authors – Page 12 – beckycochrane.com

Being flexible

In the end, I didn’t get much writing done yesterday and probably won’t today, though I’ll try. Things happen, and those require a shift in priorities. Part of that shift meant that I needed to reorganize and repack all author copies of the Timothy James Beck books, Cochrane/Lambert novels, the anthologies we’ve edited (or appeared in, sometimes under mysterious pseudonyms 🤣), and of course, the two Becky Cochrane novels. Although one of our publishers gave us only a few author copies, and we had to split those 50/50, the TJB publisher gave each author a better number of complimentary copies–but once Tim moved to Houston, that meant double the number ended up with us. Those, and bound uncorrected proofs, are for authors to give away to reviewers, booksellers, people who are supportive and have promoted us, including family and friends (and of course, the publishers are also providing those to reviewers and to other authors they want cover blurbs from).

It can add up to a lot of books, especially if a book is released in hardcover and trade paperback. Like…eighteen bins of them.

We’ve heard from readers who are thrilled to find any of these books that are out of print, especially if they’re part of TJB’s Manhattan series of five books. If they only knew–SHOOT ME AN EMAIL (becky@beckycochrane.com). I can hook you up. If you ever need a copy of one of the books, or you’d like a set to give to friends, literally if you could cover the postage, they’re yours, both hardcover or trade and mass market paperbacks.

I think we have an ample supply of everything but The Deal. On that one, I have a few of the trade paperbacks because I’ve bought them used when I’ve seen them, and I own maybe four hardcover copies that were part of a now-defunct bookclub that released their own edition. The only person who could pry one of those hardcovers from me would have to be a member of the royal family, and by that, I mean 👑 Elton John and his husband David Furnish.

Woohoo Wednesday!

My 2023 planner came. It’s inspirational and funny and quirky. I’ve been catching it up from Jan 1 until today with my daily doings and writing progress and using the photos and commentary from Patti Smith’s Book Of Days to nudge me in various directions of memories and thoughts.

It’s been a long time since I kept a date book. I’ve been mostly discreet with what I put on this blog because of my privacy and more importantly, other people’s. When I go back through my old date books and planners, there’s a lot of good info in them! Even these days, living a sheltered quarantine life, things are always happening.

Too bad I didn’t video myself putting on the monthly tabs for the comedy of it all. First, the tabs were going down the side at the beginning of each month, but it was aesthetically displeasing. I kept redoing it, and it felt like I needed to do geometry to space stuff right. I don’t do math unless I have to.

I was getting so frustrated when I suddenly started giggling and thinking, This will be probably the most UNIMPORTANT part of this planner. Make it easy on yourself. I promptly put them on the top–in exactly the worst place because of the elastic band that holds the book closed. 🙄 Moved them to the left and don’t give a flip if they’re all aligned and perfect. Can’t remember me ever personally being aligned and perfect. This planner and I were made for each other, and I can’t thank its creator, Adam J. Kurtz, enough for being exactly who he is.

A book I didn’t know I needed

A Christmas gift from Timothy (thanks again!).

Though I hadn’t followed Patti Smith on Instagram, her posts were like a little gift that would show up occasionally in my feed. Because of other things I liked? Because I follow or am followed by others on Instagram who follow her? I don’t understand algorithms; I just appreciate when I’m not inundated with posts relating to animal cruelty, animal death, animal illness. I can care, and I can and do donate to rescue organizations and to specific fundraisers, but that doesn’t mean I can deal with seeing more and more over and over.

I digress. Patti Smith was an occasional, serendipitous gift from one of the few social media sites where I find more peace than politics, more art than acrimony, more fun than friction–accompanied by photos!

Then I received this book and even before I opened it, I felt a connection with it. Then I read her Introduction, and it all sounded like words I’d been waiting to hear. Most pointed, it’s a book of DAYS. An entry per day of the year (and one thrown in for years with that extra February 29). Patti posts daily on her Instagram just as I post every day here, always with a photograph; I also try to present some photo or graphic with each of my blog posts, only she does it with more brevity and focus (look! a camera pun!).

Before his shop closes as he shifts his focus to other creative endeavors, I ordered a 2023 planner from Adam JK. At first I hadn’t ordered one because it seemed superfluous when I considered all the things other than this blog where I record things: a small book to keep up with the meals I eat and the meds I take to manage my health; a book where I scribble random things including my answers to a daily word challenge; the coloring journal that I try to connect to where I am in/what I’m doing with the Neverending Saga.

