January in the rearview mirror (Weekend Coffee Share #23)

Lately I’ve been by turns baffled and terrified at how fast time is passing. 2022? Shouldn’t that be the title of a sci-fi movie? But here we are, almost a month into that sci-fi year, and I find myself in a weird, reflective mood. The last week or so has been… odd. I feel like the fog in my life has lifted, and I’ve found my blue sky again. Cheesy? Yup. But true. I’ve come to realize I’ve spent the last quite a few years just slogging through life. They’ve been hard years–lost my mom, lost one of my best friends, watched my husband suffer through multiple painful surgeries, and kept on truckin’. That’s what I do–I put my head down and keep going–but sometimes I’m so busy doing that, I don’t realize I’ve left a part of myself behind in the bottom of a musty box somewhere. Last week, I opened the box. For the first time in a good while, I feel like I’m doing more than putting one foot in front of the other. Let’s hope it lasts.

OK, enough self-indulgent philosophizing about the state of my life. You’ll get your laughs this week, I promise. But before that happens: Welcome to the Weekend Coffee Share, hosted by Natalie the Explorer. Natalie has some wonderful pix of Toronto in winter this week–head on over and take a look!

So… January. In addition to spending way too much time in my own head, I found some time to read and write.

Writing News

• No news yet on Author Mentor Match, and yes, I’m still checking my Gmail every 1.3 seconds.
• My class from Lawson Writing Academy, Your First Five Pages: Reader Glue, wraps up today, and it’s been wonderful. The instructor and my classmates helped me take my first five pages from acceptable to great! Now I just have to do the same thing with the rest of the novel. By myself. Sigh.

Books read in January

• I‘ll Be Gone in the Dark – Michelle McNamara. This book was famous a few years ago. McNamara ran a true crime website and was married to comedian Patton Oswalt. She got deeply involved in tracking the man she nicknamed the Golden State Killer, who was known in my childhood as the East Area Rapist. Sadly, McNamara died before the man was caught, which makes the book an interesting and sometimes eerie read, because we the readers know how the story ends, but the writer doesn’t. McNamara does a good job of portraying the crimes without excessively lingering on the most horrific or upsetting details. You don’t need a strong stomach for this one.
• Every Month is August – Shannon Giles. Shannon is a longtime friend of mine, and this book is her story of adopting and raising a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder. If you know someone dealing with that, please, please, please give them this book. It’s heartbreaking, but it will help parents of kids with RAD know they aren’t alone.
• Write Good or Die – edited by Scott Nicholson. This book is a collection of what appear to be blog posts about both the craft and business of writing. Some are great, some are just OK, but it’s a good read.
• American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years, 1950-2000 – Peter Vronsky. Yes, I did read a lot about serial killers in January. I’m writing about one–a fictional one–so it counts as research (and as I said in this post, what writers call “research” is what the rest of the world calls, “farting around on the internet”–or in this case, “reading.”) Anyway, back to the book. This one was pretty good. Vronsky provides the usual lurid details essential for true crime writing, but he also puts the serial killers of this period in their historical and cultural context, which was really interesting.

I didn’t go anywhere in January–except work and my neighborhood, and I doubt you want pictures of either of those–so we’ll move on to:

Music of the Week

If you know me in real life, you know I have eclectic taste in music. I’ll always adore 80s metal, but I listen to other stuff too. I firmly believe life should come with a soundtrack. As a writer, I wish I could include more music in my books, but it’s difficult and sometimes expensive to get permission to use copyrighted lyrics in books, so the standard advice is, don’t. I had to rewrite a whole scene once I learned that fact.

Lyrics that are out of copyright (pre-1923, I believe) are fair game though. My time travel romance (the one I’m hoping to query after one more editing pass) includes a scene set in 1910, in which the female main character (who’s from present day) meets her time-traveling lover’s family. After some awkward conversation, they end up gathered around the piano for a singalong. The song I chose is an old gospel song, “Will the Circle be Unbroken.” I’ve always loved that song, and I heard it in a café in Flagstaff when I was writing the novel, and it seemed to fit my fictional situation perfectly.

Probably the best-known recorded versions of the song are by the Carter Family and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, but tons of artists have performed it. I’ll share a few of my favorite versions here, all courtesy of that great cultural archive known as YouTube.

Here’s Joan Baez:

Dolly Parton and Friends (Reba McIntyre, George Jones, Charley Pride, Loretta Lynn, Garth Brooks, and a bunch of other country legends)- live at what looks like an awards show. So, so, so good!

Let’s get bluesy with Mavis Staples, Joan Osborne, and Bonnie Raitt. I feel this one down in my soul.

Now for something completely different…

I’m not a gamer (most videogames make me motion sick), but apparently this song has quite a presence in one of the BioShock games. I think there are 3 versions from the game on YouTube. This one’s my favorite. Haunting and lovely.

And here’s Lea Kliphuis. Gentle, sweet, and with a “friends playing in their garage” vibe.

Now don’t tell anyone about this post, or I’ll lose my rocker cred entirely.

Funnies

If you skipped straight to this section, you should be ashamed of yourself. You could at least pretend to be interested in the rest of this post 🙂

This week’s meme theme is: Books!

Here’s a picture of me in my natural habitat:

Totally me, but my dream home library would also include a secret room hidden behind a wall of books like on Scooby Doo. Behind that wall? More books!

Yep. Many a dinner has gone uncooked at my house because of, “just one more chapter.” Also, many a room has gone uncleaned, because:

And then of course, one must have time to heal from book-induced emotional devastation:

That was me after Dumbledore died. I stomped around the house in a funk for a week.

So many BILFs, so little time…

And finally:

Have a wonderful week everyone! Got anything exciting planned?