Tag: Destinee Faith Miller

Destinee Faith Miller Mystery, Friends of Mine, Lancient History

Sneak Peek. Literally.

the outside lane

I told you earlier that Destinee and I are not much alike.  However, some of my life experiences are just too much fun not to pass along to her.  Leslieann, Karen, Renae, and most unfortunately, Leslieann’s ex-husband can tell you the version of this story that happened to me.  But here’s how it played out for our favorite Beauty Queen:

I knocked at the restroom door, and no one answered, so I opened it a hair and shimmied in.  No need to expose the whole room to the toilet, so perfectly framed by the doorway.  Shutting it behind me, I carried my clutch over to the sink and took out my lip gloss.  I find that when I am not feeling myself, just having a moment in front of a mirror with a good lip gloss can turn my mood completely around.

I don’t know why that is.  I suppose it might be because I feel fully in control of my makeup.  I know I can paint myself up to look like anything I want, and when I feel out of control in every other arena, I find comfort in my travel kit.

For just a minute or two, I let myself get lost in following the lines of my lips with the fuzzy applicator.  My heart rate calming as I watched them fill out and plump up with the cayenne in the gloss I was using.  When I felt a little better, I put everything back into my bag and thought I should probably spend the extra few seconds it would take to avail myself of the facilities.  I had been drinking water all day, and with the schedule I keep, it’s not always easy to take a break.

I took the two steps up to the toilet and laid my clutch down on the back of it, then did as one does in such a situation.  I was midway to full relief when a motion caught my eye and I realized the doorknob was jiggling.  “Occupied,” I called out, but the knob kept turning.

I just knew it would stop because I was sure I had locked it, but to my horror, I watched it continue to turn and then the door swung wide open.  In a heartbeat, I found myself looking out over Bobbie’s wedding reception from a toilet on a platform about four feet off the ground, and then realized that Bobbie’s wedding reception was looking straight on at me.  Do you know what is eye level to the average bear when someone is sitting on a toilet that is built up on a platform about four feet off the ground?

There I was, on the proverbial throne with Victoria’s Secret down around my ankles, and my own secret flashing the groom himself.  I squealed and slammed my knees together so hard and so fast, I bruised them both, calling, “Hey!  Shut the door!”

books, Destinee Faith Miller Mystery, writing

Slap Fight

the outside lane

Another quick note about writing, since that’s what I’m spending all my free time on right now.  One of the hardest things, for me, is staying in character.  It is very easy for me to conceive of ideas, plot points, twists and turns, but staying in character is difficult.  When you are writing in first person, how your character acts and reacts is what drives your plot.  Getting out of character can ruin a scene.

Destinee is an optimist.  She is a bright girl with a low-level education, whose vocabulary and speech patterns are a mix of small town Alabama and national pageant interview training.  She hasn’t read many of the Classics, but she is very well read when it comes to current events, and she would surprise you with her knowledge of geography and politics.  She absolutely cannot work higher math, but she is a savvy business woman and keeps her own accounting.  She is incredibly confident in the way of professional athletes, in that she can strike out in a major way, then get up again swinging without losing her sense of value or worrying that she’s not good at her game.  She looks at the world through the eye of a coach, but she is not critical until it comes to mean people.  And, she is completely independent, but wants to be close to home.  She has chosen to live next door to her family because she loves them, not because she’s afraid to be without them.

Destinee is very different from me.  I am cautiously optimistic, at best.  I am well educated, but I have not spent nearly enough time on anything of real importance.  I am not an entrepreneur.  I do not have the same kind of confidence.  I am not fearless.  I prefer bagels to bikinis.

When writing in first person for Destinee, it is easy to project my own ways onto her.  I spent a couple of hours writing a scene, but it just wasn’t feeling right.  I finished it out, slept on it, and woke up realizing the problem was that Destinee wasn’t acting like herself.  She was acting like me.

Where Destinee should have taken a few seconds to assess her situation, then taken full control of it (because she’s Destinee Faith Miller, ya’ll), she had assessed the situation and allowed it to consume her, never acting, only reacting.

If you slap me, I will gape at you and wonder why you hit me, and I will worry that if I slap you back, you’ll slap me again and it will hurt worse, and I will try to figure out how to get away from you without any more handprints on my face.

If you slap Destinee, she’ll slap you back harder and tear out a hank of your hair for good measure.

So, if I write into my personal comfort zone, the scene veers off in the wrong direction, changing the course of the entire novel–and that’s why I needed to rewrite so much.

 

books, Cozy Cat Press, Destinee Faith Miller Mystery, Lane is Writing

Things You Know

the outside lane

The thing about writing is that you never really know what you know, or what you don’t know until you start trying to put it down on paper.  I think the funniest thing is finding out what you do know.  What bits and pieces of information have settled into the grooves of your brain, collecting dust for years until you suddenly you find yourself recollecting it in the heat of the writing moment.  I was having some of those moments last night.

I tore up nearly 20 pages of work to revamp my opening last night, only to realize it isn’t my opening at all.  It’s somewhere closer to the middle.  I had to rewrite a lot of Telling with some Showing.  I can say, “Bobbie’s mother-in-law thought she dressed poorly,” and that tells you something.  Or, I can say, “Margaret Clayton eyed Bobbie’s get-up with an expression of fearful disgust that I only ever saw when my mother was cleaning out Rusty’s pockets before doing laundry. And even then, there was some fondness in her eyes.  Mrs. Clayton?  I had a feeling Bobbie could trade in her Target for Talbot’s and the only softening in her future mother-in-law’s gaze would be for the brand tag sewn into her shirt back.”  That shows you a lot of things.

