Holiday Hello

This is a short post.

I wish Joy, Peace, and Compassion to fill your life with happiness.

Gratitude

This is the month where I normally count the positive events in my life and take special note on family and friends. This is the first time the month signals a personal and significant event I can only refer to as a pain filled process of recovery from total knee replacement surgery.

Ugh. What was I thinking?? On the one hand I am grateful it is a success; however, the invasiveness of the process is beyond anything I imagined. Two weeks since surgery and my mind has come back on line enough to contemplate the event as only a writer can. At first the writer in me wants to concentrate on the dynamics of grit my teeth, razor sharp pain, my body is coping with.

Weird. Positively weird. My writer’s mind is imagining fictional characters in scenes where the main protagonist is wounded from a maniac wielding villain hacking into the hero’s leg with a sixteenth century Claymore blade. Good lord I really have gone over the edge into the dark fringe.

After a while I actually got bored creating scenes involving physical mayhem. Instead my attention has been drawn to the support network of professionals who come to my home to assist in my recovery. Here is where the true value of motive and action meet up in the generosity and uplifting nature of kindness.

Each of these dedicated people are worthy of being cast as the main protagonist in one of my fiction stories. Each have their own lives and families, and have also chosen a path towards helping those in need of healing.

And so, I come back to November being the month about counting my blessings and being grateful for the support network of family and friends. Healing hands move me towards recovery.

Autumn is here

I blinked and summer vanished. Time for brrrrr –cold and dark skies. Time to cut, prune, rip out annuals, and head indoors.

Time to take the –no going back –total knee replacement surgery next week and be house bound for a month. Yes a whole month! Talk about pruning away the old dead limbs. Gads I’ve gone over the edge into the blackness of scary.

An opportunity to go over the latest manuscript The Sons of Cain with a magnifying glass and edit like a mad woman. At the very least a grumpy recovering fiction writer.

Here’s to a good surgeon who understands gardening :­–}

Summer colors

Nasturtiums

Ready for that Pug Party comin' up!

Things are a cookin’

Finally we have some semblance of summer! Lovely warm, and in some cases record breaking, heat. Enough of the kind which cooks a garden if the gardener isn’t mindful, and waters liberally. Twice a day for plants in pots!

The Pugs are staying cool in the house and the shade on the back porch. Heat and pets can be a deadly combination and I have two water bowls, one inside and one next to the huge spearmint bush on the north side of the house next to the water spigot.

My annual Pug party in the garden is next week and the weather should cool significantly to make the day fun and entertaining. Lots of pugs, parents, and party food….human and doggy.

I am almost half way to a second revision on the Sons of Cain manuscript and have begun the task of developing my marketing strategy. The main focus for this will be on the web. It is important for any writer to develop and maintain a good working relationship with a media designer.

I was fortunate to find someone who has helped me with my website and book trailers. They understood my needs, worked with me on my design and their rates were amazing. Highly recommend them.http://yoyostringmedia.com/ or reach them here -http://www.thumbtack.com/wa/seattle/video-production/affordable-video-production

The Sweet Smell of Success

August 2011

These beautiful lilies echo a major event for me as an aspiring writer. My manuscript The Sons of Cain took first place in the Sci-fi/fantasy/ category in the annual Pacific Northwest Writers Association on Aug. 6^th !!!

The awards banquet/dinner was held at the Bellevue Hyatt and I estimate at least five hundred writers attended. My family was with me and I am ever grateful for their encouragement and support especially when I received my award and turned towards the audience and heard a familiar voice shout “Way to go mom!” Everyone laughed and applauded. Sweet.

Why enter this contest a friend asked? Because it is a serious endeavor and the PNWA are professional volunteers whose readers and judges work hard to give useful reviews to those who present their work. (Each entry receives 2 detailed reviews.) Those who final attend the banquet which offers opportunities to meet with agents and editors in the publishing business. I encourage any aspiring writer to enter the annual contest. It is a great way to test your skill and see where you need to improve.

At the moment I am digging in and making the second revision on this manuscript. I expect to query several agents after this second revision. Any manuscript worth its salt has to go through a number of revisions. I love revising, making changes and usually think of additional elements to add to scenes.

Meanwhile my garden in sprouting weeds .>.>.> But, hey weeding is like revising…yanking out words to get to sweet smelling lilies.

Digitatis purpurea or foxglove

Meconopsis betonicifolia or Himalayan poppy

Diva, Daisy, Divot, Dino, and Duke is in the garden!

What big yellow thing????

