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The Cabin

Monday, January 5th, 2009

One of the questions I get asked with some frequency is whether or not I’ve used the places I’ve traveled to in any of my stories. The answer is yes. The Raft Cities were based on my experiences at Samarai Island which is part of Papua New Guinea and I’ve used Los Angeles a couple of times, but I only needed a real general kind of memory of those places. For the Work In Progress (WIP) I’m using a very specific location. The cabin.

Usually, if a Minnesotan says “the cabin,” they’re talking about northern Wisconsin or western Minnesota, but I’m talking about a cabin in Southern Wisconsin. Nearly in Illinois, as a matter of fact. It’s a place I’ve only been to maybe a dozen times in my life, but it’s perfect for the WIP because it’s proximity to Chicago is going to cause my heroine some concern. :-) The problem is that while my memory is quite good, it’s not good enough to remember the types of small details I need to insert into the book.

My parents have pictures. Somewhere. :-) I’ve asked them a few times now to look for them and today they finally turned up a few. All but one shot is taken outside. That isn’t a huge help since the pictures are from September and the story is taking place in March. I need interior shots and lots of them. The search–I hope–will continue.

The shots I have aren’t digital and the idea of scanning them in isn’t exciting me. I’m thinking about taking pictures of the pictures with my digital camera to get them on my computer. The thing that’s really amazing me right now is how quickly I’ve become used to all the shots being digital. I found a couple of disks in my basement last weekend and they were floppies! I’m like, OMG, I better hurry up and get them onto CD because if my laptop dies that has the floppy drive, I’m done. Technology. It’s amazing. :-)

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It’s All In the Plan

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

I’ve talked before about how I need pictures of my heroine and hero before I get too deep into a book. I’ve also talked about how I’ve started printing out calendar pages and keeping track of what chapters take place on which days. It’s a huge help for staying straight on the time frame. But I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned my use of home plans.

I know there are authors who sketch out their characters’ homes and even authors who buy computer programs to sketch out homes, but I never saw the point in that. I have a site bookmarked that has thousands of house plans available, and when I start a new book, I go looking for the right house. Sometimes it’s not an easy search. Logan’s home in Edge of Dawn took a good deal of searching, but when I found the right one, it was beautiful. Not only did I have the plans, but there were also pictures of the house built and furnished. Totally not Logan’s style at all, but yet totally right for the book. As it turned out, Logan didn’t care what his house looked like inside, he just loved the property and the garage.

Last night, I went looking for Kel’s house. Kel is the hero in the Work In Progress (WIP). And I managed to find his home on the first try. (I did look at a few more, just to make sure I was right, but that first house was it.) Unlike his brother, Kel’s house is Kel. It’s smaller than Logan’s place, homey, and has a lot of outdoor space. Kel doesn’t like the walls closing in on him. No pictures of the place decorated, but knowing Kel, I’m sure it’s done simply and comfortably. That’s a guess, though.

Very little of the story takes place in Kel’s home. I think they’re there for about one scene and then it’s on to the next location, but even if the h/h don’t return to the house at the end of the book (I don’t know if they will or not), I still like to know. The house says a lot about the person and the insight into Kel’s character was interesting. I wouldn’t have guessed he was into such a homey type home, but as soon as I saw it, I was like, yeah. That fits him.

So there you go, one more obsessive detail that I cover before I get too far into a story.

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Adventures in iPhoto

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

My original plan for the blog was to do a slide show of my flower pictures. I have a bunch of shots that I’ve taken in the last few days and some of them turned out really cool. I ran into a small problem, though. I wanted to do it quick and easy on my iMac without having to login to my Windows virtual machine to access the software I normally use. It’s kind of a pain and iPhoto should do everything, right?

Well, maybe if I knew what the heck I was doing. I imported the pictures off the camera okay, but trying to save them was a nightmare. I finally managed to save a picture. That would be singular. One photo. And tried to figure out how to save the others. Somehow instead of getting my pictures in the folder, I imported chat icons. How? I have no clue, but they’re there and I can’t get rid of them. Or at least I gave up trying to get rid of them and returned to moving photos to the folder. It can’t be hard, right? This is a Mac!

