Cover Reveal--Every Last Secret

 by Linda Rodriguez

I'm excited to announce that on Tuesday, September 7th, the first of my Skeet Bannion mystery novels, Every Last Secret, will be re-released in ebook and trade paper format in a new edition with new covers. This is a thrill, especially, because readers have asked for a paperback version of these books for a long time, and my former publisher would not bring them out in that format. All three of my Skeet Bannion mysteries will be released with new covers in these new formats as a prelude to the launch at the end of the year of the 4th Skeet Bannion mystery, Every Family Doubt.

 This is the book that first introduced Skeet Bannion, Cherokee campus police chief in a small river town and former Kansas City, Missouri, homicide detective. Skeet has left the big city and come to this bedroom community to escape her drunken and disgraced policeman father and her ex-husband, who refuses to give her up. She's tired of the grim toll that being an urban homicide detective has taken on her and is looking forward to a more peaceful existence in this quiet, little town. 

Still, murder happens everywhere, and when it happens in her town and on her campus, Skeet moves back into the investigative mode and obsession with justice that made her one of the most successful big city homicide detectives and the highest ranking woman in that police force before she resigned. No one kills someone on her watch and gets away with it scot-free. Little does she know that this case will change her entire life.

I hope the many fans of these mysteries will enjoy this peek at the new cover of the first of them. Keep an eye out for the new edition of Every Last Secret in paperback for the first time, coming Tuesday, September 7th.

Linda Rodriguez's 12th book is The Fish That Got Away: The Sixth Guppy Anthology. Her 11th book was Fishy Business: The Fifth Guppy Anthology (edited). Dark Sister: Poems was her 10th book and a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, an anthology she co-edited, were published in 2017.  Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery featuring Cherokee detective, Skeet Bannion, and Revising the Character-Driven Novel will be published in 2021. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, Every Last Secret—and earlier books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart's Migration—have received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film. 

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Native Writers Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Learn more about her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com 

The Wild City--A Poem for National Poetry Month in a pandemic

 by Linda Rodriguez

As we move beyond the one-year anniversary of our pandemic lockdown and the beginning of National Poetry Month, I'm posting a poem to remind us all that, even if we're isolated from our social circles, we have companions if we can get outside--even in large cities.

THE WILD CITY


Sprawling across the Kansas and Missouri
River confluence, network of tributaries
woven around bluffs and glaciated hills,
crow-blue in the distance but green, green
as the hearts of trees in the walking,
even today, Kansas City has still-wild parks,
large, well-treed lots, and wooded streams,
homes for foxes, wild turkey, deer, coyote,
interrupting traffic patterns with flight
paths of herons, hawks, and eagles,
a metropolis of small towns linked
by the scent of water and new growth.


Smaller rivers fill out the web
of water that holds the landscape
together, leaf veins feeding surfaces
of green—Blue River, Platte River,
Little Blue River, Little Platte River,
Marais des Cygnes River.
Creeks like Indian Creek, Brush Creek,
Line Creek, First Creek, Second Creek,
Shoal Creek, Willow Creek,
Mill Creek fan out, capillaries
for the breathing system that is the city.


Once, driving along the Little Blue,
I startled at the sudden appearance,
slow flap of huge white wings
banded with black, bright red cap
leading the way ahead of stretched-out
snake neck, legs trailing behind, a legend
rising next to me and taking flight,
whooping crane on migration,
resting and feeding a day or two
in the heart of the city.


When we humans go at last,
by bomb, virus, famine,
disaster, natural or otherwise,
the wild will reclaim Kansas City
in short order, never having completely
released its original hold.


(Published in Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts, 2016)

Becoming a Phoenix Again and Starting Over

 by Linda Rodriguez

According to astrology, I am a Scorpio. In fact, I am a quadruple Scorpio, which is about as Scorpio as you get. The animals that symbolize the sign of Scorpio are three in number, unusual or the zodiac, which normally only uses one animal to represent each sign. Scorpio is represented by the scorpion, the eagle, and the phoenix. The scorpion represents the lowest aspect of the sign, mostly the negative elements in Scorpio, such as jealousy and vindictiveness. The eagle represents the higher aspects of the sign, positive elements such as perseverance, passion, and commitment. The phoenix, however, represents the very highest to which the sign may aspire, inspiration, creativity, resurrection, and rebirth.

