A Stroll Through Time

Every year, on the first Saturday night in October, the old city cemetery here in Gallatin comes alive for one night only. A bold sign at the gate declares this elegant and mysterious place off limits after dark. But on this magical evening that sign is ignored, and we are invited in by the soft glow of paper lanterns lit by the spirits themselves.

We meet about a half-dozen spirits every year, each with a poignant story to tell. They wait for us at their final resting place, embracing a rare opportunity to be more than just a name carved into a stone.Their stories resonate with life and love and laughter and loss. They remind us that once, they were just like us. And that one day, we too will be a forgotten name carved into a crumbling stone.

It seems to me that every year, the weather turns cold in Gallatin just in time for the cemetery tour. The wind kicks up and the clouds hang thick and you can feel the spirits listening. Call it coincidence if you like, but I think they want us to know they are there.

Years ago, I lived in an apartment right in front of this old cemetery. People used to ask me all the time if it was creepy to be so close to all those dead people. Maybe it should have been, but it wasn't. I was young and newly divorced. My life was in turmoil in many different ways. It was late May when I moved into that apartment, and there were many nights that summer when I crossed my back yard in bare feet and a nightshirt to stroll through the cemetery in the dark, even though it was supposed to be off limits and is within a stone's throw of a not-so-great part of town. But it was the one place in the world where I could go to find peace. No one would find me there, I knew. I could turn off everything else and clear my mind. That place is where my love of cemeteries was born.

These images are from the Gallatin Cemetery Tour in 2010. Forgive the poor quality! In the two tours since this one, I have never been able to get a picture worth posting. They never turn out well on tour night. Perhaps the spirits would rather be heard than seen.

 

 

In the weeks to come, I will be posting more pictures and stories about some of my favorite cemeteries. Come back and have a look! I hope you'll learn to love and appreciate them the way I do. Its amazing what they can tell us about the past.

Cities of Silence

Call me weird, but I love cemeteries. I love the grandiose tombs left behind by wealthy egomaniacs, still determined to show off, even in death. I love finding faded and forgotten ephitaphs which resonate with sorrow and loss. You get the tiniest glimpse of someone's life...someone who's been gone for a very long time, perhaps. Someone who no one remembers anymore. It gives you an idea of who they were and of how deeply their loss was felt by those they left behind. It brings them all to life for a moment.

I like hand-made monuments most of all, I think. They represent for me a very pure kind of love. A reluctance of a loved one to leave the grave of their beloved unmarked, simply because they could not afford a fancy stone. I've seen stones that look like they were made from Quickcrete poured into a mold, with the names, dates and epitaphs scrawled in with a stick while it hardened. For some of these poor departed, that stone may be the only tangible record left of their life; one that may have been as full and rich as any life that was ever lived, for all we know.

I especially like discovering old stones that are almost unreadable, that have faded with neglect and take time and effort to be deciphered. It's like finding a lost treasure, reading those words which perhaps no one has taken the trouble to read in decades. Thats what happened with this stone, which I stumbled across in an old cemetery not far from where I live.

While on a walk last summer, I passed this old churchyard cemetery, which is not all that remarkable at first glance. What drew me to it was the dead black cat lying in front of one of the graves. Can you see it there, in front of the obelisk-shaped tombstone? I thought to myself then, how strange for a cat to choose that particular spot to die. I wondered if maybe someone had put it there as a morbid sort of joke.

This is a close-up of the poor cat, looking quite a bit worse for wear in the humid midsummer heat of Tennessee. If not for this little guy, I would never have looked twice at this old cemetery, least of all at the unattractive, broken obelisk that marked the grave where this unfortunate feline met his end.

