Pat Bertram's Blog, page 257

So, Why Are We Supposed to Care?

The above-the-fold story on the front page of the newspaper today was about the hardships of small marijuana farmers. That once fabulously lucrative crop now only nets one-fourth the money that it did in its heyday (or perhaps I should say “hayday”). Industrial growers, new seeds geared toward indoor plants, and the push for legalization have made things tough for small, independent growers.

This seemed sort of a tactless (I’m being kind here) article to publish after a summer of droughts when food crops dried up and family farms disintegrated to dust, but beyond that, why are we supposed to care about the small independent marijuana farmer? This is like having to feel sorry for burglars because corporate greed has left nothing for them to steal. Marijuana may someday be legal, but it is not now (except for a few isolated instances) and it certainly wasn’t back in the seventies when these people started their “farm.”

It’s a good object lesson for writers, though. If you want readers to care about the plight of your characters, you have to give them something and someone to care about. In this case, the writer tried to paint a sympathetic picture — after the crop is cashed in, the farmers won’t have enough left to take their usual celebratory trip to Hawaii. Again — why are we supposed to care? They worked outside the law for decades, and while the law never caught up with them, the laws of supply and demand finally did. Seems like justice to me. So, why are we supposed to care?

This is a good question to keep in mind when you are writing your books. Too often people take short cuts, for example, relying on a mother character with rebellious teenagers to garner empathy. Such a character may gain immediate sympathy from women in that same situation, but readers who have never had children need something more than a flat insert-self-here-character to make them care. The character needs to be struggling with something more universal, such as the character’s feelings of rejection or abandonment from her almost-adult children, or conflicting loyalties between her husband and her children, or her struggles to deal with her own rites of passage.

Sometimes all you need to do to make a character sympathetic is to give them simple wants. In A Spark of Heavenly Fire, all Kate wants is a good night’s sleep. She’s been haunted by her not always thoughtful behavior during her husband’s long dying, and sleep eludes her. Ideally, her plight should gain empathy — most of us have struggled with insomnia, most of us struggle with regrets, and most of us have dealt with loss. At one point in the story, Kate does step outside the law (though the law of survival took precedence over the interim laws of the quarantine), but by then, you know the character, her motivations, her struggles, and, you don’t have to pause in your reading to ask, “So why are we supposed to care?”

Tagged: corporate greed, creating characters, independent marijuana growers, marijuana farmers, summer of droughts, why are we supposed to care

Grief: The Great Yearning — Day 197

During the first horrendous months after the death of my life mate/soul mate/best friend, I was so incredibly lost that sometimes the only way I could deal with the confusion was to write a letter to him in an effort to feel connected. I still have episodes of sadness, but I haven’t experienced that total anguish in a long time. Still, I miss him, yearn to go home to him, worry about him. Although this letter was written two years ago, much of it holds true today.

-

Dear J,

It’s been a while since I’ve written, but I’ve been thinking about you. Are you glad you’re dead? You said you were ready to die, to be done with your suffering, yet at the very end you seemed reluctant to go.

Despite all the problems with your restlessness and the disorientation from the drugs, I wasn’t ready for you to leave me. I still am not. Nor do I want to go back to where we were that last year, waiting for you to die. We were both so miserable, but honestly, this is even worse. I can live without you. The problem is, I don’t want to, and I don’t see why I have to.

I want to come home. Please, can I come home? I have a good place to stay, but without you, I feel homeless. Sometimes I watch movies from your collection and imagine you’re watching with me, but that makes me cry because I know you’re not here. Your ashes are, but you’re not.

I broke a cup today, one more thing gone out of the life we shared. Our stuff is going to break, wear out, get used up. I’ll replace some of it, add new things, write new books, and it will dilute what we shared. Is there going to be anything left of “us”? I feel uncomfortable in this new skin, this new life, as if it’s not mine. As if I’m wearing clothes too big and too small all at the same time.

There’s so much I hate about your being gone — hate it for me and hate it for you. It might be easier if I knew you were glad to be dead, but so far you’ve been mum about your situation. Just one more thing to hate — the silence of the grave. (Well, the silence of the funerary urn.)

