BoomerGirl Diary

...but I am sitting here with my time lines, trying to figure out where I went astray.

Every novel has a time line. The reader needs to know the relationships between the characters and sometimes the author has to figure out approximate dates of births or, in my case, deaths.

Yes, I was that morbid little girl in high school who usually wore black and now I am writing a morbid little novel. And I cannot figure out how I got two wedding dates for a couple in the story, or how another character ended up the age she is in one chapter and much too young in another. Hmmm... it has to be the fault of those time lines.

The problem is that I put those time lines on little stickies because I was in a hurry and now that I am close to finishing off this baby, I am reading through my 200+ pages and seeing inconsistencies. So here I am, gathering up little pink stickies and trying to string them together in a meaningful fashion so that I can make my corrections.

So I will have to figure out the time line again (maybe there is a way to do this on Excel) and re-write from there. I am looking at a couple of days of re-writing, simply because I was not paying attention from the beginning. And, yes it is important. Little mistakes in a story drive me crazy. I once wanted to board a plane, find the author who kept talking about her WWII Air Force Captain and strangle her for not knowing that it was the US Army Air Forces during that time period. Her book was great fun—except for that one big distraction. And she is well-known enough to have no excuse for not having an assistant to do fact-checking.

I also anticipate the reader who wants all the details—the girl like me, who reads with a map at her side. If a character drives from Memphis to Philadelphia, I am the one who wants to know what roads she drove, what towns she went through. I know I am not the only one out there who does this. I want the details to be so accurate that the reader would recognize the area if she drove by it. I blame that on William Least Heat Moon and Blue Highways.

I know. Sometimes I just need to sit and write, but other times I have to check the time lines, the details. I have to verify if there really is a cute little peach colored Prada purse out there, or if I need to choose another brand name.

This writing stuff is not for the lazy or the cloistered. It's hard work to research the way things were. The personal memory may inspire the writer, but it is not always reliable.

There is always that one reader out there who will know you are lying to her if you try to tell her that your character bought a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress in 1969, and you can't afford to lose that reader.