Just a quick message: because my team is so awesome, the e-book version of The Call will be ready two weeks early! If you preorder now, Amazon will deliver it on 9/1 to your reading device. Kind of like magic but without all the glitter and card tricks. Although if you want those, I know a guy you can call…
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Thunder
A storm was coming, and Hannah knew it was a bad idea to be hiking on the mountain, but Josh insisted, and in all the years of their friendship, he’d hardly ever insisted on anything. When the storm swept in, they scuttled for the shelter of a cave they’d hidden in before. He spread out his sleeping bag and built a small fire, boy scout style. By the dim light she could barely see the lurid bruise beneath his right eye and the swelling of his lower lip, leaving her the illusion of his face as its usual cute, undamaged whole. She didn’t say much; he said less. The patter of the rain and the crackle of the flames and the thunder, now a gentle roll in the distance, made her drowsy.
The next thing she knew, the storm had passed. They could have resumed their hike at any time, but it was nice in there, with the fire and the metallic smell of damp rocks and his regular breathing. Josh was still asleep, and she felt comfortable lying next to him, the rhythm of his chest rising and falling a kind of meditation. She ached to touch his lip, his black eye, to soothe away the pain. To erase the memory of his seeing her kiss Ben Thompson, the humiliation of losing the fight and getting punched not just once but twice. She didn’t mean for it to happen. The kiss, or having Josh see it, or Ben being such a jerk. Maybe she’d been nervous about what would happen to her and Josh at the end of the summer. They’d been friends since grade school, but aside from the occasional family trip, they’d never really been apart. Even when she had her appendix out, he’d come to visit her at the hospital, and they’d played card games and shared her Jell-O. Could they still be friends in colleges at opposite ends of the country? When the subject even brushed the edges of their conversation, they flinched, changing the topic. She was tired of flinching.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
His eyes flickered, and he turned his head to face her. “Why? You didn’t make it rain.”
But the silence filling the cave after his last word made it clear he knew what she was apologizing for.
“I’m sorry because it was supposed to be you. It was always supposed to be you.”
His mouth opened slightly, making the puffy lower lip look even more painful. “You could have told me that before I made a total ass of myself.”
The fire hissed and crackled, dancing shadows along the rock.
“It would have changed everything,” she said.
He appeared to think a moment, nodded, then, with what she hoped wasn’t too painful a smile, said, “Change isn’t always bad.”
“Try saying that again when we’re living three thousand miles apart.”
He rolled toward her, touching her cheek as if she were exotic and breakable and, possibly, imaginary. “We have now. We have the rest of the summer. We can figure the rest out later.”
He was right, and wrong, and the rain started up again. When thunder shook the ground, she flinched, and he pulled her tight against him.
Women in Baseball: The Umpires
I knew I’d never get to play second base for the New York Mets—when I was a kid, girls weren’t even allowed to join Little League—but it was fun to watch the games and dream. Sometimes I’d even pretend to be an umpire. I’d watch those “You Make the Call” segments on TV, where they’d break down a complicated play and show why the ump called it the way he did. But I didn’t think they’d let girls be umpires, either.
Many years later, I learned that in 1972, a few months before my eleventh birthday, Bernice Gera put on a mask and chest protector and became the first woman in modern history to umpire a professional game. She’d sued the New York Professional Baseball League for sex discrimination, fought for five long, hard years in court, and finally won her case. She quit after working just one game of a double-header, citing the incivility of the other umpires and the baseball culture in general.
Many, many years later, her story still intrigues me. Why would a woman fight so hard to get a chance to call a game and then never set foot on the field again? What was it like for the women who came after her? Women like Christine Wren, Pam Postema, Theresa Cox-Fairlady, Ria Cortesio, Shanna Kook, and currently, Jen Pawol, Emma Charlesworth-Seiler, and the indefatigable Perry Barber, one of the hardest working woman in amateur-level (but very professional) umpiring. And still, except for a handful of spring training and exhibition games, Pam Postema was the only one who’d made it to Triple A, just one rung below the majors.
