​Last week in preparation of the 9/11 Memorial I shared the story of my son, Jeff, participating in a
Re-enactment of the rescue effort at the World Trade Center.  Jeff and his friend Lee trained together for months and were “buddies for the climb”.  The climb took place at the Renaissance Building in downtown Dallas.  Thousands of firefighters and police made the climb. 
 
Firefighters wear 70 pounds of gear, just like the FDNY personnel wore on 9/11.  The 110 story climb began at the same time as tower one began to collapse fifteen years ago.  When registering for the climb each participant was given an envelope with a picture of the person who lost their life that day.  Jeff and Lee climbed for FDNY firefighter Michael Ragusa from Engine 279. 
 
This event is close to the heart and soul of every firefighter and making the climb for one of their comrades dramatically increases the personal commitment to complete the climb.  Throughout the day Jeff texted me updates and images of his experience.  The climb up took him an hour and he said the last 30 flights were grueling, the most challenging he has ever had.  This from a man who puts out fires on jet fighters.
 
I’ve included two images to share.  The first is Jeff and Lee walking down the last flight.  As a father I saw the exhaustion on Jeff’s face.  Lee is looking back over his left shoulder making sure Jeff is on track with him.  The second image shows two comrades arm in arm after they hydrated and had the strength to smile again.
 
I don’t intend to use a biased expression but among firefighters there is a special brotherhood, a bond, which is difficult to comprehend if not a firefighter.  I am unabashedly proud of Jeff and Lee.  Not only do they demonstrate for us how to “Not Forget” they show us how to honor those who died and how we persevere and deny terrorist victory.
 
For images from the event, go to:
 
http://www.dallasstairclimb.com/



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If I used just those two words would you have any idea what I was referring to?  This September 11th marks 15 years since the attack in New York and Washington D.C.  A total of 2996 people died that day.  Of those 343 were firefighters in New York City in their heroic effort to save others.
At the time my son was an Air Force firefighter serving at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.  Like many others his instinct was to get on a plane and help out those in need.  Due to security all forces, including firefighters, were grounded.
I worry that 15 years has been to long of a time and our memories blur and fade.  We live with terrorism every day now.  Just going to an airport or attending a marathon may result in being another innocent victim.
I think each of us must do two things.  First, do not live in fear.  I believe the primary mission of terrorist is to instill fear and the second is to kill.  How we live we can demonstrate to potential terrorist that we do not live in fear.  The citizens of Paris have shown the world how to live on after a terrorist attack.
Second, we must never forget and we must honor all the victims of 9/11.  Since my son is still a firefighter it is easy to remember.  Across the nation there are organizations working to raise funds for fallen firefighters, one is the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation.
To raise funds for the foundation a Memorial Climb will be held in Dallas on 9/11.  Firefighters will wear 70 pounds of gear and climb the exact number of steps that the firefighters at the World Trade Center climbed in their effort to save people.  I am proud that my son and one of his firefighter buddies will participate in the Memorial Climb.
Here is a link to the Memorial Climb event, the firefighter on the left is my son:
https://www.crowdrise.com/hinton-and-owens--dallas-911--memorial--stair-climb


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​This is my last blog for August.  I know that time is relative because as I age time speeds up.  I feel like August 1st was just yesterday.  Sorry, I digress as one month slips into history, a month I will never have again, to yet another month, which is destined to follow the same path as August.
A few weeks ago we took our oldest grandson tent camping.  In the afternoon he swam in Ottawa Lake, and built a small river with several sand dams.  We set up camp, had dinner, then built the wood fire for the evening.  He warned me to not sit too close to the fire as he pulled his chair further back.
Once the fire was roaring he pulled his knees up to his chest and looked at me with walnut size dark eyes.  “Is it time for scary stories yet?”
“Yes.”
“Gram, you start.” 
Gram read from a book she found at the library about a haunted house.   We should have read the story ourselves before dragging it to our campsite.  It was a horrible book filled with violence, not scary, just violent.  We passed the torch.
Our grandson told a very good story about two transformer characters who saved their human friend from a scary, evil transformer.  He was very engaged, used a lot of hand and arm motion and modulated his voice for affect.  The boy is a born story teller.
My contribution was a story of an Egyptian mummy that came to life in search of his killer.  For emphasis I walked stiff legged with arms outstretched toward my grandson and shook his shoulders screaming I found the killer.  He squealed with joy and laughed.
This experience had two lessons for me.  First, human beings are hard wired to tell stories.  A five year old is capable of telling complex, compelling stories based in imagination.   Second, we like to be scared.  Stephen King discovered that many years ago and has had a successful writing career and had many movies based on his books.  I don’t understand why we like to be scared but we do.
May we each continue to imagine, write, repeat stories for all of our days, its part of what makes us human.      
     

