Jo Barney's Blog

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Maybe it’s the smoke graying the air and the hills lining our windows. Maybe it’s the muffled quietness of the house, the streets outside, the subdued rooms in our apartment, so silent that my husband is asleep with the NY Times in his lap.  Bored, I sip my third cup of coffee trying to focus on the To Do list in front of me.
We are in a period of waiting.
 We are waiting for a doctor’s call to set a surgery date; waiting for a piece of mail with news of a query sent to a magazine; waiting for a friend’s call to ease our anxiety about her health; waiting for a pill to lessen the pain in my knee; waiting for good news from a son who is also waiting; waiting for a cooler moment to walk to the grocery for food for tonight’s dinner; waiting for the TV show that is our habit each evening and makes us believe, at least for a moment, in the media’s ability to tell us today’s truth. 
When we get a surgery date for Don, if I get a response from the magazine, when my friend calls, when I take a chance on walking to the store, after all this waiting, I will begin to understand that waiting is never over. New waitings will arise. I know this because of a call I got just now which ended one of the waitings I’ve been living with: the publication of my next novel. 
I had plans for the book’s arrival, a To Do list of promotions, readings, newsletter notes, a launch with champagne, maybe. Then the call came.  My publisher informed me that instead of a firm launch date, she is going out of business—on the day she had set for my book to be born.
 That waiting is over. At first I felt relieved. My To-Do list dissolved. I could. . . Maybe even . . .Then she suggested I try self-publishing. “You’ve done it before,” she reminded me.
 I have given the idea some thought since her call. My story is an okay one, one I’d like to see in print. I’m thinking that maybe I can even change its title, the awful one given to it by the now-gone publisher. Maybe, maybe.
So now I’m beginning the wait for my book to be born.  Again. My To Do list has changed, is growing complicated. I need to clean off my desk, get organized, learn how to deal with the digitalized materials that I’ll be sent, leftovers from my publisher’s emptied files. I will re-title the book, create a new cover, plead for help from Createspace. Probably cry at least once.
But I won’t have time to notice the gray smoke.   

I have been thinking a lot about memory.  I’m losing mine, it seems, like a lot of my aged friends, but I’m realizing that it is short-term memories that go, not the ones from seventy years ago.
In fact, Blood Sisters, had its beginning in a memory of a 1940’s house, the first house my parents bought, a Cape Cod. No one in my family had ever been East and we were not sure what that meant. Our Cape Cod was a two-bedroomed, unfinished attic and basement, square house with one large plate window in the living room, surrounded by twenty or more similar houses with plate glass windows. It was heaven, for my mother, and a haven for the rest of us. My bedroom in the attic was blue, my sister’s pink, and I smile now at the innocent growing up I accomplished that house.
This year has become an old-peoples’ story:  a sick spouse, an agitated wife, anxious hours of waiting beside a bed. We needed a break, and we decided that we would go to the coast, visit a town I knew well years ago, and of which we owned a part after we married. A return to the past for both of us.
Everything was different. Our favorite restaurant as closed, the old coffee shop was gone, the huge creamery a town away was handing out free ice cream, causing massive highway congestion from which we turned back.
Exhausted, my husband said he needed a nap. I needed to walk on the sand scattered with agates one more time to confirm a memory or two.
Was the cedar cabin on the hill, in the trees, my retreat for a month, the place in which I found myself, part of me at least, after losing a marriage, still there?  I couldn’t remember the street. I only had a guess at how far up the steep roads above the ocean it would be. I remembered patterned siding, a wooden walk to its front door, a small stained glass window, trees hiding the rolling ocean below. I started walking.
 I should have brought my cane. I rested as few times on concrete curbs as I made my way up. 
Ahead of me a man sauntered along with his dog.  I asked him if he knew of an unusual cedar house in the woods. I explained that I had an old, fine memory of spending a month recovering in it years before. He said he might know of a place like that. And minutes later, the house appeared on the left side of the road. I hesitated. He took my arm, led me to the wooden walk. “No one’s here. Do you want to go closer?” I touched the open gate and turned back.  “No, this is enough. It is just as I remember it.”
I made my way down the hill to my next memory, the tunnel through the promontory at the end of the beach. I knew what’s on the other side--monoliths rising out of the sea. I had used a screwdriver to scrape off mussels at their bases, working fast to beat the tide, carried them to the cedar house wrapped in my sweatshirt. The tunnel was still there. Slippery rocks lined its dark path. I took two steps and knew I’d never make it to the exit. Then a man asked if I wanted help. “I just want to see one of the big rocks again,” I murmured.
He reached out a huge hand, took mine in one of his, his lighted i-phone in the other, and said, “Let’s go.” As we chose our steps carefully, I told him I’d written a novel about these rocks, this place.
The monoliths were still there.  Like memories. We turned back.  At the entrance I found a waiting husband, who smiled, asked, “Like it used to be?”
“Yes,” I told him, “somethings will never change.” 



