Book Launch Friday - and Huckleberries

So...in case you couldn't tell from the post title, my book launch is coming up this Friday.  I'm having it at Flowery Trail Coffeehouse again, from 2 to 5 in the afternoon, and my husband is providing music.  The exciting part is that his new album has just become available, so we're turning the event into a sort of album release party as well.  So...music, books, coffee...what else could you possibly want?

On the current writing front, I'm picking up some older projects which were left in the dust when Violet Shadows ran away with me.  Two of them are vying for my attention at present, so I'm not about to complain.  More on that as it develops.

Making a foray up into the mountains with my mother tomorrow to pick huckleberries. (for those of you who do not live in the Inland Northwest, yes, there is a berry called a huckle (berry) and they are delicious!)  We generally try to go several times every year in the late summer.  We then freeze most of the berries and hoard them like squirrels, metering them out carefully to make them last all winter.  You can buy them, of course, for $30 a gallon...but then you miss the fun of hiking all over the beautiful mountains looking for them and coming down with hands that look like you've murdered somebody...and you still have to pay $30.  Of course, I wouldn't sell mine at all, even for more than that, and you can tell how much I like you if you come to my house and I break into the huckleberry store...or not.

Celebrating Ten Years in June

This is it.  I've been thinking and planning, and now it's happening.  This month I'm officially celebrating my 10th anniversary of being cancer-free, and for all sales of Ashford reported this month I will be donating 75% of my proceeds to the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC).  


UICC is a global cancer-fighting organization, and they work with smaller member organizations throughout the world, including the American Cancer Society.  I am truly impressed by their scope and the work they have done, particularly with their efforts to provide treatment and pain medication in developing countries.  I am thoroughly aware of the fact that I would not be alive today if I had not had the good fortune to live in a place where treatment was readily available.  Whatever my thoughts on our health care system (and most of you know what those are) I am very grateful for the care I received.  I have been blessed, and I would like to share that.  To learn more about UICC and what they do, follow the nifty link on the upper right side of this page.  Look at their website, sign the declaration, watch some of their videos...


This goes for paperback, Kindle, sales online through Amazon, or sales through a physical bookstore.  For those of you who live near me, Ashford is in stock at Flowery Trail Coffeehouse and Valley Drug in Chewelah, or Coffee and Books in Town Center in Colville.  It is also available by request wherever books are sold, and the Amazon.com link is to the right of this page, right under the UICC link.


For obvious reasons this is a cause which is very dear to me, and I would appreciate any assistance in spreading the word, whether you tell your friends verbally, share this link on your Facebook pages, tweet it, etc...  


I am also planning to shave my head the second week in July, and my sister is coming to cover it in henna tattoos.  Expect pictures.


Thank you all for reading my blog, and for the support you have already given me.  I would have loved to have Violet Shadows ready in time for this, but it was not to be.  Maybe a teaser in July?  Cheers!

Confidence or Illusion

I am not by nature a confident person.  In all honesty, I don't think many people are.  However, in the last few years I've had a growing number of people remark on how self-assured I seem.  It is true that I have gained a certain measure of confidence, enough at least to create a convincing facade, but I think I should give credit where credit is due, as this transformation has been the work of many years and various influences.


As a little girl I remember being afraid of many, many things, but primarily of people, even my relatives, and men in particular.  I always suspected them of some hidden agenda, especially when they were trying to win me over.  One of my greatest fears was of being one of those children who lost their parents in the grocery store and had their names and descriptions announced loudly over the intercom.  Thus I learned that if I walked quickly down the back aisle of the store, just barely glancing down each cross-aisle, avoiding salespeople and not letting my distress show on my face, I could find my parents before the staff noticed that I had lost them.  To this day I still don't like asking salespeople for assistance.  If I can't find something myself I generally go without.


I also had an abiding fear of venturing out to the chicken coop after dark.  It wasn't far from the house, but something about the way the beam from the flashlight bounced off the distant trees was unsettling, and the door of the coop had this creepy squeak.  Anyway, not sure I should be admitting this, but I invented an imaginary friend for myself whose sole purpose was to race me back to the house after the chickens were fed.  I don't remember playing with her at any other time, but she was my excuse to myself for running back to the house every night.


I learned early that I was forced to come out of my shell if I had no one to hide behind.  When I was thirteen I started volunteering at a historic mansion in Spokane.  It was a place I'd been obsessed with ever since my parents had taken me there some years before.  Anyway, I heard of the opportunity, and wrote a very nervous note to the man in charge of volunteers, saying that I knew I was young, but I would love to help, adding that I'd be willing to do any menial tasks they didn't want to give to anyone else.  He wrote back very nicely to say that he was sure they could find a place for me and that I wouldn't have to perform any menial tasks.  I didn't know anyone there, and was petrified every time I went down, but I loved it, and began to realize that strangers are actually sometimes less scary than people you know.  They have no preconceptions of you.  You choose how they see you.  It was one of the best experiences I had.  Ten years later a fellow staff member looked at me, eyes wide, and exclaimed, "You grew up here!" I suppose I did.


The first time I remember someone, besides family, telling me that I was beautiful, was when I was bald from chemo.  I think this speaks for itself.


Working at Flowery Trail Coffeehouse for the past five and half years certainly deserves acknowledgement here.  Any service job, I think, will make you either compassionate or jaded, sometimes both.  You can't run from people.  You have to help them.  And eventually they cease to become distant mysterious monsters.  They come close, and become people.


My brief stint as a rural pizza delivery driver represents the darker side of that last paragraph.  But it was a great confidence-builder for me.  When you've been sent to deliver pizzas to a trailer park and had the door answered by a large hairy man clad only in spandex shorts... well, fear becomes irrelevant.


In any case, whether it is confidence or illusion, I am much more secure than I used to be.  Even so, I still steel myself before entering a crowded room.  I still run away, though I no longer race an imaginary friend.  Perhaps confidence doesn't actually exist for anyone.  Perhaps confidence is the illusion, and we don't ever learn it, but only the means of masking our lack of it.

So, I recently unearthed a partially completed manuscript, abandoned a number of years ago.  It was the last manuscript I wrote by hand, which would explain why it survived the tragic deaths of two laptops which perished during that time, taking other half-baked ideas with them.  (I really must learn from my mistakes and save back-up copies.)


I know enough now to realize that the story would never survive the publishing world of today.  The protagonist is entirely too contented, the setting too picturesque, and I have a feeling that ragged-yet-cheerful gypsies with hurdy-gurdys and hearts of gold are on their way out as popular characters.  It makes absolutely no sense to finish it, and no doubt that's why I abandoned it at the time... but there's something in it, a freshness and innocence, that I can't help wanting to recapture, and I think the characters are impatient with me for not finishing their stories.  I may have to complete it anyway, if only for its own sake.  And you never know... 


I did recently stumble across a novel at the dollar store, which manages to smash together about five genres somehow, as well as ripping off the plots of at least three popular novels at once, with healthy doses of time-travel, sex, kilts, and rock 'n' roll, not to mention poor writing.  Yes, I might be a little bitter, but somebody published it!  Yes, it was at the dollar store, but first somebody had to read it and think, "This is good stuff.  Let's print it!"


So perhaps it means there is hope for me after all.  Or it means I shall have to resort to writing bodice-rippers to pay the bills.  Or I shall keep my dignity and work at Flowery Trail until I die.