The Truth Beyond Brother Cecil

Brother Cecil hung the hoe on its hook and turned to leave the empty barn. He slid the door shut behind him and secured the latch. With a sigh, he began the long march back to the big house, his robe rustling as he walked. In the heat of the early July afternoon, he hardly broke a sweat. Years in the long wool robes had acclimated his body. That, or perhaps the years had thinned his blood. Any amount of heat brought welcome relief from the cold ache in his bones.

            Behind the barn, the open field sat vacant. The cattle had all been sold and slaughtered, no doubt already in someone’s freezer. Only a few chickens remained in the chicken coop, and he was grateful for the fresh eggs they blessed him with each day.

Brother Cecil stopped beside the three-acre garden plot to inspect the progress. Tiny white flowers clung to the plants along one row. It would be several more weeks before those flowers would sprout into green beans. The cornstalks were not yet a foot high, a bad sign with the Fourth of July looming. Having known since early winter that he would be here alone come harvest, he had sparsely planted the garden—a row of beans, a row of corn, a trail of peas along the fence, a hill of squash, a half-dozen tomato plants.

In the distance, the picturesque chapel stood as a sentinel over the grounds. Its only stained-glass window—the round one over the front double doors—seemed to glow, even though there should be no light inside. Brother Cecil shook his head.

“Surely God is still inside,” he said out loud, though no one was within hearing except the sparrows who had taken up residence in the barn. “Ah, the good Lord is out here though, too. Eh?” He looked up at the blue sky and winked.

Meet Brother Cecil. I don’t mean to brag, but this is one of my favorite scenes from my novel, “The Truth Beyond the River”. Can you picture it as well as I do? Or is it just because I grew up on the edge of Wisconsin farmland, and this scene has been in my head my entire life?

But where did I get his name from? When I was in college, I think my second year, I took a Logic class. Don’t ask why. But we put together and took apart sentences such as “Mathematics is the queen of the sciences, and Mars is not a planet,” in an attempt, I believe, to discern the truth. One such sentence was “Cecil was a compassionate man.”

I don’t know why, but that simple sentence has stuck in my head for forty years. And when I was picturing the sweet, kind old monk, who would change the lives of several people in the book, I knew his name had to be Cecil.

If you’ve already purchased a copy of the book, thank you from the bottom of my heart. If not, click on the link to get yours. Also, I’m still waiting for that first review. And in case you are wondering, even negative reviews are welcome. After all, the theme of the book is about sharing the truth.

Holy Transfiguration Skete, at Jacob's Falls in Michigan's UP. Not much like Cecil's monastery, 

but this is the monastery I am most familiar with, having driven down this road along Lake Superior many times. 

So much for vacation

This past week was our camping trip to Michigan’s UP, which I had been looking forward to for months, so afraid it would be canceled as so many activities have been. But, nope, we headed off Monday morning, towing our little popup trailer.

I wish I could say it was a fantastic time, but this is the year 2020 after all. One thing I had hoped to do was take pictures of my latest book at all the places we visited. Did not happen, due to the wet, icky weather and then there was that whole kidney stone the last day, but I’m not going to go there with you. (You can read about it on my other blog here.)

 

Naturally, we didn’t have internet at the state park, so it limited some of my goals. Here is the list of goals I had planned to work on last week and what I did get done. To make things easy, I color-code my accomplishments: Green highlight is goal accomplished, yellow highlight is worked on and red lettering is a failure.

      1)    My novel, “The Truth Beyond the River” – Marketing, as that is all that’s left.

a.     Continue blogging about it. I was going to write a blog ahead of time and set it up to post while we were camping, but I just never got around to it.

b.     Post it (again) on my other social media. Done.

c.      Umm? Continue thinking of other things to do?  I set up an Amazon ad. We’ll see how much that is going to cost me and if it’s worth it.

      2)    Other writing.

a.     Get after that next novel, the one about the spies.

                                                    i.     Re-read up to where I left off. Done.

                                                  ii.     Figure out what organizing I need to do on it, plotting, and such. Done, I think.  

                                                iii.     Write two chapters. Wrote one and a half, or 1,975 words.   

      3)    Other stuff

a.     I really need to get after that nasty room in the basement. Done, at least good enough for now.  

It’s back to work tomorrow for me, back to the job which pays the bills. In another two weeks, though, I have another week’s vacation. We’ve decided it will be a stay-cation as there are so many projects around the house that we need to do.  

In the meantime, though, here’s what I want to do this week.

      1)    My novel, “The Truth Beyond the River”.

a.     Blog about it on Wednesday.

b.     Post my blogs about it on Pinterest (I always forget about Pinterest. Do people still look at it?)

c.      Private message my social media contacts.

d.     Remind people to write reviews of it.

