Category: Newsletters

“If you want to be a writer, your first stop should be the library.”
Angela Shelf Madearis

I confess: I’m never without a book (or two or three) nearby. I love sniffing new books. The sound of a turning page calms my jangled nerves. The feel of a book in my hands is a comfort and a joy. I’m a true bibliophile. This past month I’ve probably touched almost a thousand books. No, they weren’t books sold at my book launch in May. If I sold that many copies of my titles, I’d pop open the champagne and indulge in a triple caramel cashew sundae! I’ve been organizing books for my mission of getting kids to read over the summer called Books to Grow On.

My favorite Mother’s Day memory involves a red Solera, a cell phone, and the Interstate highways. In 2013, our daughter, Megan, newly returned to the states from eight years in the Middle East, was graduating from a radio documentary program at the Salt Institute in Portland, Maine. Our delayed celebration coincided with her institute showcase and required a flight to Maine. My husband, Michael, returned to Wisconsin alone, because on the Monday after graduation, Megan and I began our epic Mother/Daughter Road Trip. She had accepted an internship in Marfa, Texas, 2,377 miles away, and needed me to drive with her. It’s great when your adult child professes a need for your company. Since I was newly retired from teaching, I enjoyed ample free time, so I jumped at the chance to travel with my daughter.

In my last newsletter, I wrote about how nurturing gratitude in challenging times can lead to an inner condition of grace.  As we experience the ups and downs of everyday life, we have two tools at our disposal to transform our practice of gratitude into a state of grace. First we have knowledge which provides the vision and understanding of how grace reveals its presence in our life. We also have direct experience that offers us validation that grace is manifest in daily living.  Knowledge and experience guide us on the path of transformation.

As we enter into the third year of Covid, I’ve been working on my mental outlook. When the vaccines came out last year, I thought we’d turned a corner. Soon we could hug relatives, travel, eat in restaurants, attend plays and concerts, and rid ourselves of the ‘Have I got Covid?” panic every time we got a runny nose. The return to ‘normal’ was short lived. Even if we are so done with Covid, the virus isn’t done with us. So instead of dancing until dawn, I’m listening on Spotify to 21 Days of Gratitude, a meditation series with Deepak Chopra and Oprah.

Research shows it can have emotional and physical costs, like insomnia and gastrointestinal disorders. Waiting until the last minute can produce lower quality work which can impact personal and professional relationships. Unresolved stress can lead to anxiety and depression.

I wrote the following piece from the point of view of the murderer in my forthcoming book. I wanted to explore the motivation of the killer to make it believable to my reader. This was solely to inform myself of the antagonist’s mindset, which I found helpful when I was moving up the story arc toward the climax.

I’m putting it in my newsletter, but not in the book.  Hopefully, it gives my followers some clues the general reader won’t have when reading the book, but not enough specific clues to pinpoint the murderer before the climax.

“Mosquitos started hovering around Vlad like he was the last bargain picture book at a teachers’ conference and he slapped at the ones on his face and neck. As he strode deeper into the woods, small branches struck him in the face. Sweat started to sting his eyes. He glanced in alarm at a small dot that latched onto his bare leg. Was it a tick? He frantically brushed it off. He stumbled on a root, and caught himself before he stumbled over another and fell headfirst into a patch of some plant with three leaves.

When he heard the roar of rushing water, he knew he was nearing the old dam. Where the hell was that dog?

The murder weapon in my third Gaston the Poodle mystery is a pie. Not just any old pie, but a Cherry Berry Peach Pie. My character, Beatrice, enters into a pie contest at the county Fair, but instead of winning a prize, her pie kills the judge. Dessert pies were invented by American housewives, and my character, Beatrice, is following a long tradition of pie baking. When I was growing up, no Sunday dinner was complete without one of Mom’s pies. She mastered the art of a perfect pie. Not only Mom, but all the church ladies at ice cream socials, baked delectable pies. Still warm from the oven, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream melting on the side, dissolving in your mouth like a piece of heaven. Beatrice’s pie could be no less.

I planned on a different topic for June but we needed to put down our beautiful cat a few weeks ago.

I wrote about him before. Friends of ours who are not cat owners didn’t understand why we would love a cat so much when he continually tried to run away the second a door was opened, who played Alpha Male with my husband and usually won by biting hard enough to draw blood, and drank from toilets and unattended wine glasses. There’s no explaining cat love.

Little did we imagine when we brought our five-year-old granddaughter back with us the first week of a supposed three-week lockdown in March that we would have her almost weekly for the next five months. When Aubrey started kindergarten that fall, I thought our sleep over visits would be confined to school vacations and an occasional weekend. The pandemic changed all that, unexpectedly for the better.