Bailie Lawson's Blog

Does it seem fantastic to discover you have a child you didn’t know existed? “No” you are thinking -” a man could discover he had fathered a child and didn’t know – not fantastic at all”.

But what if you were a woman? “Well, that’s ridiculous!” you are thinking.

We have all heard of women who didn’t realize they were pregnant until far along in the pregnancy. But what woman would be unaware that she had given birth?

What if you are being told that you have a child?
Is someone trying to make you crazy? Why?
Are THEY crazy?

Buried secrets are fascinating -why they are buried and why they are secrets. As time passes, the lies we tell ourselves to hide the secrets become our new reality.

What happens when those old secrets are unearthed? Is it as dangerous as we feared, to face the truth? Will we be hated, hurt?
Those are the questions that interested me as I wrote my book, which I eventually decided to name WELL-TRAVELLED ANCIENT ARTIFACTS. This title is a little joke that should become apparent if you read the book.

As Sean discovers what may be very old small statues on an archeological dig in Eastern Europe he unwittingly starts an investigation that uncovers old secrets in people's lives.

Lia and Sean, a young Irish couple, are trying to get their careers and marriage started when they are drawn into odd political maneuverings and mysterious discoveries in a small Eastern European country. Sean is working with a team of archeologists, headed by a well-respected but strangely disinterested archeologist. He was pleased to be hired to work on the dig, feeling it will help him gain valuable experience. He is unprepared for the ethically troubling requests made by his boss and intrigued by the mysterious Edgar Wallace who befriends him and Lia. Edgar’s mother, Marina, has lived a sheltered life since leaving her native country, which was once part of the Soviet Bloc. But after her husband dies leaving puzzling questions unanswered she examines her former beliefs. She is inspired by Lia, who she sees as a strong modern young woman, and enlists her help as she takes the first steps towards empowering herself.

Simmering resentment, unexpressed anger, feeling trapped, all lead to toxicity in relationships. What attempts are made to adapt and to protect the self against hurtful words and actions of the partner. How does this affect how they act and how others perceive them?

How is the couple perceived by others? What judgments are made? How is the reality different from those perceptions and judgments?

These were questions I wanted to explore in my book FANFARE.

There are several couples in FANFARE. Some appear “eccentric” at the beginning of the book. As the story unfolds, secrets they hide from the world and from each other are unveiled. Resentment and feeling betrayed lead to destructive actions.

There is a toxicity to relationships that becomes apparent even as the toxic substance used in the murder is uncovered.

Some people are good at listening to their gut instinct. They are the ones who claim to be very intuitive. They often can’t tell us why they made a particular choice, just that it “felt right”.
A lot of us are not so good at this. Yes, we have feelings, intuitions, but we don’t trust them, or we kind of trust them. We waver and second-guess ourselves. We have uneasy feelings, anxiety, and get into arguments with ourselves, belittle the intuition, try to force ourselves to be “logical” and “practical” to squelch down the uneasy feelings.
I think that listening to your gut isn't about anything specific to your stomach region. It's about reading your body as a whole. When you have a reaction – changes in heartbeat, breathing, and muscle tension – why did your body react in that way?

But most of us most of the time also have a million thoughts and preconceptions about the people we know and are inclined to pay attention to those thoughts, that knowledge, that experience, those memories.

In my story, FINDING JUNIPER, because Juniper has amnesia, she had no choice but to see people with new eyes. She couldn’t rely on her knowledge or past impressions of people who said they were her friends. She had no memory of them.

Because of this her senses were sharpened. She was tuning in to her physical reactions. She was relying on her instinct.
In writing FINDING JUNIPER, I found it an intriguing exercise to look at familiar objects and people and ask, “If I had never seen this situation, person, or thing before, what might I perceive?”

When I started writing Finding Juniper I was fascinated with amnesia, especially the type that has no physical cause, what Freud would probably have described as hysterical repression.

The philosopher Hegel was quite poetic I think in his description of this form of amnesia as a form of disease in which the soul is aware of a content it has long since forgotten, and which when awake is no longer able to recall consciously.

I was fascinated with the idea of the unconscious “knowing” things that the conscious mind is not aware of, and how dreams can be paths into the unconscious.

Sense memories are also fascinating – that is, memories that are not dependent on language. In Finding Juniper I make use of visual images as triggers. There are snapshots of events, hints, but Juniper cannot yet see the whole story.

As I write this I can’t help thinking, what about smells, even tastes?

I wonder have you ever been transported back to an earlier experience, even to childhood, by a particular odor.

In my teens, my boyfriend was an artist who liked to work with oils. He smelled like oil paint.
I haven’t thought of him or seen him in years but to this day when I smell oil paint I am transported back to that time and place, to his paint-spattered hands and to his tweedy jacket with that oil paint smell and that heady feeling of young love.

Maybe this could be a starting point for a new story!