Technology in Contemporary Fiction

 

Contemporary fiction is often defined as fiction that is set in the current time period. It’s a tall order, but my goal is to write my contemporary fiction in such a way that it will seem as current ten years from now as it does today.

This is a fast-changing world, and many things will be different in ten years. Even so, I’d like to minimize the references that date my contemporary fiction. Unless the political scene is important to the story, which it hasn’t been yet, I can avoid that issue. Unfortunately, there are two other constantly changing matters that affect everyone’s lives, and I can’t avoid them. I talked about slang last week, and this week’s post covers technology.

Lately, I’ve been working on two contemporary novels. One is women’s fiction, and, as you would expect, the protagonist has a cell phone that she uses for long conversations with her sister and for texts to and from her business associates. Since she makes her living as an author, however, she also needs a laptop.

Sending a text drives me crazy because it is much slower than typing or even writing something out in longhand. As a writer, using a virtual keyboard would never work when I am in the throes of inspiration and the words come flowing out. I need a traditional keyboard or paper and pen to keep up with my thoughts. I also prefer a larger screen, so a laptop is a must-have for me, and it makes sense that my author protagonist also uses a laptop.

My other contemporary work-in-progress is middle-grade fiction with a seventh grader as my protagonist. She uses a laptop for her schoolwork and has recently gotten her first cell phone.

With technology permeating our society, the only way to eliminate all mention of it is to create characters who are isolated from the world. Since that wouldn’t work with either of my plots, I can’t expect the story to ring true unless the characters make use of the technology that every reader knows they must have. So my characters have laptops and cell phones, and there isn’t much I can do about it. I’m hoping both will still be in use ten years from now, but you never know. The cell phone might turn into a wrist communicator, and the laptop may be replaced by something that takes voice dictation and recites it back. It may even be the same wrist communicator that does it all.

For now, however, that technology isn’t in common use, and the story would be unrealistic if I imported it into novels that take place today. If I want authenticity, I have to go with the technology that people use now.

Sometimes you just have to work with what you have and hope it will be good enough.

Evergreen Dialogue

 I just finished the first draft of a contemporary children’s novel, and one of my biggest challenges was writing the dialogue. I know it seems counter-intuitive, but it was even harder than writing dialogue for my historical fiction. That’s because my historical books are frozen at one particular point in time, while contemporary fiction should normally be timeless.¹

There are exceptions, of course, such as contemporary fiction tied to current events. I’ve also read books where the writers are so intent on showing how well they understand the current generation that their fiction is outdated by the time it gets published.

Most contemporary fiction aims to stay current as time passes, however. This means that the language choices must be evergreen.

This is particularly important when using slang. I checked several sources and they aren’t entirely consistent about the specifics, but they all agree that slang means words that are used in a casual setting but are avoided in a formal one. For example, people often use “okay” or “awesome” in everyday conversation but you rarely find those words in an academic paper or a formal speech.

So why not avoid slang altogether? Unfortunately, that isn’t an option for a writer who wants to present a realistic picture. Take the book I’ve been working on as an example. The protagonist and her friends are preteens, so they would naturally use slang. If they didn’t, the story would become stilted and lose all authenticity. However, many of the slang words in use today are passing fads and would date the book. Even worse, they might not even be understood by my readers five years from now. The trick is to find slang words that have been part of the language for a long time and continue to be used and understood today. While there is no guarantee, this proven slang is more likely to stay evergreen than new words are.

In the graphic at the head of this page, the girl on the left is using current slang of recent origin, while the boy on the right is using evergreen slang.² I can’t predict what will happen with language in the future, of course. Maybe some of the words on the left will catch on and become evergreen, while some on the right might soon fall out of use. Still, if I don’t want my fiction to become dated, I’ll stick with the ones on the right.

Even so, I’m worried that limiting the dialogue to evergreen slang will make my characters sound too grown up. I’ll see how that works itself out in later drafts.

