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...to the Midnight Garden
...to the Midnight Garden
I have many interests, some of which might have elements in common with the Mayfair Witches, the Vampire Chronicles, or other subjects Anne Rice wrote about in her novels. Some might contribute to an aspect of how fans engage with or are inspired by works of fiction, their settings, characters, or even actual historical events and people fiction literature has been inspired by or based upon.
The Midnight Garden is a place for me to discuss other works and topics that interest me in their own right. They are not necessarily Mayfair Witches or Anne Rice-related at all, but topics I enjoy researching and discussing. Many fiction novels and stories are inspired by real life events, people and places. The more we learn about those inspirations, the better we understand how even fictional works can and have made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the world of the past and the world we live in today.
Why Is It Called "Shadows in the Midnight Garden"?
Why Is It Called "Shadows in the Midnight Garden"?
Shadows in the Midnight Garden is an "umbrella" under which the various things I create stand. The Mayfair Witches creations and website is but one of those things. It's like Art of the Imagination; the artist who created the beautiful illustrations in the recent illustrated version of Interview With the Vampire is represented by that name. And the illustrations for the novel are not their only work.
On the Home page, I mentioned chronic migraines. Yes, I get them. Obviously, a lot. They are indeed debilitating and VERY disruptive. That includes sleep schedules. They throw mine off so obscenely that those closest to me don't even bat an eyelash when they see my sleep schedule turned upside down--AGAIN--because of them.
If you suffer from migraines, chronic or not, you have my deepest sympathy.
I debated whether to even leave the background color of this site in white because of the glare. I don't even paint rooms in my house white because of glare. My Mayfair Witches sites all have a black background primarily because it's large and a black background is easier on the eyes. Maybe I'll do a poll one of these days to see which background color is preferred most.
Even though my sleep schedule has been thrown so much, I've come to learn a lot more about making things on a computer, more about designing my websites and creating content to share online in those wee hours. There are other conditions that slow me down as well, but that doesn't mean I cannot do anything at all. So, I took all the things I already do and began to learn how to do more to make them even better.
What Else?
What Else?
I also study my own family history and genealogy. There isn't a whole lot of mention of that so far, but I hope that will change as I have been studying it for decades. One of my early creations, or a set of creations, I should say, was profile avatars for my family tree on Ancestry.com. I made profile avatars that identify lines of direct ancestors as maternal, paternal, or both. Yes, the further you go back, the more you might find this depending on where your maternal and paternal ancestors were and where they came from at a given point in time.
I even made icons to add to profile avatars to indicate my unbroken maternal line (mDNA), and my unbroken paternal line (y-DNA). There are icons to indicate if a direct ancestor was a twin or, as in one memorable discovery, a triplet. It's a large and very interesting family tree. Of course, the vast majority of people have the same questions: what does "once or more removed" mean and are there famous people in my/your family tree?
The once or more removed is something I go a bit further into on the Mayfair Witches site. As for famous people...
Hoo boy.
The short answer in my case is yes. And more than likely, the short answer is the same for you.
Now and then, the answer to that question can be more complex as it's not always the PERSON that is most notable, but what that person became connected to whether they knew it or not.
Let me throw you a bone.
There is a...particular piece of real estate in New Orleans I discuss in detail. It isn't immediately obvious and you'd need more details to really pin this down. I'll say this much. I do have family connections to it.
The moment I realized it isn't as funny as the time I thought I'd finally found a birth record for a great-uncle who died in 1919, rushed to grab my wallet, all excited, only to stop mid-bounce, mid-cheer like a freeze frame because...the birth record was for someone of the same name, birth and death years in...England...
WHOOPS!
My great uncle was born in Montana.
It's what I must have looked like at that moment, all excited and running around grabbing stuff I needed, only for everything, including me, to just freeze-frame that sends me into laughing fits to this day. I don't know why but I have used it to cheer myself up now and then.
Anyway.
Sorry. Had to stop laughing hysterically at that memory.
When I stumbled upon the family connection to that particular piece of real estate, it was through one of my maternal lines. I was tracing a spouse when the surname jumped out at me. It rang a bell, and I just kept muttering, "Where have I heard that name before...I KNOW I've heard that name before...where did I--"
I stopped, peered upward in disbelief and blurted out, "Wuuuuuuuuuuuuuut."
And in my quiet nocturnal space that is my midnight garden, I checked. And checked. And checked again.
No mistake. Relative. I'll talk freely of it all I want.
In case some of you feel like doing some deep diving for whatever reason, allow me to direct your attention to the double picture frame on the mantle. This is a scene from my 3D model of the Mayfair Witches house, or, as it is known in real life, the Brevard-Rice house. I decided to add a little personal touch of my own, a little nod to my own family tree.
The image on the right, the modern-day image, is an actual photo of me. The only thing different is I changed the color of my jacket to blue (it's actually red). The blue was chosen in order to match the colorized image of the woman on the left. The first thing you might notice is that we are posed very, very similarly. The two photographs were taken well over a century apart. And yet, I somehow ended up sitting for a portrait very close to the same way my great-great grandmother, Julia Watts, posed for her portrait. Her portrait was taken before 1895, which is the year she died.
Her original photo is fascinating all by itself. I don't haul it out very often because it is very old. What else I noticed was we both have that same high forehead, same eyebrows, and I'm pretty sure our cheekbones are pretty close, too. So, I thought it would be a nifty idea to put the two portraits side by side like that.
To Sum It Up...
To Sum It Up...
The Midnight Garden is a nod to nights I couldn't sleep because of the pain of the chronic migraines and to what I decided to fill those hours with as I wondered if I'd ever be able to just shake off a headache. Shadows? Even at night, there are shadows. It's also a reference to some of my own stories, written decades ago and...at night.
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