Finding Jennifer Launch -

Finding Jennifer, my fourth novel and fifth published work, is finally done.  Satisfying as that is, I’ve discovered that writing, while a lonely, time consuming task, it is certainly the most enjoyable part of the book creating effort.  Unfortunately, finishing this one did little to reduce the laundry list of plot lines running around in my head, which I now realize is a good thing.  Reading other blogs I’ve discovered wide diversity in how authors approach the task of writing.  Therefore, I will attempt to illustrate what I’ve learned, mostly for my own amazement, but also hoping that other writers struggling with creative writing might benefit.

Once I get an idea started, which is ninety percent of the battle, I research whatever is available to ensure detail accuracy.  In the case of Finding Jennifer, information permeates the web about drugs and human trafficking along our southern border, enough probably for several books.  My idea was to insert an innocent person into that dangerous situation and let nature take its course.  After that it was easy.  Right?  Not so much.  Was it fun?  Absolutely!

Our hero, a character who is a loner, struggles with his past, is damaged somehow, but not beyond hope.  Give him (or her) a buddy, a love interest, and someone to drag him (or her) out of his (or her) mental cocoon and fill in the blanks.  See how easy it is?  Follow that with another hundred thousand words or so and you have a novel.  Nothing to it.  Well …maybe not.

When I’m working on a novel, I try to write a thousand words a day, but I don’t obsess about it.  I kept track while writing Finding Jennifer and when I was done I averaged just shy of nine hundred.  I also write from the beginning to the end.  Some author’s I’ve studied write the end first, or write scenes and put them all together later, or some other way of creating a story.  My lineal personality requires I start at the beginning and work toward the end, since I’m never sure what exactly comes next until my characters tell me.  The lesson here is – do whatever works.

When I’m writing, I edit yesterday’s masterpiece first before I go on.  It helps refresh my memory of what I’ve written previously and make final editing not nearly so tedious.  Editing is by far the hardest part.  You’ve slaved over your baby and you have to be brutal.  Slash unnecessary words, fight passive voice, eliminate bad grammar, search for every typo and missing formatting until you eyeballs fall out.  Then let someone you trust really edit your work.

Somewhere in my vast collection of useless information I have a hardback book written by a little known author in the early part of the twentieth century and published by a small publisher which probably sold only a few copies.  But I read it and enjoyed it nearly one hundred years after it was written.  That’s what you are going for.

Finding Jennifer is now live on Amazon Kindle Store – click here

Look for Finding Jennifer in Paperback on Amazon after March 1, 2012 - click here

Learning to Write Fiction – I confess to writing my first fiction short story in my teens a good many years ago. That first effort found its way to the trash in fairly short order. After that initial attempt the writing bug laid dormant a number of years filled with marriage and child rearing. That settled, I found time on my hands. After taking a couple creative writing courses, the bug rose to the surface again. Its been with me off and on since. The next few years left me with a box full of short stories and a matching box of rejection letters. My writing instructor suggested I turn one of those short stories into a novel. I discovered novel writing was a completely different animal but one I was fascinated by.
After writing five novels I’m still learning and proving the old adage that learning to write requires actually writing — something like a million words or the equivalent of ten or so full-length novels. I figure I’m about halfway there. Writing became a good deal easier with the advent of computers and my first efforts flowed out of an Apple IIe and Apple’s then state of the art software called AppleWorks that came with the computer. Now I use a desktop computer with more power than a IBM 360 Mainframe had thirty years ago and Microsoft Word that tells me when I miss-type (I never confess to misspelling) and formats for me automatically. Life is good.
I try to write a 1000 words a day. I don’t obsess about the exact number but when I’m working on a new novel that’s my goal. The next day, I edit the previous day’s effort before I continue. This helps me with continuity and plotting consistency. It also helps with reducing the final editing process.
I haven’t had a best-seller yet, but my sales increase every month so I guess I’m still learning the marketing part also. If you ask me if I’ve had fun, I’d have to answer a resounding -Yes!

New Book this Spring – Finding Jennifer - We’ve been working hard on a new novel which should be in most online bookstores sometime before May. I’ve included the cover art and an excerpt from the first chapter for all to read. I would appreciated commnents and constructive criticism, good or bad. The premise follows our southern border problem and how easily innocent Americans can be unwittingly drawn into the danger. Our hero, reluctantly searches for a missing young woman and finds himself in the middle of the the border war. Then things really get complicated.

