Veronica Knox's Blog, page 16

THE UNTHINKABLE SHOES

After his death, Finn Cleary, a young Irish boy, a steerage passenger on the Titanic, would rather stay on earth in spirit form than face his mother in heaven after he loses his shoes.

Finn’s search for his lost shoes parallels the lifetime of a living girl he’s promised to protect as her invisible childhood friend.

April 10, 1912 was the date the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic sailed from Queenstown, Ireland.

 

The magical realism fantasy ‘THE UNTHINKABLE SHOES’ by V. Knox, will be launched on Amazon as near to April 15th as possible – the 104th. anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.

 

TITANIC’S GHOST CHILD

A boy loses his shoes between heaven and the deep blue sea. In ‘THE UNTHINKABLE SHOES’ Finn Cleary, the ghost of a boy who died on the Titanic, remains earthbound as a girl’s invisible childhood companion in order to find his shoes, and please his mother.

‘THE UNTHINKABLE SHOES’ excerpt:

[ Yes, those are definitely my shoes, there in the museum case. Who would have thought I’d be famous for my shoes. And such a sad pair as that. I wore them the day I stepped onto the Titanic and the day I floated free of it, April 15, 1912.

     I’m not sure if I was five or almost six when it happened, but after I drowned I discovered that time is an inexact measurement. Time raced ahead of me, pulling me backwards and spun me around so I met myself arriving. Even now, after a century, it continues to fling me forward, years speeding past me until I come to a full stop without my growing an inch or aging a single day.]

*Fictional characters were inspired by a museum exhibit of a pair of baby shoes belonging to the unidentified child from RMS Titanic.

‘THE UNTHINKABLE SHOES’ by V. KNOX will be launched on April 15, 2016– GENRE: literary fiction / magical realism – 300 pages 

TITANIC COUNTDOWN to April 15

‘THE UNTHINKABLE SHOES’ is about the ghost of a boy who died on the Titanic. 

Finn Cleary remains earthbound as a girl’s invisible childhood companion in order to find his lost shoes and redeem himself to his estranged mother.

*Fictional characters were inspired by a museum exhibit of a pair of baby shoes belonging to the unidentified child from RMS Titanic which sank April 15, 1912

  The anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is 6 weeks away.

 ‘THE UNTHINKABLE SHOES’ by V. KNOX will be launched on April 15, 2016– GENRE: literary fiction / magical realism.  300 pages

 

OH BABY!

In 50 days it will be 104 years since the sinking of Titanic.

The tragic events of April 15th – 1912 has left a lasting historical aftermath of tragic fascination. The luxury liner, making headway on its maiden voyage, struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, twenty minutes before midnight on April 14th – 1912. It sank two-and-a-half hours later, four-hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland.

While a pair of old shoes can’t tell you their story (and they all have at least one) the pair of shoes, pictured above, once worn by an unidentified child aboard Titanic, inspired a fictional one.

I invite you to view human artifacts the way I do – as stories without a voice.

Visitors leave toys on the grave of another unknown child in the Titanic Cemetery. I made a connection between the two children.

As always, I write from a fanciful point of view where the afterlife meets the present life. Where ‘crossing over’ means holding hands across time.

The baby shoes shown above are part of the permanent display housed in the ‘Maritime Museum of the Atlantic’ in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Along with one of Titanic’s deckchairs, they are a star attraction in the Titanic exhibit. Dare I call them a ‘White Star Line attraction.’

‘THE UNTHINKABLE SHOES’ – a novel by V. Knox will be published through CreateSpace as close to April 15th as possible.

VISITATION

The next time you visit a gallery or open a book of renaissance art… what will a face in a painting say to you?

There is a spiritual hush in the rooms an art gallery. But only some paintings offer a peak experience. Some ‘speak’ while others remain silent. The event is subjective – only a few artists are able to capture a soul.

A painting is a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ that sees everything. A 15th century portrait witnesses events for five-hundred-years and absorbs them all. Like a phonograph record it is a flat and silent object until someone has the magic to unlock its music.

