During this Scrivener Trial period, every time I log into Scrivener the software program reminds me of how many non-consecutive days I have left in my 30 day free trial. Now it’s 15 days remaining.

What do I have for my 15 days?

1. Not as many overlapping files as in this image, but a few I can easily switch back and forth between.

2. Ten chapters of a novel-in-progress. Very rough chapters. Extremely rough. With lots of comments on the side bar for changes and things to follow through in later chapters.

I’m still not confident this novel will work to the end. But I want to continue, probably on Scrivener. If I do make it, I’d write the second draft on Scrivener because I’ll really need to process all these notes I’ve made in the various files. I see myself transferring it all to WORD for draft 3, mainly because I’m concerned about the transfer process. Will it really work? Also, a friend told me certain things come out strangely in WORD as a result of the transfer. I’ll want to fix those up before I get too far along.

I estimate that I’m a little over  1/4  of the first draft. My goal is to finish it by mid-October–unless I hit a wall.  Already, I’ve cut one character and replaced her with someone I had intended to be off-stage. The first character couldn’t move the story much and she wasn’t a realistic suspect, which felt like a waste of my limited number of new characters.

And I still don’t know whodunit. The story seems to be leaning toward one person, but I’m not convinced. For books one and two, I had a strong feeling at this point about who was guilty.

It’s unsettling, but I expect unsettled is one thing first drafts are largely about.

Nowadays, it seems to be a given that de-cluttering is good and its opposite–hoarding or excessive collecting–is all bad. Last week I wrote about a positive I gained from my mother’s hoard of newspapers. Today I’ll talk about a couple more.

The first comes from a book about hoarding I read as research for my novel, Ten Days in Summer, which involves the death of a hoarder. The book noted that hoarders are more imaginative about stuff than other people. You and I look at a used egg carton and see garbage or recycling; a hoarder sees a hundred potential uses for the dozen sculpted cups.

One of my mother’s hobbies was creating dollhouse miniatures. The craft is all about seeing something new in small, usually discarded objects. One year, she asked me to collect the plastic pieces they put on take-out pizza to keep it from sticking to the box top. I don’t even know the name for this coin-shaped plastic on three little stilts, but she could see they would make perfect café tables for her miniatures.

My second positive is from my experience of the one that got away. When we sold our house in Montreal, we had a garage sale to get rid of stuff that we’d no longer need in our new home in Calgary. Among the outgrown children’s toys and kitchen items we rarely used, I included an umbrella stand that my father had given me some years earlier as a birthday present. The stand was pretty, made of brass-colour material with punched out images. But I only use folding umbrellas, so the stand was never practical and mainly took up space in our entranceway. It would be even more useless in Calgary’s dry climate, where I expected to use my folding umbrellas rarely. At our garage sale, my neighbour bought the umbrella stand for $1.00. My heart tugged as he carried it away.

I was right. There’s no place for my umbrella stand in my Calgary home. The main thing it would do is clutter my house entrance or mudroom.

Yet, over the past twenty years, I’ve thought of this umbrella stand and wish I hadn’t parted with the thing. It was pretty and a present from dad. With a little imagination, I could have found a use for it somewhere in my Calgary home.

So is it worth hanging onto hundreds of pieces of junk so you don’t wind up throwing away the one that you’ll miss some day in the future?

Possibly.

On my publisher’s website today, you can read my blog post about how hoarding inspired my mystery novel. As research for Ten Days in Summer, I watched a couple of episodes of the TV show Hoarders.  It baffles me that people can enjoy such programs. Perhaps, for me, the show is too close to home.

My mother was far from a hoarder, but she had that inclination. I have it too, but less than she did–touch wood, if you can find a spot of wood floor in this picture (it’s not my home, although the old globe and fan look familiar).

For more research, I read a book about hoarding and wasn’t surprised to learn that procrastination is a common hoarder trait. More surprising, to me, was another characteristic: perfectionism. For example, the book noted, a person collects stuff with the intention of recycling it. But rather than just throw the stuff in a bin, as most people would, a hoarder must recycle it perfectly. The more the stuff accumulates, the more difficult it becomes to get it right and the more he puts off taking care of it.

This reminded me of me of my mother’s newspapers, which occupied a large part of her garage. Every day, when she finished reading the paper, she would fold the sections neatly back into place and add the newspaper to her latest pile. When the stack was high enough, she’d tie a cord around it and transfer it to the garage. This was before the days of curbside recycling collection, so her next step would be to decide on the best method of disposal.

