Category: Broken In: A Novel in Stories

Hit and Run – 2

A few nights later she sat on the nubby brown couch at Lou’s apartment. They had eaten a mediocre pizza and watched a movie to match, set in a future containing a wooden Keanu Reeves. Margaret slid the DVD back into its case and yawned.

“You know, Joe loved science fiction.”

At the sound of the twin’s name Margaret suddenly resembled a house pet, a cat or dog with ears perking up. Lou hadn’t mentioned him again since that Saturday afternoon in the coffee shop, and she’d been trying to think of a way to reintroduce the subject.

“Is that how you ended up watching so much Star Trek?”

Lou nodded and crammed the last piece of pizza into his mouth. She held her breath and waited. Then, in a posthumous portrait of words as his surviving brother spoke, Joey began to take form.

Sickly children either become television addicts or they are voracious readers; Joey was both. Joey read the Dune series over and over and over, loving the complex mythology and the idea of using will power to rule others, and oneself. His favorite quote was how fear is the little death. Despite his fragility, Joey’s whole existence was a total lack of fear of death.

He hated his disabilities, and avoided mirrors. But he loved anything to do with Star Trek. What he found so inspiring was the idea of a future society where beings with all sorts of handicaps or differences still had their places and their strengths.

When the boys were still little, Joey became a connoisseur of serial television. The amount of time Joey could go out and play was limited. Sometimes Lou watched old series on television with him during the afternoons. Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek and Lost in Space were their particular favorites. Margaret had been a closet fan of most of those shows all her life. Hearing how Joey cajoled his twin Lou into watching the shows, and then turned him into a follower of them, was fun.

One afternoon, Lou told her, the television show credits had begun rolling down the screen. In the green glow of the darkened cellar room Joey looked over to where his brother slouched and methodically cracked peanut shells.

“Sometimes I get this feeling,” Joey said quietly.

“What’s that?” his brother mumbled, his mouth full of peanuts.

“Like I have a hit and run life.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“A couple different things.” Joey kept looking at Lou until he was convinced he had his brother’s full attention. “I get born into this cool world, but I can’t run, or play ball, or even walk right. My life is a hit and run accident. First the accident happened (my birth) and afterwards life left me behind at the scene of the crash to deal with it.

“Or maybe the whole point of it is, it’s like I was always meant to deal with it. That I have to get up and run, even after being hit. Make the best of things.”

Lou swallowed the last of the nuts. “Maybe there’s a third option,” he objected. “Do you ever stop to think that maybe it’s the same for everyone? All of us live in a random universe, where every day totally random stuff happens. Good or bad, it’s always a surprise.” Lou sat up and leaned over the messy, scarred table to emphasize his words. “Maybe,” he went on slowly as he thought it through, “maybe it can be positive. Good stuff happening. Hits like hit songs or movies, runs like home runs and a player’s lucky streak.”

“Maybe,” Joey said. “But not for most of us. And not me, that’s for sure. My hit and run life is the version that occurred on the back road in the middle of the night. The next morning there I was, lying by the side of the road.

“But I know what you’re saying.” Generously Joey added, “I guess I’ve been trying ever since to turn it into the hit and run version you mean.”

NOTES: ©Jadi Campbell 2012. “Hit and Run” is the first chapter of my book Broken In: A Novel in Stories.  This story will run all month. Broken In and my other novels are available at Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.

Click here for my author page to purchase my books.

 

Hit and Run – 1

It was almost a year before Lou mentioned his brother. “You already know all the details about me, Margaret,” he repeated flatly. “The most unusual thing about me is that in Italian my last name means lawn bowling.”

Margaret composed a mental grocery list as she listened. In Italian… Italian food. Ground meat, ricotta cheese, maybe lasagna?

“Now, my twin, he was extraordinary.”

With that comment her attention snapped back. “What did you say? I didn’t know you had a brother! I thought you just had two sisters who were a lot older. And I sure didn’t know about a twin. How come you never told me you have a twin?” Margaret stared at him, astonished.

