Back to the Drawing Board

Hello all:  Well, I'm down but not out.  After preliminary feedback on my book "I've Come Home" I've decided to 'unpublish' it for now and rework, rework.  This is a learning process and I know I've got a durn good book in there somewhere between the first and the last page, I just need to do some major tweaking of the pages in-between.  My husband has always joked about my vocabulary and how 'verbose' I am which is apparently working against me when it comes to hooking the reader in.  All right, like the country's workforce has been facing, time to downsize.  Urrrgh.  Now that my husband has gotten to the point he'll probably live for five more minutes, I have work to do.  I'll be back . . .

Read a Sampling of my Novel!

Hello all!  Just posting a quick note that I'm still plugging away attempting to get my book published in physical book form.   I'm covered in eBook format . . . between Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and Smashwords.com my book is available (at the modest price of $3.99) for pretty much any eBook format.  And each of those web sites allow you to download a free reader to your PC if you don't have an eBook reader.  Sweet!  To give you a little sampling of the flavor of my book I just posted another page on my blog titled; 'An Excerpt:  'I've Come Home' amounting to half a chapter.  Hope you'll give it a quick read and that it kindles your curiosity.  I'm also hoping to line up an interview with the radio station Jonelle works for in Prescott, to get some publicity out there . . . yes, I can use as much as I can get!

On another note:  John goes in for his 2nd surgery this Wednesday . . . thank you family and friends for keeping him in your prayers!  All my love,   J.J.

My eBook Bases are Covered!

Hello all:  I'm happy to blog today that as for my eBook, I now officially have all bases covered.  No matter what type of eBook reader you may have, from Nook (Barnes and Noble) Sony IPad or IPhone, Kindle (Amazon) PC or anything in between, you can find my book.  For reading devices not supported by either Barnes and Noble or Amazon, go to Smashwords.com and you should be able to find a reading app for whatever device you have.  Thank you friends and family, as always, for your love and support!  Getting a printed book is proving to be more challenging . . . but I'm still going after it.  Jimmi

Where DO I Get My Ideas?

Hello All!  Happy November!  Brrrrrr . . . living at 7,000 elevation, we basically pole-vault from hot summer right into winter most years.  This one doesn't seem to be an exception.  Almost overnight the leaves on our trees decided to make a run for it.   They were just there the last time I checked!  We also had a pretty catastrophic tornado right in the vicinity.  No one was killed, but the multiple areas hit lost thousands of Ponderosa's, Oaks and Junipers.  A tornado?  In Northern Arizona?  Not likin' the changing weather patterns I'm seeing the last few years.  We're not prepared for riding out a tornado.   The house sits on top of a rock mountain, so not much chance of us diggin' out a storm cellar.  Okay, I'll save my off-the-wall opinions about changing weather patterns for another post.  I did have another off-the-wall subject matter when I started this one . . .

I've been asked how I come up with ideas; for my plays and for the story lines for my book, and to answer that sends me off into a little bit of uncharted territory.  First of all, for my various teleplays, I was following along with the television shows I wrote submissions for and the ideas just kind of came to me.  Same with my screenplay; "Mexican Vacation," following the Griswalds and combining that with all the experiences I'd had in Mexico up to that time.  With my screenplay; "Fugitive Child," well that was interesting . . . it was a timely subject that had been coming up repeatedly on the news and it hit me at some core level that got me furiously writing.  I had it finished, edited and submitted in three weeks . . . but it still wasn't fast enough.  Someone else got their version out there first:  As for "I''ve Come Home," I actually dreamed it.  Them, I should say.  Two complete and separate dreams I had that ended up coming together to form my book.

Back when the girls were in high school I was doing quite a bit of writing; exercising my mind on a daily basis in the regimen of putting pen to paper, or in this case fingers to keyboard.  We took a month-long vacation in our motorhome back to Florida in the early Spring of 1998, a time during which I thought I would be taking a break, but apparently my subconscious didn't agree.  Two weeks into the trip I woke up one morning from dreaming the storyline of Spencer and Savannah, literally shaking my head going, Where on earth did that come from?  I got busy jotting down a detailed synopsis of the dream just in time to have the second one:  the ghostly story of Garrett and Belinda.  These two dreams were unreal . . . because they were so complete.  Mostly when I dream I remember bits and pieces at best, but not these two.  By the time the trip was over I had a detailed synopsis of the two story lines, deciding later to merge them into the book as it reads now.