My woes continued. Because I accidentally somehow imported the chat icons, my flower pictures were gone because they had been under the Last Imported section. Now the icons were there. I finally managed to locate the edited pictures under the imported in the last year area. Sigh. I went with the drag and drop philosophy and managed to get all my pictures in the folder at last.

Now I thought, let’s resize them all to 400 pixels wide so that they don’t get so big that it’s impossible for people to watch the show. Um, I couldn’t figure out how to resize them at all. I finally clicked on crop and tried the custom feature, but putting 400 in the box made the picture bigger, not smaller, and to make things even better, it doesn’t automatically put in the height for me. What? I just know I want it 400 wide, the program needs to tell me what size the height should be to maintain the proper aspect ratio. Grrr.

I decided to try to create a slide show anyway–for me if no one else. I thought I’d do it in iMovie. I know, but in Windows Movie Maker, it lets me add still photos as well as movie clips and I figured the Mac would let me do the same thing. I want to be able to do that, dang it, because in my spare time (if I ever have any again in my life), I want to play with making book videos for my old books. I had them professionally done for my last three titles and they’re cool! But I can’t justify spending money on the old books. Now, of course, that plan is shot because it appears iMovie will only work with movie clips. If I’m wrong, please tell me where to find out how to add stills.

So I return to iPhoto. Yes, I can make slide shows there. I try to select my pictures as mentioned in the help directions and it doesn’t work. Yep, my photos won’t stay highlighted.

At this point, I gave up and logged into the Windows side of my Mac and did all the cropping and then uploaded the shots to Webshots. I looked at the time, thought about how tired I feel right now and how much other stuff I have left to do yet tonight and thought, the hell with it. I’ll shoot for the next blog posting.

What I wanted to do tonight was research an idea I have for the story that’s in pre-book. Every day the story gels more and more in my mind, but I need to learn a little bit more about one aspect that came to me so I can decide whether or not it’s going to pan out. Didn’t get to that. I also really want to find a picture of my heroine. She’s proving elusive. Thank goodness, Kel is Logan’s identical twin and I can just use the pictures of Logan that I had for the last book, but I’ve already spent two nights looking for his heroine and have come up empty.

Maybe tomorrow.

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Groan!

Monday, July 14th, 2008

I can’t believe the weekend is over already! In a way, though, it’ll almost be good to get back to the Evil Day Job (EDJ) because I worked like crazy this weekend. After sleeping so late that I couldn’t make it to my RWA chapter meeting on time, I cleaned the entire house from top to bottom. I also began the process of putting my music onto iTunes for my iPod. I have way too many CDs and it’s taking forever! I nearly have my country music collection uploaded, but the rock is the bigger of the two.

While I’m working, I also had my parents call me–four times! Does anyone else’s parents call them like that? I’ve asked them to refrain unless it’s important, but of course, to them it’s always important. It was making me crazy.

But anyway, today, I worked even harder. It all started so innocently, too. I took my camera down to the garden to get pictures of my new lilies. I have some white ones–I can’t remember their name–and wanted a few shots. On the way down, I grabbed my gardening gloves. Around the stone of the garden, the weeds had set in pretty thickly and I thought I’d rescue my tree lilies.

Here’s three of my four elodie lilies:

And here are my unknown name white lilies:

After getting these shots, I pulled on my gloves and started pulling. And cursing. Those weeds were out of control and had developed root systems that were incredible. I pulled with all my strength and couldn’t dislodge some of them. I don’t own a hoe, so I toughed it out, and pulled the entire side with the tree lilies. It looked much better.

But it needed some mulch and I mentioned that to my dad this morning on the second phone call with my parents. He came over with a pitchfork and other tools and we worked pulling weeds on three sides of the garden before he decided he was tired. (Keep in mind, this man had his kidney removed in April and he’s already doing things like this. Gah!) Next came putting in the edging to hold the mulch in, then layers of newspaper, followed by the mulch. Half the area around the outside the garden is mulched, but that leaves half left to go.

I’m sore from all the weed pulling and I managed to get a blister on the bottom of my toe which means walking is ever so much fun. I also managed to do a few loads of laundry and load half a gazillion more CDs onto iTunes.

