The housework didn't get done, but I designed the master layout for the new web site and did a number of the mostly text pages. Now comes the hard work with the pages that are graphic-intensive, which will have to be completely redesigned. But I now have the cover for the new book, so I can do the whole site. I think all will be unveiled next week, if I get it done in time.

My one regret is that I can't find a way to use the original artwork in the new design. My friend Rob Chambers, who now does the web comic Meatshield, drew that art for me while I played with his twin babies. I loved the "magic" of having the rollover elements so that the fairy and the frog changed to "normal" people (or vice versa) when mousing over them, but I can't fit them in this layout, unless maybe I stick them in as Easter eggs in random places on the site, which could be fun. Then again, they've lived a long and useful life, considering that I believe these babies are now finishing second grade.



(I don't have cats, so I have to use other people's babies to fulfill my "cute Internet photos" quota.)

The web designing hasn't helped this week's nagging semi-insomnia. Last night, I was designing web pages in my sleep. On the up side, I've figured out how I'll work it into the site if I sell the projects I've got finished. With one, I'll just fit it in as a second series and all of this design should still fit, unless the cover is totally out of whack (I seem to have also dreamt giving descriptions and input into that cover -- the result was something that looked kind of like the Typical Urban Fantasy cover, but instead of the tattooed chick in black leather, it would be a woman who looks a lot like Amy Adams did in Leap Year, wearing a very 1950s floral dress with pastel cardigan, but still looking utterly terrifying). With another, I'd link to it from the front page but do a totally different master layout for pages relating to that book/series.

In other news, we finished the semester of ballet last night (I've completed four years now!) and we went to Sonic after class to celebrate. We sat on their patio and had milkshakes and talked. They have their own "radio station" for the sound system and were playing a lot of what are now considered oldies. One of the songs they played was "Private Eyes" by Hall and Oates, and it brought back a memory of something I hadn't thought of in years. That song was popular when I was in eighth grade, and I developed an entire TV series based on it, with the idea to use that as the theme song for the opening credits (you know, back when TV shows had nearly full-length songs as opening credits). It was going to be a romantic comedy private detective show, with detectives from rival agencies who were always trying to undermine each other and snag the big clients, but then they'd run across a real crime in what looked like a more basic divorce/corporate espionage type case and have to team up to solve it. They were always having to use disguises and fake identities to infiltrate things, so they didn't always recognize each other but were always attracted to each other. Mind you, this was before Moonlighting or Remington Steele and this kind of series wasn't all that common at the time but was on the horizon, so I was very cutting-edge. I'd even visualized exactly how the opening credits would work as synchronized to that song. Hearing that song last night, I could still see those opening credits. I bet I still have the notebook with all those ideas written in it lying around somewhere. It probably has Muppets on the cover.

Alas, I missed my true calling as a television writer, so the world will never see that series. It would have been awesome, though. Come to think of it, it would probably be a perfect fit for the USA network today.

And now it's Memorial Day weekend. Tonight will be taco night, and I think I'll watch the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland movie on ABC Family. Tomorrow night, one of the HBO channels is showing the most recent version of Jane Eyre, which I never got around to in the theaters. Then Sunday afternoon I'm singing in a patriotic concert for Memorial Day at church (with ice cream afterward). And then I'll take my "holiday" early next week, since Memorial Day is also my dad's birthday. Posting may be sparse next week. Have a great holiday weekend, and take a moment to remember those who served and gave their all.

I spent yesterday playing around with possible layouts for a website redesign. One thing that seems to be tricky is figuring out how wide to make it. My old site seems awfully narrow on my current wide laptop screen, but it was based on the recommended parameters at the time. These days, do too many people not have widescreen format displays? If you design for the old-style monitor, there's so much space to the side and then to have any content you either need a lot of pages or require a lot of scrolling. Then there's the fact that the content seems to float in the middle of a blank screen, unless you design it so there's a colored background that stretches the width of the window, with the content in a different color in the middle. I actually find that rather distracting. I've done a test site where I don't bother with that, just keep it all white and have lots of white space and maybe do some color blocks to anchor the content, and I rather like that. It's also so much easier to work with. Then again, I'm the kind of person who finds lots of white space soothing. I can live happily with blank white walls. Other people might find that dull.

Then I realized that there's not much point in completely redoing the site until I can include the new book cover and info, but I can do the general master layout and do a lot of the pages. I think I'll mostly carry over the content from the old site, with some tweaks and updates and in a new format, but is there anything you'd like to see on my web site that isn't there? I mean, other than the complete content of the next book. Sorry. You'll have to buy that.

Meanwhile, I've really fallen behind in my housework. It's not to the point where I'd have to spend a day in panicked cleaning if I found out someone might come over, but it is getting a little messy and I've missed all my chores this week. I may play catch-up today.

