I’d like to welcome Skye Alexander to the blog for #ThisorThatThursday!
Favorite things to do when you have free time: Eat lunch or drink wine with friends, take a walk in the countryside, go to art galleries, and of course read.
The thing you’ll always move to the bottom of your to do list: Housework
Hardest thing about being a writer: Spending so much time alone, but it’s a necessary evil in this job.
Easiest thing about being a writer: I know some writers don’t like doing research, but I enjoy it. I learn so much and get wonderful ideas that I can incorporate into my stories. For example, while researching the sixth book in my Lizzie Crane series, I learned about “poison damsels,” usually slave girls who from infancy were fed minute doses of poison so that they built up an immunity to it. However, the poison in their bodies made them dangerous to men who had sex with them, so they were used by powerful men in ancient India and parts of Europe as human weapons to assassinate their owners’ enemies. Fascinating, right?
Something you’re really good at: Astrology and tarot. I’ve been an astrologer for fifty years––I’ve even helped police in seven states solve crimes using horary astrology––and I’ve been a tarot reader and artist for twenty-five years. In several of my books I use tarot readings to plant clues and foreshadow coming events.
Something you’re really bad at: Handling my finances. I’ve never even balanced my checkbook.
Something you wanted to be when you were a kid: Even before I started school, I knew I wanted to be an artist and writer. I began telling stories before I could actually read or write, and I still have drawings I did when I was three that are easily recognizable as various kinds of animals. Fortunately, I’ve been able to spend my life doing what I always wanted to do and to make a good living at it. I’m very grateful.
Something you do that you never dreamed you’d do: Live on a cattle ranch in Texas, which I’ve done for the last nineteen years.
Something you wish you could do: Sing and play a variety of musical instruments. I can’t carry a tune, and although I tried piano, guitar, violin, flute, and harmonica none of them took. (I’m not bad on an African djembe, though.) My protagonist Lizzie Crane, a soprano in a NYC jazz band during the 1920s called The Troubadours, fulfills that role for me.
Something you wish you’d never learned to do: Actually, I can’t think of anything I wish I’d never learned to do, only things I wish I’d learned to do better. My quest for knowledge has led me in all sorts of directions, from art and writing to renovating antique houses to metaphysical and spiritual practices. Every day I learn something, and I hope to keep on learning for the rest of my life.
Favorite places you’ve been: New England, where I lived for 31 years. Old England, especially Glastonbury and Stonehenge. Ireland and Scotland, most of all the Isle of Skye for which I’m named. Barcelona, Rome, Florence, the Greek Isles. New Orleans.
Places you never want to go to again: New York’s subways. Mississippi in the summertime. Any NASCAR race.
Most daring thing you’ve ever done: Hitchhiked around Europe for six months when I was twenty-one.
Something you chickened out from doing: Skydiving.
The most magical thing that happened to you: I liked your questions about the funniest thing and the most embarrassing thing that happened to me and tried to answer them, but nothing very funny or embarrassing has happened to me. So, I decided instead to share one of the most magical/romantic things that happened to me and, additionally, one of the scariest. First the most magical: I was hitchhiking through Yugoslavia in 1971, and a young man picked me up. When I told him I was on my way to Greece, he said he had a friend staying on the island of Mykonos. He sketched a map on the back of an envelope and wrote down his friend’s name.
A few weeks later after a series of synchronicity events, I ended up in Mykonos and found the envelope at the bottom of my backpack. Following the hand-drawn map, I walked four miles from the port along a dirt path where (at that time) no cars drove and there was no electricity. The first person I met was the young man’s friend, a white guy who’d been born in South Africa in the late 1940s. He left when he was eighteen due to the racial situation there and walked all the way through the continent. He’d been traveling the world for seven years when I met him, with only the possessions that he could carry on his back. I lived with him for four magical days in a cave overlooking the Agean Sea, before he journeyed on. It was the happiest time of my life.
One of the scariest things that happened to you: In 2005, I moved from the Boston area to live on a cattle ranch in the heart of Texas. Being a city girl, I didn’t know diddly about bulls. One afternoon while walking in a pasture the size of five football fields, two longhorns charged me across that vast, open space. If you’ve never seen these monsters, they have horns longer than my arms and they weigh about 2,000 pounds. Plus, they’re cantankerous and unpredictable.
With no place to run, no place to hide, no cellphone reception, and no other people anywhere, all I could do was yell and wave my arms at the beasts, trying to scare them away. The two longhorns stopped a couple feet in front of me, eyeing me curiously. Praying as hard as I could, I held out my hands and placed a palm on the forehead of each bull. I hadn’t a clue how I’d extricate myself from this situation––maybe I wouldn’t. The bulls started knocking at my arms with their horns and I realized that even if they didn’t mean any harm, they could gore me accidentally. I don’t know how long I stood there like that before I saw an old pickup truck driving across the field. I waved and called out to the driver, who stopped long enough for me to jump into the back of the truck. That night, I went out to dinner and ate steak.
Best piece of advice you received from another writer: Don’t use variations of the verb “to be” more than a few times per chapter, and never start a sentence with “There was” unless somebody’s holding a gun to your head. Her advice alerted me to the importance of active verbs and how they enliven my prose. Something you would tell a younger you about your writing: The writing life isn’t easy and the really good, successful writers work very hard at it. Believe in yourself and don’t give up.
Recommendations for curing writer’s block: When I get stuck, I usually do research. Because I write historical mysteries, I might Google “what happened” on a particular date, which sometimes yields interesting info. I did this when writing the fifth book in my Lizzie Crane series When the Blues Come Calling (scheduled for 8/25 release) to see what happened in Greenwich Village, NY (where my protagonist lives) on June 11, 1926. I discovered that a bohemian tearoom in the Village was raided that night. Its Jewish proprietor, who went by the name Eve Adams, was arrested for having written a book titled Lesbian Love. The police imprisoned her in a workhouse and authorities eventually deported her to Poland where she died in a concentration camp. Eve’s story became part of my book.
