Chris Rogers's Blog

In painting as in writing, boredom is the one factor that can kill a piece. To finish and have it bore an audience is bad enough. To finish and find yourself too bored to bother hanging it is worse.

And yes, it’s true that boredom is in the eye of the beholder. Another truth is that we should never judge a piece too soon.

When we’ve been striving for a particular outcome, concentration can give us tunnel vision. Put it aside for a while, look at it with fresh eyes and perhaps the outcome we achieved is even better than expected, better than the outcome we’d hoped for. But sometimes I get to the end and set the work aside and even with fresh eyes I’m underwhelmed.

That was the case with “All Squared Up.”

[image error]

So I attacked the painting again.   [image error]

I’m still not certain which I prefer. I like the simplicity of the original, but I find more energy in the new one.

Fortunately, in this era of digital capture, the original version is still available for prints.

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Where I live in Central Texas, old houses are plentiful, especially on land that has been repurposed for oil or gas production. A well-built house made of wood will stand empty for many years before it succumbs to weather erosion.

First it loses its paint. Then the wood begins to age in the hot Texas sun to a lovely brown or gray patina. It may lose sections of its roof, windows break, boards may tear loose in the wind. Eventually the house starts to sag on its moorings.

Like many artists, I have a fondness for old houses, and while I rarely paint landscapes, I decided to paint one in abstract, using my primary color palette – pyrole red, primary yellow, ultramarine blue and thalo blue, plus black and white. I found an old house that had not begun to lose its roof or siding and set it on a lake much like where I live on Lake Tonkawa. [image error] Yes, it’s there on the left but only roughly defined.

  [image error] Now it’s shaping up. As I’ve mentioned before, when a nonrepresentational abstract painting begins to “look like something” real, it’s not easy to avoid leaning toward that reality. It’s even harder when working with a photograph of an actual place or thing. 

[image error] That started happening here, yet I don’t want a realistic landscape. Easier said than done.

I decided to allow it to be itself to a large extent, but I wanted to avoid adding details that would render it fully realistic, and to make the surrounding landscape abstract. So I smudged the trees and house in the background. [image error]

I also splashed abstract shapes in the upper right and in the tree at left. Then I continued working back and forth between abstract and realism. [image error]

At this next point I thought it was finished, [image error]

but you’ll notice in the final version that I added faint white vertical strokes in the water and on the house to balance the black ones and to lead the viewer’s eye around the finished painting.

From a simple red, yellow, blue palette, so many options exist. In case you missed earlier posts, here are the 3 nonrepresentational paintings from this palette: [image error] [image error]  [image error]

Note: some of the color shifts you see, from warm to cool, are due to photography — snapping a quick photo in my living room instead of taking it out to the studio.

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Nobody springs into the world fully grown – at least not since Athena, who sprang from her father’s skull, and Pandora, a bride created by the gods. No matter at what age or point in life your characters enter your story, they have history.

Family, friends, lovers, familiar places, educational trials and triumphs, former occupations, a first pet, a first kiss, a favorite experience, a horrifying experience – these things have left imprints on your characters’ attitudes and behaviors.

The imprints of a character’s history inform their actions. I’m constantly amazed at how many writers think of this as “boring back story.” Yes, in big mouth-boggling gulps, it can detract. But when woven in fluently, every character’s history can add substance to the tapestry of your story.

A character we know little or nothing about is like a cardboard cutout of that person. Flat, uninteresting, two-dimensional. Give your story people depth.

What is his most inspiring memory?
What event most impacted her early life?
Who taught him everything he knows about the job he does now?
Where did she acquire her current expertise?
Why and of what is he afraid?
How and where was she most embarrassed?
Which friend or sibling has s/he remained closest to? Why?
What was his saddest moment?
When did she feel most triumphant?
Where did s/he go on vacation that left an indelible memory (good or bad)?

These are only a few of the questions that can elicit historical information and strengthen your plot. What would you add?

Flesh out your characters and you’ll lift your story from eh to exciting.

… I don’t know a better way to say this:

The greatest glory of a free-born people is to transmit that freedom to their children. – William Havard

And I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free. And I won’t forget the men who died, who gave that right to me. – Lee Greenwood

When I was young I often overheard my grandparents “discuss” things that needed to be done, and later my parents went through similar discussions. I’m talking young, now, and Grandpa Riddle was my hero, because he took time to talk to me without lecturing.

“If you had a duck,” I recall his telling me once, “in front of two ducks, a duck between two ducks, and a duck behind two ducks, how many ducks would that be?”

