Cathy Lamb's Blog, page 29
June 26, 2018
No Tricks, A Few Treats: My New Book
My new book, The Man She Married, is out on October 30.
I’m tempted to call it a Halloween book. There are no monsters or dragons or witches in it, though, unfortunately.
There are no tricks. There are some treats.
Here’s a short and sweet summary:
Natalie Shelton is in a coma.
That’s not her only problem.
Less than ten buckaroos on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Man-She-Marrie...
Rockin’ Out With Books And Rock Stars
Since most of us are book addicts here, it seems natural that I should ask you this very important question: Who is your favorite ROCK STAR?
No. Really. Think about it.
Who do you just LOVE?
Who did you rock out with when you were younger? Van Halen? Journey? Styx? The Rolling Stones?
Who did you want to be? The singer? The bass guitarist? Did you want to bang on the drums? Was being in a rock band a dream you tossed around for years?
When I was younger, I listened to KISS, when I could sneak them in.
Now, of course KISS was discouraged in my household.
I had loving, smart, dear parents, but KISS? Well, that pushed it. THEY pushed it. The outrageous costumes. Gene Simmons’ tongue hanging out. The blood. The hard rock. The pounding music.
My father had, at one time, wanted to become a priest but a wife and kids won out. My mother was the product of Texas, her mother an orphaned southern belle. She was an English teacher.
We went to mass every Sunday and CCD on Wednesday nights. We were hardly allowed to watch TV, only The Waltons and Saturday morning cartoons and Bewitched. We were handed books and told to play outside.
We kept it clean in the Straight family home, and KISS, with all that leather and those lyrics, did not fit into our family realm.
And all that just made them more appealing! I was shocked when I saw their costumes, in a fun way.
I recently read Paul Stanley’s autobiography. I gotta tell ya, it’s fascinating. It’s about his childhood, which was very rough and lonely, with parents that did not fill their role well. It’s about his sister and her tragic problems and how he was alone a lot growing up, but had ambition. He had drive. He was absolutely determined to make it as a rock star and he believed in himself.
It’s about the band and their history, their friendships and how it all fell apart. It’s about women and drugs and alcohol and the money aspects of being in the band. It’s about all the people who were around the band – the groupies, the managers, and the money men.
And it’s about Paul Stanley’s journey. How he changed and grew, found what he loved, found himself, matured and found his place with his own people with all the mess that life brings – especially when one is in a rock band.
Definitely a different read for me, and I loved it.
Rock on, read on.
Published with Tall Poppy Writers:
https://tallpoppies.org/prefridayreads-face-the-music-a-lif…
#PreFridayReads: Face the Music: A Life Exposed by Paul Stanley
June 16, 2018
Living In Russia In My Head
I was living in Russia in my head.
My brain was filled with facts and it felt like I was swimming upstream in the frozen Moskva River in Moscow with no life jacket.
When I wrote The Language of Sisters, which is about a brave family who escaped Russia in the 1980’s and moved to Oregon, I had to do a TON of research.
Then I had to do more.
And more.
And more until my eyes practically crossed and I could almost hear my brain sizzling, smoke coming out of my ears.
The Language of Sisters is told in current time, in Portland, through the eyes of Toni Kozlovsky, but I had to tell the family’s back story. I had to explain why they left Russia, especially when they escaped with a fourth child in the middle of the night, who was not their own. I had to figure out what happened to them, as a family, as individuals, and the secrets they kept from one another.
So in order to accurately portray the Kozlovskys’ lives in cold, frightening, poor Communist Moscow, I started studying Russian history.
A few of those topics, among others?
The history of the Soviet Union/Russia 1890’s – 1991.
The Tsar and his family and how they ruled the Soviet Union.
The Russian Revolution (What caused it?)
Communism
Carl Marx
Lenin and Stalin
The KGB (Dangerous, so very, very dangerous)
Christians in the Soviet Union and the consequences for being Christian. (Most hid that they were Christian, punishment was severe, including having your children taken from you.)
Food deprivations in the Soviet Union, poverty, life in general, including what it was like to buy from state owned stores with endlessly long lines and live in state run apartment buildings where heat and plumbing were intermittent/non-existent
The schools in the Soviet Union and what and how they taught (Rote. Memorization. Brain washing. Speak the party line or get in serious trouble.)
