A Hobbit House!

/in , , , , , /by

The mountainous terrain of northern New Mexico, where my husband and I spend our summers, makes me aware of J.R.R. Tolkien’s clever way of segmenting Middle Earth into various regions. I’ve let my imagination fly thinking that he set up different regions, and their diverse inhabitants, by using mountain ranges and valleys to map out Middle Earth. With New Mexico’s diverse cultural heritage, I can imagine that Tolkien’s elves, dwarves, men, hobbits, ents, orcs, and trolls might have been created, each group with their unique characteristics, by studying various cultures and then adding a good measure of fantasy.

Of course, Tolkien was British, not New Mexican, and he was probably inspired by the various European cultures and terrain. Middle Earth, the main continent in his fictional fantasy, was set in a period more than six thousand years ago – so adding fantasy to the saga was essential.

Fascinated by Tolkien’s imagination, I let my own inspiration wander through the mountains and the cultures of New Mexico and surmised that a creative mind can entangle extraordinary stories set in the Land of Enchantment. Especially if the stories are set in the ancient past or centuries in the future!

Back to the present: This summer, a good friend invited me to see a ‘unique’ house. I never envisioned I would be dropped into Middle Earth to experience a hobbit house. Little did my friend know that I love Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the prequel to Lord of the Rings, where the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, is hired by the wizard Gandolf to reclaim the treasure from the dragon Smaug.

The house we visited is known in its neighborhood as The Hobbit House. Even more fascinating is the fact that the owners built their Middle Earth abode using materials taken from the land where they were building.

Their daughter, an architect, prepared the blueprints. She assisted in tree cutting, testing the clay content in the soil, and manufacturing the adobe bricks and puddled adobe used in the construction. As you can see from the exterior and interior photos, they constructed a wonderful home. Imagine building your own and creating such a beauty!

***

Credits: All photos by Kathryn Lane

About Kathryn:

Kathryn Lane writes mystery and suspense novels usually set in foreign countries. In her award-winning Nikki Garcia Mystery Series, her protagonist is a private investigator based in Miami. Her latest publication is a coming-of-age novel, Stolen Diary, about a socially awkward math genius.

For her writing, Kathryn draws inspiration from her travels in over ninety countries as well as her life in Mexico, Australia, Argentina, and the United States.

She also dabbles in poetry, an activity she pursues during snippets of creative renewal. In the summer and fall, Kathryn and her husband, Bob Hurt, escape to the mountains of northern New Mexico where she finds inspiration for her writing.

Personal website kathryn-lane.com

Latest novel: Stolen Diary – a coming-of-age mystery.

Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSHFRD11

Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Stolen-Diary-Kathryn-Lane/dp/1735463833/

 

Chasing an Intruder

/in , , , , /by

Bob and I spend the summers in northern New Mexico. We enjoy the idyllic mountain scenery, the wildlife, the enriching tricultural experience in art, food, and the wonderful people who live here. Some are full time residents while others, like us, are only part timers.

After we arrived at our cabin, I was surprised we’d had a visitor who had left his calling card.

Ever the investigator, I wanted to identify our intruder. I asked friends, family, and long-time residents to help me out. Most people offered suggestions like a cougar, a mountain lion, a bobcat. One person thought they were coyote tracks, and another, trying to be funny, thought they were left by aliens!

I compared the paw prints left in the dust on the front deck to online research, and to photos a friend sent me from a wood block she keeps for easy reference in her mountain home.

It was easy to rule out deer, elk, turkey, or badger.

Next, I could rule out a fox, coyote, or bear since our prints did not have evidence of claws. That left the cougar!

Long time-residents claimed they had not seen any cougars in the area, yet my research indicated that New Mexico has a cougar population of 3,494 that are eighteen months of age or older as of 2023¹.

Sadly, my research also revealed that cougars are considered recreational game animals in New Mexico, and at the current rate of hunting and trapping, they will soon be at risk. In 2019, the state did prohibit trapping of cougars in certain areas.

I fully understand that cougars and other wildcats can be dangerous to people, pets, other wildlife, and livestock. Yet, these are beautiful animals that need protection to prevent them from going extinct.

A friend asked me if I’d be putting cougars into a novel in the future. The truth is I don’t know if a cougar will ever appear in a Nikki Garcia mystery or not. The question is valid since I have included dogs, crows, and mules in previous mysteries. Whenever I’m writing a novel, if pets or wild animals add to the story, yes, I love incorporating them into the story. In the meantime, my husband and I will enjoy the deer, elk, coyote, turkey, and birds we see in this mountain retreat.

