writing | Bertram's Blog

A Blessing for You

February 9, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Concerned about my struggles with my rage-ful brother, a friend sent me the following blessing by John O’Donohue, an Irish poet, author, priest, and philosopher. And now I am passing it on to you in the hopes that it will make your day a bit brighter.

On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you.

And when your eyes freeze behind the grey window and the ghost of loss gets into you, may a flock of colors, indigo, red, green, and azure blue come to awaken in you a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays in the currach of thought and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you, may there come across the waters a path of yellow moonlight to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours.

May the clarity of light be yours.

May the fluency of the ocean be yours.

May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels 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.” Follow Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Posted in culture, writing. Tags: Blessing, Irish poet, John O'Donohue, may the clay dance to balance you. 4 Comments »

“If I could invent one thing to make the world a better place . . .”

February 5, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Google is running a doodle contest for young artists — “If I could invent one thing to make the world a better place . . .” Of course, since it’s a Google contest, the doodle needs to incorporate their logo, which seems oxymoronic. What does Google have to do with the world? Google certainly doesn’t make the world a better place, it just makes online life easier to navigate, which makes me wonder if Google thinks the internet is actually “the world.”

It seems to me that the real, offline world works fine just the way it is. Earth spins on its axis, travels around the sun, and hurtles through space in an orderly manner. The sun comes up in the east every morning and sets in the west every evening. (Well, no, the sun doesn’t actually rise and set except from our perspective. To the earth’s perspective, the sun is always “up.”)

There are deserts and rain forests, mountains and oceans, lakes and rivers galore, which all make the world a wonderful place. The soil is fertile (or would be if we didn’t over use it) and water is plentiful. Skies are blue when the sun is shining, and vivid reds and oranges when it sets. Sometimes, there is even a flash of green in the tropical sky or vast waves of colors in the northern hemisphere.

Can anything invented by a human make any of this better? If humans really wanted to invent something that would make the world a better place, they would have to invent something that removed humans from the world. The world exists just fine without us. It is we who need the world. There is a story about a Native American shaman who almost forgave the white men for the terrible problems they brought because they also brought horses, and horses make the landscape more beautiful. Has anyone ever said that humans out in the open make the landscape more beautiful? (I’m talking bodies here, not gardens.)

I admit I’m being picky. I presume Google’s contest is about inventing something to make the human situation better, and even then, I don’t know if there is anything we could invent that would make our world a better place. I don’t know if there ever has been anything . . . well, except for indoor plumbing and toilet paper. Energy that doesn’t destroy the earth has already been invented (or discovered, rather.) There are ways of pulling energy right from the earth, but the problem is the energy purveyors have yet to figure out how to make money off such energy. There would be no wires or conduits, no meters, just a simple and inexpensive piece of equipment, similar to a small television satellite dish.

It would be nice if someone could invent a pain pill that actually worked, that had no side effects, and wasn’t addictive, but if someone invented ways of preventing pain and ill health and death, the earth would soon be so overrun with humans, someone need to invent something that would gradually remove humans from the world.

It’s a good thing I don’t have to invent anything that would make the world a better place, because I wouldn’t. All that the major inventions did was allow for bigger buildings, more genetically modified food, more vehicles, more incursions into once isolated lands, and in the end, more humans. What would make the world a better place is if people were kinder to each other, but that’s not something we can invent. All we need to do is do it. So today, be kind to someone and make the world a better place.

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Posted in internet, life, writing. Tags: be kind, google contest, google doodles, making the world a better place. 12 Comments »

On Writing: Clean Up Your Mess

January 28, 2014 — Pat Bertram

One of the biggest problems writers have is editing their work. It’s difficult to see awkward phrases, sentences, even paragraphs since we know what we want to say and so believe we have said it, though readers might have difficulty trying to figure it out. The best way to find such ambiguities is to ask someone to read your book (someone other than me, that is) and have them mark any passages that make them pause or that jerk them out of the fictive dream.

