Wow, it’s getting hot in here. Is anyone else warm or is it just me?

If you’re just joining me, and I doubt you are for no reason in particular, I am continuing what I have decided to call “a story about a story about a story.”

I’m speaking again with Bradford W. Scharlott, Ph.D., a tenured professor a Northern Kentucky University. Several days ago, he released an academic paper entitled “Palin, the Press and the Fake Pregnancy Rumor:  Did a Spiral of Silence Shut down the Story?”

For now, I’ve decided to pursue a format I’ve used on my Blog to interview authors, and as I did with Dr. Scharlott the other day. I'll ask Brad two questions, then he can ask me two. Like I said, I don’t have any editors managing this product. So if at some point that doesn’t work, we’ll change it. It’s all good here in the Bay Area.

LN:  Brad, I want to begin going through your paper chronologically. You say, in the second sentence no less, that the premise of all of this media coverage/lack of media coverage is that Mrs. Palin “faked the birth of her fifth child, Trig, in 2008 to cover for her daughter, Bristol.” Does this story inevitably have to link to Bristol Palin? Where does that come from? Why go down that path?

BS:  There at the start I was merely paraphrasing what the MediaMatters columnist had written – I did not foresee that people would take that as my theory of who Trig’s mother must be – but I understand why it seems that way. So I will revise that part and take Bristol’s name out. Indeed, I will make the point more than once in that paper that I am not pushing Bristol as Trig’s likely mother. I do spend a good deal of time in the paper on Bristol’s delivery of Tripp, but not because I think she must be Trig’s mother, rather because Palin’s people were jerking the press around concerning the exact place and/or date of delivery. That in itself suggests something odd was afoot – but I don’t know what.

Let me stress that this is not a finished paper ready to be published. I have submitted it for presentation at a conference, where professors generally get feedback on how to get a paper ready for publication in a journal. So, I’m now getting feedback from people all over the world – that’s nice, even if some of them call me a “scumbag … in the service of evil.”

LN:  On page two you break your thesis down into three parts.  1) “…there was insufficient evidence for the press to conclude that Palin was telling the truth about Trig.” 2) The press gave “Palin more deference than she was due.”  3) “…spiral of silence theory casts light on press performance relative to the Trig hoax  rumor and, relatedly, the Obama fake birth-certificate rumor.”  My question is this:  you see these as inter-related obviously. Why? How did you come back to these three main points after researching this story?

BS:  Well, as to #1, what evidence did Palin provide that she was Trig’s mother after the rumors spread over the Internet that she wasn’t? She merely waved a shiny object in the air and distracted the oh-so-easily-distracted press. The shiny object was her daughter, Bristol, and while waving her in the air she said, “Just look at that baby bump. Obviously, I’m Trig’s mother.” And that is the sum total of her new evidence since she was selected as McCain’s VP candidate.

What I just said about #1 also answers #2 about giving Palin more deference than she was due. In my paper I point out how some journalists in a private chat group speculated that maybe it would be in the best interest of the Palin family for any hoax to remain hidden, and thus journalists should ignore the hoax if there was one. Since when does the hypothetical best interest of a candidate’s family outweigh the right of the public to know about the trustworthiness or even mental health of that candidate?

As to #3, I’m interested in why the press came to avoid the Palin hoax story like kryptonite, but at the same time gave the Obama hoax story great play, both back in 2008 and, as we see, up to the present day. And as I argue in the paper, the reason in part has to do with how easily the press is manipulated by politicos on the right who want the Palin story buried, while at the same time folks on the left don’t know how to keep crazy-like-a-fox birthers from planting doubts about whether Obama meets the constitutional requirements to be president.

BS: Laura, here’s a question for you: Can you conceive of a circumstance under which you might wait 20 hours after your water broke to go to a medical facility? How about if you had an important speech to give eight hours later? What if you were in Texas and, in a fit of state pride, decided you would gird your loins and make it back to California because “Whoever heard of a surfer born in Texas?”