The side of the stone facing the road (I think this would be the west-facing side) reads as follows:


(the top of the stone is broken off or has crumbled away, there is unfortunately no way of knowing how much of it is gone or what was written on that part of the stone)

                                                           ........the mortal
                                                                 remains of
                                                          JOHN WEATHERED
                                                              who was born
                                                            in Chesterfield County
                                                                  Virginia on
                                                           the 13(or 18?) day of
                                                                February 1773
                                                                   and died on
                                                                  the 5. day of
                                                                December 1857
                                                                 Aged 84 years.

                                                           West-facing side of obelisk
                                                             


The side of the stone facing the church ( the east-facing side, I think) bears the epitaph, which is one of the most moving I have ever seen anywhere, either before or since. It reads:


                           (continuation from upper portion of stone which is missing)

                                                              .......is erected by
                                                                   his neighbors
                                                                    as a tribute of
                                                                     their respect
                                                                     and veneration
                                                                  it needs no inscription
                                                                    to commemorate
                                                                 his virtuousness(virtues?)
                                                                  they are embalmed
                                                                       in the hearts
                                                                      of those who
                                                                     knew him and
                                                                    their influence
                                                                    will be felt long
                                                                    after this stone
                                                                      shall crumble
                                                                    and mingle with
                                                                          his dust.

                                                     East facing side of obelisk, with epitaph


I was so moved by these heartfelt words, left behind by the friends of this elderly man who died more than one hundred and fifty years ago. He must have been a remarkable man, but this stone is all that is left of him. I wonder how long it has been since anyone has thought about him, or read his name aloud. But al these years later, we can still read these words and get a sense of who he was.
 I love that.

Last month I spent a week in Savannah, GA, and visited Bonaventure Cemetery. This is perhaps the most beautiful cemetery on earth. My next post will contain some of my favorite monuments from there.

The book is on indefinite hold, since writer's block has held me in the palm of it's ugly hand all summer long. Now that fall is here, I hope to finish the damn thing before long. In the meantime, enjoy my cemetery pictures. That's all I got to show for a summer spent enjoying myself and not writing a lick.
                                                                   
                                                       


                                                         

There is no Fate but What We Make

   Ok, so the book I promised to release by the end of March is still not done on the second of May.  My novella, which I soooo optimistically expected to finish (two weeks after starting) hasn't been as easy to piece together as I imagined it would be.
   Diary of an Immortal is a re-working of some of my favorite parts from the novel I've been working on.
   For three fucking years.
 I thought I could simply weave these pieces together from my main character's point of view, then slap that sucker up on Kindle and the world would be a better place. Sadly, this has not been the way of it. Damn you, every author who has ever written a book in two weeks! Thank you for raising the bar to unreachable heights for the rest of us!
   As I'm finally nearing the end of this writing nightmare experience, I sometimes have to stop and reflect on the perilous and magnificent journey that it is. I think there must be gazillions of people who feel just like I did before I started writing---that something vital has always been missing in their lives. I knew there was some mysterious untapped potential deep inside me; something I wanted badly but that seemed so impossible in my youth I that I chose to bury it before it really got its hooks in me.
 I come from a family of musicians, and at an early age I knew some of the most talented singers I could ever hope to hear had looked for that 'big break' so long that their talent had become overshadowed by their desperation. I recognized this at eight or nine years old, and it terrified me. I did not want to grow up and become a victim of my own dreams. These artists with voices like angels had followed their dreams and it got them nowhere. At my most impressionable, I learned that talent was by no menas a guarantee for success. On the contrary; the most famous and successful singers I knew of at the time were mediocre when compared to the ones I truly admired.

