Tag: authors

Sunday Sundries

Things that are gray. Or grey, as that spelling seems a little more magical than “gray,” and to me, all of these items have magic.


From bottom left, a rat sent by Lisa in Iowa years ago when we had to remove rats from our attic in The Compound amid much drama and mishap. In the end, the rats were gone, the house was secured, and despite it all, there were moments of humor, and Lisa’s rat symbolizes that. It was, in fact, that kind of magic that brought Lisa into our lives when she read the humorous TJB books, wrote us a letter, and a bond was formed. It included a visit to The Compound and meetings at Saints and Sinners, and it endures to this day.

Next up is little Dedo, a gift from me to Tom one year. Dedo is a small gargoyle on the Notre Dame Cathedral who is said to have a protective, caring presence. Dedo is a symbol of kindness and safeguarding. Sounds like Tom. Sometimes when you want to wander across the Internet, look up stories and legends about Dedo and his likenesses.

Then there’s Batman, whose sartorial choice for this look is a gray bodysuit. Through the decades, his bodysuit has had bold colors of several hues, zebra stripes, a mummy bandage look, brown, and black, but most often, he’s in gray. Batman is a symbol of hope and justice. He has no superhuman qualities, but he represents the best of humans in his quest to protect others, disable villains without killing them, and give people a belief in a better future.

An elephant, besides being my college mascot, symbolizes many things in different cultures. A list includes: power, wisdom, loyalty, fertility, strength, high moral character, longevity, stamina, moderation, eternity, memory, vitality, majesty, and intelligence. Speaking of magic, many years ago, over coffee, a professor told me a fact about elephants that made me rethink a certain bias I had, planting a seed that would fully bloom in the 1990s and change my life for good and for better.

Oh, the shark bites…the book. He’s only being playful. I doubt I ever gave any thought to sharks at all until one night when a few of us were hanging out in the lone convenience store in the wee town where I went to high school. (As I recall, the sister of one of my friends worked there, and she didn’t care if we gathered there. There was nothing else to do.) I picked up a book, read the first few pages of Jaws, thought, Eek! Not for me! and put it down. Later, I saw the movie when it came out, loved it (and also ended up loving the novel), and from then on, sharks held a fascination for me. I appreciate seeing them in their natural environment thanks to skilled photographers. I like seeing them in cartoons. They continue to have mystery and, like the elephant, a majesty to me.

Finally, we have what I dub a “melancholy of Eeyores.” In the pantheon of characters who inhabit Hundred Acre Wood, Eeyore seems to have a theme for many people, who think he’s: sad, depressed, pessimistic, downtrodden, negative, gloomy, and hypersensitive. However, he’s also a thinker and a planner. The magic of Eeyore is that he’s greatly loved by his friends. They don’t exclude him, berate him, try to change him, or avoid him. He brings a balance to their group, and they love him without conditions.

Finally, I included the writing prompts book Complete The Story. I feel as if I’ve story-told enough in this post already, so I’ll leave you with the prompt below. Maybe something among the worlds of gargoyles, heroes, and animals pictured will trigger your imagination or a memory that helps you create a story of your own. The story begins…

On the 4th day of the 10-day selfie challenge, I wished I’d never bought a smart phone. The photo of me was innocent enough, but what I accidentally captured in the background opened up a whole world of trouble. I had been walking…

Happy imagining and writing!

“Climb the stairs to the moon.”

This black and white page is from Jenny Lawson’s You Are Here book and titled “Climb the stairs to the moon”:

With a touch of color added. (I share the text that’s around the tree roots below the photo.)

If I cannot see the sun
I’ll follow the stars.
If I cannot see the stars
I’ll follow the moon.
If I cannot see the moon
I’ll make my own.
–Jenny Lawson

Tiny Tuesday!


Tom gave me this candle for Christmas, and it burned next to me sometimes over the multiple days this post has taken me to write.

