My intent is not to raise unnecessary conflict, only to state my opinion and point the way to more information on the examination of our recent election, which I mentioned earlier. It’s important to note here, the most critical question is not whether Kerry or Bush should’ve won, nor is it who actually won. It’s deeper and more far-reaching than that.

The bigger question is, how are Americans going to vote and have their votes counted in the 21st century? (more…)

Today we have rain in a slow, steady drizzle. The sky is steel gray, the trees wet and shining, and the blue jay acts nervous about a small hawk or kestrel hanging out nearby. Our heater is on and the cat has camped out in front of it. This is the time of year I contemplate a most important personal decision: what calendars I’ll purchase to use through the following year.

Last time around we waited until January, and in desperation picked up a free calendar at our local feed store. (more…)

I first learned to knit from my mother, as a little girl, but I didn’t get it back then. There was too much counting and keeping track of stitches and rows. I dropped stitches and wondered where they’d gone, and accidentally added stitches when I didn’t want to. My mother only knew how to knit and purl, and not much more. I soon lost interest. (more…)

I’m just popping in to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving, since I’ll be away from this blog until after the holiday. I consider Thanksgiving the most important holiday I celebrate. It’s one that anyone of any background can enjoy, and a chance to simply appreciate and share the many blessings we’ve been given. My husband and I will spend it this year with my dad and my sister, whom I don’t see nearly as often as I should. This year my brother-in-law is roasting the bird.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING and many BLESSINGS to you and yours

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. . . Happy Halloween!

According to Caitlin Matthews, in her book of daily meditations, The Celtic Spirit, Samhain (SOW-en)-the pagan predecessor of Halloween-was to the ancient Celts, “a liminal time in which the world of the living and the ancestral realms overlapped. This was a time for remembrance of the dead . . .” (more…)

It’s a writing day for me. The coffee is brewing, and my mind is busy working out scenes, turning over words, trying out new ideas and word combinations. I think about why I write. Why is it I feel so driven to share my words?

Words are a human phenomenon. They’ve exploded with our population into every part of this planet, even into space. Each of us has so many words they spill over into others’ lives, more today than ever. We may not write letters the way people used to, but we remain an utterly wordy species. Email, blogs, cell phones, text messaging, personal websites, 40,000 people a year participating in National Novel Writing Month. Books, films, songs, news, television, junk mail—all of these incorporate the written or spoken word.

This reminds me of the singing of birds. One bird sings a sweet song, but a hundred birds singing in one tree sound like pure insanity. It can be overwhelming. We live in an age of information overload, and much of it comes to us in the form of words. Why are we so driven to keep adding more? (more…)

Our local 182-day dry spell has finally broken with a good rain. A few weeks ago I read we might have a mild El Niño year, but it’s looking to me like a less mild one. Maybe that’s because rain is such a shock after so long. People come to Southern California and tell us we don’t know what real rain is. Well, the thing is, we’re not set up for it, because we get so little. (more…)

I have a complaint, and it may seem a bit hypocritical, because it’s about complaints. No, not just complaints. Crass misuse of the wonderful gift we have in this ability to share our words with others in the blink of an eye. (more…)

In a discussion about women in fiction, a friend mentioned her discomfort with women who are portrayed as hard-edged, the ones who take on male behaviors in order to appear tough or even capable. I had to agree. For instance, in detective fiction we see more and more female protagonists who talk tough, carry guns, and can apparently beat several male opponents in a fight. They often have predominantly sexual, loveless relationships, or they’re loners. Am I just old-fashioned, or is this going too far? (more…)

I just picked up a book I’ve had on my shelf for a long time but neglected to read. The Writer’s Journey, Mythic Structure for Storytellers & Screenwriters, by Christopher Vogler, provides a guide for writers to universal mythic structure, drawing on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Vogler examines how this pattern of the hero’s journey has been used in motion pictures, including his work on Disney productions.

My copy is the first edition, dated 1992. It’s been updated since, with a 2nd edition from Michael Wiese Productions in October 1998, ISBN: 0941188701. You can find more information at Vogler’s website, The Writer’s Journey.

