Heather's Blog

Monk was one of my all-time favorite television shows. I could hardly wait until the next episode would air. Each forty-minute shot of the former detective, obsessive compulsive consultant to the San Francisco Police Department acted like a salve on my exhausted soul.

Why?

Because he was like me. Or, rather, I am like him. And so are twenty percent of the human population.

Elaine Aron calls us the Highly Sensitive People. HSP’s for short. We chosen few are “flawed” in the most magnificent, if utterly trying and sometimes debilitating manner: We notice things.

We see and hear and smell and feel things that eighty percent of the oblivious humans on this planet completely ignore. They can ignore it – we can’t.

Because we are more “sensitive” to what goes on around us, we are prone to feeling overwhelmed. Imagine how you would feel if it was a hot day and you could smell every separate smell in a very crowded bus full of under-washed people while your eyes and ears were picking up the angry expression of the man two seats down, the bulge in the pants of mister weirdo three rows over, the frantic fidgeting and mewling sounds of the woman going through withdrawals standing near the door, the red eyes of the man who has obviously been crying and who is now wearing two wedding rings on his finger, and the traffic whizzing by just outside the door at rush hour. Imagine noticing all of these things with no drop in their intensity for a good forty-five minutes… while your feet ache beneath you, your stomach growls, and your head pounds.

You would probably feel rather miserable. You’d want to hug the man who lost his wife, give the drug addict a Valium, call the cops on Mr. Weirdo, and ask the angry man why he was so angry. Maybe talking would allow him to work through his anger. The world could use less angry people.

Most humans would simply ride the bus and zone out and think about dinner or their Friday night plans or the new shoes they had waiting in the closet. But the HSP is stewing in a pot of sensations and emotions, and these feelings don’t fade with time – they get stronger.  It’s why we’re literal geniuses at things like puzzles and detective work and writing. But it’s also why so many of us opt out of life through suicide. Being a sensitive person is, as my good friend Adrian would say, “a gift – and a curse.”

So, from one HSP to the 1.2 billion others out there living in the shadows of the people we save and entertain and understand, I just want to say this:

Hang in there.

Don’t give in. Don’t give up.

We are the few, the fantastically flawed, the fabulously facile.

The world is damned lucky to have us.

And I feel you.

Okay, so the title is a little misleading. It’s not an art, really. It’s simply expanding beyond the “This was so good! I loved it!” line as the entire review and telling the reader why you loved a book. It’s not hard. Just be honest. Otherwise, you’re gushing without depth, and the reader of the review will simply roll their eyes, click “unhelpful” and move on to the negative reviews – which for some reason never fail to go on and on in great detail.

For the love of readers (and authors) everywhere, if you like a book, tell the world about it the right way. Don’t just tell them you like the book. Tell them what it was about it that made you want to write the review in the first place.

I was lucky enough to be invited by Stacey Kennedy as a guest blogger on her site, paranormalromantics. Here is the link, and below is the blog. (as an aside, if are one of the first fifty people to private message me with the correct titles of two of the three books I talk about in this blog, I’ll send you a free copy of The Hunt. 🙂

http://paranormalromantics.blogspot.com/?zx=7aca2af413c79652

A few years back, I had a dream about a man with piercing blue eyes. I caught flashes of him, mere glimpses of the curve of his neck, the collar of his shirt, the strong line of his jaw covered in five-o-clock scruff. In the flurried chaos of sleep, I caught a whiff of cologne, clean and masculine and powerful. There was music playing; drifts of notes floated over me. I heard bits from a dance club, the fierce, ominous beat of techno dark wave, and the lonely, deep pulls of a Cello solo. But above it all was the sound of leather soled shoes on pavement. I saw a figure in the fog, tall and broad-shouldered, draped in black.

The images haunted me, coming closer and then slipping away. I awoke with a pounding headache and an aching need to know more. But dreams are fickle, and the shadow-killing rays of the sun are ruthless. Night slips away, sleep evaporates, and the sounds, sights and smells of our reveries are more often than not lost.

