Tag Archive for: Linda Rodriguez

Stiletto Gang Black Friday Gift Guide

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by The Stiletto Gang

Want to avoid the crowds, but still get a little shopping done?  Sit back, peruse this list of 2015 Stiletto Gang Releases, and order the gift of the written word from the comfort of your own couch.

Sparkle Abbey

Downton Tabby (The Pampered Pets Series)

Amazon 5 Star Review: How would you like to find a dead body in a swimming pool, have two friends disappear, be followed by a black SUV and have your ex try to take away your clients? That’s what Laguna Beach’s animal therapist and sometime sleuth, Caro Lamont, faces in another page turning, suspense filled, and occasional humorous adventure as she tries to find a killer, disappearances of two friends, and dealing with a scurvy ex.

Need a treat today? Of course you do! Grab some snacks, your fav drink, and settle down in a comfy place and relish this latest mystery that’s pet friendly too!

Paula Gail Benson

Let It Snow: The Best of Bethlehem Writers Roundtable, Winter 2015 Collection

Discover tales, all as different as snowflakes, in “Let it Snow: The Best of Bethlehem Writers Roundtable Winter 2015 Collection.” The multiple award winning Bethlehem Writers Group, LLC brings you stories in a range of genres selected from their bi-monthly Writers Roundtable Journal. So, while the weather outside is frightful, curl up by the fire, read, and Let It Snow.

Fish or Cut Bait: A Guppy Anthology

Fish or Cut Bait, the latest installment in the Guppy Anthology Series, presents a collection of mystery stories by rising stars of the mystery and suspense field. Tales of revenge and retribution…police detectives…cozy characters…hardboiled P.I.s…there’s something here for every fan of crime and detection!

Killer Nashville Noir: Cold Blooded

Bestselling authors Jeffery Deaver and Anne Perry join rising stars like Dana Chamblee Carpenter and Paula Gail Benson in a collection that proves Music City is a deadly place to be when your song gets called.

Marjorie Brody

Twisted, a novel of psychological suspense

Amazon or Barnes & Noble

A gang assault at a high school dance forces a young teen to confront the secret she hid from everyone, including herself.

TAA Best Young Adult Fiction Book Award, Honorable Mention, Great Midwest Book Festival, Finalist Red City Book Awards, 2015 Best Reads-Middlesex County College Library

“6 Stars Out of 5!” TWISTED, a multi-award winning psychological suspense, addresses sensitive issues in a stay-up-late, page-turning way.

“Brutally honest,” yet “tasteful,” and “hopeful.”  NYT Bestseller Sharon Sala declares TWISTED “Unforgettable.”

Anthologies, featuring Marjorie Brody

Short Story America Anthology, Vol. I, II, III, and IV

Short Stories by Texas Authors, Vol. I

Lynn Cahoon

Killer Run (A Tourist Trap Mystery)

Jill Gardner—owner of Coffee, Books, and More—has somehow been talked into sponsoring a 5k race along the beautiful California coast. The race is a fundraiser for the local preservation society—but not everyone is feeling so charitable…

The day of the race, everyone hits the ground running…until a local business owner stumbles over a very stationary body. The deceased is the vicious wife of the husband-and-wife team hired to promote the event—and the husband turns to Jill for help in clearing his name. But did he do it? Jill will have to be very careful, because this killer is ready to put her out of the running…forever!

Dressed to Kill (A Tourist Trap Mystery)

Jill Gardner—owner of Coffee, Books, and More in the tucked-away town of South Cove, California—is not particularly thrilled to be portraying a twenties flapper for the dinner theater murder mystery. Though it is for charity…

Of course everyone is expecting a “dead” body at the dress rehearsal…but this one isn’t acting! It turns out the main suspect is the late actor’s conniving girlfriend Sherry…who also happens to be the ex-wife of Jill’s main squeeze. Sherry is definitely a master manipulator…but is she a killer? Jill may discover the truth only when the curtain comes up on the final act…and by then, it may be far too late.

The Bull Riders’s Collection

Saddle up and get ready to ride with three of the sexiest cowboys in spurs. These heroes aren’t afraid of danger or a challenge, and neither are the sassy, smart women in their world. Slip on your boots and get ready to crown these men champions of the heart with The Bull Rider’s Brother, The Bull Rider’s Manager, and The Bull Rider’s Keeper

The Salem Gathering (The Council Series)

A babe in jeopardy, a coven on the loose, and only one witch hunter team can save them.
Parris McCall knows her best friend’s life in in danger, but when Parris gets orders from The Council to track down Coven X, she has no choice but to follow orders.

Ty Wallace knows there’s more to The Council’s directive than meets the eye. Can he figure out what’s not being said before he loses Parris to her distant relatives or worse, forever?

Kay Kendall

Rainy Day Women

“5 Stars! Kendall delivers a spectacular mystery. The protagonist, Austin Starr, balances being a wife, a mother and an investigator with great skill. This is definitely a coming of age story, for women and for our country. A revolution occurred during the sixties, changing the roles for women, politics and war. She shows it all.

Bethany Maines

High-Caliber Concealer (A Carrie Mae Mystery)

All Carrie Mae’s top covert agent, Nikki Lanier, wants is a quiet vacation on her grandmother’s farm. But her visit is complicated by dangerous drug smugglers, the childhood sweetheart who broke her heart, and the sudden arrival of not only her mother (who is obviously hiding something) and her teammates, but also her current boyfriend – CIA Agent Z’ev Coralles. Now Nikki must choose between doing what’s right and revealing what she really does for a living, if she wants to keep all of them alive. Nikki may be a High-Caliber Concealer, but this time it might not be enough.

An Unseen Current

When Seattle native Tish Yearly finds herself fired and evicted all in one afternoon, she knows she’s in deep water. Unemployed and desperate, the 26 year old ex-actress heads for the home of her cantankerous ex-CIA agent grandfather, Tobias Yearly, in the San Juan Islands. But soon. Tish is thrown head-long into a mystery that pits her against a handsome but straight-laced Sheriff’s Deputy, a group of eccentric and clannish local residents, and a killer who knows the island far better than she does. Now Tish must swim against the current, depending on her nearly forgotten acting skills and her grandfather’s spy craft, to con a killer and keep them alive.

