Denali Summer has a Cover

If you get my newsletter, you saw a snippet. If you follow on me social media anywhere, you’ve seen it, but now I’m getting around to posting here!

Denali Summer has a cover!

And you can preorder!

I’m so excited!

Faydra With an F: An Author Newsletter

One of the personal essays in our ninth grade English textbook is “The Work You Do, the Person You Are” by Toni Morrison. My classes and I talk about the divide between young Morrison and her white, lady-of-the-house boss. A divide so wide the boss is never named, is only She and Her. (Yes, capitalized.) We talk about how and why it can be hard to speak up. 

During this lesson I shared an anecdote about my first job as a babysitter. Twelve-year-old me was at a neighborhood pool with friends and a lady walked up to us and asked who babysat. Though I never had, I thought: I do now, and I announced that I did, I would! 

I held that job for a very long while, and for the entirety of the time that I watched their two-year-old, put her to bed, and then enjoyed their MTV, a cable luxury we did not have at my house, I was Saydra. I’m sure I mumbled a correction at least once, but week after week the twenty dollar checks for my services were made out to Saydra. The checks cleared, and Saydra I remained. I had the same inexperience of youth as Morrison but none of the racial or socio economic divides between me at that first employer. Even in a lower-stakes environment, speaking up was hard.

Eventually, Morrison was able to tell Her no when She continued to try to pay her in used clothes, but in other areas, Morrison accepted poor treatment while learning to separate her identity from her job. 

I simply learned that my name is often misheard. (There was also a birthday cake incident when an “S” was smudged off and an “F” hastily piped on before we carried it away.) To this day, whenever I say my name on the phone or spell it out to anyone, I say, “Faydra with an F as in Florida.”

I had other babysitting jobs. Then came my first “real” job at Mrs. Fields cookies in the Gardens Mall. In college, I mentored a football player (this was an actual, my university-paid-for-it gig), worked the circulation desk at the library for a year, and I got paid to type my notes for my larger classes, so they could be sold.  Was that called Class Notes? Anyone at UF in the 1990s remember? None of these jobs gave me an identity.  They were another way to fill my time and earn a few more dollars to pay for new clothes or more CDs. 

Now I’m a teacher, a writer, a mom, a wife, and a person who often sighs in the middle of the moment and thinks I’d rather be paddle boarding. I’m a person who hopes to get Taylor Swift tickets for her upcoming tour.  I love pretty much all big, ridiculous dogs and one little Nugget of a dog. I could eat spicy shrimp tacos every day.  Books! I’m a person who buys all the books! And reads a whole bunch of ‘em too.

This newsletter will be about the work I do,  and it will be about the person I am:

Faydra with an F. From Florida.  

The plan is to send it monthly-ish. You can subscribe below.

Award News

Devil Springs is no longer in print, and I won’t see my sales figures or a royalty check because the small press that published this book closed and did not arrange to get me these things. Sigh.

Publishing. It’s not for the weak of heart. (Or for those who truly need it to pay the bills.)

I have no plans to self-publish Devil Springs even though I have my rights back, so if you want a copy, maybe there’s some still in stock at Amazon or other online places, but I have no idea who gets paid from such a purchase. I do have about 25 copies of my own stock I can sign and sell though. I also have a box of ARCS sent to me after the publisher closed (kinda useless timing) that I’m happy to give away free.

AND since Devil Springs is now a Florida Writer’s Association Silver Royal Palm Literary Award winner, clearly you want to scoop up those copies :-)

My LOVE ON MAIN Blog Hop Stop

Welcome to this leg of the Filles Vertes Publishing LOVE ON MAIN blog hop!

If you somehow landed on this page and haven’t heard about the blog hop, click here:
https://www.fillesvertespublishing.com/blog/2020/01/06/love-on-main-blog-hop

My short story “The Valentine’s Eve Not-a-Date Photo Scavenger Hunt” takes place in the fictional town of Devil Springs and follows Paige Bellamy who reluctantly participates in an event hosted by the local church of a new friend. She regrets this decision as Paige has been mostly anti-social since moving back home.

If you haven’t already, add LOVE ON MAIN to your Goodreads TBR here: http://bit.ly/LoveOnMain

Also, pre-orders are available at FVPub.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository, or your fave bookseller. Convenient links are listed below:

FVP: www.fillesvertespublishing.com/product/love-on-main-a-romance-anthology/

Amazon: www.amazon.com/Love-Annual-Short-Story-Anthology/dp/1946802549

Barnes & Noble: www.barnesandnoble.com/w/love-on-main-patty-blount/1135129372?ean=9781946802545

Book Depository: www.bookdepository.com/Love-on-Main-Patty-Blount/9781946802545

Enjoy this interview with Paige and get a glimpse of a story awaiting you in LOVE ON MAIN. Remember to look for the keyword/phrase!

Happy Hopping!

***

Me: Let’s back up a bit before we get to the day of the story.  What has you living in Devil Springs?