 

I often like to say that I have lived a series of lives in this particular lifetime. It seems to me that I go through the process of the phoenix with its fiery destruction and rebirth periodically. I find myself in one of those phoenix periods once again. I have been on hiatus from this blog for some time now, due to serious health issues. Debra Goldstein has been kind enough to post older blogs that I have written and published in my time slot while I have been away. She has also functioned as an administrator, tending to many of the glitches and organizational issues that plague any blog behind the scenes. I would really like to thank her and Bethany Maines, as well as Cathy Perkins, or their administrative work to keep the blog going smoothly.

 

The interesting thing about being in one of these phoenix times in my life is that I never know where I will end up. A number of years back, I was a long-time director of a university women’s center. Suddenly, I went down with several autoimmune diseases and found myself forced to take an early medical retirement from the job that I was quite good at and loved dearly. In many ways, this was like a death of someone very close to me and entailed a great deal of mourning. I went from a position where I made a positive difference in other people’s lives to being virtually bedridden, and when I finally managed to get well enough to move around, to being pretty much confined at home, while I struggled with these terrible diseases. I knew I made a positive difference in other people’s lives, because often, as I walked through a supermarket or a shopping mall, someone would come up to me and tell me, literally, “You made a difference in my life,” or “You saved my life.” And then, I was a semi-invalid, who hardly left the house at all, except for multiple medical appointments. It seemed to me as if my life was truly over.

Once the flames died down, however, I began to create a new life as a writer, one I had always wanted and never had the time or the courage to pursue. That new life is where I have lived ever since – and been extremely happy, as well as moderately successful in the eyes of the world. A couple of years ago, however, my health started a downward spiral with cancer and the terrible side effects of its treatments followed by a couple of terrible falls that left me with permanent disability in my right shoulder and arm and a truly frightening ratification of one of my autoimmune uses, which left me on daily massive doses of steroids that continued through the years and seriously weakened the functioning of my legs. I have felt for these last few years as if someone out there somewhere had a voodoo doll of me that they were continuously slicing and dicing. All of this has led to tremendously diminished strength, heavy fatigue, and lots of pain, and trying to manage all of these problems, as well as continue working freelance as a teacher and an editor in order to try to keep afloat in the flood of medical bills, meant that I had little time or energy for my own writing.

That is the gift of the phoenix, however – to rise anew out of your own ashes. At the moment, that is where I feel I currently stand. I don’t know at the moment what shape or color this new life will take, but I can feel it bubbling up within me, itching within my back where the new wings are getting ready to sprout. I have been working with my fiber art, spinning, knitting, weaving, in order to fill the creative well within, and now I am experiencing that wonderful urge to start creating worlds and characters that other novelists know well. So, it is truly an exciting time for me right now.

Here is a poem that I wrote during that last time of my life when I was saying goodbye to my old career and old self and welcoming the new career and self that I hadn’t seen yet.

 

A PHOENIX, SHE MOVES FROM LIFE TO LIFE

 

 

and leaves only the ashes of her old self

behind. She plunges into the dark

future from the glare of her funeral pyre

that brightens the sky of her past

for miles and years and leaves a legend

told to generations of children

of a vast golden one whose gleaming

body rose from the burning corpse,

blotting out the moon

with huge wings beating against

the burning air to lift the dead

ground to the living night sky

and fly through the moon

to a new place with new people

where she could be new herself—

until the destroyer strikes again.

 

Like a hunting eagle,

she lands, claws outstretched,

golden crest and feathers lost

in transit, her wings already disappearing.

She grows backward, smaller.

Now she can only crawl

into and out of shallow holes

in the ground of this new life.

Still, the wise avoid trampling her

for they know

she drags death behind her.

 

Published in Heart’s Migration (Tia Chucha Press, 2009)

 When you hit periods of decline in your own life, do you feel as I do that you are allowed a kind of rebirth and re-creation of yourself? Do you have your own symbolic ways of thinking about those times in your life?