Can a person fall in love with a figure in a painting? And if you do, could it be that you evoke such emotions in return? Can love across a crowded museum be love at first sight? In my book ‘ADORATION – loving Botticelli’ it is. And in my latest twin novels ‘THE INDIGO PEARL’ and ‘PEARL BY PEARL’ it happens when a child of three opens a book of renaissance art. From that moment her life changes.

Delphi Sharpe, a traumatized orphan, hears the voices of past conversations of the artists and their models that emanate from paintings, and when the maternal presence of the ‘Mona Lisa’ offers her comfort, a quest begins to find two lost masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci. Every painting encountered on her journey offers a piece of the puzzle because lost paintings long to be found, and like true mothers, an artist’s spirit cannot rest until their art ‘children’ are safe. But true icons offer Delphi more than clues to a mysterious disappearance; they offer advice.

When Delphi is fourteen she falls in love with a teenage boy in a portrait. The ‘till death parts us’ kind of love. The boy is Francesco Melzi, ‘frozen in time’ by his master teacher, Leonardo da Vinci.

Cecco and Delphi grow up together for thirteen years, five-hundred years apart, promising to meet, vowing be together, but a near-death experience traps Delphi and she is frozen in her own time.

In ‘THE INDIGO PEARL’ and ‘PEARL BY PEARL’ art and science meet in a clash of violence as cryogenics, the 21st century’s version of Sleeping Beauty’s hundred-year curse, separates the lovers. Now reincarnation pits two women against each other when they’re forced to share one set of memories in a future where time-travel is possible.

“Leonardo’s name and fame will never be extinguished. Alone, he vanquished all others.” – GIORGIO VASARI c.1550 ‘The Lives of the Artists’

Excerpt from ‘THE INDIGO PEARL’ Chapter five – An Icon of Great Price… the ‘Mona Lisa’ speaks:

Fame is always chance. Time creates the conditions for a moment of amber. Nothing more.

I’m sitting pretty now, but my life was never so protected. I am the likeness you’ve seen a thousand times. I’m a famous icon. I am the ‘Mona Lisa’– my brother, Leonardo, painted two.

I smile because you can’t see me. You observe technique and composition but I’m no more of a mystery than any woman. I’m hiding right here in front of you – a story as much as a work of art. I stare back, reading you, waiting for a sign of true recognition.

You analyze me, hoping to explain why I’m revered and others are not. Muses played a part, but stardom? That was chance. Obscurity is just plain carelessness.

My beloved brother believed mutual love and desire conceived ‘children of extraordinary intellect and liveliness.’ Pearls. He described a prodigy as an incarnation of human perfection. But even a perfect child who shines its true face on the world may lose its identity.

Leonardo wanted to fly, and somewhere between the seashores of birth and death his thoughts grew wings. In time, I flew alongside him, and he taught me the secrets of the birds and the updrafts, and how to tame the sky.

As my mentor, Leonardo gave me the art of seeing. Write down your thoughts, he told me, and if you can’t write them safely, paint them in plain sight so no-one will see. My dear child. Try to evade my gaze. When you look at me, you know I can see the real you – your true face, hiding in plain sight.

Leonardo called death ‘the great sea’ and as he journeyed towards it he grew more luminous. But running out of time troubled him, so in his last years at Amboise, he archived his imagination for future generations.

‘The great sea’ has taught me that life’s energy is infinite. I call it the great teacher. I’ve learned we don’t pass on; we move forward, and we can return to polish any magic we failed to honor.

I might be the old man you brushed shoulders with on the Louvre’s famous staircase or the child you saw feeding the pigeons in the pyramid courtyard or the cleaning woman you avoided on the second floor with her buckets and mops.

You can recognize a human pearl by their secretive smile and the way their eyes pin you with a mystery, but you have to pay attention. They’re hiding in front of you.

