Bertram's Blog

Grief: Blindsided by Lilacs

April 18, 2011 — Pat Bertram

Who knew I would find lilacs in this desert community?

My life mate — my soul mate — loved lilacs. We once saw a house with lilacs lining the long driveway, and he wanted to live there, but we couldn’t afford such luxury. Shortly after we moved to the house where we were to spend the rest of his life, we dug up the lilacs that blocked a gate and replanted them around the perimeter of the yard. When we moved to that house, it was like living in an aquarium — there was absolutely no privacy. By the time he died, it was such a lush environment, it was like living in a terrarium — and there was total privacy. And the gate was once again blocked with lilacs. Apparently, we’d left just enough rootstock that the bushes grew back.

We planted all sorts of bushes and trees in addition to those lilacs, and the thrill of watching our seedlings grow to adulthood was another thing we shared in a twinned life that was all about sharing. It should have been hard leaving the place, but I was in such grief over his death that one more loss didn’t really make much difference to my sorrow.

I still don’t miss the place, or not that much. A place is just a place. I am homesick, but homesick for him. He was home. I miss him. I miss our life together. If he were to call and tell me he was waiting for me, I’d go to him wherever he was — mountains or desert, city or country, there I would be. But he’s never going to call. For months after I came here to the desert to try to figure out what comes next, I’d listen for the phone, hoping he would call and tell me that he was well and I could come home. That feeling is finally fading, but the loss of that feeling just makes me sadder — he is gone and I have to deal with the vicissitudes of life by myself.

I have minor upsurges of grief a couple of times a day, but I try to be upbeat. I have a new book published. I am getting new clothes, trying to reinvent myself from the outside in. I have made new friends (mostly people who have lost their mates. It’s amazing how quickly you can get to know someone when you cry together). I’ve been handling myself well.

And then . . .

Today, strolling around the neighborhood (it was too windy to walk in the desert), I happened to smell lilacs, and instantly, I was back in full-fledged grief mode. People keep telling me one never gets over grief, you just learn to live with it, and that appears to be true. Grief seems to lurk in dark places, ready to gush forth when one is least expecting it. And I was not expecting it today. How could I have known I would encounter lilacs growing in this desert community?

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: coping with grief, death, desert, grief, home, lilacs, loss, loss of a lifemate, loss of a soulmate, surviving grief, upsurge of grief. 9 Comments »

Wonderful Review of Light Bringer

April 17, 2011 — Pat Bertram

I just received the most wonderful review of Light Bringer, my speculative fiction thriller. You have to love a review that talks about the author’s “broad knowledge and brilliant imagination.” The author, in this case, being me.

The reviewer, Sandra Shwayder Sanchez from BookPleasures.com, also says: “The plot, replete with secret sinister underground corporate experiments, extraterrestrial creatures, a couple of budding romances, could have been the stuff of trendy comic books or yet another television series but the author’s excellent characterizations make it real, original, the stuff of literary fiction. Stylistically the author is adept at moving between lyrical poetic descriptions of nature, wryly funny dialogue and perfectly paced suspenseful writing.” Yep, she’s talking about me again. Wow.

I can’t tell you more because of copyright infringements, but you can go to Book Pleasures to read the whole review: Pat Bertram’s Light Bringer Reviewed By Sandra Shwayder Sanchez of Bookpleasures.com

To download the first 20% of Light Bringer free at smashwords.com, click here: Light Bringer

To read the first chapter of Light Bringer online, click here: Light Bringer

Posted in books, fiction. Tags: Book Pleasures, Light Bringer, Light Bringer review, Sandra Shwayder Sanchez. 3 Comments »

On Writing: Tell, Don’t Show

April 16, 2011 — Pat Bertram

In Description, Monica Wood commented: Don’t enslave yourself to showing. “Show don’t tell” is a guideline, not a rule. Sometimes telling is more effective and thrilling as long as the prose is interesting and engaging.”

