Title Change

I like this one better. Oh, and thanks to LibertyLamprey for (unknowingly) suggesting the change in the knife blade.

I'm really enjoying the reading that's acquainting me with the suspense/thriller genre. I'm also reading up on Mobile, Alabama, where most of the story takes place. Reacquainting myself with the Battle of Mobile Bay ("Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" ~Damnyankee Admiral David Farragut), the Battle of Blakeley, and other area history and place of interest is also enjoyable.

Plotting continues; all the major and secondary characters have names, most have locations, and now I'm starting on their jobs/professions. Most of this is background noise, not really pertinent to the plot, and a lot of it probably won't even get mentioned in the story. But if you're a plotter you gotta know stuff like this. Oh, sure, you gotta know it if you're a pantser, too. But I think one of the major differences between plotters and pantsers is that plotters have to know this stuff up front, before actually writing the story. Pantsers don't even think about it until they reach a point in the storywriting where it's needed.

The first major target of Freedom Fair (the anti-Confederate Group, or, more accurately, the Confederate Erasure Group) will be Admiral Raphael Semmes. They want his statue on Church Street removed. They want the CSS Alabama artifacts removed from the City of Mobile's museum. They want his home on Government Street (privately owned by the First Baptist Church) closed to the public. They want Semmes, Alabama to change its name, as well as the Admiral Semmes Hotel.  They want all reminders of him erased.  They think if they can topple this remarkable fellow and genuine hero, all the rest will tumble like dominoes.... 

This is what the Dunbars are standing up to, and the cultural war of words that results is an ongoing drama played out in the Confederate heritage blogosphere -- and elsewhere.

More Characters Coming Together

Meet Seth Becker, psychopath, of Weidner, Indiana... He's rather Adam Lanza-like, wouldn't you say?

 

And an anonymous anti-Confederate blogger who goes by the handle Hardtack....

And pro-Confederate blogger Vic Sellers (and his lovely wife, Lauren)....

 

Not sure yet where Vic and Lauren hail from... perhaps Arkansas or Texas

Story structure and plot are coming together, too, thanks to some great articles on structure and writing thrillers and suspense (not my usual genre).

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Images: 123RF, Dreamstime and FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Meet the Protagonists...

 ... of the novella Going South...

Knox Dunbar and his wife, Sydney of Mobile, Alabama

The "Rock Stars" of Confederate Heritage

I always find images (models, usually stock models) to use during the writing of my stories, to prevent "character drift." (Back in the '80s, pre-Internet, I used to cut them out of catalogs and magazines). This model is very good for Knox, though I wish he were in more casual clothing.

All of the major characters have images, and preliminary backgrounds and backstories.

I have completed a 560-word synopsis, or overview, that will guide me through the early part of the writing.

Sometimes, the models I choose for the writing stage are used in promotions and video trailers when the story is finished. But it's a little early to be thinking about that for Going South....

Did I mention that this story is gonna be fun to write? It already IS fun!

UPDATE   UPDATE   UPDATE   UPDATE   UPDATE

Did you know it is a COPYRIGHT VIOLATION to cut pictures out of catalogs and magazines? So suggests one of Simpson's peanut gallery floggerettes.

Here is a link to the U.S. Code, Title Seventeen (Copyrights). I don't have time to wade through the chapters, sections and paragraphs, but any folks of leisure out there might skim it looking for the lowdown on cutting pictures out of magazines and catalogs (smirk).

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17

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Image composited from photos by 123RF images and C. Ward

Going South -- First Ideas

Goaded by content on the Internet, a deranged northern youth travels to Alabama to "rid the world of some Neo-Confederates." He targets a husband and wife in Mobile, Alabama, who have gained kudos from the Southern heritage community for their work in standing up for Confederate history and heritage.

(Backstory: Mobile has been selected as a target for "Confederate cleansing" by a new leftist, "anti-racist" group. The ideological battle -- and the war of words -- between this group, and the husband/wife team and their supporters, has attracted considerable attention on the social nets and the blogosphere, and is coming to the attention of the news media.)

The husband/wife team (and their children) are vilified, lied about, harassed, and persecuted by critics -- mostly online, although there have been some disturbing offline incidents. They do not publicize the incidents, but a few of their friends know, and are worried about them.

