Bertram's Blog

  • About Pat Bertram
  • Archives — All Posts
  • Archives — Grief Posts
  • Archives — Road Trip 2016
  • Free Samples!
  • Pat Bertram is the author  of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One and Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Bertram is also the author of the suspense novels Unfinished, Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare, Light Bringer, Daughter Am I, More Deaths Than One, and A Spark of Heavenly Fire.

  • Bertram’s Books

    • Free Samples!
      • A Spark of Heavenly Fire
      • Bob, The Right Hand of God
      • Daughter Am I
      • Grief: The Great Yearning
      • Light Bringer
      • Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare
      • More Deaths Than One
      • Unfinished
  • Recent Posts

    • Moonflower
    • A Good One
    • Ice Cold Blog
    • From Tiny Things
    • Learning About Roofs
    • Loads Off My Mind
    • Science Says
    • New and Improved
    • Big Sibling
    • Second-Class Mind
  • Top Posts

    • A Good One
    • The Five Major Challenges We Face During the Second Year of Grief
    • Moonflower
    • Ice Cold Blog
    • The Historic Homes of Weatherford, Texas
    • 1000 Days of Grief
    • One Thousand and One Days of Grief
    • Comes the Dawn
    • Always Some Excitement
    • Meeting the Challenges of the Third Year of Grief
  • Categories

    • Adventure
    • being me
    • blogging
    • books
    • culture
    • dealing with old age
    • fiction
    • gardening
    • grief
    • history/myth
    • home
    • house
    • How to
    • internet
    • life
    • photography
    • relationships
    • tarot
    • writing
  • Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 7,916 other followers

Back to Normal

October 15, 2020 — Pat Bertram

Despite one odd reminder of The Bob, my life seems as if it’s back to normal, or as normal as it gets since Jeff died. Now that the library is open again, I’ve been going at least once a week to say hi and check out an armload of books. I’ve made a couple of forays to the historical museum, once to be briefed on a project I’m going to do for them (listening to living history recordings and then turning them into short presentations for various exhibits) and once for an Art Guild meeting. The meeting was fun — it’s been months since I was able to attend a meeting. At first, they stopped the meetings because we couldn’t plan and prepare for any guild projects, then when the meetings began again, I was working.

Everyone was there when I arrived, and when they excitedly said hello, I brandished my very elegant hat and swept a flourishing bow. Someone mentioned that it seemed as if I were a star. Of course, I agreed.

I’ve also met a new resident (an artist/musician from Austin), heard about an artist from New York who moved here to open a studio, and learned that as of now, there are no houses for sale.

Big, big changes for such a tiny town! Apparently, I slipped into the door of affordable houses before it could slam shut behind me, Or, it could be that the door had been closing all along, and it waited for me to come before it latched itself.

Next week, with any luck, my contractor will come and continue working on my various projects. He’d planned to come on Tuesday, but the gas company had the alley closed off and dug up to install new lines.

Despite all this seeming activity, I mostly spend time by myself, read, skim articles on the internet, play games on my computer, walk when the weather and I agree on suitability. And do my daily tarot card study.

Today’s card, the same one I got a couple of weeks ago, warned me about the folly of worrying about things I cannot change, and to salvage what peace I can from the chaos around me. Good advice and so needed. Although I normal don’t pay a lot of attention to politics, I’ve been worrying about the changes this next election will bring no matter who is elected, and yet, from the most recent spates of free speech suppression, I realize the changes are already here, incubating in the schools and the unformed minds of the young. If the legacy press as well as sites such as Twitter and Facebook can suppress the truth about one candidate’s son’s graft and the lies that were told about the candidate selling us out to China, if kids can be expelled from school for sharing conservative points of view (non-incendiary points of view, I might add), if dictionaries can change their definitions overnight to turn a common phrase into one that is verboten, then we’re lost. And if we’re lost, then there’s nothing I can do about it except make sure I remain found.

What’s that Rudyard Kipling poem? Something about keeping my head when all about me are losing theirs and being lied [to] but not deal in lies . . . Well, then, there would be one person in the world who is not a problem.

So, normalcy. My sort of normalcy.

As for the odd reminder of The Bob — I am working for a woman who has a nurse who works for a woman who belongs to an agency where an employee tested positive for The Bob. Not close at all, really, but too close for complacency.