 

Linda Rodriguez's 12^th book, The Fish That Got Away: The Sixth
Guppy Anthology, is about to be published. Her 11th book was Fishy Business: The Fifth Guppy Anthology (edited). Dark Sister: Poems was her 10^th book and a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, an anthology she co-edited, were published in 2017.  Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery featuring Cherokee detective, Skeet Bannion, and Revising the Character-Driven Novel will be published in 2021. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, Every Last Secret—and earlier books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart's Migration—have received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Native Writers Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Learn more about her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

Men Who Take on Other Men's Children

My stepfather coaches my little brother's team

Men Who Take on Other Men's Children by Linda Rodriguez (originally published in June 2015)

When I look back on my life, I realize I’ve been lucky enough to be closely involved with three men who had the ability to take on children who weren’t their own genetic children and love and care for them as fathers. It will be Father’s Day soon, and I want to say a word or two about these kinds of unsung heroes.

My birth father was a brutal, unpredictable man. I suspect he would now be diagnosed as a clinical sociopath. After my parents’ scandalous, highly contentious divorce and all of the violent, ugly fallout afterward, my mother settled in a small college town in Kansas and met a quiet man she married when I was fifteen.

My stepfather immediately tried to be a good father to me, which meant, among other things, setting limits and being protective. My birth parents had both been irresponsible and sometimes dangerous children, so from my earliest memories I was the pseudo-adult in the house, the one who worried about all my younger siblings and tried to protect them and care for them so they could have as normal a childhood as possible. No one had ever looked after me or tried to take care of me, so I resented my new stepfather’s efforts tremendously.

As the next few years went by and I observed my stepfather’s treatment of my younger siblings, for whom I still felt so responsible although I’d left home at sixteen, I warmed to him. He was doing his best to be a real dad to them, taking them camping and fishing, making them toys, coaching Little League teams, etc. In time, like my younger siblings, I came to call him Dad. When I gave my parents their first grandchildren, he was a doting grandfather, and when he finally died, he died in my sister’s and my arms with all my brothers and the grandchildren around his bed.

At the time I married my late first husband, I already had a baby, whose father had died. My late first husband loved my oldest as much as either of the two children we had together, and that was one of the things I loved about him, that capacity to open his heart to a child who wasn’t his own genetically just as much as to those who were.

Later when I was a single mother of two teenagers in the final years of high school and my youngest was only four years old, I met and married a man who’d never been married or had children. He had enough sense not to try to be a father to my teens, who would have only resented him for it, but he loved and raised my youngest as his own. This gentle, totally urban intellectual did the zoo safari, even though he was embarrassed that everyone else had to help him put up the huge tent he’d rented, and when our little one left the tent open to the depredations of peacocks and collapsed the whole tent on his stepfather when they were packing up to leave, he was so kind that he earned a hand-printed, hand-drawn certificate of membership in “The Loyal Order of Peacock Fathers.” My youngest and my husband to this day have a close, loving father-son relationship, and because he was so patient, he and my older two children have a warm relationship as well.

My sister has two sons. One father is a deadbeat, missing in action because he’s never wanted to be financially responsible for his child after the divorce (just as he hadn’t for all of the other children he had that my sister didn’t know about when they married). The father of the youngest paid support but simply refused to see his own son. For these boys, my current husband has been a father-figure. The younger one clung to my husband and waited eagerly for our visits and his to us. My husband used to shake his head on the way home and wonder at the idiocy of the men who refused to have any contact with their gifted, charming boys. At Christmastime, these two nephews, now grown, delight in finding eccentric books and other gifts that will please my husband, often keeping an eye out for them all year.

I’ve seen firsthand what a difference men like this can and do make in the lives of children whose fathers are gone, sometimes dead, sometimes by choice. So here’s a toast to the men who take on other men’s offspring and give them love and a true father’s care, even when it isn’t easy, even when those other men have left emotional damage behind. To Dad, to Michael, to Ben, and to all of the other men out there like them, you are the true salt of the earth!

Grandmother's Basket by Linda Rodriguez

From the archives of Linda Rodriguez Writes - a blog post and poem run for Native American Heritage Month that reminds us about the women we may love and honor for Mother's Day. 