***

¹New Mexico Mountain Lion Foundation

About Kathryn

Kathryn Lane writes mystery and suspense novels usually set in foreign countries. In her award-winning Nikki Garcia Mystery Series, her protagonist is a private investigator based in Miami. Her latest publication is a coming-of-age novel, Stolen Diary, about a socially awkward math genius.

Kathryn’s early work life started out as a painter in oils. To earn a living, she became a certified public accountant and embarked on a career in international finance with Johnson & Johnson.

Two decades later, she left the corporate world to create mystery and suspense thrillers, drawing inspiration from her travels in over ninety countries as well as her life in Mexico, Australia, Argentina, and the United States.

She also dabbles in poetry, an activity she pursues during snippets of creative renewal. In the summer, Kathryn and her husband, Bob Hurt, escape the Texas heat for the mountains of northern New Mexico.

Photo credits:

Paw Prints in the Dust – photo by Kathryn Lane

Wood Block Paw Prints – photo by Sharon Sorensen

Cougar – CA-Jason-Klassi-08

Guilty About Reading Genre?

/in , , , , , , /by

Have you ever felt guilty for reading a cozy, a mystery, or a romantic novel instead of delving into one of the great books, like Homer’s Iliad or Proust’s Swan Way or a classic like Virginia Wolf’s A Room of One’s Own?

I grew up in northern Mexico and I attended a fantastic high school that was accredited in both Mexico and the US, giving students the opportunity to attend the university in either country.

The school offered a two-semester English literature class. The teacher was a dynamic, talented woman who instilled in her students the love for the classics and the great books. She also encouraged us to shun genre and to avoid soap operas, quite popular at the time.

I moved to the US in my mid-twenties and soon discovered romance novels. After devouring a romantic story with a happy ending, I’d run to the library to borrow books by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky to balance my reading guilt. Compare the fun of reading genre to the lessons of the great books. It’s very different reading! The great books represent the foundations of Western Culture’s ethics, social norms, values, and ideas that stem from the Greco-Roman tradition. Genre, on the other hand, is pure entertainment.

Fast forward a few years when I was working in international finance and traveling the world for my corporate job.

On a flight between New York and Buenos Aires, Argentina, I missed my connection in Miami. I window-shopped airport stores in search of something to do until the next flight. A bookstore, displaying mountains of books set on tables that stretched down the hall, caught my eye.

The year was 2001 – the year I discovered the mystery novel. I purchased Tell No One by Harlan Coben and I was immediately hooked on mysteries. My new-found love in reading would disappoint my wonderful literature teacher back in Mexico, yet for the rest of my international finance career, I carried a mystery or two to read on long flights.

Mysteries became an important part of my life. So important, in fact, that I left the corporate world to write the Nikki Garcia mystery series, setting my stories in a few of those international locations where I traveled. Do I still feel guilty? Not at all!

At a book signing four years ago, I met Harlan Coben. I told him his novels influenced me to write mysteries.

And my former teacher says she loves my novels and she’s thrilled that one of her pupils became a writer. Instead of feeling like a wayward former student, I’ve converted her to reading genre.

***

About Kathryn

Kathryn Lane writes mystery and suspense novels usually set in foreign countries. In her award-winning Nikki Garcia Mystery Series, her protagonist is a private investigator based in Miami. Her latest publication is a coming-of-age novel, Stolen Diary, about a socially awkward math genius.

Kathryn’s early work life started out as a painter in oils. To earn a living, she became a certified public accountant and embarked on a career in international finance with Johnson & Johnson.

Two decades later, she left the corporate world to create mystery and suspense thrillers, drawing inspiration from her travels in over ninety countries as well as her life in Mexico, Australia, Argentina, and the United States.

She also dabbles in poetry, an activity she pursues during snippets of creative renewal. In the summer, Kathryn and her husband, Bob Hurt, escape the Texas heat for the mountains of northern New Mexico.

Stolen Diary

Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSHFRD11

Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Stolen-Diary-Kathryn-Lane/dp/1735463833/

Photo credits:

Girl Reading by Camille Corot, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Harlan Coben and Kathryn Lane by Bob Hurt

My Days as a Poet

/in , , , , , , , /by

Like so many people before me, I wanted to write. I’d left my corporate job in international finance and moved to Texas, enrolled in a creative writing course at a local college, and on the first day of class, I sat on the front row, anxious to discover the art of writing.

