Writing the Tough Stuff (Or Killing the One You Love)

September 13, 2012 — Pat Bertram

Please welcome my friend, fan, and fellow author, Aaron Paul Lazar, who will be discussing killing the one you love — metaphorically and literarily speaking, that is. Aaron writes to soothe his soul. An award-winning, bestselling Kindle author of three mystery series, Aaron enjoys the Genesee Valley countryside in upstate New York, where his characters embrace life, play with their dogs and grandkids, grow sumptuous gardens, and chase bad guys.  Aaron says:

It’s not easy writing a scene where you kill the one you love.

Of course I don’t mean your actual spouse or lover. I mean the wife, husband, or sweetheart of your main character.

I’ve done it in FOR KEEPS. Thinking about it tears my heart out every single time.

That’s what I mean by “writing the tough stuff.” Sam Moore—a retired family doctor who is our resident hero in Moore Mysteries — is very much like me, except he’s twelve years older and retired with enough money to putter around in his gardens all day. Let me repeat that. All day!

I hate him for that.

Okay, so maybe that’s a little extreme, considering he’s fictional. Shall we say, I am exceedingly jealous of his lifestyle? Although Sam was a family doctor and I am an engineer, we’re still a lot alike. We both love to plunge our hands into the soft earth and grow things. We both love our grandkids so much it hurts. And we both have spouses with multiple sclerosis. There are plenty of differences, too. I cook, I write, and I take photos. Sam doesn’t. But of course, it’s not a competition. At least I don’t think so…

In spite of the fact that he’s not real (at least not in the traditional sense, LOL), I relate to this man and feel his pain when he’s hurting. Sure, you say, writers should feel ALL their characters’ pain. We have to, to get into their heads and nail the characterization. Don’t we?

But I’ll bet some characters are closer to your heart than others.

Sam’s wife, Rachel, shares many qualities with my dear wife, Dale. They both endure MS, they both love to read, they are both chair-caning artists. Some of their symptoms are the same, but that’s where they split apart. Rachel loves to cook (that’s my job in our marriage), she’s in a wheelchair, and she stays pretty upbeat, considering her challenges. They both adore their grandchildren and both love to read. Rachel’s a tribute to Dale, in all honesty. But she also has morphed into her “own woman,” too, and I love her deeply. Er . . . through Sam, of course. (Honey, don’t be jealous!)

In the first two books of theMoore Mysteries series, Rachel sticks by Sam’s side, supports him when he’s overcome with grief and is plagued by strange paranormal events, and loves him deeply enough to keep him sane.

That’s why it really hurt when I had to kill her.

In For Keeps, the third book in the series, life takes an awful turn. When Rachel is murdered by a serial killer, it puts Sam back in the psych ward, the same place he was thrown when his little brother disappeared without a trace fifty years earlier. Desperate to fix things, he calls on the power of the green marble, the talisman his little brother Billy controls from afar that whisks him back and forth through his past.

Unlike those of us in real life, Sam gets a “do over.” He flies back in time to desperately try to fix the problems that lead to this gruesome act, and over and over again, he attempts to tweak the past to bring his dear Rachel back to life.

How do you write such a scene without losing it? How do you make it feel authentic to your readers? How much is too much? And how can you be certain that your character’s reaction will ring true?

It’s not easy. Matter of fact, since I loosely base Rachel on my own wife, and since Sam and I are really quite alike, it was close to torture.

I called upon my darkest, most powerful emotions experienced when my father died and also when my own dear wife almost died several times in the past few years. I’ll never forget the time the nurse in the ER called the nun on duty to bring me to a little room where no one would see my reaction to her impending news that Dale might not make it. She carried a box of Kleenex under one arm and a bible in the other. She was so sweet. Yet it was one of the scariest moments of my life. Thankfully, my wife pulled through and is doing okay today.

That hollow-gut, black-sludge-in-your-heart feeling is horrible when you lose someone dear to you, isn’t it? It’s all encompassing. Sometimes you just want to deny that awful truth, and pull away — far away — like Sam does in the following excerpt. (Click here to read the Excerpt From “For Keeps” by Aaron Paul Lazar.) I tried to channel those feelings when getting inside Sam’s head.  Let me know if you think it worked.

For Keeps is book #3 in Moore Mysteries, and is now available through Twilight Times Books and Amazon.com. The series can be read in any order.  Free dates of “For Keeps”: Sept 14, 15, 16th and October 12, 13th.

copyright 2012, Aaron Paul Lazar

Posted in blogging, books, writing. Tags: , , , . 18 Comments »

I’m going to Blog for Peace. Will You?

