JUDY EMERSON Author and Personal Coach

I was so pleased to be invited to join the Bookmarkers book club meeting in Pinetop on Tuesday, as their guest speaker. I was treated to a lovely lunch before the gathering of 28 book club members at the Country Club there. The attendees had all read and enjoyed their group’s chosen book for August, my novel Sack of Wrongs (three members had read it twice!) whose story was set in central Arizona (Mesa, actually) in the early 1960’s. It was so much fun to meet avid readers with big feelings about stuff my brain made up (or wherever it came from, because it often felt like I was scribbling dictation from someplace beyond the room I sat in).

They were eager to hear how I conceived of the book’s characters way back in 1996 (right after I finished my graduate degree), and developed their story in furious bursts of writing and workshopping the early versions over a couple of years, with the encouragement of a local writers’ group. That phase was followed by more than fifteen years when I laid the manuscript aside as my attention was redirected to my work as a psychotherapist, intermittently distracted by episodes of my ill-fated romantic escapades. Then there were several intense years of dedicated writing after I retired, to complete and finally publish the book in 2024.

Over such a long gestation, I fell in love with all of the characters I’d carried in my head, in my heart. They were like family—a dysfunctional family. The book group I met on Tuesday was unified on their favorites. I wasn’t surprised that their least-liked character was Dolores (whose name I chose because, if you weren’t aware, means “woman of sorrows”, aptly), the mother of Ben and his sister Katie. Dolores is NOT a direct representation of my own mother, by the way—or any other single person I’ve known. But I’m sorry to say in my younger years I manifested toward my own kids a lesser but still hurtful degree of Dolores’ blindness to the needs of others. That’s a trauma response, but a no-less-damaging character defect I’ve worked hard to amend over many years—I’m not clear of it yet, but my daughters and I have healed our relationships so much, and I’m deeply grateful. The character Dolores is still very raw, angry, manipulative, and quick to blame others. Yeah, I wrote her that way, I knew she wasn’t likeable.

It was great fun to engage with the group in a lively two-hour conversation about these fictional people I know so intimately, but I’ve realized there were unanswered questions we hadn’t covered, so I’m offering a bit more insight into the characters here. Still, I’ll try not to reveal spoilers for anybody who might not have read the book. If you comment to this post, I hope you’ll do the same.

Many readers wonder how so difficult (!) a character as Dolores could have gotten to be such a mean-spirited woman, when she’d grown up with a mom (Rose), who became such a wise and loving grandmother (Nana) to Ben and Katie. So, I shared with the group some hints about the family’s traumatic backstory, which I wrote as a part of about ten chapters I’ve filed away for an unfinished prequel to Sack of Wrongs. I hope to complete and publish that story if I live long enough, but it isn’t in the book they had just finished reading. I told the group about the fictional family’s fictional wheat farm In Kansas in the 1920’s and 30’s, near the actual, not fictional, epicenter of the nation’s great Dust Bowl, in the midst of the Great Depression.

Back before Dolores was born, her parents had weathered losses that created fractures in their marriage. Later on, their farm and livelihood dried up and blew away before their eyes. Dolores herself, their only child, nearly suffocated of dust pneumonia at the age of eight, held in her father’s arms through a terrible vigil as she struggled to survive. For weeks Dolores and her father clung to one another in a powerful trauma bond, their joint effort to keep her breathing and alive, with her mother Rose reduced to a helpless background figure. Family relationships locked into polarized positions. Much later when Dolores was fourteen her father was killed in an accident, fueling Dolores’ bitterness at being “abandoned,” left behind with the parent she’d come to hate.  Rose later cherished Dolores’ children, pouring her thwarted maternal energies into Ben and Katie. You get the general idea.

But all of that lives only in my head and my computer files. What?!!

It’s understandably frustrating to readers who’ve come to care about these characters in the book. Why didn’t the author (me) let them (the readers) know? Sorry about that.

Here’s what prevented me, as an author: First person viewpoint characters.

When these characters started showing themselves to my imagination (back in 1996) I committed to writing the story in first person viewpoints, because that’s the most up-close-and-personal view a reader can experience, seeing the inner workings of a character’s mind. No arm’s-length here. Maybe I chose this path because even back then I was already a veteran of the vulnerability of intensive psychotherapy as a client, during which I laid bare my soul to another human in the most intimate of up-close emotional exposures I can imagine. And I was poised, at that time, to begin my new career as a psychotherapist—I was entering the profession as a clinical social worker, to witness, support and guide people’s self-examination and struggle to reevaluate their histories. That resonated with my novel’s personal revelations through which readers come to know each character. It felt like familiar territory to me. First-person.

