A Word of Warning...

I spent last weekend enjoying the absolutely beautiful weather and visiting wineries with my bestie, Jessi. One of our scheduled stops was in Seward, NE. I had heard from a fellow Nebraska Writers Guild member that there were writers in abundance speaking in Seward and I talked Jessi into going with me (like it took a lot of convincing).

Our first stop was at Chapter Books bookstore where Joe Starita gave a wonderful talk about his book A Warrior of the People, which is about Susan La Flesche, the first Native American doctor in American history (I'll be talking about it in a later post-I can't wait to read it!).

The second stop was just down the street at the Red Path Gallery & Tasting Room which is an adorable place full of amazing artwork done by local artists-like my former art teacher, Mrs. T (I'm not even going to attempt to spell her last name, it's longer and scarier than mine is-okay I'll give it a shot Tomasevicz... I had to look it up, I wasn't even close) and features many different Nebraska wines to sample. That day's events featured readings by poets Charlene Neeley and Laura Madeline Wiseman who shared both their own poetry and some of their favorites by other poets.

One of the poems Charlene Neely wrote and shared with us reminded me of a fairly well known fact: writers find inspiration everywhere. In this case it was the quote "Poets have been mysteriously silent on subject of cheese" by G.K. Chesteron that lead to a fun poem about cheese.

My family understands why that would stick with me and for the saner ones in the audience who don't know, it involves an article about the great Velveeta shortage of 2014 and subsequent cheese-smothered emails on the topic.

But back to the topic of inspiration, I've talked about it before, but I wanted to revisit it for the non-writers in the group.

And here is where the warning part comes in:

If you spend any time at all around a writer, I can nearly guarantee that something you say, one of your mannerisms, a physical feature you posses, or an event you witness with your writer will end up in one of their pieces.

Who knew the sign my sister gave me for my birthday a
couple of years ago would come in handy for a blog?

You just have to ask them. They'll probably tell you, unless it's embarrassing or they killed you off... or they hate you. In that case, back away slowly throwing chocolate and fancy pens.

Ask my bestie (poor transition, sorry Jessi), more than one of our conversations have ended up in my stories. I usually ask her first, just so she can't sue me someday when she comes to her senses and realizes she doesn't need a crazy-cat-lady-hermit in her life.

Artists, especially writers, are anthropologists by nature if not by education. They study people and everything is fodder for their creative fires.

You may have ended up in somebody's story because of what you ordered in the coffee shop one day, or are the heroine of an epic poem somebody penned because the sun hit you in just the right way and you were wearing your best chain mail-er- green dress.

Now be honest, because if you lie, you'll get stabbed.
#MedievalHumor

Now, I don't say this to make you think that writers are all creepy stalker people hiding in plain sight with their notebooks and pens, furiously scribbling down all the details of your life so they can write you doing anything they want because they thrive on the power of control... okay, not all of us do that... all of the time.

And I'm not telling you this so you know to be on your best behavior around writers so they don't use you in a story. First, they spend time with you because you're interesting. Second, how boring would that be for both you and them?

No, I'm telling you this because for that split second, a second that you probably don't even remember, a writer noticed you and for that one second, you became the most important thing in their universe.

This is one of the things I love most about being a writer, taking those tiny, innocuous moments and turning them into something immortal. Making a split second last an eternity.

That's right. I'm a friggin superhero.

Operation: Nebraska Author- In Cold Storage: Sex and Murder on the Plains

The second installment in my 2017 New Year's resolution, Operation: Nebraska Author, took me about as far out of my comfort zone as I can get (I think political writings or philosophy would be the extreme for me) and while I enjoyed it a lot, I don't know that it is a genre that I will continue reading.

In Cold Storage: Sex and Murder on the Plains by James W. Hewitt is a true crime book about a pair of grisly murders that happened just down the road in McCook, Nebraska in 1973.

Creepy dead hand. I got some strange looks reading 
this in the break room at work.

