My Home, Myself

 I (Donis) am driving myself insane lately by trying to learn new and more effective methods of online self-promotion. I tried an experimental BookBub ad yesterday to no avail. I've signed up for Instagram. Suffice it to say I'm not an influencer yet. I'm doing giveaways. For the rest of this month I’m giving away three copies of my 2014 release, Hell With the Lid Blown Off, which, if someone held a gun to my head, I’d have to say is my favorite Alafair Tucker Mystery (which,  if you’d like to enter the drawing for a paperback copy, go to my website, here, click on “Contact”, and leave your name. I’ll draw the winners’ names from a hat on May 31.)

Why, you ask, am I torturing myself thus? I'm trying to make my publisher happy so they'll deign to keep publishing me. Will it help? Ask me later. 

In the meantime, I loved Rick and Barbara's entries, below, on where they write and how they sit. It made me take a good look at my own surroundings. I write in my living room, sitting in a gliding rocker, with my laptop on a small lap desk, with a big pile of miscellaneous papers on a footstool next to me. I'm a messy writer. I have to have a number of things to hand because I don't want to interrupt what is hopefully a brilliant run of words to get up and look for something I need.

I am a relatively tidy person otherwise, but I haven't had a visitor in my house for over a year, so I've kind of become blind to my surroundings, like an old bear in her cave.You grow used to your environment, and after a while you don’t see what is right before your face, until you go into it in depth, picking up each item, moving things around, digging into corners. It is amazing what you can learn about yourself if you look with new eyes at the space you inhabit. 

Here is what close examination of my domicile taught me about myself:

I live in an atelier.  Every room in my house has to do with writing. Shelves, tables, surfaces, closets, desks, all contain notes and files, reference books and manuscripts, computers, printers, supplies.  I keep a notebook on my bedside table, so that when I wake in the middle of the night bursting with a fabulous idea or the perfect image or combination of words, I can scribble them down before they are lost. It was fascinating to read some of the gems I wrote.  A few of them even made sense, and even the ones that didn’t often had a certain poetic je ne sais quoi.  To wit: “I didn’t remember the word, but I knew there was an ‘N’ in it, because I could feel the spirit of “‘N’-ness .The ‘N’-ness of it.”   And, “ I want to protect her, which makes me want to hurt her.”

I live in a library.  We had books piled on and in every available space in the house.  We were tripping over books.  So we decided to do a major go-through and box up any book that could not be lived without and donate them to the library. We boxed close to 500 books, and yet we still do not have one inch of space on any bookshelf. At least I can see a few of the table tops. I would be embarrassed to admit how many books we have, but I feel sure that most of you reading this post are just as bad as I am, if not worse.

I live in a museum. Our house is filled with artifacts of our lives. I painted the landscape in the den in 1975.  I picked up those grave rubbings in England in the ‘60s.  My parents bought the end table in the living room for their house in the early 1950s.  My sister hand-embroidered that wall-hanging. Most everything my eye falls upon - furniture, decoration, art, even clothing - has a backstory.  In fact, as I look up from this computer, I see four watercolors Don and I did of the views outside our apartment in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France, in 1977.

Cagnes-sur-Mer

My sister's embroidery

I live in a shrine.  Don loves Asian religious art, so the house is blessed with dozens of statues of the Buddha, Krishna, Ho Toi, Ganesh, Rama, Kwan Yin.  I also have a peculiar little shrine to myself.  When my mother died a few years ago, we four sibs divided up the hundreds of photographs, mostly claiming pictures of ourselves.  Consequently the entertainment center in the family room contains  Donis' Life Story in Pictures, from the ages of two to forty, when I ceased to be quite so adorable and lost interest in having my portrait made.

Me, age 2

Suspended Animation

As we near the end of pandemic isolation, I feel my life is in suspended animation. Like many others, I am having trouble organizing my thoughts. My writing is ... well, it just is. It doesn't seem to take off these days, and I can't say more about it than that. I venture forth from my house more since my vaccinations, timidly, blinking dazedly in the light. I don't know what to do for myself. I can't quite get that old mojo back.

