My little brother is getting married Saturday. This is an occasion of great joy, of course. The house and family are in a bustle of activity, readying clothes, flowers, and gifts, writing speeches, and lamenting weight/hair/acne problems. My brother has caught a cold, so he fretting that not only won't he be able to sing to his bride at the reception (For all their bravado and genuine capabilities, Traynor men tend to be awfully romantic), but he may not be able to do more that whisper his vows. There's a lot of fretting, but deep down, we know how it'll all end. The vows will be said, the dances will be pranced, the wine drunk, and in years to come, the worries will be forgotten in favor of the greater over-all joy of the day. Its a time of big change, a happy shift, a good step forward for both my brother and his soon-to-be-Mrs. As I child, I feared change. I feared growing older, for I viewed change and growth as things ending. We were children, then childhood ends. We were best friends, now we are married and other people take more time and attention. We were a unit - now we are legion, (seriously - do you know how big my family is?) augmented with new people, new children, wives and their families. Our holidays, once simple, are now complicated by competing schedules and traditions. Sometimes feelings are even hurt. Growing pains. Change hurts. When my brother takes that vow on Saturday, he'll be taking a step away from his childhood, but towards something greater. He's building something, something that is uniquely his and his wife's. He's building a family of his own. But though he may have outgrown his old room, his toys, and his old sweatshirt, he is and always will be my brother. Gray hair will come, marriages and children will interfere with one-on-one time, but we'll still have the memories that years of companionship provides. After all, we are still the only two people in the house who enjoy Simon and Simon. My little brother is a man now, but he is still my brother, my friend, and I'm still his big sister. Somethings even time can't change.
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Fall has finally come to New Hampshire. The green leaves are drying into mellow oranges, brittle yellows, and fiery reds. The air is so crisp and clean that breathing it is like drinking fresh, cold water - I fairly gulp it in as I walk along. The shops smell of pumpkin spice and the promise of coming holidays. Everyone is packing away their flip-flops and swim suits in favor of knee-high boots and comfortable sweaters that hug you like an old friend, and prepping fireplaces for long, cozy nights. If you haven't guessed it, I love this time of year. And for reasons I have yet to understand (though the name probably has something to do with it), it's in Autumn that I find myself quoting Robert Frost. So here, in honor of Friday and the beginning of fall, is a quotable from the man himself: In other news, Necessary Evil: the paperback is coming along nicely. To celebrate, down-load the eBook on October 2nd only. If you've read it already, leave a review! And if you haven't read it, now's your time to get it, on me. Tell your friends, too!
Happy Fall, everyone! So, I intended to write something charming and witty and instructional today. Something that would rock your world. Something that would send you into the long weekend with a smile on your face.
But, alas for good intentions, I got distracted by work, life, and too many John Wayne movies and Star Trek novels, so the article remains unwritten. But until next week, here's a quote from a lady whose devious plots and charming writing style still dominates the mystery world today. Have a great Labor Day weekend, everyone! Love a good mystery? Want to check out new and exciting authors?
Join the Mystery Writers Revealed Facebook on September 12th, 2015, and get to know the mystery authors, enter contests, and buy books for a special low price. A great time is guaranteed! Click on the photo for the link. Writing a novel is sometimes like going on a trip: you have a rough idea of what to pack and what you're going to see, but you never know for sure. In a few weeks, Necessary Evil will launch and I cannot wait for you to read it! It's got romance, danger, buried treasure, Modern-day mixing with the Civil War (side note: the war was anything but Civil - I prefer the wordier War Between the States title), and just a dash of darkness. I figured I'd like writing this book (I did) and I knew I'd learn alot (I did), but what I didn't expect was how much the research for this book would effect me. In preparing to write, I studied New Hampshire's involvement in the Civil War, especially the town of Chester, where the book is based, and I even learned a little about the origins of the statue that stands so proudly in the center of my town. Mostly I read letters - lots of letters, letters to and from soldiers and their wives, sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers, and other loved ones. They ranged from heartbreaking to hilarious, and spoke of everything from problems on the farm and on the battlefield to declarations of love and prayers for a safe return. Men worried about their families, women worried about their husbands, and children grew up missing one or both parents - and sometimes the other way around. Reading those letters made the participants feel real and present, and I was amazed at how modern their words seemed to be. Some of them could have been written today, with almost no alterations, and sent from Afghanistan or Iraq. The sentiments were the same. While some of the soldiers boasted of this or that feat, most