Bell Bridge Books

AND NOW FOR A DIFFERENT MESSAGE
from Trish Jensen

A couple of months ago I wrote a blog right here about writing what I don’t know. I praised and praised the value of creating a story that included people, occupations, locations you know nothing about.

I take it back. At least for this month. Because THIS MONTH I have a story based on something I know far too well. How to be the worst waitress in the entire universe.

When I moved from college to DC to start my bright future as a corporate bigwig, I soon learned it cost a lot to live in DC as a budding bigwig, so moonlighted as a waitress to keep the phone and lights on in my apartment.

If there was a person and a job that didn’t get along, it was me, and a tray full of food in my hands. Ridiculously bad is all I can say. How I kept the job for so long is a testament to how desperate that restaurant was for help.

So let’s fast forward. I won a really prestigious RWA chapter contest, and the editor who awarded it to me wanted to see the whole thing. The rejection letter after seeing it was, “You make me laugh in inappropriate places. This is a tragic book with too much funny (writer’s note: why can’t people be allowed to try to get through tragic events by using their humor?…but I digress).” She told me to write straight romantic comedy. They had a new line coming out, pure comedy, did I have anything like that in my arsenal?

I did not have an arsenal, except the one she just dumped in the round file. So I wrote back, “Of course I do! But let me polish it. A couple of weeks.”  That was me speak for “I don’t have a thing, but you’ll never know it.”

So on a walk with my dog that night I thought about funny situations. Nothing came to me. Went to bed frustrated and had a nightmare about my waitressing days. Thank goodness for a mind which pummels you even in your sleep.

The next day The Harder They Fall was born.  Granted, I was never a restaurant heiress determined to learn the business from the ground up (literally). Granted, I didn’t meet the man of my dreams the moment I dropped a grilled tuna in his lap. Granted, I wasn’t fighting a battle with this dream man who wanted to steal my restaurants.

But I knew bad waitressing. And that was the nugget that connected Darcy with me. We both knew how it felt like to be so bad at our job, even as we tried desperately to prove we could do it. Waitressing was not my thing. And it sure isn’t Darcy’s, either.

However writing was/is. I wrote this book almost 24/7 to meet my internal deadline of a couple of weeks I’d promised the editor. And in it went. It took her three months to decide (a lifetime for a writer), but she finally called with an offer and an “I couldn’t stop laughing.”

Music to my ears, even though it came at my own expense. I had to expose my own shortcomings to have fun with the heroine’s.

But just to make sure it was worth it, I made certain that during their battles that hero fell hard. And often.

Anyway, in this instance, writing what you painfully know can actually be a good thing. And I’ve never had a nightmare waitress dream again.

By the way, I’m now a fabulous tipper. Because that waiter or waitress could be me.

Click the pictures to pre-order!

My Update
by Kathleen McKenna

Hello all invisible friends. I haven’t written for a while. Well in all honesty, I haven’t done much for a while there have been a couple events which put me in this state. First of all there was a sale at Sam’s Club, buy 50 boxes of Captain Crunch get 50 for free. This really occupied me for the last few weeks, as did my subsequent massive coronary, something that sadly I was unaware of because in an effort to get healthy I gave into the pressures of television advertising and ordered some Special K online to counteract the effects of the Captain Crunch.

Unfortunately what I’d actually ordered was Ketamine. This created a sorry state and when I came to I was on a beach in Mexico and married to some English guy. It’s okay he is drunk most of the time so doesn’t bother me too much and has not tried to violate my personal space, which has grown considerably since the whole Captain Crunch debacle which started this vicious cycle in the first place.

Other than that not much to tell I got a tattoo, it’s of my own name and I had it put on my forearm (ala Mike Tyson) so that I could remember my name in a pinch (apparently there are some long term effects of Ketamine). At any rate let’s see what else, oh yeah I have joined the witness protection program to avoid my editor on The Comeback, it’s the sequel to The Wedding Gift and I know that she is going to ask me for all sorts of unreasonable things like to learn how to spell. The very thought of this has upset me to such a degree that I’ve taken to my bed, well okay, okay I never really left my bed but now I’m so worked up that I can’t see ever getting up again. In that spirit I would love to hear from anyone who has had any similar experiences or also who is just psychotically lazy and would like some support of this position!

