Barbara Samuel's Blog: A Writer Afoot, page 9

In exactly one week, Tuesday, November 1, at 3 am my time...

In exactly one week, Tuesday, November 1, at 3 am my time, I will have a little surprise for you.   Nothing like I've done before, but devoted to the spirit of play and experimentation that is changing the face of our publishing world.  Some of you will love it.  Some of you might not.  I have a feeling that I'm going to have a blast. And that's all I'm going to say for now.  Stay tuned. Countdown

The Turn of the Wheel–writing season begins

[image error]Here it is, arriving suddenly.  On Thursday, it was still Indian summer, sunny and hot.  Today is Saturday and that season has fled.   This is a wet snow, and won't stick. Next week, it will be warm again—but instead of collecting a few more roses, another couple of squashes, I will put the garden to bed for the winter. Cut down the frozen stalks of corn, compost the wilted squash, the frost killed tomatillo, so prolific that I am secretly glad I won't have to figure out how to use 10,000 more of them.

When I first looked out this morning, on the wilted, frozen plants that have been my companions all summer, I felt melancholy.  The summer is gone for certain now.  Another swift move of the calendar, this very particular summer, this sweet year of my new garden–gone.

And yet…I knew the freeze was on the way, so I found this little greenhouse at the local big box gardening spot.  (I had planned to buy PVC pipe and build one—this is ever so much better, and only a tiny bit more expensive.)  It's lightweight, and easy enough to assemble that I did everything but the cover by myself in about 2 hours.  It would have been less, but I mixed up two parts and had to redo them.   It's not all battened down just yet—I had hoped to do that today, but it will wait until Monday or Tuesday now, when the weather will be warmer again.

Stepping into that protected world last night, where the tomatoes are growing, and some more potatoes, I felt a sense of deep quiet.  Here, I can extend the season, both now and in the spring.  Here, I can have a secret stash of fresh, home-grown tomatoes and herbs. It's too late this year to do it, but in the future, I can plan what the greenhouse bed will hold and provide myself with more herbs and fresh edibles, and create a place of puttering solace for the winter, at least part of it.

Gazing out at the snug little greenhouse, I felt sweet anticipation creeping beneath the melancholy, edging it out of the way.  After a break of more than two months, the girls in the basement woke up and peered over my shoulders, yawning and scrubbing their eyes.  "Hooray!" they cried. "It's the writing season! Make some cinnamon tea while we get dressed.  We have lots of stories to tell you."

Another season begins—fresh and unmarked.  So it is.

 

My favorite rose

Double Delight is the name. The petals are photo-sensitive and the blossoms are highly fragrant and smell heavily of oranges.   Ordinary and yet, so not.  As is often the case with roses, and many other things.

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The Fruit of our Lives

Posted at Writer Unboxed this morning

As I write this, it is the last morning of summer. My yearling kittens are crouched in the garden, watching a squirrel on the fence make his way through the face of a sunflower, methodically plucking out striped seeds with his tiny hands, cracking their shells, devouring the kernels. There are piles of hulls, here and there, through the garden, where I have tied the flower heads to the fence or a branch or a gate. Light angles at a long angle, illuminating the withering squash, the tired corn. As I drink my tea, I'm a little melancholy, knowing that this season is turning. It is such a particular summer.

They all are.

One of the things that has come up in formatting my old books for publication in e-format is the recognition that they are fruits of the years in which they were born. This might seem a simple, clean observation—well, of course they are, you might say. In 1993, the peaches were good and there was a lot of rain, and there were certain political events that influenced my views and ideas. Music always shapes and influences my work, so the popular tunes of the time will add spice and flavor.

When I began the work of going through these books, written from about 1990 through 2000 or so, I never planned to rewrite them in any meaningful way. I have so much work flowing through me currently that that spending time on finished, whole work seemed a bad use of time. It is important to me to update glaring tech issues that date the material in negative ways—changing Walkmans to Ipods, for example, and updating language to reflect the moment.

But even reading to do that much is almost impossible, I find, because they hold too much of me, of my life. It is as if the fruit of those months or years of writing has been bottled and turned to wine that now carries the most powerful notes of that period in a way that I almost cannot bear. READ MORE>>>>>>

Three Reader Favorites now available!

