-Writing

I’m writing again, trying to finish already begun projects before starting more. I’m still adjusting to my new schedule, and other things (many listed in the “personal” section of this update).

-BookLove

I started out August with three weeks of reviews done, edited and posted, pending publication. Now I’m ending the month with a week’s advance cushion space. It’s been that kind of month, no, it’s been that kind of year.

-Personal

I am on the edge of some massive personal changes. I’ve already talked about some of the ongoing “projects” in my life, like our housing troubles, new schools all around, job shifts and I’ve got a few things going on that I’m just not going to talk about in a public forum.

Well here’s the other part. Now that both kids are in school I’m looking at where my life goes from here. I have an eight hour block to myself five days a week and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what to do with it.

The sad, sad choice is that it’s simply irresponsible of me to think that I can be a stay-at-home writer at this point in my career. I’m starting to have some success, definitely, but it’s not coming close to paying the bills, or even offering more than a nice dinner out with the family, and maybe a trip to the bookstore.

My choices now are to say fuck it, I believe in myself and I’m willing to risk everything on the slim chance that someday in the future I’ll be able to support myself, and my family with my writing. Beside there being nothing even resembling a clear pay off to this method, especially with as turbulent as publishing and the economy are there’s not even enough forward progress at this point. There’s the opportunity for forward progress, but I’m already taking advantage of it the best I feel I can so a big block of writing time just doesn’t seem like the best use of my time.

One of the things I don’t speak about often is that my husband has a spine injury and while it’s managed most days right now chances are very high he’ll get to learn how to use a wheelchair in the next ten to fifteen years. I don’t know if any of you have tried to live off disability, but I know people who have and it’s not going to cut it for a family of four.

Which brings me to the prospect of getting a job, and it’s accompanying problem, I haven’t had a job since I had to quit working at Subway due to pregnancy problems with my now 9 year old son. That’s a long time to employers, and while I’ve got plenty of other experiences that I can use to my advantage most of them are only really applicable in the publishing/bookselling industry, which is in a tough place right now. If I could get a position, even a basic one, at a bookstore, it could be the start of something. But I don’t see what, other than a pay check, the kind of job I could get right now (and people have told me even thinking I can get a McDonald’s job these days is an over estimation on my part) would do to build not just a paycheck, but something I can support, or contribute to the support of my family with.

The point is that minimum wage jobs don’t support a family, and that’s my end goal. How do I jump from being a stay at home mom/special needs caretaker of 10 years to making a better than minimum wage, with the potential to completely support our family if the need arises?

So I’m considering going back to school as well. I already have one and a half years of credit, so there exists this potential for me to find a “career” (a “real” one because we all know the only career for me is writing) that won’t take a huge investment of time, but will still allow me to contribute to, and maybe even replace my husband’s paycheck if need be.Let’s just toss aside all issues about paying for school (which I can’t really do since we cannot afford a drain on the finances which is why all this is coming up anyway) I still don’t know what to go to school for, because I want to sell books, not get distracted by other things. But that’s just not happening right now.

So you see my circular musings here. There’s no bad answer, really, but there’s not exactly a clearly superior one either.

Plus I turn thirty next week, and the people I see around me have either thrown themselves into being as successful as possible or appear to be stumbling their way through life just reacting to things that they could have prevented or controlled or enjoyed if they’d planned, or thought things out.

I don’t want to be here, at this level of writing success, in ten years. I need to not be here because it will break me to spend so much time with nothing to show for it. I’m not talking about giving up writing, just the grind of publishing. I do feel that I have come pretty far in the last few years and I want to see that continue. I’m pretty sure it will, but I have to take advantage of the support, the time, and the good health we have now to try to decide how to set myself, and my family, up for more success as time goes on.

I guess it’s about doing the best I can, and while I love where I am now, publishing and career wise, if this is the best I can do then it doesn’t warrant an eight hour a day/five day a week work habit.

Oh yes, and if you follow me on Twitter you’ll notice something else–I’m learning to drive for the first time and both intimidated and complete silly-feeling about the whole thing. It’s a ridiculous combination of feelings about something that so many people learn to do as teens. But it sort of reminds me of my silly reaction to going on the birth control pill. It was a year after my daughter was born and my first thought was “OMG I’m not responsible enough to be on birth control and remember to take a pill every day.”

