Temple Founder's Day--hot, hot, hot!

It was HOT! When you sit in the middle of a parking lot, surrounded by asphalt, you expect the heat, but the reality is way beyond expectations. John said it was only 89 degrees, but it might as well have been 95. There was a breeze and that helped. T. L. Gray and I had a good day selling our books and making contacts with various people. Check you T. L.'s website http://www.thebloodofcain.com/ Her book is wonderful! Be sure to read all the reviews. I recommend it highly if you like good stories that are well told.

We'll both be at MeccaFest, October 9-10, at the Cultural Arts Center in Carrollton. The Carrollton Creative Writers Club will not only be selling our books, but also will be presenting "Local Voices". We will read excerpts, poems, and stories from our works from 10:30 till 3 on Saturday and 11:30 till 4 on Sunday in the Mabry Auditorium. I'll be reading three excerpts form Mother's Day, my novel in progress. At least the readings will be inside. Come and see us at the tents or enjoy the creativity of the members. We'd love to see you all.

Flowers for Our Anniversary

Aren't they beautiful! Imagine our surprise and delight on Sunday morning to find that one of our friends--Barbara Billert--had bought the flowers for the Sanctuary in honor of our anniversary. We had no clue until someone pointed out the notice in the bulletin. Our dining room table is five feet wide and the flowers are over three and a half feet wide. They made an amazing centerpiece. And if you wondered what was piled up around the flowers, it's stacks of A Christmas Walk. Where else did you think I'd put them? ; )

33 Years! You have to be kidding!

No, I'm not kidding. Thirty-three years ago on September 4, John and I got married. We were twenty-one years old and ready to take on the world. Since we met at what was then West Georgia College in a Political Science class titled "Foreign Relations", you might not be surprised that we get married at Kennedy Chapel on the Front Campus. At eight in the morning. Really. We knew how busy Maple Street was during the day and wanted the ceremony to be outside on the steps amid the trees and flowers of Front Campus. So, early in the morning on Labor Day Sunday, we said our "I do's". Pleasantly cool air greeted the twenty-three guests. I had made my dress and John's shirt and tie.

After the ceremony, we ate brunch in place of a reception. So is it any wonder, that we celebrated our anniversary with a buffet breakfast this morning? What could be better?

We drove to Savannah for our honeymoon and loved every minute of it. In fact, on our honeymoon, we found that we have a very special freight line. Really. One day during our week in Savannah, we were out on Tybee Island and saw a containerized freight ship coming in the Savannah River channel. It was the Arnold-Mersk. Later stopping at Pulaski National Battlefield, we saw the same ship coming up the river. Hurrying into town, we found the ship sailing slowly past River Street. So now, when we see railroad car after railroad car of Mersk containers, we turn to each other and grin. Some couples have a favorite song. We have a freight line. ; )

Leaving So Soon?

I really wanted to create a four seasons cherry tree montage for the blog this year, but my cherry tree had other ideas. It's only August and the tree is dropping its leaves like it's October. So, I find myself showing you the aftermath of a record-breaking summer. There's been plenty of rain, but the temperatures have stayed in the 90's almost every day. That's taken a toll on my cherry tree. The photos above are from top left and going clockwise--August, February, April, and June. I'll admit the winter photo of snow-laden branches is not the norm for winter in Georgia. ; ) Usually the tree is lace-work limbs in the winter, clacking in the stiff northwest wind. I couldn't resist the lovely shot I got this year with our snow.

And the Cover Is...

~~A Christmas Walk is at the printer and will be here in September--right on schedule for Temple Founder's Day on September 18. The cover is glorious! I found the image at http://www.istockphoto.com/ and Diana Black designed the cover around it. Check out Diana's website at http://www.diana-designs.net/ It pays to hire the very best as you can see. ; )

House Party Alchemy

~~Cherry Hill is magic! When I volunteered to host a Forum house party, I saw it as a chance to try out my novel's setting on a group of talented writers. If Susan, Claire, Deniz, Adderbury, Marilyn, Spesh, Becky, Ron, Jill, and Tara could interact with my small Georgia town well enough to create a story, I would be happy.
~~Well, I'm ecstatic! We had a stellar house party. Among us, we wrote 180,976 words from Thursday night, July 29, to Saturday night, August 7. I had prepared about 10,000 words before hand. I didn't use all of them, and some had to be reshaped to fit the story as we went. As the other writers interacted with their characters, I found myself describing more and more about Laura Grace Chandler's home town, Cherry Hill, Georgia.
~~My characters--Laura Grace, Samantha, Rosemary, and Dean--had to respond to the story as well. I wrote a total of 13,646 words across the nine days of the house party. My total original words of all types connected with the house party is 18,410. That's amazing! Much of this material will be useful with some reshaping in my novel, Mother's Day. More importantly, my understanding of the relationship between Laura Grace and Rosemary has become clear. This is one to the emotional cores of my story. I hadn't seen a way to tell this part of the story until my fellow writers reacted to my town. Now I can write Mother's Day as it should written.
~~To my Forum family, thank you, one and all, dear friends for this gift. It's beyond anything I could have imagined.

