Thursday, May 25, 2017

Randall Sawka - Back from the Year Long Journey




Spring has us springing across much of Canada to be closer to family. When the notion of moving from the sleepy Vancouver Island community of Oak Bay to the bustling city of Toronto crossed our minds it caused shivers-shivers of apprehension. We enjoyed nearly three decades in a community where your neighbours were friends with whom you shared vegetables and fruit from your garden and tea on the patio. A short walk to the ocean was a given. On the stroll to the esplanade we would perhaps meet three or four cars. Everyone you met said hello. The "main" street was really an English "high" street. A difficult place to leave.



The draw. What would coax us to make the move? Once we mulled it over the emotions moved from trepidation to exhilaration. Of course, the main draw is living closer to family. From a five hour flight to a twenty minute walk. Far better that video messenger. We listed the other pluses and made the decision to do what was described many times as brave. That word was annoying at first. Later we lived what was included in my previous posts, the ultimate pressure cooker. Was it always smooth sailing? Of course not. Non-writing work ended. No place to call home. Numerous flights. Never knowing for sure where we would sleep the following month. Now we are three days away from our new high-rise home in the heart of a big city.


So the year-long journey ends and we are thrilled with what we did and excited with where life has taken us. The city offers us nearly endless options for entertainment, food, and travel. The new start has even energized my writing. I'm working on two novels. One is nearly done and is set in deep space. The second was inspired by our research in to big city life. Once we take that final thirty minute drive to our new home I know that the ideas will gather quickly.
We are almost home.
--

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Writing with a Retiree - Writing or Spouse?

Writing with a Retiree – What takes priority?

Simple enough question, right? What takes priority? Writing – spouse?

Of course it would be your spouse...right? *smiles*




My husband and I couldn’t wait for the time when we could travel in a 5th Wheel, towing our fishing boat and free-wheeling where ever we decided to land for a day, a week, or a month…we’d make an adventure out of the visit.

That was our vision, our dream, our plan…but what happens when dreams change after the fact? *shakes head*

I resigned from my 8:00 – 5:00 job in 2000 and pursued a career in writing. I enjoyed some ghost writing, editing, short story writing, writing young adult fiction, articles, and spent a few years writing erotic romance (under a pseudonym I shall not name:).

I love writing, as all authors do; it’s something we’re lost without. And I can’t seem to live without it.

My husband officially retired in March 2016, although he stopped working in March of 2015. Let me say, it had been an up-down roller coaster for us, from “my” writing space in the house (which I had a favorite spot in a few rooms, depending on my mood), my time with grandchildren, our trips in the RV, to the television shows we watched. What was most important to my husband now that he had extra time on his hands, was rarely what was most important to me as I’d lived as a writer on my own in the house for fifteen years (until he’d come home in the evenings from his job).

Our house had gotten very small spending 24/7 together. *LOL*

We went on a few month-long trips in the RV, and then tried longer in Florida. After three months in the land of sun, I was ready to come back to Michigan – see my family. Three months was too long away from the familiar.

He had always been supportive of my writing, but there was an on ongoing tension/pressure at my not being readily available for him. I attempted to be creative while dealing with a myriad of interruptions, until we finally had a few heart-to-heart chats…and we updated our priorities. A little tougher than we figured, but it all shook out to a workable solution for both of us.



We gave up the 5th Wheel for a 34’ trailer and parked it at a lake about a half-hour away from our home.

It’s my husband’s fishing retreat and my writing retreat, close enough that my family can visit, or I can visit with them.

Now I can write uninterrupted and he can fish to his heart’s content. There’s a balance between us, having our own priorities and making them work…together. *Big deep sigh*

Halleluiah; )



DK Davis writes YA sci-fi, supernatural, and fantasy with a good dollop of all the relationships woven in between. When she’s not writing, editing, or reading, she’s hiking, RV’ing, fishing, spending time with grandchildren or her favorite muse (her husband) in Southwest Michigan. She also writes paranormal suspense-thriller romance as S. Peters-Davis, and all genre short stories as Susan Davis.
You can find DK Davis at these links: Twitter; FB; Website; Books We Love Ltd. Author Page; Amazon Author Page
Enter Books We Love Contest here: http://www.bookswelove.com/books-we-love-contests/


Samantha’s dealing with a lot of emotional blow-back from her mother’s new marriage. Then she discovers a gifted creature living in Wolf Lake, and life suddenly becomes all about keeping his existence a secret, earning his trust. That is until his life depends on her saving him. But she won’t be able to do it alone…


Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Home is Where the Heart is. by Victoria Chatham



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.

