Stories That Bloom in the Spring

Today’s moment of self-discovery is about what I write, as well as when I write it. Turns out, it’s a spring thing with me: My story lines mostly evolve from events that occur in the months of March, April or May.

March 19, for instance, marks the anniversary of the suspicious fatal fire (fictional, of course) at the center of my novel “Chasing Ashes.” Why March? The academic year was winding down at the university my characters attended back in 1992. They were seniors, student journalists with bright futures ahead.

In “Never Before Noon,” the first novel in my Vampires of the Court of Cruelty trilogy, the story begins in April 2010, as Chloe Hart returns to her parents’ home in upstate New York; the second chapter opens in Spain exactly one year later. Book Three of the trilogy, “Never More Human,” starts in May 1864, then rockets forward to May 2012 outside Prague.

Plus, my two works in progress, a cozy romantic mystery I’m this close to completing and a time travel tale written for a planned anthology, also get underway as the earth’s trip around the sun brings us longer days.

Is this a seasonal affective thing with me? If so, I’ll take it. It was two Aprils ago that I began to write that cozy-in-progress. And I typed the opening paragraphs of that first vampire novel on a Saturday night in late March thirteen years ago.

What accounts for my spring leaning? I suppose it could be because I, too, began in spring, in mid-May to be exact, though my mother said her due date was two weeks earlier. But I prefer to think of it as my creative process coinciding with nature’s own, responding to sunshine and rain, increasing warmth, and resurgent energy all around.

The seed of an idea will plant itself in my brain, and shortly thereafter words burst from my fingers onto a blank legal pad or Word document. Sometimes when that happens, I’ll write for hours. Sometimes, I type a paragraph, then do laps around the dining room table. Or I type a paragraph, then get up to check what’s in the refrigerator. Inspiration is where you find it, right?

But in the spring, what can be better than watching daffodils and hyacinths shake off the cold, rise from their bulbs, and reach for the light? Each blossom has its own new story to tell.

Time for me to reach for my next one, too? We’ll just have to see what grows. My hydrangeas are already leafing out for a big show.

A New Chapter of ‘Me’

I’m sitting here, reading newspaper articles about Supreme Court decisions and college closures and real estate development written for the Philadelphia Inquirer by friends and former co-workers. From there, I’ll move on to the New York Times and whatever else interests me. As I await manuscript edits, I’m checking book-promotion tasks off my list in advance of the fall release of my fourth novel, “Chasing Ashes.” I’ve written and/or rewritten two short stories in the last month. Revisions of the second draft of my fifth novel await.

I’m quite busy, obviously, but the rhythm of my days is off. I don’t have a routine down yet, and because of that I sometimes feel as if I’m not accomplishing much. I jump up, and pace the house, and round and round I go.

This happens every time I start a new chapter of my life.

Which chapter is this one? Here’s a working title: Joanne tries to slow down, discovering yet again that she can’t—at least not right away.

“Aha!” you say, “you’ve been here before, Joanne. What did you learn then?”

Evidently, not much about slowing down, I’m embarrassed to say. I’m good at shifting gears, changing course, taking chances. But deceleration is not in my makeup, it seems.

“And you know this how, Joanne?”

By looking at the historical record—cold, hard facts that reveal trends of the past 5 1/2 years of my life. To summarize: From December 2017 through June 2023, I left my newspaper job; spent a year doing contract work and independently publishing my second novel; got another job and for four months simultaneously taught at a local university, then sold one house and bought another and moved, then independently re-published my first novel after it went out of print when the publisher folded. Then I independently published my third novel while working as a public-media health editor through the pandemic’s pre- and post-vaccine surges; left that job and wrote the first draft of the aforementioned fifth novel, and then spent 10 months babysitting my younger granddaughter five days a week.

No more day gigs now. At last, the plan is to give writing my full attention most days of the week instead of hit-or-miss at nights and on weekends. To work the rest of my activities around writing, rather working writing into the time left after everything else is finished. In other words, not to load up my schedule now with low- or no-priority tasks that allow me to push the author in me aside in favor of the personal shopper or housekeeper or interior designer or groundskeeper in me.

“Give yourself a break. Take some time for you. You’ll figure it out,” friends counsel.

This IS me giving myself time for me. This is me trying to figure it out. I’m writing a blog post, the first one in five years.

And then I think I’ll move my car.

Take Me With You When You Go

What makes me, me?