Paige: My college boyfriend and I married but then separated after about five months. I came home to figure out my next steps as the divorce was being finalized.  

Me: And what did you decide?

Paige: I didn’t really. My mom had a stroke, and I needed to stay and help take care of her. It’s just how things happened.

Me: How’s your mom now?

Paige: Not the same. She still needs a lot of help. She gets confused easily, so my dad wants somebody to be home with her at all times. 

Me: And that someone is you or your dad?

Paige: That’s how it’s been, yes.

Me: When you’re not with your mom, what do you do?

Paige: I work at Walgreens — it was the only thing hiring nearby when I first came home.

Me: And for fun?

Paige: I binge-watch shows. After I met Adriana, she’s who got me to do the hunt—her husband is a pastor at the church who put it on, we’d grab coffee or get together for lunch or something about once a week. My mom has a raised bed garden in the back, so I help her with that. Well, now I do most of it.

Me: That’s it? Did you have other interests before you moved home? I feel like there’s this before-the-move-home Paige and the (AFTER)-the-move-home Paige and maybe they aren’t really the same Paige?

Paige: Before I was in college. I went to football games. I had study groups. I was always with friends.  Jackson, that’s my ex, and I had a group we hung out with all the time — went to movies, got together for dinner, played frisbee golf — all kinds of things. And we stayed in Gainesville and did a month-to-month lease on our apartment while we figured out jobs. Then he got hired by a company in Portland and said he could go out by himself — room with a co-worker till he got a place, and I could join him eventually. Eventually got pushed off to never.

Me: Ouch

Paige: Yup.

Me: So you’re a different person now because you’ve been through a lot, but what about you? What do you want? 

Paige: You sound like Cole.

Me: Cole, he was one of your teammates on the scavenger hunt. It seemed like he was the reason you stayed instead of bailing. Want to talk about Cole?

Paige smiles and starts twisting a strand of hair. She has a lot to say about Cole, about how she got to know him and what they’ve been doing since they met. A whole new energy strikes Paige and her voice accelerates, but I’m not going to share what she says. Instead, you can read the story.

Devil Springs Has a Cover!

And a release date!! (April 28th 2020)

And is available for pre-order!!! (And you can support my publisher directly by ordering from their site: https://www.fillesvertespublishing.com/shop/)

Five fun things about Devil Springs:

1. This story was inspired by a very tiny news blurb about a mayor in a small Florida town who really did officially ban the devil from her town. I didn’t research it or base anything in my book off any of the actual events — that one bit of information was enough to write a book.

2. The oldest, oldest draft of this was just a short story which was part of my graduate thesis collection in 2003.

3. There’s a scene where Mesa does a lot of angry smashing, and it was really satisfying to write.

4. Mesa’s neighbor Drew has Fragile X but a mosaic form, so he’s higher functioning than most with Fragile X Syndrome.

5. The main character’s name is Mesa which is the name of my oldest niece. Yes, real-life Mesa knew I was stealing her name. I’m not really sure how real-life Mesa got her name, but fictional-character-Mesa explains her moniker this way:

Mesa means table in Spanish and in English it’s a table-top landscape, so it definitely counts as odd, but my mom and dad spoke their commitment vows during sunset at a canyon overlook in Mesa Verde National Park. In my baby book Mom wrote, “In Spanish mesa means table, but in our family, Mesa means love, beauty, and the beginning of everything.” 

When I Think About Russia

We 80s kids were the last to live our childhood during the Cold War. I can remember when Reagan said, "Tear down this wall!" to Gorbachev. I have flashbulb memories of the footage of the wall coming down, my German mother crying. I was in Germany the next summer, collecting pieces of the wall for myself. I still have them, along with some barbed wire and glass broken out of the guard towers. I witnessed the pollution and the poverty of the east at that time. I could not believe that I had relatives who had to live that way.

Jump ahead: When Kevin and I were in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, in 2005 we were told that you could still dig anywhere in the city and find bones because of the 5-month-long battle that had waged there between Germans and Russians in WW2. I wondered if my distant ancestors would consider me a traitor for adopting a Russian in this area into my own family. But if the stories I'd heard were true, not glossed over or revised to be on the right side of history, no one in my German family supported Hitler, in fact worked to subvert him, so I'd guess they'd find irony and humor in it. The living relatives certainly didn't care.

Before we physically had Kaden, we were essentially tourists in Russia, seeing the sights, shopping, and hitting every restaurant because we ate out every single meal, but we were warned (and warned and warned) that once we had Kaden to lay low, stay in our hotel. Russians resented Americans adopting babies, had been known to call the police if a child in their care was crying for any reason. They held suspicions that we were bringing the children home to be slaves. We followed the advice... sorta. We sometimes ventured out quickly for food but dined in the hotel more often than not. We did use a translator to show us the Kremlin, and when we realized a Russian family we knew from The States happened to be in Moscow we went with them to the zoo.

Another jump: In 2012 Putin ended all American adoptions of Russian orphans in retaliation for the U.S. Magnitsky Act. (Google it). Since then I almost never say Putins name out loud without putting the word "pissy" in front of it. Pissy Putin has a nice, condescending ring to it, don't you think? 

