to get out of our heads and see or hear art
that isn’t primarily word-based. It can be especially fruitful to
go to a film in a language you don’t understand or an art exhibit
of a kind you know nothing about. When we have no words to use to
explain or understand what we’re seeing, our brains are kicked into
another mode of functioning that can become quite generative. Wander
around a gallery or museum and take in the colors and shapes. Sit in
a concert hall or movie theater and let the music or film engulf you
completely, washing through your brain. Come out seeing or hearing in
a slightly different mode.

Draw,
Paint, Knit, Spin, Sew—Even better than looking at art is making
it. Sink your hands into clay or fiber. Splash ten different colors
next to each other, taking note of the changes each new color
creates. Feel the texture of the fabric, thread, yarn, fiber as you
work with it to make something new. Take a penciled line and see what
you can create with it. All of this also kicks in the right brain,
the imagistic, creative part of us. Stay in beginner mind without
worrying how “good” your art will be. This is—and should
be—play, completely carefree and innocent.

Go
for a Walk—Physical exercise is always a good thing for us
sedentary word slugs, but even more important than its many health
benefits are the creative benefits of simply moving your body through
space. As you move around, your brain begins to get unstuck and to
move, as well. A nice, long walk outdoors (preferably in scenic
surroundings) can often jumpstart the solution to a creative dry
spell. Sometimes a sterile period can arise from being overstressed.
Walks are one of the best ways to counter such stress and relax the
mind and body.

Arrange
Flowers/Rearrange Some Belongings—In the Chinese art of feng shui,
rearranging 27 items will start stuck soul energy flowing again.
Moving belongings into new configurations, trying for a more pleasing
pattern, has long been a cure for the blues and the blahs. We are
pattern-recognizing and pattern-creating organisms. To change the
habitual patterns that surround us charges us with new energy.  A
smaller, simpler version of this is to gather or buy some flowers and
assemble them into flower arrangements that please our aesthetic
sensibilities. Spending a little time in creating pleasing, artistic
arrangements of flowers or accessories will provide a creative boost
to stuck energies.

Go
to Lunch with a Creative Friend or Two—Everyone has one or more
friends or acquaintances who are creative sparklers. Like the child’s
fireworks favorite, they give off showers of sparks, or creative
ideas, constantly. They are positive and upbeat and always focused on
possibilities. Spending some time with them will leave you filled
with ideas, energy, and excitement. It’s always worthwhile to give
them a call and set up a relaxed lunch in a nice place. Rather than
complain about how dry and sterile things are for you right at the
moment, ask them what’s new with them and what they see as
possibilities for the future.  As they take off shooting
into the blue yonder, follow them wholeheartedly and build on all
their ideas. You’ll walk away at the end of lunch with a big smile
on your face and a bunch of ideas bubbling in your unconscious.
Cherish these friends, even if they are unrealistic and immature.
Their wild, creative energy is invaluable when your own has
temporarily deserted you.

One
or more of these ten methods should start your creative powers
working once again. I’ve never had to go through more than a couple
of these at a time to get my creative mojo stirring. Post this list
near your desk, and don’t spend any time or energy bewailing it
when a creative dry spell hits. Just reach for this and try whichever
of these ideas looks most appealing at the time. If the first doesn’t
completely prime your creative pump, move to another of them.
Creativity never leaves, but sometimes it needs a spark to start the
engine running again. So spark your creativity!

Plotting vs. Pantsing

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
In the mystery-writing community,
people tend to divide themselves into plotters or pantsers. This
seems to me to set up a false dichotomy where real authors either
write out rigid, detailed outlines of their entire books before they
begin their first draft or they start with nothing but perhaps an
image or a line and then wing their way through the entire book. I
know this divide isn’t true, and if you look, you can find plenty of
interviews with and articles by established mystery writers saying
this isn’t true, but still, this either-or myth seems to fill the air
and create problems, especially for fairly new writers.

I’d like to suggest that there are
myriad ways to write a mystery or thriller that partake to varying
degrees of both methods and yet are neither. Probably the initial
freeing knowledge in this arena that I encountered was from
best-selling and award-winning Elizabeth George. George has also
written a great book on writing the novel, especially the mystery, Write Away:
One Writer’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, in which she discusses the way
she writes her own highly successful mysteries. She plots out in
broad general terms what will happen over the first 50 pages, goes
into more detail about what will happen in each scene right before
she writes it, and then she changes that rough 50-page outline to
adhere to what she actually wrote in those first 50 or so pages,
plots out in general terms the next 50 pages, and proceeds this way
through the first draft of the entire book. At the end, her outline
shows the basic structure of what she’s actually written, providing a
tool she can use in revision.

