Which comes first? Tricia McGill

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The age old question. Is it the chicken or the egg, or the other way round?

    But my query is, what comes first, the characters or the story? This is a question as a writer I am often asked. I always thought it was my characters as I believe my stories are character driven, but looking back I realize this isn’t wholly true.

    Taking my books one by one. Let’s start with Remnants of Dreams.

    This one was easy as the original idea was to tell my mother’s story. I was last to arrive into our large clan so my early years were filled with stories, related mostly by my eldest sister, of life through the difficult years before and during WW11. Alicia, the main character of course is based loosely on our mum. The last time I can recall her actually cuddling me was when I was really young, perhaps 4 of 5, so this tells you a lot about her character. Cherished by all her 5 boys and 5 girls, she was nonetheless not a woman to shower us with affection. But, she was always there for us and I cannot remember a time when there was not a meal waiting for me when I came home, when the fire was not already blazing in the fireplace when I rose on winter mornings when there was ice on the outside of the windows. Never was a woman so liked by her neighbors and those who knew her. My one regret is that she never talked about her early life or days before she met and fell in love with our father. There was a period when my sister and I even surmised that perhaps they never even got married as we had no tangible proof of a wedding. But we have this picture, which we presumed could have been taken on their wedding day in 1914.

    But I have gone totally off the subject. It was easy to create Alicia. Mathew, her husband, was a figment of my imagination. Based loosely on my father, in that he worked for the gas company and was gentle, kind, and a loving husband, he differed in lots of other ways. There were so many other characters in this book, some bearing similar characters to members of my large family, but mostly created to suit the story line. That proves therefore that the story came first and then the characters—or does it? I’ll leave that one for you to sort out.

    Now Mystic Mountains was definitely story first characters second. I attended a creative writing class years ago when I had barely written one or two full length novels that had probably reached draft number two stage and the tutor at this class gave us a task to create an opening scene that featured a character arriving in Australia in the 1800s after being transported from Merrie England. That one scene turned into one of my most popular books. Bella was the girl transported for a misdemeanor against a man of the aristocracy, so it followed that Tiger would be the arrogant Englishman she detested at first sight who would become her allocated Master.

    Distant Mountains was a follow on. It was supposed to be the story of Bella and Tiger’s eldest son, but somehow Bella’s newly transported brother took over and so it became his story. It follows that his love interest just had to be a woman of quality whose father was a bigot who would never agree to his only daughter marrying, or even socializing with a convict.

    I’ve always loved Time-Travels so thought it about time I attempted to write one. Mine was destined to have a twist as I sent a couple, Andrew and Liz, who had totally opposing personalities back in time to meet The Laird. This Laird bore a striking resemblance to Andrew and so Liz half fell in love with him. Now in this book the story most definitely came first and the characters formed in my mind once the story line was set in motion.

    Travis, the Laird’s story, followed. It just had to as I was also half in love with the Laird, and could not just leave him there in the past without finding out how things panned out for him. But when Liz’s friend Beth ended up back in his time Travis was a changed man from the rogue Andrew and Liz left behind. So, story came first as I had to get Beth back there somehow.

    Now, Leah in Love (and trouble) still has me puzzled. I can’t for the life of me remember where this idea sprung from and can only attribute it to my Muse, who does tend at times to go her own way. Leah’s story is the only one I’ve told in first person, but once Leah had established herself in my psyche, what else was there to do but let her have her own way and tell us about herself and the trouble she gets in. Her real name is Violet and as that is a flower what was her occupation to be but a gardener, hence her eccentric aunt, who taught her all there was to know about flora, was born. Sean, her love interest just had to be a PI or how else would she have been involved in so much mayhem simply by working on his garden.

     A Dream for Lani was characters first. This was another one my Muse took control of. I knew I wanted a shy, introverted woman who has lots of money but not much love in her life. Ryan and his children provide her with all the love she requires—after a shaky start of course.

    Lonely Pride is set in Tasmania. I often holidayed in this magnificent state in my early days in Australia with my Tasmanian friend whose mother was one of those characters that once met you never forget. But, I digress. A few incidents that happened on one of my trips there formed the nucleus of this story. I guess I can say that story came before characters in this one.

    Maddie and the Norseman is another of my Time-Travels. I was going through a Viking phase and absolutely knew I had to set my story back in Viking times, and specifically in the period after they had finished invading, ravaging and ransacking in Britain and were in the process of becoming honest tradesmen and traders. York was the obvious setting as it was one of the first towns settled by them. So, Maddie and her Viking Erik came after the plot line had been established. I do have another Viking story on its way some time soon.

