The Race

Tracy Dunham

This coming weekend I'll be camping out at RIR in the parking lot, big Dodge truck filled with good food, a grill, chairs, and an ice chest of soft drinks. To say I'm looking forward to a whole weekend of Busch and Nextel racing is a severe understatement. Wearing my Mark Martin hat and listening to him talk to his crew chief on my headphones, I'll be biting my nails as my favorite driver burns up the 3/4 mile track, even if his place in the race for the cup is secure. It's a unique thing to NASCAR, I have a feeling - this ownership fans feel towards their favorite drivers. It's as if they're family.

I feel the same way about characters in books. When a character comes alive at the hands of a good writer, I could kiss the ground she walks on. (Or he, of course, since men can write well too. I'm an equal-opportunity reader.) That's what I want to do with my stories - create people who belong to the reader. Characters who walk off the page and into the reader's head and get stuck there are rare, just like a top ten driver on the NASCAR circuit. Nuances, quirks, all the foibles of the living, are just a bit of the recipe it takes to creating living, breathing characters. Like driver who saves a car that's too loose at 200 mph, racing three wide in a tight turn, the writer who can steady the book with a sure hand is a treasure. I hope I can get there. With the book, not the car. The car is way beyond my skills, LOL!

Typos

Tracy Dunham
I'm the queen of them. As in, "storie's" (possessive) rather than "stories" plural, which it should have been in the prior blog. I can read through a manuscript a hundred times, and I swear, mis-spellings and typos jump onto the page after I've turned it over. I've tried reading backwards from the bottom of the page, reading aloud, and staring at each word and spelling it. Nothing helps. I read what my mind wants to see, which is perfect grammar, spelling, and typing, LOL.

Now that I'm aware that I'm a terrible proofreader of my own work, I'm gleeful when I catch typos in other works. "Yes!" I cry, "someone else is as bad as I am at proofing!" It's nice to have company when you're not very good at something.

On another note, I recently finished reading Elizabeth Vaughan's WARPRIZE, and let me tell you, it's a wonderful story. If you love an Alpha hero and a heroine with guts, this is one to put in your keeper pile.

Writing Tight

Tracy Dunham

Writing tight - it's a subject I've been thinking about for a while. I love to wander down the emotional highway of my characters, but there comes that moment when all that lovely introspection has to bite the dust if it's sticking the story to the road like illegal glue on Reed Sorenson's tires. I like storie's to race along - pages flipping as fast as you can read them - and sometimes, the pretty character flowers I plant around the borders (don't you love all these mixed metaphors?) just don't work. What's the right balance between character and story? I'm still juggling, although I confess I'm pretty much a character-driven story gal. For example, I remember Dick Francis heroes like I do the weight and length of my children when they were born. The exact hours, minutes, and seconds of labor. Dick Francis writes heroes like no one else. I may remember the barest details about the plot, but Kit Fielding? He's in my head forever.

Right now, I'm pretty much in the character-rules corner. Still and all, the plot has to be there, and the characters had better be part of the plot, or all I'd have is pages filled with people with nowhere to go, no story to live.

Living stories. I like that idea. If I can write a story that lives, I'll be happy.

Tracy Dunham

Tracy Dunham
Hi, I'm finally here - and eternally grateful to Leigh Wyndfield for getting me going with this blogging gig. I feel as if I'm starting a new novel, and the right opening sentence hasn't come to me just yet. It hasn't stopped me from jumping into a book with both feet yet - I always figure it takes me forty pages to get warmed up anyway, and the pages will end up trashed when the book goes through rewrites.

I'm thinking of starting a different book than the sort I'm known for. An idea has been rattling around in my head as I get my daughter packed up to return to college for her sophomore year. It's wild - (the story, not the daughter) and I'm not sure if the story will work, but I'll try plotting it out just for fun. As much as I love my children, I look forward to the quiet and calm that descend with the first days of school in the fall.