Next week I’ll talk about another issue that can date contemporary fiction.

__________

¹ For a discussion of slang in historical novels, see my blog posts from January 25, 2021 and February 1, 2021.

² “Adulting” means acting like a grown-up and doing things a real adult would do; “sus” is short for “suspicious”; “fire” is the same as “cool” or “awesome”; and “cooked” means exhausted or overwhelmed. Hopefully I don’t have to define the words on the right.

"Lonely Rock"

 

Twelve-year-old Jessie enjoys living in small-town Maine in 1925, but then her father takes a job as an assistant lighthouse keeper and moves his family to a remote island. Forced to face her fears and deal with loneliness, illness, shipwrecks, and stormy weather, can she survive the storm in her own heart?

That’s the plot summary for my newly-published middle-grade historical novel, Lonely Rock. I rarely use this blog to promote my own books, but this is one of the few exceptions.

Lonely Rock is primarily aimed at girls ages 8–12, but I hope that it will appeal to an older audience, as well. I am one of the many adults still enjoy reading middle-grade fiction, and, if you are too, give it a try.

With Christmas coming up, consider buying Lonely Rock for your daughter, granddaughter, niece, or anyone else on your list. The novel is available both in paperback and for Kindle, and here is the link to it on Amazon.

Lonely Rock: Page, Kaye, Camp, Kathryn Page: 9798990089129: Amazon.com: Books

If you read Lonely Rock and like it (or even if you don’t), please leave a review. Honest reviews are the best way for readers to decide if a book is for them.

Thanks for allowing me this blatant self-promotion.

Michigan's Eastern Upper Peninsula

 

As I mentioned last week, Roland and I spent several days last month in the eastern part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. While staying at my brother’s cabin, we took excursions to Tahquamenon Falls and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Then, on our way along U.S. 2, we visited Fayette State Park. The first two were mainly for my research, although we enjoyed them, too, and the last was solely for fun.

One of my works in progress is a women’s fiction novel about a writer who is burned out. To get the rest and relaxation she needs for her recovery, she takes a trip to the U.P. and ends up deciding to stay there. The story is not a travelogue, but I am adding some scenes at local tourist areas for authenticity and variety.

Jo gets better acquainted with people in her new community during a church picnic at Tahquamenon Falls. The photo at the top of this post shows the Upper Falls. The one below shows the Lower Falls, which wind around an island that is connected to the parking lot, concessions, and picnic area by a foot bridge.

I wanted to get all the details of that visit right, but my primary purpose for our trip to the falls was to see if the picnic area at the Lower Falls is large enough for a small church picnic. It is, as you can see from the next photo.

There is also a large picnic area at the Upper Falls, but one advantage of having the church event take place at the Lower Falls is that there are greater recreational opportunities there. Roland and I did not wade in the water at the Lower Falls, but, like the people in the next photo, my characters do.

The next day we went to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, known to locals as “the Soo.” As a child, my family went there every other Saturday so my father could visit parishioners in the hospital and the rest of us could exchange our books at the library. My father loved watching the lake freighters from the window in his office at the church in DeTour, and we never went to the Soo without heading to the locks and watching the boats go through.

So of course that is one of things my protagonist does. Her companion checks the schedule and times it so they are there when a freighter goes through. I didn’t think to do that, so we were fortunate to arrive while the Presque Isle was going through on its way upbound. The next photo shows the ship leaving the Soo Locks and heading into Lake Superior.

Another research reason for going to the Soo was that I wanted to get a feel for the Meijers superstore where my protagonist would go when she wanted to shop for groceries she couldn’t get nearer to her fictional village. Unfortunately, it made me jealous because it was larger and had more variety than my nearest Meijers or any of my neighborhood grocery stores.

As I mentioned in last week’s post, I’m placing my fictional village on U.S. 2, which runs along the northern shore of Lake Michigan. As we were following U.S. 2, we took a side trip to Fayette State Park, which we visited purely as tourists.