Marilyn Meredith / F.M. Meredith

Not as It Seems 

Tempe and Hutch travel to Morro Bay for son Blair’s wedding, but when the maid-of-honor disappears, Tempe tries to find her. The search is complicated by ghosts and Native spirits.

Violent Departures

College student, Veronica Randall, disappears from her car in her own driveway, everyone in the Rocky Bluff P.D. is looking for her. Detective Milligan and family move into a house that may be haunted. Officer Butler is assigned to train a new hire and faces several major challenges.

Julie Mulhern

The Deep End

Swimming into the lifeless body of her husband’s mistress tends to ruin a woman’s day, but becoming a murder suspect can ruin her whole life.

It’s 1974 and Ellison Russell’s life revolves around her daughter and her art. She’s long since stopped caring about her cheating husband, Henry, and the women with whom he entertains himself. That is, until she becomes a suspect in Madeline Harper’s death. The murder forces Ellison to confront her husband’s proclivities and his crimes—kinky sex, petty cruelties and blackmail.

As the body count approaches par on the seventh hole, Ellison knows she has to catch a killer. But with an interfering mother, an adoring father, a teenage daughter, and a cadre of well-meaning friends demanding her attention, can Ellison find the killer before he finds her?

Guaranteed to Bleed

With his dying breath, Bobby Lowell begs Ellison Russell, “Tell her I love her.”

Unable to refuse, Ellison struggles to find the girl the murdered boy loved. Too bad an epically bad blind date, a vindictive graffiti artist, and multiple trips to the emergency room keep getting in the way. Worse, a killer has Ellison in his sights, her newly rebellious daughter is missing, and there’s yet another body in her hostas. Mother won’t be pleased. Now Ellison must track down not one but two runaway teenagers, keep her promise to Bobby, and elude the killer—all before her next charity gala committee meeting.

Cathy Perkins

So About the Money

CPA Holly Price juggles dodgy clients, flakey parent, ex-lovers and a murdered friend before she gets to the bottom line in this fast and fun read. ~ Patricia Smiley, bestselling author of Cool Cache

When Holly Price trips over a friend’s dead body, her life takes a nosedive into a world of intrigue and danger. With an infinitely sexy cop—Holly’s pissed-off, jilted ex-fiancé—threatening to arrest her for the murder, the intrepid accountant must protect her future, her business…and her heart…by using her investigative skills to follow the money, before the killer decides CPA stands for Certified Pain in the Ass…and the next dead body is Holly’s.

Linda Rodriguez

Every Hidden Fear 
“This suspenseful and sensitive tale of small town secrets is captivating from page one. An absolute page-turner!” – Hank Phillippi Ryan, Agatha, Anthony and Mary Higgins Clark award winning author



“Engrossing” – Library Journal



“A peaceful college town goes berserk in Rodriguez’s solid third Skeet Bannion mystery.”– Publisher’s Weekly


“Cherokee heritage and the often very painful legacy of secrets have long been hallmarks of this excellent series. … Every Hidden Fear is another very good read from an award winning author and a book well worth your time.” – Kevin’s Corner: Book Reviews and More

Sometimes a Writer Has to Dredge Up a Fearsome Memory

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by Linda Rodriguez

Recently, I was invited to participate in an anthology of
short fiction to benefit a cause I truly believe in—PROTECT, The National
Association to Protect Children, a wonderful organization that works to change
the laws of this country to give more protection from abuse and sexual predators
to children.  http://www.protect.org/

In Protectors 2:
Heroes, the stories were all to be about someone protecting a child or
someone vulnerable. I knew immediately what my story had to be. I just didn’t
know if I could write it.

When I was still a teenager back in the 1960s, I had lied
about my age to get a job as a juvenile justice officer (read: housemother)
working with young girls who had been remanded to custody. I saw and did a lot
of things during that time, but there was one incident that had been branded
into my memory. I foolhardily responded to a call for help from one of our
released girls and put myself into as much or more danger as she was in when
she called. If not for a strange elderly man who helped us, I have no doubt
that neither of us would have survived.

This was the story I wanted to tell for Protectors 2: Heroes, but I had never learned who this man was or
why he had come to my aid or how he had been able to help me. So it seemed very
unbelievable. Truth is often stranger than fiction, but if you write it as it
happened, it won’t work as fiction because of that very incredible strangeness.
So I gave the story a supernatural twist, and “Mr. Nance” was created, based
solidly in a real situation with details I had never been able to forget.

Protectors 2: Heroes is out now and available for purchase
at http://www.protectorsbooks.org/protectors-2-heroes/

I’m in great company among the other 58 contributors, and to
my surprise, I’m one of the writers featured on the cover, along with Joyce
Carol Oates, Charles de Lint, Harlan Ellison, David Morrell, Reed Farrell
Coleman, Joelle Charbonneau,  and Hilary
Davidson, as well as Andrew Vachss, one of the founders of PROTECT.

So, here’s a taste of my story, and I hope it will entice
you to check out the anthology and perhaps buy it to benefit this great cause.

It was just my luck that I took
the phone call right as I was leaving work that hot summer Saturday evening in
1968. If it had been three minutes later, someone else would have picked up the
phone, someone like Naomi, who would have just said, “Sorry, no can do,” and
gone back to reading Blazing Hearts
after hanging up and writing down the call for her shift report. As Naomi was
fond of telling me, she had common sense, which was not so common anymore.

“Bright Hill School for Wayward
Girls,” I answered. “Sofia Noguera speaking.” I hoped it was a wrong number,
and I could finish making my getaway. My roommate Kathy had already headed out
to the car and would be waiting impatiently for me, so we could head back into
the city and probably go to one or more of several parties friends were
throwing.

“Sofia, it’s Chantay.” In the
background behind her childish voice, I could hear someone yelling and
pounding. Not that unusual for a Saturday night where she was. Chantay was an eleven-year-old
former inmate at Bright Hill, who lived with a heroin-addicted hooker mother in
the projects. “You gotta help me.” She started sobbing. “Mom and a guy are
nodded off in the bedroom, and another guy’s wanting to come in and screw her.
I told him she was out, and now he wants to come in and do me instead. He’s
big, real big, Sofia. And mean. He’ll hurt me bad. I know it.”