So all the things I meant to do today–like get caught up on snail mail, email, and blog comments–all fell to the wayside. The damn thing is that I should do something similar around the tree ring and then there’s the area around my evergreens that seriously need a weeding and a lot more mulch put down. I also could add some more mulch around the house because a lot of that got beat down over the last two winters. In other words, thank goodness I’m going back to the EDJ so I can rest up!

I think it’s easier to be on deadline! I hope everyone else had a relaxing weekend.

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Picture This

Monday, May 26th, 2008

Today, Michele Hauf blogged about using pictures for her hero and heroine when she writes and that she’ll plug in familiar faces when she reads as well. When I saw this, I thought, Aha! Tomorrow’s blog! ;-)

Another interesting subject was how readers see our characters and whether or not they prefer to visualize their own idea of what the characters look like. Put me in this camp as a reader. In fact, it’s one of the reasons why I skip/skim descriptions throughout any book. I not only get irritated when the author’s vision of her characters clashes with mine, I also get aggravated when the author’s description of the scene jars against mine. :-) And until a few years ago, I thought every reader felt the same way. It was a shock to find out differently. ;-)

In my writing, I started using pictures of the hero and heroine when I wrote my first published book. Before that, I just went with my imagination, but I’m not terribly visual and I don’t see much. I always have a really strong idea what the h/h look like before I go hunting for pictures and I can spend hours and hours searching for the right image.

Which leads me in to the cover art portion. Smooth segue there, right? ;-) I’ve only had one book where I thought the h/h were close to how I saw them, all the rest have been off–some more than others. Since In Twilight’s Shadow comes out a week from Tuesday, let’s talk about Maia and Creed. Um, neither one of them resembles the models I have on the cover of the book.

Here’s the cover for Twilight’s Shadow:


And here are the models I envisioned as Creed and Maia:

Creed Blackwood

Maia Frasier

Bit of a difference between my vision and the cover, right?

I’ve also started finding pictures of the places where my stories take place. I have actual plans for Ryne’s house (In the Midnight Hour) and I have pictures of the interior of Maia’s home. For the story I’m working on now, I have both. :-) It’s amazing what turns up when you do a search for things like “dive bar” or “seattle jazz.”

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Adventures in Digital Photography

Friday, February 29th, 2008

So I have 15,000 bookmarks for In Twilight’s Shadow. Most of them will be headed to bookstores and readers’ groups, but if you’d like one for yourself–or bookmarks for any of my other books–I’ll be happy to get it/them out to you.

Send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:

Patti O’Shea
PO Box 1365
Minnetonka, MN 55345

* * *

Adventures in Photography

I might have mentioned here that I gave my parents a digital camera for Christmas. They’re always so hard to buy for and this seemed like such an ideal gift. Never mind that neither my mom nor my dad can manage to turn the computer on without me–how annoying could it be to download the pictures off their camera occassionally?

As it turned out, fairly annoying.

My parents returned last Friday from visiting my brother. On Sunday evening, I uploaded the pictures off their camera to the computer for them and my dad–the man who has left film sitting undeveloped for a year or longer–wants me to immediately order him prints of the digital pictures.

Actually, his first statement was that he would print them out on his all-in-one Epson. I was like, uh, no, you don’t have a photo printer. You don’t want to know how long it took before he understood that he wasn’t going to get a quality photo off a cheap inkjet printer. It was after this when we got into the discussion about immediately getting him prints.

So Wednesday I went over to my parents’ house and this was the day I was going to take care of it all for them. First up was getting them an email account. Yep, they didn’t have email. Next, I signed them up for an online photo service. Third on the list was getting them to pick out which photos they wanted printed.

“All of them,” my dad said.

“You don’t want to pay to print 70 shots when some of them are blurred, or have people’s heads cut off, or are duplicates of other shots,” I explained.

Now my real ordeal began. I set up the computer to run all 70 shots as slideshow. All they had to do was look at the picture, decide whether or not they wanted it, and write down the photo number. I might as well have asked them to build a rocket ship, so that I could visit the International Space Station. :-)

OMG! They watched the slideshow three times without reaching any decisions. I finally had to take charge. I would stop each image and ask, “Do you want this one?” Or if they said they wanted one, I would say, “Are you sure? It’s out of focus.” Then they’d rethink their decision. After a torturous length of time, they decided on 30 photos they wanted. (All I have to say is I don’t understand why they wanted some of them, but whatever. At least we’d finished.)

