Snow in Staunton

I have no idea how blogspot works. I didn't publish that last post on Dec 1, I published on Dec 6. I started it Dec 1 and meant to publish it that day. Does it read my mind?

Well, anyway...

Food for thought. What are the little stories your characters tell? I've spent the last two days working on Samaritan's Purse. My cousin goes every year to help inspect and pack the shoe boxes. This year she had an extra space to go since her son was unable to go and I took his place. It really opened my eyes to a wonderful project. That's another post and what I wanted to talk about here though was that in the long trip down and the long trip back I heard a lot of stories. These are the every day stories of our lives. The time the driveway needed to be repaved, the search for a new house, the children we raised or are raising and so on. The thought occurred to me as I listened that you reveal a lot of yourself not only in the stories that you tell but in the way that you tell them.

So I started thinking about the characters in my book. It's set in the 1930's. Back then as much as now they told stories and yet in my novel I'm so focused on the one I want to tell, I've forgotten to allow my characters to talk about the time the fox raided the hen house. Paw had to kill the fox before he could replace the hen. That fox skin fetched $5 which is where the money came from for the hen.

Anyway, since I'm unable to focus on my novel due to the stress of Christmas I intend to write the little stories of my characters lives, the ones they tell at supper, at the general store, on the porch, etc. By the way, I love Christmas, it's a wonderful family time, it just takes a lot of planning so that the event goes off smoothly. It's the planning I find stressful because people are so puzzling to me. Just when I think I know how to behave I'm told that no, that actually is not the thing to say or do.

I have a lot of wonderful snow pictures that I will post as soon as I can load them on my computer.

This Week in Literary Richmond

What is more frustrating? Trying to log in when the computer insists on using your accidental misspelling and no matter how often you try to backspace it keeps filling in the rest of the url or trying to catch a cat that finds it amusing to wait until you're one inch away before he steps effortlessly four feet away?

Literary wise, James River Writers moved their headquarters today. It isn't far from it's original location, however, it is more upscale. I was surprised at the art in the gallery. It would be affordable for me if I didn't have children two years away from college and yet it seemed worth so much more than the asking price.

Over on examiner they interviewed Maggie Stiefavter. Did you know they were going to turn her book Shiver into a movie?

Jason Tesauro wrote a nice online article about wine in Virgina. I noticed he didn't mention Rapidan wines. Granted I can't drink wine, turns out I'm allergic to sulphites, but I feel a certain loyalty to my own region, as if this defines taste in wine. Okay, I can almost tell the difference between grape juice and wine. Sigh, I really can't. I'll never be one of those snotty nosed connoisseurs. It took me ten minutes to find the spelling of that word, how in the world am
I supposed to tell the difference between a Merlot and a Chardonnay when both literally take my breath away? Still if you drink wine and can tell the difference between red and white,
Jason is the man to know. He isn't snotty either. He's a very friendly man with a likable personality.

Okay this post was started before I went out of town. I'm not really good with this remote stuff and I'm still out of town. Still frustrated with the computer too. I dislike touch pads.

James River Writers also has a poetry contest going on. The deadline for entering it is December 15. As far as contests go this one isn't bad. It is relatively unknown so you're not competing with thousands of people yet the judges are serious poets. Last year the judge was one of the local VCU professors. This year it is Joshua Poteat. He has published a couple books of poems.

Jeff VanderMeer will be at Fountain Bookstore on December 8. His book is Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer. It would be interesting to hear him speak.

Things I'm Thankful For

It's Thanksgiving. I'll go with the flow, here is a list of things I'm thankful for.



My daughter's talent with the fiddle. I don't know why when my children play their music (my oldest used to play piano) it calms me and lifts my spirits.

That my son won a church bingo game. It meant so much to him that he had good karma.



My father treating us to a trip to Gatlingburg. My kids will always have those memories of being with their grandparents in a fun place, doing simple things like camping, riding go-carts, riding the trolley, or playing in the river.


Picking apples in the fall. My husband was going to Graves Mountain long before he met me. We continued to go throughout the years. Traditions help us to remember who we are. This year I walked behind my son who carried the box of apples. I remembered all those years ago lifting him up to pick apples.



Playing with shadows because the simple things in life are fun. My children have all these great memories of playing at the children's museum when they were kids. It lost its appeal as they grew older and now all the sudden it's fun again because they go with their younger cousins.



The swim team. My children enjoy it. I enjoy taking pictures and the fact that so many of the parents appreciate receiving the pictures.

My camera. It provides me memories, it lets me share memories with other people, and the pictures I take become a gift to the many people who've stepped into the range of my lens.


Rapidan. For those who don't know about it, this is a small place up in the mountains, old cabins that stretch back to my husband's childhood days. My children's memories are full of this place and I enjoy the escape to a place without tv. Someday I'll go up there and finish my novel.



My flowers. When my flowers are blooming in mass and there are enough to clip and bring in the house, I enjoy this. This is most especially true when spring is cold and I'm looking at the bright yellow daffodils in a cobalt blue vase. It helps lift my mood.

Thanksgiving with my husband's family. For me it's a time to relax. None of them care if I'm fat or published or beautiful and dressed in expensive clothes. I can't compete with their intelligence so I don't try. It's nice to sit and not have someone try to prove they're smarter than me, challenging me to some stupid wit game that I can't win because when you argue with a fool no one can tell which one is which.

