Tag: art

Saturday with thoughts


Rewriting a good chapter that needs to be better. Thinking in between revising. Coloring when I think. Coloring something that has nothing to do with these characters. I’ve had fun coloring these simple pieces because of that publication on the bottom right.
Li
In
Th
Wi
Is it a tourist guide? A novel? Self-help? I kept trying to complete the title, and here are a few I came up with:

Lions In The Wild
Lice Infesting The Wicked
Lie In The Wisteria
Life In The Winnebago
Limeade In The Wineglass
Living In The Wind

All very fine, but not my winning title, which is Liars In Thorp, Wisconsin.

Wikipedia tells me: Thorp is a city in Clark County in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. The population was 1,621 at the 2010 census. Thorp is located partially within the Town of Thorp and partially within the Town of Withee. It is located between Eau Claire and Wausau. Thorp is known for some of its popular attractions, which include: Marieke Gouda Holland’s Family Cheese, Thorp Aquatic Center, and Thorp Area Historical Society & Telephone Museum.

If that isn’t the perfect location–a town formed of two towns?–for a cozy mystery involving the murder of a newcomer running for town council, I don’t know what is. Feel free to steal the idea and write a book. Don’t forget to stock up on things that can distract you.


The coloring page came from this, another of my favorite coloring books. I used colored pencils and various kinds of gel pens and markers.

J’aime la France


Oh, a hundred years ago, or thirty-something, I created a character and made him French. I think because I wanted to use the surname of my college French teacher who’d taught me a few years before. Her class was when I got those two books. (There’s a third book, but I must have stuck it somewhere else.)

This is my experience with other languages.

I had six weeks of German in tenth grade before I was moved to another school, where German wasn’t taught. It didn’t matter. I was born in Germany, but my only real interest in taking the class was because Lynne and other friends did, and I wanted to take classes with my friends. Didn’t we all?

I’m not sure which year of high school, junior or senior, I took at least one semester of Spanish. It was, as I recall, the only option for a foreign language in that school. In hindsight, learning Spanish would have been a great choice, and I did very much like the teacher, but here’s my problem with language classes. I was never one of the students who volunteered answers in ANY class. I never asked questions. I couldn’t stand to draw attention to myself. Giving any kind of oral report (even book reports, though I always read and loved reading) or reading anything out loud: absolute torture for me. Being called on for an answer? I usually pretended I didn’t know so the focus would quickly shift elsewhere.

So speaking aloud in a class using a language I was trying to learn? You might as well have escorted me to the guillotine.

ETA: Look! When I went to return the other two books to my reference shelves, I found this very thin volume (24 pages, which means a mere 12 pieces of paper) tucked among some other books. I took pronunciation seriously! Now, I can hear native French speakers teach me pronunciations online. Students these days have no idea…

Over the years, I’ve taught junior high and college students. I’ve read out loud to students. I’ve presented work-related seminars in several companies where I was employed. I’ve given talks at retreats, moderated discussions among small groups of people on various topics, and led guided meditations. I’ve spoken at book signings where my novels were being sold. I’ve done all that, but inside, I’m still the girl who didn’t want all eyes on her. And I STILL will almost never speak any of the phrases/words I know in any foreign language because I’m so uncomfortable about possibly bungling pronunciations.

And yet I love the country and the language. I don’t know a lot of French history, but I’ve done research on specific topics because… I still have that same character taking up real estate in my brain, and he, and France as a setting, play larger roles than they once did in his initial appearance in my fictitious world.

I have friends who speak French. Friends who love France. One acquaintance who is French, French-born, probably living in France again. I know when the time comes, there are people who can beta check what I’ve written, and who can make sure the online translator I’ve used when my characters (infrequently) speak French has done right by me.

Something that amuses me: I borrowed my character’s first name from a novel set in France that I read decades ago. (I liked him so much that I’d have fallen in love with him, too, just as the female character did, yet my character who bears the name isn’t a romantic lead in my series.) People I know who are familiar with the Spanish version of his name have questioned me, but I’m correctly using the French spelling. His name is the only thing I borrowed from that novel.

In addition, for the past few years, I’ve read a mystery series set in France, and I’ve tried very hard to use NOTHING from those books. (I recently realized that although I’ve bought and downloaded them, I’m two novels and one short-story-collection behind in this series. I need to spend more time reading.) I’ve met the author at book-signings and seen his online discussions of book releases during lockdown, and somewhere along the way, I was lucky enough to glean one bit of true information from him on international relations that vastly helped my plot. But other than that, my France and my French characters are all mine (with help from Google and Wikipedia), and all inaccuracies or unlikelihoods rest squarely on my shoulders (let the researcher beware…).

Though my writing brain right now is firmly in the U.S. because of the section I’m laboring over in the Neverending Saga, France is never far… And I’ve already chosen my next coloring page when the right character returns to getting page time.


Vive la République!

Tiny Tuesday!

I’m not sure what possessed me to put not one, not two, but THREE Aries characters in the Neverending Saga. I guess because I well understand the Aries nature and its range of manifestations. In my experience, Aries + Aries either tend to attract or repel–there’s no middle ground. With my characters, one is on the cusp of Taurus, one shares my birthday, and one falls only a few days after my birthday. Those last two repel each other. The Aries/Taurus character has a mostly good relationship with both of them.

