Barbara Bush – First Lady of Words

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Barbara Bush, First Lady, George H. W. Bush, memoir

Barbara Pierce Bush   White House Portrait by Herbert E. Abrams

I imagine in the coming days stories of the former First Lady Barbara Bush will fill the airwaves and spread across the internet. This week her family informed the public the Bush family matriarch is no longer pursuing medical care for her life-threatening illness. Instead, she is choosing to spend her days in comfort care and to be among her family. More likely, she’ll be the one providing comfort.

So, there’s no better candidate today to profile than everyone’s favorite First Lady, dubbed fondly “First Mom.” For as long as she has been in the public eye, Barbara Bush has been the epitome of the perfect mother and wife. She is blessed with family-oriented values, refined, unquestioning, strict, and loving.

Besides those admirable qualities, during her tenure in the White House she was a champion of literacy, something that evolved from her own love of books and the Pierce family’s obsession with reading. And, she is an author.

Barbara published her memoir in 2015, telling the story of her life. The book covers her early years, growing up in Rye, New York, meeting and falling in love with George Herbert Walker Bush, standing by her husband in good times and bad through political campaigns and the White House years, and starting life again when the two left the Washington.

As a member of the Greatest Generation, the former First Lady was witness to many milestones in our country’s history and folklore. In her book she mentions the Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping, Amelia Earhart’s flight, the Hindenberg disaster, and World War II. Her focus, however, was her family and her beloved lifelong companion, George.

Barbara credits her mother with advice that sustained her throughout her own, saying “You have two choices in life. You can like what you do or you can dislike it.” Barbara says she chose to like it.

Many would say it wouldn’t be hard to like what you do being brought up in the rarified atmosphere of Rye and in a home with a staff. Then again, as the saying goes, privilege and wealth can’t buy happiness.

“We always lived in happy homes,” Barbara says.

I wish the First Mom much happiness in her remaining days.

Nandita Godbole – The Ingredients of a Woman

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author, cookbook, inspiration, woman

Nandita Godbole

The first thing you should know about Nandita Godbole is how to pronounce her name, the right way, the given way, the Mumbai way—Mumbai being where she was born. It’s “nun-dee-tah goad-bow-lay.” Of course, if you were from India, you’d know because there are several famous actresses with the same first name.

In Atlanta, the city Nandita now calls home, she may not be a household name—not yet. Maybe soon though. Nandita is best known here as a cookbook author and frequent speaker around town.

We met at a local literary festival where I had the pleasure of moderating a panel of three local cookbook authors, including Nandita. Now, let me say, all three were fabulous cooks, authors, and entertainers. But, something about Nandita captured my attention.

Perhaps it was the exotic spices she described, cinnamon, nutmeg, turmeric, and mace. Even writing the words now brings those soft scents to my nose.

Perhaps it was the saree she wore for the event. A translucent aquamarine, sparkling with teardrop-shaped inlays of teal.

Perhaps it was her husband and daughter in the audience who snapped photos and beamed the entire time Nandita spoke, though they no doubt had heard Nandita say the same words before. Their pride in her and her achievements was obvious.

Whatever the reason, I took Nandita at her word. “The curry you think you know,” she said, “is nothing like any one of the dozens of curries available.” With that, I visited her recipe website (currycravingskitchen.com), “cracked” open a copy of Crack the Code—Nandita’s book whose cover proclaims the reader can “cook any Indian meal with confidence,”—and dove in. With Nandita’s spirit whispering encouragement over my shoulder I did manage to make Fish Cakes with Herb Butter, if not as lovely in its final presentation as her illustration, at least as tasty as I imagine hers would be. It was a matter of following the detailed instructions and mouth-watering illustrations in the book.

I would be remiss to portray Nandita as simply a cookbook author. Like the code in her book, Nandita is a layered and complex woman. She studied botany in India, came to the US to study landscape architecture and became a cookbook author and, with the release of her newest book, Not for You, a memoirist.