Stories Made Real by the Telling
by Kathryn Magendie

Most of us have heard about writing what we know in our fiction. But sometimes writing what we don’t know reveals the hidden, unearths it as if we’ve shoveled deep into the soil, excavating through dark dense layers. And sometimes writing what we do not know becomes reality and that leaves us stunned and blinking, looking down at the hole we’ve dug filled with the empty-marrowed bones of ancestors real and imagined.

After writing a particularly dark scene in Family Graces that left me drained and exhausted, I took to my bed for a nap—for the prior novels Tender Graces and Secret Graces have their bits of darkness, but nothing like the scenes in the chapter titled Grandma Faith’s Last Five Days on Earth. In that time between when I thought I couldn’t possibly nap and the time that I did fall asleep, my synapses fired off—this family, this Graces Saga, this Virginia Kate story—how do I honor them?

I had to consider why I was having such a hard time writing the third and final book in the Graces Trilogy. Usually my words come fast, heaving out in a rush. Not so with Family Graces. The words stuck in my throat, caught up in my tightened chest. Made the digging shovel go ping ping ping against hardened rock and parched ground as I strained and pushed and pulled.

Alcoholism, violence, murder, pain, secrets, suicide, abandonment, cruelty, tenderness, pride, mothers, daughters, fathers, brothers, sisters, heartache, and in between is the living and the love and family lost and gained and lost again. It’s the stuff of great and compelling fiction, but it isn’t only fiction; for in my mostly unknown-to-me biological family, those themes rise up as forbidding as the mountains I, and my character Virginia Kate, love so much.

When I began The Graces Trilogy, I knew more than 95% of it would be fiction. I took the 3-4% or so of things I and my brothers experienced—our biological mother in West Virginia giving up her three kids one by one to live with our father and stepmother—and used that as a starting point to Virginia Kate’s own story of an Appalachian family torn apart. I would not know until I dug into layers and layers of earth—memory and idea and thoughts and whispers—how much what is real and what isn’t would become muddied.

What made the trilogy the most intriguing to write are the things I thought were fiction that turned out to be have some truths that had remained deeply embedded, and only when someone said, “How did you know about . . .?” Perhaps I’d overheard something as a child and my adult black-holed brain released them through my fiction—though it brought forth no memory as I wrote it—or perhaps I just guessed in that way that “truth is stranger than fiction,” or perhaps just as Virginia Kate does, I have ghosts speaking to me who want their story told.

But stranger still, as I completed the final draft of Family Graces, how could I know the suicide of Katie Ivene’s brother Ben would become the same fate of my own half-brother in West Virginia? Oh, but too late—it’s in the story—it was in the first book, Tender Graces. It must remain—truth and fiction. And in a moment of honesty here: writers sometimes have no soul when it comes to The Story—we have no conscience; we know no boundaries of decency. Writers can be heartless in their quest for The Story. Still, it is not without cost. Yet, no matter the cost, just as Virginia Kate did, I tell the stories. I wanted them all to be hers. I did not want her story to become my own. Still do not.

As I keep this Appalachian family grounded in fictionalized events, the truths rear up in a wild white-eyed fury. I dance around them in a strange ballet that stresses my mind and body and soul—but in the way a writer calculates with the beady eye of a crow.

Family Graces often had me wandering about the little log house feeling this sense of loss and pain and curiosity and all manner of questions unanswered—the ground did not always yield to my digging. Maybe, through Virginia Kate, I not only created answers to her story, but filled in the spaces with a mud-mix of fiction/nonfiction to my own life story and my Appalachian roots.

Grandma Faith says, “Ghosts and spirits weave around the living in these mountains. They try to tell us things, warn us of what’s ahead, or try to move us on towards something we need to do. But most of all, they want us to remember . . . the stories are made real by the telling.”

And that is what I do—I make the stories real for my readers by the telling of them. They are not my own. They are not my own. They are not my own.

Bio: Kat Magendie is an author, and Publishing Editor of the Rose & Thorn Journal. She lives in Maggie Valley, North Carolina with her dogs, husband GMR, a ghost dog, lots of critters around the little log house, and a view of the Smoky Mountains that awes her every live-long day is long-lived. Visit her at www.kathrynmagendie.com. Family Graces will be released this spring.

