February is the month of love! On Valentine’s day give the best gift, the gift of love!
Love is a theme in all of my books, whether it’s romantic love (as in Love’s Compass) or eternal love (as in The Setting of The Sun) or infectious love (as in Love, Topaz).
To celebrate love during the month of February I’m offering three promotions within Kindle sales of Love’s Compass. With these offers, I hope to spur on love!
– For the month of February, Love’s Compass is priced at $.99 (99 cents!) per Kindle download of the book at Amazon
– From February 10 till February 14, Love’s Compass is FREE per Kindle download of the book at Amazon
– For the next 90 days, Love’s Compass is part of the lending library on your Kindle
Right now, only my novella Love’s Compass is available through Kindle. Within a month, The Setting of the Sun will be available on Kindle, too. This (my second novella) chronicles one day in the life of a 95-year-old woman as she attends the funeral of her husband, to whom she’s been married 75 years. As her aging mind wanders – through memory, the present day, and thoughts of the afterlife – we come to know her and the love she shared with her husband.
By the fall, the much-anticipated and hugely fun full-length novel Love, Topaz will be available on Kindle! In this mad-cap love story, watch neurotic Jerome (a writer) sneak his love (and muse) Topaz into his one week stay at a writer’s retreat. Is it possible that the love-filled, nymph-like Topaz is containable in one room? No! Readers will laugh, cry, and sigh “Ohhh…” as Topaz’s love permeates her ever-growing environment during her week’s stay within the room, throughout the retreat house, and ultimately, spilling into the small, sleepy town. Watch the icy heart of horror novelist Marlene melt as the love of one mismatch-of-a-man wins her heart. Will Topaz’s presence jump-start the stale marriage of the once hippie couple who run the retreat? You’ll see….!
As I market the works above, I’m at my desk with my author cap on, busy writing a novel that’s a bit edgier. In this story, readers will see how one act that is absent of love – an act of intolerance and rage – so injures the psyche of several individuals that recovery for any seems impossible. Told in the voices of each character, the heart of humanity is exposed in raw forms. Can it repair? I hope so.
Think thoughts of love, every minute of everyday –
A New Year Takes Shape
Great Blue Heron
As the initial days of 2012 unfold, I’m taking stock of my creative energies and devoting time to marketing my writing and photography.
I’ve established a site at Fine Art America where my photos are available in various canvas and framed options. I’m really excited about this venue! Already I’ve had viewers from across the U.S. and around the world!
Stop by the FAA sometime and see all the amazing work by an array of talented folks!
My Mother Left This Life In November 2011
I had this dream the week after my mother died –
She stands at the center of the living room, large open boxes and her twelve young children surrounding her. They know she’s sick. She knows she’s sick. They all know this moment is a gift. She’s beautiful and young. Her hair is dark. Her skin is pale and her face serious. She’s wearing a red knit dress. It hugs her and shows how frail she is. She reaches into a box and with a slender, weak arm she lifts an ornament and hangs it on the Christmas tree. Her children giggle and whisper their delight to each other, “Look at her, she’s up, she’s here.” They tuck their arms to their chests in self hugs and, in happy disbelief, they press their knuckles to their smiling lips. Implicit in each disposition, hers and theirs, is that she will soon be gone – this moment is a miracle. The children know this is their Christmas gift. Nothing could make them happier.
******************************************************
She was their sun and their moon –
their north, their south, their east and their west.
She was the sparkle of light through a drop of morning dew.
She was the scent of ocean in the air, a “sea turn” she called it.
She was the refreshing first sip of her iced tea on a hot July day.
She was the twinkle of the Pleiades and all the stars of a dark night sky.
She was the mystery of the sun spots she recorded through her telescope.
She was the cool air on their bare legs as they ran through the yard.
She was the thrill of burning piles of just-raked fall leaves.
She was the heartbeat beneath their hand as a flag passed on Memorial Day.
She was the innocence of the Christ Child and faithful to the Savior Christ.
She was the old ash tree that now lives on without her.
******************************************************
In the end, we lost our footing on a downhill run.
It came on fast, and though we tried to out-pace death, we landed in a heap, startled and dazed.
When we’d gathered ourselves, she was gone.
Our hearts are broken.
Mum and me, 1957 (photo by my father)
Quality Family Time – Second Time Around
A curious thing happened today. At about 4 p.m. I was trailed into the kitchen by my two young adult children. Though they have each lived away from home, for various reasons both are under my roof again for a time. Our home is large enough that we keep to our own spaces most of the time we are here together, and each prepares his/her own meals according to taste and schedule. So, unlike when they were young, it was a moment of note that we three had arrived in the kitchen at the same time.