My six-year-old brain quickly did the calculations, of course, and came up with, “Nine ducks, Grandpa.” He picked up a stick and proceeded to draw a picture in the dirt of three waddling ducks. As I waited for him to draw six more, a cartoon light bulb clicked on above my head.

Truthfully, I learned more from my grandmother, who taught me to sew. Yet I as I grew older, I often thought of my grandmother as a nag. She seemed always to be nagging Grandpa into doing something he didn’t want to do. My mother never learned to sew but she picked up the habit of nagging.

I suppose it was inevitable that I would grow to despise confrontation. Honey-do chores at my house never got done because I was indelibly opposed to asking more than once.

As a writer, though, I had to revisit that attitude. Protagonists need someone to say, “But dear, consider the consequences!” Or, “Have you really thought this through?” Or, “Hey, Cisco, don’t do something I’ll be sorry for.”

Every hero needs a primary nag, a naysayer – usually a sidekick. And for special situations, bring on the “expert” naysayers.

• In my Dixie Flannigan thriller series, which features an assistant district attorney-turned-bounty hunter, naysayers include Dixie’s 12-year-old nephew, her sister and brother-in-law, and her defense attorney-best friend, Belle Richards. [image error]  [image error] [image error]  [image error]

• The Booker Krane novels, which are a traditional or “cozy” series, have several naysayers, including the local sheriff but most prominently Emaline, a storkishly tall, muscular, 60-year-old golf instructor who pokes her nose into everybody’s business. [image error]  [image error]

• Captain Cord McKinsey, my 300-year-old pirate in the Paradise Cursed series, has a first mate, a cook, and a recent paramour to nag him into doing whatever he resists or to caution him against it. [image error] [image error]

• Emissary (as I work on the trilogy), has dual heroes, Ruell and Longshadow, who play the naysayer role interchangeably, but several other characters speak up, as well. [image error]

With each book, I throw in a real or self-proclaimed expert who knows more than the hero in some situations and who bellies up to the task up when the hero needs a nudge. While nagging and confrontation are still not in my nature, my early lessons come to the rescue when a story thread needs goosing.

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So enthralled was I with the Liquitex Muted Violet palette that I decided to do a larger version in yet a different abstract style. As a reminder, the colors, in addition to Muted Violet, are Naples Yellow, Burgundy, Raspberry, Twilight, and Swedish Blue plus black and white.

This time I started with a new stencil I was dying to try, Faber-Castell Ice Layers. Normally, if I use a stencil at all it is a mere afterthought and well integrated into the design. But this one was so much fun that I let it run wild all over the canvas. In the first pass, I started with nondescript black blotches, applied thinly with a palette knife, then I stenciled on Muted Violet and, since the stencil reminded me of lattice fencing, I added some Raspberry splotches to resemble abstract flowers.

[image error]  [image error]

Naples Yellow came next, to identify the path of light, along with some Twilight and Burgundy. My path of dark wasn’t quite dark enough, so I threw more Muted Violet on the left, then in the 4th pass I stenciled light areas in the dark with a mixture of Swedish Blue and white, and added a little Muted Violet on the lower right to balance it. I also added two more Raspberry blothches and began to vaguely define the blossoms.

[image error] [image error] 

For the 5th pass, I brought some ferns from my garden and used them as a stamp, lightly, in the lower left and lower middle. When we use leaves as stamps, we need to put the paint on the front of the leaf, where the surface is smoother, and I forgot that on the first try. In the 6th and 7th passes, I continued to refine and tidy up any ugly parts. Finally, I added black spatters at the bottom and white spatters at the top, but they’re too fine to see until you step close.

[image error] [image error] [image error]  

This was one of three stencils I bought that day. I can’t wait to use the other two. In case you missed the previous post, here are the first three paintings in Muted Violet. They’re done on 16″x20″ canvases. The new one, “Through a Broken Fence,” is 22″x28″.

[image error] [image error] [image error]

 

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So enthralled was I with the Liquitex Muted Violet palette that I decided to do a larger version in yet a different abstract style. As a reminder, the colors, in addition to Muted Violet, are Naples Yellow, Burgundy, Raspberry, Twilight, and Swedish Blue plus black and white.

This time I started with a new stencil I was dying to try, Faber-Castell Ice Layers. Normally, if I use a stencil at all it is a mere afterthought and well integrated into the design. But this one was so much fun that I let it run wild all over the canvas. In the first pass, I started with nondescript black blotches, applied thinly with a palette knife, then I stenciled on Muted Violet and, since the stencil reminded me of lattice fencing, I added some Raspberry splotches to resemble abstract flowers.