“Where are you, Chantay?”

“I’m in the apartment. I locked
the door on him and put the burglar bar up. But he’s all drunk and really going
at that door. I don’t think it’ll hold. You got to come get me and take me back
to Bright Hill.”

Sad that what was essentially
juvey jail looked better and safer to her than home, but that wasn’t unusual
with our girls. I could see Chantay, bright but failing school, tall for her
age, big and pudgy, but still childish in face and act and thought. What could
some grown man want with her sexually?

“Please, Sofia. Please.”

“Okay, Chantay. Calm down. I’ll
send the police.”

“They won’t come to Wayne Miner
on weekends. They don’t set foot here from Friday ‘til Monday. They won’t help
me. You got to come get me. Please.”

“Okay. Okay. I’ll get you out
somehow. Move a chair in front of that door, as well as the burglar bar. Go
into the bathroom and lock that door behind you, too. Then stay quiet as can be
in there. Okay?”

“Okay. I’ll do that now, but you
got to come get me.” She hung up the phone on that last plea that was as much a
demand as an appeal.

REPLIES TO COMMENTS (because Blogger):

(Yes, I’m reduced to this again. I was able to log on as my husband and comment for a while, but Blogger has apparently caught on and put an end to that in its unremitting hatred of me. *sigh*)

Mary, thank you! I’m so glad you enjoyed the story.


Paula, you’re right. It’s a wonderful cause and a fantastic anthology.

Debra, I believe real strongly in this cause. For example, PROTECT was instrumental in getting the “incest loophole” changed in the states where it was law. Yes, there were several large states where a predator could get out of going to jail if the child he molested was related to him!

Marilyn, I’ve often wondered about that. I don’t think the man who helped me was necessarily an angel because everyone seemed frightened of him. I’ve never figured out exactly what happened there, and this story was part of my efforts to do just that.

Reine, it’s a wonderful book, full of great stories. A great bargain. And Thomas Pluck deserves so much credit for putting it together!

Let’s Hear It for the Bad Boys

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by Linda Rodriguez

In the second Skeet Bannion novel, Every Broken Trust, I’ve complicated Skeet’s life and
relationships with a dark and dangerous man of mystery who walks into the story
and makes Skeet feel things that scare her, as well as bringing out the jealous
side of nice Joe Louzon, Skeet’s friend and possible love interest. This was
not what I’d planned to have happen in that book, and he went on to play a
major role in the third Skeet novel, Every
Hidden Fear, as well. I don’t know where this bad boy came from to
complicate Skeet’s and my lives, except of course he had to come from my own
head.

I must confess I’ve always had a fascination with the bad
boy. You know, like Marc Antony, Heathcliff, Sydney Carton in Tale of Two Cities, Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, James Dean in Rebel without a Cause, and Buffy’s Spike. I know it’s not healthy,
but judging by the sheer number of bad boys in fairy tales, literature, movies,
and television, it must be pretty common.

I
have been fortunate enough to have been married to two of the nicest men in the
world, my late first husband and my current husband, but before and between
them, I had lamentable taste in men. I blame it on all the reading I did as a
child. The bad boys were always the most interesting guys. I mean, in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens’s Sydney
Carton was a drunken wastrel of a lawyer prostituting his great intellect to
the ambitions of lesser men with more willpower, sure. But what a passion he
had for pretty Lucy Manette! He sacrificed his own life to save the man she
loved, just so she would be happy. Wow! And in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff—well, we all know how he made the
pages steam with his great love for Cathy.

One
sizzling scene in Buffy of a lovesick
Spike watching outside Buffy’s window at night inspired me to write a poem, “Outside Your House at Midnight, Coyote” (“Closing
his eyes, Coyote can see within/ your walls as you undress and slide under/ covers”).
 This was followed by a
whole sequence of poems about the bad boy archetype as Coyote, the Native
American trickster figure, such as “Coyote in Black Leather,” “Three O’Clock in the Morning Alone, Coyote,” “Coyote
Invades Your Dreams,” “Coyote at Your Wedding,” and others, ending finally with
“Coyote in High School,” where I asked, “I wonder/ if anyone ever warns the
hard-shelled boys in leather/ against the honor-roll girls?”  (These are my most popular poems with women. I
even have a whole group of female fans in the UK just for the Coyote poems.)

Of course, I am the woman who wrote an entire book of
passionate love poems with the title Skin
Hunger (“forgive me for touching so much/ while we talk/ I can’t help myself”). So the Coyote
poems and the new bad boy in my mystery novels should come as no surprise to
anyone, least of all me.

After the wild and disastrous period in my life still
referred to by family and friends as the time of “the mad monk” (don’t ask!), I
began to date a man who was a number of years younger than me. One woman friend
confronted me to tell me over and over again that I was being stupid, that this
younger man was only going to get tired of me and throw me over, that it was
just sex that was blinding me. I tried to explain that I loved the kindness and
brilliance of this man, but she kept holding forth. Finally, fed up, I said
sweetly, “You’re absolutely right, of course. I know he’s no good and is going
to break my heart, but I just can’t help myself—the sex is just so good!” Her
mouth flew open in silence, and she stormed out, never to be seen by me again.
That younger bad boy and I have been together now for twenty-seven years.

So let’s hear it for the bad boys! Have you a penchant for
the guys who exude trouble, the dark and dangerous types? Have you had any of
those passionate, crazy, and sometimes destructive loves? Or do you like to
keep those guys between the pages of a book, as I prefer nowadays?

A Clock by Any Other Name

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A Clock by Any Other
Name

by Linda Rodriguez

I imagine most of you reading this will have seen the news
stories about Ahmed Mohamed, the fourteen-year-old boy who built a digital
clock in a pencil case and brought it to school to show his teacher, only to be
handcuffed and publicly perp-walked out of school to a juvenile detention
center where he was fingerprinted and detained for hours. This led to a huge
social media outcry with #IStandWithAhmed trending on Twitter and an invitation
to bring his “cool clock” to the White House to show the President.

