THE NEXT BIG THING BLOG HOP

What is a blog hop? Basically, it’s a way for readers to discover authors new to them. I hope you’ll find new-to-you authors whose works you enjoy. On this stop on the blog hop, you’ll find a bit of information on me, and one of my books.

My gratitude to fellow author T. L. Smith for inviting me to participate in this event. You can click the following link to learn more about her work.  Website:  http://tlsmith-sfauthor.blogspot.com

In this blog hop, I have answered ten questions about a book or work-in-progress (giving you a sneak peek).  I’ve also included some behind-the-scenes information about how and why I write what I write—the characters, inspirations, plotting and other choices I make. I hope you enjoy it!

Please feel free to comment and share your thoughts and questions. Here is my Next Big Thing!

1: What is the working title of your book? 

Blood Fruit

2: Where did the idea come from for the book?

My late mother-in-law, Felicidad Samoranos, when cleaning out one of her bedrooms in her Sunnyvale home, rediscovered a photograph taken in 1959 shortly after she and her four children emigrated from the Philippines to San Francisco by ship, to meet up with my father-in-law, Domingo. Dad had traveled to California approximately eighteen months in advance of his family’s journey. An educated man, and trained in the Philippine to be a teacher, Dad was limited by his race to work in the fields. He tells the story of working in the Salinas Valley with the Braceros, the Mexican fields workers, and how the older Filipinos helped Dad because he was so slow, as fieldwork is back breaking, and requires physical endurance. Dad eventually found a job at a Japanese-American owned flower nursery in Mountain View, California, and was given a place to house his family on-site in a converted garage. The photo, shown at the top of this page, speaks volumes about immigration, and family cohesion. Notice one of the children, my brother-in-law, Frederick, is seated at the table on a tricycle, because of a lack of chairs. This is the photo that, along with the lives of Felicidad and Domingo, and their generous heritage, that inspired Blood Fruit.

3: What genre does your book come under?

Contemporary Fiction

4: Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

The main character, Madeline, who is half-Filipino, part Lakota, and Scotch-Irish, would be played by Kristin Kreuk, who is a gorgeous and talented actress, with the exotic looks to pull off being Maddie.

5: What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

The elders sowed the seeds, so that I could reap the sweet harvest of their blood fruit.

6: Is your book self-published, published by an independent publisher, or represented by an agency?

I’ll be offering it Musa, who published the sequel to Blood Fruit, under the title, Road Apples, in December of 2011.

7: How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Approximately three months. I was very inspired.

8: What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

That’s a difficult question—because I don’t know of any books along the lines of the family saga in Blood Fruit. I’ve created a multi-ethnic woman, whose career as a general contractor is unusual. She’s a fireball, and yet adheres to the wisdom of her elders, including the Filipino custom of sibling hierarchy, which complicates issues when her eldest sister is charged with first-degree murder in the death of a man.

9: Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My experiences with the Samoranos family, my husband’s side, directly influenced this book.

10: What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Madeline Benités is a feminist—that’s right, she owns power tools, and knows how to use them. In contrast, though her best friend is a man, and she occasionally engages in mild bar brawls, she loves men, though tends to be standoffish about relationships, yet direct and to the point with her words. I very much enjoyed writing about Maddie. Additionally, Blood Fruit, like Road Apples, is written in the first person, e.g., with Maddie narrating. She ties her grandfather’s legacy of experiences with the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II, to her sister’s crime of murder: As I’ve learned, when my eldest sister killed a man, we all eventually drift into a war zone.

Do you have anything to add about you as an author to what you’ve already told the reader above?

Although I don’t write what is considered to be “mainstream” fiction, I feel my work has merit in a world that is steadily becoming more progressive, and less inclusive about the definition of “Americana.” To me, “Americana” describes the new melting pot of ethnicities, cultures and ideals, and I believe the definition of “mainstream” will be reset to reflect this change.

Reading Romances’ Valentine’s Day 2013 Blog Hop

Please join with me in visiting the Giveaway Hop for Reading Romances.Com: http://reading-romances.com/celebrating-st-valentine/ 

Check out the blogs from my fellow authors, and the giveaway list. You can register, and may even win a prize!

I’m offering a prize of the e-book version of my novel, “Road Apples” for those who leave a comment on my blog.

I realized very recently that I am an addict, and that my husband, Clifford, is co-dependent. Though our inadequacy doesn’t involve alcohol or drugs, the affliction can still be debilitating, even after nearly twenty-five years of marriage. Our problem is a mutual desire for one another, and the consequent acting out that ends with a grin, and a short nap.

