Oprah occasionally features child prodigies on her show. One of these special children was a sixteen-year-old girl who oil paints—in three entirely different styles. She has been called a modern day Monet and her paintings sell for $15,000+ apiece (probably a whole lot more after Oprah’s show).

The girl was discovered at age thirteen by her junior high school teacher when he gave the students easels and oil paints, put some music on, and told them to let go and see what came of it. When he came around to this prodigy’s easel and looked at her magnificent painting, one of a mother and daughter in quiet repose, he gulped and said, “Oh, my, have you worked with oils before?”

“No,” she answered.

 “I…I think we need to speak with your parents.”

Oprah queried the young woman, asking her if she had shown any prior signs of this mystical gift. Had she always had a drive to paint? Was she always doodling or sketching?

“No,” the girl shook her head to all of Oprah’s questions. “Nothing.”

Oprah suddenly sat up straighter, as though an emotion had just shot through her. She grinned wide. “Well, did you color outside the lines?”

I laughed out loud. That was me as a child—always coloring outside the lines. I don’t remember the rest of the television show because I got lost in Oprah’s comment.

I detested coloring inside the lines or sticking to “normal” colors for things. The other kids berated me, told me a horse couldn’t be purple, that I was an idiot for coloring a swan green with a red head. And oh, the teacher. She was forever scratching that ugly red minus in the top right corner of my coloring book, for straying outside the lines. And those little buggers who had criticized me would smugly wave their coloring books at me with their precise work along with their shiny gold stars to prove it. I was only six-years-old and already, I felt like an utter failure.

One day, I finally managed to achieve the gold star. But try as I might, when I stayed within the lines and only used colors for the horse and swan that everyone else used, my teeth would clench and irritation flowed through me like hot soup. In the end,  I’d grow surly. I still felt like a failure, for now I didn’t enjoy what I was doing. Not at all. I decided something must be wrong with me because secretly, I still loved the purple horse with its munificent hump scribbled outside the lines.

I suffered that gold star in silence.

Gathering pussy willows on crisp Minnesota mornings was more to my liking, as well. One by one, I’d painstakingly glue them onto construction paper in any form of a bunny or horse I chose, using that awesome white school paste that smelled—and tasted—divine. I was in heaven. And then there were those colorful hollyhocks that grew wild against worn fences. The frothy pink bells of their flowers, stuck together with toothpicks, became fabulous ball gowns adorning my Civil War-era ladies who waited breathlessly for that young officer and a gentleman to ask for the next dance.

On my own, I found my place outside the lines.

When my son began to color,  I noticed he couldn’t seem to stay within the lines either. Diagnosed hyperactive and with learning differences, I let him color at home any which way he wanted, as long as he was happy with what he was doing. I’d learned from my own experience to put music on as a backdrop for him. Soon, I began to notice that the better the ‘fit’ of the music to his mood, the more bold grew his colors, and the further outside the lines he went. One day I saw him working on a purple horse.

“Nice horse,” I said.

“Yeah, Mom. It’s a magical horse. It can fly to the music and at night it flies around my room and into my dreams.” His face glowed with the rush of success.

He’s an adult now. Writes beautiful poetry, something I can’t seem to “catch” in the rhythm of my own flying purple dreams. My son’s gift, unique to him, began to emerge when he was in the sixth grade, just a few years after I taught him to journal and to write his garbled feelings down, something I had learned to do as an adult. I came to realize much later that my helping him to get in touch with his inner self was a precursor to my life’s work, a key in helping people tap into their strengths, gifts and creativity.

“Get the troublesome things out of you and onto paper,” I would tell him. “Underneath the negative, you will always find beauty.”

I never dreamed that teaching him to find his spirit would cause such creativity to pour forth. He is now a sound engineer, writes music and poetry, and teaches English to Hungarians in Budapest using creative techniques that brings students in asking for him in particular. Here was a kind of creativity that hadn’t so much as glimmered on the surface back then; his talents that emerged were such a dichotomy to his learning differences. I never imagined when he began journaling that he would end up writing poetry so poignant it would take my breath away. Or that he would one day stand by the ocean’s edge and play a tune on his saxophone so haunting that when the melody rode in on a gentle breeze through the window it would bring me to tears. I just kept playing music while he journaled, taught him to meditate in order to relax and let go,  made pictures out of clouds scudding across the sky. Whatever it took to help him get in touch with his inner self, to find his true spirit, was my goal, because I’d learned that within our spirit lies our genius.

I helped him to color outside the lines.

