My new book, The Man She Married, is out October 30.
A very short summary:
Natalie Shelton is in a coma.
That’s not her only problem.
https://www.amazon.com/Man-She-Married-Cathy-Lamb-ebook/dp/B079KTVHGD/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1520920054&sr=1-1&keywords=the+man+she+married
Today is the day I must absolutely, positively, without a doubt, start writing my new book. Therefore, I am headed out to my garden in my geeky red gardening boots.
Soon I will be covered in dirt, muttering at my hellebore and cursing the bulbs that died this winter. I will be taking control of the weeds and showing them who’s boss. I will whack away at mean bushes that want to take over my yard like cackling dictators.
At the end of the day I will “remember” that I needed to write, and I will slap my forehead in consternation, but I will be “too tired,” and will write tomorrow. I will promise myself this.
Then I will gleefully wonder which new plants to buy this spring…
I go to the Oregon coast to find peace.
Innocent Husband and I were here on Saturday on a date.
I was on a diet that day (torture) so of course we went to our favorite seafood place off a pier and had crab and shrimp sandwiches, clams with butter and garlic and garlic bread.
One must support the fishing industry, after all.
I looked for a chocolate dessert on the menu to support the chocolate industry but they didn’t have one. Please note that I did bravely make the effort.
Wishing you time in your own peaceful place.
I’m having a book giveaway on my Facebook page today!
Like my page, scroll down, go to the pinned post with the cover of Such A Pretty Face and answer the question.
https://www.facebook.com/cathy.lamb.9/
Good luck!
Innocent Husband put this book “Zen Golf, Mastering The Mental Game,” on my side of the bed last night.
This book MIGHT have appeared on the bed because I MIGHT have thrown my golf club the last time we golfed because the golf course was DELIBERATELY thwarting me and I MIGHT have said bad words in a loud voice.
I thought my temper was loooong buried and then I started golfing last year.
Why does golf light my hair on fire? And why in the world would Innocent Husband think that a little “Zen Talk” is going to help me? Chocolates, Innocent Husband. Chocolates. That’ll do it.
When I was about eight, my parents took my sisters, my brother, and me on a six week camping trip in a tent.
Yes, I said six weeks.
No, my parents had not lost their ever lovin’ minds. My father had a sabbatical, they were sick of the city, and they wanted out.
We all piled into our long black Ford. The Ford had an uncanny and somewhat creepy resemblance to a hearse, but we ignored that part.
We tossed in our dogs, Frisky and Alphy. Frisky bit people, Alphy bit dogs. They were both bad, odd dogs. The Ford, immediately, was in total chaos.
We left Huntington Beach, California and camped up and down California and Oregon in a big, sagging blue tent which we later learned was not waterproof, as advertised.
My mother got a scary case of hypothermia, all three of my siblings threw their guts up because they drank the lake water in Lake of the Woods, the dogs got sick in the middle of the night, and we constantly had to drop by local hospitals so I could get my regular allergy shots so I wouldn’t start wheezing like a freight train.
A lantern dropped on my sister’s head, and she had to be rushed to the hospital for a bunch of stitches. Two days later she fell head first into a pond and soaked the stitches. My father had to dive into a river in Jedediah Smith State Park to rescue my brother who would have drowned had my father not been so quick.
Alphy tried to get in fights with other dogs, and Frisky tried to bite people.
The chaos continued. We persevered.
The result? Overall, we had a fantastic time camping in that saggy blue tent. It was a pivotal moment in my life as I saw the value, and beauty, of nature.
We saw mountain ranges and beaches. Elk and raccoons. Campfires and bears. Sparkling lakes and rushing rivers. For city kids, it started a lifelong love of nature for all of us.
All we had to do was go and play outside.
(Click on the link for the full story….)
Thanks for hosting me on Writers In The Storm, Laura Drake!
Last year I was invited to my old elementary school to talk to the students about writing.
I thought you might like to see some of the pictures they drew of me.
It was interesting walking down the long hallway towards the classroom. All of these long buried emotions came in and I remembered exactly how I felt when I started school there when I was ten.
We moved from Huntington Beach because my dad got a job at a tech company. I was scared to death. It was a hard year. A lot of scary and lonely times for a ten year old!
But I met some wonderful people there who I am still friends with a zillion decades later. Anyhow, thought you might find these pictures fun.
I check once a week to see which one of my books is on sale on Amazon and this week it’s Henry’s Sisters. Cheap.