I

I have a long morning ahead.  It’s either wash and fold the laundry or sit here in front of my computer waiting for my publisher to send me her decision about the title of my next book. I looked up Blood Sisters and discovered that not one but two other Blood Sisters have been published in the last year or so. Mine would be the third,  triplets, too many for folks to page through looking for a family saga rather than a murder mystery. I complained, but to late. That day I got the proof copy of MY Blood Sisters in the mail, great cover and 181 pages, to read and correct.
Which I did immediately.  I stuck a little tab on a page whenever I found an error, sometimes mine, most often in the typesetting. My book bristled with tabs when I finished. The next morning, I sent an email with the page numbers and the errors to my publisher. That’s why I’m sitting here twitching. I’m waiting for the next step in this process, if not a new title, at least the receipt of the ARCs for the finished book.
ARCs are the e-version of the review copy, just about as perfect as it can be, to be once more looked at, and then, in the next breath, sent to book reviewers who will read the book and maybe write a critique to their blogs, to Amazon, to B&N, etc. When this gets rolling, my book will be available on line and in paperback so that I can carry copies to local bookstores and ask that they place them on their shelves. And offer me a chance to sign, read, and. . .
I’m getting a headache thinking about all this.  Instead of dwelling on the underside of being an author, I’m going to send you a bit of Blood Sisters, or whatever it will be called.  Enjoy.
CHAPTER ONEI close my eyes, my lips. Only my nostrils move as they take in what air is left. Soon, I think. Plastic film stretches taut against my cheeks. Now, I think. A scream slices through soothing fog, forces my eyes to open. “Mom!  Mom!” I am rolled over. Cool air floods across my face. Not now. You were supposed to come home at dinner time.                  I watch my son’s face crunch into its usual confusion. “We got finished early. Why are you laying down on the grass?” I feel his arm slip under my neck as I struggle to sit up. “Why did you put on that grocery bag?”                    My head on his shoulder, I smell the sweat his anxiety has stirred up. I find the strength to lie. “It was just an accident.” Shreds of plastic dangle from my neck like a tired lei, red duct tape cuts into my chin. No sense trying to tear off the tape. “Go inside and get the kitchen scissors. Be careful.”                    Jimmy releases me. I hear his heavy feet on the porch steps. In a moment he’s back, the tool’s sharp ends point at my throat.                  “Slowly, Jimmy. Keep the scissors away from me and make little cuts in the tape until we can tear this off.”                  I watch as he fumbles with the wrinkled plastic, brings the blades inches away from my skin. “Careful, Jimmy.” I choke back a gurgle of unexpected laughter.  I might want to die, but I don’t want to be murdered.                  I hear a click. Then another. “I’m doing it, Mom!” I push the scissors away, grip at the tape on each side of his snips and rip it in two. I am released from its chokehold. “You did good, Jimmy.” I sit up, pick up the remnants of my failed plan, and hand the torn plastic, the tape, the note to my son. “Put these in the garbage can, please, while I fold up the blanket and then we’ll go inside and you can tell me about work today.”                   Nothing has changed. I am still a mother of a damaged son, the wife of a damaged man, living a life empty of hope.