I’d thought we were fairly normal, until Clifford quoted from an editorial piece by one of his favored writers, Hugh Hefner. Paraphrasing statistics as laid out by the Viagra King, most Americans profess to engaging in sexual activity approximately two times per month—or, once every other week. That fits roughly 65% of adults surveyed. Another twenty-odd percent “do it” once each week, and the horniest, or the top two percentile, are at it every other day.

So, I asked him, where does this place us? We’re in the one-quarter-percentile who avail themselves of sex in a quiet, empty house, or, when necessity dictates, and the roomies are home, we’ve learned how not to make any noise. We are perfectly willing to drive 350 miles for private sex in a dilapidated mobile home atop a Simmons mattress embedded in a squeaky Ikea frame. Go ahead, baby, squeak that bed, because face it—there isn’t anyone willing to drive 350 miles to disturb our island of action (uh-oh, I can just see my adult children now, rolling their eyes).

But, with the approach of Valentine’s Day 2013, my hat is off to my husband’s parents, Felicidad and Domingo. Not for frequency, because—well, just look at my husband’s statistics. The acorn likely didn’t fall very far from the oak trees.

I am celebrating Felicidad and Domingo for over sixty years of true love, which weathered separation during the family’s relocation from the Philippines to California in 1959. It’s a love that grew while raising five children in the South Bay, through the tumultuous ’60s and ’70s, and managing to instill a deep sense of familial loyalty and duty, along with cultural imperative.

I’m bowing to a marriage that clings to honor and sweetness, through the past five years of my mother-in-law’s battle with colon cancer. My father-in-law is historically a man of few words, and yet, his face speaks volumes as he watches the slow slipping away of the woman he describes as his life. Those are his words, “She is my life.”

My parents-in-law also inspired characters in an unpublished manuscript, Blood Fruit (© 2008/09), fictional elders, who came to fruition in my novel, Road Apples (Musa Publishing—December 2011), which had been intended as a sequel to Blood Fruit.

The characters, Feliz and Enida Benités, are not too different from Domingo and Felicidad Samoranos, in the essence of who they are, and what they represent. Here, at the end of Blood Fruit, Feliz and Enida are aptly described by their granddaughter, Madeline Benités. Keep in mind that names have been changed, but the core of the fictional grandparents in Blood Fruit are derived from real life:

Last year, when she’d been cleaning up one of the bedrooms in her Sunnyvale home, my Grandma Enida came across a photograph she had thought she’d lost. Because our family is afflicted with Pack Ratterism, we keep everything and forsake nothing, so the photograph, buried but not forgotten, had a high likelihood of turning up somewhere down the line.

Grandma Enida, a very enterprising person, had managed to supplement Grandpa Feliz’s income by working the Libby’s cannery, and later standing swing-shift at Fairchild Semiconductor, and then Teledyne, working on the assembly-line. Grandma inevitably chose the swing-shift, so that there would always be an adult home with the boys.

On the side, she made extra cash by selling the likes of Avon, Tupperware and Sarah Coventry jewelry, and this particular bedroom, utilized for storage, was cluttered with the by-product of her lengthy association with door-to-door sales, forty-five years of it.

All in all, she ignored Grandpa Feliz’s rant about wasting money, and made quite sure that her family was raised in a safe neighborhood, and that they all had what they needed, a college education or a new car, or a down-payment on a house.

This life in the United States was made possible, because Grandma Enida brought my father and three of his four siblings to California in 1959, traveling by ship to meet up with Grandpa Feliz, who at that time had lived in the States for almost two years, estranged from his wife and children. My father, who’d been born in Narvacan six months after Grandpa departed for the States, was the only one who didn’t know his own father. Even the next eldest, Matthew, had vague memories of Grandpa Feliz, and accepted him readily once the family was reunited, and moved in together. Mitchell, however, fought by using the stubborn rule, to prevent Grandpa Feliz from administering love or discipline, and it took, as I observe it, a good fifty years to disprove their alienation.

Grandma was distressed that she’d lost the picture, so when she rediscovered it, she was so ecstatic, that she asked my father to copy it, and to give a printed photo to every one of our family members. Dad scanned the little 3×5 inch photo, and produced stunning 8x10s of the revealing scene, taken by Grandpa inside of their first abode, which was a converted garage on the property of a Japanese-American-owned flower nursery in Mountain View, where Grandpa worked. The date inscribed at the time the photo was developed, and included in the scan by Dad, shows June 1959, though Dad said the picture had been taken in April, less than a week after their arrival at the Port of San Francisco.

