Category: What I’m reading

The Life We Bury, by Allen Eskens

I just finished reading The Life We Bury, by Allen Eskens and I encourage you to read it. It is Mr. Eskens’ debut novel. It is the best crafted book I have read in a long time. The suspense will keep you turning pages. It’s that rare book that keeps you awake all night because you can’t put it down. Mr. Eskens has a gift and I can’t wait for his next book to be published.

What I’m reading

There’s a chill in the air. It’s that time of year when the hours of daylight decrease and my dread of winter increases. Writing, reading, and practicing the dulcimer will help get me through the cold months ahead.

I’m currently reading The Life We Bury, by Allen Eskens; My Beloved World, by Sonia Sotomayor; and The Apostles’ Creed:  Fresh Water From An Ancient Spring, by James O. Speed.

My Sunday School class has just started a study of the Apostles’ Creed, and we’re using James. O. Speed’s book as our textbook. It promises to be an enlightening study of a creed that I sometimes say by rote without thinking about the words.

I am just 70 pages into The Life We Bury and I am so impressed with Allen Eskens’ writing that I already look forward to his next novel. The Life We Bury is his first novel. This novelist who also practices law has a gift for descriptive writing and characterization. This is a good read and I can’t wait to see how the rest of the story unfolds.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s book, My Beloved World, is this month’s pick by Rocky River Readers Book Club. Ms. Sotomayor’s childhood was completely different from my own experience. Imagine someone growing up in “the projects” in New York City defying the odds and earning appointment to the United States Supreme Court!

I have a growing list of books I want to read, so stay tuned.

Book release & newspaper interview

What an exciting day! The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina was released today by Arcadia Publishing and I had my first newspaper interview about the book!

Jesse Campbell of The Mountain Times in Boone interviewed me for an article to be published on August 28 in that weekly newspaper that covers Ashe, Avery and Watauga Counties. You can’t beat free publicity like that!

This morning I participated in the filming of a pilot for a TV series about single pastors. The interim pastor of Rocky River Presbyterian Church is the Rev. Eleanor Norman. She was chosen as one of several single pastors in the US for inclusion in the pilot. Some of us gathered this morning in the sanctuary to give Eleanor an audience for a Scripture reading, sermon, and other remarks as directed by the producer. It’s fun to do something out of the ordinary. My only other TV experience was being an extra in a funeral scene the first season of the TV series “Homeland.” The pilot filmed this morning will never air. It will only be used to try to sell the idea to a network.

I’m going to the monthly meeting of Rocky River Readers Book Club tonight at Rocky River Presbyterian Church for a discussion of I Am Malala, by Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teen who was shot in the face just for wanting an education. Attending the book club meeting will be the perfect way to end what has been quite a day.

What are you reading?

I just finished reading A Fighting Chance, by Elizabeth Warren, and The Associate, by John Grisham. I’ve started reading Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina, by Walt Wolfram and Jeffrey Reaser.

Tell me what you’re reading.

I just realized I haven’t blogged in more than a month. Time flies when you’re looking after a very sick dog and dealing with 10.5 inches of snow… and life. My vintage postcard book, The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, is in the hands of the line editor at Arcadia Publishing. I’m waiting to hear what the line editor thinks of my writing. While I wait, I continue to sew and make various items to try to sell in my online craft shop on Etsy.com and I am doing the research in order to write postcard captions in case I get to do a second book for Arcadia of vintage postcards from the Piedmont section of North Carolina.

I have selected a literary agency to send a query letter to about The Spanish Coin. When I get the letter polished and we get our e-mail problems under control, I will take a deep breath and send it off.

Since my last post, I have read The Parting, by Beverly Lewis; Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail, by Louise Shivers; and The Angel of Bastogne, by Gilbert Morris. I’m currently reading Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. It is riveting! I finally had to put it down at 4:00 this morning. Great book!

More Tricks of the Trade

I am working my way through Chris Roerden’s book, Don’t Murder Your Mystery. Today I took his recommendation to find creative ways to describe characters. I was guilty of using driver’s license type details to paint pictures of my characters in The Spanish Coin manuscript, so I did some editing this afternoon to illustrate what those people are like instead of what they looked like. After all, habits and mannerisms make people more interesting than their height and eye color.