Then there was more fun. Their photo software that came with the camera doesn’t have editing capability! ::head-desk:: I uploaded the shots to the photo site anyway, planning to download them at my house, edit them and reload them, but as it turned out, the photo site lets people do simple editing. So I did. I cropped the pictures that needed cropping, placed their order, and booted down the machine.

Hurrah!

I ended up spending much longer at their house than I expected and most of that can be attributed to the length of time they spent dithering on which pictures they wanted. If I’d had any premonition that this is what my future would hold when I bought them that camera, I would have rethought my choice of Christmas gift. Argh! And just think, I’ll have to go through this every time they take pictures. Sigh.

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Holiday Talk

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

A couple of weeks ago, my dad was over at my house and working on a project. This is when he commented that it would be nice if I had a sink in my basement–and since I’d have a plumber coming over anyway, I might as well put in a toilet and a shower down there, too. (He’s really good about spending my money. :-)

But the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. And I’d want to sheet rock the room off so that it was an enclosed space, which means I’d need a light in there and a door. So I hopped online last night and checked out sinks. Because it’ll be a small room, I wanted a pedestal sink and I found one I really liked–for $650. There are sinks that are much cheaper than that, so I might end up with one I don’t like as well if I do this. That’s still very much up in the air. It’s nice to dream about, though.

It ended up being a topic of discussion at Christmas. The holiday was mostly nice for my family–I hope it was for yours as well.

The thing that kept it from being completely nice was the digital camera I gave my parents. I bought them the same brand I have (although theirs is a new, more advanced model) and I thought it would be set up the same way with a nice cradle for the camera. That way they could just grab it and take pictures whenever they wanted. Instead, the new version of the camera requires that the battery be yanked out and put into a recharger, which isn’t nearly as convenient or as simple as mine.

The camera also arrived without a memory card. I was irritated by that until I read the instructions and found out it has some built in memory, so that some pictures could be taken. Now I’ll have to go out and find a 2GB card for my parents. Then they won’t have to worry about running out of space before I can upload the pictures onto the computer for them.
Other than that (and the snow that still hasn’t stopped) it was a good day. The only thing I wanted was a cordless phone and I got that. Setting it up is today’s project–when I get home from the Evil Day Job (EDJ).

Hope your holiday was as nice!

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Images and Characters

Sunday, July 15th, 2007

I used to be able to write without finding pictures of my hero and heroine. I’d start the story and then at some point along the way, I’d look for some images of them. Now, though, I’ve somehow reached a place where I need the pictures of them before I begin. Maybe it’s because shots of the hero and heroine jump start the flow on who they are.

Take the shots of Ryne and Deke for example. As soon as I saw these models, I went “that’s them!” The attitudes… Wow. I knew Ryne was edgy before I began searching for pictures because with this story I wrote the first chapter or two prior to looking for the photos, and when I saw this model, I knew it was my Ryne. Same thing with Deke. I didn’t have to look very far or very hard to find him, but I hadn’t written a word with him yet and didn’t know what his personality was. Until I saw the picture. There was something on the model’s face that said “smart ass.” And that’s when Deke finally started to talk.

Last night, I began my search for Logan and Shona. (Hey, the RWA website was down–probably crashed from all us non-conference goers–and I couldn’t check up on the awards show so I had to do something.) I’m still searching for them this morning. I have a sense of Logan already. He’s affable, a good guy, a good brother, son, etc, but he’s a troubleshooter, which means he’s also tough. Very tough. It’s been difficult to find anyone who fits my image of him, but I think I finally have a possibility. I’ll have to look at the pictures I saved more closely and see if he holds up.

I actually thought Shona would be the easier of the two to find, but it’s looking like I was wrong about that. I don’t know exactly what she looks like, but I’m sure I’ll know her when I see her and that hasn’t happened yet.

This is also reminding me that I really need to get my house networked. My high speed connection is on the desktop and it’s not comfortable to sit in that chair for very long. I’d much rather be in the living room using my laptop to surf while I watched baseball, but trying to look at a lot of pictures while on a dial up connection would make me insane.

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