Tag: birding

Help Me Pick the Cover Picture

Mae Martin book ten is now with my editor. I’ve even written the back cover copy.

Wounded Healer

The tenth Mae Martin Psychic Mystery

Blackmail, birdwatching, and out-of-body-travel.

A letter from Nashville gives Mae Martin hope that it’s safe to recover her psychic gift. The healing process is precarious, but it’s also urgent. A friend’s two elderly dogs are lost. Another friend’s former lover has vanished. The police think he left intentionally, but would a birder leave without his binoculars? His family fears the worst.

To learn his fate, Mae pushes her limits as a healer and seer, entering aspects of the spirit world she never knew existed—some beautiful, some dangerous. Will she find the missing man alive? Can she stop his enemies from finding him first? And what will the effort cost?

The Mae Martin Series

No murder, just mystery. Every life hides a secret, and love is the deepest mystery of all.

Now, it’s time to choose the cover. I’m fortunate to have a friend who does beautiful photography, Donna Catterick. Her moody shot of Turtleback Mountain graces Shadow Family, her picture of the elephant-shaped formation in Elephant Butte Lake is on the cover of Gifts and Thefts, and the cover of Chloride Canyon is a picture she took in that location. For this book, I needed a scene at the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge, and I needed birds.

I’ve narrowed my options down to these two. Imagine the whole thing wrapping as a paperback cover, and part of it cropped for an eBook. Which image do you prefer? Vote in the comments.

These next pics are bonus material, birds who have roles in the book. The cute little verdin has a cameo, while the curve-billed thrasher gets an action scene.

If you like Donna’s work, follow her photography blog Always Backroads. Before we met, I’d been following it, and she’d been reading my books. If you read my books, you know what Kenny would say. “The Universe lines things up.”

 

Bird Meditation

The mystery in the book I’m currently writing centers around a missing birder and the people who care about him. To enter the experience of my characters, I needed to learn more about birds. Learning facts is useful, but what’s even more meaningful is paying attention. I’m starting to understand why people become birders.

I discovered the small songbirds were quieter in Elephant Butte Lake Park on the trail in the middle of the desert than when I ran on a dirt road behind a nearby residential neighborhood. The further I went, the more songs I heard. Are the trees taller in this neighborhood? Do people feed the birds? Are there more predators in the park than in back yards? The park sounds different, full of Gambel’s quail and their single-note mews or squeaks and occasionally the loud, laughing calls of roadrunners.

On a recent evening the weather was beautiful, the end of a rare spring day without wind. I walked down to the Rio Grande, expecting that all the migratory birds would have left the river by now, but a scattered raft of coots still swam there, clacking and honking and grunting and beeping. A heron soared and circled without flapping its wings for much of its flight, even though, at an earth-level perspective, the air was still. It landed on the other side of the river a few bushes away from where a man was fishing. He acted excited when he caught a fish. The bird held perfectly still and did not catch a fish. Yet.

A coot flipped upside down and disappeared underwater for an incredible length of time. A red-winged black bird in a tree next to the river sang, and one answered from a tree in the wetland on the other side of the parking lot, trilling back and forth to each other. Birds in bushes along the hot ditch, where hot spring water from home tubs and spas empties into the river, were singing a chorus, a symphony. The extraordinary range of sounds silenced my mind. The human world has been a bit stressful lately. As I grew absorbed in the world of birds, everything else fell away, leaving only wings and feathers, swimming and flight, and music.