Today is Father’s Day, so I posted this picture of my Dad as my Facebook status. It generated much interest (and a few questions), so I decided to blog about it.

My parents, both of whom I lost during this last decade, were . . . unusual. They were a pretty typical mom and dad in most ways, but they were also Hams with a capital H. For example, they loved to go on cruises that had costume contests, and for every talent show at their retirement village, they’d dust off an old vaudeville routine to entertain their neighbors. But the highlights of their entertainment career were definitely their “performances” with Don Ho.

Mom and Dad weren’t rich–Dad was a school principal–but they were careful with money and after retirement, they were able to spend two months every winter in Hawaii. They adored Don Ho and at one of his shows, Mr Ho asked who in the audience had been married the longest. At nearly 60 years, my parents won the contest and were invited on stage. Don Ho didn’t know what he was getting into when he asked the old dude in the pink leisure suit and the elderly woman in the muumuu to join him. Dad started telling his jokes and Mom did the hula without waiting for an invitation. The audience loved it so much that Mr Ho invited my parents back. Again and again.

Even after my parents could no longer travel to Hawaii, Don Ho didn’t forget them. When Mom was in the hospital after suffering a heart attack, he called her to wish her well, impressing the nurses no end!

I probably have some of these details wrong (in which case my brothers and sister will be along to set me straight), but I think you can get a pretty good picture of my parents from this post. My siblings and I are all into the arts in some way–writing, art, theater, music–and we often say that “we don’t know where we got it from” because our parents never pursued any of those creative avenues. But maybe it simply boils down to a desire to entertain. That we come by naturally.

I had such a treat this evening. I received an email a while back from a woman named Jodi who invited me to visit her bookclub. All the women in her club work at a preschool in Cary, NC, but they spend a weekend together on Topsail Island each year. It so happened they’re on TI this weekend, same time as me, so I decided to stop by for just a few minutes . What a great group! I stayed nearly an hour. There’s nothing as interesting, fun, inspirational and bonding as a group of women together. (I’m the one in the hat). They’d read The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes and had lots of questions and lovely compliments. It was a delightful visit. Thank you to Jodi for inviting me and to your group for making me feel so welcome!

Whoa, this is what I look like after a few weeks of working ’round the clock. Tired. John snapped this pic of me at Starbucks this morning while I was writing. He said “Give me a big smile!” and I thought I was. I think I’m fried!

It’s always this way in the month before deadline. I finished my second draft today. Yahoo! One more major draft and then a “clean-up” draft and I’ll be done. However, this draft needs some fixing up before I can move on to the next, and the fix-up involves ditching something I originally loved.  One of my characters, Tara, is a young widow, and I had her writing short notes to her late husband at the start of her chapters. Remember how nicely this worked in The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes, where the mother wrote letters to CeeCee? Well, it worked beautifully for about three chapters in my work-in-progress and then began to feel contrived. One of the most painful things a writer needs to learn is when to let go. Something–a turn of phrase, a particular scene, a character’s quirky voice–may seem brilliant when conceived but if it fizzles in execution, it’s got to go. So that is the first thing I need to fix before I dig into the third draft.

Then I need to completely rewrite an important chapter before I can move on. It’s a flashback chapter in which we see four women friends in college as they get to know each other and it Does Not Work. Oh, it’s okay and I could let it slide, but  I think it can be better. Much better. I want that scene to convince my readers that these women will be bonded for life. That’s my task for tomorrow. Bond a few women for life. Wish me luck!

I also have to pack tomorrow because Tuesday we’re transferring our work to Topsail Island for a fews days. I have some research to do in nearby Wilmington, a few tasks in the condo, and some all important strolls on the beach with my pups. Yeah!

So I’ll probably continue to look sleepy for a while, but I can see the end of the tunnel. Then, of course, it will be time to start working on the next book…

Today I was twice reminded that I have a quirk.

This morning, I received a request to speak at an event and had to ask my standard question: “Can you describe the venue to me, please?” Here is my ideal venue in which to speak. It’s a large, low-ceilinged room, perhaps a meeting room or ballroom in a hotel, filled with chairs and/or tables (and of course, an audience of avid readers). Sure enough, the request was for just such a venue, and I breathed a sigh of relief for reasons I’ll get to soon enough.

Then this afternoon, John and I visited a new health club. As part of the tour, we were taken into the gym. John admired the hugeness of the place, the maple floors, the equipment stored against the walls, while I hung back in the doorway asking, “Uh, the yoga class isn’t held in here, is it?” (It’s not. Big sigh of relief).

