Positive Life

Thanks to the totally fantastic Maggie Coughlin Worth and her common sense guidance, I’ve learned that a POSITIVE LIFE needs REWARDS.

I work a lot. My day job, though it’s from home, is full-time. Writing is also a full-time job, though the actual words on the page are a tiny fraction of that. So getting to run away from all the work and actually just write is a reward for me. Twice a year I give myself a retreat—and it is oh so wonderful.

Last fall I found a little cabin in the woods (NOT like the movie!), and this month, in celebration of our birthday, I took my sis Dani Wade there for a writing retreat. You can see from the pics that we had a great time! Writing, reading, plotting (and not just books 😉 ), exploring, wading. So much fun!

What about you? Where do you go to get away? What do you love to reward yourself with?

Recharging My Batteries

At the beginning of this month, I treated myself to some time away, all alone. At first it was weird, but I found that I got a lot out of the quiet and the ability to focus just on my creativity, even if I wasn’t writing 24-7.

I was at one of my favorite kinds of places: woods and water! The cabin I rented sat, literally, right on the edge of a creek, with a swing on the screened-in porch where I could sit and listen to the water flowing over the rocks and write. One morning, I opened the door and walked onto the porch—and startled a blue heron fishing in the creek! When he flew off, his wingspan had to be six feet minimum. He was a beautiful sight!

As you can see, I spent some time dipping my feet in the water, hiking nearby trails, and walking along a lake in the town next door. This is where I wrote the Halloween short for Southern Nights (if you haven’t gotten your copy yet, go here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/xoh4op3939

), where I made connections and plotted and even wrote a little on Only for the Moment and my assassins project. And this is where I began to trust just a little more in my returning creativity and love for writing. 😊

What about you? Where do you go to recharge your batteries?

Field Trip: Dismals Canyon

Earlier this month my family took a trip together, something we don't get to do often with teenagers working and my husband and I so busy. We visited a place here in Alabama called Dismals Canyon. The canyon is a "pristine wilderness" you can read more about here. I've truly never seen anything this beautiful in the US.

The area is wooded, with massive sandstone chunks lying haphazardly around the canyon. One of the images below shows my husband next to an outer wall of the gorge, giving you the scale of what we were looking at. Dismals Branch, a crystal-clear creek, runs through the entire canyon with its beautiful sand-and-rock bottom. The waterfall at the entrance to Dismals Canyon is thunderous and, yes, the water is icy cold! (You can see my daughter and niece trying it out -- many squeals were heard, let me tell ya!)

At night the canyon walls reveal the reason for their name: a species of glow worms known as Dismalites that light up in the darkness. I've included an image here from the canyon's website, showing the Dismalites. It was impossible to photograph, but you can imagine the wonder of walking along the trails and realizing you'd been there just a few hours earlier and not realized such fascinating creatures were there with you until it became dark.

The entire area is peaceful, a great place for my family to reconnect and share in the wonder of nature. Have you ever visited someplace like this, a natural wonder that made you catch your breath?

Here's Your Sign 2

Y’all know I talk about my twin sister and fellow romance author, Dani Wade, all the time. It’s hard not to when you are joined at the hip, so to speak. What you might not have realized yet is that Dani and I share a bit of an odd funny bone. Last year, while traveling in Ireland, we began taking pictures of signs that made us laugh—some because they were silly, some because, if you have dirty minds like ours (hey, we are romance writers, after all!), look highly or even blatantly suggestive. Needless to say we found plenty, and we shared them with you. (Along with running commentary, of course; what would be the fun without that? ;) ) Last week Dani and I took another trip, this time to Savannah, Georgia. Gorgeous! We had an awesome time wandering the city, but it wasn’t all serious history. No, the people of Savannah evidently have as quirky a sense of humor as those in Ireland, and guess what?  We brought back evidence of it too! Wanna see? Okay! Without further ado, I give you: Here’s Your Sign 2!

I'm SOOOO glad we got the CENSORED version!

Not a lot of good if it’s frayed, is it? O.o

As opposed to the sitting monk? The standing monk? The dancing monk?

This one speaks for itself, don't you think?

The sign says, "Late Church." It’s Southern Baptist! (If you’re Southern Baptist, you’ll get it; trust me… :p )

Well of course it’s my pie; I paid for it!

This one kinda stumped us. What happened here? Did Debi quit? Die? Did Laurie bump her off? Forget her name is actually Laurie before she had the sign made with her supposed name, Debi? "Debi doesn't live here anymore..."

Cara Bristol, Cherise Sinclair, Lexi Blake, and Kallypso Masters walk into a pizza parlor... :D :D :D

And last but not least, a gift for my Lucky 13 Golden Heart sisters, especially Bonnie Staring:

I certainly do need new cabana boys, and I'm willing to provide on-the-job training; just sayin’. *smirk*

I hope you guys have enjoyed this episode of "Here's Your Sign." :) If you want to see more of the funnies we saw in Savannah, walk your mouse over to HERE and click to visit Dani's page and the signs she's sharing. They'll provide even much more needed laughter for your Monday morning!

