What I'm Reading: 84 Paws: A Life with Old Labs

I've read another book by a fellow Writers of Chantilly author, this one titled 84 Paws: A Life with Old Labs, by Barbara Travis Osgood. This one is a memoir about Barbara's life with mental illness, and her life with a series of rescued Labrador Retrievers (twenty-one in total), and how adopting the dogs over the past twenty years or so has helped her overcome depression and despair to achieve a measure of peace in her life.

Each chapter tells the story of one of the dogs, often with a lesson Barbara learned from the dog about living her own life. One of my favorite chapters was about Hope, a female chocolate lab who had been a backyard breeder until her owners had no use for her anymore. When Barbara adopted her, she expected to find a defeated dog, ground down by the difficulties of bearing litter after litter, like many other abused breeders she had seen. But Hope was not that dog--Hope bore herself upright, with dignity, and instantly became the leader among the four dogs at Barbara's house. The other dogs instinctively knew to let Hope have her way in eating first, hopping up on the best spot on the bed, or any other doggy privilege. Hope never growled or bared her teeth, but when a younger rescue dog came temporarily to the house and tried to go first in the food line, Hope had him flipped on his back before he knew what was happening. In Hope, Barbara saw a model of perseverance for dealing with her own problems.

There are plenty of other dogs too--Raleigh, the ambassador, who made friends with everybody on their walks, including a homeless man who slept on a bench near a local shopping center; playful Buddy, who despite his advanced age and a history of neglect involved everyone in chases and games; curious Molly, another backyard breeder who has to know about everything going on and refuses to let her past burden her present.

This is an easy book to recommend to nearly everybody. In fact, I left the book lying on a table in my house one day, and with no prompting at all, my son and daughter started reading it and trading it back and forth to each other to compare notes on their favorite dogs. (That's one reason I'm only reviewing it now despite having bought it when Barbara published it last spring--it keeps disappearing in my daughter's room so she can read it!) The beautifully simple prose is complemented by one or more pictures of the dog in question in each chapter, with a gallery of dog photos at the end. It can be read beginning to end, or flipped through for a chapter here and there with equal satisfaction. And as much as the dogs have been a salve for Barbara, I think reading her wise stories of them may also prove a salve for a reader in need of healing, or at least a pick-me-up after a bad day.

What I'm Reading: This Is Not a Love Scene

What a treat, a book by my fellow Writers of Chantilly writer, S.C. Megale! This Is Not a Love Scene is Megale's first published novel, although she's well known at the writer's group table for a number of books she's read to us over several years, each done with passion and skill. Unlike most of what I've read from her before, which tended toward fantasy or science fiction, this novel is realistic and set in the contemporary era. It follows Maeve, an 18-year old senior in high school who is taking a film class and hopes to enroll the following year at UCLA in film. She's fallen in love, or at least lust, with the school's top actor, Cole Stone, who is tall and good-looking, and has come up with a film project for her class involving Cole for possibly mixed reasons. And, oh yes, Maeve is in a wheelchair with a degenerative spinal disease for which there's no cure.

Maeve has a disappointing dating history--boys who go out with her to be nice, but have no intention of becoming more involved with her. A succession of guys who are "just...not able to go there." Cole is different. He's hard to read--teasing, alternating between flirtatious and distant, often monosyllabic. But he also seems to have a real romantic interest in Maeve, and over a series of awkward (but funny!) dates and encounters, they gradually learn how to translate their mutual sexual desire into physical affection.

Maeve also has a close group of friends to help her out--BFF Mags, who's pretty and romantically experienced and unfortunately currently dating Nate, who resents the attention Maeve gets from his girlfriend; Elliott and KC, two fellow students in her film class; Quinten, an older man and retired FBI agent who lives at a local nursing home; and of course Francois, her faithful service dog.

Together, the friends help Maeve navigate the myriad adventures of an active, lusty, wheelchair-bound teenage girl--filming a fifteen-minute film project that requires multiple on-location shots, confronting the pushy local director of a special-needs camp who seems to think Maeve owes her involvement, acquiring the unusually delicious ice cream at a local store that was built before handicapped-accessible laws.

