Supposedly, every fiction writer has a theme.  Have you ever noticed a pattern with your favorite authors?  The heroines in their stories are always bumbling or a bit quirky.  The heroes are always dark and forbidding but have a well-hidden soft spot that is key to the story.  Or maybe in each book there’s some sort of bizarre family situation.

I realized as I wrote The First Time Again, the third book in The Braddock Brotherhood series, that each book in the series has a similar theme.  I call it “The Misplaced Child.”

Starting with A Month From Miami, Molly wasn’t so much misplaced as she was abandoned by her mother.  Her fervent wish for “a mommy who lives with me” comes true when Kaylee arrives on the scene and makes a deal with Molly’s father Rick:  child care in exchange for car repair.

In A Forever Kind of Guy, the silent Fletcher is also semi-orphaned and in the custody of his step-aunt, Hayley.  Mothering does not come naturally to Hayley, but Ray instantly connects with Fletcher.

Enter Matty in The First Time Again.  Baylee’s adopted mixed-race brother has been abandoned twice, by his biological mother’s choice and by his adoptive one’s death. 

In each book the misplaced child is a key player in the story line.  As I work on book four, the heroine has adopted a child who is the result of her ex-husband’s affair with the maid.

I’m not sure where these misplaced children in my stories come from.  Perhaps I watched too many soap operas during my formative years.   Does anyone remember As The World Turns and The Edge of Night?  I’m sure my mother didn’t want me watching those during my childhood, but how could she say no if it meant she couldn’t watch them either?  I loved the drama and the secrets and the intrigue.

I can recall playing “house” and creating entire scenarios for my friends to follow which surrounded adopted baby dolls.  I don’t recall why but I once got in big trouble for this. 

As a child I occasionally wished I had been adopted for that would have explained why I felt such a disconnect from my parents and siblings. 

The misplaced children in my stories are looking for a place to belong or a way to reconnect to or create a family.  I’m sure each one is part of that misplaced child inside of me.

(The First Time Again is my 30-year-old virgin story. )

One of the most common mistakes I find in books by new authors is the tendency to put in the wrong things:  they spend pages on things that should be left out, then jump right over the things that should be included.  The result is a work that feels unbalanced, giving weight to stuff the reader doesn’t care about, and depriving the reader of the good stuff.  What kind of stuff?  I’m glad you asked!

A great science fiction writer (I think it was Allen Steele) said that you should leave out the things that readers skip.  Here is a (by no means exhaustive) list. Read more…

No doubt many of you are familiar with Clarke’s law:  any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  It’s been speculated that one reason why science fiction as a genre has lost some ground to fantasy is that we seem to be living in an age of magic.  With all of the extraordinary technologies at our fingertips, we are, in some sense, all wizards now.

With the tap of a key or the “unpinch” of a window, we control space and time fly through archives more vast than any alternate realm, and conjure demons to assist us with our every desire. Read more…

Hello & Happy April Fool’s Day!

My April Fools’ Day started like any other day for me. That is, until the first five hours of my work efforts disappeared. Didn’t back up, didn’t materialize any where. Just gone. Poof. Vanished into thin air.

It’s happened to me before, and it will happen again. All writers go through this and while the simple thing might be to manually save every page, it’s not practical, especially when I get going and lose myself in what I’m writing, the way I did today. I can go an hour or two and totally lose track of time. Of course, I do have a timed back-up, which doesn’t always work. Then I also back up to a cloud, which works, but it does that maybe once a day. So that left me without most of my day’s efforts.

No big deal, right? One writer friend told me he lost three whole chapters. Another friend commiserated, but also mentioned a chapter and a half vanishing. Other friends chimed in as well, telling me all with their tales of woe. The thing is, I sympathize with all of them, but none of that would recover what I know was the most brilliant writing of my life. Or at least, the most brilliant writing of my writing day.

Anyway, I called my computer tech to see if he could offer any advice, and he did. He said, and I quote, “Write it again.” Well geez, that was a $20 phone consultation wasted. But then he gave me an additional gem, and I quote again, “This will give you the opportunity to do it better.” For that piece of wisdom I should have scrounged up an additional $20 for him (which I didn’t do.) But, as I was giving it some angry thought, I realized that maybe he was right. Maybe I would be able to do it better the second time.

Read more…