Not a Happy Camper

Not a Happy Camper by Debra H. Goldstein

Ripped off!  Violated!  Pissed. All emotions and thoughts going through my mind this morning when I picked up my Mah jongg change purse and discovered it was significantly lighter than when I put it in my car’s console Friday morning.

It was only four dollars in quarters lighter, but I was bummed.  Was the culprit the clean-cut valet who parked my car when I met my daughter in Atlanta for brunch on Sunday? Was it the nice duo who vacuumed my car and its mats at the carwash? Could it have been the industrious young man who spent so much time wiping and polishing my car when it rolled out of the wash?

I don’t know. 

What I do know is how much money should have been there for next week’s game. 

I don’t count my Mah jongg winnings every week, but instead of transferring it from my purse to the car’s console and leaving it there until I play the next week, as I did until this morning, I accidentally carried it into the house last Thursday.  Understand, I stake myself $5 every January and watch it go up and down throughout the year. Occasionally, the stake runs out before year’s end, but most of the time it is enough to entertain myself once a week for the year.  When I took it into the house and out of my purse last Thursday evening, I realized it was heavier than usual.

I counted it.  I was up.  There was $9.75 in the change purse.  Happiness.

After the car wash today, I opened the place in the car where I keep my mah jongg card, change purse, coupons, a few quarters for parking, parking passes, and sunglasses.  It wasn’t in its usual neat order.  All but two of the six parking quarters were missing and the change purse was skewed out of its normal location. I picked it up and discovered the purse felt thinner and lighter.  It was.

I counted it. There was $5.25.  Bummer.

In the future, the maj money will come out of the car – the six parking quarters will remain.  I’ve learned my lesson thanks to someone who is up $5.50 in quarters.  What’s even more frustrating, I tipped each of the suspects.  Sign me, Not a Happy Camper.

Production for Use

by Bethany Maines

In the movie His Girl Friday (Cary Grant & Rosalind Russell), a light hearted screwball comedy that centers around a newspaper editor and his ex-wife/top reporter as they attempt to get the big story and he attempts to prevent her from marrying someone else. Under the froth, romance, laughs and lightning fast dialogue the plot also deals with a poor schlub who shot a cop and is getting the death penalty mostly due to politics and in spite of the fact that he’s not really dealing with a full deck.  In the movie, Rosalind Russell interviews the schlub and asks him what crack-pots he was listening to in the park while he was whiling away his unemployed time.  The soapbox ranter he listened to the most, the one the made the most sense was a man who talked about “production for use.”

That phrase crops up for me time and time again as a philosophical touchpoint.  When I’m writing I will periodically ask myself, what use is this scene?  What has it been produced for?  Is the way in which I have presented the scene—from POV, to word choice, to start and finish points—the best, most useful way, to achieve the goal?  If the action of the characters is correct, then are the emotions within the scene hitting the right notes?  Often times as writers will get bogged down in telling who went where when and we forget to also incorporate the emotion, the driving force that pushes the character into action.  The same can also be true in reverse.  I have spent whole pages blithering on about a character’s feelings (Reminder to self: No one gives a crap.  It’s boring.  Stop doing that.) and forgotten to advance the plot at all.  And then, even if the emotions and the actions are right, is everything told in the right words—is the style of the telling the best way to tell it?

This level of thinking is difficult because it forces me to objectively look at the story and check in on the individual elements of style, tone, and content.  And generally, for me, that can only be done after I have completed a draft and I’m working in the editorial phase.  If that all sounds like a lot of work, then you’re correct, but I like to think my readers appreciate it.  After all I put a lot of work into producing a book for the use of readers to enjoy.

***

Bethany Maines is the author of the Carrie Mae Mysteries, Wild Waters, Tales from the City of Destiny and An Unseen Current.  You can also view the Carrie Mae youtube video or catch up with her on Twitter and Facebook.

TIME--A PERSONAL TAKE

By AB Plum

“If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth,” says Anna in Jodi Picoult’s wonderful novel, My Sister’s Keeper.

This quote reflects some of my feelings over the past five weeks as my husband recuperates from brain surgery. 

Specifically, he had a ventriculoperitoneal shunt implanted to relieve pressure in his brain caused by fluid build-up.

As surgeries go, the procedure took a little over sixty-minutes. Total prep time for the entry into the OR required 3 hours. Nurses monitored him every 15 minutes for another three hours following the procedure. The night quickly (slowly) got chewed up with checks of his vitals, inquiries for his well-being, and offers of pain meds. Pain, came the repeated warning, could make each second feel excruciating.