It’s hard sometimes to believe that even as recently as 1982, there had only been three brave souls in professional baseball who had gone where no woman had gone before.
I wanted to know more. I wanted to know what it might have been like for them to work in the game. Beyond the headlines. Beyond the “official stories.” And when I want to know more, I start writing. That’s when Margie popped into my head, and she had a story to tell. I’m excited that I’ll be publishing The Call later this summer, and you’ll get a chance to meet her, and her twin brother, and the rest of her world.
I’ll be posting an excerpt soon and more about the players.
Happy trails!
Salt: A Modern Fable
I’ve never written a fable before, but when I caught a headline on Politico yesterday, this story jumped into my head. I wrote it for 2-Minutes-Go.
—-
Salt
More than his gold-plated golf clubs, more than his collection of celebrities on speed-dial, more than any of his trophies, the man loved his salt. He’d cultivated that salt with a patience he’d bestowed on no human in his life. He’d traveled the earth looking for the best location to harvest it, the ideal climate, the primo seaside sunbaked leeward cove, where the big-league crystals collected. But it still was not good enough, the haul too paltry, so he spent a million dollars of his fortune on a magician’s spell to make the minerals more powerful.
That was the ticket.
The salt colonized and crystallized and concentrated and sparkled. The ocean and magic combined to imbue it with the bitter tears of mermaids in mourning, the revenge of white whales, the last cries of drowning mariners, the shaking fist of Atlantis. He brought no one there except his favorite son, on secret missions, telling his wife they were going to the circus, or hunting tigers. The first time they reached the cliffs, the boy looked confused, and the man indulged in a wolf’s smile.
“Someday,” he said, clapping a small hand to the boy’s shoulder, “this will all be yours. It will be your legacy. It will be the salt to rub in your enemies’ wounds.”
The boy didn’t understand, and the man was angry, and the boy grew quiet. But he kept bringing the boy to the cliffs when he traveled to check on his salt, to make sure the enchantment still held, to make sure there would be enough. For he had a lot of enemies. He’d hoped to push some sense into the boy. Like his father had done to him.
During his next visit, as they beheld what the family fortune had purchased, the boy asked, “Is it time yet?”
The man lifted his chin and felt the sea breezes on his freshly exfoliated face. He licked a finger and raised it in the air. “Oh,” he said, relishing what was to come. “It’s time.”
And he took off his expensive shoes and rolled up his expensive trousers and picked down the rocks to where the salt deposits lay, all the while wincing at the pain in his soft, small, pedicured feet. The boy followed his lead, carrying the golden bucket, and soldiered on under its weight as the man filled it to the brim.
The salt was beautiful, and it was his, and the man felt a touch of pride as if it were another child.
When they returned to the city, he climbed to the highest tower, the boy in his footsteps, and opened the windows where the people gathered below. From their shouts he knew that most of them hated him, were envious of all he possessed and of the victories he’d claimed, but he waved and smiled, told a few jokes. Drawing them closer.
Then with one mighty hurl, he emptied the bucket over the ledge, but the wind blew the salt back at him. He tried to duck the onslaught—too late. The last thing he saw before the crystals blinded him was his son, standing behind him, smiling. A wolf cub’s smile.
A Sudden Gust of Gravity on Sale
Hi, everybody. I’ve been busy writing, but I just wanted to pick my head up and let you know that A Sudden Gust of Gravity will be on sale for 99 cents on Amazon through the weekend.
