I Miss Camping - But so much more to do

  

A couple years ago, we sold our camper and bought a house. It was the right decision. Camping was only a couple months a year and maybe six camping trips at best, where as the house is permanent. 

Of course along with the house comes other responsibilities. Cleaning and painting, just to get the house ready to live in for one. The place was filthy. I think they previous residents had food fights in every room. Seriously, there was food streaked down every wall in every room. Okay, every room but the bathroom. 

Apparently the people who lived here previously (renters) had tempers. I heard she kicked the man out several times and he broke in. Obviously, the missing screens, windows replaced with Plexiglas, and damaged entry doors was proof that someone broke in or attempted to break in often. 

At any rate, we had our hands full just cleaning. Add to that discovering a hole in the bathtub, that even the inspector missed, we ended up gutting the bathroom. 
But all of that is done and out of the way.  On to the outside. Of course there's normal lawn maintenance, cutting the grass, which is fairly easy in the front. I have a self-propelled lawn mower. The shrubs needed trimming, which I attempted and came to the conclusion, they're too old and will have to be replaced. Next year's project or at least not until fall. I planted a few flowers in the front and my son painted our house - it was in desperate need and we'd really have loved to reside it, but that wasn't in the budget. Besides, we needed a new entry door and  storm door. Once the garage door is painted, the house itself will be done. On to the back yard.  Lord, help us. We aren't sure what to do there.  We had the maple tree cut down last year - it was leaning toward the neighbors and the roots made it impossible to cut the grass. It scared the heck out of me every time we had a storm. So down it went. This year we had the oak removed after we noticed several squirrels going into a hole where a branch had previously been cut. And there were several other

holes just not as deep.  I asked for a price in trimming the tree and cutting it down. I pointed out the hole, and he didn't even give me a price for trimming it. The maple tree, he had said there wasn't anything wrong with, that it was healthy. Not so the oak. (Not to mention I didn't care for all the leaves to rake and the acorns, oh the acorns, millions and millions of acorns. I won't miss that tree.)

My kids wanted the wood from both trees so, the tree removal crew stacked everything in a pile, cut to firewood size.  The kids rented a log-splitter and came over and split the wood. It was an all day project. We started the day with coffee and donuts, I made sloppy joes for lunch and hubby grilled a turkey for dinner. Of course, it was one of the hottest days this year, but they did a great job and they'll have plenty of firewood for next year.   They took the wood from the maple (cut last year) for their camping trips. I don't mind telling you, I was happy to see it disappear, although I now have another huge pile and this time in the middle of our yard. since the back part of our yard floods something terrible. One of my neighbors said there used to be a creek back there before they built the houses. Truthfully, I wish they would have left the creek. I don't need a pond every spring. We even had ducks. After the rainy May and June, I didn't think the yard would ever dry.  

Which leads me to my next problem. What to do? It would take truck loads of dirt to fill it in.  And I'm not sure that would even solve the problem. For now I guess I'll just keep cutting the part of grass that isn't under water and leave the rest for another year. We have an idea what we'd like to do back there, but that will be a project for another year. 

Anyway, back to my original statement. I still miss camping. The kids all went for the 4th of July and it's the first year we've been alone. Usually we celebrate with them, but this year, it was just the two of us. I really really miss camping - or maybe I just miss the kids. 

Priscilla Brown inhabits several houses

Mayor Anna's town and her farm are struggling.

 Is this sexy television entrepreneur financial salvation or major trouble?

Find details of this and my other contemporary romances on

http://www.bookswelove/net/authors/brown-priscilla-romance 

and visit Priscilla Brown at your favourite e-book store

Inhabits all those houses in my head, that is. In my real life, I have just one house, a small house in a small town in New South Wales: the design and appearance of this dwelling, nor any that I have ever lived in, do not appear in any of my novels. Where do I get the ideas for my characters' homes?

In my stories, the only house that owes its presence partly to an existing building is Anna's farmhouse in Sealing The Deal. Some years ago I used to visit this homestead, and my writer's mind stored its appearance, its timber construction and wraparound veranda for possible inclusion in fiction one day.

Other than this, I am not writing about houses I've met. I glean impressions from various sources, including observations while visiting other areas, travelling, magazines, and some of these fragments gel into composite yet incomplete images for my characters to call home.  Such snippets are merely a small part of the final pictures in my head. Imagination personalises the dwelling, ascertaining the size, appearance and location, adding details. Occasionally the character may have a suitable finished place to live when I begin a story's first draft, but usually this evolves as the plot develops. My aim is to create the home, outside and inside, appropriate to the personality and lifestyle of its inhabitant; it should also promote an atmosphere in which the storyline can flourish.