  Now and then throughout my life I saw glimpses of my own buried dream. And I knew if I ever found the courage, I could nurture it into something extrordinary---or at the very least, something far less ordinary than the never-fail path I chose instead.
   Somewhere in the back of my mind I always knew I was a writer. I think back to the seventh grade, when life was easy and I could choose to read Macbeth and Jane Eyre and The Canterbury Tales and Little Women and The Secret Garden and all the other ancient books with tattered canvas covers in my tiny school library; just because it made me feel sad that no one ever read the ugly ones. Aside from these moldy classics of literature, that year I also read such books as Our Hearts Were Young and Gay; Going On Seventeen and You Give Me a Pain, Elaine--as well as countless others. These were books I had never heard of at the time and have never heard of since. But after twenty-five years I still remember many of the titles and almost all of the characters. I can't remember the authors or the settings or even the names, but I remember the people. They were not characters to me then. They were people.  I remember what they thought and how they felt and what they did and who they knew. Whenever I glanced the yellowed library card in the sleeve of the back cover, it broke my heart to see how many of them had not been checked out in twenty years or more. That was longer than I had  been alive! What a tragedy!
  I read them all because not a single one had the eye-catching frills to entice any seventh grader in the world, and I feared another twenty years might pass before some twelve-year old as strange as me came along. The people in those books deserved more than that. They deserved to have all the empty spaces on their library cards filled with names. They deserved to be read.
 For all I know those poor old books are still there, with their yellowed library cards bearing my signature from 1986 in the last filled spot on a card full of blank spaces.
   When my girlfriends were reading Sweet Valley High or sneaking their mother's Harlequin Romances into Study Hall, they always rolled their eyes when they caught me reading one of those "weird old books" from the library. What I couldn't tell those girls then was that I read those old books because it broke my heart to think of them sitting untouched for years, with no one to realize the untapped potential inside them.
   So I suppose the purpose of this rant is to say that even at twelve years old, I knew my attachment to stories was unusual. When I skipped fifty days of school my senior year, it pissed off my English teacher to no end that I aced her unit test on Macbeth. She knew I hadn't been in class more than a handful of times in the weeks she covered the material. What she didn't know was that I had devoured it five years before and remembered every word. That didn't seem odd to me at the time. I mean, didn't people sometimes read Shakespeare for fun? Did those preppy bitches and rednecks and jocks not realize Shakespeare was awesome? Why was my teacher so pissed off that I passed?
    Because I deserved to fail, of course. I was a hundred times worse than a dumb kid. I was a lazy kid with a passion for literature---which she obviously had a passion for too, since she taught English Lit for chrissakes. My smugness was offensive to her. The nerve I had, showing up like that after ditching all that time! It wasn't fair to the other kids. There were others much smarter than me who tried much harder, yet still struggled with that particular class. My teacher wasn't going to waste her time on me anymore. In spite of any potential I might have had, I still missed fifty fucking days of school. No kid could get away with that now. I shouldn't have got away with it either. Somebody should've smacked me real hard and told me to stop feeling sorry for myself just because I was too chicken shit to pursue my dreams.

   This post doesn't even resemble the one I planned to write an hour ago. Yes, it has taken me an hour to write this how-ever-many-words-this-post-is. That's probably pretty slow to you folks who turn out novels in two weeks. But for me, that ain't too shabby. As long as it reminds someone of a time when they felt their own potential breathing inside them so unmistakably that they were scared to death.
 Because that's how you know what your passion is. It takes over everything, if you're doing it right.
Next time you feel it breathing, just let it have you. You'll thank me later.

I have a BOOK COVER. WITH MY NAME ON IT!

I am so stinkin excited I can hardly stand it! Huge Thanks go out to Claudia McKinney at phatpuppyart.com. I have been web-stalking her for months and her art just transports me to another world. Breathtakingly beautiful is the only way to describe it. You MUST take a look at her website.
STOP READING AND DO IT NOW!

Ok, now you see what I mean, Jean. I ran across this picture that Claudia had buried in an older album on Facebook. Every time I went to her site, I kept going back to it. She has hundreds of gorgeous pictures, but this one would not let me go.

