Cindy Brown's Blog, page 5

You Can Tell A Writer By…What She* Wears (Part Two)

You Can Tell A Writer By…What She* Wears (Part Two)

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my writer friends to send me images that spoke to who they are as writers. I was bowled over by the responses—not just the number of folks who replied, but also the variety of images sent. Rather than writing one post with all the cool photos I received, I decided to break it into several posts every other week.

The first post featured our tools of the trade. This post is about wearing our writing hearts on our sleeves.

My jewelry stash:

A few of my treasures

Writerly T-shirts From Jessie Chandler, award-winning author of the Shay O’Hanlon Caper Series. That’s Jessie on the right , wearing a T-shirt that says “Property of a Writer,” and author and mutual friend Lori L. Lake on the left, wearing her ” Have you Hugged an Author Today?” T- shirt.

Writers to a T

And this last image is a bit of a cheat, because it looks as if Cynthia Lott carries this locket, rather than wears it, but what a sweet story!

My photo is a locket I always carry with me and it’s instrumental in my writing. It’s a picture of my rescue dog, Sasha, who past away a few years ago. She was so very intelligent, loving, strong willed, amazing. I set her out when I’m writing because I know she’s with me in spirit and she’s saying, “Let’s do this, Mom.”

*No male writers sent me photos of clothes or jewelry, but if you’d like to do so, I’ll post it!

 

All the Best Places to Hide the Body – Colonyhouse, Rockaway Beach, Oregon

All the Best Places to Hide the Body – Colonyhouse, Rockaway Beach, Oregon

Jill Cameron discovers a dead body – Could it be her husband, Bill ?

How can you not love a beach house that exists solely for writers? Where you can go and think of nothing but your manuscript, the ocean, and a nightly game of Scrabble?

It gets better. This is one cool house. Built in 1936 by John Steiner, one of the Steiners who  worked on Mount Hood’s Timberline Lodge, the Colonyhouse  features  hand-cut and peeled logs, porches supported by forked trees, large fireplaces crafted from glacier or river rock, stair rails fashioned from naturally curved logs, and doorknobs and shelves carved from roots or uniquely shaped branches…

Colonyhouse!
(photo by Kirsten Steen)

And dead bodies.

The Oregon Writers Colony owns the house, rents it out to members, and hosts its annual Founders Day at the house each August. It’s typically a fun day of food, workshops and good company, but this year, there was murder in the air.

To begin with, we found Holly Franko, OWC’s executive director, dead on the second floor landing.

If the E.D. is dead, who puts out the newsletter?

Founding member Rae Richen was stuffed into a closet.

Asleep or dead?

No telling who Marlene Howard (another founding member ) and writer Kathleen Glanville found under the bed.

Don’t worry, there’s no monster under your bed. Just a dead body.

But Kathleen must have known something, because she was the next to die.

Dead, but clean

But the murderer wasn’t content yet – she had to kill Bill (Cameron)!

The president did it in the parlor with a fire poker.

Yes, the killer was none other than Becky Kjelstrom, OWC’s new board president!

Becky was taken away and sentenced to fundraise for a year and the Founders Day festivities continued.  After all, we had the whole mystery wrapped up.

Or so we thought.

Are those writer Lois Jean Bousquet’s feet?

 

 

 

You Can Tell A Writer By…Their Tools of the Trade (Part One)

You Can Tell A Writer By…Their Tools of the Trade (Part One)

A little while ago, I was putting together my new website (OK, my friend Lindsay Nyre was putting it together), and trying to think of images that spoke to who I am as a writer. Then I looked around me, at the Powell’s coffee mug on the kitchen counter, the “Everything Private Investigation Book” (by Sheila L. Stephens) on the back of the toilet, and the Edward Gorey sticker book I use as a mouse pad.  I realized my environment says volumes about who I am (hmm, sounds like something a writer should know, doesn’t it?). Case in point: my refrigerator holds cool writer-centric magnets (including one from Left Coast Crime, which will be held in Portland next year!), a list of restored hours for the Multnomah County Library, dinner ideas with a note for my second book  (“Pet cam”) at the top, and a postcard for Gigi Pandian’s books that also has a recipe for daal.

My fridge

So I thought it would be fun to ask my writer friends to share images that said something about who they are as writers. I got such cool and varied responses! So many, in fact that I’ve decided to break this post into several ones that I’ll put up every other week. This week features our tools of the trade:

From Julie Brokken:

An artist-poeta’s briefcase… GRiN!

From Christine Finlayson:

It’s not a mug or magnet, but spiral-bound notebooks that show I’m an author. You can find these in every room of our house and a growing pile of them in my office, full of brainstorms, thoughts, and important notes about works in progress. These paper notebooks (old-fashioned as they are) hold some of my best ideas and I treasure them because of it!

From Bill Cameron:

And some of my favorite tools:

Stay tuned for more in two weeks!

 

 

Stand by Your Book

Stand by Your Book

Curly Maple and Walnut Bookstand by Ron Curtis

Several years ago, I went to a stranger’s house to pick up a costume for a play. The gentleman invited me into his beautiful home where I waited in the library while he went to fetch the T-shirt his organization had promised me. While there, I noticed a beautiful wooden bookstand, the type you see holding Bibles in churches or big heavy dictionaries in libraries. This bookstand, which stood in a place of honor in the room, held a thick sheaf of papers. When the man came back, I asked him what the document was. “It’s my novel,” he said.