George’s practical method was very
close to what I was actually doing. I felt like a failure because I
couldn’t stick to a pre-determined outline of a whole book, nor could
I just wing it without finding I’d often left out the drama my book
needed. But, hey, if Elizabeth George did it, too, maybe I wasn’t
such a failure.

The truth of the matter is that any way
you can get a good book written is the right way for that book. Some
people love those detailed outlines—I’ve heard some authors claim
their original outlines are longer than the books themselves. Some
people can fly across the page on a wing and a prayer with no
preparation, never knowing where they’re going until they reach the
end, without later having to throw away huge chunks of draft and
spend ages on major revisions to try to inject some action and drama
into their manuscripts. As far as I can tell, however, both extremes
are fairly rare. Usually, in talking with writers, I find they use
some mixture of the two methods. Perhaps they think a great deal and
even make notes about the world of the book, the dramatic situation,
and the characters—notes they may later refer to or not, as the
case may be—and then they just start writing, having gassed up the
story machine in their unconscious with their earlier thinking, and
just keep going until the end. Perhaps they wing it until they get
into trouble and then they work on figuring out what happens next
before winging it again for a while, cycling in and out of that
process throughout the book. This is a strategy I have also used
before and may well use again.

We find what works for us for this
particular book—and the thing is, that tends to change with certain
books—and that becomes our method, until it no longer works for the
book we’re on now. So I urge all of you to eschew the seeming
requirement for rigid extremes. Try some of these hybrid methods and
see if any one of them will work well for you with the book you’re
writing now, keeping in mind that it’s not the only one and you can
change to another of them when it no longer helps. You might make up
a hybrid method that I haven’t mentioned that will work well for your
book, or you might find another that I haven’t mentioned in an
interview with a writer you admire. Use what works for you at the
stage you’re at right now.

New novelists, especially, can find it
difficult to successfully juggle all the plates of character,
conflict, action, motivation, background and setting, dialogue, scene
structure, plot points, emotional turning points, plot complications,
subplots, and a million more from the beginning. Thinking ahead and
planning for effective use of some of these aspects of the novel is a
completely successful way to work, even if you want to wing the rest
of it.

These are my two cents on the whole
plotter vs pantser thing. How do you work?

Linda Rodriguez’s Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The
World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East,
an anthology she co-edited, are her newest books. Every Family
Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear in autumn, 2017. Her three earlier
Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust,
and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s
Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International
Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices
& Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and
Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good
Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has
been optioned for film.
Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP
Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter
of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers
Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International
Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and
Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at
http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

A Poem for Mother’s Day

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
Paffi Flood was unable to post today, so Linda Rodriguez is substituting for her.
As we approach Mother’s Day, the airwaves are filled with commercials for gifts for mothers and suggestions for special ways to “spoil Mom” and celebrate this May holiday. You can’t escape them. So, this poem is for all those who, like me, have lost their mothers and find the day’s celebrations bittersweet. 


CONVERSATION WITH MY
MOTHER’S PICTURE
You and Dad were entirely
happy here—
you in purple miniskirt,
white vest and tights
(you always wore what was
already too young
for me), Dad in purple
striped pants,
a Kansas State newsboy’s
cap
made for a bigger man’s
head.
You both held Wildcat
flags and megaphones
to cheer the football
team who,
like the rest of the
college, despised you
middle-aged townies,
arranging for their penicillin
and pregnancy tests and
selling them
cameras and stereos at
deep discount.
But you were happy
in this picture, before
they found
oat-cells in your lungs.

After the verdict, he
took you to Disneyland,
this man who married you
and your five children
when I was fifteen. He
took you cross-country
to visit your family,
unseen
since your messy divorce.
He took you to St. Louis
and Six Flags Over Texas
and to Topeka
for radiation treatments.
I don’t think he ever
believed
you could die. Now he’s
going
the same way. And none of
us
live in that Wildcat town
with the man
who earned his “Dad”
the hard way
from suspicious kids and
nursed
your last days. For me,
this new dying
brings back yours,
leaving me only this image
of you both cheering for lucky winners.
Published in Heart’s Migration (Tia Chucha Press, 2009)

Getting a Life

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
Yesterday
I just crashed. I slept late. I couldn’t get myself moving on
anything I had to do, not this blog post or another guest blog that’s
due, not my usual stint on the WIP, not any of the several business
emails I needed to take care of, not trying to clear some of the
clutter and mess that have collected in my house as I’ve launched
and promoted two books while writing yet another, taking care of a
slew of freelance commitments, and preparing and teaching several
workshops. Usually I rise early, take a deep breath, gird my loins
for the day’s battle with the endless to-do list, and kick into
overdrive, but yesterday I couldn’t muster the energy or the will
to do much of anything productive. This is not like me.