“Had,” Lou corrected her, and shrugged. “Had. What is there to say? His name was Joe. Joey. He lived, he died. He’s gone, I’m here. Although I wonder sometimes what it would have been like the other way around.”

Margaret felt she was viewing something she took for granted for the thousandth time, an inanimate object, and it suddenly winked at her. “What’s that supposed to mean, the other way around? What was he like?” she prompted, intensely curious.

Lou looked away into the distance for a minute before he eyed her sideways, considering whether or not to talk about his brother. Finally he came out with, “Joe was great. He was born 25 minutes after me, but that was the only time I did anything ahead of him. We were yin and yang.”

They sat with their coffees in the café as Margaret waited for him to go on.

“My twin, who died,” Lou said with difficulty, “was a great guy. Much more fun than I was. Am.” Lou sat on a straight-backed café chair with his left leg crossed over the right, his foot tapping up and down ever so slightly. “We were what they call change of life babies. By the time we came along, both my sisters were almost out of the house already. I remember them taking care of me when I was a really little boy. They helped my parents a lot, to prepare them for the time after both my sisters left to go lead adult lives.
“But my brother,” Lou went on slowly, “Joey almost didn’t get born.”

He stopped talking and Margaret knew he was revisiting old pain, hesitant to open up a new aspect of himself (his brother, she amended as she waited) to review. Margaret carefully nodded to show she was listening and wanted to hear more.

Finally Lou went on. “I was born first, an easy delivery, but Joe was turned sideways or something.”

“He was a breach birth?”

Lou was annoyed at the interruption. “Breach. Right. Whatever. I was only 25 minutes old, so I don’t remember the details. Anyway, they had to do a Caesarean on my mother.”

“Don’t hospitals automatically do those for multiple births?” Margaret kept interrupting the flow of Lou’s story, but she couldn’t help herself.

“Damn it, Jim, I’m an office manager, not a doctor!” Lou grinned.

“Sorry,” she said contritely. “I promise, no more interruptions. Tell me about Joe!”

Joey was the youngest Bocci child by 25 minutes. He had a difficult birth but was an easy child. Joey was sweet natured from the moment he entered the world. Lou was a normal boy, engaging in activities such as Little League or pick up kickball games in the park. Lou liked stories about astronauts and wanted to be one when he grew up. Joey, though, was fragile.

For the most part, their parents left Lou on his own. He had friends and did passably well in school. They didn’t need to worry about him, and that meant they could concentrate on Joey.

Joey spent much of his own childhood at doctors’ offices or in the children’s ward at the hospital. It was impossible to pinpoint what was wrong with Joey’s body. Each new medical team identified new problems; each specialty branch of medicine claimed a piece of the little boy. Congenital disorders, the original hospital report stated.

“Congenital disorders. What a term!” Lou stood up. It was the signal it was time to go, and disappointed, Margaret trailed him to the front door of the coffee house.

NOTES: ©Jadi Campbell 2012. “Hit and Run” is the first chapter of my book Broken In: A Novel in Stories.  This story will run all month. Broken In and my other novels are available at Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.

Click here for my author page to purchase my books.

Merry Christmas

MERRY CHRISTMAS !!

Here’s the annual round-up of my blog offerings. I grew insanely prolific this year, and went from biweekly posts to once a week. Happy Holidays and we’ll meet again in 2018. —Jadi

Art: Burma took center stage with A Burmese Spirit Guide and Sand Paintings. Food as Art was a tasty diversion. Andalusia was featured in Granada Heights, Alhambra Walls & Water, and Cordoba’s Arches. And we always have Paris! J’aime la Vie

Book excerpt: From my first book Broken In: A Novel in Stories, about a little boy and other people’s belongings. Carl Possessed 1 & 2

Current Events: I opined (quietly) concerning the mood in America, hurricanes, and the refugee crisis with Flags and Houston, We Have a Problem

