Tag Archive for: Noah’s Wife

Following a Rabbit —T. K. Thorne

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Writer, humanist,
          dog-mom, horse servant and cat-slave,
       Lover of solitude
          and the company of good friends,
        New places, new ideas
           and old wisdom.

 

 

 

 

I follow rabbit trails when I am writing because they often end up in the most unusual and interesting places.

Here are three tidbits I learned writing about an unnamed woman who was married to one of the most famous men on Earth:

*Written on stone, the oldest story known is from the Middle East (Babylon) and predates the Hebrew Bible. The Epic of Gilgamesh tells a tale with many parallels to the story of Noah and the flood. 

A man named Utnapishtim survived a flood that destroy the earth after being warned to build a boat and gather his family and animals because the gods were unhappy with mankind—not because of sin, but because they were too LOUD!  (Love it!) Utnapishtim sent out a dove (the ancient symbol of the Mother Goddess) to try and find dry land.

*The earliest known deity was female!  The role of the feminine in the divine was entwined with early Judaism and keeps reappearing throughout history.

*The explorer John Ballard got money from the U.S. government to hunt for the wreckage of a secret Russian submarine in order to pursue his true desire to find the wreck of the Titanic. He found both. He also discovered the remains of an ancient flooded settlement about two miles into the Black Sea, preserved because of a lack of oxygen in the depths.

Writing Noah’s Wife was an adventure (with many rabbit trails) that took four years. I don’t regret a minute. The characters are still in my mind and come alive every time someone picks up the book. Despite its controversial challenges to traditional interpretations, it won “Book of the Year” for Historical Fiction and—more importantly to me—readers continue to let me know how much they loved it.

 

Available as print book, e-book, or Audible book. Click on image.
T.K. is a retired police captain who writes Books, which, like this blog, go wherever her interest and imagination take her.  More at TKThorne.com.

 

The Eye of the Beholder —T.K. Thorne

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Writer, humanist,
          dog-mom, horse servant and cat-slave,
       Lover of solitude
          and the company of good friends,
        New places, new ideas
           and old wisdom.

Some things have confused me for a long time, such as why flowers are beautiful and spiders are not. 

What is beauty anyway? And is there any importance in asking or answering that question?
Obviously, there are some people who find spiders beautiful (yes, really), so the quality is not inherent in the object. I lost my father  after a long illness and was thinking about my loss while walking to the mailbox. A crop of slender blue wildflowers on the road’s edge caught my eye, their beauty an instantaneous salve to my grief.

How? Why?

Somewhere in the heart of a forest, an exquisite orchid is blooming, and no one is there to see it. Is it beautiful? No. Beauty is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder. Without the eye, it does not exist. The orchid exists, of course, but it is not “beauty” to the creatures that see or smell it. (I should caveat with “as far as we know,” because we are learning that our ideas of awareness and even intelligence may extend in some manner to the plant world and certainly to the animal world, but let us assume that the concept of “beauty” is a human construct. )

This means if no human notices the wildflowers and deems them beautiful, they are just wildflowers doing their thing.

A sense of responsibility follows this thought. 

Nature is harsh relentless change. It is “eat and be eaten.” A frog makes no distinction between a caterpillar and a butterfly as far as lunch is concerned.In our stellar neighborhood, two galaxies are colliding, gravitational forces ripping apart whatever life may have painstakingly evolved. Our own galaxy is destined to collide with another, our sun to die, our loved ones, ourselves, our species unless we figure out how to move to another galaxy.

We may learn that whales or elephants or other animals share our awareness of mortality, but again, as far as we know now, people are the only creatures to seek meaning to life, perhaps because of that awareness. It is a burden. It is a privilege. In this chaos of change we call life, humans seek meaning, personal meaning. 




The concept of beauty may be one of the unique perceptual structures of the human brain. Why did it evolve? Of what evolutionary value is it? Is it just that spiders pose a threat, so we instinctively recoil from them, while flowers pose no threat and may signal a source of food? Perhaps, but some people truly find spiders fascinating and beautiful. There are spider enthusiast groups. Honest. And I have to admit I found one that gleamed with gold on a spectacular web yesterday. So beauty is a learned thing.



