In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason (Favorite Book Spotlight)

Today's book holds special meaning for me, in several ways that may be hard to express, but I will try to put it down without rambling on and on.

IN COUNTRY
by Bobbie Ann Mason

"In the summer of 1984, the war in Vietnam came home to Sam Hughes, whose father died in Vietnam just before she was born. The first children born to American GIs who went to Vietnam were coming of age, and they were starting to ask what happened."

In 1989 I lost my grandfather to suicide. He suffered with manic depression, though I wasn't aware of it at that age, and well, sometimes bad things happen to good people. He was a churchgoing man, he and my grandmother had gone to South America in the mid-70's for missionary work. He built houses, she taught in a school. Suicide was the last thing I ever expected.

He died in February, not long after my 14th birthday. I was in the 8th grade and it was the first truly traumatic life experience I had. I don't think I really took time to mourn his death. I still had trouble coming to grips with the fact that he was gone when we would go over to visit my grandmother at their house. It felt like he was still there and for me, the very idea was too surreal. He would come in out of the garage at some point, he would be there and things would be fine. My 14 year-old mind just couldn't make sense of it. It happened so quickly that there was no goodbyes, there was just an emptiness I didn't know how to deal with.

That fall, I started my Freshman year of high school. The culmination of several events that year- my grandfather's death, humiliating myself over some boy(who I'd have to face daily on the bus) and then the general stress of high school did something to me. I don't know if my coping mechanism broke or what. Normally an A & B student, I was struggling to keep Bs & Cs, if I was lucky as the school year got underway. Only a couple of months in I grew depressed and started having problems with my stomach. Whether they were real pains or psychosomatic, I might never know for sure, but I thought I was broken.

I saw my regular doctor, who ran tests for stomach ulcers. Nothing. We saw another doctor, who thought it was just my nerves and prescribed pills. I saw a psychologist, but she simply made me meet her at the high school and forced me to walk up and down the hallways in front of my peers while I cried in embarrassment, still uncertain WHY I was having so much trouble. She thought putting me in the environment I was struggling with would make it more comfortable for me. Yeah...well, that didn't work.

Then came the psychiatrist who prescribed that icky pill that starts with an X. One of the pills I was taking gave me nightmares so my mom flushed them. I was getting sick and tired of all these people shrinking my brain, my family and friends thinking I was crazy and heaven only knows what my classmates thought about me. I heard the rumors—

I had stomach cancer and was going through treatment.
I'd gotten knocked up and moved away to Virginia to have the baby.
I think some even thought I'd died.

I don't blame anyone for thinking it. My situation was confusing to me for a very long time, as it was.

When it became clear that the psychiatrist deemed me capable of returning to school the weekend after my 15th birthday in February and I was still refusing to go to school out of irrational fears, my parents had to find an alternative. It had been almost a year since my grandfather's death, I'd seen more doctors than I ever cared to see in my entire life, I'd been publicly humiliated by the psychologist(who I thought was a crackpot anyway), and we had gone through every plausible reason for my emotional and physical turmoil. I ended up dropping out and took home school shortly thereafter and I stopped all visits and treatment with the headcases.

It took years for me to self-diagnose where it began and ironically, it seems that it was the one thing my shrinky-dinks didn't even mull over for very long. A traumatic sudden death in the family that was never truly dealt with at that age will definitely pack an emotional toll. At least, that's my take on it.

It was around the time I dropped out of school, that 15th birthday, that my dad gave me a belated Christmas gift. A signed copy of In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason-

See, the construction company that my dad works for was building her house in my hometown. He meant for it to be a Christmas present, but hadn't gotten the opportunity to get it signed by her until after the holidays were over, so it ended up becoming a belated gift/Birthday present that year.

It was my first foray into reading more grown-up realistic fiction. It was down to earth and honest. It felt real and it was a gift that I'll always treasure because my father knew I aspired to be a writer, even though he warned me and warned me about how hard it was to break into the business...that it was a tough industry and not everyone who wants to write CAN write, especially when you have to support yourself financially and the business can be so fickle. I guess in some ways it wasn't any different than the advice he would have given me if I'd wanted to be a rock star or an artist. Being a writer is a lofty dream.

And yet, every time I took up that book, and saw her signature inside it, knowing she was a writer and she was from Kentucky and she lived in my hometown- it inspired me to believe that I could be a writer. That my circumstances didn't have to define who I was, as a person, or as a writer. The trauma of that loss and change in my life didn't have to turn me into a thing that cowered in the corner, that feared living life. This book will always inspire me, not just for the story Bobbie Ann Mason told, but because of the way in which I came to know it.

If you want to know more, you can click the book cover or her name at the top of the blog to go to the In Country Amazon page or her website.

Thanks for stopping by.

WIPlash Wednesdays- Questions from Mary Ellen & Katie

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

~E.L. Doctorow~

Mary Ellen T.- Is your book about your life or someone you may know? I wonder how you can put everything together for a book.

Everything I write is fiction, so no, my book, nor any others I release, will be about my life or anyone I know. As a writer I know that parts of who I am, and those I love, are woven into the fabric of the story, but I never write myself or others intentionally. I do think it just comes with the territory that, as a writer, our stories are who we are, without ever meaning to be because they come from the heart of us.

(the 2nd half of Mary Ellen's comment also kind of blends into Katie's below)
Katie M.- Do your plots just come to you?

Putting together a story for me is rather free form. Sometimes plots come to me freely, spinning out off something I heard, saw or imagined. Some of those ideas percolate in my dreams, but being I'm a pantser (write by the seat of my pants), I don't plot or outline the stories in great detail.