September 12, 2012 — Pat Bertram

On Sunday, November 4, people all over the planet blog for peace. This year, I’m going to join the the Blog Blast for Peace, and you can join the movement, too. You make your own peace globe/statement or simply choose one pre-made at blogblastforpeace.com, and become – a peace blogger. http://goo.gl/wOaGs

Peace bloggers believe that words are powerful, and that this matters. http://goo.gl/b01KH

So, check out the website or check it out on Facebook.

How To Blog For Peace The short version:

1. Choose any graphic on this page. http://goo.gl/4xepL Right click and Save. Decorate it and sign it, or leave as is.

2. Send the finished globe to blogblast4peace@yahoo.com

3. Post it anywhere online November 4 and title your post Dona Nobis Pacem (Latin for Grant us Peace)

Sounds cool, doesn’t it?

Posted in blogging, culture, How to, internet. Tags: , , , . 7 Comments »

Blogging is Writing, Too

August 29, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I always hated the saying “A writer writes . . . always.” No one does anything “always” except maybe breathe. And anyway, the very fact of having written five books and getting them published makes me a writer, even if I write . . . whenever.

But it turns out the joke is on me. I do write always, or as nearly always as possible. I’m either writing an article for this blog, or trying to think of a topic, either planning what I am going to say when I do think of a topic, or experiencing things which I will later write about. I don’t know why I tend to think that “writing” means fiction writing, perhaps because fiction comes hard for me and blogging easy, but the truth is, blogging is writing, too.

On September 25, 2011, I accepted a challenge to blog for 100 days. (I found out about it two days late — the challenge was actually to blog the last 100 days of the year, and it started on the 23, but I figured I’d add the missing two days on the back end.) I hadn’t been writing much, just an occasional blog post, and I was drifting, not doing much of anything except struggling with an upsurge of grief (still don’t know why 18 months after a grievous death is so hard, but it’s part of the grief pattern). So much I had counted on had disappeared — my life mate/soul mate, our way of life, some of the friends I made after his death— that I felt as if I were disappearing too.

I thought writing every day would give me something to hang on to, and it must have worked, because after the challenge ended, I didn’t quit. I never actually made the decision to stick with daily blogging — I just did it — and to my surprise, I find myself less than a month away from completing an entire year of daily posts.

I’ve come a long way in the past 341 days, turned several corners, came to many realizations, but most of all, I found peace. Or rather, I made peace. I made peace with the death of my mate, with my place in the universe, and with my place in the world of books. Even without the daily blogging, I might have come to the same realizations at the same time, but writing gave focus to my thoughts, and daily writing gave focus to my life. I’d planned to stop the daily posts after my one-year anniversary, but now . . . who knows. I might keep going. (Though one person suggested — facetiously, I hope — that I should give my poor blog readers a break.)

Posted in blogging, internet, writing. Tags: , , , , . 25 Comments »

Is the Internet a Good Place for Aspiring Writers?

August 24, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I had several topics I wanted to talk about today, but then I checked in with my discussion group on Facebook where they were talking about aspiring writers attacking other aspiring writers, and now that topic is the one foremost on my mind.

I never encountered attacks when I was learning to write because I didn’t get on the internet or meet other authors until I was already an accomplished writer. In the beginning, it was just me, pencils and paper, and an idea. (I didn’t even have a typewriter, let alone a computer.) Later, it was just me, pencils and paper, an idea, and a steady stream of books about writing — hundreds of them. Writing coaches often remark that you learn about writing by writing, but it takes a lot of writing (some say 10,000 hours, some say 1,000,000 words) to become adept at the craft. I thought that by studying how to write I could hurry things along so I could start making money from my books. (Hard to believe I was ever that naïve — the money part, that is. Learning to write was the right thing to do.)

I’ve hidden my first novel so I don’t come upon it by accident — it’s that bad. Of course, while writing it, I thought it sounded wonderful. Words added up to sentences, sentences added up to paragraphs, paragraphs added up to . . . well, you get the picture. Later, when I learned to write, I saw the horror of it. To this day, no one has read any of that draft, and no one ever will until I rewrite it. And re-rewrite. And edit. And re-edit. And copyedit. (I still like the premise, so it’s on my exceedingly short list of ideas for books.) I can’t imagine what sort of horrendous attack posting any part of that book online would have garnered, but as much as the attacks would have hurt, they would have been deserved, though I would not have known that.

One of the first things I did after getting the internet and learning my way around was to start this blog. (On September 24, this blog will celebrate its fifth anniversary. That day will also mark 365 days of daily blogging and my 1000th post +2. Any suggestions for a gala celebration?)