From 1867 to 1891, Fayette was a company town that produced iron for use in the steel industry. Roland was interested because he spent the first half of his working life in an East Chicago steel mill, and I was interested in how the families lived. I did learn something, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough to set a story there and I haven’t found any other good resources, either. So don’t look for a book about Fayette.

The final two photos show the town’s business district and the furnace complex where the iron was smelted.

The trip to the U.P. was both informative and fun, but next week I’ll have an announcement about a different book.

 

Researching Setting

 

Last month Roland joined me on a research trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which is the setting for a women’s fiction novel I’ve been working on. During the first few days we stayed at my brother’s cabin in DeTour Village, where I grew up, and took excursions to several places that my protagonist visits in the novel. That’s the cabin in the picture at the top of this page. I’ll tell you about the excursions in next week’s post.

DeTour Village lies on the St. Mary’s River between Lake Huron and Lake Superior, and it is as far east as you can go in the U.P. without falling into the water. I wanted to set my novel slightly farther west, though, along the northern shore of Lake Michigan. That’s still in the eastern part of the U.P. that I’m familiar with, but I haven’t been there for years. So after we left DeTour, we drove along U.S. 2.

I’m placing my fictional town along U.S. 2 somewhere between St. Ignace and Manistique, and I wanted to make sure that my memory coincided with the actual landscape. Fortunately it did, at least for the most part, and the adjustments I had to make were minor. I took these photos through the front windshield. (With Roland driving, of course.)

Many people think of the U.P. as mountainous, but, as you can tell from the photos, it isn’t all like that. The mountains are in the west, and the eastern part is mostly flat with some gently rolling hills (although they didn’t seem gentle when I rode my bicycle up them as a kid).

A writer who doesn’t know better might easily place a novel in the eastern U.P. among the mountains, but that would be wrong. It’s better to check out a setting before writing about it.

Even if a writer thinks he or she knows the facts, it’s important to check them. That was the purpose of my research trip, and it was worth the effort.

A Great Egret Sighting

 

My walks frequently take me along Schoon Ditch. Aside from the exercise, it’s always a pleasant walk because I don’t know what I might see.

So on two of my walks in June (about a week apart) and another in early July, I was pleasantly surprised to see a large white bird standing in the water. It isn’t the first time I’ve seen a similar bird along that trail, but it has been several years, and the sightings are always rare.

Although I’m not any better at identifying birds than I am at identifying flowers, I think it was a great egret. My internet research says they aren’t common in Indiana and are mostly seen here in late summer or early fall, so I don’t know what this one was doing here in June. It might have been resting but is unlikely to have been searching for food since, as far as I know, there are no fish in Schoon Ditch. Still, there are plenty of ducks if it was looking for feathery companionship and couldn’t find it among its own kind.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have my Canon camera with me, and the zoom on my cell phone isn’t as good. It takes great closeups, but whenever I got too close the bird flew away. Not far, and it seemed pretty nonchalant in that very public spot between a high school and a hospital, but it didn’t stay in one place long enough to give me a good photo op.

Next time, maybe it will pose for better pictures.

Hunting Dragonflies

 

Back in June, my camera club took a field trip to Oak Ridge Prairie with our resident dragonfly expert. I hadn’t previously had much luck capturing dragonflies with my camera, so I was thrilled by the experience. I felt as if I was in Fort Knox except surrounded by dragonflies rather than gold.

The photo at the top of this post shows a Common Whitetail, and it is the only female in the group. I forgot to ask our resident expert why there was such an imbalance between the sexes, but Google’s AI says the males are aggressive and the females tend to stay away to avoid harassment. Maybe they need a “Me Too” movement.

The rest of these photos are all males, and I have included them alphabetically. In the order they appear, they are: Banded Pennant, Calico Pennant, Eastern Pondhawk, Spangled Skimmer, Twelve-Spotted Skimmer, and Widow Skimmer.