I am, of course, the sum of the genetic material my parents passed on to me, and the genetic material their parents passed on to them. I am the product of the family in which I was raised, the home in which I was raised, the homes I created with my husbands and in which I raised my own son, and so many other influences. I am the embodiment of the love I have been given and that I continue to give, even when those I love depart this world for whatever lies beyond it. I imagine that those who are no longer here with me take some of my love for them along on that voyage.

But I’m also a writer, with this need to put feelings and information and stories into words. On two occasions, I was determined that deceased loved ones have my words with them when I said my official goodbyes to them.

When my grandmother Peppina died when I was 19, I hurried to write a poem I could place in her coffin. It was short, maybe twenty-five lines on a sheet of paper probably torn from a college notebook. I had been studying Italian, the language my grandmother spoke to me all those years, so I attempted a few bits of verse using some newly acquired vocabulary. If she and I are the only ones who have ever seen them, that’s probably a blessing.

When my mother died much later, I put a copy of my first novel, “Never Before Noon,” in her coffin. Mom had read the book as I was writing it, commenting on characters as I created them and plotlines as I struggled through them. As it turned out, the book was released on her 87th birthday, her last. Mom had been with me through most steps of that journey. I needed her to be with me a little longer.

Today, I’m thinking a lot about my cousin Adrienne, my sister in life if not in biological fact. She left us in mid-January 2022, after a long illness during which she always helped the rest of us smile and laugh. She may not have been the writer in the family, but she had a way with words. She was very funny, and sweetly sarcastic.

As I’ve done too many times over the last few years, I wrote Adrienne’s obituary and gave a eulogy. But there was no opportunity to leave a poem or a paragraph with her, nothing physical that I could hold in my hand and say, “This is for you, a part of me to travel with you.”

Maybe that’s why I’ve held onto the last text messages we exchanged, when she was in the hospital, and I had no idea I would never see her again.

My last words to her were, “I know.”

I didn’t. If I had, I would have said it better.

Go ahead: Call it cheesy

Women of a certain age (a fine vintage, that is) tend to say things like this about themselves: “I’ve turned into my mother” or “I hear my mother’s voice coming out of my mouth.” I know I have. I am my mother’s daughter in many ways.

Sometimes, that manifests itself as I’m writing scenes in a novel. A snarky remark of Mom’s comes to mind, or that tone of voice she’d use that was just sufficiently sincere to cover the criticism she delivered in a bit of unsolicited advice. It’s no coincidence that every novel I’ve written has a character named for her. (To date: Kate in my new book, Chasing Ashes; Katarina in Never Before Noon, Never Until Now, and Never More Human; and Cass in my work-in-progress, working title I Am NOT That Mary Irene Jones).

But more often, the Mom continuum is something quite different with me. Oddly enough, I’ve also become my mother’s menu. I find myself eating what she’d eat: almost no meat, though I tend to go for chicken (which she claimed to despise) while she went for pork; lots of pasta; salmon; soup.

Plus, I crave certain things at the times of the day she did: something sweet in the morning (a muffin or a scone); something salty at lunch (Mom loved a good post-holiday repast of potato chips and leftover onion dip). And cheese at any hour.

I tell myself that cheese has merely replaced peanuts in my life, an addiction I gave up five years ago, after eating half a jar of dry-roasted nuts every workday for four months during a contract gig editing articles on urban planning. (New job, new reporters, new production system made me a little anxious, though I’d edited the same material for more than fifteen years elsewhere.) But stress eating isn’t the whole story. When I eat cheese, I think of my mother, plain and simple.

For more Saturday afternoons than I can count, I spent a few hours at her kitchen table, noshing on cheese and crackers and chewing on her tales about her neighbors, and how much she hated her new appliances, and how there was never anything good to watch on TV despite hundreds of cable channels. Mom always had a hunk of sharp provolone her brother had brought over, and at least two varieties of sharp cheddar or blue cheese. It didn’t matter whether I arrived at noon or at 4 p.m., whether I needed to run errands or dash off to pick up my son, the cheese was on offer. And I ate as she had me crying with laughter while we debated what to do with our hair or the reasons why she needed to keep her cellphone with her at all times.