And yet there is a peacefulness to the situation. In fact, there is something of a feeling of gestation about it.  My writing mind is quiet, but something is going on in there, just below the surface. I hope when I am able to return to a normal life, I will be refreshed and full of wonderful, bright new ideas. That’s how I’m looking at it, anyway.

There is a certain freedom in helplessness. When all possibility of a decision is taken from you, there is nothing to do but go with the flow.  One evening, many years ago, I was crammed under a dining room table, along with my mother, brother, and sister, waiting for a tornado to hit our house.  Having grown up in Oklahoma, I have been through more killer storms than I care to remember, and yet I never got used to them.  I was always terrified out of my mind when the sirens went off.

Once when I was in my twenties and living in my own apartment, the sky turned green and my front window bowed in, and I swear to God that the next thing I knew I was standing in my mother’s house five miles away.  I must have gotten into my car like and idiot and driven over there through the wind and hail, but I never exactly knew how it happened.  I was apparently so panicky that all I could think was that I wanted my mommy.

But I digress.

Let us return to the huddle under the dining room table, which occurred a few years later. The tornado wound right through the back yard.  The electricity went off, the house began to rattle and bounce, and it became perfectly obvious that there was no escape.  And suddenly all my terror and panic went completely away, because there was nothing we could do to get out of this.  

Miraculously, the house was not hit. But to this day I remember that feeling of peaceful resignation, and wonder if that is what it’s like at the moment of death.

Of course, I used the experience to write a novel. Never let a good feeling of existential angst go to waste.

The Wrong Girl, The Right Title

I (Donis) have been enjoying our recent posts about elegant variations, but today I want to throw back to last Thursday's entry concerning titles, by John. And the main reason I want to do that is because my publisher recently informed me that they have changed the title of my upcoming novel. They ran the new title by me, of course, and asked if I had objections. I didn't, even thought this is the first time in eleven books that I've had a publisher change the title I put on the manuscript. The upcoming book, which will be out in November, is the first of a new series for me, and I had a lot of trouble coming up with a title in the first place. I love the series title, The Adventures of Bianca Dangereuse, and fortunately that is not changing. The new series is structured like the episodes in an old silent movie serial, and like those movies, I had chosen a book title that was overblown and overdramatic. That's what the publisher thought, too. Overblown and overdramatic.* So they suggested that the book be called The Wrong Girl, because this is what one of the characters says to a man who seduces and kidnaps young women.

"One of these days, you're going to choose the wrong girl."

And does he ever.

I like their thinking, too. Whenever I write an Alafair Tucker mystery, I spend many weeks trying out prospective titles on friends and relatives, judging titleworthiness by the look in their eyes. For most of my past endeavors, I have chosen a title early on in the writing process, and then changed it when the book was finished. For the Alafair series, all the titles are taken from something that one of the book's characters says in the course of the story:

"I think The Old Buzzard Had It Coming"
"He was standing on The Drop Edge of Yonder"
"It looked like Hell With the Lid Blown Off"
"Here's your Forty Dead Men, McBride. Don't waste them, 'cause the man you miss may be the one who kills you."

 And so on... While I'm writing, I'm always waiting for someone in the novel to tell me what to call it.

I love reading about how the titles for my favorite books come about. Titles are important. You want to convey something of the spirit of the story, catch the reader’s eye, intrigue her enough that she wants to read that book. When friends and family hear that a new book is underway, one of the first questions I get is, "What's the title?"

How about you, dear reader? Does a fabulous title make you want to buy a book? I’m trying to think of books that I actually wanted to read because of the title. The only one that comes immediately to mind was Bad Luck and Trouble, by Lee Child. Tom Wolfe titles catch my eye, but which of his books have I actually read? Did I read Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers? No, I did not. I read The Right Stuff, Hooking Up, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. (Okay, I also read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but I was young and it was the ‘60s.)

