Pat Bertram

Trip, Life, and Book Update

May 2, 2018 — Pat Bertram

Planning is what we do before the adventure begins. Once the wheel is on the road or the foot on the path, you have to take it as it comes. In my case, the “taking it as it comes” started long before the plans were even finalized. Originally, I was going to have a six week adventure, possibly even more, but that was cut short when I agreed to do a dance performance at the beginning of June. (I couldn’t pass up a chance to wear my belly dance costume again!) So the six week adventure became four weeks. A terrible cold knocked that four weeks down to three.

Finally, I am well enough (I hope!) to leave tomorrow.

I’ll still be able to see the people I planned to visit, but the extended camping and hiking trips on the way to Seattle have been cancelled. In a way, I don’t mind — I’m still not completely well and I don’t want to take a chance on getting pneumonia, but more than that, when left to my own devices, I tend to just drive, only stopping for the night when I am too exhausted to continue. I really get into the Zen of driving — letting thoughts drift into my mind and then leaving them in the past as I continue to drive into the future.

Although I desperately need a wilderness trek, there is much wilderness within a day’s drive of where I am staying in the desert, including access to the Pacific Crest Trail and various national parks so it’s not as if this was my only chance to tree bathe. And who knows — if I feel well enough after I’ve made turtles (the chocolate/pecan/caramel kind) with my sisters in honor of our mother on Mother’s Day weekend, I could still do a camping trip in the Olympic National Park. (That was one of the camping trips I had to cancel because of my illness.) And perhaps even a short backpacking trip, but that’s up in the air since I’ve spent much of the past three weeks in bed and have little strength.

The one bright spot in all of this is that I finished my decade-old novel!! I hope I didn’t rush the ending to get through, but I had already made all the points I needed to make, and I couldn’t figure out a second-to-last twist, so I mostly summarized their idyllic existence in their near-Eden before I hit them with the big whammy.

I still don’t know what I am going to do with the book. I do not like Amazon, so I don’t want to “publish” it there, I don’t have a publisher for it, and I don’t want to do the horrific work of finding one, so as of right now, I am just sending a PDF to anyone who wants to read it. If you want to read the book, leave a message in a comment, and I will send the PDF to you. It’s not my typical story with a mystery — it’s more of a sometimes humorous, sometimes horrifying apocalyptic novel where God decides to recreate the world. If you do read it, I would appreciate a notation of any typos you might find as well as any sections that drag or speed by too fast.

See you on down the road!

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Unfinished, Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare, Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Posted in Adventure, books, life. Tags: decade-old manuscript, foot on the path, planning a trip, planning is what we do, recreating the world, the zen of driving, wheel on the road. 12 Comments »

Badassery

April 27, 2018 — Pat Bertram

Why does everything pertaining to strong women now have to fall under the category of badassery? There are so many groups of bold women online, so many websites geared toward women who want to lead a more adventurous life that seem as if they would be interesting or inspirational, but always, there comes that word — badass — which grates on my soul and makes me turn off my computer.

For one thing, the word makes me wonder why their behinds would be called bad. If the women are as athletic as they are portrayed, for sure they’d have good buttock musculature.

For another, the word is vulgar, vulgarity seems such a cheat, especially to one who loves words.

And, of course, the word is now incredibly trite. If every woman is a badass, then none are as special as they think they are.

Look at the words I’ve used so far to describe such women: bold, adventurous, strong, inspirational. And there are many others that would be as colorful: fierce, independent, rebellious, powerful, tough, intrepid, daring, audacious, free-spirited, awe-inspiring, formidable, admirable. Any one of those words makes badass seem namby-pamby. And any of those words I would gladly claim if I could. But badass? Never.

That’s all. As you were.

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Posted in culture, life. Tags: audacious, badass, daring, describing strong women, free-spirited, good buttocks, intrepid, vulgar word. 9 Comments »

The Best Laid Plans

April 20, 2018 — Pat Bertram

Plans gang aft agley, but it’s hard not to feel silly after one has posted one’s plans online, and then have those plans come to naught. All these months, I’ve been talking about the big road-camping-hiking-backpacking trip I’ve planned for May, and then zap! I caught a cold. A bad one.

