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Take This Camera From My Hands

9/28/2014

Never again. I quit. I wasn't going to take pictures anymore. I don't want to. Don't care about it. Nope.

I once freelanced magazine articles and took the photos to go with them. I've had a photo used for the cover of a phone book, in an ad, and even had one of my pictures on the cover of a magazine.

I don't even have a decent camera anymore. Not really. For blog posting, I take quick pics and also buy photos from fotolia.com. Much more efficient than taking my own photos. The variety is amazing too. Shopping for the images is more fun than I ever expected, and kind of addictive for me--which does mean I could spend way too much money there.

Then someone told me about Quozio. It's a site you can go onto and type sayings and it will put the quote on a background suitable for Pinterest. I started playing with the site a little, but I wanted to try a few shots of my own. The next thing I know I'm outside with an old camera trying to take my own backgrounds for quotes.

To make a long story short--as if I could--I end up making a background for a friend's book--Without Mercy by Alicia Dean. I took a photo in the back yard, put a quote from her book on it and sent it to her. And she seemed to like it. Posted it on her FB page and another friend shared. The next thing I know I'm digging around in the barn hunting for rope to photograph, and barbed wire, to see if I could make a quote photo for my book.

A few days later I looked out and saw the light. I saw the light. Oh, it was beautiful. In the evening, sometimes the hues are more golden.

And so, with a borrowed camera, I took a few photos, of, you know, stuff. Like old wood and wheelbarrows. Flies. I didn't even realize when I took a picture of the deer poop that I was at it again. But after about the 30th picture of a flintlock mechanism on a gun--the little shutter inside my head clicked.

I'll still be buying photos, but I also would like to buy a camera.

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Stubby

9/26/2014

Stubby is the high-spirited cabin boy in the first two books of my trilogy. He was pivotal in both stories. In the first book, he was vital to the plot. But in A Captain and a Rogue, he was more important to me. I deleted most of his scenes after I finished the manuscript but I saved them in a file.

In that deleted file, I tell of his life on shore and how he'd once discovered that women would notice him if he stood, bedraggled, in front of a confectionary shop. He would end up with more food than he could eat. The shop owner wouldn't scare the boy away because the lad was good for business.

I also had to delete how the captain was a bit envious of the heroine's attention to the cabin boy. Stubby asked the heroine to marry him, but she refused. And because he was not a faint-hearted lad, he then asked the other sister if she might marry him. Since he thought she was a mermaid, Stubby planned to build her a house by the sea. He said he would bring her minnows on a regular basis. But she refused him too.

At almost the last minute of the edits, I left the cabin boy character in England while the ship he'd worked on sailed away. I did that so I could possibly work him into another story, and he could be reunited with the mother who'd had to give him away so he could have a better life.

His character helped me enjoy writing A Captain and a Rogue.

Kristan Higgins--Five Stars

9/25/2014

I am a fan of Kristan Higgins and if you read her post Mothra, you'll see a bit of her writing style. http://kristanhiggins.com/blog/ You'll have to look for the post, but it's worth it. And I'll give you a hint so maybe you'll rush over to read it. It's not about a moth, it's about a bat.

Now, for my brush with Kristan Higgins. I was at a conference and a young woman won an award. She was sitting not too far from me and her excitement bubbled into the air. I didn't have a clue who she was.

I took a photo while she was posing for someone else because she had that award and she was sparking the air with her happiness.

A few years later I went to a huge writing conference and she was the keynote speaker.

I read her book because someone at the conference said, "You have to read her writing." I did. And became a fan.

Back at home, I was looking through my photos and saw the face which was now famous to me. I had a real photo of Kristan Higgins before I even knew who she was.

If you're not already a fan of hers, and you read romance novels, buy her book, Too Good to be True." Read it on a day when you're not in a good mood and the world is doin' ya dirty. Lock yourself away from the world and start turning the pages. It can lift your spirits.

Writing—the exciting part

9/21/2014

My glasses were lying beside my keyboard. My head was buried in my hands.

My husband asked, "Are you okay?"

I answered, "Yes. I'm just writing."

He said, "It looks painful."

Well... Let me think about that for a minute.

Finding Passion in Life

9/14/2014

Winona Cross told me about her writing journey and something about her words jumped out at me. She happened across an online writing class and signed up. She wrote a story and another story and kept going. Her writing journey didn’t happen overnight though, it took more than a decade.