But being together was natural enough that we just chatted not aware anything were amiss. After about ten minutes, when there was a lull in the conversation, my son asked, “Is anyone having trouble with the internet?” Simultaneously, my daughter and I said, “Yes!” And immediately we laughed, knowing that for each of us, the trip to the kitchen was a snack break while we suffered through the frustration of not being able to get online. We all realized, and verbalized, how sad it is that we have become this way!
Through the years when my children were young, our home had a large L-shaped kitchen. It seemed as if the rest of the house were superfluous, needed only for bathing and sleeping. I know we each thought of those times today as we recognized our current style of living. And how almost pathetic we said, that a blip in the internet service was the impetus for our togetherness moment.
Note to self: plan a family dinner soon, just like we used to have, every day, in the old days! Chicken nuggets, anyone?
Perception and Being
I’m reading four books right now – all non-fiction. As I think of it, this flurry of reading was preceded by two non-fiction books as well. I don’t always know what’s occurring in my mind as I choose books. Certainly, two of the books I’m reading have been inspired by my employment by a startup. As we posture and position and enter the launch phase, I have a desire to read about “buzz.” So, it’s not surprising that I returned to The Anatomy of Buzz, by Emanuel Rosen, which has recently been updated and is under the title, The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited. Since reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, the power of word-of-mouth fascinates me. More exactly, how humans have a need to share information fascinates me. Humans are a natural for social media. Our tools are just catching up with our tongues.
A co-worker suggested I try Rework, by Jason Fied and David Heinemeier Hansson. This fast-paced read challenges marketing strategies that have been the platform for modern business for decades. It’s a refreshing look at how ingenuity should be brought to market. I’m enjoying it.
Alongside these work related books, I’m reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard and Twelve Moons of the Year, by Hal Borland, both gifts from someone who appreciates my appreciation of nature. I hope soon to begin work on converting my nature photo blog, SilverLining, into a book. I’m reading these books to inspire that endeavor.
There’s not a grand point to this post. Actually, what got me thinking about writing it was a thought rooted in Annie Dillard’s writing, that I found myself mulling over as the sun set beyond the forest of trees that are out the windows that are across the room from where I sit at my desk. Writing the introduction to the post got me side-tracked about the books I’m reading.
So, here’s the thing I was thinking about. In the initial pages of her book, I think Annie Dillard is setting up the reader to be aware of visual perception, so that we are prepared as she shares her mentally challenging (to the reader) perceptions of the natural world. As an exercise to stretch our understanding of the brain’s interpretation of sight and depth perception, she tells about the first life-long blind patients of cataract surgery and their initial reactions to having sight. In more than one instance, the newly seeing patient describes vision as blotches of color – the implication being there is not yet meaning in what the blotches are. Equally interesting is the expressed idea of these patients that the color is immediately before them – there is no distance between them and the “colors” – which are objects known to life-long seeing people. So the net effect was that when these people walked, they perceived the colors as parting, as giving way to their passage – kind of like the way we displace water when we swim through it.
Anyway, my random thought that caused me to post today, was that I found myself sitting here picturing myself passing through the palette of colors before me – across the room and out the wall of glass, and over the deck and into the air that leads to the woods and on toward the setting sun, all without bumping into anything, as if molecules could absorb my being and carry me through and into the infinite sunset. This was the perception of the once blind – the perception, as Annie points out, of every newborn. I believe she challenges us to consider if we construct our own constraints.
A Slant of Light
2010 – a long year,
unraveling twenty-six
that ended on the 13th
in December
The afternoon sun came in low through a window and illuminated and made shadows on a wall of objects on a chest in a corner. Christmas decorations sat in temporary place while the chest itself and a lamp and three framed paintings held the scene’s unchanging structure. Through the lens lines were aligned and varied positions were tried to use the light before it faded and the shadows were lost. Four good pictures were stored on the disc. The urgency of the moment passed and the sun faded.
What of these things, when looked at later, became more than the photos themselves? What realization made the images more than the light or the shadows or the objects or the final arrangement of the colored pixels?
He would take the chest – it was his uncle’s – and one-half of the Christmas decorations. She’d keep the paintings – done by her mother – and the lamp. The walls would be sold. All the walls would be sold, and the doors and the windows, and the upstairs and the downstairs. The profit, or loss, would be split – 50/50.
What had happened? What made it unravel? A twist of fate? Or a slant of light?
The Moon and Fun
You know how people send all sorts of inspirational emails to you? The kind of emails that are circulating to the masses and are meant to inspire or inform or put the fear of God in you or fill your heart with love? Also, often when you get them they have been forwarded so many times the format of the page is a mess or you have to scroll through about three screens worth of address groups to get to the actual message?
