Read the excerpt here
WOO WOO
death makes the heart grow stronger
_________________________________________
“Don’t pickle me away as a done”
~ EMILY CARR
Emily Carr may be deceased, but she’s not ‘done’.
She has more to confess, redress, and repair.
Truth and consequences notwithstanding,
Scottie Watson decides to help.
Now, paranormal is the only road to take
in order to reunite lost lovers,
and to discover that
love means always having to say you’re sorry.
WOO – to pursue romantically. The art of courtship.
WOO – the name of Emily Carr’s pet monkey
WOO WOO – supernatural
__________________________________________________________________
THERE’S NO TIME
LIKE THE PAST
TO START AGAIN
When Emily Carr was a teenager several untoward events caused her to reject the romantic loves of her life, but one suitor in particular, pursued her to the end of her days.
Much conjecture surrounds Emily’s obscure references to lost love, paternal betrayal, and her emotional maladies diagnosed as hysteria, that she implanted in her books as well as her letters and diaries.
Sixty-seven years after Emily’s death, an historic mystery man continues to hover over her memoirs … like a ghost.
Emily Carr was an eccentric spinster – a feisty, independent artist. Sixty-seven years after her death, she wants s chance to reunite with Martyn, the love of her life, a man she described as compelling, yet impossible to accept as a husband.
Martyn romantically pursued Emily for forty-six years after being smitten with her on the sea voyage which took her to Ucluelet, British Columbia, in 1899 when she was a bewildered twenty-seven years-old. Their serendipitous meeting rekindled Emily’s passionate nature, but also inflamed the instability between her desires and fears, and Martyn was caught in am ongoing dance of acceptance and rejection.
In 2012, Scottie Watson, a freelance historian , recently moved to Victoria, is confronted by Emily’s ghost and pressed into her service, but as Emily gains strength from Scottie’s life force, Scottie weakens.
Scottie’s passionate relationship with Jon Locke, a marine biologist with a penchant for paranormal investigation, is jeopardized.
A lost love-letter from Martyn must be located in order to latch onto the energy signature which connects him with Emily. The key is in the hands of Regina, a deceased nun, one of the ‘Poor Clares’, a sister in St. Ann’s priory, who met and befriended Emily when she lay mortally ill, in 1945.
Sometimes, it takes longer than a single lifetime to recognize the extraordinary love at one’s feet.
Emily’s totem animal, Woo the monkey, takes charge of the situation, but between Woo’s constant mood swings and the release of Emily and Scottie’s similar unconscious fears of intimacy, an unstable time loop is created which disrupts the path of true love. Their collective avoidance of marital commitment collides and snowballs in a theatre of confusion, where the separation of their personas becomes distorted into one memory. Both their lovers: the deceased Martyn and the living Jon, must be strong enough to withstand the unleashed histrionic dynamics of their chosen mates which threatens to destroy the happiness of five souls.
Is a happy ever afterlife for Emily and Martyn the parallel dream of Scottie and Jon’s new relationship? Old and new love clings to a precarious thread of fluctuating feminine power.
Woo is the mystic with the ability to unite the two women in a bond of strength to heal their mutual distrust from a father’s abandonment – an age-old challenge of denial, and repressed guilt.
Love remains hand-fast across the threshold of time, and life’s synchronistic events evolve in full-circles linked as a chain. In old-age one can recall childhood as if it were yesterday and feel like a teenager or a twenty year-old or in the prime of maturity. Glass mirrors only distort the local images of our immortality into temporal waking nightmares. TIME is a daydream of Maya inside the sleeping mind. Enjoy the present and start again at any TIME because even the illusion of death can make the heart grow stronger, and what better place could there be to start anew than in the past?
Scottie’s Salvador Dali watch
Scottie’s bear, Aloysius
Woo Woo 