Sunday afternoon...

Yesterday was a very busy day for me, a book signing in Johnson City NY, then a Gallery closing reception in Syracuse, they overlapped and we (my Fred and I) made it to both, I'm exhausted today...but I did enjoy a bit of sunshine on the porch early this morning, with my laptop in lap, a cup of coffee, and my doggy buddy, Max, at my feet (his black fur smelling sunshine sweet!) The humming birds were buzzing the bee balm, at one point three were buzzing quietly together in the same clump of balm...well, until they bumped into each other and they started to squabble, chipping and spraying poop at each other...good grief!

My flower garden is looking wild from all the rain, and because of my back, I can't do the maintenance that I usually do to tame it...but the photo opportunities have still been a delight!

Along with my self-promotion of Dusty Waters through Good Reads, I've been working pretty steady on The Fractured Hues of White Light, I'd really like to get it ready to publish sometime in August or September...but I keep fussing around with chapter 3...it's a good kind of fussing because I'm tying up loose ends and filling in a crucial time in my character Sylvester's life that also has an influence in two of my other novels, and it's sort of helping me write the one currently named Wish, which has been "on hold" for nearly two years...

Allow me to explain, the nifty thing about my books is this interconnection of the characters...the books are individuals, they're not written to be read in any order or anything like that...but the characters know one another, their lives overlap in a variety of ways...just like life, people know one another, sometimes briefly, sometimes longer (or forever)...life goes on for these people after the novel is finished...they show up in the background of another story, moving on beyond their story...or in a time or place before...depends on which book...but the familiarity is there...a community...it's been growing for a long time...

So...White Light...yes, this odd book about the autistic artist Samantha Ryder...I do love this book, it only gets better with every visit...it's my garden that I'm tending this summer...she's bloomed to 520 pages (at one point during the early drafts she was tipping into 600 pages, so she's "streamlined" now...) I'm immersed into this world for now, and I'll know when she's ready to go to print...just not yet! I'm going to take my sweet old time!

A rain soaked rose, ain't she lovely?

The writer as a child...yup, it's all about me!

The teacher told me to comb my hair...I was only five and was lucky I knew which end of a comb to use...my hair was always a static cling wreck no matter how nice my mom would fix it before I got on the bus...it still is a mess, only curlier than this baby fine blond fluff...

While I jump through the hoops of becoming a published author, I always come up against the brief biography bit that I should supply to potential agents and editors to entice them into representing me...I very often feel too humble about little ole me to toot my horn so when I do it, I cringe inside, I mean, really, it was drummed into my head not to be a show-off or to be too proud...wtf...good grief, I don't know, it's just tough trying to make my ordinary history sound interesting enough to be taken seriously by the gate keepers to the publishing powers that be...with every rejection letter, I feel like chucking the traditional route and self-publishing just to get it over with...especially now with the economic disaster that the Bush Administration has allowed to happen, well, now the publishers are tucking their tails and are definitely not willing to take a financial risk on someone like little ole me...a white girl from Upstate New York with no literary pedigree...

I must be crazy.

So for the hell of it, I wrote this down like the ones you see on the backs of books, referring to myself in the third person is so weird...it's way too long for the back of a book cover...but who says I'll put it on the back of a book cover? I'll put it here for now so if someone stumbles in, they'll have an idea of who I am...

Laura grew up in a small, old Erie Canal town in Upstate New York, and she loved getting that new box of 64 Crayola's at the beginning of the school year, beyond that point, she hated school and barely talked to anyone. Education always seemed to be modified for a certain type of student and Laura always tried to fit 'it' into her vision of how it should be. Academically she wasn’t a stellar student. Although she was considered bright, she had a tendency to not follow directions no matter the terms of the assignment, she was the quintessential square peg being shoved into the round hole of the public school system, she was mostly bored, and spent a great deal of her time inside her head making up stories. (On more than one occasion she was called a liar when she tried to share these stories.)

Laura attended art school, worked as a disc-jockey at a college radio station, she’s an accomplished horseman, and spent some time working on a horse farm shoveling shit in exchange for free riding lessons in Dressage. She has been a model, did time as a book slinger in a college bookstore textbook order department, was a clothing and shoe retail clerk, briefly did clerical work in a credit office, worked as a secretary, and is currently the Registrar at a university art collection. (She has noted that there are a lot of women named ‘Laura’ who are Registrars at art museums.)

Laura lives in an old farmhouse on a windswept hilltop in Upstate New York with her husband, their twenty-something son, five cats, and one dog named Max. On her own time outside of the day job, she is an artist and has sold several works of art to private collectors in the Syracuse region, and has been diligently writing books for the last ten years. When she isn’t writing or drawing, she loves gardening and photography; she also watches old movies, has an eclectic taste in music, reads several books at a time, is an avid supporter of PBS, she loves horses and adores wildlife. She is self-publishing her first book, Dusty Waters, a ghost story that was inspired by some of the lies that she told when she was a bored kid in a small, old Erie Canal town.

As you can see, I tried to cover all the bases and stuck with the basics of me...

But here's another one that I wrote some time ago...it goes well with this picture from my garden:


Do you think the weather in Upstate New York has anything to do with the making of exceptional writers? So many distinguished authors have passed underneath the prevalent gray sky—many have moved on, but I have stayed here, though I chose to relocate to the hill country south of Syracuse for a better view. There’s something unique about the profusion of overcast days that sparks inspiration, it is a bit moor-ish in a Bronte sense. Some times that suffusion of gray comes down as fog on my Upstate hill, and my world takes on an isolated quality; it is such a lush atmosphere that fosters creativity in cozy rooms by a wood stove fire. Sunny days are precious, and that’s when I turn my attention from the moody sky to the placid earth. I have worked out numerous plot knots with my hands immersed in the soil of my garden; my imagination tickled by the softness of a cat’s sweet tail as it brushes along my arm when it passes by me with affectionate curiosity. After hours of physical labor tending to flowers and vegetables, I return to my desk to write, contemplate—tinker and tweak; sometimes I forgo the desk to sun myself in my favorite chair on the front porch. While hummingbirds buzz at the sprays of bee balm, I rest my feet on a sun-warmed dog, and I read with a red pen poised, ready to stab at the manuscript lying in my lap. You see, I have a good life on my hill, it is so pastoral and peaceful—this is how I want you to envision me. It is important for you to incorporate this vision, because this is what I have worked towards for many years, without this quality of life and the extremes of weather, I wouldn’t be writing—I’d be stuck on survive otherwise.

Too flowery...

How the devil does one write this sort of thing without sounding like a narcissist? It's bizarre...

And so here I am, all "growed up", yup, that's me standing by the flower...she still doesn't use a comb in that fluff and has since given up trying to tame it...some things never change...I'm still trying to make up my own rules as I go along, I write books that are too 'prickly' to be considered 'mainstream'...which translates to not being a best seller blockbuster these days...but I'll be damned if I give up my vision of how things should be...