I thought about what I could accomplish if I just gave up doing things. I could add four hours of writing a week if I didn’t go to karate class and dropped one of my volunteer positions. Those four hours looked tempting, until I realized what I would lose.

Dropping karate would eliminate the main driver of my exercise program, and impact my ability to include telling details. Karate taught me what it feels like to fall repeatedly, to get hit and be hit, to push my body to its limits – details I’ve included in my stories.

Dropping volunteer work would cut me off from people I might never meet otherwise, situations I would never encounter in my normal life, and information I could never realize I needed to know. My ear for dialog has been honed by sitting in board meetings, my protagonists have faced challenges I’ve heard about at work bees, and many a plot has been saved an embarrassing continuity error because of an off-hand remark made by a presenter at an orientation meeting.

So, what is mine to give up? Guilt. And that’s yours to give up, too. Keep the activities that bring you joy, keep the volunteer work that benefits you and your community, and give up the guilt. Your writing will benefit.

Spring is a palette of color. It dispels winter with fresh sights, sounds and aromas to be savored. It brings new ideas for art, poetry and prose. Congratulations to Tri-Valley members who polished your work until it shined in the Las Positas College Anthology.

-Violet Carr Moore

The foot was warm.

The cat’s expression was not.

I considered myself lucky that a killer stare was the only thing the cat threw my way. It settled back to resume its nap and I retreated to a curio cabinet. Since everything was behind glass, I wouldn’t have to worry about mistaking a live critter for the work of a genius artist.

Today in critique group I was reminded of that experience as I told a writer that her character wouldn’t have reacted the way she wrote the scene. “The good news is I think of him as a real person. So real, that I’m ready to argue with you, his creator, about what he would or would not do,” I said.

We all laughed, but it’s worth remembering that the reader brings as much to our work as we do – or can, if we’ve done our job. The reader wants to see a fully fleshed character, wants to imagine having lunch with our heroine or going fishing with our hero. If the reader tells you we’ve made the character act in a way she would not, could not, act – listen! Like beauty, reality is in the eye of the beholder.

Just don’t tug on its foot.

Andrew Peterson will discuss plotting and writing thrillers at the next TVW meeting. The author of two novels, First to Kill and Forced to Kill, Peterson began writing fiction in 1990. He sold a short story, “Mr. Haggarty’s Stop”, to San Diego Writers Monthly in October, 1992. He continued to write exploring both the novel form and screenplays. After attending his first writers’ conference in 2005, he became serious about telling the Nathan McBride stories. First to Kill was released in September 2008. He is currently working on the third novel in a planned series featuring the brutally effective Marine Corps scout sniper and CIA operations officer.

While on a book signing journey, Andrew took time to visit VA hospitals and sit with our nation’s veterans. He gave away hundreds of books. In Phoenix, he had the pleasure of meeting a Pearl Harbor survivor and one of the last remaining Navajo code talkers. He’s also donated over 2,000 books to our troops serving overseas and to our wounded warriors recovering in Naval and Army hospitals all over the world.

He and his wife live in Monterey County with their two giant schnauzers. Visit his website at http://www.andrewpeterson.com.