Half A Million Miles From Home, At Home.

If you don't have a window seat in one of these big planes that nowadays fly across the Atlantic a trip from Germany to the US doesn't seem a a trip at all anymore.
It's more like being in a movie theater that shivers a bit from time to time, and with full service included.
I mean, Lufthansa really serves decent meals, and with style. No plastic knives and forks, and real food. Hot, tasty, and clearly recognizable as food.
Oh wait - they serve cocktails before feeding you. Someone once told me that everybody likes to drink tomato juice on a plane because it tastes better in high altitude, but I think that's a fable. It's good, but not better. I also think that some people shamelessly take advantage of the free drinks.

I watched the "Hunger Games" on this flight. Didn't make it quite through the entire movie, and I wasn't overly impressed. The hype passed me by. We had movies like that before. In a way, it reminded me of "Logan's Run" and "Soylent Green". Do you remember Logan's Run? That girl had the greatest legs ever. Jenny Agutter was her name I believe.

Funny thing is, I had to come all the way to NYC to watch Downton Abbey. Loving it! That show clearly tells me that I'm living in the wrong house. And I need a maid and a footman. No idea what I need them for, but now I do. In addition to a housekeeper, of course. Won't go into the social thing. I just want that beautiful house and the lovely Edwardian dresses. Call me shallow. But I love pretty.

Oh, immigrations! This time I HAVE to mention immigrations.
After my experiences at the Canada/USA border last summer I was in a panic about immigrations. One wrong answer, and that's it for you, right.
But not so! The immigration people at JFK are the nicest, most courteous, and attentive people. They make you feel welcome to the US, and they wish you a lovely day! THIS is the America I've known for so long! BIG kudos to whoever picked the men and women doing that job at this airport.
I was asked only ONE question: "Have you been to the US before?"
And I replied that yes, indeed, I had traveled here, they wished me a lovely day and stamped my passport. I was through in less than a minute!

Keith and Emily came to pick me up.
Driving back to their house was a strange, a lovely and actually weird experience. It felt as if I'd never been away! New York felt familiar. The streets felt familiar. It was exciting in the way it wasn't exciting.
This was the reason why I wanted to come back, and come back here, to this exact place:
visiting a city or people once is a wonderful experience. Visiting them again, is making them real. It means making them familiar, well-known, comfortable.
It's taking them out of a "once-in-a-lifetime" into "I'm at home with you".

In a few days I'll go and see my beloved publisher again, too. I'm excited about that, but in a different way than last year.
This time around I'm going to meet a friend, someone I've come to know well over the last year.
I'm looking forward to hanging out with her, the way friends do, and not only business partners.
In that, I'm the luckiest person. I have the publisher I need for me to be the best writer I can be, and she's also the greatest friend. Lucky, lucky, lucky me.

So here I am now, in Jersey City, on a sunny Monday morning, drinking coffee and eating a raspberry jam sandwich. It's my birthday, I was on the phone for an hour with afore-mentioned publisher, and there will be pastrami sandwiches and cheesecake for dinner.
I'm taking Keith and Emily to Carnegie's.
And I'll bring back a jar of pickles. Those Carnegie pickles... yum!

Tomorrow, Penn Station and a meet-up with @southboundcat's Mommy!
Stay tuned!

On The Road With Friends

Biggs Junction.
Doesn't that sound like a name for a place from one of those old cowboy movies? Doesn't it make you see a dusty, lonely railroad station in the middle of nowhere, dust devils ambling across tracks that start somewhere beyond the horizon and lead into an unformed, unknown distance? Isn't "desolation" knit into those two words, don't they whisper to you that this is their real name?

Biggs Junction is probably the last place in the US you'd pick as a tourist destination. And yet, I wanted to go there, and badly. Here's the reason why.
Last year, before I went on my long trip across America to visit Twitter and Facebook friends, a conversation on Twitter happened that made me want to see that place more than anything else. I had just introduced a friend from Portland OR to my Ellensburg WA friend, and they were chatting about meeting up somewhere for lunch. Somehow, Biggs Junction was mentioned. And my Ellensburg friend, Jane, who is married to a trucker and has seen many, many places, moaned a desperate "Oh Lord!"