I do have theories about the experience; and it's these theories I think people might find interesting, to see how my mind tracks just a little 'outside the box.'  First of all, I firmly believe that the mind is just like any other muscle of the body in that it desperately needs exercise.  The more it's exercised the sharper it focuses.  Beyond the stunning example I was given above, I cite back to my biggest confirmation of what for me is irrefutable truth:  my music.  When I was young and practicing hours a day at the piano, it wasn't only my fingers getting a workout.  My mind had absolute clarity for music, for notes on a page.  I may have been a bit of a drooler in other aspects of my life, but not that.  So burned into my mind were pieces like "Claire de Lune", "Liebestraum," "Moonlight Sonata" and many others, that to this day I've never needed to open the music to sit down and play.  It sounds strange, but I call up the sequence of notes to my fingers from a place I can't point a finger to and say from right there.  It's somewhere deep in my subconscious.  In fact, if I let my mind, my thoughts, get in the way when I'm playing, most often it trips me up.  Those many pieces were written to some kind of hard-drive inside me and the only way I can tap into it is to just 'let my mind go.'  Play from impulse only. 

The most striking example of that was after I'd officially 'quit' taking piano lessons at sixteen and was then asked to perform for the national 'American Medical Association' convention in Phoenix at the Camelback Resort.  I worked up the most difficult piece I'd ever attempted to perform all on my own to entertain them with, and I think because I didn't have my security blanket there (a piano teacher in the background) my mind was fighting me on it.  I was introduced, came up on stage and sat down at the piano, placed my hands into position . . . and froze!  I couldn't remember anything beyond the first chord.  I literally sat there for over a minute, until I started hearing some mumbles from the crowd.  I almost got up with an apology and walked off the stage.  Last second I made the decision to just play the first chord and then 'let it go.'  See what happened.  It worked.  That internal hard-drive took over for me.  It was the weirdest thing.

Writers say; 'Keep writing every day!'  Musicians say; 'Keep practicing every day!'  Fitness experts say; 'Keep exercising every day!' and I think that holds true for everything you do.  Because I also happen to believe something else:  'You either use it or you lose it.'   Just as the gifts of your life, the accomplishments, come to fruition equal to the effort you put into them, they can also fade without it.  And before you say, 'Hey, you're contradicting yourself;' yes, it is harder for me to get through one of my classical pieces now versus twenty/thirty years ago . . . I'm thinking maybe my hard-drive's gotten a little corroded.  But all is not lost or forgotten.  Just, er, a little rusty.  And here's another theory I have that ties into the above. 

It's about creativity.  I've long speculated that perhaps creativity is a quantifiable, physical element, a gene you either possess or you don't, like any other gene you have in your body . . . for blue eyes, or the ability to roll your tongue.  And I think it can be exercised as well.  Here's what I theorize this potential gene might actually do.  I imagine that as it's exercised and gains strength, it draws energy, inspiration from a source of frequency in our surrounding universe mankind has yet to label or identify.  It taps into that band, which if I'm correct and it's out there,  is just another version of the ones that carry radio waves or WIFI.  Four hundred or so years ago people thought the world was flat.  A hundred years ago people would've laughed themselves silly if you'd talked of radio waves or WIFI.  So, who knows?  Perhaps that band, that frequency captures and stores the energy we generate from our use of creativity; our ideas, our physical efforts using it; making like a mega hard-drive that all someone who was born with the 'creativity' gene has to do is tap into to make use of.  It might explain how three or four different writers come out with almost the identical movie or song or book at the exact same time.  Maybe they tapped into and downloaded the same file folder, because that idea in particular was being given a lot of mental energy and power to it at that time.  Exercising their creativity by using it everyday gave that gene within them the strength to stretch out and connect with that mega-hard-drive.  Just like some people have a gene that makes them more prone to a particular disease, or a gene that makes them more psychic, some people, I believe, are more sensitive to the source of energy where creativity is stored.

In a roundabout way my mother used to theorize on this herself, advising me that if I had something significant I would invent/create that I wanted to be mine, to claim ownership of, don't weaken or corrupt the energy of it by advertising it ahead of time, or even speaking of it out loud.    She said it would weaken its power and I'd be apt to find the rug pulled out from under me.  She was a firm believer in keeping silent as the grave until the right moment . . . keeping the focus, the energy internalized until finished and ready to unveil the masterpiece.  Too weird, I'll bet you're thinking right now.  But if you think about it in the context of above; maybe that was her way of saying;  the more you externalize the creative process with verbal words and energy, the more the mega hard-drive gathers it in, making it accessible to others who are tapped in as well.  Real Twilight Zone kind of stuff, right?  Well, mom was very much into Metaphysics.  I've never formally researched the principles put forth by it, but I'm fairly sure a lot of her advice to me in our brief time together came from their ideologies.