Just days after Edwin and Wilma Hoyt were reported missing by their family, body parts began washing ashore at a nearby lake. The following investigation delved into the scandalous lives of some of McCook's citizens and revealed the inadequacies of pre-DNA/technology criminal investigating and small-town Nebraska law enforcement.

The investigation, which started with the identification of the body parts using rings that were still on Wilma's hand, quickly turned into an investigation of the Hoyt's daughter, Kay, and her lascivious activities, especially those with Harold Nokes and his wife Ena. What had started as an affair morphed into a mènage á trios, then a violent lover's spat and finally murder.

Harold Nokes eventually confessed to killing Edwin and Wilma Hoyt, dismembering them, and disposing their bodies in Strunk Lake. He swore that his wife, Ena, had nothing to do with the murders besides wrapping the body parts in freezer paper and then helping him throw them from their boat into the lake. With his confession, Harold was convicted and sentenced to life in the penitentiary. Ena was only charged with two counts of wrongful disposal of a dead body.

One thing I really liked about the book was how much time Hewitt spent on the discrepancies between the stories told by Harold (about three different versions between his first confession, his recorded confession, and the interview Hewitt conducted 40 years later) and questions raised by the lack of evidence.

One thing I found frustrating (no doubt from too many years of watching Law & Order and NCIS) was that there was no clear-cut answer to what had happened to the Hoyts. Even with Nokes' confession, there were still too many questions left unanswered. Too many suspicious things left uninvestigated.

I was struck by how lovingly-yet truthfully- he described western Nebraska, McCook specifically.

Hewitt accepting his award at the
Celebration of Nebraska Books.

Rolling hills and weathered canyons eroded by wind and water surround McCook. Too difficult to cultivate, much of the land is used as pasture.

What few trees there are, mostly cottonwoods, line the bakes of the region's streams and rivers. Many of the pastures and canyons are dotted with scruffy red cedars, a tree that most farmers and ranchers view as an invasive pest.

The Republican River, which flows eastward out of Colorado, at McCook is a puny littler water course. Democrates say that it is a toss-up whether the Republican was so named because it was so shallow or so crooked. The water moving down the stream bed past the southern edge of McCook is about thirty feet wide, but it occupies only part of a much wider channel now nearly choked with weeds and grasses.

I discovered In Cold Storage at the Celebration of Nebraska Books where Hewitt was presented with the award for best book in the Nonfiction: True Crime division. I strongly recommend it for any true crime and mystery readers or Nebraska history fans.

Other books by James W. Hewitt:
Slipping Backward: A History of the Nebraska Supreme Court 

You can find Hewitt's books online at University of Nebraska Press, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble in addition to many local bookstores in Nebraska.

Something Slightly Political: the NEA, the NEH, & budget cuts Part II

After posting about the possibility of the presidential administration cutting the budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, I've had a few people ask for more information and what they can do to help save the NEA and the NEH.

The number one thing you can do is contact your congressional representatives and express your concerns. Here is a great link to find out how to contact your respective representatives. From what I have seen, phone calls are best but emails work also.

The second thing you can do is talk about it! Tell your friends about what the NEA and the NEH do and why they should be saved. Share articles on social media about it. Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Do whatever you are comfortable doing. Word of mouth is a powerful force. Use it!

Picture from Mrs. Osborn's Class“The arts are essen­tial to any com­plete national life.
The State owes it to itself to sus­tain and encour­age them….
Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the
rev­er­ence and delight which are their due.”
-Winston Churchill,
speech to the Royal Academy, April 30, 1938

Here are some talking points about what the NEA and the NEH do:

• "It was a National Endowment for the Humanities grant that helped pay for the “Treasures of Tutankhamen” exhibition to travel to six American cities from 1976-79. That groundbreaking exhibition, heralded as one of the first museum blockbusters, drew 1.36 million visitors to the Metropolitan Museum alone." (New York Times article from January 30, 2017)

