MERRY CHRISTMAS & HAPPY NEW YEAR

After an extremely busy December with four concerts by our church choir (along with other performers at the church), and singing at the Christmas Eve service, we enjoyed a quiet Christmas at home. Quiet--and cold. Right now, at 10 a.m. Christmas Day, it's sleeting on top of the snow we had a couple days ago.
For the week after Christmas we'll be out at the Pacific Coast of Washington, at a little town north of Ocean Shores. The weather will be dreadful with storms coming in off the ocean, but perfect for writing, reading, and watching movies.
For Christmas I got the COMPLETE set of MASH, the movie and all the TV episodes. Wow!
I know what I'll be doing on New Years Eve!!!!!
Best wishes to all!
Lynnette

Outstanding article about publishing industry

Wow! I just read the following article by agent Richard Curtis.
http://www.ereads.com/2008/12/behind-publishings-wednesday-of-long.html

He says to read it twice, and I was thinking, Huh? Why would I read it TWICE? But he explains at the end that the article -- which sounds as if it were written yesterday, was written in 1992.
He points out how abysmally STUPID and DOOMED the publishing industry's way of doing business is. In short, they overprint books and the bookstores (who have nothing to lose) have unlimited right of return. There's a lot more to it, but at the bottom is the practice of withholding authors' royalties against potention returns.

He points out (NOW) that what he predicted in 1992 (some of which I'll quote below) has come to pass with Amazon, electronic publishing, and Print on Demand publishing. Here's some of what Curtis said, in 1992:

"In the coming era of "demand" publishing, we will see direct electronic delivery of text to reader-users without dependence on distributors, or even on paper. The technology for producing portable electronic books containing or accessing whole libraries is now at hand. . . . Thanks to the multimedia and interactive features of the new breed of computers, tomorrow's electronic books will entertain readers with audio and video displays that will make traditional books look as crude as cuneiform writing on stone tablets. Gone will be the disgustingly wasteful system of merchandising books, along with the creative bookkeeping that permits publishers to hold authors' money for years."

I recommend you read the whole article. Thanks to Kelli Finger, writing as Abbey MacInnis, for the heads up about this.
Lynnette

December news

"Love with a Welcome Stranger" came out in ebook on September 19, and the reviews are very good. I'll post some of them here in a few days. It will be available IN PRINT on January 2, 2009. You can order it from www.amazon.com, or ww.bn.com (Barnes & Noble) or from the publisher at www.thewildrosepress.com.

On November 30 I received notification that it's a FINALIST for a 2009 EPPIE AWARD for Best Contemporary Romance. Winners will be announced March 7 at the EPIC conference in Las Vegas.

Other big news -- the second romance set in Bitter Falls, "Lovin' Montana," will be released in ebook and also in print on August 14, 2009.
The beautiful cover (designed by Rae Monet, who also did the cover of "Love with a Welcome Stranger") is on the first page of my website, www.RainshadowRomance.com.
Lynnette Baughman

My new book coming SOON

"Love with a Welcome Stranger" will be out in ebook on September 19 (as expected), but date of the print edition has been moved up to January 2, 2009.
This contemporary western romance is a twist on a true feature article I did for Reader's Digest a few years ago. The real story was of a young woman who'd lost about a year of her memory (totally and always lost) in a horrible car crash. She had no memory of meeting, falling in love with, and marrying the man everyone said was her husband. She endured long months of painful rehabilitation, learning to walk, feed herself, and all the other things we take for granted. No matter how many times she saw the video of herself at her large wedding, she felt no connection to the man.
Finally, he realized he had to win her all over again, so they dated and slowly she fell in love -- for the first time, and yet -- again.
Their story was in a dozen magazines and was featured on Oprah, Dateline NBC, Inside Edition, and more TV shows. It was made into a book and a TV movie.
So, in real life, the young woman was surrounded by people who knew the truth, that she loved this man enough to marry him. She was the only one who didn't understand it.
In my fictional story, only two people know that Mandy (daughter of a wealthy businessman) and Cam (a poor cowboy who worked on the ranch) had a love affair when she was 18 and he was 24. Those two people are Mandy and Cam. At the end of that summer, Mandy left Montana and Cam behind--in anger--and moved to California to live the life of a Hollywood starlet. TWELVE YEARS LATER --- Mandy is shot by a deranged fan and has to relearn simple things. Some of her memory returns; some events are lost.
Her memory of Cam West--and their love affair--is part of what's lost.
When she returns to Montana and meets a handsome, successful horse breeder, she thinks she's falling for a stranger. Cam tries to avoid her, and tries to hold on to his righteous anger, but he's in big trouble. He has to tell her the truth, but how and when can he give her such a shock? And while he's walking that tightrope, he's lost in memories of the Mandy he knew so intimately.
Visit www.thewildrosepress.com to order the ebook. When it comes out in print, you can order from Amazon.com or bn.com.

