Nature Dilemma

Karen McCullough Posted on by

A couple of days ago I looked out my office window, which gives a nice view of the back and side yards of our house. Something small wiggled in the grass just off the patio. A mouse, I thought at first. On closer look, I realized it was a baby chipmunk.

He (or she?) was tiny, no more than a couple of inches long and looked ridiculously vulnerable, particularly since we’ve seen both hawks and owls in the neighborhood. No parental figure was anywhere in view.

My first instinct was to go out there and collect it, to protect it, but I hesitated and then did what most of us do when we need to know something these days. I Googled.

I read several articles on what to do if you found a baby chipmunk in your yard. The upshot seemed to be that unless it was visibly injured or ill, the best thing to do was nothing. Leave it alone. Mom or Dad is probably watching even if not obviously around. Chase away any predators you might see hanging around. Check back if it’s still around in a couple of hours and call a wildlife rehabilitator at that point.

So I left it and got back to work. An hour or so later, I looked out again, and it was gone.

I have no idea if a predator got it while I wasn’t looking or a parental type came around and shooed it back to safety.

I like to imagine chippie junior tucked back away in the burrow under our patio, where he can get bigger and stronger and ready to tackle the world.

A case of what I don’t know actually makes me happy.

April in the Garden

Karen McCullough Posted on by

The side yard

It’s finally here! The month when nature in central North Carolina covers itself in glory. Dogwoods, fruit trees, azaleas, tulips, and iris bloom in a riot of colors. Daytime temperatures are generally comfortable enough to make working in the garden not just feasible, but a joy.

Our last frost date around here is April 15th, so there are still a few days before it’s time to plant the annuals and summer bulbs, but there’s plenty to do to get ready. Beds have to be cleaned out, turned over, and amendments added. Old vegetation needs to be cleaned away and there are always things that need to be trimmed back or transplanted.

As I do that, I admire the plants already in bloom and dream of what it’s going to look like in a month or two. The roses are leafing out nicely in preparation for their May explosion. Hydrangeas, daisies, gazanias, and other perennials show new stalks.

I need to do as much as I can now. By the beginning of June it will be getting hot, sometimes too hot to work outside other than in the early morning.

For now, though, it’s glorious and I’m ready to go.

My Romance Novels are Mysteries Too

Karen McCullough Posted on by

I write both romance and mystery novels (as well as suspense, fantasy, and paranormal). Nearly all my mysteries have romantic elements and most of my romance novels have included elements of mystery. My most recent release, Falling for the Deputy, a short romance novel, is no exception. In fact, it includes two separate mysteries. The answer to one is obvious and is really a sub-subplot that connects to the main subplot.

The basic genre plot of a romance is fairly simple, as are most basic plots. In a romance novel, two people meet, are attracted to each other, but something—or more than one something—stands in their way. They each have to work on something about themselves or their circumstances, until finally they have each sacrificed and grown enough to overcome any obstacles. Or they decide that the other person is more important to them than anything or anyone else.

What makes a story worth reading, of course, are the specifics pinned onto that skeletal outline. Who are the two people? What stands in their way? How will they overcome those obstacles? It’s all about the details.

A mystery makes a nice subplot because it can create all sorts of obstacles to a relationship. When one person is law enforcement and the other is the chief suspect, a crime puts both protagonists in tough spots and forces them to make some hard choices.

I generally don’t do a murder mystery for a subplot; murder is too impactful and would take over the story. But vandalism, embezzlement, bribery, fraud, extortion, blackmail, robbery, and others can all make for effective whodunits as well. They’re still serious crimes with serious consequences.

In Falling for the Deputy, I use both fraud and embezzlement, with the heroine a suspect in both. How the simpler one is resolved impacts directly on the second and more serious crime, which had huge implications for the relationship between the two main protagonists.

On the larger level, most novels have some kind of mystery at their heart. Based on the genre, a reader may know that the story will turn out okay in the end, but how that’s going to happen is the central question and the reason to keep reading. If we all knew how the resolution would work out before we started reading a novel, there wouldn’t be any point in going on.

That’s why people hate spoilers for stories.

Why Baseball in Falling for the Deputy?

