Yay! I'm a Llama Again!

Last spring I was waiting in the dentist office when a woman who was also waiting suddenly said to me, “You're Stephanie Van Orman, aren't you?” I smiled and said I was. She said she recognized me from church and asked me about the thing I was crocheting (I'm almost done the thing now and I'll write another post about it). She then asked me if I liked crocheting and for some reason I answered her question oddly. I said, “I like fibre.” She then told me she had a hobby farm with 17 llamas and alpacas, with no where for the fleeces to go. At that exact moment, her name was called and she disappeared into the back.

I was stunned. Try to envision me: eyes wide, pink cheeked, mouth slightly open—stunned. I had just met someone who didn't know what to do with a fleece. I have NEVER met someone who didn't know what to do with a fleece. Everyone I know wants one, sacrifices ridiculous time/money/effort to acquire wool from natural fibres. The only fleece I have ever seen for sale was up for $150. I had always thought my dream of spinning yarn on a real spinning wheel something I would never experience. Because, if you've ever priced out that hobby, you'll go back to Walmart and buy something from the end of the aisle.

As I sat there in the dentist office, I decided I could not let this chance pass me by. I wanted to make yarn and if she was just going to get rid of them, then she could give them to me. So, I grabbed her and told her of my plan for her property. She said okay.

After the shearing, I went and took pictures of the llamas and alpacas. I ended up taking every fleece they had, because I thought I could at least get these things distributed to the spinning and weaving guild.

But let's talk about what you do with an alpaca fleece.

It's horrible.

Cleaning an alpaca fleece will take days. And I'm not talking about cleaning the whole thing. I'm talking about cleaning one mesh garment bag full of fleece. One. Only one. Just one. And then you'll need to pick through the fibre and remove all the grass, dirt, poop, and any piece of fibre that isn't of a certain length. You need the long ones.

It's like being handed thousands—literally thousands—of detached My Little Pony tails and being told you have to comb the grass out of all of them.

I am not joking.

The only happy part is that alpaca fleece feels nothing like Barbie hair (it looks like it though). It smells nice and feels even better. The whole process is utterly gruelling, but one of the ladies at the guild showed me what it would look like as yarn when she span a bit of it. It looked like the best yarn I've ever seen.

So, I'm doing this.

Thing Can Sing

This thing likes to sing. This thing can't sing like anything. She sings high while the others sing low, but she is not too bad, you know.

That is not a genuine Dr. Seuss quote. Like I said, I like to sing, but my voice is what I would call completely mediocre. Sometimes, I sing really well and people compliment me and I just know I nailed it. Other times, no one says anything because they are well behaved humans who haven't calmly clamped a hand over my mouth to stop the sounds from coming out while whispering in my ear that, 'some things aren't worth dying for.'

I know what you're thinking. No one can have that large of a spectrum between awesome and Seagull from Little Mermaid. But I am telling you, I have no control over whether or not it's going to be a good day, or otherwise. I am also not particularly improved by practise. I can practice a thing, and still botch it on performance day. I also tend to cry... a lot. Now with what I've listed so far, I again know what you're thinking. I should sing in a group. Again, this is a terrible idea. If I am singing next to a person who sings, I'll just hear them singing and I won't have any clue what I'm doing with my voice. I used to try to sing in a choir, and the choir director would stop everyone, point in my direction and say, “Someone over there is off.” She wouldn't take me aside and say I was the mouldy peach in the patch, but I couldn't swear an affidavit that I wasn't the one who was off. I have ears that require silence to hear things. I'm not good at picking out overlapping voices.

Lately, I've been doing a challenge with myself to see if I can sing all the songs in church without a hymnbook. I've found I like it partly because then I don't have to hold a wrist-hurty-heavy hymnbook. So, now I tell whoever is trying to share a hymnbook with me to hold it comfortably and when they do, I can still see the words! What I want to do is yell at them that they were supposed to hold it so I couldn't see it, not hold it comfortably. How did they not understand that? Weird. I made it perfectly clear.

The most success I've ever had with singing is when I'm singing something by myself and if there is an accompanist, she's on a piano far, far, away. I'm singing something I know, I have the music in front of me and I know. I mean, I really know, that even if I blow it BIG TIME, it doesn't matter. Someone has asked me to sing something on the fly. I have had zero practice time, and something about the situation is good. I don't know what. Maybe it's that my nerves haven't tied themselves into knots with the awful knowledge that I was going to sing in front of a couple hundred people in a week or two. Maybe it's that church music has a heart of its own, no matter who is performing it. Maybe it's that my lungs are smaller than the average singer and I can take the kind of pauses I need to get the best out of my voice.

