Characters' job & hobby by J. S. Marlo

 

Wounded Hearts

"Love & Sacrifice #2"

is now available  

click here 

 

 

  

J. S. Marlo's BWL Books

When I started writing, someone told me to give my characters unusual/curious/interesting professions or hobbies, especially my female characters.

Over the years, I developed my characters in many different ways, so I went back to see what I've done with them--and what they haven't tackled yet. So, here are the biographies of some characters:

- Star is a scuba diver who investigates insurance claims. Hauk is a boat captain looking for underwater treasures.

- Riley is a librarian hoping to become a scriptwriter. Blythe is an actor whose real life is stranger and more dangerous than his fictional life.

- Rowan is a geologist turned B&B owner. Avery is a tormented RCMP looking for comfort in a bottle who likes to reconstruct animal skeletons. Bjorn is an Icelandic tour guide with a meddling grandmother.

- Amelia is an Army Colonel. Hope is a teenage deaf biathlete. Richmond is a sheriff haunted by his past.

- Julia is an accountant. Thierry is a teenage goaltender struggling with the code of silence. Luke is an explosive expert.

- Maxime is a university swimmer with a target on her back. Ross is an undercover officer.

- Liliane is a painter in charge of an election office. Jasper is a detective with a secret love interest.

- Becca is a journalist who snuck into a decommissioned military base and ended in the past. Ash is in charge of repairing and restocking warships.

- Violette is a jill-of-all-trade who gets trapped remodelling an escape room. Joe is a police officer who owns escape rooms. 

- Lana is a retired military nurse and potato farmer. Eli is a retired submariner raising his five-year old granddaughter.

I'll admit I'm partial to men & women in uniforms, but at the same time, I write mystery/murder/romance. Someone needs to arrest the perpetrator, but it's not always who it should be LOL

Happy Reading & Stay Safe!

J. S.

 

 

J. S. Marlo's Website

Green Plant versus Brown Thumb by Helen Henderson

Windmaster Golem
Click the cover for purchase information

During lockdowns for COVID-19, many people turned to hobbies, do-it-yourself projects, or exercise for mental and physical well being. One thing that fit all the  criteria is gardening.

Now let me say first off, I did not voluntarily decide to be one of those who turned to a garden for therapy or exercise. I have what has been called a brown thumb. Over the years, my brown thumb has killed plants, bushes, and other green living things including cacti, ivy, grass, forever plants, and azalea bushes. Some of which are under normal circumstances almost indestructible.

What makes my ability as a terminator more remarkable is that I grew up on a farm in the "Garden State." And, yes, that is the official nickname for my home state. 

Besides the cash crops of eggs, sheep, wheat, corn and such, we had a lilac bush so big you could ride a pony through the middle of bush. In fact our Shetland pony and a sheep used to play hide and seek and tag using the bush as shelter and hidey hole. The weeping willow tree that was as tall as our two-story farmhouse provided hours of play on the tire swing or shade for reading and cloud watching.

As  might be expected we also had a garden. It provided fresh vegetables for the dinner table and extras for canning and friends.  One of the many chores and tasks needed to keep a farm running was pulling weeds and hoeing the garden. As you can see I  am not a total stranger to gardening and plants. It is just that when it was my garden, my house plants, my landscaping, they died.

After my move south, for several seasons I tried container gardening. As to why containers were selected?  I couldn't decide where on the property to put the garden. Another consideration? Farm equipment and sibling labor were not available and I was not going to turn a plot over by fork and spade by myself.  Of course I didn't have any luck with the several tubs of tomato and pepper plants I attempted to grow.

This spring a local DIY (do-it-yourself) store gave away a different project each week and several family members decided to participate. The lobby pine given out died within three weeks. The milkweed seeds didn't get planted. That will happen when I build the butterfly house part of the project. 

First tomatoes harvested, 2021

Pepper and tomato plants were the next weeks project. For being the first in line the stock boy coordinating the distribution handed me a bush-type tomato plant. It was shortly afterwards paired with a vine type a family member donated to the project. The vine tomato is just now producing, Its fruit are the size of golf balls, a far cry from the large ones that were already harvested.

