Betsy Robinson's Blog - Posts Tagged "novel"
Why I Love The Trouble with the Truth
I'm teaching myself video editing. Hence, new videos. This one is a love letter to both my late mother, author Edna Robinson, and her book
The Trouble with the Truth
:
VIDEO: Why I Love The Trouble with the Truth
VIDEO: Why I Love The Trouble with the Truth
For People Interested in Writing Structure
Here is the Author’s Statement I drafted years ago for Cats on a Pole
Goodreads Book Page
CATS ON A POLE is a metaphysical love story of two psychically-gifted people who are isolated—like cats stuck up on a telephone pole—by their gifts. Charismatic healer and teacher Joshua Gardner and his student Harmony Rogers carry on a passionate love affair without physical contact, a battle of wills without speech, a psychic duel between male and female equals who have, for the first time, met their match … but nobody wins.
This is a complex “under-the-skin” dance portrait of two characters who are usually seen two-dimensionally: a charismatic leader who is either idealized or condemned and an odd-ball loner who watches others but rarely comes out of the shadows. The story emerges like a dance with the first chapter serving as a prelude to something that is repeated later on when the linear story catches up to it.
The essential question dealt with in Cats on a Pole is: What is going on between people in relationship? How do we really communicate? Can we find the courage to admit to ourselves the truth of how much we know and how we know it, and then reveal this to others?
My hope is that readers will recognize their own senses in this story—sensations, smells, or physical feelings they perhaps have dismissed as “nothing” or fantasy—and begin to accept them as real. In so doing, we must then take responsibility for our effect on others. And in taking responsibility, we find freedom.
But all of this is subliminal—in the fiber of a good, sometimes funny, story—and it doesn’t matter if it is ever articulated.
The book and e-book are available everywhere, but you can get discount paperbacks in the USA: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?KD...
Goodreads Book Page
CATS ON A POLE is a metaphysical love story of two psychically-gifted people who are isolated—like cats stuck up on a telephone pole—by their gifts. Charismatic healer and teacher Joshua Gardner and his student Harmony Rogers carry on a passionate love affair without physical contact, a battle of wills without speech, a psychic duel between male and female equals who have, for the first time, met their match … but nobody wins.
This is a complex “under-the-skin” dance portrait of two characters who are usually seen two-dimensionally: a charismatic leader who is either idealized or condemned and an odd-ball loner who watches others but rarely comes out of the shadows. The story emerges like a dance with the first chapter serving as a prelude to something that is repeated later on when the linear story catches up to it.
The essential question dealt with in Cats on a Pole is: What is going on between people in relationship? How do we really communicate? Can we find the courage to admit to ourselves the truth of how much we know and how we know it, and then reveal this to others?
My hope is that readers will recognize their own senses in this story—sensations, smells, or physical feelings they perhaps have dismissed as “nothing” or fantasy—and begin to accept them as real. In so doing, we must then take responsibility for our effect on others. And in taking responsibility, we find freedom.
But all of this is subliminal—in the fiber of a good, sometimes funny, story—and it doesn’t matter if it is ever articulated.
The book and e-book are available everywhere, but you can get discount paperbacks in the USA: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?KD...
DOING BATTLE AS A ZEN MASTER even without martial arts training
I'm 74 and all my life I've been a late bloomer.
When I was an actor in my twenties, a roommate advised me to do my own thing since I was already writing my own audition monologues. It was the time when performance art was exploding in downtown Manhattan. Singers were singing, actors like Whoopie Goldberg were creating their own material: finding a way to work when there was no work.
But I wanted to jump through commercial hoops. After 10+ years of leaping, my final swan song was writing and performing a one-woman (me) play called Darleen Dances to much acclaim for two workshop audiences and subsequently having the opening monologue published in a popular actors' monologue book and being performed so often that it's on a "do not do" list for university auditions. But no commercial production or work of any paying kind followed, so I got off the dead-end show-biz road.
For years I've worked as a journalist and editor while I've written novels. Some have won awards and been published by small presses. But the last two were languishing, unread despite a good-hearted agent's submissions.