This really struck home with me. My oldest son, Niles, was a
kid much like Ahmed. When he was little, I used to go to the thrift store and
buy old radios and small appliances for him to take apart to see how they
worked and try to put together again. It beat buying new appliances for our
home when he tried the same on our small appliances. Niles blew the lid off the
Iowa Basics in math and science when he was in the fourth grade. His scores
were the highest in the nation, and the testing company thought he’d been
helped by his teacher, so they sent a representative to give him the test all
over again. His scores were even higher that time.

Niles was always tinkering or building machines, appliances,
and electronic apparatuses. In high school, as computers became more important
in the schools (this was back in the 1980s), one of his teachers pulled him
into that field and made him an assistant teacher because he took to it so
well. Niles went on to study computer science in college—after an interruption
for Desert Storm—and was recruited by the major American firm designing and
installing comprehensive hospital system software packages. He immediately
became one of their top troubleshooters and traveled the country, even went to
the United Kingdom to help with initial rollouts there. He was hired away by
St. Jude’s Hospital in Memphis, which is a teaching and research hospital for
children facing cancer and other dread diseases. He ran their system for seven
years and still does consulting work for them.

Now, my son has his own consulting company with employees.
He’s in high demand at large medical complexes, such as the Stanford Medical
Center, UCLA Medical Center, a consortium of Detroit hospitals, and many other
places. He’s quite successful, and a couple of years ago consulted me about
setting up his own small foundation to fund the creation of educational software
packages for inner-city and other disadvantaged schools.

The reason I’ve bragged so shamelessly about Niles is not
just because I’m proud of him—I am—but because if the atmosphere of the country
when he was in school had been filled with the artificial fear that has been
pumped into it today, he could well have been another Ahmed. He’s brown-skinned
with black hair and dark eyes and a dreaded Hispanic last name (though his
ancestors have been born in this country clear back to before it was a
country). I could easily see the boy I loved and raised in Ahmed, that eager
mind, the excitement about managing to build something new and make it actually
work, even the NASA T-shirt.

Software innovations my son helped design make it harder for
nurses and doctors in hospitals to accidentally give the wrong medicines to
patients and make it easier to integrate all the information about one patient
from all the different departments of a hospital and different doctors into one
accessible-to-all file to keep everyone involved in that patient’s care literally
on the same page. Now, he’s also giving back to help educate new generations.
This is what happens when we, as a country, are not blinded by xenophobic
rhetoric and artificial fear ginned up by politicians for their own selfish
purposes. On this day–my son’s birthday–I hope we can get back to the kind of country we were when my son was
able to take several inventions to school to show his teachers without getting
arrested as a menace to society.

I May Have Put a Curse on Someone

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by

Linda Rodriguez

By sheer accident, I overheard an interaction between two
strangers a while back that may have led me to inadvertently put on a curse on
one of them.

The last time I went to see my oncologist, who’s at a
hospital in a suburb an hour’s drive from my house, was the first time I’d
driven so far by myself in months (after the whole broken-right-wrist thing).
When I came out of the cancer clinic, I decided I’d go to the Barnes &
Noble in the shopping center across the street to see if I couldn’t get my
wrist and knees to hurt less before beginning the long trip home.

Getting out of my car in one of the handicapped spaces (I
have a placard), I saw a lean guy in shorts, late-thirties or early-forties, confront
a very heavy woman who’d left B&N and was opening the door of her car in a
handicap space several cars up from mine. He yelled at her, “You fat, lazy
bitch. Getting your doctor to give you a placard just because you’re too lazy
to walk and too undisciplined to curb your urges to stuff candy in your mouth
all day. You’re running up everyone else’s health expenses. We’re having to pay
for your lazy gluttony.” The woman stared at him with wide eyes like a deer
caught in the headlights, began to cry, got in her car, and roared off, while
the guy stood there watching, satisfied.

As I said, these two were both strangers to me. I knew
neither one’s name. But I recognized the woman. She goes to the same cancer
clinic I do. As happens in such places, I’ve overheard bits of conversation
between her and other patients she knows or the nursing staff in the chemo infusion
lab or between rooms (I’m a novelist—I observe and eavesdrop—shoot me), so I
knew that she had a different kind of cancer from mine, that it had been very
advanced when it was found, that she’s been battling it for years now and gone
through surgery, radiation, and five or six bouts of chemo already. I knew she
had gone through years more of pain, nausea, fatigue, depression, you name it, than
I have. I knew she had dealt with pain in joints and muscles so intense that it
brought tears to your eyes walking from one part of the house to the other. I
knew she had probably had long periods where she only got a couple of hours of
sleep at night. I knew she had dealt with fatigue so overwhelming that she
would have days when just getting out of bed was a triumph, when she couldn’t
summon energy to talk or would nod off sometimes in the middle of a
conversation. I knew she took meds that did all kinds of horrible things to
your body, like eat your bones or put on pounds, no matter what you eat or how
you try to exercise, or cause swelling in your face and body.

My feeling was that if she’d consoled herself during one of
these times with more chocolate than she should have, so be it. Not anyone else’s
business. Because take it from someone who’s dealing with just a little of what
she’s had to deal with for years—there is no amount of chocolate that’s too
much when you’re facing that kind of shit.

I’m on a cane and moving very slowly—because of those meds
that cause so much joint/muscle pain, fatigue, and weakness—so I wasn’t able to
get over there before she was in her car heading out, but when I did, I turned
to this guy who looked so swollen with self-righteous indignation and found
myself pointing my finger at him, something I never do because my grandmother
warned me against it as a child. I may have yelled, but since this med makes me
weaker in all my muscles, my voice is not as strong as it once was. “I hope you
someday truly understand what it’s like to have physical problems that make you
sedentary and gain weight, to have lupus and fibromyalgia and rheumatoid
arthritis and multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s and all the other things
people have to deal with every day. May you someday understand what it’s really
like to deal with cancer.” A couple of people had stopped walking through the
parking lot and were staring, so he just shook his head and took off running,
yelling, “Another fat, lazy bitch.”