Sure, I miss her company. But these days, I also appreciate cheese in the ways she taught me. Treat it well, store it properly, and it will last for weeks in the refrigerator. No need to cook it. Its versatility can’t be beat: It’s an appetizer! It’s a dessert course! Its protein will hold you for hours, a good thing on a day when you’ve got an appointment or a long drive ahead of you. Or, as was true on one recent occasion, because you’re going to a concert and couldn’t get a dinner reservation beforehand and so were meeting friends for drinks only.

Cheese satisfies my need for nourishment, but also my hunger to reminisce. I remember my grandmother subsisting on cheese and bread during a trip through Italy when we visited her homeland when I was a child.

Seems as if my mother became her mother too. Although, unlike Mom, my grandmother and I both liked beans. Mom couldn’t abide them.

Deadline Reckoning

Even when I was a little kid, I was good at meeting deadlines. I was rarely late for school. I always got my homework done and handed in on time. (That makes me sound really dull, doesn’t it? My girlhood friends should feel free to jump in at some point and proclaim that I was, and am, delightfully spontaneous!)

After college, I became a newspaper reporter, then a copy editor, and then a copy chief, a production job that required me to do traffic control for articles being published in multiple sections every shift I worked. Later, as an assigning editor working with my own staff of reporters, it was my job to keep any number of balls (news stories, that is) up in the air, then help bring them down to land exactly how they were supposed to, and when they were supposed to.

So, here’s a shocker, to me at least: After many, many years of watching the computer screen with one eye and the clock with the other, life seems somehow out of whack unless I have a deadline. Or a reasonable facsimile of one.

Or maybe just something that gets my blood flowing.

Last weekend, I went to the Creatures, Crime and Creativity writers conference, aka C3. Great panels on the craft of writing, smart conversations with lots of fabulous writers. The adrenaline pumped through me like it was the first Tuesday in November in an off-year election cycle with hundreds of results about to land on me and my staff from dozens of suburban towns and school districts. I couldn’t sleep, I was so wired. I filled my plate at the buffets as if I were vying for slices of too-salty Election Night pizza.

Each morning at C3, I was one of the first people downstairs for breakfast, I was that eager to get the day started. There was a schedule to follow, keynotes to hear, answers to the mysteries of mystery writing to consume, facts about realistic depiction of police behavior to digest. Deadlines to meet, in other words. Best of all, a timed reading of a short story I had written that needed to clock in at seven minutes.

I enjoyed myself immensely.

OK, you could say that I’m in letdown mode, now that the intellectual stimulation is gone and I’ve refilled the refrigerator, and the laundry is washed, folded and put away.

You could reason that searching for online publications to which I might submit that seven-minute short story is less than exciting.

You could even say that I should be working on my cozy mystery-in-progress instead of tapping my toe and watching the clock. (You wouldn’t be wrong about that.)

But I know I’m just anticipating the next deadline. In this case, that will be the final edit for my new novel, “Chasing Ashes.” I feel like a runner in the block, waiting for the signal to start my dash to the finish line.

The waiting is the hardest part. Tom Petty was right about that.

A Shore thing, it wasn’t

Growing up, I spent a lot of time at the Jersey Shore, specifically pre-casino Atlantic City. My mother’s godmother, Sestina, had homes there. We’d crash for the day or the weekend any time of year, and often for whole weeks during the summer. After a family emergency when I was in college dictated that I drive to A.C. for the first time, I instinctively knew the way. Those were pre-GPS times, but I didn’t need navigational aids to find my way from Philadelphia through the suburbs of Burlington County to the farms in Gloucester and Atlantic Counties, and onward from the mainland to Albany Avenue and around the World War I Memorial.

You might have expected that over the years I would while away many an hour on the beach and the boardwalk. And I did until 1997, when life began to set up roadblocks, so to speak.

The resultant detours away from the Shore were varied. My father suffered a stroke that summer that debilitated him; my mother, with transportation and shopping help from me and lifting strength from her brother, cared for Dad until he died eight months later. Other years, I simply got sidetracked from the Shore. I went to music festivals in the Poconos with my husband, Paul, and my son, Mike, and I spent time in pools and lakes there. Mike and I traveled to Cape Cod and London (twice), by which time he was old enough to go to the Shore without me.

Life’s rollercoaster descended when my husband became ill with a chronic disease and died after eight years. It soared with my son’s marriage and the publication of my first novel, “Never Before Noon.” It swayed and turned and dipped again as my aging mother became weaker and died. The downward trajectory seemed to level off as I changed jobs, and wrote more novels, and rode smoothly into what my life has become today. But the rollercoaster never came to a full sandy stop after clearing a ramp off the Atlantic City Expressway or at the southernmost exits of the Garden State Parkway.