So, there you have it.  I don't look at myself as any different from anyone else.  I believe I happened to have inherited the 'gene' for creativity.  Luck of the draw, I guess.  I had relatives upline that were dripping with it.  I also inherited the gene for gray hair, mondo oily skin, pesky extra fat-cells and a double-chin.  I had relatives upline that were dripping with those, too.   It's all relative.  Take care all . . . talk to you soon! 

Just In Time For Halloween: My Book!

 'Prescott, Arizona, is a charming frontier hamlet harboring a sinister legacy its carried piggyback since its inception . . . Prescott's young adults struggling to survive not only each other, but a preternatural terror as old and alive as the town it holds hostage.  Can passion, the grief and courage between family, friends and lovers rise above the frightening malice running nonstop inside Prescott's borders?  Identical twins Spencer and Savannah Maitland have no mind for curses as they vie for the love of their roommate Donovan Creary; but one young woman of prominence dares to accept the challenge, taking deadly aim against the irrefutable demon, trying to save the soul of a dynamic stranger caught in its grasp and her heart.  Her body and soul the only lure, one way or the other Belinda Pomeroy will be the last . . . the curse will defer to her, or she will count herself its latest victim.'

Hello all:  It's Halloween!    My ABSOLUTE favorite time of year starts this Sunday, Oct. 31st!  And coinciding with this exciting time is the launching of my eBook, "I'VE COME HOME" on both Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com!   Check out the "I've Come Home" page on this blogsite for facts and photos, and on this post I want to share some tips with you for creating a fun, easy to construct Haunted House! 

In this, as in most every project, planning is everything.  Though several things need to be done days, even sometimes weeks before your grand fright-fest, if you don't procrastinate and just do them everything goes together so much easier.  I have oodles of trial and error at this, putting on a haunted house for several years from our home in Prescott, Arizona . . . one of our last productions drawing over seventeen-hundred people in the four hours we were open!  Yep, that's right:  seventeen-hundred people traipsed through our home in four hours, and do you know what?  Not one smudge of damage or one disgruntled or problematic thrill-seeker (with the possible exception of one startled guest who whipped their candy bag in front of them, which smacked Melody's jaw by accident.)  After that we started insisting that trick-or-treat bags be left by the front door.  She was our only casualty in all those years.  Oh, we ended up with a lot of hoarse voices for days afterward, but isn't that to be expected?  What's a haunted house without yeowls and ear-piercing screams?  What I took away from our productions was that people were thrilled and appreciative to be given that kind of fun to enjoy on Halloween.  As a footnote; I apologize to the people who bought our house.  Their first Halloween after we moved they must've seen a parade of trick-or-treaters! 

Because my haunted houses were indoors, I utilized our entire upstairs and even our garage, moving whatever furniture I didn't want to incorporate into a scene to the very outer walls of each room before assembly began.  Months before Halloween I'd become a regular figure lurking at the loading docks behind Sears and other refrigerator outlets, stocking up on discarded refrigerator/freezer boxes; the big ones that when opened down the side become a 12 foot wide, 6 foot high canvas to paint on.  My productions were so large I'd have anywhere from 60 to 80 of these painted and ready to throw up in a couple of days on any given year.  I also availed myself of my daughters' friends and fellow band/choir/club members to play my monsters and work my props.  Kids in middle-school and even through high-school loved this, a fantastic alternative to just sitting home passing out candy.  Believe it or not, I actually had a waiting list.  We would only run the haunted house one evening, on Halloween night.  We'd be open from 5pm to 9pm, with a 15 minute bathroom/refreshment break every hour for our monsters and prop-hands. 