A couple of weeks after beginning to blog, I entered a writing contest where people left comments on the first chapter of a novel. By asking some people to vote, I enraged them since they considered such messages spam, and they retaliated with some of the most scathing commentary I’ve ever encountered. After those comments — and the 200 rejections I received before I found a publisher who loved my work — I became inured to attack.

The disparaging remarks never cease. Once my books were published, I got a few low ratings from other writers who thought (foolishly) that by giving me single stars it will make their ratings look better. I also got bad reviews (or at least mediocre ones) from people who simply didn’t understand the books, mistook the genre, or realized too late the books were outside their comfort zone.

I spent years on my books — perfecting the craft, rewriting and editing, following the suggestions of my editors to make them even better. They are the exact stories I wanted to write with the exact words I wanted to use. If people don’t like my books, that is their prerogative, and they are welcome to say so, but I’m not changing a single word to reflect the tastes of the few who dislike or who misunderstand my books. The way I see it, reviews are for other readers, not me — I already know what the books are about.

Most readers say nice things about my books, and most of the reviews are wonderful. Many of the reviews seem to have been written by my friends, but generally it worked the other way around. I became friends with my reviewers. How could I not? They have such great taste!

The internet is a great tool for writers, but I wonder if it hinders just as much as it helps. If I had put myself out there too soon, I’d have taken attacks personally, and maybe followed a different path with my writing. By waiting to put myself out there after I’d become an accomplished writer, it didn’t matter so much what anyone said. I knew the truth.

Posted in blogging, internet, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 13 Comments »

I’ve Been Freshly Pressed and You Can Be, Too

August 15, 2012 — Pat Bertram

On Monday, I got an email from WordPress:

Hi there Pat Bertram,

Congrats! We’ve picked your post ( https://ptbertram.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/a-perfect-grasp-of-storytelling/ ) to appear on Freshly Pressed on the WordPress home page.

We really enjoyed your well-written, sharp, and succinct take on perfect characters, unbalanced worlds, and good storytelling in general, and we know the rest of the WordPress community will too. Your post will appear on the site in the next day or two, so get ready to welcome your new readers.

Once your post goes live, shout it from the rooftops! Tell your family, friends, and readers to check out the WordPress home page, and share the good news with your social networks (we’ll do the same).

Most importantly, keep up the great work. To boost your blogging prowess even more, check out “So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed” ( http://en.support.wordpress.com/freshly-pressed/ ) for tips on everything from enhancing your theme to becoming a grammar guru, and visit The Daily Post ( http://dailypost.wordpress.com/ ) for pro tips, blogging challenges and more.

Thanks for making the internet a more interesting place!

***

The post appeared on Tuesday evening. This was the third time I’ve been Freshly Pressed. The other two articles that made the WordPress front page were I Am a Three-Month Grief Survivor and I Am a Six-Month Grief Survivor.

All three times, the honor came as a surprise, but the truth is, I had prepared for such an eventuality by following the guidelines in “So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.” Until I read that article, I’d never used photos in my posts. I’d also over-tagged and over-categorized (though that doesn’t seem to be something they care so much about now). On the off chance that the WordPress editors would notice my little corner of the blogosphere, I cut down to no more than ten tags and categories combined, and I started adding an image to my posts. (That became an art in itself, taking the perfect photo to accompany my words.)

I’ve always aimed for typo-free text and eye-catching headlines, but I don’t always have a strong point of view. (I don’t much like contention.) Apparently, though, I’ve managed to strike the right chord with the WordPress editors three times, and you can, too. Just keep blogging. If you write it, they will come.

Posted in blogging, internet, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 18 Comments »

Weird Trick to Get You to Read This Blog

August 8, 2012 — Pat Bertram

Did the weird trick work? Did you come here because of “weird trick”? I see those very words a hundred times a day in ads in the sidebars of various sites, and I was curious if it would work to get people to click on this blog link.

“Weird trick to help you lose weight.”

“Weird trick to slash your electricity bill.”

“Weird trick to help men feel 18 again.”

“Weird trick to help save your life.”

“Weird trick to make you look twenty-years younger.”

What is it that people respond to? The “weird” or the “trick” or does it have to be a combination of both? I did fall for the weird trick once, even sat through an entire video on why a certain weight-loss program worked, but when they didn’t tell me what the weird trick was unless I plunked down a bunch of cash, I never again felt the urge to find out any more weird tricks. Have you? Did you learn any weird tricks?

The other common advertising hook is “they hate him/her.”