As a reader, one of my pet hates is when one character is talking to another, and they retell the entire story up to that point, so as a writer, when I get to a place where one character has to tell another what the reader already knows, I write something like, “and Sam told Sally about the woman who tried to kill him and how he ran off instead of trying to find out who it was.” Avoiding repetition is one reason telling is so much better than showing at times. Makes the story move faster. Might not be immortal prose, but it moves the story along.

The worst offenders of the tell, don’t show suggestion are lawyer books. They spend the first half of the book laying out the story, then the second half repeating that story in a courtroom setting. If a reader can skip a whole slew of chapters and not miss a moment of the story, the writer has not done his or her job. If the writer wants to do the courtroom scene, then make sure what is shown is new. Otherwise, simply tell what went on in a few short sentence and get to the good stuff.

Another time telling is better than showing is if a scene has no conflict, no surprises, no twists. If a character sets out to do something and accomplishes it without any problems, then showing is a waste. Just tell it. Don’t build up to . . . nothing.

A way to know if it’s better to show or to tell is to decide what you want to accomplish with a scene. If the immediacy of a scene is important, show it. If the reactions of a character who was not involved in the scene are most important, then it’s possible to have one character tell the other what happened and then show the character’s emotion.

When writing More Deaths Than One, I worried that I was cheating readers by doing the big disclosure at the end via letter (in other words, telling), but the importance of the scene lay not in finding out the truth of who Bob was but in the different ways Bob and Kerry reacted to the truth. It was about them and their relationship more than the deeds themselves. It was also about the emotion of the person writing the letter and how that emotion bound all of them together. So basically, the letter was all about telling rather than showing the disclosure, and showing rather than telling the emotion it evoked.

When do you tell instead of show? (I mean you personally, not writers in general.) How do you make it effective and thrilling?

Posted in books, writing. Tags: characters, description, emotion, Monica Wood, scene, scene goal, show don't tell, showing, tell don't show, telling, writing. 2 Comments »

Lincoln, the Quintessential Politician

April 12, 2011 — Pat Bertram

People ask me how much truth is in my books, and I have to admit that I base a lot of my story on little known facts (or those that once were little known). Truth is not only stranger than fiction at times, it’s often more compelling. Yesterday I posted a bloggery about the history and myths of the American Civil War that were included in my new novel Light Bringer, and today I’m posting some of the data supporting the claim that the civil war was about preserving the Union at all costs.

In his inaugural address, Lincoln said, “Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accesson of a Republican administration thier property and their peace and personal security are to to be endangered. I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it now exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

in 1861, after the war began, Lincoln said, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the union without freeing any slave, I would do it.”

In a debate with Senator Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said, “I am not nor every have been in favor of bringing about the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or or jurors of Negroes.”

G. Edward Griffin, in The Creature from Jekyll Island, wrote: “When conscription was initiated by Lincoln in 1863, people in the north were outraged. They protested. Federal troops eventually had to be called in to put down anti-draft riots in Ohio and Illinois. In New York City, mobs stormed the draft offices and set fire to the buildings. The riots continued for four days and were suppressed only when the Federal Army of the Potomac was ordered to fire into crowds. Over a thousand civilians were killed or wounded. They also imprisoned protesters without formal charges or trial. Thus, under the banner of opposing slavery, American citizens of the north not only were killed on the streets of their own cities, they were forced into military combat against their will and thrown into prison without due process of law. In other words, free men were enslaved so that slave could be made free. Even if the pretended crusade (against slavery) had been genuine, it was a bad exchange.”

Bruce Catton wrote: “Technically, the Emancipation Proclamation was absurd. It proclaimed freedom for all slaves in precisely those areas where the United States could not make its authority effective, and allowed slavery to continue in slave states under Federal control.” It was strategy, pure and simple, and doomed the South to defeat, because no European government could takes sides against a country that was trying to destroy slavery.

In 1921, Otto Bismark, Chancellor of Germany, admitted: “The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. The bankers were afraid that the United States, if it remained in one block and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over Europe and the world. Of course, the ‘inner circle’ of finance, the voice of the Rothschilds prevailed. They saw an opportunity for prodigious booty if they could substitute two feeble democracies, burdened with debt to the financiers, inplace of a vigorous republic sufficient unto herself. Therefore, they sent their emissaries into the field to exploit the question of slavery and to drive a wedge between the two parts of the union. The rupture between the North and South became inevitable; the masters of European finance employed all their forces to bring it about and turn it to their advantage.”

