D. Hart St. Martin

I make female heroes badass AND believable

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Interview – Julie Weston

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Julie Weston

Julie Weston is a long-time online friend from our AOL days, and I’m pleased to welcome her to my blog today. Idaho is in Julie’s background and foreground. She grew up in a mining town in the panhandle and now lives in south central Idaho. In between, she attended law school in Washington and practiced law for over 30 years in Seattle. When she began writing (other than as a lawyer), she took classes at the University of Washington to get rid of the legalese. There, she met a group of women writers. They met every week for ten years and then slowly went their separate ways. Two of them are still her readers and she is theirs.

Her first published book was a memoir of place, The Good Times Are All Gone Now: Life, Death and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). It won Honorable Mention in the 2009 Idaho Book of the Year Award. Her next two books, Moonshadows and Basque Moon, soon to be three with the publication of Moonscape, are mysteries set in Idaho in the 1920s, featuring a young woman photographer and her black Labrador dog—Nellie Burns and Moonshine. She has also written several short stories, many of them published.

Both she and her husband practiced law. Now he is a photographer and she writes. They live a lucky life in the mountains, skiing, biking, hiking, photographing and writing. Her husband’s photographs have been used by her publisher for the covers of all her mysteries.

Hart: Welcome, Julie. So tell me. What genre do you write in? What attracted you to that genre?

Julie: For now, I primarily write historical mysteries, set in Idaho. I have on the back burner a couple of other historical novels and a novel about law school. I began reading mysteries in about the 6th grade and have never stopped. When I was unable to sell a novel about a mining town and a labor union, I decided to try my hand at mysteries because I felt I knew so much about them. I learned a lot more as I began writing mysteries. Favorite mystery writers right now are Louise Penny, Anne Hillerman, Craig Johnson, Marvin Walker and Donna Leon.

H: Do you schedule time for your writing? Or do you just grab the odd minute or hour when it makes itself available to you?

J: For my first book and short stories, I tried to write regularly—about three days a week for certain—and attended to other matters on the other two. The weekends were up for grabs. Now that I am retired, I have much more time available, but it gets filled up with other activities, e.g., skiing in winter, other sports in summer. I love the outdoors. I aim for 1,000 words of new writing or revision three to four days a week. I spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out plot ideas in my head. When I sit down, I often have full scenes pretty much ready to go. I often begin a scene or write a scene long hand. When I input that writing into the computer, I usually am able to keep going for some time.

H: You, like our mutual friend Jan Maher, write about a place you know well, in a time long gone. What research do you find absolutely necessary to keeping your story authentic?

J: Because I write mostly about Idaho, I have much history in my head or through family stories. My forebears came to central Idaho in the 1870s. A great aunt wrote a book called Generations (Caxton Press, no idea of date) that also serves my writing well. The most helpful are those books written about towns and areas by local writers, photographic archives, old newspapers, and local libraries and museums. These have all been invaluable to helping keep my stories authentic.

I have a book Flappers 2 Rappers with language details that I consult regularly. My husband and I have regularly hiked around the areas where I set my mysteries. We have visited Craters of the Moon in Idaho, the setting for my new book, a number of times, and I did research in the Visitor Center library.

H: I used Flappers 2 Rappers for Soul Doubt, my paranormal romance set in the 60s. It’s a good one. So tell me, as a declared feminist on your web site, how do you see the role of women in fiction these days?

J: For years and years, mysteries were always solved by men, even when written by women, e.g., Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and others. A few women detectives or amateur sleuths began showing up, and now there are a plethora of women in mysteries, both as protagonists and villains. Publishers finally “get it,” I think. I belong to Women Writing the West which emphasizes women’s roles. Although male authors still use men in the lead roles, I am doing my part to be certain strong women are featured in mysteries.

H: Do you have a current or earlier release you’d like to promote?

J: My two earlier mysteries, Moonshadows (2015) and Basque Moon (2016), both published by Five Star Publishing/Gale Cengage Learning, are still available. The former was a Finalist in the May Sarton Literary Award and the latter won the 2017 WILLA Literary Award for Historical Fiction. My new book, Moonscape, is due out this June and is available for preorder. Same publisher, same characters plus a few more, and same setting: 1920s Idaho. This one takes place mostly in Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve in Idaho (named a monument in 1924), an eerie lava-filled location with caves and tunnels. I am working on a fourth mystery set in the mines of North Idaho.