This is the most egregious case I’ve encountered of what I’ve
started to call “health bullying,” that I’m seeing more and more often lately.
Whether it’s gluten-free, vegan, nightshade-free, or various supplements or
special diets or special kinds of exercise, some people seem to feel the need
to prescribe for people they know or even don’t know. I remember when my
youngest was a teenager and recently diagnosed with ulcerative colitis that had
almost killed him from internal bleeding. They pumped blood into him round the
clock for over a week and powerful IV steroids that put him into induced
diabetes that left him injecting insulin for a year. Once he got out of the
hospital, he had to continue taking steroids that puffed him up like the
Michelin Man. Someone tried to say he just needed to walk a little and eat more
fresh fruits and vegetables. Common sense, yes? He had no car and already
walked more miles a day than they probably did in a week, even including the
treadmill. He had a long list of foods he was forbidden to eat because they
would cause the internal bleeding to start again, and at the top were those
fresh fruits and vegetables. I won’t even start on all the folks who think they
know how to cure cancer, and I have to tell them that my doctors and I are
working on that, thank you very much.

I decided a tough broad like me didn’t need to rest before
driving home and made it fine. Could hardly walk to get inside my house, but I
made it. I started to feel bad about what I’d said to the guy. I just wanted
him to think outside his selfish box for a minute and understand what others
might be going through, but I began to realize that, instead, I’d probably
placed a curse on him. Because this guy was totally deficient in empathy, and
empathy is the only way to understand how someone else might feel—unless you
experience the exact same thing. I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to do it. I
hope he’s only going to get one of those diseases and not all of them.

Linda Rodriguez’s Skeet Bannion mystery novels,
Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret, and books of poetry, Skin Hunger and Heart’s Migration, have received many awards, such as St. Martin’s/Malice
Domestic Best First Novel, Latina Book Club Best Books 2014, Midwest Voices
& Visions Award, Thorpe Menn Award, Ragdale and Macondo fellowships, among
others. She is Chair of the AWP Indigenous/ Aboriginal American Writers Caucus.

Twitter handle—@rodriguez_linda

REPLY TO COMMENTS (because Blogger still hates me):

Sorry I’m so late getting back to everyone, but today was another doctor’s appointment, so I’ve been gone all afternoon.

Pam, thank you for the hugs and prayers. I can always use them.

Thank you, Kathy and Marilyn!

Judith, I really didn’t mean to.

Kathy, both of them did. Yay!

Ritter, you are so right about all three.

Doward, I try to avoid physical violence because the cancer meds increase irritability and I might accidentally kill someone.

Thank you, Alice!

Thanks, Mary. I know allergies must be awful. That’s one load I don’t have to carry, and for that, I’m very grateful.

Making a List and Checking It Twice

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by Linda Rodriguez

I’m a big believer in using all the
help technology and professional writing books and programs can give me in
writing. I’ve tried using all kinds of workbooks, charts, and forms in working
on a novel. I’m even exploring Scrivener-type software programs for use in
writing my next book. I’m hardly on the cutting edge, but I’m also not one of
the “if it was good enough for Hemingway, it’s good enough for me” types.
Still, sometimes we look around and find simple everyday solutions to our
problems, and it would be silly not to take advantage of them.
One of the most useful tools I’ve
found in writing a novel is the simple, old-fashioned list. If you’re like me,
you use lists to remind you what you need to do during the day, what you need
to pack for a trip, what you need to buy at the grocery store, and dozens of
other mundane projects, large and small. It’s easy to assume we need something
more sophisticated for this complex novel (for novels are all more or less
complex) that we’re trying to hold in our heads and build on paper. However,
I’ve discovered that simple lists can help in several ways with making that
story in our head a reality in print.
First of all, I keep running
character and place lists. I write a mystery series. When I wrote the first
book, Every Last Secret, I was
creating all the characters from scratch, as well as all the places in my
fictional town.  I wrote personality and appearance sketches for each
character, but in addition, I made a list of each character as s/he appeared
with a few words to note key characteristics. I did the same for places in my
made-up town. This meant I could look up the full name of walk-on characters
easily when I needed to much later in the book. It meant that I could easily
look up the important details of the buildings on the campus and the shops on
the town square as my protagonist, Skeet Bannion, walked past them or into
them.
These lists tripled in value when I
started the second book in the series and now the third. No one will have brown
eyes in the first novel and baby-blues in one of the later books. Old Central,
the 19th century castle-like mansion on the Chouteau University
campus, will not morph into a 1960s Bauhaus box of a building.
Next, when I’m plotting ahead,
simple lists come to my aid again. I’m a combination of outliner and
follow-the-writing plotter. I like to know where the next 25-50 pages are
going, plotwise—or to think I do, at least. I do this by making a list of
questions that I need to answer about the book. In the beginning, I have lots
of questions. The answer to only one or two may give me enough to start the
next several days’ writing. I stole the idea of asking myself questions and
answering them in writing from Sue Grafton. She posts to her website journals
that she keeps while writing each novel, and in these, she often asks and
answers these types of questions. I took it a bit further by trying to make
long lists of questions that needed to be answered, which often, in turn, add
more questions to the list when they are answered.
Answering the questions tells me
where the story wants to go, but these lists also help me keep the subplots
straight and make sure they tie in directly to the main plot, and they keep me
from overlooking some detail or element that will create a plot hole or other
disruption for the reader. These questions can vary from broad ones, such as
“What is the book’s theme?” and “How can I ratchet up the excitement and stakes
in Act II?” to more detailed, such as “What clue does Skeet get from this interview?”
and “What’s on Andrew’s desk?” Such question lists come in handy during
revision, as well.
During revision, I make yet another
kind of simple list. As I’m reading the manuscript straight through in hard
copy, I write down a list of questions as I go. I notice a weak spot and ask
myself, “How can I let the reader know how much Jake meant to Skeet, as well as
Karen?,” “Should I have Skeet attend Tina’s autopsy?,” and all too often,
“Reads competent enough, but where’s the magic?”
After going through my lists of
hundreds of big to tiny fixes and changes to make, and either making them
(most) or listing by scene where in the book to make the fix (for major
issues), I sit down to wrestle with 5-15 major problems from almost but not
quite minor to huge and complex. This final list is my guideline through the
swamps of revision. The issues on this list require changes that thread
throughout part or all of the book. Trying to do them all at once or even to
keep them in my mind all at the same time would bog me down—perhaps forever.
Listing them and working my way one item at a time through that list helps me
to keep my focus even while dealing with very complex situations that must be
woven in and out through the length of the novel.
In short, simple lists make the
complex task of writing a novel doable for me. What about you? Do you use lists
in your writing? Are there other tools you use for keeping track and keeping
focused as you plot, write, and revise?