The learning experience continues, and I am really enjoying the process!

Interview your protagonist

I devoured the July/August 2013 issue of Writer’s Digest as soon as it hit my mailbox last week. It was packed with tips and ideas that I have already put into practice as I continue to polish my manuscript for The Spanish Coin.

One idea James Scott Bell shared in his article, “Vitamin C For Your Thriller,” was particularly helpful and enabled me to enrich my book’s ending. Mr. Bell made the following suggestion: “Go forward in time 20 years after your story ends…. You’re now a reporter and you track down the character and ask, ‘Looking back at everything that happened to you, why do you think you had to go through that? What life lesson did you learn that you can pass on to the rest of us?’…. Now use all your skills to demonstrate that lesson at the end of the story itself, without necessarily using words.”

I asked my protagonist those two questions, and her response filled two pages as fast as I could write. The process gave me a perspective that no other exercises had given me. My book has a more satisfying ending, thanks to Mr. Bell’s recommendations.

Revisions, revisions!

In his book titled Plot, Ansen Dibell wrote, “Any story worth telling is worth revising.” That’s what I’m still doing… revising The Spanish Coin.

As I re-read every sentence, every word, I look for word repetition, unnecessary adjectives and adverbs, shifts in point-of-view, descriptions I’ve written and those I failed to include.

I’m bombarded by questions. Will my readers identify with the main character? Will they care what happens to her? Do I have too many characters? Are the sub-plots woven into the book as well as they could be? Will I ever get this published? Will people buy it?

A day in the life of a would-be author.

I’m back!

When I wrote on Christmas Day that I was ending a chapter in my writing life, I didn’t realize that I would completely drift away from my writing blog. I must be the worst blogger in history. I have good intentions of doing better in the future, but I think I’ve said that before.

Author A.J. Mayhew (The Dry Grass of August) gave me some excellent constructive criticism in January. As a result, I am reviewing my Spanish Coin manuscript with a more critical and educated eye. I’m slowly tightening up the dialog and look for word repetition. At the same time, I’m looking at the landscape and physical space in the manuscript and striving to describe the setting so that my future readers can better visualize Nancy Richardson’s home and the lay of the land in the Waxhaws. It’s tedious work, but I do enjoy it when I can set aside a block of uninterrupted time.

I’m also working on a magazine article proposal about the effect the Civil War had on the Rocky River Presbyterian Church congregation. It’s hard to break in as a freelance writer, so wish me luck!

In February, the Rocky River Readers Book Club read Picking Cotton by Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton. I’d read the book in 2010 but enjoyed reading it again. It’s a compelling story that makes the reader have serious thoughts about our justice system.

Other books I’ve read this year are The Midwife of Venice, by Roberta Rich; Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin; The Shunning, by Beverly Lewis; The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, by Wendy Welch; Fireflies in December, by Jennifer Erin Valent; and My Name is Mary Sutter, by Robin Oliveira. I recommend all of them to you. If you like historical fiction, My Name is Mary Sutter definitely needs to be on your reading list.

I just finished reading Fireflies in December on my Kindle and look forward to reading the sequels.

There are so many things I want to write about and read about, while sewing, quilting, and crocheting to put new items on Etsy to sell. HickoryRidgeCrafts is taking more of my time than writing lately. I’m struggling to strike a balance.

another book recommendation

Thanks to my sister giving me an early Christmas present, I finally have a Kindle. The first book I downloaded was Bonds of Courage. Written by Sandy Hill, it is a wonderful work of historical fiction set in Pennsylvania during the American Revolution. The author draws on an intriguing piece of her family’s history and weaves a suspenseful story of war, kidnapping, and the desperate measures people will take in order to save those they love.

Reading good historical fiction like Bonds of Courage inspires me to turn my efforts back to getting the manuscript I’m calling The Spanish Coin published. Maybe 2013 will see that happen. In the meantime, though, I’m transcribing the handwritten Cabarrus County Board of Education Minutes from microfilm. I look forward to writing more newspaper columns about our schools when that research is completed.

While you’re waiting for my historical novel to be published, I highly recommend Bonds of Courage, by Sandy Hill, and I hope she will bless us with a sequel.