GO WEST, DEAR READER
by Kathleen Eagle

As a military brat I’d lived in a lot of places by the time we moved toMassachusetts, but I was already in love with the West.  I

felt personally insulted by my fifth grade teacher’s claim that, “It’s a vast wasteland west of the Mississippi River.”  I later learned that the dyed-in-the-wool New Englander had never traveled west of theMississippi.  She had no experience, presumably had never read a good book or seen a decent movie.  I felt sorry for her.

The song “My Baby Loves the Western Movies” could have been written about me.  I was born in Virginia, and I love the Tidewater area.  I went to college in Massachusetts, and I love New England.  But I never got over the allure of the West, and when the time came to seek my own adventure, that’s where I went.  I’d lived in Idahoand Texas and traveled around many western states, but I’d never been to the Dakotas.  One summer was all it took.  I would finish school, prepare myself to set out on my own, and then I would test my mettle in a place where the natural world is the alpha and omega.  The prairie has enormous power.  It’s still God’s country.

What a romantic concept!  I didn’t set out to write romance, but that’s the turn my fiction took when I finally decided to make stories from my limited experiences and boundless dreams.  Most of my stories are set in the American West, and my characters are drawn against a backdrop of the kind of natural grandeur that gives a person pause.  The sky rules.  The overarching night sky is breathtaking.  The morning and evening sky bookend the day in beauty, and an oncoming storm can be seen in all its power for miles.  When I write, I’m temped to interpret or comment on images like these, but when I revise a scene, that kind of writing goes—or should go—out the window.  I remind myself to show the landscape, let the reader see through the character’s eyes.  The character who comes to the West will feeling something different from the one who’s lived there all his life.  The reader get to do the interpreting.

(12/31)  Celebrate National Champagne Day with Arlene Kay!

Click the picture to view Arlene Kay on Goodreads!

Kimberly Brock had an interview on Authors Round The South.

Click HERE to read it!

Texas
By Ken Casper

I read an obit some time ago on page 2 of our local paper. It noted that the deceased, who went to the Lord at the age of 98, was not a native Texan, though he had arrived here in a horse-drawn wagon fromArkansaswith his parents when he was six months old.

Texans take native-born status very seriously. Those of us who are not so blessed at birth assure our neighbors we got here as soon as we could.

There’s something about Texas and Texans that has universal appeal. Texans are a tough lot. Witness their history. Very few people “Remember the Maine,” or even Pearl Harbor, but everybody seems to “Remember the Alamo.” Texas fought its own war of independence, became a sovereign nation, then joined the United Statesby treaty. The state’s unofficial motto has become “Don’t Mess with Texas”, and the people here, whether native born or newly arrived, mean it. In Texas you look the other person in the eye and take off your work glove before shaking hands, and a handshake is still your bond.

We all know size matters. Texas is a thousand miles across, and like all things large it has variety. East Texas is Southern in culture: piney woods, rice paddies and sugar plantations.West Texas is, well, western. And it’s West Texas with its sweeping plains, rugged mesas, cowboys, cattle, oil wells and tumbleweed, that captures the imagination.

It can also be lonely land. The weak of heart don’t survive here, and that perhaps is what makes it so intriguing. The tough pioneer spirit and indomitable will have never died here. In the western part of the Lone Star State towns are about thirty miles apart—a day’s journey on horseback. I wondered out loud one time why pioneers settled in some of the places they did. A fifth-generation native-Texan friend told me that in the case of her family it was where the mule died. Yep, that would stop you.

You find wonderfully named places in Texas, like No Trees, Hell, Muleshoe, Rising Star, Dripping Springs, Uncertain, and Valentine in Loving County. There are haunted forts and Victorian courthouses, fests and fairs, smoked beef brisket and sopapillas, mariachis and lonely cowboy songs.

Most of my books are set in Coyote Springs in West Texas, but don’t look for it on a map. You won’t find it. It doesn’t exist—except in my imagination and hopefully in yours. Because it’s fictional, I’m free to put anything and anyone I want or need there, and I don’t have to worry about anyone questioning my accuracy. I also don’t have to be concerned about someone thinking I’m talking about them or someone they know.