I lamented this less-than-tragic situation often to patient family and friends. To their credit, not one of them told me to just get in the car and go already. Then my “I Can’t Get to a New Jersey Beach Blues” came to seem somehow fated one post-lockdown summer afternoon, when my guy and I barely made it to Cape May before an attack of food poisoning, a leftover from the night before, overtook him. We stayed barely an hour before heading back to Philadelphia. He felt miserable. I felt perplexed.

Was it never to be? Was it possible I could travel to Italy and lie in the sun off the coast of the Adriatic Sea yet could not get to part of the Atlantic Ocean 100 miles away or less from my home? I mean, it had been 26 years…

On a Zoom call with friends a few weeks back, someone suggested that we all meet at the seashore home of one member in Ventnor. The motion carried; a date was set.

I hemmed and hawed. I was about to start a big project, though exactly when had not yet been established. There were things I wanted to get out of the way in advance of that. I didn’t know if I could make it, even for just the one day.

“OK,” my friends said. “Come if you can.”

As the date grew nearer, I knew one thing: I really, really, really wanted to go and sit on that beach and spend some time relaxing in their fine company.

And, amazingly, I did! Nothing flared up to get in the way. A friend was willing to drive. The weather cooperated. The food and the wine were as wonderful as we all knew it would be. Getting to the Shore was easy, finally, and so worth waiting for.

On balance, and beaming in

Wobbling is a good thing. Rolling with the punches. Knowing when against the grain is the way to go. Thinking on your feet.  In business — in life, too — it’s called resiliency. Besides, steady as you go, always sailing calm seas, how boring is that?

Ah, then, how to keep from tipping over when work and life and dream and ambition tilt you off four wheels and onto two? Adrenaline has great propellant qualities, and it can make you feel as if you have to chase everything at once — as if you’ve waited all your life to achieve certain goals, so now you must, if only to prove to yourself that you can.

Sage advisers suggest (as does this road sign about half a block from my current office in Philadelphia) that you should take things slowly, ease into the curve. Is that the answer for everybody, though? Does slow and steady really win the race?  Bigger, better question: Which is more important to you, when your work-life balance is good but your non-work work life needs, well, work?

Lately, I’ve been pondering such issues: How best to direct my creative energy when I’m not on the job? Which book project to focus on now that two of them suddenly need my attention? I’m an advocate of small victories, but that supposes I know what best constitutes a win today and for the foreseeable future.

You’re wondering ( I can hear you): This is a problem, having too many worthwhile endeavors? Where is the tipping point, and what are the consequences if over I go? Excellent questions.

So I’m leaning toward this approach: If both my goals are equally achievable, at least theoretically, I need to jump in and achieve one, and then move on to the next book. Balance what I can and step around whatever spinning plates I drop in the process. Regain my footing when I stumble. Grow wiser if I miscalculate. Allow for the fact that this dilemma might be life’s way of telling me to take a breath, to look before I leap certainly, but to leap no matter what.

And if I wobble a bit, I wobble. If I don’t make the jump, I’ll never stick the landing.

 

The company I keep

The remote-employee thing isn’t what I prefer. Nothing beats the energy of a room full of like-minded people working toward a goal. Good jobs, bad jobs, no matter the challenge presented or the resulting stress, a career-full of memories has been enriched by those with whom I’ve shared office space. I’ve cherished the friends, appreciated the oddballs, defied (okay, sometimes just endured) the bullies, followed the inspiring.

Why, then, am I surprised to be so energized about my novel-in-progress, Bloodstrains, since I’ve been back in the newsroom editing a special section for my former employer, the Philadelphia Inquirer? For years while working there full time, I banged away in solitude nights and weekends writing my three previous books.

Is this time different? Am I?

I’m going with both. Being back in an office has been exhilarating. Even the morning commute has been more enjoyable than exasperating. Because I’m working with and among people I’ve known for a long time, it’s like friends with benefits: I’m comfortable with them, they’re comfortable with me; beyond the project itself, there are no strings. When I get home in the evening, it’s a good tired I feel. I pick up my notepad and scribble ideas for Bloodstrains’ next chapter, or decide on tweaks in the last chapter I must make to advance the story. And if I don’t do more than jot down ideas for a few days, I don’t feel guilty about not accomplishing more. I can forgive myself for not slavishly devoting myself to creating.

