Sneak Peek

I spent a lot of time today peeling flaking paint off my bathroom wall.  It was a strangely addictive activity... but sadly not done as I call it a day.  But I called it a day because in the middle of fascination with the curls and layers I stripped away, I found a pencil sketch of a square on one wall.  I told myself I remembered that - because I vaguely remember when this house was built 26 years ago.  But maybe I don't really remember that, because so much of the house was built in a factory, only pieced together here.

Anyway, this house is only 26 years old.  Imagine another 200 years on that history and what one would find?  Imagine what my character who is living in an old house and eventually restoring could find... and how I could link it to the other stories in this complex novel?


So I pulled myself away from the walls and typed up two pages.  I'm posting this now.  I will probably delete it whenever this novel gets any closer to a public display.  One could say there is a spoiler embedded in this inspiration ... but to appreciate the spoiler, one has to read a whole bunch of other scenes to get the context.  Anyway, here is a taste of what's to come, hopefully, when I continue this momentum brought on by summer house projects. 


Oh - and if you have anything to add about the detail of mascara in the early 1920's, please feel free to comment.  

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Aggie saw the light at the end of the hallway.  It seemed unusual, though she had seen it before when Ms. Grayson lived in that room.  Aggie never went in there – she only saw the light from down the hallway, something she remembered when she saw it again and heard the ripping sound.

Miss Langdon – Helen – was seated on a footstool, barely three inches off the ground.  It looked funny with her long legs bent uncomfortably in those funny trousers she wore.  She took in a breath of her cigarette and then leaned back towards the wall with a pair of shears, stabbing it under the wallpaper.

Aggie was only there for a few seconds to comprehend the activity when Helen turned her big brown eyes to her and smiled.  She took another quick inhale of her cigarette before stabbing it out and curving her smile into mischief.  “I don’t like this wallpaper,” she pulled off a strip of the flowered design, exposing the plaster and wood beneath it.

Aggie giggled as Helen winked and bent down to poke another edge with the shears.  “I didn’t like Aunt Pauline.  This reminds me of her,” the brown eyes wandered to Aggie.  “Did you like Pauline?”

Aggie bit her lip.  She looked down and shook her head.

“No, I suppose she wasn’t easy to live with,” Helen let out a sigh and loosened the base of the wallpaper.  “She was a very sad woman.  She brought more sadness on herself and never had the grace to learn from her difficulties.” 

Helen let out another sigh and stood up from the footstool.  “Do you want to pull it off?” Helen looked at Agnes.

“Yes,” Aggie lifted the edge of the paper and watched as it tore in uneven streams toward the ceiling.

“Perfect,” Helen loosened more and offered Aggie another chance to expose the wood and dust.  “Do you know your letters, Agnes?”

“Mavis taught me my name,” Aggie watched as Helen surveyed the top of Pauline’s dresser.  She uncovered a small jar, sniffed it, and brought it back to the footstool.  “What is that?”

“Pauline’s mascara,” Helen sat on the stool and gave the jar to Aggie.  “Use your finger and write your name on the wood.”

Aggie dipped her index finger and proudly made an “A” on one of the narrow strips of wood.  She looked at Helen who nodded as she lit up another cigarette.  Aggie carefully made the rest of her letters, getting dust mixed on her finger with the black ink.  She looked back to Helen when her name was done and offered her the jar.  “Can you make an “H?” she exhaled a cloud of smoke over her left shoulder.  Aggie nodded, prompting Helen to point back to the wall as she sucked on the cigarette.  “Then an ‘e’ like in your name.”

“Then ‘l,’” Aggie guessed.  She went ahead and finished Helen’s name, proud that her recent study was on display for her new favorite person.

“It’s beautiful,” Helen took back the jar and went to Pauline’s dresser.  She lifted the cap to the jar, but set it down again, taking one of the tiny brushes and going to the exposed wall.  Aggie turned her head and watched her paint several letters on a vertical slat.  

“What does that say?” Aggie tried to decipher the strange combination of letters.

