Category Archive

Here’s a rainbow over Blake Island, which I can see from my beach: 

Here it is, zoomed in:

And finally, here it is, reflected in the water. I love Rainbow Season, which also happens to be the name of one of my favorite romance novels.

Here’s the USS John C Stennis…from my bedroom. Interesting perspective. I was sure they’d come for me (note the contraband on the dog crate). I swear, I gave the mail bin back to the post office!

YO! Barkis is one year old today! Happy birthday to my shiny boy! Here are a few highlights of the Year of the Dog:

Here he is a year ago …

…getting more handsome every day…

(sometimes I’m naughty)

…. I’m in Canine Good Citizen Class…

.

 … I love the beach!

…and I climb trees so I can look out to sea…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MEEEEE! Woof, from Barkis.

Click the thumbnail! Do it! An eagle flew past just as the carrier was going by.

“…having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”

—Hermann Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

A carrier passed by our house this week.

I wonder where they’re off to…I hope they all come back safe and sound.

My kitchen was boring. This house is all about the view outside, but still. Off-white formica and linoleum squares were starting to get really depressing.

Then the garbage disposal broke and I thought…I never liked that sink. And while I was at it, I hated the countertops, the cooktop, the backsplash and the floor. Time for a makeover! Time to go green!

My habit of watching “Living with Ed,” the Ed Begley show about going green, finally made sense. I ordered bamboo floors, Vetrazzo countertops (in Hollywood sage, just like the ones in Ed’s house; they’re made of recycled Coke bottles) and stainless steel tile. Oh, and something called a magnetic induction cooktop which looks like a flat sheet of black glass. Check it out! NOW we’re cooking!

 Here’s a wider shot of the space:

…and a close-up of the cooktop:

But still, I spend most of my time looking out the window….

Please click this link for a beautiful slide show of the Irish countryside. And here’s a little something to read from a favorite author and friend, Malachy McCourt. And if you just don’t have enough controversy in your life, here’s a bit about the banning of “Danny Boy.” As a child, I memorized a piano piece called “Irish Derry Air” and while playing it, I was always picturing this enormous green-clad derriere.

Slainte!

How much do we love that phrase? I hadn’t heard it before, but it perfectly describes the nails-on-blackboard annoyance of randomly misplaced apostrophes. Or apostrophe’s, as our eponymous grocer would say. [Any grocers out there? Is this phrase disrespectful of grocers?] I figured I wasn’t alone in my crusade against apostrophe abuse. There’s even a flickr photo group documenting some of the worst offenders around the globe.

Cell phone pics of Barkis’s first road trip: 

In his watershed writing memoir, On Writing, Stephen King discussed his process. Early on, when I’m getting the draft down, I write with the door shut.

I’m active in two very dynamic writers‘ groups and I regularly bring material for critiquing. But not the first time around. The door-shut time around. A novel is complicated and confusing enough with one writer trying to juggle everything. I can only have my head filled with so many voices at a time, and the first draft belongs to the fictional voices–my characters. This is where they take on a life of their own, but the magic only works if I shut the door and listen.

How do you write? Door open? Door shut?

Remember my slide show with the house on the barge? It was featured on MSN’s real estate site in an article and slide show.  How much do I love my digital camera? Moving an old house to a new spot is the ultimate in recycling. Fun!

Farewell to beloved poet and philosopher, John O’Donohue. This loss feels so big and so sad, yet his spirit shines from the pages he left behind. He was just 53 when he died unexpectedly–peacefully, in his sleep–while in France. He lived in Connemara in the west of Ireland, he spoke Irish and wrote with clarity, from the heart. Here’s the Irish Times obit, and a nice tribute on God Is Not Elsewhere. Further info can be found on his web site. I wonder if, in writing this poem, he knew it would bring comfort to those he left behind. Slainte!

On the death of the Beloved

Though we need to weep your loss,
You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,
Where no storm or might or pain can reach you.

Your love was like the dawn
Brightening over our lives
Awakening beneath the dark
A further adventure of colour.

The sound of your voice
Found for us
A new music
That brightened everything.

Whatever you enfolded in your gaze
Quickened in the joy of its being;
You placed smiles like flowers
On the altar of the heart.
Your mind always sparkled
With wonder at things.

