December

December!  Another year almost over. The holiday season in the United States has already started, as Thanksgiving was a week ago today.

This final month of 2022 will be busy and hectic for many people.  Gifts to buy, wrap and mail.  Decorations to display.  Events to attend.

This final month of 2022 will be quiet and lonely for many people.  Empty seats at a table.  Estrangement from family and friends.

There are many holidays in religious and secular traditions that occur in this last month of the Gregorian calendar.  I am most familiar with the Christian holiday of Christmas.  Christmas celebrates the birth of the Christ child, the Savior, who came to human form to deliver humanity from their sins, and open the gates of the kingdom of Heaven.  Jesus, the Christ child, is also called the Prince of Peace.

Peace.  Whatever your religious tradition, or lack of religious tradition, peace is a wonderful concept.  Freedom from hostility and violence.  Societal friendship and harmony.

As December progresses, and you manage the challenges this holiday season brings for you, I wish you peace.  I encourage you to seek peace.  To extend grace.  To forgive.  To not give unkind motivations to people for their actions.

It is often said and written to be kind because you do not know what someone else is going through, and that is always true.

In this month of December, the challenges that face people can feel bigger and harder, so that kindness is more important than ever.

If we can all try as hard as possible to not feed discord, or disharmony, or anger, maybe we can make this December just a little bit easier and kinder for someone who really needs a break.

And maybe, just maybe, spread more peace and harmony.

I can't think of a better way to end 2022 than to make December the most peaceful and kindest month of the year.

Hello, It's me

 It has been a long time since I have created a blog post.  I've been super busy with writing lately, which is very good.  I am still working on "Broken Road", the second book in the "As It Could Be" series, and I have written and published a Christmas book related to the "Bayou Beni" series, "Marguerite's Christmas Project".

There is an inevitable letdown after a book is published.  There is so much energy invested in the processes of writing, editing, proofreading, and publishing.  When the book is released, there is tremendous anxiety about how it will sell, if it will sell, if it will be reviewed, what the reviews will say, etc.

My books never sell well.  I don't market aggressively, and I know that is a necessary component of strong sales.  What I know and what I feel are not congruent much of the time.  When my book sales are low and slow, impostor syndrome attacks.

Impostor syndrome was overwhelming me today, so I did some self care.  I checked my year-to-date numbers.  I have sold 73 books so far this year.  I have 5,054 Kindle Page reads through Kindle Unlimited.  My episodic novel on Kindle Vella has had 135 episodes read.  Those numbers outperform last year.  

I have eight novels and one episodic novel published.  I am not an imposter.  I am a writer, an author.  I may not have great sales, or make money from my books, but people read them and enjoy them.  And that is a very good thing, and something to be proud of.

Always learning something new

My current work in progress is the second book in my historical series, "As It Could Be".  All of my books start out as an idea.  Then the idea becomes a story.  The story gets populated by characters.  I know where my story begins and ends, but I'm never sure of the exact path the story will take to get from beginning to end.

Every once in a while, a character that I imagined as tangential becomes important.  That has happened to me with my current book, "Broken Road".  There is a character that I have come to love that will be very sad by the necessary path the story takes.  I don't want her to suffer, but suffering is inevitable in life, so my little Giselle will have a rough time.

I'm trying to figure out how to stay true to the story, not invest too much time in a character that is not essential to the story, and yet not just abandon Giselle as if she is not important.

Because one of my guiding beliefs in life and in my writing is everyone is important.  We are all God's children.  He loves all of us.  In order to stay true to myself and my writing, I have to figure out how to navigate this, and frankly, it is tying me in knots right now.

 

Trying something completely different

While I am waiting for the copyright on my finished seventh book, "Merciful Blessings", I have tried something completely new for me.

I am working on a serial novel, titled "Fractured Reality".  It is written in first person, under the pen name "Leah O'Mara".  It is paranormal science fiction.  Here is the cover art.

I'm not going to file for copyright protection before publishing it via Kindle Vella, Kindle Direct Publishing platform for serial novels.  

I promised myself I would finish the entire series before publishing the first installment, and I have finished eight of the ten chapters.  I really want to publish the first chapter, but I have to keep my promise to myself.

Here is the description of the novel:

Regina Falkes was an ordinary woman living an ordinary life until she had a stroke at age forty-nine. The traumatic brain injury created the ability for Regina to wake up in different universes. The date was always correct, and Regina was always Regina, but the decisions she and her loved ones had made throughout her life had been made differently, so the present day was always a mystery to be solved, an unfamiliar landscape to be navigated.

I have no idea what to expect when I publish it, I don't even really know how the Kindle Vella program works, but it was time to try something new, and this is it.  Fingers crossed it turns out to be a good thing.

A crisis of empathy

The single thing that frightens me most about the state of America is this.  We are in a crisis of empathy.

No matter what the crisis, no matter whose life has been taken, or changed irrevocably, no matter how brutal the carnage, too many Americans just don't care enough to give something up to help make it better.

I don't know what happened to the nation that used ration coupons and collected scrap metal and grease and rubber.  To the women that drew lines on the back of their legs because their were no stockings.  To the families that all had someone at risk to defeat the Axis forces.