Much to my surprise, the class would cover poetry for the first six weeks. The first assignment was to create a poem. That night I stressed so much I could not sleep. About three in the morning, rhyming lines about a young horse and an old stallion flowed through my mind. I got out of bed and wrote the entire poem. I later earned $25.00 when I sold that poem, despite its rhyming scheme, to a nature magazine. I became a regular contributor to that magazine.

The professor had reasons to start with poetry. Poems often have a strong narrative voice; they are filled with expressive power and do so with a few carefully chosen words. By the end of the six weeks, I loved writing them and I continue to do so on occasion.

It took my friend Ann McKennis’s inquiry about my poems on the Rothko Chapel to prompt me to look back at poetry I’d written. The Rothko Chapel in Houston is non-denominational, and it also serves as a lecture hall, a meditative space, and a major work of modern art by Mark Rothko who also influenced the architecture of the building. His paintings, in various hues of black, inspired me to write several poems, such as this one:

Red and Black

Painting is about thinking,

not merely spreading paint on a canvass—

not until the idea germinates, sprouts,

spreads like lips, hot lips covered in red lipstick,

fondling every thread of primed cloth,

like a woman arousing her lover,

her tongue licking nectar from his body.

Apply paint with controlled strokes,

drawing out emotions,

pulling passion with color.

 

Allow wet paint to slosh

from surface to edge, leave it

fuzzy so the eye adjusts before

the brain sees the artist’s inspiration.

Take red, like rage, then black,

which contains it all, and white,

as Melville said, the most fearful color—

for it is the abyss, the infinity of

death. But it is black that

swallows the red.

***

The Rothko Chapel was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in September 2000.

Kathryn Lane writes mystery and suspense novels set in foreign countries. In her award-winning Nikki Garcia Mystery Series, her protagonist is a private investigator currently based in Miami. Her latest publication is Stolen Diary, a story about a socially awkward math genius.

Kathryn’s own early work life started out as a painter in oils. To earn a living, she became a certified public accountant and embarked on a career in international finance with Johnson & Johnson.

Two decades later, she left the corporate world to create mystery and suspense thrillers, drawing inspiration from her Mexican background as well as her travels in over ninety countries.

She also dabbles in poetry, an activity she pursues during snippets of creative renewal. During the summer months, Kathryn and her husband, Bob Hurt, escape to the mountains of northern New Mexico to avoid the Texas heat.

Rothko Chapel Pictures: Public domain

Readers Love Mysteries…

/in , , , , , , /by

…and readers also love sleuths that solve mystery after mystery after mystery, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous protagonist, Sherlock Holmes. The genius detective solved mysteries and crimes during Conan Doyle’s lifetime and today continues to be one of the most popular characters in TV crime series.

Sherlock Holmes is the archetypal detective. He uses observation, deduction, and reasoning to solve complex murders, yet it is Sherlock’s eccentric personality that endears him to readers and TV viewers.

Is it the personality quirks as well as the detective abilities that keep readers attached to their favorite crime solving characters? It’s not just Sherlock Holmes. Protagonists like Craig Johnson’s Sheriff Longmire and Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch have not only taken on a life of their own, but they have also become part of a reader’s or a viewer’s family.

In other words, a series with an appealing protagonist, especially when that protagonist is clever, quirky, and not beyond being arrogant at times, like Sherlock, is golden to an audience. In the reader’s mind, those characteristics humanize the detective and make him or her lovable and therefore worthy of being part of the reader’s family.

Today, most authors of mystery and detective stories write series. Prolific authors, or those who started writing years ago, may have several series going at one time. Readers who love a character will return time and again to help their favorite detective solve the latest mystery.

The mystery genre is one of the most enduring ones. Let’s all continue writing about quirky detectives in stories filled with twists and turns. Let’s keep the mystery series going!

***

The Nikki Garcia Mystery Series (eBooks version) is on sale from March 7 to March 10 for $1.74.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1345756

 

 

 

Kathryn Lane is the award-winning author of the Nikki Garcia Mystery Series.

In her writing, she draws deeply from her experiences growing up in a small town in northern Mexico as well as her work and travel in over ninety countries around the globe during her career in international finance with Johnson & Johnson.

