Every year at this time, someone figures out I’m a Leo and responds by saying, “Well that explains it.”

Explains WHAT?

See I never put much stock in the stars. I mean I like stars, they are beautiful, especially on a clear night while I’m lounging in a spa with a glass of wine….

Wait did that sound, Leo-ish?

But my point is that I just don’t rely on a day of birth to determine who I am. I don’t consult psychics because I believe in making my own destiny. I don’t pay attention to what someone else tells me to be.

This year a friend realized I’m a Leo and said to me by email. “Oh that explains it!”

I replied, “That I’m stubborn and opinionated?”

“No, strong.”

Cool! I like that.

But it got me thinking about signs and romance. What if, after all these years I married the wrong astrological sign? What if I just IMAGINED that I’ve been so happy with my husband for almost 25 years now? Maybe there’s a reason men use that bone ass line in bars, “What’s your sign?” In fact, I just found out my husband didn’t even know my astrological sign, or more likely, didn’t remember it. (For the record, I don’t care—stuff like that doesn’t matter to me.) I found out by this conversation.

Me, “I put both our astrological signs into Google today. Leo and Aries.”

Hubby looking mildly surprised, “You’re a Leo?”

Me, “Follow the point. And yes I’m a Leo. You’re an Aries.”

Hubby shrugs, trying to see the baseball game on TV while acting interested, “And?”

Me with a grin cause I know I’m going to get his attention, “This is the cool part. I found out that we’re HOT together. Aries and Leo’s have long and very passionate sex lives.”

Hubby forgets about baseball game grins smugly, “Oh yeah? Good to know.”

Me laughing, “Yeah, who knew?”

Hubby with the smile I love so much, “We knew.”

Yeah. We do know. Wow what a relief! It turns out we don’t need to follow the stars, just our hearts (don’t groan—Leo’s are supposed to be romantic!).

If you’re curious, these are the traits of a Leo: Generous, Warmhearted, Creative, Enthusiastic, Broadminded, Expansive, Faithful and Loving. And Pompous, patronizing, bossy, interfering, dogmatic and intolerant.

I think I resemble some of those, but I believe it is life experiences, our choices and what we believe in and stand for make us unique people with layers and textures. It’s those things that make us interesting, that make us real.

I bet you think I’m going to make the obvious comparisons to creating characters. Nah—I hate being so predictable.

Instead, I’m going to ask: Do you know your astrological sign and do you think you resemble it?

And I don’t just mean what you learned in school or on the job. Example: My Kensington editor told me a long time ago what she liked most about my writing is that it’s juicy. “You have that juicy family.” I immediately got what she meant. We Tabke’s are a lusty bunch. My stories are about strong characters who stand for something and don’t fall for everything. It gets us in trouble. Yet we will never change. It’s who we are, it’s part of our DNA.

I’ve mentioned before, hubby is alpha. My boys are alpha, my girls are girlie girls. They like to be treated as such, but they also demand to be treated as an equal. Hmm, sounds like somebody I know. After almost 25 years of marriage hubby and I still hold hands in the grocery store and he will more often then not, cop a feel in the frozen food section. We laugh, we battle, and we make up. Our lives are full. Juicy.

It’s funny though, my husband will tell you I am the most unromantic romance writer out there. And if you look at my heroines you will see, while they are smart, passionate women, they aren’t romantic in the classic senses. But they love hard and will fight to the end for their man.

As far as technically writing what I know, while I know a little about a lot of things, when it comes right down to it, there are only a few things I know a lot about. Cop stuff. Herpetology (although I could use a brush up there), football, running a successful business, motivation, cooking, and throwing a damn good party. Not much when it’s all boiled down. What I don’t know I research, but frankly, IMO research can only take you so far into a subject.

I read a lot of books with complicated plots where the protagonists have specialty jobs. I can tell when the author is writing what she knows or is going off research. I recently read a book by a #1 NY Times bestselling author. The book was set in an area I am very familiar with. And while she had the landmarks correct, she didn’t in my opinion have the energy of the people nailed. It wasn’t in the details. I lost interest in the book.

I think it would be really interesting to hear what everyone is really good at. And that brings me to my question: What do you know?
And before I forget, I want to mention that tomorrow the hubster will be guest blogging over at www.magicalmusings.com. I don’t want to give anything away, but if you read his blog you will, um, have a whole new perspective on man vs beast.

Now for something completely fun!

Last week I read this article in the Sacramento Bee about handwriting analysis. Ages ago, I’d read a book about the subject so I’ve always been loosely interested in the concept.

