It may seem strange to highlight a protagonist here, particularly the reluctant hero of my first novel.  Buster Heywood is so very much in the spotlight already that he's even the only character to get name-dropped in a title.  But he's had a very, very, long journey to become the character you see on the page, and with Adjustments being his second appearance, I thought it fitting to give you a glimpse into that journey.

Long-time followers of this blog will know that I'm not shy about sharing his inspiration: comedic character actor James Urbaniak, primarily known for his voice work on Adult Swim veteran The Venture Brothers.  He's a little more widely known now for the Hulu series Difficult People, but he took a turn on the dark side for a single season of a show called Kidnapped... and that's where Buster's roots really took hold.  Originally, he was meant to be a villain, menacing June Slovich in a storyline that never completely fleshed out.  The more I tried to get to know him, the more he defined himself, as most of my characters do: and I got a clear picture of someone who wasn't creepy or awful, just extremely awkward and misunderstood.  I started to wonder how someone like Buster could wind up in a villainous role ... but before I could really start thinking about it, my own life kicked into overdrive.

I'd been working an office job for a year and a half: the longest position I'd held since college.  Without warning, the business closed because its owner had been involved in illegal activities 99% of his employees had no clue about.  I lost my job, then my apartment, and a decent amount of professional credibility.  Despite this, I knew how lucky I was to not have been involved.  In the aftermath, between looking for a new job and putting my life back together, I found Buster's story without much problem at all.  Mind you, Loren Jarvon isn't based on my former boss in any capacity, nor are Daniel and Jeremiah, or any of the victims of their collaboration.  But Buster's realization that he had to become his own advocate was a lesson I taught him so that I could teach myself.   

Like Buster, I live with anxiety and panic attacks.  My debut was a way to work through what happened when I lost that job, yes, but writing Buster now has a better purpose, a stronger one: to show that people who struggle with mental illness can still be heroes.  In Adjustments, Buster is a little older and wiser, but he's still got his anxiety, and a hefty dose of PTSD on top of it all (thanks, Loren).  In spite of these, he is still trying to be his best self and answer what he's realized is his calling: to use his uncanny knack for observation in service of the community he's come to adore.    ​

A friend on Twitter recently asked which character I thought resembled me the most, and there was no hesitation whatsover: I chose Buster.  I like to think I'm not quite as particular, awkward, or as much of a slave to my habits, but we both notice patterns, hate crowds, struggle with the spoken word, and prefer the familiar.  We also share a love for old books, puzzles, and diner food.  Buster's favorite restaurant, The Fountain, is based on a place I've loved since childhood ... and in an amusing case of life imitating art, I live within walking distance of it.   I didn't, when I started writing.   Funny how things turn out, sometimes, isn't it?  Either way, the muse is quite happy that stepping into his shoes is as easy as stepping out the door... which brings us to something we don't have in common: Buster's love of walking everywhere, or what he and his friends call Wandering. with a capital W.

A lot of events in From the Desk of Buster Heywood revolve around or begin with a Wander, and the origin of this habit was originally a flashback in the first chapter.  It slowed down the flow of the plot, though, and it is now a stand-alone story that you can find in "Finders Keepers", the free e-book I offer my readers.  I got the idea when I set out to take pictures of a local neighborhood that inspired Buster's, armed with my camera.   I didn't walk everywhere, but the more photographs I took, the more I got a clear picture of his favorite habit, and the sort of things he would notice.   Ideally, I'd share those pictures here, but an unfortunate hard drive failure in 2014 took them away from me.  They live on in words...

Please join me next week, when I'll share the inspiration behind The Fountain in my Sense of Place feature.  In the meantime, if you want a decent representation of how Buster gets squeaky when he's agitated, I invite you to enjoy a skit by the inspiration himself.  (Word to the wary: he does drop a couple of f-bombs.)

