Patti O'Shea's Blog

Join me at Romance Divas for a workshop on creating and working with characters.  Everyone is welcome, but it does require registration.  Torturing Characters.

Ever since I moved into my house three years ago, I’ve wanted to plant peonies in my yard.  I love the flower and they grow well in Minnesota.  The problem has always been that by the time I thought about getting some it was too late.  Last year we even planned to divide some of my mom’s beautiful peonies, but my dad and I dug around one, saw the size of it, and were totally intimidated.  We covered her right back up again.

This year, though, I was determined to get my peonies and I happened to be on time!  Hurrah!  Yesterday, with my dad in tow, I hit the nursery.  They had a bunch of different varieties and I bought five different ones.  I have two very different red ones, a coral, a pink, and a white.

The cool thing is that they’re actually plants and not little root pieces.  I won’t have flowers from them this year, but I could see maybe next year.  At least I sure hope so.  I planned to take pictures, but then I thought no one but me cares to see pictures of all my new peony plants.    What can I say? I’m geeky about my garden.

My other purchase at the nursery was to monarda plants to replace the ones that I planted last year that didn’t come back.  Or so I thought.  When my dad and I went to replace them, I discovered there were little monarda leafs coming up all around the mulch that had surrounded the original bushes.  I didn’t realize they sprawled out like that.  I planted the new monarda among the old ones and my dad only ripped out one of the root sections, so hopefully this will be good.

There was one more project we accomplished yesterday.  (The list was much longer than this.)  My dad and I (mostly my dad) planted my asparagus.  This is my first attempt at vegetables, and though my parents had a really big vegetable garden when I was growing up, we never had asparagus.  I’m hoping this turns out well, although the instructions were bizarre on how to plant them.

Things still on the yard to do list:  Clean up the gardens and get the debris out of them, plant the flower boxes for my deck and porch (I’m going to try seeds this year instead of plants), and plant my beans, carrots, and spinach.  I’m also doing red peppers which I totally love.  Like I said, we’ll see how it goes on the vegetables. I might be pushing my luck.

One thing I realized just recently is that when I get into a story, I get into things that are important to the characters in some way. This byproduct interests me and it makes me wonder how this happens. And it makes me wonder if any other writers have the same thing happen to them.

While I was writing The Power of Two I found myself fascinated by Vietnamese culture (Cai is 1/4 Vietnamese) and also interested in the Maldives which is the future site of the Raft Cities in the world of 2176. I downloaded all kinds of computer wallpaper featuring these islands, I actually pay attention to the news whenever the Maldives are mentioned, and I was worrying about them when the tidal wave hit in the Indian Ocean in 2006 (I think).

With Through a Crimson Veil I acquired an interest in Japan. (Mika was half Japanese.) I’d browse sites with Japanese imports and became curious about their tea ceremony–never mind that Mika never drank tea in the book.

It’s been a little less intense with my Light Warrior series, but I still developed an interest in Scottish Gaelic. I actually considered learning the language, but that urge went away when I remembered how difficult it was to learn German.

And it’s happening again. The hero and heroine in the proposal I’m working on are of Polynesian descent and I’m finding myself hugely drawn to all things Polynesian right now. My collection of Polynesian music is growing rapidly as I search out and buy more and more albums (I really didn’t expect the wide variety I found, but it’s way cool!), I’m buying videos and DVDs of dance and history, and I’ve been tempted to buy a skirt like the dancers wear even though I’d probably just have it hanging in a closet after dropping a few hundred dollars on one.

This isn’t all. My hero is into rugby, specifically the New Zealand All Blacks team and now I’m following the team on Twitter! I know nothing about rugby or its players and I doubt I’ll need to know much for the book, but I’m curious now and wanting to learn. I even checked out T-shirts.

It was when I started looking at Polynesian drums with the idea of getting one that it finally dawned on me what was going on and that this had happened before on other books. What is this obsession with all the things that are pieces of who my characters are? It seems to spring up full-blown and intense out of nowhere, although I suppose it must be building in my subconscious for a while before I become aware of it.

In a way, this is pretty cool because it means I’m deeply into my characters. In another way, it’s a little disconcerting to find myself fascinated by things I never paid much attention to before. I actually checked flights to Hawaii yesterday before I remembered I don’t have any vacation time left and the trip was strictly to go to the Polynesian Cultural Center and find someone to pin down and quiz.

You’re thinking well, it’s research, right? Not that much. My h/h were born and raised in California, and while their heritage does play a role in their world view, I certainly don’t need to know how “grass” skirts are made. (You take a straight branch of a wild hibiscus tree, scrape off the outer bark and let it soak in water for about a month. The innermost bark is the lightest in color and that’s what’s used for the skirts. It can take 300-500 hibiscus strips to make one skirt and they weigh 7-8 pounds. The heavier the skirt, the better they sway when a dancer moves her hips.) See what I mean? Have I scared anyone yet?

Sometimes things come together in ways that astound me.

I wanted my method my heroine uses to time travel to the future to be based on science, not a magic necklace or her getting clobbered on the head. I had a thought on how to do this–maybe–and did some cursory reading. There on the Wikipedia page was something I could alter and use. Or that was my plan.

Yesterday as I tried to start this story, I realized I needed more information about the catalyst and started doing more research last night. And as I dug into this farther, I found my time travel method mentioned as a legitimate theory for this device. I think my shriek of glee was probably heard around the world. What I made up (or thought I’d made up) wasn’t only plausible, real scientists had speculated the same thing I’d imagined.