Though your days here were brief,
Your spirit was live, awake, complete.

We look towards each other no longer
From the old distance of our names;
Now you dwell inside the rhythm of breath,
As close to us as we are to ourselves.

Though we cannot see you with outward eyes,
We know our soul’s gaze is upon your face,
Smiling back at us from within everything
To which we bring our best refinement.

Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Beside us when beauty brightens,
When kindness glows
And music echoes eternal tones.

When orchids brighten the earth,
Darkest winter has turned to spring;
May this dark grief flower with hope
In every heart that loves you.

May you continue to inspire us:

To enter each day with a generous heart.
To serve the call of courage and love
Until we see your beautiful face again
In that land where there is no more separation,
Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,
And where we will never lose you again.

— John O’Donohue

I’m writing like a drunken sailor–3000 words today on the new novel–so I’m going to be miserly with my words here. There’s always something pretty to look at, though. A recent sunrise, taken from my patio:

This reminds me of a pretty part of an angry Psalm:

You own the day, you own the night;
      you put stars and sun in place.
   You laid out the four corners of earth,
      shaped the seasons of summer and winter.
Psalm 74:16-17

Happy New Year to all. Here’s a calm shot, taken from my beach.  

2007, like every other year, is the year of the book. Fully confident that none of my friends or family read my blog (really, they don’t), I’ll post a partial list of some of the books I’ve bought as gifts this year:

• Rabbit’s Gift by George Shannon. The ultimate pay-it-forward story, it is my pick for Picture Book of the Season.
• Ultimate Horse Barns by Randy Leffingwell. Bonus! This came signed by the author. Glorious coffee table book.
• On Strike for Christmas by you-know-who. The men take over the holiday preparations. Squeaky clean fun!
• Where Angels Go by Debbie Macomber–the annual Christmas tradition continues.
• The Edge of Winter by Luanne Rice. Nobody–but nobody–writes about the beach like Luanne.
• Street of a Thousand Blossoms by Gail Tsukiyama, signed by my sweet friend Gail.
• Rolling Paper Graphics. A curious art form, for sure.
• To Catch a Mermaid  by Suzanne Selfors. A brilliant fantasy adventure for the middle-grade reader.
• Twilight by Stephenie Meyer for the teenage nieces–the book every teen is reading.
• Grace in Thine Eyes by Liz Curtis Higgs. A stirring Scottish historical by a very special author.
• Manspace: A Primal Guide to Marking Your Territory. A decorating book for guys.
• Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. A novel with an interesting premise involving Frank Lloyd Wright.
• Manners by Kate Spade. I knew there was a reason I love this woman!
• Ya-yas in Bloom by Rebecca Wells. Warm, tender and nostalgic, and it ends with a Christmas pageant!
• Meeting God in Quiet Places: The Cotswold Parables by F. LaGard Smith is the ultimate comfort read.
• The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs. I bought this after listening to his podcast on Amazon.
• Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading by Maureen Corrigan. The book you need after all of the above.

Bid farewell to yet another victim of the storm–a huge old fig tree in the front yard.

And here are some pics of a ferry in the storm. Drama!

Here’s something you don’t see every day. A yard barge. They moved my neighbors’ house away on a barge. Gorgeous day. There’s a slide show here.

My friend Pete took this stunning picture one morning.

He’s a key organizer of Arms Around Bainbridge, an athletic event and benefit for Olivia Carey, a beloved islander suffering from ovarian cancer. I feel so lucky to live in a place where people take care of each other in creative ways. It’s a perfect example of how a person can use his gift and his passion. to help someone.

Last year I wrote a story to benefit Cottage Dreams, an organization that gives cancer victims a week in a rustic lakeside cottage. The topic was tailor made for me–a lakeside cottage? I am so there. I’m proud to have a publisher that gives authors an opportunity to use their gifts and passions to help others.

All right, grasshoppers, print this out because it’s going to save you all kinds of time and trouble. Oh, and money. How many times have you been asked to send in a photo, “300dpi” or better… Thus leading you on a hunt to a) figure out what 300 dpi is, whether or not your photos possess this elusive quality (probably not; right-click and select Properties and you’ll see) and c) how to get your hands on one without bugging your publisher’s PR rep yet again….