Economics and atheism (Illegal to be Christian.)
The role of the Russian Orthodox church (The priests sometimes took “confession” from their parishioners and then reported on them to government authorities and then the poor person would disappear.)
What threats and punishments a dissenter would face from the government…
…which brings me to the gulag, prison, Siberia
The Cold War
Brezhnev and stagnation in the Soviet Union
When, why, and how the Soviet Union broke up
I will not bore you with a longer list or your eyes may cross, too. And who wants smoke to come out of their ears? Not me.
I loved researching Russia history because I didn’t know enough about it and found it harshly, sadly fascinating and, once again, was glad I was born here, and not there.
I hated researching/writing about Russia because it triggered my Type A personality. Which means, I researched, checked, re-checked, and checked again MANY times, to make sure that everything I wrote about the history of this family, while living in Russia, was correct.
I didn’t want to make a mistake. So, about 10% of what I learned about Russia went in the book. 90% was for me so I would know, at least somewhat, what I was talking about.
Here’s the first chapter of the book to give you an idea of what life was like in Russia for my character Toni Kozlovsky.
Chapter 1
I was talented at pickpocketing.
I knew how to slip my fingers in, soft and smooth, like moving silk. I was lightning quick, a sleight of hand, a twist of the wrist. I was adept at disappearing, at hiding, at waiting, until it was safe to run, to escape.
I was a whisper, drifting smoke, a breeze.
I was a little girl, in the frigid cold of Moscow, under the looming shadow of the Soviet Union, my coat too small, my shoes too tight, my stomach an empty shell.
I was desperate. We were desperate.
Survival stealing, my sisters and I called it.
Had we not stolen, we might not have survived.
But we did. We survived. My father barely, my mother only through endless grit and determination, but now we are here, in Oregon, a noisy family, who does not talk about what happened back in Russia, twenty-five years ago. It is best to forget, my parents have told us, many times.
“Forget it happened. It another life, no?” my father says. “This here, this our true life. We Americans now. Americans!”
We tried to forget, but in the inky-black silence of night, when Mother Russia intrudes our dreams, like a swishing scythe, a crooked claw emerging from the ruins of tragedy, when we remember family members buried under the frozen wasteland of the Soviet Union’s far reaches, we are all haunted, some more than others.
You would never guess by looking at my family what some of us have done and what has been done to us. You would never sense our collective memory, what we share, what we hide.
We are the Kozlovskys.
We like to think we are good people.
And, most of the time, we are. Quite good.
And yet, when cornered, when one of us is threatened, we come up swinging.
But, pfft.
All that. In the past. Best to forget what happened.
As my mother says, in her broken English, wagging her finger, “No use going to Moscow in your head. We are family. We are the Kozlovskys. That all we need to know. The rest, those secrets, let them lie down.”
Yes, do.
Let all the secrets lie.
For as long as they’ll stay down.
They were coming up fast. I could feel it.
June 5, 2018
Writing Is A Torture, But Cake Is Delicious
All books are torture to write, but one thing I liked about writing No Place I’d Rather Be is all the “studying” I had to do about cakes. Yes, delicious, original, creative cakes.
I pretended I knew how to bake while “studying.”
And now my latest book is on sale. $3.49 on kindle.
Do tell me you will eat cake while reading it. That’s important to me. The book must be delicious.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/No-Place-Id-Ra...
June 4, 2018
A Peek Into My Writing Cave/Garden
Want to see a few photos of my garden?
I was asked to write about my “writing cave” for Tall Poppy Writers and this is what I came up with….
It is rather funny that this column is about “writing caves.”
I don’t have a writing cave. I have a writing garden.
I love to write outside amidst my irises, butterfly bushes, hostas, pink dogwood and pine trees, orange trumpet vines, and
my rhododendrons and azaleas.
I brainstorm with my journal while sitting in one of my blue Adirondack chairs. I turn plots around in my tired brain while staring at my purple wisteria. I try to figure out what the heck is wrong with my story line while wondering why the heck my red geraniums haven’t bloomed.
Click on the link for a tiny bit more garden talk….