Each of my stories has a notebook, and among pages of scribble I sketch a rough floor plan of the plot's most important house, not attempting to design it anywhere near to scale. I do this to anchor some ideas for the story, perhaps since I don't devise a plot plan, rather let the narrative carry on. In most cases, the original layout needs adjusting to accommodate not only proceeding scenes but the workability of the whole floor. The sketch for Cassandra's cottage in Silver Linings had the bathroom squeezed into a corner with no place for a door, and much too small for the spa crucial for a significant scene; as a result, the kitchen got moved and reduced. (No significant scenes there and not much cooking either.)

When furniture and other objects are necessarily mentioned, their placement and style may or may not be detailed depending on how important these are to a scene; readers may arrange them how they wish. Furniture can suggest a facet of the occupant's taste and lifestyle: colourful or drab, tidy or untidy, overcrowded or short of seats.

The view from the windows may be critical to the storyline as in the ocean panorama from the Caribbean island cottage belonging to Cameron in Where The Heart Is; Cristina must leave the man and the view, but is finding it hard to say goodbye. In Silver Linings, windows are useful to indicate the weather, if it's suitable to go beachcombing on the blustery Southern Ocean beach (or if spending the day in the spa is preferable).


Physical  surroundings are important contributors to a home's overall ambience, and to the 'feel' of a story. Is the dwelling rural or urban, isolated or on a busy street, and how does this particular location affect the character both emotionally and practically? Is there a garden? If so, is it looked after? Anna's caring nature tends to her roses in Sealing the Deal; Cristina's mature Australian garden of flowers and fruit trees contrasts with Cameron's tangle of tropical vegetation.

While the settings of my novels are clear and complete in my head. I try not to over-describe, to allow readers to use their imaginations, thus perhaps feeling they themselves are inhabiting the story.

May 2019 be kind to you. Best wishes, Priscilla

http://bwlpublishing.ca

https://priscillabrownauthor.com

Home is Where the Heart is. by Victoria Chatham

AVAILABLE AT AMAZON.CA

For many of us writers, creating homes for our characters is par for the course. Think Downton Abbey, Tara in Gone With the Wind and the family hacienda, Las Tres Marias in Isabel Allende’s debut novel The House of the Spirits.

Elements of places we have lived or visited and loved, often form the basis of our fictional homes. Writing a book often means wearing many hats – one of them being an architect. Designing a home for our characters means that we, and the readers, know where in a house the stairs that the character might use are, where the windows and doors are so that if we involve a line of sight in our story, we know there will be no obstructions. Where are the bedrooms and how many of them, if a contemporary book, have an en suite?

Because I write historical romance, I have incorporated aspects of many stately homes that I have visited into building a home for my characters. The essence of my fictional houses, however, stems from my experience of living for eleven years in a 300-year old house.

My first view of it was in early April. Sunshine bathed its long roof, comprised of approximately 5-tons of Cotswold stone tile, and tall chimneys. In the garden, a profusion of daffodils danced beneath a row of cordoned fruit trees. For the non-gardeners amongst you, a cordon is a method of training the side shoots of the trees (usually apples and pears) at a 45-degree angle to promote support and ultimately fruit production. The lady of the house sat at her spinning wheel on the lawn, white hair drawn into a bun at the back of her neck and long, gray skirts spread out around her. It was like a vignette of the past, and I instantly fell in love with Ivy Cottage.

A cottage can be many things to many people. My impression of a cottage was a two-up, two-down home with a thatched roof. In Canada, what people refer to as a cottage is, to me, a house and so was Ivy Cottage. Its five bedrooms sprawled over a hodge-podge of levels. Two sets of stairs, one in the middle of the house and the other at one end, had different depth risers and half-landings in odd places. The house itself had started life as a stone build, but the second storey was of locally produced red brick. The windows and doors all needed replacing as none of them was a good fit.

I moved in in August, a long hot month when, once the windows had been pried open, dried the house out to the extent that wallpaper started peeling off the walls. There was much work to be done, but I was determined that the living room with its inglenook fireplace, parquet floor, and oak beams would be ready for Christmas. By then we were blocking draughts with heavy cotton velvet drapes at the doors with the additional application of kitchen plastic wrap stuffed around the window frames.

AFTER RENOVATIONS

My family and friends thought I was mad for exchanging a comfortable, modern, double-glazed and centrally heated home for this unheated, draughty rural pile. People came and went, shaking their heads at my supposed detraction from what was considered the norm. I didn't care. There was room for my kids to play and explore. There was room to grow vegetables. I left the far end of the garden wild, so we were visited by rabbits and hedgehogs, and a fox made a path in the long grass beneath the hedge. I never cut it, letting what flowers and wild plants grow where they would which in turn attracted bees and butterflies.

