Big Sibling

August 5, 2022 — Pat Bertram

Detectives and other operatives in current mysteries and thrillers look to the internet and the sites where people hang out for clues, so much so that when an author fails to mention those social sites, the absence is glaring. Just as when they don’t mention cell phones. Because cell phones make our lives so much easier and make it harder to be out of touch, the cliché is that the character forgot to charge the phone or is out of range or some such excuse to put the character further into jeopardy.

Which reminds me of Judge Judy and how when defendants talk about a text conversation, and Judy wants to see the message, the defendants always say that it was on a different phone that got broken, and now they have a new one. It happens so often that it’s rather a running joke. But as amusing (or not) as that may be, this post isn’t about cell phones but the social sites.

Have you ever noticed I cannot bring myself to call it “social media”? The closest I come is “social networking sites,” which is what they were known as when I first got online. The “media” part, I suppose, is to make us think these sites have some sort of credence, which they don’t. Not only is the news (on any side of any matter) suspect, so are the lives people portray. As if they are better — or badder — than they are in real life.

In fiction, the lives portrayed online are counted as evidence, especially if someone tells a detective they hadn’t seen the victim in several months, and an online photo shows them together. Or if they say they have never been to a certain place, and a post says otherwise.

Since this happens in real life too, I have never been so naïve as to think that anything I post online is private. I have assumed from the first day that “Big Sibling” is watching me. (Trying to be gender neutral here.) To that end, I have never posted anything I wanted to keep private. In fact, I want people to see my posts and to get to know me in the hope that they will buy my books. Still, I do wonder what I am inadvertently giving away. Anyone can do a bit of detective work and find out where I live, but any official would already know that. Anyone can put the clues together and come up with my age. A few people know when I was born, but generally online I use a pseudonymous birthday. And anyway, that information is available in any official data bank, and especially is available to anyone who has access to my driver’s license, so it’s not much of a secret.

Those officials could comb Facebook for my friends, but then, they would probably already know who they were. And Twitter and LinkedIn? I have no idea who most of my connections are, and I have no interaction with them. In fact, my profiles on both sites are more or less moribund, though the link to my daily blog is posted on both sites. Or at least it’s supposed to be. I haven’t checked recently to see if that is currently the case.

I don’t post photos directly to Facebook, though I suppose they are stored on their servers anyway because of the link to the link to my blog that I post on the site. But that’s okay. Lately all I’ve been posting are images of flowers, not me and whatever victim I might be accused of victimizing. (Though my life is so boring, I’m sure if any official were to check with my neighbors, all they would have to say about me is, “Yes, I know her. Yes, I saw her. I don’t remember what day, but it doesn’t matter. I see her out in her yard every day.)

I am so used to telling the details of my small life that if I did have a secret, I probably wouldn’t have one. I would have blabbed it here, and a blabbed secret is no longer a secret. Though come to think of it, it’s possible they would think that anyone so bland would have to be hiding something (something other than blandness, that is).

Too bad. It would be fun to have a secret. Or maybe not, if fiction is anything to go by. People with secrets are often victims. Since that brings us back to the beginning of this post about officials who come to social sites looking for clues as to who might have wanted to erase the secret by erasing the victim, I’ve apparently come to the end of what I wanted to say.

I hope you have a very nice (and very private) day.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

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Real Reality

July 31, 2022 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been reading a book about cyber technology running amok, or perhaps people running amok using advanced cyber technology (so advanced, it hasn’t yet been created, though obviously it has been postulated by someone, even if only the author). To be honest, I’m not really sure what the story is about because unlike most books that I read at a single sitting or two or three (at most), the pages on this book aren’t advancing at all. I tend to think my slow progress has to do with my falling asleep while reading. (Well, no. I don’t “tend to think” that napping is the reason for the slow progress — I know it is.)

It’s no wonder the story isn’t keeping my interest. It’s hard for me to care about people —real or otherwise — who wrap themselves in the latest technology. I understand some body/computer interfaces could have (or for all I know, all ready do have) lifesaving capabilities, but I’ve passed my time of keeping up with current cyberlife. I use only a fraction of my computer’s potential, sticking with such basics as blogging, researching, shopping a bit, playing a game (though my interest in the hidden object game I was once fascinated with has been steadily waning). I certainly have no interest in the internet of things, a potential combined internet of things and persons, the metaverse, or virtual reality of any kind. I prefer to stick with real reality (or rather what passes for real reality since there is no real consensus on what reality is).

