Modesty Is For Suckers

February 11, 2016 · 9:05 pm

All and sundry

The closer Christofer’s birthday comes, the less I think about him. I get through whole days without crying. It’s like my brain has put its blinders on. If I can’t see it, it can’t see me. Too bad that’s not how it works.

My logical mind says it’s just another day among many. But those blinders…they’re on for a reason. If I think the thought, it flies away quickly. Like right now, I’m already thinking about the rest of this post, tomorrow’s hair appointment, the busy weekend. Distraction that can’t quite pretend there’s nothing more nefarious going on.

Traegar’s Lunatics is now 33K words. I’m so in love. (first draft–don’t judge.)

Leaning low compressed lungs too weak to compensate, but Alfonse held his breath and did so. He kissed her brow. He kissed the fair princess’ cheek, and the monster’s. He dropped back in his chair, gasping. Cecibel opened her eyes, blue marbles, even, impossibly, the ruined one. The moment froze one heartbeat. Two. Three. Four. She was rising, towering over him. A wounded Valkyrie fresh from battle. Alfonse felt so small in that gaze. A withered old man who’d trespassed into places he didn’t belong, and couldn’t survive.

Cecibel’s hand came to rest on his shoulder. A swoop of hair dropped into his lap as she kissed his brow, his cheeks, his lips. She lingered there though he didn’t respond, couldn’t respond without breaking the spell. A thousand sweaty nights, languid afternoons, fresh mornings careened through his body, his brain. To pluck even one of them from the parade would undo him. Instead, his fingers curled into that hair pooled in his lap. He fingered it, concentrated on the thick softness Cecibel took with her when she pulled away.

He didn’t call her back. She didn’t glance over her shoulder. The metallic click of his door was the only indication that she was gone; he hoped, not for good.

Head back, eyes on the ceiling so high above his head, Alfonse counted breaths until he could do so calmly. He couldn’t have written the magic of these moments, not if given another century to try. Life could never be contained by words. It could only be expressed to the best of one’s ability, in the hopes of capturing a tiny spark and giving it away.

***

Busy weekend, starting with tomorrow’s hair appointment. Blue and purple this time. Really, my hair is still blue (baby blue, now) from when I did it around Halloween, but it’s grown out some. I’ve got a book signing on Saturday, and a writing group event on Sunday. I figure it’s time for a fresh-up.

****

Next Friday is Christofer’s birthday. So much distraction. I’ll be fine.

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Filed under Life's honest moments, Traegar's Lunatics

February 9, 2016 · 3:17 pm

I love it when a plan comes together

I opened my file a few moments ago, read yesterday’s work, and when I got to the end of the last paragraph–

He couldn’t know anything about her outside of, somehow, getting files from Dr. Archer, and Dr. Archer hadn’t known anything. Because Cecibel never told her, never admitted she didn’t know if the accident had been on purpose, never confessed that whether or not it was, she’d been more than willing to die.

–I added a single line.

More than willing to take Jennifer with her.

Who the hell is Jennifer?? There is no Jennifer in the story. There wasn’t, at any rate. She tagged along today and pulled a whole storyline I had sketched but not fully fleshed into sharp focus. I’d known, from inception, that Cecibel (POV character) was in a a motor vehicle accident that left her face disfigured. I knew there was question as to whether it was actually an accident, or not. Along the way to this point, I was leaning towards it being on purpose, but didn’t know why. This morning, Jennifer became the reason why.

I know who she is. I know why Cecibel was willing to die and take Jennifer with her. I know why she’s fixated on Olivia Peppernell’s vision of headlights and twisted metal in the opening line of the book. How amazing it feels, this creative process.

I got so excited, I had to record it here in my blog so, if the process gave me trouble one day, I could come back here and show myself it does happen when one’s patient.

Image result for headlights on a dark, wet road

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Filed under Traegar's Lunatics

February 8, 2016 · 2:58 pm

$800 Valentine’s Giveaway!

