Why I Oppose Fracking

My forsythia in full bloom outside my house in Moncure

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WHY I OPPOSE FRACKING

My number one priority in these aging years (I’m seventy-five) is to write, revise, and publish more books.  I also want to be a good human being and compassionate to others.  I am a self-actualizing woman.  I’m also aging well.  I keep my knees and feet going, and now I’m working on better balance.  I stopped eating sugar to slow down my osteoarthritis.  I eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, more when the garden and orchard are producing.  I get enough sleep, walk six days a week, eat mainly organic food, most of which I’ve grown.  I now have organically fed hens.  I also keep my body going by farming work–shoveling, hoeing, planting, stretching to pick figs, re-doing the hens’ flexible fence, which is a gymnastic work-out.  I do lower back exercises, and now standing-on-one-foot balance exercises.  

I benefit both from the work of growing my food and eating it–fresh and organic.  I have creatures to care for–hens, cat, dog, and I feed the birds.  I love the changing seasons here in central North Carolina, though with new climate unpredictability, it’s harder than once to gauge when to plant and how to manage sudden extremes of heat and cold.  I’ve put in drip irrigation to help with droughts, more frequent now.

In the cold months, I use a chainsaw to cut my wood the size I need for my old wood cookstove.  Generous friends provide firewood and splitting, but sometimes I drag small dead trees out of my woods.  I find and cut up lightwood, the hard cores left of dead pine and cedar after the softer wood has rotted.  Many people help me, and I thank them by sharing my home grown food and homemade bread and jams.  My computer work, writing, and reading mental work is balanced by my physical farming work.

To be outside is to feel the sun on my back as I kneel to plant, to see the sliver of new moon in the darkening sky as I shut up the crooning hens for the night, to see the flash of the cardinal’s wings as he flies to the feeder, to rejoice in the sprawling forsythia bush blazing yellow, which I started and nurtured from four twigs stuck in the ground.  I live close to the magic of seeds and seedlings, so fragile, so small, to begin; then tall, sprawling, blooming, fruiting in the wink of an eye.  

I deal with frost warnings, tornado warnings, hens that get over their fence and into my precious vegetables; raiding possums and raccoons, voles that eat my carrots, beets, and sweet potatoes underground.  These are all normal problems as is my eking out my finances, watching pennies, wanting enough work to cover my basic needs but not so much that I can’t take care of my writing and publishing.

Then fracking reared its ugly head.  I’ve worked, since I moved to Moncure thirteen years ago against a seven-state nuclear dump, for safer nuclear storage at nearby Shearon Harris, against a multi-states landfill, against air pollution, for better, more forward-thinking county government, and now, after cutting back my activist work to write since the 2006 election, I am working against fracking.  Here’s why.  Can you see how my whole, carefully worked out lifestyle to stay healthy, do my writing, publish more books, and age well is at risk?  I am not the only one.  Others have different lifestyles and ways of coping with aging, but many people living in the twelve-county area where our North Carolina legislators are so keen to frack are at risk, as much or more than I am.

I have decided, however, not to panic, not to run, not to leave my little farm until I absolutely have to, but to fight, for myself and for my community.  If you want to help, let me know.  There are many organizations here and in other parts of North Carolina and in other states working against fracking.  Here are the reasons I am fighting against fracking in central North Carolina.

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WHY I OPPOSE FRACKING–Judy Hogan judyhogan@mindspring.com, Moncure, NC

1.  Hydraulic Fracking [drilling with the use of water and chemicals until the shale breaks and the natural gas underneath is released and piped away] poisons our earth, our aquifers, wells, and air.

2.  The N.C. Legislature made fracking legal by 2014, when permits will begin to be issued.  Landowners do not have to sell mineral rights to have fracking occurring under their land without their permission.  This is called Compulsory or Forced Pooling and goes with the horizontal drilling.  Once they have one landowner’s permission, they can drill all around that landowner’s property.  Beware if they offer money.  They only need one landowner’s mineral rights to drill under all their neighbors.

3.  The companies doing the fracking don’t have to declare what chemicals have been used unless someone is about to die, so that medical treatment for illnesses that follow breathing polluted air or drinking polluted water, is handicapped.  Many of the chemicals cause cancer and some cause birth defects.  Doctors have to sign a non-disclosure statement before they can learn which of the 150 chemicals have been used.  They can’t tell even the patient.

4.  The main part of Chatham where these natural gas pockets are found is Southeast Chatham, including Moncure.  All citizens of Moncure will be affected even if fracking doesn’t occur next door because of the poisons released nearby into the earth, air, water.

5.  Fracking uses huge amounts of water, and in the summer we often have droughts.  Chatham is on voluntary water conservation year round.  Where will the millions of gallons of water per gas well come from to frack?  From our water supplies.

6.  Where will the chemically poisoned water be disposed of?  The Legislature is now trying to make it legal to inject it back into the earth.  

7.  Nowhere in the country has fracking been done safely, without people suffering illnesses, farm and wildlife animals dying.

8.  Fracking can set off earthquakes.  We felt an earthquake here which was set off up in Virginia a year or so ago by fracking.  Alabama recently stopped one fracking operation because of an earthquake.  We live on an earthquake fault, and Shearon Harris Nuclear plant is on that fault.

9.  Property values will drop, but it seems unlikely that people will be able to continue living in area where fracking has occurred.  We will be left homeless.  No one will pay us for having to leave our homes, nor could we sell them.  Where will we go?

10.  We do not even need this gas.  There are stockpiles of natural gas now.  The gas here in North Carolina in twelve counties, including Lee and Moore, is a relatively small amount, which will attract small, wild cat operators, who care even less about what happens to us here.  Mineral rights have already been obtained in parts of Lee County and southern Chatham.

11.  I don’t see this as a political issue.  Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, I would think you wouldn’t want any fracking to occur near you or under you.

12.  The fracking companies can also put down a large pad for the drilling on nearby property and run pipes across your property, without your permission.

13.  I can’t see how the wonderful sustainable/organic agriculture, which has flourished for some years in Chatham, will survive this fracking, which also adds to greenhouse gases and uses the water we need for farming.  What will happen to local food supplies?  Agriculture is still very important to the N.C. economy as well as tourism.  What will happen to Jordan Lake?

