Helen Mathey-Horn's Blog, page 43

Well, it’s not time to break out the champagne yet.

March 7 question – How do you celebrate when you achieve a writing goal/ finish a story? 

When I finish a story (after lots of edits) I think I want to ‘tell’ the world all about it.  I mentioned in an earlier post that my mother had a cartoon next to her computer showing two people and one of them is saying, “Enough about me.  Let’s talk about my story!”

If I’m feeling very satisfied with what I’ve written it becomes a part of my life and has a reality all of its own.  It seems to suffuse into what I’m doing and thinking so it becomes hard to separate that it is not part of my real world.  Bringing it to a conclusion is almost a relief.  I can stop thinking about where it is going next and how my characters are going to ‘flow’ into that situation.  I can ‘come up for air’.

I will say I am ‘pleased’ with myself.  ‘Insufferable’ might be the term my husband and family use.  It is a huge time investment, so when it turns out the way you want it to, how can you not be happy about it?

Of course the next step is…will anyone else find it as wonderful as you do?  If they do, well, there is the true pleasure!

Insecure Writer’s Support Group – March 7  See links at bottom of their post.

Apologies to Will Rogers this time

It is SPRING!  And I have proof.[image error]Please tilt your head.  I’m still working on formatting, obviously.  They were ‘upright’ in the original file, so I don’t know why the program wanted them on their sides.  Tete Tete daffodils,  Stella Magnolia and Cotton Candy Hellebore all signs of spring.  The hellebore is the most recent addition to the backyard.  The magnolia is now in its 3rd spring and pretty loaded with flowers for such a recent addition.I should have tried to get pictures of the robins also.  They are starting to mass for the journey north.  I have a holly outside the front door that is still loaded with berries, so maybe the robins aren’t quite ready to move on.  Usually they denude the holly of its berries as they get ready.   This is the time of year when the garden centers and nurseries exert their siren calls to plant lovers.  I once took a quiz that identifies the type of gardener you are.  Do you map out every inch of your garden with regimental precision, ruthlessly culling none producers, or the other extreme you buy every plant that appeals to you in hopes that some of them will survive?   There are some positions between these two poles, but I’ll confess I lean towards the latter.  What doesn’t grow becomes compose (expensive compost) in situ.  And I don’t learn as I’ll buy some things again…and again, in hopes of different results.  Why?

Here is where the apology comes in.  I live in Oklahoma, the land of Will Rogers who said, “I never met a man I didn’t like.”   My motto is similar, but “I never met a plant I didn’t like.”

Okay, we can exempt poison ivy and from that statement and maybe dandelions too.  Oh, and definitely Japanese houttuynia cordata which my husband had growing in a confined space in his Japanese yard and then convinced me I should buy some for our Oklahoma backyard.  I’m trying to keep it confined, but that sucker suckers with underground runners and I’m always trying to pull it back.  I’d rather fight mint, which I also planted, but in a corner where all it can do is grown into the grass, where the lawn guys will get it.  Ha!   Should have done the same with the houttuynia.  But I digress…

So, while I’ve met VERY FEW plants I didn’t like, I also know there are a few I’ll never get to grown here.  Poinsettias will grown outside in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and sometime as far north as Corpus Christi.  Otherwise ‘treat them like a cut flowers’ (my mom’s expression).  And some of my childhood plants of Illinois/Wisconsin melt in the Oklahoma summers.

But hope springs eternal…every Spring.  I think the nurseries are counting on it.

What plants have you found to be garden ‘thugs’?   Which ones do you keep trying to grow against their climate zones?  Is there a plant you’ve met that you didn’t like?

I’ll leave you with pansies for ‘thought’.

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Review of Laurel

Being new to the ‘getting published’ part of getting published, it is gratifying if others find your story worth reading.  So my thanks to Jeyran Main for reviewing Laurel.   I feel she did a good job of describing what I was trying to write to in this book.  I did not start out to pen a ‘saga’ of the difficulties of single women in the 1820-1830’s, but when I wanted my character to try and escape her situation, that kind of happened.  Ms. Main mentions, it is “so historically exact to its time that the reader faces slangs from that time as well.”  I’m happy she feels it is historically exact.   I worked on the research in hopes of not making any terrible errors.

Wonder if I should apologize for the slangs?  I tried to put is some, but not too much.  Like any ‘jargon’ one can go overboard and lose the reader, but with none do you lose the flavor of the ‘time’?

So this is a thank you and a plug.

Thank you, Ms. Main for review the book.

If you are interested in the book, it can be found at Amazon

And thank you for reading.

 

I’ve got a million of them….