I haven’t accomplished much of anything the past week— the book remains unfinished, the trip preparations have come to a halt, and trail foods never got fixed. (I haven’t even been blogging — didn’t want you to catch my cold.)

I still hope to be well enough to leave Wednesday as planned, but I even if I have stopped coughing by then, I might be too weak. If I left a few days later, driving mostly straight through and staying at motels instead of campgrounds, I’d still be able to visit the people I’d planned to visit (keeping my fingers crossed!) but I would have to forego some of the sights I wanted to see and the activities I’d hoped to experience.

But you never know. Everything could go as planned. And if not, well, I still have my trip book — the binder I’ve filled with maps and directions and descriptions of parks and places along the way — so I can take the trip another time.

It’s interesting (to me, anyway), the difference in my thinking when I am feeling well and when I am not. When I am well, I feel as if I can work toward impossible dreams and maybe even accomplish them. When I am weakened by illness (or by coughing fits), I feel as if even the possible would be impossible.

But thinking doesn’t change reality, even though people say it does. If you don’t think you can do something, you can still try to prove yourself wrong and end up accomplishing what you think you could not do. If you think you can do something, you can rely too much on the belief and do nothing to make it happen, you can fail to accomplish what you thought you could.

Whatever happens next week — and next month — I’ll continue working toward the goal of an eventual epic backpacking trip. That doesn’t necessarily mean I will take the trip because as we all know, plans don’t mean a whole lot if things change and you can’t implement them, but still, it’s the work that counts.

For now, I need to work on getting better.

Hope you all are doing okay.

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Posted in Adventure, life. Tags: bad cold, best laid plans, camping trip, dealing with changes, plans change, plans gang aft agley, road trip, thinking doesn't make it happen. 15 Comments »

What Would You Like Included in a Book About Grief?

April 12, 2018 — Pat Bertram

It seems as if I am being pulled back into the world of grief, not because I am having upsurges of grief, but because other people are discovering my grief posts and my grief book. Also, I have been talking to friends as they go through their grief upsurges, and at the same time, I am getting emails from newly bereft people who have read Grief: The Great Yearning, a sort of memoir about my first year of grief. (I wonder if I am the only author who cries every time I get a letter from a reader. I am glad they contact me, but oh, so much sorrow!)

As if this weren’t enough of a pull, people have begun suggesting that I write another book of grief, sort of a sequel to Grief: The Great Yearning, but from the perspective of eight years later. (At one time, I’d considered doing a sequel focusing on the second, third, and maybe fourth year called Grief: The Great Learning, but I didn’t have enough to say to fill even a small book.)

This isn’t something I can start today — I need to finish that decade-old manuscript first, then I have my trip to Seattle, and finally a dance performance. But by the beginning of June, I will have cleared out all my obligations, and would have time — both calendar time and mental time — to start a new project.

If I do undertake such a project, what aspects of grief would you like to see included in the book?

Is there a particular one (or many) of my grief blog posts you’d like to see expanded for the book? (For those of you who have already offered suggestions, I will be going through the comments and emails to find those suggestions if you don’t want to repeat yourself here.)

Are there any aspects of my life, such as my penchant for adventures, that should be included? Because a need for adventure is part of the grief process, not just for me, but for many folks. It’s as if once our lives are turned upside down, only undertaking something challenging helps get us back on a new track.

By its very nature (or rather, the very nature of the author), the book won’t be a practical guide for getting through grief, won’t offer platitudes or comfort except of the roughest kind (such as telling people what they already know — that grief is impossibly hard). There are certainly enough grief self-help books on the market, and anyway, I don’t have anything to offer along those lines. I think what I do have to offer is a safe place for people to explore their own grief, maybe even offer something for them to compare themselves to. (All grief is different, but for those who have suffered the same sort of profound loss, such as the death of soul mate, grief does tend to follow the same patterns.)

I hope I’m ready for such a project. At least it will be non-fiction, so I won’t have to relive grief through my characters like I did for Unfinished. That just about did me in!

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Posted in being me, grief, writing. Tags: aspects of grief, exploring grief, grief after eight years, grief blog posts, Grief: The Great Yearning, putting grief into perspective, writing a book about grief. 7 Comments »

The Pacific Crest Trail Theory of Writing

April 10, 2018 — Pat Bertram

A new mystery writer posted an interesting question in a writing group I run. She wanted to know how to make her story unique.

