Things Are People Too

In MaryAnneia people, places and things have personalities.  Sometimes they're happy, sometimes they're sad and sometimes they're just in a mood to piss me off.  Yes, Virginia, things have issues too. Or at least - my things do.

For example, take my office computer - please.  Nah, I guess I'll keep it.  In fact, some days, I'd fight you for it.  Others, I'd throw it across the parking lot and dance on its digital corpse.  I have a love/hate relationship with the thing.  In the morning, it doesn't want to wake up from its long nap. I don't either, so I sympathize. By the time she's up and perking, I'm mighty glad to have her help.  But she's a drama queen.  When I'm heads down on a deadline, focused on whatever words I'm writing at the time, most of my attention is not on the machine. And the machine doesn't like that. So she'll throw up a weird error or suddenly, for no apparent reason, Word, Outlook, or Practice Advantage will die.  I'll yell at her and Glenda, my co-worker in the next office, will chuckle and encourage me to teach the PC who is the boss.  (I pretend I am).

My car - a little red P.T. Cruiser - is my baby.  Like a baby, sometimes she gurgles and purrs and boogles right along. And sometimes she doesn't.  I often stroke her and encourage her. But sometimes I yell - like when I know the idiot in the other lane is trying to speed up to get in front of me. "Don't let the jackass in, P.T., I'll scream."

Don't get me started on my ice maker.  It exists to aggravate me.  It'll be churning right along and then, for no reason, it refuses to sweep out the ice cubes so that more water can pour in.  Or cubes get stuck half in and half out of the sweeper.  And there I'll be, with whatever kitchen implement I can grab, pouring or poking or prodding. All the while, I'll be inventing new vile names for the beast until my 14-year-old, Sam, yells in, "You tell it, Mom."

It hadn't occurred to me how much of MaryAnneia has crept into my books until I read a reader comment. 

The reader mentioned that in A Faerie Fated Forever Boz just reacted to an inner knowledge but that in Sixth Sense  his extra abilities spoke to him.  And the reader found that strange.  I don't but I'm a bit of an odd duck. I hold conversations with different parts of myself all the time.  That feature of Boz's internal dialogue didn't occur in Faerie because it wasn't Boz's story. I knew he'd have his day.

I do sometimes think that "things are people too."  It's a quirk of my personality and since I'm the storyteller, it appears in my writing.  One easy place to see this is in a scene from Griffin's Law.  The hero left the heroine's place so fast he didn't stop to put on his shoes.  Those shoes taunt the heroine. She has an argument with them and considers them "vile."  At the time, she felt the same way about the shoes' owner.

My WIP - The Office Ink Spells Murder -  is another of my love and the law stories.  In this one the hero's brother is murdered at the family law firm.  The hero and the brother have been tussling over a woman - a new associate at the firm - despite the firm family rule about not dipping their pens in the office ink.  On the night of the murder there' a fight between the two brothers and then the hero passes out on his office couch.  In the morning, the brother's body is discovered in the brother's office, which is right next door to the hero's.  Later, the dead brother pops into the hero's head, carries on a dialogue, and sometimes even appears.

Why do I think that things have personalities and that they're often trying to tell me something?  Why do I think it's normal for the hero of my WIP to talk to his dead brother? Perhaps it springs from trips to a cemetary when I was small. One of my Uncles passed away as a very young man. His mother, my grandmother - Mammy - didn't drive but she'd have my mom drive her up to the cemetary at least once a month.  She'd put her hand on his tombstone and tell him about all the events since last month, especially what his widow and children had been up to lately.  She was talking to her son but she was physically speaking to his tombstone. Those things make an impression.  Before long, I'd talk to my Uncle too.  The other headstones scared me but I always felt that my Uncle's was benevolent - a kind and considerate presence.

There were other events, later events.  Once, as a pre-teen, a neighbor's ghost appeared outside my bedroom window. My cousin was spending the night at the time, and we both saw Ted.  The next morning we both described him the same way to my parents.  The description surprised them and without it they'd have written it off to kids with big imaginations.  The clothes we described Ted as wearing when we saw him were the exact clothes he'd been buried in. Neither my cousin nor I had gone to the funeral.

If who I am and how I am - over-the-top and (more than) a little bit batty - didn't speak through my writing, then the books wouldn't carry my voice.  The stories wouldn't ring true and they wouldn't carry the readers, they wouldn't make the readers laugh and cry and cheer.  My voice isn't like most other authors and back in the day when the big publishing companies (the Royals) tended the gates, my books were, like me, too different to be published.  

Some readers don't get my work and others adore it.  I've been told my books are a waste of time and downright bad. I've also been called genius, brilliant and had readers call my books a must read, they've said they couldn't put them down.  What I don't get is lukewarm.  My books are a love 'em or hate 'em affair.  They'll definitely show you people, places and periods of time from my point of view.  History is a mood. Reality is a mood. They are not boxes that confine me or my characters who might say or do anything.

My husband and I bought our house quite a few years ago because it felt happy. And it's been happy overall, although we've been through good and bad times in it. I'd make the same decision today, would buy this house because it's still a very happy place.

I hope that my books are also happy places.   They're unique, like their author, and whether you love 'em or hate 'em, you'll finish them knowing you've read something new. The books will take you to a new place and I hope it's one you enjoy visiting.

I hope you'll keep coming back to MaryAnneia.  You don't even need a passport to visit.