Blog Jog Day: Introducing Light Bringer

November 21, 2010 — Pat Bertram

Welcome to Blog Jog, a one-day jog around the highways and byways of the blogosphere. Feel free to rest here for awhile before you trot on to the next blog in the jog. If you don’t know where to start exploring Bertram’s Blog you can scroll down to see my latest posts, or you can check out the index of all my posts: Archives.

Everyone who leaves a comment on this post will be entered in Second Wind’s best contest ever — a chance to win a copy of every title Second Wind will publish in 2011. This will include a copy of my upcoming book Light Bringer, which is scheduled to be released in the spring of 2011. (Suzanne Francis, author of The Song of the Arkafina Series, and first person ever to read my new book said Light Bringer is “brilliant.” My favorite word!)

Light Bringer tells the story of  Becka Johnson, who 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?

So, be sure to leave a comment, then jog on over to visit novelist and writing coach Emily Hanlon at: Fiction Writing: the Passionate Journey.

You can find the entire list of participants for Blog Jog Day at: Blog Jog Day.

Note: If you don’t want to receive information about upcoming releases and contestsfrom Second Wind, be sure to note that in your comment. You will still be eligible for this contest.

Posted in blogging, internet, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 22 Comments »

Tomorrow is Blog Jog Day!

November 20, 2010 — Pat Bertram

Blog Jog is a trot around the blogosphere, each blog linked to the next so that you can explore new blogs with a simple click on the link to the next blog. Many participants will be offering giveaways and contests, and so will I. Or rather, my publisher will. Anyone who leaves a comment on my Blog Jog post tomorrow will be entered into a contest to win a copy of every title Second Wind Publishing releases in 2011, which will include my book Light Bringer, scheduled to be published in the spring of 2011. So be sure to stop by tomorrow and leave a comment!

Malcolm Campbell, author of  Garden of Heaven,  Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire,  The Sun Singer, and  Worst of Jock Stewart had this to say about my upcoming book: Light Bringer is TYPICAL BERTRAM: plots within plots, multiple characters with multiple agendas, fast moving, more than enough mystery and intrigue for everyone, satisfying conclusion. I really enjoyed Light Bringer and feel privileged seeing a pre-publication copy.

Light Bringer tells the story of  Becka Johnson, who 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?

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No Wisdom, Just Words

November 19, 2010 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been sticking to my self-imposed writing schedule this month, doing a blog a day (sorry to all my subscribers who have been getting an email each day announcing a new post. I promise I’ll go back to my more sporadic posting next month). I’m also racking up the word count on my novel for NaNoWriMo.

I normally don’t obsess over word counts. The way I figure, I either write or I don’t, the scenes are either workable or they’re not. But this month, it’s about the word count. I hoped that by writing so quickly I couldn’t stop to think, I’d stir up my depths, and words of wisdom would automatically appear on the page. Nope. No wisdom yet. Just words.

I did have an odd experience this morning, though. I sat down to write a scene for my grieving woman book, and ended up writing a scene for my poor old work-in-pause, an apocalyptic allegory.

Makes sense, I guess. That novel has been rattling around in my head for years. I started writing it months before I started this blog. Since then, I’ve dealt with three deaths (none of them mine), learned how to use a computer, learned how to navigate the internet, made dozens of online friends, started a dozen blogs (most of which are now clogs — abandoned blogs clogging cyber space), participated in hundreds of writing discussions, gotten three books published, edited those three books plus a fourth (which will be published in the spring), spent hundreds of hours trying to promote those books without actually promoting them (the only thing more annoying that a full email inbox is an inbox full of annoying emails), and  . . . well, you get the point. I’ve been doing everything imaginable except working on my WIP. So today — ta da! A couple of scenes for that book appeared instead of the one I planned to write for my grieving woman book.

I always liked the idea of working on whatever book stood out most in my mind when it time to write each day, but I never tried it before. It might help put the fun back in writing, and who knows what I’ll end up with!

Posted in blogging, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

There’s Plenty of Grief to Spread Around

November 18, 2010 — Pat Bertram

I’m participating in NaNoWriMo, trying to find a new way and new reason to write now that my life has been turned upside down. I never liked wasting my writing — I liked to think that whatever scene I wrote had a place in the story. Writing comes hard for me (even when I’m playing the quantity game rather than the quality one) so writing for writing’s sake was never on my agenda.

