Pat Bertram's Blog, page 290

Happy Birthday, Roy Rogers!!

Today is the 100th anniversary of Roy Rogers's birth. (Actually, it's the 100th anniversary of Leonard Slye's birth. Leonard Slye didn't legally become Roy Rogers until 1942, so this is only the 69th anniversary of Roy Roger's birth. Or rebirth?) I didn't grow up watching television or going to the movies, but even I had heard of Roy Rogers and Tigger. Oops. I mean Trigger. Not wanting to spend another sad Saturday hiding away, I hied away to the park to listen to Roy Rogers Jr and the High Riders sing his daddy's songs.

After a few sets, he talked about his father and about the difference between country songs and western songs. He said country singers sing about lyin' and cryin' and cheatin' and dyin' but he didn't say what western singers wailed about. Wide open spaces, I guess. And loneliness. Hmmm. I know something about that!!

He went on to say that we don't want western music to disappear, and at that very moment, his voice disappeared. At first, I thought he was making a point, but it turns out the batteries on his microphone decided to die at that very moment. Cracked me up. But no one else seemed to catch the irony. Not a single person but me smiled. Apparently the thought of the demise of western music is not to be taken lightly in certain circles. Or perhaps everyone's face was too frozen to move. The day was bright and sunny, but the winds were icy.

Still, it was a perfect setting for the centennial. And for taking photos. The fellow in the photo below seemed to fit the scene perfectly, and I couldn't help taking his picture. Turns out it was a day for irony — he was there to take photos of the event!! (Maybe taking a photo of someone who was there to take photos isn't ironic, but it did amuse me.)

Tagged: difference between country and western music, Roy Rogers, Roy Rogers Centennial, Roy Rogers Jr and the High Riders, Roy Rogers Jr.

Short Story Contest!!!

Second Wind Publishing invites you to submit an entry to their short story contest.

Stories are to be about spring or renewal, at least, that's what the contest rules say, though that does not mean the stories have to be upbeat or happy. You can work against the theme — contrasting a disaster that takes place in the spring with the beauty of the season, perhaps. Of course, up beat is good, too, it's just that most of the writers I know (including me) don't do upbeat.

My grief book, which will be published early next year, begins: Death came in the spring. And the end of the introduction says: The spring of death gave way to the summer of grief, and grief flowed into the fall and winter of renewal. See? Who says spring has to be about happy upbeat things?

You have until December 31, 2011 to submit an entry.

Go to the Second Wind Contest Blog for rules and how to enter.

Best of luck!!

Tagged: Anthology, Contest, Second Wind Publishing, short story contest, stories of renewal

Let's Talk About Rhythm in Writing

A story that whips you through scene after scene is as exhausting as a story that drags you through the intervals between scenes at an excruciatingly slow pace. An experienced storyteller knows when to ramp up the tension and when to slow it down, when to take away a reader's breath and when to let the reader take a breather, when to run through the drama or wander through the background. This alternating of ups and downs, successes and failures, satisfactions and woes is as rhythmic as music and can be as compelling as a drumbeat.

A steady pace of ups and downs can lull a reader into a feeling of complacency, but a syncopated rhythm, with ups and downs coming at uneven intervals can create an underlying sense of unease that gets beneath a reader's skin. Even a small shift in pace can have a dramatic impact by making a minor defeat seem catastrophic or making a big victory seemed doomed.

Humorous moments, especially in tense scenes, can create a change of pace, lightening the mood and causing the reader to be more shocked by subsequent horrendous events. Sex scenes can create a change of pace, either as a diversionary tactic or as a quiet time between hectic scenes. A sex scene can even be a fast-paced action scene to get the reader's blood roiling. (What it can never be, incidentally, is a scene thrown in there just because you thought it was time for a sex scene. Such scenes need to be as germane and as necessary as a plot twist or a revelation. If the scene can be removed from the book without leaving a hole, it should be removed or rewritten.)

A change in rhythm can be subtle, such as a shift in the dynamics between two characters, a change in focus or mood, or simply a preparation for future conflicts. Or it can be as blatant as a murder.  The rate of change in a story can affect the rhythm, too. A lot of changes coming rapidly, one right after the other, create a hectic pace. A few changes after intervals of stasis can make the pace seem slower, even bucolic.

How you present dialogue can change the pace. To speed up the pace you can use quick exchanges with few speaker tags. To slow the pace, use longer speeches and/or more detailed speaker tags.