14.  Given the present movement in the legislature to hurry and frack, without another vote, without waiting for the committee set up to make rules (though it is stacked with industry people), we have only people power.  

15. Town and county governments who oppose fracking can be by-passed.

16.  There are better ways to provide Americans with the energy we need.  Spend the money to research and establish wind and solar alternatives that do no damage to our health and homes.

17. Put up a sign, write your representative and senators in the legislature, to the members of the forced pooling study group, the governor, and talk to your neighbors.  If enough people protest, we can stop it, one person as a time. 

Review and Interview of Denise Weeks' Nice Work

Nice Work: A Jacquidon Carroll Mystery.  Denise Weeks.  Dark Oak Press, 140 E. Palmer, Taylorsville, IL, 62568.  www.oaktreebooks.com Paper. $19.95.  ISBN: 978-1-61009-040-7.  August 2012.

This is a funny novel as well as a good mystery.  Those who feel a growing skepticism with the cavalier way the corporate world operates and treats employees in the twenty-first century will identify with Jacquidon Carroll, who is laid off from her job at CSD with no prior notice because the company is right sizing.  Jacquidon is sure it is because they’re hiring a young woman.  Later she learns she is accused of stealing supplies and that her boss won’t give her a recommendation, though she has slaved years for him.  She has recently been diagnosed with diabetes, and to top it all off, she is now accused of murdering her boss.

As her world falls apart, she call her sister Chantal to her aid.  An interesting and subtle connection is made between cruel bosses and local sex cubs that feature a sadistic-masochistic lifestyle.  Don’t worry.  Nothing explicit, but the implied metaphor for the corporate world today is ingenious.

Jacquidon is given ten sessions in “outplacement,” read a referral to an agency for finding a new job.  Fred Gordon, the young man running People Power is both attractive and helpful in job-hunting as well as mystery solving.  The sisters’ mother tries vainly to keep her daughters from doing anything illegal, but how else will they find out what they need to know about what’s going on behind the scenes at CSD?  Nice Work was a Malice Domestic finalist several years in a row and won the best novel contest at Dark Oak Press in 2011.  Denise’s blog for her mystery series is: http://jackiesjotting.blogspot.com.

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Interview with Denise Weeks:

Hi, Judy!  Man, this one has been tough because I never have a SHORT answer to anything.  I've tried valiantly not to blorf out too much, though.

1.  When did you begin writing?  Why?

I've been writing since I could hold a crayon.

I was an early reader, around age three--probably because my mother took me places and treated me like a little adult, so I turned out precocious like the children of today.  Also, she and my father used to sit around and read, so I was eager to be like them.  Because there were very few other only children back when I was a child (most people of our acquaintance had three to six!), I spent a lot of time alone reading, drawing, and playing pretend games by making up scenarios for myself and my various toys.  This led (some might say "naturally") to my writing down the stories from an early age.

But my parents never took this seriously.  My teachers did, from the first week of first grade, and always used to exhort me to "have that published."  They had no idea how publishing worked then (regarding magazines as well as books, because there were many magazines that printed young students' work--Golden Magazine, Weekly Reader, and many others that are now forgotten).  The professors at college were similarly encouraging, but clueless about how to get commercial fiction published.  After I left school, though, I found it far more difficult to attract attention with my writing.  I've taken long sabbaticals from writing when I got dejected or depressed.  But I've never hopped off the train entirely.

The "WHY" of it is a bit more esoteric.  I thought all books fell from the sky like the Bible had (everyone knows THAT) until the second week of first grade, when I had to spend a week at home on bed rest because of chicken pox.  (The doctor made a house call and that was his verdict!)  My dad was charged with the task of going to the store to get various supplies, and I asked him to get me a book to read.  I was thinking along the lines of a "Bobbsey Twins" or "Dana Girls" book like the ones sold in grocery stores at the time; Mama usually got me the new book(s) in the series every couple of weeks when she did the grocery shopping.  Well, he had no idea (being a Ph. D. rocket scientist--I am not making this up; he worked at NASA through the 1960s and worked on propulsion and whatnot for the Gemini and then Apollo programs when we lived in Houston) what to get, so he came home with a repro edition of Howard Pyle's _Adventures of Robin Hood_.

This was way beyond my ken and the print was pretty small to boot, so when I protested, he defended his choice.  He said that the book had been one of his childhood favorites and that there were many versions.  This is when I found out that books had individual authors--mortals who had walked among us!  And that a person could write a book that stayed around after he or she was gone, in order to speak to future generations and to people he or she had never met!  This boggled my tiny little mind, and I vowed to perfect my story writing so that I could write books.  The purpose being, of course, that these books could travel on and meet people that I never would meet, and speak to generations far into the future.  Of course NOW we have no guarantee that a library will keep a book for even three years, let alone forever, but perhaps digital texts will have permanence.  Anyway, you could say that I began to write with a serious purpose because I don't want to disappear.

Who knows if it'll work?

2.  When and why did you begin writing mysteries?

Around ten years ago I discovered that books were becoming more action-oriented and less character-oriented.  The sorts of incidents portrayed in older books like _Little Women_ or _The Brothers Karamazov_, the things that you remember out of a book, were falling by the wayside.  No longer would Heidi get to make cheese-and-bread sandwiches and have a picnic, for this would not qualify as an "action" scene.  Scenes that only revealed character and/or important details were getting omitted in favor of more stabbings, bleeding, car crashes, rapes, and plundering.  I really missed the "old" sort of book.  Briefly I was fed by a craze for chick lit, but mostly I found books that didn't spend much time at all on the details of life, all the little events that actually make up most of our days.  Life IS the little things, and I missed these interludes.  (I was getting plenty of "thinking" from the damaged main characters, who all seemed to have been abused, abandoned, punished, and so forth, and often thought about this and about who they'd next have sex with--but seldom about anything FUN from their childhoods or even from the other day.)