Chapter One

Sunday, 5:47 am

Jennifer Hollings had to park her five-year old Honda CRV at the new wash; an inauspicious beginning to a day she hoped would improve. An exaggeration when called a road, the previous rough, gravelly, seventeen mile, two cow-path byway, intended at the end of the 19th Century for mule-drawn ore wagons, challenged the Honda’s suspension. The remnants of the old wagon road ended at the edge of a deep channel, now impassable due to rare spring rain. Surrounded by fifty-plus miles of Sonoran Desert in any direction, Jennifer loaded her backpack with three 24 ounce bottles of water, a small Mini-Maglite, two Granny Smith apples, two whole grain bread and sliced roast beef sandwiches and a package of Twinkies in the predawn darkness. She’d decided the two mile walk to the old mine site would burn enough calories to afford the sweet. Arranging everything in the backpack to ensure the Twinkies survived undamaged, Jennifer added her camera bag and wiggled into the backpack straps.
Ready to go, she lifted her camera strap over her head, securing her prized Canon EOS 7D digital SLR camera with its 28-135mm kit lens close to her body. Jennifer treasured the 18 megapixel camera body and hated the kit lens. She preferred a longer, faster lens but her meager salary at the local newspaper prevented the purchase. As a beginning photographer/writer, copy person and maker of the morning coffee for anybody that wanted it, Jennifer’s skimpy paycheck barely covered her living expenses. She skipped meals and saved loose change to buy gas for her desert photography trips. So, the kit lens had to do, and she concentrated on composition, detail, and lighting to compensate. Her plan this morning included using the hike to catch a desert critter or two framed in her camera lens and reach the mine site as the morning sun created long shadows on the landscape. The old buildings would standout like lonely pillars of a past time.

Jennifer respected the desert. She knew the silent, seemingly unoccupied setting was filled with silently struggling vegetation hiding any number of ominous creatures. Snakes, scorpions, and an occasional tarantula lurked in the sparse grasses and green barked Palo Verdi brush while Giant Saguaro cactus stood like soldiers guarding her path, arms held out in welcome. She appreciated the Sonoran Desert, but had also learned enough about it to respect its unseen dangers.

Taller than average at five-foot-nine with a slim build, she enjoyed hiking in the cool of the morning and a thrill of anticipation rose inside her anticipating the coming adventure. She tied back her crimson hair with a cotton scarf to keep it out of her eyes. When she was younger she’d hated her carrot-top hair not only because of the color, but because it curled in tight ringlets making her look like a red-headed Shirley Temple. As she aged through puberty, her hair darkened and now in her mid-twenties it was more auburn than red, but still curly. Her feet protected by sensible hiking boots with Vibram soles, she wore rugged Levi pants and a boys Brushpopper shirt to protect herself from thorns. The single common trait of desert flora was sharp and sometimes barbed protrusions that could be wicked.
Jennifer dropped into the wash and climbed up the other side, impatient to follow the remnants of the old wagon road to the mine site and its abandoned structures. The old buildings would make a dramatic backdrop for her photographical creations. It was spring and the desert bloomed in proliferate color contrasting deeply with its normal earthy tones. Backpack laden, Jennifer hiked through the growing heat enjoying the smells and sensations of crimson Ocotillo blooms, white and yellow flowers peeking from the tops of Saguaros and watching the antics of geckos racing through the hot sandy soil. The desert thrilled her; its empty landscape from a distance contrasted oddly to its abundance close up.

The gravel-filled trail she followed climbed upward along the rocky contour of an ancient volcano cone, one of many that dotted the desert floor. Jennifer considered herself desert savvy, seasoned in a variety of flora and fauna that eked out an existence in sometimes severe conditions. Summer temperatures routinely reached one-hundred-twenty in the scarcely available shade. This day, Jennifer knew it would barely reach ninety. Her pace was slow and steady; conserving energy as the sun peaked over the horizon and began its daily travel across a cloudless azure sky. She also considered herself tough; once allowing a traveling sidewinder rattlesnake to slither across her booted ankles while she clicked her Canon following its movements.

