Saturday

Author Responses, Part Seven

Here's more of my Q & A with Jane Kirkpatrick. Enjoy!

If you could easily afford to have a full time or live-in housekeeper, would you want one? Why or why not?


No. I like my alone time with my husband and we have someone who works for us on the ranch so always have someone here everyday and I really would like to have private time. Having someone come in now and then, that would be great! But I’d have to clean up first.

Describe the state of your office right now. Be honest: How good or bad is it?

It’s pretty bad. I’m on final deadline and reference books and other items are strewn around. Notes of revisions I need to make are tacked to the computer; the church bench behind me holding reference books is now double stacked so I can just turn around and grab and not lose time going to the bookcase! I haven’t unpacked my retreat leading boxes either; they’re stacked. And since I just had a new book come out, the file boxes for that book have also not been put away as I might need to reference something in an interview, for example.

Thanks, Lenora, for your input--and your honesty. I think deadline time is the messiest time for every writer's home, or at least for their office. I know it is for me! And though I'm no fan of cleaning, there's something incredibly satisfying about putting my life back together again after having written "The End" on a manuscript and sending it off to the publisher. Here's hoping you'll reach that point soon yourself!

Author Responses, Part Six


This week, Jane Kirkpatrick, author of the Portrait of a Heart series (which includes An Absence So Great: A Novel (Portraits of the Heart) pictured above) gives us insight on going from messed to blessed.

If you could invent a machine that accomplished one single housekeeping task in your home, what would the machine do?


It would automatically go along the cracks between our oak floor boards (lovingly laid by hand but before the wood totally dried so the boards shrunk through the years) and pick up all the dog hairs, dust etc. that accumulates there between vacuum cleanings and kills my back bending over to get them. I have my closest friends agreed that if they outlive me, before the funeral, they’ll come to my house and clean out the cracks so no one will know we lived with such filth.

When you create fictional characters, do you ever deal with their level of housekeeping ability and/or their tolerance for mess? How does that factor into the story as a whole?


Yes! Being overwhelmed by clutter is a good indication of someone’s struggle with “weighty” issues, perhaps avoiding dealing with loss (can’t throw anything away) or feeling unworthy (keeping things and fearing that getting rid of them means getting rid of themselves) and other factors. Of course it’s also a great tension building (The Odd Couple comes to mind) between characters as well.

What's the neatest or messiest character you have ever created, what book did they appear in, and why did you make that creative decision?


For All Together in One Place , I created Adora, an older woman on a wagon train whose husband dies along with the other men on this train. She was very cluttered, messy about her person, too. Her husband had always told her what to do and took care of her and in some ways she was subtly resisting his control by being messy. But after he died, her cleaning up and clearing out became something she wanted to do. She ended up keeping a knife sharpener, though it was very heavy, that she had initially thought they should bring with them. This became her occupation when they reached California, so how her housekeeping (or wagon-keeping) changed was a metaphor for her own changes.

For more about Jane Kirkpatrick, be sure to check out her website.

Author Responses, Part Five

This week, Lenora Worth gives us two original shorts on housekeeping.

Invent a fictional housekeeper and create a scene involving that character.

I see a Granny-type who loves to nurture and clean, quiet to efficient
and non-intrusive.

Aunt Thelma worked her way around the outer perimeters of my office,
her sturdy SAS shoes whispering across the carpet with vaccum-cleaner
precision. The whish of her feather duster spoke louder than any words.
She did not approve of my messy ways, but far be it from her to ever
speak a word of criticism out loud. Aunt Thelma let the smell of Lemon
Pledge speak for her. That way, the sharpness of her disapproval
lingered in the air with a citrus-sweet smell long after she'd pranced
out of the room.


What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses with regards to housekeeping? As a creative person, do you ever tackle these issues in a particularly creative manner?


I have a plaque on my kitchen wall that states "Creative minds are rarely tidy." I think that says it all. My strength--I don't like filth. My weakness--I don't mind clutter.

Take this starter and keep going: Sally stood in the doorway of the kitchen, dismayed by the mess that greeted her there...