The photo is a bit grainy, but clearly shows an old chrome and formica dining table, and the open room of the garage, with a kitchen counter block and a bare water heater, and frying pans hanging from the wall. Grandma is seated at the head of the table, with two children on either side. On the far left is Michael, the eldest, then Miles, my Grandma, my father, then Matthew. Grandma is drinking from a cup, and most eyes are fixed upon Grandpa and the camera, except for Matthew, who is in a trance, and for my father, who is reaching toward a carton of milk with one hand, as though thirsting for more. There aren’t enough chairs, just four, so Uncle Miles is pulled up on a tricycle, and you can see the front wheel under the table.

This photograph symbolizes a lot of things to me; it records, obviously, a moment in time that is probably very similar to many immigrant families, both then and now.

There’s more: Grandma Enida’s great courage in bringing her children to America, her patience and strength in caring for four very boisterous male children on board a ship, where the passage lasted in excess of three weeks.

And I am reminded of their deprivation, however temporary, that Enida and Feliz were apart for nearly two years while my grandfather established a job and a home in California, sending for the family when all was settled. My Uncle Mark was conceived in May of 1959, even in that densely populated garage, a one-room arrangement, a study in family socialism. That my grandparents were making love while their restless sons slept, is a testament to endurance.

But the fact that my Grandma took all risks by embracing a faith in God to better the lives of her children is the exemplification of love. There is nothing else but love.

And I have been so equally blessed; I am the by-product of their tree, the traditions and habits and quirks of the Benités family, connected by our hearts. My grandparents, my parents, they’ve all gifted me the strength and honesty to make the most of my life, on my own and in due season, because I have been given the tools of culture. The elders sowed the seeds, so that I could reap the sweet harvest of their blood fruit.

* * * *

It’s sometimes easy to forget that our parents lived and loved as young people. I see the young man in my husband, the one I first met and fell head over heels for, fused with the older man he is today. Like a rare vintage, Clifford has aged extraordinarily well.

I see that love in Felicidad and Domingo, a love that endures, and never fades. I can’t imagine what they’re going through, a precipitous parting of ways, their unique place in time, which everyone must come to grips with eventually—the body ages, while the heart remains forever young.

 

Buy Link: http://musapublishing.com/index.php?main_page=advanced_search_result&search_in_description=1&zenid=9d9e291766e481996db64e1d8cbe17dd&keyword=karen+kennedy+samoranos

Web Site: http://www.saraville.com/

Photo By: Domingo Cabarloc Samoranos, June, 1959, Mountain View, California.

Happy Birthday, Musa Publishing!

Almost a year ago, I was blessed to begin a professional relationship with my publisher, Musa Publishing. Musa is celebrating their one-year anniversary this month, with a Blog Hop. I feel honored to have Musa publish four of my novels—Road Apples (December 2011), The Curious Number (March 2012), Death By Bitter Waters (June 2012) and most recently, Big Lies In Small Town (September 28^th, 2012). I look forward to Musa’s publication of my fifth novel, Small Town, Add Vice, in March of 2013.

To mark this celebration, Musa Publishing is giving away a GRAND PRIZE Kindle Fire (for US and Canada mailing addresses only). There will be two Swag Bags (US and Canada only). For everyone, which means INTERNATIONALLY, Musa is giving away a $50.00 Musa gift card. Please check the link for Blog Hop rules: http://musapublishingbloghops.blogspot.com/2012/09/musa-turns-1-and-we-are-celebrating.html

The blog tour starts on October 1^st, 2012 at midnight EST, and ends on October 7^th, 2012, at midnight PST. Winners will be drawn and posted October 9^th.

I’m offering prizes from my blog as well, for those who visit and post a comment on my blog. A random drawing will take place on October 9^th, 2012, so leave a comment and your contact info, and enter to win one of the following items:

First Prize—The full four-book collection of my current Musa novels, in the e-book format of your choice.

Second Prize—One signed Limited Edition Promotional Print Version of Road Apples or The Curious Number. 

Third Prize—Select a single title from my Musa e-books in your preferred format.

While you mull these prizes over, I’ll give you a little backstory on the books I write, and why I’m compelled to write them.

* * * *

 For most of the year, I live in Santa Clara, California, with my husband, and close to our extended family, including our grown children and young grandchildren. Approximately eight times per year, we drive up to Susanville, which is located in Lassen County, in northeastern California.