The South lost, but so did the North. We no longer own our dollars — world financial institutions own us . . . oops. I mean our money.

Posted in culture, history/myth. Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Bruce Catton, conscription, draft dodgers in the Civil War, emacipation, Emancipation Proclamation, European financiers, Federal Army of the Potomac, G. Edward Griffin, Otto Bismark, slavery issue, The Creature from Jekyll Island. 4 Comments »

Myth and History of The American Civil War

April 11, 2011 — Pat Bertram

Light Bringer is being touted as science fiction, and I am exploiting that by guest blogging at a science fiction blog, Grasping for the Wind, but the truth is, my new novel is just as much history (or alternate history, if you believe what you were taught) as it is science fiction.

Light Bringer includes a couple of scenes where a group of conspiracy theorists argue about who is really orchestrating world events, who the secret leader(s) is/are, and how far back that secret leadership extends. The story hints that this so-called conspiracy can be traced to our very roots as humans. If one follows the trail of secrecy to ancient history, especially the history we call myth, this “leadership” takes on the appearance of science fiction. But is Light Bringer science? Or myth? Or history?

Midst my characters who might or might not be fully human, midst all the technological talk of UFOs and IFO (identified flying objects), midst talk of additional planets in our solar system and of the origins of human life, are passages of history, such as this excerpt culled from a meeting of my conspiracy buffs:

“Emery,” Rena said, “what did Scott mean earlier about the truth setting you free?”

Brian, Faye, and Scott groaned.

Rena frowned. “What? What did I say?”

Brian smiled at her, as he had been doing most of the evening. “Nothing. It’s just that any mention of it sets Emery off, and we’ve heard the lecture a thousand times.”

“I don’t lecture,” Emery said loftily.

Hoots of laughter greeted the remark.

Rena turned to Philip. “Do you know what Scott meant about the truth setting Emery free?”

Philip nodded. “He used to be an American History professor, but they fired him for teaching the whole truth instead of sticking to the text book.”

“I don’t get it. Isn’t history about truth?”

Realizing that all eyes were focused on him, Philip squirmed in his seat. “It should be, but it isn’t. For example, Emery taught that states’ rights was the main issue of the Civil War, and that’s frowned on in today’s political climate.”

Fatigue etched Emery’s face. “They accused me of being a racist because I said Lincoln used slavery as a tool to get people to fight an unpopular war, and they called me a conspiracy theorist because I taught that the war extended beyond our borders—part of a world-wide pattern.

“Modern education consists of subject matter broken into small and separate units of study to keep the students from seeing the big picture, and I didn’t agree with that. The sweep of history can only be seen if you’re looking at the big picture.

“In a single decade, 1861 to 1871, the serfs were emancipated in Russia, Italy was unified, Canada was unified, the German Empire was proclaimed, the Austria-Hungary Dual Monarchy was established, Thailand was reorganized, the Meiji Restoration in Japan gave power to a western oligarchy, and Das Kapital, a philosophy for the New World Order, was published. Global movements of such magnitude do not rise independently of one another. Someone, or a group of someones, rebuilt Europe along with large chunks of the rest of the world.

“Against this panorama of history, you can see the truth about the American Civil War. It was all about states’ rights. Were we to remain a federation of powerful independent states loosely unified by a weak federal government as was originally intended, or were we to become a nation of weak states dependant on and subservient to a strong central government that could be more easily controlled by the international power elite?

“The irony is that by doing whatever necessary to keep the states unified, Lincoln managed to destroy the very nation he tried to preserve.”

The above is a simplistic explantion, of course, since a discussion about legal plunder didn’t really fit in this novel. According to G. Edward Griffin in The Creature from Jekyll Island, Northern politicians had passed protective legislation putting import duties on industrial products, forcing the south to buy from the north at higher prices than they were paying to their European sources. Europe retaliated by curtailing the purchase of American cotten. That hurt the south even more, and they wanted out. Moreover, a divided USA would be susceptible to European expansion. Says Griffin, “The issue of slavery was but a ploy. America had become the target in a ruthless game of world economics and politics.”