Adios, compadre. If you get a chance, let me know you’re okay.

***

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Tagged: Grief: Day 197, Grief: The Great Yearning, letter to the dead

Are you writing to reach a particular kind of reader?

I am the reader I was writing for. There were stories I wanted to read and couldn’t find, so I wrote them. The dichotomy of this is that I always wanted to reach a large readership and make a living by writing, so it would have been more practical to write books that a large number of people would like. To be honest, though, I don’t like what the majority of readers like, so it would be impossible for me to write such a book. At least, if I write for myself, I know that one person will like the book. But I’m lucky — I’ve found others who like my books.

Here are some responses from other authors about the particular kind of reader they are trying to reach. The comments are taken from interviews posted at Pat Bertram Introduces . . .

From an interview with Alan Place, Author of “Pat Canella: The Dockland Murders”

I am not writing to any particular readers as my works cross genres. I think if you write to a type of reader you raise the chance of missing your target. Take Pat Canella, is she for the Mike Hammer fans, is she a ghost story or is she ladies who want a strong female lead?. OR is she all to everybody?

From an interview with Chuck Barrett, Author of “The Toymaker”

Absolutely. I like to write what I like to read—thrillers, with a touch of mystery thrown in just to keep the reader off balance…but enthralled. I like when a writer throws me a curve ball, so in like fashion, I throw a few myself.

From an interview with J. Conrad Guest, Author of One Hot January

The reader I wish to reach seeks something a little different—something that combines or mixes genres. A reader who enjoys the turn of a phrase, who believes how a story is told is as important as the story itself. I hope my readers remember the stories I tell long after they’ve closed the cover for the last time.

From an interview with Sandy Nathan, Author of Tecolote: The Little Horse That Could

Yes. I write for readers who are interested in making a difference and growing personally and spiritually. My readers also want a well written, fast paced, and extraordinary read that takes them to places they never imagined.

What about you? Are you writing to reach a particular kind of reader?

(If you’d like me to interview you, please check out my author questionnaire http://patbertram.wordpress.com/author-questionnaire/ and follow the instruction.)

Tagged: author interviews, who are you writing for? trying to reach readers, writers and their readers, writing for yourself

Grief Update — Thirty Months of Survival

My life mate/soul mate/best friend died two and a half years ago. Thirty months. Written out like that, thirty months seems like a very long time, but looking back, it’s no time at all. It takes three to five years to find renewed life after such a grievous loss, or so I’ve been told, and I am only halfway there. It might seem to you as if this talk of grief means I do nothing but cry for him, but the truth is, I do quite well, with only a few unshed tears stinging my eyes now and again.

Feelings other than sadness are beginning to arise, though.

Throughout all these months, I’ve tried not to use the word “loss” when referring to my deceased mate because he isn’t misplaced, he is dead. But now, sometimes out of the blue, I’ll get that dropping elevator feeling of having misplaced something — something of untold value or something I desperately need — and I don’t know where or how I lost it. This sensation is not connected to any memory of him, and is not the same as the feeling of bereftness or yearning I so often had during the first couple of years, but still it makes the world seem precarious and alien at times.

Most things are getting better — I do not have the unimaginable pain I experienced in the beginning. Nor does the yearning for him claw at me, though I still miss him, still long for one more smile, still wish for one more word. But something is getting worse, something akin to a soul thirst or a soul hunger. For many years, being with him satisfied a need in me that I wasn’t aware of. Perhaps a recharging of my energy after a long day or maybe a regeneration of spirit. (For someone who writes and thinks as much as I do, I should be able to come up with a word to describe this need, but I only know it as a void, as something I once had but am no longer getting.) When I am hungry and do not eat, I get hungrier. When I am thirsty and do not drink, I get thirstier. And when this particular soul need is not slaked, I get needier.