After my first travel article was published in  The Montreal Gazette newspaper, I wanted to query the editor with more ideas. I realized it would help to know what locales had already been covered in recent issues and refresh myself on the newspaper’s travel writing style. I didn’t have the Internet back then, so I asked my mother if she had any old Saturday Gazettes around. She directed me to her garage.

There I found every Montreal Gazette newspaper going back to a couple years. I leafed through the neat stacks, no doubt messing up my mother’s work, and picked out all the Saturday issues. For me, they were gold. I took them home and devoured week after week of Gazette travel sections, sent the editor a query and secured my second travel feature. Later, I got a third and fourth.

In case I ever wanted to try for a 5th Gazette article, I kept all the travel sections in a box, which I brought with me from Montreal when I moved to Calgary 21 years ago.  After all, this was a company move and I didn’t have to pay to transport stuff. A  few years later, I queried The Gazette editor again. He said he remembered me fondly and wondered what had happened to me, but turned my idea down. I’ve since heard, sadly, that he died.

The box of travel sections is still in my basement. I’ll probably never read them again and really should throw them out.

And I will, one of these days, when I get around to it.

For years, I’ve listened to fellow writers rave about Scrivener, a word-processing program designed for book-length manuscripts and screenplays. Scrivener, it’s said, helps writers organize notes, concepts, research and documents for easy access and reference. One friend claimed he couldn’t write his novels without it.

Since Scrivener is most useful for first drafts, I told myself I’d consider it the next time I started a book. But when the time came this spring, I was reluctant to make the change from the WORD program I’m used to.  What convinced me to give Scrivener a try was learning that it offers a free 30 day trial. This is 30 USED days, which meant that if I signed up and found I wasn’t writing as often as I’d planned, the free period would only count for the days I logged onto Scrivener. So, if I only scriven twice a week the trial will last 15 weeks. I thought this would work well during this period that I’m easing into a new project while occupied with promoting my recently published novel.

Two weeks ago I downloaded the Scrivener trial program. Once that was done, Scrivener recommended starting with the two hour tutorial, although if I was in a hurry to start writing I could go for the 15 minute Quick session and return later for the details I missed. With my limited techy skills, I figured I needed the full deal and began the tutorial.

The first hour went pretty well. Most of the hands-on applications I did worked and they showed me how cork boards and other features could be useful for my book. Except, I’d only finished the How to Begin section.

An hour later I was about half way through the tutorial and lost in a forest of Scrivener details. It was way too much information for me to learn and apply in one day. I shifted to the Quick session and reached the end in a reasonable amount of time with enough instruction to get started.

My advice for non-tech-minded writers learning Scrivener: go for the Quick session and expect it to take the two hours promised for the full tutorial. Of course, a problem with this is that I don’t know if and when I’ll feel motivated to go back to learn more, except when I want to transfer my whole project to WORD for a later draft. Apparently, Scrivener easily allows you to do this and, in fact, expects it, since the program isn’t designed for final formatting to publication-ready.

This picture on the left shows about all I’m doing now with Scrivener. It would be fun to pin pictures on a corkboard like the one above, but I haven’t tried this yet. I’m nowhere near having an accordion document like the first picture in this post.

I’m probably only using about one hundredth of Scrivener’s capacity. I’m also still getting used to the different look from WORD. In the past, I judged my pacing by number of pages written. I haven’t discovered a page numbering feature in Scrivener, although there’s a word-count at the bottom of the page that I can measure against the counts in other chapters and in my previous books.

I like Scrivener’s feel as the words are typed on the screen and I especially like the side bars where I can write notes about scenes and characters, things to follow-through in later chapters, points to research etc. I’m a little worried about losing the material if I don’t save my Scrivener documents properly, so I’ve been saving them in various places and trust at least one will work.

After four used days, I’m not sold on Scrivener, but plan to continue in order to give it a good chance.

I knew there was something familiar about the name Scrivener. I looked it up and was reminded of a short story my friend studied in her university course in American Literature: Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, published in 1853. In that era, a scrivener was a kind of clerk or copyist.  While the job became obsolete in North America, scriveners are still common in countries with low literacy rates; scriveners read letters for illiterate customers, as well as write letters or fill out forms for a fee.

