Blogging Phenomena

I started this blog at the advice of many "experts" on media marketing with the explicit purpose of gaining more attention for the book that was in the publishing process at the time.  It HAS boosted sales a bit, making my quarterly check look more like the yearly income I had from "Night of the Tiger", but not to the point I had hoped it would.  In short, I won't be retiring from my day job in the near future to go on book signing tours, but I truly appreciate all the lovely feedback, good and bad, as it makes me a better writer to know where I'm failing my fans.....

But the blog has done something unexpected as well.

My other accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, etc. have come alive since I started this sharing of my thoughts with the world at large.  Friends from high school and college, many of whom I lost touch with many eons ago, are hailing me when I least expect it.  I joyfully add them to my contact lists and our friendship continues on as if we just saw each other yesterday instead of over 30 years ago.

People from places I've never visited also come through the other accounts, sometimes just doing a "follow", sometimes asking to be friends because they want to get to know the person under the writing hat.  While in certain ways these international connections make me worry a little that the NSA is going to start watching me more closely, causing me to think twice about the kind of things I share, it's also something that fills me with awe.  Before I started blogging, I would see visitors from Russia, and China, and Germany on the list of IP addresses provided by my Tripod account, but until the blog, I wasn't being approached by any of them.

It's a rather humbling experience to have a strange person request my friendship and, in response to my "how do I know you?" query, to have them respond "I just finished your book(s), love your writing style, and want to be updated as to when the next one is coming out."  It's one thing for me to be sitting here seeing the IP address and that they found my page through a Yandex search, which is a Russian search engine.  It's quite another thing entirely to see them post things in their native language and, on translating their post, discover that they're thanking me for adding them to my lists and telling their friends to buy my books....

I can say "Thank you" a million times over and still not express how such a thing makes me feel.

I write, as I've expressed before, because it keeps my mental works from getting all gummed up with bits and pieces of storylines, preventing a brain  explosion that would surely see me bouncing around a rubber room in the special jacket with the extra long hug-yourself sleeves.  I write for my own satisfaction, going back to edit and re-edit until it's the kind of story that I like to read myself on those nights when I can't sleep and can't find any mindless amusement on the Boob Tube.  These new friends and followers that I've been collecting the past year are slowly making me come to the realization that my selfish little writing thing, started in a series of journals and only being released into the public faction in more recent years, is actually worth all the time I put into it (even if it sometimes causes arguments between my husband and myself when I get so deeply into the writing that the housework is ignored for several days).......

So, yet again, I thank all of my blog visitors, and I look forward to seeing some of you elsewhere.  I thank you for your kind words and criticisms.  But most of all, I thank you for your kindnesses that, despite the vocabulary available to me via dictionaries and thesauruses, I simply can't find enough words to tell you how it all makes me feel.

Blessed be.

"Any sane man claiming to be a Dow is an imposter"

The quote that makes up my title for today is something that was said by Major Joseph Dow of the United States to President James Monroe in 1818.  I came across it in a lovely book that could easily hurt you, should you drop it while moving it:  "The Book of Dow" by Robert Piercy Dow.  It's a great way to start a journey into the Dow Family Tree - just as long as you keep in mind that you should really check the facts through other sources.

I started my family research with this book in September of 1980, after losing my dad to cancer.  I wanted to discover why my uncle was saying that it was incorrect when it put James Parker Dow with Alexander Dow "by conjecture".....

and I'm still trying to find out who James REALLY belonged to, as I have proven that James was not related to Alexander even though they were in the same town when James married Susan Lovina Belden.

In the meantime, as noted in a couple of earlier blog posts, I've traced lots of the other lines, but I haven't been sharing the information anywhere but on Ancestry.com.  Several relatives have been encouraging me to start a web site so that they can see what I've been finding.....

In my own little form of Dow insanity, I've added more storage space to my web site, The Northern Bard ( http://galadriel_emmons.tripod.com/ ) and started programming the pages.  The idea was that, when you click on a person's name when they are shown as the child of a couple, you are taken to that person's marriage and children.  If you click on that same person's name from their own page, you get brought to the page for their parents.  In this way, you can follow the branches of the family tree back several generations, or you can investigate the lines of siblings, or wander - probably for days or weeks, when it comes down to that - throughout the whole tree until you visit all of the 1800+ people I have listed on Ancestry.com at this point in time.

In the meantime, each time I go into Ancestry.com to collect the info I need to make the next page, the little wiggling leaves that lead me to the necessary records to prove or disprove the information I have are tempting me to continue the research.....and, at the moment, I'm trying my best to ignore them.  Once I have all the people who are already in my tree to my web site, I'll look at some of those other wiggling leaves and add any new info to the pages I'm currently creating.

In short, this little bow to those who have been asking me to share my information may turn into something that will keep me programming pages until I go into the great beyond to meet all the people I've been writing about - and I'll have to make sure to give one of my descendants all the necessary tools to continue what appears to be an ongoing project.

If you happen to be related to the Dow family from Corinna, Maine, please feel free to visit the pages that begin with a quick intro at The Dow Family Tree page ( http://galadriel_emmons.tripod.com/dow.family.tree.html ) and drop me a line if you have any corrections or stories that you would like me to add.  If you're just curious, there are a lot of other last names that are going to be included over the multitudes of generations I've traced, so you, too, may find a common relative in the ancient lines.

A little warning before you go, however:  There are a couple of lines I've discovered that make the jokes about rednecks and trees not branching very real.  Please keep in mind that, in the early days of settling America, there weren't a lot of people to chose from when getting married, so sometimes second and third cousins were marrying.