REPLIES TO COMMENTS (because Blogger hates me):
Sparkle Abbey, don’t you find lists really help you juggle in your mind all those layers and levels that come into writing?

Kay, keep your lists on the computer in the same folder as your drafts of the book, and then you won’t have to worry about losing them.

Marjorie, see my suggestion to Kay above.

Debra, I usually keep my lists, though I often use Word’s cross-through feature to show myself that I’ve taken care of that item. This helps with revision and with series continuity, and I’ve found it very useful when teaching. I give my students samples of actual documents I used in writing my books, so they can see how the process works. As to the list of illnesses, etc., from your mouth to G-d’s ear.

Marilyn, yes, I think the lists carried over from my daily life and running a household into writing a book.

Nazis and Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Brotherhood, Oh, My!

/in /by
 by Linda Rodriguez
(This blog originally ran on Writers Who Kill)

I am so incensed and upset about the massacre by a white supremacist of nine African American people at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston that I can’t think of anything else to write about, yet I don’t want to just add to the rhetoric about that atrocity. So I thought instead I would re-run a blog I wrote for Writers Who Kill a couple of years ago when white supremacists descended on my city–to remind us that they’re out there and are a real danger and to remind us that there’s a beautiful coalition of old and young who will stand up to them.


Yes, those are swastikas on the flags you see in that photo.
Saturday, the Nazi Socialist Movement, the largest neo-Nazi organization in the
country, came to my hometown, Kansas City, for a national gathering to
celebrate the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht with their pals the
Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Brotherhood, and Satan’s Saints, a white supremacist
motorcycle gang.

I’m a lifelong activist. The FBI has a file on me from the
J.Edgar Hoover days (which puts me in very good company). I’ve been
teargassed in antiwar protests and had rotten tomatoes and eggs thrown at me in
civil rights marches. I’ve put in my time at trying to make this a decent
country for everyone, and as lupus, fibromyalgia, and severe asthma have taken
a toll on me and left me needing a cane, I had decided that I was done with
going out into the streets to protest or demonstrate. I figured I’d earned my
time to sit peacefully at home and finish the book for which I have an impending
deadline.



Then the Nazis announced that they were coming to Kansas
City. They came to KC in 2007 to celebrate Hitler’s birthday and paraded around
in Nazi uniforms. I thought surely others would stand against them and no one
did. So Saturday saw me downtown at City Hall facing the Jackson County
Courthouse where the Nazis, KKK, and fellow travelers were supposed to bring
over a thousand jackbooted thugs to parade around to celebrate the night their
German forebears destroyed Jewish shops, killed many Jews, and started rounding
up them (and many other minority groups) for concentration camps to begin
Hitler’s Final Solution.

The same politicos who rolled out the red carpet for these
Nazis, allowing them all kinds of things that we counter-ralliers were not
allowed—bullhorns, ultra-large stereo speakers, microphone stands, and much
more when we weren’t even allowed water bottles or purses to carry our medicine
(I had to make use of Ben’s pockets for mine)—tried to keep us from protesting
against them, and when they couldn’t , organized another rally miles away,
effectively dividing the forces of reason for political purposes. So
reluctantly, after an exhausting week of work and events every night for my
husband’s job, we drove downtown early to set up for one more stand against
hate.



Even with the politicians putting pressure on organizations
to attend their rally safely miles away, seven hundred people arrived to stand
up against the Nazis—ministers, schoolteachers, college and high school
students, secretaries, longtime civil rights activists, young veterans of the
Occupy movement, active-duty soldiers, grandmothers with their grandchildren,
fiery young anarchists, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, white, African
American, Latino, American Indian, and a few women in hijabs. What was
especially gratifying to me was that the vast majority were young people.

What was not gratifying was that the police were aimed at us
and apparently had orders to threaten us with teargas and pepper spray.
Fortunately, none was used against us, but that’s why in some photos you will
see folks with bandannas or handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses. These
were the ones who’d been involved with the Occupy movement and had recent
experience of being sprayed with these toxic substances. Also, a little
disconcerting was the militarized appearance of the police. About six clearly
marked observers for the Department of Justice circulated among us—and may have
been the only reason that our peaceful gathering was not attacked by the police,
who paid little attention to the Nazis, et al.

The Nazis and white supremacists only managed to field about
three dozen people instead of the thousand-plus they had threatened. When asked
later by the press about the low turnout, they said that many turned back,
afraid of the publicity that our counter rally had drawn and afraid that they
might lose their jobs if they were publicly seen. Some dismissed that as fake
excuses, but I’ve seen the membership numbers that researchers have compiled
for these organizations, and I know they could easily field that many people.
Therefore, I count our protest a success since it inhibited more from coming
out in public.

The rhetoric was as awful as you might expect. Talk of
putting all but Aryans into “subservience.” Talk of the fun they have arming
with guns and going “hunting illegals” at the border, as if it were a sport.
Talk of the “judaization” of America and the world and how they will “cleanse”
it. But mostly it was the same rhetoric you can hear any day on talk radio or
from the extremist politicians who have seized control of Congress. That was
the eye-opener. They even played a recording from the 1980s of a deceased
leader, and it was basically Tea Party rhetoric with some extra-nasty violence
added. It underscored how far to the right our country has slid when the lines
the Nazis have been spouting for decades have suddenly become the main themes
of powerful elected politicians.

But the main takeaway of the day was the beautiful, diverse
gathering who peacefully stood up against the haters and said, “No.” That and
the heavy involvement of young people from conservatively dressed yuppie types
to the heavily tattooed anarchists who placed themselves in the front lines,
fully expecting teargas or pepper spray. I have had my days of depression and
cynicism when I look at the way things are going, but I am newly optimistic
after this glimpse of the upcoming generation, who, with all their differences,
will still stand up and stand together against violence and hate.

REPLIES TO COMMENTS (because Blogger hates me still):

Kay, I don’t blame the police in general (though some of them seemed to really belong over with the KKK, etc.). Most of them were just doing what the politicians who run the city told them to do.