It’s hard to explain how I feel about huge, open spaces (Like the train station above. Shudder). If you have any trepidation at all about heights, I can probably make you understand in this way: Imagine standing on the top of twenty story building, at the very edge of the roof, no railing between you and the abyss. That’s how I feel standing in the middle of a gym or Union Station or a giant auditorium. (Now, as you stand at the edge of that roof, try to give a speech. Ha!).

A couple of years ago I was discussing my speaking venue dilemma with a friend, poet and short story writer Maureen Sherbondy, and I told her how foolish I felt about my need to ascertain the venue before accepting an invitation to speak. Maureen said something like “But you’re a writer. People expect writers to have quirks.” So now I’m into embracing my inner quirk. I much prefer that word to “phobia.”

Where did this come from? I’ve already opened up in the blog about my selective mutism as a kid, and this may have been an extension of that in some way–the school phobia leading to the large space phobia. I had many fears when I was young, and with a fascination for all things psychological, I worked through them one by one as I got older. The fear I am most proud of conquering was my fear of hospitals. I wouldn’t visit hospitalized friends or family; I couldn’t even tolerate the lobbies. In my graduate social work program, I actively avoided classes where I knew there would be students whose focus was on medical social work because I didn’t want to hear them talk about their cases. Yet, an event in my life ultimately led me to want to be a medical social worker myself. I was familiar with desensitization and other ways of overcoming fears, so I created my own therapeutic approach to the problem. Six months after making my decision to switch from being a family therapist to a medical social worker, I was working in a hospital and loving it. What an amazing sense of accomplishment that was!

But no amount of desensitization or insight or therapy has ever put a dent in my discomfort with big spaces. I’ve spoken in a few of them, managing to find work-arounds that probably made me seem highly eccentric (an odd placement of the podium, perhaps), but I guess I’m just a quirky writer and that’s all there is to it. 

So how about you? Can you stand on the roof of a twenty-story building without freaking out? Ride in teeny tiny elevators? Marvel at the colors of the snake in your backyard? What’s your quirk?

I’m a believer in resolutions. I don’t always keep them, but there’s something about that “fresh start feeling” that has great appeal to me. I have a slew of resolutions this year. Here goes:

-Work at writing as though it’s a 9 to 5 job.  This may sound like a no-brainer, especially to those of you who are not self-employed, but I tend to let other things get in the way of writing during the day. Then I work late into the night and I’m usually freaking out in the weeks leading up to deadline. All right, I know I’ll still freak out shortly before deadline, but organizing my work schedule will make me feel more in control before the crunch hits. So I’m going to pretend I have a boss who will not allow me to spend hours on Facebook or run out for groceries or Starbucks when the urge pops into my mind. Which brings me to the second resolution.

-I will actually attend the gym where I have a membership, instead of merely paying them a fee each month, and I will go early in the morning so I can be at my computer at 9 am. Uh, this should be interesting. To be at the gym early in the morning means going to bed earlier at night. Which brings me to resolution number three.

-Lights out at midnight. Not sure how I’m going to do this, because my reading time is usually 11 pm to 1 am or later. I can’t give up reading, so I guess I’ll have to get an earlier start on it.   

-Attend mindfulness classes at a local yoga center. I’ve recently rediscovered my mindfulness and meditation practice, something I enjoyed when I lived in Virginia. It centers me and brings me peace and joy, but as with everything else on my list, I need to actually do it to reap the benefit. 

-Do a few hours of volunteer work each month. I am so blessed, and there’s so much need.

-Stay in better touch with my family and friends. This should really be number one on my list. It is number one. 

Looking over my resolutions, I can see the one thing that will trip me up is TIME. Like everyone else in the world, I don’t have enough of it. But I’m going to give this list my best shot.

 How about you? Are you a resolver?

Over the next few posts, I’m going to share some of the research that went into the writing of my recently resissued novel, Breaking the Silence. I’ll write about the secret CIA Mind Control experiments in which my character, Sarah Tolley, was a participant, and I’ll talk about  my personal experience with selective mutism, which is five-year-old Emma’s affliction.   

Right now, though, I’m going to start on a lighter note as I describe my harrowing experience with hot air balloons. In Breaking the Silence, Dylan Geer makes his living as a hot air balloon pilot. Since he’s a point-of-view character, I wanted to understand what his world was like. During the time I was researching Breaking the Silence, my brother-in-law worked for a hot air balloon company, so I was able to quickly schedule a flight. The weather, though, didn’t care about my connections, and six flights were cancelled because of high winds or rain. A seventh had to be cancelled when we hit a traffic jam on the beltway around Washington DC on our way to the launch site. I was living in Northern Virginia at the time, and as those of you familiar with that area know, traffic can come to a standstill that lasts hours. And this one did. Darkness was falling by the time we gave up and headed back home.