Commonly authors don't get the final say on what the title of their novel will be. Publishers have the idea that they know what will sell a lot better than some introverted, socially inept author does. Maybe they do. Being introverted and socially inept, I wouldn't know. This time, I think they made a good business decision.
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*The old title: Lust for Vengeance. What do you think?

The Dreaded Anachronism

Aline's blog about youthful slang hit a nerve with me. Nothing dates a book faster than slang. If you're paying attention, you can tell when the English-speaking characters lived just by their vocabulary. I am an historical novelist, so I don't have to worry about my dialog being dated before the book comes out. On the contrary, I'm always trying to figure out if my dialog, dialect, slang, is appropriate to the period. If there is anything that a historical novelist dreads, it’s anachronism--a thing out of time, an act whereby a thing, a custom, a word, is attributed to a period to which it does not belong. This is particularly bad in a historical novel because it will take your reader right out of the story if Queen Elizabeth (either one) says "Groovy man," or "that is phat!" Or if Caesar checks his Rolex before he conquers Gaul. Yet a historical novelist is not writing a history book. She is taking us back in time and letting us live in a different world for awhile.

How do you deal with historical terms that may be unfamiliar to the reader? How do you convey a sense of dialect or vocabulary of the time without being confusing or taking the reader out of the story? I deal with this constantly.

I've used this example before, but it is perfectly illustrative of the dialectic difficulties of the historical novelist:

I am proofreading my latest Alafair work in progress when I come across a sentence in which Alafair says:
"... it’s a big flap every night at bedtime until Mama or Daddy goes in there and knocks some heads together.”

"Hmm," I say to myself. "Would a person use the phrase 'big flap' in June of 1916? Perhaps I should look it up." So out comes the etymological dictionary, in which I discover that the first known use of the term 'big flap' was noted in 1916, being used on the battlefields of World War I among British soldiers.

All right, I think. Alafair, living in rural Oklahoma in mid-1916 would probably have not heard 'big flap' used like this, but she may very well have said 'big flapdoodle'. For according to the previously mentioned etymological dictionary, the word 'flapdoodle' was common in the U.S. and Europe dating from 1839. So I change 'flap' to 'flapdoodle', feeling very proud of myself.

One week later I'm doing historical research by reading a book which I had bought many years earlier at the Enid, Oklahoma, Historical Society entitled Reflections From the Roadside, a Quindecennial Chronology. This is a reprint of the diary kept by Oklahoma homesteader Henry Harrison Reynolds from January 1912 through December 1926. I am reading his entries for June 1916 just to see what's going on in the world that an ordinary person would remark upon and what do I see in the entry for December 1915? I quote:

"There has been a big flap for months over drilling a test well for the city north of town."

So when some reader tries to take me to task for using an anachronistic dialect terms, I can say with confidence and through direct experience that even the experts can be wrong.

It’s one thing to be accurate about historical events, dress, and vocabulary, but how do you go about making sure that your characters behave and think in a way that is appropriate to the time and place they live in? How do you handle it when your character doesn’t subscribe to the same cultural attitudes as you do? Try writing about Oklahoma in 1919 when perfectly nice people with all the good will in the world would use what today would be very offensive terminology without thinking twice about it. How do your characters deal with what we would now consider unsavory beliefs and mores like sexism/classism/racism?

In my novel Hell With the Lid Blown Off, I have a character who is homosexual, and lives in terror of discovery. No two ways about it. If he were discovered, it could be the end of him. And that is the way it was in middle America in the 1910s. After that book came out I got an email from a very troubled reader wondering what I was trying to say. Did the societal attitude in my book reflect my own attitude. To which I answered, God, no! But that’s the way it was, my dear, which is why it’s so important we don’t gloss it over. Remember how bad it was and make sure we never go back.