Go ahead, laugh at the incredible silliness of a woman with TWO kids thinking being on birth control is all responsible and adult like. I know I laughed at myself a lot over it.

So I’ll leave you there for tonight, because it’s pretty clear I have more thinking and growing to do.

ISBN: 9781416551959

The back of this book bills it as a zany, thrilling mystery wherein our heroine, the quirky Dr. Amanda Bell Brown must find the cause for the death of a disgraced playboy evangelist’s baby. I received a copy by request through the LibraryThing Early Readers Program (where it was not disclosed that it was Christian fiction) and I requested it because fiction with minority leads is something I’m actively trying to include more of here at BookLove.

Unfortunately, I simply could not get into this book.

The story opens with a long, lamenting conversation between Bell and her BFF/kinda of love interest (except she’s married) which covers a lot of what happened in the first two books in the series and what happened between books. As a first time reader I was left with absolutely no clue what was going on, other than Bell, in an effort to make up with Rocky (the BFF who apparently put her marriage in danger before abandoning her, and who repeatedly teases her and calls her “babe” constantly) agrees to go visit a disgraced evangelist trying to make a comeback.

The second chapter opens with Bell and Rocky arriving at the location where the evangelist is filming his sermon. Bell is promptly assaulted by an old religious woman who calls Bell a hussy for being there with her pastor, and forcibly exorcises her, claiming a demon of interracial adultery is dwelling inside of her. Rocky, the charming BFF that he is, sits in his VIP seat and is amused by the antics, doing nothing at all to help.

After the sermon Rocky gets Bell backstage to meet the evangelist, Ezekiel Thunder. It’s there that Bell meets Little Zeke Thunder, Big Thunder’s 2 year old son. Bell is smitten, but launches into heartache over her own inability to have children, save for the fact that she’s been nauseated a lot lately. But she can’t have kids, she reassures herself, because she had a period since her husband left her and she has endometriosis, not to mention she has a tumor. With the subtly of a brick to the face, this “I can’t be pregnant despite obvious weight gain, morning sickness and soreness” becomes a repetitive source of angst. When Bell finally moves past the topic secondary characters constantly bring it up, accusing her of being pregnant, kicking off the whole response again.

In chapters three and four Bell insists she isn’t pregnant, then is threatened by the same person who assaulted her in the previous chapter, blatantly and maliciously manipulated by Thunder, again while her BFF Rocky just stands to the side, or defends Thunder.

It is never really explained why Rocky wants her to meet this clearly malicious, manipulative preacher. There’s eventually something about Rocky wanting her to find God again, but that should never excuse the sort of behavior Bell has been subjected to.

In chapter five Bell finally does something that made me like her, she self soothes with a peppy new haircut. But when she returns to work she discovers her parking lot filled with the vehicles of all her closest, except her husband. Despite being forewarned Bell walks into the intervention. What is traditionally a last ditch effort to get a person with substance abuse to realize the extent of their actions is bastardized in this chapter as Bell’s nearest and dearest claim the intervention is because she’s fat, because her husband (who left her) is heart broken without her and she should go back to him, and because she is clearly pregnant and too old to be so (Bell is 35). The conversation is excessively scattered and even deviates into one of Bell’s friends claiming it’s not always all about Bell, except one would assume that an intervention IS about the person being confronted.

I stopped when I read the following interaction:

“If Jazz (Bell’s husband) is the one who left me, and he’s the one who is drinking excessively, why didn’t you do the intervention with him?”

“Because all of this is your fault,” my mother said.

If I hadn’t been at a doctor’s appointment I would have flung the book across the room. I did try to skip ahead in the book to see if it picked up, only to land on a scene where a doctor tells Bell and her husband, Jazz that Bell has a grapefruit-sized tumor, several grape=sized tumors and is also pregnant with twins.

The artificial drama is staggering in this book and completely distracts from the mystery Deadly Charm is advertised as containing. There is no time or build up to allow for readers to grow attached to Bell and having every character treating her like utter crap doesn’t make her sympathetic. Furthermore the pregnancy side plot is a huge problem. The medical problems (pregnant, with tumors) reads as more unbelievable, and unneeded drama, there’s never a question in the reader’s mind whether Bell is pregnant or not, and the utter insensitivity that everyone else in the book shows for Bell’s reproductive problems is pretty insulting.

It’s a bad combination of writing flaws, so Deadly Charm ends up in the DNF pile.