Day: September 15, 2013

One Day At Lunch

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

The other day at Company X, if Boss Lady wasn’t walking past my desk shell-shocked over a surprise 25th Company X anniversary party (she walked into the conference convinced she was getting laid off vs a lovely cake), she would have seen me open-mouthed at my computer. Okay, so maybe that isn’t such a rare occurrence. The day I discovered NAME REDACTED FAMOUS FILM DIRECTOR was a Company X named insured I was pretty slack jawed.

However on this particular day I was spending lunch time like I spend every lunch time. Scooping some Crock Pot/baking pan horror/recipe that would make Sandra (Semi-Homemade) Lee gag into my maw while scanning the interwebs. I noticed the horrid state of my favorite ballet flats and was checking eBay for replacements (of course I love a shoe that hasn’t been made in ages). The only pairs available were too big. The Universe and shoes and me? So evil and so difficult. No shoes for me. I did my daily check to see the current price for the Lovecraft/Wandrei letters and cursed myself for not buying them from the nice Night Shade Books man at the NecronomiCon Providence. But also glad I didn’t because of the very expensive repairs to Blacklight’s car earlier in the week. Then for ha-ha’s and because I needed a good laugh after realizing that overtime was a must even though I cherish my Saturdays, I typed in “wannabe” in Mr Search Bar.

Try it. There are many results. You don’t realized how many people have written funny and quirky memoirs with “Wannabe” somewhere in the title. I recommend Jerramy Fine’s Someday My Prince Will Come: True Adventures of a Wannabe Princess. Or how-to guides. Or a NYX comic you know Blacklight has stashed away in one of the massively heavy comic coffins shoved in the bedroom closet. And then…choke a tiny bit on your homemade using a proper recipe chocolate chunk scone because the ones at the Company X cafeteria are too expensive for your broke rump roast, your book…

The thing you slaved over, ordered and gave to the local public libraries and then flat out avoided going to those libraries yearly book sales because it would break your heart to see it unwanted and passed over on bag sale day. The book you mention as your go to for those endless “tell the group something we don’t know about you” because you don’t want to reveal anything too sad or deep or personal. “I wrote a book” works. The book that sometimes generates a royalty check that makes you squint at the envelope, sigh and open wondering which creditor this is and how much over how much time can you pay this debt and then almost faint when you realize its a check for you.

Then you instant message one of your work buddies. One of the ones who knows things about you. The one you can commiserate with over sick husbands, Medicare, too many bills, etc.  and send her the link. She would love to have a check, however small. magically appear in the mail. She wants to know more.And get a small kick and shot of pride that she’s impressed. Because most days you don’t feel awesome or impressive. You know you could call yourself a writer, you have a book but you don’t. But this afternoon, you aren’t just the person cranking out X from the XYZ drawer. You’re not just Coworker 123’s least favorite person. You are the writer and the world just has to type one little word to find your book.

An Open Book

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

There are writers who have a memoir you love and then another and then you wish they would just stop already because if you see their stupid books in the new biography section one more time you are going to scream and really? you need to spend another book writing about your addiction to overpriced shoes and your makeup collection? <wipes brow and takes a few deep breaths> Sorry, still a bit riled up over the latest of Annoying Author’s latest “memoir” cluttering up valuable space and wasting library resources. Back to the proper review. I promise.

Then you have authors who write memoirs and you snap them up because a) they are witty b) well written and c) don’t focus on stupid $200+ ballet flats. Also these authors you need to hunt down like, well…your father after a 12 point buck in during deer season. With great caution and expense. Only you don’t get some people going “EEWWWW” and “hunting is WRONG” when you snag your prey. And my dad? He eats what he gets and venison is delicious, so zip it!  Instead when the book hunter find your prey, you bring it home and curl up on Mr Couch (or Mr Bed if Blacklight is awake and ranting about Richard Dawkins and Minecraft and wrestling) and devour it.  Or you zip to the library after cleaning up the kitchen, grab your inter-library loans and head home because you’re tired and just want to collapse.

