Month: March 2017

Writing Tip

time-2132452_1280Daylight Saving Time

When I wrote about March as setting for stories, I forgot that Daylight Saving Time (yes, “saving” doesn’t have an “s”) occurs in this month.

The most memorable thing to me about the time change is to make sure I get to church on time the next day.  When my kids were babies and toddlers, it also meant a lot of work as I got them back on their schedules.

I have often wondered if I could use the time change as a key component in a mystery. One author did.  A short story from 1933, “No Man’s Hour”, written by Laurence Kirk and collected in The Third Omnibus of Crime, has a murderer trying to use the time change as an alibi but gets the times mixed up and is caught.

Before 2006, Indiana did not observe Daylight Saving Time.  Around 2000, my husband lived in Indiana and worked in Michigan.   Both were in the Eastern Time Zone but Daylight Saving Time meant an hour’s difference when my husband crossed the state line.  At that time,  Gary, Indiana, set its time by Chicago, which is in the Central Time Zone.  In the summer Gary would be two hours ahead of the rest of Indiana.  I know there’s an alibi in this mess somewhere but I’ll need a spreadsheet to figure it out.

For writers of speculative fiction, I think the time change is a possible trove of ideas.  What if people could bank the hour that is skipped in the spring, instead of using it in the fall?  A person could withdraw an hour or more whenever he needed it.  Robbers could specialize in breaking into time banks and selling hours on the black market.

Or what if during the skipped hour, people could time travel, anywhere they want but they would have to get back to their “home” time before the hour was up or be trapped for a year in that other time?  Historians would be out of jobs because all the time traveling would keep changing history.

What are your ideas for using Daylight Saving Time as a story component?

 

 

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West Virginia Wednesdays

img_20160817_0004Stil Talkin’ Like a Mountaineer

Here are a few more quirks of the West Virginia dialect which I learned from relatives.  Like I said last week, these may be found in more areas than just West Virginia.  And not all West Virginians may talk this way.  West Virginia is a crossroads.  Not North, or South, or West, or East, the state contains a little bit of all those regions.

“push” and “bush” are pronounced “poosh” and “boosh”

“dish” and “fish” are pronounced “deesh” and “feesh”

“wash” and “gosh” are pronounced “warsh” and “garsh”

Words ending in “ow”, making an long “o” sound, are pronounced “er”.  For example, “follow”, “hollow”, and “yellow” are pronounced “feller”, “holler”, and “yeller”.

I find myself using “be” and a verb ending in “ing” when a present tense verb works just as well.  For example, if my kids are doing something they shouldn’t, I don’t say, “You can’t do that!”  I say, “You can’t be doing that!”

When writing my novel, I had a hard time choosing between whether my characters would use “y’all” or “y’uns” for the plural form of “you”.  My grandparents used “y’uns” and they were from the northern part of the state.  I have friends who lived around Charleston and they use “y’all”.  My setting is north and east of Charleston but south of my grandparents’s hometown.

In the end, I decided to use “y’uns”.  When anyone reads “y’all”, the reader knows the setting is the American South.  Since West Virginia and the Appalachian Mountains are different from the South, I thought “y’uns” would signal that difference and my characters’ rural background.

 

 

 

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Writing Tip

scooby-doo-2063042_1280Sheer Luck Holmes

I love parodies.  And I love the Sherlock Holmes stories, so reading a Sherlock Holmes parody is a lot of fun.  But only if the parody is good-natured.  If I read a story and sense the author’s aim is to be mean-spirited, then all the fun drains out of the parody.

Below are some of my favorite Sherlock Holmes parodies.  All of them can be found in The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories edited by Otto Penzler, who gives an introduction to each story.  Enjoy!

“The Adventure of the Two Collaborators” and “The Late Sherlock Holmes” by James M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan.

In the first story, Holmes’s deductions so amaze Watson that he leaps to the ceiling, noting  that the ceiling “is much dented”.

