Author's Return

Hello and thanks for returning to the Good Fridays blog! I've been absent for some time and there are several reasons for this, the two most important being that I was again involved in coordinating an annual writers conference. Since 2000 I've helped organize and run the Bay to Ocean Writers Conference, which is held in late February on Maryland's Eastern Shore. This is truly a labor of love for me and the other members of the committee, but it is indeed a "major labor" involving a lot of time and energy. However, it was another huge success, with a record number of attendees and the sixth soldout conference in a row. This was BTO #15 and I'll likely be involved in it to some extent for the rest of my life. It's addictive in a masochistic way, if you know what I mean. The second reason I've been away from the Good Fridays blog is that I've been working very hard on researching and writing my next novel. This one is called Stop the Car and is #4 in the Chesapeake Conference Center series I'm writing. To find out much more about this series, please visit my website at www.dianemarquette.com. You can read a synopsis, reviews, and the first chapter for each of the first three books. I'm developing a separate blog for the Chesapeake Conference Center Mystery Series and will give the details here soon. Thanks for returning!

Here, kitty, kitty

My books have cats in them. It's not that I have anything against dogs. I love all animals. But if we're going to include spiders as animals, I'll have to think about that statement some more. Anyway, I do love animals. When I was growing up, my family had a few dogs, but mostly cats. I raised rabbits and sheep for 4-H projects. I worked for a humane society for several years, and worked for a veterinarian for ten years. I understand cats about as well as anyone can, so that's why cats are characters in my novels. In Good Fridays, Emily and her cousin Rosemary moved into their own apartment in downtown Baltimore when they began working at Upman's store. The elderly couple who owned the house where the apartment was had an orange tabby named Ginger, so Emily and Rosemary had a proxy cat. It wasn't until Emily got her own house near the Baltimore Harbor that she adopted Rhett, an independent cat who did things on his own terms. When and if he wanted attention, he asked for it. He hated anyone in the house except Emily, so when Jack Curtis came to call, Rhett was a very unhappy feline. Cats are much more self-sufficient than dogs. The women in the books I write have busy social and professional lives that require them to be away from their homes for many long hours each day. Cats sleep twenty-three hours a day, so that works for them. When they wake up, they don't know if their owner has been gone ten minutes or ten hours, and as long as there's food in their bowl, they can live with the arrangement.

Hearing voices

When I get an idea for a novel, I break out a fresh spiral notebook (as you now know from one of my first posts on this blog). I jot down thoughts about titles, character names, and the descriptions of those who will populate my book. I record ideas about the season in which the story will take place, the weather, and "visuals," such as being able to see someone's breath in the cold, crisp air, or the smothering feel of heat and humidity just before the relief of a summer thunderstorm. For me, this process of examining and recording random thoughts can go on for weeks, maybe months, until I begin hearing voices. (I'm fortunate not to have lived in the time of Joan of Arc!) The voices I hear are those of the characters who are "composting" or coming to life in my brain. I already have their approximate ages and personalities in my head, but when I "hear" their voices -- the tones they use and the unique language they favor -- that's when I sit down and begin the first draft of the book. In Good Fridays, Emily, in her eighties, uses easy, conversational phrases such as "we lived right smack dab in the middle of the block." Thirty-year-old Sara chooses gentle, non-confrontational words during the road trip with her manipulative and emotional mother, Vicki, who is sixty-four. For decades, Sara has realized she must avoid doing or saying anything that will upset her mother. Vicki, quick to judge and quick to blame, uses short, direct commands to maintain control of conversations with her daughter or anyone else in her path. The reason why dialogue needs to be unique to each character in a book is so readers can tell who is speaking in the book. If a writer has done a good job assigning the proper dialogue and tones to his or her characters, the conversations can flow freely, and not be hindered by the reader having to trip over "Vicki said" and "Sara replied" over and over, line after line on the pages. Those are speed bumps for readers. What a writer needs to do is keep the pace moving forward, and not interfere with the suspense and action that makes the reader want to keep turning the pages.

Emily's first diaries

Emily received her very first diary from her cousin and best friend, Rosemary, for her eleventh birthday, March 30, 1934, which fell on Good Friday. In her nightgown, sitting at her desk that night, Emily had no idea what to write on the first of so many beautiful, crisp white pages. She also had no way of knowing she would continue keeping diaries for seventy-four years. Emily learned early in life she'd get no comfort from her mother, while Emily's father was forced to let his wife control the family. Emily's cousins were her best friends until she began keeping her diaries. On those pages she could confide, lie, rant, and make promises to her nonjudgemental diary. She wrote of heartbreak and happiness, dreams and disappointments. She vented about her mother's unfair treatment and sadly expressed her concern for her father's wounded pride. Each night when she gently closed the diary, she'd pause for a few seconds and smile with anticipation about what the next night's entry might be. Heartbreak or happiness? Dreams or disappointments?

