Happy Fourth of July everyone!

May your day be filled with laughter and fireworks, cold ice cream and cool friends, and healthy food like hot dogs and hamburgers and apple pie.

EXCERPT

My name is Charlotte Mackintosh.

I am thirty-five. I love science. I have degrees in physics and biology. One would think I would work in a lab or teach at a university. I don’t. I write time travel romance novels. My ninth book was released four months ago.

My pen name is Georgia Chandler. My mother was from Georgia, a southern belle, and Chandler was her maiden name.

For me to be a romance writer is a perplexing joke. What romance? I don’t have any in my life, haven’t for years, since The Unfortunate Marriage. I have named my vibrator Dan The Vibrator. That should tell you about the sexual action I get. Which is, so we’re all clear, none.

My late father, Quinn, was Scottish, hence my last name, and his mother had the Scottish Second Sight. She saw the future, all mottled up, but she saw it. Sometimes she didn’t understand it herself. I remember her predictions, one in particular when I was seven and we were making an apple butterscotch pie with a dash of cinnamon.

“You will travel through many time periods, Charlotte,” my grandma said, rolling out the pie dough with a heavy rolling pin, her gray curls escaping her bun like springs. “All over the world.”

“What do you mean?” I rolled out my dough, too. We were bringing the pies to the Scottish games up in the highlands the next day, where my father was competing in the athletic contests and playing his bagpipes.

“I don’t know, luv. Damn this seeing into the future business. Cockamamie. It will drive me to an early grave.”

“I want to travel to other planets and inspect them for aliens.”

She placed her pie crust into the buttered glass baking dish. “You will live different lives, child. You will love deeply. And yet…” She paused, her brow furrowed. “It’s not you.”

“I don’t think so, Grandma. I love science. Specifically our cells. Mutations. Sick cells, healthy cells. Toran and I pricked our fingers yesterday so we could study our blood under my microscope.”

She eyed me through her glasses. “You are an odd child.”

“Yes,” I told her, gravely, “I am.”

My grandma was right about time travel. She simply dove into the fictional realm of my life without realizing it. McKenzie Rae Dean, my heroine, travels through time, lives different lives, and loves deeply. But McKenzie Rae is not me. See how my grandma got things jumbled up and yet dead right, too?

Many of her other second sight predictions have come true, too. A few haven’t yet. I’m a little worried about the few that haven’t. Several in particular, as they’re decidedly alarming.

I live on a quiet island, called Whale Island, off the coast of Washington. I have a long white house on five acres. I rarely ever have to leave my view of the ocean and various whales, my books, garden, and cats. I have had enough of the world and of people. Some people call me a recluse. I call them annoying.

My publisher wants me to travel to promote my books. I went on book tours with the first book, hated it, and have refused to go again. They whine. I ignore them. What do they know? I stay home.

I walk my four cats in a specially designed pink cat stroller twice every day. They each have their own compartment with their name on a label in front.

I read gardening books for entertainment, but they are only second to my love of all things physics and biology. I have a pile of exciting books and articles in my house on both subjects, including astrophysics, string theory, the human genome project, and cellular and molecular biology. Seeing them waiting for me, like friends filled with enthralling knowledge, flutters my heart.

I might drink a tad too much alcohol. Wine is my vice. I drink only the finest wine, but that is a poor excuse for the nights the wine makes me skinny-dip in a calm bay by my house and belt out the Scottish drinking songs my father taught me while cart wheeling

I am going to Scotland because I must. My mother asked me to go and check on my father’s house, fix it up, and sell it. “I can finally close the door to the past,” she told me. “Without cracking down the middle, but I need you to go and do this, because if I go, I’ll crack.”

I told her, “That doesn’t make sense, Ms. Feminist.”

She waved a hand, “I know. Go anyhow. My burning bra and I can’t do it.”

I have not been back to Scotland in twenty years, partly because I am petrified of flying and partly because it’s too painful, which is why my mother, usually a ball breaker, refuses to go.

I’m nervous to leave my cats, Teddy J, Daffodil, Dr. Jekyll, and Princess Marie. Teddy J, in particular, suffers from anxiety, and Dr. Jekyll has a mood disorder, I’m sure of it. Princess Marie is snippy.

But it must be done.

My best friend, Bridget Ramsay, is still living there. Or, she was living there. We write letters all the time to each other; we have for twenty years.

Until last year, that is. I haven’t heard from her in months.

I don’t know what’s going on.

I have an idea, but I don’t like the idea.

It scares me to death.

Truth often does that to us.

Since most of us are book addicts here, it seems natural that I should ask you this very important question: Who is your favorite ROCK STAR?

No. Really. Think about it.

Who do you just LOVE?

 

#PreFridayReads: Face the Music: A Life Exposed by Paul Stanley

 

 

I was living in Russia in my head.

My brain was filled with facts and it felt like I was swimming upstream in the frozen Moskva River in Moscow with no life jacket.

When I wrote The Language of Sisters, which is about a brave family who escaped Russia in the 1980’s and moved to Oregon, I had to do a TON of research.

Then I had to do more.

And more.

And more until my eyes practically crossed and I could almost hear my brain sizzling, smoke coming out of my ears.

The Language of Sisters is told in current time, in Portland, through the eyes of Toni Kozlovsky, but I had to tell the family’s back story. I had to explain why they left Russia, especially when they escaped with a fourth child in the middle of the night, who was not their own. I had to figure out what happened to them, as a family, as individuals, and the secrets they kept from one another.