I had robins and wrens nesting in the hedge, along with noisy sparrows. The teasels, that self-seeded and came up in different parts of the garden every year, attracted goldfinches. I fought the bullfinches and chaffinches for the fruit blossoms and fixed bacon fat on the bushes for the blue and great tits to stop them from peeling off the foil tops on the milk bottles to get at the cream. Woodpeckers and thrushes, both song and mistle thrushes, the latter helping to keep the garden free of snails, were constant visitors. A one-legged black bird became bold enough to perch on my hand for breadcrumbs.

All good things come to an end, and the end for me was coming back one year from a late vacation in Spain to find the house empty and cold. By then my boarders, as had my two boys, moved on, leaving my daughter and I and our two remaining dogs. I thought of all the work that had gone into the house and what still needed doing. At that point, I had neither the heart or the funds for further renovations and with much reluctance but all practicality, put the house on the market.

It is still there. I drive by every time I go home to England, noting the changes, my heart bleeding for some of them, but understanding that it is no longer my home and hoping that the current occupiers are as happy there as I had been.

Life really does imitate Art by Sheila Claydon

Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life . . . Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by a painter or sculptor, or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction. Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde isn't the only writer who said so but his quote is possibly the best known.Until recently I shrugged and laughed whenever I heard it because hey, it's just a cliche isn't it? Well actually, no it's not. Why do I say that? Well in a very small but personal way, I've just experienced it.

In 2013 my book Mending Jodie's Heart was published. It's set partly in London but mainly in the North West of England, which is where I live. The idea for the story came when I took my dog for his daily walk and discovered we could no longer use the local bridleway. This narrow sandy path that wound its way through tangled woodland and past a derelict, boarded-up farmhouse had been closed. The untidy briars and bushes that partially hid the entrance had been cut down and in their place was a shiny new gate complete with padlock and a 'Trespassers will be Prosecuted' sign.

Someone very wealthy had bought the old farmhouse and the adjoining fields and woodland and then discovered that a public bridleway skirted his estate. Anxious about the effect this would have on the safety of his young family his decision to close it off was understandable. What he didn't do, however, was consider the locals...walkers and riders alike.  It had been a shortcut to the beach ever since anyone could remember and they campaigned to have it reopened. Eventually the wealthy new owner capitulated. He re-opened the bridle path and protected his privacy instead with wire security fences which were eventually hidden by a thick laurel hedge.

Why am I telling you this? Well the writer in me was already intrigued. Why would someone, however wealthy, close off a well used footpath without considering the effect it would have on local people. Did he have something to hide?  And what was he doing building a swimming pool before knocking down the old farmhouse and building a new house of his own? And what about the trailer that had been erected. Did he live in it or was it just a temporary estate office?  There were a lot of common-sense answers to all those questions but I didn't want to hear them because Marcus, the imaginary hero of my book, had begun to inhabit the house. Not long after that he met Jodie and her horse, and thus Mending Jodie's Heart was born.

By the time it was published the new house had been built and the wealthy man and his family had moved in. Nobody knew what it was like though because by then, like Sleeping Beauty's castle, the estate was surrounded on all sides by high banks, expensively planted laurel, new trees, and the insidious creeping tangle of briar and seaside plants that had been there before and were determined to find their way back. Happy with my own imaginings I didn't care. I'd never wondered what the house was actually like inside because in my mind it was as I'd imagined it when I was writing the book. As far as I was concerned it belonged to Marcus and Jodie, and when several local fans of my books told me they felt the same way I was delighted.

Then the strangest thing happened. The wealthy owner put the hidden house up for sale and naturally curiosity got the better of me. I went onto the sale site on the Internet to check it out, and that's when life really did began to imitate art because it WAS Marcus' and Jodie's house. Every room I'd imagined was there, including the music room, the stage, the separate annexe for Luke, the wonderful master bedroom, the stables...everything, right down to the decor.  There was even room for Jodie's horse therapy school. To say I was astonished was to put it mildly. How could I have imagined this house down to almost the last detail when the last time it was visible to the public it was still a half built, empty shell. Or was it the other way round? Had some magic conveyed my thoughts to the wealthy owner, someone who I've never met. 

For a few days it had an unsettling effect then I began to wonder about other places in other books. Do they exist somewhere outside my imagination as well? It's an intriguing but slightly scary thought because, if they do, then what about the people who live in them...who are they?

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Sheila Claydon at Books We Love