​On August 10th I posted an article about my experience working with my publisher to evaluate the first 2/3 of my manuscript.  If you recall my primary question to my publisher was on point of view and how to push the story along to its conclusion.
I learned that I needed to make major changes in the first ten chapters to ground the story and let readers understand the conflicts in the protagonist, Ian Murphy’s, life.  I gave myself a few days to consider how to best undertake this job.
I decided to print out the first ten chapters and give myself time for a read through.  I had to take on the role of a first time reader and use the notes from the publisher as a guide to what was missing.  I had to admit that the context needed was in my head, it just didn’t make it to the written page.
Next I found a red pen and left the house for my favorite coffee shop to read through the first ten chapters with the intent of adding detail.  I slipped into punctuation.  I just couldn’t help myself.  I worked very hard to reel myself in and focus on content.
With intensity and focus I did discover some gaps, especially in how Ian reacts to the death of his long time friend, Kieran Fitzpatrick.  Ian feels that Kieran’s death releases him from his past.  At the first writing I didn’t realize that myself.
I also examined the relationship between Ian and his wife, Mairin.  My publisher felt their relationship was too perfect that I wasn’t allowing Mairin to have real emotions and reactions to some of Ian’s issues.  Again, by reading the manuscript for content I had to agree.  My Mairin was only two dimensional and didn’t express herself.  With the re-write, Mairin has a distinct voice and doesn’t hesitate to let Ian know exactly how she feels.
It took about a week to complete the re-write on hard copy.  I completed putting the changes into the document in a single morning.  In the re-writing process I cut out a quite a few paragraphs but I also added new material. 
I checked my word count.  When I took the detour to re-write I had written 64,488 works.  With all the edits my word count was 64,561 a net increase of only 73 words.  In the editing process it felt like I was adding a lot of words – wrong .  That’s how it goes.       

​My friend, Sandy Kintner and I started bee keeping last year.  We began with one hive each.  The queen in my hive was overthrown and killed for mysterious reasons.  I bought a second queen hoping her social skills were better than the first queen.  No such luck.  Sandy’s hive also struggled they didn’t seem to have any interest in making enough honey to share with us.  In an effort to have one strong to survive a Wisconsin winter we combined the hives into one.
We followed the recommendations of the Dane County Beekeepers Association and our one hive survived one of the coldest winters in Wisconsin history.  We both bought new hives this year.  Our 2015 hive thrived so we split it so that we had four hives, but not for long.  We also put one hive at my house.  One of the “split” hives failed and we moved the bees to the 2015 hive.  Now we have three hives.
My bad luck with queens continued in 2016.  The queen for the hive at my house was ruthlessly banished.  I didn’t want to pay for another queen so I decided to take a chance to see if the bees would select their own queen from among themselves.  The process takes several weeks and works about half the time.  I watched every week and discovered “queen cells” so it was time to leave them alone and not interfere with their routine.
Meanwhile, the new hive at my friend’s house was thriving.  There were a lot of bees and by July had enough honey for themselves that we gave them a box called a “super”.  This is a small box with ten frames that are used exclusively to have the bees make honey for human consumption.  When Sandy was on vacation in mid-July I checked the super to find about half of the frames full of honey.  We waited several weeks and all but two the frames were gushing with honey.
We talked with our bee mentor from the Dane County Beekeepers Association and decided to harvest our honey using the squeeze and drain process, we also watched a youtube video giving us step by step instructions.  We tested the honey for water and it came in at 17.5%, just under the 18% maximum.  We worked for about two hours to scrape the honey and comb off and put it through a strainer and then bottle it.  We weighed our bucket of honey on a bathroom scale and it was just shy of 18 pounds. 
Eighteen pounds of honey! All the work, the frustration, the uncertainty, was worth the first taste of sweet, delicious, golden honey.               