This month, though, is all about the words, so it doesn’t matter whether the scene works or not. It doesn’t even matter if I scrap most of the book. It’s important just to write something so that when it comes time to put the story together, I will have bits and pieces to work with.

I always knew the mother and daughter in my story didn’t get along. The mother needs someone who will argue with her, someone who has no sympathy for her grief. I’ve been assuming that the daughter found out about her mother’s cyber affair and accused the mother of being a hypocrite, and that is how I wrote the scene. Now I know that when it comes to grief, there’s enough strife to spread around, so I could probably leave the daughter in the dark about the affair.

Real mothers and daughters (not just storybook mothers and daughters) don’t see eye to eye when it comes to grief. Daughters often feel as if their mothers are carrying on too much, since grown children may come to terms with their loss easier than spouses do. Grown daughters often feel as if they’ve lost both parents when the mother becomes steeped in sorrow. Sometimes the conflict goes the other way, with the mother feeling estranged from the daughter especially if the daugher did not visit the sick father very often. (Not everyone can handle seeing a person dying slowly and in great agony and would prefer to remember the person as healthy and vital.) 

Grief should bring families together, but often it tears them apart. All that anger surfacing. The denial. The recriminations and guilt. Not everyone goes through the stages of grief in the same order. Nor do they go through them at the same time or with the same intensity.

With so much emotion to deal with, it does seem as if the daughter doesn’t need to know about the affair. In fact, I’d just as soon she didn’t come to visit her father while he was dying, at least not toward the end. A friend of the mother’s stopped calling too, which left her to deal with her dying husband without much of a support group. Which is why she had to find it online. Which is where she found her cyberlover.

If the daughter doesn’t know, though, I’m not sure how the mother will explain to the daughter why she’s taking off to meet the guy, but maybe the estrangement between the mother and daughter is such that no explanation is necessary. I’ll guess I’ll have to wait to see what happens when I finish the book.

Posted in culture, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Introducing Rubicon Ranch: A Collaborative Novel

November 15, 2010 — Pat Bertram

I am involved in a wonderful project with eight other Second Wind authors. Rubicon Ranch is an ongoing collaborative novel that we are writing online. It is the story of people whose lives have been changed when a little girl’s body was found in the wilderness near the desert community of Rubicon Ranch. Was it an accident? Or . . . murder! But who would want to kill a child? Everyone in this upscale housing development is hiding something. Everyone has an agenda. Everyone’s life will be different after they have encountered the Rubicon. Rubicon Ranch, that is.

Each of us writers is responsible for the development of our own characters. My character is Melanie Gray. She has traveled the world with her husband, a world-renowned photographer. Together they authored many coffee-table books (she did the writing, he the photographs). One of the books told about mountains of the world, one about rivers, one about oceans, one about forests, and now they have a contract to do deserts. After they rented a house in Rubicon Ranch to begin their in-depth study of the southwestern deserts, he died in a car accident.

Now, not only does she have to deal with the pain of losing her husband and figuring out what she’s going to do for the rest of her life, she needs to fulfill the publishing contract or she’ll have to reimburse the publishers, which she cannot do because the advance is all but spent. Since she is not a photographer, she roams the desert bordering on Rubicon Ranch, taking hundreds of photos, hoping that a few of them will accidentally end up being as brilliant as her husband’s photos always were. She finds the child’s body and takes photos of the scene after calling 911. At first she is a suspect but once the Sheriff has ruled her out, he requests her help in reading the desert and desert-related clues. Still, the sheriff does not trust her completely, thinking she is hiding something.

These chapters have already been posted:

An additional chapter will be posted every Monday. Please join in the adventure — it should be fun! We don’t even know whodunit and won’t know until the end.

Posted in blogging, fiction, internet, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . 3 Comments »

Writers: Be Bold!

November 13, 2010 — Pat Bertram

When writing, it’s important to be decisive. Passive storytelling, passive events, passive motivations, passive characters, passive verbs, all lead to a story without risk or conviction, full of missed opportunities.

Get rid of the unnecessary qualifying words (quite, a bit, a little, some, somewhat, I guess) and non-specific words (someone, everything, huge, handsome, very, really). Such words detract from the authority and decisiveness of your writing.