LN:  Dude. (May I call you Dude?) My personal story is illustrative of what a high-risk, very complicated pregnancy can be. That’s all. But it’s food for thought for those who have no exposure to that world. My son’s birth defect was discovered in utero at 20 weeks. By 29 weeks, he wanted to come into the world. I stopped working out and went on bed rest and a rough regime of drugs to keep him inside me. I had massive amounts of amniotic fluid building up in me. In fact, I lost hearing in one ear from it. Had my water broken, it could have been very dangerous. As it was, it took four people to break it in the operating room. So, I am the last person to ask about leaking fluid and long plane rides. You might as well ask me how the food is on Mars.

To prepare my son to come into the world as healthy as possible, my obstetrician ordered me to be injected with betamethazone, a steroid that would boost his lung development. I got the shots twice a week, 24 hours apart, for 5 weeks. On that fifth week, when I was 35 weeks along, the doctor did an amniocentesis in the hospital to test the baby’s lung development. This is the same amnio that is done early in a pregnancy for genetic testing. At that late stage, it was very painful…and very risky. It could have started labor at 35 weeks and she did not want that!

This is a triple marker test and two of the markers came back positive, meaning good, that the baby was ready. The third was graded on a bell curve. The doctor wanted to see a level 2.0. Mine was 1.8.  She sent me home again. Those were not fun days.  The following week, she did another amniocentesis in the hospital, under radiology. The three markers indicated that the baby had enough surfactant and his lungs were ready for him to be born.

Short of that kind of testing, I don’t know how a doctor can determine if a baby’s lungs are ready for birth. But at 35 and 36 weeks, my OB decided against delivery until she had medical proof that it was safe. I should point out that she is a member of FACOG as were the two perinatologists (high risk OB’s) who I also saw. She was also a surgeon. And in those days, their malpractice insurance was in the 6-figures. I don’t know how doctors manage risk when it comes to a complicated baby with other issues who wants to enter the world at 35 weeks. But my OB was a cracker jack. Nothing got by her. She took no chances.

BS:  Palin maintains she chose to give birth to a premature Down syndrome baby with a heart condition at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, which lacks a neonatal intensive-care unit, and en route bypassed several hospitals that have neonatal ICU's. As someone who had a premature baby yourself, does this ring true?

LN:  It was long known that our baby would be transported as soon as he was born to the Children’s Hospital a mile away even though our birth hospital had a Level II nursery (it does not handle surgical patients). We had already met our pediatric surgeon. They had a bed ready for our son that night. And by bed, I mean a space in the Level Three Intensive Care Nursery. This is a major, regional trauma center and pediatric facility with dozens of pediatric sub-specialties. One of those subspecialties is pediatric cardiology.

I delivered in an adult hospital in a major city. A neonatologist, or high-risk pediatrician, from the team that serves the neonatal nursery in that hospital as well as at the children’s hospital down the street, was present at the birth. She was present at the birth. We have a picture of her in scrubs, with her gloved hand on the top of our son’s head on the warming table in the corner of the operating room with 4 other people around the baby.

During my pregnancy, we had a fetal echo-cardiogram to rule out heart problems. This was done at the children’s hospital, even though I was a pregnant lady, not a child. Two pediatric cardiologists did the scan and interpreted what they were seeing. The results were not good. A serious defect was suspected. The case got more complicated and my OB, the perinatologist who ordered the test, and our pediatric surgeon all talked to us about it. So, as soon as our son was transported to the NICU at Children’s that night (yes, night, he was born at night!) they ordered up another echo-cardiogram on him. The results were blessedly clear.

If you have a baby in a smaller regional hospital, without even a Level II nursery, I don’t know how heart defects are ruled out or confirmed, especially those that were suspected in utero. Does an adult radiologist or cardiologist do the test and interpret what they are seeing? Pediatric subspecialties require years of extra training. Would a pediatric cardiologist interpret or diagnose an adult’s echo-cardiogram? I would guess not. Does an adult doctor do that easily for a newborn? They probably can, but again, with all the changes the fetal/newborn heart goes through, I would think they wouldn’t. Did a pediatric cardiologist visit the smaller hospital where Trig Palin was reportedly born and do the scan there? Was there some other way to determine that his heart was okay and he was ready for discharge?

