This is the leaf that I picked up off the ground outside of the Newhouse Building the day I met Joyce Carol Oates. A little souvenir of the day, and I photographed it on our stone step by the side door...I love the old stone steps, they're awesome! Weathered, pockmarked by the elements and time...It's a quiet morning, this week was a week with emotional upheaval caused by outside sources...and some inside... our boiler has apparently conked out, so that one more f-ing on my laundry list of upsetting things, but I'll deal with that in due time, I'm not making an emergency call to the repair man on a Sunday morning, I'll call tomorrow...at least it's not January, we have the woodstove, and space heaters, we're good. As usual, I take the good with the bad, I try not to suffer too much over such things, but well, I'm only human and so I get riled in my own special way... I'm much better today. I immersed myself into trolling through my photographs, printing special ones, working on the adjustment of images, cropping and levels, black and white and tints, pushing an image to its limits and then bringing it back...would this be considered digital painting? Dunno, but I like the idea of a digital sketchbook. Thankfully, this quiet, busy work settled me down yesterday, and so, I thought I'd share a few of my favorites...
A fading star...the squill is already done for another year, so beautiful, so brief.
A blue stone... it is a much paler blue in person, but I pushed the color around for the fun of it, pulling out the details that were lost otherwise...looks like a piece of our blue marble seen from space...
And of course, the classic rose... always the drama queen of flowers... although this one was nibbled upon by some critter... a bit of a Blanche DuBois... I love the look of it, tho' she seems a little grayer than I like, but the tint turned out nice... I'm sure I'll revisit her and tweak the image some more...
I spent one sunny evening this week underneath the bushes photographing the little white violets that are very prolific on my acre, they're just scattered everywhere...I love them! It was one of my most pleasant moments of this week of turmoil, and I found a sense of peace in that patch of sunshine, sitting in last year's pale leaves, surrounded by these delicate flowers with a powerful scent, I adore them... and this little one, with her face to the sun, so hopeful!In spite of things that went wrong this week, I'm still hopeful because of the things that went right...
I've been working on my "brief" promotional description for The Fractured Hues of White Light, I've gone through every single copy of synopsis-sis-sizzz, that I've written to the various agents in the past, and gleaned the 'gems' from them to make this one. It's hovering at around 250 words, and I'll need to trim it down to the barest bones possible, but I thought I'd share what I have so far, I fear it seems a bit pieced together, I'll smooth it out before long:
The Fractured Hues of White Light is an emotional journey that explores the inner-tickings of the human heart—who we love, why we love them, mother, father, daughter, siblings, lovers, spouses, and friends, it’s all love in some form. Samantha Ryder is autistic, it is because of her handicap that she often fails to articulate her emotions with an appropriate demonstration. Ironically, the ‘normal people’ who surround her are just as incapable of communicating their feelings, and handicap themselves with secretive obsessions, thus causing a snowballing sense of isolation full of things left unsaid. They love her with unconditional bonds that vary in degrees; her mother Lenore’s maternal nurturing is sorely missed after her death when Sammy was six. Her father, Whitley, is a possessive narcissist, but his heart is always in the right place. Memories of the protective love of her father’s stepson, Guthrie, filtered into her adolescent fantasies. Her half-sister, Helena, exhibits a lackadaisical tolerance and irritable impatience, yet offers a clinging-vine possessiveness in spite of herself. The lingering romantic feelings of her friend and former lover, Sylvester, manifest in his boundless patience; their continued friendship stands firm on a foundation of trust. When Sammy agreed to marry Preston she initially believed that she could learn to love him, but the empty bond between them causes her to emotionally lose ground. As their marriage falls apart, Preston becomes dangerous; forcing her to go on a journey of self-preservation away from the familiar security of home, her escape threatens to be her undoing.
I guess there are ghosts in this one... but they're the memories of the living...