This year is the 50th Anniversary of the moon landing on July 20. Astronauts trained at Craters of the Moon on the supposition that the landscape there would mimic that of the Moon. I am going to be a featured speaker at the anniversary at Craters of the Moon, talking about Moonscape!

I always encourage readers to buy my book at local bookstores. Ebooks are available through Amazon. And you can find me at my website here.

H: Well, thank you, Julie, for participating in my blog this week. It’s been a pleasure. And to all my readers, the comment section is open again. Let’s give Julie some great comments.

Writing’s Hard

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Photo by Oleksii Hlembotskyi on Unsplash

Life is messy, and just when you think you’ve got the clutter picked up, an earthquake shakes everything up again and leaves you crying why.

The last few weeks have thrown me up against a wall and left my head spinning. It began when I took chapter 21 of my current WIP into my writing group. I read, they told me it was great, then they calmly, somewhat kindly told me what was wrong with it. I was grateful for the critique as I’d been tossing and turning in my head over the movement of the story, how it wasn’t moving. Or maybe it was. I’ve been so caught up in the thing—what with the protagonist being closer to me than any character I’ve ever placed into fiction before—that I knew my perspective was off.

I went home that week determined to resolve the issues they’d brought up. And I thought I had when I took chapter 22 in the next week. The ending of that chapter introduced a creature into the mix that had only been hinted at up until then. I thought for sure the ending was great. So I read, sure the BAND-AIDS® I’d placed on the open plot hole wounds would cover all the problems up. I was wrong. The group eviscerated it. Okay, a bit of hyperbole, but I walked out of the class during the break and didn’t go back. I was devastated. Now, I’ve been devastated before by critique. I’ve even cried about it. But this time, I’d been hit twice in two sessions, and it took me a couple of days to pull myself out of the hole and look at the plotting honestly.

And they were right. I was right. I’d known the story wasn’t working for me, but I’d pushed on through. Which is fine in first draft. After first draft, though, I should have done all I could to find the flaws and clear them up, and I hadn’t. I’d shifted the point of view and the verb tense, both changes that strengthened the storytelling, but the story itself was lacking, and I didn’t know what to do.

The advice most writers with even the slightest amount of experience will give you is to set the manuscript aside for a bit. Let t sit. Work on something else. Go for walks. Watch movies. Binge-watch TV shows. Whatever. I, on the other hand, tend to be fairly quick about coming around. Or I don’t come around for a year or two. I’m an all-or-nothing type of gal. Lucky for me, in this case, it was the former.

Here’s what I had to do: I deleted a character which left a great hole in the entire piece, but she was more baggage than necessity. I moved the revelation of the creature mentioned above to chapter 2. Yeah, twenty chapters ahead of its previous first appearance. I added a secondary character and gave her narration rights in tiny increments. All of which have brought me to a place where finishing this thing is going to take a whole lot longer than I’d planned, but it will be better for the work, and I know it.

So if anyone tries to tell you writing’s easy, they’re either liars or they’ve never glued their butt to a chair and made themselves do it for longer than a sneeze. Writing is work. It’s work that gives me a great deal of satisfaction and keeps me sane, especially on the crazier days. I wouldn’t exchange it for any other vocation. But the last few weeks have been messy. Is the earthquake done? Maybe. But the aftershocks will live on until I put this baby to bed and call it done.

Interview – DeVonna R. Allison

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DeVonna R. Allison

DeVonna Allison is a freelance writer/speaker and a Marine Corps veteran who grew up in Los Angeles, moved to rural southern Michigan in 1983 where she currently lives, but will soon be heading to Florida to reap the benefits of warmer climes. Her husband, Earl, is also a Marine veteran, and they are the proud parents of four children and four grandchildren. Her website and samples of her work can be found here.

Hart: What genre or genres do you write in? What attracted you to that genre?

DeVonna: I write essays, or Creative Non-Fiction, because it allows me to record my real-life events into articles that encourage, educate or inspire my readers. The first book I ever read that incorporated this style of writing was Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. That, of course, is the memoir/diary of a young girl during the days of the Holocaust. I was gripped by the realization that reading one person’s life struggles could affect millions of readers.

H: Do you schedule time for your writing? Or do you just grab the odd minute or hour when it makes itself available to you?

