I’m Cathy Counts of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, born in Portland, Maine, and spent most of my adult life in Portland, South Portland, and Livermore Falls, Maine. I retired after thirty-three years working in municipal planning and code enforcement and am now living in a single-story stone cottage next to a privet hedge resplendent with birdsong year-round.
Beautiful Ocean Park Beach is just a stop sign or two away from me. I look up whenever I hear a car go by, because we are at the end of a quiet neighborhood and most of the traffic is pedestrian, canine, bicycle and baby carriage. If it’s a car, I probably know the driver.
Municipal work was my day job, while I performed in theaters, independent films, tv commercials and voice-overs on my lunch hour and after work. Now I perform on stage occasionally and am a voice actor on the podcast soap, Restless Shores, as earthy Beverly Randolph, beginning in Season Four. I’ve also begun doing occasional voice-over work for the detective noir podcast, Shamus. Both of these podcasts are produced by New Meadows Media, based in West Bath, Maine.
I’m always hungry for the next book and have a table in my living room dedicated to all the library books I’m currently borrowing. I’ve just begun Caroline Graham’s first volume of the Chief Inspector Barnaby Midsummer Mysteries, a series which consists of so many volumes, I’ll be reading these for the rest of my life, I imagine! I just bought that first volume on Audiobook, which triggered my borrowing of as many others as I could get. She’s a super writer, blessed with the ability to say much in few words. I like how I feel what her characters are feeling, with a single step or turn or observance. Her images enter my mind and shimmer there many times over.
My food truck, were I to own one, would be manned by swift-armed cooks with flashing eyes and dazzling smiles, who would bring as much emotional nourishment to the serving counter as they would good nosh. They would serve steaming bowls of veggies and grains, topped with your choice of proteins, morsels of sustenance at once crispy on the outside and utterly luscious on the inside. When the customers are finished, they will still remember their meal days hence. They will tell all their friends and even strangers all about it. They will mention not only the food, but also those flashing eyes and brilliant smiles of the cooks, and how completely happy they felt from the moment they stepped up to the service counter.
The best hour for writing is early in the morning, before life’s necessities interrupt. My goal is to make that time extend, with time for brief movement breaks throughout. Standing up after sitting too long is painful.
I am “brandy-new” to this writing community and am thrilled to be learning from Daniel David Wallace, who I think is brilliantly down to earth and gets to the gist of all I’ve been needing to learn all my life. I feel very comfortable with this approach to writing, learning, and community building. Thank you, Daniel!
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