In the end, though, it's Maeve who has to help one of her friends in a dangerous situation when no one else can. Will she survive? Will she get accepted to UCLA so she can pursue her dream of directing movies? And most importantly, will she get laid by Cole Stone?

What I'm Reading: Ten-Seven

Ten-Seven is the second Penns River Crime Novel I've read by Dana King (I reviewed the first one, Grind Joint, here) and it's a special pleasure for me to read it not only because Dana is a fellow member of my writer's group, but because he has one of the sharpest eyes and ears of any author I've ever read.

Penns River is a decaying old industrial town north of Pittsburgh, short of jobs and money, but not, unfortunately crime. "Doc" Dougherty is a skilled homicide detective who could easily have moved to a bigger city but has too much pride in his hometown to leave. He takes it as a personal affront when a murder is committed in his town, and lately, he's been affronted a lot. At the beginning of Ten-Seven, an apparently random shooting has just taken place in the parking lot of the casino, and Doc is determined to chase every wispy lead until he catches the perpetrator. This time he has help: Teresa Shimp, a young officer trying to prove she really deserves to be on the force, and is more than simply a hire to keep the department from being sued for discriminating against female police candidates.

Through the course of the novel, we also check in with the crime-associated friends we've met in previous novels: Mike Mannarino, the head of the small-time local mafiosi; and Wilver Faison, a black teen-ager on the rise in the local drug-dealing business. They have less to do directly with the plot this time around than they did in Grind Joint, but I like how Penns River is such a small town that the criminal element almost can't help rubbing against each other. The interdependence of drugs, muscle, and weapons means that one can't act without it affecting everybody else in the web.

As usual, Dana's eye for detail is what really makes the novel for me. In my review for Grind Joint I wrote that that book was as much a sociological study of a dying mill town as it was a crime novel, and that continues to be true. However, I do think the focus has shifted a bit--we get a better look this time around at the police force: new hires like Teresa Shimp and how they're fitting into the culture; the machinations of deputy Jack Harriger, who's gunning for Chief Stan Napierkowski's job when he retires; the daily work life of patrol cop Sean Sisler, who also has a secret which could endanger him but actually ends up leading to an important break in the case.

I'm not much of a mystery or crime fiction reader myself, but it's hard for me to believe this wouldn't be one of the best such novels even a hard core fan would come across this year. But this would be equally as good for anyone interested in reading a closely-observed portrait of a town that's hurting, and the crime and law enforcement institutions that play such an important part in corroding and sustaining that town.

Finished Another One

The Love Machine, my latest novel, is done.

Well, at least the not-quite-final draft of it. I finished it this morning, fulfilling my 2017 New Year's goal of having it done by June. It took about 18 months.

Because I've been reading each chapter to my writers' group a few weeks after completing them, and then going back and polishing, the book should need very little work further work, I think. I'll take a week or so off, and then do a final read-through and polish.

My next goals?

1) I have two open short stories. I'll finish one of them. Should take 7-10 days.

2A) Polish query letter for The Love Machine.
2B) Send The Love Machine  out to agents. Maybe start in a month.

3A) Go back to novel #3, which I need to make one semi-major change to. May take a few weeks for that. Otherwise, I think this one is good to go.
3B) Novel #3 also needs a title! My various working titles (most recently, Out of Place) have not worked for me.

4) Start on novel #5. I have a really killer premise and am ready to start. Maybe after Labor Day.

Secrets, Lies, & Sighs: New Anthology from the Writers of Chantilly Released!

We all have secrets, parts of our pasts we’d rather keep hidden. Inside the pages of this anthology, you’ll find secrets uncovered. A church confessional come to life, who knows what you’ve really been up to. A happily married woman reflecting on a college romance, and the unexpected revelation that ended it. A private school principal who finds kicking a student out of school may lead to public revelations of his own unsavory past. These secrets and more lie hidden in these pages, waiting only for you to discover them.

The new anthology from the Writers of Chantilly, Secrets, Lies, & Sighs, is available now at Amazon.