Montana (and Wyoming) on my mind

Bill and I just returned from Yellowstone National Park where we had a splendid time with two daughters and five grandkids. (Photo is of Lower Falls.) I really enjoyed our route through southwest Montana. My upcoming release "Love with a Welcome Stranger" is set in the far-western part of Montana.
On August 19th we're driving to Banff/Lake Louise and Jasper to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary.
In the meantime, I'm waiting to hear from my editor at The Wild Rose Press on the manuscript I sent her. And-- I'm working on a new book.
Lynnette

Ebook Readers -- take a look

I bought an ebook reader, and I'm getting used to it. In fact, I like it. The one I bought, for $140, is the eBookwise-1150 with a 64 MB memory card.
Here is some information I found in Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine (August 2008). Author is Jeff Bertolucci.
The top two sellers in this technology of "wireless reading devices" are the Kindle and the Sony Reader.
Both feature a 6" screen with high contrast. Both are easy to read, even in sunlight. Neither is backlighted.
Through Kindle, owned by Amazon, readers have access to 125,000 digital books. Price is $359. The exterior is white plastic which Bertolucci said slipped out of its leather case. It has a mini keyboard that makes it easy to search while browsing online. (That would be a great feature, in my opinion.)
Sony has a metal case and stays securely in its attractive leather holder. Price for the Sony PRS-505 is $300. You can charge it through your PC with a USB cable, but if you want a separate AC charger you'll have to pay another $30. "Chintzy, considering the Reader's high price," says Bertolucci.
Sony's ebook store has 20,000 titles.
Sony does have one huge advantage, though. There's a headphone jack for listening to MP3s.
Sony requires you to download to a computer from the web and then transfer to the reader. Kindle uses a wireless Sprint connection to download books from Amazon.com, thus eliminating the PC in the middle.
Kiplinger's opinion is that 1) these two devices cost too much for the limited advantages you receive, and 2) buying digital books through Amazon and Sony is expensive. (Featured titles on Sony are $5 to $19 and most digital bestsellers on Amazon are $10.)
Bertolucci says, "A portable reader in the $100 to $150 ballpark would persuade us to overlook a lot of drawbacks."
I hope he finds the eBookwise Reader. I think it offers the best option in portable reader devices.
The AC charger came with my eBookwise, and downloading books through my PC is fairly easy.
I'd love to hear about others' experiences with these devices.
Lynnette

Farewell, faithful friend

Laddie died on June 16, '08, at age 13. He was part collie, part retriever, part who-knows-what. Sweet-natured, loving. He lived a darn good life, walks nearly every day. Camping trips in our motorhome. He was finding it harder to jump into the car, and generally harder to get up from lying down, hard to get his back feet under him. At the end, and very suddenly, that's what did him in. He was walking on a beach with the whole family, and his hindquarters collapsed. He couldn't move at all. We kept him as comfortable as possible, but we had to make the heart-rending decision. A very tender, loving veterinarian put him down.
I took this picture of him by our rhododendrons in late May, about three weeks before he collapsed.
We cried so much I couldn't write about it until now, nearly a month later.

What a gorgeous day!

Here's a picture of my favorite mountain. Mt. Baker, which we can see looking east-northeast from our deck. It's about 140 miles north of Mt. Rainier. In the foreground is Whidbey Island.

