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| Three birds wishing you good writing luck in the new year. |
Happy New Year! I’ll get tired of saying that in a week or two but, for now, the freshness of the year invigorates me and gives me renewed hope.
I touched on hope
in my November
post—my hope that I’d bounce back into writing shape from the doldrums I’d
sunk into after finishing the manuscript for All Shell Breaks Loose,
book three in my Haunted Shell Shop Mystery series. What helped was finally
realizing that, for heaven’s sake, I’d just spent months pulling a book out of
my head and putting it on paper and it was okay to feel flattened. Also, that I
didn’t need to feel guilty about spending time doing other things until I did
bounce back. (My late sister and I used to laugh at our apparent need to feel
guilty; that if we didn’t have an immediate source of guilt at hand, by golly we’d
go find one.)
What I spent
time on involves my affinity for flat rectangular things. Books are among them,
as well as paper and the painting, printing, and marbling one can do with
paper. I learned new skills over several months, and I recognized it as a good
sign when I started making notes for the next book in the Shell Shop series and
notes for a possible new series.
While jotting notes, and getting ready for the holidays, I turned some of my flat prints, and the paper I’d painted and marbled, into three-dimensional things.
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| Little bags and boxes made from paper I painted, printed, or marbled. |
Most are
still rectangular but some, through artful folding, gained curves. (The birds in the picture, up top, are each made from a strip of paper tied in a knot so they're slightly 3-D.) Then, one snowy
afternoon, my son and I took simple ingredients from the cupboard (almond
flour, almonds, dried apricots, dates, crystalized ginger, honey, sugar, and
food coloring) and made sugar plums. Sparkly, round sugar plums. They’re less
complicated to make than many Christmas cookies, absolutely delicious, and
magically impressive.
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| Sugar plums |
Stories and novels
are magically impressive, too, don’t you think? We take words—simple ingredients—and
manipulate them into tales. Tales about sympathetic, complicated characters.
Characters who inhabit believable settings that we create from the rocks,
rivers, roads, towns, etc., in our memories and imaginations. And if we’re
skillful in our writing, if we do what we should, then readers who open our flat,
rectangular books fall into completely three-dimensional experiences. What an
amazing phenomenon.
Now it’s time
for me to knuckle down, outline the new book, and start research for the hoped-for new series. What writing goals are you working on this year?
Molly MacRae writes the Haunted Shell Shop
Mysteries, the Highland Bookshop Mysteries, and the award-winning, national
bestselling Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries. Visit Molly on Facebook and Pinterest, connect with her on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.