Monday, May 22, 2017

The Woo-woo Man Strikes Again

To Purchase From Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Frank-Talaber/e/B00UC407R0


The Woo-woo Man Strikes Again
Oh, the woo-woo thing kicked in again on me this week. I received an email from Dear Jude, publisher of Books We Love. It mentioned that we should go online or go down to our local library and request that I want to receive or look at my published novels. This way they would be in the system.
I thought to myself, do I even have a library card? Yes, I know this is heresy, haven’t even been to the library in as long as I can remember. Didn’t even remember if I owned a library card, must have at one point in life, but since I moved to BC, but I doubted it.
I was looking for a novel to help my fellow writer with a project he was working on and looked through the books in my collection. One seemed to shine at me, a book I hadn’t picked up in over fifteen years, at least. In fact, don’t even remember what the book was about. I noticed that there was a book marker inside and opened it up. Lo and behold, my long lost and long forgotten library card stared back at me. I nearly fell down the stairs in shock. I really had forgotten I’d even had one.
But I do remember in the old days how I’d go to the library to do all of my research or to second hand bookstores. In fact if I had something I needed to know on something I was writing about, I’d often walk in, walk right up to the book I needed and open it to the page that had what I needed to know. Yup, eerie, spooky stuff. But that was me, the woo-woo man. Now, I mostly Google everything, how times have changed. I wonder how much valuable knowledge is rotting away on old book shelves. I think the internet really is making our society dumber in some respects and destroying some industries, the music for one. But that’s a rant for another day.
Now if I can just visualize next weeks lottery ticket numbers. Now we’d be talking.


To Purchase From Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Frank-Talaber/e/B00UC407R0


Sincerely
Frank Talaber

Frank Talaber’s Writing Style? He usually responds with: Mix Dan Millman (Way of The Peaceful Warrior) with Charles De Lint (Moonheart) and throw in a mad scattering of Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get The Blues).
PS: He’s better looking than Stephen King (Carrie, The Stand, It, The Shining) and his romantic stuff will have you gasping quicker than Robert James Waller (Bridges Of Madison County).
Or as is often said: You don’t have to be mad to be a writer, but it sure helps.


Writer by soul. Words born within. 
Karma the seed. Paper the medium.  
Pen the muse. Novels the fire.

My novels on Amazon are at (copy and paste link):  https://www.amazon.com/Frank-Talaber/e/B00UC407R0



Twitter: @FrankTalaber



To Purchase From Amazon 

Saturday, May 20, 2017

Gardener Ted's Spring Vegetable Garden and Hydroponic Gardening by J.Q. Rose


Cozy mystery author J.Q. Rose
Dangerous Sanctuary available at the Books We Love bookstore

Writing stories has been a pastime for me since I was seven years old. Making up characters and setting them in different situations has always been so much fun and satisfying. I enjoy  conjuring up novels today on my laptop as much as I did when I was a kid with pencil and paper stretching my imagination and sharing stories with friends.

My husband's lifelong pastime is gardening. He loves growing plants. So much so that his starting seedlings in a hobby greenhouse set us on the path to becoming business owners with a flower shop, garden center and greenhouses. Now in retirement, he is living his dream of gardening year round. He has a small winter garden in Florida and a very large garden in the summer in West Michigan.

Let me introduce you to Gardener Ted and his 2017 spring garden. 

He is always experimenting. 
This year, he is trying a no-till garden. No roto-tilling. In the photo you see all the dead-looking grass? That was rye that he planted in the fall. He digs a trench in the dead rye grass and plants his seeds.
In this photo he is watering the green beans (string beans) he just planted today, May 15. 
Next to it is rhubarb which comes up every year.
 You can see the baby pea plants are just getting a good start.
The onions are finally getting some growth. We have had pretty cool nights and days this spring, so the plants are waiting to grow. But once it warms up, there will be a big growth spurt.
 This morning he cut rhubarb for the first time and cooked it. Do you like rhubarb? I can eat it in a strawberry-rhubarb pie, kind of, but he loves it "stewed" in a pot. Just rhubarb with LOTS of sugar, no crust.
 This is the best results we've had for our strawberries in the past couple of years. 
Look at all the blossoms.
My mouth waters when I think of those delicious red berries coming on in June. If every blossom turns into a strawberry, we're going to be gorging ourselves, the family, and the neighbors on lots of strawberry shortcake and pie. Oh, and don't forget the strawberries on ice cream. Mmmm...
This winter Gardener Ted designed and constructed a hydroponic growing system. The dictionary defines hydroponics as "the cultivation of plants by placing the roots in liquid nutrient solutions rather than in soil."

This is the first system he built in Florida and raised delicious, clean varieties of lettuce.

For his spring garden, he has completed his new and improved system, including doubling the growing capacity of the Florida one.



The plants' roots are in the water to extract the nutrients out of the water flowing through the pipes. Gardener Ted carefully monitors and controls these factors every day.

The water is pumped out of this big gray container, through the large pipes, and then returns to the container to be pumped through again.

This system produced the best tasting, crunchy lettuce we've ever had.

Cleaning the fresh pulled lettuce heads from the hydroponics growing system is a dream. The heads are so clean, I just run them under the kitchen faucet, and they're ready for the toppings and dressing for a delightful fresh salad.

Besides working in the garden and having the satisfaction of eating the delicious veggies, he loves spending time with our grand kids and sharing his gardening knowledge with them. They love chomping on the vegetables as they help him harvest the crops. Someone said how much sweeter a pea is when eaten in the garden.
🥕🍅🥗🌶

Are you a gardener? Vegetables? Flowers? Why do you garden? Wishing you sunny skies and plenty of rain!

Connect online with J.Q. Rose here.
Photos by J.Q. Rose

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