Tag: novels

Saturday is for chilling

I haven’t had the greatest week thanks to my old companions insomnia and headaches, but it also hasn’t been a bad week. I stopped berating myself for all the things I couldn’t do and opted for a little more passive entertainment than usual. I used Netflix for the first time in quite a while and watched a movie I’d wanted to see, Good Grief, which was sad and funny and treated me to a lot of Paris scenes. I always appreciate tucking that ambiance away for when I write the France/French parts of the Neverending Saga.

I also watched a good documentary on Canadian record producer, film composer, music executive David Foster. I was reminded of something I want to do in the chapter I’ve been trying to work on for over a month. I DO work on it, and then I delete. Write. Delete. Repeat. Hopefully, I’ll be back to writing without deleting it all soon.

Since Tom and I had finished watching the final season of “The Crown” (it was so, so sad), we decided to start the new season of “Bridgerton.” I was right back in that world immediately, so I got out the Bridgerton coloring book I bought back in 2021. I think I may have previously colored only one page from it, but this was a good week to do more. Coloring is my go-to when I need to zone out or feel better.

By tonight, we were down to three episodes, so we went for it and binge-watched them. I think this may be my favorite story arc of all the seasons (this was the third regular season, and there was additionally “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story,” which I also really enjoyed). I look forward to more seasons.


Although the pages from this book were inspired by the first season, they still capture the Bridgerton vibe. The one above I chose as an homage to Penelope, who this season shunned the “citrus” fashions her mother had always imposed on her. I colored her in more subtle colors than she wore in earlier seasons.

I also chose to color a room with a piano in honor of Francesca’s storyline this season.

Mindful Monday

Leap, 2006, acrylic on canvas

It was back in May of 2019 when I made the decision to start rewriting a novel I’d last written in the late 1980s/early to mid 1990s. It had a single title (it was the first of a series of three novels) and was nearly 600 pages long (that is way too many pages). My plan was to edit it down to an actual publishable length.

I randomly split the stack of manuscript pages, read a few, and immediately decided that was a bad idea. The writing was nothing like the style or voice my writing had evolved into by the time my other novels were published in the 2000s. My distaste for what I read wasn’t only because of a difference between the style compared to the style of the published books. I just didn’t like what I read.

But those characters had been resurfacing in my consciousness for a while. I can see proof in a lot of my posts in the months prior to that decision to rewrite–the way the most random topics would lead me back to remembering those people and their stories. As I finally said here in 2019, I wanted to know how the decades of changes in me would impact how I would change them. In order not to be influenced by the past version, I packed the manuscript away unread and began my novel in an entirely different way. I never looked back.

As I’ve admitted repeatedly, I didn’t edit that old book down to publishable size. I stopped imposing rules on it. Rules are for publishing houses and their marketing and publicity. I’m not seeking that. I’m writing… because I have to. Even if it’s for the two readers I have. [I’ve tried other readers. That hasn’t worked out well for me so far. I have to rise above the insecurity and doubt other people’s reactions or even indifference cause me so that I can keep writing. This isn’t easy. Writers crave readers.]

Once again, the book was getting TOO LONG. I split the new manuscript into three books. I’m now on the seventh. In each new novel, refreshers are needed relating to plot and characters, but I try to do those in a variety of ways that aren’t tedious for a reader.

Recently, I reached a point when I questioned why the plot unfolded as it did for these people in the old version. I know what motivates them now, but things are a lot different. So what motivated them back then?

A few days ago, I pulled this out again.

I read it first page to last. It was startling how different things are between that old version and the one I’m writing now. I can barely recognize these people. In the decades in which I first conceived them, I was either a teenager smitten by music and musicians, or I watched a lot of daytime TV, plus prime time TV offered dramas like “Dallas,” “Dynasty,” and “Falcon Crest.” Many bestselling novels of those decades were from Jacqueline Susann, Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins, Harold Robbins, and Danielle Steel, among others. That genre was referred to as glitz, and I suppose because I was writing about people with money, ambition, and fame, I thought I had to write something similar to that style.

I think that old novel fails not because I was writing outside my life experience, but because I was writing outside what I regard as my authentic storytelling voice. So what the heck ever, whether I have two readers or twenty or none, I hope I’m doing all the things listed on the above quote from Mary Lou Cook. I love these people and their flaws, mistakes, virtues, depth, humor. I break a few rules with them. I’m fine with that.

I write for my characters. I write for me. (We are not the same.)