JULY 2011

Getting a late start on this entry . . . way, too many exceptionally wonderful distractions keeping me busy. Long ago grade school and high school classmates drop back into my life! Long ago memory files tucked away in my brain cells are brought up into present time. And not so long ago gardening tasks are in high gear. Six inches of evergreen mulch has been distributed far and wide on all the beds. All the glass towers are in place and sparkle when the sun shines on them. Notice I said ‘when’ the sun shines . . . not much of it around this summer so far.

My special garden purchase this year is a Metasequoia glyptostroboides ‘Golden Dawn’ redwood. I placed it at the far back of the garden as a long distance focal point. It looks like a large golden feather shivering slightly when a breeze hits the branches. This infant tree has the potential to become fifty feet tall and twenty feet wide. Oh my, wouldn’t this light up the horizon.

Speaking of lighting up horizons. My latest dystopian urban fantasy is one of nine finalists in the PNWA Writer’s Contest and the awards ceremony is the first weekend of August. I am definitely looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new acquaintances. Three of my previous romances made the finals and one placed first. I think this is the year to hone in on an agent.

This week I have five, yes five, Pugs running around my garden. All but one are litter mates. I am babysitting two of the silly and always loveable little dogs. Feeding time is a real cafeteria style process. Good thing they each have different colored collars on because they look so similar.

Happy Summer !!!

Olympic National Forest

The Sol Duc River

Log Jam from spring thaws

Sol Duc Falls

Forest

Violets

Trillium

June 2011

Goodby May. Record cold, record rainfall, record days with no sun! Hope moves forward into June. The garden is responding to the rain with lush growth, but the wisteria are barely flowering and the birds congregate around feeders in hungry clusters. The bright goldfinches gobble up Niger seed, and everyone else empties the black sunflower feeders daily. The weather is conducting its own form of control on certain food products.

Geography and environment do dictate behavior. I am working on a scene set in the Olympic National Forest near the Sol Duc Hot Springs. I wrote the first draft and since I’ve never been to the hot springs I took the time to visit. Good thing I did. I had to revise parts of the scene because of small details which were important, like geological facts concerning terrain and distances which I’d guessed at from looking at the maps I had.

Because of these realities my characters behavior needed a rewrite. And I was also lucky to discover nuances in the forest which I will add to the scene. And I will draw on my own memory which continues to be affected by the geography and environment. These feelings still resonate through my senses of touch, sight, hearing, taste, and smell.

I appreciate my garden and my writing in a different way after being surrounded by giant cedars, Trillium flowers, sword ferns, and raging rivers cascading over basalt precipices. The living bio-mass of the forest and my garden is startling, as much for their differences, as for their similarities. The earth is always eager to retake a domesticated garden.

The stealth and tenacity of nature reminds me of the unsuspecting protagonist in my scene when he underestimates the unpredictable side of natural forces which are about to change his perceptions of reality.

A tip of my rain hat to the majestic Olympic National Forest!

A cluster of plum blossoms

A cluster of Pugs

May 2011

Sooo . . . April showers are supposed to bring May flowers. Okay, I keep looking for them and all I see are daffodils, a few tulips, and a scattering of blossoms on the fruit trees. The truth is we have had the coldest April on record, and boy the garden knows it. This is not looking good for a bountiful spring. I have hardly seen any honey bees and the little wild canaries haven’t shown up. In fact the bird population is staying away. I can’t blame them.

The earth is in a delaying pattern, or more to the point, a change of pattern. Unexpected events. Writing is often a series of unexpected events and changes in patterns.

The manuscript I am working on is like the weather. Unexpected characters keep turning up and unusual plot patterns emerge. I gave myself permission with this story to follow my intuition and work with the changes. I know how the story ends and getting there is much like the unexpected weather; a series of delays and twisting turns. Two new characters have shown up and I am fascinated trying to discover what roles and motivations they encompass.

Like the unusual weather these characters are a bit edgy, sinister, causing my protagonist to question what he is involved in and what risks are at stake. It appears there may be more opposing sides than at the beginning of the story. But hey, complexity is what makes for an intriguing story. I’m game. I’ll follow these two characters “into the woods.” Into the Sol Duc rainforest to be exact.

PS The Pugs stay cuddled together indoors until the weather gets warmer. :D

Delicate crocus and Daffodils

Hardy Pug braving the raindrops !

Hurrah for Spring !