“Rosa rubicundior, lilio candidior, omnibus formosior, semper in te glorior,” Helen picked up the cigarette she left in the ashtray.   “It’s Latin.”

“What’s Latin?”

“You’ll study it when you go to school. “

“It’s pretty.”

“So are our letters,” Helen rested her hand on Aggie’s shoulder.  “They will stay there forever, hidden under the next sheet of wallpaper.  Our secret, forever hidden in this house.”

Aggie liked that.  She liked that she had a secret with Helen.  A secret no one else would ever know.

Unsinkable Inspiration or How I Talk Myself Back Into The Writing Groove

It’s not like I don’t know there is some hype on the periphery of my daily intake of pop culture. I know there is a re-release of a movie – a re-release over which I’ve pooh poohed disdain a couple of times. But even with that, it did strike me in the last week or so that it is almost April. Almost the second week of April… when there will be a centennial of an infamous date in human history.

The centennial which will prompt that aforementioned re-release fifteen years after its record breaking box office sales. A decade and a half after I went to the movie theater 9 times (or maybe it was 10) to see it on a big screen. 

If you are completely thick and can’t guess the inference, I am talking about Titanic. The disaster and the cinematic phenomenon. But I will focus on the latter as I started mulling over it in the car today when I decided not to press skip on James Horner’s music on my shuffle.

I got that CD the same Christmas I got another soundtrack recording of The English Patient. I am listening to that now… and will never tire of it as I have of James Horner. But both were instrumental in fertilizing a seed of inspiration prompted by that movie I keep bringing up in every paragraph. 

One of those visits to the movie theater was with my mother. Probably because she wanted to understand why my almost 14 year old sister was so obsessed with the 4 hour over-hyped movie. I wasn’t expecting her response at the end. I anticipated some sort of Irish Catholic cynicism. But she muttered a question to Celine Dion’s high pitched lament… how exactly does the heart go on after all that?

It was an earnest speculation, one that initially prompted my 22 year-old-imagination to speculate the mystery of my mother’s unknown teenage years. But resigning myself to the improbability of a Jack Dawson in her history, I decided to contemplate the question in my own way of unraveling the world’s mysteries – by making up a story.

Tonight as I drove home and decided not to press skip on As Far As Florence, I tried to remember the initial threads that wove itself into my fictional answer. 

 I know I have an entire history mapped out in my brain – and on paper – revised several times in the last fifteen (good God) years. A family tree has grown and been pruned. A mystery created and solved. A story beginning and ending with that silly idea of a heart going on after all that. 

That is not the Titanic. The question … and maybe the concept of flashbacks… is all that connects this novel to the movie. But the flashbacks are more like The English Patient than the contrived excuse to go under water in 1996 and see a crustacean coated wreck.

And though I am sitting here one Tuesday night typing up the flashbacks to the beginning of creating this story, I intend to make the completion of its writing my present. Maybe this anniversary of a film is just one more resonant detail to remind me of unfinished business. Along with my current residency in a town, near a lake that inspired the setting. Or the major story in the news that asks another question I ask myself in the writing of this piece. Or the urging of my writing peers.

Methinks it’s time to stop writing about writing this book and get to it.

Running to Write

I often smirk to myself that I used the act of running as a device in my novel, An Ever Fixed Mark. A little private not so funny joke with myself. Only the joke comes now, a year after publication – three years after the completion of a first draft. Because much like my writing habit, my running habit is rather dormant.

Both are activities I enjoy. Really love, actually. But for whatever reason, it is like pulling teeth to inspire myself to get started with either. Then once I do it, once I get through the huffing and puffing of that first painful try, awakening the atrophied muscles, I realize I not only had fun but feel better about myself and life.

So right now I’m more or less in a six month exile in a small town of Central Massachusetts. I spend a lot of time in a car and at a desk in my forty (plus) hour work week. My brain and my physical energy drains from that repetition. But… then I smell the premature thaw in this rural New England paradise and I think it’s time to start again. Start running. And start writing.

