In MaryAnneia\u00a0people, places and things\u00a0have personalities.\u00a0 Sometimes they're happy, sometimes they're sad and sometimes they're just in a mood to piss me off.\u00a0 Yes, Virginia, things have issues too. Or at least - my things do.<\/p>\n
For example, take my office computer - please.\u00a0 Nah, I guess I'll keep it.\u00a0 In fact, some days, I'd fight you for it.\u00a0 Others, I'd throw it across the parking lot and dance on its digital corpse.\u00a0 I have a love\/hate relationship with the thing.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But she's a drama queen.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I'll yell at her and Glenda, my co-worker in the next office, will chuckle and encourage me to teach the PC\u00a0who is the boss.\u00a0 (I pretend I am).<\/p>\n
My car -\u00a0a little red P.T. Cruiser - is my baby.\u00a0 Like a baby, sometimes she gurgles and purrs and boogles right along. And sometimes she doesn't.\u00a0 I often stroke her and encourage her. But sometimes I yell - like when I know the idiot in the\u00a0other lane is trying to speed up to get in front of me. \"Don't let the jackass in, P.T., I'll scream.\"<\/p>\n
Don't get me started on my ice maker.\u00a0 It exists to aggravate me.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Or cubes get stuck\u00a0half in and half out of the sweeper.\u00a0 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.\"<\/p>\n
It hadn't occurred to me how much of MaryAnneia has crept into my books until I read a reader comment.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The reader mentioned that in A Faerie Fated Forever <\/em>Boz just reacted to an inner knowledge but that in Sixth Sense<\/em>\u00a0 his\u00a0extra abilities spoke to him.\u00a0 And the reader found that strange.\u00a0 I don't but\u00a0I'm a\u00a0bit of an odd duck. I hold conversations with different parts of myself all the time.\u00a0 That feature of Boz's internal dialogue didn't occur in Faerie <\/em>because it wasn't Boz's story. I knew he'd have his day.<\/p>\n I do sometimes think that\u00a0\"things are people too.\"\u00a0 It's a quirk of my personality and since I'm the storyteller, it appears in my writing.\u00a0 One easy place to see this is in a scene from Griffin's Law<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0The hero left the heroine's place so fast he didn't stop to put on his shoes.\u00a0 Those shoes taunt the heroine. She has an argument with them and considers them \"vile.\"\u00a0 At the time, she felt the same way about the shoes' owner.<\/p>\n My WIP - The Office Ink Spells Murder <\/em>- \u00a0is another of my love and the law stories.\u00a0 In this one the hero's brother is\u00a0murdered at\u00a0the family law firm.\u00a0 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\u00a0their pens in the office ink.\u00a0 On the night of the murder there' a fight between the two brothers and then the hero passes out on his office couch.\u00a0 In the morning, the brother's body is discovered in the brother's\u00a0office, which is right next door to the hero's.\u00a0\u00a0Later, the dead brother pops into the hero's head, carries on a dialogue, and sometimes even appears.<\/p>\n Why do I think that\u00a0things have personalities and that they're often trying to tell me something?\u00a0 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 -\u00a0Mammy - didn't drive but she'd have my mom drive her up to the cemetary at least once a month.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She was talking to her son but she was physically speaking to his tombstone. Those things make an impression.\u00a0\u00a0Before long, I'd talk to my Uncle too.\u00a0 The other headstones scared\u00a0me but I always felt that my Uncle's was benevolent - a kind and considerate presence.<\/p>\n There were other events, later events.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0The next morning we both described him the same way to my parents.\u00a0\u00a0The description surprised them and without it they'd have written it off to kids with big imaginations.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n If who I am and how I am - over-the-top and\u00a0(more than) a little bit batty - didn't speak\u00a0through my writing, then the books wouldn't carry my voice.\u00a0 The stories wouldn't ring true and they wouldn't carry the readers, they wouldn't make the readers laugh and cry and cheer.\u00a0 My voice isn't like most other authors and back in the day when the big publishing companies (the Royals)\u00a0tended the gates, my\u00a0books were, like me, too different to be published.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Some readers don't get my work and others adore it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 What I don't get is lukewarm.\u00a0 My books are a love 'em or hate 'em affair.\u00a0 They'll definitely show you people, places and periods of time from my point of view.\u00a0 History is a mood. Reality is a mood. They are not\u00a0boxes that confine me or\u00a0my characters who might say or do anything.<\/p>\n My husband and I bought our house quite a few\u00a0years 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\u00a0a very happy place.<\/p>\n I hope that my books are also happy places.\u00a0 \u00a0They'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.<\/p>\n I hope you'll keep coming back to MaryAnneia.\u00a0 You don't even need a passport to visit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In MaryAnneia\u00a0people, places and things\u00a0have personalities.\u00a0 Sometimes they're happy, sometimes they're sad and sometimes they're just in a mood to piss me off.\u00a0 Yes, Virginia, things have issues too. Or at least - my things do. For example, take my office computer - please.\u00a0 Nah, I guess I'll keep it.\u00a0 In fact, some days, I'd ...continue reading \"Things Are People Too\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1814"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1814"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1819,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1814\/revisions\/1819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}