Sunday Sundries

I introduced the sundries topic last week and asked for suggestions on content for it. Today’s theme, suggested by Mark L, required a bit of foraging and was fun. As a child, Mark began a bookmark collection; he still uses bookmarks from that collection as an adult. Having grown up in a house full of readers, bookmarks were definitely part of my environment, both for pleasure reads and textbooks.

Though I read a lot of ebooks now, and they open to the page I’m on each time I pull one up on my iPad or phone, I still have a need for bookmarks because I continue to read and reread physical books. Here are photos of some I found (they don’t include Tom’s, who always has a physical book with a bookmark in it on the bookcase closest to his reading chair).

First up, let’s hear it for the booksellers!

This shares a bit of the bookmark evolution at my favorite Houston bookstore, Murder By The Book. I have many because I shop there a lot, and have also attended many booksignings and even had a couple of my own signings there. There are six (oops, plus one) shown here, but there are more throughout the house. Brazos is another Houston bookstore that’s a favorite. A lot of my literary choices and books about music and music figures come from Brazos, and next week in two weeks, it may figure into a story about an author I plan to share. The Independent Bookstore Day bookmark may have also come from a local bookstore visit. On my links to the right, there’s one to the Independent Bookstore Finder throughout the U.S. Whenever possible, I order through my local booksellers, but I also order from independent booksellers who host booksignings and publicity for authors I admire and read.

That Crossroads bookmark evokes so many memories. There were two LGBTQ+ bookstores in Houston, since closed, Lobo and Crossroads (I believe both stores are mentioned in The Deal, and my late friend Steve R worked at Lobo for a while). TJB and Cochrane/Lambert had signings at both, and Crossroads was my favorite place to go people watch, work on writing, and buy books. I met many people who became friends through Crossroads (including John, who I followed from there to two different Borders locations to Murder By The Book), and when Tim first moved here, he worked there! I miss Crossroads so much.

Then–speaking of the tenacity of independent booksellers who doggedly keep going in a hard market–yet another, older Murder By The Book bookmark slipped in. The Bookshelf was a used bookstore in Huntsville, Alabama where I used to shop. It’s “temporarily closed” since sometime in 2023. I hope they make it. Then there’s Borders, a chain since closed, but it was a vital place that hosted booksignings for us. When people complain that chains drove indies out of the market, I think they provided far more good than people appreciated. I still enjoy going to Barnes & Noble, where I can get a lot more personalized information than online algorithms offer.

Finally, a few neat connections.

I’m not sure about the cherub bookmark, whether it was a gift to me or belonged to my mother. But I’m sure that’s a Greg Herren bookmark from his Bold Strokes book Lake Thirteen. Also, back in the days of Live Journal, at least as far back as 2005, I think, other writers/authors and I agreed we needed to use the reading-is-hot tag on our blogs and websites. I still use it. A lot of readers helped us by sending photos of themselves reading in beds, bathtubs, etc. It was a fun time. I don’t remember where the bookmark came from and imagine it was probably not connected to that effort, but it certainly illustrated the theme. The bookmark on the far right was from the late Linda Raven Moore, who maintained several sites, including Markeroni, to which contributors documented with words and photos their visits to historical and local locations that had markers explaining their significance. I very much miss Linda, as I’m sure many do. On LiveJournal, she was whytraven.

These are some that belonged to and were used by my mother.

They live in a metal box where I have many small mementos belonging to her. The one on the far right is imprinted with the word JOY. I have a vague memory about the one made with yarn, but I’m not sure of its accuracy.

I’ve shared these on here before. They’re bookmarks made for Tom and me by his mother with beautiful beads. I’ve used them several times in thick, heavy books.

Finally, here are some I designed (and had printed by a company I’m not sure still exists; it’s in the old ‘hood) to give away at readings and to people who sent us novels to be signed.

Notice there isn’t one for the fifth book, When You Don’t See Me. I can only speculate that for me, some of the serious themes and painful events in the characters’ lives didn’t lend the novel to a whimsical bookmark.

There are also serious themes in Three Fortunes In One Cookie; that didn’t stop me then.

Regarding the websites listed on these two bookmarks–Tim no longer has an active website (which I miss very much), and I finally shut down cochranelambert.com this year since it had been inactive for so long (and websites aren’t cheap).

ETA: Later, I went to open one of my display cabinets, and found these three bookmarks with beautiful original art that were gifts from Geri. I don’t use them because I want the art to remain intact, and that’s fine. Even utilitarian items can be appreciated for their aesthetic value.

