Crossing in Time: DL Orton

May 25, 2015May 25, 2015JT Twissel 4 Comments

Today in my When I Get it Together (WIGIT) semi-regular series on meeting other writers, please welcome DL Orton whose sci-fi debut novel CROSSING IN TIME (first in a series) was recently released and is free on Amazon May 25, 2015 (which I hope is today unless my talents using WordPress are total crap). This fast paced novel envisions a world on the brink of extinction where two star-crossed lovers may hold the key to survival. However, they must go back in time. A very risky business. From my reading of her book, DL has researched quantum physics, climate change, and – dare I say it? – Masters and Johnson’s studies on sex.

JTT: Hi Deb, thanks for agreeing to be featured on WIGIT. Let’s assume you’ve come from either the future or past (which is probably the truth). Which is it and why?

DLO: My pleasure, Jan! I’m from the future, of course. Come to the dark side; we have time machines. Unfortunately, if I told you why, I’d have to shoot you. And yes, a woman DOES eventually get elected President, gays DO have a constitutional right to marry, and Florida IS going under. If you want to know how Game of Thrones ends, sign up for my newsletter. (PS: If you’d like to win a special prize, guess the news headline for May 4th, 2050, and include your email address written backwards e.g. moc.notrold@old in the comments. I’ll send you a telepathic message if you win. Or perhaps I’ll arrive in your bathroom with the news!)

JTT: Wow, well I’ll have to sign up. In your book, Crossing in Time, you address two issues which psychologists believe are more strongly related that most people would think: parallel universes and the gender gap. Your response?

DLO: A shower curtain, an ant, and a bowling ball.

JTT: What?

Bowling ball with Einstein’s image – incredible!

DLO: Start with the shower curtain: a two-dimensional object in a 3-dimensional world. Imagine that you, gentle reader, are an ant, walking, talking, and having sex (do ants do that??) on a thin, flexible membrane (or a “brane” in physics-speak). Layered beneath you are a million other shower curtains, all of them with their own allotment of ants (some of which get paid 78 cents on the dollar due to slight differences in their copulatory organs). In a very real sense, those other ant universes are close to you in space (and time), but still seemingly undetectable — until someone drops a red-hot bowling ball on those piled up plastic sheets and makes the real-world equivalent of a black hole. Mind the gap.

JTT: Okay you’re officially too smart for me. I saw strong similarities between your female protagonist, Isabel, and Sarah Connor of the Terminator Series. Why is it that female protagonists in sci-fi series such as the Terminator, Alien and Avatar are much more formidable than the protagonists of erotica such as Fifty Shades of Grey? Can the sci-fi and erotica genres unite to gain an audience?

DLO: Well, if the reviews I’ve been getting are any indication, then no. 😉

Although my book is not erotica, I expect some women will be turned off by the sex (because my protagonist is the antithesis of the ditzy woman in 50 Shades, and Isabel’s lover is no demigod with a helicopter, handcuffs, and expensive taste in high heels. Sorry.)

JTT: No reason to be sorry. I think a lot of women fantasize about being an Isabel. I hate to ask this question because it is so hackneyed in writer interviews, but as a reader I really am interested to know, what motivated you to write this series?

DLO: When it comes to fiction, I find Frankenstein’s monster very appealing. I’m drawn to an author who tosses together eclectic body parts and then sews them into something cool and unexpected. Books with character-driven sci-fi, lots of action, good (real!) sex, dark humor, strong female leads, a bit of a mystery, and an edgy love story are great reads, but there aren’t many out there. So I wrote one. And once I got started, the monster took on a life of his own.

JTT: That’s an interesting answer! My book – the Monster! Just one last question: What do you wished I’d asked you and why?

DLO: “What did you do with the $500,000 advance you got for the book?” But I’ll settle for: “Any advice for unpublished writers?”

I once googled “how to get rid of a dead body” as part of my book research. The browser ads I started getting after that were downright scary, and I began to wonder if the NSA was going to coming knocking on my door. (I can’t imagine what would have happened if I googled “how much fertilizer does it take to blow up a building.”) I have since learned about “private browsing,” and I highly recommend it.

