Finding a Better Word

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Finding
a Better Word by Debra H. Goldstein

This week, I’ve been taking an
excellent Guppy Dramatic Tension course taught by none other than our own Linda
Rodriguez (who really goes the extra mile for her students). Although life has
interfered with my “performance” on some of the assignments, her concepts have
really hit home.

I now find myself searching
everything to go beyond plot for key emotional words and hints, emotional
consequences, and getting into the psych of my individual characters and their
interaction with the other characters from a new perspective. It is humbling to
see how much I don’t know and to wonder how I will ever absorb even a small
aspect of what she is teaching, but it has helped me to understand why I think
Linda’s books are so good.

Emotions and their consequences play
a big role in writing and in life. Choosing the right words conveys to readers
what is going on in an author’s head and in the story. As I’m writing this
blog, another horror story of death and tragic injuries occurring in
Manchester, England is flashing across my TV set. I don’t usually write
political pieces, but today I condemn those who caused this incident and the others
like it. My heart goes out to those who were enjoying concerts, vacation trips,
or other activities in peace only to be caught up in moments of terror.

Using what I’ve already learned in
class about words that produce dramatic tension, I think I can characterize
what is going through my head: I am angered, saddened, disgusted, fearful, and
surprised. It shows through agitation, amazement, despair, depression,
disapproval, frustration, frightened, threatened, and anxiousness. The
consequences as I travel and look around me in the future will be a loss of
innocence replaced by attitudes of suspicion, skepticism, aversion, and
behaviors reflecting being powerless and vulnerable.

Is this what I want my children to
see? Is this the world I want them to live in? We all dream that the next
generation will have things easier and better, but words like happy, joyful,
and hopeful have been replaced by reality. It sucks.

Clicking Our Heels – Social Media

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Clicking Our Heels – Social Media

In this age of social
media, we thought it would be interesting to ascertain how social media
enhances or distracts from writing. Here are the various Stiletto Gang member
thoughts:

Bethany Maines – Social media has enhanced my writing by connecting
me to readers and writers I wouldn’t have otherwise met. But it’s so easy to
use as a distraction from, you know, actually writing.

Cathy Perkins – Social media lets me interact with people on a
daily basis but it’s a distraction when time is so precious.

Paula Gail Benson – Both. It helps me to learn about things more
quickly, like current events, modern speech patterns, or in-vogue
abbreviations. It also is very addictive. I have to limit my time with it or
I’ve suddenly lost hours.

Sparkle Abbey – Social media is definitely both a wonderful
connection and at times a distraction. It’s so great to be able to connect with
readers and other writers, but it certainly can suck you in and then you wonder
where that hour went!

Kay Kendall – Social media enhances my writing. As an extrovert,
there is no way I could sit in a room day after day and not communicate with
people. With social media, however, I can still communicate to the outside
world. This keeps me at my desk…and happy.

Paffi S. Flood – Oh, definitely, social media has distracted me,
especially twitter. With the election in full swing, I couldn’t seem to tear
myself away, but I really needed to. 

Kimberly Jayne – Social media is a double-edged sword. You need it to
engage with people and, in particular, your readers/fans, but it’s easy to
spend too much time doing that instead of the harder job of writing. You can
dedicate an hour a day to social media; then, in the process look up at the
clock and find you’ve overshot by an extra hour. And I can’t imagine that the
extra hour gives you any more ROI for your efforts than the one- hour goal
would have. 

Debra H. Goldstein – Social media is my nemesis. I know I need it
to connect with readers and fans, as well as to attract new ones, but the time
spent on it distracts from doing other things – usually because instead of
using it for work, I check the news and gossip J. 

Linda Rodriguez – I would have answered this question differently
not very long ago, but right now, I’d have to say social media does distract me
from my writing. This is primarily because of the election and also a number of
volatile situations involving African American, Latino, and Native civil rights
in the new news. I happen to be passionately involved with those issues. 

