Cathy Lamb's Blog, page 8

The Bad Year That Brought About My New Book

2023 was not a good year.I’ve had worse.Years I try not to think about much.But 2023 was tough.Someone lied about me and it was very painful.Don’t worry! The lie was not about me burying a body, slugging someone in a bar fight, running naked along a river, or watering a weak man’s Alfa Romeo with a hose after popping a cherry pie into his smirky face. These are all things I’ve made the characters in my books do, but I have never done anything so exciting myself, unfortunately.The lie that was told was like being bitten by a know-it-all crocodile with a weird smile and a superiority complex.CLICK ON THE LINK FOR MORE FUN AND GAMES…

https://open.substack.com/pub/cathylamb/p/not-an-easy-year?r=kayfq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

(Yes this is what happened to my house…)

Read With Me! Prologue and First Chapter of Ten Kids, Two Lovebirds, and a Singing Mermaid

Hello all,

If you would like to read the Prologue of Ten Kids, Two Lovebirds, and a Singing Mermaid, copy and paste the Substack link below.

Have a good day!

https://open.substack.com/pub/cathylamb/p/a-little-snippet?r=kayfq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

 

Thank You!

Thanks to everyone who bought my new book Ten Kids, Two Lovebirds, and a Singing Mermaid.

Truly.

Thank you.

Cathy

Gardening as Therapy. Dig in the Dirt. You’ll Feel Better

I have spent hours this spring covered head to foot in dust, tiny branches, and dirt.

I love to garden.

To me, gardening is dirt therapy.

If I’m upset or stressed or jittery or anxious, I like to dig in the dirt. I like to tear up pesky weeds and plant pretty flowers.

My garden is far from perfect, but it always gives me the perfect place to cool my brain off, settle any prickly emotions I’m dealing with, and focus on one thing: Making things better.

There is so much in life that I can’t make better. Don’t ask me for my list because it will go on forever and it will get boring and tedious and you will see the dark shadows hiding inside my frazzled brain.

But even an hour working in my garden will make it look better and make me feel better.

When I garden I often get ideas for my books and characters. Sometimes they’ll pop in my head when I’m standing near my pink magnolia – the setting, the conflict, or who the main character is deep down, not the person she shows everyone else because that’s the person everyone wants to see.

Sometimes it’s a plot problem and, voila, while I’m holding up a worm, I know how to fix it.

Sometimes I’m ripping up weeds and I’ll figure out what needs to be ripped out of my book.

I’ve figured out who is going to die in my books when gardening. That can be a sad reckoning but I simply jump on a shovel and I know that that’s the way it’s gotta be.

When I’ve got the hedge trimmer roaring, I’ll think about word counts and goals and what I need to do to get my books written.

When I’m yanking out mint that grows like a sneaky weed, I sometimes think about the blonde woman with a temper who gave it to me. I liked her, but she later pulled a gun on the woman she was living with who sprinted down to my house like lightning to call the police.

Yep. Mint makes me think of guns and sirens, but it also makes me think of, for some reason, annoying people who won’t go away, and I wrestle it right out of the ground like the curse that it is.

I’ll talk to myself and often talk out loud while wandering amidst my yellow lilies and pink cherry tree. I like talking to myself and I don’t like being interrupted when I’m having my own two-way conversations.

Now and then I’ll think of someone who has ticked me off when I start lopping off pine tree branches with my clipper. That makes me sound dangerous in a botanical sort of way. I assure you I am not.

When someone lied about me last year, it was so painful and made me so angry, I cried into my rhododendrons. Luckily, later, while cleaning out dead leaves from a garden bed, I decided that I would give her condescending, judgmental, and patronizing personality to one of my characters.

I can’t stand that character, you’ll hate her too, and yet the inspiration came straight out of dead leaves.

There, that is the mean side of me. The vengeful side. But who wants to read newsletters by people who claim perfection? That would be so dreary.

When I’m cleaned off and don’t have cobwebs or spiders hanging from my hair, I’ll journal in my garden. I’ll grab my computer and write my books, staring at the pink magnolia and purple butterfly trees, the lanky columbines, the delicate violas and my late mother’s burgundy clematis.

They bring me peace.

Writing and gardening. In my life, those two go together like dirt and worms.

 

Read on Substack – sign up for my Substack for columns on life, writing, and laughter that will come to your inbox when I can get myself together and write…

https://open.substack.com/pub/cathyla...