Then I discovered cozy/traditional mysteries were still including a lot of the good stuff!  Many series characters went on to marry, have children, and have entertainingly happy lives that surrounded the obligatory crime and sleuthing.  These books seemed more my style than the action-y books, so I started reading them.  I recognized that it would take a while to learn to write a mystery, as it has to be far more planned and organized than other stories.  It did take me a while.  But I enjoy it now, and I get a bit of leeway in describing Jacquidon/Chantal and Ari/Zoë and their cohorts and their lives.  When I'm doing red herrings or hiding clues, I can do it in a scene from life that is FUNNY or that you can relate to, even if it's not an explosion scene!  Readers who click with my style and my way of doing things will discover the joys of geocaching, learn how it feels to be diagnosed with and learn to live with type II diabetes, and figure out how to break into a desk along with my sister sleuths Jacquidon and Chantal.  I've always liked to finish a novel and feel that I have learned something and have had a vicarious experience that I wouldn't otherwise have gone through.  That is cool to me.

3.  Are you writing a series or a stand-alone?  Explain your basic idea for your series.

I have two mystery series.  (Serieses?)  The first is the Jacquidon Carroll series, starring sister sleuths in the "Snoop Sisters" tradition.  Except that instead of being elderly like the original Snoop Sisters (if anyone remembers them from the NBC Mystery Movies in the 1970s), they're twenty-somethings and full of energy and curiosity.  Their banter is hilarious (usually) and the scrapes they get into will amuse and surprise you.  Their closeness will make you wish you were friendly like that with your own sister!  The idea for this series is to take readers on a fun and occasionally funny romp through an ALMOST-implausible slice of the sisters' lives.  Each book will be in the kind of setting that readers would love to see "the inside of," and readers will learn something (maybe even more than one something!) as well as laughing.

The first book kicks off Jacquidon's career as an amateur detective by placing her in the cross hairs of the police when her ex-boss Yancey is murdered (the day after she leaves the company, making quite a memorable scene in so doing).  She and her sister need to explore the intricacies of Yancey's BDSM lifestyle to find the perp, including visits to two sex clubs and a few Internet explorations.  Nothing's explicit, and there's no sex at all (even though we're not British); it's all played for laughs.  The manuscript was vetted by two friends who are/were in the BDSM lifestyle so as not to offend anyone or portray them badly (although when you have a murderer hiding in your midst, that's bound to smear a bit of nasty on the couch!)

The next book is set at a national Christmas tree-trimming contest.  (Believe it or not, there is a national gift-wrapping contest that I based this on--I went to the final round as a finalist (duh) in New York City in 1998.)  The sisters have their hands full trying to figure out who the killer is without being wrapped in tinsel and thrown into the Central Park reservoir themselves!  The book will be a Christmas release.

I also have a far darker series, the Ariadne French paranormal mysteries.  Just wanted to mention the series because _MURDER BY THE MARFA LIGHTS_ came out last summer and has gained a following.  Here again we have a pair of sisters who are cornered into sleuthing, but the difference is that the settings and their backgrounds are far darker.  Their banter is not as light-hearted, nor is the situation they find themselves in when Ari's fiancé Aaron is killed in Marfa, Texas, home of the magical Marfa Mystery Lights as well as home to many eccentrics.  If you like darker mysteries in which the paranormal may or may not be at work, this series is for you.

4.  Tell us about your journey to publication with this book.

_NICE WORK_ was a finalist in the St. Martin's/Malice Domestic contest several years in a row.  I revised it every year after its turn as a bridesmaid once again, but I finally decided that the story simply would never be to the editors' taste.  But because it was a hit with my various judges (who always sent me enthusiastic, hopeful letters notifying me that the book was among the top five finalists being sent forward to the St. Martin's Press editorial offices), I felt it would have an audience if only it could reach readers.  Agents had no luck marketing it, though.  This effort wasted several years.

I hadn't been enthusiastic about small presses, but on a whim I entered the book in the Oak Tree Press Dark Oak First Mystery Novel Contest in 2011 . . . and it won!  Oak Tree Press is a vital small press that is turning into a real force, with authors like Marilyn Meredith, Ilene Schneider, Sally Carpenter, and *me* writing mysteries (as well as several talented writers turning out Westerns and romances).  We're here and we're not going away.  The large New York houses are looking only for blockbusters and have terminated many of the contracts of the mid-list writers I have been reading for years; I think NYC has lost its way, and it can't compete with small presses, where the focus is on quality and accessibility as well as speed in getting new work out.  Nowadays, I am a small press convert.

My overall journey to publication (although you didn't ask!) began back when I was eight and sending little poems in the style of "Archy and Mehitabel" and awful little sonnets that rhymed "cheese" and "keys" off to the New Yorker (I am still not making this up) and the Saturday Evening Post as well as to the many markets that served young students.  I got back many an encouraging note scribbled by hand on the top of the quarter-page sized standard rejections.  I suspect that the slush readers back then knew that I was only a kid and wanted to encourage me.  Well, bless them, because they did.

I even wrote a novel when I was in the sixth grade, but it has been lost (and a good thing, too).  It was based on the "Godfather" that was so big at the time, except it was a comedy.  Yes, I know it must have been a real doozy.  After that, I turned to fantasy (like the Narnia books and Tolkien's work) and eventually published DULCINEA:  or Wizardry A-Flute under my pen name, Shalanna Collins.  DULCINEA was the first runner-up in the Warner Aspect First Fantasy Novel contest in 1996, but when no agents wanted to take it on (this was before Harry Potter made long YA fantasy novels golden), I went with a small press.  (You see the trend here.)  I still write YA fantasy as Shalanna Collins, and my "April, Maybe June" series will launch this summer with Muse Harbor Press.

5.  Why did you choose to write about the topic, community, issues you chose?

The BDSM deal in _NICE WORK_ is all my husband's fault.  I was working on a different plot for Jacquidon when Hubby said, meditatively--oops, if I tell you what he said that sparked the idea, it would be a plot spoiler!  But he gave me the idea for the perp and how the perp comes to be a perp and gets into a situation that prompts the crime.  It was completely different from anything I had ever done, as I have generally stuck to more white-bread settings and situations.  I think many people are still scared of S&M (BDSM) and think of its practitioners and devotees as weirdos who don't have normal lives.  In _NICE WORK_, I show that a perfectly average middle manager in a business office (Yancey) and his ex-wife (also a middle manager) can be as mundane as buttermilk and also heavily involved in BDSM as a lifestyle and as a social setting.  This takes innocent readers on a tour of some of the "light side" of the lifestyle and shows them that people are mostly more alike than they are different (bwa-ha-haa!)  I chose to give my heroine type II diabetes in order to inform people about the disease, as it seems that everyone I know has it now . . . and readers who have it will identify more strongly with Jacquidon, who finds herself making difficult food choices sometimes and suffering the consequences.  (When someone has a low blood sugar event, her judgment may be impaired, and she might say things she shouldn’t.  If you're on the drug Glucophage/Metformin, you need to avoid alcohol . . . so if something you're drinking has hidden booze in it and you don't know that, you can get pretty incoherent.  Enough said.)

