Nobody puts Baby in a drawer!

Let me tell you something about the characters I thought that I had "created":  They seem to have developed their own back stories when I was doing other things, and the next thing I knew, the voice of my little sexy stripper was whispering from a back corner of my mind. "You KNOW that wasn't the whole story!  Let me show you the rest...."

The more I tried to ignore her, the louder the voice became, and soon my handsome trucker was also starting to whisper "You KNOW there's more to tell.  You just need to make the time to write it down."

I'm not sure how this works for other writers, but in my case, if I try to ignore the whispers, the characters start invading my dreams.  First, it was the girl I had named Tanya LaMonte.  Unlike other exotic dancers, she wasn't just in it for the money.....and she wasn't going to let the short, steamy piece I wrote for the Playgirl article be the only thing anyone ever knew of her.

Kyle soon joined her, showing me scenes from his younger life, well before he was a truck driver who just happened to walk into a bar in New York to watch a petite woman pretend to be a tiger.  His sexy, lady killer smile started haunting me, even during the day, and, for the sake of my own sanity, I started writing scenes into notebooks, which joined the magazine in my drawer.  Other notebooks were in my drawer as well, with characters who were still speaking now and then, but none of them talking as loudly as Kyle and my young lady, who had revealed to me that Tanya LaMonte wasn't her real name.  She began life as Teresanna Montesallo, the daughter of a disowned rich girl named Linda and her Asian one-night-stand, whose name she never knew, but who Linda thought looked like Bruce Lee...

I really must say that writing long tales in notebooks or in short spurts on a typewriter is not ideal for me, especially when the characters are only showing you short blips that aren't necessarily presented in order.  I wanted a computer, even though in the days that I was wishing for it, the computers of the time were basically word processors, unlike what we have today.  My first computer was "purchased" through what my mother likes to call "a horse trade":  My husband traded our full sized pickup with a lady who needed to get herself, her two daughters, and their possessions back to her home state.  In trade, she gave us a Datsun pickup and a Tandy HX 1000 computer.

The computer had only 256 mb of memory, so everything I wanted to put into a document had to go on a floppy disc.  Each time one wished to use the computer, the floppy disc had to be brought out, any changes made to the document, and then it had to be saved often just in case the computer suddenly shut down for any reason.  I liked this system better than the notebooks, because as a new scene was suggested by the characters, I could go back and insert it into the document.

Then came the day that the Tandy made an odd, high pitched noise, belched a puff of smoke out of the back, and stopped functioning.

A friend came to the rescue, pulling a Compac computer he had relegated to a closet in his house out of storage and giving it to me for the price of some web searches he needed done.  But I discovered the first lesson about doc files:  They don't necessarily work on a computer that they weren't written on.

Using the notes in my notebook and trying to reconstruct as much as possible out of the things that had only been written in the Tandy files, I slowly put the story back together.  I was about 3/4 of the way through the tale when the Compac computer suddenly stopped working.  I found out about virus protection and the fact that, when you put a disc into a computer that has been infected with a virus that slowly kills it, the discs are corrupted and can't be used elsewhere.

We got another computer, and for this one, we got anti-virus protection installed.  I started again.  By this time, I had a child who was starting to learn about computers, and he showed me how to save my work in several formats so that, no matter which computer I opened the files on, one of them would surely NOT be corrupted, and I would be able to keep the work safe.  I worked on the reconstruction of my story whenever I could, but with two small children and a full time job, there isn't much spare time.

Then I injured my lower back.  I was restricted to "no bending, no lifting, no twisting" for two full months.  What else could I do?  I finished writing my book, edited it, then tried to find a buyer.....

In my next post, we'll discuss publishers, rejection slips, and how good friends can be....