A Poem for Native American Heritage Month--"Grandmother's Basket"

For Native American Heritage Month, here is a poem about my grandmother, who was so influential in my life, even though she died when I was thirteen. Like a lot of families, mine was torn apart by divorce when I was young, and as great as the loss of my father was, I think the loss of his family, my grandmother and aunt, was even more traumatic. These women had been the strong stable base of my childhood while both parents were chaotic children. Once the divorce occurred, I lost that stability and their wisdom, but never their love. Fortunately, as an adult, I could and did seek out my aunt while she was still alive and rebuilt the family connection. Unfortunately, my grandmother was long gone by then.

GRANDMOTHER’S BASKET

I loved Grandmother’s baskets when I was small.

They had intricate patterns and figures

woven into them in brown, black,

yellow, red, and orange.

She had different sizes and shapes,

used them for storage rather than display.

My favorite was in reds and yellows with a black border.

It looked to me as if woven of fire and grasses.

I would climb into cupboards, find one,

and ask why she didn’t keep it out on a tabletop

where everyone who came in could admire it.

“These aren’t the best ones,” she said

as she fingered baskets that looked beautiful to me.

“We used to make them from rivercane,

which makes a better basket and dyes the best,

but they rounded us up in concentration camps

and drove us on a death march to a new land

that didn’t have our old plants like rivercane

so now we use buckbrush and honeysuckle.”

Grandmother shrugged. “You make do.”

I asked her to teach me how to make a basket

like the one I loved with feathers of fire

along its steep sides. She shook her head.

“It’s a lot of hard work.

First, we need black walnut, blood root,

pokeweed, elderberry. Yellow root’s the best yellow,

but blood root will have to do.

They’ve dug all the yellow root

for rich people’s medicines, call it goldenseal.

Got to have our dyestuffs first.

Got to forage for most of them.

It takes lots of trips, out and back,

to get enough to make good colors.”

I knew I could do that and said so.

She laughed. “You’ve got to know what to pick

or dig or gather. It’s like with my medicines.

Can’t just go taking any old weed.”

I pointed out that I was learning from her

about the Cherokee medicine plants. She just shook her head.

“It’s not the same. I grow most of those.

Haven’t taken you out for the wild ones yet

because you’re too little still. Same for dye plants.”

I nagged at her for days, begging her to teach me

so I could have a basket of my own.

I had in mind that amazing fire-flickering basket.

I wanted to make one just like that.

My visit was over without her ever giving in.

I was used to Grandmother’s strength of will.

I knew I would have to try harder next time.

There was no next-time visit.

My mother had always hated her mother-in-law.

Now, she won the battle to keep us away.

Our relationship poured out in letters

until my mother destroyed them,

refused further correspondence.

Years later, Grandmother wrote me—

a letter that slipped past my mother’s scrutiny—

that she was making a basket

one last time for me.

I knew she was very ill,

soon to die.

I don’t know who got the beautiful baskets

when Grandmother died, especially the one

that I loved when I was small.

Her sister and niece who cared for her

in her last illness, I suppose.

That’s fair. My parents had divorced by then,

and my mother allowed no contact

with that family. But

a lumpy, brown-paper-bag-wrapped package

with Grandmother’s shaky, spidery handwriting

arrived for me after her death.

My mother opened it first and laughed.

I stood waiting eagerly to snatch up

the last thing my grandmother would ever give me.

“Look at that,” Mother said with more laughter.

“That ugly old thing’s supposed to be a basket,

I think. She sure lost her knack for that

at the end, didn’t she?”

When I was small and visiting, I knew

Grandmother already had arthritis

in her hands. That’s probably why

she wouldn’t teach me to make baskets—

because she didn’t have the dexterity any longer

to make the kind she once had.

I still have that simple handled basket

of vines (probably honeysuckle).

The whole thing is dyed black.

There are no intricate patterns of flames

or anything else. It’s just solid black.

I can see her plodding out to gather

butternuts for the black dye

and to pull the honeysuckle vines,

stripping off the leaves.

I can see her gnarled hands

painstakingly weaving under and over,

no fancy twills or double-woven sides.

Hard enough to shape

a shallow but sturdy gathering basket

for her long-unseen granddaughter.

All these years later

I have my own herb garden

where many of her medicine plants grow.

When I gather them to dry for teas and poultices,

I use that black vine basket.