“Plastic Surgeons hate this mother for developing anti-aging cream.” (It’s always a mother developing the skin cream, as if that automatically makes it safe and gentle, though I’ve known some heinous mothers in my time.)

“Electric companies hate this man for developing a way to save on your utitilty bills.”

This one never hooked me. I mean really, do doctors and utility companies even pay attention to the mother or the developer who found a way to save a few pennies? Do they care? I doubt it. Did this come-on ever hook you? If so, did you learn anything?

Posted in blogging, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Thursday the 12th — A Day of Bad Luck

July 13, 2012 — Pat Bertram

After yesterday, Friday the 13th holds no horrors. I started the day at an outdated dentist’s office that seemed like something from the inquisition rather than a modern tool of torture. It wasn’t so bad since I was not the patient, though I did have to be patient to sit through his political diatribes. (He’s British and thinks there are so few USA-born doctors because Americans are lazy, and he thinks our schools should be based on the British model, but he came here to dentistry school because he wanted a first-rate education and stayed because he couldn’t make money in Britain as a dentist.) I’ll stick with my Vietnamese dentist. At least he keeps the torturous chatter to a minimum.

Next, when I went online and checked Facebook, I discovered that someone had plagiarized me. I pointed out the word-for-word passages she used. She apologized, agreed to comply, since I was “so obviously offended.” Offended? You think? Then, after she finally removed the plagiarized bits, she said, “I assure you that this won’t be discussed with anyone.” Why would I need that assurance? I did nothing wrong. I don’t care who knows that she’s a plagiarist. I unfriended her, of course, since obviously, she was no friend. (She’s an author I only knew through Facebook, so I’m not losing a real friend.)

And then the real horror began. Something happened to my blog. The right sidebar with my covers sank to the bottom of the page, and the admin bar, the black bar across the top that takes me from the blog page to the dashboard and back again, stopped working. It turns out WordPress offers support only to those who pay for upgrades, which I don’t, so I spent all day on the WordPress Forums looking for a solution. One person suggested, Go to Settings > Writing and select “ ___ WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” and then scroll down and click “Save Changes.” Now, starting with your latest post, open it in the editor, make one minor change such as adding a space and then deleting it, and then click “Update Post.” Check your blog and see if it is back to normal.

The problem is on all five of my blogs that use the same theme, so the problem couldn’t have stemmed from anything I did. Still, I followed their instructions on the off-chance that it would help. It didn’t help me, but if you have a wordpress blog, I would suggest changing the setting. Any stray bit of html can wreak havoc on your blog.

Another person had me disable “infinite scrolling.” It used to be that you could choose how many posts would be displayed when people came to your blog, but now, when you reach the bottom of the page, you get more blog posts. In other words, there is no bottom of the page. If you want to dismantle infinite scrolling, here are the instructions: http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/disabling-infinite-scrolling/

Dismantling infinite scrolling did not correct the problem, so the next task they had me do was change all the images in the right sidebar (which of course you can’t see if you are using IE9) to smaller ones that fit the width of the sidebar. Supposedly, IE9 doesn’t make the conversions from larger images to smaller ones very easily, though until yesterday, I never had a problem. But even going through all that trouble didn’t make a difference.

I hoped that things would miraculously be back to normal today, but alas, the blog is still broken. So . . . Friday the 13th? It doesn’t scare me. But Thursday the 12th? Yikes.

Posted in blogging, culture, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Upsurges in Sadness Are Like Shortness of Breath After Exercise

July 11, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I’m fine. Truly I am. For all of you who have expressed concern over my current upsurge in grief, I just want to tell you there is nothing to worry about. Upsurges in sadness do not in any way affect my life or my dealings with other people. They are just there, a fact of my life like shortness of breath after exercise. If I didn’t write about my feelings, no one would know about my times of sadness. There is so much bad advice given to people about grief, such as acceptable durations and ways of grieving, that I want to provide a counterpoint, and I wouldn’t do much good if I kept silent about what I happened to be feeling at any given moment.

Many people have told me that after the death of their husband, they never found happiness until they married again. People have told me that even after they got married, they still experienced upsurges in grief, sometimes years afterward. People tell me they never got over grief at the loss of a life mate, it just got different. The death of a cousin or even a brother doesn’t affect us the same way as the loss of a child or a soul mate, so the severity of the loss has to be taken into affect before you start wondering if someone is grieving inappropriately. Some people do fall in a pit of depression and cannot get out without help, but I am not one of them. Nor am I ruining my health by riding out the sadness. That’s what tears are for — to release the stress. Walking, exercising, and blogging also relieve the stress of trying to create a new life for myself out of the embers of the old one.