June 2, 2018
What I Remember Most Is Super Cheap
I’m at the beach, hoping that by staring at the waves for endless hours a coherent plot line will suddenly, magically appear for my next book, when I see this on Book Bub/Amazon: $2.99 for What I Remember Most.
Here’s an excerpt:
Chapter One
I hear his voice, then hers. I can’t find them in the darkness. I can’t see them through the trees. I don’t understand what’s going on, but their horror, their panic, reaches me, throttles me. They scream the same thing. Run, Grenadine, run! It’s them.
Chapter Two
I needed to hide for awhile. To do that, I had to change my appearance.
I went to a cheap hair salon and had them cut six inches off, to the middle of my shoulder blades, then I had them cut a fringe of bangs. I went home and dyed my hair back to its original auburn color, from the blond it had been the last ten years. I washed it, then dried it with my back to the mirror.
I turned around and studied myself. Yep. That would work.
For the last year I had been Dina Hamilton, collage artist, painter, and blond wife of Covey Hamilton, successful investor. Before that, for almost twenty years, I was Dina Wild. Now I would be Grenady, short for Grenadine Scotch Wild, my real name, with auburn hair, thick and straight.
Yes, I was named after ingredients in drinks.
It has been a curse my whole life. There have been many curses. I am cursed now, and I am packing up and getting the hell out of town.
Central Oregon was a good place for me to disappear from my old life and start a new one. I drove south, then east, the fall leaves blowing off the trees, magenta, scarlet, gold, yellow, and orange. It would be winter soon. Too soon.
I stopped at the first small town. There were a few shops, restaurants, and bars. It had the feel of a Main Street that was barely holding on. There were several storefronts that had been papered over, there were not a lot of people, and it was too quiet.
Still, my goals were clear, at least to me. Eat first, then find a job. I had $520.46 total. It would not last long. My credit and debit cards, and my checking, savings, and retirement accounts for my business and personal use, had been frozen.
I had the $500 hidden in my jewelry box and $20 in my wallet. The change came from under the seat of my car. To say I was in a bad place would be true. Still. I have been in far, far worse places than this. At least I am not in a cage. Sometimes one must be grateful for what is not going wrong.
I tried not to make any pathetic self – pitying noises in my throat, because then I would have pissed my own self off. I went to a park to eat some of the non perishable food I’d brought with me. I ate a can of chili, then a can of pineapple.
When I was done, I brushed my hair. I pulled a few strands down to hide one of the scars on my hairline. I put on makeup so I didn’t look so ghastly. I put extra foundation on the purple and blue bruising over my left eye, brushed my teeth out the car door, and smoothed over my shirt. I was presentable.
I took a deep breath.
This would be the first job I had applied for in many years. I started selling collages and paintings when I was seventeen, and I had not required myself to fill out an application and resume.
I looked into the rearview mirror. My car was packed full of boxes, bedding, bags, and art supplies. My skin resembled dead oatmeal. “You can do it, Grenady.” My green eyes, which I’ve always thought were abnormally and oddly bright, were sad, tired, and beat, as if they were sinking into themselves.
“Come on, Grenady,” I snapped at my own reflection. “You got a moose up your butt? Get it out and get moving.
May 22, 2018
You Must Read Them While Eating Cake
The books below that I sweated and cried and laughed hysterically over as I semi-lost my mind, are between three bucks and four bucks at the moment on kindle, at Amazon.
You MUST read them while eating cake, that’s the rule that CANNOT be broken, but other than that, everything else is normal. Happy day to all.
https://www.amazon.com/Cathy-Lamb/e/B...
May 13, 2018
Cheaper Than A Mocha
The Language of Sisters and my latest, No Place I’d Rather Be, are on sale for $2.99….
Cheaper than a gallon of ice cream. About the same price as making chocolate chip cookies. Less than my favorite mocha.
https://www.amazon.com/Cathy-Lamb/e/B...
April 30, 2018
Two Books On Sale For You
THEY ARE ON SALE!!
$2.99 each for No Place I’d Rather Be and The Language of Sisters.
If you would like to read about fluffy cakes and charming houseboats, history and mystery, sisters and secrets, you might like these books.
This sale will be short and sweet.