I offer no answers. But I wonder if there were answers, would people feel differently about this entire controversy?  I simply say that my own exposure to that world of medicine has left me with very specific questions about this story. I received an extraordinarily high level of care, as Mrs. Palin must have. And I was not a 44-year-old, multipara sitting governor or celebrity. I was a 34-year-old primo-gravida TV reporter with excellent insurance, top-notch hospitals near my house and an incredibly cautious team of board-certified doctors who took care to manage my health as well as their own liability and risk. Again…just medicine for thought.

When we come back, I would like to talk to you about the press coverage, both in terms of the birth and the purported hoax. I’m looking at page 5 of your paper and there’s some good stuff there to discuss.

From DO THEY KNOW I'M RUNNING? by David Corbett

 

 

It was daybreak and the rancher, standing at his kitchen window, watched two silhouettes stagger forward through the desert scrub. One clutched the other but they both seemed hurt. The porch light, the rancher thought, that’s the thing they been walking toward all night. See it for miles. All the way from the footpaths snaking through the mountains out of Mexico.

Rooster lurched at the end of his chain, hackles up, that snarl in his bark, trying to warn the strangers off. They just kept coming. All right then, he thought. Not like you wanted this. He set his coffee in the sink and went to the door leading out to the porch and collected the shotgun kept there, racked a shell into the chamber, stepped outside.

Streamers of winter cloud laced the sky, pale to the east, purplish dark to the west. A cold parched wind keened in the telephone wires. The landscape bristled with nopal, saguaro, cholla. Black ancient ironwood cropped up here and there among the mesquite and Joshua trees.

Before he could close the door behind him, his wife called his name. She eased forward unsteadily out of the hallway shadow, robe cinched tight. The gaunt face, once framed with steel- gray hair pulled back and braided into a rope, now seemed all the more stark with her pallor and the stubbled baldness. The treatments were savaging her bone marrow too. He wondered sometimes whether the cure wasn’t worse than the disease—wondered as well whether he’d be anywhere near as brave when his time came.

Where does the promise go when it leaves you, he wondered. He wished the years had made them calm and strong and wise, but here they were, her sick, him afraid, trying to protect each other—their stake owned free and clear but now little more than a borderland throughway, shadows scurrying past the house at night, sometimes trying the door, shattering a window, hoping for shelter or water or food. Same problem everywhere: the Stanhope girl—raped last spring. Old woman Hobbes—robbed at knifepoint, truck stolen, the fridge ransacked and the house turned upside down for cash before the culprits scurried off, leaving her tied up in her garage. Enough, everybody said. Things’re only getting worse across the border. We’ll form patrols. We’ll make an example out of every goddamn tonk we catch.

But there’s more to “enough” than the saying of it, too much terrain to patrol and too many who still slip through to make an example mean anything. Ask the two lurching forward. The promise hadn’t left them just yet. It was as simple as a steady light glowing at the foot of a mountain pass with the black desert floor beyond. He felt the pump gun’s weight in his hands, a commensurate weight on his soul. It was that second burden that haunted him.

“They don’t look too good,” she told him, feeling her way forward, hand to the wall.

He met her eyes. “They do that sometimes.”

“Is that how we think now?”

“Not because we want to. Remember that part.”

Today I am going to take a bit of a detour from my fun, feisty, Quick Take Tuesday interviews with authors about their books and my nascent novel, to talk with a man whose most recent work truly intrigues me.

Bradford W. Scharlott, Ph.D., is a tenured professor of journalism and communications at Northern Kentucky University. Several days ago, he released an academic paper entitled “Palin, the Press and the Fake Pregnancy Rumor:  Did a Spiral of Silence Shut down the Story?”

