Okay, so I celebrated the end of 2010 with dear friends (and my husband–seen here giving me a smooch on beautiful Orcas Island.  We dined at Orcas Hotel listening to Martin Lund playing jazz tunes at the upright piano , couples getting up and dancing to the tunes finding a space among the packed tables.  Like so many on the island, we rang in the New Year on “Eastern” time, ie, at 9 o’clock we were all singing Auld Lang Syne and blowing our horns.  As you can see from my glitzy outfit, I dressed for the occasion–perhaps it’s needless to say that I was the only person there with a feather boa and a glittery hair bow.  Most were dressed in island style, casual and comfortable, but all were having fun.

So, my first new years resolution as I look back at my fragmented, ragged contribution to the world of blogs, is to be more faithful to blogging (and try to figure out exactly what I want to do when I blog!) so that, even if I have only one reader, I will at least be offering something at a fairly consistent pace.  One of the ideas I have that I hope to follow is to begin a dialogue with a few of my writer/artist friends such as the fabulous Scottish ex-cop/thriller writer, Jack Ramsay, now living in Australia and working away on his books.  Jack has his own blog but we thought it might be kind of fun to run our mix of feminine/masculine, American/Scottish, academic/constabulary writer thoughts and ideas on our respective blogs.  In between these fascinating moments of cordial discussion I will persevere with my own comments, experiences and perspectives including the fact that I will be heading to Atlanta, GA at the end of this month and then on to a month in France .

I picked my mother up at the Portland airport last night.  This was the first time in years that she has gone somewhere without my father and she was very nervous.  She almost decided not to come at all.  It took me an hour to get to the airport whereas normally it’s 35 minutes, but it all worked out fine, my mother was in a good mood and had had an uneventful flight talking with a nice man on the row with her who lives in Portland.  She was quite proud of herself for traveling by herself and says she has  a lot more confidence now .  It is interesting how, no matter what our age, when we risk doing something new it opens up new insights into ourselves and a renewed recognition of the possibilities we have for trying new things, going new places, meeting new people .

I have worked all week on an article on an artist (Irene Belknap) and was feeling quite good about it. I had written what I considered to be quite a lovely piece on one of the paintings and, yesterday, I was moving it to another part of the article when I got a call on Skype and accidentally deleted it!!! I was SO PISSED!!!! It has been an annoying week on many levels and this just capped it . So, I said, “Forget it” and took a long walk through the woods in my neighborhood, Forest Heights. It was a stunningly beautiful fall day with clear blue skies, sunshine and orange and red leaves covering the pathways. It was very still beneath the trees and I rarely passed another person except the occasional laborer blowing the leaves off the path—such a strange thing to do in a wood—a reminder that this is a suburban neighborhood, not a forest. As usual, after two hours tramping up and down hills, muttering to myself and stamping on the leaves that kept fluttering down in spite of the blower, I felt much calmer and ready to get back to the article. Walking in nature is a miraculous cure for almost any mood. Walks have always been my way of connecting…with my neighborhood, with an unfamiliar city, with nature, with my thoughts. Somewhere I read that, unlike jogging or running, walks naturally lend themselves to philosophical reflection. Since I find it harder and harder to run I find consolation in this thought. Okay, back to the article!

I notice when I’m finished with a project and waiting to hear about it, waiting to begin something new, I can eat ANYTHING! It’s pathetic really—where is that determination and discipline I had to write the damned thing? Gone! Digested in a combination of fat and acid, grape and grain…

It’s said that we are our own worst critics.  And, in general, that’s true.  I find something wrong with almost everything I’ve written—it could be tighter here, I missed a grammatical or spelling error there, the characters don’t have enough depth or they are complicated in a way that’s not compelling enough, the plot is too elaborate, etc.  We struggle to finish the novel or the book, feeling afraid of failure, of rejection, becoming discouraged but then…there’s a shift.  You don’t know when or why but suddenly, sitting squashed between people in the middle seat of an airplane or standing in line at a grocery store, you think “I’ve written a book.  I’ve completed one book and published it and I have just finished another book” and suddenly the burden of fear and anxiety is replaced with a sense of elation, a feeling that you can do anything.  You can write a third book and a fourth book and, with each book, you come closer to mastering your fears, closer to confidence in your voice, in your ability.

