Unexpected plot twist

I hadn’t expected that Grace’s life would be that changed by having come back from death. Silly me.

Grace Silverstein is the protagonist of Prodigies, and she’s generally a detached, sardonic young woman. Her past experiences include being discriminated against for her Black/Jewish ancestry, a childhood spent in residential schools for the arts with few visits from her parents, and her parents’ death in a plane accident. She has recently learned she has an inborn talent to manipulate feelings with her music, and this talent is why she, her fellow prodigy Ichirou Shimizi, and his former instructor Ayana Hashimoto have been pursued by members of an international cabal.

At the time of this scene, Grace has been recently killed and resurrected by an acquaintance, Grzegorz Kozlowski. The four of them flee to decide what to do next. I didn’t expect to write this scene: 


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It was a little over an hour to Mackinaw City and the bridge that connected the lower part with the Upper Peninsula. The UP was its own world, I remembered from my high school trip to Mackinac Island in high school, which seemed so very far away. I remembered trees, forests much like those we had traveled through, and a concert on the grounds of the Grand Hotel, which made the Palac Pugetow look like a mid-price family motel. I think I sighed aloud.

We stopped at a small independent coffeehouse with more atmosphere — offbeat and settled-in — than I expected in a small town. We wandered in, the four of us, and I wondered if the owners had had much experience meeting with a black woman, two Asians, and a man with long, fiery-red hair. They were nowhere to be seen, nor were any customers. To my relief, I noticed an isolated table sat in a back corner that looked as if it was designed for clandestine Internet use. 

“Allow me,” Greg pushed past us to inspect the corner. Ayana snorted, and I admit that my eyes bugged out a little from the moment of intrigue. He waved us back, and I noted that the nook wasn’t only unoccupied and secluded, but abutted the back door.

We settled at the back bench, and Greg took our orders — coffees for me and Ichirou with cream and sugar, green tea for Ayana, black tea for Greg; and an assortment of breakfast pastry. “I’m not vegan enough to check the ingredients,” Ichirou assured. 

Greg returned with the drinks and two Danish, three scones, a handful of biscotti, and what looked like scrambled eggs in a mug. Greg handed me the mug and growled, “You need more protein.” 

“I just want a biscotti,” I growled back.

“We have those too, Miss Grace,” he muttered as he handed me one — and smiled, a fleeting smile that felt as if the sun had come up, no matter how briefly.

As we worked our way through  breakfast, Ichirou pulled his laptop back out and set it on the table. We looked around —we were still the only ones in the store. Ayana pulled out a couple notebooks, and I wondered what was in them. Greg pulled out what looked like a thumb drive, then another thumb drive, and my curiosity was piqued by the depth of intrigue the objects on the table carried.

Ichirou had his computer, Ayana her notebooks, Greg his thumb drives, and I had nothing. I suddenly wondered if I had been kept in the dark for some reason. Did they think I was delicate? Just a girl? Were they afraid to depend on me because I had recently come back from the dead?

“Grace, I’d like you to try something,” Ayana said with her usual calm.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Do you have a song in your repertoire that says ‘This is not the table you’re looking for’?”

Hmm.  I thought about that. There’s a whole range of moods that go with the message ‘go away’, and not all of them would be appropriate to a family-run coffeeshop with a Northwoods-meets-1940’s look. 

I liked Ayana’s idea of ‘Nothing to see, move along’, but what song could be used to carry that?

What if the song had no w
ords at all? Just feelings, maybe directions?

“You’re on, Grace,” Greg murmured as a short, stocky blond man wandered toward the back table.

I took a deep breath and began, pianissimo, with a whisper of a note which grew more solid as I crescendoed, then dropped back accarezzevole. The man stood still for a moment, as if something called to him, and he turned paler than I thought he could. I had no words, only emotion that gave him as if it were the most important gift I had, which it was. It was the first moment and the last moment I had spent in heaven.

The man looked at me with tears when I finished again in that caressing tone, remembering Ichirou’s graphics that had given me unconditional love. He had not moved, he had not fled. He looked at me with tears in his eyes, and grabbed my hands in his. “Thank you,”  he said. “I needed to know that.” Before I could explain, apologize, anything, he said, “I will block the doorway to this section. I will not throw my guests to the mob.”

********
Foolishly, I had thought that the topic of Ayana’s death experience would diminish in two days. Instead it has given her more power, but there will be a price for her to pay for it.


Unexpected Poetry

Richard and I made it to The Elms for our mini-retreat. I didn’t get much of a chance to write, but I’m going to write this morning before the spa session and after. But I have a story for you:

My husband and I got into the Elms at about 2 PM yesterday. Our room wasn’t ready, and it was cold, so we sat by the fireplace.

