Living the LIfe of Stephen King?

Every once in a while, I question myself and my decisions in life, especially when it comes to my writing. The fiercest questions come to haunt me, and many have no real immediate answers 

For instance: Am I really seeing a brand new book when the characters start coming to visit me in my dreams, or am I reliving something I've read in the past, since I devoured whole libraries (if allowed to select off any shelf I wished) throughout my youth and young adulthood? 

Are these characters so much like people I've known that the people I based the character on will come forward to sue me at some point?

And this week: Am I perhaps writing in the wrong genre when I can so accurately describe the smell of a rotting corpse?

Well, okay. So the rotting corpse isn't human, but wouldn't a rotting human body smell the same as a rotting mouse body, but just that much more intense??

In my last post to this blog, I spoke of my daughter's cat, Meeko, who briefly earned himself the nickname "Houdini" from yours truly by manifesting himself in the garage often enough to make us wonder if we shouldn't have chosen a name for him from a J. K. Rowling novel. When we managed to find all of his secret passages from the interior part of the house to the garage, he stopped being able to perform his magic, so his attention turned to other ways to amuse himself.

Sunday evening, just after the girl offspring left the building to go to Connecticut for a few days, we heard a very loud squeeking noise from the next room. Confirming that some foolish mouse had managed to be waylaid by the cat, we closed the door and let nature take it's course, assuming that one of two things would happen: 

1) The cat would kill the mouse, and we would come out of the living room to find a body in the middle of the floor with a very proud kitty standing over it, waiting for us to praise him for being a good mouser, OR

2) The mouse would manage to sneak away, cheating death for another day - or, if what I found while working in a veterinary office to be right, the mouse would crawl away, covered in cat spit (which is fatal even when the cat misses, according to myth) and die somewhere else.

Therefore, when we stepped out into the weight room to find that the cat was prone on the carpet, looking exhausted and somewhat disgusted, we assumed that choice 2 was where things landed.

Until the next morning, when the floor containing the weight room and the living room had an odd smell to it, almost as if someone had worn a pair of socks for several days before balling them up and tucking them into a corner instead of taking them down to the clothes hamper. The odor was vaguely annoying, but nothing was obvious as the source.

Since it's summer in the northern hemisphere, we have our windows open and fans blowing through to move the air, so the smell didn't seem as obvious that evening. The next morning, however, when the house was sufficiently cold and the fans were shut off to avoid dragging afternoon heat through (the house stays nice and cool this way), the odor was still there, and vaguely stronger. By that afternoon, when I returned home, a body had been brought out for me to view, almost as if the cat and dog were holding a funeral for the dead mouse and had opted to have it lay in state in the middle of the kitchen floor....

And when I wrapped it in paper towel, then put it into a garbage bag and hauled it out to the trash cans outside, I thought the smell would move outside with the body.

Obviously, I was living in a fool's paradise, for the smell was even worse the next morning, enough so that I sprayed some stuff onto the carpet that was meant to take out the odors caused by an "animal accident" - though something tells me that the creator of this miracle odor destroyer wasn't thinking "dead mouse" as the "animal accident". The spray helped for that particular moment in time, but by the time I arrived home THAT evening, I kept finding myself surprised that the police weren't pounding on my door, insisting that, since the girl child wasn't back yet, that the smell HAD to be her rotting corpse....

And there was a second mouse body displayed, this one next to the weight bench, and again, it was wrapped in a paper towel shroud, put into a garbage bag, and brought out to the outside trash cans, where an odor as strong as I was smelling inside told me that this one I was currently adding wasn't the same one from the day before, magically brought back in for my distinct displeasure.

We put some more of the smelly stuff into the carpet, rubbing it in with a stiff brush to remove all remaining odor, then vaccumed it up, throwing the powder and any dirt from the carpet into the garbage bin with the bodies. We burmed incense. We put all the fans up to full bore and slept with extra blankets when the night turned a little colder than is normal for this time of year, and that next morning, Wednesday, the house smelled much better, so we followed our normal procedure and turned off the fans for the day, keeping the cold of the night before inside the house and keeping the heat of the day outside.

When my husband got home shortly after me that evening, he showed me a large gash on one hand that he'd done on his last job. Unknown to him, he had bled on the side of his white work van, and because he works around a lot of strong chemicals, he didn't smell the outside garbage bins nor the slight smell clinging to the inside of the house. Having lived in the house for the past three days, I had gone nose dead to the slight remaining odor inside. 