First day to mow the lawn, get out and clean up the garden and take in all the beautiful daffodils, crocus, tulips and budding trees. It’s so wonderful to reconnect with nature. All the frogs in the ponds are awake and tentatively sing to each other. In a few weeks ear plugs at night . . . their badass bass goes on all night ;)

Pugs love the warm days, chasing away any birds daring to swoop into their territory. Heard a few quail out in the mass of blackberry bushes. The pair of Canadian geese have arrived six houses down ready to start a new nest and hatch little fuzzy goslings in the stream which runs between houses.

This is the time of year I have to begin to balance writing with the siren call to get outside. All winter long I can hunker down and either read research stuff or write without feeling guilty. Spring demands attention. Writing demands attention. So I try balancing . . . like walking with a glass of water on my head. Slowy, slowly. Get the hours of the day into a schedule I feel happy with. Spills not allowed :}

Spring, lovely spring!!!!

First Signs of Spring

Pug Hopes for Spring Too!

March Winds Blow in Change

Withdrawal is mentally and physically painful. “Lack of computer” withdrawal, is the worst type of pain. My five year old laptop died several weeks ago and the jolt was inconvenient to say the least. My daily schedule for writing was thrown into a deep pit and lack of easy access to online research made me feel as if I’d been locked in a padded room. Add to the misery I had to start a search for the “best lap top” within my price range.

On the bright side all my writing is kept on a “fob” and I didn’t lose any work. My computer genius helped me make a wise decision to buy a 17” Toshiba and set it all up for me!!! I am back in business. The time I was without the computer forced me to finish a number of housekeeping chores I’d been avoiding. The biggest was organizing all the research books, magazines, and articles I’d accumulated for this manuscript I’m working on. I tend to build a nest around me of sticky notes pasted to articles in magazines, books stacked three and four deep on whatever flat surface is within easy reach.

Yes, I know writers who are neat freaks, who have organizational skills they could market and sell to those of us less inclined; however, I find a type of warm comfort building a bower surrounded by words, literally surrounded by them. Makes me wonder what family of birds I come from. :D

And here is a little advice for serious writers out there. If by chance I couldn’t easily purchase a computer I have an emergency plan in place. Years ago I purchased a brand new portable * manual typewriter. Yep, the old fashioned machine which uses an ink ribbon and plain white sheets of paper. It’s tucked away “in case.”

Of course the last failsafe plan is to regress to pen and paper. However, my keyboard skills have taken over the neural connections between my brain and my fingertips. This makes physically writing pages and pages of words a challenge of eye hand coordination, not to mention it’s a pain (literally). Funny how that used to be just the reverse!

Hurray for a new beginning with this portable electronic tablet. Even the birds have returned to the Northwest and are singing out their expectations of a new spring. And the little Pugs are glad the cold white stuff on the ground is gone!

New Year Bromelaid

My New Year’s Rant

December was the bug push to cajole, entice, and lure the public into the frenzied world of buying. To hand over whatever cash you had left at the end of the year. Not to mention the siren lure for us to overeat and overindulge.

January is all about tossing out accumulated “things,”and melting unwanted weight. Retail stores offer plastic storage containers, storage shelving, exercise equipment, and anorexic looking self-help experts spew out their mantras on TV.

The weight loss meme is an absurd contradiction focused towards Valentine’s Day (a month away) with shelves already jammed full of candy and chocolates. Beware, chocolates aren’t what they used to be. Check the label and you will find corn syrup and “chocolate flavored” ingredients. Nary a mention of the real stuff –coco butter.

Personally, I feel as if I am walking onto a theatrical stage where the props department work at a feverish pitch behind the scenes to redecorate the space with the next scheduled items. This literally happens overnight! Poof. All the garish red and green blinking lights of Christmas are gone. Poof. Here comes Valentines. Poof. On to the next scheduled marketing ploy.

All this activity brought to us by corporate gangsters determined to frame our reality to their goals and agendas. Frankly, I find it all boring and worse than banal. It is disgustingly predictable. And it’s become a shrill cheap process which so many of us (I suspect) see through to what’s really behind the curtain. It’s a fraud, a willful engineered trick, which leaves us feeling frustrated and bored. I also suspect many of us make a conscious decision to ignore and stay away from the lure to consume things.

It should be no surprise why people want to hibernate with a good book and ignore the predictable world of commercial blandness. I don’t know of any mall or grocery store which can offer me a trip to an imaginary world where I get an adrenaline rush caused by a riveting adventure with great characters; and at the same time cuddle up with warm loveable Pugs.

Cheers towards a Happy New Year!