Food: Always a fun subject…. A Cornucopia, The Seeds of Summer, Food as Art, and the local specialties here in Christmas Markets, Flammkuchen, and The Seeds of Summer

History & Cultural Heritage: Flags, In Search of Inspiration, J’aime la Vie, Christmas Markets and Death by Yawning

Holidays: Halloween, Japan’s Jidai Matsuri, plus Germany’s Christmas Markets

Memory: A tricky topic involving both emotions and events. I explored memory in The Seeds of Summer, Going Home (this one resonated deeply with readers), Granada Heights, Alhambra Walls & Water, Cordoba’s Arches, and Sevilla Song and Dance

Music: The sound of castanets and flamenco guitar in Sevilla Song and Dance

Nature: I went nuts writing a thread dedicated to my father. It began with The Animal Kingdom: 1 and so far 19 (!) posts have gone live. Since that wasn’t enough for me, I wrote special posts concentrating on individual critter families, such as A Clowder, A Cluster, A Cornucopia, and A Brood. I wrote a post on natural disasters, too: Houston, We Have a Problem

Places: America, Andalusia, Burma, Estonia, Germany, Japan, Latvia, Paris…

Religion: I was lucky to revisit a glorious spot where Christianity and Islam coexisted in Granada Heights, Alhambra Walls & Water, and Cordoba’s Arches

Writing: A goodly dose of humor helps on those baaad days… In Your Shoes or  In Search of Inspiration

Take a look around and see if you find old friends or stumble upon posts you may have missed. I like to think that these blog posts are my gifts to the world. As always, I welcome any and all feedback. See you next year!

NOTES: © Jadi Campbell 2017. To see  Uwe’s animal photos and pics from our trips, go to viewpics.de

Click here for my author page to learn more about my books and me.

In Search of Inspiration

If you troll blogs and the Web, there are untold numbers of suggestions on how to find the inspiration to write. Here are my ideas for how to get inspired… all tried, tested, and true. [1]

#1. Lock yourself in a room. More importantly, lock everyone else out.
#2. Leave the room only when the whining of the family dog takes on that frantic the-puddle-that-is-about-to-hit-the-floor-is-going-to-be-your-fault whimper. If the writing is going well, you’ll be dragged out of your writerly trance. If you’re slowly dying in front of a screen that remains blank, this is rescue from your flailing “I am such a loser” writer’s misery.
#3. In either scenario, head outdoors and think about writing while you’re walking. I walk in our village’s Schrebegartens [2] when I need to think through a plot knot or to stretch my legs. Or to get some fresh air finally! Usually I pass people with actual dogs, but if I’m lucky I have the dirt path through the gardens and orchards to myself. A loop takes me about 40 minutes to walk. One very cold grey winter morning, I first heard and then watched a pair of green woodpeckers. They flew from tree bole to tree bole. I stood enchanted and didn’t move.
#4. Find people who actually write. A group that sits and talks about writing and books and movies and culture is good. My group saves those acts till 5:00 p.m. when the drinks are ordered. And then the second round. And then….

#5. Wait, where was I? Oh – find people who write. The clackety clack of a friend’s fickle fingers of fate as they fly over her laptop keys will force you to bitch-shame yourself. Soon you will be outlining, typing, scribbling, anything that makes it look like you’re composing art.
#6. Do the Vampire Energy Suck. This is the same scenario as #5, but now position yourself across the table from your annoyingly prolific writer friend (and did you ever really like him?) Stare as he writes on, oblivious. Imagine an energy transfer taking place across the table, from his creative cloud to yours.
#7. Find someplace impossibly, wildly, improbably inspiring. Find that place – and GO there. While you’re there, WRITE. I’m president of a monthly writers’ group; we meet regularly in a turreted building. I climb up three flights of winding stone steps in a tower. One day a week I go to a café in the medieval square of a nearby town.