Some of the dragonflies melted into the background and were hard to see. Next week’s post talks about a bird who stood out and didn’t care who saw him.

A Fair Showing

 

Although I never made it to this year’s Lake County Fair because of the devastating storms, my photos did. The fair itself was closed for several days due to the power outage and downed trees, but the exhibit drop-off and the judging both occurred before that. And when I picked up my photos after the fair closed, I discovered how I had done.

I submitted 22 photos and received two third-place ribbons. Would I have liked to have done better? Of course. But considering the quality of the competition, I consider that a fair showing.

The photo at the head of this post received third in the Advanced Color/Portrait group. I love this photo that I took in Vietnam, but it didn’t do well in my camera club competitions, so I am pleased that it earned a ribbon at the fair.

The other white ribbon came in the Advanced Color/Lake County Fair group for a photo of a 4-H color guard for one of the riding competitions. That’s the photo below.

I wish I could have made it to the fair and seen everybody else’s entries, but I’m glad some people were able to see the photo exhibition.

And I’m proud that my photos were part of it.

Writing the Old-Fashioned Way

 

During the five days we were without power after the recent storm, I had to do my writing the old-fashioned way with pen and paper. Even so, I managed to get a lot of writing done.

The even bigger problem was doing research without the internet. Yes, my cell phone worked, and I could have used it to search for information, but the options for charging it were inconvenient and I didn’t want to waste my battery life on researching a story.

While waiting for the electricity to come back on, I started a new middle-grade novel. This is a contemporary story about a girl whose mother sends her to live with the father she has never known. That involves a bus trip from Florida to Indiana, but how long would it take? Without the internet to look up bus schedules, I had to guestimate it using what hardcopy resources I had.

The atlas said the distance from Miami to Indianapolis is just under 1,200 miles. Since my protagonist begins and ends her journey in small towns, it can’t be an express, so I worked the math out this way. Assuming a bus normally travels at sixty-miles-per-hour, it would take an express bus approximately twenty hours to cover the distance. But since it wasn’t an express and would be making frequent (albeit short) stops in small towns, I estimated that it would take about 1½ times as long, or thirty hours, so that’s what I used until I had the internet again. I’m not looking to use an actual schedule or a named bus line, but I still want to get the general parameters fairly close.

Once the internet was back, I checked the bus schedule and adjusted my time accordingly. There is no direct route and I had to add some transfers, but thirty hours wasn’t that far off. So I’m grateful that I had an old-fashioned paper atlas as a resource.

I was also grateful for the other physical resources I had at my fingerprints, including a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a book of baby names for naming my characters.

I was ecstatic when the electricity came back on and I could return to writing on my laptop and using the internet for research, but I will never underestimate the value of writing the old-fashioned way.

Sometimes it’s the only choice.

Stormy Weather

 

“Stormy Weather” will not be the name of my next published book after all, but it is literally the title of my life last week.

I had written and scheduled my next two blog posts on dragonflies and a great egret, respectively, but Mother Nature had other ideas. You’ll get those later, but for now they have been preempted by the storm that disrupted our lives.

Roland and I had been in North Carolina for a baby shower for our first grandchild, and we returned on Monday, August 10. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that we were already home rather than driving through it.

The storm came up quickly on Tuesday morning. I wish I had had the presence of mind to take photos of the breathtaking lightning and slashing rain outside the dining room windows, but I didn’t, and there is no way words can describe the scene. Suffice it to say that I had never seen such wild weather.

We discovered later that the storm is classified as a derecho, which is a widespread and long-lived line of thunderstorms that produces very high winds and significant wind damage. There can be tornados within or associated with the derecho, but a derecho moves in a straighter line and covers a much larger area than a tornado does. That’s a simplistic definition, but it’s enough for this blog post.

