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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Intimate Moments
Our most intimate thoughts and experiences are often expressed in our characters. They are our closest confidantes, reminding us of loved ones, people who have hurt us, and sometime, ourselves. Significant events in their lives matter to us, or we would just quit reading. So what brings a reader into your story? Is it the portrayal of a major life event, such as a bride walking down...
What is Imagination?
How do dreams and imagination tell a story? I wanted a very quiet and confining opening to Islands of Deception, something that would provide a stark contrast between the security of life in Holland and the perils of being a spy in the…
OUTRAGEOUS REALITY
I’ve been fascinated by epics since I was a little girl – captured by the imagery in the Odyssey and later in the vast tales of love and war that define us. In many cases these stories exist as fragments, or wisps of air blown through…