Until next week, I remain your hostess,

 Well, folks, it's been an interesting month.  As some of you may know, Mercury has been in retrograde for most of it, which always means a heck of a ride for yours truly.  (Mercury is my ruling planet, and retrograde inevitably messes with communication and technology.  If you want to know more, you can read up on it here.)   I spent a fair amount of time not being sure which way was up ... but in spite of that, I've gotten a lot done in these last few weeks! 

I've started revising From the Desk of Buster Heywood for its rerelease to herald the completion of  Adjustments, and completed the brand-new artwork for its cover.   Patreon supporters of all tiers have access to the first look at that artwork ... click on the orange banner to your right to sign up, if you haven't already!   I also made some progress on the draft of Adjustments.

It may not seem like a lot for a month, until you consider that I've been working overtime at my current job - a mandated extra ten hours a week.  This doesn't leave a lot of time for much of anything when I get home from my forty-minute commute, so I usually only have enough energy to sit on the couch with my amazingly supportive wife and eat dinner while binge-watching something.    Our current fodder is Netflix's reboot of Queer Eye, though, which has inspired me to really fight for that work-love-life balance and carve out creative time wherever and however I can.  

I've also found inspiration in something that's been a favorite of mine for a while now.  I last flailed about how my fangirl side ties in to how I approach writing two years ago, in this post about Iron Man and Spider-Man: Homecoming.   This time, I need to flail at you all about the story structure of Captain Marvel, and how it showed me that all the misgivings I've been quietly having about Adjustments are not anything I need to worry about.

"But, Ang," you say, "I either don't care for hero movies, or I don't want to be spoiled for anything."   That's okay!  I won't go into great detail about the actual MCU (that's Marvel Cinematic Universe, the name of the movie series, for you non-dorks).  What I want to talk about more is what Captain Marvel does with its eleven-year backlog of canon.   

Chronologically, this is only the second MCU movie: it takes place in the 1990s, long before everything, save for the events of the first Captain America movie.  So the writers have so many little things they can seed in to make those of us who know what's coming point at the screen in recognition.  They reward the fans' attention to detail, without making anyone who hasn't "been there before" feel left out.  Certain side characters from previous movies make critical appearances, and some viewers know who they will go on to be, and the roles they will have to play... but those references do not detract from the main story.  

This is the lesson that authors with a series of novels or stories should take from Captain Marvel, in my opinion: you can reference other works without beating your readers over the head with them.  Slip them in quietly.  Those who notice them will be, without a doubt, your greatest fans: the keen-eyed who know and love your work for its richness and depth.  

I started writing the Lines of Power (formerly Novels of Aviario) knowing that they would be a series.  I had the plot out to a certain point already sketched out in rough form: where things would ultimately head, who would be involved, and to what degree.   Five years later, a few of the characters have surprised me by demanding larger roles. and new ones have appeared that I hadn't expected, but the foreknowledge has remained solid.   The first three novels may be able to stand alone on their own - as well as "The Lost Hour" - but all are strongly connected.  I hope you will all enjoy seeing them come together when Adjustments is finished.   This drawing together of everyone I've written thus far is only the beginning ... 

What movies really stand out to you as great examples of story structure?  Drop me a comment below, and we'll have a nice cinemaphile chat.  

​Until next week, I remain your hostess,

Christopher Pike churned out young adult horror like it was going out of style, and every time I saw a new one in the book section of the supermarket, I'd beg Mom to get it for me.  (Thanks, Mom!)  I still remember the first of his novels I grabbed: Monster, which was about as 1990s as anything could get: 

That neon font!  The slouchy sweater!  But what really grabbed me were those red eyes.  What was with that quarterback?  Not only that, but I lived in a town where football was only played in the flag variety, and as a 12-year-old, high school was a glamorous foreign country. Plus, the main character's name was Angela, too.  Add  something creepy, and I was hooked.  I remembered not really being quite happy with what that creepy something turned out to be, but it didn't matter, I still wanted more.  The next book I got of his would be the one that really drove it home for me: Witch.