It’s in the writings of her memories of India and family and traditions that we can see some of what makes Nandita who she is and perhaps what intrigued me at our first meeting. In the book Not for You, over the course of the tale of three generations of her family, Nandita tells of the ingredients of her life, Love. Marriage. Denial. Crisis. Fear. Abandonment. Determination. Food. Comfort. Home.  It’s the “code” and explains how food became central to her life and her identity.

For more on Nandita, visit her websites and crack open your own copy of one of her books.
See https://www.currycravingskitchen.com for her recipes
See https://www.currycravings.com/home for posts on dining, travel, and her cooking classes
See http://currycravings.wixsite.com/turmericpress for how to purchase her books
And a list of her upcoming appearances around town is included at http://bit.ly/CC_TP_NFY1app

Sandra Johnson – A Woman Inspired

Tags

inspiration, Reading List, women, writing

Sandra Johnson

Sandra Johnson’s book Flowers for the Living comes with a warning from a reader “the author is going to stab you in the heart with her garden shovel,” but, the warning continues: “and when the last drop of blood is shed, you will find a seed planted there that will blossom…” And with that you have your first kernel of understanding who Sandra Johnson is.

We met at a book event in Atlanta, where I had the great fortune to share the stage with Sandra, the event’s featured author. While I began the day knowing little more than what her website disclosed, I left feeling as if I had known her my whole life.

Shortly after the event, I returned to the Internet to read more about Sandra and then, even more intrigued, shortly after that I read Flowers for the Living in a single sitting. Only then did I come away with the sense of having peeled back one layer of a rosebud. Sandra is a multi-layered person, and one who draws from a place deep inside to write. A place filled with inspiration and worldly experience.

Because I believe my own writing is born of imagination rather than the more profound gift of inspiration, I have a fondness for people who can grab something from their core, their past, their heart, and bring it into the light to examine and write through their struggles, producing something that as Sandra says is “beautiful and true.”

This philosophy is central to Sandra’s approach and one she is documenting in a new self-help book that is a guide for people to journal their way to wellness.  She says, we need to examine where we came from and where we are headed to know who we are.  The approach is something Sandra has used in counseling inmates with severe psychiatric illness in a South Carolina correctional facility. The working title for the book is Finding Peace Within:  A 365-Day Journal for Balance, Clarity, and Serenity.

Sandra has been rewarded for tackling tough subjects—in the most recent case advocacy for those who need psychiatric treatment while incarcerated, and earlier for Standing on Holy Ground the story of the rebuilding of a South Carolina church firebombed in a racially motivated incident. She realized an author’s dream, reviews and mentions in O:  The Oprah Magazine, Publishers Weekly, USA Today, and Southern Living and invitations to speak across the country.

Somehow, though, I suspect having satisfied her own quest to create something “beautiful and true” was the greater reward.

Of course, all this is in the past.  And, as anyone who strives to better themselves knows, Sandra is moving on. She’s writing historical fiction set in the south in the 1700s. It’s no surprise that the protagonist of Luna is a fierce, strong willed woman who perseveres though enslavement and separation from everything she loves during the Civil War to return to her family.

Another heady and inspirational topic and one that deserves Sandra’s keen eye and big heart.

Read more about Sandra on her website: sandraejohnson.net

 

Linda Sands – A Woman Walks Into a Bar

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author, Linda Sands, woman

Linda Sands stands six feet tall in four inch silver stilettos when she’s strutting her stuff, five feet ten inches in her western-style boots zipping in and out of Nashville honky-tonks during the annual Killer Nashville conference, five feet eight barefoot on the beach in Florida, and ten feet off the ground in the cab of an eighteen wheeler (more about that later). And yes, she’s a blonde. But don’t think for a minute Linda is the stereotypical blonde on the wrong end of “did you hear the one about” fame.  You would be sorely mistaken.

Linda Sands is an Atlanta-based writer who earned her stripes the hard way, with gritty, determined writing and non-stop savvy promotion.  She’s the winner of the 2016 Georgia Writer of the Year Award and two Silver Falchion Judge’s Choice Awards from Killer Nashville for her noir mystery, 3 Women Walk Into a Bar.

