Lynne

I am very excited and proud to announce my latest release Stuck In Korea Time.

Air Force First Sergeant Brenda Livingstone may have returned from her assignment in South Korea, but that doesn’t mean she has been able to leave her tour behind. It’s been five years, but the memories of one violent weekend still represent the best and worst of her life – a time when love and honor faced off against fear, pain, and loss.

Editor: Marcia Lindley. Cover Design: Liquid Reality Studios

Stuck In Korea Time is now available on Amazon – the large button on the left will take you there. Also available from Barnes and Noble for the Nook. Thanks so much to all the folks that help me make this happen. Please share the link with your friends and family.

I work alone… but I don’t. The writing is definitely done alone, but I like to talk over my ideas and discuss possibilities and more importantly – problems. Several of my friends and beta readers are involved in this process. The discussion often begins with my friend Jennifer. I’ll tell her what I’m working on, and ask her what she thinks about something or someone. The resulting discussion usually helps me sort out the who or what issue that I’m working on. In one book, I was stuck with how the lead character would decompress at the end of the day. While I like to drink heavily and break things to relieve my stress, that wouldn’t be something this character would do. We talked for a little while about the character’s job and the role of the character in the book and Jen said, “She’d get on her elliptical with her iPod and tune out her day.” It’s a tiny part of the book, but a huge key to this character. With that comment, I saw the character as a whole person for the first time.

Arwen and I took a road trip two years ago and I brought my notebook along. I was trying to figure out why someone would put out a contract on my lead character. We spent at least an hour tossing ideas back and forth. I knew what I wanted as soon as I heard her say, “…a son in prison.” We discussed many other things, but in the end, I went back to that one comment and focused on it. As soon as I typed the words, “Joe’s testimony had been key in sending him to prison,” the entire backstory played out in my head. All I had to do was write it down.

My friend Dave is often the catalyst for some interesting turns in a story. Dave was in the Marine Corps for some years and he always has a unique take on behavior. Many of his smart a** comments in our discussions become the basis for things in my books. In a recent email, he was telling me about his platoon sergeant, who was really a corporal – I’ve bleeped his language.

“He was a wiry, black guy who also happened to be a Recon Marine (go figure, right?) Had his Marine Corps jump wings and scuba bubble and everything. F***er loved to P.T. and ran our 18-year old d***s into the dirt. Also taught us a lot of cool, useful s***. Lots of good tactical grunt s***. (Of course, he also told us to check for d**** on the hooks if we ever got to the P.I., how to check to see if our San Miguel was ‘green’, that Trobicin was your best friend, and which fat broads to stay away from at the Del Mar E-club). He was also a HUGE fan of Monty Python, The Black Adder, Rudyard Kippling, Warren Zevon and skinny, tall, slightly-dikey, white girls. We all thought he was pretty cool.”

Just in case you’re confused – he thinks this corporal walked on water. So what did I get from that email? I have a clear picture of one of my side characters and an immediate idea for a scene in my book about two very different generations of Marines and the connection that music provides. Sometimes, when I’m getting ready to write a specific passage in which one of my Marines is talking, I’ll call Dave and talk to him for a few minutes. He has a very military cadence to his speech. It’s like watching westerns when you’re going to write a conversation involving a Texan. All you’re looking for is the rhythm.

And then, there’s my friend Pat. He’s my devil’s advocate. I tell him what I’m doing, he makes fun of me, and then he picks apart my idea. He asks really tough questions and neither of us is offended when the other one calls us an idiot. It’s not a book until we disagree on at least two things and sort out the details. He once prefaced his written comments with, “Okay, take a breath, read my comments, walk away and scream – then call me and we’ll talk.” I didn’t scream, but we had a “lively” discussion. Pat also firmly believes that I like Marines way too much to have ever worked with them, and I remind him that I’ve known him for over twenty years and still like him.

The point of all this is that I like to toss the ideas around with my team. Some things sound really good in my head, but not so great when I say them aloud. Sometimes, my friends will say something that sends me down another path from where I was going when we discuss the idea of what could happen versus what should happen. These conversations are often question and answer periods about the character or the location in which I have to defend and justify my character’s behavior and reasoning.

Most often, the conversations tell me what I don’t want to do. I’m able to clarify my characters and plots by saying, “No. He wouldn’t do that. He’s the type of man who would do this.” Because sometimes, knowing what is not happening is more important than knowing what is happening. Did that make sense? Well, it did in my head. See why I need a team.

There are characters who flash through my head like wild bikers. They zip in and out, cutting off other characters, and laughing with impunity at their own devil may care behavior. They have no regard for the plot or the timing. But the roar of their Harley combined with the flash of their grins makes them irresistible to me, and I try to grab onto their stories and jot them down before they disappear. I don’t always know how they will fit in the story arc, but I never ignore them when they show up.

Other characters peek out from behind something, only letting me catch only glimpses of their true selves. They aren’t ready to venture into the spotlight or stand up and announce themselves at the weekly support group meeting. “Hello, my name is Ichabod. And I’m a goofy character in Lynne’s imaginary world.” They are developing into real people, but they aren’t there yet.