Myth? Or history? Does it matter? You already know what you think, and what I think doesn’t make a bit of difference.

Posted in books, culture, history/myth. Tags: 1861-1871, Abraham Lincoln, alternate history, Civil War, conspiracy, G. Edward Griffin, slavery, states' rights, The Creature from Jekyll Island. 2 Comments »

Guesting at Grasping for the Wind!

April 11, 2011 — Pat Bertram

I am a guest blogger at John Ottinger’s Science Fiction Fantasy News and Reviews blog, Grasping for the Wind. Please stop by and say hi. It will be nice to have company. It’s my first blog appearance for Light Bringer, my first as a science fiction writer (though to be honest, I’m not sure I am).

I never set out to write science fiction, but a funny thing happened on the way to writing Light Bringer, which was conceived as a thriller debunking UFO myths. I was reading everything I could get my hands on about UFOs and UFO technology, when I came across Zecharia Sitchin’s idea of the twelfth planet. . . .

That’s how my guest post begins. Click here to read the rest of the article.

Thank you!! Your support has always been appreciated, especially now as I am beginning a new phase of my life.

Posted in blogging, writing. Tags: Grasping for the Wind, guest blogger, John Ottinger, science fiction, Zecharia Sitchin. Leave a Comment »

Grief Update: A Yearning as Deep as the Black Canyon

April 9, 2011 — Pat Bertram

I haven’t been writing much about grief lately. Partly I’ve been trying to keep an upbeat attitude so I can focus on promoting my new book, Light Bringer, which was published on the anniversary of my soul mate’s death, and partly I haven’t wanted to admit how much his being gone still hurts. It seems a bit pathetic since there are so many earthshaking and earthquaking events happening in the world today, and it has been more than a year since he died (a year and fifteen days to be exact). I am doing okay, but I still feel his absence from the earth, still miss him, still yearn for one more word or one more smile.

Fridays and Saturdays are particularly hard. He died at 1:40 am on a Friday night (which made the actually date a Saturday) and my body can’t decide which day is the right time to mourn, so my upsurge of grief spans both days. I say my body can’t decide, because there is an element of physicality to grief, especially when it comes to the death of someone who shared more than three decades of your life. You feel his absence in your cells, in your marrow, in your blood. I can sometimes feel (or imagine I feel) his vibes still surrounding the things he used, the things we shared. I find myself stupidly hugging a dish before I use it, remembering him eating off that plate.

Most of our stuff is packed away because of my temporary living arrangements. Yesterday, I felt a moment of panic when I realized that eventually I would unpack and begin using our household goods, and I would feel his energy permeating them. Usage will dissipate that energy, but for now, it’s still there. Perhaps when I need those items, the psychic remnants of him will bring me comfort, the way using a few of our things bring me comfort now, but it could just as easily set off a whole new strata of pain.

But I won’t — can’t — think of that. It still takes almost everything I have just to get through the days, to concentrate on this day. I can live today. What is one day without him when we had so many? I am most at peace when I forget that he is dead, when somewhere in the far reaches of my mind I feel that he is back in the house we shared, waiting for me. It’s not that I can’t live without him. I can. It’s that the world is such an alien place now that he is gone. I still remember how right the world felt when I met him. I had no expectations of having any more of him than that first relationship of customer (me) and storeowner (him), but back then, just knowing a person such as he existed made the world a more radiant place. When he died, he took the radiance with him.

It’s sort of odd, but I can’t identify that specific quality of radiance he brought to my life. He was sick for so very long, we gradually untwinned our lives, he to dying, me to aloneness. And yet, that connection, that depth, that radiance remained until the end. In his last weeks we even found a renewed closeness, a renewed commitment, but before that, we endured months, maybe years of unhappiness.

And, childishly, I am still unhappy. I want what I cannot have. I try to find in myself the radiance (the center? the heart? the home? — whatever it was that he gave me). I will need that to keep me going through the coming decades, and I fear I am not enough. At times, I think I have depths enough to plumb, other times those depths seem an illusion, an opaqueness that masks my shallows.