D: I’ve made it a habit to write daily at the beginning of my day. I am a devout Christian, and I have a morning ritual that incorporates devotional and scriptural reading with prayer/meditation. After I’ve spent time renewing my mind and spirit in this way, I find it easier to spend time writing, either on assignment or extemporaneously.

H: What research do you find absolutely necessary to your work?

D: I read memoirs and essays by writers in my genre as well as other literary works. I enjoy reading for pleasure; it just works out that it also helps me to hone my craft.

H: How do you see the role of women in literature, fiction or nonfiction these days? How do you promote women in your work?

D: I think as a woman author it is important for me to represent well, and therefore I always try to submit my best work. To that end, I am always seeking to sharpen my skills through reading and attending writers conferences.

H: You were involved in the creation and editing of Grit and Grace: A Women Writing Anthology as well as contributing to The Upper Room Disciplines: A Book of Daily Devotions 2019. Tell us about your experiences working on these two books.

D: Grit & Grace is the work of my all-women writer’s group and is a project I’m quite proud of. We decided to keep the book an all-female endeavor because women have a unique voice in our society, and we wanted to highlight that voice with this book. Grit & Grace became available in February 2019 and can be purchased here at our website.

The story of how I came to be involved in the 2019 The Upper Room Disciplines is an interesting one of self-promotion. I have been writing for the Upper Room’s daily devotional since 2009, but I wanted to do more for them. I know they publish books and one in particular sparked my interest. I emailed my editor at the Upper Room, expressing my interest in writing for the book but was told the contributors were chosen by specific invitation only. I was not deterred. I wrote back, thanking her for letting me know how the process worked and including an example of what I would submit if I were chosen to write for them. It worked! My next email was from the editors of Disciplines, formally inviting me to write for them! Never give up.

H: That is excellent advice, DeVonna. And an excellent note to close on. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us today.

Ramblings on What It All Means

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A cat picture to lure readers in, not my cat

I fell into deep despair about the followers of this blog this week. I strive to communicate—with my books, with my social media postings and with this blog. But this week I hit a funk. The worst of my better nature told me my blog clearly fails to pique people’s interest at all. Nor does my web site. It’s very disappointing to have worked so hard to create interest-piquing content and then come to the realization that you’ve failed utterly at that task.

We writers are an awkward lot. Many of us, as I’ve discovered on Twitter in the #WritingCommunity, are introverts who’d rather stay at home and write than get out and actually commune with people. We prefer sticking our noses in books to reveling at parties. We’d rather burn our eyes out staring at a computer screen calling up action and plot and characters than wander around a shopping mall. Thus, putting ourselves out, even on the interweb, can be tiresome and even frightening to many of us wordsmith types. Promotion? Are you kidding? And what is a blog but self-promotion?

Let’s get this clear. I write my books for myself. If I manage to draw someone into my world, I’m thrilled, but my books are my refuge, my peace place (despite the death and mayhem I often visit on my characters). But my blog represents my effort to represent me to the world. If I have few subscribers, that world is small indeed.

And what’s the trick? What’s the trick to kicking the meter up a bit and gaining followers? Self-promotion. But I thought that’s what the blog was supposed to do—promote me and my work. If I have to promote it in order to then promote that other stuff, what is the f#%$ing point?

So there you are, this writer whining about her failures and, in truth, hoping my defeat will blackmail new readers into following me. Am I a horrible person? I’ve always thought so. Hence, the self-promotion thing being such a bust. But I’ve now written the post I swore I wasn’t going to write this week. I guess that’s success, right?

Extending the Proper Invitation to the Story

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Beginnings are delicate things. First line, first paragraph, first chapter all require meticulous attention on the writer’s part. They serve as layers of an invitation to the reader to join the writer on a journey, and if the invitation fails to ignite the reader’s passion, they will get up and walk away, leaving the writer behind. No matter how amazing that journey may be, if an author can’t draw a reader in, they’re gone. So where middles and even endings can survive the sin of losing their bearings now and then, beginnings must be perfect.

I am about to slash my first chapter to shreds. I generally don’t go back and read something from earlier in a book while I’m in the process of writing or editing—I am, by nature, a linear writer—but in this case I took a look at chapters 1 and 2 last night because I’ve sent those chapters to a friend. I finished up chapter 1 with “meh” and “it’s too long,” while chapter 2 garnered my thumbs up. Why? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

I didn’t want to dwell too heavily on it, not while I’m neck deep in a complicated rewrite of changing both the point of view (from limited 3rd to 1st) and the verb tense (from past to present). (I wrote about this a few weeks ago.) I am immersed in this and pushing to get it done, so I didn’t want to get myself hung up in perfecting chapter 1, not now, not while I’m making good progress.