And after shopping for a birthday card for my dad this morning and ending up buying a rather generic one, I'm back to wanting those greeting cards for geeks. Most of the funny cards were not the sort of thing you can give your father. Otherwise, they were really tacky or rather gross about the effects of aging or were about beer, scotch or golf, none of which my dad is into. My dad dragged me to see Star Wars, the first two Star Trek movies and Raiders of the Lost Ark (seeing all of those was his idea). He's more about church than about beer and scotch. There just weren't many funny cards that weren't about "ha, you're getting old" or about getting drunk. From the selection of cards, you'd think jerks were the only people buying greeting cards, and that seems counterintuitive.

And today I walked to the bank. Exercise! Again, I went by way of the park across the street. It used to be a vacant lot the canal and walking path ran through, with a widened "pond" area and a fountain-like spray to keep the water aerated and flowing. A few years ago they turned it into a butterfly park, planting the kinds of plants that would attract butterflies, adding an additional path and some trees to the other side of the water and making the fountain something that seems ornamental as well as functional. The plants are still filling in, but the ones that have reached some degree of maturity, especially the roses, are now glorious. It's become one of those soul-restoring places. I can happily sit and look at the flowers and listen to the fountain.

It was a little unnerving when the teller at the bank called me by name, even before I handed her my check and deposit slip, but then I remembered that she had me coach her on pronouncing it on my last visit. Apparently, Norwegian names don't roll off the tongue for Indians. It's funny, I spent my teen years desperate to get away from small-town life, and I end up in a neighborhood that functions a lot like a small town even though it's part of a big city in a major metropolitan area -- in fact, even more like the idealized small town than the small town I'm from, in that I can walk just about everywhere and there really are neighborhood services like the bank, library, post office and coffee shop where the people recognize you and often know your name. My home town is very spread out and you'd be taking your life in your hands to walk anywhere. And then everything I don't do in my neighborhood I do in the neighboring small town where I can seldom go to the grocery store without running into someone I know. I think "part of a major metropolitan area" is the key part that keeps this from being the kind of small town I'd want to escape. Not only can I walk to a movie theater and library, but just about anything else I could possibly need is a short drive away. My home town was about 14 miles from the nearest "city" that still wasn't entirely civilized, and we lived on a farm outside the town, so there was no way to walk anywhere. This is more like the towns and villages you read about in books.

I don't really have any new book 5 -- Much Ado About Magic -- news, other than that things are in progress. The cover is almost complete, the copy editor is at work, and an author whose books I love has read it and given a quote for the cover. All of that will be revealed soon.

I spent yesterday working through the tutorial for the new version of my web design software because they've added features and I've forgotten a lot. I started playing around with a test site. Before I purchase the upgrade after playing with the trial, I may also try a test site using the software that came with my computer, since I'm starting from scratch anyway. I'd forgotten how tedious this process can be.

This morning's walking errand (I'm trying to trick myself into exercising) was to walk to the Indian market via the park and get some lemons for making Greek food for dinner. I get a bizarrely perverse delight in buying my ingredients for making cuisines from other ethnicities at the Indian market. The only things I've bought there for making Indian food have been rice and some spices. Sadly, the only kind of lettuce they had was iceberg, so I'll still need to go to a regular grocery store tomorrow if I want to make BLT sandwiches (I'm partial to red leaf lettuce). However, their tomatoes looked divine. If I hadn't already had some, I would have stocked up.

I seem to have stumbled into a TV cop show along the way. While I was walking there, a police car abruptly did a fast U-turn -- right out of a cop show chase scene -- and tore off in the other direction, leaving the stench of burning rubber in his wake (must remember that sensory detail, in case a similar situation comes up in a book). Then there was another police car in front of the market, with the cop talking rather intensely to someone sitting in a car parked in front of the store. When I left, that car was gone and the cop was standing on the sidewalk, talking to a very agitated elderly man and seeming to try to calm him down. The "chase scene" car was headed in a different direction from this shopping center, though, so whatever it was, it was two different incidents, unless that cop was going in pursuit of someone who'd left the shopping center. Now that I think about it, I recall that the cop was talking to the man in the car and the man in the car was telling him who his cell phone carrier was. I wonder if maybe someone stole his phone (and maybe more) and ran off, and they were getting to the carrier to track it. Normally my neighborhood is very quiet and has a really, really low crime rate, so this level of excitement is a big change. I've heard that the local police have a funny name for this particular beat, something like "Sleepytime Ranch," because it's usually so dull. I suppose I should have lingered, whipped out a notepad and pen and said, "Don't worry, I'm a writer. Carry on."