When the storm cleared, it left trees uprooted and branches scattered all over the neighborhood. The photo at the top of this page shows a tree that fell on the roof of the adult education room at our church, which is just down the street from our condo. Fortunately, the damage to the roof was minor and the leaks were quickly patched. The grounds around the church weren’t as lucky, and many of the trees in the beautifully landscaped campus are no more.

Our condo complex suffered a similar fate. The damage to the building was minor, mostly consisting of lost siding, but some of the trees in front were destroyed. The next photo was taken from our balcony shortly after the worst of the storm passed over, and the one after it is a closer up shot of the same tree when I went out for a walk on Wednesday morning. I thank God that it fell on and blocked the driveway in front of the condo rather than falling in the other direction and crashing through our window.

We lost power for five days. I had clothes in the washer, but, fortunately, it had almost finished so I hung the damp clothes up to dry. Unfortunately, the humidity was so high that some of them didn’t dry for several days.

For us, the loss of power was a bigger issue than the storm damage itself, although the extent of the damage was what kept NIPSCO from restoring the power for so long. Roland had to drive ten miles just to find ice for our cooler. Even with that, we had to throw out everything in the freezer.

Figuring out what to eat was also a problem. We had plenty of bread and luncheon meat (which we moved to the cooler as soon as we got ice), so we ended up eating of lot of sandwiches. We had taken some boeuf bourguignon out of the freezer to defrost for dinner and ended up eating it cold. The Munster Lyons Club had donated their building for a charging station and free meals, and we ate there once. A local grocery store with a generator continued selling its fried chicken, and with one thing and another, we managed.

My biggest problem was boredom. Between the natural light coming through the window during the day and a few battery-powered lanterns, we had enough light to read by. Without TV or the internet, however, we discovered that even reading and Roland’s crossword puzzles couldn’t keep the boredom away. It did help me, however, when I came up with the plot for a new book and started writing it with pen and paper.

They say necessity is the mother of invention. Although we have some battery-powered lanterns, we were afraid of running out of D batteries. I have a small but powerful flashlight that takes AA batteries and I had plenty of those, so I created my own lamp out of that flashlight, a paper clip, and a wire stand that we had been using to display a wooden egg from Romania. That way I could (and did) use the flashlight for reading and writing without having to hold it. If you look closely, you can see my homemade lamp in the next photo.

We made it through the big storm and the smaller ones that followed, but I am proudest of my church’s flagpole and the American flag that there was no time to lower before the storm hit. As you can see from the final photo, they stood tall and proud and remain a symbol of our country’s strength even among adversity.

God bless America.

Summer Flowers

 

I try to walk for at least an hour three times a week, although other commitments sometimes interfere. Today’s blog post is given over to photos of flowers I see along my regular walking paths. I’m not good at identifying flowers, but I had help from an app, so hopefully I got them right.

The photo at the top shows tiger lilies, which have always been one of my favorite flowers.

This photo of butterweed was taken along Schoon Ditch, just south of Munster High School.

I’m pretty sure this is mock orange, but it’s the one I had the hardest time identifying.

This next one is spiderwort.

Finally, these orange daylilies are everywhere along my walking paths. This particular one is past its prime, and I do have a better picture of one that isn’t, but I like the buds and the “arms” in this photo.

Next week I’ll treat you to dragonflies.

Butterflies

 

I’ve been enjoying the butterflies all summer, including the Eastern tiger swallowtail that perched on the flowers on my balcony while I took the photo at the head of this post. As summer draws closer to the end—especially for schoolchildren and their teachers—I’ll be concentrating my blog on the signs of summer that will be ending as well.

This week’s post is a poem about butterflies that I originally wrote in 2012, although I added the verse about the swallowtails this year.

                         Butterflies

Common Buckeye

A buck’s eyes prance across the wings

That hover low above the ground

From gravel path to grassy verge

And roadside park.

 

Red Admiral

 

A ring of fire encircles him

When wings are spread apart,

Or underlines the white and black

When raised in victory.