Most of my characters simply wander into my head and pull up a chair to the table. I know who they are the minute they walk in, and I know which story they fit in. They show up fully developed with a rucksack full of back-stories and attitude. The primary role players are usually in place as soon as the first ideas flash through my head. I often don’t know their names, but I know them.

Casting a book must be similar to casting a movie. I find myself muttering things aloud as I work out a character, “He’s like Peter Lorre without the bug eyes.” Or, “He needs a sidekick. Like Tom Arnold to Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies.”

Many of the characters in my head are like actors who audition for roles in my books. Am I looking for short or tall, thin or fat, funny or morose? Some of them can do it all, but a few are those character actors that appear in show after show. The ones you can’t name, but you know their face. “You know. That guy. He’s in everything for God’s sake! What the hell is his name?”

In the concept for the new book, my first image was of a young military woman who’d worked her butt off to get a certain job in a certain place. I saw a single scene in my head between this woman and an unpleasant individual and I knew I’d write this book.

From the moment I had the idea, I saw her in my head. I could describe her, I understood her, I knew her. But for over two weeks, she didn’t tell me her name. I simply knew her as Sergeant. Only when I sat down and wrote the opening paragraphs did she tell me her name. USMC Sergeant C.J. MacLean, hometown Niles, Ohio. I still don’t know if the C.J. stands for anything or not – no one has asked her and she hasn’t volunteered the information to me. Knowing who she is as a person doesn’t mean that she’s revealed all her secrets yet. That’s what makes this so fun – I don’t know where C.J. will lead me yet. But I keep hearing an explosion in the back of my head so something bad is going to happen to somebody.

Well, I’m seven days in and I feel pretty good about the opening. The first words are down and I am ready for some real trouble to start. Something will be going boom soon. Sadly, the opening and some ideas are all I have right now. I can feel the story building, and I think I know where I’m going, but I’m not convinced that I have all the details right.

Sometimes when I have a story idea, the whole thing unfolds before me. It’s a bit like shaking out a tablecloth. When you look at a stack of tablecloths in the linen cabinet, you only see a tiny slice of the cloth. Yellow. Yes, that’s the color I want today. But when you pull it from the cabinet, you see a larger segment of the cloth and realize that it’s yellow with some embroidery along the edges. It’s suddenly so much more than just a rectangle of yellow cloth. Then, when you shake the cloth open to spread on the table, you find the center is full of beautifully detailed stitching. Flowers and birds create an intricate pattern across the table. Each flower and each bird is its own character in the larger scene.

When I sat down to write Protecting Parker, I saw the whole tablecloth at once. I may not have seen all the embroidery in detail, but I saw the entire thing. As I worked and reworked the story, the details became clear and I was able to share them. When I started A Shared Fear, I saw maybe half of the cloth and hoped that the rest would be just as rich when I spread the tablecloth. There was a lot more work involved in creating that book.

In this story, I have only seen the opening – the slice of yellow in the stack of tablecloths. My experience tells me there’s some great needlework on that cloth. Now if I can just get that darn cloth out from under all the other ones without tipping over the stack and getting distracted by all the other pretty colors…

I have discovered that I’m not happy unless I have a project. It really doesn’t matter what the project is – I’m just a person who has to be working toward some type of goal. Mr. Scott is simply pleased that I’ve quit with the home improvement projects and moved on to genealogy and writing. Neither of those pursuits require his participation or the unexpected expense of a qualified electrician.

After the challenge of the NaNo Write, I took some time off from new writing projects. By the end of last November, I had four novels published and four more written. That was eight novels in about sixteen months. The four books waiting for edit were in various stages of beta read and two were nowhere near ready to go to the editor. I wasn’t burnt out, but I did need to regroup and take stock of where I was going. I had too many story lines and too many characters in my head to do a great job on the finish work.

Both of my editors have real lives and weren’t interested in working over the holidays, so we happily put everything on hold until mid-January. I stepped away from the books and worked on my genealogy for several weeks and then returned to the books with fresh eyes before sending them to the editors. Edits are their own source of stress and a different type of work. Rewriting is simply not as much fun as the original creation. But if you can get along with your editor, the work can be rewarding and the book is better because of that hard work. I like my editors and I appreciate what a challenge my writing can be for them. I am still overly fond of commas and simply uninterested in the proper use of the semicolon.

However, I’m now feeling the need to write something more than blurbs and blog posts. I think I have a story to tell and I have the opening. So, how to challenge myself this time? I have the basics, but not the details. I think I know where this new story is going, but I have no clue how it ends.

I’m giving myself sixty days. That’s starting with a basic idea of a character, a location, and a potential story line. I need to work my way through the character and story development and then do the outline. We know that I can write the basic book in about thirty days, but that was when I already had the story plotted and outlined. I’d had Saving Emily rolling around in my head for almost a year before I sat down and told it. I’ve had the beginning of this story in my head for all of about two weeks. That gives me until 15 May.

Yup! Crazy runs in the family and I’m about to prove I got my fair share…

Sixty days to get from the idea of the opening to completion of the first draft.
Target goal 65-75,000 words.
Yup! Crazy.