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Anna Myers

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So, after reading Assassin by Anna Myers recently, I went on an all-out Myers binge.

I read Time of the Witches, Tulsa Burning, Stolen by the Sea, Graveyard Girl, Flying Blind, Fire in the Hills, and When the Bough Breaks.

I read them one after another. Some took me one day. Some took a little more.

I enjoyed them all, but my favorite, hands down, was When the Bough Breaks. I liked the complexity of the book. Instead of one storyline, there were two, woven together – and I liked both of them. Sometimes when I read a book from multiple points of view, I prefer one character and want the other to shut up and let me get back to my favorite. This time, both were intriguing. Both had terrible secrets – and both were satisfying to discover.

I also still love the little things you find in a book written by a person you actually know in real life. One of the storylines – the one featuring teenager Ophelia – includes a scene at the cemetery, which is across the street from the school. I’ve been to Myers’ hometown, and the cemetery in that town is indeed right across from the school. I was driving around, killing time before a SCBWI Oklahoma workshop, when I went by the school and noticed the cemetery nearby. I thought it was a little creepy and strange, and wondered what the students though. Later, when I read the When the Bough Breaks, I was delighted to see the school and cemetery put to use in literature.

Myers’ books are such a good way to combine fiction with historical events. We homeschool, and I think her work will be a great way to supplement history when we are doing studies this year. My oldest daughter doesn’t care for history, but I think that’s just because she hasn’t had it come alive for her yet. She enjoyed Assassin. Now I just need to add more historical fiction to the curriculum.

Time of the Witches – This one focuses on the Salem witch trials and the effect on the life of an orphan named Drucilla. She is separated from her bff, Gabe, and moves in with a crazypants woman and her weird family. After she and her foster sister start visiting the servant of the town’s new reverend, several girls, including Drucilla, start claiming they are being attacked by witches.

Tulsa Burning – A story of a boy named Noble who lives in the small town of Wekiwa and faces the Tulsa race riot of 1921. His friend is trapped in Tulsa, and Noble (nicknamed “Nobe”) goes into the burning city to find him. Wekiwa had a lot of twists with who was related to who – I would have liked to have seen a dossier on all of the people who lived in the town!

Stolen by the Sea – A girl named Maggie rides out the Galveston hurricane of 1900. I didn’t even know about this event before reading the book. According to Wikipedia, the Galveston hurricane is the deadliest natural disaster to ever strike the United States. An estimated 6,000-12,000 people died. In the book, Maggie stays in her home, struggling for survival with the help of Felipe, a Mexican boy from the orphanage who works for her father.

Graveyard Girl – Another new event for me – the yellow fever epidemic in Memphis in 1878. I loved the newspaper quotes at the beginning. I also adored a quote from Grace, the Graveyard Girl, about life and death. This was a library book, and I meant to write it down before I returned the book yesterday, but of course I didn’t. Figures. I did not really love the artwork on the front, and I was surprised at how that colored my view of the title character. It reminded me of someone, and that was hard to shake. On Amazon there’s a different cover for the paperback, which obscures Grace’s face. I wish I’d seen that one first.

Flying Blind – Told from two points of view – a young boy named Ben and…wait for it…a macaw named Murphy! I enjoyed it. This book looked at the problem of plume hunting in Florida at the turn of the 20th century. The line between right and wrong isn’t so clear when Ben learns that two of the plume hunters are orphans that use the sales of feathers to survive. Plume hunting took a terrible toll on birds, with millions being killed every year just for fashionable hats for women.

Fire in the Hills – This one was about a girl in a tiny Oklahoma town who loses her mother and cares for an ill military deserter during World War I. I liked the main character, Hallie, quite a bit and wouldn’t have minded this story going on a little longer.

All in all, eight enjoyable books. I probably should have spread them out a little more so I could give each one a post. Or maybe I should get back to writing my own novels.

When you find an author you like, do you rush and read everything by them that you can get your hands on? What authors have inspired you to race through all their books?

The writing mom

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It is hard to be a mom sometimes. Okay. It’s hard a lot of the time.

I stress and worry that I’m not a good enough mom. When I worked in newspaper, I had to put in my 40 hours a week even though I worked from home. I went out to interviews – kids in tow if it was daytime hours – and sometimes hid on the porch so I could talk uninterrupted to mayors and police chiefs on the phone. Favorite kid memory from that era – stopping in front of a burning house and snapping a picture from the car, then waving to the fire chief. “Kids in the car! I’ll call you!” I shouted, and he waved back in agreement.

Small town.

Now I’m in a corner of a different room in the house with my laptop, but I’m still trying to do it all. Headphones help to muffle the bickering of three (sometimes four) children while I slip into the worlds of my novels. A chapter here…a few sentences there.

I write what I can. I spend time with the kids when I can. I take a break from writing to make lunch or put laundry on the clothes line or admire a newly-captured baby frog. Or to yell at someone to clean up their mess. It’s not all sunshine, for sure.