Finally, it looked as though the eighth flight would be a go and we arrived at the launch site with time to spare. There were to be two flights that evening, and ours would be the second. My then-husband and I climbed into the chase vehicle while the first set of passengers–four senior citizens–were helped into the basket. I was excited to have the time in the chase vehicle, and I whipped out my pad and pen to take notes as we drove all over rural Maryland trying to keep the balloon in sight. The winds were misbehaving a bit. They would misbehave a bit more before the evening was over.

Part of the role of the chase crew is to find a landing site for the balloon. This was a challenge, since the balloon seemed to be flying farther and faster than anyone had anticipated. Finally, we found a field. The only building was a beautful, big farmhouse and the crew asked the owners for permission to land the balloon on their land. Then we all stood around and watched the distant dot in the sky as it grew bigger and bigger, heading smoothly for the field near the house.

Suddenly, a gust of wind grabbed hold of the balloon, lifting it abruptly into the air again and out of reach of the crew. Everyone on the ground and in the balloon started yelling and shouting (and maybe even screaming and ducking; that would be me) as the balloon headed directly for the chase vehicle. The basket bashed into the side of the van, and then the wind pulled both balloon and basket rapidly down the gravel driveway. The chase crew, my ex, and the adult family members from the farmhouse ran after the basket, trying to stop its sideways slide. The balloon itself smashed into the farmhouse, finally bringing the basket’s wild ride to a halt. Thankfully, injuries to the passengers were minor–a bloody gash on a leg and some very jangled nerves–but the balloon was not so lucky–it suffered tears that would require repair before it could fly again. I can’t say I was unhappy about that! No way was I going up that day.

But I was determined to have my flight. A few weeks later, I climbed into that same basket on a balmy evening and we rose into the air. I had one minor moment of “Ack! This is high!” before settling into the amazing sensation of sailing far above the ground. We were up there no more than ten minutes, though, when it started to sprinkle. The sprinkle turned to real, serious rain, and our pilot began searching for a place to land. In communication with the chase crew, he learned of a quarry not far from where we were flying.

When you think of landing a balloon, you think of a nice flat field, don’t you? Maybe there’d be a goat or a bull in the field, but that would be the worst of it. But a quarry? We had to land and land fast, and the quarry was our only choice. I was able to see firsthand the skill of our pilot as he maneuvered our balloon between two rock walls, dodged the jagged remnant of a dead tree trunk by–I swear–one inch, and brought the basket down with a thud on the narrow road that ran through the quarry. I will end my tale here, and only mention in passing that the gates leading out of the quarry were locked, with the balloon and basket and us on one side and the chase vehicle and crew on the other.

Dylan Geer, my commitment phobic character,  has one close call with his balloon, though not quite as dramatic as what I actually witnessed. It was fun getting to write about something as light-hearted as hot air balloons in an otherwise serious story.

I hope I get to fly in a hot air balloon again, but I’m going to wait until I’m someplace where there are wide open spaces and no wind and no chance of rain. Does a place like that exist?

Want to waste some time? Go to Wordle and paste in something you’ve written. Wordle creates a word cloud displaying the words in your document according to how often you’ve used them. You can pick out any colors and fonts and layout you like. I’ve pasted the first chapter from Breaking the Silence (which you can read here if you like) into Wordle and created the above cloud. It’s definitely Laura’s story! Her five-year-old daughter, Emma, comes in a close second in this chapter, in which Laura’s father makes a deathbed request that she take care of a woman who is a stranger to her.

I can see how this could be a good tool to pick up overused words in my writing. I apparently use a lot of “eyes” and ”hands”, at least in this chapter. My most annoying overused word is usually “winced”, and I’m glad not to see that here. My brother, Rob Lopresti, is also a writer and here’s what he wrote a while back in one of his blogs, which I found pretty funny:

First I check for the words I tend to overuse. They are usually the bits of physical punctuation that fit between lines of dialog, like frown, shrug, and sigh. (My sister Diane Chamberlain says that the characters in her novels tend to wince too much, which suggests that while being in one of my works is boring, being in hers is actually painful.)

LOL!

So anyway, I can see how this tool could be useful in catching overused words, but more than that, I think it’s fun and the results are kind of pretty. Have some time to waste? Hop over to Wordle, paste in your latest words of wisdom. Even if they’re not pretty on the written page, they’ll look pretty on your monitor!

