1. Are
you a panster or a plotter or perhaps a bit of both?
I have had 7 books
published, so far, one stand-alone, and six with Tacoma , Washington ,
my hometown, as the locale. To do this, I read old newspapers. In the case of
fiction, I try to decide how I can work my characters into what happened during
the appropriate time period. I call this Forest Gumping. The book I’m currently
editing has street brawls, buggy accidents, the attempted kidnapping of a
Chinese woman’s and many other things that the Tacoma Daily Ledger covered in the early 1880s. I can create a
dialogue by having people talk about what they saw. However, right now, I need
to give fiction a rest, so I’m working on a proposal for a third local history
book. For this, I subscribe to Genealogybank which gives me access to a number
of newspapers for research. The company wants the book to feature Tacoma ’s crooks, crime,
and general mayhem. So, in answer to the question, I guess I’m a bit of both.
2. Which
comes first - characters or plot for you?
In fiction, the
character. One reason I stopped (at least, for now) my mystery series is that I
didn’t think readers liked the heroine. I want my protagonists to be as sweet
and loveable as Anne (of Green Gables) Shirley or Betsy (Betsy, Tacy and Tib)
Ray but I didn’t think that was happening.
3. What
are you working on now? Is this a book in a current series or something totally
new?
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4.
Do you have some kind of object or place that
figures in most of your books? I use gems a lot, hospitals and caves.
Until the Klondike Gold
rush in the 1890s, when Seattle over took us, Tacoma , known as The City of Destiny, was THE city to be
reckoned with on Puget Sound . That means,
everything on Commencement
Bay is grist for my
writing mill. The book I’m editing (and struggling to find a title for)
includes Steilacoom , Washington ,
a potlatch on the Puyallup Reservation, and a neighborhood currently called Old Town
or Old Tacoma. Back then, there were three separate communities here, Old
Tacoma, New Tacoma and the Wharf. And yes, I know, I did end a sentence with a
preposition. My bad.
4.
Do you write everyday or just when the spirit
hits?
Pretty much every day
but not always on my things. I write for my garden club, too.
5.
Where can we find you?
Just deleting unwanted
emails takes way too long, so, Facebook is best, or at bwlauthors.blogspot.com.
Having a lot of social media sites to check takes me away from writing, not to
mention cleaning, cooking, gardening, and hiking—life in general. Today, for
example, I discovered the reason my dog hasn’t been eating his own food is
because he’s been eating the cats’ kibbles. Also, I have a cat who throws
herself at me if she wants something, and then we play a game I call “Guess
What Sally Wants?”
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