Other edits, though, are less subjective, and writers should be able to find and correct the errors themselves. The most common non-subjective problem I see in even the most polished works are wrongly used participial phrases that end in ing. According to The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, “a participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.”

The example in the book is: Walking down the road, he saw a woman accompanied by two children. Who is walking? He is, of course, since he is the subject of the sentence, and the ing phrase always refers to the subject. If the woman is walking, you have to rephrase the sentence: He saw a woman, accompanied by two children, walking down the road. You, I’m sure, would never have to worry about who is walking because you’d never use such an ambiguous sentence in the first place!

The other examples of wrong participial phrases Strunk and White give are humorous and show why it’s important to follow the rule:

Being in dilapidated condition, I was able to buy the house cheap.
Wondering irresolutely what to do next, the clock struck twelve.
As a mother of five, with another on the way, the ironing board was always up.

In case you don’t know how to rephrase the above sentences to make them grammatical and remove the silliness (the first sentence, for example, says that you were able to buy the house cheap because you were in a dilapidated condition), here are my quick efforts:

Because of the dilapidated condition of the house, I was able to buy the place cheap.
As I wondered what to do next, the clock struck twelve.
A mother of five, with another on the way, I was never able to put the ironing board away.

Another ing problem comes from simultaneous actions, when an author has a character do something that’s physically impossible. For example: Pulling out of the driveway, he drove down the street. He cannot be pulling out of the driveway at the same time he is driving down the street. He pulled out of the driveway, then drove down the street.

Such sentence structures do slip into our writing, no matter how careful we are. It’s up to us to clean up the mess and make it easy for readers to stay riveted in our stories. (This is primarily a post about “ing”s, which is good since I seem to be reverting to clichés. That, I know, is something you never do.)

Authors often shrug off the necessity for self-editing because either they believe they have the right to write however they please, or they leave the work to their editors, but the truth is, it is up to authors to get their manuscripts as clean and clear as possible before self-publishing or submitting their book to an editor. As someone who has edited one heck of a lot of manuscripts, I can tell you that having to point out the same error page after page after page gets tiresome.

So, do what you were taught as a child — clean up your own mess.

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Posted in books, How to, writing. Tags: copyediting, editing, ing, participial phrases, self-editing, Strunk and White, words that end in ing. 9 Comments »

All Is Calm, All Is Bright

January 25, 2014 — Pat Bertram

All is calm in my world today, and the sun is shining brightly. There have been no storms in my life in the past few days, neither internal nor environmental. There have been no midnight trips to jail to pick up an errant sibling, no recent trips to the hospital to admit my aged father. Nothing has pushed me past my limits to where I wanted to kick someone. I haven’t had any major grief upsurges for a while, not even any minor ones. I’ve been getting enough exercise to keep my stress levels low, and I’ve been catching up on my sleep.

I don’t know how long peace will last in this King of Hearts world of mine, but for now I am enjoying the calm.

It seems strange, though, not to have much to say, especially since the word I chose for my daily resolution is “largiloquent,” meaning “full of words.” (Not a bad thing for a writer to be!) There always seems to be something — or someone — bedeviling me, giving me plenty of fodder for this blog, but at the moment, there are no jumbled thoughts I need to sort out. I have no words of wisdom, either, other than a reminder to myself that the universe is unfolding as it should, and I am where I am supposed to be — dreaming myself into the person I wish to become.

“If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.” William Arthur Ward.

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Posted in being me, blogging, life, writing. Tags: if you can dream it, if you can imagine it, largiloquent, William Arthur Ward. 4 Comments »

Excerpt from LIGHT BRINGER by Pat Bertram

January 19, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Description of Light Bringer:

Becka Johnson had been abandoned on the doorstep of a remote cabin in Chalcedony, Colorado when she was a baby. Now, thirty-seven years later, she has returned to Chalcedony to discover her identity, but she only finds more questions. Who has been looking for her all those years? Why are those same people interested in fellow newcomer Philip Hansen? Who is Philip, and why does her body sing in harmony with his? And what do either of them have to do with a shadow corporation that once operated a secret underground installation in the area?