What readers have been saying about this book:
“Filled with magic, illusion, and allure, readers will be treated to a refreshing and quick read!” – inD’tale magazine
“What I really liked about this book was the original characters: a woman who aspires to be a magician and a sensitive Korean/American doctor with a gangster past. These are not the stereotypical characters you sometimes find in fiction. I also thought the author did a great job of showing the love/hate relationship invoked by an emotionally (and physically?) abusive partner. This was an entertaining read and should appeal to fans of romance as well as commercial fiction.” – Carrie (Amazon reviewer)
“Author Laurie Boris truly has a magician’s sleight-of-hand, transforming this study in potentially heavy, difficult reality into a heartlifting, thoroughly absorbing adventure.” – Amazon reader
And now I’ll return to my keyboard, but I’ll leave you with a new trailer for A Sudden Gust of Gravity. Have a great day!
Sunday Flash Fiction: Deja Vu
This piece was inspired by this week’s 2-Minutes-Go Flash Fiction, and I wanted to share it:
Deja Vu
Lunch wasn’t sitting well, the sudden rise in the humidity was making his sinuses throb like a mother, and Malcolm still had one more job to do before he could call it a week and collect his money.
The déjà vu of the address he plugged into his crappy GPS stopped him for a moment, but then he shook it out of his head and followed its schoolmarm directives. He knew the cardinal rules of the job: have a short memory and don’t get involved. Maybe that was why he drank so much. It helped with the memory part, but it didn’t help so much with the guilt. He woke each morning with the gut-sinking sensation that he’d ruined someone’s day, maybe even someone’s future. But several cups of coffee usually killed that. So did the piles of bills on his kitchen table and the rationalization that if people hadn’t done something stupid he wouldn’t be visiting.
But when he turned up the broken driveway and saw the sheared off gutter dangling by one clamp over the raggedy lawn, one of those smothered memories snuck up and sucker-punched him.
He’d been there before. The driveway had been less choppy; the lawn had been shorter. A pale wisp of a girl, many months pregnant, had answered the door. She’d looked like his daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in years. He’d mumbled the name on the papers and she shook her head and he said he was only doing his job and she stood there growing paler and he shoved the papers at her and got the hell out of there as fast as he could and downed most of a fifth of JB when he got home.
Now he turned the car off and sat, staring at the crumbling stairs, the sagging gutters, and one intrepid weed growing straight up out of it. The doorbell glowed orange. The papers lay crisp and stapled on his front seat. His breath quickened. His mind snatched at excuses. Had an accident. Lost the paperwork. Nobody home… His smile dissolved. No matter what he dreamed up, this would not end well for her.
Then a car pulled up behind him. The pale and less-wispy girl flew out, fists clenched, eyes blazing. “You people. You people, haven’t you people done enough? He’s not here. He’s not here, all right? You want him? You go to his girlfriend’s house, you get him there, and you know what? You tell him he owes me for the care and feeding of our child.”
And with that she pointed to the backseat, and the pale, towheaded baby, and the lunch that hadn’t been sitting well in Malcolm’s stomach punched him too.
Her once-pale face flared red, but she seemed to have shouted herself out, so he rolled down his window. She stood with sagging shoulders, her right hand extended. “Okay,” she said. “I get it. The papers are all made up there, and you’re only doing your job, and I guess”—she sighed—“I guess I’ll have to find a lawyer or something, huh.”
“I can help you,” he mumbled.
“Huh?”
Malcolm cleared his throat and said, louder, “I can help you.”
And when he got home, the undelivered summons back in his briefcase, he collapsed into a kitchen chair and made two phone calls. One to his boss, telling him he quit. The second to the public defender, telling him the name and new address of the deadbeat dad.
He then tried to make a third, but the same sort of schoolmarmish voice that scolded him from his GPS said that the number had been disconnected.
The robotic words were still echoing in his mind when he drank the JB straight from the bottle, knowing it would not kill everything that he’d done, but he damn sure hoped to give it a try.
What’s Smashwords Good For?
I know. I’ve been hearing the questions: Laurie, what is this Smashwords thing you keep rattling on about? Your books are on sale there [for the rest of July, ahem], but…what the heck IS it?
I have a post up on Indies Unlimited today that explains what Smashwords is, some of the advantages, and why I chose them over their competitors.