With the cardboard refrigerator boxes I stocked up on, I'd lay out my rooms like you'd build a house of cards, after first drawing out the floorplan on paper.  You quickly learn what works best when connecting your cardboard walls . . . just like card walls, the rooms are stronger when you brace one piece to another with lots of corners; L shapes, as many bends and turns as possble.   Lots and lots of 'L' configurations add strength; not long spans of straight lines.  Because your finished product ends up being this big maze of one room after another done this way, your furniture along the walls is never seen or comes in contact with anyone.  When you've laid out your maze/room structure on paper, it'll  also help to show you which cardboard wall pieces will need to be painted on both sides because a particular piece is being utilized for back-to-back room scenes (numbering them in some way is essential, even if it's with a sticky note that can be removed from the wall piece later).  Only a few areas (hallways) did I bother covering across the top with a cardboard piece  (to make into a tunnel with creepy stuff hanging down) because I found that the six foot walls were so high, when all the lights were out people were oblivious to the fact there was a 'normal' house behind the 'haunted' one. 

I painted my walls for my rooms kind of generic, so the scenes taking place could be modified differently each year.  I had the prerequisite graveyard scene, which was usually one of my biggest rooms; the walls painted with creepy black trees, dark bluish-black stormy skies, a full reddish yellow moon, the token black owl or vulture with bright red eyes and lots of headstones.   I made up funny rhymes for the headstones; something like:  'Here's what's left of Barney Pruitt . . . lost his head but never knew it.'  In this scene, for props my favorite thing to do was to sew or glue together big cut-outs of leaves with cheap material in fall colors:  I'd make three or four 'blankets' about 5 feet long by 40 inches wide leaving the ragged leafy edges, and I'd place pillows under all of them but one, to look like mounded-up graves.  Under the last one (the one closest to the footpath) I had one of my kids laying underneath it, waiting to shoot out an arm towards someone.  I'd usually have this in the garage because I'd get sacks of real fallen leaves to strew around the floor to blend everything in.  I got either some boxes or cheap Styrofoam and made headstones for them.  Beyond that I'd have bats hanging from the few 3-D limbs I'd used in the room, and another of my favorite tricks was to have a 'flap piece' of 6 foot wall painted exactly like the rest so it blended in perfectly with the room, and some monster waiting to jump out from behind it.

Speaking of camouflage, another of my most effective rooms was a black and white checkerboard room, the blocks of paint being a foot square.   Then I'd paint three or four large empty boxes (varying sizes, but averaging about 2' x 3') with the exact same checkerboard pattern  and place them slightly in people's way along the path.  Lastly I got cheap black and white material and stitched together the exact pattern into a complete ghost shroud to cover a couple of kids.  They'd merely fade back into the wall or curl up in the least visible corner.  People would be paying such close attention to the boxes, thinking something was going to jump out at them, that when the kids jumped out from the background people fled that room like their heels were on fire; some running the rest of the way through the haunted house.  See, that's a big key to success with a haunted house:  you want to distract people's attention away from what you're doing with something else to focus on; something that looks like it might jump out at you or move or something, but isn't the real 'gotcha' in the scene.

Another great generic wall is the dungeon block wall, big blocks painted over the entire wall.  So many different scenes can be used with that.  As for paint, I'd go to the discount art supply stores and get the big kiddie bottles of poster paints.  They work very well, or I'd make several checks at stores like Home Depot for discounted cans people didn't want.  With some basic experimenting, any color can be mixed together with enough other colors to form the dark gloomy colors you want to use. 

Now, for blood.  How to get the effect without the mess?  Again I'd go to a store like Lowe's or Home Depot and buy a pint of high gloss fire-engine red acrylic paint.  Taking out my cookie sheets at least a week before Halloween, I'd cover them with aluminum foil or plastic cling wrap, then drizzle blobs of 'blood' droplets and drizzle long blood flows on the sheets, fairly thick, and let them dry somewhere safe and where I didn't have to smell the fumes (usually the garage) for several days.  When they were thoroughly dry, I just peeled and they were great for sticking to mirrors and glass, or taking a glue stick to them for porous surfaces. 

Securing my walls together was accomplished  99% of the time with the great ol' American fail safe:  duct-tape.  A couple of days before Halloween is when I'd start assembly, and after duct-taping the walls together like a fiend I'd go over the tape with touch-up paint to blend it into whatever wall I was using (but not necessary, AND if I did this I was sure to put a drop cloth down first!)