And even though you should really take a nap because it was one bleep of a workday and you are doing overtime the next day, you crawl into bed with one of your inter-library loan treasures intending to read for a little bit. And then the next thing you know you’re being pulled from a life as a nurse in training during World War II by a voice asking “who is daddy widdle wedhead?” to the fish tank and “hey are you making that pizza tonight?” to your dazed self.

Okay. That might have been a true story from Friday night. (It was). Blacklight did not get his pizza. He has opposable thumbs and can make his own dinner. How dare he summon me from the pages of Monica Dickens’ autobiography An Open Book? But he’s Blacklight and well, that’s what he does. Now what Monica Dickens’ does? Write awesome books.

An Open Book is British author Monica Dickens’ autobiography. Yes, she related to that Dickens but you get the delightful impression that their relationship (she is his great-granddaughter) doesn’t impress her that much. In fact, when she talks about her experiences promoting her books, the relationship between her and Mr Overrated seems like a burden and something she wishes didn’t exist.

I wonder if anyone coming up to her burbling “You know I loathe Mr Overrated to pieces” would have gotten a broad smile from her. Because if I had lived in her heyday, I would have been that person. Trust me. I met Mr Andrew Leman (co-founder of The HP Lovecraft Historical Society and all around awesome guy) and was that burbling dimwit who could barely form proper sentences like “I would like to buy this t-shirt” and “thank you Mr Leman”. So in my twisted little brain, the fact that Monica Dickens seems “meh” over her distant relationship to the overrated one? So very refreshing because so many other authors would be mentioning that connection every three seconds.

In fact, you could read An Open Book for her experiences promoting her books alone. Anyone who has written a book, or worked in book promotions will smile and remember their own best stories. It’s not the laugh-a minute horrors Grace experiences in promoting Hatto & Hatto’s books in Wendy Holden’s Gossip Hound (US)/Fame Fatale (UK) but it’s a universally familiar one to writers. Emma Chisit, indeed. 🙂

Instead of lingering and hovering over a distant yet important family connection, Monica Dickens weaves a tale of enchantment around life at Number 52. She’s the youngest child of three (older brother, slightly older sister) and the odd duckling in a talented and loving extended family. She goes to school and becomes a debutante but is more on the sidelines then in the first tier of things. Other people fall in love, get married and start families. Monica tries her hand at acting and then cooking professionally.

Now Monica is a nice girl from a nice family who can barely cook. She’s taken a course of six lessons. But she talks her way into being a professional cook/servant and spends many months toiling behind stoves and in cold kitchens. And apart from the occasional successful dish, comes a book about her experiences, One Pair of Hands, which becomes a popular seller. She’s not a best seller but she’s a known quality and now establishing herself as a professional writer.

With World War II, our Monica tries her hand at war work as a nurse, inspiring another popular seller, One Pair of Feet, that horrifies the nursing profession. The black mark of One Pair of Feet, doesn’t stop her from writing. Years pass and her busy pen and typewriter churn out books and articles. Along the way, Monica finds love, a husband of her own and adopts two very lucky little girls. There is sadness though. The war kills her older brother, her parents are getting more fragile and she is torn between her new home, America and the call of her childhood home Number 52.

What truly sticks in the mind besides the behind the scenes gossip of One Pair of Hands and One Pair of Feet are two sections that wrench the heart. If Blacklight wasn’t so busy watching Minecraft videos he might have looked over and saw me sniffling and then just barely fighting back tears. I dare you to pick up An Open Book and read chapters 16 and 21 without reaching for the Kleenex.

Chapter 16 is a brief thing, just a handful of pages about Monica trailing along with social worker. There’s a baby found in a room with only a burned leather couch. Another family ignores the fatal illness of an infant with the mother hoping that she’s pregnant again. Just these few pages had me tearing up as much as all three of Jennifer Worth’s excellent memoirs of her time as midwife.

