Bell Bridge Books

My mother, a survivor of the Holocaust, thought it was a miracle that she could feed, clothe and keep her children safe. For a woman who had survived the Tranistria Death March when she was fourteen, it must have seemed an extraordinary accomplishment. But many years later, she discovered Dr. Leo Buscaglia, an inspirational writer and speaker, on some television show, and she learned that it was also important to verbally express love to those you cherished. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.” From then on, every conversation ended with, “I love you.” I admired her willingness to learn and to grow. She was charming too. People were drawn to her, captivated by her beauty, her wit and flirtatious ways. But she was fragile, injured, damaged. I seem to have always known that just as I always knew it was my responsibility to care for her. In a recent interview I had on a Blogaid radio with Mananna Stephenson, she suggested that the relationship between the protagonist in The Manicurist and her mother had a similar dynamic. MaAnna also said she believed that I would have been unable to bring as much understanding to the relationship between Tessa and her mother in The Manicurist unless I was as well informed about such relationships as I am about such relationships. It was something new for me to think about.

I frequently write about the complex relationships between mothers and daughters. My mother passed on December 10, 2009 after six horrific months and three almost impossibly bleak years. She was just shy of her 82^nd birthday. During the last years of her life, I was so burdened by the cost and demands of her care that I forgot the woman my mother had been. That woman was replaced by a frail, helpless person who barely spoke and who seemed lost in her own thoughts. When I was not angry, I was frightened by the absence of ability to connect to the woman who only vaguely resembled my mother. I began to record whatever I remembered about the woman who had been my mother before illness took over.

My mother was superstitious. I wasn’t allowed to step over my brother when he was stretched out on the living room floor watching television because it would stunt his growth. If I needed her to sew on an emergency button, I had to put a thread in my mouth while she sewed. “I don’t want to sew up your sechel (common sense in Yiddish),” she cautioned. My mother was a woman of contradictions. Give her a few days in a foreign country, and she was practically a native. On the other hand, she could be so naïve at time that it was impossible to believe. This woman who spoke 7 languages and had lived to tell the tale of the Holocaust actually accepted that I was not smoking Larks in the bathroom. “Why does it smell like cigarettes?” she said. I shrugged. My story? I was simply trying to see the charcoal filter. Some mornings I would hold my forehead to the radiator and then tell her that I had temperature. She would press her lips to my forehead and agree. She never connected those mornings to my missed math tests. Years later, she was shocked to learn that I had been forging her signature throughout high school, and let’s not even get into the talk my poor mother must have dreaded having with me just a week before I was getting married. After I reassured her that it wasn’t necessary, she said, as she did so many times, “You’re your father’s daughter.” But I was her daughter too.

I loved my mother. She could infuriate me with her stubbornness and her neediness, but she could also touch my heart in ways that no one else could. She loved make-up, and when she reached in a time in her life that she had a little extra cash, she always bought something that came with a special offer. Once I said, “Mom, why do you buy all this stuff?” She smiled and said, “Because once in awhile, you just feel like a new lipstick.” She was right. I could take you on a different journey. I could tell you about the woman whose hardships, losses and struggles are incomprehensible. Orphaned at fourteen and exposed to cold, starvation and brutality, she understood life’s fragility. She dragged her parents’ bodies to a mass grave after they died, a week apart, of typhus, the scourge of the filth that people faced when they were crammed into small places without sanitary conditions. My mother was shaped by an experience so devastating that I often wondered how she managed to still love. But she did.

The last awful months of her life I often dreamed about my mother. In those dreams, she is always young, always smiling and laughing. Sometimes, we are picking big fat blueberries in a field, or making butter cookies, or I am cutting the threads between the scarves that she sewed for a few pennies each. I sat on the floor and read to her as the pink and blue and green and yellow pieces of chiffon tumbled around me, and my mother nodded, listening and humming a song she could never quite remember the words to. That’s the mother I choose to remember. That’s the mother I will never forget.

Phyllis Schieber

I HEAR VOICES

by Elizabeth Sinclair

I know what you’re thinking, “Whacko!”  Right?  Be honest. Most people who hear voices get locked away or, at the very least, are heavily medicated.  Me?  I get paid for it, as do many of my closest friends.

It began when the last of my three children went to school, and I was left alone in the house with no one to talk to.  At first, they were faint and almost indecipherable whispers, but as time wore on and I had more time to myself, they became louder and louder, until I couldn’t ignore them.  It became clear to me that the only way to silence them was to transfer their voices from my head to my computer screen and allow them to babble away to their hearts content. Oddly, their babbling wasn’t babbling.  They were telling me their stories.