How cool is this???

Now the argument could be made that I’d read this theory earlier and had simply forgotten I’d seen it. Entirely possible. But I like to believe it was serendipity, that I tapped into the collective unconscious and received the idea I needed at the right time.

To quote George Peppard from The A-Team: “I love it when a plan comes together.”

I’m so behind right now, I’m not sure I’m ever going to get caught up!  The reason why there was no blog Thursday night?  I had a choice between writing a post and writing my story.  I chose to write my story.  And today instead of doing the million other things that I needed to get to, I wrote my story.  It feels good to put the writing first and everything else behind it.  Usually it’s the other way around because I feel too guilty letting things sit, but I’m going to learn to give that up because my writing has to come first.

I’m sure you’re all wondering what I decided on the time travel story, and believe it or not, I actually did make a decision this weekend.  It helped to talk with another writer and to listen to her comments and thoughts.  And the plot choice winner is….

Drum roll please.

Setting the time travel on Jarved Nine!

It was the one I was really more excited about writing, but I had logic issues.  After talking it out, I feel confident that I can overcome them and the other potential issues that time traveling to an alien planet will cause.

I have my heroine’s name after a long stretch where I wondered if she’d ever show up.  She adjusted her last name today because I had that wrong.  The hero and I have reached peace on his real first name–he goes by a nickname.  I was trying to get him to use something else, but he disagreed.  He won.  And I think I have the set up for the story.

This, however, wasn’t what I wrote today.  I’m still working on my Polynesian story.  That was the one calling to me, and while I tried to work on the time travel, I just couldn’t find any traction.  This week sometime for sure, though.

Now that Oprah’s talked about Twitter, there will likely be a lot of newcomers over on the service.  As someone who’s been there for a while, I thought I’d mention a few things I’ve learned, a few things that are enough to make me stop following someone, and things that are annoying.

Tips

Don’t automatically follow everyone who follows you.  There are spammers out there who count on auto-followers.  Check out who’s following you and decide from their posts whether or not they’re someone you want to follow back.  If they are a spammer, make sure you click the block link.  That’s how Twitter finds these people and closes them down.

Only follow as many people as you feel you can keep up with.  My limit is around 100, which is where I’m at now, and sometimes even this is overwhelming.  Yes, I feel bad for not following people, but I just can’t keep up with more.  I do see every reply people make to me (that would be @Patti_OShea) so if I’m not following you and you say something to me, I’ll see it, and if necessary, reply back.

Conversely, make sure you’re following enough people to make Twitter interesting.  Too few, and you won’t understand why it’s so much fun.  For me, it was getting into the 25-30+ range that really made it a blast.

You do not have to page backward to read every message that came through while you were at work.  I used to do this, but it’s so time consuming.  Now, if I have a lot of posts backed up, I’ll just read the first page and ignore the rest.  Yes, I’m probably missing someone’s great news or something else that I really want to see, but I just can’t take the time to back up and reread everything that was said while I was away.

Find a Twitter client.  I like Tweetdeck the best once I got used to it–and changed all the colors from the default black.  If you’re using Firefox as your browser, you can get an add-on called Twitterfox.

I think reading through some of the reasons why I stop following people will also provide some tips for Twittering.

Top Reasons Why I Unfollow People and Annoyances

Every post is either promotional in nature or thinly veiled promotion.  Authors are particularly bad at this.  I’m happy to hear about your new release if you’re part of the dialogue on other things as well, but when it’s all about you and your books, I’m clicking the unfollow link.

Don’t Retweet (RT in the Twitter lingo) constantly.  Please.  Only retweet the particularly interesting tweets you see.  Also do not retweet yourself and please don’t repeat yourself.  There was one tweeter who constantly posted the same tweet about his books over and over.  He also repeated other things he said over and over.    For days.  Argh!

Don’t live tweet TV shows.  Ever.  I don’t care about spoilers, but it’s really aggravating to see post after post after post about a television show.  Especially one I don’t watch.  I don’t live tweet the baseball games I’m watching, you don’t live tweet your TV shows, deal?  Once or twice during an hour long show, fine, but there was one woman who was posting 25, 30, 35 times in an hour.  I used to logoff of Twitter while that show was on and then I realized I could just unfollow her.  I did.

If you don’t interact with others, merely post your own tweets, I’m likely to consider unfollowing.  Reply to people.  Start a dialogue.  Congratulate people with good news, commiserate with people who have bad news, contribute to conversation.  It’s fun.  Trust me.

If you’re going to share a link, please offer some kind of explanation about what I’ll be clicking over to see.  Posting a link with “This is great” doesn’t make me want to click a masked URL.  Something like “This is a great video about a singing cat” along with the link makes me more likely to check out what you’re sending.

Positives

And there are a lot of these.

I feel as if I’ve become friends with people that I’d never met online anywhere else.

I feel as if I’ve gotten to know people better that I already knew online, but only in a really superficial way.  It’s been cool to make the connections!

I’ve been able to ask research questions for things that it might not be easy to find the answers to otherwise and get almost instant answers.  I’ve been hugely grateful for the generosity of the Twitter community.

One of my favorite things about Twitter, though, is that I can join in any conversation without feeling as if I’m intruding, leave the conversation without feeling as if I’m slighting anyone, or just follow a conversation without becoming part of it.  It depends what mood I’m in and how busy I am.

This is just plain fun!  Almost like instant messaging with dozens of people at once.  Give Twitter a try, find a few dozen people who post often to follow, and see if you don’t get hooked yourself.