With the series finale of House last night, the main TV season is pretty much over. That was about the only thing I liked that was cancelled this season, and I was ready for it to end, so I guess that makes it a good season for me. No spoilers, but the final episode encapsulated for me what the main problem with this series became over the years. I loved the first three seasons and even contributed an essay to a book about the series, and then it just imploded. The big event that a lot of people talk about as the turning point was when they demoted/moved around the original cast and brought in replacements, and while I don't think the show ever got its balance back from that, I feel like the real problem was that they lost sight of what they were trying to do with that character.

The concept that I liked about him at the beginning was that while he was a jerk, he was mostly saying the things that most of us may think but would never dare say out loud. It was kind of cathartic to have him say these things, to be willing to call stupid people stupid to their faces instead of having to smile and nod and play nice. The rest of his jerky behavior was diagnostic. Just as his approach to medicine was to poke things (metaphorically or literally) and let the response give him valuable information, he did the same thing in figuring out people. See what riled them or how they reacted to his outrageous behavior, and then he'd have a better understanding of what made them tick. But somewhere along the way, he just became mean and selfish and acted like a spoiled toddler. There was no rhyme or reason for him to do the things he did, and he got so outrageous that it was unbelievable any hospital would let him on the grounds. And then they went and woobified him, turning him into a victim. In the first couple of seasons, they seemed to go out of their way to say that there was no particular thing that made him that way. He was the same person before his leg was damaged, so it wasn't about the pain and the limp. He never outright stated that he wasn't abused, but I thought that was strongly implied in an early episode where his parents visited. But then later they decided that he was abused horribly by his father! Who wasn't really his biological father, so his mother had been lying to him and allowing her husband to abuse him! Poor, sad, pathetic House! And then they went the standard television route of trying to show that a woman could heal him with her love! Fortunately, that turned out not to be the case, but watching them attempt to go that route was incredibly painful.

Though, oddly, what lost me for at least half a season was when they hired a third-year medical student for a fellowship. I got the feeling that the writers didn't actually know what a "fellowship" was (it's something you do after completing a residency, so it's not something you can do while still in medical school). Not to mention they kept hiring actresses to play doctors in a fellowship who were barely old enough to have completed medical school. I guess women old enough to be fully qualified doctors who have completed residencies are too icky to have on TV. I mean, they'd be over 30. And then they'd get older! (Technically, Jesse Spencer (Dr. Chase) was also too young for his role, but apparently there's a different training track in Australia that might have worked out, so you can kind of handwave that, but they had way too many 25-year-old fellows.)

I did come back for the final season when they jettisoned the romance plot and the medical student, and it did get back to what I used to love in some ways. I thought the finale was a little self-indulgent and went to the well of "let's analyze this fascinating character that is House" one too many times, but I liked the final outcome.

And next season my Monday nights will be free, unless there's something on cable. Warehouse 13 should run into October this year, so there's that. That's usually my best writing day, so I guess it will be even better.

I took care of my civic duty this morning by walking over to the library for early voting in the primary. I found that if I take the route along the canal that comes up to the library the back way, I can avoid all the campaigners. They don't stake out the path from the canal, so by the time I'm in sight, I'm already within the "no electioneering" zone. No sea monsters this time, though I did chat with the staff about that. Unfortunately, the walk seems to have re-triggered my allergies. Oh well, it's that time of year.

My big entertainment for the weekend was the SyFy version of Battleship, called American Warships, and it was glorious. It might even have made a halfway decent big-screen movie with a little more thought into the script and a higher effects budget. Yeah, some of the acting was at "jock taking drama to boost the GPA" levels and the effects mostly looked like they were copied and pasted in (here's some film of a fire, now let's superimpose it on our action!), but I suspect it was still the better "the Navy fights an alien invasion" movie of the weekend.

The story was essentially Battlestar Galactica on the water -- there are mysterious attacks using EMP to fry everything with an integrated circuit, but the battleship Iowa manages to save the day because it's a WWII relic on its final voyage and is already being restored to its WWII state to become a museum. They can fight the aliens using WWII technology and aren't immediately disabled by the aliens' weapons. There's also a convenient SEAL team that provides an Aliens interlude by boarding the alien stealth ship and finding cave-like corridors (because, naturally, your high-tech stealth interstellar ship is going to have an interior that looks like a cave). Meanwhile, the aliens' evil plot is to make the Chinese and North Koreans think these are American attacks and make the Americans think they're Chinese attacks so they'll attack each other, nuke the planet and make invasion easy (these aliens apparently thrive on radiation). So everyone's scrambled bombers with nukes, and the Iowa has to defeat the mother ship and prove that it really is aliens before the bombers reach their targets -- and all they've got is shortwave, so they can't even send photos.