Marilyn, yes, it is scary. These groups have had a renaissance of late, growing terribly in membership. And for everyone who thinks this is just a Southern problem, not so. They’re all over–Michigan, California, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Montana, Missouri, New York, Maine, you name the state and they’ve got one or all of these organizations and other like them quartered there. What I found scariest, though, was that the same rhetoric of racist and anti-Semitic hate that they’ve always used is what we’re hearing out of state houses and the US Congress now.

Marjorie, I’m sorry for what you and your colleagues have experienced. Discrimination encountered is a bitter pain, I know. I keep hoping that this atrocity, this terrible racist act, will be the catalyst that bring our society together against this vicious scourge, but so far, it hasn’t happened. I begin to despair, but not yet entirely. I still hope.

Men Who Take on Other Men’s Children

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
My stepfather coaching my little brother’s Litlle League team

When I look back on my life, I realize I’ve been lucky
enough to be closely involved with three men who had the ability to take on
children who weren’t their own genetic children and love and care for them as
fathers. It will be Father’s Day soon, and I want to say a word or two about
these kinds of unsung heroes.


My birth father was a brutal, unpredictable man. I suspect
he would now be diagnosed as a clinical sociopath. After my parents’
scandalous, highly contentious divorce and all of the violent, ugly fallout
afterward, my mother settled in a small college town in Kansas and met a quiet
man she married when I was fifteen.


My stepfather immediately tried to be a good father to me,
which meant, among other things, setting limits and being protective. My birth
parents had both been irresponsible and sometimes dangerous children, so from
my earliest memories I was the pseudo-adult in the house, the one who worried
about all my younger siblings and tried to protect them and care for them so they
could have as normal a childhood as possible. No one had ever looked after me
or tried to take care of me, so I resented my new stepfather’s efforts
tremendously.


As the next few years went by and I observed my stepfather’s
treatment of my younger siblings, for whom I still felt so responsible although
I’d left home at sixteen, I warmed to him. He was doing his best to be a real dad
to them, taking them camping and fishing, making them toys, coaching Little
League teams, etc. In time, like my younger siblings, I came to call him Dad.
When I gave my parents their first grandchildren, he was a doting grandfather,
and when he finally died, he died in my sister’s and my arms with all my
brothers and the grandchildren around his bed.


At the time I married my late first husband, I already had a
baby, whose father had died. My late first husband loved my oldest as much as
either of the two children we had together, and that was one of the things I
loved about him, that capacity to open his heart to a child who wasn’t his own genetically
just as much as to those who were.


Later when I was a single mother of two teenagers in the
final years of high school and my youngest was only four years old, I met and
married a man who’d never been married or had children. He had enough sense not
to try to be a father to my teens, who would have only resented him for it, but
he loved and raised my youngest as his own. This gentle, totally urban
intellectual did the zoo safari, even though he was embarrassed that everyone
else had to help him put up the huge tent he’d rented, and when our little one
left the tent open to the depredations of peacocks and collapsed the whole tent
on his stepfather when they were packing up to leave, he was so kind that he
earned a hand-printed, hand-drawn certificate of membership in “The Loyal Order
of Peacock Fathers.” My youngest and my husband to this day have a close,
loving father-son relationship, and because he was so patient, he and my older
two children have a warm relationship as well.


My sister has two sons. One father is a deadbeat, missing in
action because he’s never wanted to be financially responsible for his child
after the divorce (just as he hadn’t for all of the other children he had that
my sister didn’t know about when they married). The father of the youngest paid
support but simply refused to see his own son. For these boys, my current
husband has been a father-figure. The younger one clung to my husband and
waited eagerly for our visits and his to us. My husband used to shake his head
on the way home and wonder at the idiocy of the men who refused to have any
contact with their gifted, charming boys. At Christmastime, these two nephews,
now grown, delight in finding eccentric books and other gifts that will please
my husband, often keeping an eye out for them all year.


I’ve seen firsthand what a difference men like this can and
do make in the lives of children whose fathers are gone, sometimes dead,
sometimes by choice. So here’s a toast to the men who take on other men’s
offspring and give them love and a true father’s care, even when it isn’t easy,
even when those other men have left emotional damage behind. To Dad, to
Michael, to Ben, and to all of the other men out there like them, you are the
true salt of the earth!

Linda Rodriguez’s third Skeet Bannion novel, Every Hidden Fear, was a selection of
the Las Comadres National Latino Book Club and a Latina Book Club Best Book for
2014. Her second Skeet mystery, Every
Broken Trust, was a selection of Las Comadres National Latino Book Club, International
Latino Book Award, and a finalist for the Premio Aztlan Literary Prize. Her
first Skeet novel, Every Last Secret,
won the St. Martin’s/Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel
Competition and an International Latino Book Award. Her short story, “The Good
Neighbor,” has been optioned for film. Find her on Twitter as @rodriguez_linda,
on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/LindaRodriguezWrites,
and on her blog http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com.

 
REPLIES TO COMMENTS (because Blogger still hates me):

Thank you, Pam!