Here’s an excerpt. It’s a wild start about burning bras and thongs, just go with it:
I grabbed my lighter with the red handle from the kitchen, lighter fluid, a water bottle, my lacy bra and thong, and opened the French doors to my balcony. The wind and rain hit like a mini hurricane, my braids whipping around my cheeks.
One part of my balcony is covered, so it was still dry. I put the bra and thong in the usual corner on top of a few straggly, burned pieces of material from another forgettable night on a wooden plan and flicked the lighter on. The bra and thong smoked and blackened and wiggled and fizzled and flamed.
When they were cremated, I doused them with water from the water bottle. No sense burning down the apartment building. That would be bad.
I settled into a metal chair in the uncovered section of my balcony, the rain sluicing off my naked body, and gazed at the sky scrapers, wondering how many of those busy, brain – fried, robotic people were staring at me.
Working in a skyscraper was another way of dying early, my younger sister, Janie, would say. “It’s like the elevators are taking you up to hell.”
Right out of college she got a job as a copywriter for a big company on the twenty ninth floor of a skyscraper in Los Angeles and lasted two months before her weasely, squirmy boss found the first chapter of her first thriller on her desk.
The murderer is a copywriter for a big company on the twenty ninth floor of a skyscraper in Los Angeles. In the opening paragraphs she graphically describes murdering her supercilious, condescending, snobby boss who makes her feel about the size of a slug and how his body ends up in a trash compactor, his legs spread like a pickled chicken, one shoe off, one red high heel squished on the other foot.
That was the murderer’s calling card.
No one reports his extended absence, including his wife, because people hate him as they would hate a gang of worms in their coffee.
Janie was fired that day, even though she protested her innocence. That afternoon she sat down and wrote the rest of the story, nonstop, for three months. When she emerged from her apartment, she’d lost twenty pounds, was pale white, and muttering. At four months she had her first book contract. When the book was published, she sent it to her ex boss and wrote, “Thanks, dickhead! With love, Janie Bommarito,” on the inside cover.
It became a best seller.
She became a recluse because she is obsessive and compulsive and needs to indulge all her odd habits privately.
The recluse had received a flowery lemon – smelling pink letter, too. So had Cecilia, whose brain connects with mine.
The rain splattered down on me, the wind twirly whirled, and I raised the Kahlua bottle to my lips again. “I love Kahlua,” I said out loud as I watched the water river down my body, creating a little pool in the area of my crotch where my legs crossed. I flicked the rain away with my hand, watched it pool again, flicked it.
This entertained me for a while. Off in the distance I saw a streak of lightning, bright and dangerous.
It reminded me of the time when my sisters and I ran through a lightning storm to find Henry in a tree.
I laughed, even though that night had not been funny. It had been hideous. It had started with a pole dance and ended with squishy white walls.
I laughed again, head thrown back, until I cried, my hot tears running down my face off my chin, onto my boobs, and down my stomach. They landed in the pool between my legs and I flicked the rain and tear mixture away again. The tears kept coming and I could feel the darkness, darkness so familiar to me, edging its way back in like a liquid nightmare.
I did not want to deal with the pink letter that smelled of her flowery, lemony perfume.
Amazon – https://www.amazon.com/Henrys-Sisters-Cathy-Lamb-ebook/dp/B002I1XSDU/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
This book is for people who have a best friend.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P53BX3K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
I have already learned something very, very important in 2018.
I will tell you a short and, hopefully, enlightening story.
On New Year’s Eve afternoon I was hit with a mental thunderbolt. It just came out of the blue and smacked me in the cranium.
The thunderbolt told me to immediately clean the attic. The attic had never been cleaned, but I did it because I obey mental thunderbolts. Around this time, I also cleaned out two drawers that were filled with junk, muttering as I went.
Shortly after this cleaning spree, I got sick.
A tiny bit sick, not the flu. But still. Yuck.
So, I sat and thought about all this as I whined in bed. I put my thinking cap on. Why did I get sick, I asked myself, oh why? Right then, another mental thunderbolt struck. Smacked me again.
After hours of analysis and evaluation I came to this medically sound and scientific conclusion:
Too much cleaning = Sickness.
It was obvious. I had cleaned too much!
Therefore, to guard against sickness and keep myself healthy, I vow to clean less in 2018. In place of cleaning 
(= sickness), I vow to date Innocent Husband more. I vow to use that spare time to call and pester Darling Laughing Son, Adventurous Singing Daughter, and Rebel Dancing Daughter to call and visit me more.
I vow to spend more time laughing with my girlfriends, reading, walking, and daydreaming, and less time sweeping.
Happy 2018! Play more, clean less.
Cathy Lamb All rights reserved © 2011-2025 |
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