Helen Mathey-Horn's Blog, page 31

Miracles

A week ago I said the black cat had been missing for a week. Today would have been two weeks. But when we pulled up this afternoon, low and behold who come running up complaining about being hungry…Pepper. She’s a little skinnier and the only thing I can think is that she got shut into someone’s shed or garage for the last two weeks. I suspect a shed as most people would have had their garage door open some time during the last two weeks.

Any rate; all’s well that ends well.

The Island

A few posts back I mentioned a book I had written using an idea my mother had not gotten around to writing. (Click on the highlighted words to go to that post.) The book is now available at Amazon so I thought I would reblog about the book.

My mother’s idea was about a young woman showing up at her family’s ‘retreat/house’ only to find a stranger there and it should, as with a good romance, have sparks flying. I liked the idea, but decided it had to be remote enough that neither protagonist can ‘leave’ easily. I also tried to think through the motivation of each person for being there. So I think I can fairly claim the book is my own even if it started from my mother’s idea.

Enter Sylvia Harriot Fuller heading for her family’s island to escape the end of a bad marriage. Only she isn’t alone and the island might not be her family’s anymore. She and the ‘man’ who is there go through some misunderstandings, including his firing at her. “If I had wanted to hit you, I would have.” She thinks he is paparazzi. He expected to be alone on the island.

After an accident and with a hurricane coming at their position, they need each other to survive. They are both vulnerable and dealing with personal ‘demons’ and trust is not a quantity of which either has a great deal.

You can find this book at Amazon as an ebook. This one’s for you Mom.

Point of View

March 6 question – Whose perspective do you like to write from best, the hero (protagonist) or the villain (antagonist)? And why?

It is time for the monthly writing prompt from Insecure Writer’s Support Group and what you see above is the question of the month.

Reflecting on this I can’t recall that I’ve written anything from the antagonist’s point of view. There are many modern examples of this such as “Wicked” where we get the Wizard of Oz story from the Wicked Witch’s view. In fact there seems to be a current trend to take a well known story and rewrite it from the antagonist’s view point. I hadn’t paid particular notice of this, but so it seems.

I did write “Dark Queen” from the protagonist’s view (if you can call it ‘view’) because she is blind and I wanted to 1) see if I could write descriptions of what she perceived happening around her and that meant senses that did not include sight, and 2) I wanted it to center around her. There were occasional chapters written in third person when she was not present, but the bulk of the book was from her perspective.

In “Bait” I wrote from the protagonist’s point as the antagonist was shadowy and elusive.

I have another book idea that has been percolating (too many years) in which the story is from the antagonist’s viewpoint, but, as with many things, he may be redeemed by the end and becomes a protagonist at that point right?

This is really an interesting challenge and I think I’ll try this on for size. Which is why the Insecure Writer’s Support Group is bookmarked on my computer. Follow the link in the previous sentence to find out how other writers answered this prompt.

Snow Day #2?

March 3



March 4

Although the second picture looks like less snow it was taken about noon while the one the day before was earlier in the morning and all the snow was gone before nightfall.

Last night’s snow was drier and easier to sweep away, rather than shovel. But I take no credit for that. It was all Don on the clearing the walkway. Once cleared the sun finished drying it out. Temps are still below freezing and will be there all day at this point.

Want to try for snow day #3?

Coming in like a Lion, or maybe a Snow Leopard

They predicted snow, and we got snow. Enough to coat the ground. Almost enough to have to shovel, a broom was easier. And we don’t look to be getting above freezing today, so there is no melting in sight.

The male cardinals stand out against all the monochromatic backdrops. The juncos look their tidy best against fresh snow also. Double checked that there is seed in the feeders and water in the bird bath…a heated one so it is always available even in these temps and it does get used.

Stay warm.

And just because. Had a great review of “Uptimers”.

5.0 out of 5 stars Put on your seatbelt and enjoy the ride!February 28, 2019 Format: Paperback This is an action-packed adventure with twists and turns that sometimes turn back on themselves! The characters are believable, and some very likable. The fun and action is almost non-stop! A book that is very hard to put down. It does wrap up everything by the end so the mysteries are solved and nothing is left dangling. Hoping for another book with at least some of these characters.

Thanks.

A to Z Challenge 2019

In the past I’ve read blogs that do ‘challenges’. It might be writing a novel in November, or keeping up with Advent, or such. I ‘stumbled’ across the following challenge which is apparently in it’s tenth year. (As I mentioned in another post…I seem to be late to the party.) This seemed like something I might be able to keep up with. It doesn’t start until April and you post each day with day one’s topic in someway related/starting with the letter A, second day B and so on. But, Helen, April has 30 days (remember the rhyme) and so it does, but you don’t post on the Sundays so it works out to 26 days.

What the heck, in for a penny, in for a pound and if I take their suggestion of prewriting some of the posts I think I’ll be able to keep up. Wish me luck. And if this is something that might appeal to you, follow the link here.

Hope to see you there!

Well, it’s time to let go

Last week, sometime on Thursday, our tortoiseshell cat disappeared. She was around in the morning, but didn’t come home for supper, or bed, or… We checked the local shelter’s online missing animals facebook page. Even made a trip out to the shelter on Monday to double check one of the animals that looked like it might be her.

To say I’m bummed is an understatement. This cat walked the ‘hood with Apache and I to the amusement of the neighbors. I’ve held out hope that maybe she was in a garage or such (I’ve had that happen with another cat…curiosity and all that) but no I think I have to ‘let her go’. We aren’t so far from an area that is known to have coyotes, less than two blocks even, so she may have met a bad end.

Damn.