Did I mention this is gonna be fuh-huh-hunnnn to write?

This One's Gonna Be Fun to Write

Will be a short story or novelette, probably.

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Cover mock-up comp image copyright by 123RF Images.

An insight into show, don't tell.

Writers are always learning, I guess.  Back in 2006 or so, when I started writing fiction again (the last time had been in the 1980s) I found all kinds of bewildering new rules online. One of the worst was show, don't tell. Another one was GMC. A third was ending every chapter, even every scene with some kind of hook...

I muddled along and got stuff written and continued trying to educate myself about these rules, but eventually gave up. That might account for leaving a number of WIPs on the shelf, un-worked on, for months on end.

Recently I forced myself to do some plotting on the top three stories I'd like to get written. I went back and read what I had got done so far. In Dumb Jock, I came across this scene opener that occurs a good way into the story. It's blatant telling:

Alex stepped out of the club house into a dimly lit, utilitarian corridor with cinderblock walls concrete floor that led to the stadium exit. He was accompanied by two of his teammates -- Joe, a tall, rangy third-baseman, and Bill, center-fielder, who were keeping up an understated banter about each other's performance during the game, which the Mullets had one, barely, 5 to 4. Everybody was feeling good, as they usually did after a victory.

Groan.

It came to me immediately that this was telling and that I needed to show it. (Why didn't that occur to me when I originally wrote it?).  So I tossed around and figured these guys engaging in some after-game baseball banter could start the showing.  Something about game performance, maybe. So I sat there staring at the screen, because I don't know what baseball players would say in that scenario. I googled "baseball banter"  but didn't find out much. So then I decided they'd talk about personal stuff rather than baseball stuff. Maybe food. Maybe going to get something to eat, a post-game meal, maybe. Men are always thinking about food, right?

This was an opportunity to do some characterization, as well. And it came to me that I didn't know these characters, not even Alex.

It further came to me that I knew the characters in my published stories intimately -- Troy and Patty, the three sweet Southern boys, even secondary characters and villains. Knew them all, and knew all about them. Knew things about them even they didn't know.

I thought back over the writing of those stories, and realized that the way I got to know them was by writing about them. By writing the stories. Yes, I did some advance character profiling, but they came to life -- their personalities, quirks, mispronounciations, outlooks, sense of humor, etc., emerged -- with the writing of the story....

Well, duh.

I've probably known this, on some level, in the past, but lost it.

So I will have the three players banter about food, and later, as their personalities solidify with the writing of the story, I can go back and change the dialog to fit them better, if need be...

Show, don't tell. For me, it's tied to the characters' personalities.

The Progressives of Yancy County, Georgia

Sweet Southern Boys 

Legacy of Fortitude - Book Two

by Connie Chastain

Excerpt

In the fluorescent brightness of the Howe Street Cafe, Maureen stirred her coffee and purposely averted her eyes from the pair seated across from her. For a fleeting moment, she feared she would burst out laughing if she looked at them again. Thank goodness, sheer force of will dissipated the impulse and she glanced up.

 Her booth companions looked even more bizarre than they had at the One Community meeting earlier, when they had invited her for coffee to become better acquainted.

In her mid-fifties, Clara Lawson was barrel-shaped and red-faced but her most striking feature was her short, impossibly black hair, so black it thoroughly absorbed the light and gave off not a hint of reflection or highlight, not even the light from the neon sign glowing through the plate glass window that bathed their booth in an aura of pink.

Clara was progressivism's propagandist in Yancey County. She wrote columns for various free tabloids in south Georgia both promoting progressive viewpoints and pooh-poohing as hysteria the arguments of critics. Owner and publisher of The Verona Progressive, she owned the building, once a convenience store, that housed the newspaper offices and donated space for One Community.

Next to her sat Nora Weir. Her tall, thin frame worked with her pale eyes and ash blond hair to project a delicate, almost colorless appearance, distinctly at odds with her implacable personality. Earlier, during the meeting, by way of introduction, she had told Maureen, "For the past three years, I've been the head of a severely needed anti-racist initiative in Yancey county."