It is ironic, though, that despite my decreased use of social networking sites (I write my blog and spend about two minutes on Facebook going through the whole rigamarole FB has forced me into to post my blog on the site, but that’s it) I don’t feel as if I’m alone, though I actually do spend most of my time alone. It made more sense to feel as if I were with people back in the days where I was in fairly consistent contact with people, especially on the now-defunct writing site that was the best social networking site for authors, but now it’s more of a sense of being in contact rather than actually being in contact.

And then, of course, there are all those characters in the books I read that people my life.

I keep saying that one of these days I’ll start writing again, and I tend to think that day is coming soon. I was showing friends my zinnias yesterday, and it suddenly struck me that Zinnia would be a great name for a character. Later in the conversation, as we talked about lilies, it seemed that Lily and Billy would be great names for twins. Once an author has names, can a story be far behind?

I’m still “researching” the story. (By research, I mean I’m just living, but if I call my everyday life “research” then I can pretend I’m actually working as a writer.) Unfortunately, I still have no idea what story I want to write. It would be fun to write another “Pat” story, sort of a sequel to Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare. One visitor told me I have a ghost, so I’m considering a ghost story. One friend has told me a few of her experiences that makes me wonder if I want to write some sort of alternate reality tale. For example, a wildfire burned all around her house, and the people who used to own the place (who were still emotionally invested in the house) watched four tanker trucks circling her property, spraying the house and trees to keep the fire away. The firefighters working that day said they only had one tanker truck, and they needed it to keep them safe from the fast-moving fire. Even worse, they saw embers landing on her roof, and later told her they felt bad they couldn’t save her house. They were astounded when she told them the house hadn’t been touched.

It’s certainly interesting to speculate which reality was real — the former owner’s, the firefighters, or my friend’s. They couldn’t all be real, could they?

Someday, I am sure, a story — either this one or another — will gather enough strength that will compel me to write, and when that time comes, I sure hope the book won’t put people to sleep.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

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Wish Box

July 25, 2022 — Pat Bertram

A character in the book I’m currently reading was given three wishes. She ended up giving two of the wishes away, which I didn’t know was possible in wish culture, but it was a smart thing for her to do since both those people became staunch allies when she needed them.

Any mention of wishes, of course, makes me wonder what I would wish for. I used to wish for enough money so that I didn’t have to worry about my financial situation, but that was easily taken care of. I decided not to worry. It doesn’t help my precarious situation, but at least I’m not worrying about it, and in the end, that’s what the wish was about.

Other than that, I’m not sure what I would want. I certainly wouldn’t waste a wish on world peace since politicians and other self-serving individuals would screw that up with their own wishes for dominance.

Then I remembered my wish box.

It’s been a while since I added to the box, though I should have been including any cards people sent me with wishes, such as wishes for a happy new year. Maybe I’ll remember to include such wishes later in the year. Meantime, I checked to see what my wish box included besides a couple of greeting cards.

The red origami envelope includes a wish for “something that I can be but haven’t thought of yet.” Hmm. Interesting wish. And a realistic one. Some of my best come-true wishes were wishes I never knew I had, such as taking dance classes, performing on stage, and owning a house. Limiting myself to what I know is simply too . . . limiting.

The other origami envelope contains a wish for me to sell thousands of copies of Bob, The Right Hand of God. Oops. That one sure went nowhere! But maybe . . . someday . . .

In the background of the photo is a copy of Neil Gaiman’s wish that a friend sent me: “I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.” Some of that has come true, at least the part about reading, living as only I can, and surprising myself. I could do with more surprises, though. I wouldn’t like knowing that I know all there is to know about me.

I’m not sure where the stone heart came from, but “heart” certainly belongs in a wish box.