One Saturday morning she decided to go to a local writer’s group. That eventually led her to the West Texas A&M Writer’s Academy—one full week of intensive training during the summer. Along the way she surrounded herself with others who were on the same path she was on.

Which in turn resulted in her novella Dianne’s Destiny, a story centered around equestrian therapy, and which is one of the Scrimshaw Doll series from The Wild Rose Press.

It reminds me of the saying “A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.” So simple—and yet, not at all for some people. They’re waiting for the map or for someone to plot the direction for them. They don’t realize they have to create their own path and make their own travel plans, just like Daniel Boone or Ponce de Leon. The old explorers probably took some wrong turns and did some adjusting in their journey, but what’s wrong with that? They could have died for their mistakes, and yet they still risked making them.

Assuming you aren’t hurting others, isn’t that so much better than the dissatisfaction of just being where life plopped you?

Just watch out for the possible pitfall of embracing another person’s dream or what you think you should like instead of what you really like—something that is sometimes only learned through trial and error.

Winona’s journey just happened to be writing. And the years it has taken her to get where she is today would have had the exact same number of minutes in them no matter how she spent the time.

If she’d realized that flower arranging was her talent, her love, then she should have taken it and explored it. No one else’s opinion of whether something is or isn’t exciting should matter. Really.

I happen to embrace writing as well. Love it. It kind of has prestige, or at least it does to me. But it’s only because it’s where my heart leads me. In truth, any glamour wears off the 1500’th time you’ve done anything. Then it boils down to heart. That is what leads to step 1501.

Imagine a person sitting in front of a television with a remote. They don’t stop on the first channel. They click that clicker until they find something that fascinates them, and then they watch it. We all do it. Yet dissatisfied people won’t click around with hobbies and dreams and whatever. Nothing pulls their attention at first glance so they keep watching the same ol’ program. And even when it’s in their power to see what’s on the other station, they don’t realize they can just start switching things around because they don’t think the other channel sounds that interesting either. Well, maybe it’s worth looking into.

For Winona, her fascination was writing. For me, it’s writing. But if I lose my fascination with writing, I have the remote in my hand.

BTW: Winona is now a member of the Romance Writer’s of America, and four other writing groups (OKRWA, CHRW, HHRW and OWFI). I would imagine she’s made quite a few friends along the way. That’s the other advantage of pursing interests. Visit Winona’s blog at : http:winonacross.blogspot.com

The Birds Don't Have A Chance

9/13/2014

So I sit at the keyboard, watching the world outside my window. It's to be expected anyone would stop writing to watch a deer. Not my fault. Unless I was the one who put corn in the bird feeder.

Time to Close the Window Shade

9/12/2014

On the Ropes and Under Sail

9/5/2014

Not a lot of sailing vessels from the past cross my path in Oklahoma. But when a replica of Christopher Columbus' vessel sailed into the nearby town of Muskogee, this gave me an opportunity to learn more about older ships since my novel A Captain and a Rogue mainly takes place at sea.

The tour guide explained that the sails on this particular vessel were furled by using pulleys instead of the more common method of men doing the work by hand. Columbus realized that if a man fell and became incapacitated, the crew member couldn't be replaced on the voyage.

If you think of how stresses can fray the ropes, and note the size of them, you can understand how much they were a part of the sailors' daily routine.

I believe the frayed scraps were even used as fuel by the ship's cook.

The coiled ropes were bumpers that the sailors tossed over the side of the ships when they were in a dock so that the ship's sides could be protected.

Any change in the wind could necessitate a change in the sails which meant the ropes were tightened or loosened. The men were kept busy.

In the book Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.,the author recounts his days at sea during the 1830's. I admit, I didn't read all of the book, but I read the parts recounting the beginning of his voyage twice and often put placeholders on the pages so I could go back to certain details.

The book gets a bit monotonous in the middle—but it's understandable. So did his voyage. Closer to the end of the book, the author explains that when his commitment was over and he was scheduled to leave the ship, he was told he could not go. He admits that if he hadn't had influential friends back at home, he might have been forced to stay two more years away, or perhaps indefinitely. Recruiting sailors wasn't an easy task for some captains but when you read true accounts of the voyages, you understand why. (Dana's story is free on Google books.)

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