Here I am, waving to you across five centuries of chaos for no other purpose than to urge you to make peace with the art of veritas icona, your true image. Let me assure you again that losing one’s power is just plain careless.

The fifteenth-century was careless with its women. It misplaced them in the grandiose names of their fathers, but Leonardo immortalized my true image. I was known as Mona Lisabetta, the unmarried sister of the master, Leonardo da Vinci. We were both illegitimate, but as a possible heir, my brother was granted the Da Vinci name. As a daughter, I disappeared.

How fate loves to play with language. A ‘magic letter’ can drop from a hastily-copied document and change the world. Truth can be defaced by a clumsy inkblot, truncated by a myopic historian or nibbled into oblivion by an untimely mouse. Even more damaging for me, the artist Giorgio Vasari, a self-appointed authority who invented facts when only rumors were available, published ‘The Lives of the artists.’ Time loves to spin hearsay into a mystery. Vasari loved it even more.

My identity hinged on the transposition of a single letter, two coincidences, and a lie.

That letter was ‘a.’ Vasari sealed my anonymity by replacing my name with an expression – ‘the smiling woman,’ ‘La Gioconda.’ Gioconda became confused with Giocondo, the name of a close family friend. The coincidences? The name of Francesco Giocondo’s wife was Lisa; her married status decreed her Monna Lisa, and a brag of vellum, now lost, survived long enough to hint that Leonardo had painted Monna Lisa Giocondo’s portrait. The lie? Vasari, the consummate embellisher, fanned that anecdote into a serious claim. The rest, as you say, is history.

As ‘La Gioconda,’ my smile was translated from wistful to joyful until its significance supplanted the riddle of the Sphinx. How telling, and how ironic, that I’m the most famous face in the world yet no-one knows my true identity. If Leonardo had been less of a perfectionist would you be gazing at me now? Would anyone know I’d lived?

You may not credit the heights of art’s rising worth and swoon over the greater meaning of priceless. In my gallery, I’m so priceless I’m valued as a wonder of the world. The wonder is, I survived and other paintings did not. I’ve been trying to tell you. If you want to know what happened, open your heart. See. Listen. Hear. I was once alive and I still have a mind of my own. And you need insights to make sense of your own life.

I am a scrying bowl. If you can hear this much then my truth holds a message for you. Forget the museum guards. Ignore the rules. Reach over the barriers and touch the hem of my frame. As the oyster gives up its pearl, rejoice. Time has sent you an oracle.

*AVAILABLE as print-on-demand and e-book on or before DECEMBER 10- 2015 

PEARL BY PEARL

‘PEARL BY PEARL‘

book 2 of  two –  A TIME-TRAVEL FANTASY about reincarnation, love, lost identities, and missing paintings.

The fairy-tale of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ retold in a world of state-of-the-art technology… about a savant orphan who thrives in a society that shuns her by imagining her mother is the ‘Mona Lisa’ and her father is ‘Dr. Who.’

‘PEARL BY PEARL’ concludes of the story which begins in ‘THE INDIGO PEARL‘

 

 

DELPHI SHARPE has lived under the thumb of institutions for twenty-seven years. Ever since her traumatic childhood when was misdiagnosed as an autistic savant, it has been easier to retreat into her fantasy life than fight a world where she is too intelligent to be understood. Even the paintings she speaks to tell her so. 

A burst of white light flashes once at the end of a tunnel. Delphi shields her eyes until it fades to a gentle drizzle of platinum rain. It is the single-most powerful image to confirm the close of mortality. She has died. Perhaps her telepathic ability to read paintings through touch has died too.

In her brief life of twenty-seven years, Delphi has retreated into a fantasy world. Now, after her death, she is forced to transmit her experiences to her next incarnation in the form of pictures.

The shriek of a peacock splits her soul in two, and for a brief moment nothing matters. Two women wait where one had stood but Delphi’s duplicate quickly fades to mist.

A transparent white peacock sashays through the curtain and brushes past Delphi, its lacy tail widening a gap that showcases a vista of snow-covered hills and a bleached sky.