By seven a.m., after an hour of walking, Jennifer reached the half-way point, a small saddle between two pillars of eroded volcanic chimneys that looked, from afar, like two stubby fingers reaching for the sky. From the saddle, she could see the mine a mile in the distance to the west and more Sonoran Desert below her extending miles to the South. Somewhere out in the blowing dust, marked only by rusting steel posts, but at least several miles away, lay the U.S. southern border with Mexico. The border was like a sieve, with a partially built fence, but mostly guarded by technology and under-manned Customs and Border Protection, the new umbrella agency including Border Patrol agents; a thin barrier to unrelenting illegal immigration and drug trafficking. The area around Jennifer was barren and far from any population center on the Mexican side and she hadn’t heard of any problems in this locale. Besides, she reasoned, the newscasters only showed activity at night. She had made this hike numerous times without seeing a soul.

Jennifer found a convenient rock outcrop and rested. She retrieved one of the bottles of water and surveyed the desert around her while she hydrated. Her eyes drank in the scene until a stately mule deer buck stepped out of the coulee below and looked up the hill trying to decide if Jennifer was a danger. Her heart skipped a beat in excitement as she slowly brought her Canon up, turned it on, dumped the lens cap and located the deer in her viewfinder. The buck’s heavy antlers framed in her lens, it stood for a couple of still shots before sensing peril. Jennifer followed its stiff-legged, bouncing escape shooting until the fleeing animal disappeared. Excited with her first shots of the day, she had reviewed the first five pictures when she saw what had made the deer bolt. Across the canyon, somewhat higher than where she sat, the picture included a flash of light, similar to the sun bouncing off a mirror. It startled her. She looked up from her camera and stared at the spot, certain that in her many trips to the old mine; she’d never before seen light reflected from the tightly massed boulder piles across the coulee. She brought up the camera with its less than perfect kit lens and swept the hillside, but the naked boulders revealed nothing, no movement, no reflection; only desert rock. Her mind was still puzzling when her head seemed to explode in pain and the ground came up and slapped her in the face. Her nose pressed in the desert sand, she didn’t hear the gunshot reverberation echoing in the canyon.

This excerpt and photography © Dave Folsom 2012

Winter Flowers – Almaryllis (Hippeastrum x-hypridum) This tropical plant is common in Florida but a rare sight for us Northerners. This year we were lucky enough to have two, one of which was given to us by a great neighbor. Both bloomed, luckily not at the same time, so we were able to enjoy them over a longer period. These photos include two of the many color variations, the first a dark pink and white and the second a stunning deep crimson. Click on any of the thumbnails for a larger view and enjoy.

Writing fiction is mostly a solitary endeavor, one that combines a prodigious amount of typing, staring at the wall dreaming and occasionally gazing out the window at birds. Not that the birds have anything to do with the writing but they just happen to congregate in a place where I can see them. Like many fiction writers I started out writing short stories, which at least in my case, were mostly bad. Frustrated, I bravely took a year-long post graduate course in Creative Writing at a local college in my home town. I was in my mid-forties in a room with twenty something’s, an experience in itself. For each class we had to write a short story, bring enough copies for everyone in the class and at the next meeting we were critiqued. We were not allowed to say anything in defense while the rest of the folks loudly discussed and sometimes argued what they liked and disliked about our latest story. A few of mine generated vigorous though not necessarily complimentary debate.
Needless to say the experience was a humbling but fantastic learning experience. I learned  about writing, active/passive voice, character development, plotting, reader likes and dislikes, and the real meaning of humility. Only my readers can judge if I learned anything. One of my short stories I later developed into a full length novel about a small fictional community in northwestern Montana and the last years of the old time logging industry. The story focuses on the locals, a hard-working, hard-living, idiosyncratic lot who take on the task of educating a new co-worker in ways he never imagined. Confronted by a much older and salty logging boss, hard drinking and playful loggers and ill-tempered cantankerous truck drivers, he struggles to come to grips with a major loss while adjusting to his new life. These difficult industry changes are exacerbated by the construction of a hydroelectric dam that means the demise of the town and disruption of the local residents You can read an excerpts from this novel as well as my later novels here or at Amazon or Barnes and Noble where it’s available in either paperback or Kindle or Nook.

