I realize that the settings of all my books are about the sizzling south, the hot sun, the bountiful flowers of purple and red and yellow petals reminding me that the colors brought to the earth in summer is what makes me grateful for life. The sun always makes me feel good and energized. I don’t think anything really bad happens in the summer and if it does, well, a beautiful blue day is a certain mood lifter. But look at the white ice and the stillness of winter. It’s beyond beautiful, it’s magical and mystical in a way that summer cannot be. It’s stark, the way a cold setting hints at emptiness and the circles of rain around a cloud whisper sorrow.
I really must write a book about turning my collar against the wind and watching my footsteps cover over with snow. It might be a loveless story symbolically revealing the disturbance of distance or the transition of change that hovers in a future fraught with nightmares and macabre occurrences. Winter whispers to me whereas spring sings. It’s time to be still and listen to the whisper. As I stare at this photograph. I feel the silence of things to come. I can’t see the future but I can feel it. It’s time to be still and listen to my inner voice, that language that barely gets attention, the truth that bubbles at the surface of avoidance. Sometimes being alone on a white, cold day is a secret just waiting to be heard. I must write a book with a setting of snowy grounds and barren trees. I must make my heroine pensive and strong. I should set it back in time for trees live forever. There is no laughing in the fields, no lovemaking in the hay. There is only my heroine in a white cold world dreaming of warmth. The cold frigid winter day holds her captive in a mystical moment of self-assessment. The story will not end badly for the frozen white winter will thaw. The dreams captured in that ashen still day will shatter like sun spots over the ground, and the secrets of silence will free her, and the music she heard from the confines of ice will be found in new life once again.
