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Author, Historian, Storyteller

Inspiration, Live and LearnOne comment so far

I was supposed to meet my cousins at Disneyland last night.  I haven’t seen them in a really long time, they’re in town, so I braved the traffic and after work drove down to Disneyland.  Where I discovered that I couldn’t actually get into the park itself because it happened to be a black-out day on my pass.  It hadn’t even occurred to me that I needed to check blackout days – it was a Thursday night after all – but there you have it.  So I drove for three hours round trip to give them a hug outside of the main gate and chat for half an hour.  Not exactly the evening that I had imagined, but it turns out, that it was exactly what I had needed – perspective.

This could have easily ruined my night, and after the rough week that I’ve had at work I’m honestly kind of proud of myself that it didn’t.  Let’s face it, it was an EPIC Disneyland fail and there was no one to blame but myself.  But you know what, it gave me time to decompress.  For two hours driving through rush hour traffic I was present, I was in the moment.  I wasn’t worrying about my to-do list at home, I wasn’t worrying about work or all of things that I need to cram into my weekend and accomplish.  I drove.  I changed lanes, I accelerated, I applied the brakes and I listened to music.  I was blissfully disconnected from everything except for the immediate presence of the traffic around me.  Yes, I did just use the word blissful in a sentence describing LA traffic and yes I am probably crazy, but the jury’s still out on that one!  Then I got to catch up, commiserate with family that I wouldn’t have had a chance to see otherwise.  It was short and not at all as planned, but it was novel and novelty has a charm unto itself.

One of my favorite movies is “Grosse Pointe Blank” and one of the characters talks about Shakabuku.  “It’s a swift, spiritual kick to the head that alters your reality forever.”  Now I’m not saying that my reality has been altered forever, but I feel like last night was my Shakabuku – kick to the head/LA traffic, yep that’s a much more accurate description.  I spend way too much time planning and working through all of the possible outcomes of a given scenario instead of simply living.  Taking the world on as it comes, making the best of what I am given and accepting the outcome.  I don’t need to think out ten different scenarios of how a situation may turn out because that’s nine scenarios that will never exist outside of my own head – assuming of course that one of those ten is what actually happens.  What a huge waste of time!

So new goal: embrace my Shakabuku.  Let go of the incessant planning and worrying and live right here, right now.  After all, the best laid plans generally go awry anyway.  Oh, and go to the library and get an audiobook.  A good audiobook would have totally rocked last night!

Characters, History, Inspiration, WomenView all 2 comments

I’ve been a fan of history for as long as I can remember.  Not in a memorize dates and names of battles and all the generals that ever lived sort of way – don’t give me a quiz, I will fail miserably.  More in a fascinated by the motivations that caused people to act and behave the way that they did, that can only be studied in hind sight sort of way.  I credit this fascination to my father.  He was a history major and then taught history in high school for a spell.  I have a feeling that he was one of those teachers that made the subject interesting and memorable; the way that all history should be taught.  I guess this, because this is how he taught me history, not in the classroom but at home.  Much more emphasis was placed on the whys and wherefores as opposed to the specific dates, times and names.  My childhood was spent watching more WWII movies than I can even recount.  I still have a special place in my heart for “Father Goose” and “Operation Petticoat,” gotta love Cary Grant.  Come to think of it, I still have a special place in my heart for Cary Grant . . .

At any rate, I find history fascinating.  So when I was visiting a friend in Richmond, Virginia and she suggested that we go tour the White House of the Confederacy I said yes.  We wondered through all of the exhibits, read about the little toy cannon that actually fired tiny little cannon balls that Jefferson Davis had made for his son and, like all museums, I wound up in the gift shop.  While perusing the merchandise, I came across this little booklet.  It was less than 70 pages long and it was about female spies in the Civil War.  To say that I was intrigued would be an understatement.  I sat down in the middle of the gift shop and started reading.  It was amazing!  In this time of women in petticoats that were put up on pedestals, here were stories detailing how they would use those very petticoats to hide correspondence.  They would use their perceived “frailty” to continue passing information even after being caught and jailed for being a spy!

These women were brilliant and cunning and brave, and sitting there reveling in their tales a melancholy fell over me.  How had I never heard of these women before?  Why, in an entire museum, was there more about a tiny toy cannon, than an entire group of operatives, which I later learned had major impacts on battles and eventually the course of the war?  I found this sad.  So I bought the booklet.  Then finished my vacation, went home and for the most part forgot about it.  But in the back of my head these women kept kicking around, and the next thing I knew there was a story forming.  It started out as a TV show – a period piece for Showtime or HBO.  It wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles and a friend out here convinced me that this idea of mine was better suited as a book.  Yes, I essentially moved to Los Angeles to turn my TV show into a novel.  Enjoy the irony, I do.

This is when I finally sat down and started to write the novel In a Time Never Known.  It is the story of Anna and Kady, two southern ladies, a mother, daughter duo, who are spies for the Union.  We get to see the sacrifices that they make, the people they encounter and the lengths that they are willing to go in our country’s darkest hour.  Now my spies are fictional, but I’d like to think that the spirits of the likes of Elizabeth Van Lew, Belle Boyd, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, Rose Greenhow and the Moon sisters to name a few are present throughout the pages.  These are the characters that I have fallen in love with, and these are the characters that I would like to introduce to you . . . in my next post . . . because this one’s really long already . . . and I kinda want to go to bed . . .