Now I’ve figured out a unique way to use Adam’s planner. Every daily photo in Patti’s book makes me think of something from my own life: a phrase or comment that reverberated in my brain–for good or ill–for decades. A place I’ve been or thing I’ve seen that made me happy. What reaches me from a piece of art. A loss still etched on my heart. Something I read or a funny story I heard or a quirky or impactful person I’ve known. My planner from Adam will provide a place for me to note what Patti’s day has given me, and in that way, it will provide a bit of structure and purpose to the seemingly random.

Some days I may even share on here. With a picture of my own. If you want Patti’s photos, she’s thisispattismith on Instagram (where I’m now, finally, following her). Or you can purchase this wonderful book and see years of her documenting in single photos what, where, who, when, why Patti Smith was in a moment. Because she’s a celebrity? No. Because she’s an artist with gifts I’ve admired since I became aware of her in 1978.

ETA: Missed telling you the Day 5 NYT 7-Day Happiness Challenge is “Get Closer to a Colleague,” and today, Day 6, is “Put a social plan on the calendar.”

It’s in the writing

Today is National Screenwriters Day. In the world of entertainment (I include film, television, theater, and music here), there are a lot of jokes about writers, mostly at the writers’ expense. You can find laudatory comments about screenwriters at “30 Quotes about Screenwriting from A-List Directors & Actors.”

The first on that list is: “To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.” – Alfred Hitchcock

I create a screenwriter who also is sometimes a playwright in the Neverending Saga. He doesn’t get a lot of story, but he’s connected in some way to all of the main characters. To give myself a challenge, I wrote the opening scene to one of his films (it isn’t in the novel, though it will be referenced), and it was fun but a lot harder than I expected it to be.

Without my screenwriter, my characters would be missing a friend, an advisor, an inspiration, a person who breathes life into their work, and some apt descriptions of them filtered through his perceptions. He gives me a chance to use humor and kindness. As every writer in every format knows, a minor character can have a major impact.

Thank you, Phillip. You’ve been part of my brain since the 1980s. ♥ Let’s keep collaborating.

looking back/looking forward

Sometime around Thanksgiving, I shared a photo of the underside of a stone and promised to show you the other side. This is a gift I sent to a dear friend. Every time I see a heart, I think of her.

It’s been a quiet week but a good one for connecting with longtime friends by text, email, and phone. We’ve mostly gotten our Christmas stuff down and by tomorrow, it will all have been packed away. I hope to be asleep well before midnight, despite the fireworks that distress the dogs at Houndstooth Hall. I’ve never fully gotten my energy back since being sick in September/October, but other than fatigue, I feel pretty good at the end of another year.

One thing I feel positive about, as I look back, is that I managed to read seventy-six books this year, both fiction and nonfiction. After a prolonged reading dry spell the first two years of the pandemic, it feels promising to know I can once again give my attention to other people’s books. I’ve been a little concerned that I haven’t written much over the last quarter, and it occurred to me that my focus might have been another thing impacted by my health challenges.

Also in 2022, I did finish one novel and begin another. I’ve done three or four paintings on canvas; painted six ornaments I gave away; painted the wooden letters Aa to hang on the brick wall of Aaron’s Garden, and colored, I think, 36 projects–coloring pages, a bookmark, and an angel. I’ve written a few poems and sewn a few doll outfits, done a lot of organizing, donating, and purging from the Hall, and grown new plants and kept old ones alive. When I add it all up that way, I feel like I’ve been more creative than I realized over the past year.

Wishing you all a new year of good (or improving) health, satisfaction with the things you attempt or complete, abundance in all good things, serenity and energy as needed, and the gift of knowing what a wondrous creation you are, even when you don’t remember or believe it.

Much love and peace to you all.

That’s how it works

Saw this on Instagram, likely a repost from Twitter*:

Like Ware, I could not quit laughing.

*I reserve the opportunity to express my feelings about Twitter at some later date.

This is as good a time as any to recap what I’ve read this month. I do have another book to read, but at more than 500 pages, it’s unlikely I’ll have finished it by the first day of January.

Though December’s reading includes only one work of fiction (i.e., “making it up as they went along”), I think even in the realm of nonfiction, writers shape a narrative in a creative way. More about that in a moment.

First up, fiction in the form of a cozy mystery:

Bones of Holly is the 25th (!) in Carolyn Haines’s Sarah Booth Delaney series. It’s set on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a few years after the devastation from Katrina, with the memory of that hurricane delicately woven through it. Enjoyable as always to experience these characters, and it made me think a lot about Three Fortunes in One Cookie, even to the point of having a conversation with Timothy about that novel. We rarely look back at the books we had published, but that one continues to nag me for a few reasons.