This example from Light Bringer uses short speaker attributes:

Emery regarded Philip with narrowed eyes. "I always know when one of my students is in trouble. It's time you told me what's going on."

"I was never one of your students."

Emery waved away the remark. "Between the two of us we should be able to solve your predicament."

"I'm not sure there is a solution. Right before I came here, two NSA agents came to my apartment."

Emery shook his head as if to clear it. "I must have misunderstood. I thought I heard you say NSA agents."

"I did. That's who they identified themselves as, any-way. They told me they were concerned about the books I've been checking out of the library."

Emery froze. "They said that?"

"Yes." Philip paused to reconsider, then heaved a sigh. "No. They told me they wanted to speak to me. I suggested they were there because of the books I read."

Emery scowled at him. "Have I taught you nothing? Never volunteer. If you don't know what's going on, keep your mouth shut until you find out."

And this example from the same book uses longer speaker attributes which sets a more leisurely pace:

As the cowboy approached, she wondered why a man like him worked in a coffee shop instead of punching cows or whatever men like him usually did.

In a slow, deliberate voice that stopped short of being a drawl, he said, "What can I get for you?"

"Coffee."

He ushered her to a table. "How about some pie to go with it? Or a muffin? Mabel from the bakery sent over a fresh batch of whole-wheat blueberry muffins."

"A muffin sounds good."

He loped around behind the counter. A minute later he returned and set a mug of coffee on the table along with a muffin almost as big as a cake.

"I don't believe I've seen you here before," he said.

Jane tore open a packet of sugar. "Just passing through." She dumped the sugar in her coffee and stirred it. Thinking that, next to bars, her sister liked to hang around places like this to get local color, she considered asking the cowboy if he knew where she could find Georgy.

"Hey, Luke," one of the old men called out. "Bring me a muffin, too."

Jane sipped her coffee, grateful for the interruption. Georgy would never have forgiven her for inquiring about her, and there would go any hope of getting a loan.

"Holler if you need anything else," the cowboy said, then ambled off.

These dialogue samples also show one of the contrasts in the book, the the fast-paced action/conspiracy story commingling with the slower-paced cowboy story. Then there were the ethereal characters contrasting with the down to earth ones. Lots of scope for pacing in Light Bringer!! (Which, incidentally, is on sale for $1.99 for the Kindle edition on Amazon until November 8, 2011.)

So, let's talk about rhythm. Do you pay attention to the rhythm of your story? Do you use the rhythm to create a mood or a change of pace? How do you create the rhythm of your story? What devises do you use? Do you make sure that even your story's quiet moments are necessary to the story? Do you use words or sentence structure to help create the rhythm? (Short words and sentences give the scene a feeling of speed and immediacy. Longer sentences and words create a more relaxed pace.)

Tagged: pace, pace in dialogue, rhythm, rhythm and pace in writing, storytelling

I Am Not Grieving Inappropriately

I recently received a message from a woman who is concerned that I'm still counting sad Saturdays — she's worried that my grief for my dead mate is going on too long and keeping me from living. I appreciate her concern and her continued prayers (just as I appreciate the concern and prayers from all of you), but the truth is, except for readers of this blog, no one knows I still have my sad times. I don't hide myself away from life, I'm not missing from life, and I'm not missing life. I miss him, of course, and I hate that he is missing from this life, but that particular sorrow is something I accept as part of my life.

There is nothing wrong with sad times, and there is no reason to fear sadness. Depression is dangerous, but not all sadness is depression, nor does all sadness lead to depression. Sometimes sadness is melancholic or nostalgic — a seasoning of life rather than a banishment of life, a reminder not to take life for granted. For several months now I've been hesitant to continue posting about grief since such posts show me (perhaps) in a pathetic or needy light, but there are too many misconceptions about grief that we accept as truth, and I want people who have lost the most significant person in their life to know that they do not need to put aside their sorrow simply to placate others. It is their grief and they need to feel the sorrow, not ignore it. Experiencing grief and processing it are how we learn to be whole again (or as whole as is possible).

The first year after such a traumatic loss, one struggles to survive the psychic shock. The second year one deals with the effects of the ongoing loss and begins to look ahead more often than one looks behind. Since I am still in my second year, I don't know what the third and fourth year bring — perhaps occasional upsurges of grief or a continual (though diminishing) struggle to comprehend life and death and loss. People who have been on this journey and come out of it mostly intact, tell me that it takes four years before one completely gets back the joy of living. So I am still within the normal bounds of grief.

