Short blogs from two mystery writers caught my eye this week. Marcia Preston, past president of the Oklahoma Writers Federation, wrote about her son who’s off on his third tour of Afghanistan. Mary O’Gara, current president of Sisters in Crime-Internet Chapter, remembered family members who came home safely from two World Wars, offering a meditation that could easily be used as a cure for writer’s block. Together, these thoughtful blogs seem just right for the Fourth of July observance.
MARCIA PRESTON
I met Marcia Preston in Fresno, California, where she was on the 2001 faculty of the now-defunct William Saroyan Conference. I still have my cassette tape of her workshop on writing a short story. She laid it out so logically and made it sound so easy that I still think “one of these days” I’m going to write a short story.
At the time Marcia was editor-publisher of ByLine magazine and had just written her first mystery, PERHAPS SHE’LL DIE, which was nominated for the 2002 Mary Higgins Clark Award, and for Macavity and Barry awards in the Best First Mystery division.
She has since sold the magazine and (writing as M.K. Preston) published an Oklahoma mystery series featuring Chantalene Morrell, daughter of a Gypsy mother and a redneck father. SONG OF THE BONES won the 2004 Mary Higgins Clark Award for suspense fiction, and also the 2004 Oklahoma Book Award in fiction.
Her most recent novels are general fiction. The latest is THE WIND COMES SWEEPING, set on a wind farm and cattle ranch in Oklahoma.
Marcia earned degrees from University of Central Oklahoma, taught in public high schools for more than a decade, and worked for a time as PR and publications director for the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. There’s more about her and her books on her web site at www.MarciaPreston.com.
Here’s Marcia’s blog.
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THIRD TOUR by Marcia Preston
Do you know how hard it is to watch your child deploy to war in the Mid-East – for the third time in six years?
Some of you do know. Many sons and daughters have served even more tours. By the third deployment, you start to wonder how many times the little buzz-haired boy you raised can walk into harm’s way and return safe and whole. I won’t say unscathed, because nobody returns without cost.
Everyone says it’s much safer in Iraq now, but every day we read of deaths from IEDs and suicide bombings. Our son wears body armor under a standard uniform that’s not cool to start with, in summer temperatures that reach 110 to 120 degrees. And I better not find out he ever goes out without that body armor, even though this is a kid who loved to goose hunt in freezing weather and used to suffer in Oklahoma heat.
I can’t know what it’s really like for our military people, how they face their fears or mark the days missing their families, how they cope. I admire them more than I can speak. But I do know what it’s like for the ones left behind.
Think of the thousands of spouses and children, the mothers and fathers, who deal with this every day. They go about their daily lives doing their best to function normally, but a big chunk of their minds and hearts is overseas, sweating out the days with someone they love more than life itself.
They also serve who only stand and wait.
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MARY O’GARA
Albuquerque writer Mary O'Gara is the new president of the Sisters in Crime Internet chapter, an online chapter of Sisters in Crime, the international organization for readers and writers of mysteries and crime fiction. She’s also one of the busiest and most generous people I know.
Mary is a creativity and spiritual life coach with an eclectic approach to coaching. She has a lifelong passionate interest in creativity and especially enjoys coaching writers, artists, small business owners, and women over 50 who are creating new ways of living in the second half of life.
She’s also an internationally known psychic and astrologer who has been a professional astrologer since 1976, and it was an astrologer that I met her in 2003. I had an appointment with Mary while I was in Albuquerque visiting a friend and attending a workshop sponsored by South West Writers.
Mary’s bio is longer than my arm, but briefly:
She’s a journalism graduate from the University of Nebraska with both the Ph.D. and the D.D. from the Academy of Universal Truth, Seattle. She writers the Starfire astrology column for Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine and the Riding by the Stars column for Motorcycle Rider News. She has been offering online workshops on psychic topics for writers for more than a decade.
Mary is the author of short fiction published in Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine and in two anthologies, Just in Time from eWings Press and The Trouble with Romance from Trebleheart.
The Trouble with Romance was a New Mexico Book Awards finalist. Read more from Mary at her web site: www.maryogara.com.
Mary’s blog was written for Memorial Day but it’s appropriate for any patriotic holiday, and for any writer’s day.
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MEMORIAL DAY AND THE WRITER
By Mary O’Gara
Today is a fine day for a writing dialogue with someone you loved–or might have loved if he or she had returned from a war, any war–or perhaps for writing a heartfelt prayer for the ones who did come back.
In Red Oak, Iowa, my home town, they still fly the funeral flags of our hometown veterans on Memorial Day. Among them are two men I loved who came back: My father and my grandmother’s brother, who was my surrogate grandfather: Charles Arthur Reese and Philo Douglas Clark.
The stories they told me as a child were wildly exaggerated and made war sound like a great adventure. Today I might dialogue with Uncle Philo about his real memories of World War One. Dialogues aren’t limited to living people.