Now that some of our house and holiday chaos has tapered off, I’ve resumed working on the Neverending Saga. It feels really good. I mentioned that I’d gotten encouraging messages from Lynne when she read the most recent chapters. I’m very fortunate that both Tom and Lynne stay engaged by these novels and offer me not just positive feedback, but also constructive suggestions, and they sometimes ask questions that cause me to look ahead or to better flesh out things already written.

In a few months, it’ll mark six years I’ve been working on this series. It’s been challenging and sometimes discouraging. As I start the new year, I’m doing a kind of inventory of the journey so far.

First: One of the first people, who is not a writer, with whom I discussed my plan for rewriting/developing the novels, told me that I couldn’t write books that include the diverse set of people and some of the social matters I wanted to make part of the stories. Because I’m white (and so is this person), I was warned that any characters of color–whether Latinx/Latine, Black, or indigenous American–would be rejected by the “woke” readers (not my term) I might hope would be among my audience. Within a couple of years of that conversation, expressing my opinions and values, not just in the books, became enough of a problem that this person chose to end the friendship.

I was surprised but have no animosity or resentment about it. I see it happen every day among friends and families, consequences of the time we live in. It does, however, make me uneasy when other people go silent now. Instead of thinking, everyone’s busy, lives are complicated and full of competing demands, I tend to castigate myself for anything I might have said or done that drove them away. This despite the fact that I have friendships stretching back through all the decades since the sixties, and we don’t all think alike or agree on everything. If each of us has a specific fear or anxiety, mine is abandonment, and it’s based on experience. Who knew one day the term for that would be “ghosting.” I’m not a fan. I do appreciate that in the experience described above, at least I wasn’t ghosted.

Second: Getting back to what and how I want to write, I understand the concept of “own voices.” We need more books from diverse writers; people of all cultures, genders, socio-economic groups, minorities, sexual orientations. It’s not my place or right to co-opt the stories of those voices. However, I’ve lived in, and I grew up in, places with a wide variety of people. I’ve worked with, lived with, gone to schools with, attended churches with, been taught by, and been friends with all kinds of people from all kinds of cultures. Even before I ever wrote a word (I started my first novel when I was eleven), I observed everybody. I listened to everybody. I heard people’s stories. I read endlessly in all kinds of genres, set in places all over the world. I’ve taken no one else’s stories, but many of their stories undoubtedly speak to or inspire the stories I write. I’m not writing biographies. I’m writing fiction.

Third: I kicked off the first decade of this century with published novels I wrote with three gay men. Every one of us wrote every character: male, female, straight, gay, transgendered, Black, white, Latinx/Latine, elderly, adolescent, wealthy, struggling. We weren’t writing autobiographies. We were writing fiction. People often assumed I wrote the straight female characters in those novels. I did introduce a new one occasionally, but their stories were filtered just as often through the other writers as through me. Once characters are properly established, they take on their own lives, whether I’m the only writer or a co-writer. That statement right there–I’ll go back and put it in bold–is my joy in writing fiction. Characters will surprise me, defy me, break my heart, and make me love them, even their flaws.

Fourth: One friend offered to read the books as they were being written, as a kind of beta reader. I’ve never had beta readers (other than my writing partners). I gave fair warning that these were works in progress based on old, very old, versions I wrote in the far-away past. They were subject to change during new versions because I’m older now and a more seasoned writer. This person had read and enjoyed my published novels (the TJB novels, the Lambert-Cochrane novels, the Coventry novels). To me, that implied I could be trusted to tell the stories of flawed characters organically. Not only were my narrative choices subject to change, the characters would change. Grow. Make mistakes. Course correct. Learn. I think that’s called being HUMAN. I don’t write androids. Robots. Aliens. (I don’t even write vampires who sparkle, but I sure read them.) I’m not interested in writing perfect or static characters. If you trust me because you’ve read me before, then I deserve the opportunity to develop the story and allow my characters their flawed humanity. This person began to take issue with my characters’ choices. In addition, I’d get comments like, “This character is obviously a serial killer.” I’ve never written, would never write, a serial killer. Anyone who’s read me knows that. The feedback became insulting, annoying, and an impediment to my process. The friendship survived; the beta reading relationship ended.