Karen McCullough Posted on by

In my just released book, Falling for the Deputy, Barbara, my heroine, is into baseball. She played it in high school and college When she moved to Willow Ridge, she volunteered to help coach a little league team. The coach for a local, not-very-good men’s team watches her, realizes she knows quite a bit about playing the game, and asks her to join them. She agrees to do it–with lots of reservations.

A few games and some conflict ensues. It’s a subplot in the book, but it helps build the main plot in several ways. The baseball games show some of Barbara’s growth in confidence and establish a connection between her and Chris Harper, the deputy she falls for. Her interest shows Chris that there’s more to her than just the elegant, sophisticated, somewhat intimidating surface. Her help connects her more deeply with the town, and a practice becomes the backdrop for her meeting with Mookie, the stray dog who adopts her.

Still, why choose baseball?

I’m a baseball fan. Actually I’m a sports fan, but baseball is particularly close to my heart. I grew up with baseball since my entire family was into it. I also grew up in a New York suburb, where even in the 1960s you could frequently watch games on television. My mother and grandmother rooted for the Yankees. I can still remember a particular September afternoon, sitting in my grandmother’s living room with both my mother and grandmother glued to the television, watching the Yankees play in the World Series.

And I also remember how they would call each other during the season when Yankees players Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle were vying for the single-season home-run record. A telephone call always resulted when one player or the other hit the ball over the fence.

My dad was a lifelong Dodgers fan until the team betrayed him by moving out west. When the Mets were born, he hopped on board the fan train, suffering through many sorry seasons with them until that one magical year in 1969.

Though he couldn’t afford to do it often, Dad did occasionally take me and my oldest two brothers to games at Shea Stadium, which wasn’t all that far from our home.

Later I got caught up in high school and college and kind of left baseball behind for a while. Skip a few more years, though, when I was a young mother with small kids, I often turned on the radio (at first, TV later) as background for other tasks. That brought memories of how much I enjoyed listening to the game. At one point we were renovating an older house and a baseball game served as a good background accompaniment to the work.

Since we lived in North Carolina, the game of choice (and often the only choice) involved the Atlanta Braves. My husband who grew up in western SC, a couple of hours from Atlanta by automobile, was also a huge Braves fan. We suffered through many losing seasons with them, through the seventies and eighties, until that magical worst-to-first season in 1991. By then, thanks to Ted Turner’s TBS station, we could watch nearly every game on television.

Last fall, of course, we watched in surprised wonder and joy as the Braves won the World Series.

Writing a Small-Town Romance

Karen McCullough Posted on by

I’m a city girl, born and raised in a New York suburb. My family moved to a Boston suburb when I was a teenager. After college my husband and I moved to Greensboro, NC, a medium-sized city in central North Carolina.

Until now, all my contemporary novels have been written with urban settings, usually New York, Boston, or Washington, D.C., places I’m familiar with and have lived in or spent time there. How does a girl who’s always lived in medium to large-sized cities write a book set in a small town in Georgia?

First of all, the decision to set the series in Willow Ridge, Georgia, wasn’t mine. It was a group decision by the set of terrific authors I’ve joined with to create this series of books. I didn’t have to agree to write a book in the series, but I liked the premise of the heroines all being part of the Hopeless Romantics Book Club in this town. I was also up for the challenge of working with a setting that is a little out of my comfort zone.

My heroine in Falling for the Deputy, Barbara Wilton, is also a city girl relocating to Willow Ridge for complicated personal and professional reasons. To quote a wonderful song by Clyde Edgerton, “She’s a quiche woman in a barbecue town.”  You can listen to it performed by the Bluefields here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0kjqYFtJlk

Abbeville, S.C. P. Hughes, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Fortunately, I do have connections to some small Southern towns.

My husband was born and raised on a farm in western South Carolina that is way south of the nearest city and even a few miles outside the nearest small town, Honea Path. Until he was a teenager, he attended Honea Path schools. Amazingly, I discovered the town has a website here! (https://www.honeapath.com/) A quintessential very small, Southern town, it barely qualifies as a wide spot in the road.

We visited my husband’s family regularly when our children were young and his family was still actively farming. We traveled to Honea Path once or twice and a few other towns in the area occasionally. A wonderful antique shop in nearby Abbeville drew us there several times.

