The Writers in Residence

from Gayle Bartos-Pool

The holidays come fast. School gets back in session in September, then it’s Halloween and then Thanksgiving. We all see Christmas decorations pop up in stores along with the ghosts and goblins and before you know it…It’s Christmas.

Do I have a problem with that? No. I start decorating right after I take down the Halloween tree and stocking.

Since I’ve been collecting Christmas decorations, especially Santas, I have a lot to unpack. I’m glad this new house in Ohio has a finished basement so I can keep some of the things out all year.

So, enjoy the season…family, friends, decorations and especially the Reason for the Season. You might celebrate this time of year in a hundred different ways, but we can all take time to wish everyone Peace on Earth, Good Will to All.

                                    By ROSEMARY LORD

            Do you ever feel that you’ll never catch up before the year ends?

Meanwhile all around, folks are panicking at not having enough time to complete their yearly goals, year-end deadlines, working to bring in much-needed last-minute, additional income after a slow financial year and wrap up assorted 2025 ventures.

At the same time, people want to make the most of the Holiday Season: Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

            Many are adding travel to their already over-packed timetables, to visit relatives, distant friends, escape to warmer climes as winter weather encroaches – or just a New Year getaway on the schedule.

Some of us are asking ourselves, is this all a bit overwhelming? Have I taken on too much? Have I added too many incidental items to my accomplishment wish-list?

As writers are we pushing ourselves to finish that book before the year end, when we really need to give ourselves more time to investigate the timelines, plotlines, deepen our characters? Are we rushing to complete that article before the January 1^st deadline, just to get it out of the way?

I think that sometimes today, in our busy, rather overwhelming lives, we miss the point of the satisfaction of totally immersing ourselves in the creative pleasure that we’re privileged to do for a living. Just writing. Be it with pencil and pad, or the latest computer programs. Without the cacophony of social media expectations and the fear-of-missing-out, we would calmly (well – not always…) focus on the task at hand. We could focus on what we were writing, even when the deadlines loomed. We did not get distracted by today’s outer craziness. We researched, we wrote, we completed the assignment in a more centered way.

We were at the helm. None of the pressure from outside nudging us to keep posting things on social media or keeping up to date by reading everything on Facebook and Instagram, so we know what everyone and their cousin is doing or thinking. Being sure to read the ‘right’ blogs, attend the ‘right’ events, use the ‘right’ words, keep in touch with the ‘right’ people that may be able to boost our career or our ‘online presence,’ – or not.

What happened to the basic, simple goals we had carefully planned?

Our aim used to be to write an (almost perfect) article, book, novel, investigative report, children’s book. Something we would be fastidious in researching, writing and editing. Maybe running it by our beta-reader friends before sending it off.

But today we seem to have become distracted and overwhelmed by the outside influence of a thousand chattering voices telling us we’re not doing enough. That we should have this ‘online presence’ and become a social media darling so that everyone recognizes our faces and our logo. Everyone should have a distinctive logo, they say. Who is ‘they’?  

Yes, I appreciate that is today’s way to sell more of our books, our articles, get more advertising revenue. But I can’t help thinking that, if it’s the money you’re after and if your goal is to become a millionaire and get a million ‘clicks,’– there are a lot easier ways to do that than through the writing world.

When we started out, it was our writing that we wanted people to read, enjoy, appreciate, even applaud. Somewhere along the road that seems to have gotten lost.

Originally, we each felt we had something to say. A voice to be heard and enjoyed. But then some got caught up in the rush of outside influences, instead of listening to that calm, still voice inside our writers’ brain.

Some of us got too busy listening to everything and anything and lost our way, then found ourselves thinking, ‘Is this how I really want to spend my life?’

And this is a wonderful time, over these festive holidays, to calmly step back and remember what we came in for. Where is our time best spent? Rushing around following the crowd? Or finding our way back to our original writing goals?  

So, as we have our overfill of eggnog in the next couple of weeks, let’s take a deep breath and quietly plan for a wonderful year ahead of writing what WE want to write, in the way WE want to write it. Dust off our writing dreams – and tell Santa Claus what we really want for Christmas…

Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year to all of you writers and readers out there.

by Miko Johnston

The end of December. A good time to review what’s transpired throughout the year, including all the information and revelations that came from our WInRs in 2025.

WInRs may be women of a certain age, but we keep up with the times, as evidenced by several posts – including Jill’s – on AI. I expect this subject will be revisited as the technology progresses … or perhaps takes over?

When Gayle posted Characters: Real and Imagined, I could relate to her reflections on using famous people in our writing. As the author of a historical fiction series, I had to include actual people to balance the historical with the fiction. Her tips on incorporating the famous with the fictitious will help all writers.

Maggie’s Get Those Details Right! also struck a chord with me. I’d had to research locations in Prague during Covid, which meant canceling my planned in-person trip. I learned the limits of Google Maps firsthand when certain information I got from it turned out wrong. Fortunately, other ways to research locations exist (see this post).

