In All Things, Balance

Balancing writing with physical and emotional health...well, that's not a subject about which I can claim any expertise. When it comes to "emotional health," my marbles may be dinged and a few have chips, but, for the most part, they stay in their jar. I'm nowhere close to achieving the "physical health" part of the trifecta. I mean, I've a pretty good idea what I ought to be doing to arrest the dreaded "writer's spread" and stop the "chin-per-chapter" growth. Getting off my ass would be one sure-fire way. Alas, I don't have the grace of Jeffe to be able to walk and chew gum, so a treadmill desk is out of the question. Oh, who am I kidding? My list of excuses is longer than an epic fantasy box-set.

I have my weird, but it doesn't impede my writing.

Butt in chair, hands on keyboard works for me.

I have a day job. I'm on my feet an average if at least five hours a day. When I'm done with that, I write, I write by sitting my fanny in a seat and tapping away at the keys. I also make sure to turn off the internet if it's getting to distracting.

I have over 40 novels in print. I got them by sitting the hell down and writing, then repeating as necessary.

That's just me. You do you.

But get the writing done or no whining.

Why I'm Against Butt-in-Chair, Hands-on-Keyboard

I caught Isabel mid-yawn on this one. What I get for disturbing the cozy winter's nap with my photo-taking. She - like all cats - is the poster child for this week's topic, which is balancing writing with physical and emotional health.

There's a catchphrase that writers like to pass around, about maintaining productivity: BICHOK, or Butt-in-Chair, Hands-on-Keyboard. I get that it's a metaphor, meaning that you get writing done by actually writing, but it's one I quibble with because I'm so against the sitting-down part.

Four FIVE! years ago (I just checked, wow) almost exactly, I invested in a treadmill desk. I'm now on my second treadmill - hydraulic desk is still going strong! - and I consider it the best investment I ever made. It takes a *long* time to really ramp up and get in shape for extended walking like this. Even if you think you're in great walking shape, this kind of conditioning takes a while to build as the steadiness and extended times are very different. In 2017, I walked 2,537 miles. A whole lot of that was while writing. I think this the best thing a writer can do for their health, full stop. The only downside is that now I really hate sitting and feel like I can't write as well sitting down.

As for emotional health, I'm blessed with happy chemistry, so I don't struggle with depression or anxiety as some do. I am always working on tweaking my process and work days to maximize productivity, however.

In 2016, I tried to do too much. It was my first year writing full time, and a few things happened. I started writing five days a week instead of six, which compressed that effort into the five days. This isn't a problem except that I really amped up my daily wordcount goals. I had some high wordcount months - in December 2015, I had my highest month ever at 75,000 words - but then I'd have crash periods that followed. The upshot is that my overall wordcount fell off considerably in 2016

In 2017, I worked to remedy this by lowering my daily wordcount goals, but going for greater consistency. As you can see, 2017 words came up again nicely. For 2018, I'm trying to improve on that, and I'm trying something new: incorporating rest periods after finishing drafting a book. 

I've found that I have a down cycle after I've finished the draft of a book. Even if I try to write something else, I don't make much progress on it and I get annoyed with myself. It finally occurred to me to try honoring that rest period - which I seem to take whether I plan on it or not - and program in the down time.

So, this week I turned in book two of The Lost Princess Chronicles, EXILE OF DASNARIA. (These titles may change - more on THAT later.) Because the holidays and the flu got me all off schedule, I worked Sunday, too, finishing late on Monday.

Tuesday, I took the day entirely off, cleaning the house and doing the laundry, de-Christmasing - all the stuff that I'd let pile up. Good purging. Wednesday, I caught up on business stuff, including stuff about the aforementioned title changes. I also dorked around and watched a lot of YouTube videos I don't normally allow myself to squander time on. Thursday I got another book into shape - which I'm 99% sure I'm calling SHOOTING STAR - and sent that to my freelance editor. That just took some tweaking, no real creative investment.

On Friday, I took my car to be washed and waxed - a time investment I rarely indulge in (and my car unfortunately shows it) - and then spent time showing out of town guests around Santa Fe. 

This is me up on Canyon Road with SFF editor Ellen Datlow and fantasy writer Nnedi Okorafor. Ellen is in town for this event at George R.R. Martin's Cocteau Theater. If you're in the neighborhood, you should come! And Nnedi is here to meet with George on her new project that HBO optioned from her book WHO FEARS DEATH and GRRM is executive producing. We had a great time lunching and shopping, which then extended into cocktails and dinner with GRRM and bunch of other folks working in SFF publishing and production.