Jennae Phillippe – Oh man, it is SUCH a distraction. Honestly, I
think about quitting social media on a semi-regular basis because it is such a
time suck. And while I rely on it to keep me informed, sometimes the sheer
quantity of horrible things shared feels very overwhelming and draining. If I
didn’t need it to connect to readers, I think I would abandon it completely.

Sources of the Mystery Short Story

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by Paula Gail Benson
Continuing
the celebration of May as Short Story Month (see http://shortstorymonth.com/ and http://storyaday.org/), here are a few sources
where you can find excellent short stories and receive encouragement or ideas
for marketing short stories.
  
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (https://www.themysteryplace.com/ahmm/),
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (https://www.themysteryplace.com/eqmm/),
and The Strand (https://strandmag.com/) are perhaps the best
known monthly publications that feature stories, interviews, and reviews. Woman’s World (http://www.womansworld.com/) is a weekly
periodical that features a short solve-it-yourself mystery, often written by well-known
mystery writers such as John Floyd and B.K. Stevens.
Wildside
Press (http://wildsidepress.com/) offers
the monthly Sherlock Holmes Mystery
Magazine as well as anthologies produced for the Malice Domestic Mystery
Conference (Malice Domestic 11: Murder
Most Conventional and Malice Domestic
12: Mystery Most Historical) and the Guppy and Chesapeake Chapters of Sisters
in Crime. Wildside has also published single author short story collections,
like Barb Goffman’s Don’t Get Mad, Get
Even and B.K. Stevens’ Her Infinite
Variety.
Level
Best Books (https://levelbestbooks.com/)
is well known for publishing the Best New England Crime Stories series and is
currently seeking submissions (which close May 31, 2017) for the 15th
anthology, to be titled, Snowbound. Now
under new editors, Level Best has branched out with a law enforcement
anthology, Busted! Arresting Stories from
the Beat, and an upcoming culinary collection, Noir at the Salad Bar.
Two
excellent online magazines are Mysterical
E (http://mystericale.com/),
published quarterly, and Kings River Life
(http://kingsriverlife.com/), issued
weekly. If you look at the Mystery Rats Maze portion of Kings River Life (http://kingsriverlife.com/category/kings-river-reviewers/mysteryrats-maze/),
you’ll find interviews with mystery authors, book reviews, and short stories.
Sometimes there’s even a give-away offer!
Finally,
both for its list of online resources and its continuous updates of contests
and calls for submissions, Sandra Seamans’ blog (http://sandraseamans.blogspot.com/)
can’t be beat. In addition, the Short Mystery Fiction Society (https://shortmystery.blogspot.com/)
has been commemorating the short story month with selected stories from its
member authors, including our own Debra Goldstein.
If
you love short stories, particularly mystery ones, please be sure to check out
these great sites!  

Plotting vs. Pantsing

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by Linda Rodriguez
In the mystery-writing community,
people tend to divide themselves into plotters or pantsers. This
seems to me to set up a false dichotomy where real authors either
write out rigid, detailed outlines of their entire books before they
begin their first draft or they start with nothing but perhaps an
image or a line and then wing their way through the entire book. I
know this divide isn’t true, and if you look, you can find plenty of
interviews with and articles by established mystery writers saying
this isn’t true, but still, this either-or myth seems to fill the air
and create problems, especially for fairly new writers.

I’d like to suggest that there are
myriad ways to write a mystery or thriller that partake to varying
degrees of both methods and yet are neither. Probably the initial
freeing knowledge in this arena that I encountered was from
best-selling and award-winning Elizabeth George. George has also
written a great book on writing the novel, especially the mystery, Write Away:
One Writer’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, in which she discusses the way
she writes her own highly successful mysteries. She plots out in
broad general terms what will happen over the first 50 pages, goes
into more detail about what will happen in each scene right before
she writes it, and then she changes that rough 50-page outline to
adhere to what she actually wrote in those first 50 or so pages,
plots out in general terms the next 50 pages, and proceeds this way
through the first draft of the entire book. At the end, her outline
shows the basic structure of what she’s actually written, providing a
tool she can use in revision.