You can find the paper here on Scribd, which is where, I feel compelled to add, I have more than 81,000 reads of my New York Times articles, essays and novel chapters. I also have about 45,000 subscribers and I know it to be a social media site where every manner of document is available for reading, commenting and sharing.

Dr. Scharlott’s paper is 29-pages-long. Three of those comprise the bibliography. It contains photos of Sarah Palin either appearing pregnant, or not.  But more importantly, it has ignited a firestorm of criticism, discussion, and indignation.

I don’t know Dr. Scharlott from Adam. But I’m going to call him Brad during our conversation because we’ve now emailed enough times to get this ball rolling.  I am also going to say this about Sarah Palin:  I have a character in my novel, Finding Clarity,  that I call “Sarah Palin with a penis.” That is because he has very disorganized thought and speech patterns. I’m going to try to limit my opinion on her to that disclaimer.

As anyone can see from browsing my website, I worked in television and radio news – yes, even with Rush Limbaugh many years ago! – and for The New York Times, for decades. I attended Columbia University as an undergraduate and for Journalism school and was there the same years as Barack Obama apparently, though I don’t ever recall seeing him and I suspect he’d say the same of me.

I now consider myself a novelist and a blogger. I am also a happily married wife, a very active volunteer in my community, and a mother whose child was born prematurely with very intense medical issues (I’ll go into that.)

That said, this is going to be an informal conversation. I don’t have five editors breathing down my neck, so we’re free to make this dynamic, meaning mutable or changing over time. Some of the grammar might not be perfect. Let’s just see how this goes.

LN:  Brad, I had no sooner read about your paper than I found myself reading criticism of it. Let’s start with that. What’s the reaction been? Are you getting hammered? Is the mainstream media taking note of this paper?

BS: Well the first reaction was pretty odd. Last week I sent a copy of my paper to Sarah Palin’s former press secretary asking if he had any comments, since he is mentioned in an unflattering way. He went ballistic. He called me a “scumbag” who is “in the service of evil.” He said he would slap me if he ever saw me, and that in a former age he would have challenged me to a duel. And then, under the heading “Brad Scharlott disgraces your university” he sent that critique of me in an email to all my colleagues in my department. I’m guessing he was used to using strong-arm tactics like that in Alaska. I guess he didn’t realize that 1) I am a tenured professor who can research anything I want, and 2) no one in Kentucky gives a shit about what he thinks.

And then something happened he didn’t count on. The student newspaper at my university learned what he did. So they interviewed me about his toxic rant and effort to embarrass me, and then they called him and got his view (he called for me to be fired), and then they posted a story about the matter in the online version of the student paper. And I thought, “What a golden opportunity!” So I asked the student newspaper editors if they wanted to post my paper online next to the story – and of course they did. And then it started spreading like wildfire. Exactly the opposite thing that Bill McAllister would have wanted.

As for reactions from journalists, a writer at Salon.com  took note of the paper in a negative way yesterday, suggesting my university should be embarrassed that I wrote it – but give the writer his due, he posted my paper for reading or downloading so readers could maker up their own minds. His article prompted Andrew Sullivan of Newsweek/DailyBeast to essentially defend the appropriateness of my research – and to make the observation that the Salon writer was basically providing evidence in support of my thesis about a “spiral of silence.”

So those are the heaviest of the heavyweights to weigh in on my paper. There are blog sites devoted to revealing the truth concerning Trig’s birth, such as ImmoralMinority.com and Politicalgates.com, and folks there have treated me like a rock star. I’ve had dozens of emails and phone calls from people basically saying, “Thank God you’re doing this.”

LN:  What’s your thesis? Why did you write an academic paper on this? What do you hope to do with it?

BS: My contention is that the mainstream press averted their eyes from obvious holes in Palin’s story about the birth of Trig, her supposed fifth child. My thesis is that, for a variety of reasons, a spiral of silence choked off any discussion of a possible hoax, and the very topic is so taboo the mainstream press has avoided it like the plague.