There was one big disappointment for me that I think a big-budget treatment would have avoided. At one point they mention that backup's on its way, as they've scrounged together a squadron of vintage aircraft that won't be affected by the EMP. Unfortunately, with a total film budget made up of change found between the sofa cushions, that amounted to seeing two planes that went down pretty quickly. I wanted to see an all-out battle of WWII aircraft vs. aliens. I'm one of the few people who actually liked the Doctor Who episode with the Daleks during WWII because, hello, Spitfires vs. Daleks! What's not to love?

However, the very, very best part of this movie was the disclaimer at the beginning that said something to the effect of: "According to the Department of Defense, these events never happened."

Really? You mean the Iowa didn't fight off an alien invasion that involved the sinking of the carrier Enterprise? I'm not sure I would have realized that this wasn't a documentary otherwise.

Anyway, it was totally worth a big bowl of popcorn and a root beer. But I do desperately want to see the movie it could have been. Oh, and apparently the big-screen Battleship doesn't contain the line, "You sank my battleship!" But this movie had the captain snarl, "They won't sink my battleship!" Which I think is a win.

In other weekend news, I had my fifth Sunday in a row of singing in two services, and this time there was a severe soprano shortage, so I switched to singing the first soprano part, which I hadn't practiced (I'd become accustomed to not needing to rehearse both parts). Of course, this was a weekend when the allergies meant I probably could have sung alto. Now we'll see if it'll be six weeks in a row. Will I get the frantic Saturday-afternoon "can you sing in a quartet?" phone call?

I did finally sort of overcome the procrastination/don't wannas yesterday and do some of that work, but then quickly melted under pressure. One of the things I need to do is update my web site, but the files and software for that are on the old computer that can't access the Internet anymore. I found that there is a new version of the software that will work on the new computer, and it will supposedly open files from older versions, so I downloaded their trial version to check. It did open the files, but there seems to be a problem with the graphics, as the software is looking for the graphics in the resources folder via the path on the old machine, which has some different names on the new machine. I may have to delete and re-insert all the graphics, because otherwise even updating one bit of text will mean the software sees all the graphics as changes and will change that throughout the site. And if I'm going to do that, I may as well redesign the whole web site and make it obvious it's been updated. The new version of the software has a lot more bells and whistles, features and functions. But boy, is that tedious work. It may have to wait for next week.

However, the new skirt worked out beautifully in ballet class, and the teacher even complimented me on it. It did lack somewhat in twirlability, which any little girl can tell you is the most important thing in a skirt, but it wasn't really designed to twirl, since its main function is to cover the behind, and it's not doing that if it's twirling. The teacher did tell me I have to move up to the intermediate class in the fall so there can be a true beginning class and she doesn't have to try to teach so many different levels in one class. I guess after four years I can't consider myself a beginner anymore. The intermediate class for adults used to be more of an advanced class, with a different teacher, and most of the people in there were really experienced dancers -- like, former professionals who were no longer dancing professionally but who wanted to stay in decent shape. But that class kind of dissolved, and my teacher will be starting a new true intermediate class in the fall.

Now for some geeky news and stuff. The movie Battleship opens this weekend, which means we also get the SyFy channel Saturday night "mockbuster." Their version is called American Warships. There's a chance this one might come close in quality to the big-screen movie (not that this is something to aim for). I have to get up early Sunday morning, but I may take my shower beforehand and then make some popcorn and watch in my pajamas.

Meanwhile, tonight is the season finale of Grimm. And then my Friday nights will become a vast wasteland for a while -- especially with the news that SyFy is moving Haven to the fall. On the up side, Grimm and Haven will make a delicious cross-network double feature. On the down side, I have to wait that much longer to see how they resolve that insane cliffhanger, and the season premiere date is the Friday night of FenCon. I managed to get home in time to watch last year, but then I spent the weekend feeling very frustrated about not being able to discuss it with friends who hadn't seen the episode because they were at the convention. I may have to do what I did when the release of the last Harry Potter book came during a convention and force myself to wait until Sunday night to watch. After nearly a year of waiting, what's a couple more days?

And it's a good thing that they're moving something worth watching to the fall because I'm pretty blah about the new season. On the bright side, there were no cancellations that made me sad, but on the down side, there aren't that many new shows that have me very excited. There are a few things that may be interesting and that I might try watching if they fell into my open slots, but all the shows that look moderately interesting are either opposite something I already watch or on at a time when I probably won't be home (though I don't know what my dance class schedule will be for the fall). So, there are a lot of shows that I'm hoping will be available OnDemand but that I probably won't make much effort to watch otherwise.

But, hey, that leaves more time for reading and writing!