George’s practical method was very
close to what I was actually doing. I felt like a failure because I
couldn’t stick to a pre-determined outline of a whole book, nor could
I just wing it without finding I’d often left out the drama my book
needed. But, hey, if Elizabeth George did it, too, maybe I wasn’t
such a failure.

The truth of the matter is that any way
you can get a good book written is the right way for that book. Some
people love those detailed outlines—I’ve heard some authors claim
their original outlines are longer than the books themselves. Some
people can fly across the page on a wing and a prayer with no
preparation, never knowing where they’re going until they reach the
end, without later having to throw away huge chunks of draft and
spend ages on major revisions to try to inject some action and drama
into their manuscripts. As far as I can tell, however, both extremes
are fairly rare. Usually, in talking with writers, I find they use
some mixture of the two methods. Perhaps they think a great deal and
even make notes about the world of the book, the dramatic situation,
and the characters—notes they may later refer to or not, as the
case may be—and then they just start writing, having gassed up the
story machine in their unconscious with their earlier thinking, and
just keep going until the end. Perhaps they wing it until they get
into trouble and then they work on figuring out what happens next
before winging it again for a while, cycling in and out of that
process throughout the book. This is a strategy I have also used
before and may well use again.

We find what works for us for this
particular book—and the thing is, that tends to change with certain
books—and that becomes our method, until it no longer works for the
book we’re on now. So I urge all of you to eschew the seeming
requirement for rigid extremes. Try some of these hybrid methods and
see if any one of them will work well for you with the book you’re
writing now, keeping in mind that it’s not the only one and you can
change to another of them when it no longer helps. You might make up
a hybrid method that I haven’t mentioned that will work well for your
book, or you might find another that I haven’t mentioned in an
interview with a writer you admire. Use what works for you at the
stage you’re at right now.

New novelists, especially, can find it
difficult to successfully juggle all the plates of character,
conflict, action, motivation, background and setting, dialogue, scene
structure, plot points, emotional turning points, plot complications,
subplots, and a million more from the beginning. Thinking ahead and
planning for effective use of some of these aspects of the novel is a
completely successful way to work, even if you want to wing the rest
of it.

These are my two cents on the whole
plotter vs pantser thing. How do you work?

Linda Rodriguez’s Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The
World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East,
an anthology she co-edited, are her newest books. Every Family
Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear in autumn, 2017. Her three earlier
Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust,
and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s
Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International
Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices
& Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and
Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good
Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has
been optioned for film.
Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP
Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter
of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers
Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International
Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and
Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at
http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

The Box Set Funeral

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Box sets have been a marketing staple in the publishing
industry, but a lot of people are ready to call the technique dead and bury it.
Queue the band and plan the funeral.
Or not.
The opportunities presented by setting up a box set remain
as numerous—and practical—as ever. The sets offer a chance to collaborate with
other authors to reach a different group of readers. 
In well run ventures, many
hands mean a combined promotional effort that expands the reach of an
individual. And on a practical level, the book is already written, so the set
adds another potential income stream.
Genres sets tend to perform better than literary sets,
especially if the books share a similar audience. Many of the current box sets
share a theme, setting, or type of hero/heroine.
Does that mean you should dive into the next set you hear
about? 
Probably not. 
From the author’s perspective, understand why you’re joining
the set and who you’re teaming with. Are their readers potentially your
readers? On a more personal level, will the other members of the team pull
their weight and take responsibility for their marketing or preparation tasks? Other
decisions include financial management of royalties and/or required buy-in of advertising
dollars.
Let’s say you’ve considered the options and assembled a
team, chosen a theme and established a time line. What’s not to like about this decision?