The dreaded road trip

Of course, the original story of Emily's life in Baltimore and the Eastern Shore of Maryland takes up the majority of the pages in Good Fridays. But inserted among the parts with Emily's diary entries are the daily accounts of the five-day road trip Vicki and her daughter, Sara, are making from Denver to Baltimore for Emily's funeral. Whether it's a book or a movie, a story needs to have conflict, suspense, action and resolution. There has to be one or more problems facing the main character, and the sooner the better. For Sara, who is the main "contemporary" character in Good Fridays, that conflict begins on page one and represents the fact that she's going to be in a car with her domineering, condescending mother for five days and fifteen hundred miles. Each way. This is a woman Sara has never been able to please, has never been able to let her guard down around, and has never understood. Until now. Although Sara feels somewhat empowered by the recently-acquired knowledge that the problem with her mother is that she has a mental illness, Sara isn't sure she can manage such an enormous amount of "quality time" during the trip and come out of it in one piece. Sara knows Vicki's white Mercedes is about to become her cell for five days. The reader learns that Sara has set two tremendous goals for herself during this trip. First, Sara is planning on confronting her mother about the unfair treatment she's been handing out during Sara's thirty years, and secondly, Sara's going to also confront her mother about another injustice that Vicki's guilty of, something that's been kept from Sara her entire life. So right away, there's lots of suspense for the story. When the white Mercedes arrives to pick up Sara, the reader has already learned enough about Vicki's behavior to pause before joining Sara in the passenger seat. The action throughout Good Fridays is what leads to the story's resolution. By the end of any story, people have to change. Things don't always work out the way a character hopes, but things are definitely different than they were at the beginning of the story. The reader should be given a sense of satisfaction by "The End." Happy endings? Sometimes. But sometimes more like real life.

The conflicts of Vicki and Sara

Sixty-four-year-old Vicki Stephenson Edwards and her daughter, Sara Edwards, thirty, have always had a challenging relationship. For as far back as she can remember, Sara has felt responsible for her mother's happiness or unhappiness. She's tried to conform to her mother's moods to avoid outbursts and arguments, but even after three decades, Sara feels she's failed to develop the skills to stay out of her mother's cross hairs. About two years before the story of Good Fridays begins, Sara learns that her mother has a mental illness, called borderline personality disorder. The relief Sara feels when she realizes everything is not always all her fault is short-lived when she learns that her mother is incapable of changing. Sara now understands that her mother is a high-functioning sufferer, meaning Vicki can achieve a semblance of normalcy if necessary, but when in the company of those closest to her, like Sara, she shows her true self. Vicki plays the blame game, never taking responsibility for her behavior. She's a bully and a manipulator who twists the truth to suit her needs. As Sara's therapist explained, Sara's in a no-win situation because her mother's goal is, "Heads I win; tails you lose." Dr. Harper has worked closely with Sara to show her the only way to survive being Vicki's daughter is to change herself. Sara is now prepared to confront her mother to set boundaries about the way her mother treats her. The therapist has convinced Sara that she does not have to be the target of her mother's rages; instead she can calmly tell her mother that they won't accomplish anything by talking when her mother is so upset about a situation, but that she will discuss anything with her mother later when Vicki feels calmer. This tactic will definitely not change Vicki's treatment of her daughter, but it will limit some of Sara's exposure to the abuse. Just when Sara makes the commitment to stand up to her mother about this issue, she discovers something much bigger, something so life-changing and heart-breaking which her mother is solely responsible for, that Sara has to summon all the strength she has to confront her mother about this new injustice.

Conflicts for Emily

There is no story without conflict. It doesn't have to be as gigantic and menacing as Moby Dick, or anything as terrifyingly evil as the creature in Alien, but there is no story without a problem. If everything is perfect in the characters' lives, what's the point of reading about them? Each of us has too many books waiting on the bedside table to waste our time wading through boring books. A successful Hollywood screenwriter (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, speaking of conflicts!) once told me that writers have to earn their readers' loyalty with each word we write. In my novel, Good Fridays, Emily Carmichael's life is dominated by her mother. Young Emily can accept the fact that she has strict nuns for her teachers, and she can handle the disappointment of having to be somber when her birthday (March 30th) falls around Good Friday, but her mother is a major source of fear, anger and frustration in Emily's life. Emily's father has learned to let his wife be the boss because he realized a long time ago that when she's happy, then everyone else can be happy. Seeing her father resigned to such a life saddens Emily, but she has no idea how to cope with the years of unfair treatment inflicted on her by her mother. When Emily protests her mother's unfairness, her mother flies into a rage, yet when Emily complies, her mother abruptly twists the truth, confusing the issues and angering and frustrating Emily. Her mother controls every aspect of Emily's young life, from selecting the clothing she wears to which boys she's allowed to socialize with. When the older Emily falls in love with Oliver Wells, the man she wants to marry, her mother rejects him before even meeting him. When Emily and Oliver's daughter is born, Emily is so deeply depressed (because of the recent heart-breaking events in her life) that she submits to her mother's demand that she give up baby Olivia  for adoption. Emily's mother had rejected Oliver and because Emily had gone against her mother's orders and married Oliver, the baby was also rejected by Emily's mother. This is the major conflict in Good Fridays that sets in motion the story of Emily, Vicki and Sara. Next time, I'll discuss the conflicts between Vicki and her daughter, Sara.