A figure shuffles in the far distance – a snowman on the horizon white as a blank page. He waves a scarf madly and blows kisses. “Run towards me,” he shouts, before climbing onto the peacock’s back.

Rider and bird comet across the sky, soon lost in a swirl of thick white flakes that fall in soft drifts. Their leaving billows the curtains in slow motion and the panels swing together with the sound of ice cubes clinking in a glass.

Delphi blows on her hands to warm them but her breath crystalizes and falls at her feet like a sift of sugar. She calls out, and the word hello forms an icicle in the air. It shatters when she touches it. “Cecco!” she screams. “Ti amo!”

Silence erases all her fears until half-a-century later, Delphi awakens, reincarnated as the ‘other woman’ – Cherry White, a bionically-enhanced time-traveler struggling with memories of her former life, the artificial duplicate of Delphi’s unlived dreams.

To fulfill their dual destiny, Delphi and Cherry must reconcile their split personalities and comb time to recover lost renaissance paintings, uncover a bizarre secret thousands of years in the past, and reunite with the ghostly lover they now share.

Cherry evokes Delphi’s memories to exact revenge on the descendants of those who betrayed her. But Delphi, devastated by a shameful secret, is reluctant to face another defeat. She craves Cecco and forgiveness and moving on… and Paris.

 

 

‘THE INDIGO PEARL‘ and ‘PEARL BY PEARL‘ will be AVAILABLE to purchase in PRINT-ON-DEMAND and E-BOOK FORMATS on AMAZON

*on or before DECEMBER 1 – 2015

 

THE INDIGO PEARL

 

TIME-TRAVEL FANTASY

‘THE INDIGO PEARL’ and ‘PEARL BY PEARL’ is a two book series – an historical time-travel fantasy about Delphi Sharpe, an autistic woman savant trapped in a near-death experience whose soul is coerced into transmigrating into the programs of Cherry White, a prototype bionic human, creating an eccentric female android with a mind of her own. Both women must surmount extraordinary odds for one of them to survive reincarnation.

Delphi, who can communicate telepathically with paintings, must complete her obsessive mission to find a lost work of Leonardo da Vinci and reunite with Cecco, the teenage boy in a fifteenth-century portrait she fell in love with, before her death is final.

Cherry, designed to withstand the stresses of newly-discovered time-travel, is intrigued by the stream of Delphi’s emotions she can only process as theoretical images. Tempted with the prospect of becoming human in order to fully-experience her plan to destroy her creators before self-destructing, Cherry is determined to access the full range of Delph’s senses. But becoming more human changes the stakes when Cherry falls in love with Cecco.

Cecco has aged year-for-year with Delphi, and now the separate incarnations of the same woman must compete for the teenager, now matured into a persuasive lover, determined to rescue both women from the institution where Cherry is pressed into service to mine the past for missing paintings in order to satisfy the greed of a corrupt art syndicate.

Book one of two. Publishing date: on or before December 1 – 2015

Second Lisa

Veronica Lyons and her autistic son Jupiter, visit the Louvre and walk out with the Mona Lisa. Not the painting, but the spirit of Lisabetta, Leonardo’s youngest sister, trapped in her portrait.

Lisa has the remaining nine months, during the anniversary of her death, to move on to her next incarnation. But during the five-hundred years since her death, the people closest to her in life have reincarnated.

It’s up to the eight-year-old Jupiter to rally them and his despondent mother to unlock the conundrum of an anonymous woman being the most famous face in the world.

Jupiter can see Lisa; his mother can only hear her, and Lisa must rely on their challenged relationship to communicate with each other and redress a powerful wish, uttered in haste, in order to reunite with her loved ones and live again.

The ‘Mona Lisa’ has stepped outside her painting to avenge a five-hundred year old mistake.