of them just wanted the killing to end and peace to return. It put a human heart, so to speak, into the granite Chester soldier, and a story behind all those veterans laying quietly buried in my hometown. Times and wars and places change - but humans and families are still very much the same. The Restore Coaching series is a collection of three booklets, each dealing with an aspect of divorce/separation caused by domestic violence. Jenna Brooks, an DV advocate with over a decade's worth of experience, brings her knowledge, compassion, and typical unflinching honesty to these issues, offering insight, support, comfort, and a path forward. Brooks' philosophy is that the best way to recover from divorce, domestic abuse, and parental alienation is to move ahead, building a life of dignity and worth that every woman deserves. Not suffering from any of these tragedies (being a single, childless woman whose history of romantic entanglements is so passive as to be rather boring), I read these books from the point of view of some one trying to help a friend in need. Its a heartbreaking, difficult subject to read about. The pain and confusion caused by this kind of abuse and neglect can take years to repair. Women coming out of these situations can create defensive barriers - emotional and physiological - which are complex and painful to dismantle, and off-putting to the well-meaning friend. But that is not to say that these victims are without hope. Indeed, the over-all view, while frankly admitting the obstacles and the difficulties, is still an uplifting one. This series isn't a self-help one so much as a chat with a best friend who has been there and back and survived to the tell the tale. Brooks' experience has taught her not only how long a road there is to recovery and restoration, but that such healing is possible and achievable. With faith, hope, love, and a resumption of dignity, women can shed their tormented past and create the life they deserve. Of that, Brooks' has no doubt. Highly recommended. There are three books in the series: 1. How to Help a Battered Woman (which I thought was the most striking of the three) 2. Alone Again... Happily: A Post-Divorce Coaching Session 3. Banished: The Alienated Mother They can be read as a series or as stand alone. I meant to leave an awesome review and write and post a witty, scathing essay today. But, alas, this week was so enormously busy that I ran out of time and energy and wit to do either.
So I'll be running away for the weekend instead, escaping humidity and stress. Usually, I am not a huge fan of running away - I believe most problems/stresses/issues are best faced head on and dealt with in the moment - but some days, weeks, months, running away is seems the best way to get a proper perspective on the planet. Besides, I had a hard time turning down an opportunity to hang out in the gorgeous northern New Hampshire mountain region (seriously, my life is so hard). But rather than post nothing, here are some of my favorite quotes on the writing life. If you can't runaway this weekend, perhaps these will give you the needed boost to face your every-day stresses. Good luck, friends! Have a great weekend! By Harper Lee Synopsis: A young woman returns home to the Deep South from New York City to discover racial bigotry running rampant in her hometown - affecting even those most dear to her. The first and most important thing to know about Watchman is that it is not a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. While the names, places, and faces are familiar or similar, Watchman reads like revisionist history or the parallel yniverse theme so popular in sci-fi shows. Instead of asking 'What became of Scout?', it asks, "What if Mockingbird never happened? What if the Atticus Finch we knew and loved was the figment of a lonely little girl's imagination?" By now you probably know that Watchman's Atticus is not the sterling character that Mockingbird had him out to be. As Jean Louise (formerly Scout) learns to her horror, he's heading the segregationist movement in town, speaks White Supremacist with a lawyer's ease, and even dabbled in the KKK (though not as an active member - even this Atticus draws the line in horror there). Where Jean Louise is sickened by segregationist activity, Atticus views this as a means to keep the Federal Government from leaning to heavily against state's rights - as well as keeping the poor naive blacks in their place. Watchman doesn't effectively dispute his points: it's essentially about a little girl learning that her father is simply a flawed man. Mockingbird's greatest strength lay in the idea that change could come from within. Living in the north as I have, the idea is prevalent (if not openly stated) that the South would never have come around had it not been for Northern interference, that all white men and women were united in their efforts to keep their black brethren under their heel. Mockingbird told us that one of their own could stand against the tyranny of racial hate and that their own could bring about segregation's demise. It was a story that treated all its protagonists with respect and dignity, and voiced the rather shocking opinion that a white Southern man might be anti-segregation. Watchman offers no such assurances. Even Jean Louise, in voicing her contempt for Atticus' white superiority, admits something close to it: "They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn't make them subhuman," and even she fails to notice that while she's calling her black acquaintances by their familiar names, every one of them refers to her as 'Miss Scout' or 'Miss Jean Louise.' Her