Rain Trueax's Blog, page 41

another heartbreaking tragedy :(

Although I had written a blog for tomorrow on writing, after seeing the damage done to  Oklahoma by the monster tornado, I have no heart for using it. Nothing seems important in comparison. What I want to figure out now is to what agencies would be best to donate. I feel so sorry for the losses and words just don't cut it in such a situation.

Making Memories

Creativity and process are part of life and in so many areas besides writing or what are considered the fine arts. Creativity is in cooking, decorating, even living. How someone gets from A to Z with a creative work is something Diane Widler Wenzel illustrates in her exhibit at Oregon's Albany Public Library (2450 14th Ave. S.E.) which will be running through June.

Diane has been a friend of mine since college and her creativity and art work has been stimulating and always of interest. Going on a trip with her and her husband, watching her begin a work, take it home to finish, seeing it lead to something else has always inspired me.

This exhibit of 33 paintings not only shows the work spanning through her life but has signs to explain how she thinks about it.


Her exhibit is on the second floor. It's an extensive show going from one end of the second floor to the other. She put a lot of energy and thought into writing signs that describe her process and how she gets from A to Z. So if you happen to be in the Albany, Oregon area, it will be there through June.








More of Diane's thinking on the creative process at Color Bridges.

the nature of warriors

Before I begin writing a story, a lot of time is spent mulling over plot and characters in my head. It is when I begin to think about who goes with the two main characters. I work out the difficulties they will face and come up with subplots. For me it all happens before I begin typing. Once in awhile I might write a vignette to help me think about the mood of the piece-- the snippet often won't ever make it into the book.

In the historical story I am currently planning, its two lead characters will be different than any I've written-- both are warriors in different fields. I've written about heroes who had been in the military and about lawmen but never a career military officer. To add to the difference, my heroine will also be in a business that required secrecy and involved danger. She will be able to shoot and react as well as a man when required.

Two warriors. And me not a warrior. Well, I've been listening to documentaries, reading things, to get the feel for what that means. Music is a factor also and the following video is about warriors over a period of generations. There are no images-- just words about a desire for peace while one straps on a gun to do their part to bring that about. I have to get the feel for a world in which I have never lived in order to tell the story that has come to me this time.

covers that tell the story

One of the books I put out I dearly love but always knew it'd be a hard sell to readers as it is a romance that covers a subject that sometimes is covered in romances but never quite like mine. When I first begin writing I thought being original would be good... guess what-- it's not. Readers want the plots they have read and liked over the years. They want it a thousand times but with different characters. If you don't believe me, check out the popular romances. So to be original which might seem would be good-- is not. Anyway it doesn't matter because as I've said a zillion times-- we write what we can write and the stories that come to us. 

Moon Dust is the story of a marriage on the brink of divorce. Its hero is a high school principal confronting what is very typically a problem in schools today and sadly was when I wrote the story over 15 years ago. It also deals with the ramifications of childhood abuse on adults. That isn't so unusual when it's a heroine but in this book's case, it's the hero.

I don't know why people have wrongly tended to think sexual abuse of males as children isn't as serious a crime. I think that is changing. Sexual abuse of children is a crime of control and it's not less disastrous for the impact on an adult when it's a male than a female. I did a lot of research for the book, reading case histories, coming to understand what might be the telltale clues.

Then I set my story into the problems this high school principal was facing with violence in the schools. It's kind of a difficult subject every direction but I think I handled it tastefully and believably while keeping the story romantic. Still it's not surprising it's been a hard go for readers.


What I needed was a cover that depicted the story in a way that at least leads potential readers to look at the blurb and read the sample. It's what a cover is all about-- like fishing bait on a hook. The bait interests them and hopefully the hook is the blurb and free sample of the first chapter. Cover though comes first and I've tried a lot of them. The current cover is back from an earlier one but with a new background and font. Will it help sales? whoever knows with eBooks. You really never know what leads to them or means you get none.

I'd like to see this book do well not only because of the healing information that I think is within for individuals but for our culture; but also because it then leads into reading Second Chance which I think is also a book that has more than a romance as a reason to read the story.

So, once again new cover and maybe... just maybe... it'll be the last one as this really is Susan's story as she wrestles with first the loss of her marriage and leaving a man she still loves and then the truth of why he has been as he is. Finally as she has to fight to save him.

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covers covers everywhere and not a ... never mind

I know. I know. I've written about this all before; but this business of book covers is still mystifying me. As I get closer to putting out the first historical, I'd like to have all historical covers have a similar look. It seems more important for them than it did for my contemporaries. I thought I had it figured out as basically I had already created all of them... That's always good for a -- wait 'til you see this idea.