There’s a disparity between my official home, and my seasonal getaway, especially in the voting records. If you take the most recent presidential election (2008), you’ll find that in Santa Clara County, 69.5% voted Democrat, while only 28.6% voted for the Republican ticket. Lassen County is a rough opposite—31.5% Democrat, and 65.8% Republican. With those vague statistics, you can easily conclude that the political atmosphere and social concerns between these two California counties differ like night and day.

As an example—in 2008, 71.3% of Lassen County voters supported Proposition 8, which amended the California Constitution to ban same-sex marriages. I don’t have the stats on Santa Clara County in regard to Prop 8, but I do know that after its unfortunate passage, Santa Clara County joined San Francisco and Los Angeles counties in a lawsuit, becoming the first governmental entities in the world to sue in support of same-sex marriage, essentially to overturn Prop 8 as discriminatory against homosexuals.

Although we’re a Catholic family, Prop 8 struck us as deeply exclusionary. Why should heterosexuals have all the fun—or, all the anguish—when it comes to marriage equality? The unilateral and heavy financial support that the Catholic Knights of Columbus gave to the Mormon Church in order to pass Prop 8 in California, galled us, and is the reason why my husband immediately withdrew his membership with the K of C.

Guilt is a required Catholic emotion, and often the butt of jokes. To keep this guilt in check, we regularly attend a more woman- and gay-friendly Catholic parish in Silicon Valley. When we’re in Susanville, we go to mass at Sacred Heart.

Sacred Heart stands plainly on the corner of Nevada and Union Streets in Susanville. It’s an unassuming building, with concrete steps and an orderly exterior, a visual austerity that complements the high volume of conservatives in this ranching community, and former mill town (which at present is supported by employment with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation). The diagonal parking slots along Nevada Street are generous in width, painted with burly three-quarter-ton diesel pickup trucks in mind.

As Catholic churches go, Sacred Heart is far from ornate, a plain white stucco building, with a simple design. Once inside, the church has small town charm. The sanctuary exudes warmth, from dark wooden pews, to beautiful stained glass windows through which light is caught and enriched.

You can literally attend every mass in the United States—barring those that still follow Vatican I, or offer Latin High Mass—and the form is the same everywhere you go. After all, “catholic” means “universal.” The litany of definitions includes eclectic, broad-based, all-inclusive and liberal.

That word, “liberal,” is really the most intriguing of definitions. Alternate usages are: tolerant, unprejudiced, enlightened and progressive, ideals the Catholic Church upholds, but isn’t always keen on practicing. Strangely, if you search for antonyms to liberal, they include bigoted, narrow-minded and conservative.

“Conservative” is defined further as right wing, reactionary, Republican, and my all-time favorite, the informal “redneck.”

Some folks might be proud to define themselves as conservative, though I find it baffling that one would want to broadcast how small-minded and intolerant they are. Further, since the dictionary on my laptop has bound the word conservative tightly to the term, redneck, I must inform the reader that rednecks are, “working-class white people, especially a political reactionary from a rural area.”

I don’t want to give the reader the notion that Susanville is inhabited by rednecks. In fact, most of the people we’ve met have been gracious and welcoming, kind and hospitable. Walking around town with my husband in our obvious interracial marriage, we have yet to be disparaged for our multicultural configuration. However, I wouldn’t advise my son to hold hands with his boyfriend as they walk down Main Street. They tried that once in Livermore, California, and were called “fucking fags” by a very tall redneck walking his wife and two young daughters. Livermore is a town known as a bedroom community of the San Francisco Bay Area, and thus, is usually more tolerant and upscale than, say, Alturas, Bieber…or Susanville.

We love Lassen County, because we can do things that would garner us a citation in Santa Clara County. In the winter, we burn wood on our wood stove. During the summer, we spend hours riding our dirt bikes in the backcountry. There’s nothing like driving down the street from your rural home, and hitting potentially a thousand miles of unpaved and unchecked dirt biking freedom, populated by pronghorn, coyote, bear and eagles. Rarely do we ever glimpse a redneck.

The only blot on our experience would be the woman we met at Sacred Heart, who invited us to join the music liturgy. This was after the June 20^th, 2006 edition of the local Susanville weekly newspaper, Lassen County Times that published a very crazy—at least by Silicon Valley standards—theocratic essay on why God is punishing gays. Entitled, “Signs of the Times, Judgment of America,” its content was quite sufficient to forever brand the Times as a wacky, far-right publication without any journalistic integrity whatsoever.

