Why a winner is always a writer

Thank you Jan, Abhishek, Wendy, Kailynn, Tina, Suedenym (sp), Deb, Elizabeth, Melanie, MusicalDogs, Mike, Jacqueline, DukTape, and Anonymous for your comments on the guest post from author Carolyn J. Rose. You were entered in the drawing for the novel, HEMLOCK LAKE, A Catskill Mountains Mystery, published by Five Star.

Due to the high credibility of this blog and desire to sustain that enviable status, the drawing was held at a neutral place (my place of employment), in a neutral spot (the lunchroom), was conducted by a neutral party (first person I could enlist), was witnessed by people who didn't care, and has been authenticated as COMPLETELY LEGIT. Signed affidavits will be provided upon request.

Cue drum roll:

Congratulations:

DEB CUSHMAN

YOU WON.

(enthusiastic applause!!!)

Deb is a children's writer living in Washington State. Her short stories have appeared in several children's magazines and she is currently working on a contemporary middle grade novel. She also blogs at the Adventures of Freckles & Deb, Bunny Bloggers. Her prize has been delivered, read and savored. We'll wait for Deb to chime in with a review.

To everyone: I am looking forward to sharing more of your wit and thoughtful commentary to balance my blather. Oh, and its way okay to invite your friends on over to the Pearl of Carol.

In conclusion, a winner is always a writer because in the contest you had to leave a comment.

That requires writing.

Any questions?

Send them to: pearlofcarol (at) gmail (dot) com.

Click the Peal to Get Back to the Top

Rain powered writer

Guest Post by Carolyn J. Rose - with FREE Book Contest

(Enter a comment below and you're entered to win a copy of HEMLOCK LAKE).

Writing through the dark days of winter – 
How to be a precipitation-powered writer

Rain. It’s a fact of life in the Northwest.

If you live out here, odds are you’re going get wet—either because you forgot your waterproof jacket, figured you could outrun a shower, or failed to check the warranty expiration date on your roof.

In early October of 1989 my husband and I came to the Northwest on a job search/vacation. We experienced a full day of sunshine before the clouds rolled in. “It will be lifting soon,” Mike and I told each other every morning and again before we went to bed.

On day six, drenched and depressed, I interrogated the waitress at a diner in Florence, Oregon. “When will it let up?”

She took a quick peek out the window at what looked more like a stream than a street, tore the check off her pad and said in a tone that implied I’d asked the dumbest question of the decade, “April.”

The joke was on her. I got a job at KVAL news in Eugene and moved to Oregon anyway.

Right away I found that the perception of participation was far different than it was in Albuquerque or in the Catskill Mountains where I grew up. Back there we’d had rain, thunderstorms, and occasionally drizzle. But out here there are many more words: rain, mist, drizzle, showers, storms, thunderstorms, sprinkles, drenching rain, continuous rain, and intermittent all of the above. There was, I discovered during the years we lived in Eugene, also lot of fog, and beyond that, freezing fog. Sometimes there was snow, especially in the hills.

But my first Northwest winter was filled with new experiences and so, as I got to know my way around, I scarcely noticed the weather. My second winter, however, was marked by deep depression. Fog moved in not on little cat feet but like a cougar driving a bulldozer, and it hung around for weeks. I made it through by eating too much chocolate and spending too many hours in bed, propped up on a pile of pillows, indulging in comfort reading.

The next year I decided I wouldn’t give in to depression, wouldn’t allow myself even a few hours of the blues. I vowed to write through the winter and focus on the weather in my fictional settings instead of outside my window. So, in late September, I sat down and made a list of what I would do to prepare for the onslaught of Pacific storms. It worked. By spring I was halfway through a novel and hardly noticing the hammering of thick drops on the roof.

If you want to power your own writing through the dark days of winter, here’s my list:

• Drench yourself in Ds. Step up your vitamin D intake during the dark months.
• Turn on more lights. Full-spectrum bulbs are good. But any kind of extra light is a bonus.
• Stay away from greasy foods and heavy meals.
• Don’t overdo coffee and caffeine. Sure, it wakes you up on a dreary morning, but too much can mess with your sleep patterns.
• Cut back on alcohol. The buzz might feel good, but remember that it’s a depressant and will bring you down later.
• Escalate the exercise. It’s easier to get depressed when you’re sedentary, so keep moving.
• Get out and confront precipitation. Walk in all weather.
• Splurge on high-quality waterproof winter wear.
• Two final words: cute boots.

If you have tips for powering your writing through the winter, please share them in the comment spaces. I’m always looking for ideas to add to the list.

---

Carolyn J. Rose grew up in New York’s Catskill Mountains, graduated from the University of Arizona, logged two years in Arkansas with Volunteers in Service to America, and spent 25 years as a television news researcher, writer, producer, and assignment editor in Arkansas, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. She teaches novel-writing in Vancouver, Washington, and founded the Vancouver Writers’ Mixers. Her hobbies are reading, gardening, and not cooking.

She is the author of Hemlock Lake, Consulted to Death, Driven to Death, and Dated to Death, and the co-author of Sometimes a Great Commotion, The Big Grabowski, The Hard Karma Shuffle, The Crushed Velvet Miasma, and The Hermit of Humbug Mountain which will be on sale as a Kindle during December.

Visit her virtual home at www.deadlyduomysteries.com

Editors Note: Leave a comment to be entered to win a FREE copy of Hemlock Lake by Carolyn J. Rose.