I think it will last forever.

Published in Dark Sister (Mammoth Publications/ Blog published at Linda Rodriguez Writes 11/17/17

Sparking Your Creativity

Sparking Your Creativity by Linda Rodriguez (originally published June 2017)

As an artist and creative person, I can experience times when I reach down for ideas, for creative excitement, for images, and come up temporarily empty. These have usually been times that have combined lots of creative overwork and lots of business work—taxes, promotion, correspondence, contracts, freelance editing, etc. This kind of emptiness and feeling creatively dry can be terrifying, but I’m now used to it, and I know what to do to refill the well and spark new creativity. In these circumstances, it’s necessary to take time to do things to build up new creativity energy within you. So here are ten ideas to get you started.

Journal Writing—This is the backbone of the creative life, especially for writers. I’m not necessarily talking about a daily diary. This is a notebook in which you write about what you see and hear, turning it into dialogue or sensory description. This is where you can work with writing prompts from books, workshops, tapes, and DVDs, your version of the pianist’s daily scales. Set a kitchen timer for a few minutes and do some freewriting to unload some of the chattering of your surface mind and move into deeper ideas.

Read Poetry—I’m a poet, as well as a novelist, but I’ve been surprised by how many commercially successful novelists I’ve met who say they regularly or occasionally read poetry as a springboard for their writing. It actually makes great sense because the poet deals in imagery, which is the language of the right (creative) brain.  I know that, whenever I read poetry, it sets my mind whirling with tons of ideas and images. I have come up with ideas for entire novels from reading a poem.

Read Something Very Different for You—If you always read and write poetry, check out a popular novel. If you’re a mystery reader, take a look at what science fiction writers are coming up with. If you read and write literary fiction, pick up a romance novel. Jog your mind from its habitual ruts of thinking and imagining. Stretch out of your comfort zone. Even if you don’t like what you read, it should still shake up your mind enough to start generating ideas, images, and characters.

Singlehanded Brainstorming—Most of us have been taught how to do and forced to sit through group brainstorming sessions before. Take those techniques and a sheet of paper with pen (or iPad or laptop), get comfortable, set a timer again, and start throwing out ideas at top speed. Same rules as with the group process. You can’t disqualify any idea, no matter how unrealistic. You want to generate as many ideas as you can as quickly as you can. Just list them down the page—or even use a voice recorder to capture them.  After the timer goes off, you can go down the list considering the possibilities you’ve listed. Look for possibilities to combine aspects of ideas. Write down any new ideas that get sparked by your consideration of the ideas already down on the page. Choose one or two promising (or least abhorrent) ideas and freewrite about them in your journal.

Making Lists—I love listmaking. Make lists of ideas, of characters, of backgrounds you’d like to use someday, of isolated bits of dialogue or description, of actions you’d like to see a character to take. My favorite is to write a list of scenes I’d like to read—exciting scenes, action-filled scenes, emotional scenes, surprising scenes, suspenseful scenes. They don’t have to have anything to do with any project you’re working on or any character you are writing or have written. They just need to be scenes you’d love to read—because scenes you’d love to read are scenes you’d love to write.

Visit a Museum, Gallery, Play, Film, Concert—We writers live and breathe words. Sometimes we need to get out of our heads and see or hear art that isn’t primarily word-based. It can be especially fruitful to go to a film in a language you don’t understand or an art exhibit of a kind you know nothing about. When we have no words to use to explain or understand what we’re seeing, our brains are kicked into another mode of functioning that can become quite generative. Wander around a gallery or museum and take in the colors and shapes. Sit in a concert hall or movie theater and let the music or film engulf you completely, washing through your brain. Come out seeing or hearing in a slightly different mode.

Draw, Paint, Knit, Spin, Sew—Even better than looking at art is making it. Sink your hands into clay or fiber. Splash ten different colors next to each other, taking note of the changes each new color creates. Feel the texture of the fabric, thread, yarn, fiber as you work with it to make something new. Take a penciled line and see what you can create with it. All of this also kicks in the right brain, the imagistic, creative part of us. Stay in beginner mind without worrying how “good” your art will be. This is—and should be—play, completely carefree and innocent.