Kathryn and her husband, Bob Hurt, split their time between Texas and the mountains of northern New Mexico where she finds it inspiring to write.

Reinventing the Wheel

/in , , /by

 

For my fifth Nikki Garcia mystery, Nikki’s brother, Andy, is introduced as a character. He’d been mentioned in a couple of earlier Nikki novels, but this is his debut as a living, breathing character. Andy is a sleep researcher, studying the deep-winter sleep of black bears, and torpor, shorter periods of hibernation, in squirrels and chipmunks. In other words, it’s a subplot on mammal hibernation.

In the novel, Andy hypothesizes that our ancient ancestors, being mammals like bears, slept through the winters to lower their metabolism and conserve energy. He figured that if he were a barefoot Neanderthal, he’d find a cozy cave to curl up in, maybe even next to a family of bears. After all, the Pleistocene era, or last ice age, ended 11,700 years ago. It lasted for 2.6 million ultra-frigid years.

If human ancestors, Andy theorizes, could wake up in springtime, they would find that ice on rivers and streams had melted for easy consumption, berries were available on bushes for families to feast on, and the weather was far more tolerable on their feet.

I felt like a scientist! I’d discovered a theory for Andy to work on. Up to that point, I had not researched hibernation in humans, current or ancient.

I did a bit of research and guess what? I’d reinvented the wheel. In fact, an article in New Scientist described researchers working on ways to place astronauts into hibernation while they are flying to Mars and beyond. Space travel would be so much cheaper and easier if energy, food, water, and boredom could be conserved through deep sleep for long-distance space travelers.

Scientists based their true-life studies of futuristic hibernation on findings in the bones of early humans in northern Spain that showed inconsistent bone growth throughout the year. The skeletons of bears show the same inconsistency due to their hibernation.

Now I must re-focus and re-write Andy’s work. He’s still going to be a sleep researcher because he’s motivated by his wife’s sleepwalking.

I’ve just started this new Nikki mystery and I’m already loving it. Also, it’s set in the mountains of northern New Mexico, where Andy finds lots of bears sleeping in caves.

***

I might fly to Mars if I could sleep most of the way!

Kathryn Lane writes mystery and suspense novels and draws deeply from her experiences growing up in a small town in Mexico as well as her work and travel in over ninety countries around the globe. Her award-winning Nikki Garcia Mystery Series features a strong female protagonist whose private investigative work often takes her to foreign countries.

Photo Credits:

Reinvent the Wheel – Pinterest

Sleeping Bear – Atapuerca article, La Vanguardia

Neanderthal – Neanderthal Museum, Mettmann, Creative Commons

European Space Agency astronaut sleeping in Bag – European Space Agency

 

 

A Spark that Inspires a Novel

/in , , , , , , /by

A miniscule thought that crosses my mind or an article I’ve read in a newspaper can light up like a distant sparkling star and inspire a story. If the spark grows and gains momentum, the concept might become a novel.

The spark in Revenge in Barcelona (my Nikki Garcia Mystery #3), was the city itself, its unique architecture, colorful history, rich culture, physical beauty, and its independent-minded people. The spark grew in my mind until I knew that Nikki should experience action, mystery, and danger in Barcelona.

The process of following a spark of inspiration is similar for many writers. Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, was inspired by a trip to Pamplona, Spain, to witness the running of the bulls and bullfights at the week-long San Fermín festival. He’d intended to write a non-fiction book about bullfighting, which had become a passion for him. Instead, the book became fiction based on Hemingway and his friends. In it, he explored the themes of love and death, a total reversal of what he’d originally intended.

This reversal of original intention happens to many authors of fiction, me included. The spark starts out with one concept, and it morphs into a totally different one. Yet the original spark, such as Hemingway’s bullfights, are often woven into the novel either as a theme or subplot, while the full storyline becomes much broader, richer, more scintillating.

Last week, I started my 5th Nikki Garcia mystery. The spark that lit up my imagination was a belt buckle that a man was wearing. It featured a mule.

I knew at that moment that I had to weave a mule or two into Nikki’s next novel. And where can I put a few mules? In a wilderness adventure, of course!

***

What sparks your imagination?

 

All photos are used in an editorial or educational manner.

Photo credits:

Sagrada Familia Steeples – Kathryn Lane

The Belt Buckle with a Mule – Pinterest