The Mystery of Ideas

A New Mystery Photo

Are you ready for a new mystery photo? Here it is to the left. Leave a guess to have an entry in my book giveaway. If you've guessed on the other posts, guessing here will give you another entry. You don't have to guess right. Just guess. I've really enjoyed all your comments and guesses. 

Sunday's Mystery Photo

And for those of you who haven't guessed on Sunday's mystery photo, here it is again. Take one last look and guess before I reveal the rest of the photo below. I will tell you that I've tricked most of you on that picture, many more of you than I expected to. I'll post one more mystery photo Sunday and then on Wednesday, the 19th, I'll draw for winners (2) of my book, Summer of Joy (or winners can choose one of my other titles) and a grab bag book by a different Christian author. I'll offer the winners a choice of several titles. Maybe one by Dani Pettrey or Julie Klassen. 

The Mystery of Ideas

Do you ever wonder where writers come up with ideas? That is one of my most asked questions when I'm giving a book talk. Where do I get my ideas? It's a hard question to answer since sometimes I don't know exactly where the ideas come from. When I'm beginning a new story, I start with just the germ of an idea. Usually a "what if" question. 

The Heart of Hollyhill's What If Question

The Heart of Hollyhill series started with a question something like this "What if I had a young girl whose father was a preacher and whose mother had deserted the family years earlier?" Of course that was just the beginning. But from that question, all the other questions about what happened next came - through three books. 

Some parts of the idea can be tracked down to their origins. The part about David, my preacher character, not being able to get a church after his wife left him came from my own pastor's experience. He lost his pastorate at a church when his wife left him and for several years was unable to find a church that would let him preach even though his wife had been unfaithful to him and insisted on the divorce. 

Then I pulled a lot of the setting for the books from what I remembered my little town being like in the 1960s. If you take part in the The Book Club Network, www.bookfun.org, you can check out a special giveaway about Summer of Joy there beginning March 25. I just finished doing a piece that will be posted by Nora on TBCN about how I based the setting for my Hollyhill books on my own small town and my own country church. 

But there were also things that either grew out of the story and just suddenly came to mind in a way that's a mystery to me. Wes from Jupiter for one. I didn't plan Wes when I was trying to come up with the plot of the book, but I'm certainly glad his spaceship hit that air bump and he landed in Hollyhill. That probably sounds really crazy if you haven't read Scent of Lilacs, but Wes tells Jocie Jupiter stories to keep from revealing his past. Other story events are equally as hard to explain, but it's just what happened when my character came to life in my imagination. 


The Mystery Revealed

You are all going to be surprised, but there was only one correct answer and she was sure she was going to be wrong. So Donna, you can laugh, but because you were right and not wrong. Popcorn, cotton, and cotton candy were what most of you guessed. But here's the rest of the picture so you can see. Baby chicks waiting to be sold at Tractor Supply. A very springtime photo. Can't you almost hear them cheeping? 

Thanks for reading and for guessing. Don't forget to guess on the new photo and come back Sunday for one last mystery photo. I haven't figured out what that one is going to be. It's a mystery even to me. Remember if you guess and want to be in the drawing for the books, you have to leave a way for me to contact you. Thanks.

Do you ever wonder where writers get their ideas?

Mystery Photos in Spring

 "Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand." (Neil Armstrong)

Do you like mysteries? I like reading them. Not sure I'd actually want to be involved with one although when I was a kid I imagined being like the Hardy Boys and solving all sort of mysteries. Now I'm happy when I can solve the mystery of my missing keys or what happened to that letter I just had in my hand and laid down somewhere a minute ago. Of course, that might not be such a mystery if my desk wasn't such a mess. 