Hmm. I might have to stop calling the Chinese virus “The Bob.” I wouldn’t want people to think my new book Bob, The Right Hand of God has anything to do with The Bob flu.

And yay! We’re getting closer to the October 20th publication date every day.

If you are planning to get a Kindle version of my new novel, Bob, The Right Hand of God you can now pre-order on Amazon, and the minute the book is published, the book will appear in your Kindle. Click here to purchase: Kindle version of Bob, The Right Hand of God.

If you wish to buy a paperback copy, click here: Bob, The Right Hand of God, sign up for email notifications, and Amazon will let you know the minute it is for sale. 

I truly hope this book will amuse you, entertain you, make you think and perhaps even dream a bit about what it would be like if God decided to recreate the world. I especially hope the book sells big. Admittedly, that would catapult me out of my recent return to normalcy, but that’s the sort of change I could go for.

Posted in culture, life. Tags: Bob The Right Hand of God, dictionaries changing definitions overnight, Pre-order kindle book on Amazon, sign up for email notification on Amazon, suppression of free speech, tarot card, What if God decided to recreate the world, worried about the election. Leave a Comment »
Proudly powered by WordPress
  • New Release!

  • “I am Bob, the Right Hand of God. As part of the galactic renewal program, God has accepted an offer from a development company on the planet Xerxes to turn Earth into a theme park. Not even God can stop progress, but to tell the truth, He’s glad of the change. He’s never been satisfied with Earth. For one thing, there are too many humans on it. He’s decided to eliminate anyone who isn’t nice, and because He’s God, He knows who you are; you can’t talk your way out of it as you humans normally do.”

  • Grief Books By Pat Bertram

    Available online wherever books and ebooks are sold.

  • Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One debunks many established beliefs about what grief is, explains how it affects those left behind, and shows how to adjust to a world that no longer contains the loved one. “It is exactly what folk need to read who are grieving.”(Leesa Heely Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator ).

    Click here to buy Grief: The Inside Story

  • Grief: The Great Yearning is not a how-to but a how-done, a compilation of letters, blog posts, and journal entries Pat Bertram wrote while struggling to survive her first year of grief. This is an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.

  • Other books by Pat Bertram

    Available online wherever books and ebooks are sold.

  • While sorting through her deceased husband’s effects, Amanda is shocked to discover a gun and the photo of an unknown girl who resembles their daughter. After dedicating her life to David and his vocation as a pastor, the evidence that her devout husband kept secrets devastates Amanda. But Amanda has secrets of her own. . .

  • When Pat’s adult dance classmates discover she is a published author, the women suggest she write a mystery featuring the studio and its aging students. One sweet older lady laughingly volunteers to be the victim, and the others offer suggestions to jazz up the story. Pat starts writing, and then . . . the murders begin.

  • Thirty-seven years after being abandoned on the doorstep of a remote cabin in Colorado, Becka Johnson returns to try to discover her identity, but she only finds more questions. Who has been looking for her all those years? And why are those same people interested in fellow newcomer Philip Hansen?

  • DAI

    When twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents -- grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born -- she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted them dead.

    A Spark of Heavenly Fire

    In quarantined Colorado, where hundreds of thousands of people are dying from an unstoppable, bio-engineered disease, investigative reporter Greg Pullman risks everything to discover the truth: Who unleashed the deadly organism? And why?

    More Deaths Than One

    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?

  • Bertram's Sites

    • Bertram’s Website
    • Book Marketing Floozy
    • Dragon My Feet
    • Mini Fiction: 100 Words
    • Pat Bertram Introduces . . .
    • Wayword Wind
  • Blogroll

    • Dale Cozort
    • James Rafferty
    • L. V. Gaudet
    • Leesis Ponders
    • Malcolm R. Campbell
    • Mickey Hoffman
    • Sam Sattler, Book Chase
    • Sheila Deeth
    • The Editor's Blog
    • The Write Type
  • Archives

  • Meta

    • Register
    • Log in
    • Entries feed
    • Comments feed
    • Blog at WordPress.com.
  • Follow Following
    • Bertram's Blog
    • Join 7,916 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Bertram's Blog
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...