6.  How have you found it to be published?  Share that experience.

I have found it to be a joy.  Also a lot of hard work.  You'd think that everyone you meet would be eager to read your books, but guess what?  Now that everyone is self-published on the Kindle, it's not a big deal.  And people don't want you to market to them.  It's a tightrope walk sometimes.

My family always says, "You don't make any money from this!  Spend all that time doing something that makes money!"  They don't see merit in anything that isn't a big money-maker.  Originally my elderly mother thought that writers made lots of moolah, but ever since she has been enlightened (during social events with other writers and with editors), she has been less than enthusiastic.  Some writers have families who are supportive, and I would like to tell them how lucky they are.  It's a struggle when every day you have to justify why you are writing and hold up the contracts you have with your publishers (and because those publishers are not Random House and Penguin, the family sneers).

Still, this has been a lifelong goal of mine.  As long as the books are out there in trade paperback and as e-books, there's a chance that someone will stumble across them and will love them the way I have loved many a book over my lifetime.  There are books that made me believe again in the indomitable human spirit, and I hope my books can do that for somebody out there.  This is a hope I can hold on to during the dark nights of the soul.

7.  Do you have comments from readers or reviewers you’d like to share?

I have received many good reviews that are posted on Amazon.  I can't abide people who are always bandying about quotations from some "famous person" or another, mostly because I don't have anything like that.  (LOL)  People who like my books are generally the more thoughtful types who like to hear a character's thoughts about what's happening to them, rather than preferring the type of character who acts before thinking and never considers the consequences beforehand.

One faithful reader mentioned that she could identify with my characters because they weren't superhero types, but just regular people caught in bad situations.  Another mentioned that the setting often becomes a character--especially in the MARFA LIGHTS series.  It's nice to have my books praised for their narrative drive and inventive plots.

My Amazon author pages (where you can read the reviews by clicking through):

http://www.amazon.com/author/deniseweeks   (mysteries, mainstream, romantic suspense)

http://www.amazon.com/author/shalannacollins (fantasy, YA fantasy)

8.  What other books have you published and where, when?

As Shalanna Collins:

_DULCINEA_ (YA fantasy), 1999, available on Amazon

_CAMILLE'S TRAVELS_ (YA urban fantasy), ditto

As Denise Weeks:

_MURDER BY THE MARFA LIGHTS_, as I mentioned, came out last summer and is the first in the Ariadne French paranormal mystery series.  It's available from Amazon in trade paper or on the Kindle (for only $1.99!)

_LITTLE RITUALS_ is my literary paranormal women's fiction with a chicklitty voice.  Available from Amazon in trade paper or on Kindle ($1.99!)

You can try a sample of any book if you have a Kindle.  Go to the Amazon page and get the FREE sample.  That'll give you some idea as to whether you're going to click with my voice and style.

9.  Do you have a work in progress now?  Is it part of a series?

I'm working on the sequel to _NICE WORK_, the one about the tree-trimming contest.  I am also doing the final edits (galley edits) for the first book in the _APRIL, MAYBE JUNE_ YA fantasy/adventure series.  After I finish the final edits and send that one off to my publisher, I'll go back to putting the final polish on _LOVE IS THE BRIDGE_, a standalone romantic suspense that has elements of technology (a possessed cell phone?) as well as the paranormal.  Waiting in the wings is the second book in the Ariadne French mystery series--it's a rework of a book that originally was number one in her line-up and which also finaled in the St. Martin's contest almost ten years ago.  _MIRANDA'S RIGHTS_, a standalone urban fantasy, will be next.  I've been working on that one on the back burner for several years.  More to come.

10.  If you belong to Sisters in Crime, and/or the Guppies, has that been helpful?  How?

I used to belong to every writers' organization I could find, and it was exciting to attend meetings and socialize with others who put writing first as a priority.  We often had informative guest speakers.  But the cost of belonging to the organizations kept inching up, and I never derived any benefit from being in any of them--I'm sorry to say.  The exception is Romance Writers of America, where it's a good idea to join because you then can participate in their many contests or judge contests.  If you enter their contests, you might get feedback from an agent or editor.  If you judge their contests, you can give useful feedback (which I have tried to do every time I've judged.)  I've won the Golden Rose and the Stiletto contests in the recent past, although that never led anywhere as far as publication (although I did get a gold-plated rose as grand prize a couple of years ago; that was pretty stunning.)  I got the agent that I briefly had through a query, not through connections, and I've never connected positively with an editor as a result of any organization, unfortunately.

Sorry to sound kind of negative.  Perhaps someone who is more outgoing and who is good at schmoozing would get lots more out of the organizations by attending all the face-to-face conventions.  A LOT of this business, like any business, is who you know and who takes a liking to you.  Life is a popularity contest.  In other words, junior high never ends.  LOL!  Unfortunately, I am not good at all of that.  I'm not a basilisk, but I come across better in writing, and I only appeal to people who don't subscribe to the "too long; didn't read" philosophy.  If you can do sound bites and are charming, you might score big at a convention.

11.  What benefit to you has it been to go to mystery conferences like Malice Domestic?

I'm about to get on the wrong side of a LOT of people, even though I don't mean to:  I think conference organizers work very hard to create a good experience, and I know lots of people get benefits from attending.

Me?  I attended two conferences (not Malice) that were fun and interesting, but ultimately did not lead to a business benefit when weighed against the cost of admission, travel, and lodgings.  What typically happens for me is that my contest entry always wins something, and I get an appointment (an "audience") with a high-powered agent or editor as a result, and I go to the appointment at the con, and the agent or editor is wildly enthusiastic and wants me to send the full manuscript right away.  I do so, and then about eight months to a year later I get it back with a form rejection attached.  Your mileage might differ greatly; I fervently hope that it does (using the universal "you" here, not Judy in particular!)  I know that many people report great forward strides in their careers from attending such conferences.  And they're wonderful for those who are adept at networking.  Good luck out there!