Excerpt from Light Bringer:

The trail was a gentle decline, hard-packed, and free of rocks, as if it had been well traveled since time out of mind. It ended at a stream so clear its cobbled bed looked like a mosaic of semi-precious stones. On the other side of the stream, the tall meadow grasses, lavender in the mountain’s shadow, whispered softly among themselves.

Laughing, Rena caught Philip’s hand. “They’re inviting us to come play.” She ran the last few steps toward the edge of the water.

He pulled his hand away, hearing in his mind the sickening sound of ripping ligaments and tendons, and feeling the pain.

Walking carefully, he joined her by the stream.

“Too bad there’s not a bridge,” she said, “but the water isn’t deep. We can wade across.”

He put out a foot, drew it back. “You go. I’ll wait here.”

She nodded in understanding, and took his hand again. “That’s okay. I can go another time.”

They sat on the forested slope, listening to the whispering of the grasses increase in pitch as the day came to an end. After the sun set, they headed home in a rich, warm alpenglow that turned the world to gold.

***

Where to buy Light Bringer:

Second Wind Publishing

Amazon

Barnes & Noble Nook

iStore (on iTunes)

Palm Doc (PDB) (for Palm reading devices)

Epub (Apple iPad/iBooks, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo)

Posted in books, fiction, writing. Tags: Colorado, fiction, Light Bringer, mystery, novel, search for identity, Second Wind Publishing. 2 Comments »

Waiting for Late-Blooming Genius to Flower

January 12, 2014 — Pat Bertram

I’m not a creative genius by any means, and that’s probably a good thing. A large percentage of such geniuses (77% for novelists and 87% for poets) suffer from some sort of mental disturbance — schizophrenia, cognitive disorders, depression, bipolarism, neuroses, alcoholism. I don’t even have the sort of mental dissociation that many creative non-geniuses have, such as sitting back and letting my characters tell the story, like some form of spirit writing. My characters never do anything that I didn’t intend them to do, they never take on a life of their own, they never appear to me in my dreams. They are a deliberate construct, created by carefully chosen words.

On the other hand, there is still a chance that I will end up as a one of those poor tormented souls. There are two kinds of genius — the wunderkind kind where a person is born with their genius, and the late bloomer kind where a person develops their genius through experience and trial and error. (To the extent that I have a talent for writing, mine is the late blooming kind. I tried to write a novel when I was young, but when I sat down to write, hoping the words would flow, my mind was a complete blank. Throughout the years, though, I did learn how to write.)

There is another possibility for such late-blooming genius to flower in me. Dan Chiasson, writing about poet Marianne Moore who became a star in her seventies, said “Poets often make a sudden advance with the death of their parents, as though a curfew has suddenly been lifted; for some, it happens just at the moment the imagination has stalled.”

If this “curfew” is lifted from other creative types, too, then when I am free from the responsibilities of looking after my father, my creativity could erupt. (And anyway, I used to be a poet once upon a time, so either way, the curfew lifting could be a boon.) I have the stalled imagination, that’s for sure — for several years, I haven’t been able to write much of anything except blog posts with sporadic forays into fiction writing — so who knows what will happen in the coming years. I just hope that if genius decides to descend on me, I get to keep my normalcy. I have no desire to suffer from any sort of mental disturbance. I’ll be satisfied with being just a garden-variety, everyday, creative non-genius who writes magnifient books.

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Posted in books, culture, writing. Tags: creative genius, creative genius and mental disorders, Dan Chiasson, late-blooming genius, Marianne Moore. 1 Comment »

On Writing: Get Off the Bus!