Thanks to those of you who suggested a title for the story of the laurel hedge and the postwar life in a housing development. I sent them along to my publisher, a nice person, I’m sure, since she agreed to publish my books, and she conferred with whoever shares her office and said they had come up with a title.  She hoped I liked it.
                                            BLOOD SISTERS
I gasped and then realized that she’d picked up on a scene where Patsy and Eleanor decide they can be friends and share lives, once they had found their ways through the hedge. They didn’t draw blood, but they did agree that they would have each other’s back if the going got rough. “Blood sisters, like Laverne and Shirley,” they say. If you don’t remember who Laverne and Shirley are, you are young and you need to Google them.
So, we have a title, I have edited my bio for the back of the book, the cover is unofficially designed but cannot be revealed quite yet. And yes, I like it. A book is about to be born.
So now, all this author needs to do is to bring her almost -book, coming out in September, to the attention of her friends. That’s why I'm sending  emails  to everyone, acquaintances, relatives,and anyone else who has landed on my contact list. Two sendings, actually, because I got exhausted and quit midstream in the list.
At this point, I find I have a need to talk about writing with other writers or those who are interested in writing. As an ex-English teacher, I have the tools of getting the sentences on the screen, but what I’m lacking is the support that comes from sharing ideas and words with like-minded folks, who like me, have thoughts that bud half-formed, need to be pruned, poked at, fertilized, maybe even weeded, and of course, admired as they develop.
With that awkward metaphor, I wonder if you, dear reader,  are interested in talking about your desire to write, sharing a some of your words, learning what others are writing about, meeting occasionally in a casual writing group. I have a dining room table and a coffee pot.  We are on line and can operate that way too, minus the coffee.  I’d love to hear what’s blooming in your quiet moments. Let me know, here or by email:  jobarney@earthlink.net.

Okay, I misspoke--or mis-wrote--or even worse, mis-forecast my future a while back.  I said good bye to my readers, you folks who have been tuning in to Breakout Novel: A Race. . . on and off for several years.  I know about you because Google Analytics (a ghostly Google entity) has let me know that even after I gave my last hurrah to this project, some of you kept tuning in.

I'm back as a blogger.  I'm also back as emerging novelist, not that I haven't been emerging for fifteen years or more until I decided to stop emerging. The reason is that my publisher has accepted a new story of mine, one that I wrote a year or so ago and gave up on because it didn't have an old lady in it.  She will publish it in September, despite the fact that it doesn't fit the Henlit model. No old ladies wander its pages, just memories of an old lady.  Me.

 The time is about l970;  the place is the postwar housing development I grew up in and left in l956 for marriage and who knew what. The small bungalows were built for returning veterans and for
shipyard workers like my father. Families had some money, probably for the first time in their lives. They could afford a new house, two bedrooms, one bath and yards big enough to build a garage in.  They were beginning again, this time without war. The future looked good. The neighborhood filled working husbands and wives who had time to make friends over morning coffee klatches.

But war continued, not THAT war, but the one in Korea, then Vietnam, then the Middle East.  When the first settlers in the development moved on, their old homes filled with new surges of veterans' families glad to have a chance to begin again, to heal. Eleanor, old timer, white, in the neighborhood, meets  her new neighbor, Patsy, black, through a hole in the overgrown laurel hedge that separates their houses. Different wars, different colors, similar struggles. Their lives entangle, like the limbs of the hedge between them.

I really like this story. However, my publisher and I cannot agree on a title  My idea, You've Come to the Right Place is a copyrighted song title.  She says we can't use it.  Do any of you have a suggestion? 

 THIS IS WHAT I MEANT WHEN I MENTIONED MY NEW TALENT FOR TYP0S IN THE FIRST EDITION OF THIS LAST BLOG. (My last words, promise)

Lou died two days ago—Lou, the character in one of my first novels based on good friends of mine, a funny friend, a quiet person who attracted us to her because of her lack of pretension, her open heart, and her sense of humor which at one time had us sorority sisters rolling across the sorority living room she played EbbTide on the piano. We danced vertically until we had to lay back breathless with laughter. 
Her real life name was Pat.  The other three friends in a novel that had several titles and ended up published as Her Last Words are also eighty-two.  We are saddened and yet realizing that we are walking, or shuffling, me with my three canes and bum knee, the same path that Pat has meandered..
The end of a long-term friendship like mine with Pat has forced me to again to accept that I too will come to the end of the trail I’ve been following since college, a trail with gorgeous views, difficult ascents, quiet shadows, and surprises, like the trilliums Pat introduced me to fifty years ago and the sweet salmon berries my sons handed to me along the way.  I’m hoping that there will be a few trilliums and salmon berries left as I poke forward, my cane leading the way.  But I also know  that I’ll be leaving a few items along the trail, like the pioneers lightening their loads on their ways to Oregon
The most painful items are friends like Pat.  Not really left behind, just tucked into memories that arise at quiet moments at night like the yellow evening primroses that have delighted me on this journey. As I try to find sleep, I can still see her cross and re-cross her skinny legs as she drags on a cigarette, her elbow on a knee, in the Solarium, making us laugh. “You were saying,” she whispers through a cloud of smoke.
Also painful to drop along this trail, but inevitable, is my dream of writing a break-out novel, of scratching some sort of meaningful mark on the literary world, one that would make the days crouched here in front of my computer, the hopeless investment of  my retirement funds on advice and editing, the dismal dreams of a sale at book sign-ins and readings, worth the effort.  For a while it was.  No longer.
So, I join a small group of writers I admire, in saying, I’m done.  It all was worth it, the dreams, the disappointments, the email tension, but it isn’t any more.  Alice Munro and Philip Roth announced their retirements recently. Others have just gone silent.  I knew it was my time to move along with a lightened load when I realized that I can no longer type one line of words without three or more typos.  The two books I have written in the past two years have been clear examples of how slow that makes writing a couple hundred pages and are evidence of the wisdom of knowing when to quit.  I’ve decided to  pause  and enjoy the scenery along this part of the trail.