Three of my most beloved novels from my contemporary romance days are now available in ebook format.

[image error] The Last Chance Ranch 

Amazon Kindle

Barnes and Noble Nook

Smashwords

A full length contemporary romance.

Weary and battered after a stint in prison for killing her abusive husband, Tanya has been dreaming of the day she could renew her relationship with the son she lost.  Now cooking at a ranch for troubled boys, she takes the first, tentative steps toward her son…and to his adopted father, Ramon, a man so real and true he might be able to teach Tanya how to trust…and live…again.

Story behind the story:

There was a string of domestic violence cases in Colorado one year. One woman left behind notes to her young sons, and as a mother of young sons at the time, I couldn't bear it.  Another woman was gunned down at Taco Bell right across the street from the domestic violence shelter.  Finally, one Easter morning, my street was closed at both ends while an army of police tried to track down the man trying to kill his wife across the street. She had escaped with her daughter out the back door, but my youngest was outside playing when it all happened. I'd finally had enough and decided to write about a woman and child who made it out.

This book won The Janet Dailey Award, a $10,000 cash prize awarded to a romance that best explores a social issue.  It was also a RITA finalist, and remains a big reader favorite.

 

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Jezebel's Blues

Amazon Kindle

Barnes and Noble Nook

Smashwords

Jezebel's Blues is a full length contemporary romantic novel.

When the Jezebel River overflows her banks and tries to swallow the small town of Gideon in East Texas, Celia Moon is alone and frightened in the farmhouse she inherited from her grandmother. When a mesmerizing and troubled drifter washed up on her porch, she has no choice but to take him in. As the river rises, the pair retreat to the attic to ride out the storm—and discover a compelling attraction.

The daughter of two artists who were besotted with each other, Celia has always felt the odd woman out. She yearns to find a place she can call her own, a family of her own, a life that has some stability and meaning.  Her grandmother's farmhouse in Gideon has always represented that.

Eric fled his grim childhood in Gideon to find a life as an acclaimed blues guitarist, but that life has been taken from him, too, and he's back in Gideon with a chip on his shoulder that hides the vast, hunger he, too, feels to find his place, his home, his life.  Waiting out the storm with sunny, optimistic Celia, he wonders if maybe there's a place in Gideon for him after all, in the arms of a woman who might know more than she thinks about acceptance.

A novel as rich and deep as a river, Jezebel's Blues is both a haunting love story and a tale of finding your way to accepting yourself.

Story behind the story

This is one of my personal favorites. It was my first RITA finalist, and the conference that year was in St. Louis, which was flooding that summer.  Mainly, I just loved it, and it helped me explore ideas that would lead to In the Midnight Rain, and to another tale set loosely in the same town during WWII (more as I am able to say).

 

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Breaking the Rules

Amazon Kindle

Barnes and Noble Nook

Smashwords

Mattie O'Neal was on the run.  She'd stolen a car, cut off her hair, changed her name and was slinging hash in a small Arizona town.  She thought she was safe – until Zeke Shephard walked through the door. His rugged, muscled body set every woman's heart aflutter – but his probing questions made Mattie weak for another reason.

Still, when the bad guys caught up with her, it was Zeke who rescued Mattie and took her to his own retreat.  Zeke who comforted her . . . protected her . . . and loved her.  Although Zeke insisted he was just a guy for the moment, could Mattie persuade him to make that moment last a lifetime?

Story behind the story:

I have a weakness for road books.  What happens when you disappear and start over–what can you find out about yourself, the world, and a great love? Zeke is a bad-boy with a broken heart, and Mattie is a woman who can heal and transform, both herself and her world.

Stove Atrocities

This morning's post to The Lipstick Chronicles.  What household jobs or areas are repugnant to you?

 

I have an old stove—a dull cream model with ancient electric rings and a black front.  It's serviceable, but little more than that.  I hate it when the sun comes streaming through my kitchen window and illuminates the splatters of grease across the control panel and the aged dust stuck to the inner hood.  I'm sure I must have wiped it all down when I cleaned the kitchen last night, but it looks like something out of a hoarder's episode.   Dust from the wings of cat-murdered miller-moths mixed with flutters of dog fur mixed with kosher salt mixed with that creeping cooking sludge I can never quite identify.