On occasion, I have run into writers (and even readers) who believe that genre writing is easier than say, literary writing. Since I’ve never written a literary novel, I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that creating an entire new world in a fantasy or science fiction novel cannot be easy. Finding different ways for people to fall in love in romance novels must be tough. Keeping the attention of a middle schooler all through a YA novel is a daunting prospect. Making sure that mysteries contain all the necessary clues without giving away the ending sometimes seems impossible (I heard Isabella Allende speak about writing a mystery. She said she’d never do it again).

It’s easy for me to fall into the “it’s not as if my book’s a Pulitzer Prize winner” mentality. I’ve heard other authors do it, too, especially genre writers. I’m not going to do that any more. I’m going to give my book its due.

Writing a book is not easy. Finishing a book is even more difficult. And completing a book you can be proud of is an achievement. No matter what we’re writing, I think we should all have beautiful bookstands—even if they’re just in our minds—and put our novels in the places of honor they deserve.

If All the World’s a Stage, Which Shakespeare Character Are You?

If All the World’s a Stage, Which Shakespeare Character Are You?

(keep reading for the fun game bit!)

 Way back in college (way back), I got to play Juliet in Measure for Measure. It was my first acting introduction to Shakespeare and I immediately fell in love with his work. I also learned two things:

Shakespeare is such a wonderful playwright that there truly are no small roles. Even a role with just a few lines (like Juliet in M for M) gives an actor some great meat to chew on.
If one of your castmates draws a smiley face on the skin-touching side of your fake pregnancy belly, the heat of stage lights plus a ten lb. costumes will transfer said smiley face to your actual belly where it will remain for weeks.

Later, I was lucky enough to work with The Courtyard Players, a Phoenix-based Shakespeare theater that produced mostly condensed versions of the plays. I got to play some great characters, including Sylvia in Two Gentleman of Verona;

Phebe in As You Like It (this photo and the Twelfth Night one by the lovely and talented Kristina Brendel);

Murdering Sylvius (Brad Eaton) with my eyes

Lady Macbeth in the Scottish play (which was performed in a Scottsdale nightclub for part of the run—way cool):

Viola in an ill-fated production of Twelfth Night, which would have been great (with fabulous Phoenix actors Ken Love as Orsino and Mike Lawler as Malvolio!) if it had actually been produced. The actor playing Toby Belch threw us over for a film role a week before opening night. Sigh.

Cindy and Chris Daly as twins Viola and Sebastian. Yes, twins.

And a lover in a sonnet show. I’ve forgotten the name of my character and the show, but do remember how beautifully playwright Julie Peterson wove Shakespeare’s sonnets together to create a storyline about four lovers:

With Ken Love, Gavin McLeod, and Luhr (a wonderful actress with a glorious voice, whose last name escapes me).Plus my favorite costume ever, by Esther Turner.

But when I played this “Which Shakespearean Character Are You?” game, I was none of the characters above. I’ll tell you which character represents the real me after you play, too:

Okay, I was Romeo. I believe the site said something about being naïve, romantic and impulsive. Busted.

Snoring Dogs, Flaming Doritos, & Walking Dead Pizza – Fun With Research

 Snoring Dogs, Flaming Doritos, & Walking Dead Pizza                    
Fun With Research

Have I mentioned lately how much I love being a writer? Not only do I get to create a world where that justice and true love prevail, but I get to mess around on the Internet and call it work. These past few weeks, I’ve been working on the first draft of the second Ivy Meadows mystery, The Sound of Murder, and needed to research:

Whether a dog could snore loud enough to keep an adult awake. Yep.

 If the song “You’re the Cream in my Coffee” was in the public domain. Probably not. Certain recordings of it appear to be, but the Sonny Bono (Sonny Bono!) Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended copyright protection to any United States work published between 1923 if the copyright was formally renewed at the Copyright Office. After fooling around on the copyright website for awhile, I gave up and decided to create a parody instead.
How easy it would be to break into a garage. Very. You can do it in six seconds according to this video:

 If pepper spray would work once it been submerged. It will, according to a very nice gentleman from Guardian Self Defense & Security Products
 If medical personnel would be able to smell chloroform or ether on an incoming patient. I posed this question to the experts on the fabulous crimescenewriters listserv. Not only did I learn that the answer is yes, I learned what both gases smelled like (chloroform-sweet; ether-pungent), and how the smell of ether sometimes clung to the clothes of a respondent who used to freelance in ill-equipped hospitals before machines took the exhaled anesthetic gases out of the operating rooms.

Sometimes it’s not exactly a question that leads to my great discoveries. A Tweet from the Good Men Project led me to a video of lifehacks that included using Doritos as firestarters. Had to try this out with my friend Holly Franko. Yes, indeedy, they do burn really well, though it can be difficult to get them started.

Nacho typical firestarters

One of my characters likes gadgets. I can’t even remember how I found this one.

I love it and would buy it, but my dog would probably push it all day long.

But my favorite find came when I was researching dinner theater menus. I wondered if the food had changed much since I did dinner theater years ago. Didn’t seem so. But then I found a menu that featured Macho Nachos and Walking Dead pizza at…The Manor Professional Wrestling Dinner Theater! What a great idea! Someone has finally taken advantage of the obvious connection between professional wrestling and theater! If I’m ever in Kissimmee, Florida, I will definitely get front row seats.

Which of these interesting tidbits will I use in The Sound of Murder? You’ll have to read the book to find out (it will be published by Henery Press in Sept. 2015. The first Ivy Meadows book, MacDeath, will be out in January 2015).

BTW, I just realized there weren’t any comments on this blog because I needed to OK them as they came in. I’ve got it now – please comment away!