Two women had gotten the same idea — one woman of about sixty who stood close to the fireplace to warm herself, and another woman who, at first glance, looked out-of-place amongst the Mission-styled details of the lobby. She was immensely obese, the type whose fat flows with gravity, with a mouthful of badly decayed teeth. I instantly chastised myself for my judgements, because if she was there in the lobby of the Elms, she deserved to be there just as much as I did.

The woman tried to engage the woman by the fireplace, who gave terse responses. Apparently, this woman persisted in her notion that the other didn’t belong there. I couldn’t stand the thought of the woman being shunned, so I drew her attention to me.

We talked about The Elms, of course; we both had been there before. I asked her what she did for a living, and she talked about the ups and downs of truck driving, where “your office is in the front and your house is in the back.” I then asked, “What advice would you give someone about truck driving?”

She brought out her poetic sense, and told me about injuries that included two major hernias from lifting; unexpected moments of generosity from clients; and hypnotic beauty on the road — frozen waterfalls, sunrise from the driver’s side windows. I could see the scenarios in my mind, flowing out of the fog of an early morning.

When we parted, she told me to find a poetry anthology whose name I forgot — luckily Richard wrote the name down, because she had contributed a poem to it.

Of course I found a fellow poet, and I almost missed her because of my own prejudices.

Reflection

Every morning, I sit in the living room on the loveseat where I keep my computer desk. I stare at the screen waiting for inspiration to write this blog, and to write on my latest creation. As I’m a morning person, morning is my best time to write, uncomplicated by the day’s work and accompanied by coffee.

I literally stare at the post editor of Blogger every morning wondering what to write about. I don’t ever think I’ve come up with a topic the night before. Writing this blog is like Chicago-school improv* — I pay attention and see what see what hits me.

I’ve written on writing techniques, psychological techniques used as writing techniques, and writers’ block. I’ve talked about characters, themes, and storylines, both in general and in my writing.

I’ve written about my life — journeys, mental health issues, rejections, and deep depression. I’ve mused on muses and coffee and other sources of creativity. I’ve shared emotions — sometimes deep emotions.

I write about social issues such as ostracism, sexual and physical abuse, discrimination, and abuse of power. I don’t write about politics for the most part, because politics aren’t going to be what cures these social ills — the Peaceable Kingdom, you and I and all those who want to share the world with those not like us, we will lessen those social ills if we extend our arms to help, one tiny moment at a time.

I have been writing in the blog since April 10, 2017, so I’m approaching the one year anniversary of the blog. I’ve never written this regularly in a journal since — since ever. I think it’s because you’re reading, whoever you are, that I feel obligated to keep on writing. I don’t know why you read this blog — you’re a Facebook friend of mine, you’ve stumbled on this blog by way of the labels on notes; a friend of a friend told you to check it out, you have a secret crush on me (just kidding!), you’re an agent on the verge of adopting me (I wish!), you’re a stalker … it doesn’t matter; you keep me going.

* Chicago-school improvisation (improv) is a form of humor I grew up with. Its best applications, believe it or not, were in children’s television programs of the era.

A Geeky Love Story

Have I explained how Richard and I met 13 years ago?

We met on Match.com, which was a thing back then. The full story is much quirkier. Let me explain:

I was a 41-year-old tenured professor who found the pickings in Maryville, MO very, very slim. I had only had two dates in the first seven years of living there, and both of them were men who hadn’t quite grown up (and both denied that they’d gone on a date with me. No idea why.)

I had shied away from online dating, because I was very skeptical. However, at a professional conference, I sat in on a session featuring Life Coaches, who are very talented people who help clients get out of their comfort zones and set new goals. One of the presenters said, “We can work with any problem. Does anyone have a problem they wish to explore?” Me, being the risk taker I am, announced in a room full of 400 people, “I’d like to find a husband.”

After a demonstration of how life coaches help break preconceived notions, I walked out of the room to deal with the bathroom lines. On my way out, an adorable plump woman tugged on my sleeve and whispered, “Try Match.com. That’s how I found my husband.”

When I arrived back home from the conference, I decided to experiment with three online dating sites: The want ads on Craig’s List, Match.com, and eHarmony. Craig’s List was a cesspool of married men whose wives didn’t understand them. I finally got forcibly removed from there because a man I jilted who wrote execrable poetry alleged that I had posted pornographic content. eHarmony would have been a good place if I were conservatively Christian and wanted to be a stepmom to someone’s kids. Match.com was intriguing — I got a lot of “I think I’d date you if you didn’t live so far away.”