For some people, grief is a time of shutting themselves away, of forgetting that they have other people in their life who need them, and if this goes on too long, they might need to seek professional help, especially if there are children involved. For me, though, and for others who are grieving appropriately, this is a time of opening up, of showing our vulnerability, of admitting that life is not always happy or fun. And in doing so, we make connections to help us rebuild our lives.

If I had hidden my sadness, if I had followed my natural inclination to bear my pain in silence, my life would have been much diminished. You and all the people I met since I began this journey nineteen months ago have added so much to my life that it tells me what I already know: I am not grieving inappropriately.

Tagged: appropriate grief, death of a soul mate, depression, grief, inappropriate grief, loss, sadness [image error] [image error] [image error]

Kindle Sale! Get Any of My Books for Only $1.99!!

Have you been wanting to get one of my books? Well, now is the perfect time! The Kindle edition is only $1.99 on Amazon from now until June 8, 2011. Happy reading!
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[image error]In quarantined Colorado, where hundreds of thousands of people are dying from an unstoppable disease called the red death, insomniac Kate Cummings struggles to find the courage to live and to love. Her new love, investigative reporter Greg Pullman, is determined to discover who unleashed the deadly organism and why they did it, until the cost — Kate's life — becomes more than he can pay. This is a story of survival in the face of brutality, government cover-up, and public hysteria. It is also a story of love: lost, found and fulfilled.

Click here to read the first chapter of: A Spark of Heavenly Fire by Pat Bertram

$1.99 Kindle sale! Click here to buy: A Spark of Heavenly Fire by Pat Bertram

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Bob Stark returns to Denver after 18 years in Southeast Asia to discover that the mother he buried before he left is dead again. He attends her new funeral and sees . . . himself. Is his other self a hoaxer, or is something more sinister going on? And why are two men who appear to be government agents hunting for him? With the help of Kerry Casillas, a baffling young woman Bob meets in a coffee shop, he uncovers the unimaginable truth.

Click here to read the first chapter of: More Deaths Than One by Pat Bertram

$1.99 Kindle sale! Click here to buy: More Deaths Than One by Pat Bertram

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When twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents — grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born — she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted them dead. Along the way she accumulates a crew of feisty octogenarians — former gangsters and friends of her grandfather. She meets and falls in love Tim Olson, whose grandfather shared a deadly secret with her great-grandfather. Now Mary and Tim need to stay one step ahead of the killer who is desperate to dig up that secret.

Click here to read the first chapter of: Daughter Am I by Pat Bertram

$1.99 Kindle sale! Click here to buy: Daughter Am I by Pat Bertram

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[image error]Becka Johnson had been abandoned on the doorstep of a remote cabin in Chalcedony, Colorado when she was a baby. Now, thirty-seven years later, she has returned to Chalcedony to discover her identity, but she only finds more questions. Who has been looking for her all those years? Why are those same people interested in fellow newcomer Philip Hansen? Who is Philip, and why does her body sing in harmony with his? And what do either of them have to do with a shadow corporation that once operated a secret underground installation in the area?

Click here to read the first chapter of: Light Bringer by Pat Bertram

$1.99 Kindle sale! Click here to buy: Light Bringer by Pat Bertram

Tagged: A Spark of Heavenly Fire, Daughter Am I, Kindle Sale, Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, Pat Bertram's books, thrillers [image error]

Wishing You a Happy, Horrible Day

Once upon a time,

Long ago and far away,

Lived the queen of the witches,

Griselda the Gray.

If you think all witches are tall and thin,

You are wrong about that.

Griselda the Gray was short

And she was extremely fat.

Like everyone else,

Griselda tried to be good.

Griselda never did anything bad

Like normal witches should.

This upset the other witches

Because they had to copy their queen.

They had to be nice

When they wanted to be mean.

So they all got together

And mixed up a brew.

They gave it to Griselda

When they were all through.

The brew was so rotten

Griselda had a fit.

She screamed and yelled

And hollered and bit;

She howled and cackled

And made such a noise

That the other witches were happy

And began to rejoice.

"Griselda is bad

And we are glad.

Griselda is ghastly

So now we can be nasty.

Oh, what a happy, horrible day!

Hurrah for our queen, Griselda the Gray!"

The moral of this story is that witches should

Never try to be very good.