In 2006, when I first started writing with the serious intentions of getting published, pretty much every story I had started with bare bones- character names, a general idea about what they do for a living, how they might get thrown together, what kind of conflict could exist between them and a tentative title.

All the stories I've written so far stem from those. In truth, I'm still working on writing all the ideas I already have jotted down and it hasn't been until more recently that several ideas sprung from the well I thought was dry. The only problem is that until I finish some of my others, the new ones have to be put on the back burner.

How did the new ones come to me? I fell asleep one night with all the thoughts racing in my mind and when I woke up they were still there, burning into my brain, so I wrote them down. Doesn't happen often, but I figured it was worth taking notes. Some have followed me to bed and taken their sweet time to congeal over long periods. The majority of them though, I wrote in a month, taking my cue from my participation in NaNoWriMo- conforming my writing patterns to nailing down the first rough draft within 30 days. I tend to produce a lot more when I work under such tight self-imposed deadlines.

How do you keep all the back stories straight?

Keeping the back stories straight is usually pretty easy. I don't outline, but I do usually keep a list of all characters, main and secondary, in a notebook wherein I also keep track of how scenes play out, how characters are connected (family, friends, coworkers, acquaintances- I've even jotted a sketchy-at-best family tree, just to make sense of how many siblings there are), how long the chapters run, and make notes of things to come as I'm writing or even research I've done online for certain things like preparation of certain meals or dishes or decorating jargon, rodeo information, the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Grauman's Chinese Theater, or when the match came into existence, etc.

For Castaway Hearts, I was halfway through the story when I wondered if matches even existed in the late 1700s. A quick search on Bing found my answer.

Friction matches, were first invented by an English chemist in 1826, so no, my character couldn't light pipe tobacco from a match. So what did they do to start a fire? Before friction matches, also known as lucifer matches, men lit their pipes with a paper spill or carried a tinderbox with them for lighting their tobacco. This was a much more time consuming habit, but I knew I had a few places in the story where I needed to remove the match lighting and give a little insight into what would have been the norm in that bygone time.

Story timelines, most especially for those that play out in chronological order are definitely something I need to police myself over a little more. I realized at the end of January while reading through to finish my current WIP, that a secondary character, who was pregnant in a previous book, would have been due in March, but when the WIP started, it was already May, but she was due anytime...I kept thinking, wait...2 months OVERDUE? That's just not possible! And so I had to fix it. And then there's the whole, "did that couple get married in the last book, or are they getting married in this one?"

It's a juggling act, to say the least, but something I enjoy tremendously.

Thanks for the questions ladies! Tune in next week for a question from Joey R.

Feel free to leave me more questions in the comments here at anytime.
I'll be happy to answer them.

Happy Hump Day! I can see the weekend from here!

Shaded Vision By Yasmine Galenorn Release

If you don't see me anymore today, it's cause I hightailed it to Barnes & Noble to get my copy.

Love Yasmine's D'Artigo Sisters!

Memory Lane Monday- Early Memories

My mom swears I don't really remember as far back as I tell her I do, because she says if I saw it on old home videos, it doesn't count as a memory so much as something I've burned to my files up in the old noggin.

Still there are things I remember that I can't possibly have seen on home video because there just aren't any reels or footage of it.

For instance, I do remember the night my sister was born, and my mom sitting on their bed explaining to me where they were going and why I had to go stay with my grandparents and uncles and aunt. That was not on home video. (Though I did hear that story a lot growing up.)

Nor was the time when I was probably 2-3 years-old, my mom and two cousins were hanging out in the kitchen at the old Ripy Place, I think it was, and my dad was out in this barn/building doing some woodworking and I wanted to go out there, but it was starting to get dark. I remember them telling me, if I went out there, the Boogeyman would get me and I remember staring out the screen door and inching my way out but getting scared and darting back in the house.

I remember going on wrecker runs with my grandpa and uncle because they owned a junk yard and I spent a lot of time climbing around on old junk cars. I gathered eggs with my aunt from the chickens, who at one time were housed in the old body of a bus or something. I learned about the life cycle of mosquitoes in the cows' water trough.

Some of my favorite memories was going fishing with my grandma at what we called 'the Slab' down near the old distillery way out past where my grandparents lived. She and I would always pack peanut butter and crackers, vienna sausages and when we stopped for worms, she'd get us Hershey candy bars and Coca~Cola in the glass bottles. That must have been our thing, come to think of it, seeing as we got the same snack together at the hospital when we went to bring my mom and sister home.

Of course, my grandfather had a rented soda machine that dispensed glass Coca-Cola bottles for a long time for his junk yard business, but Grandma would wait until we were on the way and stop at a bait shop to get our drinks.

(the one pictured above is almost exactly what I remember)

What I do remember about the vending machine on the front porch is the long door on the left side of the front that you opened to grab a drink after you'd deposited your coins. I remember how hard it was to sometimes yank that bottle out. I remember that the Coca-Cola guy always had to come refill it a couple times a week and take the empties with him. I remember the brown "faux" wood paneling on it and how on really hot summer days, your soda would turn to slush as soon as the bottle cap was popped. Nothing tasted so good on those days either as a good slushie soda. Other times, my aunt would take a nail and poke a hole in the cap and let me drink it that way. I'm not sure why we did that, but it sure was fun back then.

Of course, I rarely buy Hershey's bars and I don't drink soda anymore, but memories like that inspire me to find one of those "retro" glass bottles of Coca~Cola and a Hershey bar, just so I can relive those moments when I was hanging out with my grandma and enjoying the simple things in life. I miss those days more and more as I grow older.

What are some of your favorite moments spent with a grandparent?
Were there special things you did together?