When our newfound musical benefactor at Sacred Heart began to paraphrase the Times article’s writer as though he was St. Paul, we knew the most sensible thing we could do was simply stay away from this church. We wisely departed, and, as I stated in a previous blog, spent those may Sundays fishing for Eagle Lake trout. God created fishing, so we intended to honor God’s creation.

Most recently, my husband and I attended Sacred Heart—it had been six years—with no trace of the woman. Whew! That was a close call.

I love Lassen County, so I write about Susanville from the perspective of a Catholic liberal (according to the Dictionary, that’s supposed to be redundant). I poke fun at everyone, but I also place many of my characters in serious jeopardy. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists Susanville as a flashpoint of the Ku Klux Klan (no doubt, due to prison gangs in this region that offers the CDCR as the principal employer). A lot of what I write examines religious extremism, gun control, and race relations, pitting liberals against conservatives, and sometimes joining them at the hip.

I am at my best when I’m being provocative with the written word.

My latest novel with Musa Publishing, Big Lies In Small Town, explores these themes, along with female empowerment. One of my favorite recurring characters, Kate McLain Sumner, has emotional and spiritual firepower, and isn’t afraid to kick ass at the proper time.  I hope you’ll find your way to the Musa Publishing site, and buy a copy of Big Lies In Small Town. Just like my tendency to drift back uphill to Susanville, you won’t regret it!

Buy Link: http://musapublishing.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2&products_id=393

Susanville, California — Round #1

In a recent online issue of the Lassen County Times, sandwiched between a tragic domestic murder-suicide in Alturas, and the Susanville police solving the mysterious case of a peeping Tom in the women’s restroom at Walmart, is a more uplifting article.

Graced with a color photograph of mounted horses, is the “Saddle Up for St. Jude” fundraising ride, sponsored by the Lassen County Sheriff’s Posse. According to the article, the LCSP is rootin’-tootin’-ready to raise another five grand to donate toward fighting pediatric cancer and other heinous childhood diseases.

The nasty bread in this small town sandwich is sadly commonplace in urban California—murder, mayhem and sex offenders.

But “Saddle Up for St. Jude” is the soft center, a wholesome event that brings together members of a community for a common cause, in this case the healing of children.

The Lassen County Sheriff’s Posse doesn’t chase down shackled criminals over hill and dale following a freak jailbreak. The LCSP is a non-profit that raises money for scholarships and general philanthropy. In fact, you can go straight to their web site—www.lassencountysheriffsposse.com—with little fuss, because they’ve made it easy for you in its glaring simplicity. The only glitch is that their page, “2010 jr. fun day” is two years behind the rest of the world’s calendar.

The LCSP’s failure to update their web site is an integral part of the Lassen County experience—a community converging to offer assistance, mixed with a tinge of slight incompetence. Reading about the goals of the LCSP, I agree that their attention is better served by focusing upon their mission statement. All those small details are crucial to a nit-picky person in a faster-paced world. In Susanville, triviality is allowed to fall to the wayside.

I’ve lived part-time in this community since 2005, though I’ve been a seasonal visitor for most of my life. There’s been little change in Susanville, aside from the new Safeway and Walmart, and the fact that they’ve added ten thousand people to their population base.

These aren’t your everyday citizens—they’re prison inmates. In order to qualify for a larger piece of the federal highway fund pie, the brilliant civic leaders decided that ten thousand inmates at High Desert State Prison could legally qualify with their official residence as Susanville. The “Welcome to Susanville” sign boasts a population of 17,500, rather than the actual 7,500 that truly free range this small town.

Susanville a nice place to live, even with a high rate per capita of methamphetamine abuse, and large tracts of open country that shelter marijuana plantations, thought to be established by Mexican drug cartels. Usually it’s the backcountry sportsman who stumbles across these crops. This brings about the almost immediate response of law enforcement.

One would think that marijuana plantations are a new trend, and yet, thirty years ago, following a weeklong surveillance of a grow site at Cottonwood Mountain, just south of Antelope Lake, forty members of law enforcement made what was described then as “California’s largest marijuana bust.” Almost forty-five hundred marijuana plants, with an estimated street value of over four million dollars, were confiscated.

As a sidebar, I’ve always wondered what law enforcement actually does with all that pot, though I have my suspicions…

That bust was a big deal in 1982. Today, it happens with more frequency. A marijuana grow site was removed from public lands in the northwest area of Lassen County as recently as August 17^th, 2012.