Why?
Because I'm not famous, I don't have a big sales record on Bookscan, and … Who know? I don't really care.
But as the 2024 election approached, my whole being went into alarm with thoughts of "Time's up!" My psychic voice was screaming that no matter how big Kamala's crowds, a blood bath was encroaching. And I had something to say about dealing with it in the second of my two languishing novels, The Spectators.
So I started Kano Press and published it two months before the debacle erupted.
What did I want to say so badly?
The Spectators is a novel about our herd nature and dealing with it as a person who prefers to think independently and observe. And my epiphany when I got to the end of my story was that it is not an option to divorce the herd. We can tell ourselves we are independent, but that is a lie. As goes the herd, no matter how we resist, we will go as well.
And since you cannot control anybody else in the herd, all you can do is try to find an inner truth and live by it. Doing that is by no means a passive action—witness Cory Booker's marathon. But acting with an impermeable sense of truth is like Zen Master fighting. You do battle in a relaxed, energized state, knowing exactly who you are and why you are playing your part.
Part love letter to NYC’s Upper West Side, part an ode to friendship between a writer and her creations (reluctant psychic protagonist Lily Hogue and her loner friends, with guest appearances of real and fictional historical events and people, from Bernie Madoff to Paul Simon to terrorists), The Spectators’ cast of characters battles the problems of foreknowing disasters we cannot control and being part of an uncontrollable human herd.
Discount ($10 in the USA only) paperbacks here: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?jp...
E-books are sold everywhere you can buy books (even on Bookshop.org).
And here’s a short reading:
https://youtu.be/4GOZTPxQ6H8
When I was an actor in my twenties, a roommate advised me to do my own thing since I was already writing my own audition monologues. It was the time when performance art was exploding in downtown Manhattan. Singers were singing, actors like Whoopie Goldberg were creating their own material: finding a way to work when there was no work.
But I wanted to jump through commercial hoops. After 10+ years of leaping, my final swan song was writing and performing a one-woman (me) play called Darleen Dances to much acclaim for two workshop audiences and subsequently having the opening monologue published in a popular actors' monologue book and being performed so often that it's on a "do not do" list for university auditions. But no commercial production or work of any paying kind followed, so I got off the dead-end show-biz road.
For years I've worked as a journalist and editor while I've written novels. Some have won awards and been published by small presses. But the last two were languishing, unread despite a good-hearted agent's submissions.
Why?
Because I'm not famous, I don't have a big sales record on Bookscan, and … Who know? I don't really care.
But as the 2024 election approached, my whole being went into alarm with thoughts of "Time's up!" My psychic voice was screaming that no matter how big Kamala's crowds, a blood bath was encroaching. And I had something to say about dealing with it in the second of my two languishing novels, The Spectators.
So I started Kano Press and published it two months before the debacle erupted.
What did I want to say so badly?
The Spectators is a novel about our herd nature and dealing with it as a person who prefers to think independently and observe. And my epiphany when I got to the end of my story was that it is not an option to divorce the herd. We can tell ourselves we are independent, but that is a lie. As goes the herd, no matter how we resist, we will go as well.
And since you cannot control anybody else in the herd, all you can do is try to find an inner truth and live by it. Doing that is by no means a passive action—witness Cory Booker's marathon. But acting with an impermeable sense of truth is like Zen Master fighting. You do battle in a relaxed, energized state, knowing exactly who you are and why you are playing your part.
Part love letter to NYC’s Upper West Side, part an ode to friendship between a writer and her creations (reluctant psychic protagonist Lily Hogue and her loner friends, with guest appearances of real and fictional historical events and people, from Bernie Madoff to Paul Simon to terrorists), The Spectators’ cast of characters battles the problems of foreknowing disasters we cannot control and being part of an uncontrollable human herd.
Discount ($10 in the USA only) paperbacks here: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?jp...
E-books are sold everywhere you can buy books (even on Bookshop.org).
And here’s a short reading:
https://youtu.be/4GOZTPxQ6H8
