Sharing a Tale

This short piece from a novel is such a delightful tale-beginning that I am compelled to share it; please pop over to read BLUE by Marie Cartier. Not only is the story marvelous, but the message it is sharing is vital.

Maine Coast; an hour from where I used to live

Intentions

One of my intentions for this year is to provide more posts on my HolistiCARE blog, so I invite readers to pop over there for a visit once in a while if you are curious. I will be mentioning specific remedies or methods, as well as educational resources, about those modalities in which I've been trained.

I'm also hoping to start growing some fresh food-herbs now that I'm living in a moderate climate. I've never had much of a "green thumb," but perhaps the Ozarks will be kind to me in that respect. If it is, I will post the uses of those herbs that do grow, and how I incorporate them into our meals. I'm a modest, non-adventuresome cook, but this may turn out to be a curious journey nevertheless.

Spring is right around the corner, and a new season awaits. But meanwhile, I enjoy the ability to see the sunset for a while longer; once the trees get their leaves, the sun only peeks through.

Characters

A delightful aspect of creative writing in fiction is the ability to develop characters -- those I love and even those I don't, though, granted I don't do a lot of backstory on my villains. I write women's fiction these days, and, to be honest, the evil forces I'm most interested in are those in our own minds.

While my protagonist and her friends are modern young women (the story takes place within the last decade), I go several generations in their backstories and the history of the town. Several of the characters are elder women (the middle generation), and it is this interweaving of her-story that emerges.

The origin of people and place is at the old turn of the century, from the 19th to the 20th centuries. Here are images of three of those ancestral characters, although, as with other images, my characters are not identical to these -- the images have simply provided inspiration and a visual touchstone.

Vianne

Bertha Rose

Kisaiya

Another fun feature of creating extensive backstory is that I already have the bones of at least six more stories I could easily conjure to take place across the past hundred years!

Settings

I've turned my attention to my three-quarters finished rough draft manuscript of my novel; here are a couple buildings and a yard scape that have inspired specific settings in my imaginary town high in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. I'm changing them in the story, so that they fit my characters and events, but the images give me a visual reminder. Could you live here?

The back garden of a wealthy local matriarch in my fictional town.

House where the veterinarian lives.

Shop with upper apartment where my protagonist lives.

Notes from the Past

It's funny what appears sometimes. Here I am, diving back in to my fiction manuscript, and I want to file an article I had clipped from last year, one that I had simply stuck into my pile of papers. I pull out the folder and it falls open to reveal an old newspaper clipping from 2003.

What's funny about this is that my protagonist has a "father issue" and this is one of the few artifacts I have from my own father who always seemed to disapprove of whatever I was doing in my life, including writing (I wasn't writing the "right" material). Attached to the article was a note from my father:

My father died a little over five years later, in 2008; finding his handwritten note along with the article made me feel closer to him. And, even though he never said he was proud of me, maybe he was...just a little. He was encouraging me, and I take that as a good sign.

Flower Therapy for Cats