• "The agencies [NEA, NEH, and Public Broadcasting] are particularly proud of programs they run to benefit veterans, such as the National Endowment for the Arts’ creative arts therapy project for military personnel at a hospital at Fort Belvoir in Virginia." (New York Times article from January 30, 2017)

• "Some 40 percent of the arts and humanities agencies’ budgets go directly to state and regional arts councils across the United States." (New York Times article from January 30, 2017)

• "The NEA is the single most important source of institutional support for the nonprofit literary field, which includes independent presses, literary magazines, book festivals, literary centers, service organizations, and reading series." (Elliot Figman, Executive Director Poets & Writers)

• "Each year, the NEA also offers creative writing fellowships to individual writers; since its founding in 1965, the agency has granted over $45 million to more than 3,000 individual writers." (Elliot Figman, Executive Director Poets & Writers)

More talking points- these came in an email I received from Humanities Nebraska Executive Director, Chris Sommerich:

• State humanities councils like Humanities Nebraska play a key role in our local communities through programs that promote literacy and other employment skills, boost local economies and our quality of life, and explore history/culture.

• State humanities councils reach people of all ages and walks of life with programs in libraries, schools, museums, senior centers, cultural centers, and other places.

• State humanities councils are independent nonprofits governed by local boards who determine appropriate programming in each state.

• State humanities councils receive essential funding from the NEH, which enables them to reach rural areas, urban centers, and everything in between.

• Total FY 2016 funding for NEH was $148 million. This is only 0.003% of federal spending, but makes a big difference in the cultural health of our nation.

• Please thank your representatives for their service and support for the humanities!

More places to check out:

• LitNet: The Literary Network
• Humanities Nebraska (or if you don't live in Nebraska, your state humanities organization)
• National Endowment for the Humanities (of course)
• National Endowment for the Arts (this one too)

Something Slightly Political: the NEA, the NEH, & budget cuts

I really try to stay out of the political talk, especially when it comes to places that I present myself as a semi-professional author, but I am breaking that rule to address something that hits extremely close to home.

It was brought to my attention yesterday that the new administration of the United States is considering cutting the entire budget of the Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

I know some of you gasped and are filled with the same outrage as I was, while some of you are shaking your head in confusion because you don't understand the significance of it.

The National Endowment for the Arts helps fund programs that encourage the arts across the country. They support art, music, theater, dance, writing, and cultural studies. There is also a huge push within the NEA to study how the different art forms affect and help unrelated subjects like education, health care, and business.

Without the NEA, there will be a huge cut of art programs in schools and communities across the country. There won't be the money for school bands, art classes, local theater, writing workshops, or dance programs. Without the exposure to the arts, it will be the end of people like Frank Loyd Wright, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Misty Copeland, Stephen King, Beyonce, Suzanne Collins, Robin Williams, and thousands of others.

The National Endowment for the Humanities encourages and funds projects that deal with history, languages, archaeology, cultural heritage, comparative religions, ethics, and anything else dealing with humans as a whole. They promote programs at cultural centers like museums, colleges, archives, public T.V./radio, etc.

The NEH is all about learning and educating the public about who we are as a people and how we fit into the grand idea of humanity as a whole. It helps celebrate our differences and helps bridge the gaps to encourage understanding.

Without the NEH, many small museums would lose the grants that help them get wonderful traveling exhibits and presenters. Some even rely on the NEH for grants to keep the doors open. Small libraries would not be able to afford to bring in nationally renowned speakers, authors, and educators. Without the NEH's funding of preservation projects across the country, thousands of pieces of America's history in the form of interviews, oral histories, newspapers, books, letters, and photographs would be lost.

Please follow the links to what these two organizations have done in the last year alone: NEA's website and the NEH's website and explore the rest of their sites to see everything they have done in the past and what their plans are for the future.

I am probably not in the right mood to talk about the possible loss of these two amazing organizations. As a writer, a museum volunteer, an art lover, a student of history, and a humanity watcher, I am terrified at what this news means, I am angry at the potential loss, and I am frantic with the unknown timeline of the budget cuts.

