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The Lipstick Chronicles

Barbara Samuel — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 16:00:12 +0000

I have been in hiding, deep in my cave, finishing the new book, THE GARDEN OF HAPPY ENDINGS, which will be coming your way next May. I finally mailed a second pass back to my editor on Monday, which felt like delivering a very large, overdue baby. It’s alive and well.

Some readers here know that I post twice a month at The Lipstick Chronicles, with a group of very entertaining and interesting women writers. I am posting there the first and third Friday of every month, and here are the opening paragraphs of the most recent three. Stop by!

Ian and the Blue Gill

Three women, ranging in age from senior to ancient, are settled in a half circle at the end of the dock. The chairs have been dragged down to the pond from the main house, metal lawn chairs with green and white woven seats. My young son and I sit on the wooden slats of the dock. A little while ago, there were some bigger boys, young teenagers in baggy shorts and skinny chests, daring each other to swim in the murky water with snapping turtles and water snakes, but they’re gone now.

The old women wear cotton skirts and sensible shoes and soft cotton hats to protect their good complexions. Gnarled fingers fix bait. Fishing lines trail lazily in the water of the small pond. The air
is thick and still, so hot I find it hard to breathe, and my son’s pale cheeks are flushed. We are Colorado natives, and this is the countryside of the border between Missouri and Illinois.

I’d rather be almost anywhere else.

I hate fishing. I hate humidity. I hate the heat. Before we arrived, I’d been excited about this gathering with my husband’s family, but the reality is daunting. It’s hard to understand some of their deep south accents, and I don’t understand references to times and people I don’t know. And maybe they’re notpatronizing me, the much-younger, blond wife of an older African-American man, but all the usual in-law negotiations seem particularly exaggerated.

The Ghost in the Garden

Have you ever lived with a ghost? I have. In fact, I’m pretty sure she wanted me to save her house.

My eldest son was in kindergarten when I first saw this house. It was a narrow, two story brick, with a bay window on the top floor, and deep porch. It was well over a hundred years old, and looked it—the yard was bare dirt, baked by the southwestern sun to absolute sterility, the paint on the old wood was peeling. There was a crack in the brick over one window. It was empty. Abandoned.

But every day, as I passed by with my son’s five-year-old hand in mine, the house caught my eye. A pair of windows faced east, illuminating a staircase with a beautiful old banister, and spilling sunshine into the open front rooms. The light was so inviting, so peaceful, that often I would pause on the way back home and peer in the windows to see what else I could see. That inviting upstairs bedroom with the bay window. The enormous front windows overlooking the street, arched and ancient, the glass thin and wavery. One of them had a tiny bb hole in it. The kitchen was horrific—a single bank of cupboards made of tin, covered with wood-grain contact paper.

How to be a Perfect Mother In Law

My son was married on April 7. This means that I am a new mother-in-law. I have to forget everything I knew about mothering, and adopt a new approach.

This is not the simple transition I imagined it would be. For one thing, the son who got married is my mama’s boy, a child so devoted to me as a baby that I called him my joey. He was two weeks late emerging from the womb, and then I carried him on my hip for the next ten months because he wouldn’t allow anyone else to so much as change a sock. He’d howl piteously even if it was his father.

He’s grown into a strapping man who towers over me and has tattoos all over his arms and shoulders
(including, natch, one for “Mom” (please note the quill)). His bride is a serious, level-headed Air Force sergeant who looks at him with enough love in her eyes to make any mother happy. He’s an exuberant character, and worships the ground she walks on. I liked her immediately and have only grown to love her more
over time.

5 Dos and a Do-over at Chick Lit is Not Dead

Barbara Samuel — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 16:19:38 +0000

Join me over at Chick Lit is Not Dead for a special blog and a chance to win a free book.

1. Take a chance on something that seems impossible. Write a novel, maybe, or throw your heart into a crumbling old house and try to save it from the wrecking ball. When my boys were small and we were poor, I fell in love with an old house down the street. It was empty, maybe abandoned, and I could see into the light falling across the stairway, and upstairs was a big room with a bay window beneath the high pointed eaves. Every morning, I walked by and it whispered to me. Somehow, with no money whatsoever, we ended up buying it and spending years and years renovating one thing and then another. There was a ghost in the garden, who befriended my cats, and it was her ancient globe lilies and giant roses that grew out of the rock hard dirt in the backyard. (I am convinced she is the one who called me to save her house.) My children grew up with torn up floors and ancient bathrooms and sheetrock tape, the two of them crammed together in one bedroom so I could have the tiny office downstairs for work. It was a house of great love, and although it never became This Old House, all gleaming and perfectly restored, we saved it from the wrecking ball. READ THE REST….

Yesterday, when I was nineteen

Barbara Samuel — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 19:25:21 +0000

Over at Lipstick Chronicles, we are talking about where we were and what we did at 19. Come tell your story. http://thelipstickchronicles.typepad.com/the_lipstick_chronicles/2011/02/yesterday-when-i-was-nineteen.html

Food and love and important things like that

Barbara Samuel — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 21:02:03 +0000

One of the ways writers get their books out these days is to guest blog everywhere. It’s actually fairly productive, but it leaves the local blog sadly neglected. As I said before, I will be posting at Lipstick Chronicles twice a month starting in February, and you can catch me there talking about food and women’s fiction and…well, you know, the whole catastrophe.