I'd already started dabbling in fantasy at that point - we'll touch on that in a future blog, which will likely explain why so many of my characters spend so much time eating - but Witch showed me that fantasy could be modern, without being flat out horror like Monster had been.  

Over the next few years, I read Christopher Pike's books like they were going out of style.  I even got ​ brave enough to pick up one or two Fear Street books, despite being a stickler about reading things in chronological order.  (I stuck to the prequels that had just started coming out.  Always wise.)   My enthusiasm for horror grew, and branched out to include mysteries.  I graduated to a Stephen King novel by the time I started high school, but left him alone for a little while.  We'll come back to him, too, of course.  

Here's the thing about Christopher Pike that I have to admit: his YA stuff is about as formulaic as an episode of Scooby-Doo, from what I remember.  By my sophomore year of high school, even I was cluing in to that fact: probably because I owned everything he'd put in print up to that point.  Waldenbooks even special ordered some of the oldest titles for me.  (If you don't remember Waldenbooks. it was a wonderful place of magic, and I pity you.)   To come back around to it, though, I did say farewell to Mr. Pike and gifted my collection to a friend who enjoyed his books but had not read all of them yet.  The swath of neon left my shelf and went on to have a new life giving the heebie-jeebies to someone else who would love them as much as I did.  And for a long time, that was the end of it: until I discovered paperback editions of these same two books at Goodwill a couple of years ago.  Fifty cents each was a bargain, so I snapped them up, hoping for the chills and thrills of my youth. 

For someone who graduated to Thomas Harris, King, and Gaiman, the value was purely nostalgic.  The descriptions are bland unless Pike's really dishing out the creepy or gory stuff: that's when he goes to town.  It's still pretty timeless, though: I could see a teenager reading these with just as much zeal as I did.  They're perfect as what they are: young adult stepping stones to decent darker stuff.   

I know I don't brand myself as a flat-out horror author, but parts of the genre still found their way into Lines of Power: I dip into it whenever the plot makes it appropriate to do so.  I still remember how it felt to crack open that paperback, curled up in my orange-and-black armchair, and see the words in black and white: 

Christopher Pike's writing may be on a YA level, but his plotting and execution are still masterful: he grabs you from the first page, and within the next, you're on the ride with Angela Warner and you won't get off until he lets you.  I went through those books in single sittings, and it was because I had to know what happened.  I'm proud to say that I've gotten similar comments from people, and in looking back. I think I have to thank Christopher Pike.    He didn't just give me a taste for the darker side of things: he unconsciously fed my knowledge of how to hook a reader:

Thanks, Mr. Pike.  From me, and from Buster.  And thanks to all of you for coming around!  I'll see you all here next week, when I'll give you an update on how things stand, and maybe a little something extra, too.

​Until then, I remain your hostess,

First off, I owe an apology to novelist Ralph Ellison, possibly on behalf of my entire 2002 literature class, which is where this whole thing really started to grow roots.  We received a handout of an essay, "The Sense of Place", by Wallace Stegner.  It's an excellent essay, but Stegner appoints his key thought - we can't know who we are until we know where we are - to nature writer and activist Wendell Berry.  For over 15 years now, I've been thinking it was his.  It's only until I went to look it up for this blog entry that I discovered, well ... it isn't.  So, thank you to Quote Investigator, and my apologies to Mr. Ellison.

Now that that's out of the way, let's start this new blog feature properly, with a quote from the proper author himself:

It's a Big Thought to wrap your head around, to be sure.  That literature class took it one step farther, when our professor, the lovely, inimitable, and quite memorable Dr. Ann Page Stecker, posed something to us: that the concept could be just as easily applied to literature.  Setting affects our characters on the page just as much as it affects us in our daily lives... like the setting of that particular class.