While we didn’t actually go to Honea Path often, I got a strong feel for it just from listening to his family’s conversations among themselves and with others who occasionally stopped by.

I learned by eavesdropping how everyone knew what was happening to everyone else. When someone’s wife hitched a ride with a truck driver and disappeared for a couple of weeks, word got around so fast it seemed almost like magic. There was no place to hide when Mr. Bigshot was accused of embezzling money from his company or a town councilman was arrested for being drunk and disorderly.

I also got a first-hand view of how they’d rally around someone in need, showing up to help rebuild a house damaged by weather or bringing food to a family when members were sick.

Family ties meant a lot, and one of the first things someone meeting you wanted to know was who “your people” were, meaning your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. Because, inevitably, somewhere along the line, your people and their people were tied together if you came from the area. And who “your people” were said a lot about who you were, at least in the minds of many who met you.

Except of course, in the case of someone like me or my heroine Barbara, a big city girl from up North, with generational lines that go back only a few steps to some place in Europe. Once in the US, families scattered, which means the sad scandal of Uncle Ronnie could be so carefully hidden no one even remembers it now, and, although this never comes up in the book, like Barbara, I have cousins, even first cousins, I’ve never met.

I’ve tried to look at both up and down-sides of life in a small town. I see a lot of strength and good things there. Many things have changed over the last few years, with the spread of cars, television, and the internet bringing different attitudes in younger generations. Too many of them leave for better opportunities in other places.

Many small Southern towns are either dying or turning into bedroom communities if they happen to be close to a city. Something is being lost in that process, a part of what has made the country strong. I tried to show some of that in the book. I hope that many years from now there will still be small towns where everyone knows everyone else and they care about each other.

The pin below is a tour of Belton and Honea Path!

Out Today – Falling For The Deputy!

Karen McCullough Posted on by

It’s out today! Finally. The ebook version of Falling for the Deputy is now available. You can order it here. It’s also available as a FREE READ in Kindle Unlimited.  The paperback version should be released in the next day or two.

Over the next few days I’ll have a few posts talking about various aspects of the book, including how a city girl manages to write a book set in a small town, how my love for baseball figures into the story, and how I manage to work a mystery into even my short romance novels.

 

Long Covid – Where I Am

Karen McCullough Posted on by

I haven’t talked about this for a while, so I think it’s time to update everyone on where I am in the recovery journey. This is probably the last time I’ll talk about it.

For those who don’t know, I got Covid-19 in March of 2020. I was an early adopter. But really, Covid is not a joke. I was sick for almost six weeks, bordered on needing to go to the hospital a couple of times, and even though I did get over it, my recovery has been bumpy, to say the least.

I also became an early member of the group of sufferers from the malady that has come to be known medically as PASC and more commonly as Long Covid. We’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of my initial battle with the disease. I am better, much better than I was for the first few months post-Covid, when relapses of symptoms every few weeks would lay me low for a while and rob me of any progress made during the intervals. But I am not the same person I was before Covid. At this point it’s unlikely I ever will be. I’ve mostly come to terms with that.

What has gotten better: The relapses are fewer, farther between, and not so severe as they were in the first year post Covid. Then a relapse would mean coughing, chest tightness and shortness of breath, headache, body aches, and profound fatigue, usually lasting a week to two weeks. My last relapse was a few weeks back, the first in several months, and was really just a bit of achiness and fatigue. I had an occasional cough but not the constant hacking I used to have. Between relapses I can exercise almost normally with one BIG limitation.

What hasn’t gotten better and probably won’t: I cannot push the intensity of anything I do beyond a certain point. I’ve always been a pretty active person. I work out on an elliptical regularly and do strength-building routines. My husband and I have for years enjoyed taking long walks.

But if I increase the resistance or speed on the elliptical, I get short of breath very quickly. The same happens when I try to walk too fast. Even going up hills can make me huff and puff like a steam engine. There is no pushing through it. And repeated efforts don’t result in any improvement, just collapse. Over the last year I’ve discovered (usually the hard way) where my limits are and how to avoid pushing them too hard.

Pre-Covid, I could increase my endurance or strength by gradually increasing the intensity of the activity. My main limitations in any activity were due to cranky, arthritic knees. Hills were no obstacle. Post-Covid, increasing the intensity of an activity means only that I will have trouble breathing and likely drive me into the kind of fatigued collapse that will keep me glued to the recliner for the rest of the day. (If I’m lucky, that is, and it doesn’t put me down for several days.)