READ MORE >>>>>>>

Photo of the day

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The simple pleasure of tea

A reader wrote to me recently with these comments:

I just finished another of your books and I really enjoy them……In your stories the women drink a variety of teas…..I'd like to find a good breakfast tea to replace coffee in the morning, is there one that you would recommend? So many choices on the shelves its[image error] confusing……

Although I didn't realize the characters in my novels drink a lot of tea, it really is not surprising, since I am a serious tea drinker. Always have been. When the Englishman entered my life, that particular habit found a cozy spot and settled in for good.  We always drink tea first thing in the morning, and when together mid-afternoon will often indulge another.  It's easy and comforting and reviving. If you, like the reader above, are overwhelmed when it comes to shopping for and preparing a good cup of tea, I am sharing the advice I sent in reply. Perhaps you'll find it handy.

Dear Reader:

To replace coffee, the main thing to remember is that you want black tea. Not green or anything else.  And most coffee drinkers prefer to start with something not flavored, so go with straight black tea.

My #1 favorite breakfast tea is PG Tips, but you have to get the kind that is imported from England (the "English" tea sold in the US is made with different parts of the tea leaves and is not as flavorful). Unless you're just insanely in love with tea, that's a bit expensive.  Because Christopher Robin is British and must begin his day with a classic cup (two sugars and milk), we have his mother send boxes of it.  I also buy it at the English store (most towns have one).  Again, pretty expensive, but fun to try maybe.

To get started in the US, I'd suggest trying Twining's English and Irish breakfast teas.  The trick is to get the water boiling and pour it over the teabag as soon as it stops boiling, then let it steep for a full five minutes.  The color is good after 1 minute, but the flavor is not really developed until five minutes.  Also important: don't put cream in tea, only milk.  Add sugar as desired.
Do not let my beloved hear me say this, but I also think just plain Lipton's is very good. It was what we drank as children and I still find it very good if the water is hot enough.  (The temperature of the water is what makes having a good cup in US restaurants so difficult. The water is almost never hot enough.)

Those are the best black teas.

For some other great things to try, here are a few:

Constant Comment, by Bigelow, the classic orange flavored tea.  Also try their Lemon Lift and Mint teas.

If you ever see Twining's Blackberry tea for sale, grab it.  It's one of the seasonal releases, and it's absolutely delicious.



Caffeine free:
Celestial Seasonings have many different kinds.  Peppermint is nice after dinner.  I like Sleepytime when I'm having trouble sleeping.  Mandarin Orange Spice is nice, too.  You might choose a box of mixed flavors and see what you like.

One of the best teas in the world to me is Good Earth caffeine-free blend.  It's strong and sweet without sugar, and has no caffeine, so I can drink it all morning while I'm writing.  It smells wonderful, too!

Now I'm off to put the kettle on. There's a rain storm bearing down over the mountains and a nice cup of tea sounds like just the thing.  Do you have other favorite teas to recommend?  I know there are readers here who, like me, have to have the English blend. Raise your hands and be counted.

The Girls in the Basement ….now available!

"Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant." — Edna Ferber

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Click cover to order now

For three years, I wrote a column called The Care and Feeding of the Girls in the Basement. It was a chronicle of my day to day struggles and rewards with the writing life. Much of it was written during an enormous transition in my life.  The column was written for a group of professional, commercial fiction writers. (NINK, for those who might know it.)   To my surprise, the columns were quite popular, and I really enjoyed writing it, but after three years, I'd written plenty and gave it up.

The story might have ended there.  Except that people kept telling me that they had kept the columns to re-read. They gave them to friends who were feeling discouraged.  And because the newsletters are private to the organization, they did not have a wide circulation. Aspiring writers never saw them.

So I decided to collect them for writers–aspiring and published alike–who might find a laugh or inspiration or encouragement in them.  There are two volumes of columns, but my ebook genius and I are collecting three books of the most popular class materials for release in the fall.  (First, the contemporaries to which I've regained the rights–stay tuned).