If you feel any sort of connection to either of these two organizations, please, do what you can to help save them. Together they make up less than a half a percent of the national budget, but without them, this country would be a darker place.

Operation: Nebraska Author- Blissfully Married

After my blog post last week about wanting to share books by my fellow Nebraska authors with you, I stood in front of my bookcase and tried to decide which one to start with for Operation: Nebraska Author.

Do I go with a system like:

• Alphabetically by the author's last name/first name/astrological sign/book title
• Put the names in a hat and draw
• Try to remember which one I got first and start there
• Chronologically by publish date
• In order of cover color and where they fall in rainbow order

Or something different?

And then I realized, that would not really be any fun for me. I'm very much a pantser and setting up some sort of plan like that would not work.

So I stood in front of my books and decided that I was in the mood for something fun and lighthearted. 

My eyes fell on Blissfully Married by New York Times best selling author Victorine Lieske. My choice had been made.

Picture from my Litsy page
The little gargoyle lurking in the background is my
roommate's Bug, Riley.  Isn't she cute?

What I did not realize (and should have) is that Blissfully Married is actually the fourth in Victorine's (can I call her by her first name if I've had a conversation with her and I feel like she'd recognize me if we ever ran into each other again? I'm going to.) Married Series. The other books in the series are Mistakenly Married, Reluctantly Married, and Accidentally Married.

Thankfully, I was not lost at having not read the other three books. I think some of the characters cross over, but they are stand-alone stories in their own right.

In Blissfully Married, we meet Sidney who runs a match making business named Blissfully Matched. She has a gift for matching people up, but her lack of a significant other makes her clients a little uneasy about trusting her abilities. Enter Sidney's friend, Mia, who offered an obvious solution: get a fiance.

Toothless is a terrible book holder.
I think its the tail.

Or, to save on time, make one up.

One quick photo shoot with Mia's sweet and nerdy brother, Ted, and a fake diamond ring later, Sidney is ready for business.

Or she was until a not-so-blast-from-her-past Blake walks into her office looking as swoon-worthy as he did when he walked out of her life years before.

A whole lot of awkwardness with a huge helping of pride on the side takes our leading lady and the man she's loved since she was a kid through a series of hi-jinks and misunderstandings that would make Shakespeare proud.

Blissfully Married is a fun, lighthearted romance with real and entertaining characters. It was a fast read for me, only taking two days (would have been only one if I didn't have to do stupid things like go to work) because once I got started, I didn't want to put it down.

I definitely recommend Blissfully Married for anybody who likes romance stories with quirky characters, Comedy of Errors-esque action, and is light on the bodice busting (genre-ly: Clean Romance, I had no idea this was a thing, but it makes sense). And I definitely will be checking out Victorine's other books.

I got to meet Victorine at the Nebraska Writers Guild 2016 Fall conference. She gave a presentation on BookBub and how authors can utilize the newsletter to get word about their books out to the masses. It was very interesting and I learned a lot. She was great to chat with later on also. As a former Nebraska Writers Guild president and a New York Times Best Selling Author, she is very much a down-to-earth Nebraskan, warm and welcoming. She was inspiring and I hope you enjoy her books.

See! I met her!

Other books by Victorine:

The Married Series:
Mistakenly Married
Reluctantly Married
Accidentally Married
Blissfully Married

Not What She Seems (spent 6 weeks on the New York Times Best Selling eBook list)

The Practice Date

The Truth Comes Out

The Overtaking

How to Find: Success Selling eBooks

You can find Victorine's books on Amazon and cleanromancebooks.com.

Learn more about Victorine Liesk on her website, on Facebook, or on her blog.

Operation: Nebraska Author

Happy 2017 everybody!

In addition to the standard New Year’s resolutions: save money, get healthy, take over a small country, and FINISH WRITING A BOOK ALREADY!!!! I have added another project to my list for the new year. 