Only problem was, it wasn't the image I had in my head for the cover of CRADLE OF LIFE, the novel I've been writing for...oh....eighty years or so. My MC, Julian Shaw, is a vampire born in 1786, but my novel takes place in the present. This image, however, reminded me so much of my early character sketches of Julian, I decided I had to have it. I couldn't bear it if somebody else took my cover. It had been waiting for me on Claudia's website for at least a year. I would just have to tell Julian's story from his point of view, because that is what I see every time I look at this cover.

CRADLE OF LIFE is written in third person, and tells the story of Ashton McFate, a newlywed nurse who loses her husband ninety-five days after her wedding. After a seven-month hiatus from life, she returns to work on the Labor and Delivery unit to find that a gorgeous new weirdo has been hired to catch babies at night. That weirdo is Dr. Julian Shaw.
But the Julian I see when I look at this cover is the fledgling vampire of the 1830s or 40s. His clothing in this picture is much earlier, and that fits him too. He is a creature of the time in which he lived, and his attire fits that perfectly.

I just LOVE everything about this. I hope I don't sound like a bragging mother who thinks her child is beautiful. Oh fuck it...my child is BEAUTIFUL! JUST LOOK!

DIARY OF AN IMMORTAL will be available for download March 31st. Print version to follow later this Spring or early Summer.

I haven't decided yet on whether or not KDP Select is the best way to go, especially 'right out the gate.' Any thoughts on that? Anybody out there ever tried it?

I'd love to know what you think of my cover! What does it say to you?

Why Taylor Swift is my Favorite Writer

Today, in honor of Friday the 13th, I am posting about my favorite writer, Taylor Swift.

It is no secret to those who know me well that I am an avid fan of Taylor Swift. I admit that when I learned her video for You Belong with Me was filmed in my hometown, I watched it over and over until I recognized the red-brick apartment buildings in the background of a particular scene. I then drove around the adjacent neighborhoods until I spotted the side-by-side houses where Taylor and 'the boy' communicated with handwritten signs from their bedroom windows.
 I also admit that after spotting the For Sale sign in the front lawn of one of those houses, I called the realtor and pretended to be interested in buying the house, just so I could take a look inside.

Does this make me crazy? Obsessed? Out of my ever-loving mind?

Not in the least. I love you, Taylor. We were meant to be together.
 And I mean that in the most adoring, totally non-stalking kind of way.

  Some may say I am jumping on the Taylor Swift bandwagon, but I've loved her ever since she was just the "Cute little girl from Hendersonville who sings that song about Tim McGraw."
 That's how a friend of mine used to refer to her, and that comment is what prompted me to buy her first CD.
 Taylor's hometown of Hendersonville, Tennessee is the next town over from where I live--Ironically, about 13 miles from my front door. (Thirteeen is Taylor's often-quoted lucky number. It is mine as well.)
 I thought it was cool that a Sumner County girl my daughter's age had a CD out, with a song that was actually being played on the radio! Who knew then that she would soon be one of the most recognizeable superstars in the world?

I did. I knew it the first time I listened to her album all the way through.

What sets Taylor Swift apart is her voice. Not her singing voice, which is lovely, but not that much different from a million other girls like her. What is unique about Taylor is her voice as a writer, the voice that is hers alone, that speaks to her listeners in a profound way. 

When I listen to a Taylor Swift song, I can tell which songs are a collaboration with other songwriters and which ones she wrote entirely on her own.  Her voice is much 'clearer' in the songs she writes by herself. When I first heard the Kelly Pickler song Best Days of Your Life, I remember thinking how much it sounded like a Taylor Swift song. Later, when I Googled it, my suspicions were confirmed. Taylor Swift co-wrote the song with Pickler.
I say all this to simply prove a point: The voice of a good writer is clear and unmistakable. It jumps off the page or the screen or whatever medium from which you absorb it, and it speaks to you directly, in a way you can relate to. It creates a sort of channel between the writer's mind and your own, even if that writer is someone who is long dead. A writer's words are a window into their soul, a form of communication that will survive for as long as there is someone willing to read them.


