We writers sit alone most day writing. That's how it works. Lately I've been putting more effort into getting connected with readers and other writers, both for my sanity and to build that dreaded but apparently all important 'platform'.

Conferences are great for new and more experienced writers. I have gone to the SIWC (Surrey International Writers Conference) (www.siwc.ca) in Vancouver for the past two years in October and it is worth every penny. It is truly international and, I keep being told, one of the best (3 best?) in North America. I am lucky to be able to stay with my daughter, although it is an average of one hour drive each way to her apartment in Vancouver's West End. But I'm not complaining.

You read this all the time in How to Write books, go to conferences to meet agents. As a not terribly outgoing person I thought sure, how exactly? Won't they be talking to people they already know or people much more outgoing than me? In case you are new to this let me explain. You can sign up for a 10 minute pitch session with an agent (or more than one if you are prepared to line up for additional appointments, as I do) and talk to them about your book. How? There is lots of material out there about pitching, but basically prepare a blurb explaining the point of the book in half the time you are allowed. That leaves time to talk. It has worked for me and I have good luck meeting agents this way. The workshops are terrific too, how-to by some of the best in the business.

For those interested in Mystery - check out the Bloody Words Conference, put on by the Crime Writers of Canada, this year in Victoria BC, Vancouver Island June 3-5 2011.(www.bloodywords2011.com) They have an amazing list of speakers and guests, including Micheal Slade, Tess Gerritsen and William Deverell as guests of honour. I have signed on as acting volunteer coordinator so I hope to see you there.

If you are in other parts of the country or the world, check for conferences in your area, they are everywhere, or come to beautiful Victoria for the spring flower show, resident Orcas and, oh yes, the conference.

Till next time. Judy

Worst blogger in the world award goes to - Judy Hudson!
I set very low goals - once a month to update my blog and missed the last two months. I could list my reasons (It's my saturn return, that major life changing transit that happens every 29 years, does that count?) but I won't. I'll just hang my head and take the blame squarely on these broad shoulders.
I think that generous deadline I set myself, once a month, is partly at fault. It pushed it too far onto the back burner. the broken burner at the back of the stove. I often think of things to blog and without a set time maybe I'll do it. Once a week at least. That way it is part of your conciousness, part of your life. Like the class in writing fiction I am taking at our fledgling local university. It is a credit course that I am auditing - but taking it seriously. I got my BA in Fine Arts in 2000 and considered doing a masters at UBC this fall but it's really expensive, I'm writing genre fiction at the moment so thought it would be overkill, and was told by friends and family (all with degrees or some even professors themselves) that I don't need it. Maybe if I was 23, with no life experience... but at my second Saturn return I am far from that tender age. So I signed up for this course in the hopes of finding a writing community here in small town Vancouver Island. I have found a few people, the whole class are all potentially good, or just plain good, writers. and a few are even my age, not that that matters. And the class is really fun, gettin out of my office and into the world.
One thing it has me doing is writing short stories, something I never have mastered, or even really tried. I am finding it is great for fleshing out characters and tightening up my style. I was working furiously on editing my Fortune Bay (read: Honeymoon Bay) story, Summer of Fortune, and decided to write my short story assignment on a minor but important character, the ghost, Aunt Augusta. Now, she lives in the cabin and always has, but she never has a POV in the story. So I wrote the short story mostly from her point of view and found it so exciting I might write a prologue from her POV for all three books set in the cabin, to tie them together. I think this is a technique I will use again.
But about that isolation thing. I just read in the latest issue of Wrioters (I like that typo!) Digest that arrived yesterday more about how important social networking is. Yes it takes time, but it is part of doing business these days, networking, finding out what's going on and how other writers and agents and publishers are handling it all. Time to get with the flow, actually post something on my face book page and try to find out why people I respect say it is so useful. Time to invest the time in myself and my career. Bite the bullet and write out there.
This was not what I was going to blog about today, I was going to write about my experience at the Surrey International Writers Conference in Vancouver last weekend, but this is obviously what is on my mind, and I promise myself I will write that this week.