Perhaps the concept of beauty is just an odd byproduct of the complexity of our minds, our thought processes. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it came into being to give us something we crave—meaning. 

I have been told that my book, Noah’s Wife, was “beautifully written.” This was welcome feedback, but puzzling. The story is told from the unique perspective of a young woman with what we now call Asperger’s Syndrome. She sees the world in literal terms. Looking at her straightforward words on the pages, I was befuddled at how they could be considered “beautiful.”

But perhaps it is not the words themselves, but the fact that they create meaning for some readers, truths about being human and that renders them beautiful in the same way that Picasso’s art is beautiful to some eyes. His paintings force us out of our typical perceptions, whispers in ways we may not be able to voice, even disturbs, but speaks the language of meaning and (some) find that beautiful, even in the harshness or starkness of his lines, just as some find beauty in abstract art or different types of music . . . or spiders.



Woman with Mandolin



Beauty is observable by all our senses, including our ability to see a beautiful act of kindness or a beautiful scientific formula. If we are uniquely capable of determining beauty, then we have a responsibility to see it, to open our eyes to it, to find meaning in it, our uniquely human meaning.


 T.K. is a retired police captain who writes Books that go wherever her interest and imagination take her.

What We Really Write About–by T.K. Thorne

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T.K. Thorne

      

        Writer, humanist,
           dog-mom, horse servant and cat-slave,
       Lover of solitude
           and the company of good friends,
        New places, new ideas
           and old wisdom.

  

       


Hi ya’ll!

 

With my first two words as a new member of the Stiletto Gang, I have given away that I am a Southern girl. Okay, I am . . . um . . . a bit past the dictionary definition of “girl,” but where I’m from, we are still girls no matter our age.


I never thought I’d be a member of a Stiletto Gang, as I never met a pair of high heels I didn’t run from, but here I am. There is much in my life I never thought I would be or do, such as becoming a police officer after graduating college. Actually, it was an accident (that lasted over two decades), but that is a post for another day. Today, I am introducing myself.


So here are some “fun facts” about me:

  • I’m a 4th degree black belt in the martial art of Aikido.


  • At age 8, I won a ribbon for being stubborn.


  • I dove the Great Blue Hole in Belize, the largest sea hole in the world.


  • As a rookie police officer, I had to devise a different way to hold a gun because my hands were too small.

  • 
I once had an M-16 rifle pointed at me while researching a book.


  • Frogs make me smile.


For as long as I can remember, I wanted to have adventures. I blame my Granny for inspiring that desire. She read Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to me long before I could read them for myself. For many years I decided the biggest adventure ev-er would be to meet aliens (the kind from outer space). Every night I checked out the back window to see if the spaceship had arrived to pick me up. I guess that is why, after life had twisted my path a few times, I picked up a gun and badge.


As you can imagine, being a police officer provided plenty of adventures and enriched my writing. I never met aliens, but I did encounter lots of strange people. Another way to say that—my experiences exposed me to a side of humanity I would never have otherwise encountered and deepened my understanding of human nature. And that, I truly believe, regardless of the genre, is the real essence of what we all write about—what it means to be human.

 


T.K. has written two award-winning historical novels, NOAH’S WIFE and ANGELS AT THE GATE, filling in the untold backstories of extraordinary unnamed women—the wives of Noah and Lot—in two of the world’s most famous sagas. The New York Post’s “Books You Should Be Reading” list featured her first non-fiction book, LAST CHANCE FOR JUSTICE, which details the investigators’ behind-the-scenes stories of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing case. Her next project is HOUSE OF ROSE, the first novel of a trilogy in the paranormal-crime genre. She loves traveling and speaking about her books and life lessons. T.K. writes at her mountaintop home near Birmingham, Alabama, often with two dogs and a cat vying for her lap. She blogs about “What Moves Me” on her website, TKThorne.com. Join her private newsletter email list and receive two free short stories at “TK’s Korner.”

 

P.S. After the holidays, my normal day to post will be the 4th Friday of each month. See y’all then!