Sylvia May's Blog, page 4

Thanksgiving 2014 in Bermuda

Monday was Thanksgiving day in Canada, and even though we live in Bermuda we still celebrate at our house. We love carrying on this tradition of gathering around the table for a turkey dinner and not just because we love the food; we live a fortunate life and are extremely grateful for everything about it.This weekend we had special visitors to celebrate with–our daughter and son-in-law and 3-month-old granddaughter. Our turkey dinner was shared with two other Canadian families whom we consider to be part of our Bermuda family.

There was an added element to this year’s Thanksgiving however. Our lovely island had just been hit by Hurricane Fay in Sunday’s early morning hours.

I actually started to write this Thanksgiving blog that morning. I had gotten up early (5:45ish), made myself a cup of tea and sat down to it. But the howling winds distracted me and so did our patio chairs being tossed about outside. I left the computer to help Mr. M battle the winds to remove the patio furniture to a safe place and by the time I returned to the blog we had lost our power.

When our power is down, so is our running water. Needless to say, it was a tough morning…no coffee, no showers…however we were one of the lucky households who had their power returned by noon. Others were not so fortunate, including the friends who were invited to share Thanksgiving dinner. We were happy to share our electricity (and shower) with them. And we had a wonderful Thanksgiving after all.

Being in the middle of a hurricane was an an interesting and new experience for our visiting family. I can imagine our little granddaughter saying years from now: “I celebrated my first Thanksgiving in the middle of a hurricane.”

New Book Cover

The cover for my new novel, BREATHING SPACE, is done. I love the sense of airiness it projects. Take a deep breath, exhale, and walk on the beach.

Do you want to know what the novel is about? Here’s a brief description:

Sometimes walking away from your life is the only way to find yourself…

Lydia’s vacation on Hyde Island turns into a journey of self-discovery. The island so entices her that she decides to stay, forsaking her family and obligations in Toronto. Her new life on the lush green island is peopled with a hippy scientist, a dashing Southern gentleman, a slimy boss, and an undocumented Mexican hotel maid with a sad history. As Lydia makes one questionable choice after another, she soon begins to understand why she so easily succumbed to Hyde Island’s lure.

BREATHING SPACE is scheduled for release in mid-November, so you only have to wait a month or so before you can read it.

Computer Chaos

The internet is a wonderful thing. When I am writing, I use it to research factual questions that crop up as I develop a story, or if I need a name for a character I’ll ask Google for suggestions, or I’ll check the online Thesaurus to find just the right word. Unfortunately, the Internet can also sidetrack me–with Facebook, Youtube, interesting articles; sometimes I go online to look something up, get distracted by something else and forget completely why I went online in the first place!

Having so much information literally at our fingertips is amazing, but it can be overwhelming. Who has time to read everything on the Internet that is relevant to them? Often I’ll bookmark a link or download an article for later perusal. But what this creates for me is computer chaos.

I am a neat freak. I always have been. The compulsive tendency to organize, clean up, and put everything in its place has been a part of who I am my whole life. And now I not only have a house and desk to keep in order; I have a laptop that’s a mess. It is filled with documents containing articles I haven’t read, emails that need answering, photos that need sorting, files that need organizing…my bookmarks list is so long it takes several minutes to scroll down it. I get antsy when I begin to think about the time it would take to sift through everything and decide what to do with it. So I task-avoid, and just keep adding to the jumble of information, which unsettles me even more. Argh! How do I get out of this computer chaos and get on with writing?

A Day Derailed

Life can turn in an instant. One minute you can be happily driving along and the next your car can be smashed into a wall and you can be sitting in the driver’s seat with a sore head and chest and feeling dazed, wondering what happened. That’s exactly what happened to me last Friday.

I was driving along Harbour Road on my way to a friend’s house. It’s a very narrow road that has walls right to the edge on the sides. I was not driving fast to begin with (one can’t really, on Harbour Road) and when I saw my turn coming up, I slowed down. Suddenly,  BAM! the left front side of my car was rammed at an angle against a lamp post and the wall. My first thought was “What happened?! What did I do?” I could see the pole and the wall, I could see that my car was mushed into them, but I had no idea how it had gotten there. It was a bizarre and surreal feeling. After retrieving my glasses, which had flown off, I tried to reverse to straighten the car, but it wouldn’t move. I opened the door and stepped out, noticing that several people behind me had stopped and gotten out of their vehicles.