This will be a very visual post – some of the photographs that sparked my first story. As I said last time, I was, and am, a photographer. Like Maddy, the heroine of my first novel, I was a darkroom photographer during the years I lived in Honeymoon Bay on Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island (basically the 1980’s). It was just before the age of digital photography struck and I took photographs in black and white by choice, considering it an art form.

I studied photography at the local college and first worked in the darkroom there. Later I got my own darkroom and still have the equipment although I rarely use it. It is a very magical process that I liken to alchemy, and is just as mystical to me. I was always the artist, never the chemist. I did, in fact, go on to finally get my B.A. in Fine Art at University of Victoria almost 20 years later.

These are photos I took of the farm around the corner from our Honeymoon Bay home, a place that is one of the sparks of the story. In Summer of Fortune it is the home of the hero, Jake Murphy. I had belonged to his grandfather, West Coast pioneer, Frederic Murdoch.

The real farm is known in the Cowichan Valley as March farm, after Henry March, the pioneer who arrived from England in Cowichan Bay in the 1880’s at the age of nineteen. He walked twenty miles along the ‘Indian paths” up the Cowichan River (there was no road) to the village of Lake Cowichan. A few years later he settled on an area of level ground on a bay down the lake and began the unbelievable job of logging the land to begin a farm.

The property was covered with gigantic, first growth Douglas Firs, often 6 and 8 feet in diameter, that they cut by hand, two men, one on each end of the cross cut saw perched 6” up the tree. These giant butts are still scattered around the forest, remembrances of the original old growth forests and the crosscut event is still part of the local Loggers Sports celebrations every summer.

I have seen photographs of oxen pulling the giant logs along skidways on the March Farm lands. These are roads built of smaller logs laid side by side on the forest floor to allow the logs to be dragged to the lake. They were then sold to get the farm up and running, for the house, the barns and the livestock.

Eventually Henry became lonely and rowed 12 miles down the lake (Cowichan Lake is 18 miles long) to a homestead where Edith, a single lady of good family, lived with her married brother. Apparently he was half dead when he got there and stayed for a few days. Henry did this again, courting her and, so the story goes, eventually rowed her out into the lake and wouldn’t return her to shore until she agreed to marry him. He brought her back to his homestead on the bay, which they called Honeymoon Bay, and together they built the farm which to this day is known as March Farm.

Murdoch Farm in Summer of Fortune is March Farm, although there was never anyone like Jake that I knew living there. These are my black and whites of March Farm that I took in the days I lived around the corner from the old homestead.

Next time I will show you the photos that sparked ‘Aunt Augusta’, the ghost in the story.

What sparks you writing imagination?

Judy Hudson

How and Why.

In June 2008 I had a minor operation on my foot and had to keep it up for what turned out to be 6 weeks. At the same time I got a new laptop and my husband went away for two weeks leaving me alone. Now this does not happen often since we both work at home, so I usually love it when he goes on a trip without me.

I could hobble for a few minutes at a time, so I was okay on my own. The weather was lovely and I remember thinking, gleefully if slightly fearfully, that this was the time.

So I started my first novel. Plunged in, working hours each day, foot up on the coffee table, the chairs on the screened in back porch or further outside, almost unheeding of hummingbirds buzzing by me.

The premise? I didn’t really have one. I work a lot on visuals and that’s where I started. When I lived at Honeymoon Bay on Vancouver Island in the 1980’s there was a cabin on the lake around the corner from our house (which was not on the lake). Like my heroine, I couldn’t really see the cabin.

“Her foot hit the brake when she saw the cabin by the lake. All that was visible through the trees was a crumbling chimney and broken window, half-hidden by overgrown lilacs . . . A rope hung across the head of the lane that wound through tall fir trees toward the cabin. Nailed to one massive trunk was a faded No Trespassing sign. Squinting to read it, she decided it was so faint it could almost be considered and invitation …”

The cabin is still there, and I have still not seen it, which was probably for the best because for years I hung stories on that chimney. There were other things that sparked stories for me too and I just started rolling them all together. I was a dark room photographer at that point, in the ‘80’s, and so is my heroine. In some ways she is my alter ego, for instance she is on the brink of becoming a successful photographer – something that never happened to me, not in that way. In other ways, most other ways, we are totally different.