Perhaps, the developers of Scrivener chose this name for us tech-illiterate writers.

The gist of the Bartleby the Scrivener plot is that people kept asking Bartleby to do his job and then other things. He’d increasingly reply “I’d prefer not.” Eventually he preferred not to eat and died. My friend was drawn to story’s absurdity.

Critics have speculated that Bartleby might represent  Melville’s frustrations with his writing situation. Like Bartleby the scrivener who preferred not to do the sort of writing expected of him Melville found himself preferring to explore new territory in his novel Moby Dick.

I can only hope Scrivener doesn’t prove too foreign and complicated for me that I prefer not use it.

From April 9-12, 1917 the WWI Battle of Vimy Ridge took place. A largely Canadian army captured the German-held escarpment in rural France, today a 2 hour drive north of Paris, and forced a German retreat. This week’s newspaper accounts of the 100 year anniversary of that decisive battle have reminded me of my trip there with my husband and son Matt two years ago, almost to the date.

In the Vimy visitor’s centre we learned that in 1922, France granted Canada perpetual use of a section of land at Vimy Ridge for a memorial and battlefield park featuring wartime tunnels, trenches, craters and unexploded munitions. Large areas are closed for public safety, although we were able to explore some trenches and a section of a tunnel.  Nearby is a soldiers’ grave yard.

The memorial took 11 years to build and was unveiled in 1936 by King Edward VIII, attended by the president of France, Albert Lebrun, and over 50,000 Canadian and French veterans and their families.

Toronto architect and sculptor, Walter Seymour Allward, who designed the memorial, described it as a “sermon against the futility of war.”

The Canadian Corps captured most of Vimy Ridge on April 9th, the first day of the attack. On April 9, 2007, the 90th anniversary of the battle, Queen Elizabeth II rededicated the monument, following a major restoration project, which included general cleaning and the recarving of many inscribed names.

Veterans Affairs Canada maintains the Vimy Memorial and other Canadian war memorial sites in France. Canadian students can get postings at these visitors’ centres, a great educational and travel opportunity for them. I found that talking to the young guides felt like being in a piece of Canada in France.

This Sunday, April 9, 2017,  Canada will honour the fallen soldiers and the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge with a commemoration ceremony at the memorial. Attending dignitaries include Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Governor General David Johnston, President of France Francois Hollande and Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince Harry of the United Kingdom. 

Today, I’m guesting on my publisher’s website with a blog post called How the Calgary Stampede Inspired My Murder Mystery Novel. Books We Love has given me a regular slot on their Author Insider Blog, the 12th of every month. By the time I got there, most of the other days had been claimed. That’s close to 30 authors collectively blogging daily on the BWL site. Those with dates from 29-31 won’t be posting every month and I have a feeling I’ll start to envy them before long. The monthly deadline rolls around quickly.

To get a sense of what others were writing, I subscribed to the BWL insider blog. I’m not a big reader of blogs. Who has the time? But rather than skim through the posts, I found myself reading many of them with interest. Quite a few of the authors write historical fiction, which I have a hankering to write but haven’t attempted yet. Others write personal stories, sometimes involving travel. They tend to be mature writers who have led interesting lives — and often still do.

If you click onto the BWL Insider Blog after March 12th and don’t see my post, check the archives or scroll down the posts dated March 13th, 14th, 15th and later. You might find yourself getting distracted along the way.

In my blog yesterday, I interviewed BWL author Janet Lane-Walters. Today, read about three of Janet’s numerous published books. Janet mentions my new book and the launch for Ten Days in Summer in her blog.

The Aries Libra Connection (Opposites in Love) by Janet Lane-Walters

Jenessa is Aries, a nurse, union advocate and likes a good fight.

Eric is Libra, Director of Nursing, and believes in compromise.

Can these two find a way to uncover the underhanded events at the hospital? They’re on opposite sides but the attraction between them is strong. She’s a widow who fought to save her husband’s life during a code. She feels guilty because the love she and her husband shared had died before his death. He assisted at the code but he feels guilty since he was the one who was responsible for the short staffing the night her husband died.

Now they face falling in love and trying to solve the problems between the nurse’s union and the president of the hospital’s Board who wants a take over of the hospital by his hospital group. Is their connection strong enough to survive?