So in order to accurately portray the Kozlovskys’ lives in cold, frightening, poor Communist Moscow, I started studying Russian history.

A few of those topics, among others?

• The history of the Soviet Union/Russia 1890’s – 1991.
• The Tsar and his family and how they ruled the Soviet Union.
• The Russian Revolution (What caused it?)
• Communism
• Carl Marx
• Lenin and Stalin
• The KGB (Dangerous, so very, very dangerous)
• Christians in the Soviet Union and the consequences for being Christian. (Most hid that they were Christian, punishment was severe, including having your children taken from you.)
• Food deprivations in the Soviet Union, poverty, life in general, including what it was like to buy from state owned stores with endlessly long lines and live in state run apartment buildings where heat and plumbing were intermittent/non-existent
• The schools in the Soviet Union and what and how they taught (Rote. Memorization. Brain washing. Speak the party line or get in serious trouble.)
• Economics and atheism (Illegal to be Christian.)
• The role of the Russian Orthodox church (The priests sometimes took “confession” from their parishioners and then reported on them to government authorities and then the poor person would disappear.)
• What threats and punishments a dissenter would face from the government…
• …which brings me to the gulag, prison, Siberia
• The Cold War
• Brezhnev and stagnation in the Soviet Union
• When, why, and how the Soviet Union broke up

I will not bore you with a longer list or your eyes may cross, too. And who wants smoke to come out of their ears? Not me.

I loved researching Russia history because I didn’t know enough about it and found it harshly, sadly fascinating and, once again, was glad I was born here, and not there.

I hated researching/writing about Russia because it triggered my Type A personality. Which means, I researched, checked, re-checked, and checked again MANY times, to make sure that everything I wrote about the history of this family, while living in Russia, was correct.

I didn’t want to make a mistake. So, about 10% of what I learned about Russia went in the book. 90% was for me so I would know, at least somewhat, what I was talking about.

Here’s the first chapter of the book to give you an idea of what life was like in Russia for my character Toni Kozlovsky.

Chapter 1

I was talented at pickpocketing.

I knew how to slip my fingers in, soft and smooth, like moving silk. I was lightning quick, a sleight of hand, a twist of the wrist. I was adept at disappearing, at hiding, at waiting, until it was safe to run, to escape.

I was a whisper, drifting smoke, a breeze.

I was a little girl, in the frigid cold of Moscow, under the looming shadow of the Soviet Union, my coat too small, my shoes too tight, my stomach an empty shell.

I was desperate. We were desperate.

Survival stealing, my sisters and I called it.

Had we not stolen, we might not have survived.

But we did. We survived. My father barely, my mother only through endless grit and determination, but now we are here, in Oregon, a noisy family, who does not talk about what happened back in Russia, twenty-five years ago. It is best to forget, my parents have told us, many times.

“Forget it happened. It another life, no?” my father says. “This here, this our true life. We Americans now. Americans!”

We tried to forget, but in the inky-black silence of night, when Mother Russia intrudes our dreams, like a swishing scythe, a crooked claw emerging from the ruins of tragedy, when we remember family members buried under the frozen wasteland of the Soviet Union’s far reaches, we are all haunted, some more than others.

You would never guess by looking at my family what some of us have done and what has been done to us. You would never sense our collective memory, what we share, what we hide.

We are the Kozlovskys.

We like to think we are good people.

And, most of the time, we are. Quite good.

And yet, when cornered, when one of us is threatened, we come up swinging.

But, pfft.

All that. In the past. Best to forget what happened.

As my mother says, in her broken English, wagging her finger, “No use going to Moscow in your head. We are family. We are the Kozlovskys. That all we need to know. The rest, those secrets, let them lie down.”

Yes, do.

Let all the secrets lie.

For as long as they’ll stay down.

They were coming up fast. I could feel it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

All books are torture to write, but one thing I liked about writing No Place I’d Rather Be is all the “studying” I had to do about cakes. Yes, delicious, original, creative cakes.

I pretended I knew how to bake while “studying.”

And now my latest book is on sale. $3.49 on kindle.

Do tell me you will eat cake while reading it. That’s important to me. The book must be delicious.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/No-Place-Id-Rather-Be-ebook/dp/B01N2Q59G8

 

 

 

Want to see a few photos of my garden?

I was asked to write about my “writing cave” for Tall Poppy Writers and this is what I came up with….

It is rather funny that this column is about “writing caves.”
I don’t have a writing cave. I have a writing garden.

 

A Peek into the Writing Cave of Cathy Lamb

I asked people on my facebook pages this question…

CHOOSE ONE. I’m really trying hard to procrastinate so I don’t have to edit my book, so I’m thinking about vacations. Where would you go for one month if the whole darn, beautiful, fun thing was free?

1) Scotland. Men in kilts. Bagpipes. Rolling hills and mystery.
2) Thailand. Lagoons and an ocean. Lush jungles. History.
3) Alaska. Cruise. Sea life. Animal life. Sunsets. No driving.

And I received these answers….

 

The books below that I sweated and cried and laughed hysterically over as I semi-lost my mind, are between three bucks and four bucks at the moment on kindle, at Amazon.

You MUST read them while eating cake, that’s the rule that CANNOT be broken, but other than that, everything else is normal. Happy day to all.

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Cathy-Lamb/e/B001IGO5L0