Exuding confidence wherever she goes, Linda dares to use a numeral at the front of her title. Think how much less interesting “Three” Women Walk Into a Bar would be. And, just as you’re asking what kind of novel is it anyway, know that the three women in the title are dead on page one. That alone takes a lot of bravado. What are you going to do for the other 291 pages, some would ask.

Her readers answer. In quotes from a handful of reviews: weird and irreverent, peppered with humor, sexy, funny, multi-layered, spunk, as fresh and deliberate as a sucker punch in the face, a bit noir, a bit off-beat, and a heckuva good time. That’s what they say about the book, not Linda, or maybe it’s both.

Best of all, though her ratings run the gamut from great reviews from great writers to the “not for me’s,”  Linda keeps on smiling and keeps on writing. It’s just my opinion but I think that is one element of Linda’s secret sauce. She doesn’t look back and just keeps on rolling.

Rolling, literally. Her latest novel Grand Theft Cargo takes us into the world of eighteen wheelers. Research for the novel included face-to-face and in-the-cab interviews with long-haul truckers. At the outset, Linda wanted to create a coffee-table photography book in partnership with a friend and photographer, but the stories kept growing and the idea for her novel featuring trucker Jojo Boudreaux and her co-driver Tyler Boone was born. What? You thought maybe a trucker named Sally or Jane?  Not in Linda’s book.  Prepare yourself as the cover says for “a secretive highwayman, explosive house bombs, singing telegrams, flaming mice,” and more…

What a romp ahead!

In Linda’s words, “There’s more to come.”

Read more about Linda Sands on her website: lindasands.com

Beth Terrell – Lady With an Alias

Tags

books, detective, mystery, PI, suspense

Jared McKean is a private investigator with a past. He falls for women in distress and in Racing the Devil, Terrell’s first in the PI series, he finds himself in bed with a black-and-blue bruised woman in a halter top in less than 15 pages. The sex is “all animal ferocity and passion, sweat and thrust and howl and moan.” Ten pages later, he’s wanted for murder and you are not going to put this book down.

It’s a beginning that startled me, having met the author Beth Terrell (pen name Jaden Terrell) six months earlier.  Beth is soft-spoken, maybe a bit on the shy side, and nearing middle-age, not at all the in your face, no holds barred writer of a private “dick” novel — that’s what the soon-to-be dead woman called Jared.

Beth confessed she took the pen name Jaden thinking the name had more of an edge and element of mystery to it than her given name. She also uses a “headshot” on her social media that begs you to want to know more and is light years away from what she Beth says is her cherub-faced school -teacher appearance.  She’s probably right, but after reading Racing the Devil, Beth’s writing stands on its own, her real name and real face are irrelevant.

Beth knew she wanted to be a writer from the time she was eight years old. And, when stories about hard-boiled private investigators called, she schooled herself in the genre by reading everything she could find. She also attended the local Citizens Police Academy, the FBI Citizens Academy, the Tennessee Bureau’s Citizens Academy and Lee Lofland’s Writers’ Police Academy–one experience not being enough to satisfy Beth’s curiosity and thirst for knowledge.  Then, too, she’s a member of nearly every crime writer’s organization I know, Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, and Private Eye Writers of America. For many years, Beth served as the Special Programs Director of Killer Nashville, the mystery/thriller writers’ annual conference in Nashville.

Oh, and did I forget to mention Beth holds a Red Belt in Tae Kwan Do?

The softer side does come through, both when she exposes the kinder side of Jared McKean and when Beth explores the tortured relationship McKean has with his ex-wife, a woman he can’t forget—at least as far as I have read.  That side of Beth comes from a career in special education, a passion for ballroom dancing, and a certification in Equine Massage Therapy, the latter explaining why horses make frequent appearances in her novels.

You don’t have to take my word for how well written her PI series is or how devoted she is to her craft.  Beth is a Shamus Award nominee, and winner of the Magnolia Award for service to her local chapter of Mystery Writers of America.

A Taste of Blood and Ashes is the fourth installment in Beth Terrell’s series.  It is available on line and in bookstores everywhere as are the other installments, if like me, you are starting with the first.