12.  What else would like to say about your books, the next one in your series?

My books appeal to hardcore readers who enjoy cadenced prose and the clever turn of phrase.  They are probably not for someone who says, "I hate metaphors" (although usually that is said while the reader is pointing at some other figure of speech--LOL) or "I like things to be simple and easy."  For some reason, it never comes out that way for me.  But of course I welcome anyone who is curious--please download a sample chapter and give my work a try!  That's how I find new authors.

I'm on Facebook as Shalanna Collins, and I have a page for my books at

http://www.facebook.com/DeniseWeeksBooks

My blogs (if you want to take a peek):

http://deniseweeks.blogspot.com/  (general official blog)

http://shalanna.livejournal.com/     (personal journal)

http://shalannacollins.blogspot.com/   (official Shalanna blog)

http://jackiesjotting.blogspot.com/  (for the Jacquidon Carroll series)

Thanks so much for giving me your blog as a bully pulpit, Judy!  I'm looking forward to reading and blurbing your upcoming new book.  See y'all on the 'net!

***

Denise Weeks, a lifelong writer from Dallas, Texas, has been writing since she could hold a crayon.  Like many homegrown Texas humorists, she is not funny.  Novelist, pianist, belly dancer, baton twirler (but no fire batons ever again, by order of the Renner, Texas, Volunteer Fire Brigade), and amateur radio operator.  She is a polymath (and that doesn’t mean she can still actually DO math).  A graduate of SMU many years after Laura Bush, Denise has worked as a software engineer, Dairy Queen soft-serve cone maker (she perfected that little twirl on the top of the dipped cone), and middle school math tutor.  She and her husband live happily in a northern suburb of Dallas, Texas, with their two beloved pets: a yappy Pomeranian and Denise’s elderly mother.

Her novel Dulcinea (written as Shalanna Collins)was the first runner-up in the original 1996 Warner Aspect First Fantasy Novel contest.  She collects recipes for fried yak.  Homeland Security sees her as a Person of Interest.  (Guess which two of those statements are lies.)

Killer Frost: Reader Comments V.

Orchid and Daffodils from Early March 2012.  This March the orchid, again on my dining table, has five flower stems, and the daffodils persist despite many frosts.

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Here are more reader comments on Killer Frost:  I'm still open to more comments.  Send them along.

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KILLER FROST READER COMMENTS V.

Larissa Bavrina (Russian friend, in a letter of Dec. 1, 2012):

I fully agree with the comments from Margaret Stephens and Pam Kilby (see Reader Comments II, blog for Sept 21).  I imagined the classroom where Penny taught, the students--their characters are vivid and real, then the room at Penny’s home where her friends gathered to discuss the college problems, the scenes in the garden and the orchard.  Though it’s not clear about love–why it struck Penny unexpectedly (it I can understand) and suddenly finished (this I cannot understand).  Maybe it was friendship, spiritual intimacy, but not love?  By the end of the book, I felt like I was in a circle of people about whom I cared much and would have liked to learn how they’d live after the mystery had been solved. ... 

So this book is number 6 in the series.  Maybe there’s a description of Penny in one of the books?  There’s no information why they were in Wales?  Maybe it’s also in the previous book?  One thing is certain.  I really wonder what happens next to Penny, Oscar, and the college administration, and the students.

Review from mystery author Denise Weeks (in email 2-17-13):

I really enjoyed this book and the issues that the author explored via her setting, characters, and plot events.  It was more literary than most cozies and contains a few literary allusions (which just made me like it all the more), but you can figure those out.  Because there’s no gore or gratuitous sex/blood/violence, it’s perfect for younger readers as well as adult mystery fans.

Penny Weaver is hired to replace a fired professor in the middle of the semester at St. Francis College in Raleigh.  The school has many students who aren’t properly prepared for college (and at least one with a learning disabilities and a possible diagnosis of brain damage) because this gets them state and federal grants and perks.  She’s immediately attracted to her department chairman, Oscar, who seems intensely attracted back–and this creates tension in her mind because of her passion for her husband, Kenneth, and her fear that something will happen between them.  First the school provost and then a professor are murdered, though more important concerns come to everyone’s minds.

The characters were well drawn and believable.  I can’t resist saying that one character here (in fact, two of them, one of each gender) reminded me of Lennie in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.  The solution of the crimes turned out to be a surprise to me.  I enjoyed the portrayal of campus life, and especially appreciated the author’s knowledge that many educators are in the business of helping and saving the students who are struggling–their reward is to help students succeed despite the odds against them. (Of course there is always the unscrupulous teacher and/or administrator, and these are illuminated here as well.)  The pressures in academia now work against the traditional role of the university, which was always to teach students how to think.  Now the concerns of the administration is elsewhere.  This makes the task of a teacher ever more challenging.

I’ll note that one reason some reviewers might be upset with the book (someone mentioned the dialect spoken informally by many of the characters–I’ll get back to this) is that it reveals what’s happening in much of academia and not exclusively at traditionally Black/African American colleges, but there as well.  So very many students come unprepared and functionally illiterate/empty of study skills and unable to catch allusions and references.  This is the fault, in my opinion, of the test mentality caused by “No Child Left Behind” and also by the emphasis of the entire culture on popularity and youth/beauty instead of knowledge and strength of character (integrity).  Our youth culture may claim it is big on education, but to be “smart” in school is to be “uncool,” and celebrity worship leads children and older students to emulate dangerous and unwise behavior.  No longer is a professor held in high esteem and respect (remember in the original film “The Day the Earth Stood Still” how the little boy took the visitor to the professor as a high authority?).  This novel exposes the way that many athletes are brought to college and left on their own to cope with the more stringent requirements of their classes, and told only that they have to pass or else.  It exposes the difficulty of catching up when you have basically been passed forward without learning to read, to reason, or to put together a coherent essay (not to mention the innumeracy and lack of mathematical intuition).

It’s happening all over, so I’m sure it is happening at the traditionally black colleges as well.  If this is a hot button for you, then this won’t be the book for you.  Others with open minds will be better able to cope with these ideas.

