I Heart You Not

 Holidays, Love, Relationships  No Responses »
Feb 122012
 

I despise holidays based on either extortion or expectations of the heart.

Everyone knows my feelings about Halloween. (See “Why I Spend Halloween in the Basement.”) Valentine’s Day ranks right up there with it; I was tempted to name this post “Why I Spend Valentine’s Day Under the Bed.” 

I didn’t always think Valentine’s was a total waste of pink, doilies, and red construction paper. I’m not a complete ogre. I still have those homemade love notes from my kids, and they still make me cry. And then I remember those same kids, years later, sobbing in my arms because some elementary school doofus gave everyone a Valentine but her or because she did’t receive a rose that day from a single high school moron.

This holiday is rife with expectation, hope, and sentimentality. It makes me gag. It makes my heart hurt for all those sitting at home waiting and for those coerced into going out on a miserable date not because you want to but because that’s what you’re supposed to do on February 14.

Romantic love is not dashing into Cub Foods at 5 p.m. and snagging the last bouquet or giving, heaven forbid, a love coupon worth one heck of a time at a future date. It is not having a jet waiting to fly you to Paris (althought that could earn massive points).

Romantic love is giving and receiving a smile EVERY day. It is keeping your mouth shut when you are jumping-around-inside-of-you dying to say something.

You want true love? I’ll give it to you.

One day my husband (whom I shall call Rubbertoes) and I were arguing in the backyard. I forget what it was about, but it started to get heated. Finally, my normally peaceful Rubbertoes flung his gardening trowel into a bed of impatiens and shouted: “And that’s your heart!” For a moment, the world stopped; the birds ceased singing; the children gasped.

And then I burst out laughing. I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of my lawn chair.

No one sends a spade spinning into the aorta of a garden unless they truly care. When we drive each other to the edge and still hang on, that is love. It does’t have anything to do with chocolates or jewelry or tattoos.

My curmudgeonly advice: Don’t do anything special this holiday. Instead, make all the other days of the year special. That’s my plan—do nothing. At least until the grandkids come along.

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Do you celebrate Valentine’s Day? How? Are you a curmudgeon or a mushy, chocolate-loving, diamonds-are-a-girl’s-best-friend sort?

 Posted by at 3:37 pm  Tagged with: , , , ,

12 Shameless Reasons to Shop the Indie Book Blowout

 Book of Mercy, Books, Christmas, Holidays, Kindle, On Writing  22 Responses »
Dec 122011
 

This time of year you are inundated with promotions—every single one of them shameless. I’d like to keep Christmas pristine just as much as the next guy, but what’s an indie author to do? I’ve got birds to feed, kids who need more electronics, and an 81-year-old father expecting something for Christmas.

We’re all—both indie and traditional publishers—fighting for your attention. Hey, you out there in cyberland, yes you, look at me, look at my book (major waving and jumping around). Put down that L.L. Bean catalog and come to the Twelve Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout.

The Blowout is like that annual book sale you wouldn’t miss for the world, the one held at your church or your local library. Every year you go, slowly making your way down aisles between tables crammed with books. Your neck gets a crick in it from turning at just the right angle to read book titles on old moldy spines. The room smells of books—and excitement. What treasure will you find this year?

The Twelve Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout is full of treasures. Here are twelve shameless reasons why you should explore it:

