Dyslexia, Civil War Research, & Old Friends

I'm not sure how many people realize this, but I have dyslexia. I spent years putting my shoes on the wrong feet and refused to really read until I moved to Estill County where they had a reading program that forced me to pick up a book and stare at it in the fifth grade. I can't remember how long it was, it could have been twenty minutes? The thing is that you can only spend so much time staring at words on a page before they actually start to grab your attention. Before I knew it, I became addicted to the Goosebumps series.... and eventually started writing. I must have been about eleven or twelve when I really started to write. Funny thing; I really wanted to publish a vampire novel for the longest time, and that character developed while I was still a kid. She's still in a finished novel on my hard drive but I just haven't been able to edit it because it's hard to read my old work. Spelling errors and grammatical atrocities aside, I just don't feel like the story line would be believable enough to grab a reader's attention the way some of my romance novels have. I still have weird spelling errors that pop up when I'm writing on paper and I interchange cursive and print. I have friend who is also dyslexic and he said he does the same thing. I've seen some of his handwriting and it looked similar even though it was kind of a chicken scratch and I had to stare at it a little longer than usual. I had to actually train myself to spell certain words like "necessary" (I still botch it up) and pretty much any word that has more than one of the same letter. It's been so long I can't really give any other examples than "necessary" because I still have to stop and think about that one. I suppose, though, that everyone has one little word they get stuck on from time to time but for me it could be five minutes staring at the thing before I give up and fiddle around with autocorrect on my phone in a note.

Ask me to do a math equation, and I'll laugh in your face. I am awful with anything except multiplication and I usually need a calculator for it. It's a wonder I got through algebra in college. It's not easy to admit weaknesses like this, but I spent years in special education classes until I got into high school, and as much as they drove me crazy, I still probably wouldn't be able to form a single sentence without it looking horrible. It also helped that my mother is a poet and gave me books whenever she finished reading them. I really think if it hadn't been those early reading sessions in school that I probably wouldn't have ever bothered with any of it. This isn't an easy thing to talk about but it happened and now on the computer I obviously have no problem writing. Handwriting, eh, iffy.

So... add in a character who isn't as educated as the woman he wrote the letters to in Cheap Tricks, and you've got a really frustrated writer. Now it's hard for me to even imagine how a word would be spelled phonetically anymore and I think it's because I spent so many years training myself not to do that. It confused me more while I was working on Cheap Tricks the other night. I know there are at least 8 distinct dialects in Tom Sawyer so I figured why not catch Kentucky dialect in Timothy's letters to Mary?

(Just as a spoiler, Sophie, who was in Cheap Guitars? She's the main character in the book and the central plot revolves around her trying to save her grandmother's farm. If you've read the first one, you know she's an archaeologist, and because she finds some old letters and a few other Civil War Era artifacts, she talks her grandmother into keeping her property a bit longer until they can figure out what to do with it. Neal is a main character too. ;))

I've been excited this WHOLE time for the Civil War love letters that are going in this novel, and I decided to work on them first because I need to get them out of the way. It's just...sitting there and trying to think of how to spell a word wrong--I have some actual love letters that were written during the Civil War that I googled--left me confused and with a blood vessel threatening to burst in my brain. I'm exaggerating, I'm good for that. Anyway, my solution?

Gave them to a friend who's spelling is atrocious.

Seriously.

He un-edited it for me. I'm laughing so hard at this but he did me a huge favor and his fiancee kept laughing at me on Facebook last night. It was a much needed laugh. I've known this guy since elementary school and now I'm becoming closer to his fiancee. I've caught him using a few words like "knowed" several times whenever we talk but this really is a part of the dialect where I live. I've gotten into debates on how to pronounce "oil" with a few of our mutual friends and for the longest time it irritated whenever he spelled "hey" as "hay". I've long since let that go. I don't want to get into the it's because I have more education than he does--no. That's not what I'm aiming at in this blog post. I feel like that dialect might go away if everyone keeps on going after a higher education in this area and as a former anthropology student I don't want that to happen. You also can't force eighteen year olds into college if they really don't want to go. A lot of the people in this area are--I think--Irish and English descendants and a few times I've wondered if their ways of talking are closer to how they spoke back in the 1800s. It's come up in several conversations I've had with people who know the area better than I do. I grew up here, kinda, but I wasn't born here. Most of my family is in Ohio and Pennsylvania and I'm part Czech (gypsy as Mom likes to call it) and Sioux. There's a little German, Irish, and viking in there too. If I'm really tired and I'm spending some time with Kentucky friends I catch a small accent but it's still mostly all Philly girl. I feel like I wouldn't do the story justice if I don't catch the dialect correctly in the letters But back to this, they were isolated (being in Appalachia) and so it didn't really change.

So, that was part of my Civil War research. Thanks, pal, if you read this. 

I also have a few things I've kept from my research when I worked on All This Time that I'm using again but really I am just trying to map out what happens in the war with a lot of googling. It's so much fun, and this novel is coming out so much faster. Please get excited with me! I have a feeling Cheap Tricks will be better than Cheap Guitars. I've learned a lot about writing since I published it. :)

Also, get excited. Head Over Heart's release date is getting closer. June 30th, baby.