Thanks, Mark, this was a good journey, and as always, I found other things along the way that merit a little more storytelling. In fact, there are enough of those to require a Part Two on the Bookmarks sundries topic. Hope to see everyone next week when I share them. AND PLEASE give me more topics (I do have several thanks to visitors to this site, two who left comments, and others from people who tell me via other channels). As always, thank you for visiting and engaging.

Hump Day


Since I mentioned author Donna Leon in Monday’s post, I decided to poke around and see which novels in her series I hadn’t yet read. There are two, and I’d forgotten I downloaded one of them quite a while back (and I immediately added the other). I’ve been kind of low-energy this week, so though I’ve done some writing, I also began reading Give unto Others (number 31 in Leon’s Commissario Brunetti series).

Along the way, I was struck by this excerpt and copied it, redacting information that might constitute spoilers.

These words from Leon so perfectly summed up a character in the Neverending Saga whose actions in the past (before my narrative begins), and years later in the first book of my series, negatively impact people’s lives for decades.

I can think of only three characters I’ve ever written who are irredeemable. Do I think people like them exist? Yes. Everyone is capable of redeeming themselves; some never make that choice. Unlike in life, where you often read about the irredeemable in the headlines, when you’re a writer, you get to mete out a satisfying justice for those characters.

There were a few things from the overall series that I missed from Give unto Others, but those made sense in context of the time it was set. As soon as I finished it, I started reading number 32, So Shall You Reap. Just as with the Martin Walker books, I learn so much about culture and history from the many details authors deftly weave into their plots. Some of those things I missed from the previous book were back, to my delight.

I believe the next novel in the series comes out in July. The next Martin Walker novel in the Bruno series is due out in September. These are things I can look forward to while I write my way through the summer and fall forecast of heatwaves and hurricanes, and I also have a couple of other favorite series/authors with books just out or on the way.

Mindful Monday

I’d saved that a while back, but over the last few days, it really hit home for me as I read the three Martin Walker ebooks that had been waiting on my iPad for a while. I’ve already posted about the other two; this was the third I finished Saturday night:

There’s another in the series coming out in the fall. I’m really looking forward to it.

In the last two novels, Walker scattered a lot of global topics among the mysteries, the denizens of St. Denis, and the food (always the food!). I found these new storylines riveting (and not cumbersome): election interference, countries on the edge of war, the manipulation of public opinion via social media and disinformation, global politics, the rise of tech billionaires, the historical and cultural significance of migration from centuries past. There are many cozy things about the Bruno books, but the books themselves are not cozies. They fall into the same smart writing as Donna Leon and Louise Penny, two others among my favorite writers (with series set in Venice and Quebec, respectively), in which family, friends, and fellowship are always part of the theme but aren’t the full stories of their characters’ lives.

In Walker’s series, Bruno himself seems to be changing, but in all the ways that matter, he’s still the good human he’s always been.

Wikipedia background on Martin Walker: Born in Scotland…Martin Walker was educated at Harrow County School for Boys and Balliol College, Oxford. He lives in the Périgord/Dordogne in Southern France with his wife with whom he has two daughters.

Walker was on the staff of The Guardian from around 1971, working in a variety of positions, including bureau chief in Moscow and the United States, European editor, and assistant editor. Walker resigned in 1999 after 28 years with the newspaper.

Walker joined United Press International (UPI) in 2000. While at UPI he was also an international correspondent. He is now editor-in-chief emeritus of UPI. He also holds a variety of other positions, including senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.; senior fellow of the World Policy Institute at The New School in New York; member of the board of directors of the Global Panel Foundation (Berlin, Copenhagen, Prague, Sydney and Toronto). He is also a contributing editor of the Los Angeles Times’s Opinion section and of Europe magazine. Walker also is a regular commentator on CNN, Inside Washington, and NPR.

Tiny Tuesday!

Because of something I wrote recently in the Neverending Saga, I repurposed another of the illustrations from my old 1981 calendar, coloring a kitten and a tiny chick hatching. Putting the page in my “coloring book” reminded me of an exchange in comments between Mark and me in which I talked about how Tom is always helping me figure out how to make ideas reality or find solutions for problems or projects I take to him.

It began with this oversized sketchbook I bought once at Ross. I don’t know why, because I don’t sketch. I’m not sure how artists use sketchbooks, but I assume after sketching, they tear out pages and do something with them (for example, I have a nephew who’s an artist, and sometimes he sketches when he’s in a restaurant or coffeehouse, and then gives the sketches to his servers, which I think is very cool).