And then there was Richard. A bit funny looking, very geeky and quirky, a lot like the people I hung out with in college. He wrote to me weekly, but he came off as — well, oblivious. Even so, I didn’t immediately click with him, and I had two other men in the periphery —  one comically inept, the other a bad boy — that I might have been dating but wasn’t sure.

Richard and I had a meetup in Des Moines as I was on my way to visit my parents in Illinois. My mom called me while I was on the trip and I told her I was meeting up with a guy named Richard at the Barnes and Noble. She asked me his last name and I honestly didn’t know it, so I called Richard and asked him his last name so my mom wouldn’t think he was an axe murderer.

Then Richard invited me up to Des Moines for a Mannheim Steamroller concert. I can get into that family-friendly electronica stuff (although I prefer Dream Theater) so I said yes, and we ended up with our first date. Except that Richard discovered that I was going to eat Thanksgiving Dinner at the local Hy-Vee cafeteria. He invited me up to Thanksgiving dinner, which was an eclectic affair held by one of his friends. That ended up being our first date.

The next day, I introduced Richard to one of my favorite rituals — watching people shop on Black Friday. We said hi to a woman who talked with us briefly, and he later pointed out that she was his supervisor when he used to work at a bookstore —

Then I remembered stopping into a bookstore, where a spectacled man with black hair and Asian eyes recommended a book by an author his fiance loved.

Which is how Richard and I met, more than thirteen years ago.

Boy, Do I Need a Break!

I get off work at 1 PM today, and after that? Spring Break. Americans don’t get as much vacation as do people in many European countries, and when we do get vacation time, we frenetically spend our vacations going places — usually places in the southern portion of the country where it’s over 60 degrees.

That’s not what I intend to do with my spring break. We have such a paltry train system here that long-distance car driving is the only way to travel distances, and the scene from the interstate is less than enchanting. I’m also not fond of beaches and drunken crowds (which is what happens at Palm Beach, Tijuana, Fort Lauderdale and other southern beach properties.)

If I had the money to travel for spring break, I would travel to one of the following:

  • Thailand, to apprentice to a fine cook there and eat durian till I’m banned from public transportation;
  • Vancouver Canada, in the hopes I discover my next career there (not likely to happen)
  • The British Isles, hoping to secure a non-tourist tour that exposes me to real life.
  • Somewhere in Europe, but only if invited, and knowing my husband is coming with me.
In other words, I want slice of life, authentic food, and connections with real people.
What will I be doing for Spring Break?
  • On Saturday March 17, I will be watching the World’s Shortest St. Patrick’s Day Parade and eating traditional Irish faire at the Historical Society. Oh, yes, and celebrating my 11th wedding anniversary (in case you’ve wondered, I’m part Irish (and Welsh, German, Ojibwe, French, Polish, Dutch, Irish) so a St. Patrick’s wedding day makes sense. On the other hand, Richard (although his name is Leach-Steffens) is German and Chinese. 
Us, eleven years ago. We get better with age.
  • On Sunday March 18, we’ll take a trip to The Elms in Excelsior Springs again for a reasonably priced two-day writing retreat. I don’t know if Richard will write, but I plan to work on Whose Hearts are Mountains, the next installment in the Archetype books. (I’m saving finishing Prodigies, a YA novel, until Camp NaNo in April.)
  • From there, it will be garden work and finalizing my annual portfolio. Not much we can plant now except peas, lettuce, cabbages and maybe root vegetables.
Overall, not exciting. I’ll probably post during vacation (like I managed during Atlantic Hope, Missouri Hope, and New York Hope — nothing can stop me, not even depression) 
But here’s a new thought — if you want to, send digital postcards to lleachie@gmail.com. It’s the next best thing to having coffee with me.

If I’m going to put Voyageurs in Kindle Scout next month, I might as well give you a segment now to tweak your curiosity:

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We stood outside a solarium, where we viewed a tree line of dead trees and towering plants with huge, decorative leaves. I strolled closer to one to touch one, and Ian grabbed my wrist and hissed, “Don’t touch that. It’s a giant hogweed, and it will permanently scar your skin. And possibly make you go blind.”
“Whoa,” I muttered. “Thanks for the tip.” 
We walked to the solarium, and I noticed that the dirt was beyond cracked. No grass grew, and dust eddied at the slightest breeze. The air felt like a blast furnace. Even the sun looked hazy and malevolent.
“This is what a dying earth looks like. He opened the solarium door, which should have been locked but stood slightly ajar. Inside was Carlie, and she cradled a thick black book.
“Kat, come here,” Carlie said in a slightly rough voice. “I have a secret to tell you. Hurry.” 
I studied the woman’s white, spiky hair, her cheekbones hollowed by disease and age, her wickedly defiant smile dressed up in old woman’s dress —
I hurried over, although I knew what she would say before I heard it, because I knew her more closely than anyone could.
My mouth must have hung open. “Oh, yes,” she said with a chuckle. “You do recognize yourself, don’t you?” She regarded me with ice blue eyes, the same as I regarded her with.
I held her hand for a moment and savored the rare moment of meeting myself, not knowing whether I would be crushed or boomeranged, not caring.
My vision grew dark and I felt drawn through a tiny hole …

Dusting myself off and trying again

It looks like I’m going to subject myself to another round of the Kindle Scout campaign process.