Sally stood in the doorway of the kitchen, dismayed by the mess that greeted her there. How had things fallen apart so badly so fast? She had to clean it up but didn't even know where to begin. Shoulders sagging as she reached for the broom, Sally couldn't help but think that if she had a man to help her around here, things would be so much better.

The loneliness of moving through this messy room hit her each time she looked at the stack of dirty dishes, all from dinners for one. She'd be more inclined to clean this place if someone else actually ever saw it.

Take this starter and keep going: Jared knew Beth was the girl for him the moment he laid eyes on her impeccable...

Jared knew Beth was the girl for him the moment he laid eyes on her impeccable kitchen. Everything was so perfect, so precise. She had even color-coded the containers for cereal, flour, sugar, rice, and pretzels. He loved pretzels. And he liked order. But when he saw one of the matching dish towels settled a bit crooked on the oven door, Jared felt a twinge of anger, followed by a harsh regret. So she might not be perfect after all. Maybe he could help her along with improving that a little bit.

Awesome! Thanks, Lenora!

Author Responses, Part Four

More from Lenora Worth this week, including an excerpt from the book she's currently writing.

If you could easily afford to have a full time or live-in housekeeper, would you want one? Why or why not?

I don't think I'd ever have a live-in housekeeper. I like my privacy
too much and I don't like other people going through my "stuff." But it
would be nice to have someone come in once a week maybe.

Describe the current state of your office. Be honest: How good or bad is it?


I've been trying to clean my office for days now. It always get messy
toward the end of a book being written. It's cluttered but I have
little organized spots so I can at least attempt to find things. I
don't like it too neat. That kind of scares me. But I can handle only
so much clutter before that gets to me, too. I like a good balance.

Provide a brief excerpt from one of your books that shows a scene involving housekeeping/mess/cleanliness.

From Let's Make a Deal (working title) Harlequin
SuperRomance--January 2011--Lenora Worth

Letting out a groan, Jane Harper looked up from her now ruined black
Italian leather “client-meeting” pumps to the two-storied whitewashed
farmhouse sitting with forlorn loneliness up on the hill in front of
her. At least she was here now. And from the looks of the place, she’d
be here a while. The yard was weed-covered and drought-thirsty. An old
International tractor sat lopsided near a giant live oak on a hill,
looking like a petrified bug. The steps were cracked, the porch paint
was peeling. And the porch was lined with several pieces of vintage
wicker furniture and Victorian plant stands, along with exercise
equipment and piles of various brands of empty beer cans.

Author Responses, Part Three


Our next author, Lenora Worth (her 2010 release, Hometown Princess is shown above) was full of great answers about housekeeping. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.

If you could invent a machine that accomplished one single
housekeeping task in your home, what would the machine do?


I'd invent some kind of machine that could wash, fold and put away
clothes. I seem to always be behind on the laundry.
Maybe a machine where you put them in and they go through the whole
process on a conveyor belt--start to finish!

Mindy's note: It exists--or nearly so. In a future blog post, I'll tell about a behind-the-scenes tour of a cruise ship that my husband and I took last fall. In the laundry room, we watched in awe as a worker put sheets and towels from the washer onto a conveyor belt, which brought them through a single machine that dried, pressed, and folded them!

When you create fictional characters, do you ever deal with their level of housekeeping ability and/or their tolerance for mess? How does that factor into the story as a whole?

Sometimes, I'll have one character who is extremely neat and pit that
character against a slob. Or I'll show my character cleaning the house
while fretting about something or just dumping everything into a corner
so she can go for a long walk and talk to God. I think it's important
to show such traits to round out the character and give the reader a
sense of that character's quirks and reality.

What's the neatest or messiest character you have ever created, what book did they appear in, and why did you make that creative decision?

In a book I just finished, the heroine is a life coach who "trains"
people to organize their homes. I put her up against a retired NFL
football player who's having a mid-life crisis and has allowed clutter
in both his home and in his head. It was fun, but it was also a tough
book to write because his emotional clutter really was causing him to
hoard things in order to built a wall around himself.

Great answers. Thanks, Lenora!