So when the girl child came home from her time away to see blood on the van, smelling the rotting mouse corpses in the outside bin and still smelling that smell inside the house, and finding her dad gone (he was playing 8-ball with his buddies in the pool league), she had to question what had happened. Had I perhaps decided that 32 years of marriage was more than enough and done something horrid over the three days she was gone?

The moment I started telling the story about the mice and the odor, both inside and out, the cat started rubbing for attention, making sure we knew that he was tall enough to rub his head on our thighs....

(My daughter and I are both tall women. It's scary to have a cat be able to rub his head almost at one's hip and, when he extends his paws, he can tap our waists.)

and luckily, the first thing my husband showed her was the hand he'd cut.

I was a little surprised that the police hadn't been by, just to check on the smell, until I was going over to visit the grandkids. On the side of the road, there was a porcupine, road kill from several days prior, from the look. As my car drew closer, that now familiar smell started to surround me. By the time I passed it, the odor was strong enough to make me want to gag - much stronger than the two little mice in my own covered garbage bin. In comparison, my little stench is nothing...

But I still have to wonder if this knowledge of the exact qualities of the odor of a rotting corpse will ever come to my aid in the writing of a romance novel....

Or am I writing in the wrong genre?

His mama named him Meeko, but I call him Houdini

My daughter, who is in her early 20's but is currently back in the family home, has a cat who is Bengal and Maine Coon. He has stripes, almost like a raccoon, so she named him Meeko after the Disney character of the raccoon in Pocahontas.

He lives up to his name, as he is full of mischief.

The past few days, he seemingly developed magical powers, appearing from places he's not supposed to have access to.....

But let me start back in 1998, when we saw a "for sale by owner" sign on a house about a mile from a friend's camp. It wasn't the cleanest walk-through, but the house had a wide-open floor plan that promised lots of solar gain in winter, when we'd need extra warmth. There were nifty little nooks and crannies from the seller adding on a section. There were a couple of minor things noted by the inspector that had to be fixed before we got the loan to go through, but it was an old farmhouse with it's own special character.

We're still finding interesting things from the "adding on a section" bit that are kinda scary, in a way, but sometimes just fun, as Meeko has demonstrated with his magic act.....

Meeko is, and always has been, an indoor cat. This doesn't mean that he wouldn't LIKE to try outside, but he gets afraid when something strange happens and panics, so outside is something we try to avoid.

The garage, where there are rakes, shovels, picks, and other implements of destruction to do damage to an unwary cat. There are also spots where chiipmunks and squirrels have been coming in since day one, and considering the size of some of those squirrels...

So Meeko is NOT allowed in the garage, even long enough to allow me to get something out of the large chest freezer that's in constant use. Imagine my surprise when, just a couple of days ago, I was going out to get something from the freezer - and Meeko breezed past me, rubbing my leg on his way in from the garage.

I asked my husband if he'd been in the garage since arriving home, as I hadn't been in the garage all day. He didn't recall going out there, but admitted to being tired, so we wrote it off.

And then it happened again last night.end

He came and greeted me as I came home, and both his "mama" and "Grampa" were right there, finishing fixing a light fixture that had fallen apart. The next project was repairing a storm door handle, so I sat down on the one set of stairs that leads to that door to watch for the animals, not wishing to chase dog or cat down the road....

That was when Meeko turned up missing.

I went through the house while my daughter went outside and started circling the house, looking for signs he'd managed to sneak past. When I opened the garage door, a very smug looking cat was sitting on the third step down. He wasn't outside, but he was back in a place where no door had been opened to allow him access. This time, we went looking for the secret way he was getting out there, and found a spot where we had thought there was a wooden wall. It was just cardboard and a thin layer of fiberglass insulation...

Smoke and mirrors, as many other portions of this place seems to have been built.

So we lock the cat up and look at ways to either fix the spot or keep him out of the basement. There are no support beams. Door lock it is, so that gets accomplished. Meeko is let out of lock up. In short order, he's disappeared again. Open the garage door. There he is.

Another hole is found and plugged. Another disappearance. Another cat in the garage find. This continues all evening, until finally, we've found all the little spots he's found to gain access from the upstairs to the basement. The disappearances finally end, and he's spent the entire day looking for new access - and glaring at all the humans in the house.

We seem to have temporarily blocked his magic, but like Harry Potter, I expect he's plotting on how to get back his wand and disappear again.....