I'm looking forward to ballet class tonight because I have some new gear to try out. I'm finishing my fourth year of dance, and every year I complete, I reward myself by buying some new item of dance gear. After year 1, I got a second pair of tights so I don't have to wash them every week. After year 2, I got a new leotard. After year three, I had to replace my shoes. This year, since my shoes are in good shape and I've got plenty of tights and leotards for a once-a-week class, I indulged in something a little more frivolous. The adult class doesn't have a dress code, and that means most of us don't strictly wear the leotard and tights ensemble. We generally wear shorts, sweatpants, yoga pants, leggings, etc., over the leotard and tights. I've been wearing an old pair of knit shorts that I think were originally meant to be "loungewear" -- not really pajamas, but not for wearing in public. They're lounge-around-the-house clothes. But I decided to buy one of those chiffon wrap ballet skirts to wear instead of shorts. I'm finally starting to feel like I'm really dancing instead of just going through the motions, and that kind of makes me want to dress like a pretty ballerina. Plus, we're starting to do actual choreography. Most of a dance class involves doing exercises that are the building blocks to steps, then doing the steps themselves in a sequence of combinations. Now, though, we're learning a dance. And I get to wear my fluttery little skirt for it tonight. Yay!

I feel weirdly like a seven-year-old, back in my previous dance-crazed phase, when I would have killed to wear a fluttery little skirt for dance class, but we had a strict black leotard/pink tights/no skirts policy. Only now I'm an adult and I can wear what I want, so there! My inner seven-year-old is overjoyed. I think I'll even wear the purple leotard tonight (although my other leotards are black and I like them better).

I really have to buckle down and do some business/promotion type work, and although that used to be my favorite form of procrastination, it's now becoming something I procrastinate on. It doesn't help that I seem to have an extreme case of book hangover from getting to the end of what's available in the Song of Ice and Fire series. My brain doesn't like incomplete stories and keeps trying to finish it for me, and I have to remind it that it's not my story. For one thing, it's not nearly funny enough for me to have written, way too many people die, and there's too much blood and guts. Funny thing, though: the editor for those books is a big fan of my books. Go figure. I guess she needs a happy break every so often. At any rate, I'll be trying to focus on something and my brain will be going, "Hmm, what if …" and then I'll find myself checking the background for a theory either by digging through the books I still haven't returned to the library or by looking in online forums. I may need to get copies to keep because I'm seeing that there's lots of stuff I missed.

I should have known better than to let myself get into a never-ending doorstop epic fantasy series. This sort of thing never goes well for me. I fall into obsession way too easily. I guess I need to find something else to read that will be a new obsession trigger, and I actually have a whole Saturday with no plans ahead of me that I can dedicate to reading and relaxing.

Happy day. I got my favorite checker at the grocery store, the one who sings along with the Motown songs on the in-store sound system while he checks out groceries and gets me to groove along with him. We have way too much fun (and I think he remembers me as the customer he can do that with).

I had a reader question about writing dialogue that flows without sounding stilted and awkward. I'm not sure I can just tell you how to write dialogue, but I can tell a little about how I learned to write dialogue and give some exercises that might help you develop your ear.

What you want to do in writing dialogue is write it so that it sounds like the way we think people really talk. You don't want to write the way people really talk because it would drive you nuts. Real human talk is full of filler words, things like "um" and "uh," repetitions and half statements that get sidetracked. You just don't notice these things unless they get really, really awful because your brain automatically edits them out. You might not even notice if you recorded a conversation among your friends and played it back, but if you transcribed that conversation, it might read like pointless drivel. I've seen a similar effect in amateur blogger/journalists who get the chance to interview someone or participate in one of those group conference call interviews, and then their post from that interview is a direct transcription. Even a very articulate person who's used to working with the media comes across as something of an idiot if you transcribe every word he says, exactly the way he says it. In writing fictional dialogue, you want to write it to sound the way we hear people talk -- the edited version.

I think the biggest help for me in getting an ear for dialogue was going to journalism school. You get the information for an article by interviewing people, so you really have to listen to what they say, and the article is also largely made up of quotes, so you have to capture the way the person talks while getting the gist of the info in what they're saying. Most people don't speak in soundbites, so this can really require some work. You may not actually quote someone word-for-word, since a lot of that would be useless words, but you want to convey the sense of what they said in a way that they would say it, using the words they actually said. In taking notes from an interview, you only write down the real content that matters, not the extraneous stuff. If you do it right, the person you interviewed can read the article and think that's exactly what they said because it's what they meant to say, even if in reality there was some meandering along the way. Do this enough, and you get used to capturing people's speech patterns.