Since I like to fill empty sketchbooks with my coloring pages, and many of my coloring books are oversized, I decided to use the large sketchbook for that purpose. I wanted it to have a more personalized cover, so I collaged it. The collage is full of things that reference memories, friendships, interests, and my fiction. Since the front cover of the sketchbook was of very thin card stock, I glued a sturdier sheet of cardboard on the inside front cover so the collage wouldn’t weigh it down and damage it.

I began to fill it up in 2022 and 2023 with the coloring I did. I used only the front pages, and when I came to the end of those in May of this year, I didn’t want to stop using the book. I still felt very attached to my collaged front cover. I decided to start at the end of the sketchbook and put new coloring pages on the back sides of every page until I got back to the beginning of the book. This is the last page in the book that I did when I was coloring up a storm–I mean, literally coloring pages during daylight hours when the storm knocked out our power for six days.

Here’s an example of how using the backs now provides two completed pages to view at once.


However, that flimsy front cover began tearing at the holes on the spiral binding. When I’d reinforced the cover in 2022, I hadn’t considered how the unreinforced holes would bear the increasing weight of the sketchbook.


So while the power was out, I showed Tom the problem, and as always, he devised a solution. He removed the front cover, cut another strip of the cardboard, glued it on the edge leaving extra space to punch holes, and put the front cover back on the spiral binding. I think this will hold until I finish filling the book. Maybe by then, I’ll have enough images to collage the front of another sketchbook–and when I do, I’ll pick one with a sturdier front cover.

Button Sunday


Found this button online, a steampunk theme with cursive writing. I do so little writing by hand these days that my penmanship is atrocious. But I do know how to write that way, and I well remember all the handwritten letters I received in my younger years (truth be told, I still have most of them, though I hope all the males to whom I ever sent letters have thrown all of mine away–or could send them to me, so I can roll my eyes at my younger self).

I already had journals and journaling on my mind when I was looking at buttons today. Yesterday, as I searched for my original essential oils inventory list, which I never found (finally just started a new one and input it to a computer doc, so I’ll know where to find it when I need it again), I opened a file folder that contained a tangle of embroidery thread and a ticket stub. I suspect the embroidery thread went with a cross-stitch piece I started back in the 1990s of a white cat sitting in a window (you can read about that in an old post here).

When the stitching remained unfinished, I finally wrote a poem about it and put the partially finished piece in a frame with the poem. It hung on my wall at The Compound for years, and now I have no clue where it is. I added it to my list of inexplicably missing items.

In the same folder, I found a ticket to a matinee showing of Star Wars: The Last Jedi from February 2018. That faded ticket, at least, I could put inside my current Moleskine.

As you can see, I’ve rarely used my Moleskines for capturing my sloppy cursive writing.

Like the one above, the Moleskines (and some are Moleskine knockoffs) are filled with mementoes of all kinds, and they get very fat; too fat for shelving. So they have a bin they go into when they’re full. I do still journal from time to time, but I mostly scribble a day’s events or thoughts in whatever kind of day planner or daily appointment book I keep.

Do you still handwrite your letters? Do you journal or keep a datebook or diary?

P.S. I have now reread all five of the TJB novels. I was amazed at how many things I’ve forgotten and how moved I could still be by those characters and their stories. This book, in particular, required a box of tissues right next to me. I kept having to close the book and cry.

Now I need to get back to The Musician in the Neverending Saga before he writes mean songs about my neglect.

Thursday thoughts

A couple of days in a row (Tuesday and Wednesday), we had storms. On both occasions, the power has flickered but hasn’t gone out. One thing I’ve learned, however, is the bad weather a couple of weeks ago definitely had an impact on my dogs. When the sky gets dark and there’s thunder, they all have strong reactions. This didn’t used to be the case, and I feel sad for them. I try to distract them, let them be where they feel safest, and I talk to them (which I do all the time anyway) in my normal conversational voice.

Anime and Eva are hiding their heads, Delta’s trembling, and Jack seems to be in protect mode closest to the door, but I think he’s just sleeping.

Meanwhile, I am not writing, but I think what I’m doing is probably good for me as a writer. As I predicted might happen, after reading the first couple of TJB books, in between dog management, cleaning up after dogs in the backyard, and doing housekeeping, I’ve kept going and read numbers three and four of TJB’s books.

I’ve wondered sometimes about things we might have missed the mark on, plus there’s so much I’ve forgotten and wondered how I’d react to all of it. Every time I stopped, instead of the things I feared, I was caught up in the stories and only wanted to keep reading. Time and distance have been friendly, and I need to remember this when I’m being hypercritical of my new writing. Trust the process and trust that eventually, there will be early readers who’ll give me feedback before I hit “publish” on anything.

