Great READING!

Usually I read over the weekends. With last weeks suggestions I had plenty of fodder for my reviews, but the time got past me.

No, that's not entirely true.

I've been grazing on amazing insight from Award Winning Author, Susan May Warren. I LOVE her books! Not a book this time, but pages of chats and invaluable notes from her My Book Therapy sessions. I investigated suspense, sifted through characterizations and settings, and even dallied with a little romance.

With sparkling eyes and dimpled cheeks, I told my

Totally Stumped!

I just finished Camy Tang's Deadly Intent. Can I just say, "WOW!"

This story is more than a suspense novel. The plot weaves in and out of the characters' lives with a master's touch.

Naomi Grant's terror from

Mystery Writes Itself - Where Does This Take You?

Skeletons of a medieval knight and a female companion were found under the floorboards of a chapel in a castle in Scotland. Further info proves that the knight had several old injuries, doubtless from battles, but the killing blow was struck as the man was lying on the floor, by a sword through his face. There were no details about the cause of death of the woman. Does this just beg to have its story written?  

Now the attached article takes a little of the romance out of the story as I read on, but with just that much information, my mind went wild! 

First thing that caught my mind’s eye was the fact that the knight was found under the floor boards of a chapel.  Nice outta the way place to hide a body that someone didn’t want found.  

I was just starting to deliberate on why he might have been killed when I a second thing caught my mind’s eye: the skeleton of a woman was found beside him. Well, that makes it juicy! I could just see the lord of the manor bursting in the room full of jealous rage as he witnesses his wife in an intimate conversation with another man.

Third interesting thought is the origin of this man; there is some speculation that he was French, so the husband intrudes on this heathen from a foreign land, who not only infiltrates his home, but seduces his wife.

Oh, the places my mind goes!

I could see a political plot to overthrow the lord be squelched by the murder of the man; maybe the Frenchman was a spy, settled into the role by an opposing ruler who wanted to gain the land. Maybe the Frenchman was a messenger from that ruler, bringing a letter from the opposition in hopes of wooing the wife and gaining that power. 

What if the knight wasn’t killed by the lord at all!  Suppose the lord was blamed all along for the disappearance of his wife and the knight, but since no bodies turned up, nothing could be proved.  Maybe the knight’s family took out their vengeance on the lord, because he had been the only one, on the surface, who would benefit from the man’s death.

I don’t think the lord killed the spy-knight at all. I think he was killed by the opposition because he betrayed them.  His great love for the lord’s wife wouldn’t allow him to put her into any danger.  I think she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and was killed to cover up the original murder.  As for hiding them beneath the foundation of the chapel that the lord was having built, that was just making the most of the opportunity!

Well, that’s the way it all looked in my mind anyway.  Truth be known, the chapel was built much later over a small cemetery – plot killer!                  

Here’s the whole story! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1279306/Face-mystery-medieval-knight-finally-revealed-modern-day-CSI-skills.html

Writing Realism

I'm a weather buff.  I openly admit that when the cumulonimbus clouds start building I get a little excited! 

I come by it naturally.  My grandfather was a fire chief in Dallas.  My mom is a first responder and storm tracker for Rowlett.  My nephew is the Emergency Management Director for his town.  Even my son and hubby think the thing to do when the storm sirens sound is to go out on the front porch and look at the sky.  (No, that's not what you're supposed to do!)

My favorite place during storms is in front of my laptop, analyzing the radars, storm attributes, and wind velocity, preferably while The Weather Channel is showing me some other things that I can't access.

I watched the St. Louis tornado a month ago.  I had my map app open and was praying for the neighborhoods in the path of the storm.  What a frightening night that turned into an amazing situation when I learned that no one had died in that horrendous monster. 

Such was not the case a few days later in Alabama and other areas of the deep south.  Still, with my girls enjoying Night of the Twisters by Ivy Ruckman (which is an AMAZING children's book at about the 5th grade level), I relished the beautiful pictures of the powerful storms, prayed for those affected, and tried to avoid the videos of the damage. 

The next week, my redhead and I enjoyed several tornado and storm-based movies together.  I gave a holler to my aunt when a tornadic super-cell was headed her way, and stayed glued to the TV (flipping between stations) to watch live feeds from some of the local helicopter reporters of rotating wall clouds, several funnels, and an amazing twister that looked exactly like an elephant's trunk drifting down from the sky. 

I told you I was a buff.  But I'm not a buff of tragedies.  Seriously, I'm one of the .3 % that didn't see Titanic and don't want to!  Who needs a tear-jerking movie?  I'll weep over a sentimental McDonald's commercial!

Still, when my girls asked to watch the last of our storm movies last night, I had neither the inclination nor the heart to watch.  After the Joplin devastation, I can't make myself sit and watch a storm for entertainment of all things!  It hit too close. Real people were doing regular everyday things, and now they are just gone!
Something else that hit too close to me last week was a story I read about child trafficking.  With tears streaming down my cheeks, I confess I had to scan through some of the descriptions and skip whole sections of the narrative altogether, especially when a new character who was just the age of my twins was introduced.  I know; that was just a work of fiction!  Still, the horrors I experienced reading about it weren't anywhere near the reality that actual, young, vulnerable, innocents have to go through, even here in America, every day.

So I'm reeling a bit from the fresh sorrow of the weekend, and eye-opening realization of something about which I was totally naive!  And I can't help but wonder why, with so much pain in this world, we feel the need to read about (or watch) more of it?  What is it about devastation and tragedy that entices us? 

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this!