In a nutshell, a spiral of silence takes hold when people perceive an idea they hold is outside of what most people seem to think and therefore censor themselves, to avoid disapproval or ridicule. And the more such people censor themselves, the more outside the mainstream their view becomes, until the view is virtually extinguished from the mainstream, at least as represented in the mass media.

My hope for the paper has always been twofold. One objective is to do what academics like me typically do: present the paper at an academic conference and then publish in an academic journal. (I’ve submitted it to a conference – I’ll hear in next month if it has been accepted).

But the other objective has always been the overriding one: to use my paper to force the mainstream media to confront their negligence concerning the fantastic birth story and report on it. Since the fall of 2008 I have been dismayed by the cravenness of American journalists. I’m a former journalist myself, and now I am a journalism professor. My aim, in part, is to help reveal the truth. But even more than that, my aim is to help American journalism regain its integrity, in some small measure.

BS:  I’m now going to ask you a question, Laura. You were a reporter for a long time. Yet you’ve been out of the MSM for a while. What do you make of this pregnancy story?

LN:  At some point I pitched the idea of investigating this story to one of my editors at The New York Times. I think we had some other conversations going and I never heard back on that specific point. This is a very awkward story. And because of how polarizing Palin is – and I think people on all sides can agree with that – this birth story is also very polarizing. But from a journalism standpoint, the story the Anchorage Daily News proposed about why this story won’t go away was an appropriate one. I actually emailed Pat Dougherty about why his paper gave up on it following that contentious email correspondence with Mrs. Palin. He told me, and I must have the email somewhere, that Trig is her son. He seemed to perhaps have some inside knowledge. Still, I think it was a valid question to pursue publicly. But they stopped doing that. I still wonder why. But back to awkward.  This controversy involves body parts and an innocent child. In many ways it’s the perfect story because it’s so untouchable.

BS:  You mentioned your own experience having a child with medical problems. How did that affect your own interpretation of this pregnancy story?

LN:  Let me state clearly that I can see this story going either way. I can see arguments on both sides, which makes it such a great story because if anyone really reported this thoroughly, they could make arguments or find voices to articulate arguments either way and really write a fair story. I’ve looked at many photos on many blogs and one minute I can say: Oh right! And the next: Nah, not really.

But what I can state unequivocally is this:  My son was born in Berkeley at 6:50 p.m. I’ve never said in one speech that he was born 10 miles away in San Francisco or 40 miles away at Stanford. I’ve never said in one speech that he was born “that night” and in another that he was born “the next morning.”  Those are the things that are immutable. Those facts cannot come out of my mouth differently from one day to the next.

My son also spent three months living in neonatal intensive care. When he was older, I spent five years volunteering in that unit. I’ve written extensively and publicly about both times in our lives. So I’ve seen many comments over the past three years stating all manner of misinformation or speculation about what would happen to a preemie with a hole in its heart (reportedly Trig) and what kind of bed or environment such a baby would live in. So in the absence of any real reporting, holes are filled in with conjecture, speculation, innuendo, and supposition.

But I’ll leave off today with this thought:  my son was born at 36 and 5/7th weeks. To. The. Day. He weighed 5 pounds 14 ounces. When anyone asks, that’s my story. I’ve never said he was 7 months, 7.5 months, 8 months in utero. Again, these are immutable facts. And it’s the notion that a public figure, a famous woman, cannot adhere to the most important facts or moments in not only her life, but in any woman’s life…well, that’s what makes this story not go away. That’s what makes this intriguing and compelling.

Let’s put together some more questions off line and come back and talk another day. We can dive in to more detail and really have a conversation about this. Thanks for joining me, Dr. Brad Scharlott.

Today’s guest is:  David Corbett,  author of The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime, Blood of Paradise and Do They Know I’m Running. David is formerly a senior operative with a prominent San Francisco private investigation firm, also known as a P.I. or dick.  (let the record show I am not calling David a dick for no good reason).

