Blog – Page 28 – Deborah Makarios

December 2, 2020December 2, 2020

How Characters Come to Be

“Unlike most writers, Rankin does not plan his characters: he has said that Rebus arrived virtually fully formed on the page.”

Until I read these words in How to Write Like a Bestselling Author (a collection of magazine articles on bestseller characteristics by Tony Rossiter), I had no idea that most writers actually plan their characters. One of those disconcerting moments when you realize that what’s going on in your head is not the same as what’s going on in other people’s heads, even if you have the same name for it.

I don’t plan my characters. They just pop into my head, like bubbles rising from the frothy cauldron of my unconscious mind. And while I might change some minor things about them – such as their names, and whether or not they’re actually in the book – the characters themselves are fairly constant. (Minor spoilers follow…)

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November 25, 2020November 25, 2020

Colouring In with a Hook

Colouring books for grownups have become a real hit in the last five or six years. You can’t hardly visit a bookstore, stationery shop, or anywhere else involving paper-based products being retailed to the public at large, without happening across a selection. Usually, if the retailer is clever, with coloured pencils stationed close at hand, because who has yet recovered from the childhood passion for a fine array of coloured sticks?

I have yet to fall to the temptation of the adult colouring book (though I’ve coloured in a Book Depository bookmark or two in my time). Yet a new passion for colouring in has seized me, not involving pencil or crayon, but hook.

Some of you may recall that I developed an obsession a couple of years ago (how time flies!) with the form of embroidery known as tambour. The obsession went on the back-burner with the book idea that it came with, but it’s been simmering away, and recently, as the book idea moved to the front burner, so did the obsession.

Here’s what my first efforts on ‘real’ fabric – as opposed to netting – produced. (Those of you with fine artistic sensibilities may wish to avert your eyes.)

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November 11, 2020November 11, 2020

An Unexpected Succession

No sooner do you start reading about how to make the most of a small garden – especially where eatables are concerned – than you hear about succession planting. The general idea is that most plants don’t take all year to grow, so why not have something else – or more of the same – ready to fill the vacated spot when harvest time arrives?

I freely confess that my organizational ability floundered at this challenge, even in theoretical form, much as a tortoise flounders when trying to do a Fosbury flop. (Something I suspect a flounder could do with ease.) I decided I’d just improvise as I went along.

So here we are in late spring, and the garden is beginning to see some succession. But not at all in the way I intended. Take the alyssum, for example.

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