Check out Rosemary Griggs’ website (http://rosemarygriggsclayart.blogspot.com) to view her wonderful, whimsical ceramic pieces. I have a pot face wine cooler with grapes garnishing the ‘head.’ It’s a great vase for flowers as well but there are many wonderful fun pieces to browse through and enjoy. Her garden is also wonderful–full of various pieces of pottery and sculpture. Check out some photos from a recent visit to her studio.

I just flew “Southwest” from St Simons Island, Georgia to Portland, Oregon. I sat on the plane between a plump, young girl and a trim, middle-aged man. The girl was curled up on her seat next to the window, watching a Dan Brown movie on a tiny Ipod, her face covered by the hood of her jacket; cowled like some twelfth century monk watching a movie set in a church with frescoes of Christ, oblivious to the darkening clouds and setting sun outside the window. The man was reading Forsyth’s spy novel, The Cobra, on a Kindle, the black words illuminated against the white screen. Both the man and the woman were tuned into an electronic world of visual and verbal entertainment, all three of us crossing the United States in the extraordinary manner of flight—still (in spite of the discomfort and inconvenience of air travel) a most amazing experience.
These oddly juxtaposed images captured for me the ambivalent nature of our twenty-first century world—the girl reminding me of a male figure of a medieval monk transformed into the female figure of a young girl watching a man acting a part on a quest in a Christian setting all reduced to the tiny screen of her I-pod, the man reading a story of drug-smuggling while sipping a gin and tonic from a plastic cup imprinted with an image of a Southwest Airlines airplane which, at first glance, I thought was the image of a whale emerging from the ocean—the plane’s wings appearing as horizontal lines of the sea, the body of the plane looking like a great sea creature rising from the water.
Amused that I mistook a human invention for one of nature’s colossal creatures, it struck me that the same could be said about the association between the girl and a monk, between the religious images and the tiny electronic screen, between the cramped seats and the miracle of flight, the plastic cup and the powerful whale—all of these contradictory associations are derived from our human ability to make connections, to make leaps of faith and to attempt to realize our dreams.

Just got back from St Simons Island, Georgia where I spent days walking the beach from the pier to the King and Prince (hotel built in 1935), eating fried shrimp and oysters, drinking wine and just inhaling the island atmosphere.   Here are a couple of photos I thought I would share with those of you stuck in the interior .  The first is sunset from Crane Cottage on Jekyll Island, then a shrimp boat early in the morning and the beach I was walking on.

I have just finished my second novel. This is not an easy task because it takes me FOREVER to write a novel. This is because I don’t outline my novels—I start with ideas, with a vague plot, with characters, with snippets of dialogue and a location, then I just start writing. Whenever I begin a book I feel great; I love writing the initial chapters, the dialogue, the descriptions, I love setting up the characters and their relationships but then, about halfway through a book, doubts begin to set in—I start questioning whether the book is of interest, whether the characters have enough depth, whether there is too much description, too many nodding heads and meaningful gazes. I start going back over what I have written and I go over and over the book, altering dialogue here, re-working a scene there, questioning whether a particular character would really react to a situation in the way I have portrayed him. I often find myself locked in battle with my novel—it teases me, turns a cold shoulder to me and my needs. I think my novel is extremely self-centered until I realize, suddenly, that it’s me who is self-centered—I’m not allowing the book to be what it is, not giving it the space to develop the way it must. This is the point at which I’m able to complete the book—the point where I acknowledge its independence from me, where I “set it free.” So, Women Who Die Less Vertically is done. Good luck to her .

Art is life, life is art-enriched by a glass of Pinot Noir or Veuve  Clicquot, by conversations overheard while dining alone in a restaurant or by the special connection suddenly revealed as you stand before a painting by Caravaggio or de Kooning, Rembrandt or Manet-these are all threads by which my life is woven into a narrative, and I hope you may find connections here to your own story.  I invite you to enter and share a glimpse of my world.