Fifth: Other people agreed to or offered to read the works in progress. Here have been the results of that. One never started the first book after agreeing to be a reader. One read the early lives of the first three of four characters who have points of view in the first novel, but then got tired of reading anything and wanted to switch to watching television for a while. The manuscript was never picked up again. One read the first novel and asked for the second, where the reading stalled. As far as I know, it remains unfinished. A fourth wanted to read them, has the first two novels, and again, as far as I know, never began.

These things definitely impact my self-esteem as a writer. Now, when someone asks, “May I read them?” The answer is, “Not until they’re all finished.” The beta/early reader concept hasn’t worked for me, and I realized it can even be harmful. I’ll continue writing and hopefully finish these novels because I want to. Because I need to know how it all turns out.

Below, using the week’s theme of black and white, is some motivation. Maybe you need it, too, as encouragement to forge ahead and protect yourself from what inhibits or harms your creativity.

Sunday Sundries

This week’s theme: Things that are black or black and white.

A pyramid with hieroglyphics; a raven on a skull, evoking Poe; a crow and a raven on either side of a cranberry/amaretto candle (gift of Debby–a nice scent to create to), atop two of my favorite books, ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ and ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’; coffee mug with ‘LOVE’ that includes a paw print; quartz crystal ball with black tourmaline inclusions; and the ‘300 MORE Writing Prompts’ book.

Taking a prompt from the book, here’s what I wrote this morning.

La vache violette

Je n’ai jamais vu de vache violette
Je n’espère jamais en voir un
Mais je peux te le dire, de toute façon
Je préfère voir que d’en être un

My mother used to recite this Gelett Burgess poem to me (in English). I have it in this book, first publication date after I left the right age group, but this edition was also before the time of my nephews and nieces. Who knows how or where I acquired it. The lines around the poem are part of the way the publisher decorated the page. No child scribbled those.


Since this was the first of my coloring books in which I could find a page with a cow, I decided I must do a little more to make her très chic to match the week’s purple theme. She’s definitely outstanding… out standing in her field, as my Uncle Dwight might have said.

 

 

Tiny Tuesday!


A small bottle ideal for perfumes and scents. Also purple.


I thought the bottle might pair well with my “Bridgerton” coloring book. Based on the Regency romance book series by Julia Quinn, the fourth season of the TV series returns in 2026.


On this page, the anonymous “Lady Whistledown” is making a surreptitious late-night visit to her printer so all the gossip about London society (and a bit of the royal household) can be consumed by anyone with around five cents to spend. (They were free at first, and once the populace was hooked, she began to charge for her sheets.) This coloring page was a big help to me yesterday.

Regarding the rest of today’s post: I don’t think today is necessarily the best place to share this information, but it’s uppermost on my mind and is impacting what I feel like sharing here and how this kind of thing can dominate my thoughts and my days. For example, I can color, because it’s soothing. I can manage my household and my health because I have to. But I can’t write. Writing fiction demands that I tap into a full range of feelings, many of them including conflict.

I can’t watch anything (movies, television) that will have too much emotional impact.

I don’t easily handle small frustrations (yet I STILL feel grateful for all the things that go well and the wonderful parts of my life, because I’ve hardwired myself to do so).

I’m doing what I can to proceed with Christmas (still don’t have a holiday photo for our Christmas cards/letters this year, and still haven’t mailed out the packages I’m running out of time to send).

I need the normalcy of updating here. I need the structure it provides. I’d rather not be thinking about yesterday’s event or letting it affect me, but these tragedies always do and likely always will. I won’t rant. I’ll just provide a graphic and talk about my website. (After a cut, so if a coloring page and a photo of a bottle is what you can handle today, I completely get it. For me personally, the amount of news and social media exposure I’ve cut out since November is necessary for my emotional and mental health.)

Continue reading “Tiny Tuesday!”

