BLOOD COLORED GLASSES by Karen Duxbury

I invited today's guest blogger Karen Duxbury to join the staff of WWK.  She turned me down flat!  But, I did spur her into writing a blog for us, and I hope she'll do so again.  When Karen graciously volunteered as Treasurer for the SinC Guppies subchapter, I got to know her.  Karen is one of the Great Unpublished authors with whom I have confidence one day will become a published author.  E. B. Davis

Recently a story was posted to the SinC Guppies forum about a death in South Carolina.  A woman called for help saying her elderly mother was having trouble breathing.  When Medics arrived they found the 98 year old woman covered in bed sores and lying in an unheated, bug infested house.  When the woman’s pet parrot kept repeating “Help me” followed by laughter, it lead investigators to charge the daughter with abuse. They surmised that the parrot was mimicking the elderly woman’s cries for help and her daughter’s laughter as she abused her.

Within thirty minutes of that story being posted, members of our writing group had morphed the sad but simple tale of an elderly woman being abused to the nefarious scheme of her other daughter who taught the bird what to say in order to set up her sister for the abuse of their mother and keep the inheritance to herself.

This got me to thinking about how writers see the world. I always counted myself as a proud member of the Rose Colored Glasses crowd until my husband and I took a trip to Hawaii many years ago. We were driving the twisting, narrow Hana Highway one day and got stuck in an hours long traffic jam due to construction on one of the many one-lane bridges. As we sat there we noticed a woman walking from car to car. She would stop and chat for a moment then move on. When she got to us she said hello, asked about our trip and then left for the next car. I didn’t give her another thought until later that night as we drove back to our house. I was half asleep when I began to wonder what would have happened if she had left our car and gone to visit the next one in line only to find a dead body slumped over the steering wheel. That became the opening scene in my first novel.

Since that fateful day, I’ve realized that I tend to ‘see’ the gross, disgusting, illegal, scary possibilities in lots of otherwise mundane everyday scenarios. When I walk across the old wooden bridge over a nearby bayou, I don’t see the gnarly tree branch floating by, I see a body. When I smell something dead in the wind, I don’t imagine an animal; I wonder who died, who killed them and how they got here.

So I have to ask my fellow writers and readers out there – do you too filter all of life’s simple, inconsequential, everyday occurrences through your Blood Colored Glasses?

Karen Duxbury is a happily reformed accountant living in Houston, Texas. She is in the process of completing her fourth novel and editing her third. A CLASH OF SKULLS follows the daughter of a cursed woman battling mysterious forces as she tries to right the grievous mistake that led to her mother’s death. A MURDER OF CRONES is the story of a woman who infiltrates a bogus grief counseling retreat to search for her pregnant niece before the unborn child becomes a pawn in the final and greatest con of a family of elderly grifters. When not observing the world and writing about it, Karen spends time on her duties as Treasurer of the Sisters in Crime Guppies chapter.