Introducing Leira Nomis

I wasn’t an only child, but having a much older sister, I grew up in the house alone. I guess that’s why, at an early age, I began to tell stories. First there were stories to my dolls, then my parents and finally my friends.
            By the time I entered school, I knew that I had a talent for story telling and could take the most mundane subject and give it life. I can’t begin to tell you how many stories I wrote in my free time. Both my parents were a bit older and in and out of the hospital with various chronic ailments. My free time was spent watching re-runs in the hospital rooms, or writing. I preferred the latter. It was an escape into worlds which I created.
            By the time I hit high school, writing was a thing of the past. Occasionally, I’d get the urge to write down something other than a diary entry about my latest flame, but it faded quickly with a plethora of long homework assignments.

Predisposition about subject

               In our city, it is well known among the junior high and high school students that if you are in “just a bit of trouble”, you may have to do community service as a consequence.  Most of the time this requires approximately one hundred hours of doing duties around one of the schools, parking lots which the city owns, graveyard mowing and trimming – just something to wake the students up a bit before they get into real trouble.  This seems to work very well among the students.

In addition, a lot of our junior and senior high schools also offer legitimate jobs to outstanding students who need a few bucks a week for spending money.  They are usually employed after school doing a variety of custodial duties.

My son is adopted.  He is also not Caucasian.  This has never been an issue in our home, as we have several adopted children.  Our home is a melting pot of ethnicities, races and creeds.  However, we sometimes forget that this is still an issue with society – even today.

Style it up a bit!

               Style it up a bit.  That statement is one comment which was made to me early in my writing career.  Before I could ask about it, the professor was gone.  So, I took quite a while to analyze my paper.  I thought it was stylish.  I thought it represented the subject matter.

Bringing it to other students, they seemed okay with it, but then, I brought it to a library tech who frowned when I told her the comment.  She smiled.

“It’s not about the subject matter, kiddo.  That’s not the problem.  The problem is it doesn’t represent you.”

One Tree 

Today’s blog is entitled, “One Tree” because I wanted to give aspiring writers not only a bit of hope, but how inspiration can come from the tiniest of moments.

This morning, the third day after a major snow storm, I was tooling to work a few miles over the speed limit when I suddenly spied a lone patch of ice on the other side of the road.  I slowed down and it took me a minute to realize that the only reason the ice – the only ice on the entire stretch – remained was due to a large tree which had yet to lose its leaves.

Visualization of the story

Why is it so important to detail out each scene and still leave a little left for the imagination?  As I have said in previous blogs, your own imagination is much better than almost any detailed description.  Therefore, my job as a writer is to provide just enough background to allow the reader’s imagination to flow.

            This is usually based around the setting – what decade and what level of poverty?  Let’s face it, a rich house in the 1920’s would have a hidden liquor cabinet, maids and cooks and their hallways would smell like lemon wax.  A poor home in the 1920’s would be very cluttered by family members who were just making ends meet.  There would be no signs of maids, or high polished floors.  The smells would probably include body odor and dirt, even in homes where adults were trying hard to survive.  That would be the difference – living and surviving.

In answer to: "What inspires you to to write?"

I lead a pretty busy life.  I have a lot of kids and dogs, a wonderful husband and a very old parent who lives with me.  Like all of us, schedules change rapidly and I’m not always up on exactness.  What I have written down on my handy dandy list to do for the day gets changed at the drop of a hat.  So, although writing is something I love to do, it sometimes gets pushed to the back of my list and sometimes (quite frankly, a lot of times) it’s something I have to try to make time to do.

Imagination is what makes me write!

Have you ever read a book and “saw” yourself in the setting? Are the descriptions so vivid that you can smell and feel what the characters are involved with? When I was a small child, some of my best memories were reading stories in which I could “jump in” and be right there – either as one of the characters or tagging along behind them.
Isn’t that why we so like watching television and going to the movies? One minute we’re right in the comfort of a darkened theatre or in our own home, the next, everything else seems to fade away and we are in the story itself! What a mind trick and what a wonderful experience!

Where do my ideas come from?

People ask me where I get the ideas for my characters. I guess it would be fair to say that they resemble someone I have met or someone that impressed me in some way. Over the years, I’ve found I’m a people watcher and truly get a kick out of seeing what people will do next. I’m always surprised by their reactions to simple things and I believe I incorporate those ideas into my characters.