It has been very interesting experiment. The plant are on my covered back stoop. Besides watering (or keeping them from getting drowned in the summer storms), they were shifted against the house when they needed protection from high winds. Of course I did have to rely on someone who had successfully gardened in the locale as the climate and conditions are drastically different than what I was familiar with. (And so are the bugs, including a very aggressive green species.) So much time (think decades) had passed since those early childhood gardens, that research on the care and feeding of the two very different plants.

Authors are always told to write what you know. Which must be why none of my characters insisted they be master gardeners. So far the only one who has any real experience is Deneas whose tale is told in my current work in progress, Fire and Amulet (scheduled for release next year.) If any other of my characters are gardeners, they will probably be hydroponic engineers who are in trouble because of a brown thumb.

Here is what happened to her garden. To set the scene, it is the evening before she leaves on a journey from which she will probably never return.

An idea formed on how to thwart Karst from getting anything he hadn’t earned. Instead of sleep, she spent the cool candlemarks under the moon pulling the root vegetables that were ready for harvesting. The red fruit that hung heavy on the vine filled another large basket. Next she took the growing pots her mother had made or bartered for and by the time the moon was full overhead had half the garden in pots ready to be gifted to others in her village.

This experiment has given me a greater understanding of why some assisted living facilities have a raised garden for their residents. The daily routine of watering, snipping errant sucker vines, and monitoring for bugs and ripeness can be therapeutic.

As to whether I will try gardening again ? That remains to be seen. I prefer more interactive beings. Depending on their loquaciousness, you can actually hold conversations with a dog or cat. Our 18-year-old cat could quite clearly say "Now" and "Out." And when she's in a good mood, the husky I visit, can talk your ear off. Especially if you answer her.

 

 To purchase the Windmaster Novels: BWL

 ~Until next month, stay safe and read. Helen

Find out more about me and my novels at Journey to Worlds of Imagination.

Follow me online at Facebook, Goodreads, or Twitter.

Helen Henderson lives in western Tennessee with her husband. While she doesn’t have any pets in residence at the moment, she often visits a husky who have adopted her as one the pack.

CRAFT BOOKS - A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION by Victoria Chatham

AVAILABLE HERE

When I started writing seriously, over twenty years ago, I had never heard the term ‘craft books.’ I associated craft with knitting, sewing, or woodworking and furniture restoration. My first writing instructor explained that there were many, many craft books on the market and what some writers swore by was anathema to others.

My very first craft book on writing was Guide to Fiction Writing by Phyllis Whitney (September 9^th, 1903 to February 8^th, 2008.) I read it slowly and carefully and the one thing that struck me was her comment, ‘I had worked hard to learn my craft.’ This was something of an eye-opener as I had never thought of writing as work.

I suppose that stemmed from having always been good at English, a carry-on from early exposure to books and reading from a very early age. Not only did I enjoy my English grammar classes but also English Literature, both taught as separate subjects at the high school I attended. Words were fun, making up stories was even more fun. Writing prize-winning essays carried all the perks of extra points for one’s house and, if one was very fortunate, maybe the gift of a pen or a notebook.

But, as an adult, the fact that good writing didn’t just happen was something of a challenge to me. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write, so continued taking short story writing courses until an idea gelled into a western contemporary romance. Did I know how to write romance? Nope. It involved a lot of reading and deconstructing some of the novels I read. It also involved many, many more craft books.

Other early books were William Zinsser’s On Writing Well and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. These did not necessarily enhance my romance writing ambitions, but they did help the structure of my writing. I’m not sure at what stage I came across Stephen King’s On Writing, but that one book has remained my firm favorite. Being more mature when I really settled into my writing career, I really appreciated these words by King (2000):

‘I have spent a good many years since - too many, I think - being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent.’ (p. 50.)

My family and friends had always looked on my writing as ‘Vicki’s little hobby’, undermining any confidence I had. This resulted in me relegating whatever project I was working on to the back-burner until I had either a) recovered my courage enough to pick up my pen again or b) come up with a better idea. I got to the point of not sharing my ideas with anyone, secreting my scribblings away into deep, dark drawers.