In the book, many students and friends of the sleuth speak a dialect or form of Black English.  This is bound to offend some readers, even though it’s probably fairly accurate as a portrayal of the way some people still speak causally to their friends and those they trust.  It lends flavor and color to the setting.  It is also another indicator of how these students are not equipped to deal with college and the world beyond, to me, because they don’t use formal or business English when they’re in class, as I would.  I didn’t take offence, and in fact it enriched my understanding of the characters.

I’m looking forward to the next book in this series.  Recommended!

Farm Fresh and Fatal Will Be Published

Organic vegetables for sale at local market 2008.

FARM FRESH AND FATAL TO BE PUBLISHED

I have learned that the publisher of Killer Frost, Mainly Murder Press in Connecticut, will publish Farm Fresh and Fatal, the next mystery in my series, in November 2013.  Since my poetry chapbook Beaver Soul, will be published in late August 2013, with books available only a month later, I will combine my celebrations and readings, so look for a launch party sometime in November probably (I don’t have an exact day in November yet), and then readings to follow, some into the new year.  

Here’s the gist of the plot for Farm Fresh and Fatal.  The same central characters are back:

When Penny Weaver joins the new Riverdell Farmers’ Market to represent their neighborhood garden, squabbles break out among the farmers about their places.  The county poultry agent tries to sort them out before Nora, the market manager, arrives, infuriating her.  Penny discovers that there may have been racism behind her friend Sammie’s almost not being accepted to sell her flower bouquets.  After the third market, the poultry agent is found dead of food poisoning, apparently after drinking the fruit punch provided by Nora.  That and her fights with him cause her to be arrested.

Penny and Sammie work to uncover the real poisoner and to release Nora.  The poultry agent is unpopular with the quirky farmers, with the exception of the genetically modified seeds man and the baker/jelly maker.  Penny and Sammie discover that the poison was black nightshade, but which farmer grows it and who put it in the punch?  The state ag department threatens to close the market, if the case isn’t solved. 

***

I will have pre-publication orders for both books, for Farm Fresh and Fatal, with checks coming to me directly; with Beaver Soul, pre-pub checks will go to Finishing Line Press, and will determine the print run.  I have to sell fifty-five copies to have the poetry book printed; the more I sell ahead, the more copies they print.  Both presses are quite good, and I’m pleased to work with them.  These days authors have a lot of promotion and sales work to do.  I’m so delighted to get books in print, I’m happy to have the opportunity to sell my books, and my faithful readers have rewarded me by buying and enjoying the books.  I will keep my book news list and this blog posted as to when the pre-pub orders begin.  So more to come, folks!  Stay tuned.  Judy Hogan

Review: Carolyn Mulford: Show Me the Murder

Show Me the Murder by Carolyn Mumford.  Five Star.  Publication date: February 15, 2013.  328 pages, $25.95.  ISBN: 978-1-4328-2688-8.

When Phoenix Smith, who’d been working undercover for the CIA, is shot in Istanbul and given medical leave, she returns to her hometown, Laycock, Missouri, to see her oldest friend and arrange to sell her mother’s house.  On her arrival she becomes the comforter instead of the comforted when she learns that her friend Annalynn Keyser’s husband, Boom, the local sheriff, has been found dead in a sleazy motel room with a young Hispanic woman, Maria Lopez, in what the Sheriff’s Department is calling a murder-suicide.  Annalynn, though grief-stricken, is outraged at this assumption.  She knows her husband would not have been sexually involved with, or have killed, Maria, and she is sure he wouldn’t commit suicide.  She begs Phoenix to help her prove that Boom was victim, not killer.

Still in pain after her surgery, Phoenix agrees.  A third friend, Connie Diamante, insists on being involved.  Phoenix uses her considerable shooting and detecting skills to work out what actually happened while keeping as much of her real situation from her friends as she can, as well as hiding her sharp shooter skills from the local deputies.

Annalynn talks her way into the role of temporary sheriff.  Connie gets people to talk to her, and Phoenix finds a wounded, trained Belgian Malinois police dog, whose response, when taken to the motel where the shooting occurred, convinces Phoenix that Achilles had witnessed what happened and would be able to identify the real killer.

Once Achilles, who’d been slightly wounded and left for dead, is rescued and healed, he sticks close to Phoenix and protests mightily when he’s separated from her.

There is suspense here, gun battles, and a car chase, but what I enjoyed most were the relationships between the three friends and between them and other characters, including the dog.  Mulford has a real talent for showing how people change, how they influence each other, how they learn to trust and change their minds in good ways.  I also liked the authentic presentation of the tension between Phoenix’s cynical inner voice and how she speaks and behaves to others, how she works out whom she can and can’t trust.  Her gradually strengthening attachment to Achilles, when had been convinced that she does not need a dog, is endearing.

The plot is deftly handled, with lots of puzzles for the reader, and the ending is both a surprise and satisfying.

Five Star has published a winner, and I understand another book in the Phoenix Smith series is in the works. 

***

I grew up on a farm near Kirksville, Missouri, the fictionalized setting of my first middle grade/young adult novel, The Feedsack Dress. During the summer I worked in the fields and garden, pumped water for the milk cows, and read books that carried me far away.

About the fifth grade the urge to write stories overtook me. A few years later I learned that few writers earn a living writing novels. That knowledge and experience on my high school and college papers  prompted me to earn a Master’s degree in journalism at the University of Missouri.

Before taking my first job as a magazine editor in Washington, D.C., I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia, teaching English and helping build a school for lepers. On my way back to the States, I traveled for six months in the Middle East and Europe.

One intriguing city I visited was Vienna, Austria. I returned there to work for the United Nations until the bureaucratic writing drove me to quit. Again I spent six months returning to the States, traveling through Asia and Australia.

Settling in Washington, D.C., I edited a national magazine on service-learning and then became a freelance writer and editor. I wrote hundreds of articles, four nonfiction books, and a variety of other nonfiction materials. I edited several national newsletters, most notably Writing That Works. From 1990 to 2011, it served as a monthly “desktop seminar” for corporate writers and editors.

A few years ago I revived my childhood dreams of creating my own worlds. I moved back to Columbia, Missouri, to focus on historical fiction for young readers and, my current emphasis, contemporary mysteries for adults. My mystery series begins with Show Me the Murder (February 2013) and Show Me the Deadly Deer (December 2013).

