Oh The Places We’ll Go

Danielle Steel is my mentor. Rosamunde Pilcher is my inspiration.

Why Steel? Because she weaves description, character development, dialogue, and backstory into one seamless flow, and she is so prolific she has kept me reading for months. Pilcher because I just love her. Her writing is exquisite, and her first best seller was The Shell Seekers, about a painting.

My novel, The Girl on The Pier, too, is about a painting.

After completing a novel titled Song of Africa I saw that one publisher was offering a two book contract (not to me), but I thought, my God, two books? How could I ever write a second? 

Whap! A thump on the side of the head.  “Write about the young namesake from the Africa book, and about a canvas featured there painted by her uncle.

Sara Andrews, 22, fresh out of Parsons School of Design, and now with a job as a curator of a gallery in SoHo New York, meets the love of her life on page one of  The Girl on the Pier.

The following day Sara receives a call from a customer wanting to view the painting The Girl on the Pier, painted by her uncle, Clyde Dales. When the customer sees the painting, however, he says, “That isn’t the painting.”

Sara didn’t know there was another. Two paintings by the same name?  When the customer offers two million dollars for it, Sara acts as though she sells two million dollar paintings every day. Uncle Clyde’s paintings have sold for thousands, but never millions. 

Something is fishy.

Sara’s search takes her and her new love from New York to Los Angeles, to Seattle, to Gambia West Africa, to Kenya, to Paris, and with Paris comes my reason for writing  this…

Not knowing Diddy squat about Paris, I needed to find a museum there—not the Louvre, and so I searched and found Muse’e d’ Orsay. And within that museum, I stumbled upon a collection of Vintage American Photographs.

Shirley temple signing her first movie contract

I had to show you a few:

JFK and Jackie, 1953, in a photo booth

Girls at soda fountain 1940's

1939

Hawaiian surfer. The missionaries outlawed surfing, luckily the Hawaiians didn't listen.

Live Wild,
Joyce
P.S. See link below

Live Wild

Island Lilikoi* iced tea, El Yummo

Come sit a spell...I'd pour a frosty glass for you if I could,

We live on earth is experience life.

We write about it to make sense of it.

I tried to be wild once but gave it up in favor of ice.

We lived on the island without a refrigerator—well, we had an ice box, but it didn’t make ice. Strange how something as simple as ice can mean so much when you don’t have it.

Happy times on the Island were going to sleep to the tune of the #Coqui frogs, and awakening in the morning fresh as the #Lilikoi Iced tea pictured above. My computer was in front of a window and as the sun came up it enlivened the green outside my window as though the Morning Goddess was turning up her rheostat.

We saw no sunrises or sunsets where we lived on the island for the trees stood in the way of them, but when we were on the West side of the island we stood in reverence watching the sun sink into the sea. Fascinating again how exquisite a daily occurrence can be when you do not have it daily.

I said my mission statement is “Live wild.”  That doesn’t mean running away and living on a tropical island—although one can, and that sounds good--Swimming in a bath-tub warm sea, and being able to go to luxury hotels when the urge and pocketbook collide.

When I say “Live Wild,” I don’t mean going to #Waldon’s Pond as Thoreau did where he wrote 

I mean, follow that wildness that is buried deep in your solar plexus. You know the feeling. It burns with a desire to break free, to live the life you’ve always wanted, to have the courage to follow your dreams. It’s not coming to the end of your life and realizing that you have not lived.

What might those dreams be? And what are you willing to do to accomplish them?

Live wild,

Joyce

P.S. What really pushed us off the island? I have written rewritten, contemplated and journaled about that experience for what, about five years now? Maybe one day One Year on the Island will be a book. Hope springs eternal.

P.S.P.S.  This blog isn't about it being a business, I love you guys too much to enter that into the equation. I'm going to carry on as I have always done--rambling, contemplating, urging all readers to greatness. Whew! That releases the stress.

Ta Da

Lilikoi blossom. Isn't that exquisite?             Lilikoi passion fruit