Winter in the Sonoran Desert is a great time to enjoy the desert as temperatures are mild and the colors gorgeous. A recent trip to Phoenix in the early morning afforded an excellent opportunity to photograph a region that is loaded with the giant cactus common only to the northern Sonoran Desert. Saguaro Cactus (Cereus giganteus) are a long lived cactus that grow arms only after about eighty to one hundred years old. The multi-armed monsters that appear in the pictures are often much older and may reach as much as two hundred years at maturity and thirty to fifty feet in height. A truely magnificant plant, they are the largest known cactus in the United States. Two of the pictures highlight the truly brilliant morning colors common in The Senoran desert. Click on any picture for a larger view.

As an End of the Year Book Promotion this blog will celebrate the second Christmas that we’ve covered a little bit of everything on the All About This and That blog.  During that time we’ve met a lot of new friends, developed an outlet that keeps me out of the bars, and out from under  my spouse’s feet, a benefit for which she is eternally grateful.  For all of you dedicated followers and new readers, we are going to provide an opportunity to download an E-copy of any of our books for $0.99.  That’s 80% off for the novels and 75% for the collection of short stories.  That’s an opportunity to get all four for the price of one.  This promotion is  effective today and will expire on December 31. Here’s how:

Go to Smashwords.com and set up a free account, then:

The Dynameos Conspiracy and used coupon code DG76N (not case sensitive)

The Zeitgeist Project and use coupon code ED69E (not case sensitive)

Scaling Tall Timber and use coupon code LA52Z (not case sensitive)

Running with Moose and use coupon code SQ79R (not case sensitive)

Each book is available in several formats such as ebook, mobi for Kindle owners, and several others.  If you don’t have an e-reader PDF format is also available for reading on a computer. Merry Christmas and have a safe holiday. Enjoy!

Photographing clouds is sometimes challenging, but both Arizona and South Dakota afford ample opportunities. Most of the time the shots are early in the morning at dawn or before and/or in the evening the last half hour before sunset until dark.  This two “golden hours” are for cloud photography also.  These are some of mine, taken in both South Dakota and Arizona.  Enjoy and click on any of the thumbnails for a larger view.  Criticism is always appreciated as are comments.

Politics as Usual – I haven’t been able to add much to this blog lately as an accident to my right hand left me unable to type in recent weeks. Other than confessing that my wife and children have unceremoniously awarded me the Dumb Ass Award of the Month, I leave it to your imagination as to what happened. However, now that I’ve reached the one finger typing stage of recovery, the asinine antics of Washington politics has forced me back to the keyboard.

For several months, we’ve been subjected to the denials that no one, it appears, in the Obama Administration knew that the ATF was allowing automatic weapons to migrate into drug dealer hands along our southern border, a project with the inane title of “Fast and Furious.” The reason for this “migration” was ostensibly to somehow assist in their efforts to prevent the movement of drugs across the border. Having little law enforcement background, I fail to see how this would work, but common sense tells me that the idea would probably reach a lofty level of stupidity. Nevertheless, government arrogance notwithstanding, the end result was the death of a CBP agent using one of these weapons.

Denials aside, it smacks of either lying on the part of some high level Administration officials or incompetence at a level beyond belief. This is the same government that hasn’t passed a budget in over two years, has run up a massive debt that now equals our GDP, isn’t concerned by the disappearance of a 500 million dollar loan to a failed solar panel company that was in deep financial trouble time the loan was approved, and allows Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac to award obscene bonuses to high level executives for doing a failing job. So, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. I could go on but my hand is getting sore.

On a similar note, the same agency that allowed the guns to disappear along our sieve-like Southern border, sent a warning letter to Alabama officials cautioning them against enforcement of a recent law passed in that state stiffening their illegal immigration regulations. If the Justice Department would use that same tenacity to secure our borders from not only illegal immigration, but drugs, terrorists and others whose purpose is to drain state’s coffers dry with entitlements, we’d be sympathetic.

Attorney General Holder will testify again today, I suppose to reiterate that he was clueless (which we can’t argue with) about Fast and Furious. We can’t wait to hear what he has to say.

It’s official!  The Capture Dakota book selection photo is the one shown below.  The Capture Dakota books  are now available and a gorgeous book it is.   The competition among Dakota photographers was fierce.  Arround two hundred best of the best photos were selected for inclusion out of nine thousand six hundred fifteen photos submitted by four hundred twenty-three Dakota photographers.  It was great to be part of in this talented and creative group.