Too many flashbacks rob a story of drive, give it a sense of aimlessness. So does a lack of focus. Thank heaven for rewrites! The grieving woman in my NaNoWriMo story keeps reflecting on the past, which makes sense, because for her there doesn’t seem to be much of a future. Still, it does seem aimless since she’s thinking instead of doing something. When I rewrite it, I’m going to take away the aimlessness by having the story revolve around a theme to give it focus.

The worst offense for indecisive writing is backing off from a major scene, skipping it entirely, or doing it in flashback. Many new writers don’t feel they are capable of writing dynamic action scenes, so they skim past it and hope readers won’t notice. Or they have a character other than the hero commit the final act, such a man showing up at the end to rescue the heroine in women-in-peril novels. This isn’t as common as it once was, which is good. If the woman is the hero, she needs to put herself on the line during the final scene and not expect someone else to do it for her.

In More Deaths Than One, it might seem as if I passed the buck — the solution to the mystery of Bob’s identity came in a letter rather than his doing the work himself — but the point of the scene was for him to interact with the waitress, not interact with the villain. I wanted to show her emotion on his behalf, show his reaction to her as together they learn the truth. It was the immediacy of their reaction that I needed. How a character feels, reacts, or emotes, is every bit as important as what a character does.

It’s important to trust yourself as a writer. Trust that you will be able to recognize the truth of your scene and what you want to accomplish (as I did with More Deaths Than One). Trust that when it comes time to rewrite and edit, you will know what you need to do to create a dynamic story, and that you will be able to do it.

Most important of all, don’t skirt around the story. Get right to the heart of the action. Be bold.

Posted in writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Amanda, Amanda, Amanda

November 12, 2010 — Pat Bertram

Since writing during this month is about word count, not producing a finished work, I haven’t spent a lot of time or thought on visuals to ground potential readers in the scene, I just jumped in with the character and started writing. During rewrites, I’ll go back and add the setting — it’s not a good idea to start every every scene with the character’s name (though many writers do it). Here are some of the sentences I temporarily used to open new scenes. Poor Amanda.

Amanda opened her husband’s closet and stared at his clothes, wondering if she’d ever be able to get rid of them.

Amanda pushed the grocery cart through the aisles, looking for foods that didn’t remind her of meals with David, but every time she reached for a can, bottle, or box, her stomach clenched. 

Amanda checked her emails.

Amanda went from eating nothing but yogurt to eating cookies, candy, cake, crackers, chips — anything she could grab and eat without cooking or having to sit at a table to dine.

Tired of crying, of holding the shattered pieces of herself together, Amanda hugged David’s robe-wrapped ashes one more time and climbed out of bed.

Amanda stared at her reflection in the mirror. The woman looked familiar, as if she had known her intimately long ago, but the woman seemed to have nothing to do with her todays.

Amanda felt her life, her love for David rewinding.

Amanda checked to make sure the box was empty.

Amanda woke to light seeping in from between the slats of the closed blinds.

Amanda wandered through the house, seeing not the shabby furniture, the shelves overloaded with books, the 20-inch out-of-date television, but the home she and David had created.

Frenzied with grief-induced adrenaline, Amanda yanked open the door to David’s closet and slammed his underwear into a garbage bag.

Posted in life, writing. Tags: , , , , . 6 Comments »

Don’t Mess With a Grieving Woman

November 11, 2010 — Pat Bertram

This is an excerpt from my NaNoWriMo novel:

Amanda was fumbling in her purse for her keys when a voice said, with low-toned menace, “Give me your purse or I will kill you.”

She jerked her head up. Standing between her and her Corolla were two men who looked barely old enough to shave. One jiggled from foot to foot like a child who needed to go to the bathroom, but the other stood firm, his hands steady on a gun.

The scene didn’t seem quite real. Perhaps she’d wandered onto a movie set? She looked around. No cameras. Just the two men standing before her in broad daylight.

Was there such a thing as narrow daylight? She giggled at the thought. Then stopped abruptly. I really am going crazy.

“What’s with you, bitch?” screamed the man with the gun. “Gimme your purse or I’ll kill you.”

“Promise?” Amanda said, clasping her purse to her chest.

The jiggling man lifted his hands and pointed a finger at her like a gun. “Yeah, we’ll kill you, bitch.”