One of the great advantages of setting otherwise unrelated stories in the same place is the sense of continuity and community that develops and builds from common characters and reference points: the name of the daily newspaper, the local steak house, the military installation. As a reader I enjoy books set in places I’m familiar with. By setting my books in Coyote Springs, I’m doing my best to develop that same feeling of coming “home.” Even if you and I aren’t native Texans!

I’m actually very late to the concept of plarn, but I’m enjoying learning a new skill.  I’ve never even crocheted until a couple of weeks ago, but I’d always wanted to.  I started with cotton yarn and dishcloths.  One in single crochet.  Another in double crochet.  A third in half-double crochet.  I was learning a new vocabulary at the same time!  But I was tired of square dishcloths.  How many dishcloths do you need, anyway?  So one evening, I was google imaging easy crochet paterns and found this, a little backpack with white trim.

http://www.myrecycledbags.com/2009/07/17/recycled-plarn-backpack-pattern/

I thought oh, cool, a little backpack – that’d make a nifty present for a niece.  Then I noticed it was with plastic bags.  Huh, plarn? I watched one of the many videos on how to cut the bags apart and chain them for knitting or crocheting.  I was hooked.  I’ll never look at a plastic bag the same way again.

The benefit of coming to a craft two years after everyone else has discovered it is that there’s HUNDREDS of patterns out there.  The typical stuff, naturally—totebags, pot scrubbies, purses.  But did you know you can make plarn soapdishes?  Plarn bracelets and coasters?  SHOES?  Yup, if you’ve ever worn those ultra comfortable Teva style sandles, there’s patterns out there to make those with plarn too.  If you check out that website above, there’s bunches of free patterns on the sidebar.  RecycleCindy simply Rocks!

So I started out thinking I was going to make a totebag, like this one:

http://www.myrecycledbags.com/2012/01/25/plarn-sunflower-tote-bag/

I had bunches of those khaki Kroger bags.  Then I started looking at plastic bags.  Plastic bags everywhere!  White ones, clear ones, pink and black ones.  And those newspaper delivery sleeves were such a nice shade of blue.  So I added in a few stripes.  Then I found this one online:

http://www.myrecycledbags.com/2008/04/04/messenger-bag-crafted-from-plastic-bags/

Ohh, a flap!  So when I got to the top, I kept going on one side and came up with this:

Next I think I’m going to try a net produce bag, with some pink yarn and white plarn.  🙂

So I took my new plarn messenger bag to the store today, all proud to be contributing to the ‘green’ movement.  Told the girl bagging my groceries to put the heavy things in the big stripey bag, while pointing to the heavy jug of juice and bottle of V8.  Of course that’s ALL she put in there until I told her to go ahead and put the other canned stuff in there too.  My checker was a guy, and was just astonished that I’d made it out of Kroger bags.  Almost speechless.  “Oh, Man, whoa!”  he kept saying.

I didn’t notice until I took my groceries out of the van, at home in my driveway, that the bag had stretched.  I had forgotten that plastic crochet stretches and stretches and um… stretches.   I had gone overboard with the length of the shoulder strap. And the length of the bag itself. (I may not be a GOOD crocheter yet, but I’m certainly an enthusiastic one.) Even putting my head through the strap, the bottom of the bag, fully loaded, hangs well below my knees.

Here’s a before and after shot.  In the picture on the right, the bag contains two cans of soup and three cans of tuna.  It was even LONGER with the jug of juice and the V8.  Know any tall basketball players I could sell it to?

SHOWERS OF BLESSINGS
By Kimberly Brock

It didn’t matter whether the temperature barely inched its way into the fifties, each Spring I knew that with enough pressure and perseverance, I could convince my granny that it was time for me to go barefoot in the yard. I’d climb out the back door onto the chilled concrete floor of the carport and tip-toe out into the first baby-soft green grass of the season, knowing I was really getting away with something. In less than ten minutes, it felt like my toes would freeze right off, but I would grit my teeth and  watch them fall off like Vienna sausages before I’d admit defeat. I’d hop from one foot to the other. I’d march all over the yard, just trying to work up my blood until the warm rush and the glory of such naked heathenism made me forget the cold.