Looking forward to reading number five, the last of the TJB books.

On writing and looking back

Something else I did while the power was out was unplanned but not unprovoked.

From time to time, readers of the TJB books mention to its four writers, or on social media or book sites like Goodreads, that they’re reading the five Manhattan novels again (the fourth of those isn’t set in Manhattan but is connected peripherally with two or three cameo appearances by or references to the Manhattan characters). There are also people who say they reread my two Coventry books (especially A Coventry Christmas during the holiday season). There are still people who tell me Three Fortunes In One Cookie (written with Timothy) is their favorite of all the books I’ve cowritten (and some who contend that in The Deal, the main character chose the wrong man at the end, which always tickles me; as readers, we bring our own histories with us to the books we read).

I understand this compulsion to reread, because there are novels I’ve been rereading since I was a kid. They’re comfort novels, or novels connecting me to childhood, or funny novels that still make me laugh, or novels with love stories that I never tire of. There’s nothing like a satisfying ending to a love story. One set of novels I’ve reread more times than I could count, written in the 1940s/50s, is a series that tracks a family from the American Revolution to World War II. It connects me not only to my joy of reading as a young teen, but to my mother and sister, who also read, treasured, and reread the series. (Note: The last time I read these, I said, “Debby, these novels would be problematic now,” and she agreed. I guess they’re like early love: recalled with affection, but with awareness that it probably wouldn’t appeal to you at a wiser age.)

Additionally, beginning around 1990, I read a lot of gay fiction (and non-fiction, for that matter), much of it recommended by my late friend Steve, a bookseller and avid reader. It was Steve who said to me, “One day, when you write, please tell our stories. Please don’t let all these things be forgotten.”

In the early to mid ’90s, every attempt I made to do so (mostly in short stories) felt flat to me. It could be because I felt flat. There was a lot of loss to take in over a few short, intense years. I knew I’d rather write nothing than write it badly.

And then into my life came very much alive men who urged me to write those stories, and the three men who began to write them with me, with the outcome of that: books on bookshelves.

About those novels I wrote or cowrote: I read them so much when writing, editing, and proofreading them, that by the time they were released (usually about a year after the final manuscript was submitted), I didn’t have a lot of interest in revisiting them. As soon as a novel was released, I’d read it once, for two reasons: I looked for any errors that made it through all those sets of eyes (ours and our publishers), and I wanted to refresh my memory before I read industry reviews and reader reviews, and before I/we started getting reader email.

Not including short stories in anthologies, the nine novels I’ve written or co-written were released over the years 2001 to 2007. I likely haven’t reread any of them since their publication year, other than quick checks to ensure continuity (since characters are shared in the TJB books and they are linear, and the same is true of the Coventry books).

Upon the release of the TJB novels, I could say with pinpoint accuracy which of the writers wrote what scenes, as well as recall discussions of what edits were made by us to all of us. And now… I have discovered that’s no longer true. While the power was out, during daylight hours, I picked up the first Manhattan novel, It Had To Be You, and read it again. I was amazed by all the things I’d forgotten. I knew the general plot and how it would end, but mostly it was like reading it for the first time. The most startling thing was that I COULDN’T REMEMBER WHO WROTE WHAT.

All that made for a much more pleasurable read. I’d worried about a couple of things over the years: that the books would be dated (especially with how technology has changed); and that some things might seem insensitive, because we understand or are learning so much more about LGBTQ+ lives and issues in 2024 than we did when that first book was written (beginning in 1998 and up until publication in 2001). All of those concerns melted away as I got to read that book with fresh eyes. Would I rewrite the book? No. Are there word choices I might edit? Sure. Always. But none of that took away my enjoyment of the characters, the humor, the pathos, and the drama–because some characters are actors, female impersonators, or drag queens, of course there is drama. Drama is their profession. And after all, outside of novels, we are each of us the main characters/heroes/villains of our own ongoing stories.

I don’t know if I’m ready to reread all of the novels I’ve written or cowritten, but I don’t mind admitting that when I closed the back cover on this one:

I immediately returned it to the shelf and took out this one:

In both novels, though I couldn’t say for sure who wrote exactly what, there are points when I said, “OH, this sounds like me, and I hope I wrote that. Either that or part of it.” And points when I realized there are connections/similarities between things in those first two novels to things I’m currently writing. That leads me to believe those things were written by me, or if not, as I texted Timothy and Jim, “Don’t sue me.”