FAVORITES, FAILURES & FRUSTRATIONS--GUEST AUTHOR DORA BRAMDEN

Award-winning Australian author Dora Bramden writes heart-melting, passionate romance. Learn more about her and her books at her website. 

What’s Great About Epic Fails?

I’ve had so many wrong turns in my life that I’ve come to expect them, even dare I say welcome them. At the time I feel like they’re some kind of retribution for a past life crime, but later I find they were there to move me on from a stuck in the muck position.

The first time this happened I was pregnant with my second child. My employer told me that because I’d been hired as a casual, I didn’t qualify for maternity leave and I wouldn’t be able to return to my part-time job. I really counted on that money and was incredibly upset. It was a community organisation and I assumed they’d be supportive of a young mother. Wrong! I made a big mistake not making sure my employment terms were agreed upon and had a signed contract.

From that epic fail I found out that I must be responsible and not assume others will look out for me. Also, after my son was born, I found work in another community organisation closer to home and with varied fun roles and greater opportunities. So I look back and think I was kind of lucky that bad time happened to me.

Much later when my children were grown, I was divorced, and succumbed to a terrible illness that had robbed me of my home, family, career, use of my legs and my thinking brain. Extremely lucky for me, I recovered, but there wasn’t much of my life left the way it used to be. I had to begin again. What was great about that was that my life was a clean slate. Everything that had been blocking me was also gone.

A lovely man came into my life and supported me through a long recovery; he’s still by my side, more than two and a half years later. Friends and family bore with peak hour traffic to visit me in a city hospital for weeks on end. At times, I couldn’t even talk to them but they kept coming in. I learned that I didn’t have to entertain people, or do things for them to have them want to be around me. I learned that I was enough.

At times I wanted to get better quickly, so desperately but timing is everything. I feel now that I’m better and living a life I love, that I needed to go through that time to be the person I am now. I wrote A Dance with the Laird before I became sick, and I edited it after I recovered. I rewrote some of it to include what I learned in my journey.

Natalie Baxter, my heroine, has made some epic fails; marriage to a man who appeared reliable and career focused led to tragedy. She still hasn’t learned and decides she will focus on her career, but jetlagged and lost she’s put on a collision course with the man who’ll challenge everything she believes about herself.

She’s decided to keep away from finding love but can’t resist the charms of Angus McLaren, AKA the Laird. Submitting to her attraction to him seems to be the worst thing she could do, but of course it is fate stepping in to help her out.

Angus has a great deal of responsibility resting on his shoulders. He too has made mistakes that have left him wary of love but he can’t resist helping someone out. He thinks falling in love is an epic fail, but caring Natalie is the woman to thaw the ice around his heart.

Epic fails and frustrations can turn out to be the very thing you need to get what your heart really wants.

A Dance with the Laird

Natalie Baxter’s sorrow is she can’t conceive a child. She’s devoting her event planning skills to helping orphans. Falling for Angus McLaren, Laird to an ancestral estate is a mistake. He must have an heir to secure it, and the family foundation’s work with orphans in the third world. He can’t consider marrying Natalie, his beautiful event planner. He can, however, be her lover for the one month they have together, organising a charity ball.

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FAVORITES, FAILURES & FRUSTRATIONS--#ZUCCHINI FAIL

Lois Winston, Anastasia’s creator, stepping in today to talk about one of my failures. I’ve never been a great gardener. Instead of having green thumbs, mine are red. I say red because if you look at a color wheel, you’ll see that red is the opposite of green.

In my defense, I’m was born and bred a city girl and have never quite adapted to suburban life, no matter how much I’ve tried. And believe me, when it comes to gardening, I’ve tried…and tried…and tried. And usually failed.

However, one thing I have had success growing in the past is zucchini. Even I couldn’t kill that stalwart squash and have spent many summers with bumper crops from a single plant—until the last several years when even the zucchini decided to rebel against my efforts.

This year I decided to plant in a different sunny spot in my backyard, thinking maybe location was the problem, even though I'd rotate crops within my small gardening plot. The zucchini gods must have thought that was funny because after two months in the ground my poor zucchini plant has yet to produce a single new leaf, let alone any flowers. It’s exactly the same size it was when I bought it. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was a plastic plant!

I am bowing to the inevitable. We can't all succeed at everything we try, no matter how much we'd like to. So my fresh zucchini this year is coming courtesy of the local farmer’s market that sets up at the train station every Saturday morning. 

FAVORITES, FAILURES & FRUSTRATIONS--GUEST AUTHOR MAGGIE PILL

The Author Attempting to Play Piano

Maggie Pill is the author of the Sleuth Sisters Mysteries, which make people say things like, “That’s just like me and my sisters!” Maggie is also Peg Herring, (Simon and Elizabeth historical mysteries, the Dead Detective Mysteries, and the Loser Mysteries). Maggie is funnier--and much younger. Today Maggie stops by to talk about one of her failures. Been there, done that, Maggie. Minus the sisters, I could have written this post myself! Learn more about Maggie at her blog. 

Failure

I’ve done well with many things in life, but there’s one thing I always wished I could do, and that’s play the piano.

People who can play, either with music or by ear, are popular folks. Ask for some Billy Joel and they’ll rattle it off. Give them a piece your choir wants to sing, and they’ll be ready when rehearsals begin. Our elementary school music teacher could play whatever we asked for and watch the boys to make sure they weren’t misbehaving behind her back! I admire people like that—and sometimes I hate them.

Accompanists need a good sense of rhythm, a feel for musical tone, and fingers that glide across the keyboard without conscious thought. My problem is my hands, which don’t play well together. As kids, my older sister and I expressed a desire to play (our third sister showed no interest), so we took piano lessons from our pastor’s patient wife. I learned to curve my fingers, count inside my head, and strike the right notes most of the time. What I never achieved was any sort of fluency. My hands simply don’t trust my brain to move them to the correct positions. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Whichever, my playing of even the simplest song is filled with long gaps as my fingers fumble to find the right keys.