I am finding other ways of fulfilling the roles he played in my life. Wherever he was, there was my home, and now I’m learning to find home wherever I might be. He was my playmate for many years before he got too ill, and now I have friends to do things with — have lunch, go to festivals and fairs, take yoga classes (and maybe Tai Chi — something I’ve always wanted to do). There is no one with whom I can talk to about all the things he and I used to discuss, but I can spread those topics around, discussing each with a different friend.

But so far I have not found a way around the role he filled for electrifying my spirit, (for lack of a better word). Walking in the desert helps, being with friends helps, but neither of those things sustains me once they are over. Perhaps a new love — another person or a passion — would help, but I am too new for another relationship (I’m still learning how to be me), and so far something to care passionately about remains beyond my reach.

I hope you understand that I am merely chronicling yet another step on my journey and not feeling sorry for myself or asking for pity. I once had something that few people get to experience — a soul connection with another human being. It was not always a happy or comfortable connection — at various times we both railed against it — but through it all, the good times and the bad, we were together.

I saw a plaque today: We can do anything as long as we’re together. I really believed that when he and I were together, we could do anything, though it turned out not to be true. We couldn’t make him well. We couldn’t keep him from dying. And now, we are not together, have not been together for thirty months, and will not be together for the rest of my life.

A person can get used to anything, so eventually I will get used to plodding along without that galvanizing connection with him, but for now, I’m still trying to find my way.

Tagged: grief at thirty months, loss and grief, loss of a soul mate, surviving grief, surviving the death of a spouse, two and a half years of grief

Can We Be Whoever We Want to Be?

There is a fallacy that dogs us our whole lives, instilled in us by our parents, teachers, preachers, writers, and everyone else who has influence over young minds. We are told over and over again that we can be whoever we want to be, but this simply is not true. We can never be anyone other than ourselves, no matter how hard we try, and anyone who has ever taken a vacation to get away from it all knows this. No matter where you go, there you are.

We can participate in the creation of ourselves, trying on new styles of dressing and living, for example, but that does not change the essence of our being. We go through many metamorphoses during the course of our lives, from infant to adolescent, from adolescent to adult, from adult to . . . whatever one is called in the last stage of life. (Odd that there isn’t a noun to denote such a person. There are words to describe all the other stages of life, but not that one.) We also go through traumas and grief and come out the other side feeling like a different person, but that person is just another facet of our being, not a completely new entity.

Often when we are told we can be whoever we want to be, the speaker is referring to our occupation or vocation, not our essence, but even this variation of the saying is a fallacy, because we cannot always be whoever we want to be. For example, a short, fifty-year-old man with small hands and an inability to handle a basketball will never be a professional basketball player, garning millions of dollars and fans, no matter how much he desires it. Not every girl who dreams of being romanced by the love of her life and living happily ever after achieves her dream. Too often the frogs she kisses are simply frogs. Or the love of her life dies before the relationship can come to full flower, leaving her alone and grieving, which happens way more than we ever imagine.

Even worse than being made to believe we can be whoever we want is being made to believe that we cannot be who we want to be.

When I was in high school, my sophomore English teacher told me that she saved papers from all the students she thought would make it as a writer but that she never saved any of mine. It was sort of a strange and very cruel thing to say, particularly since she knew I planned to write. I never thought of her as cruel, so her words puzzled me, but other than that, the slur never really mattered. I had no burning desire to be a writer — my saying so was more of a statement of my love of words, and I have kept that love throughout all my life.

I never really had dreams, though I often wanted not to be me, which is why my current commitment to being me is so important. But now I wonder if I need to find (or create) a dream, too. Are impossible dreams important, helping us through the traumas of our lives? Or does the unfilfillment of those dreams cause other traumas? Sometimes a miracle does happen, and the impossible suddenly becomes possible, but a dependence on miracles seems a rather inept way of planning for one’s future, no matter what our age. So maybe the fallacy that we can be whoever we want to be isn’t important. Perhaps it’s the instillation of dreams that is important.

Tagged: are dreams important?, creating dreams, creating ourselves, fallacy, we can be whoever we want to be

Blog Posts I (Sort of) Wish I Hadn’t Written

It’s easy to forget how far-reaching the internet is. I tend to think I am holding court here in my own corner of the blogosphere, but the truth is, anyone who happens to search for the right term (or wrong term) can land on this blog.