      2)    Other writing.

a.     Blog a post about our camping trip.  

b.     Write two chapters on my spy novel.

c.      Research places to submit my short stories or poetry.

      3)    Other stuff.

a.     Continue working on that room in the basement. It is at least presentable now, but the cupboard and shelves where I stuck junk? Not so much.

b.     Harvest veggies from the garden. It’s that time of year; I’ll be out there at least every other day, picking beans or tomatoes.

c.      Spend a day next weekend helping my daughter clean her garage. That is another whole story.

Hard to believe it’s almost August! Summer is almost over! Have you been able to take any vacations this summer? How did they turn out for you? How is the new “normal” affecting you?

Seeing A LOT of Green

It was another busy, stressful week, but as you will see below, productive.

Here is the list of goals I had planned to work on last week. To make things easy, I color-code my accomplishments: Green highlight is goal accomplished, yellow highlight is worked on and red lettering is a failure.

1)    My novel, “The Truth Beyond the River”.

a.     When the proof arrives, Tuesday, go through it quickly, page-by-page, making sure I didn’t miss any more mistakes. Done.

b.     Resubmit the newly edited version. Done.

c.      Read that newest version through on-line and hopefully find no mistakes, so that I can do letter d. Done.

d.     Release the paper version!!! Done!!!!!

e.     Order my copies of it. Done.

f.       Marketing. Finally, on to marketing.

                                                              i.     Continue blogging about it. Done.  

                                                            ii.     Send out another Mail Chimp email, announcing the paper version is ready. Done.

                                                          iii.     Put the book in the side bar of my blogs. Done.   

2)    Other Writing.

a.     Pull out my next novel to write, the one where the government recruits common people to be spies. Now that “Truth Beyond River” is done, it’s time to write the next one. Not done. Come on, like really? I was going to do everything on this list!?

b.     Continue researching places to send my short stories. Yes, did some.

c.      Submit those pictures of the loons to Birds and Blooms magazine. Done.  

3)    Other Stuff

a.     Work on organizing the new garden shed. Nope.

b.     Start cleaning the spare room in the basement, in anticipation of the additions to the family – two baby kittens! Nope. Too nice out all week to spend time in the dank basement. I keep walking in there, and come out, saying, nope.

I think – no, I know – that this week I am going to take it easy. Yes, there are still things to be done, but with the major weight of publishing the novel off of my shoulders, it’s time to take a bit of a break.

      1)    My novel, “The Truth Beyond the River” – Marketing, as that is all that’s left.

a.     Continue blogging about it.

b.     Post it (again) on my other social media.

c.      Umm? Continue thinking of other things to do?

      2)    Other writing.

a.     Get after that next novel, the one about the spies.

                                                    i.     Re-read up to where I left off.

                                                  ii.     Figure out what organizing I need to do on it, plotting and such.

                                                iii.     Write two chapters (not like I’m overextending myself there).

      3)    Other stuff

a.     I really need to get after that nasty room in the basement. Wish me luck with that!

How is everything going for you? With the pandemic going on, have you taken any vacations or have they all been stay-cations? I’m starting to dream about trips to be taken next year and beyond. How about you?

Since I was seeing so much green, I thought I'd include some of my loon pictures. They are so green because of the nearby trees reflecting off the water. And no, I didn't submit either of these; they are not even close to how remarkable some of the other ones are. 

The Truth and the Media

   I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I could string two or three words together to make a sentence. When I went off to college, that was still what I wanted to do, but to declare your major as “writing” causes your advisor to look down her nose at you. So, instead, I went with Mass Communications, thinking that I would fall somewhere in between journalism and advertising, thinking that I could put a creative spin on news stories, or something like that and eventually turn to fiction. When it came down to it, I disliked most of those classes and couldn’t imagine doing any of those things for a living.

That being said, I still came away from those three and a half years of higher education with a respect for people who worked in the field of sharing the news.

And what about today? I think that those journalists and news broadcasters are all still doing their job, it’s just the world we live in, the world that someone with an agenda created so that we end up hearing only one side of the story.

The big news items these days – the Coronavirus pandemic and the killing of George Floyd. I shouldn’t have to tell you that both these news stories have run the gamut from fact to sensationalism.

Why is that? Coz that’s what the public wants to hear about and read about, and where the truth lies, I cannot make a guess.

One of the main themes in my novel, “The Truth Beyond the River”, is right in its title. The Truth.

Teresa, the main character, is tasked with finding the truth in the story she is covering. As much as she wants to dig to the bottom of things and share that truth, it turns out to be much more difficult than she realized. And in the end, because we never actually read the article she wrote (because I never got that degree in journalism), we are left wondering what truth she reported.

