Lynn Hesse's Blog: Book Signing, page 6

Is truTV true?

[image error]My grandson is addicted to his electronic device just like every other thirteen-year- old, but he does look up and speak, occasionally. During Christmas vacation he spent  a couple of nights with us, and we reconnected the old-fashioned way. We talked. He helped with the chores and involved himself in making decisions about Christmas presents. I learned he liked Adam Ruins Everything and Carbanaro Effect on the truTv channel. Both funky shows debunk common held scientific and not so scientific beliefs. They use the process of critical thinking, a skill I find lacking in many young people.

I might be a little less concerned his one-eyed monster obsessions will turn his brain to mush. Now, my next goal as a grandmother is to make sure his mind is straight about the power of both sexes, or as Aretha would say, “RESPECT.”

He will be trapped in a car with me for four hours to and from Alabama for an upcoming family wedding. Well, he will be dating soon…

Adam Ruins Everything, truTV

Carbanaro Effect, truTV

Will Darts Do?

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Usually, I don’t play cards or board games. Will a game of darts do?

This family game of darts has entertained many an overly energetic child. I remember my daughter and my son in their youth playing with this set, as well as my grandchildren, or anybody waiting impatiently for a Christmas pageant to begin, or the food to be served at family gatherings.

History: Darts originated in England during the reign of Henry VIII, and Anne Boleyn even gave her king an expensive set to win his favor, but the game evolved in the English pubs. No doubt the darts were shortened arrows and kept the King’s archers’ skills sharp during the harsh winter months when training was delayed. The first dart board was probably the end of a barrel, known as a butt, or the French archery term “butte” meaning target.

Genetics and Legacy

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My husband, Dean Hesse, has never been curious about his ancestry, but he proudly told our grandson, Teddy, about his father, Robert, being in Okinawa in WWII and how he painted art on the Navy pilots leather jackets.  Later, he was a printer and an artist. Dean’s third great-grandfather fought for the Union in the Civil War, and Dean possesses his forefathers’s legacy, a 1852 Sharps Carbine rifle used in the capture of New Orleans in 1862.

His mother’s father, John, was born in Hungary. He came to the U.S. in 1899 and worked as a printer, sent money home, and brought his ten brothers and sisters to America. His bride, Mary, migrated to America through Ellis Island from Scotland in 1901. They met in the stockyards in Chicago where she was working as a secretary. Dean has memories of her Scottish brogue, being a devote Catholic, a lover of bull fighting, and telling him not to put cats next to his throat because as she said, “You’ll get tuberculosis.”

John cooked dinner, baked pork chops or chicken, mashed potatoes and corn every Sunday, and the meal became Dean’s favorite for life. Neither grandmother ever cooked. His mother raised him on Stouffers’. As a result when I met Dean, he preferred the taste of frozen dinners over a home-cooked meal.

Teddy and Dean are proud left-handed people like their forbearers on both sides of the family. They have similar mannerisms, linguistic rhythm, and love cats, not genetic proof, but enough to make me smile.

 

Saved Christmas Cards

I save Christmas cards, thank you notes, and sometimes birthday cards. I store the cards each year in a Christmas ornament box. My husband never brings down the same Christmas boxes from the attic. It’s his way of protesting the task. This husband and wife negotiation game has lead to a ritual for me. I reread the cards from whatever year or box my husband randomly selects as I decorate the Christmas tree. (I like to put up the tree on my son’s birthday, December the ninth.) I keep the cards because my friends and colleagues remind me to be kind to myself, laugh, and enjoy where I am in life.

My friends make me smile because they are clever, sincere, and talented. They forgive my tendency to create constantly. I’m a planner; it’s easy to lose track of the now as I organize and visualize tomorrow, but today I want to reflect back to the past.[image error][image error].

I discover some ornaments my children made in elementary school, a clay Santa Claus with his hat broken off and a card shown above taken from a box marked 1998. It is a card sent from the other side of the world, China, to me from Lin Fei, a friend. She continues to teach me many things about humanity probably without realizing. Every news story about China comes to me from the perspective of us, not them.

“Bah, humbug,” you might say. This is what I know: I taught myself to deal with being shy as a kid by realizing we are all a little scared to take the first or next step–of being humiliated. Ah-hah. This idea could apply to nations. I challenge each of you to drop your assumptions about a neighbor or acquaintance and reach out this week to another human being. Be surprised.

I wish each of you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays at the close of 2017, but more importantly I wish you abundance of spirit, right now.

The Loss of My Critique Group

I knew my Emory critique group was important to me for many reasons. The members would see what I couldn’t, tell me what worked, and what didn’t. Mutual respect for each other and our differing writing styles developed over a period of more than ten years. It jarred me when the facilitator decided to disband the group.

We were composed of people with a wide range of life experiences and careers: Emory University professor, journalist, lawyer, event planner, marketing specialist, and a law enforcement officer. Members left because of babies, high-pressure jobs, soccer mom exhaustion, too busy–meaning our group wasn’t a good fit for them, personal health, caregiving, and one male member died from cancer. Other members joined. We wrote.

Primarily, we met twice a month. Submission were emailed a week ahead of the scheduled date. After reading and digesting 20-30 submission pages for the submitting member, we typed comments, jotted notes, or wrote on the back of the last page. We shared over coffee or tea. Life complicated and infused our writing processes. Some people wrote literary fiction. The genres varied from crimes, detectives, amateur sleuths, fictionalized memoirs, thrillers, and YA fantasies. Short stories and in-progress novels  were accepted as submissions.