Now, stirring her coffee heavily laden with cream and sugar, Nora expanded.

"When I first arrived in Verona, I was astounded. It was like this place never knew there was a civil rights movement twenty, thirty years ago, never heard of Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior, or Brown versus the Board of Education, never heard of Selma or Freedom Summer or all the other civil rights efforts--or the massive and bloody resistance from Southern whites.”

Clara nodded. "Ditto feminism, despite a very savvy and active group at the university that's been working hard on women's issues almost twenty years. Bianca can tell you more at our next meeting. She's gone to a women's issues conference in Saint Louis this week."

"I'll be glad when I can meet her," Maureen said. "I'll admit, I was a bit disappointed tonight by the attendance. I don't know why, but I was expecting more than six or seven people, even in such a small town."

Clara looked pensive a moment. "You might as well be told about this now. We're ... sort of ... rebuilding. One Community was founded two and a half years ago by Ruth Adamsky from the Twin Cities in Minnesota. She is sponsored by several people in Minneapolis, who sent her South to organize progressive groups. She's a genius at initial organization, but not at all interested in administration. Eight months after One Community was launched, it was going great -- member organizations were networking, helping each other, keeping each other informed, and welcoming a couple of newly founded groups. Happy with that success, Ruth relocated to start the same process in Dothan, Alabama."

Nora appeared to tune out most of what Clara said -- she'd probably heard it all before -- and her eyes glanced at the other patrons of the cafe. The faint look of disdain on her pale countenance intrigued Maureen, and she had to force her attention back to Clara's narrative.

"Roughly a year after One Community started, Jessica Grant, the director of the Women's Assistance Group at the time, helped a woman in a local business with a sexual harassment complaint. Jessica aggressively pursued this guy, and it got out of hand. What was supposed to be a confidential, in-house investigation and resolution was broadcast all over town. The man's reputation was ruined, at least temporarily, and his family harassed, including his elementary school children."

Faint lines appeared between her brows and she shook her head in regret.

"Turned out that he had ironclad proof not only of his innocence, but that the woman accusing him had hit on him. Tried to seduce him in his office after work. Rumor had it that she was somewhat emotionally unstable, a factor Jessica ignored.”

Clara paused for a sip of coffee, interrupting an absorbing narrative, and Maureen resisted the urge to snap, Well? What happened?

“She was eager to spotlight a sexual harassment case because it really was a big problem in corporate Verona. Still is. But some people thought Jessica went too far. The WAG lost some members over that, and it even set One Community back quite a bit. We're starting to recover now, though. Bianca's done a great job rebuilding WAG."

Nora examined the wadded paper napkin she'd been toying with and glanced to her companions. "If he didn't do it to that girl, he did it to some other one. Probably more than one."

Somewhat taken aback by Nora's demeanor -- there was something a little creepy about her -- Maureen suppressed the thought that Nora would never have to worry about being sexually harassed.

"Jessica said he was a typical privileged Southern white man," Nora continued, her pale eyes fastened on Maureen. "We're not like these Southerners, you know. Clara here's from Baltimore, I'm from Binghamton, New York and you're from -- Chicago, you said?"

"Yes. My family's been there generations."

Nora nodded. "These hicks and rednecks," she said, echoing Maureen's son, "they're not like regular people. They've been racists and haters so long, I think it altered their DNA. I honestly do. They can't recognize their own evil and don't even know what they are." Nora paused and lifted a corner of her mouth in a lopsided grin. "Excuse me, I need to go to the women's room."

She threaded her way through the tables in the dining room to the back of the building.

"Our Nora," Clara gave an embarrassed laugh. "She's a bit odd in her thinking, but she's as dedicated to eradicating racism as anybody you'd care to meet.”

She pulled a small notepad and pen from her purse, jotted a note, and handed it to Maureen. “This is Maxine Teasley's number. She'll be back in town day after tomorrow. She can help you get a volunteer position on the city events committee. That's where you've got to start if you want to tackle the Christmas Festival.”

“All right. Thanks.” Maureen folded the slip of paper. dropped it in her purse and felt the slight stirring of challenge warm her veins, anticipating the satisfaction of bringing cultural enlightenment to this benighted religious backwater....