Along came reading criticisms of using too many images of Jimmy Thomas-- who puts out a lot of the images that are on indie romance covers (two of mine and more would be on the historicals). He is on them because he looks like the heroes and he provides reasonably priced, creative images with emotional impact and artistically framed. Why is it that bad to see him on so many covers? Was it okay for Clark Gable to play more than one hero? Ryan Gosling? on the other hand-- is it bad to see him on all of them? Well was it okay to see Clark Gable play a lot of heroes which he wasn't? It's called-- use your imagination.

Anyway I wrestled with the subject of covers in the middle of the other night, and it dawned on me that for about six months, one of my books, Second Chance, had been without a person on the cover, had been a little artier, AND hadn't sold a single book during that time. Was the problem that the cover moved away from the romance genre? I got lots of compliments on it... except compliments don't sell books.


Now an owl on the cover was very apropos for what the book is about. Second Chance takes two characters from an earlier book, Moon Dust, and brings them together in a romance set eight years later. The hero runs a wildlife rehabilitation center. So an owl on the cover is a winner, right?

Wrong apparently. It didn't tell enough of what the book was about. If you write sci-fi, your cover has to depict it. I wasn't writing a non-fiction book about wildlife rehab centers even though I did have some of my own experiences with them in the book. It was a romance. It was about a young man who had done all he could to rehabilitate himself from early mistakes. It was about a woman who was dealing with a broken marriage and raising a daughter with an ex husband at odds over how to do that. Second chances all around.

So I went back to its original cover. Basically it's more true to the story probably as this is a guy, 28, who works as a short haul truck drive to support his real love-- the rehab center as it gets its feet under it. He is a hunk. Will the cover stay this way? Maybe and maybe not. It is one plus with writing ePublished books. It's up to me.

The middle of the night when I told Farm Boss what I was thinking, after we both had awakened at the wrong time, he said, you really are a disturbed woman to have something like this fretting you in the middle of the night. I said, no, I was a lucky woman that I have something that excites and interests me this much at my age-- and that I can do something about.


More coming up on covers-- and this time about the book that really has never sold much. The following video is for Second Chance.

Reading as 'art'?

After writing about Zane Grey, a writer no elitist reader would admit reading, what should I come across but a review of the kind of book that is on the top literary lists. Of course, since the reviewer took my view of this particular book, I had to grab the link.

The Great Gatsby
With the film coming out, I was reminded again how it's a book and set of films that I have always avoided for the reason to which the reviewer above spoke. Why spend time with depressing and unpleasant people and plots? Seriously I'd like to know as I do not get it. The only time I read something like it was in high school and college literature classes and then for my own good-- supposedly.

Leaving aside Gatsby, my own books, and heading instead toward what makes people choose to read books that are about icky people doing icky things? Why do they read what the critics of their time tell them is good and ignore what they might enjoy more?

Enrichment of the soul? How could Gatsby do that. It's a stupid plot if you just take the plot alone. It pushes sanctimonious thinking which must have worked since they keep making movies out of this ridiculous, manipulated story. Should it?

And as a writer, the plot device to make Gatsby pay for his excesses just seemed wrong. The author needed a tragedy but couldn't he have come up with a more believable method? What did it gain? Well it gave Fitzgerald an enduring classic in the eyes of most critics, a book most Americans have read (often forced in a class) and some have on a list to prove they are well-read.

Some of the books on lists of the greatest literary works deserve to be there on all levels but do we really need to read books that make us feel worse about humanity? When I want that, I want it to be non-fiction.

We just sold one of our young bulls to a local rancher which made my day considerably brighter. He had dropped by yesterday to ask if we had any as he has twelve cows and needed a bull. Fortunately he wanted one like we have of the smaller Hereford breed with smooth shoulders to cut down on having to pull calves. For big ranchers, they don't mind a season of pulling calves but someone like us, we are looking for easy calving, something that doesn't take the cow down from a hard birthing. 

The photo above is our old bull with one of his sweeties who he bred earlier this week :) The attention he gives a cow he has bred is worthy of a lesson to any would-be Lothario. He's there for her until she doesn't want him there anymore. Isn't she lovely and feminine, even make-up around her eyes; while he's the typical broad shouldered romantic hero ;)

Under the Tonto Rim

 "Dusk mantled the forest. A faint night wind arose, mournful and sweet. Lucy threaded her way back toward the clearing. And the peace of the wilderness seemed to have permeated her soul. She was just one little atom in a vast world of struggling humans, like a little pine sapling, lifting itself among millions of its kind toward the light. But that lifting was the great and the beautiful secret."                     from Under the Tonto Rim by Zane Grey

Having said how the books of Zane Grey inspired me toward life values and my own writing, I thought I'd go a bit farther with the why of it. Some say his view of life was too idyllic, not the way of the West as it was. His words often flow more like poetry than prose.  He is praised for the descriptions of the land but belittled for the idyllic view of the relationships between men and women.