Tagged: fable, halloween, moral, story, story in rhyme, witches shouldn't try to be good [image error] [image error]

The Man Who Married a Bridge

Imagine my surprise when I came to the end of a romantic story (not my normal reading choice, but the book was free and so was I. What else need I say?) and found this paragraph:

Few present had ever seen anyone so radiant, they declared, and they may even have been right. Certainly her new husband thought so. He seldom took his eyes from her, it was almost as if he didn't quite believe in her presence, so that he had to keep looking back to assure himself she was real. But then, few bridges had such creamy ivory skin to complement a creamy silk gown, and few still had such luxuriant midnight-black hair. 

Hmmm. An odd-looking bridge she was, to be sure. No wonder the groom had to keep looking back to assure himself she was real.

For the most part I am indulgent of an error or two or ten in a book. It's the norm now in a publishing world where the bottom line is more important than the written line, and I know how hard it is to check every single word, but this typo was such a doozy it rated a comment. To be fair, the misspelled word was on the second to last line of the page, and was the last word in the line, and those are notoriously hard places to check. When you copy edit, as when you read, your eyes focus on the center of the page, so any words around the edges (the first and last lines, the first and last words in a line), end up in the hazy field of peripheral vision.

So, if you're copy editing your manuscript or proofing a book, make a special trip around the edges of your pages, looking for misplaced brides and other anomalies.

Another way to check for typos is to temporarily reset the margins or type size so that the words that would normally appear at the top or bottom of the page end up in the middle. It gives you an entirely new perspective of your book. On the other hand, perhaps you like your grooms marrying bridges. I must admit, it does have an interesting ring to it. (Yeah, I know. Bad pun. But I couldn't resist.)

Tagged: check for typos, copy-editing, finding a different perspective, proofing a book, romance [image error] [image error]

Saturday, My Sadder Day

Another sad Saturday — 83 of them since my life mate died. Even when I don't remember that it's Saturday, or that Saturday is the day of the week he died, my body remembers, and my usual muted feeling of sadness becomes more pervasive. It's not that I want to be sad; the sorrow just comes, especially when the weather is as perfect as today's — warm, still, clear sky, bright sun, gently cooling breeze. I'd worry more about my continuing sadness except that I tend to be of a melancholic bent. And the sadness does reminds me to pay attention. Since he can no longer make note of a lovely day, it's as if I need to appreciate it twice — once for me and once for him.

If Saturday is a sadder day than normal, that must be a sign that I am doing okay most of the time (otherwise I wouldn't feel sadder; I'd just feel sad). The world still feels flawed, I still feel the phantom itch from where he was amputated from my life, and I still yearn to talk with him. Part of me (perhaps that fabled inner child?) cannot understand why I can't call him to find out how he is doing, to see if he needs anything, to ask if I can come home. This yearning flares up every Saturday, as if he's closer on this day, and it seems as if I should be able to reach out and touch him. But he's gone, out of reach of even my sadness.

Oddly, in many respects, my life is much better now, at least temporarily, than it was at the end of "our" life. I don't have to worry about him any more (though the habit of a lifetime is hard to break, so I wonder if he is feeling as lost and as alone as I sometimes feel). I have a lovely place to stay with proximity to wild spaces. I have a respite from bills and other such annoyances. I have time to indulge myself with small excursions and escapes.

But my heart doesn't care for such things. It wants what it cannot have, especially on Saturday, my sadderday.

Tagged: death, grief, grief yearning, loss, love, sadness, Saturday [image error]

Occupying Wall Street, the Desert, and Small Spaces

This morning I went walking among the creosote bushes with only jackrabbits for companionship. It was a gorgeous fall day in the desert and would have been perfect except for the smoke from people's fireplaces that burned my lungs and aggravated my allergies. People are within their legal rights to use their fireplaces around here, but still, they encroached on my right to breathe clean air just because they didn't want to wear sweaters or otherwise deal with inside temperatures a degree or two beneath their comfort level.

The problem with humans is that we encroach. We always want what we want without regard to others. And if we're not stopped with regulations or fights or lawsuits, we continue to encroach.

An example of encroachment took place several years ago at an art show. Each person was allotted a ten-foot-by-ten-foot space. One woman (let's call her Pat) used a six feet table across the front, with two feet on either side for an entry to an additional exhibit behind her table. All would have been fine except that the neighboring person used part of Pat's space for an easel. People couldn't get behind Pat's table without tripping on the easel, so Pat moved her table to give people space to get around the easel. Next thing she knew, the neighbor moved the easel further into her space, so again Pat moved her table because it just didn't seem worth fighting over such a petty matter. Again, the neighbor moved the easel, and yet again, but now there was no room to shove the table out of the way, so Pat asked the neighbor to move the easel, explaining it was in her space. The neighbor didn't move it, so Pat did. And all the rest of the day, she had to listen to her neighbor complain about how Pat had moved her easel and stolen her space.