The biggest criticism of the box sets is the same disdain leveled
at other forms of “cheap marketing”—i.e. free or very inexpensive books. 
“They
devalue the written word.” 
“They’re destroying the industry.
Yeah, yeah, the sky is falling.
There’s also the naysayers’ claim the book hoarders simply
snap up the inexpensive sets and place them on their e-reader, where they
disappear among the pixels. 
That may happen. But there are also readers who dip
and sample through the set (or even better, voraciously read all the stories).
And they just might tell their friends about a new –to-them author (you!).
Because word of mouth marketing is still the best kind.
I’m sure you’re surprised to hear I joined a box set that
released this week. LUCK OF THE DRAW features thirteen brand new stories centered
on a life-changing stroke of luck. (Special release week price at Amazon) 
My contribution to the set is DOUBLE DOWN. Murder isn’t supposed to be in the cards for blackjack dealer
Maddie Larsson. A single mom, struggling to make ends meet, dealing
at the Tom Tom Casino pays better than anything else she’s currently
qualified to do. Busted takes on a new meaning, however, when her favorite
customer, a former Poker World Tour champion, is murdered. His family
claims—loudly and often—that Maddie is a gold-digging murderer. She better
prove she’s on the level before the real killer cashes in her chips.
If the victim’s body had been dumped five hundred yards up the
road, Franklin County Sheriff’s Detective JC Dimitrak wouldn’t have been
assigned to the Tom Tom Casino murder case. Instead, he’s hunting for suspects
and evidence while dealing with a nemesis from the past and trying to preserve
his own future. He better play his cards correctly and find the killer before
an innocent woman takes the ultimate hit.

Austin Starr’s Bad Day

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by Kay Kendall

The protagonist-turned-amateur-sleuth in my two mysteries is Austin Starr. Here she shares her thoughts about the problems she faces in my first book, DESOLATION ROW, and hints at ongoing issues that develop further in my second, RAINY DAY WOMEN.