Apologies to Jimmy Durante.

My second book is now available in Kindle form from Amazon.  Where “Laurel” is a romance, “Dream Warrior” is fantasy.

Meet Teryn, and friends and foes, in the first of a series of books taking place on Tienna’s World (a planet that in future books will be given its name and backstory).

Teryn knows what the enemy is going to do before they do it.  Okay, sometimes is it only minutes before, but usually, there is enough time to pick a path to victory.  Until Rabisle.  Now, Teryn is on the run with Tasmine, the country’s heir, trying to find a place of safety until they can get back to Tasmine’s

mother, the queen, but at each turn, Rabisle seems to be about one step ahead of them.  Teryn may have to use tools even stranger than dream to stop him.

I realize more and more that I owe a lot of my ideas in writing to Andre Norton.  The last time I picked up one of her books to read was many years ago.  I read all of them I could get my hands on avidly through middle school and high school.  Then, I guess, I moved on to other authors or other distractions.  Looking her up on the internet I see I’ve missed out on all the newer books she had authored or co-authored.  I’ll be honest, I don’t recall any specific details or characters, and yet, the memory of the general form of her world and stories is there like a shadow.

I hope writing this post does not detract you from reading my books or hers.  I think the time between when I read hers and I’ve written mine is long enough for my memory to remember the feel I liked about her books, but not the plots and characters.  I maybe wrong.  I guess I should go and read her again, just in case…

 

If I am a ‘Guest Author’ then I’m legit?

I have been invited as the guest author on Rita Lee Chapman’s blog.  If you were looking to know a little more about me, you may read the interview here;

.Rita Lee Chapman

I’m never quite sure what kind of answer a person wants?   What kind of answer do I want to give?  And given the interview is over the electronic waves, it can be a little awkward to read too little or too much into the questions.

I always read the ‘blurbs’ about the author on the back covers or fly pages of books.  You would think after the many years of reading I would have developed an idea of what kind of biography I would want to give.  On the whole I think I’m kind of an ordinary person, married (twice), one child (son-married), retired teacher…yada, yada, yada.  Probably the unique feature to my life has been the fact I spent about thirty-three years living overseas on various US military bases teaching the dependent children of the military members living abroad.  It has been an interesting life.

Growing up in northern Illinois, I really wanted to go somewhere else and live somewhere else.  Don’t get me wrong, Woodstock, Illinois was a great place to grow-up, but I was ready for something more.  One of the more disappointing moments in high school (I did not have many of them) was not getting selected to do a student exchange year abroad.  I can’t blame them for not selecting me.  I had good/great grades and was involved in my school, but…BUT…I had not studied any foreign language, so I agree it would have been kind of dumb to send me to another country.

But I still got that chance as a military spouse and I think I took that chance for everything I could get out of it.  I believe what I did there could be applied to living anywhere and that is ‘get out’!  Now take that with what inflection you wish, but I mean, get out of the house, your community, your comfort zone.  Try something new, different, uncomfortable.  It doesn’t have to be overseas.

Example; once when taking painting lessons I was struggling to do what the instructor asked me to do with the paints.  I had painted for years at that point, in several media.  It wasn’t the language, it was the fact that what I was doing was so new and different from what I had done before that I was frustrated and wanted to cry.  It was a moment of realization that I was really learning.  If it is easy, if you aren’t grappling with a new idea or concept, are you really getting it?  Feeling it viscerally?

So, I guess I’m grappling with this idea currently.  I now have a published voice.  What will it say about me?  I am I ready for what it says about me?

No more prayers, they ain’t working.

It is the best of times; it is the worst of times.  Sorry Dickens.

Thank you, Olympics, for showing us what humans can aspire to; we need this.

18 gun incidents already in 2018!  WTF!

This is not a racial, sexual, religious, income, or immigration problem, except that the shooter was a white American male.  This is a problem that needs some ‘grown-up’ laws applied to it.

First and foremost, who needs an automatic, assault type weapon?  The name says it all…assault.

I’m not totally anti-gun.  I come from a gun owning family.  My dad always took a gun with him into the woods in Northern Wisconsin for two reasons, there were black bears and two if he ran into a problem (broken leg/heart attack) he had someway of letting my mother know.

But the brother whose estate I worked on clearing out after his death…why did he have all those semi-automatic rifles and ammo?  He didn’t need them.  He went to a gun range to fire them for ‘fun’, but he didn’t need any of them for self-defense.  No one was likely to break into his Portland, OR home to steal anything, not in his neighborhood.  Okay, they might have to steal the guns.

And second, the ‘grown-up’ countries around the world?