I am back to walking and working out, thank goodness. I’ve learned that I can (very slowly) increase the distance I walk, but not the speed. I’m back to walking a mile to a mile and a half a day. Sometimes even a bit more if I’m very careful. I can handle hills only by taking them at a much slower pace. I can and have increased the time I spend on the elliptical or working with weights, but not the resistance or speed. In other words, I can exercise, as long as I do it very carefully, without pushing myself too hard.

I still have episodes of feeling short of breath. Times when I feel I’m not pulling in enough air. I have a pulse oximeter and use it regularly. It continues to assure me that my blood oxygen level is fine. My heart has been checked and a CT scan of my lungs showed no significant damage, so there’s no explanation for why all of this is happening.

But it is, and I’m learning to live with it.

And I honestly think that’s as good as it’s going to get for me. I’m grateful I can do anything at all. It’s been a long, sometimes difficult road to get to this point, but I’ve found ways to live with my new normal.

As I finished writing this, I found this article from the New York Times that describes the problem with Long Covid sufferers and exercise: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/12/well/move/long-covid-exercise.html

This is me, now.

Writing Progress – Falling for the Deputy

Karen McCullough Posted on by

Yesterday afternoon I finished the first draft of Falling for the Deputy. I’ll spend a few days going through it to check pacing and fix any grammar, word choice, or continuity errors I find. (I almost always change a minor character’s name somewhere in the course of a book.)

Then it will be off to a couple of trusted readers and an editor. Once I have their feedback, I’ll go through it again, reworking what needs fixing. It should be ready to format and load up to Amazon a few days in advance of its March 29th release date.

Blurb:

After losing at love twice, Barbara Wilton needs a change, some place far from her home in Boston, so she takes a position as manager of a small branch bank in Willow Ridge, Georgia. She’s done with relationships and ready to concentrate on her career. The experience in Willow Ridge will help her move forward in the banking industry, but she doesn’t plan to stay there permanently. Nevertheless, an invitation to join the Hopeless Romantics book club, a position on a planning committee, helping a little league team that needs coaching, and being adopted by a stray dog begin to wind her into the community.

Barbara

Chris Harper was a police officer in Charlotte until his marriage fell apart. With his mother and elderly aunt in deteriorating health, Chris returns home to Willow Ridge to help them and takes a job as chief deputy to the local sheriff. The wound left by his failed marriage is still raw and, despite his mother’s nagging, he’s not interested in pursuing any relationship, even with the attractive new bank manager.

Fate, helped by a few local residents, conspires to push Barbara and Chris together. They meet during a false alarm at the bank and then he assists her with a car problem. But when his aunt receives a foreclosure notice on her house, Chris is angry with Barbara for not warning him that his aunt was behind on her payments.

She agrees to help him work out the problem with the bank, but the deeper issues between them keep flaring. Can two wary, wounded people learn to trust again and find happiness together? Find out in this sweet, second chance, enemies to lovers romance.

The 2022 Winter Olympics – The Good, the Bad, and the Very, Very Ugly

Karen McCullough Posted on by

The Olympics ended two days ago and I’m still thinking about what happened then. I watched some of the closing ceremonies but, honestly, the pageantry doesn’t interest me. I love the Olympics for the sports. I love seeing competitions that I rarely get to see and watching people do things that look impossible. I revel in seeing athletes giving their very best. As far as I’m concerned anyone who makes it to an Olympic competition is a winner. I feel for the heartbreak of those who work so hard and don’t win any medals. I glory in the soaring performances and amazing feats of those who go above and beyond all the rest. I’m awed by the stunning talent on display.

In the Olympics just finished we got to see some of the best and worst of what the games can be.

I should state my biases right up front. I’m an American, born and raised in the US of A, and while I root for all athletes to do well, I’m especially thrilled to see American athletes excelling.