This
year, 1968, looked so promising at first. I married my college boyfriend David.
He’s kind, smart, handsome…and taller than me. That’s a real plus.
Unfortunately,
today I can’t see him because he’s in jail. And if that’s not bad enough
already, he’s in jail in a foreign country.
OK, OK,
so we’ve only moved to Canada…but we Americans aren’t supposed to feel any
culture shock up here in Canada. Ha! Not true. I’ve got news for you. Canada is
not the 51st state.
Now,
please, don’t get the wrong idea about me. Just because the man I married
became a draft resister, don’t think I’m a hippie, or anything like that.
Really, I’m just a good Texas girl from a small town who followed my mother’s
advice—to get married and settle down, do what your husband tells you. Mother
simply never dreamed I’d end up living in such a cold climate, in a strange
place. Canada.
I’m so
homesick. I miss my family and friends back in Texas. And I’m scared. So very
scared. They say the Mounties always get their man…and the Mounties now have
got my husband.
They’re
sure David murdered another draft resister. But I know he didn’t do it. After
all, we came to Canada because David was against killing—against all
killing—even in the war in Vietnam.
Today
I’m setting out to prove my husband isn’t the killer. I’m nosey, curious, and
had some training from the CIA. My handler, “Mr. Smith,” was sorry to see me
leave the program. He warned I might not be happy and said he’d keep the door
open for me, in case I ever wanted to return. Smith says the Agency needs my
Russian language skills.
Shhh,
please don’t tell David. He doesn’t know about this part of my life. I don’t
think he would approve.
Here’s
the strangest thing about this murder case. I was the one who found the
body—literally fell over it, in a church basement. Yes, me. And it turns out
the corpse was the draft-resisting son of a United States Senator. That’s why
the Mounties moved so fast to jail my poor David. The senator called the prime
minister of Canada and demanded the killer be caught, fast.
Now
everyone is satisfied the murderer is in jail—everyone but me, that is.
So now
I’m on a mission…even though I’m alone, homesick, scared…and only 22 years
old…I have to prove David’s innocence. I’m his only hope.
I’m
Austin Starr, and I’m hunting for a brutal killer. Wish me luck.

~~~~~~~

Read the first 20
pages of Kay Kendall’s second mystery, RAINY
DAY WOMEN here! http://www.austinstarr.com/ Her book won 2 awards at Killer Nashville in 2016.
Her first novel about Austin Starr‘s sleuthing,

Kay Kendall & Wills AKA King William

DESOLATION ROW, was a finalist for best mystery at Killer Nashville in 2014. Visit Kay on Facebook at                               https://www.facebook.com/KayKendallAuthor
 


 

The Flying of Time

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by J.M. Phillippe

There comes a point in a new position where everything begins to feel routine. Where the schedule is pretty locked in, the tasks rote, and the days start to blend together. I always worry when this happens, because as the weeks whirl into months, I feel my life passes before my eyes at an almost numbing speed. I become complacent.

Writing is the only thing that seems to help keep the flying of time in check, because it is a measurable use of time. Most of my tasks disappear, as it were, by the next week. As a therapist, I see the same people over and over again, marking their progress with notes written weekly and treatment plans written every three months. But the progress in therapy is sometimes is small, and hard to see from week to week, like tracking the growth of a child. You know they are growing, but it takes a while to actually see it.

At the breakneck speed of a mental health clinic where I see clients one right after another, with one short break midway through a stretch of 9 clients in a row, it’s hard to spend a lot of time processing each session to look for those moments of growth or change. Each week picks up on the topics of the previous, so it feels sometimes like I am binging other people’s lives.

And it sometimes feels like in doing so I am neglecting my own. Again, writing is one of the few things that keeps me grounded in my own goals and dreams, and helps me see my own growth. I can see the pages that mark the passing of time, see the drafts build, one on another, and when I hit that final draft, have an actual product to give people that is a physical manifestation of “how I used my time.”

However, I struggle to make time for writing. It often comes after — after work, after chores, after general life maintenance. It’s been hard to put writing first. When I look back over a stretch of time and see how few pages I have to show for that period of time, I know my priorities have drifted away from me, and that my routine has taken over.

You’d think that the natural thing to do is to make writing part of that routine, and that has always been my goal. But with so little time, and so many other things going on, it continues to be very hard to make the kind of dedicated writing time I want. I end up getting snatches of time here and there, which never seem to let me get to the place I want to get to, where the words just flow and the story takes over. That is what I miss, more than anything, when I say I miss writing. I miss being a conduit instead of a work horse. I miss feeling inspired instead of feeling obligated. I miss getting quality time with my own imaginary adventures.