Bast’s Warrior – An alternate Egypt Story by Janet Lane-Walters

Tira flees a threat to her life and encounters two elderly women who offer her the chance to be sent to an alternate ancient Egypt with no thought of return. She has had a fascination with Egypt and can even read hieroglyphics. Once there she will be given a task. Failure could mean death. Dare she take the chance and can she find the lost symbols of the rule before an enemy finds them?

Kashe, son of the nomarch of Mero is in rebellion. His father desires him to join the priesthood of Aken Re, a foreign god. He feels he belongs to Horu, god of warriors and justice. He decides to leave home, meets Tira and joins her in the search for the symbols of the rule. Will his aid bring good fortune and will their growing love keep them from making a fatal mistake?

Previously published as The Warrior of Bast

“This engaging voyage into an ancient Egypt that includes power-hungry priests and hazardous treasure hunts entertains from page one. Familial intrigue heightens the tension, as does a kidnapping or two. The cast of characters is dynamic and complements the well-conceived plot.” ~ 4 Stars, Susan Mobley, Romantic Times Magazine

Seducing The Blakefield Sisters  by Janet Lane-Walters

Part One
Seducing the Chef – Allie Blakefield, editor of Good Eatin’ wants to do a feature on Five Cuisines a restaurant across the river from NY City. Her father forbids the feature and won’t say why. She’s not one to sit back and be ruled by someone. She borrows a friend’s apartment. While leaning over the balcony she sees a handsome dark haired man doing a Yoga routine. He looks up and she is struck by the Blakefield curse. Love at first sight. The pair start a hot and heavy romantic interlude. She visits the restaurant and is recognized by Greg, the chef’s mother. The woman goes ballistic and the affair is broken. Can Allie learn what’s going on and rescue her love?

Part Two
Seducing the Photographer
Meg is sure she’s made a mistake when she agrees to pick up and Injured Steve, the magazine group’s photographer from the airport. The first moment she saw him, the Blakefield Curse took effect. She fell in love and she was a forever woman. He wasn’t. Spending time with him over the weekend only cements her feelings. She has rules of life and she breaks everyone of them even the new ones she added that weekend.

Steve has been intrigued by Meg and he enjoys her blushes. He’s found ways to raise them but something more is happening here. When she leaves abruptly, he wants to track her down but his broken leg makes pursuit difficult. Now he must find a way to win her over and that takes some time and clever moves

My fellow BWL author, Janet Lane-Walters, invited me to visit her blog today. See Janet’s blog for my answers to the following questions, which I have asked Janet.

Question 1.  Welcome Janet. Tell us readers, what were you in your life before you became a writer? Did this influence your writing?

I think I always was an aspiring writer but what I loved as a teen was doing non-fiction papers. Then I became a nurse, trained at a hospital school in Pittsburgh, Pa. I continued writing non-fiction papers except the  teachers said I put in too much about the families, physical descriptions of them and their homes that weren’t necessary to the papers. That must be where fiction began to creep in. I worked as a nurse, got married and had children. During this time I began to write and have persisted to this day. First published in 1968 with a short story.

2 Are you genre specific or general? Why? I don’t mean genres like romance, mystery, fantasy etc. There are many subgenres of the above.

I am genre general. I’ve tried many forms of romance and also dabbled in cozy romances. The romances fall into medical, paranormal – mostly fantasy but some are alternate world and reincarnation. There may be a bit of mystery thrown in with the romance and sometimes a bit of paranormal creeps in. I also have a fantasy series for Young Adults that contains a lot of suspense. There are a couple of non-fiction books with my name attached. One won an EPIC award as the best of 2003.

3. Did your reading choices have anything to do with your choice of a genre or genres?

Reading has definitely slanted my writing. I read just about anything except horror and preachy inspirationals. Horror creeps me out a lot.

4. What’s your latest release?

My latest release – Two double books with one more to come. Seducing the Blakefield Sisters and Seducing the Blakefield brothers. They’re short, spicy romances.

5. What are you working on now?

Right now, I’m working on the fourth of the Opposites In Love series – The cancer-Capricorn Connection and revising a reincarnation novel Past Betrayals; Past Loves. Also trying to update a lot of books for BWL press. I’ve done a number but there are more to go.

6. Where can we find you?

https://twitter.com/JanetL717

http://janetlanewalters.com/home

https://www.facebook.com/janet.l.walters.3?v=wall&story_fbid=113639528680724

http://bookswelove.net/

On a warm Friday evening this January, I attended a fun event at Loft 112. Twelve visual artists and nine writers (plus three in absentia) sipped drinks, munched snacks and introduced ourselves and our work.