I immediately thought, “Hey, I have a gold mine here.  These faceless people will tell me a story and all I have to do is write it down. I’ll be in control.  I can twist the stories anyway I want.”  WRONG!

Once I gave them the freedom to be heard through me, they took over. And they turned out to be a persnickety bunch.  Some didn’t like the mate I’d chosen for them, others didn’t want to live through the story the way I’d had it envisioned.  Some even changed their names mid-stream because the name “didn’t fit their character.”  Others got pregnant without even consulting me.  It was chaos . . . but wonderful chaos.

Each day turned into an adventure to see where they’d lead me, what countries/states/time periods I’d visit, how they would unsnarl their tangled, unhappy lives and what lessons we’d both learn in the process.  I found myself looking forward to each day of writing like a child on Christmas morning faced with a stack of brightly wrapped presents.

The most recent voice to guide me through my writing is one very familiar to me.  As a child, my grandmother, Susie, played a huge part in my life. She was a bit stern, but had love and down-home wisdom flowing out her pores and into the world. Our friends and neighbors knew they could talk to Susie and go home feeling better. When I began the HAWKS MOUNTAIN series, I wanted a woman like that as one of the town’s ongoing characters.  And so, Granny Jo was born and became Susie, complete with her mannerisms, her sage advice and her love of humanity.  Writing this series is like sitting down with my grandmother each day and revisiting my childhood memories.

Many of you have expressed how much you, too, have come to love Granny Jo and hope to see her in other Hawks Mountain books.  Rest assured, Granny Jo will make an appearance in all of them in some way. Her next appearance will be in SUMMER ROSE, book #2 in the HAWKS MOUNTAIN SERIES, to be released by Bell Bridge Books in January 2012.

Greetings and thank you for stopping buy, you were probably mislead by either my free offers for either cash or dog weight loss programs but since you’re here anyway you might as well stay and read my incredibly interesting story.

I’m the author of The Wedding Gift the tale of a small town beauty queen who marries up and is then stuck living in hell house. But to find out more about that you can just read the excerpt. For now I’ll explain the writing process. Like all writers I am unemployed and likely to stay that way, further I am pathologically lazy and wanted to find something I could do which allowed me to stay in bed all day, this seemed like a better choice than the obvious alternative. But what to write?

Well I like love stories but not sappy ones, and I like vampires but really the field is getting a little crowded besides how many people do any of you know who have actually met a vampire? I thought not, but ghosts? I think everyone either has their own ghost story or knows someone who does, and I’m no different. I set my book in the south because my grandmother came from there and I love that part of the country. I made my heroine a crazy beauty queen because I didn’t think my story especially the romance part would appeal to a lot of people if it was about a seven hundred pound ninety year old woman in love with a young Brad Pitt look alike, I mean I don’t write or read science fiction!

I have no idea if there is a single person alive who might find my personal life interesting but just in case here is my autobiography: I was raised by wolves which makes telling people the truth about my age impossible as everyone knows wolves suffer from an inability to tell their real age. I am pretty normal, I like nuclear waste facilities, pretending to be invisible and talking about various different subjects as long as its about me. I have a rare medical condition called Irish Bulimia, which in a nutshell means that I overeat and then forget to vomit afterwards. Where do I see myself in five years? Now there’s an interesting question, and I’m pretty sure the answer is the couch, I’ve been contemplating moving from my bed to the couch now for several months as the couch is much closer to the refrigerator.

Other than that I don’t think there is much to say, but I do like to hear from people as long as they are writing with lavish compliments and new cake recipes. Meantime, Happy New Year everybody.

Kathleen Mckenna

My love/ hate relationship with Canadian geese
By Donnell Ann Bell

My mother loves to tell the story of when they lived in Texas and our family had a pet goose.  Mom says as a toddler I would chase that bird.  When I would fall down, the goose would stop, wait for me, I would get up and our routine would begin anew.  Little did I know that that wild goose chase was merely a foreshadow of more to come.

Fast forward oh, thirty-five years or so, and my husband, kids and I move into a new home in Colorado.  We love it here.  It’s a quaint little neighborhood with a lake setting a block away, and a lovely circle in front of the house that the homeowner’s associate saw fit to plant with an abundance of trees and grass.

I, obviously, am not the only one who thought the area was charming.  For the past ten years or so I’ve had guests.  Not the type that clutter-up-the- bathroom guests; they don’t come with suitcases, although they do fly in in droves.  I’m talking about the majestic, beautiful Canadian goose.