And instead of feeling like I’m doing an adequate job at writing and at parenting, I feel like I’m doing a mediocre job at both.

I guess it’s my perfectionist nature.

Easter

Easter Egg coloring…yay Mom!

When I look at all I’ve accomplished: three awesome children and several completed books – I’m kind of impressed. But when I look at dishes stacked up and stains on the carpet and messy bedrooms and unrevised novels, I feel like I’ll never match up to what I’d like to be.

A friend posted a link to a blog post today that made me feel a little better. I need to remember to read it often, and try to live by it.

I’m not Supermom. I’m a real mom. That is enough.

http://rachelmariemartin.blogspot.com/2013/07/why-being-mom-is-enough.html

 

 

Tornado

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I’m still processing my feelings after a killer tornado ripped through central Oklahoma yesterday. Although the majority of damage was in Moore, the tornado started in Newcastle.

Newcastle’s the next town over from ours. They’ve been hit by several tornadoes in recent years. The tornado destroyed a subdivision behind a shopping center we frequent.

It also ruined the old Canadian River bridge linking our area to Oklahoma City.

The old North Canadian River bridge, after the May 20, 2013 tornado. Photo by Darla Welchel.

I know that there are more important things than a bridge.

I’ve loved that bridge since I was a little girl. My late sister loved that bridge. One time, she drove us there and we walked on it. This was deliciously illicit, because it was closed long ago.

I always thought it should be renovated for a pedestrian/bicycle bridge. I think they only kept it because there were gas lines under it. I guess now they will just tear it down. I wish it could be saved.

This comes right on the heels of a fire in our town that destroyed the old Opera House that was also desperately important to me and my sister. But that’s another story.

My friend Darla wrote a post about the bridge, complete with damage photos, at her blog, Through the Lens. It’s pretty incredible. I found out things about the bridge I never knew. It makes the loss even more tragic.

A Bridge with a Past but No Future

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Write about something that flopped.

Ugh. Another one that I have nothing to write about. I know these are few and far between, but I had a minute and thought I’d try to catch up again, and when I read this, I almost just closed out the window and gave up for another day.

Almost.

But then I didn’t. See, I know I’m not going to have an epiphany tomorrow or the next day and think of something that flopped…so I’ll never, ever get back into it. So I’m going to just sit here and try to think of something. Anything!

Okay. I got one.

And writing about things like this are hard – really hard – because they really show the imperfections of a person, I think. Like that babysitting deal I wrote about a while back. Revealing myself like that was really hard…and what it revealed was not as cool as I like to pretend to be. This is like that too.

Okay. I’m in college, and Ben and I and our friend Jeff are talking about doing something fun while we are still young enough to do so. I don’t remember what else we talked about, but the idea of saving up a little money and going to Europe came up. I remember thinking, Why not? We could do that.

imagebot (1)And the thing is, we could do it. There was this program that allowed college students to come to England and work for a summer as part of their education. It wasn’t really a green card type thing; it was a student program, but you could still do it the summer after graduation.

I did a lot of research on it. A whole heckuva lot of research. We had all types of fliers and pamphlets and information. I sent off for all kinds of brochures. I knew the program inside and out.

The idea of it was exhilarating. This was shortly after my dad had died of cancer, during our senior year of college. Maybe that had something to do with how thrilling the idea was of throwing away the shackles of college and a future of work and wifery that I was heading into. To travel – I’d never gone anywhere. To go out of the country – it was an unimaginable possibility. Could it really happen? My head said no…but my heart said yes. The excitement that other people experienced could actually be mine. I felt like an adventure of a lifetime – an adventure of new sights and smells and ideas – was within my grasp.

Others said it would never happen. Part of me agreed with them. How could I possibly go to Europe? But I pushed that part aside and said we could do it. I figured out how much we would need to save each month to make it happen. I looked into hostels and other places to stay and things to in Europe. I thought that if I acted like it would happen, and believed that it would happen, it would happen.

I guess Jeff felt the same way – he even went so far as to get a passport. I never made it that far. The first month, we didn’t make our savings goal. That was okay; we could make it up the next month. But that didn’t happen, and we never met our financial goals for the travel expenses. Three months into it, I realized it just wasn’t going to happen. Jeff still talked about it for a while even after I accepted the fact that we weren’t going. That was hard.

I wish we hadn’t told other people that we were going. But I really thought it could happen if we believed in it enough. I don’t think Ben ever believed in it though. I don’t know if that made a difference or not.

Well, you’ve probably guessed from the topic of this entry, but long story short, we didn’t make it to England. Instead, we graduated and moved back to Tuttle.

It’s okay, but it is kind of a painful subject – not because we didn’t get to go to the U.K., but just the failure of the whole thing. Planning for something and believing that it would happen, and then just having to let it go like that was a real disappointment. It also seems vaguely uncool, and trying to appear cool at all costs is kind of my thing. I guess I’m going to have to start letting that go, huh?

What a fun entry! Thanks, 100 journal entry site! These memories are truly priceless.