You could also dialogue with the condition of living in a world at war, and you might be surprised at what you discover for your own life and your writing.
Or this may be a chance to say good-bye in dialogue–or hello to someone you never got to meet.
Dialoguing is simple: Sit quietly and breathe slowly and deeply. Write a name on the journal page and make a short list of up to a dozen milestones in that person’s life, remembering that you are only one of those milestones. Then close your eyes and imagine that person or something representing the situation in front of you.
Close your eyes.
Write: Hello or some other greeting.
Listen and record what you hear or understand.
Write your next sentence. Continue until the conversation drops.
Ask if there’s anything else.
Sit in silence a little longer, waiting.
And when it’s really done, jot down a summary sentence for yourself or maybe a reminder about what you want to take into the rest of your life from this moment.
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Full moon over Anasazi ruins known as UWukoki in Wupatki National Monument, Arizona. Photo from nationalgeographic.com.
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By Pat Browning
The rock musical “Hair” ran on Broadway from 1968 to 1972 and played more than 1,800 performances. I saw the road show twice, once in San Francisco and once in Las Vegas. The novelty of naked people milling around onstage dimmed with time, but the music stayed with me …
“When the moon is in the Seventh House/ And Jupiter aligns with Mars/ Then peace will guide the planets/ And love will steer the stars/ This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius … “
Forty years later “Hair” is set to reopen on Broadway in March, we had an interesting alignment of planets on New Year’s Eve, a couple of astrologers hint at a rerun of the ‘60s, and this may or may not be the Age of Aquarius.
Just as 2008 was going out, Venus, a crescent moon, Jupiter and Mercury were in close proximity. According to a news story, you could draw an imaginary line from Venus and the moon, down through Jupiter and Mercury, and the line would point to where the sun set.
Nothing stirs our imagination like the moon. I don’t know what “house” the full moon of January 10 was in, but it was a Wolf Moon – so named by early Algonquin tribes for the wolf packs howling hungrily outside Indian villages.
As to the Age of Aquarius, you could spend a week just surfing the Internet for various interpretations of astrological ages. Astrologers, astronomers, seers, psychologists and philosophers have studied the progression of the planets since time began. About the only thing most “experts” agree on is that an astrological age lasts about 2,150 years. However, calculations as to the beginning of the Age of Aquarius vary wildly – from 1447 AD to 2060. It’s a subject for serious study, not a Saturday blog.
Of more immediate interest are the interpretations and comments from a couple of astrologers.
Astrologer Mary O’Gara of Albuquerque writes the monthly Starfire column for Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine (www.fmam.biz). Here’s an excerpt from her January forecast for early 2009:
(Quote)
East of the Mississippi, money may seem to disappear as quickly as it arrives–but at least cash does show up to fuel your vision and meet your emergencies along the road. West of the Mississippi, money flows from business, marketing, promotion; if you’ve got something (from a book to a widget) to sell, it’s time to get back out and talk to potential buyers.
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Large publishing companies may cut back because of the bottom line–and innovations will fill the gap. Look around your own industry and see what needs to be done, then find a way to meet the need.
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For a writer, that may mean writing more how-to articles. For travel writers, the focus may be on family travel by car again or other service articles rather than glamour pieces. But it could also be science fiction based on the new scientific questions about energy and planetary change.
Change, in other words, is inevitable. We may be less innocent about change than we were in the 60's, but we’re also more knowledgeable about its potential.
(End Quote)
Californian Rob Brezsny, who writes a syndicated column “Free Will Astrology,” believes that what’s written in the stars is more of a suggestion than a hard and fast rule.
In an interview with David Ian Miller, published in the San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com) Brezsny says: “I believe our imagination is our most important asset for creating the future. … Why not, then, create self-fulfilling prophecies that lead us in the direction of love, integrity, happiness and generosity?”
He also says:
(Quote)
I believe that we've got some pretty interesting changes ahead for us. It could go a couple of different ways, and I would not be so arrogant to say that I know which will prevail. There is a configuration for the next three years, starting in 2009 and really kicking in fully in 2010, and it involves Saturn, Uranus and Pluto. The last times those three planets occurred in tight configuration was the period between 1929 and 1932 and the period between 1964 and 1968.
(End Quote)
Something to ponder there. The year 1929 kicked off the Great Depression. The ‘60s were a time of great social upheaval. Like the interviewer and the interviewee, if I had a choice I’d take the ‘60s.
Brezsny has written a book -- Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings – in which he urges people to come up with their own religions. He suggests possible names for the deity: Blooming HaHa, Whirl-Zap-Gush, Sublime Cackler.
Brezsny’s own choice: “I like to refer to that Supreme Intelligence, the one consciousness that pervades the universe, as The Divine Wow.”