What about you? Did you color outside the lines? Did you always want to write or was there a moment when you discovered you could? I’d love for you to leave a comment. I’ll choose two people at random to win a meditation CD ($20 value). The first track teaches you a gentle meditation technique and the second track is the guided meditation that helps you to relax and bring forth creativity. As a certified hypnotherapist, I wrote and produced Relax and Meditate. It is used by everyone from children to fighter pilots heading overseas. Thanks for stopping by.

Years ago an Alabama grandmother gave the new bride the following recipe. This is an exact copy as written and found in an old scrapbook, complete with spelling errors (For you non-southerners, wrench means, rinse)

RESIPE FOR WARSHING CLOTHES

Build fire in backyard to heat kettle of rain water. Set tubs so smoke wont blow in eyes if wind is pert. Shave one hole cake of lie soap in boilin water.

Sort things, make 3 piles

1 pile white,

1 pile colored,

1 pile work britches and rags.

To make starch, stir flour in cool water to smooth, then thin down with boiling water.

Take white things, rub dirty spots on board, scrub hard, and boil, then rub colored don’t boil just wrench and starch.

Take things out of kettle with broom stick handle, then wrench, and starch. 

Hang old rags on fence.

Spread tea towels on grass.

Pore wrench water in flower bed. Scrub porch with hot soapy water.

Turn tubs upside down.

Go put on clean dress, smooth hair with hair combs. Brew cup of tea, sit and rock a spell and count your blessings.

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I remember my grandmother used a hand wrung wringer washer with a galvanized tub like in the photo above. She was of a different generation, and no matter how many times my father and uncle offered to take on the task, she refused to have indoor plumbing installed (which is why I didn’t like staying overnight in the cold Minnesota winters—that trek to the outhouse before bed was bad enough in the summer). She did have a clothes line out behind the house though, no tea towels drying on the grass!

What about you, do you have any memories of “the old days”, or do you have any old diaries or recipes for cleaning and laundry? Leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you.

Some of you may make a habit of dialoguing with your characters before you begin to write a novel. Others may not have heard of the idea. I have done a form of this for years, but never applied it to characters in my novel until I began reading a few blogs where the actual hero or heroine were interviewed. What I great idea, I thought, so I applied it to two characters I thought I knew from the inside out. Turns out I didn’t know the heroine as well as the hero. After I had a chat with her, I went back and fleshed her out with the ease of writing about someone I had known a lifetime (but then, perhaps she has been a seed inside my soul my entire life, waiting to sprout).

Recently, I had to have a particular medical procedure that made me feel threatened. What could I do to get myself through this without having a meltdown in the middle of it? Well, talking to the heroine in my new WIP did the trick.

Here I was, on a table in a medical center in a foreign country, while my heart and soul were elsewhere. In my mind, I was in a lush green meadow carpeted with a thick layer of bluebells and sitting under a blossoming wild cherry tree. When a gust of wind blew, white blossoms rained around me like scented snow. Sarah (my character) and I leaned our backs against the tree and chatted. She told me what it was like—really like—to be caught in the terrible predicament she was in, and how she was changing as a result. Next thing I knew, the practitioner said in her broken English. “All done.”

I opened my eyes, looked into her smiling face and at the clock over her shoulder. I could not believe the time that had passed or that the procedure had entirely escaped my conscious state! Mind you, I am a certified hypnotherapist and have for years taught meditation, but when I tried to do both of these things with fear running through me like water from a faucet with no shut-off valve, I couldn’t remain focused. But under the cherry tree, blossoms in our hair and sheep in the meadow, I was living in nonlinear time in 1850’s England—Kent to be exact, with the farthest thing from my mind being laid out in a large medical center.

Today, I will rest by the therapy pool after physical therapy and dialogue with my hero—Augustus Malvern, Lord Eastleigh. I want to know—from the deepest part of his heart—what things were like for him during the Crimean War. Perhaps it will help him remember the one thing that keeps him from living life to the fullest.

What about you? Do you dialogue with your characters? Have you had any similar, surprising results? Please leave a comment, I would love to hear from you.

Below is an excerpt from my first conversation with a character, Mary Katherine. It is the first night over dinner with Wolf who sits across from her chatting with the ship’s captain and her parents. I did not stop to think or rationalize. I simply wrote as quickly as she spoke and did no editing other than to hit spell check.

“Tell me about yourself, Mary Katherine. Maybe start with some recollection as a child.”