Time during that overnight-hospital stay collapsed, expanded, collapsed in a blur. The morning hours disappeared in consultations with a physical therapist, a social worker, and the surgeon’s assistant. A successful walk around the hospital wing provided proof he could go home. We arrived at our front step thirty hours after we left—though we both admitted to feeling as if we’d traveled in space for at least a year.

Pain management ate up the first couple of days. Sleep gobbled up much of the rest of “normal” awake-time. Night hours for sleeping fogged over as I helped him out of bed about every ninety minutes. A walker helped navigate the steps from bed to bathroom. Early-March nights felt as if we'd taken a detour to Juno.
Unlike with a baby, no need to feed or soothe back to sleep. Our consciousness crashed—until the next ninety-minute interval.

We returned to the surgeon at the end of the first week for a tweak to the shunt. This helped regulate gait and reduce the persistent headaches. Time became more defined, taking on a rhythm similar to the before-surgery pattern of our lives.

Today, exactly five weeks since I sat in the waiting room, my husband and I feel as if four hundred years have passed. Walking without a cane is no longer a challenge. Sleeping through the night is a given. All pain has disappeared. Dèjà vu—back on Planet Earth.

Looking forward—we have the insight to recognize the five weeks spent in ‘coming back’ pale compared to the several decades of quality life we hope lie ahead. I won’t claim we’ll never take time for granted again, but I will say we have a new appreciation for the minutes, hours, and weeks of each day. 

On Hold . . . for Unspecified Time

I've uploaded The Lost Days to Amazon, but need a bit more time to revisit my launch plan. First things, first. In the meantime, I'm hoping to carve out time to finish Book 3, The In-Between Years in the next month.

Recommended!

Looking for a book?

Truth is the back up of e-books on my reader boggles the mind. Thank heavens I bought all those as yet unread books digitally. If they were in print, there would be no room in our house for people.

That said, I continue to buy books. Friends’ books. Recommended books. Books with appealing covers.

And now I have found a new toy. If you’ve not yet discovered recommendemeabook.com, I suggest you click on over. Think first pages unidentified by cover or author or title.

Some first pages are immediately recognizable—It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Others are new and undiscovered jewels.

I recently spent a happy hour reading the first pages of everything from John Updike to Sylvia Plath. From Charles Dickens to Wally Lamb. From William Faulkner to Roald Dahl. Go. Play. Fall down a rabbit hole.

Find a new book or rediscover an old favorite.

You’re welcome.

Julie Mulhern is the USA Today bestselling author of The Country Club Murders. 

She is a Kansas City native who grew up on a steady diet of Agatha Christie. She spends her spare time whipping up gourmet meals for her family, working out at the gym and finding new ways to keep her house spotlessly clean--and she's got an active imagination. Truth is--she's an expert at calling for take-out, she grumbles about walking the dog and the dust bunnies under the bed have grown into dust lions.

Her next book, Watching the Detectives, releases May 23rd.

Sales Attacks

by Linda Rodriguez

My late first husband, who died fourteen years ago, still receives mail at my house—though we were divorced for fifteen years before he died. If he were alive, he would be old enough for Medicare. Suddenly, missives from various insurance providers (almost none with identification of the firm involved) are hitting my mailbox every day. I called the number listed on one of the early ones to tell them that Michael was dead. I sent back the cards, which others provided without a phone number, printing in large block letters across them, DECEASED.

Almost immediately, I began to receive hectoring telephone calls from the first company, who now had my phone number and name from my call to advise them of Michael’s death. The more I refused the Medicare insurance they had to sell, the more verbally aggressive and downright mean they got. I began refusing to pick up the phone at sight of their phone number in caller ID, so they switched numbers and caught me another couple of times before I learned those new numbers. Currently, they call four or five times within five minutes, varying the number each time. They start at 8:00 a.m. and continue throughout the day, every few hours. When I’ve told them that they must stop, they say I contacted them so they have the right to call me, even though I’m on the no-call list. And unfortunately, that seems to be the truth, even though I contacted them only to tell them their target was not here.

Meanwhile, someone from one of the other companies showed up on my doorstep, insisting I let him in so he could give me the hard-sell on his company’s insurance plan. When I repeatedly said no, he verbally abused me for agreeing to be visited and changing my mind, shouting and leaning into my face at the door until my dog was straining at the collar I held, trying to get at this stranger threatening his mom. I slammed the door in his face, puzzled at his feeling of entitlement until I realized that he must be from one of the companies I’d sent a card with DECEASED written on it. Someone at their corporate headquarters must have interpreted that as permission to send their salesman around.

I’ve been in touch with our attorney general’s office about these events, and I’ve learned that this is common. Medicare is confusing, and these companies have made a habit for years of using high-pressure sales tactics with the elderly, since they’ve found older people’s unquestioning regard for authority figures makes them easy targets to bully.