Mostly people get here by using various search terms having to do with writing or grief, but occasionally I post an article that gets hits of a sort I never intended. For example, three years ago, I posted a transcript of a conversation I had with my sister “Was It Bizarre Reading a S** Scene Written By Your Sister?” A couple months later, when I realized that the article was attracting a huge number of hits from people who wanted to have s** with their sisters — 1,954 hits as of right now — I posted the list of the search terms people had used to get to here: S** With Sister Tips. Um…Yeah. That list has garnered 16,790 hits in the past three years. Two days later, I wrote S** With Sister Tips — Writing Tips, That Is. It was my idea of humor — if they wanted tips for having incestuous s**, I’d give them writing tips, sort of as a gentle chastisement. The article itself wasn’t humorous. It was a very pragmatic look at the pitfalls of writing about sibling s**. That article has garnered 9,272 hits.

The whole situation ceased to amuse me years ago, and now makes rather uneasy. (Which is why the asterisks — I’m trying to keep the search engines from finding yet another s** with sister article.

The other post that makes me a bit uneasy because of all the attention is How Many Books Are Going to be Published in 2012? (Prepare for a Shock). I’d only written the article as a way of trying to make sense of the current book climate and to show the meteoric increase in the number of books available, not to establish myself as any authority on the subject.

Although the article was posted only five months ago, it has had 1,536 hits as of right now. I don’t mind that, of course, but I do mind being touted either as an authority or as an idiot. Several sites that offer book publicity services use that article as a reason for authors to sign up for expensive promotions, and others write scathing articles calling me an idiot who shouldn’t be allowed around statistics since I misuse them.

The truth is, there is no way to extrapolate from the information I gave as to how many books will be published in 2012. Bowker estimates they will issue 15,000,000 ISBNs this year, as compared to 407,000 in 2007, but the truth is, many people use several ISBNs for various titles since some retailers want separate ISBNs for ebooks and print books. And many self-publishers don’t use ISBNs at all, especially if they are only going to sell on Amazon and B&N since both companies will issue their own product numbers. So there could be 5,000,000 books published, or 15,000,000, or even 150,000,000.

This was supposed to be a cautionary tale about being careful what you post since it could haunt you for many years, but it in the end, telling your truth of the moment, no matter what the fallout, is the important thing. It does sadden me, though, that some of my best writing — inspirational and thoughtful posts — sink into oblivion, while these posts get many views.

Tagged: blog posts that make me uneasy, blogosphere, making sense of the number of books published, statistics

Thank You for Five Incredible Blog Years

Five years ago today I started this blog. I’d only been on the internet a few months (four months to be exact), had no idea what a blog was but knew enough about book promotion to know that I needed one to help establish my online presence. I spent a few days researching the various blogging platforms and ended up here on WordPress.

My first post was tentative, a mere dipping of my pen in the metaphorical ink of the blogosphere. All that post said was:

Am I an aspiring writer? I have written 4 books, rewritten them, and will continue rewriting them until they are perfected.

No. I am not an aspiring writer. I am aspiring to be a published writer.

Not a bad statement of intent for a new blogger. In the beginning I wrote about my struggles to find an agent or a publisher, my attempts to learn all I could about how to become a bestselling author (still don’t know — drats!), my efforts at establishing my online presence. In the beginning, I used no photo of me, just an initial. I still hadn’t decided if I wanted to use a male pseudonym or any pseudonym at all. I’d also started writing a new novel that I now call my work-in-pause since it’s been sitting there, half-finished for almost five years.

Much has happened to me since I started this blog. I entered a couple of writing contests and made it to the semi-finals in both, (one was the very first ABNA contest). My mother died. I found a publisher. My father had quadruple bypass surgery. My life mate/soul mate got sicker and sicker. And throughout those two and a half years of turmoil, this blog sustained me. It gave me a place to escape from my daily life, a place I could count on.