And here are the limits of the first-person viewpoint:

Whichever of the three main characters are narrating the events we see on the pages, they can tell us only what they hear, see, feel, and know, within the limits of their awareness and their personal tendency to notice. Ben tells us what’s meaningful to him, within his field of vision and understanding. Katie makes frequent reference to her yellow quilt, her cat, and her love for her teacher.

The character of Dolores has a habitual focus on what she feels in control of. She wants everyone to see her as having all the answers, competent so solve any problem without any help. (In this I share her tendency to lean into ego, which is a character defect that creates a defensive barrier to intimacy. I’m more aware of that these days, and I’m working on change—not done yet—but Dolores isn’t at all aware.) She’d rather think about what gives her dominance: her excellence at work, her ability to attract and manipulate a man to her own advantage, and her judgments about others’ failings. Like most survivors of serious trauma, she doesn’t like to think about the stuff that scares her, stirs unmanageable feelings, or identifies her failings. So, she blocks out the trauma history readers would like to know in order to understand why she is such a difficult person. Little hints emerge when she has bad dreams and wakes up choking or crying, and in her expressed devotion to her lost father. (See an example on pages 71-74 in the book.)

Once committed to letting only these three characters tell us what they know and what they’re willing to reveal, there’s no natural way for an authorial voice to show up and give readers hints. If the character isn’t aware, or won’t admit it, the reader won’t know it. Kind of like any person I observe on the street, or even a friend I know well. If they’re unconscious of it or unwilling to share it, any outsider won’t be privy to things that may cause that person private pain, or shape their character. Each of us has more unconscious content in our brain than what we know about ourselves. I often don’t recognize my own motivations fully, and sometimes I’m still entirely blind to them. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, as they say.

Dolores doesn’t have deep insights about the men in her orbit either. She doesn’t much wonder about what makes them tick unless it might be leverage for her to get what she wants. So, she can’t tell us what’s going on behind the scenes for her boss or the guy she thinks could be useful to her cause. Readers are usually just as surprised as Dolores, Ben, and Katie, when everything changes. I was stunned when, writing the chapter to find out what was going to happen, the idea of the arrest popped into my mind,. I never saw it coming, but when it came, it felt like it was a pre-existing truth, and the only possible outcome.

Leaving Dolores aside for now, here’s a peek behind other scenes. First, this novel is NOT autobiographical, except for two specific incidents the happened for Katie, that actually did happen to me as a kid. I told the book group that I chose to make Katie born the same year I was (1953), for two reasons: 1) because she was the character who first came to my mind and she shared some of my patterns as a child (love of books, reliance on teachers). And 2) to make my job easier (on this, my very first effort to write a novel) in choosing all the elements to create the world on the pages of the book. I could see the world through Katie’s eyes, because I lived my own version in the same years.

The internet makes research so very much easier than it would otherwise have been, and I did a whole lot of factchecking. What music was on the radio, and when, and what movies were released at the drive-in theater during the years the story takes place. Beer busts were a thing. Twilight Zone and Route 66 and Walter Cronkite and the news of the Civil Rights Movement Katie witnessed were familiar to me when I was a child. Babies were held on Moms’ laps in the front seats of cars. The internet showed me weather patterns for high and low temperatures in central Arizona on a day-by day record for 1963.

And this personal detail: I once fell into a fishpond when I was roller skating. I don’t remember being seriously hurt, I didn’t feel like I was drowning, and I didn’t develop a pathological fear of water. But it might have gone that way. My memory of it was a vivid one, popping into my head as a detail that I as a writer could shape as a prompt for some of Katie’s personal traits. And as I later discovered (revealed to me, not engineered by me!) what would happen in the book to Katie’s younger brother, there was already established natural causation for her behavior during that incident! Wow. That’s what happens when a story is developing in front of a writer’s eyes.

And the other real thing that happened: Someone recently said to me, “But would a teacher really do ‘that’ in the 1960’s? They sure couldn’t do it these days!” I answered, “Yes. They could back then. It happened to me.” I’ll explain.

When I was in sixth grade, near the end of the school year Mrs. Zickefoose kept me after class one day and told me that she knew I had beautiful handwriting, and that she had, at home, a drawerful of recipes clipped from magazines, and she wondered if my parents might allow me to come to her house sometimes during the summer when school was out of session, to transcribe recipes by hand onto little index cards. She said she would pay me a little bit for the “work”. Mrs. Zickefoose was a very compassionate teacher who saw what probably all my teachers had seen over the years. Mrs. Z. saw that I was an academic achiever who worked hard in class and always had her hand up with the right answer—and also that I was a very needy kid, who craved attention and affection. Surely, she extrapolated that something must be very wrong at home, and that a long summer without school as an escape might be hard for me to get through. The way Katie’s teachers must have seen, always. Because teachers can see these things. Teachers save a lot of kids, by recognizing needs and offering extra attention, letting a kid grade class papers or clean the blackboard.  In my case, my parents wouldn’t give permission for me to accept Mrs. Zickefoose’s very kind offer of writing out her recipes. That missed opportunity broke my heart back then, but I could give that gift to the character of Katie, who was also a needy kid. And no, I can’t imagine a teacher could do the same in today’s school environment.