But I couldn’t help it. I went to bed, sat on the mattress edge and thought about it. It was then it occurred to me. I may (or may not—the jury’s out) safely eliminate reference to a particular entity throughout that first chapter and give it its due in chapter 2. Will I be able to make it work? I don’t know. And I won’t know until I return to chapter 1 on my next rewrite. I’ve placed a large Post-it® on the cover page with some brief notes of what I want to do, and that’s going to have to be it before I get back to it.

Sometimes we have to kill our children. It’s a writer’s adage. Editing sucks, and what sucks more than anything is when amazing phrases or metaphors must be sacrificed for the sake of better storytelling and better prose. But we do it. And I’ll do it when the time comes to rip that chapter apart, throw away chunks, saving them for use in chapter 2 but knowing I’ll likely use very few of them, if any at all.

Why do we put ourselves through this torture? It ain’t the money, that’s for sure.

Celebrate the Women Part 2

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A silly start to world building

The members of my writing group are all confused. They keep expecting Lisen’s Garla, but we’re not in Garla anymore. Last week I wrote about the process of creating Garla, of what it took to make the absence of sexism, the elevation of women to absolute equality, work. This week, I’ll tell you about the creation, in the wake of that revolutionary society, of a world that isn’t a cookie-cutter imitation of Garla, a world that can stand on its own without leaving me yearning to return to that world where I spent so many years rather than staying with my new world in progress. A world called Azzur.

The story of Mari Spencer, the protagonist of my current project, begins on earth, just as Lisen’s did, but where Lisen had a destiny and her life had not begun here on earth, Mari is all human with no prophecies to bind her. I started with a magical forest. In order to move from one world to another, there must be a portal, and the forsaken forest is that portal for Mari. She also has a guide, a woman named Tula who lives within that forest. Now all of that was easy, but where could I go from there? Where was the fantasy world I wanted Mari to discover?

City of Afra with pencil notations

The world Mari ends up in is Azzur. Actually, that’s the name of a city state with Afra as its capital. I wanted something not entirely typical of fantasy settings, nothing medieval, thank you, so I settled on the fertile crescent, the cradle of civilization—Mesopotamia—as my jump-off point. That was the easy part. Plop a river down, place cities on its banks and move on from there. The physicalities were not at issue.

What was at issue was how men and women related to each other in this world. In my research, I was pleased to discover that during King Hammurabi’s time, his code may have restricted married women from participating in commercial pursuits, but many women engaged in business anyway. Property was left to them by their husbands, and they then left that property to their children. Now this may seem like a given these days, but back then, it was a very big deal.

So how was I to make this world palatable to my feminist sensibilities without simply duplicating Garla? It took a while, as it always does, but here’s what I came to. I began with Azzur having a ruler whose eldest child inherits regardless of gender. Men and women are equal in their spiritual life with the priesthood in the Temple open to both. In addition, the higher the social class, the more equal women are. But why? Why the upper classes but not the working masses?

Eventually I discovered—because world building is a process of discovery—that the existence of only female serpents (read, dragons), which are bonded to the royal family, triggered this effect. When I decided these female serpents would be parthenogenic—able to reproduce without the aid of a male—I realized this had motivated the royals into a belief that the bodies of females of any species knew somewhere deep within how to reproduce without the assistance of their corresponding males.

With their survival at risk, the male royals took their cue from the female serpents and started treating their own female counterparts as equals. The closest upper classes, including the priests in the temple, followed suit. On the other hand, the further down the social ladder a person lands, the more likely they are to think of the serpents as only a myth and—if they’re even aware of the serpents’ unique method of reproduction—parthenogenesis as part of that myth. Therefore, this equality of the sexes only goes so far, but in the upper stratosphere of Azurian hierarchy, it is a given.

If this sounds a bit contrived, it is. At this point. Book 1 of this series is in the midst of rewrite, and more will likely be revealed as I reach completion of this first story. World building is a process, with each step dependent on the last, and all steps open to reconfiguration, if necessary, until they’ve been permanently enshrined in print. We’ll see how things change by the time I publish this book.