The fall. Warm falls are nice because the kids play in the leaves. The snow because it's a fun day. The best days are the ones where I've got a fire going, school is out, and all day they go sled, warm-up, drink hot cocoa, and go back out again.


That day when the weather was a perfect late summer's day, seventy-two, warm sun, comfortable chairs and four ball games going at once. I walked from one to the other taking pictures and reveling in the fact that my sister lived so close our kids played ball in the same location. We grew up never living any closer than six hours drive from our family. In many years we weren't even in the same country. I didn't know how much I wanted that simple life until I had it. There are some days when lifted spirits can't be measured against other events. It isn't like the moment you buy a house or win an award. It's deeper and more pervasive as if the soul could be filled with just the right amount of sun. Not a sweaty summer day or a reflective snowy one, this one lies right in the middle where it feels like an embrace rather than an illumination.



That my brother-in-law is alive. We had a close call this year. By Labor Day he was well enough to participate in the parade. Just to say it felt good to see him coming up the road, all in green, surrounded by laundry on the line, well, it doesn't quite sound as heartwarming as it was. If you've ever had a close call with a loved one you know it isn't the big things that remind you of how important life is, it's the little ones. It's as if Providence says, "the blanket on the line only reminds us of sleeping, the shirt reminds us of who wore it."



My husband. I had a close call with him too.

This Week in Literary Richmond

It was an ambitious project I don't seem to be doing well, keeping tabs on literary Richmond that is.

I did find some interesting news that while not tied to Richmond it certainly affects many of our Richmond writers. Harlequin has decided to extend it's name to self-publishing. Yup, they now have Harlequin Horizons and this is a self publishing house. There has been a lot of hullabaloo on the internet about this. I'll assume most of you already have heard it. Mostly the Richmond romance writers have been silent. The literary agents have not. Authors have not. Romance Writers of America took Harlequin's conference privileges away.

Personally I think it was foolish of them to include the Harlequin name. Way back a hundred plus years ago this company called Bayer created a pain killer and named it Aspirin. That was the copyrighted name. The problem is, it became synonymous with any pain killer made with acetylsalicylic acid and ultimately Bayer lost the copyright to its name. Aspirin is now the generic term for the simple pain killer.

Already Harlequin's name is synonymous with romance. If they muddy the waters by letting anyone publish their "romance" how long will it be before those self-published erotica books become porn? For the women who can't seem to get enough romance novels to read, the ones who might chose a self-published book just for something different, well there is no way of knowing what you will get. Sweet Barbara Cartland style or racier Johanna Lindsey. You don't even know if they plagiarized, Janet Dailey, and that's why the writing seemed to similar to so-and-so's. Personally I think Harlequin would be better off keeping their name respectable and extending their self-publishing arm under another name before the name Harlequin becomes generic for poor quality writing.

Something tells me though that Harlequin isn't terribly impressed with my opinion. I'm glad they listen to RWA. Now I have a headache and need some aspirin.

David Robbins Speaking Event

It's a lot late but here it goes....

November 13 David Robbins spoke about his latest book, Broken Jewel. I had already picked it up and started reading it when I went to this event. I remember reading a long section that was essentially back story dump and wondering, he did this? Really the man who rants and rave against authors who do this, actually spent pages telling back story? You know what section of his book he chose to read? That one. There is a big difference between reading and listening. When he read it aloud I started to hear things in that section I hadn't noticed before.

I'm a detail person. I had a cruel teacher in high school that would fail you for not noticing details like the color of the umbrella. So I noticed when David included Mark Lazenby in his novel. This is a friend of his. I noticed when he had one of the comfort women acting in ways that are very true reactions for rape victims. Most people, unless they've studied the psychology, do not know how to treat rape victims. I noticed the comfort woman clutched a doll though I was never sure of why this was. I suspect she was attempting to regain the childhood she lost.

What I heard when he was reading was that the main character loved his wife. I understand now why poets insist that poetry be read aloud. I had somehow missed this as I was reading silent to myself. I noticed the brown paper used as wallpaper and the magazine cut-outs as decoration but I didn't quite see this as love when I read it. Yet there was something in the way David was reading that made me understand this was her way of showing love.

Anyway, it was interesting to listen to him talk. He told us why the book was titled Broken Jewel which seemed particularly well applied. He talked about convincing his editors of his ability to write from a comfort woman's point of view. It was a scene he read to us, rather bravely, I must admit because even had I written that scene I don't know that I would have wanted to read it aloud, very revealing. It wasn't graphic. As he said the point was to let the reader apply to the scene his or her own knowledge and conclusions, however, it was still a point of vulnerability. It takes guts to stand before your readers and discuss things most people avoid whenever possible.

All in all I was surprised by David. He does this sometimes. Just when you think, he has done too many things so that anything he does is not a surprise, well, he did again. I opened this book thinking there was no possible way he could handle the subject that would impress me. He did because I believe he took the time to research and understand the subject matter.

Of course, I didn't know any of this November 13 since I hadn't finished the book yet. I was mostly impressed with how he dealt with a particular audience member that seemed to want to be the center of attention or at the very least demand her questions be answered.