Welcome to my world, a place where memories and imagination dance.
Recent News
Our story is getting ready for the big screen! Take a peek at the screenplay treatment. Many thanks to Voyage Media for getting the ball rolling.
NEW ARRIVAL!
From time to time you see them, stories of homes that someone gave away for free. Other days you see a television or newspaper clipping about an individual hoisting a house and moving it. Obsession with an old house becomes a life’s work. Into Dark Corridors: A Tale of Hands, Heart, and Home tells the story of a Los Angeles treasure and the community that made it happen.
Kirkus Review
Hood recounts how she restored a derelict house in 1980s Los Angeles in this debut memoir.
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She fills her stories with vivid details, and she often employs a humorous tone as she tries to make light of her complicated situation; to that end, many of the work’s short chapters have amusing titles, such as “Ghost Workers” or “Painting the Lady.” The book includes color photographs, taken by Hood and her ex-husband, which drive home the house’s transformation. The narration is captivating throughout, and in the second and third parts of the book, some chapters are told from the point of view of Chet, an actor who, as the reader learns, will become Hood’s second husband.
An often engaging remembrance of a challenging journey into renovation and self-renewal.
In the Beginning
In the pile of Christmas gifts in 1960 was a pretty white leatherette journal, with gold letters 1961. Books were my favorite gifts, but this book was blank.
“What is this for?”
“You write in it. Tell it things you can’t tell anyone else. When there’s a secret inside of you, this is the place to keep it safe. This is for your stories.”
The completed journal lay in a drawer, framed my first book, Off the Tracks: A Beatnik Family Journey. That year proved a bumpy ride for the children who were towed along behind a mother who decided to drop everything and follow her lover for a year of riding the rails in Europe, no tickets. The memories of other adults, mother’s love letters, Beatnik party tapes filled out a child’s impressions.
Over the years five filing cabinets of family journals, photos, letters, notes, and press articles collected at my home. People died, but the past lived on. Eccentric characters and endeavors existed in rolled-up papers and notebooks.
My estranged father mailed us ten pages of notes in 2002. A historical novel emerged, Islands of Deception: Lying with the Enemy. Outrageous reality shed light on two adults who accused each other of lies for sixty years, screamed their secrets in Dutch. Truth lay underneath their stories.
So, about that home…
Journals
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The Talking Dead
Are you listening? The voices beyond the veil are many – pleading, guiding, advising, sometimes warning us. At times they come through very clearly, almost like an email. Other nights it’s a flash, static, or just a feeling. Sadness, fear, even anger may come through – unfinished business. The gentlest of ghosts remind us to spend these autumn days in quiet, a time to reflect on deep love that...
Dreams We See
In Islands of Deception: Lying with the Enemy, the main character changes his identity. The first step is to convert to Christianity and find a community. I have no idea what my dad might have actually done about conversion because he never admitted his original background. It seems that he was reinventing himself into a man he would want to be. Night after night I experienced dreams telling...
Real People & Imaginary Friends
As a Historical Fiction novelist, I’m constantly blending facts and imaginary scenes. For me, the bits just tumble around like marbles in my head. Then I had my first conversations with readers. Readers came up to me asking, “What is real, and what did you make up?” The novel Islands of Deception: Lying with the Enemy is an espionage story based on my father’s notes. The key events are true....