Before we go any further, I want you to handwrite the following (it’s a line from one of my books):

She’d called in every favor, stolen expensive equipment from FBI headquarters, and hacked into private companies all in what she feared was a futile effort to save Paige’s life.

Okay, done? Good.

So handwriting analysis is interesting–for example, a strong right slant says you’re impulsive and spontaneous, while a varying slant suggests you’re moody, have internal conflicts and are unpredictable. Your signature is your “public image” or the image you WANT to project publicly, while your handwriting is your “private image”–the way you really are. If your signature matches your handwriting, for example, you’re a “what you see is what you get” person.

There’s basic standards by which all handwriting is analyzed. From Crime Library:

The primary factors for analysis are divided into four categories:

1. Form — refers to the elements that comprise the shape of the letters, proportion, slant, angles, lines, retracing, connections, and curves
2. Line Quality — refers to the results from the type of writing instrument used, and the pressure exerted, along with the flow and continuity of the script
3. Arrangement — involves the spacing, alignment, formatting, and distinctive punctuation
4. Content — this is the spelling, phrasing, punctuation, and grammar

Handwriting analysis is used in many major cases, from the Lindbergh kidnapping to the Green River Killings to the BTK murders. Often it’s used to weed out copycats or publicity seekers. Killers, like the Zodiac killer, used letters to taunt police, but he also spurred a lot of fake letters (like who would WANT to be a serial killer?)

If you want to check out a creepy analysis of John Wayne Gacy’s signature, go here. For Walter Railey, the analyst said here:

The outstanding characteristic of this writing is its control and tension, indicated by the writer’s struggle to maintain verticality, angularity in letter forms and along the baseline, plus narrow letters, all revealing self-control and emotional repression, and the compulsive personality type.

So now the fun. One of the points to analyze in the Sacramento Bee article is how you make your letter “f.”

I thought this was really cool. What the writer said:

The standard lower-case cursive F you are taught in school has the same length and width and is a measure of your organization. If you make this perfect F, you are well-organized. But if the emphasis is on the upper loop, you plan better than you execute, while if the bottom one is bigger, you are better at action than planning.

My bottom loop is definitely bigger than my top loop. In fact, I have no top loop.

So I got to thinking: what if this is a reflection on whether we’re a plotter or not? I don’t plot–and my “f” shows it! What about you? Look at your “f” in the sentence you wrote and tell me what it most resembles. Big top loop? Are you a plotter? Big bottom loop? Are you a fly-by-nighter? Do you form perfectly balanced “f” loops? Maybe that means you’re balanced–you plot a little, but not too much, and you get the book done.

So share your “f” and then head on over to a new, motivational writer’s website called The Write Attitude and let us know what you think of the video! Enjoy

A friend sent this to me recently. I don’t think I’ve ever read a better, more succinct way to describe the vocation of writing, and I wanted to share it with all of you. It was Madeleine L’Engle’s acceptance speech for the Newbery Award, written in 1963—-

August, 1963

For a writer of fiction to have to sit down and write a speech, especially a speech in which she must try to express her gratitude for one of the greatest honors of her life, is as difficult a task as she can face. She can no longer hide behind the printed page and let her characters speak for her; she must stand up in front of an illustrious group of librarians, editors, publishers, writers, feeling naked, the way one sometimes does in a dream. What, then does she say? Should she merely tell a series of anecdotes about her life and how she happened to write this book? Or should she try to be profound and write a speech that will go down in the pages of history, comparable only to the Gettysburg Address? Should she stick to platitudes that will offend no one and say nothing? Perhaps she tries all of these several times and then tears them up, knowing that if she doesn’t her husband will do it for her, and decides simply to say some of the things she feels deeply about. I can’t tell you anything about children’s book that you don’t already know. I’m not teaching you; you’re teaching me. All I can tell you is how Ruth Gagliardo’s telephone call about the Newbery Medal has affected me over the past few years.

One of my greatest treasures is the letter Mr. Melcher wrote me, one of the last letters he wrote, talking about the medal and saying he had just read A Wrinkle in Time and had been excited about it. This was one of the qualities that made him what he was: the ability to be excited. Bertha Mahony Miller in her article, “Frederic G. Melcher — A Twentieth Century John Newbery,” says that “The bookstore’s stock trade is …explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly…” I like here to think of another Fred, the eminent British scientist, Fred Hoyle, and his theory of the universe, in which matter is continuously being created, with the universe expanding but not dissipating. As island galaxies rush away from each other into eternity, new clouds of gas are condensing into new galaxies. As old stars die, new stars are being born. Mr. Melcher lived in this universe of continuous creation and expansion. It would be impossible to overestimate his influence on books, particularly children’s books; impossible to overestimate his influence on the people who read books, write them, get enthusiastic about them. We are all here tonight because of his vision, and we would be less than fair to his memory if we didn’t resolve to keep alive his excitement and his ability to grow, to change, to expand.