Hey, all! Want a chance to win one of four $200 Amazon gift cards in The Kindle Book Review’s $800 Valentine’s Giveaway? Of course you do, especially when all you have to do is click click on the link and enter at the #1 site for reader giveaways–The Kindle Book Review. It’s easy & fun. If you love reading, enter now. Ends Feb. 22. Valentine’s Giveaway

Seeking Carolina is on page two, and currently only 99 cents. Not only will you get a fabulous book to read, but several chances to win a $200 gift card.

Valentines-2

Gads, I love this story

Just a little snippet, because, egads, I love this story…

Alfonse chuckled, a wheezy, breezy sound. He offered his arm, and Olivia took it, resting her head to his stooped shoulder and remembering days gone by. A similar setting. A sanctuary, they called it. His shoulder broad and sinewy. Her hair like fire. Fans waiting. Gossips too. But in there, safe from them. From Him. Her injuries healing. Her memory daily and diligently erased by drugs and electrical shocks. Dreams of tumbling turned to headlights and twisted metal. No one visited. Not the man who refused her a divorce. Not the children he kept from her. Only Alfonse, and sometimes Cornelius, though never at the same time. Now, decades hence, decades older, decades lost, they bookended the fame, the fury, the sweetness and safety and solitude. They’d give to each other, to Cecibel. And maybe it would be enough this time.

Traegar’s Lunatics. Just under 30K words. It’s coming along nicely.

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Filed under Traegar's Lunatics

February 2, 2016 · 7:33 pm

Here’s the thing about novellas…

Those of you who’ve known me for a while have heard this rant before–Novellas, they’re not what you think they are. They’re not–I repeat, not–about word count. Novella means new* in Italian, not, as many think, little novel. Suggesting a novella is a short work of fiction between 20K and 40K words is like saying a sonnet is simply a poem composed of fourteen lines. As Canadian author, George Fetherling said, (in his essay, Briefly, the case for the novella) to reduce the novella to nothing more than a short novel is like saying “a pony is a baby horse.” See? It’s not just me.

Why do I get such a stick up my ass over this? Because this isn’t a grammar rule in flux, we’re losing an art form, a beautiful art form, and that just hits me in the writerly gut. The world of literary fiction knows and holds the difference when it comes to categories and prizes, but the genres and the general populace don’t, and that’s the danger–because a lie believed by the masses becomes the truth.

Very briefly, it is structure that defines a novella, not word count. There are no designated chapters in a novella, rather they are presented as a whole divided by white space to designate a significant shift. (Though, to be fair, I have seen novellas utilizing chapters.) Plotwise, it ends quite close to where it begins. In fact, little can and usually does change if at all. The form concerns itself more with the character development, the evolution (or devolution) of that character, than it does on plot conflict. The internal vs. the external. Novellas tend to begin close to the precipitating incident, but skip back and forth in time, filling in background. They usually end on the moment of climax, on the brink of change.

I recently came across this diagram that shows the structure in a visual way: structurenovella

See how it climbs, then how quickly it falls? The reversal (something that happens to change the action’s direction) in the rising action is intrinsic to the structure. I thought that was pretty cool. So I’ll end this here, having gotten it off my chest, and will leave you with a few examples of actual novellas you’ll have heard of:

Breakfast at Tiffany’s ~ Truman Capote

A Christmas Carol ~ Charles Dickens

My Mortal Enemy ~ Willa Cather

Animal Farm ~ George Orwell

Ethan Frome ~ Edith Wharton

The Old Man and the Sea ~ Ernest Hemmingway

Shawshank Redemption ~ Stephen King

The Stepford Wives ~ Ira Levin

The Picture of Dorian Gray ~ Oscar Wilde

*I’ve recently seen it as “little novelty,” but that’s no more right than “little novel” is.

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Filed under Writing is Life

February 1, 2016 · 3:12 pm

Get it while it’s hot!

Have you gotten yourself a copy of Seeking Carolina yet? No? GOOD! Because if you go HERE right now, for a very limited time, you can get your ebook copy of Seeking Carolina for $0.99. Yup–ninety-nine cents. (Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, and Google.)