Six law enforcement agencies converged on this particular crop site—Lassen County Sheriff’s Office, the Susanville Police Department, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (not sure what their function would be), Modoc County Sheriff’s Office, the California Department of Fish & Game (because of the environmental pollution), and officers from the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP is a task force from the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement).

Collectively, law enforcement is the largest source of employment in Lassen County, and this is what I’ve told one of my daughters, a criminal justice major. Go to Susanville, and become a cop or a Sheriff’s deputy, I said. Work for the Department of Corrections, or Juvenile Probation, or the California Highway Patrol. Find employment with the federal government as Park’s Department police, or work for the U.S. Forest Service. Above all, be sure to buy a Glock 23.

And, by the way, the real estate is cheap, I added.

Affordable real estate in Susanville is an actual truism, and not simply a sales phrase, bolstered by the MLS listings. In Lassen County, you can buy a modern four-bedroom/two-bath/two thousand square foot home, for half the price of a cramped, rundown fixer-upper in a shady neighborhood in Santa Clara County.

This is what has made Susanville so tempting for Correctional Officers: a ready-made job site (High Desert State Prison), rows and rows of contemporary, ranch-style single family homes, and lots of things to do…if you hunt, fish, love the outdoors and vote Republican.

If you and/or your children are liberals and city slickers, heed my warning, and stay away from Susanville. You can get easily bored with only two movie theaters to choose from, and keep your mouth shut about your environmental ideals. Nobody likes environmentalists, because they’re tree-huggers (it’s Sierra Pacific who is responsible for killing their own sawmill, shutting it down to avoid paying millions in retrofits). And become a member of the NRA (National Rifle Association). And be wary—or eventually you’ll become an alcoholic, and your children will turn to meth to fill empty hours consumed by doubt, guilt and boredom.

But…if you love the outdoors, then Susanville’s your cup of tea

Hunting is a religion secondary only to Christianity (though you’re in trouble if you’re not Christian, because there are no houses of worship for other creeds).

Our neighborhood is on the outskirts of town, “up in the trees,” they say up here. During hunting season, you occasionally hear the hunters firing guns up on Roop Mountain. Most of our neighbors have quads, and they ride them on the County roads without protective gear. I’ve seen a guy, during winter, with chains on his quad, dragging his kids behind him on a snowbound street, the children mounted atop a plastic sled. Loads of fun, I guarantee. What’s more blood curdling, is the dude who tied the sled to the back of a lift-kitted Ford truck. One application of the brakes, and those kids would’ve been bloody toast. Plastic sleds don’t have brakes, and Ford trucks have huge, deadly tires, not to mention that differential your head is speeding toward.

I can’t wait for my criminal justice major to move up to Susanville, have children, live in a mobile home (e.g., “trailer”) and follow the winter tradition of putting one’s offspring in jeopardy. Meanwhile, this child of mine will have a choice of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to choose from for employment.

Just don’t work for Highway Patrol, because dammit, I want to keep crossing pavement on my dirt bike.

The Professionals at Musa Publishing

I first noted Musa Publishing on a thread on the forum site, Absolute Write, and decided to send a submission for my manuscript, Road Apples. I was in the midst of the querying process to literary agencies with this manuscript, and in fact at the time the manuscript was being read by two rather prominent literary agents. But when Musa offered me a contract, I didn’t hesitate to sign.

What attracted me to Musa Publishing, aside from their concise business model, was the honesty and energy of the staff, starting with Celina Summers. I felt that with Musa, I would be able to get my work professionally published at the beginning of an era where eBooks would eventually replace the demand for print books, and in that vein, where people like Celina, Kelly, Kerry and Coreen would do everything in their professional capacity to ensure that my work was ready for sale in a timely manner.

Musa and the staff didn’t disappoint. Celina allowed me to further my writer’s voice with Musa by subsequently signing four more books after Road Apples—The Curious Number (March 2012), Death By Bitter Waters (June 2012), Big Lies in Small Town (September 2012), and Small Town, Add Vice (February 2013). Both Annie Seaton and Melinda Fulton have done amazing work editing, and as a consequence, allowed me to be a better writer. Kelly Shorten’s book covers are not just of professional quality, she’s also very intuitive as an artist. Dominique Eastwick works tirelessly in promotions, and Coreen Montagna’s book designs are outstanding.

As for transparency, I always have the online tool, Delphi, to check my sales or the status of books in their various stages. Timely, communicative, professional and honest—what can I say? I love working with Musa, and feel fortunate to have made the connection. I would recommend Musa Publishing in a heartbeat.