“From a Detective’s Notebook” by P.G. Wodehouse.  I love the beginning of this story.

” A private investigator asks a group of men, ‘I wonder . . . if it would interest you chaps to hear the story of what I always look upon as the greatest triumph of my career?’

We said No, it wouldn’t, and he began.”

“Detective Stories Gone Wrong: the Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs” by Robert Barr

This one makes me laugh because Kombs find the weapon used in the crime using ridiculous deductions.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had no reverence for his creation and wrote two parodies of his own: “How Watson Learned the Trick” and “The Field Bazaar”

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Scripture Saturdays

in-640517_1280Why Shouldn’t We Worry

Two weeks ago I related how I gave up worry for Lent last year and am doing it again this year.  But why should Christians give up worry?  I use Matthew 6:25-34 as my reason.

“Therefore, I tell you do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.  Is not life more important than food, and the body more imprant than clothes?  Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not much more valuable than they?  Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?”     Matthew 6:25-27 NIV

AND

“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.  Each day has enough troubles of its own”.           Matthew 6:34 NIV

So we have it from the lips of Jesus:  DO NOT WORRY.

But worrying is such a huge part of my life – I am so accustomed to it – when I don’t do it, I feel like something is wrong.  I didn’t realize until this past week I needed to replace worrying with something positive.  Nature abhors a vaccuum, and I believe our minds and souls do too.

In Matthew 12:43-45, Jesus describes a demon being driven from a man.  When he comes back to the man, the demon finds him empty and invites seven more demons into the man.  Verse 45 states, “And the final condition of the man is worse than the first.” 

I think we can substitute “bad habit” for “demon”.  When we get rid of a bad habit, we need to put something positive in its place or we will got back to the bad habit or develop worse ones.

I recently read that the opposite of worry is hope.  I’ll talk about hope next week.

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Writing Tip

sherlock-holmes-book-1959204_1280What I Learned From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I learned how important it is to create memorable characters.  Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were so believable that during Doyle’s lifetime, some readers  thought they were real people.  Now they have moved into immortality.

You couldn’t have the one without the other.  If you don’t believe me, read the two stories Holmes tells, “The Blanched Soldier” and “The Lion’s Mane”.  While they are interesting, they aren’t like the others when the two are working together.   Watson’s admiration and friendship make Holmes human.basil-rathbone-402601_1280

Doyle also created strong secondary characters.  He may have invented the idea of an arch-nemesis, a villain who shares some abilities as the hero but uses them for evil purposes.  Professor Moriarty has inspired a a slew of imitators.

Irene Adler is another fascinating character.  The one woman to foil Holmes and inspire his admiration, she appears in only one short story, “A Scandal in Bohemia”.  We learn so many interesting tidbits about her history and character that she has fanned the flames of authors’ imaginations for a century.  My favorite is a short story entitled “A Scandal in Winter” by Gillian Linscott and can be in Holmes for the Holidays and The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries.

When I create characters, I want them to come alive to my readers and dropping hints about their hobbies or opinions or dreams, as Doyle did, can aid that effort.  With main characters, I have time to scatter in additional facts about their lives even though those facts are not critical to the plot.  But I must not overload my story with unnecessary details.

Secondary characters are more difficult.  I want to make them memorable but have little space to do it.  I sometimes give them back stories, even though these stories won’t appear in print, so I have a better handle on how the character should act.  Devising revealing traits, such as the character’s appearance, expressions, or speech pattern, can give him or her distinction.pipe-407547_1280

In my novel, the owner of a notoriously wild bar is an important character in the last third of the book, but I didn’t want to bog down my narrative with long descriptions and backstory.  So I tried to convey the character’s personality through dialogue and actions.  For example, I have him say “You guys” instead of “y’uns” which is what everyone else in the county uses.  That is a hint to the reader that the bar owner is not a local.

I have recently read to my kids adaptations of the Holmes stories for children.  They can’t get enough of them.  One more generation is becoming enthralled in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

 

 

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