​Several weeks ago I reached about the 75% complete mark with the first draft of my manuscript for the third book in the Ian Murphy.  My goal has been to finish the rough draft this year so being at this point in July was ahead of schedule.
Then it happened.  I ran into a stone wall.  I couldn’t figure out how to keep the story moving along in first person point of view.  I realized I needed help.  I submitted my manuscript to friend, author, publisher Christine Keleny and asked if she thought I should change the point of view from first person to third person objective;  just one question, one straightforward, simple question.
After about a week Christine sent me an e-mail asking if I had an outline for the book, the theme of the book and if I knew the ending.  I responded that I never outline, the theme was in the title – reckoning – from the nautical use to know where you are by knowing where you’ve been and I gave her a few lines explaining the ending.
A few days after that Christine sent me an e-mail suggesting we set up a time to talk on the phone.  Really?  I only asked one question.  I expected she would write maybe one page of comments, tips on craft, answer my point of view question.  No, she wanted to talk.  That was not good.  I was traumatized.  Family was visiting from Texas which gave me the perfect excuse to delay our discussion.
She thought the beginning of the book about the first ten chapters needed work.  I needed to explain why the events Ian experienced were important and what they meant to him.  She thought the point of view worked well.  On my problem with the stone wall she said to ignore it and concentrate on writing the conclusion.  So, there you have it.
When you ask for help you must be prepared to accept what you are offered in return.  I worked with Christine extensively on my second book, Out of Darkness, I trust her professional judgment.  When she comments she always says I can accept or reject them.  When I ask:  should I XYZ?  She responds with, that is your decision to make, she’s never directive.
I reflected on Christine’s comments and re-read my notes from our conversation for a day.  I’ve decided to re-write the first ten chapters.  Getting the start right will only help bust through that stone wall to write the conclusion of the story.  Of course, the moral of this experience is ‘to be careful what you ask for.’     

​I posted my last blog on Wednesday 6/29/16, thirty-five days ago.  My primary reason for not posting in July was in response to my inner writer, feeling the need for a break from writing a weekly blog.  As I closed the article I wondered what would happen to my readership if I didn’t post a weekly blog.
I have talked with many writers who have a blog as part of their website.  All agree that very rarely do we receive comments on our blog.  I do receive these bizarre automatic comments that show up in my e-mail, not on the comment section of my website.  The automatic responses are often nonsensical and clearly coming from some non-English as first language source.  If I could figure out a way to block them, I would.
About half way through July I lost the ability to access my website visitation statistics.  I felt the fickle finger of fate point as me, just when I wanted to learn what would happen to page visits, I couldn’t get the report.  I called the technical support staff at Ipage.com and thought we had agreed on a solution to the problem.  I received an e-mail informing me that the problem was solved.  I went to check the stats and I was still blocked.  As it turned out the person I talked with didn’t understand the problem at all.  I blamed my poor communication for the failure.
I then exchanged a number of e-mails with the technical support staff because, as a writer, I could express myself better with the written word than with a conversation.  Finally, toward the end of the month the fix worked and I had access to my numbers.
In June I had 7202 page visits and July 9461.  In the explanation of the metrics suggest is tracking page visits as the most accurate assessment of individual visitors.  From June to July I had 31% more page visits.  My assumption that blogs attract page visits is clearly wrong.  Who knows what attracts page visits?  I will continue to blog, because I enjoy the writing, not sure if it will be once a week.
It is a complete mystery to me who all the people are visiting my page.  I do know that they don’t buy my books, if only 1% bought books it would be nice, not a best seller, but nice.  Goodreads advertising suggests a response rate of 0.4%, so based on June visits that would mean selling 28 books.  My sales are zero.  Oh well, back to writing and no more WHINING.
                  

​When I began writing the manuscript for my third novel in January my first decision was to give myself an entire year just to write the first draft.  Last year I attended so many author events that by November my stamina was gone and my creativity depleted.  I gave myself the entire month of December off to focus again on family and my volunteer activities and to re-charge.
It was the first time since I began writing full time in 2010 that I gave myself time off.  I tire of those writers that insist a person must write every day and you must write every day.  If the only thing you have an interest in is writing, that’s fine.  However, that’s not me.  My hunch is that because I didn’t begin full time writing until 59 my perspective is different.  I view writing as my encore career, what I do to fulfill myself and reach my creative potential.  I don’t write for commercial success.  In addition, I have a number of other interests.  First, I have four grandchildren ages 1-5.  Enough said.  Second, I am a volunteer by nature having had excellent examples from both my parents and I’ve recently found my niche.  I am a member of the South Central Library Board of Trustees; the Sun Prairie Library Board of Trustees; and, the Chair of the Sun Prairie Library Strategic Planning Committee.  I am also completing a yearlong project to acquire public art for the Sun Prairie Public Library to create an outdoor programming space.
I gave myself a weekly word goal in writing my manuscript and as usual I find that the perfect motivator for me.  I’ve been humming along and am a good month ahead of my goal.  I’ve allowed myself to take off a week from writing, once in April and once in June.  In April I needed a break to consider the plot and arc of the story.  In June I needed a break because the next chapter to be written I knew would be emotionally draining for me.  I completed that chapter this week and I was a wet wash cloth afterward.
I feel that I’ve matured as a writer since 2010.  I know my purpose in writing and how writing fits into my life.  This year I have learned how to listen to my inner writer.
I’m thinking about taking a break from writing this blog for the entire month of July.  It could be interesting to see what happens to my readership.     