January 11, 2014 — Pat Bertram

In a blog post on the Second Wind Publishing blog, author Paul Mohrbacher wrote: “At a writing workshop two years ago I heard this advice: Don’t spend time driving from one place to another in your fictional story. All you can do in a moving car is talk, talk, talk, or if you’re alone, think, think, think. It slows your story down. There is no room in a transit narrative for action. Get off the bus!” (Click here to read the rest of the article.)

This is actually good advice, and yet there are many novels that take place on a trip — on trains mostly, which makes sense. A train trip is leisurely, which gives plenty of scope for both character and plot development, and is much more romantic than a bus ride.

I wrote an entire suspense novel that takes place on a small bus, one that was big enough to fit eight people (because that’s how many characters I had!). In Daughter Am I, my characters are going cross country to find out who Mary’s grandparents were, why someone wanted them dead, and why her father had disowned them. Much of the story is “story time” — the characters telling about their past, and it is in these stories that Mary finds the truth. Of course, they do get off the bus occasionally, but emotion and connection are part of the “action” of a story, so as long as they are present, it’s okay for characters to stay on the bus. Also, in Daughter Am I, the drive makes it seem as if the story itself is going somewhere, not just the characters. Each leg of the trip carries with it the hope of finding the end of the quest, and instead turns them in a different direction. Literally.

Two of my other novels also involve lengthy trips. In More Deaths Than One, Bob travels halfway around the world on a quest to find out the truth about himself, and in A Spark of Heavenly Fire,, world-famous actor Jeremy King travels to the ends of Colorado in a quest to save himself from the disease that ravaged the state and the quarantine that was supposed to keep the epidemic controlled. During each of these journeys, the characters learned more about themselves or we learned more about them and their quest, so the journeys were important to the plot.

Sometimes, though, a trip was just a place to get the characters from one place to another, in which case, I skipped any narration about the trip, merely saying they are going to a specific place and picking up the story again when they arrive.

And sometimes (though never in my stories) there is a lengthy car chase. Car chases seem to fit more with the visual construct of a movie than with a written story, because viewers see the narrow escapes and so get involved, though such chases also find their way into novels. Either way, I find them boring. In fact, they put me to sleep.

So yes, get off the car, or bus, or train, or airplane . . . except when something important to the story is happening in the vehicle.

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Posted in books, writing. Tags: Daughter Am I, get off the bus, quest stories, traveling in stories, writing advice. 12 Comments »

A Photo of My Muse

December 24, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Rubicon Ranch is a collaborative and innovative crime series set in the fictional desert community of Rubicon Ranch and is being written online by authors of Second Wind Publishing.

In Rubicon Ranch: Secrets, the third book of the series and our current work in progress, the body of a local realtor is found beneath the wheels of a blow-up figure of a Santa on a motorcycle. The realtor took great delight in ferreting out secrets, and everyone in this upscale housing development is hiding something. Could she have discovered a secret that someone would kill to protect? There are suspects galore, including a psychic, a con man, a woman trying to set up an online call-girl service, and the philandering sheriff himself. Not only is the victim someone he had an affair with, but he also has to contend with an ex-wife who has moved back in with him, and a jilted lover, both with their own reasons for wanting the realtor dead.

I got tired having my character, Melanie Gray, finding bodies in the desert. Since the story time ended up being around Christmas, I remembered seeing this decoration last Christmas and thought it would be an amusing scene. I didn’t have a photo, so this year I made sure to get a photo of the muse who inspired me.