Recent short story published online

The blog maintained by the Writers of Chantilly recently posted one of my short stories. I actually meant to include the link weeks ago but I kept forgetting... Anyway, here it is now. It's titled Favor in Thy Sight.

I should add the WoC blog also has several other stories by other members of the group. Some of them are quite intense and moving. If you have never visited there, it will be worth your time to go and read some of them!

The Importance of Writing Groups Redux

I've written in the past about the importance for a writer of being in a writers group.  In those posts, I mentioned four reasons to join a writers group:

1) Reading out loud in front of a group makes you try harder when you're polishing your work.

2) The support of other writers boosts you and supercharges your desire to write.

3) The critique provided by the other writers is an important tool in improving your work.

4) A regular meeting helps you get back on track when you've lost your way.

I'd like to mention a fifth that's occurred to me lately.  At the last few meetings, some of the other writers have read some really great pieces.  A couple writers in particular read chapters from their books that impressed me--and maybe made me a little envious.  Hey, I can write as well as that!

So why haven't I?

Obviously, I've really got to up my game if I'm going to keep up with these guys.  And so we come to the fifth reason: competition.  When other writers are hot, when they bring in something that makes you say "Damn!"  When they're providing the group with a master class in how it's done, you know it's time to get to work on your own story or manuscript.

What I'm Reading: Grind Joint

Grind Joint is another Writers of Chantilly book, this one by long-time member Dana King.  It's a hard-boiled mystery about a good cop, "Doc" Dougherty, in Penns River, a once-prosperous but now dumpy industrial town.  The title refers to the new casino in town--a grind joint being a downscale casino catering to the most desperate clientele.  No sooner does the place open its doors than a dead body shows up on its doorstep.  Seems the casino has attracted the attention of some Russian gangsters, who want to move in and displace the Italian mob family that's long used Penns River as a convenient, low-key base for their real business down in Pittsburgh.  The Russian gangsters figure the grind joint will being some real action to Penns River, and have no desire in keeping things low-key in pushing out the mafiosa.  It's up to Doc to solve the murder and stop the coming gang war, if he can.

Now in my life I've read perhaps eight or ten hard-boiled mysteries, and half of those were during a summer in high school when I got into the Spenser series, but even I can see that there's nothing particularly original in the plot or characters here.  But that's hardly the point.  I think a mystery fan would find this lean and perfectly-paced, with proper genuflection to all the stations of the genre cross.

What interested me, however, was another book, contained in the same pages but hidden under the genre conventions: an anthropological study of a west Pennsylvania mill town in decline. I hope that doesn't make it sound boring, because I mean the opposite. With just a few lines of naturalistic dialogue, with a passing comment about traffic patterns, an offhand line about a streetscape, a short sketch of the relationship between a politician and a mobster, King deftly builds up a thick description of Penns River, a stand-in for any number of actual towns far enough from Pittsburgh not to be suburbs, but close enough to still be in its orbit.

So there you have my recommendation--Grind Joint is suitable both for the reader who might enjoy its considerable virtues as hard-boiled detective novel, but even more so for a student of American urbanism who wants a nuanced document of a decaying industrial town, fictional in this case but different only in the particulars from hundreds of other actual towns.

What I'm Reading: A Journey to Self-Publishing

A Journey to Self-Publishing is another one by a member of the Writers of Chantilly.  The author here is Kalyani Kurup, who gives us a brief (five chapters) but charming memoir of her experiences as a writer and her misadventures in the publishing world in India and the United States.

I can definitely recommend this book to other authors, especially those considering the alternative world of self-publishing.  Writers will find a lot of useful lessons on dealing with publishers and free-lance employers, as well as the occasional pointer on improving one's writing style. Some non-writers may find it to be a lot of shoptalk, but I think others will appreciate how well she laces her story with self-deprecating humor and careful observations of the people she meets.  I especially love her story of a lengthy search for a certain address in Bangalore, accompanied by the world's worst-oriented auto-rickshaw driver.

I might also add that despite her frequent protestations in the text to the contrary, Ms. Kurup's English is impeccable! Her prose style is elegant and tasteful, a little like one of those Bangalore gardens she must have seen that day--perhaps more flowers and ornamentation than are strictly necessary, but all directed towards the end of creating a beautiful, well-tended place for relaxation and edification.