So, now that I see that my time management has gotten away from me, it’s time to make adjustments and put writing back up on the priority list. I know doing that though means that some other things may start to slide. There simply just isn’t enough time for everything. I have to use the time I have better.

***

J.M. Phillippe is the author of Perfect Likeness and the short story The Sight. She has lived in the deserts of California, the suburbs of Seattle, and the mad rush of New York City. She works as a family therapist in Brooklyn, New York and spends her free-time decorating her tiny apartment to her cat Oscar Wilde’s liking, drinking cider at her favorite British-style pub, and training to be the next Karate Kid, one wax-on at a time.

May is Short Story Month!

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by Paula Gail Benson

Thanks
to my friend, phenomenal author Art Taylor (Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and
Macavity award winner for short fiction and winner of
the Agatha Award for Best First Novel for On the Road with Del &
Louise: A Novel in Stories—check out his website at: http://www.arttaylorwriter.com/), I learned that
May is Short Story Month. It’s a tradition that started in 2013. You can read
about it at http://shortstorymonth.com/ and participate
with your own contributions at http://storyaday.org/, which encourages
people to complete a story each day during the months of May and September and
provides writing prompts and featured guests (like Neil Gaiman) as inspiration.

Art
has been celebrating this year by featuring a different story each day on his
Facebook page, including one by his very talented wife Tara Laskowski (read
about her terrific short story collection Bystanders
at http://taralaskowski.com/). Tara is the editor
of http://www.smokelong.com/, the online
literary magazine devoted to flash fiction.

I
began thinking about the mystery short story writers who have inspired me. I
credit Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Alan Poe for luring me into the genre, but
a number of current authors keep me reading and teach me the true artistry of
the short story craft. Here’s a list (beginning with Art and Tara and in
alphabetical order below) of a few that you may want to add to your TBR stack,
if you haven’t already discovered them.

John
Floyd (http://www.johnmfloyd.com/), a former Air
Force captain and IBM engineer, has written more than 1,000 stories that have
appeared in the Strand Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Woman’s World, The Saturday Evening Post, Mississippi Noir, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2015. In addition to
receiving three Derringer awards, he has been
nominated for an Edgar and three times nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He blogs
at http://www.sleuthsayers.org/. His books are: Rainbow’s End (2006), Midnight
(2008), Clockwork (2010), Deception (2013), Fifty
Mysteries (2014), and Dreamland (2016).

Kaye George (http://kayegeorge.wixsite.com/kaye-george), while writing
four series of mystery novels, continues to produce quality short fiction.
Recently, she took on the job as editor for Day
of the Dark, an anthology to be
published by Wildside Press on July 21 that contains 24 stories about eclipse,
to commemorate the one that will take place in August. I met Kaye as a
member of the Guppy Chapter of Sisters in Crime. She served as treasurer, then
President of the online chapter, and throughout her membership has been a
consistent contributor and commenter to the short story critique group. Her
insightful advice has helped many of us to improve our work.

Barb
Goffman (http://barbgoffman.com/) has been
nominated numerous times for the Agatha, Anthony, Derriger, and Macavity
awards. She has won the Agatha and Macavity and her Don’t
Get Mad, Get Even won the Silver Falchion
for best single-author mystery-short-story collection published in 2013. She
blogs at http://www.sleuthsayers.org/ and
is an accomplished editor.

Debra Goldstein (http://www.debrahgoldstein.com/), my
blogging partner here at The Stiletto Gang, is an active member of the Guppy
Chapter short story critique group. Recently, her “The Night They Burned Ms. Dixie’s Place” appeared in the
May/June 2017 edition of Alfred Hitchcock
Mystery Magazine. Check out her mention on the cover at: https://www.themysteryplace.com/ahmm/.

Robert Mangeot (http://robertmangeot.com/)
calls himself a  “Turner of Phrase, Counter of Beans, Crafter of Sandwiches” on
his website.  His fine stories have been
published in the MWA anthology Ice Cold and
the Bouchercon anthology Murder Under the
Oaks. He is a frequent contributor to Alfred
Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

Edith Maxwell (https://edithmaxwell.com/) has
the distinction of having her short story and novel both featuring her Quaker
midwife protagonist nominated for the best short story and best historical
novel at this year’s Malice Domestic Agatha awards. In addition to writing four
mystery series and blogging with the Wicked Cozy Authors, she continues to
produce quality short fiction.

Terrie Farley Moran (http://terriefarleymoran.com/) won the Agatha
Award Best First Novel winner, Well Read, Then Dead, the debut of