  1. The most shameless of the shameless: my new novel, Book of Mercy, is there. Where else will you get a serious topic—censorship—all wrapped up in a funny novel? (There’s pie throwing, a wife who binge drives, a navigationally challenged husband, a villain who wears Prada, hubcap art, and a bad guy who likes Richard Nixon masks.) FOR JUST 99 CENTS. The first three chapters alone are worth that. And once it’s on your Kindle, it’s easy to get to, unlike some partridges in pear trees.
  2. Turtles (not to be confused with turtle doves) are fearful things. They duck back into their shells at the slightest provocation. At the Blowout, you can work on facing your own fears. You WILL find the perfect book for Uncle Harvey or Aunt Rose. There are more than 200 from which to choose—and every book is only 99 cents.
  3. Looking for something foreign? I don’t think there are any books in French or about hens. But you should examine every one, just to make sure.
  4. If you hadn’t read this far, you wouldn’t know that the famous holiday tune actually sings of “colly birds” on the fourth day, not “calling birds.” What’s a colly? It’s a blackbird. In England, a coal mine is called a colliery, and colly refers to something being black like coal. Isn’t it great to learn new stuff? No doubt you will access all kinds of new information in your Blowout books.
  5. I cannot promise you that you will receive five gold rings this Christmas. However, if you shop at the Blowout, you could win a new Kindle. Buy a book and get entered into the giveaway. What will you do with another Kindle? Keep it for yourself and give your old one to your kid.
  6. Don’t lay a goose egg this Christmas. You can give Blowout eBooks to friends and family who don’t even own Kindles. They can download a free Kindle app and read into the wee hours of the morning on their computer, iPad, or smartphone.
  7. Duckling or swan? Shopping at the Blowout will bring out your inner beauty. Because that’s what reading and books do. They grow our spirit, make us laugh, and feed our dreams.
  8. If you’re a maid who has a lot more milking to do before the sun sets and can’t face the mall, simply turn on your computer and head to the Blowout. You can satisfy any reading appetite without leaving your desk: scary horror stuff, fun romances, intriguing mysteries, smart contemporary fiction, mind-blowing paranormal tales, and in-your-face nonfiction (it’s all true, baby). Every book is 99 cents, which fits perfectly into a milkmaid’s budget.
  9. Remember the Black Friday riots: people grabbing toys out of other people’s carts; shoppers shoving, pushing, and pepper spraying? At the Blowout, we are all about decorum. You can act like a lady or a gentleman—and still stuff your stocking to overflowing with Kindle books. Go ahead, do your happy dance now.
  10. Every day of this special sales event, the Blowout will be giving away Amazon gift cards to winners randomly selected from the Indie Book Blowout subscriber database. That ought to set your lords to leaping. Enter the giveaway with each purchase. That’s extra smackeroos to supplement your Christmas budget (or to pack your Kindle with more Blowout deals).
  11. Sorry, there is no music being sold in this holiday promotion. You will have to get your pipers piping elsewhere.
  12. Drum roll, please. This wouldn’t be a shameless list if I didn’t mention my book again. Book of Mercy: a funny novel about a serious issue—censorship. Don’t fall for a book of similar title by some guy named Cohen; that’s poetry. I don’t write poetry, and I don’t sing. But I have always wanted someone to dance me to the end of love.

So let’s get in the shopping, er, holiday spirit. Go to the Twelve Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout NOW and begin wandering our virtual aisles. The Blowout only lasts from December 12-24, 2011. It is sponsored by the Indie Book Collective, a group of authors who believe readers rock.

Happy holidays and enjoy your books.

_____________________________________

MORE! Check out these blogs by other Indie Book Blowout authors:

Rachel Thompson: Indie Book Blowout Begins!

J. Sterling: Being an Indie Author

Shannon Muir: The 12 Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout

Abbey MacInnis: Twelve Days of Christmas Event

Ron Vitale: The 12 Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout

JC Andrijeski: 12 Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout (with free Kindle and Kindle Fire!)

C.K. Bryant: 12 Days of Christams: Indie Book Blowout!

 Posted by at 7:14 am  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Christmas Unplugged: A Short Story

 Christmas, Holidays, Married Life, Short Story  2 Responses »
Dec 042011
 

Jenna already has her lights up, of course. I would have mine up, too, except ever since Sam fell into the Grand Canyon, I have been a little behind on things. I told my husband, leaning over the edge like that, that there wasn’t anything down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon but river. Well, he proved me wrong. Men dance on the edge of the abyss, not even thinking about the mess they’ll leave behind.

From the moment Sam hit that rocky bottom, my world changed. It didn’t help that the stock market went splat, just like Sam, shortly thereafter. I have held on to my 1940s St. Paul bungalow by judicious spending, prodigious coupon clipping, and lowering the thermostat. It’s not so bad. Zoey the cat and I burrow under the down blankets and listen to the snowplows at night.

My one worry is the Christmas lights. Electricity is expensive, and I simply MUST have at least 5,459 lights. That is the number smothering Jenna’s house, trees, and that tacky plastic North Pole diorama. She’s been bragging all over the neighborhood about this year’s display. If I can’t produce one light more, she will win.

“You and Jenna have been competing with each other since the cradle,” Sam always said.

It was true. I took the crown at the Beautiful Babes Contest when we were four; Jenna threw a tantrum and ripped out her pink bows and half her blonde hair. But she came back swinging at the State Fair when we were sixteen, becoming one of the beloved dairy princesses. As I fumed, my mother said, “Now be Minnesota nice, Abigail. Besides it’s cold sitting in that freezer getting your likeness carved in real butter.” I wanted to knock that tiara off Jenna’s butter head with a hot dish.