[image error]  [image error]

Naples Yellow came next, to identify the path of light, along with some Twilight and Burgundy. My path of dark wasn’t quite dark enough, so I threw more Muted Violet on the left, then in the 4th pass I stenciled light areas in the dark with a mixture of Swedish Blue and white, and added a little Muted Violet on the lower right to balance it. I also added two more Raspberry blothches and began to vaguely define the blossoms.

[image error] [image error] 

For the 5th pass, I brought some ferns from my garden and used them as a stamp, lightly, in the lower left and lower middle. When we use leaves as stamps, we need to put the paint on the front of the leaf, where the surface is smoother, and I forgot that on the first try. In the 6th and 7th passes, I continued to refine and tidy up any ugly parts. Finally, I added black spatters at the bottom and white spatters at the top, but they’re too fine to see until you step close.

[image error] [image error] [image error]  

This was one of three stencils I bought that day. I can’t wait to use the other two. In case you missed the previous post, here are the first three paintings in Muted Violet. They’re done on 16″x20″ canvases. The new one, “Through a Broken Fence,” is 22″x28″.

[image error] [image error] [image error]

 

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Every book about writing has a different take on how to start a novel, including mine – Goosing the Write Brain: A Storyteller’s Toolkit. When possible, in the first 50 to 150 words, I like to divulge the 3 P’s – Place, Problem, Protagonist. We can accomplish that fairly easily, but what we most want is a hook that tugs a reader into the story.

I’ve staged seven different openings, each focusing on slightly different angles.  Tell me which, if any of these, grabs you.

Ruell discovered his host’s true nature in their second year together. It happened slowly as he explored Kirk Longshadow’s various personality quirks. A human word, quirk, meaning trait, whim, idiosyncrasy–Longshadow had them all. Where Ruell resided now, in his host’s corpus collasum, he had plenty of opportunity to examine Longshadow’s personality and to begin to understand. Humans needed a large amount of understanding.
From where Longshadow lay, sprawled prone on asphalt pavement, the nighttime sounds and smells of the alley resonated repulsively in his muddled brain. He wondered how long he’d been out.

Four minutes, fifty-nine seconds, Ruell informed him.

Hosting an alien energy in your body often proved useful. Longshadow opened his eyes a slit.

Voices approached. He recognized the high-pitched nasal squawk of Skinner Reed, wielder of the pipe that had clubbed him.
For eight consecutive Mondays Longshadow got a phone call from her. If he turned his phone off it didn’t matter, because they had nothing to say to each other. She’d leave a text message, which he would read later and discard.

Then on the third Friday in January, no call, no message. He’d spent the evening at the gym, working off a grumpy mood while watching a tanned and muscled personal trainer fail to impress a couple of yoga students wearing curve-cuddling Spandex. Toweling off from a shower, he checked his phone again. Still no message.


Longshadow knocked on the hotel door knowing that in the next few minutes he’d have his answer, or he’d be dead. The woman opened the door just as he raised his fist for a second, louder and more thoroughly pissed off knock. She did not look like a woman who could turn a blind eye to killing over a hundred thousand people. Barefoot, she wore a blue silk dressing gown splashed with shades of green, and a notable air of impatience. Her short brown hair stuck out in places, her lips were glossy with butter from a half-eaten slice of toast she held. From deeper in the room, a strong odor of coffee scented the air.
Hearing footsteps enter the alley behind them, Ruell, like Longshadow, expected the sheriff’s deputy was joining their stakeout. The corporate analyst under investigation was silently exchanging envelopes with a short scruffy-looking man. As was her habit on alternating Tuesdays, she had entered the bakery, ordered coffee and a toasted bagel with cream cheese, then headed toward the restrooms. Until now, no one had suspected a hidden door to the alley or that anything important could occur during the three minutes she was gone.

And now, if not for his intense concentration, Ruell might have sensed the footsteps were not the deputy’s, and have avoided the heavy pipe before it struck.
They buried Holly Marie Simpson three days after her murder. Polly Simpson wore black, as befitted a grieving sister. Sunlight angled through the trees and glinted off of every reflective surface, including the huge diamond on her left hand as she patted a stray lock of hair in place. The lightly wooded cemetery reminded Longshadow of his neighborhood beat in Houston, where trees grew in profusion. He didn’t miss the beat, but he sometimes missed his friends on the force.

Polly’s eyes, he noticed, were not focused on the funeral. Not on the coffin, the mourners or the minister delivering his elegy. Instead, Polly seemed to be watching for someone to arrive.
After a brief discussion with the pest control man, who had arrived in a red pickup truck, Polly Simpson strolled away from her home along a sidewalk bordering two massive houses on her side of the block. Longshadow, parked across the street in the heavy shade of a live oak, wondered if she was sensitive to the chemicals the man used or merely averse to being at hand while he worked.

