With all that’s going on in our family with Mom suffering continuing medical crises, one would think that my brain would be too preoccupied to conceive and organize a new novel. It seems, however, that novel writing is my brain’s way of coping. So, even with Deborah’s continuing nightmare with William cooking away in the sequels to To Inherit a Murderer, here’s the beginning of yet another novel about an orphan boy with special “gifts,” a single-parent teen with special “needs,” and the “family” who takes them in, and, yes, it’s another “wierd” one.

Chapter One

Nobody in town much liked West Gate or the Groves who owned it. Encompassing all of Gate Creek from its source to something the locals called The Plunge… .

Coming back after a long summer hiatus, the first thing that strikes me is The Net Hasn’t Changed. At all. The second thing that strikes me is that writers haven’t changed…at all. (The industrious ones are still working hard, more than willing to hone their craft and perfect their manuscripts; the lazy [...]

Today we had to go to “the big city” to get an LCD screen still under warranty on the road to being replaced. One word to describe the experience–exhausting. Traffic was frenetic and rude with people cutting in and out, no prior signal for warning. Is there some death wish out there? At 65 mph, it seems prudent to be a little more conservative with your own and others’ lives. Cars aren’t weapons of mass destruction, or shouldn’t be. Slow the [[expletive deleted]] down, be a bit more patient, and be considerate that the lives at stake are more than just your own!!

End Rant

I thought I’d share a bit of the kind of thing which inspires novel scenes. Here, with full permission of the original email author is an entry in what I’m going to call North Idaho Diary.

My favorite author events are those where the author might read a passage of the book, then stop, look up, and say something like: “You know, the morning I wrote this particular section was right after I spent a night shoveling water.”

all alone, lost in “writer’s trance,” there comes a jolt!

What’s especially fun is to watch a complete sceptic turn white, eyes bulging, hair on the arms erect, lips quivering, when you take them to visit a friend’s house known to be “haunted.”

 
“Different” — that’s a word that stood out in my “private and confidential” school records.  Private and confidential?  Not when they tell you…and everybody else what’s in there when pointing out the whys and wherefores of being passed over for something you very much want to do.  I’ve been stuck with that label my whole [...]