Now, we live in a nation that reveres guns and ammunition.  No number of children, or nurses, or doctors, or teachers, or grandmothers, or anyone dead from the gun violence epidemic in America will make them consider a change that might impact them and their 'rights'.

This is great news for the people who can't put their cell phones down.  The gun deaths of people less than twenty outnumber the motor vehicles deaths for the first time in recorded history, so the motor vehicle deaths caused by cell phone use and distracted driving don't matter either.

I will never understand how any tragedy can be trivialized to the point that a person doesn't care. I cry and cry.  I become paralyzed with grief with the news of the horrific deaths and disabilities caused daily by violence and negligence.

In my books, empathy is a guiding emotion.  My characters feel terrible when anyone suffers, and do their best to relieve whatever suffering they can.  And when someone suffers, everyone prays and tries to help.

I believe one of the purposes of fiction is to allow us to meet people we can never know, and to see a world different from the one we live in.  My solemn hope is that by meeting people in fiction that you would never meet in person, all of us become more tolerant and accepting of the stranger, believing that we share more with our neighbors than just the air we breathe.

The other hope is that fiction inspires us to become more than we are.  More like a character that we admire in a work of fiction.  More loving, more forgiving, more merciful.

I have been taking great solace in my writing in these turbulent times.  I keep praying that somehow I will be able to make a difference.  Help someone learn empathy.  Help someone appreciate sacrifice for the greater good.  Help someone cope with the ugliness around us by showing them a beautiful loving community.

And I pray that empathy and sacrifice will become core values that everyone embraces for the good of each other.  I don't know any other way to navigate through this darkness.

A valuable lesson

 One of my favorite things about learning to write fiction is how much writing has taught me.  I am not a fan of first-person narrative, so my books are all written in third-person.

To effectively write a third-person narrative I have to immerse myself in the character I am writing about.  I have to understand what motivates them, what makes them happy, what makes them sad, what frustrates them, and what angers them.

I was still very early in my writing vocation when I realized that my characters were so strongly formed in my mind that they would not let me write a story line that did not 'fit' with their character.  I have reworked story lines and scenes because it feels like my character told me they would never react or act in a certain way.

Where is the valuable lesson in this?  Learning to see the world through my character's eyes and mind has allowed me to see that my perspective is not the only one.  In the real world, that has slowed my emotional reaction time.  I find myself wondering why a person behaved in a certain way before reacting to their behavior.  I'm certainly not perfect, and I don't remember to take that step back all the time.  But the more I write, and the more I try to see all sides of a scene in a book to make it realistic, the more able I seem to be to see all the sides in the scenes in my own life.

Even more than in the present, the work on seeing all sides has allowed me to look back over my life and see my past differently.  I have so much less angst about the past than I used to.  I am able to run the scenes in my life through a different filter, one that has developed as a byproduct of my writing.

Everyone is unique.  Everyone is experiencing every situation from their own perspective, with their own life experience influencing how they are seeing the same thing you are seeing.  When I can remember to step back and realize that, and allow that knowledge to inform my reactions, I am much less likely to do unintended harm to the people in my world.

And anything that I have learned that can allow me to do less harm is a valuable lesson indeed.

Mother's Day

 At one moment or another in almost any given day, I miss my mother.  On Mother's Day, it is impossible not to miss her more poignantly.

I was blessed and lucky to have a wonderful mother.  Harriet was human and flawed, like all of us.  But she loved deeply and truly, and tried her very best to take care of everyone she loved.

While I was growing up, like most women with their mothers, I had some rough times with Harriet.  I didn't fight with her a lot, but I seemed to have an incredible ability to make her cry, and I never wanted to do that.  She and I didn't see eye-to-eye on how to raise my daughter, and with the perspective of maturity, I wish I would have listened more and resisted less.

Harriet loved my father, George, with an astounding devotion.  When I think of the care she gave him throughout his decline into dementia with Alzheimer's, I am humbled by her ability to love so generously as her husband disappeared a piece at a time.

As I tried to be a good mother to my daughter, and as I struggled and failed at times, my admiration for Harriet grew.  She had four children, not one, and she had grandchildren before she had finished raising her own children.  The lives she pictured for her children weren't the lives we chose.  But she loved us, and spoiled us anyway.

When I look back at my life through the lens of adulthood, I see things differently than I did in the moment.  I see so much more strength and fortitude than I saw as events were unfolding.

Of all the things I admire and respect and love about my mother, I think the single biggest thing is how her ability to be kind, to be gentle, to extend interest and compassion to everyone never went away.

Even as she lost her own battle with dementia, she was kind and gentle.  I remember more and more as I age how nice she always was to the cashier in the store, to the waiter or waitress, to the bus driver, to the housekeeper in a hotel.

Harriet believed in the goodness of people, and she allowed everyone to show her that goodness, and most people obliged.  

That is what I miss and what I treasure.  A mother who showed in her everyday encounters that everyone was deserving of dignity and respect.

As I miss her this Mother's Day, I pray that she is celebrating in Heaven with Daddy and all the aunts and uncles and grandparents.  And I remember to thank God for blessing me with such a wonderful mother.