An Idea Worth Pursuing

I have a good idea for a story. One of the cliche questions authors are often asked is where the story ideas come from. After Bob Dylan received his Nobel Prize last week, 60 Minutes (click on to see the interview) showed a brief clip from an earlier interview with Dylan in which Ed Bradley asked him that very question. The answer is: who knows? Dylan said it was rather like magic, and I can’t argue with that. I think sometimes you just achieve the right state of consciousness, and the ideas are bestowed upon you out of the aether. In my series, I’ve used ideas that have come to me in every conceivable fashion.

A recurring character in the series came to me in all his fully realized glory several years ago when I was at a concert of the Black Watch and Cameron Highlanders Massed Bagpipe Bands and watching a very young, very serious, athletic, rose-lipped, red-cheeked Scottish sword dancer with dewy black eyes and a shag of black hair.

The murder in The Drop Edge of Yonder is based on an actual incident that happened to one of my great-great-grandfathers on my mother’s side during the Civil War. (A lot of the incidents in my books are inspired by my own and my husband’s wild and wooly family backgrounds.)

The Sky Took Him began with an idea that came to me while I was on the Oklahoma leg of a book tour for Hornswoggled in 2006. I had set up an event in Enid, OK, which is my husband’s home town. I was sitting with my husband and his sister in a restaurant called Pasttimes, the walls of which are covered with historic pictures of Enid. I was facing a 1915 print of a street scene showing two women going into Klein’s Department Store on the town square. You know how they sometimes do the opening of a movie by starting with a still photograph that dissolves into a moving scene? As I sat there and looked at that picture, those two women became Alafair and her daughter Martha on a shopping spree. What, I asked myself, are Alafair and Martha doing in Enid, of all places?

One great thing about writing historical fiction is that when you do your research, you discover that what really happened is often better than anything you could make up. I decided to set the sixth Alafair Tucker mystery, The Wrong Hill to Die On, here in Arizona, where I live, rather than in Oklahoma, where Alafair lives. I figured this would be a nice little diversion for Alafair, and for me as well. But Alafair has ten kids and a large farm, so there are a couple of problems I had to solve before I even begin: 1. Why on earth would Alafair go to Arizona in the first place? 2. Once she gets there, what is going on that she could get herself involved in, how, and why?

So I hied myself off to the Arizona State University library here in Tempe and begin perusing the files of the Arizona Republican newspaper for March of 1916, the date I intended to set the novel. I knew I’d find something really good, for after five previous novels set in the 1910’s I’ve learned that life in the early Twentieth Century Southwest was nothing if not action-packed. Was I ever right. Plot points and atmosphere galore, and all I had to do was spend an afternoon unspooling microfilm.

Hell With the Lid Blown Off  is about a tornado. Because, I thought, I can’t write a series set in Oklahoma and not write about what life is like in tornado alley. I didn’t need to make anything up. I used some incidents from my sister’s experience in the Joplin tornado and some very strange tornado experiences from other relatives and even some pretty odd ones of my own. But it’s impossible to exaggerate reality when it comes to what a big tornado can do.

My upcoming book, The Return of the Raven Mocker (January 2017), revolves around the flu epidemic of 1918. No one knows for sure how many died in the flu pandemic, but modern estimates put the number at somewhere between thirty and fifty million people worldwide. More than six hundred thousand of those were Americans. Twelve times as many Americans died from flu in 1918 than died in battle during World War I. In early 20th Century America, every housewife had her arsenal of remedies for common ailments, and many of were quite effective. Even so, it is likely that more than a few people died from unfortunate home remedies such as turpentine, coal oil, and mercury. Some scientists think that many who died during the epidemic were killed by aspirin poisoning rather than the disease. In the book, I used a story about the curative power of onion, told to me many years ago by the person to whom it happened. My friend was a young boy, he developed such a severe case of pneumonia that the doctor told his mother to prepare herself for his imminent demise. In an act of desperation, his mother sliced up a raw onion and bound it to the bottoms of his feet with strips of sheet, then put cotton socks on him. In the morning, his fever had broken, his lungs had cleared, and the onion poultice had turned black. Is that what saved him? I don’t know. But that didn’t keep me from using the idea.