In the meantime, this is a blog I posted there that I think many of you might enjoy

“A little while back, when I first blogged here at Lipstick Chronicles, a couple of people mentioned writer MFK Fisher. I had never read her, but always hungry for food writers, I googled her and started reading. Two hours later, I ordered four of her books from Amazon, including the hefty anniversary edition of The Art of Eating.

When the books arrived, I curled up in my chair with two kittens and a class of wine and cracked open Art, and I’ve been dipping into every day or two ever since, doling out the pages like some rare, complex cheese. Sometimes, I cannot stop reading as fast as I’d like, carried along by the drama of her narrative as surely as if I’m lost in a novel. She led an unusual and adventurous life, and was a highly celebrated woman writer during at time when that was not at all common or easy. I feel as I did when I first read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast—how is it possible I missed this work until now?

All things in their proper time. Thanks to some of you here, I have found a new favorite in Fisher.

For those who are not familiar with her work, she was a food writer who predates Julia Child by some decades. She wrote in the thirties and forties and fifties, writing with good humor and intelligence and wit.

In The Gastronomical Me, she writes in her foreword:

“People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?

Guest blogs elsewhere

Barbara Samuel — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:46:48 +0000

I’ve been recovering from all the back and forthing, and doing copy edits for my next book, THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING, which will be out at the end of December, and sleeping, and watching movies. Also have guest blogged twice in the past week.

At WRITER UNBOXED, I blogged about how to get yourselve moving even when you really, really don’t want to write, and you have a headache, and the baby woke you up three times last night and you have to–whatever. Here it is: Six tricks for writing when you don’t feel like it.

Over at Romancing the Blog, I wrote a post about my life and RWA conferences and how much this writing world has given me as a woman. Check it out here: As Time Goes By, My Life and RWA Conferences.

I started working seriously on my new book this morning, after hearing it rattle around for a few weeks. Now it’s starting to rain again, so I’m going to curl up someplace warm and read the afternoon away.

Hope all of you are well!

Pardon the dust

Barbara Samuel — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:07:42 +0000

Working on the header images today, so forgive me if things come up too small or weird or distorted or blank.

Blogging today at Writer Unboxed

Barbara Samuel — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:05:08 +0000

My subject is writing pace. What’s you writing pace? Do you know?

Read the blog here: http://writerunboxed.com/2009/03/25/the-pace-of-you/

Blogging on food television at RTB today

Barbara Samuel — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:13:33 +0000

Come talk with me about Top Chef and the pale imitation Chopping Block at Romancing the Blog today.

Plotting blog and "Magic" class

Barbara Samuel — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:54:48 +0000

Two things this morning:

#1 Posted a blog to Writer Unboxed this morning, Plotting for the Severely Right-Brained. Might be helpful for some of you who have a brain like mine.

#2 Reclaiming the Magic class starts on Monday. The published workshop is nearly full (one spot left), but there is plenty of room in the aspiring class. I really thought it would go the other way! This is not divided for elitist reasons, but so that we can focus on the issues writers have at different stages of their careers.

Some of the things that might specifically come up for aspiring writers:

How do you keep writing after three or five or ten years when you haven’t published and people around you have stopped believing you’ll ever publish? How do you keep believing in yourself? What tricks and techniques can help you get your work done even when you’re exhausted from kids/work/life? How do you recover from a string of painful rejections or bad contest commentary? How do you deal with other people publishing when you’ve been writing longer? If this sounds like something you’d enjoy, please email me.

And DON’T FORGET: THERE ARE SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE FOR BOTH PUBLISHED AND ASPIRING WRITERS! Only a couple of people have tossed their names in the hat this time. If you’d like to take the class but just can’t afford it, you might as well give it a shot, right? Send me an email with “scholarship” in the title.

Questions?

Did Joan wash her hands at the same sink?

Barbara Samuel — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:30:37 +0000

Joan Didion, the celebrated writer, went to Columbia Elementary School for awhile. The old building, made of red sandstone (as well as I can recollect), not the modern version that occupies the lot these days. I have been drunkenly reading her work, admiring the western cleanness, the spare and unsentimental way she captures the world, my world, the west. I was electrified to read her casual mention of the school, a brief sojurn while her father worked at Petersen Field, and even though I now wish to find the exact reference, I can’t. It was small and not very important.

Is is important to me, however, because I went to Columbia Elementary School, too, back when it was a tall, graceful building with long double hung windows. I, too, am a writer. I remember my classroom on the first floor, the western side of the building, where the teacher had hung squares of construction paper with the names of colors written on them. Orange. Brown. Red. Yellow. It seemed I could own those colors by knowing their names, leash them with letters. Mine!

Did Joan Didion sit in the same chair ….Read the rest of this post

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