There were lots of wonderful moments. Redemption stories always move me, and there were plenty of those. Lindsay Jacobellis finally exorcising the ghost of her epic failure in the 2006 snowboard cross race by winning gold in 2022 at the age of 36. She tried and failed so many times in between. Her combining with forty-year-old Nick Baumgartner for both of them to win a gold medal in the team event was the best story of these Olympics for me. Followed closely by Nathan Chen skating beautiful programs in both team and men’s individual events to win gold in the individual after his horrible meltdown at the 2018 contest. They all worked incredibly hard, for such a long time, and endured so many failures to get that prize.

Other good stories included Shaun White coming in fourth in his final Olympic appearance in a sport he pioneered and dominated for two decades. He might’ve liked another medal but knew it was unlikely and he seemed to find joy in just competing one last time. Elana Meyers-Taylor became the most decorated Black athlete at the Winter Olympics. Erin Jackson became the first Black woman to win a long-track speed-skating race. Eileen Gu soared way above the competition in several different settings, performing tricks that looked impossible.

I was happy for the many athletes who recognized what an incredible achievement it is to win even a bronze medal and rejoiced in it. It’s an Olympic Medal and something few people in the world will ever possess.

The bad – My heart always breaks a little for those who try so hard and fail for whatever reason. Especially for those who come in with high expectations on their shoulders, like skier Mikaela Schiffrin, who was expected to win multiple medals in a sport she’s dominated, but who leaves with none. I can only hope she’ll someday get her own redemption story.

I hate it when announcers talk about bronze and silver medal winners as though they’re losers because they didn’t get the gold. Anyone who leaves the Olympics with a medal has achieved something very special. Even those who leave without a medal still share in a special level of competition most of us will never even get near.

The ugly – Do I even need to tell you?  This article says pretty much everything I want to say about the women’s figure skating debacle: https://slate.com/culture/2022/02/olympics-figure-skating-free-skate-valieva-trusova-shcherbakova-sakamoto.html

What to do? Not everyone agrees, but I think we need an age limit for figure skating. Yes, it will likely eliminate the quad jumps from the women’s competition, at least for a while. Honestly, I don’t mind. I’d rather see wonderful, creative skating than children jumping around on the ice.

Plus, the IOC has to grow a spine and quit coddling the Russians. They cheat. Possibly not all their athletes do, and I’m sorry that an Olympic ban might curtail a few dreams, but the evidence is they can’t be trusted not to cheat, so they need to suffer the consequences. It’s not likely, but I can hope.

Will I Ever Really Want to Read it Again?

Karen McCullough Posted on by

In a previous blog post, I talked about trying to get rid of as much of the “stuff” I have cluttering my home as I can. Some of it’s relatively easy to sort through and dispose of.

When my grandchildren were babies, I bought a fair amount of equipment for them for when they visited. Now that they’re older, I’ve already eliminated a lot of it, donating things to women’s shelters and groups helping resettle refugees.

I’ve gone through several boxes of old photos in the process of scanning them, and those will get tossed once I’m done with the project. A couple of boxes of financial records dating from well before the three-year period we supposedly need to keep have been shredded. I’m still trying to figure out what to do with the boxes of stamp albums and loose stamps I inherited from several older family members.

I always have the most trouble parting with books. I love books and I tend to hang on to all of the ones I’ve enjoyed, found useful, or learned from over the years. Once the kids grew up and flew the coop, I turned the two upstairs rooms into my own makeshift library. Now, as I get older, I realize a time is coming when we’ll be moving out of this house we’ve lived in for 30+ years and I won’t be able to take it all with me.

Many—most—of the books have to go. It’s painful letting go of them. So I’ve developed a technique for deciding what to keep and what not to keep. I gather up a batch of books and bring them to my office, where they get sorted into three stacks. The criteria is asking each book: Will I ever read you again?

Books where the answer is a clear no go in one stack. A few I’ll want to dip into it again before I decide. And even fewer I can glance at and know that this book is a keeper.

As I’m getting older and my life reading time gets more and more constrained, though, I’m finding it easier to say that I’m never going to read this book again. I read it once, and that was good, but enough.

I don’t actually re-read all that many books because there are always so many new ones teasing me. At this point, I’ve eliminated almost half of the library and I still have work to do. I don’t have an actual goal except to get rid of all the books I know I’ll never read again.

Someday I may have to deal with all those books sitting on my Kindle that I’ve read or are waiting to be read. But that’s a problem for another time.