Guest Blogging

Instead of Working Stiffs, I'm guest blogging over at the Sisters in Crime blog about our local chapter.

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Mom Update

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It’s been a while since I wrote anything about my mom. If you follow me on Facebook, you’ve probably noticed a number of posts recently about long nights in the ER with her. I appreciate the kind concerns and prayers from friends and family. But while I know they’re well intended, the “hope she gets well soon” sentiments cut like a finely honed blade. Mom isn’t going to get well. She has good days and bad. More and more of the latter. Today’s “good days” are about the same as the bad ones a couple months ago. She has vascular dementia. In addition to her mental slippage, her legs have grown weak and uncooperative, adding to her pre-existing balance issues. We plead with her to call for assistance to get out of bed. Unfortunately, she can’t remember that she’s had numerable falls lately, so she continues to try to get up and around on her own, resulting in more falls. And in more trips to the ER. She has dislocated her right hip twice now. She’s hit her head more times ...
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No Complaints

I admit that I tend to spend half of the year complaining about being too cold and the other half complaining about being too hot. There’s just no pleasing me. However, this summer, I haven’t been the one complaining. Leastways, not about the heat. There hasn’t been much of it. We had what we thought was a taste of summer back in April. Instead, it seems that WAS summer. It lasted a week and we’ve been dealing with autumn ever since. We’ve had temperatures in the seventies and rarely in the low eighties. Low humidity. We had a long dry spell and now we’re dealing with rain and dreary skies. But we NEEDED the rain. My garden REALLY needed it. Basically, I’m loving the weather. I’ve been able to sleep. We haven’t had to run the air conditioning much, which is nice for the electric bills. Plus I’m at “that age” where I carry my own internal heat source around with me. I don’t really need 80 or 90 degree days to build up a healthy sweat. So here I sit, on a dog day morning in July, feeling...
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Scene Under Construction

The last couple of scenes I’ve written in my WIP (Work In Progress) have been construction projects. No, I’m not writing about buildings. But I am building a scene, and there are similarities to building a house. The scenes in question are what I call “technical” scenes. In the story there has been a shooting. My protagonist is a paramedic and my second main character is a cop. The first scene involves the medical response. Granted, I used to be an EMT, but procedures, laws, and technology have changed since I rode on an ambulance crew. So I have to do research. For me, research equals a blueprint. From there, I start to write. Using the research/blueprint, I lay out the technical layer of the story. It’s mostly dialogue and who does what. Details, details, details. The result reads like a textbook. A dry textbook. But this is only the beginning. The walls of the house are up, but are nothing more than two-by-fours. Maybe some plumbing and wiring. Necessary, but nothing great to look a...
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