    So, there we are, I really haven’t proved anything. Sometimes it is simply an idea that appears in the first light of dawn and the characters have to then decide how they wish to fit into this plot we’ve decided on, and other times the characters rule and insist on going their own way. Whatever, you can bet we authors love letting our characters show us the way.

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Ghosts Don't Wait For Halloween

Halloween is almost here. It is my next-to-favorite time of the year. I love to decorate my home, inside and out, with scary scarecrows and witches and things that go "boo!" in the night. My husband installs a green light at the curb of our house, and when it goes on at dark, strange things happen! Shadows begin to sway, witches begin to fly, and it is one heck of a frightening place for people to see! And I love it.

But this is not about Halloween. This is about the ghosts that are real. Not made up, not in fiction, but those that happen in real life. Don't believe in ghosts? My husband didn't either, for much of our marriage. He does now.

I saw my first ghost when I was twelve. We had just moved into a rented house in Seattle, Washington, coming from Seward, Alaska. My parents told me not to go into the attic, because the people who owned the house kept stuff up there, and I should leave it alone. One day I came home from school and the house was very quiet. My father was at the Army fort where he was stationed, my mother was at work. I started to do my homework, but then I heard it. Faint musical notes. Strange, I didn't have the radio on. I went back to my math problems, but then...it came again. Louder, this time, and definitely somewhere in the house. I searched for the sound in every room, but we only had two radios and both were turned off and silent. ( This was in the horse-and-buggy days before TV.)

As I passed the stairs to the attic, I could hear the music more distinctly. I paused. Yes, it was definitely coming from the attic. I wasn't supposed to go up there...but that was then, this was now. I climbed the stairs and found the door was unlocked, for some reason. I opened it.  The first thing I saw was a very old organ, the kind you had to foot pedal to get the musical sounds. The second thing I saw was the lady. She was not much more than a smoky blue figure, but she was there. And playing the organ. I must have made a noise, because she turned. When she saw me, she vanished. The music stopped. The foot pedals stopped moving.

For almost every day of the eleven months we lived there, I went up the attic stairs, opened the door just a crack, and watched the Lady in Blue play the organ. If she saw me, she vanished. I learned to sit on the top stair, and open the door just a crack, and it was okay.

My parents never saw her, but she was not the only ghost in that house. We also had a poltergeist that loved to torment my mother in the kitchen. She would be cooking, and a cupboard door would fly open, and dishes would fall onto the floor. I spent more time sweeping up broken dishes that I did washing them. Once my parents had company, and they were sitting on sofas which faced each other in front of the fireplace. A vase of freshly cut roses was on the mantle. It suddenly flew off the mantle and dumped water and roses all over the woman guest. They left soon after.

There were other incidents of ghostly behavior in my life, like when my children and their father bought me an antique spinning wheel for my birthday. No, the wheel didn't spin wool by itself, but several strange things happened in our house after it came. Items disappeared from both my son's and daughter's rooms; I came home one day from the university where I was teaching, and found every picture in the living and family rooms turned to the wall; one night there was a funny sound like someone was continually dropping something. My teen-age son went into the main bath and came back with this comical look on his face. He told us to come see what was happening: the toilet seat was going up, coming down, going up, coming down. We all stood there with our mouths open for at least five minutes, watching that stupid seat go up, come down, go up, come down. It finally stopped.

When Richard and married, 37 years ago, he was the typical male non-believer in anything psychic, strange, ghostly, or otherwise not explainable nor understandable in technical terms. He was a Project Manager in Aerospace, so he had no time to believe in "unearthly" things. Except: he learned over the years that there were times when I told him something was going to happen. Something I could not possibly have known about. And it did. A few times I asked him not to do something, or go somewhere, it was important to me that he didn't. He always listened, and always, something went wrong...once there was a fatal accident at the exact point on our freeway that he would have been on at that same time.

He always knew I had an unexplainable bond with the horses, both ours and those brought to the ranch for training. I always knew when one of them was sick. Our vet would come out, examine the horse, and say, "Mikki, I can't find anything wrong." He would leave, return an hour or so later when the horse was down. He started asking me to come with him when he had to examine an unruly horse, especially if it was a stallion. I could quiet the most anxious or frightened or just downright ornry horse simply by talking to him. I could get the most untrainable horse to come to me, by silent communication...which is why we had a few, uh, uncooperative young horses come in for training over the years.

But that is not a ghost. When we sold our ranch, our present home was not finished yet, so we had to live for 9 months in a rented house in the High Desert of Southern California. The first thing that happened there occurred right after we moved in. We had bought a new refrigerator for the new house, but couldn't get it hooked up in the rental where we could use the automatic ice water maker. So Richard put the filter for that up on top of the fridge, still in its box, and said to leave it there so he would know where it was when it came time to move to the coast. The next day the filter was gone. It stayed gone for 9 months. The day I was packing up dishes for our move, I opened the cupboard door and found the filter sitting on top of the dinner plates. I called Richard to come see it, and said, "See, Mergatroid has been at it all along."