A silly story perhaps since there was nothing at stake besides a couple of feet of floor space, but it illustrates a fundamental human trait — we want whatever we can take, and once we've taken it, we feel it is ours.

The rich want to take from the middle class (they don't want to take from the poor since the poor don't have anything), the middle class (what's left of it) wants to take from the rich, and the poor want to take from the rich, the middle class, the government, anyone they can. Our whole system of entitlement is based on this need to encroach. We need, so we should get. We are all trying to capture as much of our share of resources (power, money, land, energy) as we can. Sometimes we buy into the stock market hoping to make a killing. Sometimes we do get something for our investment; other times we lose it all, and when we lose it, we complain about all we have lost, when in fact we have lost nothing but paper profits we took from someone else. Sometimes we have many children, which is a way of staking out more than our share of resources. Sometimes we cheat a little — or a lot — and justify it because how else are we going to get what is ours? And sometimes we occupy someone's space just because it's there.

Quite by accident the other day, I happened to walk past a western offshoot of "Occupy Wall Street." Most of these people wanted a redistribution of wealth, some wanted to ban Nukes, some wanted a place to stay or a reason to feel important. Perhaps those who began the movement are right and the rich have too great a share of the world's resources, but the trouble is not the rich. The trouble is us — all of us, rich and poor alike — and our inbred penchant for encroachment. We all want more. The rich are just better at encroachment than the rest of us. Or maybe not. Maybe they just had more resources to begin with. Or were in the right place at the right time. Or were smarter. Or were more nefarious.  Or were born into a rich family. But it doesn't really matter why they are rich. If the pyramid of wealth were reversed and the rich became poor and the poor became rich, the world would be exactly the same, just with different faces at the top and bottom. Our situation/status in life defines us just as much as we define our situation in life.

Still, whatever our status or situation, we want something we don't have. And today what I wanted was a wonderful walk and a perfect day. And like most of our wants, I didn't get it because other people wanted something completely different.

But the day was not lost. I got a blog topic out of the deal.

Tagged: desert walk, encroachment, entitlement, human traits, occupy Wall Street, resources

Life Goes On Even if the Whole Thing is Flawed

Today marks the nineteenth month since my life mate — my soul mate — died of inoperable kidney cancer. 580 days of missing him have passed, and there is still a lifetime of such days ahead of me.

It was a quiet day for me today, no big emotional storm — the storm came last month. I can see why there would be a grief upsurge at twelve months — that is a major anniversary and a big step. But at eighteen months? Can't figure that one out. But, as I have learned, grief has no logic. It comes and goes as it pleases. Most times I do well by keeping busy and focusing on the moment, other times I am overwhelmed . . . again . . . by the realization that he is dead.

I hate that he is gone. The world is so much poorer without him. If he had left me for another person or place on earth, I would probably be furious at him for leaving, but I would not have this feeling of blank. It's as if something in the middle of the page of my life was erased, and that blank spot remains. I work around the blank spot, fill it with excursions, friends, exercise, online activities, but still, it is there, a major flaw in my life.

He and I used to make tapes of the songs we liked, along with an index of each tape so we'd know what we have. I started going through some of his music tapes, trying to decide what I want to do with them. (I'd like to keep everything I have left of his, but when one leads an unsettled life, extraneous possessions become a burden rather than a luxury.) I was doing fine until I came across a tape marked flawed. I pulled out the paper that listed the songs on that particular tape. He had written in big letters across the top of the page: whole thing flawed. I set both the tape and the index on my work table, and that was the end of that. I haven't been able to go through any more of his music, nor have I been able to throw away that tape or that paper. So every day I see that message: Whole thing flawed. That's what life feels like now — it's continuing on, but with him gone, the whole thing seems flawed.

I still have his tape player, and in the player is one of his tapes. If I rewind the tape a bit, I'll be able to listen to the last song he ever heard. That's something else I haven't been able to do, or wanted to do. I don't know how I'll feel. Don't know if it will make me feel connected to him, if it will set off a storm of tears, or if I will feel as if I were spying on him. So the tape player with that final tape is packed away, along with all his other tapes except the one on my table with it's stark reminder: whole thing flawed.

Tagged: death, grief, life is flawed, loss, music, nineteen months of grief [image error]