I, as a bystander, across the Atlantic and all of America, the European, googled Biggs Junction, and this is what came up.

nowhere to go

The thing to read here are the comments from "nowhere to go" and "poker slim".
This place I wanted to see!
Some more twitter moaning, and the sentence, "But there's NOTHING to eat in Biggs, just greasy, awful fast food!"
See, here's where unbiased googling comes in. My American friends, who didn't have the smallest inclination of ever going to Biggs, perked up when I pointed out that there seemed to be a really, really nice restaurant in Goldendale, not too far away from Biggs.
Even Sue from Vancouver who so far had loudly protested that she would stay in Ellensburg and wait for the rest of us to return  - or not - was suddenly quite willing to come along,

So we went.

Along the Yakima River, on the old Canyon Road, and the landscape was enough to make me, the German, gape. So much open space, so much... COUNTRY, and not another car or human in sight.
We drove for hours, and nearly always there were the mountains marching away to our right.

I shouldn't say mountains, or you'll think of a mountain chain. This is what we saw:

Volcanoes. Mt. Rainier, Mt. Adams, and Mt. St. Helens.
All this space...  it made me feel as if I could stretch out my arms and lift off, stretch out and drift away in the hot, country-fragrant air until my fingers touched the snow on those mountains.

At some point, the hills closed in on us, we were driving on a winding road through arid land, bushfire land, and the trees and grass were so dry I could smell the smoke even though they weren't burning, almost as if they were having nightmares of a fire that hadn't happened yet.

It came as a relief when the land dropped away, quite suddenly too, and the gorge of the Columbia River opened up before us.
What a drama!

There it was, Biggs Junction. Perched on the side of the river, caught between highways and a railroad track, forgotten in the middle of nowhere.
All roads lead away from it, lead into kinder places, and the river rushes by on its way to the Pacific.
We crossed the bridge and stopped outside the trucker mart.
Heat welcomes us, dry, relentless heat like a wall that dared us to step forward, leave the comfort of the car. There were no other tourists. No one goes to Biggs Junction as a tourist, only me, the insane German. There were some trucks, some cars at the gas station across the parking lot. No one looked up from their business of refueling, getting a cold drink or dashing to the washrooms, no one cared about the surroundings they were in, intent on getting away as fast as possible.

Sue, as always the one with the most determination, said that I needed a souvenir. Anything, even a napkin, a paper cup, but something that said, "Biggs Junction".
We went into the mart.
There were no souvenirs. Biggs doesn't exist on the souvenir map.
The store manager came up to me after I'd circled the store for the third time and asked me if she could help. I said I wanted a Biggs Junction souvenir. She was ready to reach for her phone and call the cops.
Bemused, she shook her head. No one, she said, no one ever had asked for a souvenir before.
"This is like a prison," she told me, "Everyone wants to get away."
Back out on the baking parking lot, we looked around.
A MacDonalds, a Burger King, a gas station, the mart, and this little jewel of a motel:

"Psycho," Sue mumbled, "That's such a Psycho setting." (And took out her camera to take this pic.)
The longer I stood there, the number I got. The constant drone from the highway along the river had a hypnotizing effect on me. I was ready to lie down right there on the oil-stained, baking asphalt of the parking lot and go to sleep.
It was hot, and it was lonely. Jane, leaning against her car, started to hum "Hotel California", and that was when we all moved at the same time, jumped into the car, and drove off.

"Maryhill," Jane suggested, and so we went.
It's a museum now, but it was built by Samuel Hill, the same man who dreamed up the highway along the Columbia River.
We sat on a bench in the shade of some pine trees, right at the edge of the gorge, and looked down at Biggs, now across the river, and its cave of metal and asphalt.

Right below our feet, among the gorse and dry grass, bees and crickets were battling the dull hum of the highway. The heat was just as relentless as it had been down there in Biggs, but it didn't smell of gasoline and sweat. There were peacocks in the park, sculptures, neatly trimmed grass, clear paths. A defiant stand of civilization against the cruel call of the desert wilderness around it.

"Lunch," Susan suggested, looking at her watch, and we left.
We turned our back on Biggs, the river and even Maryhill, and drove off to Goldendale and the Glass Onion (the restaurant I'd found online).