Beyond that, I was a broadcast journalism major and did a lot of work in radio news. I even interned at a bureau for a radio news network. A radio news story generally contains a story the anchor reads with a clip or two from the interview with the subject speaking. Because of the fact that there are hesitations, repetitions and useless words in the way people normally speak, there's no time in the story to just run a clip verbatim (about the only people you can do that with are politicians working from a script). You have to edit the tape to the point that it will sound to listeners like what they'd hear anyway, since we mentally edit out that stuff. I spent a lot of time editing tape the old-fashioned way, rocking the reels on a reel-to-reel deck back and forth to find the start/stop points, marking with a grease pencil, then cutting out the bad part with a razor blade and then splicing the tape back together again. Then in the scripts we sent to the network, I had to transcribe the clips. Sometimes I also had to transcribe an interview for the correspondent so he could pick the clips he wanted. All of that taught me to really listen to the way people talk and also get an ear for the way they talk without the excess stuff.

(Incidentally, it's more challenging with TV because you can't edit within a clip without it being obvious. TV reporters are more likely to ask the same question in multiple ways throughout an interview, so by the end of the interview the subject will have had a chance to think about the answer and phrase it better, and then there will be a usable clip. That's also why people tend to come across as kind of stupid in TV interviews, because the reporter can't clean them up. And it's why TV sound bites are so very, very short -- they have to find the few seconds of footage that contain good content without insertions or digressions)

A good way to get a sense of the way we think people naturally talk, look for a TV show or movie that strikes you as having good, natural-sounding dialogue. I think Friday Night Lights was a good one because sometimes it sounded almost improvised, it seemed so natural. Try transcribing a scene or two and see how the words come across in print. Otherwise, just listen to people, a lot. Eavesdrop on conversations and imagine how you'd write them. Look for speech patterns like word usage or rhythms. Listen to the way a conversation flows.

A few tips for writing dialogue:
* If you're writing contemporary American characters, use contractions unless there's a specific reason not to. If someone is saying "do not" instead of "don't," it's usually to emphasize the "not." Not using conjunctions is going to sound stilted -- though that may be what you want to convey with some characters.
* If you have trouble getting distinct voices for your characters, mentally cast them, then watch something with those actors to get their voices in your head and try to hear those voices saying the lines as you write.
* Read your dialogue out loud to yourself. Is it uncomfortable to speak those lines? Do you feel stilted? Can you tell a difference between the characters? Do you run out of breath? If you can't say a sentence in one breath, you need to break it up or trim it because your character would also need to pause.
* It may help to take an acting class. You may be able to find a class through a community college or continuing education program or though a theater organization. Learning how to embody characters and speak dialogue can really help in writing dialogue -- or at least in the way you read your dialogue out loud to yourself so that you can tell if your dialogue works.
* Edit, edit, edit. Most first-draft dialogue is too long for the way people really talk. Pare it down to the minimum, unless what you're trying to convey is a long-winded character.
* Make use of subtext. Most people aren't going to directly say what they're thinking unless they're really in a comfort zone or are too desperate to play games. They may say only a few words or deflect while their body language gives them away. In writing dialogue, remember that not everything has to be said in words. Incorporate non-verbal communication, as well, and it will feel more natural. Remember that people are more likely to subconsciously believe what's being said non-verbally than they are to believe the actual words being spoken, especially if they contradict each other. Think about someone saying through clenched teeth, "No, I'm not angry at all," while clenching her fists.

And now a brief commercial announcement. If you write fantasy, science fiction or horror and write short stories and you want a chance to get feedback on your story, as well as an opportunity for publication and a cash prize, FenCon, a science fiction convention in Dallas, sponsors an annual short story contest. Go here for details. You don't have to attend the convention to enter. If you think you might attend the convention, there's also a writer's workshop held at the convention. Here are the details.

I've just realized that I need to do a writing post tomorrow, and I have no clue what to talk about. Hit me with questions about craft, the business or the life, please!

I spent a lot of yesterday pondering what kind of story could include all those elements I mentioned yesterday -- the caper, trapped with a killer and with a freedom fighter in hiding while there's internal tension and one of the characters has to step up. I'd been thinking that I'd have to come up with an entirely new story or series idea because it didn't fit into anything I currently have in the works, but now I've realized that if I give the elements a few twists, that's actually a perfect scenario for a climax to a story idea I've been mentally playing with where I have the set-up but I couldn't come up with a plot. That one's going to take a lot of research, and when I get a chance to work on it could depend on what happens with a book that has supposedly just gone out on submission. If that one doesn't sell, then this could be my next stab. If it does sell, I'll need to write those sequels.

But I suppose I may as well start some of the reading for the research, since I finished the last available book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, and now I need to find something else to read. The trick will be to find the right transition. I think I need something lighter (and shorter), but at the same time, that's a pretty immersive world, and something too far from it would be hard for me to get into right now.