Checking in, with apologies for not posting more this past week. After my motherboard went out on my laptop, and I lost a few days of work I hadn’t yet backed up, I acquired a refurbished laptop and spent some time setting it up. The refurbished one works better than the old one did when it was brand new, which is a nice surprise.

I don’t use my laptop to post here, but keep it disconnected from the Internet, to encourage focus on my fiction writing. So I haven’t been online much while getting the new computer set up and catching up on some of the lost work. (more…)

I’ve always had a cat. I’ve loved these creatures since early childhood. I love their mystique, their grace and delicate beauty, as well as their tenacious strength. I love the way a cat will get this “I meant to do that” look when he’s occasionally caught in an awkward stumble, or slides across a slick kitchen floor right into the refrigerator. I love purrs, meows, eyes that see in the dark, soft fur, and a tail like a flag in the air to tell you when she’s happy.

I don’t want 20 cats. I only want one, perhaps two, special cat friends living with me at any given time. They’re subtle creatures with complex personalities, who deserve individual attention. Right now I have one, named Emily. She’s a fluffy gray who showed up to steal puppy food from our patio, days after we brought our dog home.

Emily 9-5-2004

My husband looked outside one day and saw a grayish cat stretched out on the patio, looking like a queen, licking her chops. She’d eaten the puppy food he’d left outside. As soon as he opened the sliding door she slunk away. I was out of town at the time, and he decided to start keeping the puppy food inside. (more…)

Yesterday afternoon my husband was out front talking to the neighbor, when a small brown pickup truck turned abruptly into the neighbor’s driveway, two men jumped out, ran between our houses, and continued down the hill in back. (more…)

We found this moth out on our porch this afternoon. It’s about 1-1/2 inches long.

…Moth on Porch 09-03-2004

and while browsing through some photos I’d left on the camera, I came across this sunset from a couple of weeks ago.

…Sunset 08-22-2004

A brief update:

The hole in the ceiling is but a memory. (This is mostly my spouse’s accomplishment. I fetched tools and fasteners, and performed cleanup.)

I’ve finally reached Chapter 2 of the second draft of my mystery.

I’ve switched email programs and browsers. I save way too much old email, and have too many bookmarks, for that to be a simple process.

Now I must get back to writing. I write at a laptop disconnected from the Internet, because otherwise I’d get no work done. There’s so much to do on the Internet . . . a silly part of me is afraid I’ll miss something, and harbors this notion that I can actually read the whole thing. My grandmother used to say that no one in our family could clean an attic, meaning that we’d stop to read everything. She never encountered the Internet.

We’re on our way to having the two-foot hole in our ceiling fixed.

The other day, while seated peacefully at the computer, I heard a horrible noise above our living room. My husband had been performing some home improvement work in the attic, when he stepped on a temporary flooring board, which broke, sending his foot down through the drywall. (more…)

Here’s a photo taken last night, just after sunset, of a thunderhead south of Mt. Palomar. (Click to view larger.)

I wish it had rained here, but this was a nice scene to end the day.

“And the day came when the risk [it took] to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
-Anais Nin

When we create, we dare to open a bud and bloom. It can be scary, and sometimes it takes a great motivation or incentive to persuade us to release what we hold tightly inside. Or the right environment like, for a flower, the pressure of a warm, sunny day with abundant water and fertilizer.

We gather our courage and take a risk in showing ourselves, our inner gallery, to the greater world.

Bloom! Suddenly we’re on display. Sometimes it fairly bursts out of us, in a profusion of color and magic, like an exotic dance or a light show. Others bloom more like the whisper of a single star jasmine on a vine filled with others.

The release may take such a great effort that it’s difficult to sustain the performance, or to withdraw gracefully, and we appear to droop on the vine.

Then a breeze comes along and stirs our perfume into the air. Pollen settles, seeds form. We know there are more blooms yet to come.

