I have been wanting to create one of a kind knitted accessories based on the characters from my Ty Merrick Novels. These novels are sci-fi/mysteries and Ty Merrick is a district marshal in the near future, where there’s poverty, rationing, and rampant superstition as well as a maximum of government corruption, control and greed. Ty’s a rationalized lycanthrope. She doesn’t grow hair or fangs but she does change. Along with her partner, Andy LaRue, and her fractious lover, Dr. Gibson, she hunts down killers in some very bizarre situations. Ty’s roommate is an old woman named Baba, who is the grandmother type with a mouth like a sailor. She collects ‘trash’, bits of fiber, ribbon, rags, yarn, even wire, to weave blankets.

It seems only fitting that my store feature knitted items that Baba might make. Only these clothes aren’t made from wire or rags. Instead, they’re fashioned from handspun yarn, silk, lace, ribbon, beads and baubles.

This first scarf will appear in Ty’s section, made from a corespun batt bought from Jazzturtle Creations. I’ve added silk, lace, and even sequins. The batts are full of lovely additions, from firestar to mohair to silk noil. The picture below is a scarf that will also include danglies--because Baba would never make anything that didn't have charms and power to it.

December 24, 1974, Quantico Naval Hospital, Quantico, Virginia

I looked through the thick glass windows of the double doors. In the courtyard beyond, I watched the blades of a military helicopter slowly spin to life. The thrump, thrump, thrump vibrated the doors but I couldn't actually hear the noise. I did hear a nurse walk by behind me, her shoes squeaking on the cracked linoleum floor.

Movement caught my eye as a door on the far side of the courtyard opened. Doctors, their lab coats flapping in the breeze of the rotating blades, pushed and pulled a wheeled gurney toward the chopper. The back end of the transport slowly lowered like the jaw of the whale that caught up Jonah.

I leaned against the doors and pressed my face to the glass, trying to see her. My mama. She was on that gurney and she was being taken to a better-equipped Naval hospital. I watched until the big green whale swallowed them up, watched as the helicopter slowly rose and then disappeared over the edge of the building. With a sigh, I turned back around. Here it was--Christmas Eve; I was sixteen years old, and alone.

When my mama--Mary Frances Sorrell DeMartino--was in her late twenties, she'd suffered from tuberculosis. She spent several months in a sanatorium just after WWII. She'd been 'cured' with the use of streptomycin. You would have thought that not being able to breathe would have been enough to set her on a path to a healthy lifestyle, but you would have been wrong. In those halcyon days of the 1950s, smoking cigarettes was a happy and accepted past time. So Mama smoked. And smoked. To the tune of three packs a day. I remember she used to say, "I don't smoke that much. They usually burn out in the ashtray." Unfortunately, not enough cigarettes burned out in the ashtray.

Mama spent one month to the day in the bigger, better Naval Hospital. When it didn't look like she'd be coming home any time soon, my dad and I bundled up the forgotten Christmas presents and took them to the hospital. We tried to laugh and tell jokes, but she was strangely quiet and tearful. It seems she'd gotten the news but didn't tell us straight away. She had lung cancer.

They decided to remove her left lung in hopes they could give her another six months. I kept telling myself that it would be all right. She was a fighter. But the day they took her to the operating theatre, I could see the fear in her eyes. I wonder if she could see the fear in mine.

The lung removal was a success, yet the news was bad. Her right lung was failing and the cancer had migrated to her heart and other organs. They placed her in a room with another dying woman and we waited some more. Six days went by and we were invited in to see her for a last time. She held my hand so tightly that day. It was like she tried to gather some of my life force and I would have gladly given her what I had. The hardest thing I have ever done is to let go of her hand. She died the next day, surrounded by doctors who wouldn't even allow us to be by her side as she made that final transition.

I've told you this sad story for one simple reason:

CIGARETTES KILL. PLEASE DON'T SMOKE.

I've had some health concerns since the beginning of the year and it took over three weeks to get an appointment with my doctor. (I am fine, by the way. Thanks for asking.) Towards the end of the three weeks, I had pretty much worked myself into a tizzy with the various outcomes that may have stemmed from this doctor's visit. One of my friends suggested I do the age old process of writing about it. Her idea was a good one.

I tried. I sat down numerous times before the computer and ended up checking email and lurking around Ravelry. I picked up a gorgeous notebook thinking I could pen a story and ended up doing Zentangles instead. No matter what I tried, I couldn't write about my feelings.

Emotion is interconnected with creativity, don't you think? Being sad, worried, or macabre melancholia doesn't do much for my sparks. Being joyous, happy or light of heart doesn't do much more for my sparks. I need a middle road--one not too bumpy in either direction. This dual nature of emotion and creativity may be indeed, why writers have often turned to drugs or to alcohol. Both substances have an equalizing effect that I suspect is necessary to pull words from the undulations of gray matter.

I don't do drugs or alcohol, so I used my time to create a spun and knitted scarf of my own design. It has the tactile qualities of silk, leather and lace and while I created it, I realized that my writing contains these 'feelings'. My stories have a vintage feel to them--in my own mind, at least. The language may not be Victorian, but the images I see are awash in sepia and as stained as spilled tea. I can't access these feelings when I'm too much of this or that. Like Goldilocks, I must be just right.

Now that I know I'm going to be all right, I can now return to a project that came to a screaming halt about a week ago. I'm ready to finish it.

"They" say you should spend New Year's Day doing what you hope to be doing all year long. I wrote today--all day--and it felt great! I also practiced my spinning and totally rutched it up, hosed my email program, and nearly overcooked the pork loin for dinner. I hope this last part is not a foreshadowing of the year to come. (I regularly burn dinner, so there's nothing new there.) Thomas would say I'm merely testing the limits of my stove. I have not one, but many resolutions and they're all secret longings that will probably never be dragged out and put on the coffee table. Still, that's okay. As long as I'm able to get words to pixels and then to pages, I'm as happy as a clam.

I would like to win the lottery, though. Thomas just told me not to hold my breath.

Just a quickie to let you know that Manjinn Moon is now available as a Kindle Edition and soon to be available as an oversized trade paperback. Manjinn Moon is the third installment in my Ty Merrick Mysteries. I hope you'll get your copy today! Go to: http://www.amazon.com/MANJINN-MOON-ebook/dp/B0032AM60W

"As a violent hurricane heads for District One, three agents from the Office of Intelligence have massive strokes--simultaneously. Coincidence? Not a chance. When Ty investigates, she uncovers an assassin with strange powers and deadly cunning: the Manjinn.

Now time is running out. The Manjinn has kidnapped the man Ty loves--the only man who knows the true nature of her lycanthropy. Outside, the storm rages. Inside, Ty edges to the brink of sanity. And the ultimate game with the Manjinn begins..."

"The perfect blending of mystery and science fiction."-- The Midwest Book Review

"A refreshing change from mysteries where the SF is merely window dressing." -- Locus