This September: I read Ruta Sepetys's Between Shades of Gray and learned of a Stalin atrocity of which I'd never known--how Lithuanian intellectuals were rounded up in the early 40's and shipped to Siberian labor camps and even the South Pole to be silenced. (And after the election I wondered do I, like Lina's mother, now have reason to sew bribes within the lining of my clothes?)

And now: My oldest may have been born in Russia, we may have photos with Mother Russia and beautiful souvenirs, but we still recognize the evil in Russia's history and the present.

This very night: For a project, I was looking up both Donald and Hillary quotes from before election day. Oh this gem from the 3rd debate: “I actually think the most important question of this evening, Chris, is finally will Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this and make it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in this election, that he rejects Russian espionage against Americans which he actually encouraged in the past?”--HRC

Are we paying attention? Do we think there will be folks tried for treason for involvement and/or corrupt reasons for not following through with this Russian investigation prior to Nov 8th? Could one of those people be our president-elect? Is this bigger than the spying scandal that was Watergate? Whether it is or isn't--will it all blow over before we can know because of the power of the quickly re-filling swamp?

So yes, I think about various histories and if they even matter. 

But also: that I will remain a person who cheers when walls come down and not when they are built, when treason is exposed, when the guilty face judgment and receive their due consequences. 

And with all of this happening during the backdrop of Advent, I know I will cheer loudest when "the things of earth (particularly its corruptions and cruelties) grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace." Come, Lord Jesus.

In the Kremlin--little K in front of the world's biggest bell.

Our Read Aloud Books in 2016

Kaden (12), Blue (10 now, but 9 while reading these), and I still read children’s literature out loud. I started it because Kaden isn’t a strong reader but was ready for older kid stories. Without the support of our read-alouds, he still couldn’t access these books. Although I do the majority of the reading, their turns help with fluency/practice at reading with expression, my chance to correct their mispronunciations, my chance to correct Blue’s habit of speed reading that causes him to make up words. It also allows for occasional vocabulary explanations. (Of funny things—I realized that my boys had no idea what it was talking about in Harry Potter when it mentioned a “four-poster.” They couldn’t even guess it from context clues.)

Here are the books we covered in 2016:

From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg
I couldn't remember if I'd read this as a kid or not, so I wanted to. Alone in a museum at night. Stuff doesn't have to come alive for that to be awesome.

Amy Carmichael: Rescuer of Precious Gems by Janet and Geoff Benge
Back when we finished this I made Blue give me a quote for goodreads and he said, "Any kid who likes nonfiction and wants to be inspired to help people will love this book.”

Listening for Lucca by Suzanne LaFleur
We picked this because Ms LaFleur was slated to be at the April is for Authors event in West Palm and I wanted the boys to be familiar with the works of as many of the authors before we went.

A Snicker of Magic by Natalie Lloyd
Another April is for Authors speaker. Natalie tells kids, "Your words are magic," and "your life is the best story you'll ever write." She is a lovely positive role model with a very adorable dog named Biscuit. If you haven't already, check out her books for sure.

Teslas’s Attic by Neal Shusterman and Eric Elfman
Shusterman was April is for Authors keynote speaker. The boys attended this as well as a session that Shusterman and Elfman did together about how they collaborated. They loved this book AND that session!

The BFG by Roald Dahl
Had to read it before the movie came out.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Book 4) by J.K. Rowling
We have done the first three as read alouds in year’s past. The boys aren’t allowed to watch the movie until we’ve read the book together.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
I picked it before I ever knew about the movie that’s in the works.

The Secret Horses of Briar Hill by Megan Shepherd
There was enough buzz around this book that I bought it on release day. It was compared to The Secret Garden and… that’s all it takes apparently for me to say, “Take my money!’

And for our final book—which we’re starting today:

The Watsons Go To Birmingham by Christopher Paul Curtis
The kids went to Birmingham for Thanksgiving but all we did was hang out with family, see Fantastic Beasts, and visit a botanical garden. I’m eager for them to read some history about a place that, for them, is just about visiting cousins.

There is not one dud in this list, and I’m proud that I took them through nine books with a range that included two 1960s classics through a book released in October of 2016. I’m thinking we can do better than only one non-fiction in our 2017 picks, but other than that, I think we came up with a nicely eclectic list for 2016. We bought all of these books, and I love seeing the boys going back through them once we’re done. Blue, especially, is a big re-reader.

I recommend all of them, but of these books Blue says he liked Tesla’s Attic the best because of the crazy inventions. Kaden says he liked The BFG best because of the silly words, giant world and how the bad giants get trapped by the military.

Upcoming for 2017: We might still be finishing The Watsons Go to Birmingham. After that I think we’ll do R.J. Palacio’s Wonder, and then after that I’ll probably look to the April is for Authors line up to choose a book or three. 

Do you read aloud with your older kids? What have been your kids’ favorites?