Visualizing Success

/in /by


By
Linda Rodriguez
One of the best books on actually
living a writer’s life is Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See. I often
give it as a gift to serious aspiring writers I know. Carolyn is herself an
award-winning novelist, and her advice is pretty solid. (I have come to feel as
if she is my friend from reading her novels and this book again and again, but
though I’m on first-name basis with her here, I’ve never actually met Carolyn
See.)
First, she tells us to write 1,000
words a day every day. Blam! Just like that! Right at the beginning! But she
says they don’t have to be finished words—they don’t even have to be good
words. We just have to put down 1,000 words every day. And of course, it
works—because no one will be able to keep slapping random words on the page. We
start to make sense, and then we start to make story. So, her rule number one
is write 1,000 words each and every day.
Carolyn’s next rule will prompt
groans from everyone. She talks about the need to build a writing community and
to get involved in the writing community that already exists. So she wants us
all to write a charming note each day to a different writer or editor or agent
or reading series administrator, expressing our genuine appreciation for
something they’ve done or written. I suspect this will be the biggest stumbling
block among her rules for living the writing life, even though I’ve come to see
the sense of it. (I must admit I don’t follow this rule very often, though,
being no better than any of the rest of us.)
The
rules continue throughout this informal and witty book, and they are all good
rules. When I abide by them, I am in better shape than when I don’t. This I
know. However, it’s another part of the book that I want to talk about here.
 Carolyn makes a great case for
visualizing the career and life we want to live as writers. She talks about
well-known writers who have entourages, chauffeurs, phalanxes of attractive
bodyguards, or dramatic capes and trench coats. She makes a persuasive case
that each of these successful writers had at some time in the past decided,
consciously or unconsciously, that when they were successful they would
have—entourages/ chauffeurs/ bodyguards/ trench coats.
Carolyn encourages us to consciously
visualize the successful writer’s life we want to have in the future in detail,
including what we’ll wear, if that’s important to us, what friends we’ll have,
where we’ll live, and more. That kind of visualization is important, I think.
If we don’t put some thought into what we want, how will we know when we’ve
achieved it? She encourages us to go into detail because some of the details
are easier to achieve than others. It’s very tough to make the New York
Times bestseller list, but it’s not so hard to save up for a splashy cape
or dramatic trench coat.
So my question to all of you today,
as well as to myself, is what would your life look like if you achieved the
kind of writer’s success that you long to have?
I’m
not into splashy capes or trench coats or matched pairs of bodyguards, but I
think a chauffeur might be a nice achievement, especially on regular
professional visits to New York City (which are very much a part of my
visualization). Actually, I think I’ve already achieved this.
On my last trip to NYC to meet with
my editor and attend a poetry award ceremony, I found a livery car service that
took us all over the city at all hours and for less than a cab would have cost.
After the post-award-ceremony bash, native New Yorkers in our party were
futilely trying to gain the attention of cabs outside the restaurant while one
phone call brought our driver to pick us up in front and take us across town to
our B&B.
What would you visualize for your
life as a successful writer? Inquiring minds want to know!

REPLIES TO COMMENTS (because Blogger):

Marilyn, how big is big? The power’s in the specificity of the details. Do you want a fan base of 100,000? 600,000?

Mary, yes, first-class travel might well be a perk to visualize. A cook/nutritionist would help you stay in good shape so you could turn out more of your books.

Judith, the idea of ease is a great one. Things that make the different tasks we face easier for us will always be a favorite.

Hurray for Netflix—From the Woman Who Doesn’t Watch TV

/in /by


By Linda Rodriguez


As some of you readers of this blog know, I’ve been through
a real run of bad luck lately, battling cancer and complications and then, once
free of that, breaking two bones in my right wrist. In recent months, I’ve felt
more than a little like Joe Mphstlspk of L’il Abner cartoon strip fame, who
traveled everywhere under a black cloud.

One of the problems these two health situations have had in
common is trouble with sleep, due to pain and side effects of medication. I’ve
spent all too many nights sitting up in the living room in the middle of the
night in the past year or so. Normally, in such circumstances, I would read or
knit or spin yarn to use in knitting or weaving.  Unfortunately, the surgeries for cancer and the
lymphedema that accompanied them—and later the broken wrist—all affected the
right arm/hand, and holding a book and turning pages was not an option. Neither
was holding knitting needles or a spindle.

Decades ago, I gave up watching television. This was not
some intellectual I-refuse-to-watch-that-trash kind of thing. Rather it was
simply an I-have-to-give-up-something-to-find-time-to-write thing.  During this time I have battled these health
issues, my youngest son was living at home with his big-screen TV and Netflix
subscription, something I paid little attention to until I ran into these problems.
Suddenly, TV has become my friend once again.

As I’ve struggled through these sleepless nights, I’ve
watched all the great Inspector Morse,
Inspector Lewis, and Endeavor (Morse as a young man)
television series I’d missed. I’ve also taken myself out of myself with the
flawless Foyle’s War, the British and
the Swedish Wallander series, all the
Poirots and all the Miss Marples. I’ve watched all the trite
romantic comedies I never saw and all the treacly, weepy death dramas.
(Remember, this period in my life has lasted for almost a year.) Finally, I sank
to the lowest point and aimed the remote at a 1980s television series I’d never
even heard of, Beauty and the Beast.
Linda Hamilton of Terminator. Ron
Perlman before his Hellboy fame. “Beautiful
NYC DA falls in love with subterranean-dwelling lion-man,” the blurb said. I
wrinkled my nose and asked myself, “Can it really be worse than something
called Scrotal Recall (an actual TV
series on Netflix)?”

Folks, Beauty and the
Beast is a writer’s TV show, a show about books and reading and ideas and
people trying to take care of each other in the face of a greedy world.
Produced and often written by George R.R. Martin back before he was really
famous for Game of Thrones, it’s the
only network television series I’ve ever seen where a major feature of each
episode is the reading aloud of a passage from some great book. It’s basically
a romance—and I’m not a big romance fan. But this series had so much more. And
it didn’t hurt that it had this hunky lion-man who recited poetry to the woman
he loved.

Unfortunately, it would seem that Ron Perlman was much
sexier in his pounds of makeup and lionesque prosthetics than he ever was in
real life. If the man had just kept his lion mask on and stayed in costume, he
could have been on one of those People
“Sexiest Man in the World” covers.

My son has finally moved into his own place and, after
months of promising to move his stuff out of our house, has finally taken the
big-screen TV and his PlayStation which ran Netflix. (Though our garage is
still full of plastic bins and boxes of his stuff. *sigh*) I finally have the
cast off my right wrist, although I still don’t have much use of it, and
sleeping through the night is becoming more possible. But I will remember my year-long
venture into television-land and, with special fondness, that there once was a
major television series that celebrated writers, books, and reading.
REPLIES TO COMMENTS (because Blogger. *sigh*)

Sparkle Abbey,

Thanks so much for good wishes. May it be so!

Bethany,

Foyle’s War is amazing! Perfect writing, directing, acting. It’s a treasure.

Mary,

Who knew the 1980s had such a cool TV series, full of Shakespeare, Dickens, Dylan Thomas, etc.? One where the hunky male lead was willing to risk everything to meet his favorite writer who had, he said, “shone light on some dark places in life for me.” Ah, if Perlman had only stayed in costume and kept reciting all that great writing, he could have been the biggest star around. 😉