And we here in the United States claim not to understand how we all got so stupid......

*shrug*

And now let me introduce my very special guest star.......

I noted in a blog not too long ago that I was getting a second tattoo, and had posted the "first draft".  This was what I got tagged in as a final draft on April 8th by my lovely tattoo artist, Jen Jacques:

She had cleaned up some of the elements that she didn't like on the first draft, added a couple of leaves as kind of a backdrop, to make him stand out a little better - and floored me, as this is much more than what I was expecting even though I've seen a lot of her other work and have been sincerely impressed in the past.

Then came the 'big day", I arrived at the tattoo parlor psyched despite knowing I was setting myself up for a painful experience, as the first part isn't too bad, but when she gets into shading and making sure that everything is perfect, meaning she's going over already raw skin, it can get pretty painful....

But OMG!  The finished product is well worth every second of stiffness from having to sit still for a long period while she's working!  This is the first intro to "Occie" (which, when you say it aloud, sounds like "Ozzy") the Ocelot:

I look at certain elements, like inside his ears and his gorgeous eyes, and I can't help but feel honored that this beautiful young lady spent so much time and trouble to make this a truly epic piece for me to carry with me!  Once again, I'm saying that I'm not going to get another tattoo, but then again, if not for an off-hand comment by a friend about the tiger (whom I've been calling "Shere Khan" after the Jungle Book), I wouldn't now have Occie......*grin*

So, if you're coming to the Portland, Maine area and would like a truly awesome piece of art to take home with you, something permanent and one of a kind, might I suggest looking up Jen Jacques?  Until June, she's at Til Death Tattoo on Fore Street, and then she's moving on to Lucky's Tattoo Company on Exchange Street.  You, too, could have such an awesome piece of art to show off.....

When a writer SHOULDN'T write......

I'm having a week that I'm pretending that there ISN'T a file in my computer called "A Wild Tiger's Heart".  It's not that the characters aren't still showing me the images, nor that I'm not putting notes into a separate file to remind me of the scenes at a later time, but this is NOT the time that I want to do serious work on the project.

Why?

Because my son works nights, usually getting home from work around 2 a.m., his lovely lady is away for a ten day special assignment, and, since they can't afford such a thing as a live-in nanny for her six-year-old and their 20-month-old, Yamma is doing a lot of babysitting this week.  On nights when the older child doesn't need to go to school the next morning, they're spending the night at our house - which means the children are awake later than normal because they have a hard time falling asleep in a strange place - and because I can't sleep until the children are both out for the night, that means a little sleep deprivation for yours truly.....

And because I've had some interesting editing experiences when I've written things with this much sleep deprivation in the past - or when interrupted by my husband or children in the middle of a hot and heavy scene in which whatever they came into the room saying ended up having to be taken out of the scene - I've promised myself that I won't continue the serious work until I've managed to get my synapses firing in the right order again.

In the meantime, the research has taken on a new direction with a simple status on Facebook in which I've asked any of my friends and family who've traveled to the places that Chase, Ree and Kelly are currently going to please give me their thoughts and impressions.  (I only asked them for the first three destinations, so you're getting more than they did.)  In the interest of giving my Constant Readers here on the blog the same opportunity, I'm going to do a little SPOILER ALERT here and ask some specific questions of any of you who live in or have traveled to the following places, where the characters are spending three weeks per country, beginning just after Christmas at the top of the list:

Ireland - specifically Derry (correction: Dublin - I told you I was tired), Cork (focusing on Blarney Castle and the Rock Close) and Belfast (celebrating New Years Day in Derry and moving south before going to Northern Ireland to transfer onward via ferry)
Scotland - Glasgow, Edinburgh (focusing on Mary King's Close) and the Isle of Skye (late January to mid February)
England - driving from Scotland to such iconic things as Stonehenge, London, and any other places of interest you think might need to be included as part of Kelly's "Bucket List" (Heathrow is featured briefly, as Kelly sends Chase and Ree back to America before continuing the trip solo in early March)
France - Kelly meets a friend in Paris, but has also hinted of some time in the countryside, so where would YOU suggest she go? (March into early April)
Italy - Rome, Capri and Venice are Kelly's top three destinations, but Kyle runs into a couple of minor issues that cause him to ask her to extend her trip by a couple of weeks.  Where would you go in late April/early May if you unexpectedly had to extend your vacation?

Now, the main questions I have about such spots are:

1) What are the homes and countryside like?  I've seen some photos of most of these places, but people tend to only take the most picturesque shots, so what would you note about the area NOT captured by touristy web sites?

2) Are there specific restaurants or shops that might be "off the grid" as far as the tour guides that you would recommend?  We ARE talking a mother and daughter who get uncomfortable in large crowds due to being able to feel the emotions around them, so the trio would tend to want to go to less crowded spots.

3) And naturally, I'm looking for personal descriptions of some of the tourist traps.  How crowded might they be in the off season period when Kelly specifically planned her trip to avoid crowds?  What are the people in these places like when approached by Americans?

Thank you for any feedback you feel compelled to provide.  And now if you'll excuse me, I need to brew a second pot of coffee if I'm going to make it through until 1 a.m. - or possibly later, as my son is like me and will stay late to complete any tasks before he signs out of work.......


And one last note:  A MAJOR thank you to all my visitors here!  I'm only 5 visits short of 1000 views as of this morning - less than a full year after starting this blog on the suggestion of some friends.  The thought that there have been that many clicks on this one humble spot on the internet staggers my mind - and I will be forever grateful.