Now, the baby boomers are hitting retirement and Medicare age. My late first husband was in the vanguard of this group. If he were alive, he would never have put up with this sales-bullying, and I think these companies are going to find that their stereotype of little old elderly people who are easy to pressure into sales will backfire in their faces as they try it out on the boomers. We have had precious little regard for authority figures throughout our lives.

I have encountered more and more of this aggressive, high-pressure behavior in salespeople of all kinds lately. I wonder if that’s because I’m moving toward that age when we’re supposed to turn into people easy to bully into sales that are not in our best interests, or is it because times are tough financially and people are desperate to make sales. Which do you think it is? I try to keep in mind that even the most hectoring salesman is just trying to put food on his (women can be bad, but the worst offenders are all men, I’ve found) table. Still, it really makes me mad. Have you noticed this kind of sales warfare being waged against you lately?

Linda Rodriguez's book, Plotting the Character-Driven Novel is based on her popular workshop. The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, an anthology she co-edited was recently published. Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery featuring Cherokee campus police chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear in 2017. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret—and her books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart's Migration—have received honors, 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.

Visit her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

The Best Job: Telling Stories

By Sparkle Abbey

We have the best job! We’re storytellers.

Not only that, we’ve been blessed recently with readers who have taken the time to email or tell us in person about their experiences in reading our books.

One lovely reader shared that she got through an illness abroad ship with our first three books that she had on her Kindle. Another read to her mom who was hospitalized and they laughed together at Caro, Mel, and the indomitable Betty and her shenanigans.  Several others have shared that the books have been an escape at a time when they needed one. A lift, a laugh, a little bit of fun along with a whodunit that kept them guessing. Can you see our big smiles?

We absolutely love it when readers tell us they laughed out loud while reading a Sparkle Abbey book and got funny looks from others on the train or in the break room at work. Sigh. That’s just the best.

The truth is that, as readers ourselves, there has been some time in our life when reading and books got us through a bad time, an endless wait, or just provided a get-away when we couldn’t actually get away. And whether an author writes humorous mysteries like us, or straight serious storylines, or romances, or dark thrillers, we all want to transport readers. We want to envelope you in our fictional world. We want to share our story people with you.

We believe writers write because they have to. We can’t stop. There are stories in our heads and we’re compelled to capture them. Ask a room of writers why they write and you’ll hear words like passion, joy, and need. They’ll often say things like, “The story nagged at me until I finally had to write it.” Or something along the lines of ,“That character just kept talking to me, insisting I tell her story.” You can see why we have to hang out with other writers, can’t you? Other people might question our sanity. We're sure our friends and families have at times.

Ultimately, writers write not only because we have to, but because we want readers to be pulled into our worlds. We were entertained, enlightened, shaped, and sometimes even saved by books. And we want to do the same for others with our own stories.

So, readers, don’t ever hesitate to tell an author (in person or via email) what their book meant to you. We need to hear that. It’s what keeps us going when the characters won’t behave or the plot won’t untwist.

It’s what keeps us telling stories.

Sparkle Abbey’s first book in the Pampered Pets series is currently part of a drawing for a giveaway of 55+ cozy mysteries and the grand prize of a Kindle Fire. Details are here: Book Sweeps

Also, our publisher is running a special on our 7th book Downton Tabby and it is $1.99 in all ebook formats until April 15th.

Amazon
Nook
Kobo

Stay up-to-date on new releases and other Sparkle Abbey news by signing up for updates at: SparkleAbbey.com

Linda Rodriquez' book, Plotting the Character Driven Novel Review by Juliana Aragon Fatula

One of the first writers to reach out to welcome me was the mystery writer, Linda Rodriquez. We met many years ago, at AWP in Denver, Colorado and she kept in touch via social media. She invited me to join the Stiletto Gang last year and I began blogging about being a writer. My excitement after reading her book on writing: Plotting the Character Driven Novel, grew into a fire that burned bright. I devoured the one hundred and twenty pages in record time. I returned and highlighted text, tabbed pages, and took notes. I’m a lifelong learner and enjoy the challenge to improve my writing by studying master writers like Linda.

Linda explains in her book how to “use character as a springboard to a strong plot.” The beginning chapters cover the basics: How to Use This Book, Writing is Thinking on Paper; To Find Time to Write Your Novel, You Must Take Time to Write; Motivating Yourself to Write in the Time You’ve Created; Learning to Read as a Writer; and It All Starts with Character.        

Her book provides concise instructions and writing exercises. Linda writes, “What if? Those two little words are the most valuable tools of the novelist at the beginning of the book.” Her book offered me a guide and exercises in writing, and plenty of motivation.  She also recommends other books on writing by master writers. I visited my local library and read the books she suggested. Many of the books she suggested, recommended the same book, Stephen King’s, On Writing.