If I just tell you something, you have to trust my word and that’s that.  But if I show you the picture of something, you are allowed to infer and draw your own conclusions.  If I do it properly, you enjoy it more.  If I do it properly, I’ve given you a wider view of the character’s world.  If I don’t do it properly, you just get a lot of strawberry scented elegance, and I do try to avoid that.

And that’s why I had to tear up 20 pages.  I spent 20 pages telling you things I should have shown you.  That’s good, though.  I mean, you need to know just why Mushroom and Cockatoo made Bobbie cry, and how that came to be, or else when it comes time to start pointing fingers at murderers, you aren’t going to care.

 

books, Counting Blessings, Cozy Cat Press, Destinee Faith Miller Mystery

The Boston Book Festival and Me. Mostly Me.

the outside lane

Meet me at the Boston Book Festival on October 19, 2013. Look for her and TIARA TROUBLE at the Cozy Cat Press booth.
Meet me at the Boston Book Festival on October 19, 2013. Look for her and TIARA TROUBLE at the Cozy Cat Press booth.

 

I am very excited to announce that TIARA TROUBLE and I will be at the Boston Book Festival at Copley Square in Boston, Massachusetts on October 19, 2013.

I’ve never been to Boston, so I am doubly excited to visit.  And triple-y excited to get to see Boston in October!  Trees!  Colors!  Harbors that taste like tea!

Most, I am excited to start promoting TIARA TROUBLE.  I can’t wait for you to get your hands on a copy, and let me know what you think of Destinee and her Dolls, Tishelle and her Divas, and the mystery murderer and his/her motives.

For information on attending the festival, visit the website at www.bostonbookfest.org.

A Day in the Life, Beauty, Inside Lane, The Book, Tiara Trouble

Destinee’s Destiny–Never Was Mine

the outside lane

I’ve had two parents enjoying (ha!) brief hospital stays this week, but am happy to report that all parties are home and accounted for, neither needing any radical surgeries or treatments.  Still kicking–as they should be.  I got an email of clear health from the one who was leaving the hospital (in another state), while sitting in the emergency room with the other.  My mother said to me, the next day, “I felt so sorry for you, sitting up here with me.”  I said, “I’d have felt a lot sorrier for me if I didn’t have you to sit with.”  She considered and nodded, then said, “You win that one.”

Working to help my mom get some things in order, I’ve come across some old pictures.  Notably, I came across a stack of photos from my Little Miss Phenix City days.  They run the gamut from hilariously confused to hilariously stoic.  It appears that I was not the smilingest of little pageant queens.

To wit:

lmpc

This is the night after I had been crowned.  I walked the runway at some point before the crowning of Miss Phenix City.  I had been completely confused and bewildered by winning, and was even more confused and bewildered by having something else to do the next night.  In my mind, I won, I was finished, and that was that.  Sweet tiara!  Now, let’s go dance to the music coming out of the transistor radio shaped like a can of RC Cola that I won.  (It didn’t work well, btw.  Mostly static.)

Given that I had really not understood the whole process, I certainly didn’t understand why people were cheering for me.  I knew why my family was happy, but I didn’t know any of those other people, and couldn’t figure out why they would care.  Also, it took a really long time to get my hair to do that, and it was not done without tears.  I did not think anything in the world could be worth all that time getting my hair done.

My family, especially my mother, had been very clear with me that winning the pageant wasn’t a big deal.  If I won, that would be a fantastic honor, but if I didn’t, that was fine.  I was still Lane, and no tiara could make me any better than I already was.

I’ve written before that my school entered me in the pageant.  I had no idea I was up for consideration until the school called my mother and told her to get me ready to compete.  I think she had a week?  So, we ran down to the Kiddie Shoppe in Columbus, GA and she bought me two dresses that were on the sale rack.  My favorite was the one pictured above–it was a chick yellow, dotted Swiss, with a crisp white pinafore.  I wore a floor length, white cotton sundress, with horizontal seams for the pageant.  It had pockets.  I loved the pockets.

I love how confused I am. Like I'm wondering what in the world I am doing holding a bouquet.

I love how confused I am. Like I’m wondering what in the world I am doing holding a bouquet.

What I did not love was having to have my hair styled on a daily basis.  I did not love having to stay clean.  I did not love being kept out of the yard for a week.  I was a play-in-the-dirt, rip my tights rolling on the ground, black-edged fingernails kind of girl.

I do remember being excited and happy about my win, but I also remember being quickly disenchanted.  I didn’t see that I had done anything special to win, so I wasn’t sure what the fuss was.  All I did was walk up and down, and answer a few questions.  Nobody had asked me to sing, or to tell stories, or show them stuff I could do…what was the big deal about me just walking around?  (I didn’t understand that 90% of the competition had to do with what the judges saw when they took the little contestants out to lunch, out to a playground, and what they saw when they did little group interviews with us.)

Nothing about me had changed, but suddenly I was getting attention from people who hadn’t bothered with me before, and even at 6 years old I recognized it had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with the tiara.  My parents had done a good job making me believe the tiara didn’t make a bit of difference, so I was suspect of people who seemed to think it did.  And there was that one rotten boy, who threatened to break into my house and steal it.

When I started writing Destinee, I was trying to imagine what it would be like for a little girl whose world was founded on pageants.  I was wondering what that little girl would grow up to be–that little girl whose mother had made her looks what mattered.  That little girl whose family put value on her face, her hair, her fingernails, and not her heart, her mind, and her behavior.

But I wanted Destinee to have a happy family.  They might not share my values and they might not have expected much from their daughter, but they love each other, and they stick together.

Tell you what, Destinee wouldn’t be looking like a deer in headlights on a runway. She’d look like she belonged there.