My favorite item at the moment is printed on the gray card with trees: small joys, simple goodness, hope renewed. It might not be worth wasting three wishes on those things (especially since I wouldn’t have any left to give away to people who desperately need wishes, as the character in the book did), but for sure, they are things for me to strive for.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

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Liking What I Write

July 14, 2022 — Pat Bertram
jockey

Sometimes I read an article I wrote, and I think, “I wish I had written that,” then it hits me that oh, wait. I did write that.

A case in point:

This morning someone left a comment on my post “Let It Ride,” telling me he was doing a podcast about the movie and wanted to know if I would like to join the discussion. Not remembering having ever written about the film, though it is one I like, I went back and read the post. The piece turned out to be not so much a rehashing of the movie (which the critics hated and apparently, so did the screenwriter, because she had her name removed from the credits), but a discussion of the philosophy of luck.

I generally do not like stories about gambling. They set my teeth on edge because of the inevitable slough of despair the character falls into when the addiction gets the better of him. Despite that, Let It Ride is one of my favorite movies, probably because although the story takes place at Hialeah amid the horse racing culture, it is not a movie about gambling. It’s the story of how the forces of the universe align to give Jay Trotter (Richard Dreyfuss) one perfect day, how he had the wisdom to recognize the gift, and how he had the courage to accept it. Not everyone accepted the gift. Even those who saw what was happening to him and were jealous, refused to follow his lead when he so generously offered to share the luck.

I think the part I liked most about that particular post was my summation: What does this philosophical vision of the movie teach me? Perhaps that luck — and life — should be taken as it comes, we should trust ourselves, and beyond that, we should just let it ride.

So, that was an example of something that I wish I’d written and had. On the other hand, there are a lot of things I read that I am very glad I didn’t write. The last book I read (or attempted to read) was a mystery written by a man from the point of view of an alcoholic woman journalist who kept sabotaging her life. It was a popular book, though I don’t know why. A writer struggling with alcoholism is such a trite theme; hundreds, if not thousands of books (though not a single one by me) have been written with that same generic character.

Another book I was glad I didn’t write was the one I read before that — a novel by a youngish white woman whose point-of-view characters were a flamboyant black woman and an old man (who turned out to be younger than I am). I thought such stories were no longer acceptable in a world where people don’t appreciate race appropriation.

I suppose I should be grateful that I like the things I write since there is so much writing out there that I don’t like. I also suppose I will follow through and email the guy about his podcast, though I’m not sure I’ll accept his offer. I really have nothing much more to say about the movie than what is already in this post and the one where he left his comment.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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Winter in July

July 5, 2022 — Pat Bertram

I checked out a Christmas novel at the library this morning, hoping that the cool chill of winter from the story would bring relief from the summer heat, and oh, what magic! Shortly after starting to read the story, I distinctly felt cooler. I must confess that the coolness wasn’t literary magic but electrical magic — the air conditioner clicked on.

Still, I take my magic however it comes.

Most often, these days, the magic that comes my way is in the form of “yard pretties.” Right now, most of the colors in my yard are varying shades of greens, from the grass, from plants that have flowered and are taking a breath before producing more flowers, from plants that have spent their blossom-forming energy, and from seedlings that are too young to flower.

And yet, there are splashes of color wherever I look. A patch of golden zinnias,

a trio of black-eyed Susans,

a dwarf red plains coreopsis,

an especially eye-dazzling daylily,

and Johnny jump ups.

Oddly, despite their delicate looks, (like miniature pansies), Johnny jump ups are rather aggressive. The Forest Service says it’s an invasive species that has contributed to the decline of 42% of U.S. endangered and threatened species. Eek. Despite the “eek” factor, I doubt my single plant will do much damage to the environment even if it survives the winter, either the literary winter the Christmas novel will bring this July or the actual winter the spinning Earth will bring in December.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

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Cocooning

June 1, 2022 — Pat Bertram

This was a cocooning sort of day. Chilly. Dark. Heavy clouds. Rainy morning. Misty afternoon. A good day to stay inside, huddle under the covers, and read.

So I did.

The end.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

Posted in books, life. Tags: , , , . 3 Comments »

Ill-Conceived Stories

May 30, 2022 — Pat Bertram

There have been a whole slew woman characters over the years who were amateur detectives. In many of them, the amateur was smarter than the whole police force put together, and she managed to find out the truth while they were still bumbling along. In others, the amateur had a cop boyfriend or a reporter or someone who could feed her information while she made fools of them all. Some put a twist on the story, and make the woman character the detective — private or otherwise — and she still finds out the truth before the professionals with all their equipment and resources.