Tomorrow starts a week of fifty-ish degree temperatures. There is no ice on the roads. Not to mention, I now live on roads with very little traffic. It's early enough in the season there are few annoying insects. Gauntlet on the ground. I am going to run.

I will run down the road and past the house and lake that helped to inspire so many of my novels. But most especially the one that keeps nagging my thoughts these days. A story about a house and all the memories trapped within it. Memories trapped in houses tend to be a favorite theme in my stories. Most especially in this one, whose working title is In Memory Locked.

But more about the book in later posts. Because there will be later posts, to blow the dust off this neglected blog. And maybe this post is more for myself than anyone who reads it… but lest anyone reads it, there is the embarrassment factor of not doing what I said I would do. And then maybe the happy consequence of this coercion will be the increased oxygen flow to my brain and the glimpse of the house that makes me want to write about Helen Langdon Bradshaw and all her trapped memories.

write what i love to know

I grow very attached to places. Read my blog and you'll know I have an enduring affection for a certain historic house on Cape Ann, for London, and even that part of the world that seemed so small seven years ago but pulls me back this summer. Clearly, I like the history of places. The ghosts. Or if you are a disbeliever in such things, we can just call them shadows of what was once in that intersection of latitude and longitude centuries before.

Maybe then, it’s no surprise I take a lot of inspiration from the places with which I am so familiar and fond. It’s excellent fuel for the imagination and less controversial than using people as fodder for a story. 

Of course, I grew up near a setting ideal for an overactive imagination heavily influenced by the romanticisms of Anne Shirley. The house and lake (yes, lake as in 70 acres of water) privately owned by my next door neighbors were perfect inspiration for many a story as I tried to entertain myself betwixt algebra and chemistry assignments. By the time I was in high school and enlisted with the daily task of walking the dog after school, the neighbors were in Florida six months out of the year. So walking around their yard and fields was a favor to them as well as opportunity for me. The lake soothed my ruffled teenage angst. Whether it looked like glass reflecting the sky or a choppy bounce of glittery waves… it was always a place to go and think. 

But the surrounding property held its own charms. On the hill overlooking the beach area and behind a single row of pines was an overgrown tennis court. The bittersweet had invaded much of the perimeter and was creeping towards the rusty holes where a net once was installed. The cracked surface echoed of summers gone by. On the other side of the lake, way on the corner of the fields left to grow hay for neighboring farms, there was the remnant of a barn. By remnant, I mean a hole in the ground walled with stone. There was another foundation a quarter mile down the road that was a house, complete with steps descending into earth overgrown with saplings. I found part of a wash basin and several pieces of terra cotta pots. A little ways off was a rusted wagon… and another neighbor found the skull of a horse there.

I learned during some lengthy afternoon in the town library that there was a fire there a hundred years before my time. A suspicious blaze linked to different views on the church or church politics or something like that. But… that foundation stays with me, as does the tennis court and the lake.

I often coveted the farmhouse that still stood in the center of it all. Large and historic, framed by two lofty oaks in the front yard and adorned with plenty of gardens Mrs. Carroll pruned in her months of residence. 

The house sold about ten years ago. It looks mostly the same. But the younger family that occupies is there all the time… and a little less neighborly. Then again I’m not there at all these days. And yet… this property sits in my memory ready to be transfigured into the setting of my current fiction. They say, after all, to write what you know. But when it comes to place, I write what I love to know.

It's a Launch at K.J. Barron's in Worcester

I am very excited to announce my first public reading and celebration of the electronic release of my novel, An Ever Fixed Mark.

On Thursday, February 10th, I hope you will stop by the tasting room at K.J. Barron’s in Worcester. I will share a few scenes, tell a story or two of how Lizzie and her world came to be, and answer any questions you might have about the novel.

In addition to being the gracious hosts, K.J. Barron’s will be tasting some of their wine (a beverage that has a significant place in Lizzie’s life after meeting Ben).

For more information about K.J. Barron’s and directions, please visit their website: www.kjbaarons.com.

If you haven't started reading yet, get a taste at: http://everfixed.wordpress.com/

I very much hope to see you there!