Photo by Rex Rogers, 2008.

What I Feel I Must Do

Snow scene of Russian winter.  Photo by Vera Belikh.  Taken while she helped with a winter camp for children near Komarovo, House of Creativity for Writers, near St. Petersburg,where I stayed July  1992.

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The thing I do that’s unusual, I’ve learned, is work from what I feel I must do–hold onto that–and then use my ingenuity to solve the problems related to persisting toward my goal.  Things don’t always fall neatly into place.  Arranging my trip to Russia turned out to have many snags.  

Communication was so difficult, and then the local Sister Cities group that was my link for information on how to do this was preoccupied with their other projects.  They had their first big delegation going to Kostroma at the same time.  Perhaps their leadership was even resentful that I had popped up in the middle of things with an official invitation.  They helped me, but half-heartedly and distractedly.  I remember my rage at the person I needed most to help me.  It took him forever to get through on the phone to Kostroma, but then he forgot to ask my urgent question.  My rage did no good.  

I needed patience.  Looking back I see that I did the main and necessary things, and so did M. on his end.  We worked–both of us–from this faith in the other.  With so little knowledge.  A remarkable combination of faith and ingenuity.  I got a cable from him a few days before I left and figured out all the Russian words with my Russian-English dictionary but one.  I wrote to him the number of the train car I’d be in, and that, it turned out was what the missing word had asked.  I had answered the question before I knew what the question was.  But that letter hadn’t arrived even when I left Russia.  

I had learned it was very difficult for the Russians to telephone outside of Russia, but he called me in Finland.  My Finnish friend answered the phone and said someone was speaking a language she couldn’t understand.  She hung up.  I said, “Maybe it’s Russian.  Next time speak English.”  She did, and sure enough, I was being called.  I talked to the woman I would later know as Natasha, my interpreter, and she asked me the train car number, and I ran to get my ticket.  So all worked out.  They found us (my son and me) in car number nine.

One of the funniest of my obstacles, occurring on the very last day, was that I had to take a car radio Tim had borrowed back to his friend.  The friend had proved himself untrustworthy for Tim, as far as I was concerned, over and over.  Tim got angry at him but persisted in the friendship.  The friend, B, was trying to manipulate Tim into coming to town on the pretext of the radio, and I put my foot down.  I would take the radio when I went to town in the morning to do other errands.  I got excited.  I yelled. 

Notwithstanding his knowledge that I was upset, B called back, disguised his voice, and asked to speak to Tim.  Then he asked Tim if he could come out and get his radio.  I again said no.  Tim got very unhappy with this fight between his friend and his mother, and said, “Here, you talk to him.”  

So I said, “B, I’ll bring your radio at 8 in the morning.  You be there to get it.”  And hung up.  B called back again to say their Doberman pinscher would be loose in the A.M.  I left for town that last morning in N.C., wondering if after everything else, a Doberman pinscher would eat me up and stop me from going.  I put the radio and speakers in a box and approached the house cautiously.  No dog.  I opened the car door and pushed the box out.  Then B appeared.  I pointed toward the box and drove away.

So the Doberman pinscher, the fiercest dog in the U.S., by reputation, didn’t keep me at home, didn’t prevent my getting to this window in this room where I am happy to sit and look and think and write all day long.

Being here though, doing what I’d planned to do here, is a tougher challenge than the effort to leave so that I would have this time to write.  Jacques Maritain, whose book Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry I’m reading, refers to the “self-abnegation and the ordeals imposed by poetic creativity.” (161)  “The road of creative intuition, however, is exacting and solitary, it is a road to the unknown, it passes through the sufferings of the spirit.”

It is so much easier to plan to write than to write; to arrange time, notwithstanding impatient friends, bank book errors, and Doberman pinschers, than it is to do the inward searching and groping that writing means, for me anyway.  Some days it comes to me relatively easily and quickly, and then my mind signals that’s all for awhile, so I do other things....  

Little chores are a welcome relief from the slow turning of my mind as it wrestles with feelings and meanings.  I can’t say I know where this book is going any more than I know how this new love I feel will work out.  Two mysteries I’m living with and laboring with in the present.  Both are in a birth process.  Yesterday I labored, and slowly but surely, words came to me.  Today I labor and the words seem so elusive–or perhaps it’s the dance of meaning under the words.  I guess my being here is not unlike my being in Russia because of a bond I felt with another soul.  I’m here because of a promise to my own soul...

Once I put the same determined spirit, the same care and ingenuity into raising children, into keeping Carolina Wren going.  I took breaks, but then I went right back into harness.  I’m not going back into harness this time.  I am going to lean on my writing, put the weight of both feet there.  That’s the thing I’ve needed to think about and bring to the surface.  The face to face fact of it has eluded me.  

It’s like, all morning and now well into the afternoon, I’ve been laboring to draw up this brimming bucket of water from the well inside me, and I doubted after awhile there was anything there to come up, it seemed to be moving so slowly.  There’s resistance.  Fear?  Maybe?  Maybe I’m not a good enough writer to lean on my writing.  What do I have to give?  How do I know it’s worthwhile?  Who will wish to read it?  I don’t have these answers.  I’ll have them one day hence, when this present has become the past, probably a pivotal moment in the past when clearly, I’ll one day see, I did what I needed to.  

Then the hills of my life will look to me like these Devon hills look right now.  Sun is everywhere upon them.  The green of every pasture and field glows with the immortal ichor, the green blood of the gods.  The clouds are held at bay or pass without coming between the sun’s rays and that brilliant, everywhere-present green. ..

It comes down to devotion.  To admitting when one has a certain steady, consistent ability–a hexis–according to Maritain.  Creative intuition as a gift.  It happens to me.  He describes it exactly: (p. 35)

“Art resides in the soul and is a certain perfection of the soul.  It is what Aristotle called an hexis, in Latin, a habitus, an inner quality or stable and deep-rooted disposition that raises the human subject and his natural powers to a higher degree of vital formation and energy, or that makes him possessed of a particular strength of his own; when a habitus, a ‘state of possession’ or master quality, an inner demon, if you prefer–has developed in us, it becomes our most treasured good, our most unbending strength, because it is an ennoblement in the very kingdom of human nature and human dignity.”