It was a little classroom, with long, short rectangular windows at the ground level, and for some reason, we were having said literature class in the science building.  I remember, because we all seemed so out of our element: a bunch of hopeful authors and essayists and brimming minds surrounded by shelves of gradiated flasks and posters detailing the layers and ecosystem of the nearby swamp.  In contrast to the tall, thin, balding professor I'd taken introductory Biology from in the same room as a freshman, Ann Page was short and round, with an elegant gray bob and fringe that moved as emphatically as she did from side to side of the room as she gave her lectures, thoroughly undeterred by the change in venue.   During this particular class, I realized the reason my first draft of a certain novel had been floundering for the past two years: it had plenty of characters, and the story was a whip-cracker, but the setting needed work.  Lots and lots of work.   After class ended, I approached her and shared my revelation.  

"Angelaaa D'Onoffrioooo," she said, in the mockingly stuffy tone that always made me feel not only welcome, but at ease.  "That is exactly the sort of thing I wanted you all to take from this.  Walk with me and tell me about your setting."

It wasn't a particularly long walk from the science building to the hall where the literature and communications courses were held, but we lingered outside her office for a moment, then moved right on into it.  I hadn't really been invited into a professor's office just to hang out before, so this was a particularly validating and amazing thing for me.  Over the course of that visit, we devised a brilliant idea together: that she would host an independent study for me in my next semester, where I would make it my goal to develop my characters' sense of place: a little town called Aviario.

I knew what it felt like: the towns in Connecticut where I spent holidays visiting family, with a heavy dose of stereotypical New England charm and heritage, proud of its history.  I'd never drawn a map before, but grew up loving fantasy books or other novels which started with one.  So of course, a map was required.  The first draft is long since lost to coffee stains and time, but the version you see above was lovingly copied from it to make room for more houses and locations as it grew, some time around 2009, when I started thinking about Buster Heywood, and what kind of story he would have to tell.  His apartment building isn't even numbered above, yet: but Charlie's Bar is.  Those with keen eyes will find it at the northwest corner of Centre Circle, #30.  In this early version, places like Millstone Antiques and Cameron's apartment building aren't present yet, either.  I've got an updated version with a page for each quadrant of the map, which I'll be posting piece by piece in the future.  Which brings us right  back around to the beginning ... and this new feature, Sense of Place, which will serve as a partner to What A Character. 

By the end of my sophomore year of college, Aviario had a map, and I had a mock travel guide which laid out some of its history and important locations.  I also wrote a narrative of a walking tour, where a tourist encountered a few townies who pointed out local landmarks, and each landmark segued into a flashback of the town's history.  While I'm brave enough to share a 17-year-old map, I don't quite have the courage to share writing of the same age.  I may clean it up for a future installment of Sense of Place, though!  Expect future installments to focus on specific locations in the Lines Of Power novels, with photographs of the places which inspired them, their place on the map (if applicable), and excerpts or anecdotes which help bring them to life.   I hope you'll enjoy them!  If there's a particular locale you'd like me to feature, leave a comment below! 

Until next week, I remain your hostess,

Longtime readers of this blog may remember that I am a fan of Boston singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer, and that her book The Art of Asking inspired me to start my Patreon, and made me feel a lot more comfortable with several aspects of my creative life.   I feel like getting into her music and her creations dovetailed with the period in time where I finally started to consider myself A Real Creative Professional, and not just someone who was trying to become one.  Then, of course, I realized that the only one who can assign you those coveted capital letters is yourself, in the creative world.  Art and writing are so relative, and subject to so many other different forms of validation than, say, someone who opens a shop to sell watches or golf carts or antique Pez dispensers.   