“Are you okay?” “What happened?” One woman came up to me, touched my shoulder and asked if she should take me to the hospital. A man who had been riding his scooter behind me said he saw the tire blow and that’s what caused the car to do that. I was pretty shaken up, my lip felt swollen, my face hurt and my chest hurt. These are all places that had come in contact with the steering wheel or been thrust against the seat belt. People pointed out the seat belt “burn” on my neck.

Everybody who stopped were very kind. Three guys lifted the back end of the car to move it off the other lane (supermen!), one guy called the police and one guy stayed to direct traffic around my car. I phoned the friend whose house I had been going to and she called a tow truck and then came to help. Another friend who happened to be driving by saw what had happened and stopped to give me a hug and make sure I was all right. The police who came were considerate and sympathetic. The tow truck driver was solicitous and supportive.

When I started to write this post, I wanted to tell about the accident itself. But I just realized that what I am really writing about is the kindness of strangers, the thoughtfulness of friends, and the compassion of people in general. My experience on Friday showed me that when someone is in trouble, people come through. They help. Even now, almost a week later while I’m still bruised and in pain, friends, casual acquaintances, and even Facebook contacts take the time to make sure I’m okay, to try to help me feel better.

We hear so much negative news that it’s important to remember that there are many positives in our world. Those positives are generated by people like you and me. My accident was certainly a negative experience, but the people around me made it bearable. Thank you humankind.

Sabbatical?

A question people often ask is how I come up with ideas. Coming up with ideas isn’t a problem for me. I have many stories rattling around in my head. Life is full of stories. Every day, what we experience can be a story. I have files filled with story ideas, first chapters planned out, notes written. My problem is deciding which one of those to focus on, which one to develop into a novel.

Lately I’ve been in a writing slump, one that has lasted quite a while. Some might call it a writer’s block, but I haven’t been blocked in the way most people would interpret that term. When I hear “writer’s block” I envision an author staring at a computer screen with a mind devoid of words. My slump has had more to do with wrestling with too many ideas, with not being able to settle down to one story.

During the past several months, my response to this dilemma has been task avoidance. I’ve been keeping myself busy with everything but writing. I’ve been traveling and entertaining visitors. I’ve been walking on the beach, riding my scooter, playing badminton. I’ve been pursuing other creative interests, such as painting, playing piano, knitting. I’ve been sorting photographs, making videos. I’ve been socializing and devoting time to volunteer jobs.

What I haven’t been doing is writing. That’s why you haven’t read any posts on this blog. That’s why, when someone asks me what I’m currently working on, I sheepishly mumble something about developing ideas. That’s why my book proposals haven’t been finished.

Today that has ended. My “sabbatical” is over. I have settled on a story. I have a setting (Bermuda), a protagonist (Gracie), and a plot. Here goes…

Guest blogging

It’s been a very long while since I’ve posted on this blog. All I can say is that life waylaid me and distracted me. The fact of the matter is that I took a few months where I just wanted to have minimal time at my computer screen. What did I do instead? Played piano and recorder (learned a Sonata by Schubert and one by Beethoven piano, and a couple of movements of a sonata by Haydn on the recorder). I’ve been following a DVD course in water colour techniques. I’ve been traveling (those trips are subjects for another blog). I’ve been reading. And I’ve been writing…well, I’ve been formulating plots and characters and settings so that I can write again.

But now I’m back. Ironically, today’s return to blogging is to announce that I am a guest blogger today on author J.M. Kelley’s blog. Come and visit. Click here.

And I’ll see you here again next week.

Just in case you’re interested…

Today I am guest blogging on One Woman’s Write blog, talking about how I became a writer. (Thanks for having me there, Linda!)