But what isn’t shallow is how much I miss him. That yearning is as deep as the Black Canyon.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: Black Canyon, coping with grief, death, grief, illness, loss of a soulmate, mourning, yearning. 10 Comments »

On Writing: Ruling Passions

April 5, 2011 — Pat Bertram

I once read the whole of Danielle Steele’s oeuvre as a research project. I wanted to see what in her books made her so popular. It was the most excruciatingly painful reading experience of my life. Her writing style is surprisingly amateurish, her characters are not well drawn, she tells and explains instead of showing, and she repeats herself as if she can’t remember from page to page what she’s already said.

But I did learn her secret. Her characters are passionate. They never like or dislike anything. They love and hate, but mostly love. “She ate a piece of cherry pie, and she loved it.” “They had sex, and they loved it.”

She also picks issues people are passionate about, and wraps her story around that, so not only do her characters have a ruling passion, so do her readers. When passions are all consuming, as they often are in her books, they create collateral damage. Maybe that is what makes her characters compelling — readers keep waiting for the train wreck.

And yet . . . all-consuming passions are not the only way to tell a story. Most of my characters aren’t particularly passionate about their ruling passions, but they do have strong motivations, such as a need to discover the truth, whether their particular truth or a more universal truth.

In A Spark of Heavenly Fire, all Kate wants is a good night’s sleep, but first she has to deal with the death of her husband, and then she has to contend with a state-wide epidemic. Although the forces that drive her are fairly tame, many of the characters in that book have stronger passions. Jeremy is consumed with getting out of quarantined Colorado. Pippi is first passionate about Jeremy, then passionate about escaping with him, and finally passionate about returning home. Dee is passionate about helping the homeless. Greg is consumed with the need for truth. The villain is passionate about his deadly little organism. Turns out the only non-passionate person is my heroine! Yet the story revolves around her.

In How to Write a Damn Good Mystery, James N. Frey tells us that our main characters, both the hero and the villain, should have a ruling passion. Alexander Pope, perhaps the first person to use the term “ruling passion,” wrote: “The ruling passion conquers reason still.”

Seems like an interesting conundrum here — a character must have a ruling passion, and a character should be smart (or at least working to the best of his or her abilities) yet the ruling passion overrides that. Should make for a good inner conflict.

(This article was compiled from comments I made during a live chat. If you’d like to see the entire discussion, you can find it here: Ruling Passions — No Whine, Just Champagne Discussion #146)

Posted in books, writing. Tags: A Spark of Heavenly Fire, Alexander Pope, Danielle Steele, How to Write a Damn Good Mystery, James N. Frey, motivations, ruling passion, writing. 2 Comments »

A Life-Long Quest for Truth

April 4, 2011 — Pat Bertram

When I was eleven years old, I overheard my brother ask our dad if he believed in Atlantis, and something inside of me leapt with recognition. I knew, without any doubt, that there had once been a wondrous place called Atlantis, though I hadn’t any idea what or where that place might be. The very word seemed like a beacon, illuminating an incredible and mysterious past. Until then, I’d never heard of Atlantis, never even had a concept of lost civilizations, and yet, there it was . . . that instantaneous knowing.

(This recognition happened only one other time in my life, and that was when I met the man who would share more than three decades of my life, but that came years later, and only has a bearing on this story because he also shared my need for truth.)

I seemed to have an innate belief that great truths (and even lesser ones) were being kept from us, though this belief could have stemmed from my being a child, and much is kept from children, but still, I wanted to know. And so started a life-long quest for truth — the real truth, not the sketchy half-truths and self-serving lies we are taught to accept as fact, both in school and on the news.

There have been so many mysteries to study and to ponder: UFOs; the Kennedy assassinations; mysterious places such as the pyramids and Stonehenge; ancient, lost, and forgotten civilizations; the origins of mythology; historical truth; the war on gold; alchemy; who our true leaders are.