Fun Guesses

For some of you my mystery picture wasn't much of a mystery. For others of you, the picture had you doing some creative thinking. Love the yellow boots and sleds in the snow guesses, and you know, that snow does look like soapsuds or maybe ice in a cooler. A few of you saw a fence and bananas. Right color. Wrong object. The best wrong guess was Kristy's idea of a book in one of those yellow plastic bags that the telephone company uses when they pitch out the new telephone books by our mailboxes. I could see that. But, as you can see in the "rest of the picture" above, those of you who said a daffodil or jonquil, as we always called them when I was growing up, in the snow were right.

Mystery Picture 2

So are you ready to do some more guessing? You'll probably get this one right away too. Or at least some of you will. Remember, it's more fun to guess first and read the comments second. Then you can guess if you're right or not. A new guess gets you another entry in the drawing. Some of you didn't leave a way to contact you with your first guess, but you need to do that if you want to be in the drawing for one of my books and another grab bag book. I'm going to pick two winners on the 19th. Remember you can write your e-mail out with yourname(at)mailprovider(dot)com or net. And if you'd rather not do that, you can always send me a message at annhgabhart(at)yahoo(dot)com. 

Spring is Springing

Here in Kentucky, spring is going to give us a little preview next week with temperatures in the sixties. Official spring is about 10 days away, but usually spring sneaks into Kentucky early. Not so much this year. However, Daylight Savings Time did show up earlier than it used to. That will make the days feel longer even though they're still the same twenty-four hours. 

What gets you to thinking spring?   

I noticed my windows needed washing today. But I'd rather be seeing flowers to get me thinking spring instead of dirty windows. what has you thinking spring?

"No winter last forever; no spring misses its turn." (Hal Borland)

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

Hal Borland

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/spring.html#IoEjqrK8OhXK5SVG.99"No

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

Hal Borland

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/spring.html#IoEjqrK8OhXK5SVG.99

Mysteries in the Safe

When I was a kid, there was a safe in an outbuilding at my aunt's house. The safe was the size of a small chest and locked. Nobody knew the combination. Nobody knew what was in the safe. It was from the past that nobody in my family remembered. At one time, some of my ancestors operated a distillery. My aunt even had a bottle of the whiskey that was distilled there. She used a little of it on her fruitcakes at Christmas time. And she threatened us with lemon and whiskey in sugar when we had bad coughs. My cough was never bad enough to even get the threat, but my sister had asthma and she did. Not sure if my aunt ever tried the cure on her or just talked about it.

The safe had been at the distillery that was put out of business by Prohibition. Why the safe ended up in my aunt's wash house, I don't know. I do know that when we were young, my sisters and I were fascinated with the safe. We'd twirl the dial this way and that, thinking that at any moment we'd hit the right combination of numbers and the safe would open and reveal its mysteries. Of course we expected gold bars or maybe bags of cash. Diamonds and coins were not beyond the realm of our imaginations. Needless to say, we never stumbled across the right combination. 

Fast forward fifty or so years. My sister now owned the place where the safe was located, where it had survived a fire, but still was locked tight. She sold the place. That's the old log house being torn down that I wrote about Sunday. A neighbor asked my sister if he could have the safe before she sold the place. When he was a boy, his parents played Rook every week with my parents, and he had obviously explored, found the safe in the outbuilding and been as entranced by what might be inside as we were when we were kids. He promised to share the wealth if he could get it open. LOL. 

I don't know if he used dynamite or skill with safe cracking, but he did get it open. No gold. No sack of money. Not even an old penny. Just some mementos from the past that had a treasured place in that safe for almost one hundred years. This woman's picture was in there in several different poses. This ticket to the 1919 Kentucky State Fair was there too. Was there a special date at the fair that was the reason for keeping the ticket? Was she a love lost? So, after all these years, we know what was in that safe, but we don't know why. We will never know. But it's fun to imagine!

What do you think? Wouldn't it have been nice if whoever had locked those things in there had locked his diary in there too?

Thanks for reading. I'm sending out a newsletter tomorrow. If you aren't on my newsletter list and would like to be, let me know.