Donna Hechler Porter

Two weeks ago the Porters did the Great Room Shuffle once again. Two adult boys in one bedroom just wasn’t cutting the mustard anymore. In the process, I lost my “office” room and am now back in the dinette in the kitchen. It’s not so bad. I get to look out the backyard. I can open the windows a tad (not too far or Fuego will push through the screen . . .

I don’t watch a lot of television. Having said that, I will admit I have had a run lately on good quality shows – Poldark, When Calls the Heart, Victoria, and Mercy Street. These are all, of course, on PBS with the exception of When Calls the Heart which is a Hallmark show. So yea – you see the sort of stuff I watch. Not much different than the kind of stuff I read. So it was a little odd when a friend hooked me on This Is Us. Me watching a major network show is like seeing

Yep, apparently there is no longer any room for small businesses on Facebook either. Beginning in January they will start charging for any sort of postings on “business” type pages. This includes pages like my author page. The jury seems to be out whether they will allow advertising of sorts on personal pages, but it seems unlikely they will do so.

It’s the little things that count! I have this morning ritual. I eat egg burritos, hopefully have a clementine or something similar, and drink my coffee. A perfect ritual involves coconut oil in the coffee, but right now it’s not perfect. Sigh . . .

I read recently that Mary Higgins Clark works several books at one time. Never thought I could do that, but apparently I can as I not only wrote/edited nearly 10,000 words on Breaking Promises the past two days, but started another story at the same time. I started a beginning scene with a shy young man, an outspoken young slip of a girl, and a Ossabaw Island Pig bent on destruction. Ossabaw Island Pigs, of course, are rare breeds that are no longer used but can be found at

Bunnies hop. Feet hop on hot pavement. Toddlers can hop and hop and hop . . . Dr. Seuss likes to “Hop on Pop.” But readers should not be forced to hop between characters while reading a book. This is called head hopping, and it is one of the first mistakes emerging authors will make. And nothing, I mean NOTHING, screams “amateur” like head hopping.

This week for Toolbox Tuesday we are going to switch from prose to content, specifically characters. After all, characters are an integral part of any novel. I have stuck with some rather sloppy reads as far as prose and structure, especially from newbie authors, simply because the characters popped from the page and I CARED about what was happening to them. I previously discussed how to use the four temperaments in creating characters here . . .

When I finished my first novel, Keeping Secrets, it came in at a whopping 180,000 words. Of course, that was way way way too long. It was time for a crash course in editing and revising. One of the first things I realized while in the throes of trying to cut down words was that I was being redundant. Redundancy, for those needing a formal definition, means “not or no longer needed or useful; superfluous” or “word or data able to be omitted without loss of meaning or functio

Tags. New authors love them. Seasoned authors hate them. And no, I am not speaking of shopping. For those of you who do not know, tags are the words at the end of dialogue. They usually take the form of the words said, asked, or answered, but other words can be used as well. One of the mistakes new authors often make, and seasoned authors fight against, is the overuse of them.

I finished Mary Andersen’s A Trusting Heart this past weekend. I very much enjoyed it, and a formal review will be coming on Roses and Thorns review blog in about three weeks. Andersen writes what is being termed as edgy Christian fiction, which category I would imagine my own books fall into. The best definition of this fiction can be found at her own website. I quote it here:

I’ve set the final release date for Breaking Promises (which is two weeks earlier than planned) on May 28, 2015. So, I feel this is a post I simply MUST make. I feel I should offer all my readers a fair warning. The red flags are up. I have a dart board attached to my chest. I am ready to run if I need to. (After all, I have to write that third book.)

It finally happened. I put a character into a such a stressful situation, I had to get up and walk away from the computer. Poor David. And it was all Jackson’s fault, sort of. I love writing. I love the craft of creating the characters, giving them their own little strengths and weaknesses, putting them into situations they can’t seem to find any way out of.

You know you’re a book nerd, or a writing nerd, when the most exciting thing that happens over the Fourth of July weekend is finding the old path your characters would take from Richmond, Virginia to Bedford, Virginia. But that’s what happened Saturday night, and boy did I do a happy dance.   

Now that my cover for Keeping Secrets is posted and out there, the question is bound to come up in the minds of my future readers. They might retain the thought in their head. They might whisper it behind my back. Or, heaven forbid, they might even access social media behind my back. Gasp!

(republished from a previous blog, c. 2014) For want of the nail the shoe was lost. For want of the shoe the horse was lost. For want of...