I’m just finishing one more edit of the book Voyageurs for a possible Kindle Scout campaign. It, like Gaia’s Hands (which, with fewer than 15 days left, will not make the cut for publication), is a standalone book for the moment. Voyageurs doesn’t happen in the same space as the Archetype series, so it wouldn’t break up a series (which would make it unattractive to an agent).

Voyageurs is very different than Gaia’s Hands. Where Gaia’s Hands is a delicate, pastoral slice of magical realism, Voyageurs features the sardonic daredevil Kat Pleskovich and the bookish Ian Akimoto from the disastrous ecological future called The Chaos. What begins as a string of suspicious deaths among the Travellers, or time-jumpers, becomes the uncovering of a plot to destroy the world.

Although it would be easy to dismiss this book as a time traveller romance, I’ve skewed things a little too much to use that label comfortably. Present-day Kat’s streetwise manner and her prickliness make her anything but the girl who needs a big man to protect her. Ian from the future, frail and bookish, has more empathy but a tendency to try to ingratiate himself to Kat. Their mentor, Berkeley, is a frustratingly droll time historian who revels in the Socratic Method. The bad guys? You’ll have to read the book.

I would call this book a crossover — soft SF with a touch of mystery and a relationship that helps pull things together.

If you have any ideas about the timing of the book campaign, please let me know.

Thank you for sticking with me!

Moving Forward in More than One Way

I have to share this, because even though it doesn’t have to do with writing (directly), it’s so funny I have to share:

I’m going back to school.

I had long been of the opinion that, once you got a Ph.D. and hit a certain age, you would never need any more schooling. I would have been correct, except for a perfect cluster* of events:

  1. Six years ago, my department at the University got disbanded because they had to cut something, and Family and Consumer Economics (Home Economics or Human Ecology for my overseas friends) was a low-cachet major.
  2. Because I had tenure, they couldn’t fire me without due cause, so they put me in the Behavioral Sciences (Psychology and Sociology) department.
  3. Our school accrediting body, the Higher Learning Commission, decreed that if faculty were in departments they didn’t have a graduate degree in, they should at least have 20 graduate hours in the discpline. This rule appeared within the past three years. I’ve been here for 20.
  4. I fall short of that 20 hours — I believe I have 12 hours in psych/soc classes at the graduate level.
  5. We’re going through re-accrediation here, and our provost has been hired in part to guide us through the new accreditation.
  6. I was advised to take some grad level classes in an aspect of psychology/sociology by my chair — I was never told I would be fired, but I was told that doing so would “make me look better”.
  7. Taking the grad classes will not improve my pay. In fact, I will have to pay for the classes. It won’t help me get to full professor status, because I don’t publish enough research. I’m literally doing this to help my university get reaccreditation.
So I have to enroll in graduate classes … and I couldn’t be happier, because I get a benefit none of them can take away from me — I get to learn and improve. I move forward, which is the best feeling to me. 
I have applied to an online program at South Dakota State University for a graduate certificate program in Disaster Mental Health. I decided this by 6 PM last night, and by 8PM I had turned in my application materials, ordered a transcript, and secured three letters of recommendation from my colleagues with disaster management in their background. A reminder: I became Emergency and Disaster Management faculty simply by virtue of teaching a class in their major. The interest in casualty simulation (moulage) and CERT (community-based first responders for disasters) came from that. 
As I will be taking only one class per semester, I don’t expect it will make too big a cut in my time, and I even suspect that the book about the care and feeding of roleplayers might be a independent assignment. I will continue to write, because I can’t relax by vegging — just by doing**.
So here I am, a PhD taking more college classes, even though it’s ten years till I retire. Life is strange, isn’t it? 
****************
* To my international friends, “cluster” is short for a very salty military swear word that rhymes with “fustercluck”.
** “Doing” is a strange word. We’re expected to read and pronounce it “DO-ing”, but if you look at the word the wrong way, it looks like a sound effect that rhymes with “Boing” and mimics the sound of a fry pan hitting a cranium: “DOING!!”