So, it was a really lovely week. Monday I'll work on page proofs of PRINCESS OF DASNARIA (again, name change pending), which is another non-creative task. Then I'll spend a few days on a new project before launching next week into drafting a new novel. It's feeling like a good thing to do. I'm feeling remarkably relaxed and replete with time.

Also, my house is clean.

Cook and Caravan Master - Tertiary Characters?

Chef Stephanie was first introduced in this book

I write in two genres primarily – science fiction romance (SFR) and Ancient Egyptian paranormal romance. I have a fantasy romance series started but it’s certainly not my primary focus.

Our topic this week is so-called ‘tertiary’ characters and do they ever try to take over a story?

In the SFR, I write pretty lean, with my focus on the hero and heroine and the dilemma they’re in. I might have a few secondary characters, especially if the novel is set on my Nebula Zephyr luxury cruiseliner (interstellar spaceship variety).  The ship has an entire crew obviously, not to mention a rotating set of passengers, but we’ve not met most of them. There are strong secondary characters, like Security Officer Red Thomsill and his fiancée Meg Antille, but they were the lead characters in their own novel  before moving to the Nebula Zephyr. An example of a tertiary character on the ship, I guess, might be the Executive Chef, Stephanie. She’s been in a few of the novels for a scene or two, and was the lead in my special Thanksgiving short story, but for the most part she’s in the background, cooking up those terrific five star meals the cruise line boasts about. Will she get her own plot someday? Maybe…but at this point I don’t have an idea for her. She’s certainly never tried to take over the story.

In the ancient Egyptian series I’m more likely to have tertiary characters because I’m dealing with a powerful Pharaoh and his court, as well as the entire pantheon of Egyptian gods, any of whom could show up in a book at any point. (Ancient deities are like that!) But again, none of them try to take over the book. They might find themselves appearing in other books where I hadn’t necessarily expected to place them but where they fit the narrative. A good example of this would be Caravan Master Ptahnetamun, who first appeared in Dancer of the Nile. He showed up again in Magic of the Nile and just recently in Lady of the Nile. (Yes, I am quite stuck on “of the Nile” as part of my book titles LOL.) He comes onstage for a few scenes where he’s needed and exits gracefully, never demanding his own story arc.

As others have said this week in discussing their characters, I do assume any or all of mine have a full, rich life going on, with all kinds of events and milestones…but none of that detail is needed for my story. Or at least not right now.

Honestly, it’s not something I worry about when I’m writing a book!

Background Characters with Minds of Their Own

I wonder if the romance genre doesn't much lend itself to tertiary characters with delusions of stardom. Something I say because I'm with Jeffe on this one. Tertiary characters? We don't need no stinking tertiary characters. Mainly because there's just not space. We've got internal conflict reflected in or exacerbated by the external conflict. We're maximizing hero and heroine page time. Or hero and hero. Or heroine and heroine. Or any combination thereof.

Secondary characters? Absolutely. Even the most committed of romantic partners need challenges and/or narrative outside of the primary pairing. Unless this is where we're talking 'tertiary.'

Anyway. I am 100% guilty of grooming my secondary characters to become the primary characters of their own novels. If I've ever had tertiary characters, they were zombie squirrels, and even then, I feel like those where more plot device than anything else. In Enemy Games, Silver City might be a tertiary character. I wanted the station to have personality - for it to feel like a familiar city with idiosyncrasies all its own, but there's no danger that I'm ever going to have a space station be the main character of a book. I don't think. Granted, as I type that I kinda want to - just to see if I could pull it off. Maybe I need to get out more.

What does everyone else think? Do romance writers have to spend enough page space on other issues that we don't have room for tertiary characters who want to break out of the background? I'm trying to think of anyone I've read with a background character chewing the scenery. If there is one, it'll come to me at 3AM. I won't get up to tell you about it. I know I haven't yet had a character try to take over a book. So far. If that ever does happen, I'll probably have to bargain with the character - behave and I'll get you your own book. Or novella. I look forward to having to deal with it if ever.

Tertiary Characters Taking the Stage

So, I've often said how my time acting on stage has, in part, informed my writing.  Namely, to treat characters as a part that an actor would enjoy playing.  That means, when I bring in a tertiary character, I usually plan to have some fun with them.  Give them a deep, inner life that isn't necessarily on the page.  Sometimes to the point that they take a greater role in the narrative than I ever intended.  For example, when I was writing The Thorn of Dentonhill, the character of Hetzer literally only existed at first so Colin had someone to talk to when standing on street corners or sitting in the turnabout.  But as Colin ran headlong into the big confrontation at the end of that one, I realized Hetzer wouldn't let him go alone, and suddenly Hetzer became a crucial part of the climax.


