Hello, friends!

daleyrose
Jul 28, 2016
5 min read

Welcome to my first EVER blog post! I am tremendously happy to have you here!

(Can I declare this my first blog post? I’m not sure if that’s a cool thing to do, but I’m all about transparency, so here we go. My first blog post!)

I know that we are going to have some good times. Trust me. But first, let me tell you a bit about who I am, where I’m coming from, what I know, and what I hope to share. And we can start to get to know each other.

Who am I?

I’m an author-in-progress, trained as an architect, now spending most of my waking hours in the higher education realm of Design - teaching, researching, and writing. (Notice that’s with a capital “D.” I’ll get back to it.) I deal with faculty, students, and practitioners in the areas of architecture, landscape architecture, industrial design, graphic design and even fine arts. Despite all that, my heart belongs to architecture. Honest and truly.

Scratch that. My heart actually belongs to writing. Hence me here, doing this.

That being said, and with the utmost respect to my dear, dear, BEST friends in the architecture field (and my husband, because of course I went and married one), architects are unique individuals. So weird. Like seriously. There is endless supporting evidence for this, and I will be happy to share examples with you as time goes on. And discuss. And laugh.

What do I do now?

That’s actually a good question, and the answer would probably change depending on who you ask. I won’t go into the gory details now, but one of the primary tasks of my day job is to write things, so I write. Currently, my wealth of writings have to do with not-so-fun things like research methodologies, grant proposals, and findings. (Me, at work. >>>)

Yuck.

So I’m making the transition to writing more fun things - but totally rooted in my design world experiences - and this is where I hope you’ll join me. My fiction work will have its foundation in experiences, stories, and the like from my time in architecture. And from my friends still in design. But I’m spinning these experiences into Women’s Fiction, because it’s more fun if you throw in some mishaps, romance, potions, and even a potato gun - so that’s my general plan.

What will I share?

A whole bunch of goodness and laughs, that’s what. And some fun stories along the way. I’m going to try to provide you with posts in five areas, or buckets. Those five buckets are:

(1) Transitions between creative fields.

Writers and designers are both creative. I know there are some fascinating similarities, and some equally interesting differences. I’m going to dig into some of those, because I’ll tell you - this whole writing thing is really interesting from the perspective of someone trained as a designer.

(2) The culture of architecture and design. There are some real gems in the design world that are just begging to be unearthed and made fun of. I swear to you, architects actually make fun of themselves (at least the ones I hang out with - the others wouldn’t be reading this), so it’s ok. I promise. There won’t be any irate architect mobs coming after me, so certainly you’ll be safe, dear reader. I may even invite some of my architecture pals to help out on occasion with posts. I am so excited about that idea!

(3) Cool design. I’ll share legitimate design articles, images, and information that is just cool, inspiring, or great fodder for ideas for your settings. There’s so much there, and the field is evolving. There is some seriously cool stuff going on, and these cool things can make their way into your works-in-progress, big idea boards, and or your lives.

(4) Book reviews. I’m a writer, yes, but I’m also an avid reader. (I may or may not have been known to read at really, really long stoplights.) I read Women’s Fiction, a combo of that and Mystery, some Paranormal Romance, regular Romance, and those kinds of things. My to-read list is about four miles long, and growing every day. I hope to share my thoughts on books as I get through them! And what I would REALLY love to do is find books with designers as the main character, because I love to see how they’re portrayed. These caricatures are awesome. I’ve already got one under my belt, where the main character is an eccentric female architect that essentially went into hiding, and I’m anxious to share my thoughts with you!

(5) Miscellany. Certainly there will be other things, like travel and daily experiences that I’ll want to share, so I’m just going to create this catch-all bucket for that stuff. For example, I was recently in Lisbon and have some thoughts (and great pictures) from the perspectives of both a writer and an architect. There’s so much!

Where am I going with this?

That is always a good question, because I’ve noticed that where I’m planning to go is rarely where I end up. But we have to start somewhere, so here I am. I’m currently working on two (or maybe three) works of Women’s Fiction, and I’m hoping that you all will like where they’re headed. And maybe stick with me to see them finished.

My first work-in-progress is using the working title of Form, Function and Frozen Dead Guys, and I’m finishing the first draft and starting to edit. It’s about a young architect that returns home to Ohio from Texas after the holidays to lead a snow castle competition, at the request of her social butterfly mother. Trying to avoid most people from home but failing miserably, and hating the bone-chilling cold, she and an old friend discover a high school acquaintance dead in the park within thirty-six hours of her arrival. With endless pictures of her in the dead man's car, her brother missing, and a shotgun-toting Gram with special gifts at her side, Tess hustles to solve the murder, find her brother, and pull off a successful snow castle competition, all while trying to figure out how - and where - she can find happiness on a blank page.

The other two, I will leave for later. I can’t reveal everything in my first post. I need a little something to keep you coming back!

So that’s me. I hope you aren’t scared away by this first post and my enthusiasm, and will visit my Facebook page, Twitter (which I’m just trying to get a handle on), and my blog often. I hope to post something every other week for a while - - you know, what with my whole day job thing and all. But I’ve got some posts already planned out, so I’m good for a while.

(This really isn't me, but I'm totally going to take a picture like this for the next post. I love it.)

Before you go, please let me know a little about you. Do you have a favorite building ? There are some AMAZING things out there, and I’d love to hear about them. Let me know in the comments. Your favorites might make their way into my books!! (Seriously - there’s a snow castle competition and the teams are going to have to build famous buildings. Your favorite could be one!)

Thank you all for reading! I look forward to seeing you back!