I can tell you this: If you EVER - for whatever reason - happen to be near Goldendale WA, STOP HERE.
Trust me on this. Do it. You'll have one of your best meals ever. And I'm not talking about the normal American fare, either. This is a jewel of a restaurant, and they'll serve you amazing food, fresh food, local produce, and all of it utterly delicious.
I'd go back all the way to Biggs just to have lunch there again.
This was dessert:

I know. It looks amazing. It WAS amazing.
We came out of that place with smiling faces. No one complained about coming to Biggs anymore, this had been so worthwhile.

It's been a year now since I was in Ellensburg, visiting Jane, her sister-in-law Susan, together with MY Sue from Vancouver. Sadly, I won't be going back this summer. There just isn't enough time.
But I have to go back.
Not to Biggs, mind you, or even Goldendale.
But to see my friends.

Insights. The Healthy And The Wise. Random.

You may have figured this out by now: I'm not the world's best blogger. I'm not even in the top fifty percent.
Blogging is awkward.
There is this deep anxiety of having to write something profound, something that will mean something to others, instead of blabbering about myself or my writing or whatever else I'm doing, or what I had for breakfast. Blogging, for me, means someone else should profit from it. 
And that's something I rarely can provide, because my life is so boring and slow, there's just nothing anyone else could learn from me.


Take the writing. 
What do you want to learn from my path to being published? Nothing.
One morning three years ago I woke up, and while I was lying there in bed, staring at the early spring sky and the geese passing by outside my window on their way back home, way up in the North, I decided I'd get up, make coffee, and start writing a book.
Just like that. And that's what I did. I got up, made coffee, opened my new laptop, and began writing, and I didn't finish until the book was finished.
Then, when that was done, on another random morning, I posted a page of it on this blog. Hours later, I was talking to my publisher, and weeks later I had a book deal.
End of story. Boring. 
By now, I have two more books written, signed, and on the way to being published, and a new project is looming on the horizon.
It's a job. I work for Buddhapuss Ink. 
I get up in the morning (as before) make coffee (also, as before), start writing, and stop when it's time to stop. It's a fun job, and I do it with a passion, but it's a job and pays my bills.


So if this counts as an insight, I'm fine with it.


My husband is sick.
Not mortally sick, not invalid sick, he just has what many men of his age have who like their food and drink too much and don't go for regular checkups: the famous "metabolic syndrome". In normal speak: high blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol. 
Last Sunday, he had to be taken to the ER in an ambulance because we thought he had a stroke, but no, it's only a paralysis in an eye muscle, thank you, diabetes. It was a huge, loud, cannon ball shot of a warning, and I'm quite certain he'll take all those pills and stick to a sensible diet and all those things.
But.
For a while there, while I was waiting for the first results at the ER, all by myself, I was wondering how our life was about to change.
It COULD have been a stroke. An aneurism. A tumor. All those were real possibilities. 
This Sunday could have changed our lives forever. 
He'll have to change his diet and lose some weight. He'll have to learn that a meal without meat is still a meal, and that a bowl of fruit for dinner is enough, you don't need a pastrami sammie to feel full.


The insights I've won from this week for myself, though, are wonderful. 
I've learned that whatever happens, I'll never be alone.
Even while I was waiting at the ER until my kids arrived, my publisher messaged me and asked if there was anything I needed.
The darling woman, I wonder what she'd have done if I'd replied, "Come here! Come here NOW! I need you here!!!"
But anyway, that would have been mean, and I know what she meant  - she was there for me. 
As were all the others. My Facebook friends, my Twitter friends, those I've met in person, those I'm going to meet this year, even those in places I'll never go to, people I'll always only know through the internet, they were ALL there, virtually holding my and my husband's hands, praying, sending good thoughts, asking how it was going, offering support. Quite a lot of them messaged me their phone numbers, asked me to call them if I needed someone to talk to, a couple of doctors offered medical advice.


Just so you know: the first thing I did when my hubby had his diagnosis and I saw him there in his hospital bed was to slap his arm, and hard.
He smiled at me and called me "darling". He knew I did it because I was so relieved to see him well.
He's home now.
After the Easter holidays, on Tuesday, he'll have to go and see our own doctor for his medication, and from now on,  go for regular visits to the lab. It's a small price to pay for a big, big scare.
We are still a family.
I am grateful today.
And that is the most important insight of all: don't take your loved ones for granted. 
Never, for a moment, believe you'll have them forever. Tell them that you love them, every day, all the time. Show them you love them, by caring about them.
Because, you see, there may come one Sunday when you look into their eyes and see something is wrong, just like I did.
Only maybe you'll not be as lucky as I was.
It may just be too late then.