I was amazied how the story emerged from somewhere in the ether with what felt like no help of my own. Although the place, which I called Fortune Bay, was very like Honeymoon Bay, the people were not based on anyone I knew there. The characters emerged fully formed and were revealed to me as the story progressed. I would say to people, “And it turns out she was”, or “had been”, or “her mother was”, and they would say, “What do you mean ‘It turns out’!?” So much of it came as a surprise to me. I couldn’t concentrate on reading stories in real books, I just wanted to know what happened next to my characters. The next chapter was out there, I just had to sit down and type it.

Now this doesn’t mean the story came together quickly. I made every mistake in the book, in all the books and I did read them all. Am still reading about how to write. They say to write about what you know and writers out there have complied. If you, as a beginning writer, haven’t availed yourself of this fount of information, by all means do, either from the library or buy them. Most are very inexpensive. In another blog entry I will list a few books I have found particularly helpful.

So what would I say to someone who has been playing with an idea? Plunge in. If worst comes to worst, there is always the delete button.

And who knows, like me, you might get carried away.

A writer - coming out of the closet.

I am a writer. Since I spend the greater part of everyday writing, I think that qualifies me to call myself a writer. I have even had a few articles published, but now I’m working on the big one – a novel.

My dad, whose name was Gordon Meyers, was a writer, so I know it is possible to support yourself and your family by writing. Even so it took me to my mid-fifties to start writing fiction. I don’t regret the other things I did in the meantime, it’s all grist for the mill, but I do wish I’d started sooner. I encourage anyone reading this who is considering it to give it a shot – now.

But I wish my father was still alive so I could ask him if he had ever wanted to write a novel. Today I asked my mother, who simply said, "He could never afford to take the time. He had a family to support." So he wrote for the Sears catalogue to begin with, then for Howdy Doody, a Canadian children's show of the 1950s. Then he went, very successfully, into advertising to support his family. Later in life he wrote for Ideas, a CBC radio show, and countless other things, but never a novel. And all of this with a grade 8 education. But those were different days. It was the 1930's, to be exact, when he quit school to go into the family painting and paperhanging business. But I digress.

He could never afford to write a novel. Don't I know it. I am on my second book, a murder mystery, while my first, a contemporary romance, is out shopping for agents. I feel it is out shopping without me. I did spend a lot of time getting it ready before sending it out into the world, but once I pushed 'Send', it was on it's own.

It is two years since I started working on the novels, and if I wasn't a "kept" woman, ie. married to a very supportive man, I couldn't be concentrating on writing to this extent.

This is the start of my writer's blog. Why and I writing them? Maybe to start a dialogue with other writers. Like my son said, just write all the stuff you talk to us about. Stuff they don’t necessarily want to hear. Everyday. And maybe other writers do.

How and Why I started on my first book, well, that's for next time.

Love to hear from other writers out there. Or agents...

Travels of the Princess and the Pea

The Adventures of the Princess and the Pea or how camping out in a stranger’s living room could turn out to be the highlight of your trip.

It wasn’t until bedtime that my butt hit the bed with a thud. My husband had already commented that the beds were too short, to which I had blithely replied, “just an optical illusion” created by the oversized Euro-style pillows. But as I lie here now, old bones complaining, on what can only be described as a piece of corrugated cardboard on a hollow plywood box, with my feet hanging over the end of the bed, I have to admit that he’s right.

We are driving through central Europe with our Czech-ex-pat friend Peter, meeting and often staying with his network of friends. Since we've been traveling in what I've come to think of as the ‘Central European way’, I have found myself bunking in all manner of rooms and beds: some good and some, well, not so much.

But the experiences we have, and the people we meet along the way more than make up for it.
Previously, when we’d stayed in small hotels and kept to our family unit, never really getting to mix with the locals, we'd treasured any interaction, no matter how small. Glimpses snatched through open doorways often left me feeling slightly like a voyeur, but there is little opportunity for mixing when you don't have an “in” to the community. Peter was our ‘in’.

He picked us up in Prague in the Skoda he keeps with relatives in a nearby Czech town where he grew up. The trunk was full of pears from this cousin’s tree and fresh bread. First stop, Chesky Krumlov where we had no 'in', but garnered a castle view window none the less.