Without further ado, an excerpt from Book #1

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Click cover to order now

AN EXCERPT

Beginner's Mind:   Keeping the Faith

from The Girls in the Basement

Talk on one of my email loops has been exploring the changes and ups and downs we all experience after five or ten or thirty years in this business.  Several writers are discouraged by crushing career news and financial setbacks and the challenges of living as a writer.

The discussion led to questions of faith.  How do we keep going? How do we recover that fire?  Where did it come from in the first place?  And how did it get lost?

Writer Raphael Cushnir says the dark night of the soul comes to all of us in different ways, but the emotions we experience during that dark night are all the same. A long-time writer who is struggling with reinvention or renewal is struggling with a disturbing set of questions. Was she wrong, all this time, about her vision? Is he, after all, a fool for loving this work, just as cousin Harry and his mother and Aunt Jane have said? Should any of us try to make this our life?

While this discussion was going on, I was also talking with a friend who is beginning to sell to non-fiction markets.  He's been in the music business a long time and wants to write for a living so he can stay home with his wife and daughter.  He's a pretty talented guy.  He'll probably make it, and the writing life can't be any worse than the music life. We had lost touch years ago, long before he actually made it into the music world and I made it into the writing world, and through the delights of the Internet, we have been spending many happy hours talking about old times and new.

And writing.  He always understood creativity.  Writing now burns in him the way songs once did.

He sent an email (from Ireland. I love writing that: my friend in Ireland. Very nice of him to end up there) that poured out his desires, his path thus far, what he thinks he might be understanding, what he has yet to figure out.

His longing filled me with a bitter-sweetness, a swift wish to return to the beginning, to the magic.  I find myself feeling cautious in my replies, as if he's just fallen in love and I'm an old married hag, reluctant to douse his fever.

"So, tell me," he emailed. "How did it happen? How did you sell your first book?"

My flood of memories may be not unlike yours. I was twenty-nine. It was November 22 (never mind the year), just before Thanksgiving.   It was a category romance I had called The Phantoms of Autumn, about a classical guitarist and a writer who met on a train journey.  My advance was four thousand dollars, which was almost precisely double my annual income as a bowling alley cook and attendant—a job I'd taken to help make sure I stayed focused on writing work—and more than enough to get my phone turned back on.

Beyond the simple facts, of course, are a host of emotions and memories.   The late nights with my headphones on while my very young sons and husband slept in their beds.  The jumble of undone housework that meant I never, ever allowed anyone to "drop by".  The cloistered life I led during that passionate period when I had no time for anything but the books, the boys, the family.

I remembered, too, how I'd stood in my kitchen a few weeks before that magic phone call, weeping bitterly over a rejection that dashed a very real hope I'd had of making a sale to a literary magazine where the editor liked me.  I didn't know how much longer I could stand to see yet another SASE with my handwriting on the outside, knowing it meant a rejection.  My fire, my belief in myself, was dwindling, and I didn't know how I could keep going on like that, believing when no one else did.  When I look back, I'm not sure how I discovered the chutzpah to believe so absolutely that I would sell a book eventually.   But I did believe, with a depth of faith that—

Well, more of that in a minute.

The facts of that first sale don't reveal how many pages I wrote trying to get there.  Thousands.  Many thousands, probably.  As you did, I'm sure. I wrote poems and short stories and aborted novels, and finished novels that were not particularly good, and journals and papers and articles that were published, first in the college newspaper (where I also had my first column), then in the local newspaper.   The facts don't reveal how many pages I read, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, considering how fast and voraciously I put books away in my teens.

Telling Tom about that first sale, I found myself nostalgic for the time when I was yet dreaming.  The time of magic in the pages of every writer magazine, every tale of every writer's first sale, every breath of lemon-scented hope that came on rejections scribbled by editors. When I spent endless hours reading, dreaming, plotting out books, scribbling new ideas. There was nothing I didn't want to know, no stone I could leave unturned.  I thought of nothing much but writing for a living.

I'm sure you were much the same.

When I wanted to try to sell romances, I read them with a serious eye, taking them apart, highlighting the passages that illustrated the techniques the writers had used to increase curiosity or sexual tension, describe something, or create a mood.   I kept my favorites at hand when I needed to know how to do almost anything, so I could refer to the masters' techniques.  I still remember the books I studied so intently: Rebecca Flanders had an entire section in my notebook, as did Sandra Brown.