.

The Dolphin Of My Heart's Desire.

I talked to a friend yesterday. We were best buddies in high school, during grades eight to ten. We did everything together, all the time. There wasn’t one weekend when we didn’t sleep over at each other’s houses, not one day when we didn’t spend hours on the phone after school, no lunch break we didn’t hang out together.

We had the same hobbies, shared the same passions…well, almost.

Carol always loved horses and dogs, and I’m scared of horses (they are so HUGE!) and I’m more of a cat person. 

She preferred rock music, while I was (in the early 70s) more of a Neil Diamond, Albert Hammond and Simon & Garfunkel girl, with some Joan Baez and Janis Ian thrown in. There may or may not have been a Barbra Streisand album or two thrown in.

I remember learning some English words from Neil Diamond that were definitely not in my text books, like “transcend” and “overhear”. It must have been around that time when I decided I wanted to know every English word there was.

Carol and I wrote stories. 

Like most teenage girls, we had our secret loves, TV stars, pop stars, and we made up stories about them. Well, Carol made up the stories. I designed the “covers” and came up with the titles. And I watched her write.

I helped her make up the plots, and I did write a bit myself, but generally I was too lazy.

I didn’t see myself as a writer. Carol was the writer. She was the one soaring in her imagination. She was the one who brought wonderful sentences to paper.

Her novels had a plot, they had a beginning, a middle, and an ending, there were characters in them that seemed alive and real. Normal, living people, while the heroes I made up were always some kind of celebrities, famous, rich, and carefree.

You see, there was enough dreariness in my real life to want to keep it out of my dream world. I wanted to escape to nicer, happier places, like California with its eternal sunshine. The music business, creativity, those were my subjects, while Carol wrote about a family living on a ranch, with horses and dogs.

My people had to struggle with their creativity, with their loves, but never with money, and certainly not with animals. They didn’t even have time for a potted plant, let alone a pet, they were that busy creating and loving.

I lost Carol when we were in 11th grade.

She drifted off into the drug scene, and I went to Canada for the summer. When I got back, she was in a clinic, and I changed schools.

We met once more, about ten years later. I was married by then, my first son in pre-school. My husband and I stopped for a brief visit with her.

She was married too, had three babies, and was living in an apartment overlooking a factory yard, as far away from that ranch and the horses as you can imagine.

We never reconnected after that, until yesterday. She had found me on Facebook.

I called her on the phone, and we talked.

She told me she is a widow now, her husband died of a brain tumor six years ago. There were four kids, she had to raise them on her own, and it wasn’t easy.

The family lives out in the country, in an old farm house, with horses and dogs and cats. Carol doesn’t have a lot of money, but, she told me, she’s happy.

When she asked me about my life, I told her about my just published book, about the new contract I’ve just signed with Buddhapuss Ink, about last year’s book tour, and the one coming up next year.

“I’ll be going to New Yoek,” I told her, “And Salt Lake City."

There was a long pause.

“Wow,” Carol said, “I’ve never left my home town. We went on vacation once, but that’s it. I’m still here.”

She could hardly believe my life. She could hardly believe it when I told her I was a published author now, and my book was selling and getting good reviews.

“You lived our dream,” she said, “You’re going to all those places we were dreaming about, you are a published author! How did you do it? Where did you get the spark?"

The spark?

There was no spark. There was only a lingering dream, a constant, soft pull I had ignored for most of my life.

It almost felt like the dolphin of my heart’s desire playing in the ocean of my life, sometimes breaking through the surface, but never long enough to make much of an impact.

I don’t know what changed.

All I know is that, on a gloomy day in November of 2008, I woke up and knew the time had come. Suddenly, with every fiber of my soul, I knew I had to write that book.

My hubby bought me a laptop, and I sank into The Distant Shore, forgetting everything else. Often enough, there was no lunch for the family, and no ironed shirts for my husband.

I was too busy writing.

And I didn’t stop until the book was finished. I had left the surface, and I was dancing with the dolphin. The moment I put that first sentence on paper was like jumping from a cliff into that ocean where the dolphins were waiting, and I was free.