My favorite holiday - the Fourth of July

We had a splendid Fourth of July. My husband and I sang in a big church program at one o'clock and at three we went to a community band concert. After an easy supper, we watched the Annual Fourth of July Celebration at the U. S. Capitol. It was a terrific show. Jerry Lee Lewis still has it! And a Broadway singer, I think it was Bryan Stokes Mitchell, wow! They did a salute to the upcoming Summer Olympics by playing John Willliams "Olympic Fanfare." In addition to the National Symphony Orchestra, they had the U.S. Army's Herald Trumpets.
It's my favorite holiday. No presents to buy, no expectations to live up to (or fail to live up to!). It's a BE THERE day.
Today -- we picked fresh strawberries at a nearby farm. What a blessing.
Strawberries are sweet kisses from God.
Lynnette Baughman
www.RainshadowRomance.com
coming Sept. 19 from The Wild Rose Press: "Love with a Welcome Stranger"

Houseful of love

Chaos Theory is proven correct at my house this month. My four granddaughters, age 9, 9, 7 and 4, are visiting for 10 days (from Utah). Their mom is here, too, and their dad will join all of us for the last 4 days. Today we'll spend the day in Port Angeles doing the Marine Science Center and more. Tomorrow, big day in Seattle to the Seattle Children's Museum and later to the Arboretum & Botanical Garden.

The weather just turned gorgeous after being chilly and rainy. You probably saw on national news how it was SNOWING two days ago up on Snoqualmie Pass (where I-90 goes across the Cascades). It's the first time Washington Dept. of Transportation has had to use snowplows in JUNE. Near us, Hurricane Ridge (in the Olympic Mountain Range) had snow, too.

We're not complaining, though!!! It's SO sad about the flooding in the Midwest and the tornadoes all over. My heart goes out to the thousands of people who've lost everything they worked their whole lives to build. Even worse, those who've lost loved ones, like the boy scouts in Iowa. I pray that God will comfort them.
Lynnette

Movies on my mind

I'm not a big movie-goer. I watch Ebert & Roeper every week on TV and ninety percent of the movies they review I DON'T want to see. By that I don't mean I believe whatever they say and adopt it as my own opinion. More often than not, Richard Roeper and his guest reviewer LOVE a movie that I know would be torture for me to sit through. I hate most high-action computer special effects movies. I could never sit through weird superhero movies like "Transformers" or "The Incredible Hulk."
I hate martial arts extravaganzas. One guy kicks and disables 15 guys. Yeah. The bad guys wait in line for their turn to get kicked like bored customers at the post office. And the hero leaps twenty feet into the air. GAG. Bite me.
I also hate extreme violence. I really believe the pervasiveness of gun violence, car chases through crowds of innocent bystanders, and bombs have an effect on young (or older, but unstable!!!) minds. I remember running out of a theater in horror during a McCauley Culkin movie. I think it was called "The Bad Son." The evil boy drops big rocks off a highway overpass causing a multi-car pileup. It was treated with nonchalance, not indicating the horror of the innocent families who would DIE from such evil.
I won't watch any movie (or TV show) where a serial killer is raping and cutting up children and women. I accidentally turned on the TV to "Law & Order: SVU" recently and I was shocked by the language of how the dead woman's body had been mutilated. I shudder to think of the fertile minds they're feeding with such crap.
After saying all that, I'll name some movies I am currently enjoying. The new "Indiana Jones" movie was a lot of fun. Like millions of people, I walked into the theater full of nostalgia for the earlier Indy movies.
I just rented and greatly admired "The Savages" starring Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The ending disappointed me, though. Honestly, I think the screenplay author is still working on it in a garret somewhere, saying, "One more week. I'll have an ending in one more week."
Next week I'll go see "Kung Fu Panda." And in a few days I'll post to the blog about old movies I've been seeing. [I just joined Netflix. A whole new world.]
What movies are YOU seeing?