I want to be Beth Terrell when I grow up, but for now, I’ll just count myself as one of her many friends on facebook and in real life. She has come to my rescue at a book signing in Nashville—a city where I barely knew more than a handful of people—shouting out my event across her network. I couldn’t ask for more.

Read more about Beth Terrell on her website.

http://www.jadenterrell.com/

 

Janet Evanovich – By the Numbers

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author, book, Janet Evanovich, mystery, Stephanie Plum, women

The acknowledged queen of the mystery genre enters the room to a round of applause.  She takes the stage, sits down, and comments about the phallic-shaped mic in her hand and how it reminds her of Ranger a character in one of her books. Only one person can get away with that. Janet Evanovich.

By adhering to my rule of reading no more than a single book by any author (except for … well, that’s another story), I have missed the evolution and intrigue that surrounds Evanovich’s most famous character, Stephanie Plum.  Plum is a female bounty hunter who has a pet hamster Rex and several love interests, including Ranger.  And as legions of Janet Evanovich’s fans the laughter rippling across the room attest, Stephanie Plum is as loved and real as the author herself.

Smart dialog and sexual banter fill much of Evanovich’s writing, including this snippet from Hard Eight:

“He [Ranger] stopped in front of my parents’ house, and we both looked to the door. My mother and my grandmother were standing there, watching us.
“I’m not sure I feel comfortable about the way your grandma looks at me,” Ranger said.
[Stephanie] “She wants to see you naked.”
“I wish you hadn’t told me that, babe.”
“Everyone I know wants to see you naked.”
“And you?”
“Never crossed my mind.” I held my breath when I said it, and I hoped God wouldn’t strike me down dead for lying.”

Entertaining?  You bet. In a televised interview, Janet Evanovich said she thinks of herself first as an entertainer and added delights in providing devoted readers vicarious thrills. I imagine she means both in bed and in hot pursuit of a criminal on the lam.

If there’s a secret sauce in writing mystery, then Janet Evanovich has discovered it, bottled it, and dips from it whenever she sits down at a keyboard.  And that is often.

She even has an app.  Yes, there’s an app for All Things Evanovich.

And there needs to be to keep up with Evanovich’s 68 books. They include a dozen romance novels, the genre in which Evanovich started and never truly abandoned, nine co-authored novels, and five series, including 27 in the Stephanie Plum series. Even if you haven’t read a Plum novel, you have likely seen the covers and the clever titles, beginning with One for the Money then Two for the Dough and on to the most recent Turbo Twenty-Three.

Along the way, Evanovich penned a book on writing, How I Write: Secrets of a Bestselling Author, and a graphic novel — which Evanovich advises is great fun but hard to translate to “bottom line” results.  Take heed, that’s advice from a woman who has combined an in-born sense of business with a knack for writing.  Her husband, son, and daughter, and, I suspect,  many minions behind the scene make the Evanovich enterprise hum.

Across Evanovich’s website are games, puzzles, contests, pet pictures, numerous places to sign up for her newsletter or get a sticker with her signature to place inside your copy of one of her novels — please send a self addressed stamped envelope. And, of course, you’ll find buttons that link you to a shopping cart.

So, with all she has accomplished, what does Evanovich, regret? At the writers conference I attended, she said she misses the time spent talking to fans at book signings in bookstores across the country. Today, the mere rumor of an appearance can shut down a Walmart for hours.  I think I can imagine that, if I close my eyes real tight, I think I can.

Things she promises: Stephanie will always be young and beautiful, Rex will always be by her side, and Ranger, well… I’m waiting for Sixty-Six and Sex to decide.

Read more about Stephanie Plum and, oh yeah, Janet Evanovich at evanovich.com

News and Gifts and a Word from Our Sponsors

Tags

book, rona simmons, suspense, terror, The Martyr's Brother

I can easily fill pages with words about fictional characters, perfect strangers, friends, relatives, associates, anyone other than myself. And my guess is readers of this and other blogs would prefer to read about anyone but the blogger behind the blog.

But I’m allowing myself this luxury and begging your indulgence because I have news and I bring gifts.