The café’s interior has exposed timber beams and archives date the building all the way back to 1566. I want to pinch myself when I am in both spots: I write here! How lucky can I get? Other days I’m more severe: If I can’t get inspired by views and surroundings like these, I’d better hand in my writer’s badge now.

the bells in the clock tower ring every 15 minutes

#8. At least the rounds of drinks always taste right….

… as does the Flammkuchen we always order (thin crust pizza with onion, créme fraisch and bacon)

NOTES: [1] Results from writer to writer may vary. [2] German Schrebegartens are areas designated for gardens and orchards. You can own or rent, and may have a garden house complete with a cellar. But you can’t have electricity or live in the hut. © Jadi Campbell 2017. All photos © Jadi Campbell. To  see some of Uwe’s photos and pics from our trips go to viewpics.de.

Click here for my author page to learn more about my books and me.

Carl Possessed: 2

Carl simply gritted his teeth as he cried until the punishment was over. When she was done, his mother sat abruptly in the living room’s one easy chair and pulled Carl up onto her lap. “Honey, someday you’ll be big and smart enough to get all this stuff. But you have to wait until that day, do you understand?”

Carl didn’t particularly, but he nodded his head anyway, because neither of his parents ever talked to him in such an adult fashion. The seriousness in her voice surprised him in a way the punishment had not.

“There are those on the top, and everybody who’s below them,” she instructed. “If you get to the top you can call the shots. In the meantime you keep your eyes open for what’s going to be yours, do you understand?”

Again she asked an unanswerable question. Carl wasn’t sure what the proper response might be, neither then nor later.

His mother did something else that surprised him. She lifted him off of her lap and set him back down on the floor in front of her. She fished something out of the top pocket of her apron: it was the wrapper of the stolen candy bar. His mother had smoothed the paper back out and ironed it so the Mars© logo and lettering were plain to see.

She placed the candy wrapper in her son’s open hand and closed his small fingers over the edges. “You hang on to this Carl, and put it in a safe place. You go look at this every time you think about stealing something you see in a store.”

A year later his grade school science class studied the planets. Carl confused the candy bar with the workings of the solar system. For a short but intense time, somehow he identified the act of the theft with the order of the Cosmos, a feeling he never entirely shook off as an adult. It didn’t matter how hard he tried or how much more he learned and knew as the years went by; the feeling remained.

NOTES: – from my short story “Carl Possessed” in Broken In: A Novel in Stories. © Jadi Campbell 2012. Go to following link to order my books: https://www.amazon.com/author/jadicampbell

Carl Possessed: 1

Growing up, Carl just wanted to be accepted as middle class. Years later he heard the term hard scrabble. It defined the subsistent existence of getting by, but for Carl it always meant more: the tough climb required to get anywhere. Scrabbling perfectly defined the undignified, difficult activity. It might not be a proper verb in the outside world, but in the one where Carl lived scrabbling was very much a real activity. To scrabble had nothing to do with a board game and everything to do with surviving the harder rules of the real world.

Everything about his family was poor; their upstate area had rocky soil for anyone trying to farm, and a rocky climate for manufacturing, business, or trade. It was a hard climate for everything to do with life, actually. The sense of security that anyone who lived there could hope to establish was a rocky one at best.

When Carl was five years old he went to the single market still left in town and stole a Mars© candy bar. His mother found the empty candy wrapper where Carl had shoved it underneath the blankets of his bed. She frowned as she pushed wispy hair back into the plastic hair clip. “What’s this?”

Carl pretended he didn’t hear her or see the crumpled paper she held, hoping the confrontation would simply go away.

This was when his mother realized the problem was greater than her son eating in bed. “You have fifteen minutes to tell me,” she informed him before she turned her back on Carl and went to do the ironing. But her son stayed silent.

Mrs. Penderson didn’t believe in corporal punishment, but half an hour later she smacked Carl with a ruler as punishment for stealing. While she hit him, she explained the why of the beating. “You think anybody around here has enough extra for you to take it from them? Or that store owner’s little kids think it’s okay that you get something for free from the store and they don’t? Well, do you?”