Photo Friday, No. 939

Current Photo Friday theme: Cinematic


I’ve shared this photo before, taken somewhere in the Texas Panhandle in 2014 when Timothy and I traveled from Houston to Colorado and back as part of a rescue animal transport. I kept telling Tim I was looking for “the last picture show,” and in this moment, I found that mood. I converted it to black and white and quoted from Larry McMurtry’s novel, later a movie, The Last Picture Show in my post back then.

I’ll post the McMurtry excerpt here, too.

Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were one Saturday morning in late November. The night before Sonny had played his last game of football for Thalia High School, but it wasn’t that that made him feel so strange and alone. It was just the look of the town.
Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show

Coloring fiction (and history)

Taking a suggestion from Mark for coloring that might include history and England…

C.S. Lewis was a British writer, literary scholar, and Anglican lay theologian. You might know him best because of The Chronicles of Narnia, which begins with the first novel, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When the four Pevensie children are evacuated from London during the Blitz*, they live with a professor in his house in the countryside. There, they discover a wardrobe that’s a portal to a magical land named Narnia.


The coloring pages I did below, of the wardrobe, can be found on the copyright page and last page of this lovely coloring book.

I didn’t read the Narnia series as a child. I was introduced to it by my college roommate Debbie, who I think gave me a paperback set for a birthday or Christmas. I then told Lynne about the series because both of us read fantasy as teens and young adults, specifically The Lord of the Rings novels (J.R.R. Tolkien) and The Sword of Shannara trilogy (Terry Brooks).


Years later, when I worked at a bookstore, badly damaged books were often marked 50% off, and that’s how I was able to afford my hardcover collection on my meager salary. While they may not be the prettiest, they came to me gently loved and remain loved.

Debbie’s recommendation also began my fascination with lions thanks to Narnia’s Aslan. Aslan is the reason my father did this for me in pen and ink:

And Lynne’s sister Liz did this ceramic piece for me:

And Debby gave me this canvas print by artist Leonid Afremov as a recent Christmas gift.

*The whole lion fascination was a detour. Back to British history. Long before I read C.S. Lewis, I’d read books about children who were evacuated to the English countryside as well as to the United States to stay with host families during World War Two. The Blitz is the term for Germany’s bombing raids of cities and towns in England from September 1940 to May 1941. In London during that period, there were 57 consecutive nights of bombing. People wore gas masks and used blackout curtains. They were on food and petrol rations, and volunteers patrolled the streets at night to sound warnings and make sure people got safely inside shelters during air raids. Civilians, including women, drove ambulances, helped rescue people trapped in bombed houses, and tended to wounds as they could. Mark, in a comment you left on Mindful Monday’s post, you pinpointed some of the qualities that explain why I have so much love and admiration for your country and its people.

Because of my interest in that period of history, there’s a backstory for a brother and sister in the Neverending Saga that includes being sent to live with relatives in rural England during the war. Though their parents were killed in a London bombing after the Blitz, just in London alone, 30,000 residents lost their lives during the Blitz.

Sunday Sundries

I will put this Instagram link here and hope very much that it works for you, because this video is not yet on youtube, or at least I couldn’t find it. If you watch “Labs of the Mohicans,” make sure the sound is on, and you might understand what motivated me to make today’s sundries include book, movie, soundtrack. All amazing in unique ways, much like Stella the yellow lab.

You could read the book. I confess, I didn’t read it when it was on the syllabus of one of my favorite classes taught by one of my favorite professors. I have the good memory of being taught it, but many English majors may remember the drawback of taking on extra classes because you love literature. If you multiply four lit classes by the number of books for each class, and add all the reading and requirements of your non-major classes, you have to make choices. I read parts of it, and in atonement, I plan to read it in its entirety now. I’ll see how that goes.

You could watch it. Because, good grief, Daniel Day Lewis. Madeleine Stowe. The rest of an outstanding cast. I plan to watch this again soon (not in lieu of reading the novel!).

You could listen to the soundtrack, some of the music so sweeping and powerful that unrelated movies have used it for their advertising trailers. I already listened to it again on Friday and have kept the CD handy to listen again while I’m writing.