It’s a good question because almost every situation imaginable has already been written. Almost every character is now a cliché because authors have taken the clichéd character, turned it on its head, and created a shadow cliché of the original.

But still, there is originality even in the most banal situation. A situation becomes unique and original if you fully develop the characters and the situation. You give the good guys bad characteristics and the good guys good characteristics. You show why your characters are the way they are, giving them good reasons rather than just throwing them into the mix fully formed. You tie them to the story, making their characteristics an integral part of the plot. When you find that your story is going too much in one direction (straight to the resolution of the plot, for example), you turn the situation and throw more trauma at your characters. What does this trauma do the clichéd drunk cop? Make him or her give up drinking? What does the new trauma do to a clichéd rookie cop? Make him or her stronger, weaker, more determined, go seek counsel from someone who has been a tormentor? And you work against their characteristics and strengths. If the rookie is smart, throw her into a situation where her intelligence is no help. If the drunkenness of the cop is a liability, throw him into a situation where the drunkenness becomes an asset.

You can also find uniqueness in what the characters see. (That’s what made Sherlock Holmes so popular — he saw things differently from other people.)

And you can look at things through a different kind of glass. For example, I lost someone very dear to me a few years ago, and now I cannot write a character that isn’t affected by that grief. For another example, people who hike the Pacific Crest Trail are always afterward affected by what happened to them on the trail.

So, this brings me to the Pacific Crest Trail Theory of Writing. Every year, thousands of people attempt to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the beginning to the end. The trail is always the same. It is what it is. In a way, the people are always the same, too, divided primarily into a couple of groups — the kids (mostly boys) just out of college and older recently retired couples. (Though people from all over the world of all ages hike the trail, these are the two biggest groups.) Despite this similarity, each of those hikers hikes a different trail and a different hike because each one of those hikers has a different motive and motivation, each sees something different, each reacts differently to what they experience.

And so it is with writing — it is the characters, their motives and motivations, how they experience what they experience, that makes a story unique.

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Posted in fiction, writing. Tags: cliches in mysteries, every hike is unique, look at your character a different way, make your character unique, make your story unique, motives and motivations, Pacific Crest Trail, Pacific Crest Trail and writing metaphor. 5 Comments »

Free Review Copy of Unfinished

April 9, 2018 — Pat Bertram

Stairway Press has just informed me they have review copies of UNFINISHED to give away! If you would like to review this novel about the secrets a grieving widow uncovers when she goes through her deceased husband’s effects, please leave a comment on this blog. Reviews are to be posted on Amazon and at least one other place, such as your blog if you have one, Goodreads, Twitter, or Facebook. Stairway Press would also like permission to post the review on their website.

The review doesn’t have to be brilliant, just a few words to tell your honest opinion of the book and how it made you feel.

If you’ve already read the book, and have not left a review, please leave a review on Amazon. As Stairway Press said to me in a recent email, “Your book is good. It should please readers and fan word-of-mouth flames. But, it’s just sitting there looking at us as if it expects us to do something.”

So, let’s do something! Even if you don’t want to review the book, please share this post so that it can reach as many people as possible. Thank you.

Click on the cover below to read the first chapter and see if Unfinished is something you’d like to read and review.

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Posted in books, fiction, grief, writing. Tags: grieving widow story, honest opinion, reviewers wanted, reviewing books, Stairway Press, Unfinished. Leave a Comment »

Uncreating and Recreating my Life

April 7, 2018 — Pat Bertram

It’s been exceptionally windy lately, and will continue to be windy through tomorrow. I still did my faux backpacking treks the past couple of days, though I must admit, I procrastinated this morning. It wasn’t just the wind I couldn’t face, but the struggle to get the backpack up onto my back. I can do it easily sitting on the bed, but I have it on good authority there are no such beds out in the wilderness. In the desert, there are often boulders the right size, but I’ve hiked many places where there wasn’t even a place to sit down except the ground, and sometimes not even that if the trail follows the side of a mountain or swings through a deep forest.

