Another Character

My first romance novel was about Wanda, who had been very comfortable with her life before the readers meet her. She was very happily married, with a husband, Hank, who thoroughly supported her efforts to be a full-time author. Wanda wasn’t sure how much money Hank was making with his IT job, but he paid the bills without complaint, and he told her he was saving ‘as much as he could’ in case they ever had any emergencies. They had friends they got together with regularly and life was pleasant in their apartment in Chicago.

The reader meets her shortly after Hank has died in a traffic accident going to work in a blizzard. She is deep into grief, not just because Hank is dead, but because she knows she can’t pay the rent on their apartment on her own. She will have to move.

As she is going through Hank’s papers, wondering what she can get rid of, Wanda comes across a deed for a house in a tiny town in Nebraska. The house was an inheritance from Hank’s grandmother, given to Hank and somebody named Charles. Charles had apparently sold his half to Hank, or gifted it, but whatever, it looked like the house was entirely Hank’s. It seemed strange that Hank had never mentioned the house, but he didn’t talk much about where he grew up. Except happy memories of his childhood.

Wanda contacted a real estate agent in Nebraska who might be able to answer questions. The agent knew the village of Belgrade well and assured her that the house was in decent shape and fully furnished, although it was likely to be dusty, since it had been empty a couple of years.

So Wanda moved, without even seeing the house she was moving to. Or the town where she would be living. Not having rent or a mortgage to make payments on, she was confident she could make ends meet. She took herself from a place where she had been happy to a place where she was an outsider.

The first person she meets in Belgrade—a bartender at one of the two local bars—looks an awful lot like Hank. Besides fixing her some lunch, he makes phone calls on her behalf to get her utilities turned on.

It only takes a few days for Wanda to realize there are 3 men in Belgrade who look like brothers to Hank; Bob (the bartender), Charles (who had briefly owned ½ of the house she now owned), and Lyle, a drunk womanizer. Bob tries to make her feel welcome. Chuck seems too busy to run into her very often. She wants nothing to do with Lyle.

But this is a romance I’ve written, and it takes place in a very small community, where gossip is the normal method of entertainment for the residents. It isn’t long before people are wondering which of the town’s young men will catch Wanda’s eye. Even though Wanda is still grieving and trying to keep her distance from the men, in a town of less than 200 people, that doesn’t seem to be possible.

If I’ve piqued your curiosity, you can get an e-copy of Hank’s Widow at www.smashwords.com/books/view/1090836 Use the coupon code JN73Q when you check out to get it for half off.

And just to put a little icing on the cake, so to speak, you can also get “The Game”, a story that explains the relationship between Hank and his look-alikes. This short story is free at www.smashwords.com/books/view/1091675 .

 

 

About Mac

I want to talk about Mac. Colleen “Mac” MacDowell is a character I’ve been working with sporadically for the past 20 or 30 years. But the last couple of years, I’ve been working pretty intensely on getting her story written. I’ve still got a long way to go. (I’ve got about 9 volumes written in the series, but I’m thinking it will be at least 15 volumes long, maybe more.)

Colleen—

Nobody calls me that. It’s Mac.

(Sigh.) Mac is a girl. Or rather, by the time we meet her, she’s a woman. She was born and raised on a heavy-world planet, namely Gaelund, so she has more strength than it seems she would have. She’s also fairly short, about 5’2”. She has fire-engine red hair, typically only found on Gaelund, and emerald-green eyes.

She was raised the only daughter, with 7 older brothers. Their father instilled in those brothers that they would protect their sister’s ‘innocence’ no matter what the cost. She carries a lot of baggage with her.

I came here with 1 regulation duffel bag!

I meant psychological baggage.

Oh, that.

Anyway, after 4 years at the Fleet Academy, and roughly 5 years bouncing from one tug to another, she somehow finagled a promotion and a transfer to the FSS Fireball from her former captain. She’s the 4^th communications officer on the Fireball, and she’s assigned to the midnight shift.

Tell them about Bugsy.

Stop interrupting. She was happy to get to the Fireball because she knew the senior helmsman, Bugalu, who she considers an adopted brother. Bugalu was two years ahead of her at the Academy and was roommate for her youngest brother, Matthew. It took the 2 of them to keep Mac out of trouble, and to get her trained to get along in Fleet society.

Trained? You mean, like a pet?

You’re interrupting again.

You talk too slow.

I type even slower. Now, let me get along with this. When Mac arrived on the Fireball, along with 2 other beautiful women, the captain wondered which of the 3 would turn out to be trouble. Capt Jane Burke couldn’t tell from her first introduction to them, but they all seemed to have personality quirks that could mean trouble down the road. Still, she sent the ladies off to their assignments and hoped their supervisors could nip any potential problem before it got too big.