I’ve recently come across still another version of this same archetype, a variation on the cop boyfriend theme. In this version, the amateur and the cop are not in a relationship but are merely best friends. (Even though it’s obvious to everyone but them that they really are in a relationship, just haven’t gotten to the sex part yet.) What makes this version so appalling is that the girlfriend, whether an ex-cop or merely a know-it-all, is allowed to accompany the cop on his investigations, as if she were her partner, and no one has any complaints about this — not the other cops, the police higherups, or the victims. They all just go along with that. Despite the ridiculousness of this, and the ridiculousness of the girlfriend showing up the cop, the worst is that the cop is a doofus and lets the girlfriend tell him how to do his job and even does her bidding when she sends him on assignments. For example, in once case, the amateur tells the cop, “I’ll go talk to the guy. You go find out what the woman has to say.”

How did these books get published? I suppose stories like this made sense before women became street cops and detectives, but it doesn’t make sense that such inane novels would be published now.

Luckily, not all books are as poorly conceived and written. There are plenty out there for me to choose from.

Even luckier, at this time of year, I don’t need to hunker down with a good book quite as often as I do in the winter.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

Posted in books, life. Tags: , , . Leave a Comment »

An Egregious Error

April 5, 2022 — Pat Bertram

In a book I read the other day, a 1929 speakeasy waitress (a flapper) was trying to solve the mystery of why a patron had been murdered. She went into a hardware store that one of the suspects owned, and started out her investigation by innocuously asking to see a Black and Decker electric drill.

That stopped me cold. It’s hard on me as a reader when anachronistic elements show up in a novel; it takes me out of the story, and makes me wonder what the author was thinking.

The worst example of such a literary crime was in a best-selling (or so she claimed) novel by a self-published writer who wrote racy regency romances. That’s so not my thing (though I did enjoy the books by Georgette Heyer, who has been credited as the creator of the modern regency romance genre). Still, at the behest of my publisher, I took a look at the books to see what the big deal was, and just about the first thing in the first chapter was a breakfast of chocolate chip pancakes with maple syrup. What? How could anyone have made such a ridiculous error?

Maple syrup wasn’t served on pancakes until after the regency era, and who knows if it would have arrived in England by then, and even more doubtful if it was used on pancakes. In addition, although pancakes have been around for hundreds perhaps thousands of years, they were not a common breakfast food in regency England. But I will give the author the benefit of the doubt since I can’t for sure say that rich people wouldn’t have eaten pancakes with maple syrup back then.

Also, although chocolate was known and favored during those times and served in the morning, it was in the form of a hot chocolate drink. Chocolate chips, however, were not invented until a hundred and fifty years later. Created in 1938, chocolate chips were called “morsels” until sometime in the 1940s when “chocolate chips” became the more common term, though “morsels” is still used by the first company who sold them.

Needless to say, I never read more than the first few pages of that book.

The flapper book turned out not to contain this sort of error. In fact, Black and Decker was in business in 1929; it had been founded in 1910. And they were selling an electric hand-held drill by 1917.

I had no idea that electric tools went back so far! It makes sense, though, that power tools would have been one of the first uses of electricity after lighting since electric tools make work so much easier.

As for the flapper book — after time out to research Black and Decker and power tools, I went back and finished the story. Apparently, it wasn’t that great because I can’t remember a thing about the story, but at least it didn’t suffer from an egregious error like the chocolate-chips-in-the-regency-era novel.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

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Traveling Books

April 3, 2022 — Pat Bertram

Although you might think this post concerns books about traveling, it’s actually about books that travel. I’d never given much thought to how far books travel, and probably never would have if it weren’t for the confluence of two events. First, my friend who returned to Thailand to be with his ailing wife, took my book Bob, The Right Hand of God with him, which, according to him, makes me an international author. Sounds good, doesn’t it, being an international author? More accurately, it makes the book itself an international book because the author — me — is definitely not international since I’ve never been out of the USA. But my book is now out of the country, having gone by way of car, plane, bus, and perhaps even train, so that makes it a traveling book.