Or maybe, I have it all wrong and dying waterfowl sound better.

Little Prairie Girl

Today I felt nervous. I have a lot of new things I'm doing/trying and today I felt really nervous. I tried to read something and my brain just would not accept reading as a calming activity. I was too fired up... but in a bad way.

So, suddenly I got the idea to go on Pinterest and look at pictures of the prairie. It was really amazing at how well it worked to calm me down. Actually, it was almost embarrassing. Whenever I was anxious as a teen, I'd go for a walk out to nowhere. And it really was nowhere. It used to be my ambition to write stories that took place in my hometown, but it always failed, because nothing ever happened there. Nothing could happen there. And I was not able to write a proper novel until I had spent enough time in Edmonton to set a story there.

My hometown was the place ideas went to die. But there was always a gust of wind and a sunset and a view of the mountain range far away. There was clover growing in big itchy or cooling clumps (depending entirely on the position of the sun), and there was a sky so big, you wouldn't know what was happening on all nine sides of it at once. And yes, the sky had nine sides. Big clouds. Cemeteries. Sometimes it seems impossible that I met and married a man there, because my memories of my hometown are remarkable void of people. Sometimes I became a person who spent too much time alone. Wandering on the edges of fields that didn't belong to me or people I knew. I pet the noses of their cattle since they were the only ones curious about what I was doing there. Home wasn't home. And nine sides of sky were not always welcoming. And there wasn't much to think about. Doing anything would start you doing more than you could stand. Can't sing. Someone could see me and call me weird again, because being or doing anything would be weird. And their view of me might make me more alone.

After all my griping about how I couldn't think an idea for a story to set in my hometown, I finally gave up writing a novel and wrote a short story called 'Blog Entries of the Brokenhearted.' And it really is all that my hometown was... but like I shone a spotlight on it and then cut the cord to set it free.

Here's a link to it. Free reading. Leave a comment if you like.

https://www.fictionpress.com/s/2706114/1/Blog-Entries-of-the-Brokenhearted

Excerpt of 'Behind His Mask'

Welcome to the excerpt of Behind His Mask.  This is the part of the blog where I include a segment of my new book for your reading pleasure.  I read this excerpt in my liquid romance voice when I do reading in public.  Please enjoy reading here since it is the next best thing to hearing me read it out loud.

I only had one spare that day and it was during second to last period. It wasn’t until then that I got a chance to crack open Evander’s book. I went to the library, found a cozy spot in the corner on one of the couches, and pulled it out of my bag. The book itself smelled great. It looked great too, just like one of those beautifully bound books on the shelf of a nineteenth century library. I was excited as I flipped open the cover and found the title of the first part. It was called The Lord of the Capricorns.

Insert girlish scream—which was immediately squelched by the grouchy librarian's glare.

I started reading.

Once upon a time, there was a land of greenness unlike any other. It bordered no seashore, no desert, and no mountains. It was a land touched by the grace of the goddess of rain. There, the sun shone golden, covering the land in light and beauty. It was a place of peace where the fields had not absorbed the blood of war and where dead warriors were not buried. Flowers were as valuable as gemstones. Images reflected on a clear lake's surface were more prized than those on foreign mirrors.

The kingdom was known as Lilikeen. In the center of all gracefulness and goodness was their greatest prize, Princess Sarafina. Her beauty caused aches of longing throughout all the neighboring countries. Her head was blessed with soft, sunlit, curls that fell in voluminous waves to her slender waist. When she wore rings on her fingers, the rings seemed enormous and made her fingers more elegant. Her eyes were green like the green that unfolds in the curve of a newborn leaf.

Love for her was inevitable.

Reading it made me hate Evander, too. Of course he liked that kind of girl. It sounded like a female version of him, except for the green eyes. But even after having my fears about him confirmed, my disgust didn't negate my interest in what he had to say, so I kept reading.

At the age of fourteen, she stood in her personal library. It was a beautiful room designed with enormous panels of glass in the ceiling to let in the light for the weightless vines that clung to the bookshelves, adding color and freshness. She was meant to entertain a prince, but not just any prince. The youth invited was the second prince of the Kingdom of Bellique—a country with a strong political hold on Lilikeen.