Q) There are a gazillion accolades out there for you from The New York Times to Publishers Weekly. You wow people in classrooms. You woo people on book tours. You are called a “powerful new voice in fiction” because you write about thugs, druggies, smugglers and sultry red heads. Yet you also write so lovingly about the people, and pets, in your life!  Break it down for me.

A) Not sure I’m a “new voice” anymore, since I’ve been around since 2002, but I’m still relatively unknown – a charter member of the Highly Respected and Widely Unread. Being compared to Graham Greene and Robert Stone only helps if people know who they are. I write about the stuff that interests me and about which I can make some small claim to authority. I was a PI – or a dick, as you so delicately put it – for about 15 years, and I saw a slice of life that a lot of people don’t see. Given that background, there’s little point me writing about nouveau cuisine chefs or origami aficionados – unless they’ve been indicted.  

Q) I’ve heard it said that your readers get grit in their eyes from your stories. But that’s must be better than a glazed look, non?  How do you keep it live, fresh and cutting edge? And how do you get so many single women to come to your book readings?

A) Well, you’re never more attractive than when you’re unavailable. My current Brainy-Babe-of-Interest is a filmmaker who does documentaries, and I’m smitten. (You'll have to ask her if it's mutual.) She’s been all over the world filming everything from lesbian macaques to the widows of Russian submariners to artificial walrus vaginas (did you know that male walruses get aroused by the sound of power tools?).

As for keeping it real, you develop an intuition as a writer, a sense of when you’re close to the bone as opposed to just flogging the keyboard. I think every writer relies on that instinct, bred from the key moments in his or her own life when the expected vanished and suddenly it was: What-the-Hell-is-Going-On? I’m no different than any other writer in that regard. It just happens that some of my key moments involved people trying to run me over, lie to me, extort my client, or otherwise make my life miserable. Or over.

But to be totally honest, I don’t think my PI experiences have any more to do with my artisitic vision than the premature deaths of my brother and wife or my rebellion against the role of doting/complicit son to my sweet, fiery, alcoholic mother. And playing in a bar band in my late teens had no small part in wising me up. I’ll be tapping into all of that until death puts me out of everyone else’s misery.

//BUZZER NOISE AND SOUND OF TABLE BEING TURNED//

Q) Okay, your turn, Laura. You and I have both been out there on the mean streets, with the job of getting the goods, and getting them right – making stuff up was a cardinal sin. How have you adjusted to the freedom – and the terror – of working without a net, i.e., writing fiction?

A) I pride myself on the fact that I never, not once, missed a deadline in my decades in the news business. And I never made any terrible factual errors. So, it’s a huge sigh of relief for me to not live like that now, all that double, triple, quadruple cross checking and confirming. Yet at the same time, you can’t always say what you learn in the news biz. It’s often on background or off the record. Or it’s delicious but not newsworthy:  the anchorman with the restraining order against him, the news director with his pants down around his ankles and his wife’s friend on the hood of the car. Juicy stuff like that (and yes, I know names!) Now, with fiction, I am free. I can report or say things I have never been able to. In fact, I have sentences and dialogue in Finding Clarity that really came out of people’s mouths that gets safely stirred up into a composite in my fiction. My beta readers have said to me:  No one would ever say that! Oh yes, they do and yes they have! And I relish this new freedom to be able to type it out and put it on the record.

Q) Another point of similarity between us – we’ve both endured some reasonably heavy personal adversity in our lives. And yet we’re also both pretty cheerful people. Where does that resilience come from, and how has it worked its way into your writing? Has it saved you from bathos? Has it sharpened your eye, quickened your wit, or hardened your heart?

A) We have, haven’t we? I always say the worst things that have happened to me, are also the best things that have happened to me. That’s because I always grow and come out on the other side a wiser and better person. It must be hard wired into us because other wise we buckle and fold, and that’s never been an option for me. The struggle can be horrendous, but I don’t think we learn without getting kicked in the teeth. And since I am such a resilient person, I still find beauty and joy in what I have here and now. I mean, what else am I going to do? Give up and stop breathing? And so I think, or at least I hope, that I have taken the pain, the resolve, the fury and the fun and given them over to Clari Drake, my protagonist. Sure she’s shallow at times, which I believe keeps her from drowning in a tub of bathos. But she’s also insecure, feisty, funny and out to get some people. And that makes her a highly loveable but unlikable, and deeply flawed woman. Sounds like someone I know, as a matter of fact!