In snug black shorts, black athletic shoes and a white t-shirt, she ambled distractedly with no apparent destination. Five minutes later, she returned. Edging slowly alongside the pickup, she glanced around then lifted the lid of a storage box in the truck bed and removed a red quart-sized jug.

One through seven – which hooks you best?

 

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From the beginning, this abstract painting reminded me of a coastal shoreline, possibly a foggy bay area. [image error] Usually I avoid attaching any sort of realism to the abstract images that appear, because I tend to start leaning toward that hint of realism. This time, I held off working on the painting at all, moving instead to the other two canvases in this Liquitex Muted Violet palette. Eventually, I had to decide what to do next, and the shoreline image continued to tug at me, so I went with it.

 [image error] [image error]  But where to go from here? I could picture ships docked at what appear to be piers – yet I wanted to pull it back to abstract. One move that often works for me in this situation is to finish with a flurry of gestural strokes that I call graffiti. Since the painting was quite low key, I added white. [image error] Okay, that brightened it, yetthe stark white was too much, so I toned it down with a medley of colors from the palette. [image error] Better, but a few white highlights now were needed. In my Muted Violet trio, here’s how “Even a Foggy Workday Can Be Fun” stacks up against its two sisters, “All Squared Up” and “Where Clouds Go to Rest”… [image error] [image error] [image error]

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I had the experience recently, as I suppose many authors do, of losing my motivation to write. I confess, I was dismayed, recalling explicitly that upon finishing my first (unpublished) novel in 1989, I made the statement, “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life, even if I never make a nickel.”

At the time, I was president of the National Association of Women Business Owners – Houston Chapter, Secretary of the Greater Houston Speakers Association, and served on the board of a business incubator. Nevertheless, I folded my own business that year  – it was business burnout that had started me start writing – took an administrative position at a bank and began honing my craft of novel writing.

Seven years, five novels later my fifth book, Bitch Factor, was sold by PMA Literary Agents in a three-book contract to Bantam Books for publication. Life was good. I wrote the next two books in that series, Bantam published them, and readers responded with cheers. Then Amazon came along and changed the publishing world forever.

For the next 14 years, I continued writing fiction while also ghostwriting nonfiction books. During that time I started Emissary, a scifi/mystery crossover novel, which never seemed to quite fit the market yet continued to implore me to keep laying down words. Market be damned, there was something in it I wanted to say.

In 2014, Emissary was published by Chart House Press. I was thrilled, but the market was underwhelmed. Most who read it gave glowing reviews, and it continues to have a 4.6 out of 5-star rating on Amazon, yet Emissary never reached the level of sales I expected.

Since then, I’ve written and published five more novels, five short-story anthologies, and once again was feeling a serious case of burnout. My motivation was seriously circling the drain. The only thing that kept me writing a few pages occasionally was the enjoyment I get from being around other writers.

Then two weeks ago I gave a talk at Houston Focus on Concerns for Women on the topic of “Switching Streams – Strategies for Adopting a New Life Goal.” It included some of the words I’ve written here and finished with this phrase, “During those years I picked up a paint brush and entered a new life stream – abstract art.” I honestly felt at that moment that my novel-writing life was behind me.

Before I could leave the room, several people approached and specifically asked if I intended to finish the Emissary trilogy. They had enjoyed it and wanted to know what was next in the lives of Kirk Longshadow and Emissary Ruell. A couple of mornings later I woke with words in my head and went straight to the keyboard. I wrote only three paragraphs, but I believe they’re the beginning of Emissary 2.

This place, all darkly metallic but rubbery to touch… and knobby… Ruell recognized it—a ship’s cockpit. Smaller, more confined than he recalled, snug bucket seat pushing him knees to knobs, his face so near the wraparound visual of what the ship was rushing toward that he shrank back in alarm.

In the blackness of space, a planet loomed like a chunk of impossibly round ice swirling with blue hatred. In truth, it was thousands of miles away, yet in the click of a moment it filled the vis-screen, slamming into the ship, pouring its seething hatred through holes that had been knobs. The hatred emerged as writhing snakes of bile and anger.

They slithered up Ruell’s legs and wrapped around his middle, pinning him in place, anchoring him to his seat as the cockpit closed in, rubbery metallic knobs pressing against his arms, his head…

These first paragraphs, quite naturally, might be edited as the book progresses, but let me know what you think.

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