Moonlight & Roses
Hi! I’m Taylor
I have imaginary friends.
They chatter away in the background as I go about my daily business.
They are (mostly) the ghosts of ancestors who want to be heard. And I indulge them in my Family Genealogy posts. But some… well, an occasional blog post about a discovered record was not enough to satisfy them. They wanted to be stars!
And so, Taylor MacDowell was born, for the sole purpose of giving these pushy few relatives a place to shine. Fictionally, of course.
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How does your garden grow?
I’ve never been a gardener. In fact, I usually tell folks that “I don’t kill plants; I just make ’em wish they were dead.” So, it’s fitting that, as I plan what flowers I’ll be planting this spring, I’m thinking about Rose, who also wasn’t much of a gardener.
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Author Intrusion
As a writer, one always questions if a character is being true to their own nature or whether the author is projecting his or her own moral belief system or code of action upon them. To be clear, you don’t want the latter. That’s called Author Intrusion. Sometimes, however, it seems impossible to keep the…
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Writers’ Games
Sometimes, when words are hard to find, my writing group plays a little game. We spin for prompts, which are just words or phrases that have been plucked from various sources and added to a numbered list, and then see what we can write that includes one or all of the prompts. Occasionally, the resulting…
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Banking Panic
I’ve been considering bank closings, and the panics that ensued, and how that would have manifested itself in the small town where Rose and Harold lived? We’ve seen pictures of the mobs that rushed banks in New York after the big stock crash in ’29. But stories about smaller crowds, smaller towns, smaller banks, are…
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House Parties… and promises
Harold and Rose have been time-traveling. They just returned from a trip aboard the Titanic, the latest of House Party settings at the writers’ forum I frequent. House Parties are an interesting phenomenon. Multiple writers throw characters from their many WIPs into a particular setting and, while characters of different backgrounds, time periods, and genres…
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I wish’t I was in Peoria
You haven’t seen much of me lately. I apologize for that. But… well, things got a bit crazy here, what with storms and rising water and holidays and new homes. Still, Rose and Harold are with me every step of the way. In fact, I’ve been listening to 1920s and 1930s music to get a…
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When your plow is a pencil…
Old Ike once said, “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.” [1] Of course, he wasn’t talking about aspiring novelists who’ve set their story-world smack dab in the middle of a Depression-era farm.
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Hot & Sticky
Why is it that the A/C has to wait until mid-July to conk out? Couldn’t it have done this in April??? It’s been a long time since I’ve tried to sleep without air conditioning. But, as I notice the little runnels of sweat forming on the back of my neck, I can commiserate with Rose.…
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The Dirty Work of Illumination
We take lighting for granted. The sun goes down; we flip a switch. Instant illumination. Sure, sometimes the power goes off and we have to “rough it.” Candles or hurricane lamps for a few hours, a couple of days, sometimes longer if you live on the Gulf Coast and it’s hurricane season (there’s a reason…
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Answer Key
Not many of you played. Still, in all fairness, here’s the answers to the recent Pop Quiz.