Drop by for a read and feel free to leave a comment:

http://www.onewomanswrite.blogspot.com/2013/08/sylvia-may-how-i-became-writer.html

Out of the Box

One of the more interesting aspects of living in other places is experiencing cultural events that are different from what I’ve grown up with. Take for example Cup Match weekend in Bermuda. This is THE holiday of the summer on the island. It’s a four-day weekend, during which a serious cricket match is played over two days (Thursday and Friday) between the St. George’s team (east end) and the Somerset team (west end).  The event itself is exciting and not just for the match. People wear an assortment of hats, refreshments flow freely, and a Crown & Anchor tent tempts people to lose their money.

Also on that weekend, families set up tents and campsites all over the island. Parties go on everywhere, stores are closed, people fly in to celebrate the summer.

On the Sunday, there is a non-mariners race, where people create unique floating devices and race them. In addition, anyone with a boat who wants to participate sails over to Mangrove Bay, anchors and ties their boat to other boats and they party. People float in the water on noodles or other floatation devices with drinks in hand, music blares from various crafts, and the atmosphere is full of fun and happiness.

We are fortunate enough to have friends who own a boat, and they invited us to join them this past weekend at the Non-Mariners. Our two sons were lucky enough to be visiting at the time and they joined us too. We had a blast! The sun shone, the water was warm,the company was great, and the drinks were cold. Is there a better way to celebrate summer?

Summer hiatus

I can’t believe that two months have passed since I last wrote on this blog. Those months were filled with people, travel, and fun. Just after I posted my last entry, I travelled to Canada to attend a wedding and spend some quality time with my kids. After we’d been home for barely a week, one of my best friends came to visit us in Bermuda. Ten days after she left one of our sons arrived for a visit, followed three days later by our other son. Visitors definitely keep me busy and distracted. And of course, there are the usual summer activities that I participate in when the water warms up, like scuba diving, snorkeling, and kayaking.

Phew. It’s no wonder my blog fell by the wayside in my list of priorities.

Still, in the midst of all that busyness, my writing life has continued. While the summer hasn’t been too conducive to making much headway on the new novel I recently started, I did manage to secure a contract for my second women’s fiction novel. It is titled BREATHING SPACE (hopefully my publisher will choose to keep that title). Although I will keep you posted on any progress as it occurs, its release date isn’t until early 2015, so it will be a while before that book hits the bookshelves.

No matter. I have enough to do. I just received the final edits for the third Lucy Arlington mystery (BOOKS, COOKS AND CROOKS), so my co-author and I will be busy with that over the next few weeks. And once we send that out, I will have no excuse not to buckle down with that new project that I started a month ago. I have characters to flesh out, a plot line to solidify, a story to tell…I’d better get to it!

 

Home Under Water

Our Bermuda spring has been, in my opinion, unseasonably cool. We’ve had more rainy, cloudy days than I recall for the four springs that I’ve lived on the island, and the water is taking longer to warm up, which means that I haven’t been in it yet. Until this weekend.

A friend of ours invited us out on his boat Sunday to join a flotilla accompanying the Sea Dragon, a science vessel, out to sea. The day dawned cloudy and cool, with rain on the horizon. “Do you think we’ll still go?” I asked my husband, hoping he’d say probably not. But no, we packed our picnic lunch and our snorkel gear (and jackets!), and at 8:30am got on our scooters and rode to Jim’s boat. Once aboard, we sailed in the rain to Hamilton Harbour to join the other boats. I have to say that we looked a little like drowned rats by the time we arrived.

Finally our little flotilla headed off–four boats sailing out of the harbour under clouded skies. (We figured others had let the rain influence their decision not to join the parade.) Despite the wet grey skies, our spirits were high. In the distance we saw patches of pale blue. And those patches gradually got bigger and bigger, so that by the time we reached the point where the Sea Dragon would leave us behind, the air was warm and sunny, the sky blue, and the water turqouise.

We headed for Whalebone Bay, where we anchored, donned our snorkel gear and jumped in the water. Brr, it was chilly. Nevertheless, I put my head down and flutter-kicked my way to the reef.

When I caught sight of a big purple fan coral and a little sergeant major swimming toward me, I forgot all about being cold. “Ah,” I thought. “I’m home.” That’s right, home. It had been months since I was under the water and I hadn’t realized how much I missed it until that sea fan made me feel like I’d returned to where I belonged.

By the way, that photograph is one I took while snorkeling on Sunday. Can you see why I was so happy to be back there?