I must say that getting to the end (so far) and having the story still entirely unresolved, combined with the season finale of Once Upon a Time, is making me realize that I like closure. I read an essay recently on how these books aren't so much "books" as they are chunks of story. In a sense, this is similar to the way Dickens' books were published, as one big story in serial form, but instead of publishing chapters monthly to tell a novel-length story, it's Dickens-length books published every five years or so to tell one story. Meanwhile, Once Upon a Time seems to be telling one story that may morph and adjust over the course of the series without ever being truly resolved until the series gets cancelled. I guess there's a reason I never really got into soap operas because that slow progress and lack of resolution is very unsatisfying.

On the other hand, I'm also not crazy about the pure procedurals where each story stands entirely alone and has no consequences down the line. They don't do a lot of those these days because they'll at least have some kind of season arc, even if it's just in the characters' personal lives, but I remember the cop/detective shows in the 80s where an episode might end with one of the heroes seriously injured or in love with a guest character, and in the next episode he's fine and there's no sign or mention of his one true love.

I seem to like a hybrid, where there's an overall big-picture arc but there are also episode cases that get resolved, so there's some closure even while the big-picture story continues, like with Grimm and Haven. Or shows like Buffy and Angel and Deep Space Nine most of the time, where there might be a Big Bad for the season and instead of a true cliffhanger at the end of the season they'd actually resolve that season's story arc and defeat that Big Bad, and then in the last moment they'd introduce the next season's problem. In between, there might be standalone episodes with sub-problems that might or might not relate to the arc that could be resolved.

That's sort of what I've tried to do with my books. The same Big Bad is out there, but each book is about defeating a particular scheme. And now for your weekly Book 5 hint:

Book 5 wraps up the arc of the series so far. We learn who the real Big Bad is and have the ultimate confrontation with that Big Bad. Think of this as the season finale.

I hope everyone had a lovely Mother's Day. Although I'm not a mom, my church has the kids hand out flowers to all the women in the church because we all play a role in the lives of the kids, which I think is a nice touch and keeps the day from being depressing for those who wanted to be mothers but aren't, for whatever reason. Because I got the last minute "can you sing the soprano part in a quintet at the early service?" call, I got two flowers from singing for two services. This quintet was a little nervewracking, as we didn't get much rehearsal and as the choir director was singing with us (he's a former professional opera singer). I felt a wee bit intimidated singing what amounts to the lead in that kind of group, but I think I did okay, and I was more nervous in the one run-through we did than I was actually performing. I may eventually defeat the stage fright entirely.

While I was starching and ironing all my bedroom Battenberg lace last week, I put on one of my favorite episodes of Grimm to watch, and then I noticed that the episode was written by Jose Molina, who also wrote my favorite all-around episodes of Firefly and Haven. Either I need to start a fan club, or I need to become his best friend because we seem to like the same things. He wrote the Grimm episode "Cat and Mouse," which was the one with the fleeing freedom fighter. I'm not sure yet I'd say it's my favorite, but it's an episode I've already rewatched several times OnDemand. On Firefly, he wrote the episode "Ariel," the one where the crew robs the hospital and nearly gets caught by the Feds. There may be scenes, moments or storylines I like better in other episodes, but for an all-around episode that embodies all the things I like about the series, I think that's my favorite. And on Haven he wrote "As You Were," the one where the cast is trapped in an old hotel on an island during a storm, and then discovers that one of them has been taken over by a murderous shapeshifter. Again, there may be plots, scenes and moments I like better, but for an episode as a whole that embodies what I like about the series, this episode is currently my favorite.

Then because overanalysis is pretty much my hobby, I started trying to figure out what these episodes have in common that seemed to push my buttons. One thing I determined is that they all center on some of my favorite story tropes, which would be an argument for the "best friend" plan, but they give the familiar trope a twist or two that makes it even better. The Firefly episode is mostly a caper -- an elaborate and intricate scheme that requires the whole team to work together. But this caper goes awry not because there's a flaw in the plan but because one of the team members turns traitor, and that then turns this seemingly one-off episode into an arc episode because it brings our characters right up against what had been a mostly off-screen antagonist.

The Haven episode is a wonderful example of the "group of people is stranded in an isolated, spooky place -- and one of them is a murderer" story (that I still want to write), but unlike the Agatha Christie style take on the plot, motive doesn't really come into play. There's no reason (that the characters are aware of) for the shapeshifting killer to have taken any one form over another, which makes it more difficult to ferret out who the shapeshifter is. Then the Grimm episode is pretty much a classic WWII resistance/spy thriller plot, just set in modern Portland and with fairy tale creatures. Books about that kind of stuff (the resistance/spy stuff, not the people who are also wolves and foxes) were my bread and butter in junior high and high school.