I can’t go on rambling here forever. But one last thing.

I totally forgot to tell the gathering at the book club! I am in the middle of working on producing an audiobook of Sack of Wrongs, for those who enjoy LISTENING to books rather than traditional reading. I wish I could have recorded it myself for the audio, but my asthma makes that a daunting task. And I can’t afford to hire actors to do the reading. So, with some reservations, I’ve contracted with a production company for AI voices, which is allowing me to choose three different voices, for Ben, Katie, and Dolores, with quite a lot of editorial approval on how it will sound.

I’m not entirely sold on AI, which certainly has its limits, to say the least. But I don’t have a better option for now. The process has been fascinating so far. At the outset, I gave them general descriptions for how I wanted each character to sound. For Ben and Katie, we pretty quickly landed on voices that feel pretty close to what I hoped for. But the audio clips they sent me as nominations for Dolores’ voice, in several rounds of possibilities, kept coming back as sounding too young, too high-pitched. I said, “No, she’s more alto, not soprano. She’s a world-weary, cynical smoker-and-drinker older-than-her-years woman. She complains, but the pitch is not whining.”

After yet another frustrating mismatch, I had a brilliant idea. Lauren Bacall! Lauren Bacall, if you aren’t familiar, was a 1940’s-50’s movie star. Dolores sounds like Lauren Bacall, in my head anyway. So, I sent them this clip: Lauren Bacall, 1979 TV Interview. That was the answer. We’re not finished, but they actually used her name as the model for Dolores’ chapters. You’ll hear Lauren Bacall in the role of Dolores.

Once that got clear, we had other issues. In the initial samples they sent me, the characters were reading the text of the novel like it was a race. “Too fast!” I wrote the manager who was my liaison. I asked them to slow the voice by 10%. I don’t know how they did it, but they promptly sent back a 10% slower reading. Nope. Now too slow. After several tries, I think we landed on about 7% slower than the initial version.

And more edits. The voices were pushing past punctuation, paragraphs, and page breaks like they didn’t exist, so I asked for pauses of varying lengths there. I’ve gone back through the manuscript (not finished yet) adding italics for emphasis in the audio version, that didn’t exist in the print version.

And pronunciations! Apparently, AI does not know how to pronounce “Shinola” (or what it represented, I’m guessing), as in “doesn’t know shit from Shinola” in the book. (If you don’t remember, it was a brand name for a kind of shoe polish. Google the origin and meaning of the phrase.) So, I’m making a list, including: “Shinola” = “shine-OH-lah”. I’ll direct the human techie person to do a whole-document search for each incidence of the word, and make the computer AI voice, however they do it, read the word phonetically.

Eeeeeesh.

Most of the pronunciation edits are Spanish words. I don’t speak Spanish, by the way, except for a limited set of common phrases and the familiar vulgarities and curse words I overheard growing up all my life in Las Cruces, New Mexico, surrounded by lots of classmates of Mexican descent. If you have feedback for my use of Spanish language words in the text, I’d appreciate your letting me know. I had a hard time finding a native Spanish speaker to read the manuscript.

Once I heard the sample clip of Ben in chapter one saying “andale, muchachos!” and the AI voice pronounces it “ANN-DALE” (like the feminine name followed by the masculine name, for God’s sake!) I knew I had to pay very careful attention to the Spanish pronunciations. So, I’m still in the middle of searching out everything in Spanish in the book and creating the edits list.

After I get the pronunciation edits completed and sent, I don’t know the timeline for them to complete an audio draft for me to review, and then however many more edits I may discover are necessary.

If you’re interested in the audio version, you are welcome to email me at judyemersonauthor@gmx.com and I will put you on a list to notify you when it’s released. I hope very soon, but the variables are unknown. I’ll keep you posted!

So, this blog post has been a little view into the weird/astonishing experience of how this novel (and the characters and their little world) developed in my head and on the page, plus the bonus of audio book production. Did you find it interesting? Did it raise more questions? Comments are welcome. Subscribe if you’d like to read more.

And check out the many other blog posts at judyemersonauthor.org Look for the word “blog” at the top of the home page and click there. I write vulnerable personal observations about stuff in my life, about God, about mistakes, growing, healing, taking responsibility, getting better, grace, forgiveness, my cat, and more. Let me know what you think. And whatever else is going on, take good care of yourself. I’ll do the same.

Judy