How personal should a character get with the reader?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

In the final revision of my novel What’s Left, I’d take a passage like this and have her speak directly to him, rather than about him. It makes a world of difference. Think it would work here?

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I could say it was always gentle and kind, rather than laced with frustrations and sharp clashes. I wish, well, who is any of us, in the end? Maybe I need to ask our Orthodox priest more about the Book of Life or the Book of Judgment and all that?

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Do you hear her asking her father if he was always gentle and kind? Or if she should ask the priest about the rest? Do you, too, feel that line needs to be inserted?

We can easily create a shopping list of what we desire in those dearest to us — or, if we’re more ambitious, what we can offer to others. So let’s fire.

What quality would you most want in the person who’s closest to you?

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Cassia’s roots included inspiration like this. Greek Orthodox icon at Mount Athos created by Father Vasileios Pavlatos in Kefalonia, Greece using the technique of Pyrography. (Via Wikimedia Commons.)

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Ten cool facts about glaciers

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

In my novel Nearly Canaan, Joshua and Jaya settle into a place unlike anything they would have imagined. One of its features is the glaciers on Mount Rainier and Mount Adams.

Glaciers are made up of permanent snow cover that’s become compacted into what are sometimes called rivers of ice as they are pushed down a mountainside or valley.

Here are some details.

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  1. About 10 percent of the earth’s surface is covered by glacial ice, but that’s shrinking fast.
  2. Glaciers store about 75 percent of the earth’s fresh water.
  3. If all of the land ice melted, sea levels would rise 230 feet.
  4. During the last ice age, glaciers covered up to a third of the world’s land mass.
  5. Glacier National Park in the Rocky Mountains of Montana has 35 named glaciers. At current global warming rates, none will be left by the year 2030.
  6. Scientists categorize glaciers into eight types, from ice caps and continental ice sheets to hanging glaciers and cirques in depressions on a mountain.
  7. Their surface often appears rough and wrinkled, containing deep cracks or fissures known as cravasses. These can be a deadly hazard for mountain climbers, especially when hidden by fresh snow or a whiteout.
  8. Ice caves melting into a glacier mouth are filled with ethereal blue light during the day.
  9. Antarctic ice shelves calve icebergs that are up to 50 miles long.
  10. To be classified as a glacier, an ice field needs to maintain at least .1 square kilometer of size throughout the year. That’s nearly 25 acres or 19 football fields.

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Have you ever seen one? Up close?

Two climbers pass under a glacier. (Photo by Kurt E. Smith)

Remembering Nosmo

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

I’ve never been a dog person, but we did have cats when I was growing up and again in my first marriage. These days, it’s been household rabbits, a whole different story.

But my all-time favorite cat was an all-black, marvelously sleek male tommy who was half-Siamese. He’s the inspiration for Gobi in my latest fiction. Our dog-loving neighbors even gave him the compliment of saying he was more like a dog than a cat, and their own German shepherd was one dog I came to enjoy.

The naming came about in one of my flights of imagination. I was sitting in a classroom looking at a NO SMOKING sign and wondered about shifting the space. That led to NOSMO KING, which was soon bestowed on our kitty.

I thought I was being pretty clever, but a few years later my in-laws sent us a newspaper clipping where a human named Nosmo King was mentioned. I don’t remember if he had a different last name or whether King was it. Drat!

Yes, sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. And sometimes it just leads to some strange fiction.

One way to get inside the publishing scene

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I revised my novel What’s Left, I compressed the details regarding her mother’s book-publishing venture. Here’s how it stood in an early draft:

As her dream of establishing a small-press also takes shape, the family council decides not to include it outright among our Five-Spokes enterprises but rather to extend a ten-year microloan to allow her to retain full control of its success or failure. Her game plan anticipates a modest start, essentially continuing the annual calendar and the greeting cards featuring local photographs by Baba, as well as the release of the first volume of Nita’s collected columns. These are things Baba can shepherd along while Manoula finishes her degree. From there, a cookbook would be a no-brainer in the lineup, something Barney can begin putting together immediately. We know he’ll be fussy and irritable, miss deadlines, do the whole prima donna bit. Besides, he’s not a writer, so there will be extensive editing and revision. After that, Baba can worry about the photos. He says shooting food’s a specialty all to itself. You can bet, though, the results will be worth it. And all that’s before Manoula gets to anything like poetry or fiction. 

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This is so far from the snippy colloquial vibe the novel has since taken. Think of it more as a memo to the author in conceiving a plausible pathway to independent business success for Cassia’s mother. Or possibly just an old dream of my own, way back when, along with memories of a few difficult collaborators.

One struggle in shaping What’s Left was the matter of determining just how much of her family’s business side to include. Passages like this one ran the danger of turning the story into a case study for marketing or investment classes, rather than focusing on Cassia’s yearning for emotional healing.

Was I right in deleting the passage as too much “insider” insight for the novel? Or does it add to your understanding of Cassia, her mother, and her family? Do you ever dream of doing something the way her mother does?

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In the family, Cassia may have had food like Spanakorizo, a common Greek dish prepared with spinach and rice and flavored with herbs such as dill and/or fennel. Photo by Katerina Strak via Wikimedia Commons.

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