Things are never quite what they seem, are they?

Different strokes…by Anita…

This week you have the pleasure of my company, as Jay still has the flu and feels terrible. I think I can manage to do this weeks post, although if it all goes haywire I will run screaming for the hills!
How Jay manages I don’t know, for she tends to forget all kinds of things including her name some of the time. All joking aside, she has learned how to make bricks without straw among other things and achieved miracles. Far more than either of us could ever have imagined when we started out.
I can still remember how years ago, a computer was just something to play solitaire on, and now look at us! If we can just learn more about marketing and promoting our books, life would be even more wonderful.
It’s all about the right time and place and we have been so close on occasion, just an eyelash away from recognition only to have to walk home, having missed the bus.
Bad Moon is far and away my favourite creation, my baby if you will, but over the years since it was written I have come to think of it as cursed in some peculiar way. Perhaps I shouldn’t have chosen to write a book that was a mix of The Walton’s meet Deliverance. A very powerful story but maybe too powerful?
I seem to have an affinity with West Virginia in America, almost as though I have lived there at some time. I hear the dialect and I am instantly home, and when I write about the lives of my characters it really does seem to be a memory. Quite inexplicable really as I have never been there.
Some of the best publishers really liked it, but somewhere along the road of their deliberations it all went pear shaped and they declined, almost as though they had discovered a nasty secret lurking in the pages. (Apart from nasty stuff I put there!)
I still write, I cannot help myself as writing is the only thing I think I am any good at. But try as I might, nothing that crawls out of my pencil is as good as my first effort and none of it seems to inspire me as much.
I wish Jay all the luck in the world with 9Lives. She has been putting off writing it for so long as everything kept getting in the way, so she kept it in the back of her mind wrapped in turquoise tissue paper, patiently awaiting its arrival. I have read the first few chapters and she writes well. I can’t wait to read more, and that fact alone would indicate that 9Lives should be a good book.
Perusing Molly Greene’s blog the other day, she commented on Anne R Allen’s post, ‘How to Blog your Way out of the Slush Pile and onto the Bestseller List’. Very interesting reading!
Something else that I found very interesting… my granddaughter Kathryn told me about an amazing coincidence that happened to her the other day. She became aware of a poster that was on the wall of her college lobby. It read, ‘Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming these are what makes life meaningful.’
She must have walked past this poster many times, but something made her stop that day. She thought it was an interesting statement and thought no more about it. Later that day at a Chinese restaurant she opened a fortune cookie and was astounded to read the very same statement!
You will be glad to hear that Jay will be back next week, but I have enjoyed talking to you all and will have to do it again sometime.
I have just been asked to mention that we have a new page on Facebook, ‘Reading and writing for fun’… it’s somewhere we can concentrate on all things literary…see you there!