First the news (and a brief note from our sponsors):

My latest novel, The Martyr’s Brother, will be available next week.  That’s the official date, but (yes, here it comes) it’s already available on Amazon and on a pre-order basis through my website (ronasimmons.com).

Okay, phew, that’s out of the way.

Here’s where you ask, what’s the book about and why should you fork over a few hard earned dollars to buy a copy then devote an afternoon or day of your time to reading the book?

At the most basic page-turning level The Martyr’s Brother is a cat and mouse story of a young man from the Middle East intent on committing an act of terror in the US and the woman who must stop him. But if you peel back the layers, the book is also the story of the impact an act of terror has on the people it touches.

And then there’s your retort. You ask, what do I know about terror? To best answer that, I’ll use the words of my protagonist, Alicia Blake.  In the book, she says, “people had forgotten there was a day in the not too distant past when they’d not seen or heard of bombings, and suicide vests, and snipers.”

I am fortunate to have lived in a time and place where terrorism didn’t happen in our backyards. I hope people don’t forget, and I pray that terrorism does not define our future.

Do you prefer to watch a video or what’s known as a “book trailer” to convince you? Check out the video I created on YouTube (Book Trailer: The Martyr’s Brother) or perhaps the podcast of me reading the first page.  (Reading from The Martyr’s Brother)

And now the gifts:

I’m taking a different tack in releasing the book. Trying to be “social” and tech-savvy, I’m holding a virtual book launch party on Facebook. The party will feature all the trappings of a real world book launch: music, libations, hors d’oeuvres, special guests, lots of chatter, and yes contests, prizes, and gifts.

To join the party, go to my Facebook event (Launch Party ) on October 26 from 4 pm to 7 pm (Eastern). Say hello and congratulations by commenting on the page, join the conversation, and stay as long or as little as you like. Everyone wins something. And a few will take away gift certificates and copies of The Martyr’s Brother.

Thank you. And, for the next post, we’ll be back to our regular programming!

Miss Jane Marple – A Role Model

Tags

Agatha Christie, author, books, Miss Jane Marple, mystery, women

Last month I profiled Nancy Drew and Carolyn Keene, the pseudonym for the group of authors of the series of detective novels featuring the ingénue detective extraordinaire.  This month, I’ve journeyed to the other end of the spectrum to spotlight Miss Jane Marple, Dame Agatha Christie’s much loved cozy mystery sleuth.

A “cozy” mystery as I had to learn is distinguished from other mysteries and thrillers by an amateur sleuth who solves mostly domestic crimes. The crimes often occur in rural settings and violence and sex are left to the imagination, well, well off stage. Dame Christie is credited with inventing the genre and perfecting it in the character of Miss Marple. The aging crime solver appears in twelve of Ms Christie’s novels that span the period from 1927 to 1976.

While I didn’t use Miss Marple as inspiration for Alicia Blake, the amateur detective and soon to be professional police woman in my upcoming thriller, there are similarities between the two characters. For the most part the two share a reliance on intuition.  Feminine intuition to be exact. The decidedly feminine trait was much used by Christie. In Murder at the Vicarage (1930), Christie compared the skill of intuition to “reading a word without having to spell it out.”

Christie had forty years to hone Miss Marple’s skills, but even at the outset, Miss Marple demonstrated the uncanny ability to take an idle comment from casual conversation and connect the dots, solving crimes that eluded her professional male counterparts. Often, Miss Marple put two and two together while relaxing in a comfortable chair, knitting, or in her garden with a pair of gardening shears in hand. Other times, she stayed in the background and listened while those around her chattered away. From everywhere clues dropped like rain, but only she noticed. And, as every Miss Jane Marple reader knows, if a male character thought he had the crime solved and explained how he believed the impossible unfolded, watch for a roll of Miss Marple’s eyes or a shake of her head. He is inevitably not even close.

In Nemesis (1971), the last Marple novel, Jane had aged. Nevertheless, she was just as much at work as she was in her earlier days. Christie described her as “old fashioned,” prone to taking naps, and with a rheumatic back that prevented her from working in her garden, but she still knits and she still solves a crime. All it took was a glance at the obituaries in her favorite newspaper to spark a memory and, by page two, Miss Marple was off and running, or perhaps, ambling down a lane in St. Mary Mead.