When I read his words now (and I own all his westerns, some so old and battered that they are lucky to hold together), it takes me a little to get into them and then it happens as I fall into the flow of the words and images. Once again I begin to feel their energy as it inspires me regarding the land and relationships between humans.


Clearly they have influenced my own value set. The snippet from The Call of the Canyon speaks to a philosophy I have often espoused.

"Carley saw two forces in life-- the destructive and constructive. On the one side greed, selfishness, materialism: on the other generosity, sacrifice and idealism. Which of them built for the future? She saw men as wolves, sharks, snakes, vermin, and opposed to them men as lions and eagles. She saw women who did not inspire men to fare forth to seek, to imagine, to dream, to hope, to work, to fight. She began to have a glimmering of what a woman might be."

As I looked at his books more critically to write about them here, the first big thing I saw explains why he was such an influence on my writing. He didn't consider himself to be a western writer but to be a writer of historical romances. That explains why women were so important in his stories of the West.

Although the women are strong, if not in the beginning, they become thus, I suspect feminists might hate the books which tend to see women as responsible for a lot of what goes wrong in a culture when they adopt materialism, immodest dress, and lack of responsibility in how they use their beauty. On the other hand, they are seen as what will inspire a man to his best. As he portrays them, they are either the downfall or the salvation of a culture; and they can make or ruin a man.

A book like Under the Tonto Rim has an Arizona hero who is a wild-bee hunter. The heroine has come to the valley as a welfare worker to help families learn better ways to live. She does this by living in a cabin tent at the home of one of the families. The hero is the typical romance hero-- tall, muscular, a woodsman and used to living wild. He needs some taming as she also has to come to value the wild. There is a bad guy, but it's really about the beauty of that area and the rural community.

In his stories, Grey wrote about community events that my father used to talk of seeing where his parents would attend community barn dances in South Dakota and the dancing went on until dawn. The children were put into the loft to sleep but they could watch their parents dancing below.

Grey writes of a culture that isn't seen most places any more. The value set though was part of many western communities in the time he wrote with his first book being published in 1903. He wrote 90 books many of which were published after his death in 1939.

Probably a fiction writer of today couldn't write as he did with his poetic phrasing, the condemnation of modern culture, his characterizations of minorities (and boy was he not politically correct even for his time), the desire to go back to nature, and have his level of financial success.

Writers have to fit their times, and his time was open to his style and way of thinking. People wanted to be inspired, to reach to higher values. Critics thought otherwise about his writing, and he wrote how that bothered him.

 "Those critics who crucify me do not guess the littlest part of my sincerity. They must be burned in a blaze. I cannot learn from them."

If his many fans back then had known how he truly [lived his life in terms of the other women], would they have turned on him? Well in those days private lives for celebrities (and he was a celebrity of his time) were more possible. The quotes from his writing reveal black periods which makes me wonder if he was undiagnosed bi-polar, something that wouldn't have been possible to understand in that era. 

"I will see this game of life out to its bitter end."

"I see so much more than I used to see. The effect has been to depress and sadden and hurt me terribly."

Knowing some of this now, the depression he must have suffered, it's amazing the positive feeling that his books project. Some say his wife, Dolly, was a big factor as she was his editor, promoter, mother figure, and perhaps even sometimes co-writer especially where it came to the women. I don't know though because if he had many lovers, he might've understood women better than one would suppose for a man who was supposed to be this great outdoorsman where fishing and hunting were his greatest treasure.

He wrote quite a few books where either a man or woman came to the West, engaged in hard labor and found their soul and deepest core strengthened. It was clearly a belief he had that hard work, nature, time on rivers and in mountains, those were all necessary to living fully. It appears that for him though one woman for a lifetime was not sufficient, and we can ask why, what drove him and how it was reflected in his books. I decided to order the biography, that is reviewed above, as I'd like to understand more about the life behind those books.

Photos all from my trips under the Mogollon Rim and on Tonto Creek

western writers-- Zane Grey

"Love of man for woman - love of woman for man. That's the nature, the meaning, the best of life." Zane Grey

I would guess that every writer has writers who have influenced their goals for writing. Some who end up wanting to write the great American novel might have John Steinbeck; a mystery writer could look to Dashiell Hammett; for science fiction -- H.G. Wells; and fantasy -- J.R.R. Tolkien. Well for me, it was the western author, Zane Grey, who got very little credit from critics during his successful career of writing books about the American west, action, nature and love.