Thanks for reading these thoughts for the past years.  I’ve enjoyed writing them.  I'll think of you
 always as friends.   JO

Lou died two days ago—Lou, the character of one of my first novels based on  good friends of mine, a funny friend, a quiet person who attracted us to her because of her lack of pretension, her open heart, and her sense of humor which at one time had us sorority sisters rolling across the sorority living room she played No Other Love on the piano. We danced vertically until we had to lay back breathless with laughter. 
Her real life name was Pat.  The other three friends in a novel that had several titles and ended up published as Her Last Words are also eighty-two.  We are saddened and yet realizing that we are walking, or shuffling, me with my three canes and bum knee, the same path that Pat has meandered..
The end a long-term friendship like mine with Pat has forced me to again to accept that I too will come to the end of the trail I’ve been following since college, a trail with gorgeous views, difficult ascents, quiet shadows, and surprises, like the trilliums Pat introduced me to fifty years ago and the sweet salmon berries my sons handed to me along the way.  I’m hoping that there will be a few triliums and salmon berries left as I poke forward, my cane leading the way.  But I also know  that I’ll be leaving a few items along the trail, like the pioneers lightening their loads on their ways to Oregon
The most painful items are friends like Pat.  Not really left behind, just tucked into memories that arise at quiet moments at night like the yellow evening primroses that have delighted me on this journey. As I try to find sleep, I can still see her cross and re-cross her skinny legs as she drags on a cigarette, her elbow on a knee, in the Solarium, making us laugh. “You were saying,” she whispers though a cloud of smoke.
Also painful to drop along this trail, but inevitable, is my dream of writing a break-through novel, of scratching some sort of meaningful mark on the literary world, one that would make the days crouched here in front of my computer, the hopeless investment of  my retirement funds on advice and editing, the dismal dreams of a sale at book sign-ins and readings, worth the effort.  For a while it was.  No longer.
So, I join a small group of writers I admire, in saying, I’m done.  It all was worth it, the dreams, the disappointments, the email tension, but it isn’t any more.  Alice Munro and Philip Roth announced their retirements recently. Others have just gone silent.  I knew it was my time to move along with a lightened load when I realized that I can no longer type one line of words without three or more typos.  The two books I have written in the past two years have been clear examples of how slow that makes writing a couple hundred pages and are evidence of the wisdom of knowing when to quit.  I’ve decided to  pause  and enjoy the scenery along this part of the trail. Thanks for reading these thoughts for the past years.  I'll be thinking of you, as always, as friends.
Thanks for reading this occasional blog.  I’ve enjoyed writing it.  JOHer

