Last week, I asked on Facebook if people could stand reading a blog about my lifetime with allergy problems. There was a fairly strong sentiment against that–a running nose is just too yucky a topic, I imagine.
But before I even came up with an idea for my Tuesday blog, allergies knocked me down. No one gives people with allergies any sympathy because everyone has them and they are not, for the most 
part, terminal conditions.
So I missed blogging this week. I’ll be back next week.
Readers always ask me if I design my own covers. A resounding NO on that!
One of the reasons I like traditional publishing–where a publishing company buys the book and puts it out–is that I prefer writing to all the techie stuff. With both Steeple Hill and FaithWords, I sent in a cover art sheet on which I made suggestions about scenes for a cover and described the setting and characters. Then the editors took over, sent the pages to an artist, and she–the editor–worked with the artist. And, voila, the cover was created. I was happy with every one of them–except one.
I’ll use my first published book The Mad Herringtons as an example. I first contracted with a small, niche publisher in 1999. The editor had an artistic friend come up with a cover. The novel took place in England in 1812, during the dazzling Regency period, a time of waltzing, flirting, and house parties on huge estate. That first cover started with a great idea: a ball with the couples swirling around the dance floor. Sadly, however, she had drawn a large chandalier on the ceiling of the ballroom that looked a great deal like an enormous pink spider. The scene seemed like a horror movie with a mutant creature poised to fall on and consume the dancers. Wish I had a picture of this to show you.
That publishing house went bankrupt and I got the right back just as 
Avalon opened their historical line. Avalon sold our books to libraries so they were somewhat conservative and very lovely. The plot took place at a country estate. Here’s that cover.
A few years ago, I received my rights back from 
Avalon which means I was free to publish this book myself. It took me a while but I recently got in touch with By the Page. The nice people there came up with this beautiful cover which will be sold to readers on Kindle, Nook, and most electronic readers.
Did that answer any questions?
Guest blogging today is George’s favorite sister, Diane, a fabulous historian. She’s writing about her mother, one of the finest people I’ve ever know. Thanks for the memories, Diane.
My mother was the most law abiding person I ever met. This trait went beyond any ethical positions in her beloved nursing career, it went beyond taking the AARP safe driving course every year between 55 and 90 when we took the keys to the car away because her peripheral vision was gone. And it reached beyond using both hand signals and flickers when making turns.
However, Mom was also the biggest rustler I ever met and I think I was the cause of all her lawlessness. One year after I’d moved to 
Pennsylvania, I gave Mom Peterson’s Field Guide to Eastern Songbirds, and she had my brother build three bird feeders and squirrel guards plus the metal cages to hold suet for the winter birds. She enjoyed the Field Guide so much, I gave her Peterson’s Field Guide to Eastern Wildflowers the very next holiday. And therein lies trouble, trouble, trouble.
You see, Mom’s property sloped downward in the back toward the creek that flowed through the subdivision. She and Dad had purchased a double lot, about an acre and a half. She fenced the entire lot so the dogs could run freely and safely. She enjoyed planting flowers and never met a tiny tree she didn’t love, right where it planted itself. So the property was abloom all spring, summer and fall. Although she had a tendency to plant the tall flowers in front of the small flowers so from the road, it was a little strange. But she looked at her birds at the feeders and her flowers from her windows in the house, so it made sense to her.
Back to Peterson and his wildflower guide. Mom’s property had a steep fall away from her garden area down to the creek and it was very shady with old trees – walnuts, oaks, maples, elms. Her decades of theft began on a trip to Cumberland Gap in Kentucky. On the way home, she made Daddy stop five times so she could take a trowel and dig up wildflowers along the 
road. She was very well prepared with plastic bags and wet paper towels. It wasn’t until five years later that I came to Kentucky in the Spring; prior years I’d always come at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Proudly Mom showed me the delicate trillium, the snowbells, the jack in the pulpit, the dog-toothed violets, Virginia bluebells, tiny flowering grasses, coral bells, lilies of the 
valley, wild strawberries, and dozens of other gentle splashes of color as the sunlight cascaded through the budding trees.
Oh my God, my Mom had become a wildflower thief. “Mom, this is against the law,” I said quite self-righteously (having just received my 10th point on my New Jersey drivers license for speeding across Princeton.) “No it’s not,” she insisted. “I’m reforesting.” “What?” I said with emphasis. “I’m taking the hillside back to its original Kentucky shade lands.” And then she put her hands on her hips and tilted her head like a sparrow…subject closed.
There in the midst of a subdivision where most of the people poisoned the creek with lawn care pesticides so their lawn could gleam like a golf course, where all the house plantings were carbon copies of each other, where they hung planters of cascading annuals to brighten the 
greenery, my Mom had recreated God’s natural woodland. So I decided, since I was the one who gave her Peterson’s Field Guide, I’d simply testify to her innate goodness if she was ever arrested for wildflower rustling.
The reason this all came to mind was this week when my daughter said she was starting to look for perennials for the shady part of her property. I almost sent her Peterson’s Guide to Eastern Wildflowers….No, No, No.
* * * I need to add to this. When Ollie (my mother-in-law and Diane and George’s mother) visited us in Missouri in 1968, she did the same thing. Wherever we took her and Grandpa, she had her trowel and box in the trunk. She’d make George stop while she leaped out to dig up a plant she’d not seen before. She wasn’t only reforesting the hillside to its original Kentucky shade lands, she was also reforesting is back to Missouri shade lands.
Also, by the time she’d lived in that house for forty years, the double lot was covered with live Christmas trees she’d planted every spring. They’d reached enormous heights . Other trees filled in. This meant the interior of the house was very dark and mowing the lawn was like going down a slalom slope, but she was happy and that, really, is what counts.
How my grandparents met is a true love story. In the early years of the twentieth century, my grandmother Jennie Dunn was a member of the Salvation Army. One afternoon while she played in the band to bring sinners to the service, a gang of young toughs decided to harass them. My grandfather John Myers was part of that group, but when John saw Jennie, his life that changed. Love at first sight for both. She left the Salvation Army to marry him. He found faith and wrote religious pamphlets that were very popular in Wichita, KS. They had seven children, one of whom was my father. I’m named for my grandmother whose name was Jane. Jennie was a popular nickname for Jane back then.
I only knew my grandmother when she was much older, nearly seventy. Completely deaf at that time, she looked a great deal like Whistler’s mother in Arrangment in Black and Gray. She sat straight and unsmiling and never said a word. I knew her children adored her but I knew her not at all.
But she had experienced a love strong enough to steer her life in a different direction, to leave what she knew and begin life with a man so different from her.
How often we judge people on how we see them not who they are or who they were before we entered their lives. How much we miss out on!
Do you know an unexpected love story you’d like to share? I’d love to read it.