‘At the Ballet…’

“But, everything was beautiful at the ballet…” Do you know what show these song lyrics are from?

Last night we went to the Tulsa Ballet. The performance was Tchaikovsky’s ‘The Sleeping Beauty”. And as usual everything was beautiful.

Somewhere I just lost what I had written, so let’s try this again.

Tchaikovsky’s ballet is wonderful and great for kids. There were quite a few in the area around us which I think is great. This is the kind of exposure all children should have a chance at, but not many do.

Coming later this year will be ‘Giselle’ which I had a chance to see in London with a group of eighth graders on a field trip from Germany. They were from that small American school I worked at and have talked about before. This was the year after I taught at the school. One of the teachers organized a trip for the students (her father regularly took college students, so she knew the routine and how to prep kids). I went along as a second chaperone. Heck, I learned a lot, including how to plan for such a trip.

One of the things we did was to go to a ballet. Now this could have been a snooze-fest if not properly set up. This teacher was a master. She had prepped the kids with the story line, the music, etc. So by the time they sat down they knew it. So much so that the boy I was sitting next to was so excited he had to tell me the story…during the show. Yes, as adults we understand that isn’t ‘ballet etiquette’, but he was so excited and as I had him the year before in class and knew he was kind of shy I let him tell me, although I tried to ask him to keep his voice down.

Well on my other side were two elderly British matrons, think Agatha Christie, ‘they’ll be bumped off by an annoyed cousin’ British matrons and they kept shushing in my direction. I’m trying to get the student to be quieter, but still let him have the joy of explaining it to me and on the other side two women who are getting a little louder each time they ‘shh!’

Finally the interval comes and the one immediately next to me turns and in that way only an Agatha Christie matron could deliver says, “We do not speak during the ballet.”

And I replied equally haughtily, “I know.” Pause. “But he was so excited to have learned this ballet in class and wanted to tell me the story.”

At that point the woman leaned forward to look past me. What she expected to see was a bored husband I suspect, but instead was a boy very large for his age with his happy face. Suddenly it was okay, or at least tolerable. And with a few quiet words from me, we made it through the rest of ‘Giselle’ without setting back Anglo-American relations.

So all those young faces around me seemed like a good sign last night and if any of them were whispering to their parents, I didn’t notice … and would not have cared.

And the quote at the beginning is from ‘A Chorus Line’.

How Quickly We Forget

I had put a letter to my d-i-l out for the mailman to pickup. I had clipped it out very early because we seem to have different deliverers and some come early and some come very late. It was still there when I came home after lunch, but no worries, I’ve seen it picked up as late as 5 pm. I emailed my d-i-l that it was ready for the mailman, but not picked up yet. She reminded me that (duh) it’s a federal holiday and there would be no mail pickup. Oh, yeah, I knew that.

This is a holiday that combines George Washington and Abraham Lincoln into one day. I’m pretty sure all the states celebrated Washington when I was a child, but not sure how many did the same for Lincoln. Growing up in Illinois it was a given that we got his birthday off also. The outline/shape of the state of Illinois always makes me think of an outline of his face, but I digress.

It is another cold snap here, but signs of spring, the crocus (croci), are flowering. These are the yellow ones that seems to be able to take more and keep coming back every year and maybe spreading a little. The daffodils are sending up bud shoots, but don’t look ready to open. And the same with the Stella magnolia. Trust me when it opens I’ll be there to get pictures. There is another bush in the yard, for the life of me I can’t remember it’s name. It is flowering with small flowers and a vanilla/citrus aroma. It’s kind of wasted on me as I’m not spending much time out there in these temperatures, but I’m hoping if there are any bees or such that need a food supply this is available.

Pictures only of the crocus.

Signs of Spring.

Writing – Thanks Mom

My mother was never really at a loss for words. She could use and ‘sling’ words with the best of them. She joined several writing groups in her local area and then joined forces with Libby Aavang, her best friend from school (and cousin by marriage), to write ‘The Greenwood Book’. (Not to be confused with the current movie ‘The Green Book’.)

Their book was a sifting through local history, oral stories they collected, newspapers, microfiche, old pictures and diaries to tell the story of the community they grew up in, Greenwood, Illinois. It consumed a lot of their time as they did all the research themselves and then had to decide how to tell the story and in what order, chronological, or by topics (sawmills, schools, etc).

But before my mother undertook this ambitious task she wrote odd tidbits for local writer’s groups she belonged to. She often shared these ideas with me and on one occasion when she was mulling over a writing prompt, I gave her an idea for a sci-fi short story which she liked. Around the same time she shared an idea she had for a story that she never quite found time to write. A few years later I asked if I could ‘steal’ the basic story idea as I felt I had some backstory I could use for one of the protagonists and she gave me her permission.

Her idea was a romance, where a woman goes to her family’s ‘island’ to get away and finds a stranger there. That’s straight forward enough. And the idea was okay but did not resonate until I listened to an NPR book interview with Sebastian Junger. He was discussing his experiences embedded with American troops in Afghanistan. (If you are interested in the book they were discussing that time, it was “War” and you can follow the link to find it on Amazon.)

What if the female protagonist is ‘fleeing’ a personal situation and goes to what she thinks is her family’s private island to get her mental balance only to be confronted with a man who seems very physically capable of handling any situation, but is working through his own personal Traumatic Stress Syndrome and claims to own the island? The island is isolated and with a hurricane coming in it is about to be even more cut off from the outside. Can they save each other?

So that is the book in a nutshell, except for will they find more than just peace of mind.

My d-i-l is working on the publishing of this book. It is not yet on Amazon. I’ll let you know when it is. Thanks. And thanks, Mom!