Traveling and Talking Books

Carolyn Hart and Hannah Dennison

I've just returned from Huntington Beach, California, where I participated in the third annual Ladies of Intrigue event, which is sponsored by MysteryInk bookstore. It was a day-long conference featuring more than 15 women mystery writers. including Carolyn Hart and Robin Burcell. This was, according to her, Carolyn's career event finale, and since she has no plans to travel out to this part of the country again, she particularly asked me and former Type M-er Hannah Dennison if we would participate in the conference this year. Of course we said yes. Carolyn has been a mentor and a friend from the beginning of both of our mystery writing careers, and we would both do anything she asked. So off we flew for one day in California, where we mingled and served on panels along with eleven other fun and fabulous authors*. Then Carolyn, Hannah and I schlepped back to Phoenix for an appearance at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore last night.

Carolyn, Hannah, Donis at Poisoned Pen
photo by Judith Starkston

I wonder sometimes how cost-effective it is for an author to spend her time and money traveling around the country appearing at bookstores and events and conferences. I know that every appearance gains at least a couple of new readers, who will spread the word, we hope. But as Rick said in his post about book launches (below) doing events with other authors is always a celebration. The mystery community is nothing but kind and supportive, and it's always nice to know that even authors who are infinitely more well-known than I have the same problems with their writing.

The view of the Pacific from my hotel balcony was worth the trip

I was interested in Aline's post (below) about audiobooks. I've met many a "reader" who prefers the audio version of a book to the print version, and I've been lucky that my publisher has sold the audio rights to all my books--but one! The audio version of my latest, All Men Fear Me, has not come out yet. According to Blackstone, the publisher who does the audio books for Poisoned Pen Press, the audio version of my previous Alafair book, Hell With the Lid Blown Off, did not sell well enough. This surprises me, since the paper version of Hell did very well. Also, I loved the audio version of that book. Hell is the only book in the Alafair Tucker series that has some first person narration, and when I first heard the character of Trent Calder (who had been a secondary presence in all the previous books) speak for the first time, I was bowled over. It was as though Trent, who had only lived in my head, was suddenly a real person.

Perhaps it was more expensive to make because Blackstone had to pay two narrators for Hell instead of one. I have been told that Blackstone is waiting until the audio of Hell makes a profit (Hmm. Hell Makes a Profit. Sounds like a book title to me.) Therefore, Dear Readers, next time you’re at your local library, please do me a favor and check to see if they own a copy or two of Hell With the Lid Blown Off in audio. If they do not, I would be grateful if you would request that the system buy one. Most public libraries have a mechanism for users to request titles. If you'd like your own download, check it out here. Once Blackstone makes money off of Hell, they’ll do an audio of All Men. I hope they do one eventually, since the ninth Alafair book, The Return of the Raven Mocker, will be out in January, and I don’t want to get several titles behind when it comes to audio books.

*Attending authors at Ladies of Intrigue this year were Carolyn Hart, Robin Burcell, Rhys Bowen, Kathy Aarons, Lisa Brackmann, Ellen Byron, Donis Casey, Hannah Dennison, Kate Dyer-Seeley, Earlene Fowler, Daryl Wood Gerber, Naomi Hirahara, Linda O. Johnston, Carlene O’Neil, Laurie Stevens and Pamela Samuels Young.

Writing a Long Series

My ninth Alafair Tucker mystery (The Return of the Raven Mocker) is coming out in January of 2017. That's four months from now. And yet I’m already working on book ten. When I first began writing the Alafair Tucker Mystery series, I had a story arc in mind that was going to carry through ten books. This is a wonderful idea, but as anyone who has ever written a long series knows, after a couple of books all your plans for a story arc have been knocked into a cocked hat.