“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.” ― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

I was feeling really down recently. Here in Maine, it's been raining a lot and, although the normal temperature at this time of year is low 80's, we're barely making low 60's most days. (That's Fahreinheit for those of you who need to calculate to Celsius.)

In short, after a long, cold winter, we're having a wet, cold summer, too, it seems...

So I've been cruising Facebook a lot...and I found this lovely photograph that I resposted to my wall:

Now, I personally like this because I have a nephew who spent a LOT of time in the hospital as a baby, and he would have LOVED this....

I'm amazed at the number of people who have liked this on my timeline. I posted it on June 22, and as of today (June 26), it has 450 likes and climbing....and the lovely comments from people who liked it as much as I did has restored my faith in humanity. They mirror my thoughts on this type of person:

These Every Day Heroes deserve SO much more attention than the Reality TV types.....

Of course, now I'm trying to think how I can do some little act like this every day. It suddenly came to me that each time you help that elderly person in the grocery store, or smile at a baby who is being a little fussy and make it smile back, or any little, simple kindness that you do for your fellow man, YOU can be an Every Day Hero!

Here's to the Every Day Hero in all of us! 

May we all find that faith, trust and pixie dust is all we need to make a better world..

One foot in the past and one foot in the present

My current work in progress is one of those "long term" pieces.

It started out in 1989 in a series of notebooks - 5 little 5x7 notebooks, to be exact - written during my breaks and lunches while working at a little place called Yield House in North Conway, New Hampshire. It was the first time a story flowed solidly from end to end instead of popping in as bits and pieces, and my sister-in-law was reading each day's progress while I cooked supper, as she was staying with us for a brief time.

Then I set it aside, wanting to research the time frame to make sure I made no obvious gaffs...

And now all of that research is going into the rewrite....Heaven help us all.....

The story is, in the same format as the prior books published by Northern Bard Publications, already 686 pages....and a LONG way from being finished. The native American side of the story explains so much about the world that the young lass lives in, and presents a real problem for the knight who has been granted land in the New World. As I continue to edit, getting myself caught up to where the story went before the characters started arguing about what happens next about a year ago (when I was typing it onto the computer and adding in the research about the natives), the characters are impatiently waiting for me to get back to where I left them.

For those of my era, there was an old Carol Burnett bit about a playwright (view here, for those who need it: https://youtu.be/KOVOv5WrZWs), and strangely, that's what I think of when I think of Max and Amy, waiting for me to finish the edit and continue with their story. Sir Maxwell, dark haired and dark eyed, in his native American clothing, keeps glaring from me to Amy, with red hair and pale green eyes...and she glares right back....

Some days, I seriously wonder if that skit was true.....

Hating Selfies As Much As All Pics of ME......

For someone who wanted to be an actress when I graduated from high school, I've been told I have a bad attitude about pictures of myself. I'm supposed to be like the people whom I met in the college Theater classes, self-absorbed and so determined to succeed that they were stabbing the others onstage with them in the back, just to get a better part to show them off to better advantage...

It went against every reason I had for wanting to be an actress in the first place.

The crew I was with in high school understood that a production is a group effort. Each member of the "team" has a different role that is very important to the show. No role is more important than the others, because the so-called "star" needs the other people to play off of. How can Scarlett O'Hara win the eye of the man of her dreams without Mammy to tighten her corset to the proper degree?

Of course, there's also the fact that, from a very young age, I seemed to be the one of my siblings to "ham it up" for the camera, doing what my parents called "ruining" every family portrait they ever took. Take, for example, this shot of my siblings and I on our swing set in the early days of colored photographs. The Brownie camera that Dad owned needed the sun behind the photographer's back in order to get a properly lit outside shot. My siblings all managed to look into the sun with just the slightest squint to go along with their smile. Me? Not so much...

Yes, that would be me making that funny face in the little plaid dress - and I started this nonsense of goofing for the camera before I could even walk, as this photo of me and my cousin at the age of 6 months (he was just three weeks younger than me) at Christmas time.

As I've grown older, I've tried to NOT make faces, but even a selfie that I did yesterday (because one of my sisters insists that I post WAY too many photos of other things and not enough photos of me enjoying whatever the thing is I want to share) makes me cringe, because even when I just try on a small smile, I think I look exceptionally stupid. What do you think of me "channeling my inner gypsy" in the skirt I got for my birthday last week?

Suffice to say that I need to get together with someone who will direct me properly in order to get a new author photo like one of my current favorite authors, Sherrilyn Kenyon. She looks like the kind of person who understands romance, doesn't she?