I’ve mentioned my overabundance of books in a couple of posts before: Who Is This Shrinking Violet Person Anyway? and Leaving Books Behind. Of course one answer, as Marcia at LiberalTopia pointed out in a comment here, is to trade them to a used bookstore in exchange for books. Another is to donate them to a charity thrift store, to the local library’s used book store, or to our military serving overseas.

Yet another intriguing option can be found at BookCrossing. If you’ve never heard of this organization, check out their website for a fun way to exchange books by “catch and release,” and track their journeys through the reading world. A local newspaper article about BookCrossing can be found here.

Other Places to Donate Books: (more…)

We have no children, and we rarely eat at the same hour from one day to the next, so cooking is often a last minute decision in our house. The other day in Costco I had apples on the list, so we found our favorite Fuji apples. Then we saw berries. Strawberries, blueberries, big containers of them, wafting their divine aroma into our path. (more…)

I live in Southern California, with my husband, in a house that is way too small for us, our pets and our hobbies. One problem with the size of this house is it doesn’t hold enough books. For us, books are a priority. All kinds. First edition hardbacks, mass market paperbacks, novels, anthologies, self-help, and professional texts. There are never quite enough shelves to hold them, so they spill over into places they don’t belong. I keep a pair of binoculars (more…)

The rough draft is done!

It’s so rough I’ll probably need a Jeep to make my way back through it. I began writing this latest mystery on 4/29/2004 and finished the first draft on 7/4/2004 at some 100,000 words.

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been busy writing. And not writing. Major writer’s block. I’ve also been working on some artwork for another project. I thought a lot tonight about the deaths we hear of and take notice of, deaths of people like Mattie Stepanek. Don’t you wish we could hear when such people are born? A kind of heads up: Hey, world, pay attention to this kid, he’s going to make a big impact on many people’s lives. (more…)

Dream a few nights ago: As I crossed a parking lot to my car, a lion followed me. I knew the lion was powerful, yet I also knew he wouldn’t kill me. He bit my hand, at one point, but it was a pet cat kind of bite, not hard, just a warning. I had the impression he was chasing me back to my motivation. (more…)

I thought today about Halloween costumes for children, because of a chapter I’m writing.

I recall when I was in first grade, and the teacher mentioned Halloween costumes, then went on to talk about a play or skit the class was to participate in. She asked what parts we wanted to play. Meanwhile I drifted off into dreamland (more…)

My husband told me this morning about a dream he had of a parakeet and a myna bird. I won’t go into the details, they weren’t important to what I’m writing here. Just the fact that those two birds were in his dream. It didn’t carry meaning for me until later. Some interesting facts that stand out now regarding his dream: My mom used to raise parakeets. His mom used to have a pet myna bird. Both species can be trained to talk, at least to repeat words and phrases (the myna bird is able to replicate a specific human voice).

A couple of hours after he mentioned that dream to me, I was researching my current novel. I needed a quick refresher about the kinds of things people record in business planners. For an example, I took three months worth of planner pages of mine from two years ago, when I worked fulltime in a busy office as a manager. I chose a random three month period. Perhaps my subconscious was at work, and still influenced by the Reagan funeral coverage on TV, because the three months I chose happened to be from the time of my mother’s death. I chose March through June of 2002 for my planner sample. She died in April of 2002.

Mom in Orange Dress 1925

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The total number of books I read in 2001 is disappointingly small, since I have little free time these days. However, it’s rich in good reading. (more…)

Three major reasons I read mysteries are (more…)

Here’s a journalist/author I’ve enjoyed reading. His name is Gerry Boyle, and I understand he is or was a columnist for the Maine Sentinel. (more…)

This is an obsession for me, as well as one of the most fun aspects of writing fiction. It’s something I did as a child, before I ever considered writing novels. (more…)

A few years ago a mystery-loving friend of mine traveled to Seattle. One day he decided to eat in a restaurant at the top of the Space Needle. He took his newspaper with him, and lay it down beside him while he decided what to order. When he turned to pick up his newspaper, it was gone. (more…)