P.B. Cannon's Blog, page 21

Free Book at Amazon on March 21st, 22nd, 23rd

My novelette, Hard Changes, will be FREE at Amazon on  March 21, 22, & 23.

New Short Story

Just published a new short Story at Smashwords.  It can be had for .99 cents. 

Tax Time!

It’s that time of year again. Yeah. That time. Tax time. And here I go procrastinating again. I don’t know why I do that. It’s not as if I have some horrible, complicated financial situation. Indeed, my taxes are not hard to do at all. In fact, it’s so simple, I don’t really need a tax program to do my returns. I’ll use one, though, because I’m going to do the free efile thing.

Of course, I have to find one I can use at irs.gov. No problems with the income limit, I’m well below the allowable limits of the $51,000 for some or the $57,000 for most, but some free-file companies have restrictions on age – I’m too old for some – and since I also have to file a state return, some don’t take my state.

Sigh. Well, I’ll find the right one, and hop right on it.

Sometime between now and April 15th.

Read an Ebook Week

I will be participating in Read an Ebook Week  from March 3rd to March 9th.  All my books at Smashwords only will be FREE! Just go to my writer’s page here, (or click on the above image) and take any book you want…it’s FREE!  The coupon code is RW100.

Mom

From time to time, thoughts of my mother gather in my head.

Mom. Sitting here thinking of her, gone now for over eighteen years. Yet, I still see her in my mind’s eye, as though she were sitting right across the table from me, huddled in her fuzzy burgundy robe, sipping on a hot cup of herbal tea.

She came to live with me when she was seventy-eight, after my son left home leaving me with an extra bedroom. The first time I saw her all bundled up in that housecoat, with leg-warmers on, and a knit cap, I was aghast.

“Mom,” I exclaimed, “Are you cold?”

“Not anymore,” she replied, smiling.

Well, after I got through laughing, I turned the thermostat up a bit. I couldn’t see freezing my poor old mom just to save a few pennies by keeping the heat turned down low.

She was eighty-six years old the year she died, and a lot of those were hard years. I don’t know, or remember from her stories, the whole tale of her life, but she was born in nineteen hundred and eight, delivered by a mid-wife, as probably most folks were at that time. Or, at least in the south, if they were poor.

Her mother died when she was a year old, and her father placed her, and her brother and two sisters in the care of his sister and her husband. Just as her parents were, they were share-croppers, so the work was hard. Somewhere in there, along about the time she was three or so, her father died, too, leaving them total orphans.

She wanted to be a teacher but she never got further than the seventh grade. At the time she completed that grade, there was no public high school for blacks – or as we were (politely) called then, “coloreds” – available for her to attend in the area, and her family was too poor to send her off somewhere to a private one. And anyway, from what she said, they didn’t much value higher education for girls, so she probably wouldn’t have been educated even if it could have been afforded.

So at around the age of twelve or thirteen, she got married. Too late for her, a few years after that, a high school for blacks was built in Charlotte, the city near where she lived. Soon after marrying, she gave birth to a baby boy who died at around six months old, and the marriage didn’t last long after that.

She married again and had more children but she never forgot her first child, David. She had no means to get photographs taken of him, she was much too poor, but she always said she remembered his little face, how he felt in her arms, the sound of his voice. He was born sometime in the nineteen-twenties and died of pneumonia, while lying on her lap. She knew he was dying, so all she could do was pray for his soul. One can only imagine how frightened she was when, years later, her youngest child – me – became ill at the age of two with the same disease. By then, it was nineteen forty-nine and penicillin was widely available, so: I’m still here.

Neither I, nor my sister or brothers, will ever forget that we had a brother we never got to meet. But, because of our mother, we did know him, and we have never forgotten him.

And that is just one story from the life of my mother.

Not Much Here…

Today is the second day of the rest of…the week!…and as soon as I find something else to say and get the time to say it, well, by God I will!

New Book

Published a new book at Amazon.com. It’s a novelette and only available at Amazon. Click to see.

Hard Changes by Bea Cannon

Feedback?

Made a page for an excerpt from my new book (see Boucher’s World Transformation Excerpt). Sure hope I can get some feedback.

Doing stuff…

Okay. So I’m trying to set up a twitter account. Never twitted – um, no, no, I think that should be “tweeted” though I’m not sure – before! Don’t know who to “follow” but the thing is giving me “suggestions”.

What I really want to be doing right now is working on the second book in my series that I’m trying to get completed and published sometime this spring. Got stuck on that, so I thought I’d work on the other book I’m writing that’s not part of the series but is in the same “universe”….got stuck on that too!

So I finished a novelette I’ve been working on since last fall. Working on the cover for that one, hoping to get it published shortly.

Good thing I’m “retired”.

Each day, I learn a little more. Sometimes it’s somethin...

Each day, I learn a little more. Sometimes it’s something good, sometimes not. Sometimes it just is. Sometimes it’s a realization that it’s something I already knew.