I unpacked some (but not nearly all) of our books recently.  One whole, long shelf ended up being full of just Elizabeth Peters books.  Those cracked and well-worn spines represented years of an author’s devotion to the craft.  And those were just the ones she wrote under that pseudonym.  To them you can add all the many books written as Barbara Michaels (any of you give yourself nightmares reading Ammie Come Home?), and her non-fiction books on archaeology written under her real name of Barbara Mertz.  I notice her cover photos are starting to show her age, but she’s still writing.

Think about it.  All those years of struggling with plot and character and continuity in her series, and editing.  Now that’s love.

The first book I purchased of hers was back in the late 1970’s and was called Legend in Green Velvet.  It was during the time period of Phyllis Whitney, Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt.  You know, the gothic romance period.  The book was set in Scotland and since I was madly in love with anything Scottish and had just started Scottish dancing, I counted out my seventy-five cents and bought it.  Elizabeth Peters tricked me.  It wasn’t a gothic romance.  It was hilarious.  It was a mystery.  It had characters who weren’t perfect, and who were eccentric.  Needless to say, when she followed that with the first in the Amelia Peabody series, I was hooked.  All these years later I still anxiously wait for the next one, knowing that as she ages, the chances are good there won’t be more.

One of the things Elizabeth Peters has always done is insert ‘inside’ comments.  If you’ve read all her books, you understand them.  A character from one series wanders through another.  An object important to one book shows up in another.  A character says something that has to do with another story.  I know there are other writers who do this, but she does it with a gentle hand and with the humor that is in all her books.

Another thing Elizabeth is very good at is showing the protagonist in stories written in first person.  If you like to write in first person, I strongly urge you to read the Amelia Peabody series.  The books have evolved over the years, but even in the early ones written in the 1980’s, she was very strong in this aspect of writing.  Amelia has a view of herself that is at odds with the way everyone else sees her.  And Elizabeth manages to show everyone’s opinions without stepping outside of Amelia’s mind.  This is very strong in her later Peabody books.

I would say that Elizabeth Peters went a long way toward encouraging me to write.  I was writing anyway by that time, in secret of course, but she instilled in me a desire to be able to pull a reader so fully into a story, to make them laugh out loud, and to make them want to be part of the character’s family for many years.

I can only hope that she has some more books in her because I’m not ready for her to be done writing.  There’s still one more shelf to fill.

Margie Lawson has this great technique for editing your work called the EDITS System.  A person can go to her website and download her seminars for a very reasonable price, and the course comes by email or as Word documents so you can print them out and go through them at your leisure.  The theory is great, the reality less so.

EDITS teaches you how to assign highlighter colors to things like dialog, description, action, etc.  When you edit your work, you take the pages, highlight, and then lay the paper out.  It’s a great, immediate visual to see where you have too much or not enough.  I learned a lot from her course on this and would recommend the copyrighted course with the following reservations.

Margie must be a powerful speaker in person as her energy shines through on the pages.  Lots of smiley faces, LOL acronyms, and exclamation points.  I felt exhausted after reading.  I also found them distracting and at times, immature, as if I was spending time with a teenager and cell phone.

Distractions that eventually resulted in me deciding not to order any more courses from her, no matter how much I learned, included the errors of misspelled words, grammar mistakes, and typos.  Lots and lots of them.  It was obvious that someone typed them up totally ignoring the little red underlined words.  And then never took a moment to read through the document before presenting it, breaking one of the first laws of writing.  If something was submitted to an agent or publisher with that many mistakes, it would have been tossed.  Plus, it leaves the impression that if she didn’t care enough about the material to edit it, why should I care enough to pay for it?  And I have to admit, being tight with money, that it annoyed me to pay for something that didn’t feel professional.

The course was many pages long, but as I got into the material I realized it could have been condensed down to at least half that, because the majority of the course was using other writer’s stories as examples.  A few would have been perfect, but pages and pages of them became almost as distracting as the typos.

And yet with all these serious problems, I did learn from her system and I use it when I sit down for a first read through, for first rough impressions of chapters.  I love the visual aspect of the highlighter system, and Margie is very correct when she explains that dialog, for example, should be broken up with bits of internalizations, body language, senses, and so forth.  I’m glad I paid for the course, I’ll continue to use it, but I doubt I’d purchase another from her because the quality of work simply sets my editing teeth on edge.  And after that sentence Margie would type, ‘Cliche Alert!!!’

I live and learn and write and grow as a writer, no matter the quality of the materials I learn from.  In spite of first, last, and continuing impressions. And one of the things I’ve learned from Margie is the importance of those first impressions.