Earlier this week, when heavy rains threatened to flood the road that runs through the park in which I live, I worked on the Inquirer project from home. It was a busy day, with several articles to edit and photos to manage. Because of the weather, my dining room seemed dreary compared to the bright expanse of newsroom in which I’ve been sitting the last three weeks. My only companions were my cats.

Until about noon, when two young deer wandered up to the bird feeder for lunch. Suddenly, it seemed less like a chilly editing environment tethered precariously to the mother ship by web-based applications that would go kablooey if the power went out.

Seemed more like a co-working space, if only until the birdseed was gone. Worked much better for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The alpha reader

Here we are, celebrating. Big day for Mom and me two years ago: She had just turned 87; my first novel, “Never Before Noon,” had just been released by Eternal Press, an imprint of Caliburn Press. The print edition hit Amazon.com on her birthday, March 5. Seemed fated, since my mother was the very first person to see pages of my manuscript.

This picture was probably the last taken of us. Certainly, the last good one. She died three-and-a-half months later, in July 2016.

Five summers earlier, as we drove to the Poconos to scatter my husband’s ashes on the river that ran near our friends’ beautiful mountain home, I had shoved a fistful of typewritten pages at her. “Read these,” I said.

We were about to enter the Lehigh Tunnel. No chance for escape. “What’s this?” she asked.

“A vampire novel. Just read it and tell me what you think.”

She looked to see how many pages I’d handed her. About thirteen, a first chapter. My usually chatty mother pulled reading glasses out of a pocket and went very quiet. Too quiet? Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her occasionally looking up at me. I might have been driving a little fast. It’s nerve-wracking to watch the woman who gave birth to you discover the characters you’ve birthed. Especially when she finishes, then reads the pages again. Didn’t they make sense the first time?

We were pulling onto Pennsylvania Route 940 when she said, “Good. Is there more?”

“I hope so. If there is, will you read it?” As mothers will, she looked at her grown daughter as if I were a four-year-old and shook her head. Kids, right?

Between that June day in 2011 and our last time at the Mexican restaurant that had become my family’s birthday/graduation/Mother’s Day go-to spot, she read more than 331,000 words, the first drafts of both “Never Before Noon” and its sequel, “Never Until Now” (moving toward release this year). She critiqued and questioned, offered thumbs up and down on point of view, motivation, character, dialogue. When I found myself having to defend a decision too much, I rewrote the scene — sometimes more than once.

When I began work on the third book of my Vampires of the Court of Cruelty trilogy, Mom wasn’t up to reading manuscript pages. So I’d tell her the story on Sunday afternoons, in her kitchen or in the sunroom at the nursing center where she was a regular those last months.

I can’t foresee a day when I don’t associate March 5, 2016, my mother’s last birthday, with publication of my first book. Wish she were here to kick my literary butt now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Checks and balance

Settling into the real-time rhythms of what I am today: writer; consultant; seeker. Getting my new mojo working: on my latest novel; on my job hunt; on myself. One thing I have discovered about my hiatus: This less-pressured life ain’t cheap.

I’ve invested in a gym membership, and clothes for the gym, naturally, though I’ve shopped at Target and Five Below — you know, to be frugal. I’ve invested in an online course in meditation, to keep myself and all around me from going bonkers during my transition from go-go-go journalist to woman of (temporary, I hope) comparative leisure. I’ve invested (or will after my month-long trial is up) in a subscription to Publishers Weekly.

I’m know I’m helping the bottom line at my local utility companies: lights on; thermostat cranked up (so glad this year has not brought the return of the Polar Vortex); coffeemaker going constantly.

And I’ve bought books, because nothing gets my writer’s juices flowing more than reading. I’m sure Amazon and my local indie bookstore will ultimately be as grateful to me as I am to them. But as anyone who has ever visited my house knows, it isn’t lacking in unread material. I just did an inventory: Every room except the basement has books or magazines in it. Yes, I’ve read many of them, but not all. Not by half.

Whenever I leave the house, I spend money, but staying in the house is not an option — not if I want to retain my sanity. This has come as a surprise, though I marvel at my epiphany. Duh.

Fortunately, I haven’t yet developed a gambling habit or the need to buy haute couture. But my sofa is looking a little shabby, and those Presidents Day sales are still going on … uh-oh.