And there were many surprises. For example, when I first started delving into mysteries, I came across the idea of continental drift, that all the continents had once been connected and had drifted apart. At the time, it was only discussed in esoteric circles, because the scientific community did not recognize the validity of the theory. Years later, when revisiting the topic, I discovered that the theory of continental drift had become standard.

Another surprise came from the study of “The New World Order.” Those words have been bandied about for centuries, sort of a slogan for conspiracy researchers who were aware that the goal of many secret groups throughout the ages has been to develop a one world government — a new world order — and then George Bush used that very phrase. Shocked the heck out of me. But it shouldn’t have. Many once secret groups, such as the Council for Foreign Relations, have become mainstream.

But the biggest surprise came when all those mysteries, those fields of study began to converge. Some of the players in the Kennedy assassination drama, such as Guy Bannister and Fred Crisman, showed up in UFO literature. Modern technologies began to mirror mythological technology, such as plasma guns, fusion torches, weather manipulation.

The past emerged into the present, science merged into history and politics, and a larger picture took shape. Whether this big picture has any truth to it or is simply the result of a mind seeking patterns where none exist, doesn’t really matter, at least not to me, not any more. I never had an emotional stake in the resolution of the mysteries. I simply wanted to know the truth.

It does make a great story, though, the pattern of truth I found. At least, I hope it does. This lifetime of research into arcane subjects is the foundation of Light Bringer, my newest novel.

As for Atlantis, I have no idea if such a place by that name existed, but there is no doubt that civilization did not begin with us, that there have been many civilizations that rose to prominence and disappeared, leaving only traces of stone behind.

Posted in culture, history/myth, life. Tags: Atlantis, conspiracies, continental drift, Council for Foreign Relations, Fred Crisman, Kennedy Assination, Light Bringer, lost civilizations, New World Order, the big picture, UFOs. Leave a Comment »

On Writing: Family

April 2, 2011 — Pat Bertram

If a character has well-defined family members — that never-satisfied mother, that demanding great-aunt, that silent father — then we authors don’t have to create that character. The family does it for us.

The family of Mary Stuart in Daughter Am I truly helped create her. When Mary found out that she was the heir of grandparents she never knew existed, she had to find out who they were so she could find out who she was. Once I set the family dynamic, that determined the character of Mary. Her father was close-mouthed, wouldn’t talk about why he disowned his parents or why he told his daughter they were dead. He also bonded more with his daughter’s fiancé than with her. The mother seemed to be mostly a shadow of the father. Because of this, it was inevitable that Mary got engaged to the guy they liked, and it was also inevitable that she dumped him when she became her own person. And even that “own person” was created by family — turns out she was just like her dead grandfather, with his set of values, a desire to build his own life despite social conventions, and an intense loyalty. Even her “adopted” family helped create her. As she followed her quest to learn about her grandparents, she accumulated a crew of travel companions — all friends of her grandparents — who become a new family of sorts.

Rubicon Ranch, the collaborative novel I’m doing with some other Second Wind authors, is all about family. The birth family who’s been searching for the girl and who fall prey to con artists, the couple who wanted a child so bad that they kidnapped one, the old man who suspects his son of the crime, the woman who suspects her father, the boy who is being abused by his father, the sleepwalker who is still haunted by his dead sister, the woman who is grieving for her dead philandering husband. It’s interesting how the theme of family has evolved in such an extemporaneous project. We never planned this theme, but each of us separately chose to deal somehow with family skeletons.

The family of Bob in More Deaths Than One certainly helped create him, especially since that was the basis of the story. He comes home from an 18-year sojourn in Southeast Asia to discover that the mother be buried before he left is dead again. He goes to her funeral and sees his brother, but they had never been close, so he doesn’t make contact. Bob also sees himself, but a doppelganger isn’t really family, so it doesn’t have any part of this discussion.

Lack of family also helps define characters.

In my just-published novel Light Bringer, two of my main characters found each other when they were searching for their birth parents. Those characters were truly a product of their upbringing and their birth. That is the whole crux of the story — who the characters are and why they were birthed.

How does your character’s family make her who she is? (Or make him who he is.) How do they bind her? How do they set her free? Do they add to her conflicts, either internal or external, or do they help her on her life’s journey?