And then there were THREE

This is kind of new to me. I have an anthology out. It came out last week.

Funny thing.

A book I wrote that came out in the Heartsong Presents book club and now it's rereleased, very little fan fare, no book signings, although I'm hoping the book signings I have for Calico Canyon might also offer copies of Alaska Brides.

No press releases.

I wonder why that is?

Anyway, not what I want to write about today, I'm just mentioning it because the poor little book is being ignored and I'm it's co-mommy.

Moving on...................

I had a fun exchange with Debra Ullrick last week. We were talking Characters. She asked me for advice, and my advice to her was, "Run for your life before you take advice from me."

But the woman has zero self-preservation skills so she told me she wanted to hear what I thought.

she said what I told her was understandable at least...all the better to confuse her for an extended period of time of course, so since we're talking about writing skills here I thought I'd recreated that advice for you Seekerville folks and then we can debate it a little.

Is this good advice? Does it work every time? Does Debra now need electoshock therapy to erase my advice from her mind? And most importantly, is electroshock therapy covered under most Health Insurance Plans?

I spend last week going over Book #1 in my cozy mystery series, Of Mice and Murder. Here is a not-yet-finalized cover, but Susan Downs from Heartsong Presents Mysteries says it will look a lot like this.

I FORBADE Susan to put a mouse on the cover and she laughed (cyberly) in my face. Arg! Maxie the Mouse Mysteries!

Anyway, because of this week's galley editing, I've been thinking of these characters in Of Mice and Murder.

A lot of people say that for them, a book always starts with characters. They’ve got a guy in mind or a heroine with an attitude and then they have to hunt up a story so they can deal with that character.

It’s never like that for me.

For me it always starts with story.

I’ve got a story I want to tell and the characters come after that. Even when the characters are secondary characters in a series, I still think in terms of story first.

Maybe because of that, creating characters is a kind of painful process for me. I love it, but it comes slow…and that’s mainly because I just start writing my story. The characters have to come along for the ride.
When I start writing the story, it takes me a while to really know the characters and I nearly always end up with an ah-ha moment when the guy especially finally fully becomes real to me. The guy, more so than the girl for some reason, usually takes about the first hundred pages.

Then I need to go back and weave this guy into the book and have him react as he really is (now) and have other people react to HIM as he really is.

Like I said, I just finished doing galleys on my cozy mystery. Of Mice and Murder, the first of a three book series, is a different voice for me and God bless Barbour for letting me write in different genres. Maybe 'different voice' isn't right, the romantic comedy is still the same. But it's a little different style of story for sure.
I just LOVE this hero who emerged from Of Mice and Murder. Nick O'Connor is outwardly a classic, tall, dark, handsome knight-in-shining armor, but inside he's this fat genius math geek who was five two and weighed 200 pounds in junior high and was bullied and his interior life is just chaotic.
He's always thinking things like, 'God make me cool.' 'Please God make me smooth and suave and classy' 'no, no, no don't say that you idiot'!

Then he just says something so stupid. And usually it's because he's just fraught with all these self doubts and he also daydreams a lot and that distract him from what's going on around him. I think Nick is a really fun, funny character.
And of course, everyone around him just sees Mr. Tall Dark and Handsome so they’re not getting any insecure vibes at all because it just doesn’t fit with their perception of him.

Giving a character flaws and doubts and weaknesses, especially when you're trying to make them act cool and making other people, like the love interest react to them like they're cool, can deepen characters. Characters need these small flaws to be fully human, I think. Of course they need the deep, aching, broken hearted conflict that is so fundamental, but something lighter, brighter, silly even adds dimension. And for the cozy mystery I didn't have to go that deep into character conflict because honestly, I was busy trying to solve a murder.

Also in the cozy Of Mice and Murder, my heroine is terrified of mice. (that's the part of me in the book) I make that a running joke through the whole book. And she thinks she's a complete idiot for being afraid but she can NOT control it and everybody in her small hometown knows about her phobia and they tease her mercilessly, except for the hero, who is trapping her mice for her.

So what do you do to create characters?

I've heard of interviewing them.

I've heard of doing excel spreadsheets.

One thing I do know is : writers come at writing in lots and lots of different ways and no one way is right. So I'm not gonna tell you how to do it, rather I'd like to learn how you do it, since it's a sort of slow process for me.

How do you create characters? Let's hear it.