People will tell you that you have to have “Photoshop,” an expensive RAM-hog program, in order to edit your digital photos. You don’t. You just need to go to www.irfanview.com and download their swift little free program. To convert a shot to 300dpi, right-click the photo. Select “Open With” and then select Irfanview. On the menu bar, select Image–>Resize/Resample and in the box that comes up, change the DPI to 300. You might also want to reduce the size in pixels, too. Et voila! Your photo is ready for print.

So there I was, putting the finishing touches on my revisions, when the carrier John Stennis came steaming home.

Welcome home, Navy guys! This closeup gives you a perspective of its size. Note the 200-car Washington  State Ferry in the background:

In fact, seeing how tiny and vulnerable the people on deck look was the inspiration for the mishap in one of my books.

Barkis took it in stride…

But the show wasn’t over. Along came a shiny new yacht, with a helocopter hovering overhead, apparently filming or photographing it.

I put up a slide show of the whole business. And here I thought living on the water was supposed to impart a zen-like calm….

In further news about my apparel, 5000 sailors saw me in my jammies when an aircraft carrier went by my house.

It’s pretty common to see a carrier in this part of the world, but I also live in a spot where the carrier can see
me. 

Which is a tad disconcerting when you are standing in your yard, blinking at the dawn, having been awakened by an insistent puppy with a very small bladder.

A passing aircraft carrier is surprisingly quiet, even surrounded by tugs and Coast Guard vessels. It glides by, barely leaving a wake, and on a very still morning at about, say 5:30a.m., sound easily carries across the water.

But I still think Navy guys are hot.

Last month, I lost one of my oldest and dearest writing friends. I found comfort in the words Alice herself wrote in Devoted, her first published novel. This is from the final page:

…Owen felt again a hint of the peace that had descended on him in the church when he committed himself to Christ and his people’s cause.

He still had no assurance of anything, not tomorrow or his springtime, but he had found his heart and his life. However long he lived, he would take that assurance with him.

Even if his road brought him soon into the shadow of death, he would carry that achievement , that peace with him into darkness and beyond. To whatever God waited there.

–Devoted by Alice Borchardt (1995)  Here’s a detail of a memory collage I made to give to Alice’s husband:

Wishing peace and love to all.

Would you please see if you get “Sunrise Earth” on your telly? …And then set your DVR to capture it every day, preferably in High Definition? It’s the sort of program to put on while you’re fixing your morning coffee and then staring dully around, trying to figure out what to write for the day. That’s how it works for me, anyway. I have the prettiest sunrise view in the world, right here (see photo above) but I seriously love getting up with the bison of Wyoming, or with frogs on the Amazon, or the fisherman of Sri Lanka. The only sound track is the natural sounds that take place in the scene. Anyway…check it out. There’s nothing else quite like it on TV.

It’s a dangerous business going out your front door.
–JRR Tolkien

You never know what you’re going to wake up to around here:

It’s a submarine in tow, so close to my house I could hear people talking on board. More shots of this can be found here.

Peace,

Susan

I wish I had more time to work in my garden. But–come to think of it–things are coming along quite nicely without me. Here are some scenes from my yard in the springtime.

 Gardening is good for writers because it doesn’t occupy the same channel in the brain as writing does. I should do more of it. There is more power in the plotting done while pruning the box hedge than in staring at a blank page for hours.

I’m not a very technical gardener. In this climate, you don’t need to be. Things tend to grow on their own. However, there are two things I always wear while gardening–my Chooka Rockabilly gumboots–because trust me, there is nothing grosser than stepping barefoot on a slug. I also wear those stretchy gloves that look as though they’ve been dipped in rubber–again, it’s the slug thing.

On the other hand, here is a tidbit of writerly wisdom for the day: If you step on a slug with your bare foot first thing in the morning, then you can be pretty sure nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.

‘Tis done. We talked, sang, laughed, cried, created, learned, ate and had an incredible day at the Field’s End conference. Thanks to all the amazing speakers and writers who participated. Special thanks to the Bainbridge Island Beach Cottage for providing accommodations. There’s a slide show of the event here. Happy writing to all!

Authors Carol Cassella, Michael Donnelly, Mickey Molnaire at Kiana Lodge.

Jay took this around 5:30 this evening. Someone up there is telling us to go boating: