YOU May Be A WINNER!!!

I don't gamble. I don't buy lottery tickets. But several time a year, I invest a stamp and some time in jumping through the various hoops needed to enter the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes.

Find the special stamp HERE and paste it THERE; initial this; verify your address and the directions to your house so that the Prize Patrol can come right to your front door with The Big Check and the red roses. (Ha! They'd better have four wheel drive.) Verify name of local florist. Okay. I've got the vase ready.

They used to include a car as part of the prize -- years ago it was a Jaguar and I was always torn between elegant black and British Racing Green. I made my choice but alas! no Jag. I wonder how much time I've spent, in the past 30-some years, doing these silly entries.

The current Big Prize is staggering -- $100,000.00 a week for a year! Half a million in just five weeks! Over five million by the end of the year!

The mind boggles. Even after government took its hefty share, there should be enough left for a little modest fling.

Or, as the old joke has it, we could just go on farming till it was all gone.

A Happy Woman

Today I received a list of questions from a person doing an article/promotion piece on some of the authors presenting at the upcoming Blue Ridge Book and Author Showcase. A couple of the questions really set me thinking.

1. What is one interesting tidbit about you that few people know?

2. If you weren't a writer, and could be anything you wanted to be, what would it be?


3. If you could have lived in a different time period, what would it be? Why?


4. What is the one subject that you would never write about? Why?


5. What is the most imaginative scene you have ever written?

I've been given that first question before and the way I answered it previously was to tell how I once broke up a dogfight using an unorthodox technique learned from reading Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels. This time my answer was that in 1969 my husband and I spent three glorious months riding a motorcycle around Europe.



It was the second question that stopped me cold. I thought about it a bit and decided to go on and answer the rest then return to formulate an answer.



Question three, what other time period would I like to live in, is one I've thought about a lot. There are lots of times and places that I would love to visit but ONLY if I were at the top of the food chain, so to speak. Elizabethan England, for example, might not be so bad if you were wealthy -- unless, of course you were a Roman Catholic . . . or a woman . . .or a Jew.


And even if you were wealthy, the hygiene, the medicine (or lack of it),the callous disregard for animal and human suffering (for example, bear-baiting, hanging, drawing and quartering for execution). . . no, I think I'll stay put in our times, flawed though they may be.


Number four, the subject I would never write about is cruelty to animals or the death ( other than old age) of a dog. Okay, I have killed a cat and a squirrel or two in my books -- but always quickly and without suffering.

Number five I had to think about. I'm not sure about the most imaginative scene I've ever written -- in a way, that's more for a reader to say than me. But off the top of my head, and since I was eager to get back to question two, I chose the scene with Elizabeth in the Melungeon cabin toward the end of In a Dark Season.

And then I went back to the second question, trying on, in my mind, other enticing directions my life might take if I could be anything I wanted to be . . . and I realized that there is nothing I'd prefer to the life I already have -- with or without the writing.

So I answered that I'd like to be a very wealthy gardener. I don't want to live anywhere else but money for more plants and more help in the garden would be nice.

Even without it, I'm a happy woman.

But you probably knew that.