And then, two and a half years ago, my soul mate died. His death catapulted me into a world of such pain, that it bled over into this blog. My posts became not so much a way to escape, but a place to try to make sense of what I was going through, to offer comfort and be comforted, to find my way to renewed life.

This blog also helped me to re-establish my life as a writer because, after all, blogging is writing, too. A year ago, I made a commitment to blog every day for 100 days, and somehow I never stopped. And today marks an entire year, 366 days of blogging every single day. (Leap year, in case you’re wondering why 366 instead of 365.) I recently recommitted to another 100-day challenge. It’s nice to know that whatever life throws at me, whatever problems I encounter, whatever challenges come my way, this blog will be here for me.

I started with meager aspirations, hoping for the seemingly unrealistic goal of 12,000 views a year, and as of right now, this blog has had 215,817 all time views. On my busiest day, I had 3,542 people stopping by. I’ve been Freshly-pressed three times, written 1,003 posts (including this one), received 7,159 comments and almost 3000 likes and shares. My best ranking on Alexa.com was 607,198 out of 350 million websites. Quite an achievement for someone who, five years ago, did not even know what a blog was.

I ever told you how much your reading my posts has meant to me, so I want to do so now. Thank you all for your comments, your likes, your support. They have meant more to me (especially this past two and a half years) than you can ever imagine.

Tagged: aspiring writer, blogging, blogging and life, book promotion, postaday

Writing My Life

I’m writing a short story for the Second Wind Publishing holiday anthology, and it just occurred to me that the main character is the first one I have created since the death of my life mate/soul mate who isn’t a grieving widow.

I started a novel a couple of years ago, wanting to capture what it felt like to lose a spouse while my feelings were fresh, but I haven’t finished the book. The pain that seeps into the story is too raw for me to handle yet, and besides, I still don’t know what the point of the story is. Is it primarily to show what it feels like to grieve? Is it primarily the mystery of why her minister husband would get out of his deathbed to kill a neighbor? Is it primarily the mystery of who she is now that she is no longer a minister’s wife? Is it a story of renewal, love, acceptance? Unless I figure it out, that poor widow is doomed to grieve forever in the pages of that unfinished manuscript.

The next piece of fiction I attempted was in Rubicon Ranch, a collaborative mystery series I’m writing online with other Second Wind authors. My character is Melanie Gray, a writer whose husband died in a car accident, but certain inconsistencies are showing up in the investigation, pointing to something other than an accident. Melanie’s attempts to come to terms with her life and to find the truth of his death are a couple of the unifying themes in the series, though they are not the focus of the stories.

The third piece of fiction I wrote was “The Willow,” a short story I did for Change is in the Wind, a previous Second Wind anthology. My character in that story is a woman who found renewal in the spring of her second year of grief.

My fourth project is a steampunk collaboration I am doing with several authors I met online. It should come as no surprise that my character is grieving woman. The deaths of her husband and his mother are the catalyst for the story, since her father-in-law goes back in time to try to save them. This sentence hints that maybe her grief (and mine) is waning: Flo stood motionless and stared at her husband. She wanted to run to him, to embrace him, but he looked different somehow. Unapproachable. There seemed to be a bit of flabbiness around his middle, a discontented tilt to his head, a defeated slump to his shoulders. What had happened to the radiant young man she remembered? Had her vision of him changed over the past year, become idealized? Or had she stopped seeing the truth of him even before he died?

In the story I am currently writing, the character’s boyfriend doesn’t die. He leaves her. She doesn’t go into paroxysms of grief, at least not much, but she does cut her hair in an entirely unconscious symbol of mourning (so biblical!). I had her lopping off her long tresses more out rebellion than out of sorrow, since he had always demanded that she didn’t change.

It is strange to see such a pattern show up in my writing. From stark grief, to sustained grief, to a semblance of peace, to seeing the deceased as not so perfect, to easing the focus on grief. Apparently, no matter what I write, I am somehow writing my life (though oddly, the characters are getting progressively younger).

I’ll be interested to see what I write next.