Every story does have two sides – well, don’t we wish it was that easy. Every story actually has as many sides to it as there are people who lived it.

I’m just sharing this as another way of saying that “The Truth Beyond the River” is relevant to our current lives in this one more way. You’ll have to read the book to figure it out. (Maybe I did learn something in those advertising and marketing classes. 😉)

(I also took the picture above when I was a freshman in college. At the time, it was just another goofy, meaningless still-life, but looking at it now, I guess it does tell a story.)

Bad things come in 3's

This was another one of those weeks. One of those weeks, where you think, “What else is going to go wrong?”

I woke one morning to a tree down over the driveway, for no good reason. That night, however, we did have a thunderstorm, and lightning struck our satellite dish, knocking it out. And thirdly, Hubby ran into some medical problems, which has had him laid up since mid-week. (But at least it’s not COVID!) They say bad things come in threes, so I guess that’s where we are at. Until the next set of threes begins!

Here is the list of goals I had planned to work on last week. To make things easy, I color-code my accomplishments: Green highlight is goal accomplished, yellow highlight is worked on and red lettering is a failure. I do throw in a random highlight for something which doesn’t fall into those three categories, but I hate to commit to any more color.

1)    My novel, “The Truth Beyond the River”

a.     The proof isn’t supposed to get here until the 13^th, but on the off-chance it gets here sooner, I need to read it page by page as quickly as I can and submit the final approval to Amazon. Proof hasn’t arrived.

b.     Marketing. Oh, what shall I do?

                                                              i.     Continue blogging about it. Done, twice.  

                                                            ii.     Send out an email via Mail Chimp. Done.  

                                                          iii.     Make a list of who I need to send a copy to when I get my author copies. Done.

2)    Other writing

a.     “Holding all the Aces”, the memoir of my sister.

                                                              i.     I should read it over to see how much more work it needs. I’m thinking that while the whole Amazon publishing thing is fresh in my head, I should publish this too. It would be more as a family gift, but who knows. Did not look at it. And now I’m thinking that now is not the time, it’s not calling to me like another project is (see the upcoming goals).

b.     Research places to submit a couple of the short stories I’ve written recently. Actually, I not only researched and found an e-magazine, I submitted a short story to it. 😊

c.      Submit the fantastic pictures of loons I took last month. Did not.

3)    Other stuff (this list used to be quite lengthy and complex, but I am going to try to keep it simple; I’ve got enough going on and it is summer!)                   

a.     If the weather is nice next weekend, put up the camper and clean it out to get it ready for our next camping trip. Done.

b.     Try to help Hubby organize our new garden shed. Not done.

Well, that looked like a mixed bag of accomplishments and failures. Like all the color? I know I should be shooting only for green and not the rainbow.

Goals for the coming week:

1)    My novel, “The Truth Beyond the River”.

a.     When the proof arrives, Monday or Tuesday, go through it quickly, page-by-page, making sure I didn’t miss any more mistakes.

b.     Resubmit the version I worked on last weekend, after I found four mistakes.

c.      Read that newest version through on-line and hopefully find no mistakes, so that I can do letter d.

d.     Release the paper version!!!

e.     Order my copies of it.

f.       Marketing. Finally, on to marketing.

                                                              i.     Continue blogging about it.

                                                            ii.     Send out another Mail Chimp email, announcing the paper version is ready.

                                                          iii.     Put the book in the sidebar of my blogs. 

2)    Other Writing.

a.     Pull out my next novel to write, the one where the government recruits common people to be spies. Now that “Truth Beyond River” is done, it’s time to write the next one.

b.     Continue researching places to send my short stories.

c.      Submit those pictures of the loons.

the garden shed

3)    Other Stuff

a.     Work on organizing the new garden shed.

b.     Start cleaning the spare room in the basement, in anticipation of the additions to the family – two baby kittens! Arriving after August 5! Two little girls named Timber and Ash. Cannot wait!

our last kittens, Alice and Ches

How is everything going for you? Taking some time off to just relax and enjoy the summer? Or stressing about all the things there are to stress about? I hope not! Hang in there. Better days are coming.

The Truth Beyond Current Events

As you already know, the idea – or at least the setting – for “The Truth Beyond the River” has been in my head for over forty years. When I finally started writing it, the various characters began talking to me, filling me in on their backgrounds and painting a picture in my mind of who they each were. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll draw you a word-sketch of each of these people.

Today, though, I wanted to circle around to how God must have wanted me to publish this book now, how it relates to current events.

 Tommy, the main character, came home from the Vietnam War haunted by visions and nightmares. When this story takes place in 1974, the medical community called that Shell Shock and was just beginning to realize that it was a real thing, that war vets, as well as others suffering extreme trauma, can’t just “get over it”. That what they are experiencing needed to be understood and treated.