character, far from redeeming white Southerner, rather reinforces the two rather trite ideas that seem common to books on racial hatred: that change can only come from the young and/or those trained on the outside. In this case, Jean Louise had to spend years in New York City before she could recognize the bigotry in her home town, making her either the most blind heroine since Helen Keller or astonishingly self-absorbed. Neither is flattering. I do wonder what I would have thought about the book had it not been about Scout and Atticus. While the story cannot take place in the same universe as Mockingbird, the editors clearly relied on the fact that readers have already read and loved the first book. Without the idea of saintly Gregory Peck hovering in the back of our mind, would Jean Louse's revelation feel as devastating? And I wonder, too, at the publisher's wisdom in releasing this book in the wake of riots in New York and Baltimore - with the current tension between the races, is it really wise to tear down Atticus Finch? Summary: Watchman is a retread of an old idea - sometimes you can't go home again - and adds nothing of substantial value about racial tensions. Skip this and stick with To Kill a Mockingbird. Lucky Code: A Guide for Winning at Life by Gaynete Edwards From the back: Down on your luck? Need a lucky boost? This book offers a frill-free approach that dismisses the premise that luck is attained through charms or birthright, and instead provides readers with easily digestible A to Z chapters containing powerful codes to increase their chances of success and, of course, lots of luck! Our thoughts and actions shape the course of our lives. This book teaches you to direct them in such was that you cannot lose! Ms. Edwards provides just what she promises: an fun, fast-paced, and easy-to-read guide book to living a 'lucky' life. Each tenant is listed in alphabetically (such as Code C: Character Building, Code D: Dress for Success, or the creatively named Code I: Indebtedness - Just a Fancy Word for Gratitude), and gives the reader an explanation of the Code, actions to apply it, and inspirational quotes for encouragement. This book is encouraging while putting the emphasis on personal action: if you want your life to change, you have the ability to do so. "Luck", according to Edwards, is merely the organization of your life in such a manner as to create positive results - a definition I can really get behind. Written with a breezy, optimistic, and no-nonsense manner, Edwards is witty, entertaining, and thought-provoking. Best read with a journal, this book is highly recommended for anyone looking to up their game in life. For more information, visit the author's website. Being a New Englander, you knew I had to come to Thoreau sometime...
Moving forward requires letting go and Dream-Catching requires courage and tenacity. We are capable of all these things. Go forth and live your dream. Make Thoreau proud. On gray days like these, there is nothing like a little J. R. R. Tolkien to remind you that things are not as they seem, nor as unchanging as they appear.
This man's bad day is about to get worse.
A 1940s Gangster Comedy, coming soon from Narrow Street Films. I'm not a Minimalist. Quite the opposite, really. I call myself a Curator. My minimalist, neat-nick brother, A, is too polite to say it, but he would honestly call me a Pack Rat. And I was okay with that, really. Until this weekend, when I realized that I was tripping over boxes of stuff that I haven't used in five years. When I realized that holding on to it wasn't just physically keeping me in place (the idea of packing and moving all this junk terrifies me), but mentally holding me back, too. Every item calls out for my attention, whether it is for storage consideration or dusting or 'why won't you wear/play/read/work with me today?' Everything I had that is not currently useful is becoming an energy drain. And I'm exhausted. It's like these material things are holding me hostage. If there's one thing this proud, stubborn, Irish girl can't stand is the idea of being held back. So this June, I'm accepting the Minimalist's Game Challenge: I'm getting rid of 465 things in this month alone. That's 15.5 items a day, but I've gotten a head start - today, I've already gotten rid of 24. Only 441 to go. I'm not a Minimalist. But if the freedom I felt returning after boxing up and tossing out those items is any indication, I will be by June 30th. Are you doing the Minimalist Game this month? If so, comment and let me know! For more information about the Minimalists (and you should definitely check them out: so inspirational), here is their website. For another take on minimalism as a lifestyle, check out Joshua Becker's Becoming Minimalist site. Hey there! Have you missed me? I've missed you too! It's been a while since I've written and there's actually a good reason for that - several, actually. I've been busy finishing my next novel, Necessary Evil (A New England suspense/mystery/treasure hunt/romance with ties to the Civil War - trust me, it'll be awesome), promoting Not That Guy's screening (May 9th, in Londonderry NH), and editing a script for Narrow Street Films' new movie (a throw-back to Classic 40s comedy/gangster movie - trust me, this is also awesome), as well as the usual family/work stuff. It'll be another week or so before I can return to my usual, haphazard schedule, but rest assured: Wanderings will return, along with more book reviews and fun. Promise. In the meantime, check out the new trailer on When I'm Not Writing and be sure to comment! See you soon! |
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