Mother's Day 2008

What a pleasant surprise -- a warm, sunny day at last. Very breezy, but we can't have everything. Rumor has it that it will be 10 degrees warmer one day next weekend. And whenever we're tempted to complain about the weather, we look at the suffering in Tornado Alley and shut our mouths.
Happy Mother's Day to all!

Tribute to my mom

This essay was published several years ago in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Mother's Poem
By Lynnette Baughman

My mother memorized only one poem. It's a fragment, actually, of a long, fairly obscure poem by the American poet James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). Two or three lines are famous, the rest seldom recited. "And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days . . ."

She couldn't remember the author or the poem's name, so in college when I came across "The Vision of Sir Launfal," and read of the perfection of June in "Prelude to Part First," I wrote it out and memorized it. Mother prided herself on reciting it rapid-fire, the words an aural blur. I surprised her by saying it as fast as she could. From then on it wasn't Mother's poem. It was our poem.

My mother grew up poor in Bradford, Pa., and Duluth, Minn. She was second-generation American of Irish descent, fond of saying in an exaggerated but very realistic brogue, "Me mither's name was McMenamin, and her mither's name was Hannigan!" Her own mother could only stay in school through fifth grade, but my mom made it through high school. It was touch-and-go that last year. Her father had survived smallpox, but his kidneys were damaged. He could only work sporadically; her mother kept them fed by doing washing and cleaning in other people's homes.

Mother had two outfits, one for weekdays and one for Sunday. Her school outfit was a navy blue serge skirt with bloomers. The pinwale corduroy blouse had two sets of detachable collar and cuffs, so she could hand wash one set every night. The outfit was washed every weekend. She had one hand-me-down coat that lasted for years.

"I had to walk a mile to school in bitter cold weather, following a horse plow which made a path on the sidewalks," she wrote later. "I carried 5 cents to ride home on the trolley if the weather was too bad, but I hung on to the 5 cents and walked."

She wrote, too, of her graduation in 1922. "We had no money, but I had to have a dress under the rented graduation robe. We had some real lace curtains that we, as kids, had had for dress-up but which now had gaping holes in them. My mother fashioned a dress out of that lace, and every hole was covered with a rosette made of satin ribbon with a dime-store forget-me-not in the center. The slip underneath was new -- pink sateen. The dress was something to be proud of, and I was. No one had to know its origin."

She had taken the business course in high school, and went to work immediately as a stenographer. When her father died 15 months later, she became the sole support of her mother and sister. She went alone to Philadelphia to find work, then moved the family there to be closer to her married brother.

I was the youngest of her six children, the only one born after the family moved from Philadelphia to Bremerton, Wash. Both my parents worked very hard. After my dad was severely injured working on the construction of Ross Dam, Mother had an even harder life. I scarcely ever saw her in daylight. She rose early to take public transportation to her job, then took a bus and a ferry and a bus to the hospital in Seattle to see my father. We moved to New Mexico for his health, but he died when I was 10.

On some forgotten June day in my 20s, when I was busy with children of my own, in Texas, or maybe it was Michigan by then, I called Mother and recited the poem.

And what is so rare as a day in June? I began. (But I said it her way, "Andwhatissorare asadayinJune?")
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune, And over it softly her warm ear lays;
Whether we look or whether we listen, We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;
Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers,
And, groping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.

The tradition became an annual phone call, and it was a contest to see who would remember first and be the one to call and do the recitation. In 1991 -- I have no idea why -- I almost forgot. On the 25th of June I made the call, and her relief almost made me cry. By then she was so old, so frail. She'd used most of her savings, and it took everything she got from her retirement and Social Security to pay women to take care of her so she could stay in her little house in Las Cruces. Actually, it took more than that. Her five surviving children pitched in every month to make up the shortfall.

I remembered on time June 1, 1992, and I placed the call, planning to recite it without so much as a hello, to make sure I beat her to it. But the caretaker answered instead. I heard Mother's reedy voice in the background. "Who is it?" "It's Lynn." I hear the rustle of the phone being carried to the hospital bed there in the living room.

She, too, skipped hello in order to fire the first poetic salvo. "AndwhatissorareasadayinJune?"