 

Clouded Sulfur

 

Alfalfa fields a common haunt

For your night-feeding frenzy,

A pretty sight to untrained eyes

But no friend to farmers.

 

Monarch

 

Milkweed stalks with silken heads

Become a Monarch’s throne.

Then winter comes and orange and black

Aims south and flies away.

 

Swallowtails

 

Black outlined in yellow

Or yellow outlined in black,

Two delicate tails

Set them apart.

 

I’ll end this post the way I started, with the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail.

Join me next week for flowers I see along my walking trails.

The Importance of Titles

One of the hardest parts of writing a book is choosing a title. Last week I mentioned my current work-in-progress using the title Burned Out, but I had actually changed it by then. As I got farther into the book, I realized that the title wasn’t appropriate since my protagonist was only burned out for the first third of the story. It is now titled Agamiing after the fictional village where most of it takes place. That may sound like a strange title, but many women’s fiction novels are named after their settings.

I usually consider several options and choose a working title before I start writing. That working title often becomes the final one, but not always.

My first middle-grade historical novel went through several title changes. My protagonist is a half-Japanese girl living in California when Pearl Harbor occurs, and it follows her as she is temporarily confined at the Tanforan racetrack before moving to more permanent quarters at the Topaz War Relocation Center in the Utah desert. My initial title was “Topaz” since that camp takes up more pages than any other location in the book, but I wondered if that was too dull. As I mentioned above, fictional settings are often used in women’s fiction titles, but they are less frequent in children’s novels. Besides, Topaz was a real place and there are many books written about it.

Then I tried “Topaz Blue,” trying to capture the mood of the camp, but I wondered if that was too obstruse or too depressing for my young audience. By the time the book was published, the title had changed to Desert Jewels. Its meaning is explained by one of the teachers in the camp, who calls the children precious jewels and compares them to the topaz found in the desert.

Then there is the middle-grade book that I have coming out in October, which tells the story of a girl whose father takes a job as an assistant lighthouse keeper and moves his family to a remote island. I named the fictional island “Lonely Rock” and used that as the working title for the book. Although it fits the island, it’s a boring title for a book, and I am looking for a better one before the book is published.

My latest thought is to use “Surviving the Storm.” It isn’t one long storm, as in a disaster story, but there are storms in both the book and the protagonist’s heart. The picture at the head of this post is a mockup of a possible cover, using a negative image of a photo I took in 2021 of Portland Head Light in Maine. Although that lighthouse isn’t identical to the one described in the book, it’s close enough and is the best of my own photographs for the purpose. I still have a little time to decide, though, so both the title and the cover could change before publication.

But I’d love to know what you think of them both.

Writing a Book Within a Book

 

Last week I wrote about using a story as a means of recommending books to readers. This week I’m going to talk about how to write a story within a story.

The Arabian Nights is a classic example. To keep her husband from killing her, Shahrazad entertains her husband with story after story, always withholding the ending until the next night. That is the story that frames 1001 others, including the story of Aladdan.

Then there is Shakespeare’s famous play within a play, where Hamlet hires a group of roaming actors to tell the story of his father’s death.

Among my favorite modern examples are Anthony Horowitz’s novels about editor Susan Ryeland. In Magpie Murders, for example, she edits a murder mystery for publication while a real murder mystery unfolds around her. The contents of the book she is editing are an integral part of the plot and are included in the text.

The protagonist of my current work in progress is an author, and Burned Out contains passages from the book she is writing about her detective’s last case. That means I have to face the question of how to best weave the inner book into the main plot.

The fact that the book is being written is important to my story, but, unlike The Magpie Murders, the contents of the inner book are not integral to the plot. That means I only need bits and pieces of the book my protagonist is writing, although I will incorporate enough of the manuscript to give the reader the general plot of the inner book, including the solution to the case.

One thing I’ve discovered, however. It can be as much fun writing a book within a book as it is to write the main one.

I just hope it will be as much fun to read.