As for props?  Large appliance boxes make GREAT props!  I painted one oven/range box to look like a chimney, cut a hole in the top and had one of my kids dressed like 'Chucky' jumping out of it one year, a 'demon' clown the second . . . speaking of clowns; remember the movie "It?"  One of the scariest things I did was to make up a costume that looked like "Pennywise" the clown, got some helium balloons and merely had one of my kid's parents slowly walk up our stairs, balloons in hand, saying; "We all float down here!"  I'd made a 'hallway' of my refrigerator boxes in front of the stairs to prevent people falling down the stairs, and merely cut out a good-sized peephole for them to look in to see "Pennywise."  Geez, did I get a stream of "Ohhh____'s" over that one.  For other props, I'd have a look around.  My husband's motorcycle was incorporated into a city scene I'd done, and I plunked my husband on it dressed as 'The Terminator' complete with an empty shotgun sitting on his lap, pointed up to the ceiling.  I also incorporated our bedroom . . . our rustic poster bed we had.  I reclined one of my daughter's smallest girlfriends on a piece of 1/2 inch plywood with her arms stretched out and drew around her form, then cut it out with a roto-zip, cutting inside the drawn border about an inch all around (so the form wouldn't be seen under her).  I cut the end of the board straight across a little above where her ankles would hit, so her feet would dangle over the end.   Then I took a hundred-pound test clear fishing line and secured the form to each of the four posts using four strands of the fishing line, with the plywood form hovering about two feet off the bed.  Halloween night she merely dressed up in a long-sleeved cotton nightgown and stretched out on the form and, abracadabra!  The exorcist levitating scene!  I had a hidden fan blowing on high to billow the bed sheers, and I rigged a door on my nightstand with elastic to slam open and shut with a teen hidden behind the bed pulling on the door with the same fishing line.  The bedroom door had a rope in front of it so people couldn't actually walk into the room, only pass by it.  That ended up being one of my most realistic-looking scenes.

I made tons of different props out of paper-mache'.  That's done with one inch wide, long strips of newspaper dipped in pure liquid starch, then crisscrossed over whatever base mold form you dream up and left to dry for several days and then paint.  Needless to say, you need to start collecting newspapers well in advance, or find a way to raid a recycling bin.  I made 'pods' from the "Alien" movies, with paper mache' beasties inside; I made the neck and shoulders of a headless ghoul one teen strapped on top of their head with a long gown, really the possibilities are endless.  I even went so far as to do a 'dummy form', it's abdomen made out of paper mache with a hole in the middle in which I popped up the alien beastie through it.  This dummy looked to be laid out on a table draped around with a curtain effect, when in fact the teen was sitting in a low recliner underneath, only his head and one arm poking through the dummy, his other hand under the 'table' shoving the alien up through the stomach.  That was such a hoot!  It is a lot of work, but it really is so much fun!  We went for monsters and such, not real hard-core gory stuff, but that was just us.  We also had a rule for our monsters about 'no touching' because honestly, to grab onto someone just seemed to throw them into too much panic.

I hope this has given you some ideas if the ghoulish urge hits you to whip up your own fright-fest for your fortunate neighbors and friends. It's a little late this year for lots of advance planning, but with just an hour or two spent every so often throughout this upcoming year in preparation, by next year you can give them a night they'll not soon forget!  In the meantime, I'd love for you to give my book a read . . .  it'll put you in the mood for things that go bump in the night!  All my love!

Gettysburg-History Everywhere

Hello all:  John and I have encountered something unique coming to Gettysburg, PA.  The entire town resonates history . . . not only did the Battle of Gettysburg encompass the surrounding countryside for miles but the streets and buildings of downtown itself.  Three days of battle and over 51,000 lives lost, (almost as many as the entire Vietnam war) 5000 horses, and over 165,000 soldiers converging for battle.  It's an amazing place to see, to attempt to grasp the scope of war that happened here in and around this town.  All to restore freedom to every American . . . so many lives lost for that ideal.  America, let us not go backward.

Start Spreadin' The News . . .

We're in New York, Neeeewww Yooorrrrk!!  I absolutely love this countryside, the Adirondack forests!  But, um, is it just John and me, or is everyone in this state seriously pissed off?  With the exception of one couple we met walking their dogs in a park (probably visitors from out-of-state) everyone we've smiled at, waved to or tried to engage in conversation looked as if they'd just sat their butt down on an enormous, infected boil, and their attitude has been less pleasant.  John asked one cashier where he could find the bottled water and the cashier actually snorted and rolled their eyes, pointing in silence toward the far wall. Wow, did we ever intrude on their day.   Looking forward to meeting up with family again in a few days and together the four of us soaking up some good ol' Southern hospitality.  It's a little too chilly up here!