My second best tip is: Keep writing, but also keep reading! Lots of the unpublished writers I meet have stopped reading because they don’t feel they have the time for it, and I think that’s a mistake. Reading is an excellent way to keep your writing tools sharp, and hey, it’s damn good way to come up with unsavory phrases to google!

And my final tip: Murder the hero, maim the children, rip the clothes off the intrepid heroine, bestow fame and riches on the villain, and set the whole damn city on fire, but whatever you do, don’t draw cartoons of bearded dead guys, and don’t shoot the dog!

JTT: Great advice! Best of luck with the book.

Between Two Evils Series: The First Disaster

DL ORTON lives in the foothills of the Rockies where she and her husband are raising three boys, a golden retriever, two Siberian cats, and an extremely long-lived Triops. Her future plans include completing the books in the BETWEEN TWO EVILS SERIES followed by an extended vacation on a remote tropical island (with a Starbucks). When she’s not writing, playing tennis, or helping with algebra, she’s building a time machine so that someone can go back and do the laundry.

How to contact DLO:

Back from the Future: Newsletter Sign-Up
Author Website
Free on Amazon here

Tell Me WHY

May 17, 2015January 31, 2018JT Twissel 21 Comments

I have a hard time answering the question “why do you write.” This, I’ve been assured, is a disaster. Being able to articulate your WHY is a key element to “building your platform,” “branding yourself” or “finding a niche.” People who succeed in the WHY will sell books and those who don’t, won’t.

The WHY, being so important, must be answered before we set pen to paper or slop enchiladas over our keyboards in the middle of the night. However, being that I’m a half-ass backwards kind of person, I started writing long before I knew about the WHY. I just sat down and words came out.

The God moment

However lately I’ve had a revelation.

Revelations are strange things, aren’t they? You see the face of Jesus in beer foam and suddenly boom/ bang you know your WHY. I wish I could say this revelation came to me while meditating on the top of the mountain or deep in the forest but it didn’t. It came to while sitting on my butt, eating peanuts and watching Philomena, which, for those of you who haven’t seen it, is a full box of Kleenex movie about an Irish girl forced to give up her baby by evil nuns. When she goes in search of him many years later those same nuns lie about not knowing his whereabouts and so she turns to a journalist for help. The journalist takes on the assignment not out of the goodness of his heart. He intends to turn her story into a “human interest story,” one which will tug at the hearts of readers and reestablish his drowning career. His WHY is money and fame.

Several times during their search Philomena balks at the idea of her story being publicized. Does she really want to expose things long unseen or forgotten? Painful things, the revelation of which may alienate family, friends or even God?

Would you? That is often the dilemma facing writers. In telling a story will we incur the censor of family and community, maybe even God?

I’m sure once Philomena’s story did get published (and turned into a movie) it irked the Church to which she’d remained faithful, despite their treatment of her (where is Jesus – lost in the beer foam?). But it also brought to light an abomination and maybe even helped other poor Irish women to find their stolen sons.

So my WHY is a slippery little devil. Sometimes I write for fun and sometimes it’s a slide down the Iron Maiden. But if I write with the intent of not stepping on anyone’s toes (even my own), it doesn’t feel genuine.

Here are more articulate writers on the topic of why they write.

“Those of us who write do it because there are stories inside us burning to get out. Writing is essential to our well-being.” Judy Blume
“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” Ernest Hemingway
“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.” Flaubert
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” Joan Didion
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.” Lord Byron
“Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” Gloria Steinem
“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.” Truman Capote

Of these esteemed writers I think Lord Byron’s WHY makes the most sense to me. How about you?

Maybe it’s a Drunken Kangaroo

May 9, 2015May 10, 2015JT Twissel 25 Comments

From Bing Images

My husband just told me we have a “large” animal living in the cellar beneath our house.

Me: “How large?”

Him: “Well, it wasn’t afraid of me. It just kind of waddled away swishing its fluffy tail in my direction.”

Yikes!

“Do you think it was a raccoon?” I ask hopefully.

The only other animal small enough to get into the cellar is, yes, you’ve guessed it – a SKUNK. Double, triple yikes. (Faithful readers will remember the unrelenting Skunk Siege of December 2014.)

