Summertime...

Fatty Woo Hobbes has taken to staring at himself in the mirror...and purring very loudly while doing so...and at times, has laid down in a plump little crouch and dozed off... he's 13 years old, I'm wondering if the little old dude is getting a bit funny in the head... no matter, he's adorable, and I love the squishy little fatty fur ball!

You know its summertime when the roses bloom in the garden...

I'm always on the look out for interesting things to photograph around the acre, but today I'm posting a couple from the city of Syracuse, well... it's just the small area outside the door on my way out from work where I wait for my Fred...

Some spray paint on asphalt caught my eye...I suspect this is the remains of an art students project...

I stepped out the door one afternoon and caught this photo...it reminds me of a Georgia O'Keeffe drawing from her time spent in NYC...

I've been coming down from the high at the gallery last week (was it really just last week?), it was a magical time...but back to doing things again...making new art and writing and proofreading...promotion of books is ongoing...

On my Goodreads Q&A for The Fractured Hues of White Light, I've written a bit about where my characters come from...well, I grow 'em in that special part in my brain that churns out characters and stories, of course! But it's not that simple. It's always a fine line that authors walk on their words when making up people and situations. Readers always wonder who these people are "supposed to be"...I really don't write them to be anybody but who they are in the book, they have their fictional life...granted, I've cherry picked from the buffet of things that I've learned about human nature from my experiences, but I never set out to write a character who is a specific person with the name changed to protect the innocent... it gets a little hinky whenever a writer does that sort of thing... I guess it's the difference between a novice and an experienced writer.

Once a friend said to me, "You're Katharine, right?" I laughed. "No, I'm Jonathan." Yes, she did a double take...and I poked her that no one has to be me in this... yes, they do come from me, I'm telling the story, there's a difference between the author's voice that is doing the telling and the author as a person separate from the story. I think readers often forget to keep the two separate... books tend to take on a special life of their own because they get under your skin and inside your head, capture the imagination. Sometimes during the writing of them, the mental immersion involved is quite intense, dreamlike, and can be disorienting because I've been crawling around inside my head trying to figure out the workings of someone else who I've made up out of bits and pieces (operating instructions not included.) Oy vey, you have no idea.

Writing about Samantha Ryder was difficult, trying to stay within the parameters of Autism and keeping her believable, and then working out the perceptions of the other three characters who also weigh in on her with their ideas and ideals about her... Sammy is like the elephant being examined by the blind men, each one has their own perception of what they've touched. Samantha has her own ideas...and they don't often jive with what others think...it was tough writing her...but I love her, she's very special to me.

Any time I'm working with facts from experience, I cinch up the literary waders and go in deep, make up as many lies as I can to get away from the truth, and then tweak it to sound believable. Everything I write in my books are lies...cross my heart, it's fiction!