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Posted in books, writing. Tags: collaboration, innovative crime series, Rubicon Ranch, Santa on a motorcycle, Second Wind Publishing. 1 Comment »

Happy 100th Anniversary of the Crossword Puzzle

December 20, 2013 — Pat Bertram

To honor the 100th anniversary of the crossword puzzle:

Down
1. Name of Pat Bertram’s blog (2 words)
2. Prose that describes imaginary events and people
5. Author of A Spark of Heavenly Fire, More Deaths Than One, Light Bringer, and Daughter Am I (2 words)
8. Pat Bertram’s publisher (2 words)
10. The country where Bob Stark from More Deaths Than One lived for eighteen years
12. The treasure that Mary Stuart searched for in Daughter Am I
16. A written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers

Across
3. A formal assessment of a work
4. A person who has written a particular work
6. A fictional person
7. Death notice; the piece in the newspaper that catapulted Bob Stark onto his journey for self-discovery in More Deaths Than One
9. The interrelated sequence of events in a work of fiction
11. Category of a novel
13. The state that was quarantined in A Spark of Heavenly Fire
14. Archaic word processing instrument with delete capabilities
15. A book-length work of fiction
17. A person who uses penned or typed words to communicate ideas or tell stories
18. An electronic version of a book
19. Relationship of James Angus Stuart to Mary Stuart in Daughter Am I

Anyone who solves this puzzle will receive a coupon for a free ecopy of one of my books at Smashwords.com. Your choice of title! Send your responses to secondwindpublishing@gmail.com. Offer expires December 31, 2013.

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Posted in culture, writing. Tags: crossword puzzle, Pat Bertram's crossword puzzle. 3 Comments »

Excerpt From More Deaths Than One

December 16, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Yesterday, while searching More Deaths Than One for references to the scent of frangipani for my post Justifying Our Sex Scenes, I happened to find the passage below. It’s been so long since I’ve looked at the book, the story seemed fresh and new, and something I’d be interested in reading. (Which, actually, is why I wrote the book — to write something I’d like to read.) Note: ISI is Information Services, Incorporated, a corporation with ties to US intelligence agencies.

Description: Bob Stark returns to Denver after 18 years in SE Asia to discover that the mother he buried before he left is dead again. At her new funeral, he sees . . . himself. Is his other self a hoaxer, or is something more sinister going on?

Excerpt:

“Here, put this on.” Bob held out a brown two-inch-wide belt.

Kerry lifted her shirt and showed him the waistband of her dark cotton slacks. “It’s elastic, see? I don’t need a belt.”

“It’s a money-belt. I got two of them yesterday, one for me and one for you. There’s ninety-five hundred dollars in each of them—”

“Ninety-five hundred dollars?” Her eyes grew round. “In cash?”

“Yes. I would have liked to get more, but that’s all we’re allowed to bring into the United States without having to fill out forms, and in our situation, that can get sticky.”

“What would happen if we brought in more than that and didn’t declare it?”

“Maybe nothing unless we got caught, but since we’re traveling with fake IDs, I’d prefer not to complicate matters. When the problem with ISI goes away, I can have some of my money wired to an account in Colorado or wherever.”

“Just some? Not all?”

“It’s safe where it is.” When she gave him a narrow-eyed look, he laughed. “I don’t seem to be able to keep anything from you. It’s in a private bank in Chinatown. Hsiang-li sponsored me, otherwise I’d have to use the same banks as everyone else, and ISI would probably have found my account by now.”

“Wouldn’t ISI have already traced the bank through your traveler’s checks?”

“My bank doesn’t offer that service. I paid cash for them at another bank that does, and since they don’t know me, that’s a dead end for ISI.”

Becoming aware he still held out the money-belt, he said, “Well, are you going to put it on?”

She took it from him, fastened it around her waist, and smoothed her shirt over it. Turning sideways to look in the mirror, she asked, “Does it make me look fat?”

“I don’t even notice it.”

She gave him a laughing glance. “Aren’t you afraid I’m going to run off with your money?”

“No. In fact, you can have it.”

She looked at him aghast. “I can’t take your money.” Reaching under her shirt, she started to remove the belt.

He put a hand on her arm. “Keep it for now. If we get separated, or if anything happens to me, you’ll need it to get back home.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” she said fiercely.

He nodded as if he agreed and did not mention the sense of foreboding that made his shoulder blades itch.

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