“If your name were to be irretrievably lost, cut apart from your time and permanently  erased from the world, overshadowed by the lies of silence… were you ever truly here?”  ~ Lisabetta

 

 

 

The Phoenix Project

 

‘Phoenix Angelus’ – original oil painting by Veronica Knox

‘PEARL by PEARL’ – the past-life memories of a renaissance woman

– by Veronica Knox

 

*REMINDER: Delphi Sharpe,  orphaned at birth, from a mother who swore her conception was immaculate, has the psychic ability to ‘read’ the provenance of paintings through touch. 

When Delphi’s silence is misdiagnosed as autism she is considered unsuitable for adoption and sent to a mental institution where her fascination with birds grows into a fixation enabling her to feel safe. She also becomes infatuated by a book on renaissance art that speaks to her, and begins to present the characteristics of a savant. But is she?

Delphi is discovered and adopted by a private art collector, who runs a science project on the cutting edge of cryogenics and robotics. W hen Delphi gains confidence and receives an offer to live an independent life she’s an asset worth fighting for. But how far is  ‘The Phoenix Institute of Art and Technology’  prepared to go to keep her?

For years, Delphi was content to work for ‘PIAT’ by retreating within a fantasy to survive her loneliness until a vision of blinding light confirmed her untimely death at the age of twenty-seven.

The deceased, Delphi, now inspires her new incarnation, Cherry  White – a time traveler created in ‘PIAT’s’ lab. Together, Delphi and Cherry, have become an irreplaceable resource for the art syndicate now called ‘The Phoenix Project.’  

 

The CONTINUING SYNOPSIS (from previous blog post):

Cherry is part human; part the latest creation of robotic technology – an enhanced hybrid android implanted with Delphi’s consciousness, programmed with perfect logic and the constitution to withstand molecular time travel, but ‘she’ lacks emotional intelligence. 

 Seeking kinship, Delphi had found refuge within the imagined family she created as a child with the ‘Mona Lisa,’ an ethereal voice named Sphinx, and an aristocratic ghostly lover from the 15th century. Fantasy and reality quickly evolved into an extraordinary lifestyle.

When Delphi was alive her instinctive rapport with birds helped process her awkwardness with people. She invented a game that matched human personas to birds that symbolized their true identities. A game she still employs to process the people in Cherry’s artificial ‘life.’

Now, Cherry and her new colleagues find themselves involved in a corrupt art market dealing with fakes, and to survive they must become allies in a race against time.

Delphi’s insecurities and her romantic illusions battle with Cherry’s clinical approach to the bizarre situation. Cherry has no qualms about killing her employers but until she feels the instinct to kill, she relies on her former incarnations emotions, hoping to kindle the feelings of violence. The problem is, Delphi was the embodiment of compassion. 

Real birds reflect the past, foreshadow the future, and offer clues to the underlying secret of Delphi’s origins. Meanwhile the male influences from Delphi’s past: Cecco, an aristocratic fifteenth-century ‘peacock,’ and his master teacher, Leonardo da Vinci,’join forces with a new man in Cherry’s life, dubbed as a shy ‘pelican.’

Cherry’s colleagues are swept into a corrupt art syndicate as they follow Cherry and Delphi’s conflicted worlds inhabited by influential swans, kites, a spring robin, and a pair of real pet birds: a cockatoo named Florence and Cawdor, a three-hundred-year-old Scottish crow.

Delphi pines for Cecco and her stolen future, caught between feeling like an ugly duckling and an abandoned  phoenix, but she shadows Cherry as a compassionate spirit. Delphi tries to defuse Cherry’s growing anger. Intent on destroying her enemies, Cherry needs to access Delphi’s memories and emotions in order to carry out her plan.

 Cherry’s team endanger their own lives as they help the conflicted Cherry stabilize her human connections while she continues to fulfill Delphi’s original mission to save the lost paintings of Leonardo da Vinci.

While Delphi and Cherry come to terms sharing Cecco, the ‘Phoenix Project’ exploits Cherry’s ability to locate and authenticate paintings, greedy to possess lost renaissance art by harvesting paintings destroyed in the fires of the past.