He seems to read my mind: “Maybe that’s why our house smelt so bad for so long – a skunk confronted our raccoon.”

Now it’s our raccoon. I must nip this idea in the bud, immediately. Hubby has already adopted several squirrels and chickadees. “It’s not our raccoon!”

He has another idea. A few weeks back he left the door to the cellar ajar and of course Pretty Kitty with his little furry paws managed to pry it open and romp around in the dark, dank and dirt of the storage area. Of course we didn’t realize it until three in the morning when we heard a piteous yowl and practically fell out of bed. “What the hell was that?” We both asked in unison. The resulting search of the house failed to locate Kitty and, after coming to the conclusion that he was hiding in some deep crevice and would come out when he was ready, back to bed we stumbled to try to get some rest. In the morning Kitty still could not be found, until around noon when I looked out the back door and there he was.

Playing peek-a-boo

Snubbing his nose at us as if to say, “Aren’t I a clever cat”?

Hubby’s new idea is that the cat ran into the raccoon. “Maybe that’s how he got outside.”

“Wait a minute. If it’s been under the house for so long then what’s it been living off?”

“Hum. I haven’t caught any rats in a while.”

Great! Apparently while I sleep there’s a party going on beneath me. Cats, rats, raccoons and skunks. Did I mention that we keep our wine in the cellar?

If he can wrestle crocodiles, I reckon he can take on a raccoon!

Never fear. We’ve called in Crocodile Dundee to track the wild beast down. Who knows? Maybe it’s a drunken kangaroo and he’ll know just what to do.

I’ll let you know how that goes.

The Interpreter – Arleen Williams

May 9, 2015JT Twissel 1 Comment

Today I turn the floor over to fellow author Arleen Williams whose ALKI Trilogy has just been released. For those of you who don’t know, Alki Point is just west of Seattle Washington, an area very lush and green. Wikipedia describes it as “reminiscent of a Pacific Northwest beach town, with a mix of mid-century bungalows, medium-rise waterfront apartment houses, waterfront businesses, a thin beach, and a road with a bike/foot trail running several miles along the water.” As you can tell by the titles, Arleen is a very active woman as are her protagonists! In this piece she talks about the inspiration for her novels.

Years ago I was living in Mexico City and thought about studying English/Spanish interpretation. When I took the college entrance examination and failed, I was sad and filled with relief. It really wasn’t for me. I have too many of my own words and thoughts to express to fill the role of an official interpreter. Yet at times, I still feel like an interpreter. In The Alki Trilogy, I “translate” immigrant lives into stories, offering a window into the realities of modern immigration.

As I write these words, I am reminded of Reese Witherspoon’s 2014 movie, A Good Lie, about the lost boys and girls of Sudan. I remember sitting in the darkened theater shaking my head when those responsible for assisting these immigrants upon their arrival to the U.S. were portrayed as totally clueless.

“Nobody can be that dumb, can they?” I whispered to my husband.

“Most people haven’t spent thirty years working with immigrants and refugees,” he shot back.

In a world of instantaneous information, one would think we’d all know of the horrors that continue to bring immigrants – both documented and undocumented – across our borders on a daily basis. But we are inundated with snippets of news and information, with work schedules and family responsibilities, with the challenges of the hectic day-to-day routine so common in this country. We don’t always understand the stories or the worlds behind the headlines we catch as we rush from one responsibility to the next in our busy lives.

In The Alki Trilogy I introduce readers to characters living lives in the shadows of our own back yards, characters making livings, making love, making mistakes and often interacting with native-born Americans in relationships that enrich the lives of all. And like those immigrants who cut our lawns and clean our pools, who grow our fruits and vegetables, who care for our elderly and infirm, they do it carrying the horrors that brought them to this land branded on their souls.

I wasn’t on some sort of zealous mission when I started writing The Alki Trilogy. In fact, when I began the first novel, Running Secrets, I had no idea I’d be writing a trilogy at all. I simply had characters in my head demanding to be heard: a suicidal young woman and an Ethiopian home health nurse, a homeless Salvadoran girl alone after her parents were deported and the college student who offered sanctuary, an Eritrean man haunted by the terrors of his escape and the hatred of some African-Americans while buoyed by the love of another. These stories were rooted in a lifetime of teaching, explaining, interpreting my world to immigrants from around the globe in an attempt to help them build new lives in this strange land. I suppose at some point my audience shifted.