For the record, I almost never forward those emails. And, if I do, to protect my family and friends from viruses, I copy and paste the body of the message into a new email.
Today, I have received a link in an email from a friend – my preferred way to receive these unsolicited but informative emails. And the post that the link took me to is so delightfully awesome, I am bypassing the email method of spreading the charm, and blogging about it.
It will take you no more than a minute to enjoy this link.
Here’s what it says to me —
Humans are fun by nature. We forget to have fun. We forget how to have fun.
This is fun – enjoy!
http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2010/11/04/131063948/moon
(Scroll through all eleven images, which follow the brief text.)
Fall Festival – Ashfield, Mass.
- Pumpkins in Ashfield, Mass.
I went to the Ashfield Fall Festival in Massachusetts this weekend. It was a symphony of color, light, people, and music. The weather was fall perfect. I think that, for me, it was more about the mood, the ambience, than anything else. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. Here are 17,000 words worth of pictures I took at the festival.
Thanks for a wonderful time, Ashfield.Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Into My Home
Ladybug
I’ve mentioned in this blog lots of times that I write a photo blog about a pond near my house. I love the blog. It’s called SilverLining because it’s been the silver lining in my life for more than three years now.
Once a day, at least, I get up from my desk and I head out the door with my Nikon D40. I walk about a sixty paces and I’m at a small pond where, for three and a half years as I walk around it through all seasons, I’ve become far better acquainted with nature than ever before in my life. Sometimes I wonder if I had the same wonder for the natural world in my childhood, the toddler years. I think it’s likely. I was outside most of the day and most of the time was spent exploring the fields and woods around my house.
I’m not a professional photographer. In fact I know very little about my camera and picture-taking. I just do my best to get good focus, I pray for good lighting, and I let nature show itself to me. The photo above, which I took just yesterday, is no prize winner, but it’s awfully sweet!
Last night as I sat working at my computer, a bug like the one above (did in come into the house with me?), flew onto my computer screen. I was so happy! At long last one of my outdoor pals came in to see me and to have a good look at my world! For half an hour or more it crawled all around my screen and the frame of the computer.
It spent a good deal of time studying the latch. In fact it crawled inside it.
And it did a little exploring at the highest point. See how cleverly I’ve cropped the next shot…!? (Lower left corner…)
And below, my visitor unwittingly causes a great plug for the client whose site I was working on!
For the naturalists among you, I believe (I always use that qualifier as I’m no more a naturalist than I am a photographer) that this is a Convergent Ladybug.
Happy weekend.
sublime days 
The Setting of a Clock Tower
Ayer Mill Clock Tower - Lawrence, Massachusetts
I’m putting the finishing touches on a slip of a book (21,000 words) and will be uploading it to Amazon’s Kindle digital publishing, KDP, in the next week.
The book, The Setting of the Sun, tells a story about love – and love’s power over death. Because the love I saw between my maternal grandparents inspired the story, I chose their home town, the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, as the location of the story. My grandmother, like the main character in The Setting of the Sun, was born in 1898. Lawrence was a thriving mill city at that time – a planned city (designed by the Essex Company), which sits on the shores of the Merrimack River, from which the mills drew their power.
I did a small amount of historical research for this work of fiction. But I also grew up in a small town a few miles from Lawrence, so some history of the city was sort of innate to me.
My mother was my first editor for The Setting of the Sun. Educated in the solidly good Lawrence school system of the ’20s and ’30s, she had a strong grasp of English grammar. We had no idea at the time she was editing The Setting of the Sun that she’d be gone from this life within a year. I’m so glad now that as she edited it, she saw that I had dedicated the book to her.
My whole life I’d taken for granted that I could see the Ayer Mill Clock Tower in Lawrence from the top of the hill I lived on in my hometown, which neighbored Lawrence. My eyes were also quite used to seeing the clock tower loom over Lawrence as I drove toward Rt. 495 when taking the highway north or south.
But as my mind visualized one of the final scenes in the novel, the clock tower took center stage. Its significance in the geography of the city, as a symbol of the once mighty mill city, and in representing the passage of time – the Ayer Mill Clock Tower became a natural symbol within the story I was writing.
I’ve incorporated into the book jacket a Photoshop sketch of a photo (above) that I took of the clock tower in July 2010.
I know this is a rambling post…but what I want to get to is that today I was poking around on the Internet, reading about the Ayer Mill Clock Tower. I found a wonderful article (written in 1998) about the keeper of the clock at that time. It’s a delightful and informative read. If you’ve seen the movie Hugo, it will have even greater impact.
Enjoy!
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