The Alfa Romeo that Sparked Ten Kids, Two Lovebirds, and a Singing Mermaid

His name was Joe.He had a dark beard, dark eyes, and always seemed a little angry.He lived two houses down from our home on Deauville Drive in Huntington Beach, California. I was about eight years old when I knew Joe. His three kids played outside with me, my sisters and brother.Joe had an Alfa Romeo. It was white and slick and fast. No one else in our neighborhood had a speedy car like that.We had an old, black, clanking Ford, long and tank-like. We would regularly stuff two parents, four kids, and two temperamental dogs into that car. My parents did not believe in fancy cars. They did not believe in flashy things. They thought any outward expression of wealth was in poor taste and “showy.”In our middle class neighborhood, where children freely roamed, and parents kept a loose eye on their offspring, that fancy, showy Alfa Romeo stood out. CLICK ON THE LINK FOR MY SUBSTACK ARTICLE.

https://open.substack.com/pub/cathylamb/p/the-alfa-romeo-that-sparked-ten-kids?r=kayfq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

 

 

Running Around and Reading Books

When I was a kid I played outside as much as possible, read books and daydreamed.

Of course I had to write about it.

 

 

April Rains Bring Christmas Stories

Rainy day here in Oregon, which means it’s the perfect time for me to continue writing my Christmas book.I have one character nicknamed Whisky and another named Bellini.It’s a love story.Ho ho ho!!

SURPRISE! My New Book is Out TODAY!

Hello everyone,I hope you are all doing well!My new book, Ten Kids, Two Lovebirds, and a Singing Mermaid  is now available, only on Amazon.If you would like a book that will, hopefully, make you laugh, you can click on this little link right here…https://shorturl.at/hlx49I so hope you like it! It’s a happy, hopeful story about two broken families who heal their hearts together with a lot of laughter and love. Ten Kids, Two Lovebirds, and a Singing Mermaid  was inspired by my wild, somewhat feral childhood on Deauville Drive, in Huntington Beach, California.However, the two families are straight out of my imagination. As you know, I daydream a lot. Maybe too much.Here’s a little more info…Set on Deauville Drive in Huntington Beach, California in 1979, the O’Briens and Rossis become next door neighbors and life is never the same again.July 2019Jesse O’Brien receives the phone call she never wanted and never expected. Her frightened sister, Joyce, tells her, “She’s missing.”June 1979On the day Jesse’s mother’s marriage fell apart, her face was slathered in snow-white cold cream, everything but her mouth and small circles around her eyes covered. She wore a plastic cap to dye a few gray hairs snaking through her thick brown waves and a pink polyester housedress.Annie O’Brien, usually calm and cheerful, is livid as her husband tells her he’s leaving her and their five children for a woman who looks like Barbie.Stunned, Jesse follows her furious parents outside as her father loads his suitcases into his Alfa Romeo and her mother loads a pie into her hand and heaves it at her father then waters his face with a hose.When the dust settles, the Alfa Romeo roaring down the street, the cold cream now mixed with cherry pie filling, the shattered O’Brien family meets the Rossi family who have just moved in next door: Tommy, a Vietnam vet who looks like a motorcycle gang leader; his sister, Liliana, who believes she’s a mermaid; and Tommy’s five kids.They are mildly surprised at the family drama, but eager to get to know their exciting new neighbors.Five kids plus five kids equals ten, and the adventures begin with an ending no one saw coming. Ten Kids, Two Lovebirds, and a Singing Mermaid  is a funny, sweet story about life changing pies and Slip ‘N Slides, swearing parrots and sunny days, and mending aching hearts…together.+++++++++++++++++This is my first book in four and a half years. I took a break, and a breather, from writing, went back into education, and the break ended up being a little longer than expected.I am delighted to be writing full time again, my brain crammed with characters talking/laughing/throwing pies/talking to parrots, etc.Wishing you all well,Cathy

Crazy First Line for a Christmas Book

I started writing a Christmas book today, as I wait for final proofs for my Huntington Beach book.This is the first line. How do you like it?“Honey, my uterus has been stolen and I need you to come home for Christmas. Bring the cats.”

My Old House is the Inspiration for My New Book

This is the house I lived in for the first ten years of my life in Huntington Beach, California, on Deauville Drive, before we moved to Oregon.It’s the setting of my new book.It was about two miles from the beach and where I spent some of the happiest years of my life with my parents, brother, sisters and two dogs.One dog bit people sometimes, one dog bit other dogs whenever he could. They were bad.The book is being proofed right now…Cover coming soon.