I described my short story “When a Warm Wind Blows Off the Mountains.” Written over ten years ago, the story finally found a home last year at the Loft’s October Long Lunch Reading. While guests feasted on roasted red pepper soup, I talked about this 2900-word tale inspired by my many walks on Calgary’s Glenmore Reservoir pathway. Two characters at low points in their lives set out from different starting points–Rockyview Hospital and Glenmore Landing Shopping Centre. They walk toward each other, meet on a park bench and share a moment. The connection momentarily lifts them from the depths, like a Chinook in Calgary winter. I like to believe it helps give them strength to deal with their troubles ahead.

The Loft published the story in handmade chapbooks for each of the October guests. I thought this was it for “Warm Wind” until Lisa Murphy-Lamb, the Loft inspiration and owner, emailed us monthly contributors to say they would be publishing the twelve stories in an anthology called Long Lunch/Quick Reads. The book would be out by the end of the year.

Prior to this, Lisa had told us they were applying for a Canada Council grant to turn the stories into individual art books. She asked if we were interested. I said, “Sure,” and sent her the required details. In January, Lisa advised us the grant had succeeded.  She organized the Friday evening meeting for the artists and writers involved. At the end of our presentations, Lisa and her co-conspirators announced the artist/writer pairings.

My partner, Sylvia Arthur, is a life-long resident of Forest Lawn, Calgary. She is currently involved in an art project in the  Crowsnest Pass. Sylvia took home a chapbook of “Warm Wind.” When I emailed her the digital version the next day, she said she was already thinking of ideas for turning my story into visual art. I am certainly curious to see what she comes up with. Today, I had a look at Sylvia’s website, which features drawings she has done to poems. I love her work. Her most recent posts are tributes to Leonard Cohen and her late friend. I am confident “Warm Wind” is in terrific hands.

Inside the Mental: Silence, Stigma, Psychiatry, and LSD by Kay Parley continues my blog series on mental health.

At 179 pages and not much larger than my hand, Inside the Mental offers something different — an inside look at mental health treatment in Canada during the 1950s and 60s. In 1948, Kay Parley suffered a breakdown as a student at Lorne Greene’s Academy of Radio Arts in Toronto. She was admitted to the Weyburn Mental Hospital in her home province of Saskatchewan. The Weyburn was home to her in other ways, since her father and grandfather were long-term residents at the hospital. During her stay, Parley only saw them briefly due to the numbers of patients, various wards and her doctor’s concern meeting them could be disturbing.

Parley spent nine months in the Weyburn as a psychiatric patient. Today, she might not have been admitted at all. She wasn’t a threat to others or herself and, by her own account, was reasonably functional. She worked on the hospital newsletter and participated in drama activities. Upon release, she went on to a productive life with breakdowns every six years but no further hospitalizations. Parley was initially diagnosed as schizophrenic, although she might be bipolar or something else. In her view, the label doesn’t matter. She eschews treatment with medication, since her doctors at the Weyburn taught her to work through her problems.

The book’s big surprise for me was the enlightened treatment she received. Far from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, most of the hospital staff showed the patients’ respect and a measure of equality. The Weyburn came across to me as less a prison and more a community for people able to thrive in a protective environment. This was misleading, as in the last chapter Parley states that life there was terrible for the majority of residents, who were deemed untreatable. Yet, her grandfather had an occupation as a hat-maker and she admits long-term patients able to work in the garden or other areas didn’t have it so bad.

During the 1960s, the Weyburn got into experimenting with LSD as a treatment for mental illness. Parley, now a nurse, became a regular sitter for those given LSD in the controlled environment. She says the drugs they used were purer than the later street forms. As often as not, the experimenters were hospital staff who viewed LSD as away to understand their patients. Parley isn’t sure acid trips mimic schizophrenia, as LSD hallucinations tend to be more visual than auditory, but she feels LSD opened the staff’s minds to other consciousness. She believes these treatments worked especially well for alcoholics and might still be useful for treating addictions.

Inside the Mental challenges an assumption that medical treatment always represents progress. While reading this book, I found myself constantly wondering if today’s mental health treatment is better or worse than it was 60 years ago. It’s sad to realize I can’t answer that question. For sure Parley’s book challenges us to not assume we’re on an improved track and to look at other possibilities.