~ Ella

It All Started With...

…this comment about a road sign. Dani, my twin sis and fellow author, remarked on it as we drove down the road toward our hotel the first day in Ireland. It looked like this: She’d seen it before, in Scotland. The “picnicking in the middle of the highway” sign, she called it, or as I affectionately refer to it, the “large Tron robots ahead” sign. “They have a lot of weird signs over here,” she said. “Like the one in the airport?” I asked. “Exactly.”

What sign in the airport, you might ask? This one:

I noticed it right off. “What does that mean?” No one else in our group knew. A bit giddy from a fourteen-hour trip and almost no sleep, I said, “It means…flee!” “Run very fast this way!” Dani said. And we laughed like drunken hyenas.

And thus began our journey into the Wacky World of Irish (and English) Signs. Scroll down to journey through this wacky world with us; then hop over to Dani’s page to see even more. It’s totally worth it, I assure you. :)

And we begin with:

Apparently “Enter” isn’t clear enough. But hey, way to declare yourself in the “in” crowd—not just “in,” but “way in.”

I would not have expected to find a Georgia Bull Dawgs fan in the middle of Ireland, but there it was. Of course, the same town had two pizza restaurants, one named Kentucky and one named Apache Pizza. What can I say?

This restaurant sign was my favorite, found somewhere in London near the end of our trip. For those who can’t see it clearly, it says, “Hummus Bros” and below, “Give Peas A Chance”. I can’t help but picture dozens of tiny peas bouncing up and down, begging, “Pease, pease eat us!” Dani: With French accents, like in Veggie Tales. ;)

Note the reference to accommodations in the pic above. Apparently Hussey doesn’t have to go far to get her "gig" on. Right upstairs, in fact. Convenient. Dani: It gives a whole new meaning to “Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am!”

The road signs, like the one we started out with, were particularly interesting. The one below I gathered to mean “Old-fashioned photos ahead."

Dani: Because we all need pictures of ourselves driving, right?

And then there’s this:

I can’t figure out if this is an instruction (“Yield!") or a warning (“Something’s about to give way! Watch out!”)

I’m not sure what it is about Europeans and arrows, but these...

...are particularly, um, unpointed. In fact, you might call them…flaccid. Or half-mast and decidedly uninterested, not sure which. Dani: How about floppy?

Speaking of flaccid:

I had to nab this one off their website since we walked by here way past dark, and trust me, around midnight, it looks a lot dirtier than it does in this picture. Talk about false advertising. Dani: Hey, I wanted to stop...

What is it with the penis references? Jeez. Apparently only the British have “Great Knobs.” ^_^ Dani: Or dirty ones. All I can think about when I see this is, Great Knobs of Fire! A new kind of burn. :p Of course the idea of the British having “greater knobs” might be played out by something our Irish tour guide, D, said about midway through the trip. We’d stopped at a buffet restaurant hanging over the cliffs on the Ring of Kerry, and it just so happened that the line for food snaked past the men’s restroom (or toilet, as they say over there). It was one of those with the little hall leading to the door, so all that could be seen was the opposite wall, nothing exciting. D, however, came up about the time I passed said door and firmly closed it. “We don’t want that open, now, do we?” she said. I shrugged. “I figured I couldn’t see anything, so I wasn’t worried about it.” D huffed. “Well why would you want to? Nothing to see, really. I mean, you’ve seen it all before, haven’t you?” And then she wandered off, leaving me staring, wide-eyed, after her. Apparently Irish “knobs” are a bit less “great”; once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Dani: According to her... I'd like to see one, just to be sure. Ah-hem. Onward. Speaking of food, there’s no better way to describe a chip than:

Really? Apparently even the makers couldn't figure out what these were! Okay, okay, I could go on forever. But thankfully I don’t have to, since Dani has more great signs over on her blog today. So slide…

…on over to Dani’s website and continue the amusement. (No climbing, food, dangling your toes in the water, or hand shaking, though!) Hope you enjoyed all these wotsits—and Dani’s—as much as I did!

Off We Go...

Forgive me a minute while I go all fan girl, not over a person -- although that's usually where I go with this -- but over a place. Ireland. Why? Because next week, for the very first time, I will leave the US for another country, namely Ireland. I can't tell you how excited I am, but I'll try. I!!!!!!!!!!!  AM!!!!!!!!!!!!!  EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I thought I'd share some pictures of things I hope to see on my trip. Oddly enough, looking at the countryside of Ireland reminds me of the countryside where I grew up in the Deep South, though it also holds a mystic quality that fascinates and amazes me. Maybe y'all will enjoy the beauty of this country as much as I do.

Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

O'Connell Street, Dublin, Ireland

Christ Church, Dublin, Ireland

Skellig Michael, Ireland

Blarney Castle, Ireland

Waterford, Ireland

*Photos by William Murphy, amerune, geographic.org.uk