Granny was glad to watch me. She’d take a little worn down yellow broom and sweep off the back porch. She’d laugh and sing little snatches of tunes, Showers of Blessings, while she wandered around the yard, pointing out the first sprigs of mint that grew by an old stump, picking little pieces we could sniff. She’d cup them in the palm of her hand and we’d stick out noses in there and roll our eyes back in our heads, enraptured. We’d inspect the tight little buds on the forsythia bushes and dig around to find the nubs of tulips and daffodils on the verge of shooting up. Purple and yellow crocus always surprised us, seeming to spring out of the ground while our backs were turned, and we would goggle at them like we were seeing a pure wonder, instead of the very same thing we’d seen the year before.

Usually, along with going barefoot, I would be decked out in my favorite regalia, which amounted to a cherished old square dancing skirt that Granny bunched up at the waist and fastened with a diaper pin so it wouldn’t slide off me. Once I discovered I could spin and make that skirt fly out like a wide, white wave, or that I could walk along with the most perfect Scarlet O’Hara sachet, it was rare to find me wearing anything else. High on mint and frozen from the ankles down, I went about picking tiny weedy blooms that sprang up at the edge of the drive, or squatted near the gnarly roots of the pecan trees where bright green moss grew thick and dreamy, fully expecting to converse with fairies.

Nearby, Granny dug up dandelions. I understood this was a long-suffering battle that started years before I was born, Granny dragging her hoe across every square inch of the lawn. I knew her routine – the slow step, the bend of her back, the strength of her arms, the sound of the sharp edge of the hoe digging into soft earth, the sharp tang of dandelion juice in the air. I was aware of her ritual, as surely as I knew where to find the mint or the moss or the exact weight of the cotton ruffles swishing past my calves. But I didn’t understand it. The dandelions were beautiful. They were part of the thrill of those days, bright and round and full. And when I asked her why she had to dig them up, she told me they were weeds and they would ruin her yard.

I was too busy singing our songs and feeling larger than life to really worry about it for a long time. Then one year I got it in my head that the dandelions needed a champion. Who would speak up for the dandelions, if not me? And I argued with her that the little purple flowers at the driveway were just weeds. The mint at the stump was a weed, for we hadn’t planted it there. What was different about the dandelions that made them deserve to be yanked out? If I thought I’d get a good answer, I was disappointed. She stuck to her reason. Dandelions, left alone, would take over. You couldn’t let the dandelions get ahead of you. It wasn’t an answer I liked, but I still had my square-dancing skirt and my toes in the grass, and I was easily distracted from the dandelion’s plight.

One year, we walked down the road to a neighbor’s field where, in memory at least, there must have been an acre of daffodils. We picked as many as we could carry home. I think of it now and nothing compares. I was most impressed that the farmer’s wife had only planted a few dozen bulbs and Granny explained they’d multiplied, just like the loaves and fishes. It seemed to me there wasn’t much difference between the daffodils and the dandelions and I mentioned it. But Granny wasn’t impressed. She told me one day I’d have a yard and I’d see for myself. I didn’t say that when I had a yard, I wanted the dandelions to take over. I imagined what that would feel like, going barefoot on a lawn of big, yellow blossoms.

Back at the house, we filled every vase, every mason or jelly jar and even the plastic cups that came from the oatmeal box so daffodils were in every room. The honey-sweet fragrance made us drowsy; our food tasted like daffodils. She said we’d do it every year. If we did, I only remember that one day. But I do think of it, even though she’s been dead for many years. Because those days were magic, at my granny’s side, at her knee, my face turned into her sweet neck, her hands holding the whole world and smelling sharp and bitter as dandelion greens.

I suppose at some point, I got too old for the square-dancing slip. When we cleaned out her house after Granny passed, I looked for it, but nobody knew what happened to it. I hate that. The crocus bulbs gave out, I guess. They don’t come up anymore, or the tulips, either. But the forsythia still busts out all over and the mint still grows at the old stump. I wish I knew who planted it there.

I sing the songs she taught me. I grow mint, miles from the old pecan trees, and I pick pieces each spring. I cup them in the palm of my hands while my children dance from one icy, bare foot to the other, and bury their noses to sigh in ecstasy. It’s a bitter scent my heart is longing after, as my woman’s toes curl in the cold, soft earth.

I don’t dig up the dandelions. I hope they carry me off.