I am calling it Operation: Nebraska Author.

After a year of being active with my writer’s group, finally getting active with the Nebraska Writers Guild, and looking for the time to be active with some other local groups, I have discovered that there are many very talented authors in my neck of the woods. And I would not be surprised to hear that none of you knew that either (well, I would be if you read my Celebration of Nebraska Books post or have seen any of my gushing). 

So, this year, I have made it my goal to read at least one book a month by a (mostly) contemporary Nebraska author and talk about it here. Most of the "Nebraska Author" stack on my “books to be read” shelf that I have collected over the past few years are outside of my usual genre so I am looking forward to stretching myself a bit. I’ve got biography, autobiography, true crime, suspense, humor, romance, steampunk, fantasy, family drama… and only two of those genres are what I’ve read regularly since I grew out of picture books.

Some of the books I plan on reading this year!

In no particular order, I present the books...

Physical:

The Meaning of Names by Karen Gettert Shoemaker

In Cold Storage by James W. Hewitt

Born to be a Warrior by Lynn O. High

Recipes for Revenge by G. M. Barlean

Blissfully Married by Victorine E Lieske

Sky Rider: The Story of Evelyn Sharp by Dr. Jean A. Lukesh

Dust & Cannibals by Bruce Schindler

The Downeys Trilogy by Genevieve Dewey

Steam on the Horizon & Clouds of War by Melissa Ann Conroy

Diary of an American Witch by Heather Stowe

Audio Book:

One Two Kill a Few by John Achor

E-books:

Broken Road by Mari Beck

Thorns of Rosewood: Book 1 by G. M. Barlean

Plus the six or so books that I need to get my hands on, including the 2017 One Book, One Nebraska book, Black Elk Speaks by Black Elk and John Neihardt.

I would not be surprised if I add to my stack over the course of this project and it may grow into a regular thing beyond 2017. Heck, I might even add a book of poetry (nothing against it, just not my thing) if I’m feeling a little adventurous.

If you have read/written a book that I absolutely must check out (mainly by Nebraska writers for this, but I'll always take recommendations), let me know either in the comments below or by email, Facebook, Pintrest, Litsy (K.Wielechowski), smoke signal, carrier pigeon, etc.

Blame it on the Holidays

Good morning/afternoon/evening everybody,

I thought I'd take a moment to apologize for being remiss in my blog posts for the last month (Its been a month since I last posted!?!?!?!). I told myself that I had to find the time to write a blog post nearly everyday and yet, it didn't happen.

Why?

A culmination of a lot of reasons:

1) Not enough hours in the day
2) No self-motivation
3) Out of topics
4) No self-discipline
5) My computer hates me
6) My dog-er-cat ate my homework
7) The stars are out of alignment
8) The library flooded (not even kidding on this one, but the water was confined to the basement... where the computer lab is, not that I use it anyway, but still scary)
9) Pandora is playing all the wrong songs
10) Too cold

And the list could go on and on, getting more ridiculous with each entry, but I can sum it all up into one thing:

I work retail and its Christmas time resulting in the lack of energy, time, braining, hope, faith in humanity, patience, and sleep.

I would really like to say "It's okay that my blog has been put on pause, I'm still writing other things."

Ha. Ha.

Nope, can't say that. This is actually the most I've written in probably 3 weeks. In fact, I actually was excited to get off work a little early so I could go to the library and work on writing prompts before my writers group meeting.

I'm writing this post instead.

Thanks to the holidays, I have too much to do, not enough time to do it in, and I know I have at least a dozen more gray hairs now than when I woke up this morning. Oh, and I'm changing positions at work so I've been trying to learn an entirely new area of responsibility while still kind of doing my old job.

I'm kind of proud of myself for NOT bringing my flask to work in order to make it through the days.

Anyway, enough of me bitching about work. The holidays are almost over, I will eventually learn my new job, and I will hopefully find the time to write again.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and the end is nigh, my fellow retailers.