Friday, May 16, 2025

More author/reader musings.

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1717:

I did get both walks in before lunch yesterday, and I also got slightly over 400 words written, which was more than I thought I would have time to do. This morning is gray, and it isn’t supposed to get as warm as it did yesterday. I’ve done yoga, cleaned, ordered groceries, and when I finish this post, I will take my first walk.

But as promised, I thought I would write a little about the kind of decisions I need to make as an author in terms of what characters I make point of view characters in my historical mystery books. First of all, these mysteries are written in third person, past tense. For example: Annie told Kathleeen, “I’m feeling tired, so I think I will retire for the night. Kathleen curtsied and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

But I do like to get into the actual thoughts of some characters, but not all of them, which is called a limited third person point of view. Here is an example: Annie, afraid she was going to break down in tears, she was so upset, told Kathleen, “I’m feeling tired, so I think I will retire for the night.” Kathleen curtsied and said, “Yes, ma’am.” In this case, we know what Annie is thinking, but we don’t know what Kathleen is thinking about Annie’s decision.

I knew from the start that I wanted to hear the thoughts of my main protagonist, Annie Fuller (now Annie Dawson.) However, when I wrote the first draft of this book (back in 1988-89) I knew from the start that I wanted Nate Dawson, the local lawyer who would help Annie out in the first mystery, to become a continuing character and her main love interest. The model and inspiration I had for this was the four Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane mysteries she wrote (Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, and Busman’s Honeymoon by the English mystery writer, Dorothy Sayers. If you haven’t read these four books—but like my mysteries—I do suggest you go make the effort to find them to read.

Anyway, I wanted Annie and my male protagonist, Nate Dawson, to have a similar relationship to Vane and Wimsey—struggling to understand each other and accept each other as equals, as they solved crimes together. This meant it was important to me that my books wouldn’t just be presenting Annie’s perspective, but that the reader would understand what Nate was thinking and experiencing as well. Consequently, I gave these two protagonists their own point of view scenes in Maids of Misfortune.

I don’t know that I really understood how important this decision was until I was forced by a prospective agent to get rid of Nate Dawson’s point of view chapters and rewrite the whole book from only Annie’s perspective. This agent didn’t end up representing me, thank goodness, since I am convinced I had a much more successful career choosing to become a self-published author. But I am also sure that Maids of Misfortune would not have been nearly as good a book if I had published the version I had written for that agent.

I hated this version. First of all, Nate Dawson didn’t come off as a multi-dimensional character. In fact, in this version, because the reader doesn’t know what he is thinking but primarily has to go by what he was saying or doing, he wasn’t nearly as sympathetic a character. In addition, since he wasn’t a point of view character, it forced me to narrow the scope of the plot to what Annie herself experienced. I could still have Nate go off and interact with other characters, even leave town, but this had to happen off the page, and then he would come back and “tell” Annie what he learned. This meant more dialog, much of which didn’t really move the action forward.

Needless to say, I was much happier doing one more rewrite on Maids of Misfortune to get the book back to providing both Annie and Nate scenes from their point of views.

Over time as I wrote subsequent books in the series, I also let other characters in the novel, in addition to Annie and Nate, have point of view scenes. For example, Kathleen got her own point of view scenes in the second book, Uneasy Spirits. One of the reasons I like to wrote short stories and novellas, is because this gives me a chance to let one of my minor characters be the primary point of view, character. But each time I start a book, or shorter work, one of the first things I have to decide is who in the story will get this special attention. If I just stick to Annie and Nate, this limits my ability to develop other characters fully, and it also limits where in the city I can easily take the reader. On the other hand, too many point of view characters can feel a bit chaotic (or make the book too long!)

In the short story Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong, I only gave Annie point of view scenes. This was in part because all the important scenes for Wong were when he was with Annie. And there wasn’t another character in the story who I wanted to expand upon. For the current novella, Mr. Wong to the Rescue, I also decided not to do scenes from Wong’s point of view, but there is a character, besides Annie, that I have given one point of view scene, and I am debating whether to expand and provide them more opportunities, now that the short story has morphed into a novella!

But that is something I will need to do when I start on my first main edit of the novella.

Here are some blooms, but I thought I would change things up and provide some other plants a chance along side the roses.

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