I remember smiling the day they arrived.  “Oh, look, honey,” I said to my husband.  “We have geese.  Let’s see, there’s one, two…120!”

I was okay for a while.  They seemed to be content to stay on the circle in front of the house, until one day one goose decided to venture forth.  Did you know geese migrate?  And when one migrates…the others follow?  You guessed it.  Soon I had one, two. . . 120 geese in my front yard, leaving me all kinds of slippery “presents.”

I called my homeowner’s association. “What are you going to do about this?” I demanded.  To which they replied, “It’s a wild bird, Donnell, they’re protected.  What do you expect us to do about them?”

The soup kitchen came to mind, but that appeared out of the question.  So, I had a little talk with “my” birds.  That’s right, because they reside in the circle, and love my yard primarily, my neighbors christened them “mine.”

Reasoning with this great gaggle, I ordered them to stay on the circle, and for heaven’s sake, I cried, stay out of the street, where they were blocking traffic and likely to get ran over.

I was thinking about the “write what you know” thing. Sometimes people think it means to write what you have experienced in a tangible way. It can be, of course. It can also be what you empathize, which is still “what you experience,” but in an indirect kind of way.

Years back, I went by a friend’s house to visit her, while on my way to somewhere I don’t recall. I was dressed nicely, had on make-up, et cetera. I was as I am now: Healthy as the clichéd horse. My friend, however, had cancer. Her hair was falling out. She was pale and tired. I brought something to her and we chatted a while.

But what I want to focus on was the moment I stepped into the door. I walked in, smiling and strong. I walked in with all this HEALTH surrounding me. My pinked cheeks, my sturdy body, my clean-and-free-from-cancer insides. I walked into her house and she sat in her chair with cancer eating at her, what was left of her hair and her partially bald scalp showing through a little from her scarf, her pallid complexion.

What hit me with a sudden ‘oh,’ wasn’t only when she said something to the effect, “You look so nice,” and her tone was wistful. Before she said a word, it was the look in her eyes. Her demeanor said, “I want to be healthy again. I want to be strong again. I want to have on my cute clothes again. I want my hair back! I want this damn cancer out of my body RIGHT NOW! I want to be ME again.” And maybe even, “I’m glad my friend is here, but . . .” But, she’s making me feel sicker. But, she’s making me feel ugly. But, she’s making me feel hairless and sick and pale and pukey and weak.

For that moment before we chatted and were just the friends we were, I’d put myself in her place (and maybe she in mine)—what I thought I would feel if I were sitting in that chair and she had come breezing in with all that gawdamm Health I used to feel and wanted to feel again—whether I’d hit it on the nail isn’t important for the purposes of things from a “writer’s perspective.” What matters is—

Empathy.

I could sit down now and remember that moment of clarity. That “look” I saw in my friend’s eyes. The feeling I suddenly had that made me feel as if we could so easily trade places. The feeling that somehow I made her just a little sad or uncomfortable or maybe even a bit envious of my good health—for why should she be sick and I be healthy? Who or what decides these things? In “writing what I know” I can also use that moment of recognition to write something from my friend’s perspective.

Will I get it exactly right, will I know everything she thought or felt? No way, but that one moment of that one flash in her eyes, that sound of her voice, the energy charged in the room and the energy wished for, the sickness and the health, all of it I can recall. And from that could come a story written from “what I know.” Empathy. Paying attention. A knowing. A guessing. A learning. A reaching into and out of. I could take what I’d think I’d be feeling and pass it onto her (on to my character).

Sometimes that’s what Writing What You Know means.

By the way, my friend is fine now. Healthy and feeling wonderful. Pinked cheeks and shiny hair. No one would ever have to know, except her, and me, and all the future characters who may come.

Marshall Seese will be narrating the audiobook of Eyewall. Check out the news!

http://www.buzzbernard.com/
eyewall-marshall-seese-and-the-rest-of-the-story/

I cannot begin to count the times when, upon seeing the stack of “dragon” books arrayed before me on a book-signing table, some potential reader has asked, “How old are your children?” a question that always triggers the same response.

“Children?”

If curiosity overcomes their need to sidle away at that point, they no doubt want to know how I came to be an author of children’s books. This is usually when I explain how I really had no choice, as I never fully matured, mentally, but truth be told, I actually did grow up at one point. It was not until years later that I returned to the mental level of a seventh-grader.

Though I didn’t recognize it at the time, the humor-writing seed was first planted when I read Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. To this day I’m not sure what age Hitchhiker’s Guide humor was intended for, but at the time I was twenty-five and thought Douglas Adams was hilarious.