Carl simply gritted his teeth as he cried until the punishment was over. When she was done, his mother sat abruptly in the living room’s one easy chair and pulled Carl up onto her lap. “Honey, someday you’ll be big and smart enough to get all this stuff. But you have to wait until that day, do you understand?”

Carl didn’t particularly, but he nodded his head anyway, because neither of his parents ever talked to him in such an adult fashion. The seriousness in her voice surprised him in a way the punishment had not.

“There are those on the top, and everybody who’s below them,” she instructed. “If you get to the top you can call the shots. In the meantime, you keep your eyes open for what’s going to be yours, do you understand?”

Again she asked an unanswerable question. Carl wasn’t sure what the proper response might be, neither then nor later.

NOTES: – from my short story “Carl Possessed” in Broken In: A Novel in Stories. © Jadi Campbell 2012. Go to following link to order my books: https://www.amazon.com/author/jadicampbell

Good Things Come in Threes

There is an old saying that ‘good things come in threes’. Right now this is true for my writing at bookoftheday.org ! I am in the unique position of being featured 3 times around the site. Broken In: A Novel in Stories is one of the books of the day. Tsunami Cowboys stayed on the ‘Trending’ list for weeks, and remains on the The Trending Jumbotron Top Ten page (http://bookoftheday.org/top-ten/). And I have an author page.  It’s not often that a writer gets to share news this good! Please take a look at the site and explore the pages. In our electronic age, clicks add up.

# 99 # 99 # 99 # 99 # 99 #

I always feel a little strange when I recognize it’s time to mark milestones and I have several to announce.

This is my 99th blog post.

I’ve posted in these virtual pages twice a month since I began way back in September of 2012. It all started with my husband’s suggestion that I establish an Internet presence….

My published books are fiction, and this blog serves as a good place to present excerpts. Potential readers of my books might want a sample of my writing and a glimpse of the human being behind the words. It’s also a place for non-fiction essays. I get to explore ideas and topics that don’t need to be transformed for novels. Posting every other week is great writerly discipline. I’ve never missed a bi-monthly posting date!

My topics bounce all over the place like gleeful ping pong balls. I’ve written about current events like The Death of Robin Williams, Helping Refugees: Part 1 and Tunisia Without Terrorism, to the World Cup in The Year the World Came to Party.

I occasionally write about historic events, too. Several are 8:15 A.M.,  Amsterdam, and Stolpersteine 1: Tsunami Cowboy’s Stumbling Stones.

I riff on artists in Meet the One-Tracks and art, like the sacred sublime in Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres or sacred sexual in The Erotic Architecture of Khajuraho. I profile art made by human hands Wine and Sculpture, Wildly Creative in Upstate NY: The Ferros of Little York, Egypt 1: We had the entire Valley of the Kings to Ourselves or found in Nature: The Music of the Heavenly Spheres, Steamy Rotorua! and It Was a Bitterly Cold -22°.

Art can serve as reminders to bring us together, as in Stolpersteine 1: Tsunami Cowboy’s Stumbling Stones and The United Buddy Bears.

Of course, I write about writers: My Sister & Maurice Sendak and Baum, Bats, and Monkeys. I quote my beloved Shakespeare with Egypt 2: Along the Nile. Even Colleen McCullough gets a mention in The Outback!

And I write about writing itself: The Gift of Gab, Someone Burned My Book.

Food has been a topic: My Mother-In-Law’s Cookies, Despair Is An Exotic Ingredient, Adventures in China’s New Territories 3: The 100-Pound Fish, Deep Fried and Served with Sweet & Sour Sauce, The Fork is Mightier than the Sword. A Blog Post in Which I eat Paris, The Salt Pits and A Visit to the Food Bank, Part 1 &  2.

Holidays have been fun, from You Rang? (the worst/best Valentine’s Day in history) to Happy Halloween!