This photo has nothing to do with anything, but it's new and I like it

The reason this happened, at least to me, is that I seem to be writing about real people who have their own ideas about how things should be gone about, and once I put them into a situation, they react to it in ways I had never anticipated.

So much for a ten book arc. I think there will end up being twelve or thirteen books. I want to get all Alafair's kids out of the house and settled. Besides, I really want readers to be able to pick up any book in the series and have a satisfying experience without having to know anything about what went before. This poses the million dollar question for the author of a long series: How do you keep it fresh? How do you make every story stand alone, yet in its place as well? How do you keep from repeating yourself, or losing your spark?

I’ve had quite a journey with my protagonist over the last decade. Alafair is a farm wife with a very large family who lives in rural Oklahoma at the turn of the 20th century. She is a woman who knows her world and has made her place in it. Each of the books features a different one of Alafair’s newly-grown children, with whom Alafair either works to solve a crime, or works to save from him or herself. Since each child has his or her own distinct personality and interests, this gives me a great deal of latitude to explore all kinds of things that people were into in the early 20th Century.

For each book I must come up with a compelling reason for a farm wife and mother of ten to get involved in a murder investigation. I also have to figure out a convincing way for her to either solve the murder or at least contribute to the solution, which as you might guess, isn’t that easy. I have found over the course of nine books in the same series that I have begun to depart from the usual mystery novel format. The murders take place later and later in the story with each book I write. The later books are constructed more like thrillers than puzzles. In book seven, Hell With the Lid Blown Off, I told the reader who was going to die in the first sentence, but didn’t actually kill him for a hundred pages. In book eight, All Men Fear Me, we kind of knew who was doing at least some of the killing. But the question became why, and was there more than one killer. In book nine, Raven Mocker, I immediately start out with the information that we have the wrong guy.

I want to mix it up from book to book. I want to keep the readers on their toes. And I want to keep myself amused as well!

Cover Stories

Since All Men Fear Me came out, people are always asking me about the man on the cover, but since the publisher chose the cover and I had no more to do with it than to say, "I like it", I could never tell them who he is, only that he is a perfect depiction of the villain in the book. However, thanks to a curious reader who actually queried my publisher about the cover photo*, I now know who the man is!

Here's what the cover artist revealed: "I acquired the actual photo (not a scan or reproduction) from a collector. It is an original 1900s mug shot one of about a dozen that I purchased. The collection is quite intriguing; each mug shot has a frontal face photo, a profile photo and on the back is the name of the arrested and a hand-written description of their crime! Although there were some murderers in the collection of mug shots, this man was arrested for being a 'disorderly person'. His alias was 'Jack the Hugger' and he was arrested in Jersey City, NJ in 1903."

Now there's a story. I imagine old Jack was just a bubble off plumb, and was arrested for walking around Jersey City giving random hugs to people whether they liked it or not. The saga of the man in the photo has caused me to ponder the history of the covers on my novels. When my first book came out in 2005, Amazon and the ebook were not the juggernauts they are today. Just in the past few years, cover artists have to take into consideration that most people will first see the book cover as a thumbnail online.

I was told that a book cover is like a movie poster. The whole point is to intrigue the potential reader. For my early novels in the Alafair Tucker series, the production supervisor asked me to send family photos for the cover artist to work with. So I provided the photo on novels one through four, which have rather busy covers and look a bit cut-and-paste to me.



By 2011, when the fifth novel, Crying Blood, came out, the internet was the thing, and nobody asked me to provide anything. The only input I had was when they sent me the mock-up and said, "here it is. Hope you like it." The cover artist had created a simple, colorful cover that looks good online or on a physical book. When All Men came out late last year, the cover was down to its bare essentials. The book is looking right at you. "Buy me," it says, "or you'll be sorry."

One of my favorites, the tornado book, 2014

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*Here is what the curious reader said to the publisher: "he must have been a murderer! His face was so creepy that I had to turn the book face down on the coffee table when I wasn't reading it!" She then called back a little while later to clarify that she did not mean to insult the cover--in fact, quite the opposite; she thought it caught the spirit of the villain and the book perfectly!