Seeking-Carolina2

Why should you get it now aside from that? Because Dreaming August, second book in the Bitterly Suite, comes out on April 12th. Reading Dreaming August doesn’t require Seeking Carolina, but, oh how nice to spend some time in Bitterly with all the different characters poking their heads in to say hi.

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“The Coco sisterhood is an amazing foursome, and the author evolves their relationship with each other and their respective men with fresh candor and honesty.”

One sale until March 1st! Get it while the gettin’s good!

Putting things in their places

Seven months. Seven months. It seems impossible.Just the other day, I made him softshell crabs for dinner. And yet, it seems like he’s been gone so, so long.

We emptied his room out within the week of his death. I didn’t want to erase him from the house, (as if that were possible–he imbues every splinter, every molecule of air,) but I couldn’t bear to have it look like he’d be home any minute either. We moved his couch up from the basement–the one that was the scope of his world for months after his accident. Frank’s desk went in there. Pictures. Family Mementos. The antique table and all the games. We had it painted.

And there it stood still, a catchall for things we couldn’t deal with just yet. Not his room. Not Frank’s office. Not a game room. Just there.

The bathroom, essentially his, was the same. Stuff piled in the tub long after it was repainted. No shower curtain up. Just sinks, a toilet, and light fixtures.

I bought a new shower curtain yesterday, and put it up today. Then hung a picture, a big wooden star. It looks like a bathroom again. Frank and I also started putting his room back together. We hung pictures and rearranged the furniture so that it’s not all thrown in haphazardly. Best of all, we hung his bows–in all states of their creation–on the wall.

The top one is an arrow–two, in fact, from where he got a bullseye in a bullseye. If I remember correctly, it was at seventy yards. That’s where he usually shot from. Robin Hood would have been proud. That wasn’t the only time he did it, but it was the first. The rack it and the bows are lashed to? He built it as a frame to hold the bows while he varnished them. It was cathartic, putting it all together, hanging it on the wall. And not without a few tears.

This moving on thing is harder than anyone has any idea until they’re faced with doing it themselves. I’ll just leave that there now.

Peace.

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January 18, 2016 · 3:54 pm

Snapshots

The electrician came this morning; a man I’ve known for years.Well enough to be happy to see him; not well enough to know if he has a wife, kids, though I know he has a dog. He installed a new light fixture in the walkout basement workshop Chris built and we had enclosed properly just a few months ago.

“This is new,” he said.

“Our son built the frame and we had a roof put on recently.”

“Oh, so he can work on ATVs and stuff out here?”

“Yeah,” I said. He died last June, I didn’t say. There was no reason to. He knows me well enough to feel that instant moment of sorrow, to go home and tell his wife or dog how bad he felt, but not well enough for that information to be relevant to his world.

****

We planted trees for our kids in the old house on Country Farm Lane, trees grown too big in the ten years we were there to take with us when we left. Here along the river, we planted new trees. Apple trees for Scott and Chris, a Kwanzan cherry for Grace, and a Magnolia for Jamie.

In the Halloween blizzard of 2011, Gracie’s tree was damaged by branches weighed down with snow on leaves. Christofer’s toppled. Scott’s tree, that had never really thrived, held on with little damage. Jamie’s, despite all the heavy snow on leaves, held strong, the branches popping back to their places as the snow melted.

We trimmed Grace’s tree, and it looked pretty sad for a while, but even the split in the trunk healed. It flowers abundantly despite the scars spied among the foliage.

Scott’s tree continues to hang on, wiry branches stretching in every direction, but it always flowers, always bears a little fruit.

Jamie’s tree grows ever-outward. It blooms randomly throughout the year. April. July. September, I’ve even seen those fuchsia and white blooms–two, five–in January.

Christofer’s tree, we braced as upright as we could get it. The roots replanted themselves, but it never quite got back up again. It blooms profusely, and bears more apples than we can use, but it grows sideways out of the hill, reaching down instead of up.