Yesterday, I had such a hard time getting the pack on, I was afraid I would wrench my back, but it’s something I have to learn — getting the darn pack on with nothing or no one to help. Then, it came to me: do the left side first. (The instructions for putting on a backpack were to haul it up on the bent right leg, put your right arm through the strap, then with the left hand gripping the haul strap, sling the thing onto your back, but my left hand isn’t strong enough and even if it were, the wonky arm no longer bends the way it’s supposed to.) I switched sides, and by golly, it worked. Despite the twenty-eight pound dead weight, the pack went on easily.

Then, of course, I had no excuse not to go out walking.

As I was sauntering along with all that weight on my back (plus two pounds of water in my belly pack), it occurred to me that I no longer feel the pull to do an epic backpacking trip. It’s not that I am giving up on the idea, it’s that I’ve already been pulled. It’s no longer an impossible dream, though the dream has to be tailored to my fitness level. It is and will probably always remain impossible for me to do the whole 2,700 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from beginning to end in one season. An average of twenty-miles a day for six months? Eek. Not even many young fit folk manage to do that. But I will be doing some of it, even if only a few miles — it’s just a matter of when and where.

I like the idea of doing the last hundred miles of the northern section and the first hundred miles of the southern section, and then filling in the center. Sort of like the way I colored when I was a kid — first the outline, then the middle. But we’ll see.

My May trip is getting closer, and I still have a lot to do to prepare, most notably searching through my storage unit and the closet in my room for all my camping and backpacking gear so I can decide what to take. (And make sure I don’t leave something important behind!)

Meantime, I am spending most of my mental time on my book, trying to figure out the last section. There needs to be more upheavals before they settle down, but I’ve already uncreated the world and recreated it, so I’m not sure what I can do that doesn’t set up echoes of what’s already been done. I’ll think of something though — in fact, I might take inspiration from one of my silly little water colors, and pull the stars down to earth and the flowers up into the sky. One can do that if one is a writer, especially if one is a writer who is playing god.

I’m still not sure whether to create a Garden of Eden or some sort of cave person environment. (I’ve been trying to find out what a Garden of Eden would look like, but to no avail.) Not that it really matters, but they have to settle somewhere. I don’t want to have to research a whole set of survival skills for them, so it has to be easy for them and for me, this primordial and primitive place where they will raise the baby they are going to have. (And yes, the poor kid will be named Adam. What else could his name be, this first boy child born into the recreated world?)

With any luck and a bit of determination, I might be able to finish the book before I head out, to free my mind for all the new adventures coming my way. So, while I uncreate and recreate the world in my book, I am also uncreating and recreating my own life as I finish the novel, prepare for my trip, and continue my backpacking conditioning.

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Posted in Adventure, life, writing. Tags: conditioning for a backpacking trip, creating a Garden of Eden, excitement and dread before a trip, playing god, putting on a backpack, trip preparations, wonky arm. 2 Comments »

A Gathering of Gatherers

April 4, 2018 — Pat Bertram

Once upon an e-time, long ago and far away, there was a social networking site for writers, photographers, and artists of all kinds called Gather. I haven’t thought about this site much lately because, well, because it’s no longer there. The owners sold it, and the buyers only wanted the health site part of the owners’ holdings, and so Gather was deleted. All our photos, articles, discussions . . . gone. Though some people were perspicacious enough to copy and save those discussions, I was not one of them. Luckily, I was able to recreate some of the photo essays I posted on the site, those I was most proud of, such as Echoes, Deep Thought. Or Not, and Short and Witty Photographic Ditty.

Today, when I was talking with my sister about my upcoming trip, she mentioned how wonderful it was that I actually turned online friends into offline friends, and so I told her about two of the women I will be visiting on my way to Seattle. Then it dawned on me — I’d met both of those women on Gather. Not only that, it was my sister who had introduced me to Gather. She’d found a contest on the site that she talked me into entering. And that contest led the way to many new friendships.

It’s interesting to think how one small thing can reverberate through the years. I don’t know if my sister actually changed my life by her urging me to enter the contest, but she sure had an effect, and my life is richer for it.

Gather might have been the beginning, but I have since met others online through my blog or Facebook. Generally these folks started out as fans or fellow grievers and became friends. People often caution me about visiting people I only met online, but I have never had a problem. (Apparently, they haven’t had a problem with me, either, because almost all of them have remained friends.) Over the years, reading and commenting on each other’s blogs, seeing the photos of their families and vacations, participating in various discussions, you do get to know people. (It’s the same as offline, actually.)