For me, an upsurge in grief usually comes right before or right after a new level of acceptance or a greater understanding. This latest upsurge began on Independence Day. It’s a day for families to get together, to have fun, to do whatever it is that families do when they get together, and I was alone. I understood that this could be the way holidays will be for the rest of my life, and I found it difficult dealing with the unwelcome understanding. Also, while walking in the desert recently, I’ve had several revelations that are helping me with my search to find a new focus for my life, and such forward motions bring on an upsurge of sadness because they take me further away from the past I shared with my deceased life mate/soul mate.

And anyway, even though I am no longer a child in the world of grief, I’ve not yet achieved full growth, either. Therapists who have studied grief and grievers admit that it takes three to five years to find your way back to life, and I am just past two years. I still have a long way to go. Besides, what’s a few tears among friends?

The truth is, though, I am more exhausted than sad. I’m tired of living in an alien world, tired of having to figure out where to go from here, tired of not feeling like me, but mostly, I’m tired of his being dead. Whether I continue to be sad or find happiness, whether I continue floundering of find new focus, he will still be dead. And absolutely nothing I do or say or feel will ever change that.

Posted in blogging, culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , . 6 Comments »

Waiting. Always Waiting.

July 5, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I am waiting. Always waiting.

I’ve had this sense of waiting for a very long time, but didn’t realize until yesterday how much energy I put into waiting. I wait for the phone to ring. I wait for the mail to come. I check each of my email accounts several times a day, waiting for . . . hoping for . . . I don’t know what. Perhaps a few words that will make sense of my life? Maybe a sense of connection to another person or to life itself?

This pervasive sense of waiting started years ago when my life mate/soul mate first got sick. I used to wait for him to get better, and then, during that final, terrible year, I waited for him to die. After his death, I waited for the worst of my grief to pass. I waited for him to call and tell me I can come home — he never did, of course, and I understand now. . . I feel it . . . that he never will. I also waited for something wonderful to happen, because only something extraordinarily good could balance such a trauma as his death. Since life does not keep a balance sheet and does not seem to care that we need to believe in balance and fairness, I gave up that particular notion.

But still I wait.

When we are happy, we are automatically in the moment. We are where we want to be, so there is no more waiting — we have arrived. But when we are not particularly happy, it’s hard to accept the truth of the present, and we wait for something else.

I need to get past this sense of waiting and realize that however empty and lonely, this is my life at the moment. This is what I have to deal with. This is where I am. (And yet, at the same time, I have to allow for the possibility of something wonderful happening.)

Sometimes when I finish writing a blog post, I’ve figured out the answer to that day’s conundrum, but not this time. I haven’t a clue how to deal with this sense of waiting. Maybe I need to live more in the real world? Stay away from the internet with its siren song of expectation? That will be difficult. Offline, not much occurs in my life, but online there always seems to be something to do. Writing this essay for example. Clicking on facebook to see what is happening in my online world. Checking my email accounts, waiting for . . . hoping for . . .

Posted in blogging, grief, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , . 12 Comments »

Ads Masquerading as Blog Posts

July 3, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I got a message on this blog from someone who wants me to do a sponsored post (meaning an ad that masquerades as an article) about . . . cars. The message said:

Hi,

I’d like to inquire about doing a sponsored blog post — about 150-300 words that talks a little bit about cars and automobiles and links back to our site. We are a car dealership and thought we might be a good fit for your readers/visitors.

Here’s a list of some blog post titles we’ve done in the past:
– What To Look For When Buying A New Car
– 2012 Cars That Look Good And Saves You Gas
– Reasons Why Buying New Cars Is Better Than Used

Our budget is around $15 for the post. Is this something you’d be open to?

Also if you have some other sites just send them over and we might be interested in doing a sponsored post on there as well!

Regards.

They sure did their homework, didn’t they? A good fit for this blog? If it weren’t so obvious they hadn’t looked at a single article, the comment would be funny. And then, to top off the insult, they offer to pay me the princely sum of $15.00. Lucky me.

I was shocked when I first found out that in fact many bloggers do accept such sponsored posts — I often read articles about how much money people make pretending to be simply bloggers talking about subjects they are interested in, but such subterfuge is not for me. It’s possible their price nixed the idea. If they had offered me a new car, I would have jumped on the deal. Or not. If something is too good to be true, it probably is. And anyway, my car runs just fine, even if it is forty years old.

Posted in blogging, internet, life. Tags: , , . 3 Comments »
« Older posts
Newer posts »