When Grey wrote about his heroes riding or walking across trails, you felt he'd been there and knew that land and not just the physical features but the emotional impact. He loved the romance of the West and it showed in his characters and the philosophy he espoused. Yes, for today he's not politically correct-- maybe wasn't for his own time; but he wrote about a world he did know and a lot of his novels, some of his best were set in the rim country of Arizona.
 
Luckily, in 1974, I decided I simply had to see the cabin he had built in Arizona under the Mogollon Rim. He used a lot of Arizona as the backdrop for his stories and was there often until 1929 when he got mad at the state for not bending bear hunting rules and said he'd not be back. He wasn't.

That year, we camped in a campground on the road below and found out the road up to the cabin was closed due to washouts from floods which meant we'd have to walk about two miles. This was a time of small children but we opted to do it anyway.

Part way up a couple of young rangers came along with a pickup and asked where we were headed. They offered us a lift to the cabin which meant we rode in the back of their pickup.

Luckily the caretakers were there, and we got to go inside. I even bought several copies of his books, which I already owned, but it was because they had come from there. We were there again in 1978 but that time no caretakers to let us inside but we did walk around the house and porch.

In 1990, the Dude fire swept over that part of Arizona and destroyed the original cabin. They rebuilt a replica in Payson (photo below). I was in Payson in 2011 but didn't want to go into the replica although maybe someday I will. The photos of what it looks like inside weren't what I remember from when it was under the Tonto Rim.


In 2011, we were aiming to drive through Paradise Valley where historically there was a family feud that killed all by one of them before it was over. It's not an easy drive as the area is still fairly remote especially to drive in from the north and out to the south. Grey had been fascinated by the story, based one of his books loosely on in after talking to many in the valley who were old enough to remember when it happened (and many were still evidently hesitant to talk about it).

That trip, we stayed at Kohls Ranch Lodge where we'd been before and drove up to where the cabin had been. A big gate and no trespassing sign put up by the Zane Grey Foundation blocked us from walking around the old site. We did take photos of the area.


Kohls. on the banks of Tonto Creek, is a nice place to stay. The main lodge has the portrait below of Grey above its fireplace.


He was such an early inspiration to me and still I enjoy his books on several levels. He wrote about nature, about the ideal of western values. He had strong heroes, action, a fight for good against evil. Sometimes nature was a healer. His heroines were worthy of the men they would eventually choose as their mates. The books had a big influence on my life and I think still influence my writing-- although he never had more than a few chaste kisses in his books. If those kisses took the heroine's breath away as they did in the book below, you can just imagine what the marriage would be like ;).


This cover was one I photographed from my daughter's collection. Her husband's uncle left her his collection of hardback Zane Grey's with the dust covers in place. What a treasure for someone who valued his work. She has said she took a quote from this book for her life motto. It's a darned good one for mine also.

"I hope I have found myself, my work, my happiness -- under the light of the western skies."Zane Grey

Here's the thing---

Here's the thing---

Spring has sprung

Even where it comes to creativity, I have days where it just isn't working to write about the process. Currently my world is about editing which isn't so much a creative process but one of craft. I see it as very important to what any artist/writer does, but it doesn't inspire creative thoughts as much as other stages of the work.


So instead of more here on writing, how about pieces of my world?  We celebrated Beltane May 1st. The lambs are going crazy with their gang activities which is a lot of fun to watch but hard to photograph. I am at war with my cats, who are inside at night but have had limited outside privileges (fenced yard) during the day.

The problem is the colorful columbine are blooming. That should not be a problem-- except I have one cat who only cares about catching hummingbirds, and hummingbirds now will be low as they go into the columbine for nectar. It's a constant conflict which the cats could care less about but interrupts my work day as I try to alert the birds or stop the cats.

The main hummer killer has gotten two so far this season but both he had in his mouth in such a way (moss with one and grass with the other) that the hummers could be rescued and after recovering go on their way. One problem with hummingbirds is they are little kamikaze pilots as they dive bomb the cat to drive him off. They know no fear. That works well-- not.

So a few photos of my world-- minus the cats and the hummingbirds who aren't cooperating for photos.







I live in a very creative environment in all the ways I can imagine as right now I listen to the blackbird singing. Too bad lately I am spending my days looking at words on a computer screen... I know. I know... It's a choice.

The garden sculptures are cement, not mine. The one on the deck is mine and clay but not the kind that can go outside year round. Soon I hope to use the easel but currently I want to get the book ready to go.