“Okay.” Amanda stared at them, hope blossoming in her chest. God provides, David had been fond of saying. Maybe God was providing a way out of her grief.

The hand with the gun began to waver.

“Do it, man,” yelled the jiggler.

“Yes, do it,” Amanda said softly.

“I’m out of here.” The gunman took off running.

The jiggler danced in place. “Where are you going?”

“She’s crazy. Or a cop.” The words floated back to them from between a pick-up and a mini-van.

The jiggler looked longingly at Amanda’s purse, hesitated, then trotted after his companion.

Posted in fiction, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 5 Comments »

Opening a Vein

November 10, 2010 — Pat Bertram

There’s nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.  ~Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith

I always thought the above was a silly, though poetic thought. If a story really does mean that much to a writer, why are so many books barely adequate? They tell a story, but have no depth, demand no blood in response, give no transfusion.

Even from a writer’s point of view, the idea seems rather overblown. Writing is more of an intellectual activity, at least it always has been for me. But not with this NaNoWriMo project, my grieving woman book. For the first time, I understand the sentiment. I feel as if I am opening a vein while writing the story. Or at least picking at scabs. I thought I was moving right along with my grief, handling it well, but yesterday while writing I hit too close to the truth.

I worried about doing this project, wondering if it was too soon to re-immerse myself into the world of grief, even if only through fictional characters, but I jumped in with both feet. And now here I am, crying again.

I have a hunch that the only way out of this writing dilemma is through, so I’ll continue to open my vein of grief. As Ray Bradbury said, “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

These are the final words of the scene that destroyed my equilibrium:

“Do you need some liquid morphine?” Amanda asked.

David looked up at her. “Is it time?”

“You can have the liquid whenever you want it.”

“I don’t want to go to Hollywood and be an actor.

An actor? Amanda tried to decipher his words. His mind seemed to take convoluted paths when the simpler words wouldn’t come. Then all at once she understood. “You won’t become a drug addict. I promise.” She left the second part of her thought unspoken. You won’t live long enough to become addicted.

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

Healing the Split In Ourselves

November 9, 2010 — Pat Bertram

I’ve spent many hours walking in the desert during the past few months, which has given me plenty of time to contemplate grief, life, death and anything else that comes to mind. One thought that filtered through my mind was the idea that when my mate died, I split in two. The me that shared a life with him is grieving still, while the other me, the one who was born with his death, continues to live and grow. As long as I am in the person of this second me, I do fine — I’m strong, in control of my emotions, looking forward to what comes to me in life. The problem is that I keep slipping over to the other me, the grieving me, and when I do, the grief is as new as it was when it first hit me. The task is to reconnect the two parts — both the grieving me and the new me.

This might seem like dissociative personality disorder, though it’s not really a disorder. It’s how we all deal with life. I don’t remember the name of the person, but a psychologist once hypothesized that there are no true moods. What we think of as moods are different personalities. This natural order becomes a disorder when you lose track of yourself during mood swings or when they cease to be a way of dealing with life and become a way of hiding from life. I don’t know the truth of this, nor do I know the truth of my idea of splitting apart, but my idea feels true. I can almost feel the clunk of the gears as I switch from one mode to the other. I don’t switch as often now, which makes me think I’ll eventually be whole again.

Today, at my grief group meeting, I had a graphic example of how I am moving beyond my grief (at least for the moment. It does swing back and slam me in the gut from time to time).

During these meetings, there is a lesson — a topic — that we discuss before going on to personal updates. One of today’s lessons started out: Grief brings with it a terrible and lonely loss. Instead of acknowledging the sentiment, and contemplating my terrible and lonely loss as I was supposed to, I looked at the words, and said, “No, it doesn’t.”

This brought the meeting to a standstill while everyone stared at me.

“Grief doesn’t bring the loss. Loss brings the grief, ” I said.

More silence. Eventually, they agreed with me, probably to shut me up and get the discussion going again.

The point is, I focused on the words, not on the emotion. Of course, this could be more that I’m in writing mode than that I’m moving on with my life, but I took it as a good sign. Because this is the truth: death brings a terrible and lonely loss. Grief is our reaction to the loss, and ultimately it’s how we learn to heal the rift in ourselves brought about by that loss.

Posted in grief, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 4 Comments »
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