And that’s the way we’ve gone on for fifty years: frenemies. Neither will be the first to let our hair turn gray or admit our true age. She even moved in right across the street from me. Her house is bigger than mine, and newer, but mine is an original Craftsman, not one of those knockoffs.

I tear my gaze away from Jenna’s house and pluck the electric bill from a nest of bills in my lap. “Zoey,” I stroke the cat nestled on top of the bills, “where can we save a hundred dollars and keep my lights on?”

“You could put up fewer lights,” Sam would say.

“Not on your life,” I tell Zoey.

Outside Jimmy, the boy from down the street, is doing Sam’s old job. He is my new light man. He lifts and untangles and hammers and strings. It will take him two days, and I just hope he knows his way around a roof.

While Jimmy works on the lights, I walk to the hair salon. This time of year, I always take a route that passes the Black Rooster because it offers one heck of a Christmas display. As I’m taking in the decorations, I peek through the diner windows and see Bennie Nordgaard, Jenna’s husband, in a booth, giggling and patting the hand of a woman who is at least twenty years younger. He glances in my direction and jerks back his hand. I raise an eyebrow. He looks away.

That night I can’t sleep. Zoey is hogging all the covers. She is fifteen pounds of Maine Coon dead weight. I look like crap the next morning when Jimmy knocks on the door. He spends another day untangling and hammering, finishing about four o’clock. He has tested his work and swears that every one of my 5,460 bulbs is working. Five thousand four hundred and sixty—I make Jimmy count them twice.

That evening I bundle up and go outside to stand in the street and bask in the glow of my Yuletide extravaganza. Before long, Jenna joins me. As she stands beside me, the smell of her Chanel reaches across to me in the cold. We both stare at my house. I cross my arms. She crosses hers.

“How many?” she asks.

This is when I do the victory dance in the packed snow. I have the numbers and the money to keep them lit. But for some reason, I don’t jump to respond. I find myself thinking of the blonde in the booth at the Black Rooster.

Before I know it, I lie: “5,458.”

Jenna stands a little taller and gives me a satisfied smile. “Too bad. 5,459.”

“Well, there’s always next year,” I say.

“Yup, next year.”

As Jenna minces her way across the icy walk back to her house, I return to mine. Zoey greets me at the door. I bend to stroke her then whip off my hat and shake out my hair. I examine my gray roots in the mirror. Sam had been pushing me to go au naturale for years.

A dye job at Missy’s Mane Event costs about a hundred bucks.

“Merry Christmas, Sam,” I whisper.

__________________________________________

If this story brought some holiday cheer to your busy day, please take a moment more and check out some of Sherry’s other fiction: Book of Mercy, a funny novel about a serious issue—censorship, and Maud’s House, about what happens when creativity goes missing in a small Vermont town.
 Posted by at 10:11 am  Tagged with: , , , , ,

Why I Spend Halloween in the Basement

 Holidays, Married Life, Relationships  8 Responses »
Oct 282011
 

Our marriage is a Halloween-free zone.We also avoid restaurants with themes, ever since the waiter at Renaissance Buffet plopped down on one knee, thumped his chest, and said, “My liege, might I suggest a hearty meat pie or a joint of our finest mutton roast?”

That put my husband off his feed. “I don’t like people in costumes touching my food,” he said. “They unnerve me.”

“Hmm?” I said, studying the menu. “What’s in the Borgia Burger?”

You might wonder how we raised two daughters with these types of phobias. We did okay until they hit preschool and learned from some loudmouth that other kids actually procured bags of goodies on Halloween. That happened to be the Halloween they both had chicken pox, so after much begging, I relented to conjuring up two princess costumes. I smeared white makeup on their faces to hide the red spots and pronounced them ghost princesses. I agreed to let them extort candy from one house.

When we returned, my oldest said with dreamy eyes, “That was so much fun. Next year, can we do two houses?”

And that was the end of my Halloween bliss until they got old enough to make their own costumes and preferred parties to walking the streets.

Really, I don’t think we need to teach our kids about extortion. There is enough of that in the world already between South American kidnappers and Somali pirates. Maybe, instead, we should turn the day upside down and have our kids give out treats instead of asking for them.

Being a chocolate lover, I could get into that. But wait, I’m not allowed to answer the door on Halloween. Ever since our daughters went to college, our tradition has been a simple one: we hide.

We order Chinese takeout, pull the shades, turn out the lights, and go to the basement with our moo goo gai pan. There we watch a romantic comedy, where no one is terrorized by little beings in costumes or overzealous waiters.

 Posted by at 8:43 am  Tagged with: , , , , ,
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