Day 28: Mystery

Today’s prompt is actually from the Capture Your 365 prompt list for October.  I decided to go with this over the Skillshare prompt as it is Mystery. The Skillshare prompt is Your Friends, which is one that I’m not able to actually do since most of my friends don’t live in the same place as I do. Mystery is a little more doable as I have an entire bookshelf full of it.

Mystery  novels have been a favorite genre of mine as far back as I can remember. I remember as a child going to our public library, picking up a Nancy Drew novel, pulling up a dinosaur chair and getting lost while my mom browsed the shelves looking for a book for herself.  From Nancy Drew, I moved on to the Sherlock Holmes novels, and those were the stories that hooked me as a mystery genre fan. I have multiple copies and sets of these novels, one a pop up version of A Scandal In Bohemia and The Blue Carbuncle that was given to me as a gift.

As an adult, I started working at the public library for the town we lived in, and it was there I discovered the novels of Sue Grafton. The first book in the series, A Is For Alibi was released in 1982, the latest, Y Is For Yesterday came out in 2017. I have every novel in the alphabet series. As she passed away in December of 2017,  the alphabet ends with Y.  A couple of shelves below beloved Sue, is the ever popular James Patterson, and I have enough of his novels to take up multiple shelves. His writing is so detailed and intriguing, it’s hard to put down one of his books once you’ve started it.

I could go on and on about the different mystery novels I have and authors I enjoy, but instead I will recommend that you take some time and go to your library or local bookstore and spend some time among the shelves and discover some of the brilliant and ingenious books and authors that will leave you on the edge of your seat, hooking your chapter after chapter. I will forever be a fan and lover of great mysteries and spend time in their pages whenever I get the chance.

 

Day 13: Self Help

Self help is a subject I had to ponder for a bit as I had to reflect on what it really is for me. I am the type of person that tends to put themselves on the back burner to make sure everyone and everything else is taken care of first. When I sat and thought about, the two things that have always been what I turn to when I need to decompress, or uplifting or to relax are books and music. Throw in a nice cab sav and we’re cookin’ with gas.

Music has always been a constant in my life. My mother told me that I was singing before ever started talking. And while I do enjoy singing, it was never a passion to the point that I wanted to pursue it professionally. As far back as I can remember, there was always music playing in our house, on vinyl and my mother always played a variety of genres, so we grew up well rounded. At the age of 6, Heart was my favorite band and you could hear me rocking to Barracuda with the Wilson sisters. Saturday mornings were set aside for house cleaning and Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band was frequently played for that. Everything from Alvin Bishop’s Calling All Cows to Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA came across our speakers.

Growing up in the 80’s we were exposed to a plethora of fantastic music and in our little town, I was the queen of the hair bands. My first concert was Def Leppard and Europe and I remember vividly to this day. Tonight I will be going to the first concert I’ve been to in a while and I am beyond excited as it will be my first A cappella show to attend. I first saw Home Free when they were on the tv show The Sing Off and was blown away by their talent. There are a handful of singers who can stop me in my tracks where I have to just listen. Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Urs Buhler of Il Divo, Avi Kaplin, and both Austin Brown and Tim Foust of Home Free.

Music is powerful and can drive your emotions. This is demonstrated how it’s used in movies, commercials, at sporting events and can even further or change the mood of a listener, depending on what they choose to listen to.

While music brings me back to center, reading is my escape. I can go anywhere in any country in any century. My taste in books is as eclectic as my taste in music. Like with music, I have had a book in hand from my childhood. And again, like music, what genre I read is often determined by the mood I’m in. Currently I am in True Crime mode and while I don’t get to pick up one of my books as often as I would like, I do spend time in the children’s genre as my granddaughter is becoming a bookwork just like her grandmother. I will not apologize.

No matter what you do as a mode of self help, it is important to take some time to invest in yourself, doing some good to you. We live in a busy world and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down, so taking the time to purposefully slow down is something that we have to do on and individual basis and then we have to make the most of those “me moments”.

 

Day 12: Seasonal

The actual day 12 prompt is entitled “Your Sketchbook”, however I don’t sketch or journal so I opted to use one of the bonus prompts. As we are getting closer to Halloween, and it is a favorite holiday around this house, I decided to go with that one, but am already rolling around the many possibilities that I can go with this particular prompt.

With the exception of last year, we have always gone over the top decorating for Halloween and have done a different theme each year. This has resulted in us collecting decorative items and homemade props that we have stored in two different buildings. I will never run out of photo prop ideas for this holiday.

I did some playing with the flat lay layout before and after the breakfast photos, giving the creepier feels. The first flat lay photo I actually shot I call “Creepy Tea”, utilizing one of my favorite tea cups, my skull tea diffuser, dragon tea bag holder, lose tea and dried thistles from a Halloween flower arrangement my husband bought me a couple of years ago.  I knew in my mind that I wanted hard shadows in the photo because I wanted it to have that film noir feel and that you were fixing to sit down to tea with Alfred Hitchcock or Vincent Price. Out of all of the flat lay style photos I’ve done, it is my favorite.

The second flat lay shot was inspired of course by Edgar Allen Poe, one of my best-loved authors. While he is famous for The Raven and this poem is inspiration for tons of Halloween décor, his other poems and shorts stories are haunting and fantastic. He was in a class of his own and probably my favorite American Lit author. The one non Poe element in the photo is by an artist called Twisted Spiders.   These fantastic arachnids are made from any type of bead you can think of and come in multiple sizes as necklaces, pins and earrings.  This particular spider, whose bead reads “Enjoy the journey” was a perfect edition to this shot.

The third shot was a montage of different Halloween items that I pulled together for Halloween At Home. The idea of the shot was not to be creepy, more so spooky, family fun. I couldn’t help but include one of the Pop! action figures from The Walkind Dead that my granddaughter commandeered for some quirky fun.

Fall is our favorite season. The cooler weather, the changing of the leaves, trick-or-treating, corn mazes, the 31 days of Halloween. There is so much to capture with the camera, so much to experience each and every day.  And with a camera, you don’t have to be dictated by the calendar for a seasonal shot. Any day can be Halloween!