Carolyn J. Rose was my teacher for Novel Writing Boot Camp I and II. Out of that experience sprang an incredible critique group that has produced two Pacific Northwest Writing Association winners, Melanie Sherman and Pam Stanek. PNWA has noted on my entries, "Really good writing here," which is reward in itself, and I continue to claim, "I can criticize anyone to success."

Top

Social Media for Writers

Vancouver Writer's Mixer
December 4, 2010, 5-6:30 pm

Featuring Carol Doane:

Social Media for Writers

Saturday Carol's got the internet wired for fun, for feedback and success! She's the doyenne of Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, and many another virtual publicity websites.

Carol will be demonstrating the basics of navigating these treacherous technical waters.  Find out why you should dabble, even just a little, on-line. 

By the time we're finished, you'll be amazed and eager to get out there and start networking!  It's so easy, even Smedley the bookstore cat tweets. Carol will touch on hot social media topics such asTwitter, Facebook, Foursquare, YouTube, Plancast and blogging.

Learn quick tips, easy to use shortcuts and what to do if you hate the idea of marketing yourself. 

Carol Doane was a top finalist in the 2010 Social Media Awards of the Pacific Northwest (SoMe Award) for her volunteer campaign for the Southwest Washington Blood Program. Winning campaigns awarded to Air New Zealand, Travelocity, PAX East, Mio Gelato, Portland Fit, Hotel Max, Mio Gelato.

She is also a published writer (chapter in Laughing Nine to Five: The Quest for Humor in the Workplace) and she has two completed fiction manuscripts now in the hands of literary agents on both coasts.

 Many, many thanks to Angst Gallery owner Leah Jackson for allowing us to hold the mixer in her venue. If you want to chat with Carol after the event we'll be taking over the couch in Niche Wine & Art next door.

Online event registration for Social Media for Writers powered by Eventbrite

GUEST: Author Carolyn J. Rose

Today's post is by a unique guest, author and teacher Carolyn J. Rose. 

Rose shares her thoughts on growing up in the Catskill Mountains and how those memories can create a strong setting. Rose earned an honored position on the list of Celebrities Who've met ME! when I took both her Novel Writing Boot Camp classes. From that experience blossomed a loyal critique group that has produced two Pacific Northwest Writers Association winners--attesting to her  skill as a writing coach.

Carolyn' J. Rose is the author of several books, most recently Hemlock Lake available in hardback or Kindle.  Here's Carolyn . . .


In Washington, where I live now, the term I hear is “forest.” But when I grew up in the Catskill Mountains, the leafy realm that began at a dozen yards from our house was always called “the woods.

Trees dug in their toes at the edge of a scabby lawn sprouting through
rocky soil scraped into a semblance of level by a tractor blade. This was no spongy, springy, emerald green lawn. This was a pale lawn of ruggedly individualistic blades of grass, roots corkscrewed in among pebbles and stones, clinging to scant, glacier-scoured soil.

Each spring we reclaimed the edges of it from an advancing army of sumac, oak, and birch, from hemlock, pine, and cedar. We hacked away at brush and vines, lugging what we dropped to piles that would be set alight in the dark of winter.

The summer woods seemed impenetrable, the winter woods empty, bleak, and barren.

As a child, one of the biggest treats was a Sunday afternoon walk with my father. It was a pursuit of adventure, of wildness—it was piquant sauce for the predictability of the Sunday dinner of ham or roast, that Sunday sense of waiting for things to begin again with Monday’s dawn.

My father would identify tracks and droppings—deer, bear, raccoon, skunk. He’d name trees and point out nests aloft.

I’d try to walk silently, but winter winds had scattered twigs and branches that snapped beneath my shoes and slabs of shale slid underfoot when we climbed the ridges.

I became fearful when we left the landmarks I knew and could identify, worried we wouldn’t find our way back to the dinner simmering in that cast-iron kettle. But I was always confident that if I stayed by his side, we would return safely. After all, these were the woods he had roamed in childhood and if he’d found his way home as a child, he could surely do the same as an adult.

And this was no dense green-black forest of Douglas fir—no wall of forest, shadows, and night. This was a woods where sun spangled through the leaves of the hardwoods. This was a woods of saplings and bright autumn tints, of long, stark shadows cast by a weak winter sun. This was a woods where stone walls intersected like lines of longitude and latitude. Even humped under winter’s snow they provided a means of navigation.

Looking back, I realize how “tame” and “civilized” those woods were. And yet, they were mysterious, filled with unanswered questions: Who had left that sickle blade hanging in the crotch of a sapling and when had the tree grown around it? Who had left an ax leaning against a spur of stone wall and when had the handle rotted away? Whose initials were those scraped into lichen-scarred stone, carved into the puckered bark of a tree? Where had these people gone and when and why?

As I wrote Hemlock Lake, I often imagined myself back in the Catskill Mountains, back in those woods and I created mysteries of my own—a man who roamed the ridges seeking his lost self, ghosts, a man bent on vengeance, a killer. Hemlock Lake deals with universal themes—betrayal, revenge, love, loss, and redemption—but my memories of those woods make the story unique.

---

Editor: Thank you Carolyn for continuing to share yourself with your writing students and the reading community.

Listen to an interview of Carolyn J. Rose as she speaks about writing Hemlock Lake on The Author Show.

Purchase Hemlock Lake on Kindle here.

  
Read an interview of Carolyn J. Rose. It can be read in three parts:

• Carolyn J. Rose interview: Creative Process of Writing a Novel I
• Carolyn J. Rose interview: Creative Process of Writing a Novel II
• Carolyn J. Rose interview: Creative Process of Writing a Novel III

Carolyn J. Rose also founded the Vancouver Writers Mixer with Mel Sanders of Cover to Cover Books.

Top