I drove down the long gravel driveway to the Weymouth mansion Thursday afternoon with a prayer of gratitude on my lips. Coming here is like flipping a switch from the world of laundry and grocery shopping and doctors’ appointments and phone calls to the world of writing and nature and friends. Sarah Shaber was the first person I saw when I climbed the stairs to the writers’ section of the house, and she said she’d felt a lump in her throat as she came up the driveway. Clearly, I wasn’t alone in my joy and gratitude. I knew I wouldn’t be.

We’re all gathered here now (in the photo, L to R, that’s me, Margaret Maron, Katy Munger, Sarah Shaber, Alexandra Sokoloff and Mary Kay Andrews. We’re missing–in more ways than one–Bren Witchger, who couldn’t join us this time). The Weymouth Mansion opens its doors to serious writers who have a North Carolina connection. In our case, we’re all published and we all understand the trials and tribulations of the business and the writing process. It costs us nothing to stay here for up to two weeks each year, though most of us make donations to help with utilities and maintenance. Our rooms are small, but the mansion is huge and we each carve out our personal space in which to write.  Our needs this week are simple: M & M peanuts, two games (Balderdash and Taboo), the ability to check our email, and our works-in-progress. We brainstorm with one another and take solo, meditative walks around the beautiful grounds, but for the most part, we work and it’s fantastic to suddenly realize you’ve written twelve pages almost effortlessly.

Today was a little different. We actually put on make-up this morning and dressed in something other than sweats, because a writer and photographer were coming from Our State Magazine to do an article on us. Someone at Our State had heard about our twice-yearly retreats and asked if they could spend half a day with us. I asked the writer, Anne Webb, to snap this shot of us on the stairs with my camera as we posed for the “real” photographer, Natalie Ross. It was fun to share our morning with Anne and Natalie, and we’re all looking forward to May, when the article will appear in Our State. Of course, their visit wreaked havoc on our writing schedule, but it didn’t matter. When I was wandering outside after their visit, I stumbled across Natalie (in the Witches’ Garden) who asked if I’d like a Native American spiritual card reading. I jumped at the chance–knowing I’d have her read the cards for my character rather than myself (see my blog post on Tarot for writers). We found a sunny spot and sat down on a bed of pine needles. Natalie pulled out her deck of special cards, and in about five minutes, I had an unexected twist for my storyline. The whole thing was kind of woo-woo and wonderful.  

So now, the wine is being poured as we all catch up on our writing and ponder where to go for dinner. (One of us who shall remain nameless is munching M&Ms; not me. I’ve already had my fill for the day). After dinner, we’ll play Taboo, since we wore out Balderdash last night (Anyone know what a prickmadam is? We do now!) Alex won’t play–she is the real workhorse of the group, rarely taking a break, and she eats healthy food all the time, but we love her anyway!

I’ll check in with another post later in the week. Till then, enjoy whatever you’re reading, knowing that some of your favorite authors are here, spinning new tales for you!

I’m not much of a believer in the occult, but I do love Tarot, not in any small part because the 78 cards in a Tarot deck can be so beautiful. There’s something undeniably fascinating in the symbols and images, and it’s easy to get caught up the magic.

My first reading was done by a real pro: author Nora Roberts. We were at the Washington Romance Writers’ annual retreat at the fabulous Hilltop House in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and Nora was doing readings for her friends. I think she told me my marriage was destined to last forever. The next reading I had was by another fellow writer, the late, beautiful Virginia Ellis, shortly after my divorce.  Ha! So as I said, I’m not much of a believer, but I do believe in taking brainstorming help wherever I can get it, and a good Tarot Card reading–for a writers’ characters rather than for the writer herself–can jumpstart a scene, or even an entire book. 

Like Nora, Gin Ellis was a generous reader. At a Novelists, Inc conference in Santa Fe one year, she read for every major character in my work-in-progress. I learned one character’s deepest, darkest secret, why another was afraid to be a mother, and why yet another  chose his particular career. There are many, many other ways to brainstorm, but none as intriguing or fun as Tarot.

I’m aware of one book on Tarot specifically for writers (Tarot for Writers, by Corrinne Kenner), but I’m sure there are more, because writers have turned to Tarot over the years (over the centuries, since Tarot’s been around that long) to help them develop characters and story lines. 

Tarot came into play with my upcoming novel, The Lies We Told. I didn’t use it to help me brainstorm, but my characters themselves use it to. . .  well, I’ll wait until the book comes out to tell you!

So how about you? Have you ever had a Tarot reading?