If you’re new to self-publishing, or considering other avenues besides Amazon, you may want to read more here.
Catering Girl
Coming soon on Amazon!
Stand-up comic Frankie Goldberg is one of my favorite characters. She popped into my head while I was stuck in traffic in the middle of Woodstock, New York, and she had a story to tell me. That initial meeting eventually became The Joke’s on Me. But before Frankie reunited with her family, she wreaked a little havoc in Hollywood. Catering Girl is a novella from that chapter of her life.
Frankie keeps getting fired from her day jobs, thanks to her smart mouth and a lot of other bad habits. Now a thirty-something catering assistant on a movie set, she reluctantly agrees to bring a cappuccino to the resident diva. The young star Anastasia Cole is in tears, distraught about disturbing changes in the script. Frankie serves a side of common sense with the coffee, and excited to have an ally, Anastasia offers her the role of a lifetime. It’s not what Frankie had in mind—but being needed might be exactly what she needs.
I’m excited to share a bit of Catering Girl with you here, before I publish it this weekend.
—–
Catering Girl
Chapter 1
I wasn’t supposed to be smoking on set, even though it was an outdoor shoot nearly halfway to the Mojave Desert. I wasn’t supposed to be smoking at all, having promised everyone who still loved me that I’d quit. But lack of sleep and a vicious hangover made for a deadly combination that lowered my willpower to zilch. I’d just lit up, intent on spending my midmorning break in contemplation of my bad habits, when a voice perforated my muzzy thoughts.
“Catering! You there, catering!”
Busted. I ground my cig underneath one designer heel and prepared for another lecture. Snapping his fingers at me was the producer’s son, an entitled little creep with a Napoleon complex and a suspiciously low hairline. Per my contract with the studio, I didn’t have to man my station for another ten minutes. For almost anybody else involved in this movie, I would have hopped to, probably with a joke and a smile, but I had no intention of saluting this guy’s flag any sooner than required.
My deficiency of hop-to did not appear to please him. His eyes narrowed to nasty slits. “What are you, deaf? Cappuccino to trailer three, nonfat milk. Don’t screw it up.”
Speaking of entitlement. “I’m not going in there.” I’d yet to meet the performer in person, but the last coffee jock who’d gone into Anastasia Cole’s trailer had exited wearing the cappuccino, then kept on walking.
If either he or Miss Silicone thought that a slew of forgettable slasher flicks and one Oscar—best supporting actress, in a slow year—earned her the right to go full-on diva, they both had another thing coming. I didn’t care that my teenage nephew adored her and had seen all her movies, some twice.
The heir apparent sighed. “Okay, what’s it worth to you?”
“Excuse me?”
He pulled out his wallet. “Ten bucks?”
Ten bucks? I saw what that putz drove onto the set. My parents hadn’t paid that much for their house. “Fifty,” I countered. “But if she throws it at me, I’m walking, too. And I’ll take the entire catering unit with me.”
I had no authority to pull up stakes, but I’d been working with guys like this for years. It seemed a safe bet that beyond his own imagined influence, he didn’t have a clue who was responsible for what.
A vein bulged on his left temple. “Christ. You’re as bad as the agents. Anastasia won’t do the nude scene, the other producers are threatening to bail, and now the catering girl is shaking me down for a lousy cup of coffee.”
Catering girl? I straightened my spine, which probably didn’t make me any taller than my usual five foot five, sans moussed curls and impractical footwear, but it made me feel more intimidating. “What did you call me?”
He got right up in my face. “Catering. Girl. No power.” He pointed to himself. “Producer. Power. Get the difference?”
I smiled sweetly at him. “Thank you for clearing that up for me. Now let me give you some advice. When Daddy makes you drive to McDonald’s to pick up dinner for the crew, don’t forget the french fries. Makes the union guys pissy.”