Tagged: change is in the wind, dealing with grief, mystery series collaboration, Rubicon Ranch, Second Wind Publishing, writing grief, writing my life

What are You Going to Do With the Last 100 Days of the Year?

Tomorrow begins the last one hundred days of the year. What are you going to do with those days? Will you finally get around to the New Year’s resolutions you made and promptly forgot? Are you going to slack off, giving yourself permission to take a break from the breakneck speed of your life? Are you going to get going on that novel you wanted to start, continue, finish, or edit? Are you going to make inroads in the pile of books on your nightstand, or finally read some of those ebooks you downloaded? Are you going attempt the photography project you always wanted to do? Are you going to make a commitment to blog every day?

That’s what I’m going to do — make a commitment to blog every day. I’ve been blogging every day for the past 364 days, and I intend to extend that commitment to the end of the year. (I’ll try to make the blogs interesting because posting something just to post something sort of negates the “challenge” part.) Feel free to join me! We can help each other, offering encouragement or topics when the will begins to wane.

Just to make things fun, I’m also going to give up sugar. I used to forego sugared products except for occasional splurges of chocolate, but after the death of my life mate/soul mate, I got on a sugar jag, eating all sorts of sweets I hadn’t eaten for years. When one is grieving, it always feels like three o’clock in the morning — your mental and physical defenses are down and your blood sugar feels as if it’s at a low ebb — so I got in the habit of treating myself. I stopped eating sugar and flour a couple of weeks ago, and I intend to continue doing so. (Sugar is a poison, screwing up the system, causing myriad problems, including weight gain. This has been known for many decades despite the front page news this morning that “new research offers the disturbing suggestion that regular consumption of high calorie sugared beverages may turn on genetic switches that incline our bodies to becoming fat.” Duh. Can you believe researches actually got grants for that?)

And a final challenge (the hardest of them all) — I’m going to stop obsessing over things I cannot change. When things happen that I have no control over, I tend to work them over and over in my mind, trying to make them come out right, but that only puts me on the treadmill of circular thinking. As I wrote once a long time ago (showing that I’ve always had this tendency):

it is real, yes

and it does exist

but that does not mean

i should have given it

so much of my reality

So, have I shamed you into taking a 100-day challenge?

Tagged: 100 day challenge, blog challenge, obsessing, postaday, sugar, three o'clock in the morning

My 1000th Blog Post!!!!

This is my 1000th blog post for this blog, and what do you know. I haven’t a thing to say. You’d think after writing 1000 articles on subjects that range from reading to writing, from being in grief to being in the moment, from social networking to socializing, I’d be able to come up with a few pithy words to celebrate the occasion,  but here I am, at a loss for ideas.

You’re probably curious how I managed to write all those articles — well, it took five years, one topic at a time, one word, at a time. You can see all the posts here: Archives — All My Posts.

Here are are a few of my favorite posts, though to be honest, a list of my favorites would include either my entire ouevre or merely the last one I wrote. I enjoyed writing all of them, and at the time of writing, each was my absolute favorite. Life changes, though, and so does perspective; what once seemed profound later seems merely mundane.

The Slang Game

Write Lofty and Carry a Big Chisel

How Often Has This Happened To You? (Close Encounters Of the Buffalo Kind)

What Kind of Blogger Are You?

Sports As Story

A Terrible Writing Accident

The Living Language of Dying

Pat Bertram And Lazarus Barnhill Discuss Writing as Destiny

Waiting For an April Time

Self-Editing — The List From Hell

Creatures of the Corn

On Writing: Looking Up

Free Exclamation Points for Everyone!!!

The Slamming of the Doors

These posts are all from my first couple of years of blogging. I don’t remember why I wrote some of them, such as The Slamming of the Doors, perhaps as a writing prompt. Others I had fun creating, such as my list of bloggers in What Kind of Blogger Are You? and my quiz The Slang Game, and I was disappointed at how few people ever saw the posts.

Thank you, everyone, who has read any of my posts or commented on them. It’s been a pleasure blogging with you.

Tagged: 1000th blog post, blog archives, blogs, pithy words, writing blogs