That wee painting (above) uses a Shiner Wicked Ram IPA bottle cap. I’ve only ever had one of those come to me, and naturally, I held on to it because: Aries. I would really enjoy creating some more bottle cap art (and continue to accept bottle caps if you have them). On future Tiny Tuesday posts, I’ll share some of my bottle caps that haven’t made it into art yet, and maybe even some more bottle cap art I’ve done. To get a better sense of how wee the one above is, here it is with a bit more of the wall art in the writing sanctuary.

Mindful Monday


Learn, from my One Word Art series, December 2005

ETA: For all its complications, I can’t regret the easy access the Internet offers. My fictitious pianist is diverting himself by playing the twenty-four etudes of Chopin’s Op. 28, and thanks to YouTube, I can listen to someone perform those as I write. So can you, if you’d like to be still and relax for about forty-two minutes. You can hear what he hears.

Button Sunday

Heed the crow, friends.

Today is Great Poetry Reading Day, and you can learn more about it at that link. As for me, as soon as I realized this, I went right to the Houndstooth library and took out this book. I don’t know why I thought to check, because I rarely do this anymore, but I looked inside the front page and I had, indeed, written my name and the date I got the book, which in this case was 1997. I wonder what prompted me to purchase it that year, whether I had a hunger to read more poetry or I was in a bookstore, saw it, and decided, I need that!

I paged through the book randomly, reading poems, and came to a section with work by the American poet Robinson Jeffers, who I’ve always read with pleasure. Full disclosure: In 1995, I bought the book Safe As Houses by Alex Jeffers and wondered if he was related to Robinson Jeffers, but these were the days before I had the entire world of information at my fingertips. I reminded myself that just because two people share a last name… Lucky for me, one of my literary icons, Edmund White, had blurbed the novel on the back cover, and he shared that Alex is Robinson Jeffers’s grandson. Curiosity satisfied. Since I’m off-track already, I want to reiterate that it’s among the highlights of my writing and editing career that I queried Alex about submitting a story to Timothy and me for Best Gay Romance 2014, and I was delighted with his submission, “Shep: A Dog,” and really excited to include it in the anthology. If you have interest in reading an excerpt, I provided one at this old post.

Today, I relished Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Love the Wild Swan,” because I really hungered for more of the validation I got last week that yes, I am a writer, and no, I’m not on the wrong path, I’m on my own path, a path where I can and do love the wild swan.

I even crafted a bit today to showcase Jeffers’s poem in between periods of writing, all while listening to music. If you can’t read the words on the photo below, I’ll add the poem at the end of this post. The swan outline came from ColoringAll.com, and I bought that floral paper (to the right) the swan is on at the bookstore where I was an assistant manager in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I met so many good people there, one of whom, of course, was another of our assistant managers, Steve R.

I didn’t forget for a minute that today is Steve’s birthday, and as I do every year, I whipped up something chocolate in his honor (we’ll be adding a dollop of ice cream to those brownies). We love you always, Steve.

Love the Wild Swan

“I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”
–This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast,
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your. . . self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

Robinson Jeffers, 1935

Thank you, Taylor, for today’s creativity soundtrack. Your lyrics mean a lot to me and to some of my characters.

Fun fact: In An Aries Knows history, I launched Button Sundays on September 17, 2006.

Assorted Saturday thoughts

I had plans when I woke up today and they mostly included writing. I’ve been able to write in bits and pieces this week, but most days found me in a bit of a gray mood, including about writing. Then an old friend of mine who has a knack for getting in touch in the most timely (and usually amusing) of ways did so, and suddenly our conversation, as well as one it provoked me to continue with a cousin, turned things around and gave me the incentive I needed. (Also, it gave the friend and me reason to read an author I’ll discuss in a post next week sometime.)

I was looking forward to getting back to the saga because one of my favorite characters is in the chapter I’m writing now. She always makes me smile, and at this point in the timeline, I believe she’s four years old.

Regrettably, a terse email from a stranger that I read shortly after I woke up derailed my plans. I took care of her request, and then I decided I was overdue to make changes I’d long intended to make to this blog. No one will probably ever notice but me, but it took me eight hours to handle that project, and I wasn’t in any mood to stare at a monitor for the rest of my waking hours.

I did, however, color a wee fairy that I was able to download for free from this wonderful site, The Graphics Fairy, whose terms and conditions are more than fair, and I love her coloring pages. I colored this page in honor of my favorite fictional, magical four-year-old. My photo doesn’t do justice to all the sparkling fairy dust I added under the title or to the spots under her eyes that were on the original page.

Just breathe (a letter to note April 25)

Lightness and darkness. Lightness and heaviness. Sometimes, I feel heaviness settle. I try to find ways to sit with it, consider it, and then let it go.

I sat outside and blew bubbles for you. Bubbles are nearly weightless. They float on air. They catch and reflect light. Their beauty is fragile and fleeting. Each bubble carries a bit of our breath with it, but the air and our bodies are quick to replenish our lungs. Inhale. Exhale.

When the heaviness and darkness come, I try to remember the lightness of you and our time together.


I tore out another reverse coloring page. I took circles from Kendra Norton’s book, and then I outlined them and as artist Andrea Nelson suggests, “rounded off the corners.”

The original from the book.
I added a few strips of “light” here and there and a label from one of the bottles. The “bubbles” in the drawing are all of us, imperfect and interconnected. We bump into and absorb one another.

I remember to breathe.