 In the limbo between the present and the past, newfound victims must be rescued to fulfill an ever-evolving dual destiny. Delphi and Cherry must reconcile their differences and continue to sift time for clues to the way forward as they attempt to recover lost renaissance paintings, uncover a bizarre secret in the distant past, and reunite with the dissociated lover they’ve shared over five-hundred years.

Cherry invokes Delphi’s memories to exact revenge on those who betrayed her. But Delphi, devastated by guilt, craves forgiveness and moving on.

ONE MIND, TWO ROADS… HOW WILL THREE LOVERS RECONCILE AN AFTERLIFE MADE FOR TWO?

 

EXCERPT:  ‘Bird magic quickened casually under my skin and fluttered in my veins as mild tremors. I sent my eyes to keep lookout from a tall pine spar. I was watching for my father’s ship. I was waiting for the ‘Tardis.’ I was looking for a sign.’

 

 

‘PEARL by PEARL – the past-life memories of a renaissance woman’ is a time travel fantasy by Veronica Knox                                      Publication date – July 1, 2015

The Peacock – a Symbol of Rebirth

 

A time traveler must re-experience her previous life as a woman savant to recover the missing paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and reunite with her lost love

 

‘PEARL by PEARL’ – the past-life memories of a renaissance woman

– by Veronica Knox

SYNOPSIS

Delphi Sharpe, orphaned at birth, from a mother who swore her conception was immaculate, has the psychic ability to ‘read’ the provenance of paintings through touch.

When Delphi’s silence is misdiagnosed as autism she is considered unsuitable for adoption and sent to a mental institution where she becomes obsessed with a book on renaissance art and begins to present the characteristics of a savant. But is she?

Delphi’s desire to find kinship is fraught with loneliness and she takes refuge in the fantasy family she created as a child with the ‘Mona Lisa,’ an ethereal voice named Sphinx, and a ghostly lover from the 15th century.

But at the age of fourteen her extraordinary reputation reaches the attention of a private art collector who runs a research laboratory on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. In need of funds he liberates Delphi and begins a new sideline evaluating and restoring fine art through a black market art syndicate under the auspices of ‘The Phoenix Institute of Art & Technology.

When Delphi gains confidence and an offer to live an independent life she is an asset worth fighting for. But how far is PIAT prepared to go to keep her?

Delphi is content to shelter within her fantasy family until a vision of blinding light confirms her death at the age of twenty-seven.

Half a century later, she wakens, reincarnated as Cherry White, an android time-traveller struggling with memories of her former life.

To fulfill their dual destiny, Delphi and Cherry must reconcile their split personalities and sift time to recover lost renaissance paintings, uncover a bizarre secret in the distant past, and reunite with the dissociated lover they’ve shared over five-hundred years.

Cherry invokes Delphi’s memories to exact revenge on those who betrayed her. But Delphi, devastated by guilt, craves forgiveness and moving on.

‘Pearl by Pearl – the past-life memories of a renaissance woman’ is my seventh art history time-travel mystery. This one is  about supernatural strangers, timeless love, the ghosts of art, and fanciful wings. And it begs the question…

DOES IT TAKE TWO LIVES TO MAKE ONE WOMAN?

 

Publication date July 1, 2015

EXCERPT:

“At the tender age of eighteen, Delphi buried a shameful secret which left me threading our next life around a blind spot, pearl by pearl, one memory at a time, reincarnation woman to woman. If the wisdom of the ages be pearls, Delphi and I were a necklace – a cultured double-strand of past and future lives. I disregarded the present as the band of limbo in a dismal rainbow. That listless color of dead purple where red unsuccessfully blends with blue.

From the perspective of the afterlife, time is an immeasurable string of heartbeats spun around a singularity – earth is a ball of yarn adrift in space. Delphi arrived, a lone heart sent to unravel an invisible ball of yarn in a lost painting.”

‘THE MADONNA OF THE YARNWINDER’
– one of several versions attributed to Leonardo’s pupils