My day job is as massage therapist, and sometimes I write about healing and medicine. Helping Refugees: Part 1,  Massage in Indonesia: Lombok, Adventures in China’s New Territories 4: The Gods of Medicine, A Massage at Wat Pho are a few of the posts.

…. and this all began simply as a way to introduce my two novels Tsunami Cowboys and Broken In: A Novel in Stories. Both are available at amazon.com in book and eBook form.

It’s been a fun journey these last three years! Thanks to all of you for visiting these pages. I wish everyone the happiest of holidays. I’ll be back in the new year with an announcement. Milestone #2 is on the way!!!

# 99 # 99 # 99 # 99 # 99 # 99 # 99 # 99 # 99

Someone Burned My Book

I’d been warned: the 5-Star reviews couldn’t last forever. “Be prepared,” people cautioned me. “Trolls are out there and sooner or later one of them will pan a book. It’s going to be ugly.” I don’t check for reviews on Amazon much as I take the long view. Writing a book is a slow process, and building up a list of reviews can take a while. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to receive consistently solid, glowing reviews.

Until now.

I got my first 1-Star review. The German guy says Tsunami Cowboys is the worst book he’d ever read. He didn’t finish it. And, after page 56, HE BURNED IT.

WTF? Really?? In the 21st century, people are still burning books?!?

I went into shock. I was horrified. Shaken. Ashamed, even. In my worst nightmares, I never ever ever imagined someone would actually destroy my words like this. Until now, it was beyond my powers of imagination.

I got out a copy of the book. What could possibly be so offensive? I opened to page 56 and the peak of a chapter in which Coreen, one of the main characters, is trapped in a cult and can’t get out.

Ok…. Maybe the troll was upset by the topic. I sure was; that’s why I wrote about it. If he’d made it to the end of the book he would have learned the following: I’m religious. I believe in God. My heroine’s story continues well past the page where he stopped reading.

If he’d bothered with the author’s Afterword, he’d have learned my personal reasons for even including this thread in my book.

I’m appalled that someone would be so hateful. I questioned everything I am doing as a writer, and worried about the consequences of exercising my voice. Then I remembered: I just went to a high school reunion. It was a fantastic weekend spent seeing wonderful people again. By far one of the most lovely is a woman who was a missionary.

She’s read both my novels. At the reunion, she made a point of telling me that the story of Coreen and the cult disconcerted her, and she had to put Tsunami Cowboys down for a while. It hit a little too close to home. But, she said, she picked it back up a few months later, read it to the end, and liked the story I told very much.

So that reassures me.

Words contain a lot of power, more than we realize. My encounter with the troll really brings that realization home to me, and in the future I will pay closer attention. His other reviews have the same ugly caustic tone, so I’m not alone. I’m not sure if that makes me feel better, or worse.

As my dear writer buddy Nancy Carroll remarked: “You’re now in good company, Jadi. Think of the books that have been burned through the ages.”Tsunami Cowboys

Indeed.

Think about them.

NOTES: [1] http://www.ala.org/bbooks/

http://uwm.edu/libraries/exhibits/burnedbooks/

[2] I swear it just came to my notice that this is Banned Books Week: September 27th – October 3rd.

Tsunami Cowboys

Tsunami Cowboys

Prepare to meet Todd, a hero with dangerous fantasies. Coreen, trapped in a cult. Ronnie, dreaming other people’s futures. Guy, waiting for disaster at a Christmas Market. And Lynn, the connecting thread, taking a train with a seductive stranger. By turns terrifying and funny, this is the story of people riding life’s waves… the tsunami cowboys.

It’s official: My new novel Tsunami Cowboys is available in paperback and eBook versions. Look for it on Amazon around the world. The following links will get you there for the US and Germany:Tsunami Cowboys (for Amazon.com) Tsunami Cowboys  (Amazon.de)

I’m excited and proud and tired and floating on air. This book is the results of the last two years of writing. Thanks for your encouragement and support. It has made this journey a real pleasure.

 

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