Being an author means you never have to retire, a point made by Linda’s post, Retirement? Even if we stop writing for publication, we can continue to pen (or type) notes, keep a diary or journal, or log our family history for future generations.

Jackie’s piece on Mystery Books to TV Series inspired me in a reverse way. I selected a few series I’d enjoyed watching and bought the books, one of which I’m reading now.

Readers of this blog know I love to travel and often do, another reason I always enjoy the journey I take whenever I read one of Rosemary’s posts. London’s World of Words and Stories not only brought me back to a city I hadn’t been to in many years but reminded me how much travel has inspired and informed me about life outside my bubble, not only as a writer but as a human being.

Possibly the most controversial post this past year came from me. In A Contrarian View of Cozies I explained why I won’t read the sub-genre. Some of the responses softened my opinion. A little. Interestingly, when I wrote about cliches in mysteries in an earlier post, I never expected life to imitate art. After the recent jewel heist at the Louvre, a photo of policemen standing guard at the facility included a very dapper man, which raised questions as to who he was:

                                                                                                         Photo by Thibault Camus/AP

According to one pundit*: “Never gonna crack it with a detective who wears an actual fedora unironically. To solve it, we need an unshaven, overweight, washed-out detective who’s in the middle of a divorce. A functioning alcoholic who the rest of the department hates.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. Turns out he had nothing to do with the investigation, but it proved my point.

Our purpose at The Writers in Residence is to entertain, inform, and encourage our readers. If you follow this blog, or recently found it, have we achieved our goal? Did any posts help or influence you as a writer?

*Melissa Chen, a tech executive based in London, wrote this in an X post that has been viewed more than five million times.

Miko Johnston, a founding member of The Writers in Residence, is the author of the historical fiction series, “A Petal in the Wind”, as well as a contributor to several anthologies, including the recently released “Whidbey Island: An Insider’s Guide”. Miko lives in Washington (the big one) with her rocket scientist husband. Contact her at mikojohnstonauthor@gmail.com

 

 

by Gayle Bartos-Pool

Years ago, we could actually watch a favorite TV show, whether it be a television series or a variety show and see some famous, older, celebrity appear as a guest star. I just watched an old Man from U.N.C.L.E. 2-hour movie from 1966, The Spy in the Green Hat, and saw a bunch of famous, older character actors who guest-starred in it. Names like Allen Jenkins, Joan Blondell, Elisha Cook Jr. and Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom.

These actors were in classic old movies from the 30s and 40s. I had watched them decades later in the 60s and 70s and even now on the old movie channel because I like the quality of the story telling and the great acting these folks did. They were memorable.

I watched another one of those 2-hour U.N.C.L.E. movies, The Karate Killers, where Joan Crawford was one of the guest stars. Her film career had slowed since the 1950s and she was appearing in lots of TV shows, but she still had that talent that made her famous. She was in the opening segment of this Man from U.N.C.L.E movie and was killed off by the bad guy in the first fifteen minutes, but she turned in a marvelous performance. I wasn’t expecting her to do that good of a job, but that gal beat all expectations for an actor in a few minutes of a silly Man from U.N.C.L.E movie. This wasn’t exactly Gone with the Wind, but the lady delivered.

Using the talent of a famous, seasoned actor was good business back in the day when we actually had stars who did excellent work in movies that had a point. I’m not seeing much of that anymore. Call me cynical, but I haven’t been to a movie theater in over 30 years. I might watch a newer movie (maybe 10 or 15 years old) on TV, but since I’m usually disappointed in the results, I still prefer old movies.

But…and there is a “but,” in this post. I have used an older actor to “guest star” in one or two of my short stories. I don’t use their actual name but rather disguise the name slightly. And I might be the only one who gets the subterfuge, but I still do it. I used actor Glenn Ford in a story but changed his name to Dale Carr. (Another word for a “glen” is a “dale.” Another name for a “Ford” is “car.”) I always liked the actor and borrowed him for the short story “Arabian Knights” in the second Johnny Casino Casebook.

I’ve done this several other times in my stories. Sometimes I mention the fact in the Acknowledgement section of the book, but sometimes I don’t. My call.

But what about using a character from a famous book? I know there are legal issues to consider so I wouldn’t use a relatively new character from a famous book in a story unless I disguised their name. One could always say the character in your story was an incarnation of some famous character or maybe say: “he remined me of the private eye in that book, Mystery Whatever, but this guy was much taller…” Or maybe: “She was a modern version of Miss Marple, but this gal wore shorter skirts and high heels…”

But what if…?

What if you wanted to have Sherlock Holmes help solve a case? I mean the real Sherlock Holmes taken right from the pages of one of Arthur Connan Doyle’s books. And maybe the main character in your story never really understands who or what that character really was. Was he real or a figment of your main character’s imagination?

I’ve already come up with how a story could end if I did use such a character. In fact, my mind is racing to do this maybe a few times.

So…If you did pick a famous character to appear in one of your stories, who would it be?