“I suppose I was always aware that there was something different about my parents. I trusted Old Chinese, my mentor, to raise me, but not my parents (and please don’t call me on his name. It is what he chooses to be called and there is a reason). I prefer his logic and his integrity and morals. In fact, I need and desire his integrity and morals. I relate to him more than to my parents. I remember his hands…so strong and powerful, but so safe when I slipped my hand into his when I was a little girl. In some ways that hand still holds mine.

Mother is terribly emotional and undisciplined. She is impatient and impetuous. Unfortunately, I have inherited that tendency and it is what I use my self-discipline against. Father has more discipline since he studied under Old Chinese, but he lacks the character and integrity that are a vital part of the old man’s teachings.

I knew from a very young age, I don’t know how I knew, but I did, that I was not to speak of what my mentor taught me. I also knew from a very young age that I was being groomed to take over his work. I didn’t know fully what his work was until he chose to reveal it. I never questioned why my mother and father trusted a man alone with me until after you wrote the book. Thank you.

For whatever reason, my thoughts never strayed to men and the emotional/physical nature, even though I was secretly surrounded by them. Wouldn’t mother have had a fit, had she known?

My job, my goal is one of securing the future of the farm. I must somehow convince my father…well, my parents, to let me have the farm and live up there.

However, now there is a fly in the ointment. My parents, despite their wealth, have not been accepted into Boston’s upper crust. Jonathan came forward and asked for my hand. It was promptly accepted by my parents and I cannot easily renounce it without throwing some kind of suspicion on me that I am up to something else. He is everything I despise in my parents’ world. I must have a life that will allow me some freedom. This is a terrible problem, because you see, I am their ticket, their only ticket into society…they have tried all else.

And now there is Wolf. Oh, I saw him years ago when he walked into the hotel all scruffy, and something shot right through me. It wasn’t a sexual thing then…it was, I don’t know…a power in him…perhaps a destiny…an inner knowing…I just knew he would be right for the farm. That feeling I got when I saw him, I carried it right through to now. I wanted a man like that.

And now here he is, on the ship, sitting right across from me and I see him as perfect for what I need a man for, but I also see something else. He does something to me. I want to climb right over the table and lick the side of his face—to taste him. I want to crush my mouth to his and draw from him something, I don’t know what… into my soul.

He is the one. He must be.

An artist friend who is about to give birth to a huge one woman art exhibit emailed me with the following:

I am having a freaky couple of days. I am working on my large piece for the exhibition. Although it is going pretty well, I am having a stream of mini panic attacks, anxious moments and a strange restlessness. My confidence is seesawing beyond belief…is this what ’suffering’ for your art means!!!! I am completely out of my comfort zone with it and it is driving me bonkers. I am totally aware of the causes, but cannot stop the effects!!! Hear a large scream.

Here is what I wrote back to her:

OK, all artists/authors experience this from time to time. Here’s my prescription for what you are going through.

Everything has its opposite. For day there is night, for black there is white. Did you know that insecurity is the opposite of creativity? Ah, no wonder you are flipping from one to the other. Here’s what to do: Stop trying to create for the moment. Sit down with a pen and paper and at the top of the page write the following words: Who, What, How, When, Where.  Now under the word ‘How’, write how you feel. Next, go through all five of these words. List under the word ‘What’…what would happen if you failed, succeeded, etc. Under ‘Who’, write down who is involved in your project (you may be amazed at who might be in the fringes you are afraid of letting down) and so on with each word.

When you are finished, let it sit. Have a cup of tea and go for a walk. Come back and on another piece of paper find the opposite of any negative you wrote on the other paper. Then form a positive affirmation (as though it has already happened) and start chanting the affirmation in your mind every time you start to feel insecure.

This works. I have used this method for years.

With regard to men reading the Romance genre, let me share this: Among other things, my husband holds a double Ph.D. in political science and economics, speaks five languages, is a member of the (exceedingly boring to me) International Heraldry Society (he can interpret most any coat of arms at a glance), daily scans several international newspapers (in their language) and I consider him to be one of the most intelligent men I have ever met. The first time I went to his house he invited me to pick something off his (vast and varied) library shelf to read while he responded to a few phone calls. Hmmm. Seems I was on the wrong set of shelves or something because much to my horror (call me intimidated) there was nothing there in English! I looked around and finally spotted a single tome written in the only language I could understand.  The title? How to Understand the Japanese Mind. Darn, call me intimidated again.