Of course, today, we call this PTSD, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Recently, it has been studied extensively as more and more people are reporting these symptoms.  

When I finished writing this book three years ago, I thought that then would be the perfect time to publish it as PTSD was getting a lot of press.

Other news from that time revolved around the proposed oil pipeline which was to run from northwestern North Dakota to Illinois. Groups of Native Americans protested this as the pipeline would run through their lands and there was great concern over potential leaks, in additional to defiling certain sacred lands.    

With the injustices committed against the Native Americans in my book, again, I thought it would be perfect timing.

But no, the time to publish this story was now. No, there is no pandemic in the book, but there is a fair amount of racism against not only the local Native Americans but even the reporter who has a Spanish-American heritage.

As I was going through my book one last time, another theme in the story hit me in the face – appropriate choice of words there. Police brutality. I never meant to write about that, yet there it is, in all its wrongfulness.

What I want you to remember though, first and foremost, is that no matter what a person’s race, nationality, religion, occupation or whatever other slot you want to put them in, there are good people and bad people in each of those categories.

Within the pages of “The Truth Beyond the River”, you will find some really good people and some really bad ones. It doesn't matter what color, creed or occupation those bad people belong to, I don’t like the things they do and I hope you don’t either. But then, don’t label the rest of the people – the good ones – based on the actions of others.

One last reminder. The book is only out as an e-book right now. The paper version will be available to order in another week. If you are the type of person who throws their book across the room if they don’t like something that is going on in the story, don’t throw your e-reader or other electronic device. Wait until you have the paperback.

Formatting - just one of several nightmares

On Sunday afternoons, my plan for this Blog is to post my goals for the week and what I did or didn’t accomplish. One of my goals is to make this post short and sweet, saving my ramblings for other days.

To make things easy, I use color-coding:  Green highlight is goal accomplished, yellow highlight is worked on and red lettering is a failure.

Goals for last week:

1) My novel, “The Truth Beyond the River”. 

a. Finalize the back cover. Done.

b. Format the e-version. I thought I was all done with this, but I have to do some kind of tortuous hoop-jumping to get the chapters to be accessible by a tap on the Kindle. It was painful, but I got it done.

c. Scan through the formatted paper version one last time. Done, like six times. First, I couldn’t get the page numbers or the headers to be on only the pages they needed to be. I sent it to my son to fix, which of course he did in a matter of minutes.

Then every time I uploaded it to Amazon to look at a proof, it came out looking frightful. At the bottom of about every fifth or sixth page, the paragraphs jumped to the next page, leaving a massive gap at the bottom of the page. I lost track of how many times I went through the entire manuscript. The only plus is that in desperation (am I doing something wrong here?), I emailed a writer-friend who recently self-published and she had the same problem.

If you read my other blog, The Dino Chronicles, you’ll see that I finally even resorted to prayer. Always blows my mind when that works !

d. Publish both the e-version and paper version on Amazon. Went halfsies. I published the e-version, but am gun-shy on the print version. I finished it this afternoon but ordered a proof to review before I submit it for the world to order.   

e. Market, market, market. Not sure what I’m going to do there yet; there’s a lot in my head. Never did decide what to do for this, that’s why there’s next week!  

Goals for the coming week:

1)    My novel, “The Truth Beyond the River”

a.     The proof isn’t supposed to get here until the 13^th, but on the off-chance it gets here sooner, I need to read it page by page as quickly as I can and submit the final approval to Amazon.

b.     Marketing. Oh, what shall I do?

                                                              i.     Continue blogging about it, either here or on my other blog.

                                                            ii.     Send out an email via Mail Chimp to all my followers.

                                                          iii.     Make a list of who I need to send a copy to when I get my author copies.

2)    Other writing

a.     “Holding all the Aces”, the memoir of my sister.

                                                              i.     I should read it over to see how much more work it needs. I’m thinking that while the whole Amazon publishing thing is fresh in my head, I should publish this too. It would be more as a family gift, but who knows.

b.     Research places to submit a couple of the short stories I’ve written recently.

c.      Submit the fantastic pictures of loons I took last month.

3)    Other stuff (this list used to be quite lengthy and complex, but I am going to try to keep it simple; I’ve got enough going on and it is summer!)                   

a.     If the weather is nice next weekend, put up the camper and clean it out to get it ready for our next camping trip.

b.     Try to help Hubby organize our new garden shed. 

I think that’s it for now. Have a great week and enjoy the good weather (hoping that you have good weather where you live!).

(And look at this post more closely and you’ll see why I hate formatting and why it hates me.)