Adventures of a Writing Life

Welcome to my blog on the adventures of a writing life. I also blog on research subjects at Baroque Explorations.

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{Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash.}


Now: where was I?

Now: where was I?

For a lock-it-down quiet pandemic life, my husband and I have been moving around quite a bit. In November, we closed down our rural house in Ontario in anticipation of going to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico for the winter. We’d last seen our house there over two years before when we returned to Ontario unexpectedly for medical reasons. And then Covid, of course, and the world closed down.

Fast forward to last November. En route to San Miguel, we stayed in Kingston, Ontario, not far from where our daughter and her family live. Our son and his wife came up from New York State with their baby, and a wonderful family time was had by all. We’d all self-tested negative before getting together, and so could hug freely and without worry, making for a very special holiday season.

Richard and I were due to fly south on January 7, but did an abrupt swerve because of the Omicron surge, heading back to our house up north. I’d hardly even settled when I went by ambulance to a local hospital to be operated on for a burst appendix. Yes, quite a surprise!

My operation was a little over two weeks ago. I’m feeling more and more myself, and so have ventured down to my “bunker” — the lovely little room off our basement that’s my writing space.

This is how I found it:

It felt like time travel. What had I been working on? What was I researching? And why?

Obviously it had to do with Elizabethan England and my increasingly tangled Young Adult biographical novel about teen-aged Elizabeth Tudor, the future Queen Elizabeth I.

Princess Elizabeth, artist unknown.

I’ve been going through the usual periods of despair known to all writers, alternating with periods of optimism, swinging from one to the other and back again. The last few days have been hopeful — I’m back at work, and that makes all the difference.


The image at top is Moon2 by Netherland artist Rob de Vries (Rookuzz on Flickr). I like how this image evokes feelings of being both lost and found. What I take to be a broom is a special touch. I subscribe to Every Day Poems, which sends out a poem every morning together with an image, usually a photo. Of late, they’ve been showing the work of this artist, and it immediately grabbed me. De Vries very kindly gave me permission to use his images here. He’s described as a photo-realist artist, but I like his abstract work best, which I gather is photo-based. I’d love to know more about his process.

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