But then further analysis uncovered more parallels. One thing all of these episodes have in common is that they've got a lot of tension and conflict -- but much of the conflict is internal to the regular characters/good guys rather than between the good guys and the bad guys. In the Firefly episode, the Blue Hands guys and the Feds are there and are a threat, but Jayne is the real antagonist because he's the one willing to betray members of his crew. He's out to get Simon and River, and he thinks that will earn him favor with Mal. But even before his plot comes to fruition -- though after it's too late to stop it -- even he starts having second thoughts. A lot of the tension in the episode comes from how he reacts to the fact that Simon trusts him and thinks he's really trying to help them.

The Haven episode is really a showpiece of internal conflict among the regular characters because the "villain" of the episode isn't actually doing anything to stir things up, other than getting them into the situation. They're all doing it to themselves because the situation brings out all the underlying tensions. Aside from one newcomer in the group, all of these people have known each other most of their lives, so there's a ton of baggage. We've got the older generation vs. the younger generation, the mother and daughter who love each other but can't seem to stop fighting, the father and son with a rift that can't really be overcome because the father thinks the best thing he can do for his son is toughen him up and that makes the son think his father thinks he's a weak idiot. There are the brothers who are usually close but who also have very different opinions of what should be done. There are three cops in the group and one career criminal. There are the young men who've been "frenemies" since they were five -- you get the impression that they were actually friends at some point but that there have been a lot of betrayals and disappointments along the way. And there are the cop partners who get along well and consider each other friends but who realize in these circumstances that they don't actually know each other all that well. Throw in the fact that one of these people has been replaced by a killer shapeshifter and they don't know which one it is, and things get extremely volatile.

The Grimm episode has more of a presence by the bad guy, but there's still internal conflict, with the woman whose family connection with the resistance drags her into it, and that then drags her friend into it when he's tried to stay out of that stuff. Then there's the fact that our main character, Nick, the "Grimm" who normally would kill people like them, would traditionally be the enemy of the freedom fighter, plus he's also a cop and the freedom fighter is a murder suspect. And then the audience knows that Nick's boss is in the middle of all this, while Nick doesn't know, so we get the tension of knowing more than he does about how perilous his situation is.

But the real thing that I think makes these episodes resonate with me is that they're all turning points for a character and are about a character really stepping up to face a challenge. Since this is all arc-type stuff, it may not come from this particular writer, but he does seem to get assigned those stories. In Firefly, Simon has up to this point considered himself an outsider. He may be a federal fugitive, but he's not a criminal like the rest of the people on the ship. Here, though, he's the one who crafts the elaborate (and extremely successful) heist, proving that he just might be the best criminal on the ship. We also get to see him in his element in the hospital, and then we get to see him really rise to the crisis when they're captured. He stands up to their captors, never losing his cool, and then he's able to take out one of the guards with his hands chained behind his back. One of the disappointments of the premature ending of the series for me was that we never really got to see where this led. I loved the idea of Simon as budding criminal mastermind. We did see in one more episode after this one (by the same writer) that Simon was capable of scaring even Jayne. There was a lot of potential for a character arc stemming from this episode.

On Haven, the turning point wasn't so much something that changed for the character, but rather that it changed the way we (the audience) and the other characters saw this person. Up to that point, they'd mostly focused on the nice-guy aspect of Nathan. We knew he had some seething anger beneath the surface, but for the most part, he was the sweetheart of a guy who turned into mush in the presence of a baby, got shy and awkward when talking to women and who was capable of empathizing with people in emotional distress. We knew he was physically tough because of the "curse" that keeps him from feeling pain, and we knew he was a smart, good cop, but we weren't sure that his father wasn't right about whether he could handle the tough stuff emotionally. And then in this episode, he's the one who solves the case and who is capable of coldly shooting someone who is an exact duplicate of someone close to him, so we learned that there's a lot of steel under that nice-guy exterior. This is not someone you want to mess with, and you really don't want to mess with someone he cares about.

On Grimm, this was the episode that really made Nick stand up and take a side in the conflict in this magical secret world he's found himself in, and this was the time he ended up acting in that role rather than as a cop. In previous situations, he's come down on the cop side, regardless of whatever else he knows is going on. Here, he witnesses a murder (though in self-defense) and lets the killer go because he knows that even going through the process of booking and going before a grand jury will only cause more harm to the secret world. I have a feeling there will be a lot of ramifications from this episode.

Now I think I need to find a way to force a character to step into a destiny-like role and amp up the tension among the good guys -- while they're pulling a caper in a remote hotel where freedom fighters are hiding. That would be the best book ever.