What I'm Reading: Red Flag Warning

A couple years ago somebody got me the book The Big Burn by Timothy Egan, because the person knew "I like history books."  At first this seemed like a terrible choice.  Sure, I like history, but a book about a forest fire in Idaho a century ago, in the early days of the Forest Service and the National Parks System?  Sounded like a snoozer.  But how wrong I was!  The Big Burn was so well-written, so tense and dramatic, that I easily count it among one of the best history books I've ever read.

It was with that in mind that I turned to fellow Writer of Chantilly Melanie Florence.  One of my writing/reading goals for this year is to read something by all the WoC writers with books out, and her recently self-published book, Red Flag Warning, claims on its cover to "showcase the realities of wildfires in our western forests today."  This seemed like it might be a good fictional companion to the Big Burn.  And it is!

There are really three layers of story interest: First, a murder mystery.  Our heroine, Sophia, works on a Forest Service field crew as a botanist.  One of the other women on the field crew, a soil expert named Jackie, is resented among other crew members for her laziness and drinking on the job.  But when she turns up dead from poisoning on one of their work sites, suspicion centers on the crew members--especially Sophia, with whom she had recently clashed.

Two, the story takes place against the backdrop of a series of wide-ranging forest fires in eastern Oregon.  It's mid-summer, and this area of Oregon has suffered seven years of drought.  Huge, acreage-destroying fires flare up with the flick of a cigarette butt or a spark from a metal tool.  Sophia's husband, Gerald, works on a fire crew and puts his life in danger with every new conflagration.  Not surprisingly, as she works in the woods, the threat of fire is ever-present for Sophia herself, as well. The plot points and descriptions here are comparable to the Big Burn.

Finally, the book gives us fascinating descriptions of Sophia's life as a botanist on a field crew for the Forest Service. I had never previously known or really thought about a job like this, but the book gives us a realistic portrayal of what such a position entails, working the details in organically with the rest of the plot.  This actually turned out to be probably my favorite part, as it's always fun to see other people's jobs.

The book could be classified as a "cozy mystery" but it ratchets up the tension and drama effectively by the end.  Melanie knows what she's doing and after a somewhat slow start, Red Flag Warning becomes a page-turner by about halfway through.  If I have one complaint, it's that there were two many characters.  I believe for verisimilitude's sake, she made Sophia's field crew the size of a real field crew.  However, many of these characters blended into one another, especially the guys: Randy, Butch, and Aaron.  I think it would have been more effective if these three had been condensed to one or two more sharply-drawn characters.

All in all, an entertaining book that I think cozy mystery fans would enjoy, and would also interest anyone who likes the Big Burn and wants to learn more about the phenomenon of Western wildfires.

New anthology available: Etched in Memory

Readers of this blog are surely aware that I'm a member of a very active writing group, the Writers of Chantilly.  What they may not know is that this year I edited the group's annual anthology, which just in the past week became available on Amazon and Kindle.

I am quite proud of my work on this, and I learned a lot from my first time as editor, about both the editing process and about writing.  Unfortunately, I do not have any stories appearing in this anthology, though I tried writing two.  The first took a twist (into erotica, oddly--never had that happen before) that I felt made it inappropriate for the book, and the second I was unable to finish.

For fans of my writing (all two of you!) I promise that next year's anthology will definitely have one or more of my stories.  In the meantime, I can heartily recommend this book as being crammed full of fascinating short stories and essays.  Here's the book's description from its back cover:

In this latest anthology from the renowned Writers of Chantilly, you will discover a variety of unforgettable stories describing incidents that have left an indelible mark on their participants. Some are from the past, some from the imagination, all are Etched in Memory.

Again With the Importance of Writing Groups

So I was on vacation last week, and the week before that was just crazy, and maybe the week before that I'd been kind of lazy.  But for whatever reason, I hadn't written in my WiP for three weeks.  I was really dreading getting back to it, too.  After you haven't worked on your project for a while, it's hard to get back into the groove.