 

Link to my books on Musa Publishing: http://musapublishing.com/index.php?main_page=advanced_search_result&search_in_description=1&zenid=a45e8f058633e5c87a10945b12edf596&keyword=karen+kennedy+samoranos

Death By Bitter Waters

Imagine the unthinkable. Imagine that a world power far superior to the United States has suddenly invaded our shores. America is outclassed in weaponry and her people outnumbered fifty-to-one. And not only are these invaders driven by what they consider a God-given right to acquire our sovereign land and round us up indiscriminately like sheep, they also set loose a more ominous tool of warfare—bioengineered viruses, so virulent, that ninety percent of all living citizens of the United States are wiped out, their immune systems unable to cope. Whatever survivors are left have been transferred to small tracts of land unfit for supporting the barest essentials of human life, and so scores continue to die of malnourishment, disease and a simple loss of hope for a future. Your children, the ones who seemed to miraculously survive the horrors of invasion and placement into these concentration camps, are forcibly removed from your care, and trucked far distances to attend new state schools, institutions that transform them into docile subjects of the new order, under the premise that their education and their new language skills will enable them to assimilate into a system that has been force-fed.

Imagine too, as you walk to the camps set up for the conquered, that the invaders, who stand along the street, jeer at you. Your baby is ripped from your arms, and killed. Your daughter, your sister, your mother and your grandmother, are spit upon, and all because somebody wanted the land beneath your feet. And your son, your brother, your husband, your father, your grandfather—they’ve all been removed to prison, for being male, for trying to protect their people.

Sound impossible? In our modern society, the very concept of a world power steam-rolling the sovereignty of another first-world nation is far-fetched, an Orwellian vision that seems as distant as that high-school class where we were required to read “1984”.

But for the Native people of the Americas, all of the hypotheticals are a real part of history, and for many, a horror that still lives today.

In Indian Country, the campaign that started as Manifest Destiny*, a new age for white settlement in the United States, was appropriately seen by Native people as ethnic cleansing. Manifest Destiny was nothing more than a policy of government-sponsored genocide, and would have been decried in our modern times, as it was in Europe during World War II, and later, when the Srebrenica massacre took place.

Eurocentric greed saw the Americas as untried ground, despite being firmly settled by unique and complex cultures for millennia. The Natives, these non-Christian savages—who believed in a Creator—were doomed by the accepted ideal that they were unworthy of keeping the land they’d populated as recently as twelve thousand years ago.

This is why I wrote Death By Bitter Waters, to present a paradigm from the opposite side of American history. The first two paragraphs of this article seem mind-boggling, and yet, seven generations of Indigenous people in the Americas have been carrying this theme of cultural trauma, taught that they were bad, simply for being Indian.

Death By Bitter Waters details the elements of genocide and helplessness, now replaced by cultural empowerment, and community need. As the character Arlene Guerrero argues in Endings and Beginnings: Red Power is not a “motto of turbulence” but instead, “a symbol of positive change.”

In Smoke, Kate Sumner learns to live with the loss of a child, thirty years after her son was abducted by an ex-husband, and spirited off to Mexico, literally swallowed whole by the landscape. She carries the loss of her child, along with the loss of her culture, having been an abductee herself, removed as an infant by well-meaning whites from her Native American mother.

Winnowing describes the three Knight siblings as adults, and how culture and love transcend differences, whether in color or sexual preference. As Aspen Knight reflects, she and her brother, Buckeye and sister, Manzanita, share the quirk of stubbornness. The resistance to capitulation served them well in odd moments.

And in Second Chance Snake, Freddie Snake, having survived a life-changing gunshot wound while on duty as a Lassen County Sheriff’s deputy, nearly drowns what’s left of life in alcohol. It’s not the physical pain of the injury, but the denial of the cultural pain he remembers.

The title itself, Death By Bitter Waters is a misnomer, not tied to death, but to life beside a great body of water—in this case, Honey Lake—its content too alkali to drink. It’s similar to that line from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” In this fictional version of the Honey Lake Valley, the Washoe Indian people call the lake, deyuliyi, for certain death by drinking the bitter waters of Honey Lake.

Death By Bitter Waters celebrates life and culture, after enduring seven generations of genocide. As Kevin Gover, the Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Indian Affairs said in a speech on September 8^th, 2000:

“And so today I stand before you as the leader of an institution that in the past has committed acts so terrible that they infect, diminish, and destroy the lives of Indian people decades later, generations later. These things occurred despite the efforts of many good people with good hearts who sought to prevent them. These wrongs must be acknowledged if the healing is to begin.