Had I written all that into a novel, these melodramatic metaphors, it would have seemed heavy-handed. Cliche, perhaps. Even saccharine-sweet. And yet, there you have it. I couldn’t ignore the real-life symmetry, children and trees, if I wanted to.

I’ve been thinking about it ever since–ergo, this entry. Maybe it’ll stop floating through my mind now.

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Filed under Family, Uncategorized

January 15, 2016 · 7:43 am

The Power (and evil) of Reviews

I’m a fortunate author. I get emails and FB messages, cards in the mail saying how much readers loved Seeking Carolina. It thrills me, every time, and is typically followed by the thought, “if only they’d put this up on Amazon, or Goodreads, that’d be really awesome.” Then I feel bad, because how greedy is that? Isn’t it extraordinary that friends, family, long-lost acquaintances, strangers would take the time to send me a personal note about how much they loved my book? Yes it is.

It bothers the crap out of me that I have to worry about such praise going up in a public venue just so the machines powering the industry can rank me, promise me visibility. It feels really wrong, and yet, without it, my future work is in jeopardy, because–as we’ve all found out somewhere along the line or the other–it’s about numbers, first and foremost.

The general population doesn’t know (and shouldn’t) much about the publishing world. I’m a “little” author. I’m not in bookstores, on talk shows, in magazines. My work is fairly invisible to the reading world at large. I blog. My publisher promotes my book on sites trafficked by romance readers. But my reach is limited. Nora Roberts doesn’t need reader reviews. I, and other small authors like me, do.

In a world where any potential publisher, agent, reader can look you up and make a judgement based on the numbers they find, the slope gets really slippery. On the one hand, I want no part of it. On the other, I have no choice but to drink the Kool-Aid. So I’m going to go out on a limb here, and ask–If you’ve read Seeking Carolina, consider putting up a review on Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes & Noble. It matters. Thanks.

Hmmm…cherry Kool-Aid isn’t so bad. Leaves my tongue red though.

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Filed under Romance

January 13, 2016 · 3:29 pm

For you foodies

Oy, what I made last night. Speck e mozzarella involtini di pollo (involtini=rolled, pollo= chicken. Now doesn’t it sound way better in Italian?) It was extraordinary.

Frankie D and I visited his nephew and his family in Milford, PA last weekend. Lovely little town. It reminds me of Cape May. It also happens to be the home of Fretta’s Italian Food Specialties. The tiny store by itself is worth the trip. Drying sausage and sopressatta hanging everywhere, porcetta, scamoza, pancetta, marinara sauce, soups, pastas and more–all either house made or imported. For Frankie D, it’s better than Home Depot.

We bought a bunch of stuff, but two things smacked me in my culinary-brain–speck, and scamorza. Speck is a Tyrolean ham, a kind of super-concentrated proscuitto. Scamorza is smoked mozarella. The play of smoke and spice and sweet begged to be made into an involtini.

Involtini: I filleted the chicken nice and thin, layered the speck, then the cheese, and rolled it up nice and tight. A little egg wash, a dip in bread crumbs, and a quick fry–in olive oil, of course–just to get a crust. I put it in the oven at 375 for about forty minutes. (The Hollandaise sauce, I will admit, came from Trader Joe’s. It’s light and creamy and lemon and I’ve never made a better Hollandaise myself. Note–it would have been just as good without the sauce.)

Potatoes: russets, cubed small. Olive oil, garlic, salt and paprika. Into the oven at 375 for about an hour. Take it out, give it a stir, and a squeeze of lemon juice. Toss on a little parsley and put it back into the oven for about five minutes.

Broccoli: simple sautee in olive with garlic and salt. Make sure you get a little caramelization going.

I’m a good cook, but I have no technique training. I don’t use recipes. Every night is like an episode of Chopped, without the gross ingredients. From my first pot of sauce (gravy,) my culinary know-how has been the result of a good palate, and trial and error, same as I learned how to mother (sorry, Jamie!) write, and do just about everything I do. Sometimes my attempts end up less than stellar. And sometimes, they’re so far beyond what I ever expected, it balances the failures out. Like this one.