her Read ‘Em and Eat series. Currently, her “Inquiry and Assistance,” a
Depression era story published in Alfred
Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, is a nominee for a Derringer award as best
novelette. A copy of the nominated story may be accessed at: http://terriefarleymoran.com/short-stories/.

B.K.
“Bonnie” Stevens (http://www.bkstevensmysteries.com/) has
become a beloved friend and confidant. I first met her when I contacted her to
tell her how much I loved reading “Thea’s First Husband” (now included in
Wildside Press’ Her Infinite Variety: Tales of Women and Crime). In
addition to her novel, Interpretation of Murder, a traditional whodunit,
and her YA martial arts mystery Fighting Chance, Bonnie has written over
fifty short stories, most published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
She won a Derringer and has been nominated for Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity
awards. In addition to blogging at http://www.sleuthsayers.org/, her
own blog features authors describing the first two pages of their work, both
novels and short stories. Check it out at:

http://www.bkstevensmysteries.com/category/the-first-two-pages/

Please
indulge and celebrate May as Short Story month by taking time to enjoy these
wonderful authors’ stories. Then, why not write one or two of your own?

The Facebook Post is BS – I Want a Mother’s Day Gift!

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The
Facebook Post is BS – I Want a Mother’s Day Gift! by Debra H. Goldstein
Dear Mom,
On Facebook this week, the unknown
writer cut and paste post tied to Mother’s Day is:
Every year my
children ask me the same question. After thinking about it, I decided I’d give
them my real answer:
What do I want for Mother’s Day? I want you. I want you to keep coming around,
I want you to ask me questions, ask my advice, tell me your problems, ask for
my opinion, ask for my help. I want you to come over and rant about your
problems, rant about life, whatever. Tell me about your job, your worries. I
want you to continue sharing your life with me. Come over and laugh with me, or
laugh at me. I don’t care. Hearing you laugh is music to me.

I spent the
better part of my life raising you the best way I knew how. Now, give me time
to sit back and admire my work.

Raid my
refrigerator, help yourself, I really don’t mind. In fact, I wouldn’t want it
any other way. I want you to spend your money making a better life for you and
your family. I have the things I need. I want to see you happy and healthy. When
you ask me what I want for Mother’s Day, I say “nothing” because you’ve already
been giving me my gift all year. I want you.
I think the posters have it wrong. I
want a gift. I’d like the opportunity to spend another day with you. A day when
we talk for more than a few moments. A day when I ask you about you instead of
ranting about my life or getting annoyed because I’d rather be doing something
for work or with my family rather than making my daily telephone call to you. A
day when we go to lunch or take a drive or laugh at a joke.
Thank goodness you were with us for
Jen’s wedding, but I’m so sorry you missed Beth’s. It was special, too. You’d
be thrilled at how your grandchildren and great-grandchildren are doing and
you’d be patiently listening, and silently praying, over the antics of your
playboy grandson.
So, I want a real gift this Mother’s
Day. Memories aren’t the same.

                                                                    Love,
   
                                         Debbie                                                 

A Poem for Mother’s Day

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
Paffi Flood was unable to post today, so Linda Rodriguez is substituting for her.
As we approach Mother’s Day, the airwaves are filled with commercials for gifts for mothers and suggestions for special ways to “spoil Mom” and celebrate this May holiday. You can’t escape them. So, this poem is for all those who, like me, have lost their mothers and find the day’s celebrations bittersweet. 


CONVERSATION WITH MY
MOTHER’S PICTURE
You and Dad were entirely
happy here—
you in purple miniskirt,
white vest and tights
(you always wore what was
already too young
for me), Dad in purple
striped pants,
a Kansas State newsboy’s
cap
made for a bigger man’s
head.
You both held Wildcat
flags and megaphones
to cheer the football
team who,
like the rest of the
college, despised you
middle-aged townies,
arranging for their penicillin
and pregnancy tests and
selling them
cameras and stereos at
deep discount.
But you were happy
in this picture, before
they found
oat-cells in your lungs.

After the verdict, he
took you to Disneyland,
this man who married you
and your five children
when I was fifteen. He
took you cross-country
to visit your family,
unseen
since your messy divorce.
He took you to St. Louis
and Six Flags Over Texas
and to Topeka
for radiation treatments.
I don’t think he ever
believed
you could die. Now he’s
going
the same way. And none of
us
live in that Wildcat town
with the man
who earned his “Dad”
the hard way
from suspicious kids and
nursed
your last days. For me,
this new dying
brings back yours,
leaving me only this image
of you both cheering for lucky winners.
Published in Heart’s Migration (Tia Chucha Press, 2009)