Well, I’ve just frozen my credit accounts, directed a check to the Red Cross, called a person whom I don’t know to ask why she sent a letter that indicated my mother, age 102, has an insurance policy. (Turns out she does, protecting her cremation plan from Medicaid) and then I delivered to a bank the monthly Mom/Nana checks from her children and grandchildren to cover the fees in her adult foster home. After that I sat for an hour waiting for Medicare or Medicaid or anyone to answer the phone and tell me if she is eligible for funds to help her family pay her bills. I finally gave up. I electronically deposited a small check from my publisher before I was tempted to say What the hell and get a pedicure with it.  All that this morning.  Business.  No writing, only a little reading during the long phone wait. No walk around the park to get my legs moving in a normal, not alarming, way.
 At noon I called a friend, a very good friend who is not feeling good these days, and wished her well. Talking to her was the best part of my To Do list. The second-best part, an hour later, was a self-reward glass of wine on the terrace and the realization that this was the first time I’ve seen blue sky in two weeks. The wind has sifted; the smoke from Eagle Creek is headed in another direction.
The business part of this day had accumulated during the previous week as I plowed through the hundreds of red lines on the manuscript to my editor sent back, not with accolades but with notes: “This character’s name was different on page 30;” “Did you really mean to skip what happened after he hit her?” “The little I know about gonorhea doesn’t include bed care, and it’s spelled differently,” and so on. I finished, depressed and exhausted by the eradication of red lines, and spent this morning trying to distract my depression by frantic busy-ness.
 After giving silent thanks for the return of the blue sky and my glass of wine, I went to my computer. My publisher had emailed: “Jo, we love your writing; send the next one and we’ll be glad to look at it.”
No promises, of course, but the words, We love your writing, wiped out of any remnants of my despair. I celebrated with another glass of wine and understood how words can change a day if not a life. I hope I am able say something that powerful to someone else tomorrow. I’ll start with, I love how you. . .”

It’s a small city park, built to meet the requirement of the city’s quota of greenspace in an area that used to be filled with warehouses and train tracks. I look down on the scene from my condo terrace four floors above it, not from the fourteen floors I couldn’t afford, but okay, especially on this day, where blue skies, white clouds, fill the air above the surrounding hills instead of the smoke-gray fog we have dealt with for two weeks.  It’s safe to breathe, these clouds signal.So, I do, over a glass of dry Riesling celebrating an avoidance of a $200 charge to replace the toilet paper holder in my bathroom. My back aches, my mind frizzled by the conquering of an Allen wrench one more time. At eighty- two, that’s about all I can conquer these days.Below me is the three-acre park; a green oval snuggles in its middle, a playground blooms with racing children at one edge.  At the other end of the oval, an empty dog park waits for customers. I’ve looked down on many community festivals rollicking for a few days on that green grass--lively colored tents drawing people in to taste homemade cider, local barbecue, yoga moves, a smiling summer parade of pleasure seekers.             This afternoon, sipping my award-wine, the scene below me is quiet. Fifteen or so small active bodies, a cluster of parents and au pairs, one grandparent, keep watch as their thrill-seeking children ascend and descend the play structure’s chains and slides or spill shovels of sand on each other. The kids laugh, chase. The adults talk or look down at their phones.            An oval path wraps the park, a running-walking kind of concrete trail, 1/8th of a mile-- just the right length for older folks to use in exercise routines. Dog owners walk it, too, their four-legged friends enjoying and using the grass at its edge. The empty dog park is enclosed by a fence that separates the big dogs from the little ones, for some reason. I lean over my terrace’s railing and watch an electric wheel chair roll up to the gated entry to the children’s playground. A German Shepherd leashed to the chair barks twice. A child, a girl by the colors of her blouse, jumps off the back of the chair and runs to the locked gate and turns the lever. The gate opens, and she moves through it, pushing aside a two-year-old hoping to break out. She closes the gate behind her. The dog, rigid, alert, barks.  Once. Loud. A warning. The girl heads toward the chains. Another bark, this time high-pitched, almost frantic. She pauses, looks at the play structure. The dog brushes against the gate, watching. The girl turns, goes back through the gate and climbs onto the blanketed mound in the chair.  She wraps her arms around it, whispers something. She returns to the playground.  The dog, motionless, stands guard. I am distracted by the non-moving chair-person, the anxious dog, and when I look back toward the play structure, I have lost the girl in the colored blouse. I cannot locate her on the chains, the slide, the sand or the benches. I sip my wine, wait. Five minutes. I still cannot find her. The dog and the chair remain at the gate. I remain at my railing.  Are we all searching? The sun is obscured by a cloud. In a gray shadow, I wonder has the girl escaped from a bad situation? Has someone captured her and taken her away? Why is her dog worried? Has the person in the chair fallen asleep and does not know she is missing? Dead?  Should I do something, hovering four stories above them?The person in the chair does not move. The dog ignores those going through the gate, his tail still.Then a ray of sunlight cuts through a meandering cloud and the park lightens and becomes the harmless place it is supposed to be. A girl in a flowered blouse emerges laughing from a bush tunnel. She runs through the gate, hugs the hump in the chair, and climbs onto the passenger step  behind the hump. The dog rises, stretches the leather leash as he leads the two of them onto the oval path. They disappear into the dog park. I almost had a book in this scene. I think it’s still churning.