But the man with the blue eyes came back. The following night, he not only returned to my dream realm – he declared himself king. Before my mind’s eye, a story unraveled, playing itself out to breathless, erotic perfection. The man had a name. And when I awoke this time, I wrote his name on paper, using it as the title for the first story I would ever share with the world on a grand scale.

As I said, that was several years ago. Since then, I’ve had many dreams, both waking and not. In one, a man’s stark green eyes followed me across the TGB while he directed his men to block every one of my exits and cage me in. I wrote his story under the spell of his perfect, mesmerizing voice and am enraptured by it still. In another, the rumble of a motorcycle vibrated my soul and the smell of leather followed me back into the real world, seducing me to pick up the pen once more.

It’s an enormous gift to be a writer – to be able to take these temporary obsessions and share them with the world in such a way that my obsession is effectively passed on to some other unsuspecting soul. To know that I am not the only one who falls in love with my characters is truly amazing. I have been hypnotized by the men of my other realms, seduced by them, held prisoner by their every undeniably charismatic attribute. But lucky for me, I don’t have to suffer this captivity alone. As long as you all continue to open my books and read, I’ll be in good company. 😉

There’s a saying: If a writer writes a story in a forest and no one is around to read it, is she still a writer? Okay, so maybe it’s not really a saying so much as something I just spouted, but it should be a saying. As far as I’m concerned, without my readers, I wouldn’t really be a writer. I know of what I speak – I didn’t always have readers.

Before on-line posting, Amazon and Kindle, Nook and all of those wonderful things, I wrote and wrote and wrote, but the words I penned remained relatively voiceless, devoid of paramount dimension. There is a certain depth to a sentence or a paragraph that only a thousand sets of eyes can give it. Until they are read by this person and that, they remain mere scribbles on a sheet, pointless and flat. And the one who scratches their curves and lines is no more a writer than a Saturday morning jogger is an Olympic Gold Medalist.

And so this blog is for the readers of the world. Without their open minds, their resolute spine cracking, and their unbreakable will to find the next best plot line and loveable characters, people like me would be scribblers, dabblers, and the dreamers of dreams that had never come true. I can’t stand jogging and would never waste my Saturday morning at such an endeavor. But because of my readers – my wonderful, irreplaceable, magnificent readers – I am a writer, and I wear my gold medal with pride.

Hi all,
It looks like The October Trilogy will be put on hold indefinitely. There are some things going on with that series that need to be resolved. On the up side, it frees up more time for me to write the sequels in my other series.

I highly recommend going to www.twitter.com and finding my account at killoughwalden. My characters have misappropriated my phone and have really been going to town with it. 😉 Make sure to read the past posts – I swear, they’re telling their own stories these days.

Hi everyone – a new teaser for “The Hunt” has been posted to the Tidbits/Teasers page of this site. Enjoy! And if you do, let me know. 🙂

It’s a question I have been asked a thousand times. It’s also a question that is very difficult for me to answer. The thing is, I was born in one state, moved to another at the age of five, then another at the age of seven, and another at eight, and another at nine – and so forth. I have no discernible accent and when asked this popular question, I have to stifle the incredible urge to deepen my voice and reply, “Lots of different places.”

To make matters more confusing, I can honestly say that until now, I have never been to a place where I felt at home. “Where you are from” should be the place you think of as “home,” should it not? It should be the place you dream of returning to after a really hard week or a traumatic event or too many days of bad weather in a row. It should be a place you identify with and that ultimately, at the end of the day, makes you look forward to getting up in the morning.

It’s been decades since I’ve felt that way.

But I feel that way now. And so, after nearly thirty years of interviewing locations across the globe, I have finally made my decision. I’ve chosen my home. Because we can do that, you know. Home is not tied to birth or blood or material things. It’s not necessarily where you hang your hat and it’s not where you park your car. It’s whatever and wherever you want it to be. Hell, my daughter’s “home” is Saffron City in the fictitious (or so I think) Pokemon universe.

Kindly bear witness. From now on, when someone asks me, “Where are you from?” I know what I’m going to tell them.

“San Francisco.” City by the Bay.

God, I love this town. ☺