Of course, for all I know, she has the same attitude as my other favorite SK - Stephen King. He also has stated that he doesn't like photos of himself, but puts them on the books just because that's how it's done. Maybe his attitude is the one I should take: People don't care how goofy I look in my author photo as long as the story is good...

At least, I hope people think the stories are good. It's been so long since I got a review from anyone who wasn't there before I published the first novel that I'm not sure what any new readers think. Most of my reviewers are close friends who give me good reviews out of kindness.

Would a better picture, maybe put on the back of the book, make a difference? What are your thoughts on this?

"The hurrier I go, the behinder I get" - Lewis Carroll (and my dad.....)

I heard the quote I've used for today's title my whole life. Dad used it whenever he had a lot of things going on and not enough time in a day to get it all done.

I'm having that same issue myself, complicated by the need to move slowly due to my surgery in April. Six months after the hernia repair, I've been cleared to start putting yoga and weight lifting back into my routine - but with the caveat that I have to listen to the muscles and NOT push to the point they hurt, or at least, not yet. In short, "Feel the burn" CAN'T be part of my vocabulary yet.....

And, for a person like me, who is used to going 'hurrier" than most people around me, thiis is SO thoroughly frustrating!

Among the things I'm getting "behinder" on:

1) My flower gardens, which need weeding, mulching, and fertilizing (though not in that order) so that they look nice for the summer. (The fertilizer and mulch bags are still at the store, since I'm still not allowed to lift 40 pounds yet, and my husband is too busy with the spring fishing trips with his buddies to help me out by at least getting them home for me to be able to just take what I need out of the bag and out it where I need it.)

2) The vegetable garden, which is still waiting for my hubby to borrow the rototiller from the neighbor - and which also needs a few bags of fertilizer to get worked into the soil before I can start putting the veggies in for us to eat later this summer.

3) Getting the kayaks down to our friends camp so that, on those mornings when I'm about to climb the wall because I can't think of more than a couple of things that I'm ALLOWED to do, I can at least go and push my sorry butt around the lake, listen to the loons call, and pretend that I'm all the way healthy again for at least a little while. (Yes, the kayaks are heavier than I'm supposed to lift, but if they made it to the camp, I could viably roll the Tiggershark over and drag it to the edge of the lake.....)

And the list of things that I need to get done but am still not allowed to do goes on.......

On the good side, the editing of "Fireblossom and the Dream Weaver" is going well, at least, even if I'm keeping myself awake until after midnight and getting back up again at 5 a.m. in order to get that work done around my "day job" and the other little chores I'm allowed to do.

For those who aren't aware, "Fireblossom" has been sitting in a desk drawer since before I had my youngest child. She celebrated her 24th year on the planet in December, so the fact thst I STILL haven't completed work on this book is somewhat disturbing. In my defense, I got 687 pages, if the Microsoft program that I've been using to try to set this in the 6 x 9 format of the other books put out by Northern Bard Publications is actually correct, that I'm about halfway done editing before I continue on with the tale. I had made it that far in the transposing the story from the 5 small notebooks I initially used to write it during my lunchtimes at work and adding in the research about native Americans before the characters started to argue about the scene that came next. It seems Sir Maxwell Colburn had one idea of whree the story should go and Amy McCullum had a different idea, so......

This may well be my first 1000 page book by the time all is said and done.......

So, if anyone wants to come by for a visit to help me do some of the things my doctor says I shouldn't, drop me a line. In the meantime, a little prayer or two that I don't tear anything apart while I start work on redoing my strength training would be very appreciated.

And if anyone wants to explain to me what I was thinking when I decided a redheaded woman was going to be the main character for this particular book, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. That fiery wench can cause more trouble in ten minures than anyone I know can cause in ten days......

Off to try to get less "behinder".......

Singing the blues for a blues legend.....

This one is going to be short and sweet, as one of the greatest blues musicians has gone on to Rock and Roll Heaven.

B.B. King, a true legend in the world of blues music, having influenced millions of today's top guitarists, has passed on. Being a lover of all types of music since before I could walk, this is a very sad day for me, even though I saw that he had gone into hospice care at his home earlier this month...which is never a good sign for anyone who has long-term health problems.

Please join me in singing along with one of the songs this great man made famous....and may his legacy live forever....

"The Thrill is Gone"

https://youtu.be/4fk2prKnYnI