Go for a Walk—Physical exercise is always a good thing for us sedentary word slugs, but even more important than its many health benefits are the creative benefits of simply moving your body through space. As you move around, your brain begins to get unstuck and to move, as well. A nice, long walk outdoors (preferably in scenic surroundings) can often jumpstart the solution to a creative dry spell. Sometimes a sterile period can arise from being overstressed. Walks are one of the best ways to counter such stress and relax the mind and body.

Arrange Flowers/Rearrange Some Belongings—In the Chinese art of feng shui, rearranging 27 items will start stuck soul energy flowing again. Moving belongings into new configurations, trying for a more pleasing pattern, has long been a cure for the blues and the blahs. We are pattern-recognizing and pattern-creating organisms. To change the habitual patterns that surround us charges us with new energy.  A smaller, simpler version of this is to gather or buy some flowers and assemble them into flower arrangements that please our aesthetic sensibilities. Spending a little time in creating pleasing, artistic arrangements of flowers or accessories will provide a creative boost to stuck energies.

Go to Lunch with a Creative Friend or Two—Everyone has one or more friends or acquaintances who are creative sparklers. Like the child’s fireworks favorite, they give off showers of sparks, or creative ideas, constantly. They are positive and upbeat and always focused on possibilities. Spending some time with them will leave you filled with ideas, energy, and excitement. It’s always worthwhile to give them a call and set up a relaxed lunch in a nice place. Rather than complain about how dry and sterile things are for you right at the moment, ask them what’s new with them and what they see as possibilities for the future.  As they take off shooting into the blue yonder, follow them wholeheartedly and build on all their ideas. You’ll walk away at the end of lunch with a big smile on your face and a bunch of ideas bubbling in your unconscious. Cherish these friends, even if they are unrealistic and immature. Their wild, creative energy is invaluable when your own has temporarily deserted you.

One or more of these ten methods should start your creative powers working once again. I’ve never had to go through more than a couple of these at a time to get my creative mojo stirring. Post this list near your desk, and don’t spend any time or energy bewailing it when a creative dry spell hits. Just reach for this and try whichever of these ideas looks most appealing at the time. If the first doesn’t completely prime your creative pump, move to another of them. Creativity never leaves, but sometimes it needs a spark to start the engine running again. So spark your creativity!

Turning to Other Writers for Inspiration

Turning to Other Writers for Inspiration by Linda Rodriguez (originally published on The Stiletto Gang-November 4, 2016)

Periodically, I get a little burned-out from working too long and hard without a break. I start to face resistance when I sit down to write. I have developed several techniques for dealing with this, but the first one I always try—and one that usually works—is to turn to what other writers have written about the trials and tribulations of writing.

So I look at what other writers have written about resistance, about finding themselves reluctant to sit down and write, even when that's what they most want to do. Many writers have written about this topic because this state is one that every writer finds herself or himself in sooner or later. As I go down the long list of writers who have written about this miserable place to find yourself, the first thing I encounter is a very wise statement from science fiction writer, Kameron Hurley.

"If I quit now I will soon go back to where I started. And when I started, I was desperate to get to where I am now." – Kameron Hurley

I realize, as I read, that the problem at bottom is always fear, no matter what else is also involved. Yes, I'm tired and need a little break and some recreational reading or activity that will help restore and replenish my well of creativity, but always, lurking for moments of exhaustion and weakness, is the writer's bane, fear. And I find a great writer there before me, as well.

"The work is greater than my fear." –Audre Lord

So, for the next time you find yourself burned-out and exhausted and coming up empty when you sit down to write here are more helpful quotations from writers about the process.

“Discipline is simply remembering what you want.” – Judith Claire Mitchell

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” – Louis L'Amour

“Work is the only answer.” –Ray Bradbury

"A word after a word after a word is power."–Margaret Atwood

"The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pratchett

“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying. ,,, This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us." – Steven Pressfield

Have you got some favorite quotations from writers that help you in such a situation?

Linda Rodriguez's book, Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, is based on her popular workshop. Her Skeet Bannon series featuring Cherokee campus police chief, Skeet Bannion includes Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret. She also is the author of several books of poetry. Linda has received critical recognition and awards, such as Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film. Find her on the web at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com.