A few years later I met Nancy, the woman who will surely be the topic of many future blogs but back then was just some crazy girl who would later become my wife. I was not exactly what you would call an avid reader, having read exactly four books since leaving college, all of them from the Hitchhiker’s Guide “trilogy.” Nancy, however, owned hundreds, if not thousands of books, mostly in the science fiction/fantasy genre, and hearing of my unquenchable appetite for humor books, she steered me toward Piers Anthony’s Xanth series.

I was an ancient twenty-nine when I read that first Xanth novel, so naturally I didn’t think of what I was reading as a children’s book. This could explain why my first “Journals of Myrth” story, with its many Xanth-like puns, was originally written with all adult characters. Not until I bundled it up and sent it off to that first publisher did I realize the type of books I enjoyed reading and writing were meant for children.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. This guy really didn’t mature, mentally, did he? Maybe not. But once I realized that and rewrote my first Myrth book with child characters, I knew I had found my calling. Problem was, without children of my own to remind me what it was like to be a seventh-grader, I was forced to rely on my memories. I was in serious trouble.

Nancy can attest to the fact that I remember little about what happened before the age of twenty, or after. I do, however, seem to recall those preteen years as the one short-lived period of my life when I knew absolutely everything. Sure, there were awkward moments, some ninety-nine percent of the time, but even then I saw the humor in those many ridiculous, embarrassing situations. I didn’t know when or how, but I knew someday I would use those absurd experiences to my advantage.

Otherwise, what would be the point of having suffered all of that misery and humiliation?

Bill Allen

All of the following titles are on free promotion at Amazon:

The Cart Before the Corpse

Famous southern carriage-horse trainer Hiram Lackland, a handsome widower, dies mysteriously after retiring to a farm outside Mossy Creek. His estranged daughter, Merry Abbott, also a horse trainer, arrives to settle his estate. But Merry quickly plunges into bit-chomping dilemmas when her father’s friend and landlord, mystery-novel maven Peggy Caldwell, insists he was murdered. Before Merry can so much as snap a buggy rein, a handsome and annoying GBI investigator, Geoff Madison, is on her case. Then there’s the troublesome donkey: Don Qui. Short for Don Quixote. And the fact that Hiram was teaching all of Mossy Creek’s lonely women how to–ahem–drive his carriage.

Twice Dead

Newly undead shifter-turned-vampire Kita Nekai is coming to grips with the reality that her cat has not awakened since her change. What she needs is a little time to adjust to her new liquid diet and the increasingly complex attraction to her sire, Nathanial. What she gets is a headless harlequin. With the body count rising, Kita is dragged into a dangerous game of vampire politics. Her involvement draws the attention of an ancient vampire known as the Collector who has a penchant for acquiring the unusual – like a pureblood shifter-turned vampire. Kita still has unfinished business of her own and finds herself deeper in magical debt.It’s a bad time to be a kitten who can’t slip her skin.

Blood Rock

Dakota Frost is back, and the ink is about to hit the fan-again. Graffiti comes to life in the dark heart of Atlanta’s oldest cemetery, slaying one of the city’s best loved vampires before the eyes of his friend Dakota Frost. Deadly magick is at work on the city’s walls, challenging even the amazing power of Dakota’s tattoos to contain it. The hungry, graffiti magick loves to kill, and the Edgeworld is no longer safe from its own kind. Dakota begins a harrowing journey to save those she loves and to discover the truth behind the spreading graffiti-even if that truth offends the vampires, alienates the werekin and creates police suspicion of her every action. Saving Atlanta may cost her everything, including custody of her “adopted” weretiger daughter, Cinnamon. But failure is not an option. If the graffiti> isn’t stopped, Cinnamon could be the next victim.

Mossy Creek

We’ve got a mayor who cleans her own gun, and Police Chief who doesn’t need one. We’ve got scandal at the coffee shop and battles on the ballfield, a cantankerous Santa and a flying Chihuahua. You’ll want to meet Rainey, the hairdresser with a tendency toward hysteria, and Hank, who takes care of our animals like they were his children. Don’t forget to stop in for a bite at Mama’s All You Can Eat Café, and while you’re there say hello to our local celebrity, Sue Ora. Like as not, she’ll sit you right down and tell you a story. People are like that in Mossy Creek.

