Painting Pictures with Words

When I was a teenager I fell in love with pen and ink drawing. I liked doing a beautiful drawing with black India ink and then adding some delicate glimpses of color with Higgins colored inks. I did some acrylic painting too back then and explored watercolor painting. All the time I was doing art with pen and ink and paint I was also writing.

I was out of college by the time I realized that the prettiest or most striking pictures I had ever painted were the ones I had painted with words.

I have always been a voracious reader. I was bored in school because once I learned to read I read every book in the house. My mother always encouraged our love of reading. She had my Dad tear down the walls in the long hallway of our four bedroom ranch house and replace the walls with floor to ceiling bookcases thereby making the hallway our library. You could always find one or two of us sprawled on the hallway floor reading. Our best road trips were to Bookland in Northampton and Holyoke- this was before Barnes & Noble arrived in Holyoke. Then came Walden Books. While my peers were buying clothes and make-up I was buying books ad writing stories.

I even read the dictionary, probably a Websters when I was a teenager. I retain individual words better than I retain phrases. I can't remember a joke to save my life. But say a word and I can pretty easily list five or six synonyms just off the top of my head without really thinking about it.

When Kelly was born I would get up to feed her in the middle of the night and while she had her bottle I would grab a book off the bookcase already present in the nursery and read it to her and show her the pictures. Every night I read picture and storybooks to her from her library. Between ages two and three she nearly fell on the cement steps in the back walkway and said, "That could have been a catastrophe!" Around that time she liked to wear hats and march around the dining room table at my parent's house. One day she handed a Greek fisherman's cap to my Dad, put on his bucket hat he used for yard work and said, "Let's form a procession!"

Those two instances opened my eyes and ears to the fact that small children are sponges that absorb everything they see and hear. They have minds like computer processors, matching new words to actions, objects, emotions... I never talked baby talk to her. I never parked her in front of the television. We danced in the kitchen to every kind of music imaginable because I did not want to limit her horizons to the walls of a small box. I gave her the whole world ad let her explore it.

Picture books and storybooks come with age ranges. I ignored them. We read wonderful stories above her age level, often reading the same books over and over because we loved them so much. And in not dumbing down her ability to learn she easily learned to read and loves to read to this day. She also writes some pretty amazing books in her own right-although she hasn't buckled down and published anything yet, except on wattpad.

She is a minimalist painter with words, but she has the ability to choose the perfect word from her extensive vocabulary so it is like the exact brushstroke and evokes the exact emotion she wants the reader to feel.

My writing is a little more descriptive and dense. I find myself writing too much sometimes so I have to go back and pare out the excess verbage, distill the image, idea, emotion to it's purest form. Where Kelly is concise, I am expansive. We have totally different writing styles. But if you see us together and listen to us talk you will witness a duel of words as we aren't afraid to use the choicest words we can dredge up from memory for ordinary everyday things. Where someone would walk into a furniture store and see chairs, tables, couches, and lamps Kelly and I see a vast assortment and variety of chaises, settees, divans, illumination devices, candoliers, club chairs, wingchairs, Morris chairs and so forth. It drives my husband crazy but occasionally he joins in one of our conversations and coughs up a cool archaic word. Language- both oral and written is certainly not dead in our house. I don't use abbreviations or texting shortcuts on social media. I shall not slaughter the English language is my motto.

Language is beautiful. By utilizing carefully chosen words in the body of a text a writer/author can create beautiful images that paint pictures in the mind of a reader, enhancing the story being told with the visual imagery.

The fiery red fox streaked across the sloping green lawn like a flaming arrow shot from the bow of the earth. That is what I saw the other day- a fox running across the back yard. How would you write that sight on facebook?

Paint pictures with words and make the world a more beautiful place!

The Sounds of Spring

It's 7AM Tuesday morning. I'm sitting at the kitchen table checking my email. There's a conference call scheduled for 7:30PM this evening- the first time the club Officers and Board of Directors is attempting this. Kelly has just left for work. My husband is awake and already stressing about not being able to find a new job.

Outside the open kitchen door (even though it's only 51 degrees out I'm allowing Revere a breath of fresh air) I hear rain- a slow but steady spring rain. The blue jays are screaming and calling to one in the woods just behind us. Smaller birds are chirping in the arbor vitae hedges to the left and right of our property. Rain is gurgling in the downspout. Listening carefully through the rain I can just discern the rush of water in the brook down in the ravine behind us. It's running faster due to the rain- even though it was a fairly dry winter we have had some rain, heavy at times so there is plenty of water in it.

I like listening to the rain...although it kind of makes me wish I could crawl back into bed and sleep for another few hours.

Leaving for work in half an hour...time for a cup of tea before I go.

Happy Spring!

A Tiny Dream

I was talking about this on my goodreads blog the other day.

I have a tiny dream.