Many years later, I am now comfortable with myself as a writer. I like to think that I have learned, and continue to learn, my craft. Along the way I have acquired many more craft books, too many to mention and goodness knows how much I have spent on them. I love talking to other writers and many have recommended books they find useful. Some I have read about in trade magazines or on some blog. As I have acquired a book, I have read it from cover to cover. Some have been discarded or passed on, many have been kept on my bookshelf and revisited often. I have my favorites, Robert Mckee’s Story being one of them. Dwight V. Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer is another and my go-to grammar book is the saucily titled Comma Sutra by Laurie Rozakis. I rarely go into a bookstore without looking to see what is new on the shelves but I have to be firm with myself. There is little point in getting lost in the how-to or why of writing. The lessons learned need to be put into practice by writing and then writing more.

So now I have finished writing this post, I am going to write the next thousand words in my work-in-progress. The operative word here, now that I am older and wiser, is work! If you have a favorite craft book, please share by leaving a comment.

My Favorite Things by Roseanne Dowell

One of my favorite things to do when I'm not writing is embroidery. Another is quilting. I’ve found a way to combine the two. 

First, I made baby quilts for two of my nieces. White on white, I machine embroidered them with the darning stitch so I had control. They turned out really nice, but I really love to hand embroider. That’s when I discovered red-work. During a quilting shop-hop, one of the stores highlighted red-work. For those of you who don’t know what red-work is – it’s embroidery done in all red floss. Just the outline of the picture, not filled in like other embroidery patterns.

Anyway, I fell in love with it. Every year I make something for Christmas (often a Santa) for my six children and give it to them on Thanksgiving. I found a Santa pattern and did it all in red-work, framed it and gave it to them.

That's when I decided to make a queen-size quilt for our bed, using various flowers. I found a book with different flower transfers and proceeded to iron them onto fabric and embroider them. It took the better part of a year to finish the quilt and many times I wondered why I started it and was tempted to quit. I’m glad I persevered. The quilt turned out beautiful and I use it every spring/summer.

Once I finished that, I decided to make a baby quilt for each of my

grandchildren – for their first born. I started out looking in coloring books for designs. I traced the images onto 12x12 squares of muslin. After I finished embroidering the squares I cut sashing and sewed them together. For the backing I used various fabrics, not nursery print. None of the quilts have nursery fabric in them at all. I've used patterns from animals to Winnie the Pooh to Sunbonnet Sue. 


Eventually, I found transfer books and started using them for designs. I looked everywhere for baby designs. I finally finished my

14th and last quilt. That’s a lot of baby quilts. Most of them are done in red work, but I varied some with other colors, too. 

It took a couple of years to do all the squares. Four years ago, I made quilts for my niece’s twins using kitten and bunny patterns. They’re done in many colors. Since then she had another child, another boy, so I made one for him using baby animals.

Four years ago, I also gave my first grandchild’s quilt to my oldest granddaughter, whose baby boy was born in June – my first great grandchild. That same year, my fourteenth grandchild was born, another boy and I did puppies for him.

April 12^th, I gave my second quilt at another granddaughter’s shower. She’s having a baby girl in May. It’s exciting to see the look on their faces when they open the quilt. I hope they cherish them and love them as much as I loved making them.

I've marked each quilt with the name of which grandchild they're supposed to go to in case I’m not around to give it to them. My daughters have been instructed to pass them out. I hope I'm around to give them all away.



This last quilt I made for another niece's baby. I'd say it's one of my favorites, but honestly I say that about all of them. It's impossible to choose one. They were all fun to work on. Now I have to find something else to keep me busy. I think I've found it, chip carving but that's a topic for another blog.

Check out my books at Amazon   Here's one of my favorites.

Forced to stay in a nursing home while undergoing therapy, seventy-two year old, Mike Powell refuses to get out of bed, won't cooperate with the nurses, and won’t take his medicine. At least not until he meets Elsa. The tiny, spunky little Elsa sparks new life into him. 

Seventy year old, Elsa -left in the home while her son takes a family vacation - joins forces with Mike, setting the home on its heels, and later discovers deception and fraud. Can they find happiness together? 

Who says life begins at 40? Life is wonderful at any age, as long you're willing to live it. Elsa Logan and Mike Powell prove it. And I want to be just like them when I grow up! One of Roseanne Dowell's best, and my personal favorite! 
Elsa Logan bears a striking resemblance to a romance writer I know who shall be nameless but whose initials are R. D. ~ Romantic Suspense Author, Gail Roughton