The Goddess of Fried Okra

Ex-cocktail waitress and “convenience story professional” Eudora “Pea” O’Brien is filled with grief and regret, low on cash and all alone. Headed down the hot, dusty back roads of central Texas, Pea is convinced she’ll find a sign leading her to the reincarnated soul of the sister who raised her. A sign that she’s found her place in the world of the living again. At least that’s what the psychic promised. In an unforgettably funny and poignant journey, Pea collects an unlikely family of strays—a starving kitten, a pregnant teenager, a sexy con man trying to go straight, and a ferocious gun dealer named Glory, who introduces Pea to the amazing, sword-wielding warrior goddesses of Texas author Robert E. Howard—creator of the Conan the Barbarian novels—and celebrated in festival every year. Six foot tall, red-headed Pea looks good with a sword in her hand.

All of the following titles are on free promotion at Amazon:

Beyond the Misty Shore

Marketing executive Maggie Wright and artist T.J. MacGregor are linked by a mysterious car accident that killed Maggie’s cousin, Carolyn, T.J.’s fiancee.  When Maggie arrives on the Maine coast determined to get answers from T.J., she discovers a tortured man who is bound to the Seascape Inn by supernatural forces.  Despite the tragedy that stands between them, Maggie and T.J. begin to fall in love, seeking answers and a healing spirit they may never achieve.

Imagine

After years in prison for a murder he never committed, escaped convict Hank Wyatt knew how to survive. But he didn’t know if he could last an hour marooned on a deserted tropical island with a beautiful blonde and three orphaned children. Now, looking out for number one doesn’t seem to be enough… San Francisco attorney Maggie Smith felt like having a good cry. Thoroughly modern, wealthy, and bright, she’s suddenly been cast in the role of mother and forced to battle wits and hearts with the most arrogant man she’s ever met! Fate has thrown this makeshift family Robinson together and kismet tossed in a touch of magic…the chance for a love more powerful than they could ever imagine…only a wish away!

The Wedding Gift

Leann wasn’t good enough for her upper-crust in-laws, so they gave her the mansion none of them wanted. Years ago, something or someone in the house killed Leann’s brother. Will its violent secrets kill her next?

The Year She Fell

When Presbyterian minister Ellen Wakefield O’Connor is confronted by a young man armed with a birth certificate that mistakenly names her as his mother, she quickly sorts out the truth: his birth mother listed Ellen on the certificate to cover up her own identity, but also because Ellen is, in a way, related to the child.

Too Close for Comfort

He kidnapped her in her own hospital…to keep her alive. Dr. Marissa Fairfax is a calm, cool trauma surgeon.  Police officer Jack Corelli is a tough cop who’s been assigned to protect her until she testifies at a murder trial–whether she wants his help or not.  Jack’s more than willing to enforce the mandatory protection order, but he’s got his work cut out for him.

I was robbed last night as I left the grocery store. The guy had no weapons on him, or at least he didn’t brandish any. He just walked over as I was placing bags in my trunk and said, “I’ll take those groceries, and nothing will happen.”

I looked at him, and wasn’t scared at all. He had a pleading kind of look in his eyes, so it was obvious he wasn’t really schooled in the fine art of theft. Not to mention, the lot was pretty busy. All I had to do was scream. Not to mention, I’ve lived here 20+ years, and there just isn’t any kind of violent crime. And funny that he wasn’t asking for my wallet, my jewelry, nothing but my bags of groceries.

So I asked why he’d want my groceries. Did he own a dog? He said no, he just wanted to feed his kids on Christmas. I said, “Boy, did you come to the wrong place.” I showed him all of the stuff in the bags, which were about 99% dog treats, and one onion and one jug of milk.

He looked so defeated, I couldn’t stand it. I’d just gotten forty dollars back from the cashier in the store for spending money over the weekend. I took out my wallet, gave him the forty dollars (which I sure as hell couldn’t afford to give away) and said, “Here. Go buy your kids food for Christmas. Legally!”

And then my robber thanked me so profusely I was almost afraid he’d fall to his knees. But I just said, “Merry Christmas, now go buy your kids a great supper, and for God’s sake don’t rob anyone else.”

And then I watched as he kind of straightened up and strutted proudly into the store, cash in pocket to buy his kids a cool supper.

I have to say, that was the lamest robbery on record that I’ve ever heard of. Although I was out $40, he could have demanded all the cash in my wallet, could have forced me to hand over my rings (one of which is diamonds and emeralds and is valued at $2,500, but is more precious to me than monetary value because of its history), could have been a real thug. He wasn’t. He was just desperate. And it broke my heart that he had to stoop to trying to steal someone’s groceries so he’d have food for his kids. Also made me happy he didn’t have a dog, since mine would be pretty upset if I came home empty-handed.

Trish Jensen, PROBABLY the biggest sucker on earth…