Taylor Swift is famously candid in the songs she writes. She does not shy away from exposing her emotions through her songs.  As a writer, that isn't always easy. But it is essential. If the writer does not feel what he or she is writing, their words will be empty and hollow. The better a writer is at letting herself be vulnerable, the better her writing will be.

 Just ask Taylor. She's turned vulnerability into an art form.
 And her fans love her for it.

I am a horrible, neglegtful mother to my novel! (and my blog, for that matter)

There it is. I admit it. I have no excuse to offer other than this--since typing "The End" on the final page of my novel in mid-June, I basically turned my back on my baby for a while. Truth be told, I turned my back on all things writing for the rest of the summer. My poor, fledgling blog was no exception. So to my thousands and thousands of disappointed readers out there (cough) I apologize.
What can I say. Mommy needed a break.
Writing has taken up so much of my life for such a long time, I'd forgotten what it was like not to have a book to write. And it's been WONDERFUL.
 Ok, sometimes it's been hard. I've been used to stepping into the lives of my characters nearly every day.
I think about them all the time, the same way you might think about a dear friend you've lost touch with.
 And I miss them. Alot.
Ideas for Book 2 pop into my head nearly every day, but I simply jot them down in my notepad without expanding on them, no matter how sorely I am tempted. The truth of the matter is, I'm just not ready to commit to starting another book--one that, no doubt, will consume me every bit as much as this one has.
For Pete's sake, I still have edits to do and query letters to polish and decisions to make about what the next move is with this one! The thought of starting the entire process over is terrifying.

I envy those writers out there who churn out books in a matter of weeks (Amanda Hocking states on her blog that she wrote her first vampire novel in FIFTEEN DAYS. Switched, the first book in her popular Trylle Trilogy, was written in ONE WEEK.)  I admire Amanda enormously for what she has accomplished as a self published author. While some of her books are badly in need of more thorough editing, for the most part they are entertaining and well-written, especially considering the time it took to write them.
So I ask myself, is it smart for me to agonize over every step in this process the way I do? Is there a point where you have to say "to hell with what the experts say--I'm just gonna take a week's vacation from work and write this damn thing and throw it up on Kindle and see what happens!" It goes without saying, there's never been a better time for self-published writers than RIGHT NOW. It is tempting to skip the whole query--wait--get rejected--cry pathetically--query again--cycle that is the story of nearly every writer out there, at least at some point in their career. What are your thoughts? What has your own experience been?

The Dang Thing's Finished---NOW WHAT?

OK, I know I posted in my bio that my book was finished already. And I thought it was. Mostly. Kinda. Well, maybe I was always pretty sure the ending was as thin as wet toilet paper, but by golly, I could tell myself it was DONE.
 In my rare moments of honest self-appraisal, I knew that ending needed serious work. So here I am, nearly six months later, finally pleased enough with my ending to show my manuscript to a few trusted friends. What I would really like now is to find a beta reader or critique group---a step I realize most writers take at an earlier juncture, but my courage has failed me numerous times. Now that I have a semi-finished product under my belt, I feel I'm mentally ready to be torn to shreds by a room full of my peers. I was scared to death that if I recieved too much criticism too early, it would completely shatter my already fragile ego and I would abandon my project altogether. I'm sure that will sound pretty lame to many of you, but think of how hard it is to devote yourself to the task of writing your first novel, all alone. You're already asking yourself every day if you've lost your damn mind---devoting every spare moment to either working on your novel, preparing to work on your novel, or thinking about working on your novel. It's hard enough to convince yourself on a daily basis that yes, someday, all this will be worth it. I couldn't risk being derailed by a well meaning, enthusiastic would-be editor. But I have to get ready now. Cause the dang thing ain't getting any younger, collecting dust on my hard-drive. Its time to see what its made of. Wish me luck.
And if anyone out there would be interested in beta-reading for me, send me an email. All comments and advice are greatly appreciated!