My husband watches the TV program Tiny House. I get a kick out of whole families wanting a tiny house (how unrealistic is that? My family would be a pack of snarling dogs crammed into too small a space!)

My dream is to have a tiny house for writing in my backyard. It would be in the Carpenter's Gothic style with a tiny front porch, screened in so Revere and Beans could come and hang out with me while I write at my tiny desk in front of a window that looks out over the woods and the brook in the ravine beyond the path. It would have to be wired but not necessarily plumbed. It would have a loft with a place to rest and reflect. And all the walls would be lined with floor to ceiling bookcases for reference books and some of my favorite novels. I might add a fold down desk for when Kelly comes to visit and we write together.

This is one writer's tiny dream.

Talon: The Familiarity of it All (Book 3)

Kelly did a final read through and edit of Book 3 in the Talon series this weekend. It always makes me nervous when she applies her critical eye to one of my novels, however, there were some moments that will remain with me from this- such as coming into the kitchen to sit down opposite her to work on another project and finding her in tears as she read a certain section. Later, she was laughing, and once when she had moved into the living room and was reading there I walked through and saw her smiling- no, grinning! I know a story is working if I'm able to draw those kinds of emotions from a reader, even if it's her. She is very analytical and black & white sometimes, like her father, but she has also inherited a creative side from me and I'm able to reach that side of her through my writing. When I get a high five at the end of a read through I know the novel works.

Book Three is set two months after book two- Dr. Giles Talon (ME & grim reaper) and Bryce Briscoe (nightshift Morgue clerk and his portal) are rapidly approaching their Valentine's Day wedding when chaos breaks out as her family is attacked and they are attacked by demons and other beasts from the realms beyond. Bryce once again rocks the heavens with her unorthodox improvisations because she is still new at what she does and the High Council continues to debate her merit in emergency meetings. Their wedding finally happens but there's a shock as they leave the reception to begin the honeymoon and once again Bryce is challenged to find a way to remedy a very bad situation as quickly as possible.

Book three includes the bonus holiday story, set five years into the future when Dr. Talon and Bryce's son Cayle is five years old. This is the year Talon gives his portal her heart's desire.

And now off to finish up a final edit of Book 4 (the partial novel I found in the dining room not too long ago!) But first a huge thank you to Kelly for all she does for me! You're the best!

Found in a Notebook

I evidently write poetry late at night- found this in the pages of a small binder with book notes last night:

The silver stars shine
   in the dark pools of your eyes;
I see a gilded moon
   suspended from a lock of your hair-
The lambent light casts
    half your face in shadow,
Bathes the other half in pale moon glow-

You are a being
   from a distant world
Who has come only to kiss me;
   and I surrender to the alien sensation
of cool lips against mine.

This kiss is like a cold drink
   washing down a desert throat;
I am at the oasis-
   oddly shivering,
   oddly scorched.


This may have been written to go with a story I was writing at the time, but I can't think which one. Possibly Cooper's Moon which I don't think I've published yet because I'm incorporating the short story into a novel- one of the four novels I'm currently working on.

Daffodils

We've had a rather mild winter here in western Massachusetts so all the spring bulbs poked their green noses above the earth earlier than normal and proceeded to bask and flourish in the balmy spring-like temperatures that we had throughout most of March. Our daffodils alongside the back walkway bloomed, and looked so cheerful- so bright yellow that they hurt one's eyes!

And then we had about 3 inches of heavy snow this past Sunday and Monday. My daffodils were bowed beneath their snowy mantle. When the snow melted on Wednesday I was sad to see them all lying face down in the bark mulch, still pretty but looking so woeful and defeated by that little blast of winter in April.

Today, as I was leaving for work, I was cheered to see that the majority of the daffodils had managed to straighten their bowed stems. Once again their adorable ruffled faces were turned toward the sun that had just risen over the top of the mountain behind us to the east. Only two flowers were still half bowed. I'm hoping that they will find the strength to stand upright once again- maybe tomorrow.

It brightened my day to see my flowers standing tall again.

Talon Series Books 3 & 4

I've been busy writing the past week or so. I have more or less finished Book 3 in the Talon series which was supposed to be the third in the TRILOGY...except while poking around in a file box I found a binder with a fourth Talon novel half finished, so spent Sunday afternoon through this morning finishing writing that fourth novel.

Therefore- while waiting to go to work I had to go and make an adjustment to the covers of the first and second books in the series (Talon: An Intimate Familiarity and Talon: A Sense of Familiarity) because on the covers of those books it reads in the subtitle first and second books in the Talon trilogy and that's no longer the case. They are the first and second books in the Talon Series. It was a quick fix on the CreateSpace website. I zipped in, fixed the covers and resubmitted the files. Now that I'm thinking about it I should probably go back and add the subtitles to the title pages in the books also.

Books 3 & 4 in the Talon series will be undergoing their final editing/proofing review process and then should be available in May.  Book 4 is set twenty-two years after book 3, but I can't say anymore about it right now.