While
driving with my husband past Kansas City’s Plaza, which is a
premier pedestrian shopping mall/outdoor art gallery full of
fountains, intricate and colorful Spanish tiles, ornate buildings,
and beautiful sculptures, I reminisced sadly about the good times we
used to have walking the Plaza and sitting on one of the many benches
to watch the parade of people. I reminded my husband of the fun we
had taking picnic lunches to some of Kansas City’s many great parks
to enjoy after a refreshing walk. I waxed nostalgic over the weekend
day trips we used to make to explore lovely small towns all around
the Kansas City area—I’ve given many of their best features to my
fictional town in my Skeet Bannion series of novels. The strange
thing is that, though we don’t do any of those things any longer
due to lack of time, we used to do them when I had an
ultra-demanding, 60-70-hour per week university job. Now that I’m a
full-time writer, however, I have no time to enjoy leisure activities
with my husband or any of the other things I used to do to make a
real life—cooking, fiberart, gardening, going to Shakespeare or
concerts in the park, lunches with friends, etc.

How
did this terrible imbalance in my life occur? Isn’t one of the joys
of being a full-time writer supposed to be the flexibility of time
that allows you to lead a fuller, richer life? How did I manage with
that old job and all its hours and responsibilities to weave in time
for recreation and fun, time with family and friends, time to feed
the creative well inside me, yet now I can hardly find time to even
wash dishes or do laundry, the minimal tasks required to keep us from
sinking into total chaos?

If I
were just writing my books, I would have time to enjoy some of these
activities still, but I have to promote those books in an effort to
constantly increase sales. Publishers are dumping, left and right,
amazing writers who have received impressive reviews and award
nominations because their sales are just not spectacular enough. So I
have to work harder to try to get the word out about my books and
persuade new people to try them. The writing and publishing (with its
line edits, copy edits, and page proofs) when combined with the
promotion and marketing (with its touring, social media, conferences,
and events) are two full-time jobs. Since my writing career is still
not earning enough to support me, I must take on freelance
writing/editing/evaluating/judging/teaching contracts, yet another
full-time job. It’s no wonder I’m so tired!

I’m
hardly the only writer in this predicament. Writers who are far more
successful and have been doing this for far longer than I have are
facing the same dilemma. The Sisters in Crime listserv periodically
rings with the cries of authors who have run out of steam trying to
do all of this. Some are even seriously thinking of giving up
writing, which they love, because they just don’t think they can do
all of it any longer.

As a
country, we are moving more and more to a freelance or independent
contractor environment, where we don’t have paid vacation and sick
days and where we can find ourselves working all the time—or
feeling as if we ought to be. How do we make a go of this kind of
career and still have any kind of life outside of work?

I’m
the first to admit I don’t have the answers to that question. I
will be spending my next few days trying to find some, however. How
we spend our time is our actual life, even if we think we’re just
doing it until we
bring in enough money or reach a certain level of success. I intend
to find a way to bring those elements of a real, lived life back into
mine. Can I do it without shortchanging the efforts I need to put
into my writing and promotion of my work to create a successful
career? I’ll have to find a way.

How
do you manage that career-personal life balance that can be so
difficult to get right?
Linda Rodriguez’s Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The
World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East,
an anthology she co-edited, are her newest books. Every Family
Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear in autumn, 2017. Her three earlier
Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust,
and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s
Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International
Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices
& Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and
Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good
Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has
been optioned for

film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP
Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter
of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers
Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International
Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and
Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at
http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

Life Lessons

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
I’ve been around for a lot more than
a few years. And, stubborn as I can be, I’ve learned some things
along the way. Oddly enough, it’s not the big lessons that have
made a difference in my life, but a series of small rules for happy
living that I’ve learned to make a part of my daily life. 