//BUZZER NOISE AND SOUND OF AMAZINGLY LOUD APPLAUSE//

Thank you for joining me on Quick Take Tuesday David Corbett, phenomenal and prolific writer, teacher, dog lover, walrus admirer, and private investigator, which means I can truthfully say he used to be a real dick!  Please come back and fill me up, so to speak, with some of your work for my Friday Feature!

Linda Lee rocks. She owns the business AskMEPc-WebDesign based in the Bay Area. She also organizes and manages the vast number of volunteers who work the San Francisco Writer's Conference each February.  She's a bucket full of ebullience, brains and beauty. And she has lots to say on her site about your web presence and how to improve your look and business.

I took copious notes from a class Linda taught at SFWC. And I'll share those later. But I want to limit this post to Matt Cutts. 

Who is Matt Cutts?  Well, he has his own Wikipedia page, for starters. He is the public face for Google on all things Search Engine Optimization.  And according to Linda Lee, Cutts' blog is the go-to place  for learning about and keeping pace with Google/SEO.  

I bookmarked Matt's blog, and then decided to go all high-tech by clicking on his orange RSS box with the curved white lines. I have one of those on my blog too, but am not quite sure what it all means other than Really Simple Syndication, or Rigatoni Sans Succo or Rather Snotty Society.  So I clicked on it, or a link nearby or something (I didn't leave crumbs and can't find my way back.)

And that led me to this page on Feedburners.  And I think that's a good thing that will help me learn more and improve my SEO.

Meantime, I know I am supposed to track back with this blog post, but I need to find out what that means, because Google ranks based on how many people are following you. And I think track backs helps with that. But then again, I'm the 50 year-old whose teenager had to instruct how to put a link to a website behind a badge or word only one month ago. So bear with me while I brave this new world! Meantime, I'm certain that if scientists put my brain and that of Matt Cutts on a table next to one another, they'd look radically different. 

Riversong by Tess Hardwick

She slept fitfully that night and woke late the next morning, hot under her bed covers.  The air reeked of smoke.  Her sunburned skin stung.  She threw back the covers, longing for the feel of water on her scorched arms and legs.  She dressed in a ratty pair of shorts and t-shirt.  On her way down the hall she paused in front of her mother’s room, leaning for a moment on the closed door.  A bird’s summer song drifted in through the open hall window.  Her mother snored softly inside the room.  She put her hand on the doorknob to go in like she did every morning but then hesitated.  The familiar sadness crept in but she forced the feelings inside, scratching her sunburned arms with her fingernails, drawing blood.  The river beckoned to her, as if it called her name.  She withdrew her hand from the door and walked away, down the hall and the creaky stairs, all the while hearing a call to the river, knowing that she would not look back again.

In the yard the sky felt long and hazy, different than the day before.  She knew it would be a scorcher, unusual for June.  She walked the path towards the swimming hole.  At the swing, she paused, holding the rough rope between her fingers, wondering what it felt like to fly over the river and then plunge into the mystery of its waters without fear or hesitation.  She took the worn path to the water, slipping several times but going on anyway, determined to be brave.  At the river’s edge, she inched in, her overheated skin shocked at the cold.  When the water reached her shoulders she moved her arms in a circular motion, pretending to swim, keeping her feet anchored to the sandy floor.  Then she bent her knees, closing her eyes and submerging her head under the water.  She stayed like that with her eyes scrunched closed until the coolness seeped in through her skin and reached the place inside her where hope and despair lived side by side.  She imagined the pain of her childhood diminishing to flecks of ice.  Her feet came off the ground and she opened her eyes.  She was floating.  Her hair streamed out in front of her as her t-shirt ballooned around her body like a safety device, bubbles escaping from her shorts.  The gray floor of the river hosted several red crawfish and a school of minnows swam around her.  Infinitesimal specks of fluorescent algae drifted through the water, illuminated by the pelting sunlight.  She felt triumphant.  She was refreshed, cool at last.