But on Monday I went to my Writers of Chantilly meeting, and I came away charged.  Ready to return to my work.  Maybe it was the positive comments I received on my latest chapter.  Maybe it was being around other writers excited about their work.  Maybe it was simply thinking about the writing process.  Whatever the reason, last night I sat down at the computer and made a number of changes to my novel I've been meaning to for a while, and got in some actual writing as well.  All in all, a solid night, and I'm still ready to write again tonight.

So here's another reason we could add to the list of why you, a writer, should definitely be in a writer's group: getting back on track when you've lost your way.

New Book Out: Nana...and Other Grandmothers

The Writers of Chantilly have their (nearly) annual collection out: Nana...and Other Grandmothers.  The various writers in the WoC have contributed stories based on the theme of Grandmothers.  One of those writers is me!

My contribution is titled "The Price of Gas."  Here's the tag line:

When Grandma Schmeckpepper drives her eight-cylinder 1970s gas guzzler, the decades fall away.  It takes a grandson’s request to make her consider the possibility of aging a little more gracefully.  

If you are a parent or grandparent of mine, don't bother ordering, you will be getting one of these in the mail sooner or later.  Maybe for Mother's Day?  Others may go to this Link and order the book for the low, low price of $10.95!

As further incentive, here's the first paragraph of "The Price of Gas":

It was a dew-glistening spring morning, gentle and balmy, the kind of morning made for leaving your jacket in the closet. A tan young woman jogged down the sidewalk in quiet contemplation. A man in a business suit stood reading his quarter-folded newspaper at the bus stop. An elderly man sat on his front porch observing the scene. And Mrs. Schmeckpepper took the corner at sixty miles an hour, stepped on the accelerator, and punched her 1977 Buick Skylark down the block with a rumble that shook the pavement.

Work in Progress update

Last night at my writers' group I read chapter four of my WiP, which I have given the working title of "Piece."  I was worried the writing wasn't as smooth as what I normally read, and maybe it wasn't.  Nevertheless, it got quite a reaction.  The chapter ends a cliff-hanger and members were asking if I'd brought Chapter Five with me.  A good sign, I think!

Oddly, the writing is coming easily in my WiP though I still don't have certain basic parameters down, like who exactly should narrate certain chapters.  Still, it's coming together, and my writing group is a big encouragement.

WiP reception

So last Monday I read the first chapter of my current WiP to my writers group, the Writers of Chantilly.  Very promising!  Everybody seemed to enjoy the first chapter, and one person wrote that they "loved" one of the characters I introduced.  And that was one of the written comments, which I put more credence in--verbal comments often tend to be more positive but generic "good job"-type remarks.

Next Monday will be Chapter Two.  Hopefully I'll get as good a reception--or, almost as good, a worse reception but with concrete advice for improving.

The Importance of Writing Groups

I've been a member of the Writers of Chantilly for about 18 months, and it's made a tremendous difference to my writing.  Before I joined, I thought the most important thing about being in a writers' group was the group's critique of the story.  But now that I've been a member, I've come to realize the critiques aren't the most important thing, or even second.  No, the critique is third on the list.

Second on the list is the moral support.  Now, I've been writing since I was a little kid.  Short stories, poems, screenplays, essays for school or even for myself.  I guess I'm pretty well internally motivated.  Even if I wasn't in a group, I'd still be writing.  But I'm not sure I would have finished my most recent novel, or maybe it would have taken me much longer.  The twice-monthly meetings of my writers' group energize me, supercharge me, make me eager to come back and write for the rest of the week.

But even that is subsidiary to what I've discovered is the primary advantage: being in a group makes me try harder.  Where formerly I might have glossed over an awkward passage or half-assed a difficult scene, or skipped it entirely, I know now I'm going to end up reading that in front of other people, so I really have to polish my work.  Make sure everything is exactly how it should be.  Even if it's good, it gets an extra re-reading, and if it's bad, I keep going at it until I know it's something worth reading to the other members.

That's why for writers, I've come to believe being in a writers group is essential.  It's something I would recommend to any writer.  I'm not sure there's really another way, at least for me, and I suspect for others, to get out the best writing we're capable of.