Silly old woman. Silly dear old woman. About four and a half feet tall if she stood up, but she couldn't. Not a month went by without another fracture of her brittle bones. The phone, the mail and visits meant the world to her by then.

She died that December 30, four days after her 88th birthday. At the luncheon after the funeral I made reference to "Mother's poem" to my oldest brother, then to the others. That was when I knew I was the only one who had memorized it. It really was our poem.

My own children knew about "Grandma's poem," though they only knew the first three or four lines. Since I always recited it fast, like a tongue twister, they probably never distinctly heard the whole thing. I had long forgotten the name of the poem.

My daughters and I use the phone (long distance) to excess. Or maybe there's no such thing. It's a big world, and I am, after all their mother. What's a couple dollars? (Of course, when Erika was in Australia, and Shije was in Mexico, and Sonje was stationed in Japan -- and the cost was a dollar a minute -- less contact might have been tolerable.)

There's one phone call I wouldn't trade for the world, though. It came June 1, 1995. Erika, a girl of taste and intelligence, but the daughter who comes closest to being an airhead at times, was 21. Then attending college in New York City, she was a woman of the world, a cosmopolite, but she was still my baby -- my youngest and the youngest of Mother's 20 grandchildren. She was the one who sang "Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is Calling" at Mother's funeral in a voice that would make an angel sin-sick with envy.

"Hello?" I said that June day.

Erika didn't say hello; she didn't need to. She didn't need to say she loved me, either. She said it all with words she read from a book, a book she'd gone to great difficulty to find at the huge New York Public Library. As she told me later, several librarians had been involved in the search for the unnamed poem by an unknown author. All Erika knew were two lines, but they were in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, so the librarians took on the challenge.

"And what is so rare as a day in June?" she began. "Then if ever, come perfect days . . ."

My throat tightened and I fought to breathe. Nothing. That's the answer, I thought. Nothing else is so rare.

Sharper Image

I understand the business by that name has gone into cadavership, but the need for sharper images in writing will never expire. This past weekend I attended a two-day workshop by Margie Lawson on "Power Up Emotion: Four Levels for Writing Success" and "Empowering Characters' Emotions with the EDITS System."

The workshops were sponsored by Tacoma Community College here in Washington. The facility is perfect for such events; our classroom had power outlets for laptops at every seat, and the room sloped so each person had excellent line-of-sight to the screen.

In addition to presenting in person, Margie Lawson teaches these classes online once or twice a year. [Visit www.margielawson.com for details.]

The lesson on rhetorical devices (she explained 26 of them!!!) was too much for me to take in during the time allotted, but I'm determined to understand these better and use more of them to enrich my work. While she flipped from slide to slide and example after example of anaphora, epistrophe, etc., my head felt like a bathtub with water gushing in. Unfortunately, my drain stopper is made of brittle matter (one suspects age) and much of the lesson ran out. Luckily, I have a list of the devices and a splash of examples to review.

EDITS system is a color-coded method to highlight Emotion (pink), Dialogue (blue), and other factors of vibrant writing in fiction and non-fiction.

Now, I must get back to work on my current project.
Lynnette

New month, new place to blog

April 2 -- Anne Whitfield invited me to be part of her blog on the always popular subject of Authors & Books. Please stop by and meet some authors.

I'm busy now proofreading the galleys for LOVE WITH A WELCOME STRANGER. I don't have the pub date yet, but I will soon.
Lynnette

Welcome to the Rainshadow

April is only two days away and Easter is already passed. I will have the galleys for the new book any day now, so very soon I'll be able to announce the date it will be available. Good news, for sure!
Three events on the early part of my April calendar have stars.
1. The local Audubon Center is presenting a program on raptors April 4. Hawks are my favorite birds. Just the other day I sat by a field at Dungeness Recreation Area and watched a male and female northern harrier hunt.
2. In addition to attending a meeting of Greater Seattle Romance Writers of America on April 5, I'm going to the Seattle Art Museum to see Roman Antiquities from the Louvre.
3. April 12 & 13 I'll attend a workshop on writing (and editing) by Margie Lawson at Tacoma Community College.
I'd love to hear what's up with you.
Lynnette