Mergatroid was the name we gave to our ghost. Oh, yes, he was real. He took my favorite coffee mug from where I had left it one night, and never gave it back. He took a chain that Richard was going to use to secure the back fence. We turned the house upside down and inside out, and never found the chain. Until the day we moved, when one of the movers picked it up off the floor from under the sofa. Oh yes, that sofa had been moved, the cushions turned out, but no chain was there...until that day.

One night, Richard was up late watching TV. I heard him yakking at the TV, and came out of the bedroom, asking what was wrong. I looked at the TV and saw what was wrong: the picture went off, then came on, went off, came on, went off, and small green circles of light came out of the TV and plastered themselves on the wall. The circles started off small, getting bigger and bigger as they moved on the wall towards Richard and his chair. They stopped just opposite his chair, then started back to the TV, getting smaller and smaller as they went. The picture came on, the circles disappeared, and everything was fine. Except my husband. But that incident, and many others while we lived in that house, convinced him without a doubt that ghosts were real.

In the Seattle house, the Blue Lady was the woman who had owned the house, and who, one day at about age 90 something, died of a heart attack as she was playing the organ. We didn't know who the poltergeist was.

As for the spinning wheel, it had been owned by two sisters, never married, who had used that wheel to spin wool and cotton as their main means of financial support. This was back in the 1800s.

We found out about the time we moved from the rental in the High Desert that all the houses on that street, the last in the neighborhood, were built over an ancient Indian graveyard. The Guaymaya Indian tribes who still lived in that area had fought the developer about those houses, but had lost the battle, and the houses were built in the 1990s. I'm sure that "Mergatroid" was the spirit...or ghost...of someone who was buried at one time beneath that house.

I believe in ghosts. Not the kind you can communicate with, but they are real, nevertheless. There are too many instances in my life, true, real incidents, where a ghost has made his or her presence known, for me not to believe. And now, Richard does, too.

I'm not a psychic. But I talk to horses. And there are still times when I know what is going to happen before it does happen. Those incidents don't come often, any more, for which I'm glad because I have never had an explanation for them.

Do you believe in ghosts?

Thankful for Orange Kool-aid by Diane Scott Lewis

With an intense, type A personality, I sometimes find I haven’t stopped to “smell the roses” (or gardenias in my case) much. I stormed through my teens, twenties, thirties…and so on, careening toward something I hadn’t yet figured out. Finally, I decided to embark on the passion of my youth, writing novels. That will be so easy, won’t it? I’m vastly talented and creative, aren't I?

The other day, after tied to my computer screen, I had to let the dog out for his duty, and I sat on my front steps. The weather was gorgeous, no humidity, and I glanced down on my gardenia bush, which has never bloomed (too cold in Virginia, I guess) Update: I now live in Pennsylvania—even colder. I recalled the luscious blooms my mother grew in California. That fabulous gardenia smell I remembered from my childhood.

With Halloween only days away, more of my childhood filtered in to my cyber-fried brain. Our small town came alive—or dead—every Halloween. We children roamed the streets, entered haunted houses, and visited houses where fake hanged men were tossed from ropes off roofs so we could scream. My mother hand-made our costumes, and prepared popcorn balls and caramel apples that no one was afraid to eat, because we all knew each other and felt safe. We gathered tons of candy we weren’t leery about munching on.

One street over, two women who were teachers, wore excellent witch costumes and stirred a huge cauldron that they placed in their lighted garage every year.

Inside the black pot swirled orange Kool-aid, with orange slices floating on top. On Halloween night we children, after stuffing our mouths with sticky candy, knew we could come here and partake of a refreshing drink. I hope I thanked those women, because I always appreciated their efforts. Who these days would bother, because of all the warnings about tainted treats? Plus, some parent would sue if their little darling got cavities or fat thighs—all that sugar!
So I’m thankful for my wonderful, fairly safe childhood, all the kind people I met, my mother’s gardenias and that delicious orange Kool-aid.

To get in the Halloween mood, be sure to check out my vampire novel, A Savage Exile. Were vampires roaming the island of St. Helena during Napoleon’s exile? Is a top official one of them? Or someone close to the emperor? A young French maid is caught up in the dangerous mystery.

Click HERE to purchase A Savage Exile.

If you want to know more about my books, usually historical novels, please visit my website:
http://www.dianescottlewis.org