I’m still down there, frolicking in the freedom of the sun-dappled water.

And I’m never coming back.

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Ending Friends

Today's guest post is by crime author Sam Hilliard. His book, "The Last Track", is one of the very few crime novels I've ever finished. He's pretty cute, and very funny.

He also a fellow author at Buddhapuss Ink. 

Some day in the future, we may yet write a book together. Because I think we are friends.

There is one question that people almost never ask writers, which is fortunate, since it’s the very question writers most want to avoid—especially in a public forum. It’s safe to ask them about the writing process, or the inspiration for their main character.  Or possibly how long it took to write the book. If the writer is in a good mood, an entertaining (and often winding) story might follow.

Yet lob this bomb during a writing panel discussion, a setting where a writer is flanked by peers, and it will elicit a very different response: an awkward sort of reaction, like when a groom realizes that the bride is not terribly late for the walk down the aisle, rather, she’s not coming to the wedding.

Which brings me to the taboo query: can two writers really be friends? 

And by friends, I don’t mean in a Facebook or Twitter kind of way, where every acquaintance, no matter how incidental, constitutes a “friend.” Can two individuals, who both consider themselves writers, maintain a healthy friendship? Or at least be the sort of people who could sit next to each other on a grounded plane for more than twenty minutes? 

The answer hinges on how an individual author views the actual business of writing, which has very little to do with the craft. At the risk of oversimplifying the argument, I submit that there are two basic viewpoints, and generally authors adhere to one or the other, albeit not too vocally.

If a writer sees publishing as a zero-sum game, and any bit of success someone else attains detracts from their personal luster, then they cannot be friends with another writer. They probably can’t be very good friends with anyone, but they certainly can’t be friends with a peer. Sooner or later, one of them will be more successful than the other, and the flames of resentment will ignite. One clue you are dealing with a zero-summer, these sorts of authors will not write blurbs for your first novel (or probably anyone else’s who isn’t at least as famous as them).

But if both writers see the business of publishing as a limitless blue ocean, a sea of opportunity with as many possibilities for either of them as well as anyone else, well, there’s a chance they can be good friends. These are the people who look forward to reading what their friend is working on, and cheer each other on from the sidelines. Where appropriate, they might offer constructive advice and support. 

They might even write a book together. 

Find Sam here: http://www.samhilliard.com/wordpress/

                          http://buddhapussink.blogspot.com/p/sam-hilliard.html

Sense and Nonsense of twitter #ff

Good morning, Friday, as always you bring us the joys and tribulations of the twitter #ff lists. There are  many who refuse to do the #ff honors completely, some who believe they only work of you do a few, individual #ffs, and some who do nothing but send out long lists with recommendations all day long.

Just now a discussion about the value of the FollowFriday  cropped up on twitter. There seems to be a general tiredness about the whole thing, and a doubt that it does any good at all. I think originally the #ff were meant to connect people, to get a chance to easily meet friends of friends, but that's not how I see it anymore. With the many, many tweeters out there right now, and growing numbers in followers, introducing ALL of your friends is insanity, would take about twenty-four hours and bring on the infamous twitter whale for two days.

No, here's what I think.

There is a whole different meaning to the thing, and that's why I still do them.

By giving people a #ff shout, I show them how much I appreciate their tweets. This might be for different reasons: because they are my publisher, and I want to promote them (and myself, ahem), or the authors I connect with most (because by talking to them on twitter I feel a little more like an author myself), they tweet delicious recipes (yeah, I like to eat; who doesn't), they send beautiful photos (Paul Steele; the grand-master of amazing links!), they tweet funny stuff (ScoDal; follow or die!), they are literary agents (Janet Reid; hilarious, useful blog! And Rachelle Gardner, twitter friend, full of good advice.), or simply because they are beloved, friends.  There are many others, not listed here now because this is only supposed to be a short, dashed-off blog and I want to get back to the REAL writing.

So you see, I do #ff. With them, I tell people, "Hey, I know you. I read your tweets. I like them so well that I think others should read them too. I love being your friend. I love that you think my tweets are worth your time. In this very second, typing your name, adding #ff, pressing "enter", I'm thinking of you. Have a wonderful day, and thanks for talking to me!"

That's all. Please proceed with your Friday. :)