I’d very much wanted to read Valerie Bertinelli’s Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today, published this year, but I also wanted context for it. So first I read Losing It: And Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time, 2008, then Finding It: And Satisfying My Hunger for Life without Opening the Fridge, 2009. If I pare down the journey of her life in a three-word soundbite: Food, Family, and Fame, as an older reader, I sometimes felt like I understood young Valerie better than she understood herself (in an everywoman kind of way). In the third, current-day book, with both of us older and more mature, her growth and perceptions have been tempered by a lot of loss and a greater self-acceptance.

You might guess that my own interest was based on my enduring affection for Eddie Van Halen, and it was with some relief I read how their story is dramatically different from the fiction I’m writing. Years ago, I borrowed Eddie’s smile and drew on a little of his charm for my musician, but my character’s love story (with a woman nothing at all like Valerie) is all their own. (Maybe not nothing, as my female, like Valerie, enjoys sports, but I took that from one of my own real-life friends before I learned it about Valerie.)

Then I read three works from a young woman I met/follow/interact with on Instagram, Shilo Niziolek. I enjoy her photos of her dogs, her world (home, city, travels, time in nature), and her personal fashion aesthetic, and we share a mutual fascination with crows.

I can’t give a better description of I Am Not An Erosion: Poems Against Decay (Ghost City Press, 2022) than this one from Goodreads:

…a micro chapbook of collage poetry. Shilo uses her own medical records, prints of her own images, and magazine material to create poems that seek to take back power from her own medical history which is plagued with chronic illnesses and trauma. These pieces speak against the narrative that those with pre-existing conditions lives are somehow worth less, that they are not as full. The collection asks us to look closely at the world and our own magic just by existing in it.

I love collage, I love poetry, I love magic, and I feel I’ve come to know Shilo, so of course I happily dove into this collection. It became a place I want to revisit so I can shift attention between the poems, the photos/art, and the medical records underlying it all. It’s almost like a puzzle. (Like Tom and me, Shilo also puts puzzles together.)

Both Fever, Querencia Press, LLC, 2022, and A Thousand Winters in Me, Gasher Press, 2022, are memoir/essays of creative nonfiction. They present perspectives of trauma from chronic illness and domestic violence, and musings on grief, loss, love, and sexuality. Niziolek has an MFA and is a writing instructor; it’s unsurprising that her writing is fluid, lyrical, and evocative, compelling a reader to want to take this frequently painful journey with her. Undercutting that pain are the complex, enduring nature of friendships, relationships with family and a partner, and an appreciation for animals and natural beauty.

In one of those “we find what we need when we need it” moments related to all my struggling with what to do about the problematic nature of my journals (and I had a side conversation about journals on Instagram with Shilo’s mother, also a writer), I reexamined the process of creative nonfiction. I was reminded of mentors and teachers who urged me to write essays examining certain aspects of my own life. And I realized I don’t need to destroy those journals (too late for a few dozen pages, and that’s fine). I need to use them as material (NOT FOR PUBLICATION; I’m not as brave as Shilo!) to create a not-necessarily linear narrative, one based on recurring themes I can tease from the details I recorded.

I needed to remember what it is to be a writer first, and a novelist second. I do plumb my emotional life for my characters, even though everything about their lives is vastly different from mine. Fiction: making it up as I go along, right?

It’s all a lot to think about over the coming year. Shilo’s writing is a gift in itself and also for the way it has informed and inspired the writer in me.

Button Sunday

Picked these up the last time Tom and I were on a shopping expedition to Cactus Music. That day, we also went to Murder By The Book, where Brenda recommended a new-to-us author. I’m once again in a kind of reading dead zone, so Tom’s reading it first. So far, he likes it.

I don’t remember the author or the title, which reminds me of people who once came into the bookstore where I worked with info like, “I can’t remember who wrote it or what it’s titled, but the cover is red and I think it was on Oprah.” For that reason, corporate used to send us a list of authors who were doing the talk show circuit to promote their books.

When I once again share on here what I am or have been reading, I’ll let you know the author/title.

What are you reading?

Recap

Strange week filled with ups and downs and serendipity and labor put into things other than writing.