Then I turned and started for my car, forcing a cool, confident walkaway so he wouldn’t see that I was having a quiet nervous breakdown over what I’d just done. It was a crappy movie, but I needed this job, bad. In the thirteen years since little Frankie Goldberg had left the East Coast and the comfort of my mother’s brisket, the career as a famous movie star hadn’t panned out. Nor had I been doing very well as a fair-to-middling standup comic. The only marketable skill I had left was a knack for cooking in large quantities. At the moment, I couldn’t afford to put my job on the line just to make a point. I had bills coming due, my beat-up Barracuda was on its last cylinder, and I owed my sister and her current husband, at her last accounting, six hundred and thirty-two dollars and fifteen cents.
It was the fifteen cents that bothered me the most.
“All right,” he said. “Fifty. And I’ll talk to her first.”
I let out my breath. For fifty bucks, I’d even draw a little heart in the foam. “Nonfat milk, you said?”
Six Ways To Self-Edit & Polish Your Prose
Spot-on self-editing tips from Kristen Lamb.
Whether you are new to writing or an old pro, brushing up on the basics is always helpful. Because no matter how GOOD the story is? If the reader is busy stumbling over this stuff, it ruins the fictive dream and she will never GET to the story. So today we are going to cover six ways to self-edit your fiction. Though this stuff might seem like a no-brainer, I see these blunders ALL the time.
….unfortunately even in (legacy) published books.
When I worked as an editor, I found it frustrating when I couldn’t even GET to the story because I was too distracted by these all too common oopses.
There are many editors who charge by the hour. If they’re spending their time fixing oopses you could’ve easily repaired yourself? You’re burning cash and time. Yet, correct these problems, and editors can more easily get to the MEAT…
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Heart
I’d like to share a story inspired during this week’s Two-Minutes-Go on JD Mader’s Unemployed Imagination blog. Great writing happens there. Maybe one week you’ll come by and play. Because it’s fun. And fun is good.
—–
Heart
He didn’t recognize the purple-inked handwriting on the note he’d plucked from beneath his windshield wiper. Maybe his eyes were whacked from staring at computer code all day. So he blinked again, and again, and saw only the same few words in the tiny and most likely female script: “I heart your car.” A black cloud descended over his thoughts as he shook his head and crushed the slip of paper in one pale fist. More jokes. He drove a beat-to-crap Honda Civic that wasn’t even born in this century, hardly the stuff that inspires women to verb a perfectly good noun like “heart.” And if this writer of purple prose knew who owned the car? Yeah. Game over. He saw how they reacted to him. Women whispered when he walked past, gave him a wide berth in the hallways, as if afraid they’d catch something. A computer virus. Nobody wanted to talk to the dorky code guy. He wasn’t all smooth and sexy like the dudes in advertising or sales. No. He sat in the basement under the fluorescent lights and drank cold coffee and wore Spiderman socks.
Maybe he should rethink the socks.
He tossed the crumpled note on the back seat of his car.
When he turned, a girl was standing there. He jumped, and pressed a hand to his heart, which from her sudden materialization, had started to verb.
“Sorry,” she said, the left side of her mouth lifting for a second. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
She was pretty. Her hair was long and dark and neatly parted on the side. Her glasses sat crookedly on the bridge of her nose, and he couldn’t explain his desire to straighten them. He opened his mouth to say something hopefully clever, maybe to ask her name or if she was new because he’d never seen her before, but his mind felt like a giant intersection, all the strings of words confused as to which had the right of way.
She gestured to his car and said, “I have the same one.”
That explained the note. He looked up, across the neat rows of parked vehicles, and as if to assist him, she pointed. “I keep thinking I should get something newer,” she said. “But then I’d have to find new bumper stickers, and I don’t know that they make any like that anymore.”
She kept talking, something more about her car, but he had followed the line of her finger. One of the stickers read, “I’d rather be watching Firefly.”
And then he smiled, and his heart really started to verb.