Chapter 21 deals all too briefly in my opinion, with Monica Dickens’ work with The Samaritans. Now if you’re a Red Dwarf junkie, you know that Rimmer’s stint at the Samaritans is used as a joke in the first few series. Who knew that Monica Dickens helped found the American branch of The Samaritans? Without looking at http://www.samaritansusa.org? And this from a woman who beat herself up emotionally for mishandling her first call even though that caller got help.

Is it any wonder reading An Open Book had me abusing using my beloved inter-library loans with a white hot speed? If only it wasn’t Sunday or I would be headed to the East Hartford Public Library RIGHT NOW to brave their vertigo causing fiction section and not have to wait for the inter-library loan system. Or that Monica Dickens is on my list favorite authors. Unlike Annoying Author, I never wanted to slap Monica, or roll my eyes at her. Instead I wanted to sit down for a cup of tea, eat a scone and go pet her horses. Pity more authors can’t inspire that.

My Favorite Dickens

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

I know what you’re thinking..EWWWWWW…now THAT is horrid, disgusting and certifiable. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Correction…I know what you’re thinking about me having a blog post called “My Favorite Dickens” because anyone who spends anytime talking books with me discovers I loathe Charles Dickens so much and so very hard. Just the thought of the time and school hours wasted on reading Bleak House and Great Expectations is maddening. Not even Gillian Anderson can make Bleak House tolerable. However I have to be grateful for the fact that Charles Dickens, that overrated blowhard who makes my eyes roll back so far in my head I almost need a trip to the UConn Health Center ER, is a link in a chain that created one of my recently discovered favorite authors, Monica Dickens.

For those who want to play family tree. Here it goes. Am very sick of typing Charles Dickens. So very sick. Charles Dickens spawns Henry Fielding Dickens who spawns Henry Charles Dickens who spawns Monica Enid Dickens.

Now usually (see Tigers in Red Weather), I don’t like certain writers and their extended writing spawn. But when trolling the fiction section of Book Barn and the library book sales bag days, I don’t always think about the writer’s last name and just zero in on certain publishers, figuring “oh gee…they haven’t done me wrong so far.” And oddly enough both these publishers (Virago Classics and Persephone Books are British and on my I Want Every Thing They Publish lists…such another post entirely…) And into my shopping bag went Monica Dickens’ Mariana in the Persephone Books reprint edition with the main thought “If I don’t like I can always try and sell it to Book Barn”.

And how very glad I am that my brain focused on “OMG Persephone Books” and “what a lovely cover” and didn’t process that an British writer named Dickens could be related to <shudders> HIM…because I would have missed out on a wonderful author. Like Stella Gibbons and Angela Thirkell, opening a Monica Dickens books, fiction or one of her memoirs, is like stepping through a door into the past. Only you don’t have to be of a certain class because even the best Stella Gibbons and Angela Thrikell isn’t that fond of the lower orders. It doesn’t matter if you’re curled up on Mr Couch rocking a tattered Marvel t-shirt or sprawled on Mr Bed, fighting a hacking cough and wishing you had sprung for a Miskatonic University sweatshirt because it’s gotten freezing and the layers of Mr Blankie and Mr Cardigan aren’t enough, you’re “Monty” putting on a battered looking hat, taking the bus to the employment agency to try out a career as a cook even though you can barely make scrambled eggs let alone a feast for 12 after being an epic failure at theater school. You’re the slightly older and maybe not wiser “Monty”, confused as to how to make a nurses cap out of a round of linen and scraping wax off hospital bed wheels while trying to survive as a nurse in training during World War II. Or you’re the older “Monty”, an established and beloved wife and mother, looking back on her life and career through the years.

And then you’re yourself again, coughing and hacking, lurching into the living room for your computer to see if the local libraries have any and I mean ANY more Monica Dickens books in their systems for an interlibrary loan. You will even accept one of her children’s horse books which in your head are akin to Noel Streatfeild’s Shoe books. You must have more Monica. And then when you’ve tracked down those few titles, ecstatic that they are available, wanting them that second and vowing to scour the library sales and your favorite used bookstores for more titles while filling an Amazon Wish List that you know no one will ever check because your family just doesn’t function that way, you pick up the book you just ended and start again from page one.