Japan, there you might, MIGHT be killed, but they will be knife wielding and you cannot kill a lot of people in a short time if you have to slice them up.  It has happened, but mass deaths???? No.  Heck, as a single woman, I didn’t lock my door (MY HOUSE DOOR) the three years I lived in the Iwakuni area.   Obviously I NEEDED a gun….not.

Switzerland issues you a gun, to be part of the militia and you are expected to know how to use it and keep it secure.   Gun problems…no, it isn’t treated like a toy or a privilege, but a duty.

Germany, you may have a gun (not assault) after you register it and yourself, and take classes (education) in proper use and safety, oh and you have to have an approved, lockable gun case for it and use it.  It is a privilege, one they pay a lot to exercise.

So as Spidey would say, ‘with great power comes great responsibility.’  or another quote, ‘The truth?  You can’t handle the truth,’ America.

I wish it was only the Olympics to discuss.

No more prayers, they ain’t working.

 

Searching for Gertrude

An interesting romance set in Istanbul of the 1930- early 1940’s. The characters are an American Jewish girl, a British diplomat/spy and a German bureaucrat who hates working for the Nazis, but it is his only way to find his lost love, Gertrude. How they all get tangled together is interesting. How the author resolves it is equally interesting. There is a tension in each of the characters due to the times and situations. Who can you really trust? Are you falling in love? And can this end well?

I was asked to read this and comment/review.  All opinions are my own.

Strictly Gershwin

‘S wonderful and D’lightful,  We went to the Tulsa Ballet’s performance of “Strictly Gershwin” last night.  It was fabulous!  The orchestra, soloists (vocal, piano, and dance), many specialty dancers (I’m looking at you tap), music, lighting, costumes, and choreography, all were topped off with the fantastic dancers of the Tulsa Ballet.  Everything was fabulous.  Gershwin’s music is always magical with his unusual rhythms and lyrics.  But the dancers were heavenly.    And just so they didn’t take themselves too seriously, bicycles on stage?  Rollerskaters?  Dancing conductor?  Did I like it?   You can’t tell from this?

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WONDERFUL dancing.  Kudos, Tulsa Ballet!

 

The Modern Thesaurus

I have, thanks Mom, a pretty extensive vocabulary.  I remember one summer where I was able to work at Livermore National Laboratory with about 20 other teachers.  We would gather for lunch.  One of the teachers was preparing for the Graduate Record Exam and was working on his vocabulary.  He would call out a word and see if any of us knew the meaning.  Better than 95% of the time I knew the word.  He was kind of amazed and asked me about it.  I admitted to loving to read, but also my mother used unique words all the time.  She used ‘wonky’ as in off kilter before I ever heard it used elsewhere.

I know in high school a Thesaurus was recommended for writing, not that I ever owned one, after all I had a walking one at home.  But when I did start to write I found the thesaurus program in Microsoft Word invaluable.

Well, welcome to the twenty-first century, writer.  Nance, https://writersthesaurus.com/ ,  has started an online thesaurus for writers.  It leans heavily towards the murder-mystery in genre and the present in time.  If you are writing a current hard-boiled detective or police story I can see it being very useful for your writing.  Most of the synonyms seem to carry negative connotations which would be appropriate for writing a hard-core detective story.  However ‘Romance’ and ‘Romantic’ had some sweet terms.  And to prove they have a sense of humor, look at the ‘X words’ category.  However the only terms for ‘mob’ referred to a mob in general and not The Mob, probably an oversight, right?  It is not a finished work, so I expect this site to develop further.

Can I see myself using it?  Well, I’m kind of stuck in either a galaxy far away (note only one far) where I might be inventing my own words, ‘waverider’ (a clairvoyant), or a period two hundred years ago where ‘chirky’  and ‘foolscap’ were more commonly used. (chirky – cheerful, foolscap – paper with a watermark).   So, no, but a writer using a current time period would find the list very useful.

Go take a look.  You might feel like writing ala Micky Spillane.

When the editor needs to pause…

My daughter-in-law is acting as final editor for me on the many stories I’ve written over the years.  It helps to have another pair of eyes when it comes to finding grammar errors.  And I will be the first to confess that grammar was my weakest area on the standardized tests we had to take, back in the day.  So E is retyping a book of which I had a hard copy, but the computer files have gone missing.  After several moves overseas and back to the States, maybe that isn’t surprising.  Today she told me that she had to stop typing and just ‘read’ the book, she was so absorbed in it.   That makes a writer’s heart go pitter-pat and more so as it was the same thing my mother said about my writing when she was editing it for me.  Hopefully others will feel the same.