House Party? Am I invited?

~~The short answer is yes! You're invited to travel to Cherry Hill, GA, the setting of my novel in progress.
~~The long answer takes some explaining. ; ) I'm a member of the CompuServe Books and Writers Forum and an active participant in the Writers Exercises folder. My fellow members and I do writing craft exercises every month and every few months, we hold an online house party in the setting of one of our works in progress. This time, my Laura Grace Chandler is hosting over forty characters that range from contemporary to historical and fantasy to scifi. Twelve different writers are adding to the running story that started late Thursday night and will continue into the coming weekend. They are from all over the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. We trust each other with our characters and, as the story evolves, we can find our creations doing all sorts of strange and wonderful things. The greatest thing about a house party is that, as you write by the seat of your pants, you have to respond to suggestions and situations you could not have thought of by yourself. Characters have a way of deepening and stretching in reaction to the scenes and the writer's grasp on the person that inhabits their stories deepens with it.
~~If you would like to sample the story go to:
http://community.compuserve.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=1&nav=messages&webtag=ws-books&tid=68081
You do not have to be a member of the forum to read the story. But a word of warning: It is wickedly fast, well over 200 posts long, and no where near to completion. You just might find yourself hooked. ; )
If you want to get a glimpse of how we communicate with each other outside of the story, try the commentary thread here:
http://community.compuserve.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=1&nav=messages&webtag=ws-books&tid=68082
~~Happy reading! ; )

The Queen's Court

~~Darkness became an only cat again when Snow died. She took it in stride as with everything. We never saw her hunting for him, but then, she had watched him like a hawk as he felt his way about the house in his last days. She was about fifteen years old by then and we really didn't expect to get more cats until she had purred her last. In fact, she was starting to sleep more and more by the time she was seventeen. Cataracts, reduced hearing, and arthritis were slowing her down to a crawl. We began to talk about what we would do when she was gone from our lives. We thought we might hunt for siblings this time. A yellow tabby and a calico were on our wish list.

~~Then it all changed. Living by a church and across the street from another seemed to make us a animal rescue center. For years, we noticed that people thought that someone who went to church would have pity on a poor abandoned animal. Many dogs and cats had been dropped off in the neighborhood. We weren't in the position to care for them at all. So they either wandered off or found the wildlife to their liking. The woods in the backyard were full of squirrels, birds, rabbits, and chipmunks. It seemed that many a cat made a good living on the edges of our yard.

~~One day in the fall of 1997, we found a young female cat hanging at our door. She was striped like a tabby, but she was not all yellow or gray striped. Her legs would be both in the most interesting fashion. The vet would describe her as a calico tabby. At John's parents' house next door, there was a young yellow tabby male. They were obviously siblings with the same light green eyes and markings. We couldn't resist them, but the male had a lump on his abdomen. We were hooked and decided to keep them outside to spare Darkness the upheaval kittens would cause her very sedate life.

~~Named Sunshine and Meow, the twins had to come in when Sunshine's lump turned out to be an umbilical hernia and he needed surgery. Trying to keep the three separate was impossible. The cats decided that they were going to investigate each other and that was that. We soon realized that the kittens were just what Darkness needed. They would trot just fast enough to keep their tails in her eyesight. She would run as fast as she could, but didn't catch them. That's when we noticed that she was feeling much better. Darkness lived another four years thanks to Sunshine and Meow. They were Maine coon cats while Darkness was a small domestic short hair. She never weighed more than ten pounds in her life. The kittens would top 18 and 22 at one time and yet, Darkness was the undisputed queen of our home. Regal until the end.

~~Sadly, Darkness developed severe dementia at 21. She ceased knowing who we were and began to bite. When she latched onto my hand and refused to let go for minutes at a time, we knew she was ready. She had ceased to purr the last month until we took her in to the vet the last time. Then we were rewarded with the loving little girl we had lived with for so long. In the fall of 2001, Darkness passed into her reward. We have never forgotten her. She'll always be the queen.