I had just read King’s book and felt jazzed by the influence it made in my writing. But, I was missing the woman’s voice. King writes about his experiences as a male writer. Linda helped me face my fears with her female voice on writing. I can’t help shouting praise for both books; however, I prefer the format of Linda’s book. She teaches the writer with quick chapters and gives examples of her first draft notes, journal freewriting plot documents, scene analysis, chapter outline and character freewriting and reveals several samples of her own writing from her mystery novels. The samples from her personal writing notebook makes a great model to follow.

Her chapter, Ending with a Bang, contains five writing exercises that helped me with my struggles to finish my first draft of my manuscript. I pictured myself sitting in a classroom with Linda in her writing workshop. Her book speaks directly to the reader in her unique voice both nurturing and challenging her readers to finish their novel. I learned valuable writing tips. I recommend her book on writing because it is brilliant. Trust me, I’m a fiery Aries with a bright flame of curiosity and hunger for knowledge and Linda’s book gives the reader power and skills to burn with excitement using “character as a springboard to a strong plot.

P.S. Turning Sixty this Spring

 

April 2, 1957 the year of the big spring blizzard.  Colorado Highway 115 between Fort Carson and Canon City closed due to hazardous roads. I was born in to a storm. How cool is that?  My father explained to the State Trooper that his wife was having a baby thirty miles south in Fremont County and begged to be allowed to drive through the storm to rescue his wife and baby girl. Born under the fires sign, Aries, I burst into the world from my Mother’s womb like the Aztec god, Huitzilopochtli, the warrior who saved his mother from being murdered by his sister Coyolxauhqui the moon,  and the four-hundred Centzon Huitznahuac, who were thrown into the sky and became the stars. I’m a fiery-being from Aztec mythology. I was born into the blizzard and fought the elements to survive. I’m fire, stone, heat. I came into the world to save my mother from the blizzard; I warmed her body with my blazing aura. I’m a force like the wind, snow, and ice that closed the highway and stranded travelers on Highway 115.

Sixty years ago, I entered el mundo with ice melting flames. Named after my great-grandmother, Julianita. The stars lined up and created my destiny. Not everyone understands my loud, gregarious, bombastic personality; but the few who do, get a passionate, loyal and protective friend. I want to thank Linda Rodriquez for being a positive role model for me and I aim to make her proud of me and to be a positive role model for young women aspiring to be writers. This is my birthday gift to myself. I’m going to finish my novel and dedicate it to all of the women who struggle to make sense of the world and who retain their sanity with writing, mystery, humor, romance, and high heels. Thanks Linda for everything. You are an inspiration to all of us women writers. Viva las mujeres!

Planting the Seeds of Reading and Writing

By Kimberly Jayne

When I was eight, I was a third-grade student at Desert View Elementary. My teacher was a tiny elderly woman in her eighties. Mrs. Hawkins was sweet and welcoming and, because of her, I looked forward to going to school. I adored her.

It was 1963, a year that changed America, and a year that Mrs. Hawkins changed me.

I remember to this day her announcement that she was going to teach us fractions, and we were going to absolutely love it because fractions are so much fun. Whether by the power of suggestion or her teaching methods, she was right. Fractions were fun. Multiplication tables were fun too. I digress and give her a C on division. Because of division I received the only "2" (B) in an entire year of report cards decorated in "1s" (A's).


Mrs. Hawkins holds a very special place in my heart for not only getting me to appreciate math and school in general, she taught me to love reading. She read to the class first from E.B. White's Stuart Little and then from The Pink Motel by Carol Ryrie Brink, and then another book whose name I don't recall. Every day we'd hear a chapter, and I couldn't wait for reading time. When I was home, I would think about Mrs. Hawkins and what wonderful things might happen next in the story.

More than anything she read, it was The Pink Motel that transformed me from a kid who liked books into a kid with an avid love of storytelling. Mrs. Hawkins kept me spellbound with a book that pulled me in and made me feel like I was right there with Kirby and Bitsy in that Pink Motel with a menagerie of quirky characters.

And from those stories, I became a storyteller in my own right.

At the end of the school year, I was happy for summer, but I missed Mrs. Hawkins. I went to say hello when I entered the fourth grade, but she wasn't there. She didn't return to teach because during the summer, she had passed away. Even now, I get a lump in my throat when I think of her and what a tremendous affect she had on me.

Do you have someone from your early life who instilled in you a love of reading and writing?

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Kimberly Jayne writes humor, romantic comedy, suspense, erotica, and dark fantasy. You can check her out on Amazon. Find out more about her at ReadKimberly.