I must admit, having people to meet along the way makes any trip a wonderland of possibilities — not just because of meeting the people themselves, but because of all the things they love in their area they want to share, things I would never have found on my own.

People who are fed up with the politics and policies on Facebook and who are looking for another place to hang out would be gravitating to Gather if it still existed. For a while, Facebook was an adequate substitute for Gather, but it is becoming increasingly unfun. (Which is one of the reasons I keep blogging — it makes me feel as if I am in control of at least a part of my online destiny.)

I can’t go back, but I can go forward, and forward means I will soon be meeting friends from Gather and elsewhere. I can hardly wait!

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Posted in internet, life. Tags: changing someone's life, Facebook, fans and friends, Gather, looking for another social networking site, meeting online friends offline, talking to my sister. 7 Comments »

He Loves Her. He Loves Her Not Yet.

April 2, 2018 — Pat Bertram

I was making progress with my decade-old manuscript until I got to where I just want to end it. I’ve made the points I want to make, and I’m afraid the rest of the story will seem anti-climactic, and yet I need to get my two characters where they need to be — assuming, of course, I can figure where that is. The ending is also dependent on their having a baby, and they just now had sex. So there has to be something happening between now and then.

This book isn’t a romance, though there is romance of a sort in the story. The two start out not liking each other, come to an uneasy alliance and perhaps even respect, and then they make love. I’m not sure I’ve built a strong enough connection between the two of them so that it will seem to the reader that these two are actually in love, though it doesn’t matter for the story’s sake. I mean, they are the last people left on earth — they are stuck with each other either way.

Still, it would be nice if they did love each other.

In the sex scene, as I originally wrote it years ago, after they’ve had sex, the man tells the woman he loves her. And she admits the same. Nice, right? But if the connection isn’t there, then it seems glib. So I took out those few lines. Then the scene seemed less romantic, so I added them back in. Then it seemed too romantic since up until that time, they had little actual contact, so I took the lines out again.

At the moment, those few lines are back in the manuscript.

Ideally, the words of love need to be saved until a time when the characters actually feel more connected (or when the reader feels that they are connected) but those parts have to be written.

I hoped to have the book finished before I took off on my trip, but I’m running out of time, I’m thinking of skipping to the end, giving them their baby, and being done with it.

But no. I’ve waited this long to finish the book, so I might as well do it right.

As soon as I figure out if he loves her or loves her not yet.

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Posted in culture, fiction, writing. Tags: adding words and taking them out, connecting to readers, Love her love her not, saying I love you in sex scene, sex scene, working on an old manuscript. 1 Comment »

Wishing You the Joy of This Day

April 1, 2018 — Pat Bertram

A new month starts today, maybe even a resurrection of sorts. Despite the predominately religious meanings of this time of year, there is a more personal spiritual meaning — that no matter how down (or up!) we are, we can find a renewal, a liberation, a breaking open of the constraints that bind us so we can burst forth into a new day, a new way of being.

Or something like that.

After yesterday’s feeling that much of what I’ve been doing is just plain silly, today I am taking a break from all of those things. Well, most of them. Obviously, I am blogging, but I did not go sauntering with my pack (though I did chat with a fellow on FB about various sections of the Pacific Crest Trail in Washington), did not go to dance class (that counts even though there was no dance class today), have not added any words to my book (though I did delete some, which doesn’t seem anywhere near as silly as adding words).

So did doing not much of anything feel silly? Nope. It felt good just to be. To enjoy the moment. I do enjoy the moments when I am doing something, of course, but when I am not doing “nothing,” the enjoyment is sort of a tagalong feeling to whatever it is I am doing — enjoying the desert while sauntering, enjoying the energy of dancing — rather than enjoyment as a separate entity.

I so often feel a push for more — to carry more weight in the pack, to walk more miles, to write more and better, to get stronger, healthier, wiser — that it’s good once in a while to burst out of the winding cloths I’ve wrapped myself in, and step out into the joy of being

I’m overdoing the metaphor a bit, but so what?

It’s a new day. And today I can do whatever I want. Be whatever I want. Well, in my own mind at least. There is still the matter of a body that doesn’t always cooperate, but that is a matter for another time.

Wishing you the joy of this day.