When I started writing Biking Uphill, I wasn’t ready to say good-bye to Gemila Kemmal, and when Walking Home came to me, The Alki Trilogy flowed from pen to paper as though I were nothing more than a conduit for the voices of my students and the characters based on the lives and experiences they have shared with me over the past thirty years.

About the Author:

Arleen Williams is a Seattle novelist, memoirist, and co-author of a dozen short books in easy English for adults. She teaches English as a Second Language at South Seattle College and has worked with immigrants and refugees for three decades. To learn more, please visit http://www.arleenwilliams.com and http://www.notalkingdogspress.com.

Play Me Please

May 3, 2015July 21, 2021JT Twissel 18 Comments

I was once the grandmother of a girl as black as I am white. She was also quite beautiful – a Serena Williams lookalike and about as tall and curvy. Wherever we went – to restaurants, to parks, to the mall – we got stares that made her uncomfortable.

“They’re staring because you’re so beautiful,” I tried to assure her but she didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe me. It didn’t help that she was accustomed to getting food and clothes from soup kitchens, food banks, and other giveaways and thus had no idea how to act in restaurants or clothing stores. For example, she wanted to go to a Chinese restaurant and once there she ordered fried chicken. She’d gotten the idea somewhere that if you went to sit down restaurants you could order whatever you wanted and when she realized that was not the case, her embarrassment turned to shame which turned to agitation. It didn’t help that she was with foster parents who basically ignored the fact that the four teens in their charge were dodging school, smoking pot, staying up all night and quite possibility prostituting themselves. I tried not to make assumptions as I had no proof and they were not abusing the children. They were getting fed, clothed, etc., which hadn’t been their situation when they entered “the system.” When dealing with these kids the first thing you’re taught is not to judge the lifestyles of other people by your standards.

At my first meeting with the “social” he warned: “She’ll play you.” To which I wanted to say: I don’t care. I’d rather be played by a fourteen year old whose father was in jail and whose mother’s whereabouts were unknown than by the traitors in the Congress claiming to be patriots or by the dancing jackals of corporate America cutting their own taxes while freezing out the poor. But instead I kept my mouth shut. I’d been so excited to meet my first “child” that I’d driven thirty miles sans wallet or cell phone sweaty and flushed after a tennis match.

My black grandchild answered the door in an oversized sweatshirt with a half dozen kittens up her sleeve and her hair knotted on the top of her head in a scarf. Instead of fourteen, she looked eleven. I was immediately enchanted. Then we sat at a table in the fosters’ dining room for a half hour as her social lectured her. After he left I was exhausted. She said she was too and so we made plans to get to know each other the next week.

A week later, I could have sworn a hooker from downtown Oakland answered the foster’s door. The darling girl I’d met the week before had on a long curly wig, a low-cut skintight mini-dress, full make-up, and five inch gladiator heels. I thought for sure I had the wrong house but before I could beat a hasty retreat, she recognized me and off we went in search of Cheetos. The stares that time were brutal. We decided if we ran into anyone she knew, she would tell them I was her grandmother.

It takes a long time to get to know a child who’s been in the system for awhile. To them, you are just another stranger in a long line of strangers who make decisions about their lives which sometime put them in tenuous and frightening places, one of them being Dependency Court. I don’t know many times I explained to her that she was not in trouble and that the judge was on her side, the undeniable fact is, it’s a court with bailiffs and lawyers and tons of paperwork. Despite the smiles and toys, it is intimidating.

Photographed by Bishop M. Cromartie

Because of confidentially rules I cannot go into the particulars of my black granddaughter’s case but, suffice it to say, I was a failure. Mine was not the heartwarming, inspirational story told on posters and in the brochures. I wish I could say I was the only one but sadly there are more failures than successes. However, regarding all the debate over whether or not racism is still alive and kicking, if you’re white and you want to know what it’s like to be black in America, became the grandparent of a black child.