Conversely, my sister was a natural pianist who could play pretty much anything. By high school, she was known as an accomplished accompanist, and I had given up. I knew it wasn’t her fault she was good, and I kind of knew it wasn’t my fault I was bad, but there’s the whole sibling rivalry thing. I sang, I played the baritone (not a hit at parties), and eventually directed several choral groups in town.

But I couldn’t play the piano, even to help out at rehearsals. A one-finger melody is the best I can do, and there are still plenty of mistakes as my brain screams, “You’re going to hit the wrong note!...Told you so.”

Over time, my sister got bored with the piano and simply stopped. She doesn’t even tell people she can play anymore. If she does, she says, people will ask her to.

I struggled on through life without that skill I’d love to have. I write popular mysteries. I garden. I speak to groups interested in reading and writing. Still, there are times when I imagine myself sitting down at a piano somewhere and having people gather round to sing along with my graceful tickling of the ivories. It isn’t going to happen, but when I need a little inspiration for the Sleuth Sisters books, I remember that among my sisters, one of us never cared to play the piano, one of us always wanted to and can’t, and one of us can and doesn’t. It’s a great reminder that sisters are the same but oh so different.

Sleuthing at Sweet Springs

At a local nursing home, Faye meets a woman who insists she doesn’t belong there. Though Faye suspects the claim is wishful thinking, she agrees to look in on Clara Knight’s flock of chickens, penned up at her home on Sweet Springs, ten miles from Allport, Michigan.

At the springs, the sisters find the body of Clara’s neighbor, who apparently fell to his death. Something isn’t right, and Barb and Retta temporarily set aside their argument over the necessity of the Oxford comma in order to help Faye do some digging.

As the Sleuth Sisters investigate, they find Clara Knight’s involuntary move to a nursing home is only one example of the strange things happening at Sweet Springs in the last few months. Barb, Faye, and Retta (with Styx the Newfie and Rescue Dog Buddy along for company) find evidence of arson, deceit, and even murder.

The question is why? What does the land around Sweet Springs have that would make someone willing to kill to own it? Who is trying to get rid of the long-time property owners? Suspects include Clara’s pushy niece, Barb’s old enemy Stanley Wozniak, and a smooth-talking client who makes it clear he’d like to get to know Retta better. And that's just for starters, since there's a shadowy, threatening figure lurking in the background.

The sisters are determined to find out what's going on before more bad things happen. Can they save Clara from someone who wants her out of the way? Will they have to put their own lives in danger to do so? And can chickens play a role in a daring rescue?

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FAVORITES, FAILURES & FRUSTRATIONS--GUEST AUTHOR RABBI ILENE SCHNEIDER

Rabbi Ilene Schneider is one of the first women rabbis ordained in the U.S. and also the author of the award-winning Rabbi Aviva Cohen Mysteries. Now she’s finally decided what she wants to be when she grows up, recently retiring from her day job to devote herself to writing. Learn more about Ilene and her books at her website. Today Ilene joins us to talk about failure.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who thought she could sing, despite all evidence to the contrary. Instead, she was the student whom the music teacher told to “mouth the words” in school assemblies.

She also thought she could play a musical instrument. After all, her grandfather had been a professional saxophone player in Paul Whiteman’s society dance band in the early 1920s, and her father had been in the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, as was her cousin. Then she was introduced to the recorder in fourth grade. All she could produce were squeaks.

Fast-forward about forty-five years. The little girl’s sons turned out to have some musical talent. The older played guitar and did ear-splitting renditions of punk rock. The younger one played violin at age five, switched to piano, and then switched again to guitar. He could play by ear, had perfect pitch, and composed as well as played. His singer/songwriter type songs are similar to Leonard Cohen’s: wonderful melodies combined with incomprehensible, metaphysical lyrics.

When the younger boy was still taking piano lessons, he never practiced. “Just imagine,” his teacher would sigh, “how accomplished he could be if he practiced.”

“I have a great idea,” said the little girl, now a woman who should have known better. “I’ll teach by example. I’ll take piano lessons, and when my son sees me practice, he’ll do the same.”

Big mistake. Yes, I was that little girl who was supposedly a mature, intelligent woman who had rid herself of self-delusional behaviors. I somehow managed to forget that I cannot translate the sounds in my head to my vocal cords or an instrument. I have no sense of rhythm. I have no idea if a note is too high or too low, too sharp or too flat. My fine motor skills aren’t great – I stopped trying to make my own clothes when I realized I couldn’t follow the lines when cutting a pattern – and I can’t coordinate my two hands to do different things simultaneously. My small hands can barely stretch to an octave, and I had to hit the notes using my long nails.

I think the first song we learned was “Jingle Bells.” It sounded like a dirge.

And my son was right: practicing, especially scales, is BORING.

Scheduling time for lessons became difficult, so I stopped taking lessons. The teacher, an older European woman who was classically trained, celebrated by retiring.

Maybe it’s not my most humiliating failure, or my most serious, but it haunts me still.

Unleavened Dead

Two members of Rabbi Aviva Cohen’s congregation are found dead, victims, they say, of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. But Aviva has info that leads her to doubt it was an accident. Then, police suspect Aviva’s niece’s partner in a hit-and-run death. Aviva is sure the woman is innocent, even though her SUV has a body-sized dent on the hood. As she looks into the two disparate cases, Aviva discovers they may be connected, and her amateur sleuthing takes a sinister turn that involves sexual abuse of teenage girls, money laundering, stolen identities, and an FBI investigation. Once again, her curiosity has put her life in jeopardy.

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