I get a monthly newsletter from author Carolyn Haines. I’ve downloaded her latest Sarah Booth Delaney mystery, Bones of Holly to my eReader and will be reading it this month. In her most recent newsletter, she provided a link to a free reading of a short novella called “Junebug Fischer” by author Mandy Haynes. Here’s the description: Junebug Fischer will be ninety-six come June. She’s ready to set the record straight and let you know what really happened the summer she turned fifteen. It’s true, she killed someone, but she never killed nobody on purpose. That was purely accidental. I don’t know how long the novella will be free, but this link will enable you to either download it to your favorite reader or open it on your computer to read without downloading: link to read ‘Junebug Fischer’. I enjoyed it, and I’ll be reading more by Mandy Haynes.

December has a few challenging anniversaries, so I’m always grateful for the good stuff. A couple of high points of the week included a good update about a family member’s surgery and a photo my brother texted to a proud sister/aunt showing him with his son and grandsons. I already have that photo printed and hanging in the family and friends gallery in the hall.

For years, I’ve tried to replicate my mother’s recipe for fried corn. She gave me directions. She let me watch her do it. She told me the specific kind of fresh corn on the cob I needed to buy and how to prepare it the way she did. I have never found corn sold under that name. And I have never successfully made a batch of corn that tastes like hers. This week was no exception. I mean, the corn was fine, but it wasn’t hers. I’ve searched and tried online recipes. I’ve enjoyed Lynne’s version that she cooks the way her mother did. Even the best fried corn I’ve eaten doesn’t taste like my mother’s. I try this at most every two or three years, so it’s not a big deal, and in one way, my failure amuses me: my mother would like knowing she did something no one else has been able to do. (There are many others; even if she never acknowledged those, I do.)

In the few years before I was laid off from my job because of the pandemic, one of my holiday frustrations was not having the time to address and send Christmas cards to friends and family. I could start the process in December but sometimes didn’t finish it until my March birthday and, one year, even Easter. No more job meant this is one activity I’ve been able to accomplish since 2020 before Christmas. This year might be my earliest ever, partly because we were able to get a family photo in November thanks to Lindsey.

Yesterday, I dropped the first batch of cards in the mail when I had to pick up more stamps at the post office, and today, I’ll be sending the rest in the batch pictured here.

While finishing the task might not seem like a big deal, this particular activity provides me a much-needed feeling of connection. That’s helpful since I’ve drastically reduced texting and messaging using social media due to ongoing technical problems (e.g., wonky computers, Internet outages) but also the state of the world (watching billionaires have public pissing contests with one another on unnamed apps or millionaires detail their lives via “reality” shows or TikTok videos holds no allure for me at all; your mileage may vary).

I have three gifts to box and ship (once I do a little more shopping) that will include what I think are the last of my cards. After that, I can focus on the remainder of our holiday preparations, including Tom’s birthday on Christmas day, and maybe then, finally, my brain will assure me it’s okay to focus on my fictional work in progress. I need writing to feel balanced, too.

I’m ahead on one thing, though: I have my New Year’s Resolution all ready. =)

This is how I write

This is not how I always write. But this is how I write the Neverending Saga (which I’m tackling sometimes only a paragraph a day). I’m taking the reader on a journey. I’m not worried about the pacing (people will say that’s a no-no). I’m not worried that everything and everyone isn’t perfect from the first motion out of the gate and may never be perfect. They can only be who they are.

Sometimes things will go slowly. Sometimes things will come fast.

It’s like life. The older I get, the more I see both the shock and the gentleness of patterns, of connections, in my real-life personal timeline. I think of those readers who aren’t willing to stay along for the ride when they read something they don’t like, wouldn’t do, don’t approve of, whatever. To me, their distrust of the writer (me), their unwillingness to find out what happens next, is akin to those people in my life who couldn’t extend grace, forgiveness, compassion, tolerance toward me and stick it out with me through the years.

Others were willing to take a long, winding trip with me even when they weren’t sure of the destination. I cherish them as I hope one day to cherish readers of what I’m working on.

I am not for everybody. Everything I write won’t be for everybody, either.

Tiny Tuesday!

While I’m not writing and have low energy, I’m doing small projects slowly. One is that I have a lot of photo albums (thirty-eight right now) on shelves in Lynne’s room, and whenever I go looking for photos, it’s anyone’s guess how many I’ll pull out before I find the year I’m looking for.

No more. They’re all labeled with dates now, unless dates are irrelevant, when they’re labeled with something that lets me know their contents. This will make future usage of old photos a lot more efficient.

This is not one of the photos in those albums, maybe, but it’s one in my Flickr account. Whenever I want to think of a photo I’ve taken over the years that makes me happy, this one often comes to mind. It’s from November 2010, when David Puterbaugh came to visit, and Tim and he are walking wee Hanley away from the Menil Museum.

What a beautiful day with people I love.