The second event concerns the book I am currently reading. It was written by a Spanish author and translated and published in the U.K. And somehow a copy of that book, printed so very far away, ended up in the local library in the ongoing book sale section. It looks like a well-read and much-loved book, so who knows what sort of roundabout journey that book made to get here. And now it’s in my hands.

This made me think of other traveling books I have known. For example, a friend sent me a trio of books about trees for a house anniversary gift, and those books also came from the U.K. Actually, they came from Amazon in Las Vegas, which is mystifying because she ordered the books from a business located in U.K. Still, since those books were published in London, they had to have traveled to Las Vegas somehow, before they ended up here.

I’ve also been an agent a couple of times for someone overseas who needed out-of-print books that were not available where he was living, and if I remember correctly, at least one of those books originated over there.

Most books don’t travel that far, at least I don’t think they do, but still, they rack up the miles going from the printer to the distributor to the seller to the buyer and then to the reader if the buyer and reader aren’t the same person. Eventually, books travel to a secondhand store and then continue their journey to another home. I ordered one such book from a used book outlet in Oklahoma, and the gift card inserted into that obviously unread book showed that it had been gifted to someone in New York. It was delivered to me in California, and then I myself brought it to Colorado.

But that was a simple journey. Some books travel in a more convoluted fashion. I heard of a woman who had donated her childhood books, then later in life found one of those very same books in a used book store far from where she grew up. She bought it, of course, because obviously it wanted to go back home to her. One can only imagine the secret life of that book — where it had traveled, who had read it, who loved it, and how it ended up back in the hands of its original owner.

A huge percentage of books don’t enjoy that kind of far-reaching journey. 77,000,000 unsold and unread books are pulped — destroyed — each year by the major publishers. (Print-on-demand, where only books that are already sold are printed, hasn’t changed things much because bookstores need the product on hand even though they return up to 40% of those books to the publisher, and up to 95% of those books are sent to landfills or recycled into paper pulp.)

But that’s too depressing to think about. I’d rather imagine the journeys books go on. It’s only fitting that they get their own journeys since so many of them take us on mental journeys and allow us flights of fancy such as this blog post.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

Posted in books, culture, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

People Like Me

March 23, 2022 — Pat Bertram

I finally finished the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy. Whew! It really got tedious, all the shopping and designer clothes and idiomatic terms that were translated in footnotes.

The most bizarre thing about the books is that I would have thought they’d be used as examples of how not to write, but apparently, if a book makes money, no one cares about the lack of a plot, the lack of clearly defined major characters, the lack of any sort of character arc, the insertion of too many characters that have no point except to pound home the point that the rich, no matter the nationality, are different.

One of the many things I didn’t understand were those footnotes. Though the story was written in English, these people were not actually speaking English in their own homes among their own families, yet the author kept inserting Asian terms in the midst of what should have been Asian people talking in one of the many Asian languages. I didn’t understand why he didn’t just translate those terms as he did the rest of their dialogue and forget the footnotes. Admittedly, there were times they spoke English, and I suppose they would bestrew their English sentences with Asian terms, but I don’t feel like giving the author the benefit of the doubt, especially since he kept inserting himself in the footnotes. I had to look at the footnotes to see what the heck the characters were talking about, which was bad enough, but it was especially jarring to have all that author intervention. Anyone who knows about writing knows that the author should be invisible. A story is a conversation between the reader and the characters, and no author should ever poke his head into the conversation. It disrupts the fictive dream and takes the reader out of the story.

In this case, I don’t suppose it really mattered since there was no real story. Just a lot of rich people doing rich people things.

Luckily, I’m finished with that particular literary non-event and will go on to a completely different book, this one about a middle-aged, middle-class woman in the sandwich generation — caught between raising young children and taking care of aging parents. I’m not sure I’ll be any more into this story than I was into the rich folk saga — both are alien situations that I can’t really identify with. But then, if I only read books about people like me (assuming, of course, there are any books about people like me), there’d be no reason to read because I know about people like me.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive? If you haven’t yet read this book, now is the time to buy since it’s on sale.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

Posted in books, fiction, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »
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