So I have this.  My soul has this gift, and I’ve accepted it but kept on with many other things.  And now I’ve come to Thoreau’s ‘one thing,’ as much as possible.  There will be other work, and I’ll have to earn a living.  But my task over the next few years will be to free more and more time, so that this gift has my best energy and time and effort.  I do have a persistent experience behind me.  I’ve stayed true to it.  So many writers around me are confused and, even when they have the gift, betray it.  At age 53 my hexis is in very good condition, and my conscience clear.  A few people have been interested in what I write–a small but genuinely enthusiastic audience.

I also know it’s work of the hardest kind: work of the spirit. Patient digging and examining, evaluating what one has turned up.  But then suddenly the spirit leaps in, like sun reappearing after the clouds have blown over, and the words rush to the surface of the mind, and one can’t write quickly enough.  All the pieces of one’s daily life–spread out on the window ledge–the books and papers, the glass holding a sprig of honeysuckle, the grey rocks with a white stripe I picked up in Wales, the empty coffee cup and small alarm clock, the paintings from the Kostroma painter.  I watch for changes as the light changes.  The birchbark glasses case M. gave me.  

All these now are part of an integral vision, whereas before they were only pieces–separate objects.  Now they form a whole.  They are at this moment in time the tangibles, the signs and symbols of my writing life, my devotion, my patient sitting here by this window, as by a pond, waiting for fish to rise or turtles to break the surface for air and then descend again.  The sun brings the chickens across the road running out into their yard to peck for insects, and a sudden shower from a cloud blown low to the ground, sends them scuttling back into their house with the conical thatched top.

It’s a lot to take on oneself–the role of poet and seer.  The way Maritain describes it, I recognize it.  He says, “... so the unique rule of the perfect artist is finally: ‘Cling to your creative intuition, and do what you want.’   ‘This kind of excellence... we recognize in a person in whom we are aware of a rare presence, a pure creative force, or an untrammeled spirit.’” (p. 45, last quote from George Rowley, Principles of Chinese Painting, p. 80).  

I’m like this.  But to live it out, approach it, not limping, but with both feet carrying their weight, is awesome.  It does imply I’m devoted to my artistic “demon,” living for the sake of my habitus.  It may well be the way I help other people, including other writers, the most–by living this way.  I can’t expect everyone to be enthralled, to think I’m great.  I have to do it without asking for recognition.  I have to do it, whatever people think of it.  I have to leave my thought, and the words given to me to speak it, articulate, alive in the world, written down, and hopefully, printed.

I have no choice in this either.  These two strands of love and art are choiceless.  But having chosen and acknowledged them in the present; having accepted the rule of “It” a la D.H. Lawrence, I am free.  Free to struggle and occasionally to be given a respite from struggle, an ecstatic moment when I know that everything I did before, no matter how wrong or inadequate it seemed at the time, was right, was good, because it led me here–to this present moment, which is where, exactly where, I’m supposed to be.

Living in the Present

January sun on my  seven month hens, photo by John Ewing.  The green is chickweed, their winter vegetable.

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More excerpts from Change of Life, Devon, September 1990.

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September 6.  The present is perhaps the greatest mystery of all, and if I’ve learned anything at all, it is, perhaps, how to live in the present.

There was a time when I tried to wrest meaning out of the present. I wanted to understand why I was suffering so much or why I was in love.  I wanted the present to enlighten me about itself, but I desired this in vain.  It wasn’t possible.  I found an idea that helped in an astrological book by Dane Rudhyar.  He said that often we must wait for some time to pass in order to understand what is happening to us in the present.  

I also found an image in Esther Harding’s The Way of All Women that helped even more.  She said that in situations full of conflict, one could only work one’s way forward like a plant finds its way through a wall toward the light on the other side.  Trust one’s intuition each day.  Do one’s best with each stage forward.  And one would look back and marvel at one’s cleverness.

I’ve seen this work.  I’ve now been in countless difficult, “impossible” situations, and unable to see my way forward, nor to understand what was happening, what it meant.  Yet I’ve trusted to the deepest impulses of my heart and kept moving.

This got me here.  I have lengthened the time I give to my writing and to my time off from my regular work.  I need a way to get completely out of one kind of life with all its activities, schemes, and worries, and into another.  

When I left North Carolina mid-July, I still had a list of the bills the press needed to pay, and the various moneys we could expect to receive, in my head.  I was waking up early worrying about money.  This was intensified when I discovered that I had made a mistake in arithmetic in my own checking account, and instead of having $1000 in it, I had $0.  I had just bought $1500 in travelers’ checks and thought I might have to trade some of them back in.  By working on the bank book carefully, planning smaller amounts on some of my monthly bills, asking Carolina Wren to pay some of my loan back earlier, and also receiving over $300 Saturday night before we left, from the group of people I was leaving behind in charge of Carolina Wren Press, I was able to work through that crisis, which had given me a leaden feeling in my stomach.  

Then there was my friend E., to whom Carolina Wren owed money.  We were late paying her, and I had to call her and say it might be still later.  She was not patient.  She was angry and let me know. 

Then my youngest child decided to break up with her boyfriend the day before we left and wanted to come home.  Before I could leave to go get her, she had called back to say they had made up. Perhaps she needed to know she could stay in my house and use my car in my absence.  In any case, I told her she could, if they did, in fact, break up.

Many of these things would have kept someone else from going.  They might have kept me from going if I hadn’t been following an inner directive.  It is easier though for me now to see in my own mind the legitimacy of taking time off than it was ten years ago.  I had even borrowed money from my mother again.  I didn’t like to ask, but I had this urgent something inside me saying to go, partly because of M., whom I felt I must meet.  He had done his part and sent the official invitation–I must now get there!  But also because I was at a crossroads with my writing.  

I must put my full weight on it for awhile, even if, when I got back, the various money problems again descended on me.  They will.  Other people are working on it in my absence, but even if Carolina Wren is doing okay, I’ve got the rent to pay when I get back.  Some work is lined up, but I’ll have to find more.  Most people wouldn’t do that either.  I’ve gotten good at calculated risks in the past nineteen years.  I can get some kind of job, if worst comes to worst.  I have friends and a friendly landlord.  I won’t starve.  I’ll pay the rent.  I have a class lined up to teach.  And Carolina Wren still owes me $500.

***

Third installment next week!