I had plenty of opportunity for those kinds of characters in Lady Henterman's Wardrobe.  Part of the plot demands that the Rynax Brothers and their crew do a pit of con-artistry, and that means there are always the random people who they do that to.  Be it a guard at the office building they want to get into, a public servant they want to get information out of, or a head butler they want to hire them, they're constantly interacting with people briefly, and I strive to make those people pop.


But, for me, the ones that definitely took a life of their own was a pair of boys on the street.  In Lady Henterman's Wardrobe, Mila continues to have her "Bessie's Boys" to run errands for the crew, be an extra pair of lookout eyes, or whatever else she needs.  In Holver Alley, they were largely a nameless group of young boys she bossed around.  Here, we get to meet a few of them, and two of them-- for me at least-- kept coming back into the plot. 

The youngest, the tiniest of the Bessie's Boys, the twins, Tarvis and Jede.  Both of them, at the tender age of six, are possibly the most savage and cold-hearted little bastards you'd ever meet.  And, oh my lord, were those two just a delight to write. 

And you'll get to meet them both soon enough, when Lady Henterman comes out in March.

Intrusive Tertiary Characters

Tertiary characters who demanded the spotlight...Do I have any? What'd I do with them? Why aren't they more important? Did they get a promotion to secondary?

Confession: I suffer greatly from the Cast of Thousands curse. I can't afford to add upstarts to the roster who shouldn't be there. Any tertiary characters--the guys who might not even have names--who somehow hog the focus of a scene during WiP drafts are usually indicators that I'm not using my secondary characters well. For me, third-string characters are either fodder or seeds planted for future books.

In short, if I have a tertiary character demanding focus he needs to shut his pie-hole or be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Tertiary Overload

So the concept for this week's article is tertiary characters that demand more attention.

"Jim, whatever do you mean?"

I mean characters whop aren't supposed to be overly significant, who decide otherwise as you're writing. Sounds crazy, right? But it happens, It happens a lot more than I like ot think about. Let me give you a perfect example. Bump. Bump is a knock off character. meaning that his sole purpose for existing when I created him was to be a name and a filler and the likelihood, especially in MY writing, is a short, lifespan with a violent death.

Yeah. Didn't happen.

In the first draft of FALLEN GOS (See picture below) Bump just went crazy. he went from being a smart ass character with a few lines to being THAT guy on the battlefield. Which Guy? THAT guy, the one who does absolutely insane shit because it strikes his fancy. In one scene, when all is lost and nothing is working, Bump grabs a horse, spurs it into action and leads it over a cliff, where the poor animal rolls down the too steep area and crushes several of the enemy under its weight before it dies. In his defense, the horse was old and lame. No one buys it. But he DID save the group with his antics. From that moment on, he tried to commandeer the novel. He stole scene after scene without any hesitation whatsoever.  (for the record, I do not condone animal violence, But I write fantasy set in a barbaric time, and barbarians, especially crazy ones, do their own thing.)

From then on Bump became a hero of the story.

Right up until my editor slapped some verbal sense into me.

Most of Bump's scenes of heroic madness were reassigned to the character they were supposed to come from in the first place, and he was pushed back down to tertiary character. For a moment he shined so very brightly. Then common sense prevailed.

it's not the first time that's happened and I pray it won't be the last.

Sometimes the mind does its own thing when you're writing, Sometimes that means the plot goes off the rails and other times it means that character who was just there to add to the body count screams "Screw you! I want to live!"

Happened in my first novel, too. by the way. I created a female character whose sole purpose was to torment our "hero" with mind games. She was supposed to die a horrible death. I did everything but put a shotgun to her head. I ran her over with a car. Still, she would not die. Instead, much to my surprise, she evolved. By the end of the tale she became a young woman of surprising strength who fell for one of the guys who was also meant to be a secondary character and both became important to the tale.

is there a moral tot his story?

Only this: Let your characters do their thing, If it goes to far, rein them in, but otherwise you can assume that your mind is finding ways to work on what it sees as a flaw in your tale. That may not work so well if you write rigid outlines, but since I don't I can take advantage of the situation from time to time.

On the new release front, this week sees the release of A HELL WITHIN the third of the Griffin & Price occult detective series, co-written with my buddy Charles R. Rutledge. Available in both ebook and trade paperback at Amazon.com.

Also, BLOODSTAINED WONDERLAND, the very long awaited sequel to BLOODSTAINED OZ, came out on the January second. It's a limited edition (500 signed and numbered 15 signed and lettered) get 'em while they're hot from Earthling Publications.

That's it for this week! Keep smiling, 

Jim