Bellique lay to the south. It was a great arching country that covered the entire continental coast and cradled a multitude of small kingdoms in its arc. It was the shape of a crescent moon and Lilikeen was like a star dangling from the top corner of it. Bellique sat in a rather difficult position, for it was constantly under invasion from the countries across the sea. It was stained in blood until the earth was red, and if Lilikeen and her neighbors wished to keep their lands pure from warfare, they had to pay a heavy tribute. The money kept Bellique's soldiers paid, their weapons sharp, and their boats afloat. Each and every citizen of Lilikeen paid some of their income to keep Bellique's war machine ticking.

The morning Sarafina entertained Prince Murmur of Bellique, the Queen of Lilikeen watched with great interest from a balcony above.

Murmur entered. Sarafina stood by an empty fireplace with nothing on her mind particularly. She had already learned she did not need to exert herself particularly when dealing with prospective suitors. She did not need to think of witty conversation. They were happy enough to talk about themselves and the time would soon pass.

For Murmur, the effect of her beauty was devastating. Because she did not speak much, she opened his imagination up for what she could be instead of exactly what she was, which was bored, underdeveloped, and childish. He didn't know this. The combination of her obvious acceptance of him and her outward perfection made him believe, even though he was too young to marry her then, that he could have no one else as his wife.

The next day he was carried away back to Bellique's impenetrable capital, but two months later a very royal missive was received by the King and Queen of Lilikeen. It was an official request for a betrothal. An excellent offer it was too, for it offered to have the tribute sent to Bellique reduced by half during each year Sarafina was married to Murmur. However, the King and Queen did not accept it. The Queen knew what their kingdom had—they had a daughter capable of mystifying a prince in one afternoon. From that moment on, the Queen began plotting for a better marriage for Sarafina. What good was Prince Murmur? He was not the Crown Prince. He would never be a king. Instead, she set her heart on his older brother, Prince Tremor.

Tremor was a legend. It was not Murmur who protected the entire continent from the threat across the sea, but the Crown Prince. If Sarafina could have the tribute halved by marrying a prince who would never be a king, how much could she have it reduced if she married the man who would be? Tremor was an unmarried soldier, a general, and a prince who would be a king.

The Queen wrote a letter inviting Tremor to Lilikeen. There was no response for over six months and when the epistle was received, it was opened to uncover his refusal. He could not leave his fortress at Sealoch to go courting. To the Queen, it was a minor setback. This was a different kind of warfare, one for which a queen was well equipped. She would have her daughter married to the Lord of Sealoch!

Welp, I hope y'all enjoyed that.  Now please, be captivated, mesmerized and thirsty for more.  Please buy my book on amazon. Here's the link to amazon.ca and below that the link to amazon.com.  

https://www.amazon.ca/Behind-His-Mask-First-Spell/dp/1981024735/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1533585096&sr=8-1&keywords=behind+his+mask+by+stephanie+van+orman

https://www.amazon.com/Behind-His-Mask-First-Spell/dp/1981024735/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1533663990&sr=8-1&keywords=behind+his+mask

Hello Dear Readers,
Today I am announcing the release of my novel Behind His Mask.  Here's the synopsis:

Sarah thinks she knows everything about Evander.  He hardly speaks to her, but she doesn't need him to explain his snotty upbringing.  She still likes him.

Things change when she is given a book he authored, and is unexpectedly drawn into the story.  Suddenly, she's wearing ball gowns and playing hostess to princes.  The pretend world of his book seems like the adventure of a lifetime, until the world Evander created becomes dangerous in ways that spill over into real life.  There are bloodthirsty capricorns to contend with, ironclad knights who keep threatening to light her on fire, and a doomed mansion with howling ghosts.  Perhaps even a demon.

She'll have to read the whole book to find out who Evander really is.

Paperback and ebook versions are on sale on amazon.com and an ebook version is on sale on amazon.ca.

Next week, I'll post an excerpt.

Happy reading!

Wild Animals are Everywhere!

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that there are wild animals here and they are everywhere. My property backs onto 15 km of wild forest. I don't own it, but the government doesn't charge me for looking at it.

Yesterday, I was sitting on my back deck and a saw part of a little green body between the boards and I thought to myself, “I'm about to see the biggest grasshopper I've ever seen.” I was pretty into it and waited excitedly for the little friend to show himself. To my delight, he was not a grasshopper but a pacific tree frog. I didn't even know we had tree frogs in Canada.

We had rabbits in Edmonton, great big jack rabbits that were honestly big enough that the whole concept of 'rabbit stew' made sense. Here we have little brown bunnies that look like something off a Disney cartoon. They're small and fat with... wait for it... floppy ears.

We went to a rocky beach to hang out and my sons caught a truck load of crabs. Not tiny crabs. big crabs. I didn't take them home and cook them because I had absolutely no idea how to do that or even if you're allowed to just walk to up to the beach and start treating it like a grocery store. But I like crabs and was very entertained by the event.