I remembered, too, walking my five-year-old son to school in the mornings that fall.  I would say to him, with a sort of Julie Andrews, Sound of Music lilt to my voice, "One of these days, there will be a note in that mail box that says, 'Yes, Barbara Samuel, we would like to buy your book.'"  He, small and blond and beautiful, would say, "I know!"

And he was the one, the day the call came in, who said, "Mommy, they said yes!"

(He is also the one who later said, "I will never be a writer. Give me a cubicle, a regular paycheck and health insurance.")

I didn't write all those things to my friend. I wrote just a few of them, to entertain, to inspire—he's yearning so hard for book publication that his desire is a living being. After I wrote these things, I found myself tasting something in memory that I couldn't quite capture.   Not quite hope.  Not quite dreams.  Something else.

And as will happen when I'm being Instructed to Pay Attention, I experienced a most unhappy writing week.  For one thing, the words themselves were being very, very stubborn.  I'd sit for a day and write a total of three or four pages.  It was agonizingly slow work in that beginning stretch where every detail is world building, and each new fact requires some thought.

I also had a business problem or two, and I felt sorry for myself for not getting  exactly what I wanted exactly when I wanted it.  I couldn't seem to settle in and work, no matter how I chained myself to the monitor.  I grumpily wondered what the whole point of it all was.  Why bother? It would be much easier to open a restaurant or go lead adventure tours.

Oh, and let's not forget that it was spring.  I'm an outdoor girl with a passion for gardens.  Who wants to sit inside and write books when there are flower beds to be weeded, roses to be pruned, trails to be hiked?  Not I.  Not when the grass is greening under a brilliant blue Colorado sky and the cats are coming in from the backyard with their fur mussed and scattered with seeds from rolls in the warm dirt.

Things felt stirred up in me, too. I was thinking of the discussion of long careers, and how to keep them going for even longer—the flexibility and lightness of attachment required, the terror of seeing how capricious the whole thing is.   And I was having this discussion with my friend (in Ireland, remember).

I was also teaching an on-line voice class to a small group of very talented aspiring writers who are struggling to understand their vision and song. Their hunger to publish reminded me, too, of how important to me it once was to cross that line.

Where is our faith? How do we tend it during a dark night of the soul?

We need to try to hold on to a beginner's mind, a beginner's passion.  When it becomes difficult to remember why we're writing books,we should go back to the beginning. What did we dream about? What did we hope to accomplish?

In the beginning, we're open to a dozen answers to whatever question might come up. We're willing to fly, reinvent, start over, try again, always burning to have our words read.   As we become experts, however, we can become entangled in the desire to be read a certain way, to receive certain rewards.

I don't discount the difficulty of this business.  It's brutal, and only the most resilient survive.  But those people do, and it's worth considering how it happens if you want to be one of them.

As I type this, Julie Andrews is singing in my head: "Let's start at the very beginning…" Which makes me think I should go watch The Sound of Music again. It's one of my favorites, hopeful, uplifting, happy.  It's all about perseverance under difficult circumstances. Another one I like is Fame.

What are some of your favorites?

Are they favorites for the same reason? Has your faith faltered? What can you do to bolster it? What can you do to go back to a beginner's mind? Become reborn? Believe?

DANCING MOON now an ebook!

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This is the only Western historical novel I wrote, and it's actually very untraditional for that genre.  The Irish heroine is fleeing a cruel husband, along with a pregnant slave when their party is overtaken by Indians.  The hero is a Comanchero out of Taos who rescues both women and takes them back to the village.

I loved this book, writing it, living in it, exploring the Spanish influence in this area and the native tribes of the Front Range.  I read Irish history and Cheyenne history and Spanish colonial history, as well as stories from the women who made this arduous journey at a time when it was extremely dangerous.

Dancing Moon is an adventure and a romance and set in my own neck of the woods at a time when it was wild and quite different than it is now.  (Garden of the Gods and the healing springs of the Manitou area figure heavily into the end of the book.)   Ruth Wind readers will especially like this book, the setting, the multicultural aspects, and the romance between Tess and Joaquin.

Buy it now at:

Amazon

B&N

Smashwords