She had “a scent for evil, in the evening of her days, her peculiar gift,” Christie said.

More than 125 years after Miss Christie’s birth, the literary world is re-examining the prolific writer, casting her in a more modern light as a feminist, an identity others claim she would have resist.  Though Christie brought women characters out of the shadows and gave them center stage, they remain in their decidedly female roles, chock full of feminine intuition.

That’s not a bad role model for my own protagonist. Watch for more news about my upcoming thriller, scheduled for release this fall.

 

Nancy Drew – My First Girl Detective

Tags

books, detective, first books, mystery, sleuth, thriller

Can you remember the first “real” novel you read—or at least an early, early one—a book that launched you down the reading path? In my case, it was a hand me down. I had an older sister who loved to read (and still loves to read, devouring a book or two each week) and so, when she discarded a book it found its way to me.

If memory serves me correctly, my first was a Nancy Drew mystery. With over forty titles in the series by the early 1960s, I can’t say now whether I started with “The Secret of the Old Clock,” or “The Hidden Staircase,” or the “Clue in the Diary,” or “The Message in the Hollow Oak,” or “The Haunted Bridge”… There seemed to be an unending supply of the books for girls, written as I later discovered by a syndicate under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene.

In retrospect, I suppose they were perfect novels for girls who would become women in the 1970s. Nancy triumphed where others failed. She even went on to be “Nancy Drew, Girl Detective” in the series that continued into this century. Somehow, I think Nancy changed with the times; and I shudder to think of her texting or playing pokemango. For me she’ll forever be climbing dark staircases, running through dark forests, or exploring attics, on her own or with an occasional sidekick. And, of course, she’ll always find the clue and solve the mystery.

The books are definitely for the young reader. Consider the opening words of “The Hidden Staircase.”

Nancy Drew began peeling off her garden gloves as she ran up the porch steps and into the hall to answer the ringing telephone. She picked it up and said, “Hello!”

“Hi, Nancy! This is Helen.” Although Helen Corning was nearly three years older than Nancy, the two girls were close friends.

“Are you tied up on a case?” Helen asked.

“No. What’s up? A mystery?”

“Yes–a haunted house.”

Nancy sat down on the chair by the telephone. “Tell me more!” the eighteen-year old detective begged, excitedly.

There you have it, in less than one hundred words: three exclamation points, a mystery, a haunted house, and a sidekick. Oh yes, and long garden gloves that have to be peeled off.

Seriously, maybe there is a reason to go back and read a few books from the series. In this very short passage there’s drama, tension, suspense, and the beginnings of character description.  With chapters titled “Strange Music,” “Frightening Eyes,” and “An Elusive Ghost,” to come, what’s not to love?

With my own new novel, a thriller, coming to market this fall, maybe I can call my publisher and ask them to hold the presses while I inject a bit of Nancy into my own heroine.

A Woman After My Own Heart

Tags

authors, women

As I am taking a breather of sorts — a few days away — instead of writing a new post myself I am “cheating” and leveraging an article Marta Bausells, social and community editor for The Guardian, recently wrote.

Ms. Bausells was responding to the furor that rose from Gay Talese’s failure to cite one woman author as someone that had inspired him.  It’s not an argument I need to rehash or add to here.  Instead, I simply list the reporter’s “10 Inspiring Female Writers You Need to Read” and provide a link to the article in the Guardian.

The list contains more writers I haven’t read than ones I have.  So, for me, it’s an inspiration to go back to my very long to-be-read list and add a few more names and titles.  I hope you too find a new work among those listed.

1. Doris Lessing
2. Toni Morrison
3. Ursula K. Le Guin
4. Virginia Woolf
5. Clarice Lispector
6. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
7. Margaret Atwood
8. Zadie Smith
9. Elena Ferrante
10. Angela Carter

Read the Guardian article: 10 Inspiring Female Writers You Need to Read