My point? When we married and merged houses and books, I thought about keeping my romance novels in a box, but to heck with it, I thought, we were honest and open with one another, right? Well, suffice it to say, dear hubby reads every romance novel I bring home and agrees with me: this genre should be required reading for every male on the planet. He understands that it is our feeling nature that give us value and that we need to keep romance alive in our relationships. It is the “spark” that keeps a relationship from running cold. It is the “glue” that gives us strong bonds when the times are tough. But keeping romance alive requires work and attention to maintain it for the long haul. When someone comments to me that they admire the relationship my husband and I obviously enjoy together (14 years of it), I promptly lend the man in the relationship a book – and guess what? It ain’t How to Understand the Japanese Mind!

Do you ever wonder where some terms come from? Recently, I read a novel where the hero was raised by his father to always “keep a stiff upper lip.” Consequently, he was out of touch with his feelings and nothing much moved him. So I decided to look into the background of this odd saying and here’s what I came up with:

In the early 1800’s a strange fashion arose among officers with regard to facial hair—they tarred their moustaches! These thick pelts over the upper lip became works of art. After an officer carefully groomed his moustache, he would then comb hot pitch through it and mold it into the desired shape. This had to be done quickly before the tar cooled and the moustache grew stiff.  Then came their dress uniform complete with ribbons, gold braid, epaulettes and voila! they were the height of fashion.

“Keep a stiff upper lip” whispered by one officer into the ear of another meant their jaunty moustache was in the process of drooping. It was a rare exception for a military officer to hail from anything other than nobility. Since these men conducted themselves in a codified and rigid manner, soon, the term “keep a stiff upper lip” spread beyond the military to the rest of nobility. Eventually, the term filtered down to the general population and came to mean a show of inner strength and fortitude. Unfortunately, it also meant a man never wept, never displayed a sign of weakness and became remote with his feelings.

Quick, who wrote the novel Typee?

Oh, please leave a comment if you knew this right off.

Quickly, who wrote Omoo? Leave a comment if you knew this as well.

Now quickly, who wrote Moby Dick? Ah, sigh, Herman Melville.

Did you know he wrote the other two as well? Before he wrote Moby Dick, Melville was well known at the time for writing pop fiction (adventure stories to be exact). Moby Dick was completely different from anything he’d ever written before. When the book hit the public’s eye, there was outrage. Critics trashed it. One newspaper went so far as to print a headline that he’d gone mad. Family members urged him to have a doctor check him out for possible insanity!

Instead of caving in and writing what the public demanded, Melville refused. He wrote to his father-in-law during the creation of Moby Dick, telling him that everything else he had written in the past was tied to purse strings. He was finally at a place in life where he could write not for market success, but for the love of it, and so he wrote Moby Dick from his heart and soul.

Not until some thirty years after his death, and seventy years after Moby Dick was published was Melville’s brilliant novel regarded as a masterpiece.

I know you’ve heard similar stories, but I think it’s important to remind ourselves, in this day of “author branding” (a relatively new concept in the past ten years), that we need to write from the heart. In fact, I am writing this today, not for you, but for myself as a reminder that I must write what I love. If my words happen to strike a chord with you, then welcome to my world.

My “brand” would have to be “writer of sensuous Victorian Romance”. However, I still feel driven to one day write the WWII love story that prowls the interior of my soul. If branding rules it out, it will be written under a pen name, I don’t care, just as long as I can write to my heart’s content. Maybe I’ll name it Moby Dick. No? OK.

Have a great day.

So, how did I go about choosing the two winners of Lori’s debut WILD HEART? Very scientifically. Hamish McDuff, my little Westie, hangs around my desk when I write (so he is there most of the time). He has the strange habit of laying on any paper that happens to find its way to the floor (which can be often, depending on my speed of thought on any given day). Drop more than one page I’m working on, or how about an entire chapter, and he suddenly becomes very selective about where he parks his round belly (he’s eleven, he earned his round belly). Aha! What would he do if I spread all the contestants names out? So I wrote them on pieces of paper and spread them on the floor. He sniffed. And then he sniffed again. He sniffed each paper and then plop, down he went on the first page.

 Drum roll, please…Lisa Santos!

 That was so cool! Let’s do it one more time. I gathered up all the papers, discarded Lisa’s (while Hamish looked on, slightly confused) and scattered the others about.

 ”For me?” I could imagine him thinking. He made another sniffing trek around the sheets of paper and plopped down. Again, a drum roll, please…Tess!

 See, don’t you think that was professional and very scientific? Ladies, please email me with your mailing addresses so I can pass them on to Lori Brighton.

 Thank you, Lori, and thank you everyone for a fun contest.