*Manifest Destiny: Coined by columnist John L. O’Sullivan in 1845 to promote the annexation of Oregon Territory and Texas by the United States government, Manifest Destiny evolved in the 19^th century into a vast collective doctrine or belief that the settlement and expansion of the United States was justified and inevitable. The term was used to further the concept of a God-given right assigned exclusively to white Christian males that knew how to better use the land, than did the aboriginal inhabitants, who were considered godless savages.

DEATH BY BITTER WATERS

Musa Publishing, June 22nd, 2012

Buy Link:  http://musapublishing.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2&products_id=312

Stop and Smell the Roses

I attended a funeral yesterday, for my dear stepfather, Richard Janes, who passed away on June 8^th. As a former Marine, he was present at the DMZ toward the end of the Korean War when prisoner exchanges were taking place. But what was most profound was his relationship with God as a Nazarene-Christian. It was this relationship that made him a humble man, and gave him the love and courage to care for my birth mother after a serious stroke that spelled the end to their intimate married life.

On the way home, I pondered on Dick’s life, his dedication to my mother, Betty, which carried him through nearly twelve years of daily visits to her bedside in a convalescent hospital. During this period, he lived in the Veterans Home in Yountville, California, and would drive twenty-two miles over the hills to Sonoma to see Betty daily. Soon, the care home moved Betty closer to Dick, to their Napa facility, where the trip encompassed a mere eight miles. And when Dick’s health failed, and he could no longer drive a motor vehicle, he would board public transportation to carry him to his beloved.

Recently, Dick became too ill to stay in the Veterans Home, and so he was hospitalized at Queen of the Valley Medical Center in Napa, close to Betty’s care home, no longer able to see her except for the two times she was trucked by wheelchair in the facility’s bus to sit at his bedside. For two people who survived a lot of personal tragedy, these two wonderful lovers were, as my sister characterized, “totally crazy about each other.” When Dick passed away, he took that light with him, and I know Betty keenly feels her loss.

On the return trip home, while passing through Oakland on highway 880, I happened to see two birds on the highway verge. One, a night heron, poised with its squat body at the edge of a clump of brush, and the other, a much taller and more elegant great egret, was stalking the grass at the rise of the slope. All this, while vehicles rolled past, slowed by a big-rig stall that clogged the already packed commuter traffic. There they hunted, totally oblivious to our world, focused on the creatures in the grass, or hiding in the shadows of the brush. It was a beautiful tribute to how the world moves on, barely aware of our human creations, and without a need for our technological marvels.

Later, still meditating, I saw a freeway onramp, its supports ringed by brown. At first I was puzzled, thinking that Caltrans had made a concrete repair to all of the huge supports of the structure; strange, too, because it was a new onramp. But as I observed in that flash of time, I noticed little birds, mud swallows that had built their colonies high above the ground, safe from sharp-shinned hawks and snakes. And once again, without a care for humanity, as they live their swift lives on curved wings, carrying insects back to the nests for their chicks. Beyond the freeway onramp in that one glimpse, was a marsh, and I began to imagine it filled with more life—red-winged blackbirds and avocets, fat coots and Canada geese, and soaring ravens, life moving forward, despite our best efforts at “running in place.”

I don’t use that term lightly. It’s an affliction of our modern world, a frantic kind of energy that makes us believe that we’re getting somewhere, when truthfully, we’re getting nowhere fast. We’ve lost the primal ability to stop and listen, to think of others, instead of focusing on ourselves. The silent disease is caused by a disconnect from nature that kills the heart slowly, and before you know it, life’s past in the blink of an eye.

We have to pause ourselves, to see the little birds, and the marsh, to listen to the wind, and smell the dirt.

I think Richard Janes did this masterfully. He appreciated the small things every day, from Yountville to Betty, and back again. He was kind and welcoming to me, and to my family, even though I hadn’t grown up as Betty’s daughter. And I wasn’t even a prodigal in the sense of one who has squandered a father’s riches, and returned destitute.

Still, my life was enriched by getting to know Dick and Betty. I now have two younger sisters I never knew. I have an elder brother, and I have extended family, that were never mine, but somehow, belong to me the way I belong to them.

Thanks, Dick, for loving Betty.

Richard Dale Janes—August 7^th, 1931 to June 8^th, 2012.