Mac had a tumultuous probation period on the Fireball. Between not being able to pass her probational test and arguing with men who want to date her, it seemed Mac was going to be the problem. Meanwhile, the Fireball had some adventures, and somehow, Mac always seemed to be in the middle of those adventures. And then Mac came up with a problem that she couldn’t solve.

You’re going to end it there?

I have to leave some mystery to it. I can’t give away all your secrets.

Now, all of that, I’m thinking, will be in the first 5 volumes. And I’m thinking that Volume 1 will get published on 9/16/2025. That should give me time to get it edited, formatted, a nice cover for it… all those things that go into publishing a book.

That’s over a year away, even on Gaelund.

We’ve been working on your story for decades, what’s another year?

I think that’s what my fiancée thought when he…

Grief

We all know what grief is. I dare say we’ve all experienced it at various times during our lives. Well, I’m dealing with grief of a slightly different kind.

We’ve decided to get rid of my car.

This is my car. I picked it. I bought it. I paid for it. It’s mine, through and through.

It’s a 2007 Pontiac G6, red in color. I bought it about the time I retired, so right about 2010. It has served us well for 13 years.

But…

I don’t feel I can trust it right now. It needs work. A lot of work. And I haven’t got the money. It needs an oil change and maybe some brake work… I don’t remember all the routine maintenance the garage said it needed, but it amounted to about $600. I haven’t found that money in the almost-a-year it’s been sitting in our driveway. I am nervous just driving it 2 miles to the grocery store, for fear it won’t start (or something else goes wrong) so that I can’t get it home.

That isn’t all. There was a bunch of not-so-routine maintenance that they said it also needed. That is a further $500.

And to cap it all off, the AC unit is completely fried. That would be $5,000. Yes, it is that fried.

A year ago, I was thinking it needed some bodywork and a paint job. I was dreaming, of course.

We’ll try to sell it, but if anybody shows any interest in it, we’d have to tell them what a fixer-upper it is right now. It wouldn’t be honest or ethical to keep that to ourselves.

If we can’t sell it, we’ll give it away.

I’ll still have the memories, right? The memories of driving that car back and forth between Omaha and Orlando for several years. Memories of driving it to Kansas City and back to Omaha once a week to take a class on Theatrical Makeup. Those were lonely trips, with just me and my car. And a road Atlas to keep me from getting lost. I think I still remember the route.

There was one trip to Orlando where my hubby flew down to meet me for a vacation (as usual). This time, while we were there, he bought two big tubs of cosplay costumes and a bunch of supplies from Smooth-on. That was a very loaded down car for the trip back to Omaha!

Well, I could keep talking about memories all day. It won’t change anything.

It’s kind of like when your pet dog is on his last legs, won’t eat, can’t even keep water down, and you know it’s time to put him to sleep.

Yeah, it’s kind of like that.

But I’ll miss it.

Interruptions to Your Writing

Most authors have heard that they should ‘write every day’. I don’t always manage to do it, and sometimes when I do write, it isn’t on my current Work in Progress. I might have a blog post coming due, so I write that. Or I work on a piece for an upcoming newsletter. Typically, these ‘also wrote’ items are not very long, and adding them to my Writing Journal doesn’t make my stats look any good. But it is writing, and so I count it.

But sometimes, something comes along that knocks you right out of the idea of writing. It might last a couple of days, a couple months, or even longer. For instance, last year when my right arm was broken in a car accident, I could not write longhand nor by keyboard for at least 6 weeks. Even then, I had to have weeks of physical therapy to get that arm used to doing things again. But I remember plotting out several scenes in my head while my hand was otherwise occupied, and as soon as I could type again, those scenes flowed out of me easily.

Another example: My hubby was facing surgery this past Monday. All surgery has its risks. Neither one of us got anything productive done that Saturday and Sunday. I couldn’t even focus enough to plot upcoming scenes. But on Monday, after his surgery was done, and he was sitting up and eating his supper while looking for something to watch on the hospital tv, I wrote. Even though I didn’t have any scenes thought out, I wrote for 3 hours, putting more than 1,200 words on the page. Not bad.

And now the worst example. At one point during my first marriage, my then-husband criticized my writing. Not in a good way, he meant to be mean. I gave up writing for 10 years. I wasn’t going to let him be mean to me in that way again. Eventually I divorced him and moved on. And after a few more years, I started writing again. It took me time to get back in the groove of writing, but I enjoy doing it, and I miss it when I don’t get to do it.

Just because you have things crop up that intrude on your writing time doesn’t mean that you aren’t a writer. It’s whether or not you pick yourself up and get back to putting words on pages.