I am of the first generation to profit by Mr. Melcher’s excitement, having been born shortly before he established the Newbery award, and growing up with most of these books on my shelves. I learned about mankind from Hendrik Willem van Loon; I traveled with Dr. Dolittle, created by a man I called Hug Lofting; Will James taught me about the West with Smoky; in boarding school I grabbed Invincible Louisa the moment it came into the library because Louisa May Alcott had the same birthday that I have, and the same ambitions. And now to be a very small link in the long chain of those writers, of the men and women who led me into the expanding universe, is both an honor and a responsibility. It is an honor for which I am deeply grateful to Mr. Melcher and to those of you who decided A Wrinkle in Time was worthy of it.

The responsibility has caused me to think seriously during these past months on the subject of vocation, the responsibility added to the fact that I’m working now on a movie scenario about a Portuguese nun who lived in the mid-1600′s, had no vocation, was seduced and then betrayed by a French soldier of fortune, and, in the end, through suffering, came into a true vocation. I believe that every one of us here tonight has as clear and vital a vocation as anyone in a religious order. We have the vocation of keeping alive Mr. Melcher’s excitement in leading young people into an expanding imagination. Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe, that we can help our children avoid by providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.”

So how do we do it? We can’t just sit down at our typewriters an turn out explosive material. I took a course in college on Chaucer, one of the most explosive, imaginative, and far-reaching in influence of all writers. And I’ll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote in a white heat of fury, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these thing. That isn’t the way people write.”

I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn’t done deliberately.

Do I mean, then, that an author should sit around like a phony Zen Buddhist in his pad, drinking endless cups of espresso coffee and waiting for inspiration to descend upon him? That isn’t the way the writer works, either. I heard a famous author say once that the hardest part of writing a book was making yourself sit down at the typewriter. I know what he meant. Unless a writer works constantly to improve and refine the tools of his trade they will be useless instruments if and when the moment of inspiration, of revelation, does come. This is the moment when a writer is spoken through, the moment that a writer must accept with gratitude and humility, and then attempt, as best he can, to communicate to others.

A writer of fantasy, fairly tale, or myth must inevitably discover that he is not writing out of his own knowledge or experience, but out of something both deeper and wider. I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him. I know that this is true of A Wrinkle in Time. I can’t possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice. And it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.

Very few children have any problem with the world of the imagination; it’s their own world, the world of their daily life, and it’s our loss that so many of us grow out of it. Probably this group here tonight is the least grown-out-of-it group that could be gathered together in one place, simply by the nature of our work. We, too, can understand how Alice could walk through the mirror into the country on the other side; how often have our children almost done this themselves? And we all understand princesses, of course. Haven’t we all been badly bruised by peas? And what about the princess who spat forth toads and snakes whenever she opened her mouth to speak, and the other whose lips issued forth pieces of pure gold? We all have had days when everything we’ve said has seemed to turn to toads. The days of gold, alas, don’t come nearly as often.

What a child doesn’t realize until he is grown is that in responding to fantasy, fairly tale, and myth he is responding to what Erich Fromm calls the one universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture. Many Newbery books are from this realm, beginning with Dr. Dolittle; books on Hindu myth, Chinese folklore, the life of Buddha, tales of American Indians, books that lead our children beyond all boundaries and into the one language of all mankind.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth… The extraordinary, the marvelous thing about Genesis is not how unscientific it is, but how amazingly accurate it is. How could the ancient Israelites have known the exact order of an evolution that wasn’t to be formulated for thousands of years? Here is a truth that cuts across barriers of time and space.

But almost all of the best children’s books do this, not only an Alice in Wonderland, a Wind in the Willow, a Princess and the Goblin. Even the most straightforward tales say far more than they seem to mean on the surface. Little Women, The Secret Garden, Huckleberry Finn — how much more there is in them than we realize at a first reading. They partake of the universal language, and this is why we turn to them again and again when we are children, and still again when we have grown up.

Up on the summit of Mohawk Mountain in northwest Connecticut is a large flat rock that holds the heat of the sun long after the last of the late sunset has left the sky. We take our picnic up there and then lie on the rock and watch the stars, one pulsing slowly into the deepening blue, and then another and another and another, until the sky is full of them.

A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

*This usage granted with permission of the American Library Association.

Copyright © 2007 Crosswicks, Ltd. (Madeleine L’Engle, President)

All one can say to this is, “Amen, sistah, amen….”