​Our local library has a very nice feature.  The entrance to the library is like a large hallway.  In the center of the hallway about twenty feet from the entrance is a set of special displays.  First there is a table with special books related to a program the library is having or an event in the community.  Behind the table are a series of four foot high shelves formed in a rectangle surrounding a round seating area.  In the rectangle area books and DVD’s are divided into different categories.
One set of shelves has staff pick books.  Another has staff pick DVD’s.  Yet another has recently published books.  One set of shelves is devoted to a specific theme each month.  For example, in March this year the theme was Ireland and St. Patrick’s Day.
I was browsing the books in the theme area this past March and was surprised and elated to find both Murphy’s Troubles and Out of Darkness.  The staff never mentioned to me that they had featured both my books.  I am at the library so frequently I think they suspected that I would find the display on my own and of course they were right.
I was so pleased that our Library had been so thoughtful and supportive.  I couldn’t resist, I had Lynette take a picture of me with my books.  One day we had our oldest grandson, Ross, with us at the Library.  Ross loves the library and even has his own library card.  I’ve taught him to use the self-check out machine when he borrows books or DVD’s.  I took Ross to the Ireland display and gave him one of my books.   He went to the nearest chair and sat down to look at the book.  He scanned the front cover then turned over to the back of the book blub.  “Papa O (his name for me) your picture is on the back of this book!”
“Yes, Ross, it is.”
His face scrunched into a question mark.  “Why is your picture on the back of this book, Papa O?”
“Because I wrote the book, Ross.”
He pulled his legs up and smiled broadly, looking at my picture.  I’ve image included the image with this post.
It just doesn’t get any better.    
 
 

​A humorous part of birding is how the creatures are actually identified.  The common birds are easy – bluebirds, robins, cardinals, crow, red wing black birds and so on.  It’s the birds you don’t see often based on where you live that are difficult to identify.
All of the birders carry a field guide.  The field guide will show a full color picture of both the female and male of the species, give information on type of nest, food, flight pattern, migration, type of egg, incubation, fledging, type of song or call and where they live in your state.  I have four bird guide books.  Two are specifically for birds in Wisconsin, one is for birds of North America and one is a songbird guide with recordings of the song for each bird.
Of course, you can’t haul four books around with you while tramping through the woods.  For field trips I choose the smallest, about 3” x 3” because it fits in my back pocket.  When out with a group I soon discovered that each of us had a different guide.  You would think there would be some standardization but that’s not the case.  Birders tend to be very individualistic.
The identification process was less than scientific.  Our guide would point in a direction and say – there is a bird, what is it.  We would use our new binocular skills and spot the creature in a tree about 40’ tall and 30 yards away.  Then the guessing begins.  Someone would call out a bird species wanting to be the first to call it right.  Our guide remained silent, which meant the first guess was wrong.  Then one or two other people would call out a guess, both wrong.  Then we would lower our binoculars and get out our field guides.  We stood in a circle examining our books trying to find the right bird.  Someone would find a bird in their field guide and show it to the rest of us.  Then each of us would locate that bird in our own field guide.
We would then compare our field guides and decide by consensus the bird we had just seen.  I laughed out loud and announced we were birding by consensus and everyone in the group agreed.
Selecting popular books is much the same process.  At the Writer’s Institute I attended in April the buzz was about fantasy thrillers like Game of Thrones and Hunger Games.  Everyone droned on and on about these remarkable books.  One of the features most admired was the creativity of creating fantasy worlds.  The consensus was that it was a remarkable accomplishment.  Next year the buzz will be something else.
My view is that it is much more of a challenge to create a fiction world that readers are familiar with.  I find Kent Haruf’s  Holt, Colorado and Richard Russo’s Empire Falls much more creative than any fantasy world.    The fantasy world is built only on imagination and everything can work exactly as the author wants.  Holt and Empire Falls are based in a reader’s experience so the world and characters that inhabit the town must ring true. 
No surprise, I don’t agree with the consensus.  No worry, next year’s book buzz will change – maybe it will be thrillers.