Our destination, however, was Lago Scura. Damp and cool always describes our favorite Agriturismo in northern Italy in October. Just outside Cremona, the dairy farm cum cheese factory that looked like a miniature castle. We wouldn’t stay anywhere else. The two lumpy single beds were adequate, but it’s the view from our shuttered windows of the three-hundred-year-old tower and crenelated roofline that I dream about when I’m back home.
We bought some organic cheese from the store on the premises, huge chunks cut from large rounds. Cheese for the road, “and we’ll take some as gifts,” Peter said.

“Gifts for whom?” I wondered vaguely.

Peter’s friends, Volodja and Marie, as it turned out, who lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Marie is a French-Canadian ex-pat and happily accepted the tin of maple syrup that Peter had carried from Quebec just for her.

Ljubljana is a delightful city known for beautiful buildings and, we were assured, over-priced and inadequate accommodation. Our generous hosts insisted we must stay with them in their elegant, historic, second and third floor apartment. Afternoon turned into evening as we sat talking on the balcony that overlooked the river and up to the castle on the hill. Accents were flying, French, Slovenian, Croatian and Czech. Lucky for us they settled on English as their common language.

My husband and I would sleep in their expansive living room on a blow-up bed; more comfortable, they assured us, than the pullout couch. We sat smiling and nodding while the screaming electric pump did the work, temporarily silencing all possible conversation.
It was very comfortable, but it was mid-October and, until we reached the mountains of Slovakia, we found that no one had turned on the heat so, with only one blanket between us, we cuddled together for warmth.

But for breakfast there were fresh, warm, bakery croissants, our cheese, and the strong coffee that our host continuously made, one tiny, delicious, pot-full of after another. That’s when I discovered that by sharing a stranger’s home for a night, there’s a good chance you leave the next day as friends for life.

Zelko was another guest that night, and he insisted we return with him to Zagreb. It was an unplanned stop for us, but he would not take no for an answer, so we grabbed the chance to see the city with a native. It was on our way to Budapest, we could stay at his apartment – a generous offer – how could we refuse? He himself would stay at his girlfriend’s apartment.

He took us to his parents’ apartment first thing, and we gave given them a big piece of stinky cheese and a bag of coffee when we arrived. It turned out that was not nearly enough to repay them for the generous meals we received in return. Each meal, including breakfast, began, in our honor, with a toast of Slivovitz, the traditional plum brandy that burns all the way down. It was followed by Turkish coffee, strong enough to stand a spoon up in. His mother showed me how she made it: boil the water in a small pot, then pour in the powdered coffee until “you feel some resistance when you stir it with the spoon.” It made Starbucks espresso pale by comparison.

The next morning we all agreed that our host had never slept or eaten at his own apartment himself. He didn’t even have a bed! – which was something that we had somehow failed to notice during our whirlwind orientation to the small bachelor pad. My husband and I slept on the pull down couch, five and a half feet long with arms at both ends, and so narrow it required “spooning” and turning in unison all night long. It was, however, debatably better than the cloth cot with one inch of foam that Peter drew.

But how we enjoyed meals with his family!

This pattern of open-armed hospitality continued, through Hungary to Slovakia, where I now sit on my box of a bed in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, writing this missive. And I’m sure the hospitality will be repeated in spades at our next stop, Peter’s home town of Olomouc in the Czech Republic.

Staying with friends is a central European tradition, and sharing what food you have is a must. Although we’d given up multi-starred hotels for a chance to camp in someone’s living room, those warm, insider experiences definitely made this trip special.

We never made it up the hill to the castle in Ljubljiana, but by meeting our hosts, and their family and friends, we learned more about the culture than we would have wandering the city alone.

And now that we have friends there, I’m sure we will be back. But next time I'll have an extra suitcase of my own for coffee, cheese and maple syrup.

In the meantime, I'll share with you our visits to these interesting, sometimes out-of-the-way places in Central Europe. Stay tuned for future installments.

Up and Running

Just getting my new blog up and running, so bear with me! Check back soon to share stories from the road, travel articles I've written, fascinating background information and travel tips.

As well I'll post photos from my extensive photo cache, (http://www.judyhudsonphotos.com/).

Judy and her husband Reid at Coba ruins, Yucatan.