Today’s guest is Tess Hardwick (www.tesshardwick.com), a mother of two young children, wife, playwright, Blogger, food-wine-life enthusiast, and author of soon-to-be-released Riversong, who lives with her family in Washington State.

Q) I left out the part about you being really pretty, blonde and vivacious in both your photos and your writing. But I DO want to mention that you are launching your first novel next month. That is SO exciting. Tell me more while I bathe in your beautiful aura.

A) You are so kind.  My husband takes all my photos, so I make sure he deletes all the unflattering ones right away!  But yes, it’s an exciting time with Riversong’s launch in just a couple of weeks. I’m the poster child for never giving up on your dreams or succumbing when adversity presents itself, which is also one of the central themes of Riversong.  After my heroine’s husband commits suicide, she escapes to Southern Oregon, in order to salvage what’s left of her family home so she can sell it to pay off a debt to a dangerous loan shark.  Once there, she becomes deeply involved in the community, the fictional town of River Valley, loosely based on the town I grew up in, helping it to reinvent itself into a tourist destination.

Q)I love your Blog. Your writing is so clear, clean and from the heart. And you write about heartache, I mean REAL heartache. Yet your spirit shines through. I could see shopping for shoes with you and then discussing character arc over Caesar salads. How do you do it?

A) I would adore shopping for shoes and talking about writing over salads!  But, in all honesty, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the blogging concept when my publisher suggested it.  However, my goal is to be a working novelist that can support a family and I understand you have to put yourself out there in order for readers to find you. But I had to figure out first, what is my blog for, what is my intention with it? I ultimately decided that when my readers gift me with five minutes of their valuable time, I want to give them something in return, a little gem that hopefully inspires them and carries them into the rest of their day feeling a little more energized for whatever challenges await them.  I’m completely transparent in my posts because authenticity about your own difficulties and triumphs conveys that we are not alone in our human experience, which I believe is the most important thing we can do as writers. 

//BUZZER NOISE AND SOUND OF TABLE BEING TURNED//

Q) Okay, your turn, Laura. Your novel, Finding Clarity, has a dwarf as one of the main characters. How did you come about that?

A) My own son who’s now 15, was born with serious medical issues. I know what it’s like to live life through that lens and I wanted to include that in my fiction (my essays and first chapters of Finding Clarity can be found here on Scribd). Max’s issues weren’t visible on the outside. But I once worked with an editor whose son has achondroplasia, meaning he’s a dwarf. She was one of the nastiest women I’ve ever worked with. And I didn’t want to believe that it was due to the strain that they might have experienced with his medical issues. So, I wanted to re-write her “character” and make her a mom who was feisty yet loving and supportive to the people around her. This was a chance for me to rework my experience of this woman.

Q) Your son is nearly 16. That means both your lives are changing rapidly. Does your writing keep pace with that?

A) You know, I remember the day my husband told me that he could no longer hold Max with just one arm but he had to put the other hand under his butt. I think that would have been around the 6-week mark. Now, we’re looking at colleges. We just visited UCLA and your alma mater, USC. All I know is that there is going to be a thundering silence in this house when Max is gone. I dearly hope that writing will patch some of the holes for me. And that maybe I’ll be able to dig deeper into life. The good thing about having the two boys in my novel, Zach and Zeppo, is that I can bring them right along their mom, Clari Drake, in the mystery series I have already begun.

//BUZZER NOISE AND SOUND OF INCREDIBLY LOUD APPLAUSE//

Thank you for joining me on Quick Take Tuesday, pretty, vivacious multi-tasker, Tess Hardwick, author of Riversong! www.tesshardwick.com. Please come back and fill me up, so to speak, with some of your work for my Friday Feature!