One of the things I struggle with the most is also one of the most common questions people ask when I tell them I'm a self-published author: "How are your sales?"   I instantly become Mrs. White from that infamous scene in Clue: ​

The more I think about how visceral and immediate my anger is at that question, the more I feel it needs unpacking.  While my sales at the moment are very small, that speaks to a number of factors.  I just caught myself beginning to list them, and made myself stop, because that isn't the point.  For creative people, it is not first and foremost about the money.  (Sure, we like it.  We have bills to pay just like everyone else, and any creation costs money to produce.)    The heart of why most people create - books, music, art, film, you name it - is because they are inspired, and they feel a deep-seated need to share that inspiration with the rest of the world.  Not for the sake of our own aggrandization, but because we feel that what we are making has something to say.   When someone asks a creator about the monetary value of their work as an icebreaker. it hurts.  It sends the message that they are only interested in our social and economic standing, not in what made us want to do these things in the first place.    The problem is ... I got this question a lot.

It began to make me think that my work would only be legitimate to other people if I could say "Oh, it's in the top whatever, on Amazon", or "I made enough money  on my books last week to pay one of my bills", or something similar.  I started thinking I needed to market better.   Then I had to job hunt, and took a position that at first seemed ideal for an author.  Unfortunately, all it turned out to be was demoralizing and draining, and on top of that - as you may recall - a number of stressful and unfortunate things happened over the course of late 2017 and the first half of 2018.  Then the summer of 2018 became another struggle similar to the last job hunt.  I found a position which is supporting me rather well, though it has its flaws, and I find myself once again thinking about What I Really Want.  Which brings me back to Amanda Palmer.

As a "We Survived" sort of thank-you present to my wife and two close friends, I bought us tickets to Amanda's upcoming There Will Be No Intermission tour.  One of these friends is only passingly familiar with her music, so I curated a YouTube playlist for her.  When I did, I found myself listening to one particular song over and over, because of how much it resonates with me:​

I started thinking of all the people I'd convinced myself I wanted to be: the maybe-not-best-selling-but-definitely-recognizable-author,  and then maybe just the locally-recognizable-famous-in-a-small-town-sort-of-way-author ... and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that those were both things other people had seemed to want for me or aspired to for me.  The sort of people who would joke, "Oh, I'd better hang on to this receipt, it'll be worth something when you're famous".  But I don't ​want to be famous.  I don't even really think I want to be rich.  Financially comfortable, sure, but rich just seems a bit too much.  All I want ... is to write books, and make art, and create things that will make people's lives just that little bit nicer.   Am I still going to compare myself to other authors or crafters or artists, and be jealous of their success?  Of course.  I'm only human.  But I'm also going to be proud of them, and happy for them, because they have something which I am realizing is incredibly rare.    

Don't get me wrong: this isn't me making an excuse to not try as hard, or to work as hard.  I still intend to work at consistently improving my writing, at getting this self-marketing thing down, at building a decent Etsy store for Hazel's Moving Cottage, and whatever else may come along with all of that.  But I'm reminding myself that I don't have to be that super-woman who holds a 40-hour job (with frequent overtime), helps keep an apartment in shape, spends quality time with her wife and friends, still has hobbies, AND somehow manages to crank out a novel a year and market it with panache, precision, and a constant stream of brilliant and witty social media across multiple platforms.

Maybe every other year.   Maybe I'll become the next George R. R. Martin - no, who am I kidding, I wouldn't be able to stand waiting that long between books, myself.  I don't know when Adjustments is going to be ready.  All I know is, I'm still working on it as often as I can, along with a lot of other things, and I will always let you know where I'm at.  You'll have plenty of advance notice.  And I'm going to fill this blog with lots of other fun stuff in the meantime - like more What A Character entries, and things about the background of the books, the places, and other neat things - so that you have plenty of reasons to stick around.  

In short, the next time someone asks me how well my books are selling, I'll respond, "You know, I haven't looked at my metrics in a while.  I'm just happy that they're out there."   And that'll be the truth.  Because that's the kind of author I want to be. 

What kind of You do you want to be?  Is it the same answer now as it would have been a few years ago?  I'd love to hear your thoughts.  Drop me a comment below.   

Until next week, I remain your hostess,