  1. Do at least one thing a day that
    gives you pleasure. 
  2. Live your life in chapters. Focus
    on the chapter you’re in now. You don’t have to do/have/be it
    all now!
  3. Don’t get overwhelmed. Break
    everything into baby steps. One page a day is a book in a year.
    Fifteen minutes a day on any overwhelming or distasteful task adds
    up and eventually will lengthen on its own. The ordinary kitchen
    timer is your friend.
  4. Always clean up your messes.
  5. Be kind to yourself and others.
  6. Give something back.
  7. Use it, appreciate it, or lose it.
    Your body, mind, belongings. Remember, unapplied knowledge is
    wasteful (f not tragic).
  8. Make time to do often what you do
    well and enjoy. Spend time with people who think you’re great.
    When the world isn’t noticing you, notice and reward yourself.
    Give others recognition, in turn.
  9. Make quiet time for yourself alone
    every day. And a corollary is have a place, even merely a spot,
    that’s just for you. Use it for devotions, meditation, journaling,
    or just reading. Give yourself 10 minutes of silence every day.
  10. Pay attention
    to your breath. Conscious breath control can help you control
    stress, worry, and fear and replace them with calm and peace.
  11. You create the path you’ll walk
    on in life with your words. Think before you speak. Remind yourself
    that, to a great extent, you are creating your reality when you
    speak.
  12. Pay attention
    to your own emotional needs and desires.
  13. Decide what you
    want your life to look like. Write it down. In detail.
  14. Act “as if.”
    Imagine if your desired life were here now, if you could not fail.
    What would you do? Do it.
  15. Conserve your energy. Rid your
    life of energy thieves—negative people and habits.

What about you? What rules would you
add to my list?

Sales Attacks

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez

My
late first husband, who died fourteen years ago, still receives mail
at my house—though we were divorced for fifteen years before he
died. If he were alive, he would be old enough for Medicare.
Suddenly, missives from various insurance providers (almost none with
identification of the firm involved) are hitting my mailbox every
day. I called the number listed on one of the early ones to tell them
that Michael was dead. I sent back the cards, which others provided
without a phone number, printing in large block letters across them,
DECEASED.

Almost
immediately, I began to receive hectoring telephone calls from the
first company, who now had my phone number and name from my call to
advise them of Michael’s death. The more I refused the Medicare
insurance they had to sell, the more verbally aggressive and
downright mean they got. I began refusing to pick up the phone at
sight of their phone number in caller ID, so they switched numbers
and caught me another couple of times before I learned those new
numbers. Currently, they call four or five times within five minutes,
varying the number each time. They start at 8:00 a.m. and continue
throughout the day, every few hours. When I’ve told them that they
must stop, they say I contacted them so they have the right to call
me, even though I’m on the no-call list. And unfortunately, that
seems to be the truth, even though I contacted them only to tell them
their target was not here.

Meanwhile,
someone from one of the other companies showed up on my doorstep,
insisting I let him in so he could give me the hard-sell on his
company’s insurance plan. When I repeatedly said no, he verbally
abused me for agreeing to be visited and changing my mind, shouting
and leaning into my face at the door until my dog was straining at
the collar I held, trying to get at this stranger threatening his
mom. I slammed the door in his face, puzzled at his feeling of
entitlement until I realized that he must be from one of the
companies I’d sent a card with DECEASED written on it. Someone at
their corporate headquarters must have interpreted that as permission
to send their salesman around.

I’ve
been in touch with our attorney general’s office about these
events, and I’ve learned that this is common. Medicare is
confusing, and these companies have made a habit for years of using
high-pressure sales tactics with the elderly, since they’ve found
older people’s unquestioning regard for authority figures makes
them easy targets to bully.

Now,
the baby boomers are hitting retirement and Medicare age. My late
first husband was in the vanguard of this group. If he were alive, he
would never have put up with this sales-bullying, and I think these
companies are going to find that their stereotype of little old
elderly people who are easy to pressure into sales will backfire in
their faces as they try it out on the boomers. We have had precious
little regard for authority figures throughout our lives.

I
have encountered more and more of this aggressive, high-pressure
behavior in salespeople of all kinds lately. I wonder if that’s
because I’m moving toward that age when we’re supposed to turn
into people easy to bully into sales that are not in our best
interests, or is it because times are tough financially and people
are desperate to make sales. Which do you think it is? I try to keep
in mind that even the most hectoring salesman is just trying to put
food on his (women can be bad, but the worst offenders are all men,
I’ve found) table. Still, it really makes me mad. Have you noticed
this kind of sales warfare being waged against you lately?

Linda Rodriguez’s book, Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel is based on her popular workshop. The
World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East,
an anthology she co-edited was recently published. Every Family
Doubt, her fourth mystery featuring Cherokee campus police chief,
Skeet Bannion, will appear in 2017. Her three earlier Skeet
novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and
Every Last Secret—and her
books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received honors, such as Malice Domestic Best
First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best
Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros
Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships.
Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in the anthology,
Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film.