Whoever planted the flowering bushes around my house had hummingbirds in mind and more than one variety comes to drink out of the different trumpets, but when I try to identify them according to the internet, they aren't on the list of hummingbirds that are supposed to live on Vancouver island.

Owls live in the woods too. Of course you can't see them because it's night and they seem to be quite a distance from the house, but you can figure out woo they are by their hoot. I think we mostly get great horned owls.

There are lots of different birds of prey who circle around the skies during the day. The bald eagles are easy to spot and when they come by the shoreline to catch things, you can get a real sense of how big they are. Ya know, because they're really close.

Another surprising flying thing are the pale swallowtail butterflies. When I first saw one this spring, I ducked because it was super enormous and heading right for me. I didn't get a good look at it, and it looked like a tiny flying cathedral with long dark bars like the iron work of a stained glass window, except that there is no colour, only pale light gleaming through the bars. As the season progressed, you could see one swoop by nearly every time you went outside, and every time I'd stop and gaze in amazement that butterflies could grow that big.

The squirrels here have enormous fluffy tails. They are mostly black or grey. There are racoons that cross the street here. I mean I hit my breaks for one crossing the street. I also hit the breaks for a mama duck and her line of ducklings. One time I drove alongside a buck with beautiful antlers. I didn't do that until it seemed very certain that he had no intention to cross the road. The deer around here seem like they know a lot about crossing the road. There's lots of roadkill here, but I've only ever seen one deer. Mostly, they're dead racoons.

So, there are snakes here, and humongous slugs, and dragonflies, and damselflies, and big black beetles with shiny shells, and quail who run hilariously, and noisy cicadas, and more birds than you can shake a stick at who like to sing at four in the morning, so no one will ever know what they look like.

But then... I think I heard a cougar kill a deer in the forest outside my window recently. People around here talk about cougars like they're around and I roll my eyes and go, “Yes, please don't talk to my kids about them. They'll refuse to walk home from school.” But this was in the dead of night. The cougar hissed and the deer screamed and then the deer let out a cry that was totally guttural, and then there was silence. And I looked out into the black woods and saw nothing.

That's a Paddling

Since I live in a village that surrounds a lake, I decided that I needed to take up some kind of water sport. Years ago, I was flutter-boarding in Hawaii and I saw this woman paddle-boarding to shore. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and I wondered exactly what I would need to do to be that cool. I immediately decided that it was completely impossible. I mean, I lived in Alberta, which is landlocked and my last experience with dipping my toes in Albertan water was in Waterton. I don't know if any of you have noticed, but no one should do a water sport in Waterton that involves touching water. It's so cold, its best purpose is to treat BBQ burns.

So I put paddle-boarding out of my mind.

But then I moved here and decided that I was going to buy a paddle board and get busy.

There were a lot of naysayers.

I heard all kinds of things. Things like, “It takes a lot of stamina to paddle board.” Honestly, I have zero stamina and that scared me. “Isn't it hard to balance?” My brain finishes that thought with, “And doesn't every human being start losing their balance after their tenth birthday... or soon after?” “Are you sure you want to buy one when you've never done it before and you're from a province that's land locked?”

There were a lot of doubts.

Okay, so I bought one and I've done this and this is my report.

It does require a lot of stamina. Firstly, mine weighs fifty pounds. I have to drag it out of my garage, heave it onto the roof of my vehicle, strap it to the roof, drive to the lake, find a place to unload it, unstrap it, pull it down, lock up and look cool while carrying a fifty pound board that is heavier on one end to the water. It's not easy, but I have always had T-Rex arms, so maybe a little harder for me than the currently disembodied you.

When it's time to go, I have to heave it out of the water, carry it back to my van, heave it onto the top, strap it down, drive home, open my garage door (which is not automatic my arms have suddenly noticed), unstrap it, get it down, and haul it into the garage. It should also be noted the last time I did this, when I was about to pull my paddle board down from my van, my neighbour yelled over the fence, “You got it up there, so you can get it down again.” I bit my lip on, “Who asked you!?”

So, yes, paddling-boarding takes a lot of stamina. Balance? Yes. It's heavy and sort of wants to crush you. Was it extra hard because I hadn't done it before? I may be from Alberta, but that's where heavy things come from, so no.

With all that said, it's a good thing that once you get your board on the water, it is essentially effortless. And the best way to get a view of my lake is to get in the middle of it. It is really tree lined. What? This is still Canada.