A Book is Born

Spring in Arizona

It is spring, the time of new beginnings. Barbara Fradkin has completed her latest manuscript, Vicki Delany’s latest has just been released, and John Corrigan has the end of his WIP in sight. Authors are traveling all over the Western world. And I am happy to say that I just finished the first draft of my eighth book, which is a good thing since it’s due to my editor at the end of this month. Besides, I am now brain dead.

The last few weeks of writing before a manuscript is due in to the publisher is intense and hair-raising. You finish. You send it off. It’s out of your hands. You are like a cork that has been anchored under the water for weeks and months, and now the string is cut and you pop to the surface. You’re floating. The sun is shining, the air is fresh. You are drifting. Aimless. You are disoriented. You’re blinking at the light. You don’t know what to do next. This has happened to me every time I finish a novel. I despair of ever being able to write another word.

This book, All Men Fear Me, which is scheduled for publication in November, was particularly hard for me to finish. It’s long. I have a lot going on. Too much? I don’t know. It seemed to me that everything I put in was necessary to the story. For every book I must come up with a compelling reason for a farm wife and mother of ten to get involved in a murder investigation. I also have to figure out a convincing way for her to either solve the murder or at least contribute to the solution, which as you might guess, isn’t that easy.

I have found over the course of eight books in the same series that I have begun to depart from the usual mystery novel format. The murders take place later and later in the story with each book I write. The later books are constructed more like thrillers than puzzles. In book seven, Hell With the Lid Blown Off, I told the reader who was going to die in the first sentence, but didn’t actually kill him for a hundred pages. In this book…well, I’ll let you see for yourself.

Or it could be that they’re all hard for me to finish and I just don’t remember from book to book, rather like childbirth. It’s a pain, but you’re always so pleased with the result that you forget how you suffered.

Anyway, my beta reader has the MS right now. I have no idea whether the book holds together or makes sense or is any good. I like the way it turned out, but mothers love their ugly babies as much as their pretty ones.

The Year of Material Satisfaction

Happy New Year, Dear Readers.

Donis here, and it is my privilege to be the first Type M poster of the new year, even though I am, if not a day late and a dollar short, at least several hours late.

There is a reason, but it isn't very interesting. Besides, we must think only happy thoughts on the first day of a new cycle.

I had no major emergencies in 2014 and a new book that did well, and at this stage, I call that a pretty good year.

My 2014 book

Since my birthday falls between Christmas and New Year, the end of the year is the literal end of another year of life for me and I always approach January 1 with  anticipation. There will be another book this fall and some upcoming trips to which I look forward, so I hold out hope for a pleasant 2015.

Many years ago, I had a friend who was into numerology. Now, I must tell you that of all the divination arts such as astrology or palmistry or tarot or reading chicken entrails, I had always considered numerology the most illogical.* But no, my friend told me, one must approach numerology with the mindset that there are no accidents. That there is a numerical logic to the universe, a vibrational order, like music.

Every number, she said, corresponds to a vibration, a musical note, and we humans are attuned to this music and express it with our language. Each number expresses a series of qualities or traits, just like combinations of notes, rhythms and silences create certain types of music, from rap to classical.

Get it?

This means that your parents looked at you when you were born, sensed your tune, and said to each other, "hey, she looks like a Jane. Jane Doe. That sounds nice." I was impressed by the logic, whether I buy the idea or not. (I prefer to be in charge of my own destiny, thank you very much.)

The point of all this is that 2015 is an 8 year, my friends, and 8 is the number of material satisfaction. Any numerologist would say, "it ain't that simple", and any non-numerologist would say, "you're nuts, lady." But whether you believe it or not, it's a nice idea.

So here's wishing all of us a wonderful 2015, full of lots and lots of material satisfaction.
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*Though chicken bone divination is a close second.