Advice: Whether you’re new or a seasoned participant in the game of fiction writing, I recommend you find a group of  writers to critique your work. They should challenge you, celebrate your small triumphs, and rally around you when a rejection email knocks you for a loop. You’ll gain skill as much from critiquing their stories as you’ll hone from editing and rewriting your own words. Note: The Atlanta Writers Club is one resource if you wish to join a critique group.

Endings are hard to write in fiction and live through in daily life. Loss doesn’t feel good. The balance beam has splitters. [image error]

Change happens, but dang it, I’ll miss you, Ruth and Cheryl, and your stories. I sincerely thank you and all the other members who read my rough drafts and made suggestions.

“The Strangest of Professions”

Author Lisa Wingate writes in the acknowledgments of The Sea Keeper’s Daughter: “Writing is the strangest of professions. Here is a job in which your ask each day to listen to the voices of people who don’t exist and describe events that never were. It’s the adult version of Let’s Pretend.”

While writing the rough draft for Another Kind of Hero, a previously unknown character, Wanda Millard, woke me from a sound sleep and demanded to be put in the novel.

I hadn’t planned on a ghost. I wasn’t happy.

My oppositional sister characters, Mavis and Helen, were quarreling in plot #1 about how to protect Joy Wilcox from the assistant manager’s sexual advances at the Pick’n Pay in Forsyth, Georgia, and Helen was posed to met undercover DEA Agent Dewey Blackmon, a man in pursuit of law and order in South Georgia and my main character  in plot #2. These two plots were headed down paths I hoped would merge soon, then Wanda’s voice, clear and distinct, destroyed my plan, made me take a u-turn and start over.

I deliberately employed humor during the initial chapters of Another Kind of Hero because I needed a break from the weighty material of racism, sexism, and domestic violence in my first mystery, Well of Rage. A ghost story meant a cozy, not my intention for Another Kind of Hero, but as the first person narrator coached me, I realized she wasn’t a traditional ghost, a haunting, woo-woo ghost. She was a character, who happened to be a ghost, and her job was to keep the other characters out of harm’s way. To accomplished her mission, her journey, she needed to learn why she couldn’t move on and what skills were at her deposal. Through trail and error, she embraced a type of mental & other-plane-of-existence agility haint bootcamp. She learned to pay attention and work with what she had, not focus on her many deficiencies. She learned in death what we all hope for in life: if you hang in there, you’ll make a difference.

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New Holiday Book Giveaways

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Look for 3 free Kindle copies from Amazon & three free paperback copies from Goodreads on or before November 30, 2017

Thanksgiving Dessert: Cake or Pie Person?

The Pennsylvania Dutch immigrants considered cake people more refined than pie people because you may put any scrap of meat or vegetable in a pie, bake, and take it into the fields to go to work. No forks necessary. Cake required sugar, honey, or molasses and a yeast or a rising agent. In other words, it required resources and money. Class definitely showed in what and how you ate your daily bread, cake, or pie.

Anne Byrn writes about the history of cake making and many other fascinating facts about colonial culture in her new book, American Cake, From Colonial Gingerbread to Classic Layers, the Stories and Recipes Behind More Than 125 of Our Best Loved Cakes.

I crave cheesecake, pound, and coconut cakes.

Warning: Being a mystery writer and also a pie lover, I must mention the macabre character, Sweeney Todd in the penny dreadful, The String of Pearls, probably by James Malcolm Rymer and/or Thomas Peckett Prest.  Sweeney cut his customers’s throats in his barber shop and their bodies became the meat in Mrs. Lovett’s pies.

Yeks!  Maybe, I should cancel the reservation and cook at home this year. Whether you eat your turkey with your hands or a fork, I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving.

Miracle

[image error]I’m a rookie cop in the early eighties. It’s that thickest, darkest time of night between 2-4 a.m. where nothing is moving, except burglars, drunks, and officers. I pull over my first D.U.I., ever, on Dresden Drive. Back up is not coming. The male cops have made that pretty darn clear. The drunk is way past the legal limit. He fails the walking-a-straight-line test with flying colors. I tell him he is under arrest, pat him down for weapons, and get one handcuff on before he decides to fight. Somehow, I hold on to the one cuff, get the backdoor open, and push him inside the patrol car. We wrestle around in the dirty backseat for a few minutes. I still have a grip on the loose cuff–the one he can beat me with if I let go. I’m close to exhaustion when I hear, “Officer, let me help you.” A long arm comes over my shoulder and pins down the guy’s beefy hand. Click. The handcuffs snap shut. I turn to thank the civilian, this good Samaritan. No one is there. Nothing. The street is empty.

This written piece and my performance in “Miracle” on June 25, 2017 at Core Studio in Decatur, Georgia are dedicated to my buddy and fellow officer, Wendell T. Davis, who died too young in the line of duty. Perhaps, he is my guardian, my angel.

Beverly “Guitar” Watkins Music & Pain

[image error]Music saves me and soothes me when the pain level, thick like a fog sits on my back, gets too great to think or write.

Last Friday night Beverly “Guitar” Watkins and her band, The Meter Tones, played in the municipal parking lot on Main Street in downtown Stone Mountain, Georgia. She played with her son, B.J. and rocked and cajoled the crowd into a community of believers swaying and dancing to her rhythms.

I almost didn’t go because the pain makes me want to curl up in the middle of my bed and surround myself with heat or ice packs, but I didn’t. Thankfully. You have to move when you hear this seventy-something woman make sounds filled with joy and sorrow laying out a lifetime steeped in southern whiskey, greens, and country gospel.

Her wisdom and humor reminded me to relax and keep going. After the performance as she worked the crowd “old-school” thanking the community and shaking hands, I recognized a former PD colleague walk toward me. While we shook hands, I realized my pain had lessened. I walked away lighter with less pain.

Thank you, Miss Watkins, for sharing the magic of your art and fostering community.