A Little Bit of Luck by Hannah Rowan #RomanceGems

 “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from,” according to novelist Cormac McCarthy.  While the Dalai Lama says that “sometimes not getting what we want is a wonderful stroke of luck.”

I’m not sure I agree with either of them.

I can’t say I wanted anything except to get home for dinner after a day of college classes when a tractor trailer popped into the driver’s side door of my VW Beetle, picked me up, and carried me down the interstate highway. It was one of those moments when time slowed to a crawl. Hmm…there’s a truck in my window.  I climbed over the gear shift and into the passenger seat, inexplicably still holding the steering wheel as though I thought it would help the situation. Eventually my car bounced off the truck’s grill, spun across a few lanes, and landed in the median facing the opposite direction.

I was surely lucky that day, although I was really annoyed that I’d just spent several hundred dollars putting a new motor in the car and now it was totaled. I didn’t have any injury except mild hysteria. And the insurance money financed my first trip to Disney.

Sometimes I wonder how I made it to the age where I was old enough to drive a car.

As a curious child, I inserted a metal wire into an electrical outlet just to see what would happen. What happened? A jolt that felt like the pins and needles you get when a limb goes to sleep magnified a few thousand times as I was catapulted across the room. But no permanent damage that I’m aware of. I guess I was lucky.

Undeterred, I was playing by an empty warehouse that had a slanted driveway leading to the underground garage door. The driveway was filled with water, and I’m still not sure what happened except that when I touched a pipe, I felt that now-familiar jolt of electrical energy. Lucky again.

There were so many things I did growing up that, looking back, I marvel that I survived. Racing my brother across a railroad bridge to get to the other side before the train came. Riding a dinky little rubber raft down a river into a reservoir with no lifeguard, not to mention lots of rocks and dangerous currents. Bringing home what I thought was a sweet little lost dog who turned out to have rabies or distemper or whatever it is that causes a dog to foam at the mouth and try to bite a person’s arm off.

I could go on, but the pertinent fact is that I survived all of it, which I probably shouldn’t say because it might be unlucky.

Maybe Mr. McCarthy and the Dalai Lama have a point after all.

Turn on the Heat by Hannah Rowan #romancegems

 Winter wonderland?  Really, fellow Gems?

I can’t help but think of Green Eggs and Ham. “I do not like it…”

I know there are people who love the cold weather. I don’t understand them one little bit.

Do they not have to go out in the morning and scape a few inches of ice from their windshields, then slide sideways along slippery highways to get to work?

Do they not then come out of work only to find it already dark at 4:30 in the afternoon?

There was a time when I was probably insane. As a child I would bundle up in my hat and gloves and boots and trudge through the snow to ride a sled down a steep hill that ended at a river. My brother and I would make a trail through the woods so we’d have a clear path on the way down, but inevitably my sled would veer off course and I’d crash head-first into a tree. Brain damage would indeed explain why I thought this activity was fun, with snow melting down the back of my coat and my mittens and sleeves all wet and freezing and snow sliding into my boots.

My town would flood a parking lot bordered by railroad ties so kids could ice skate there. I tottered along on my skates—no graceful gliding for me—with visions of hot chocolate dancing through my frozen head.

And I thought I was having fun?  As I look back, I’m horrified.

Later I would take my children skiing. Or more accurately, I would drive them to the slopes and huddle in the ski lodge by the fireplace reading or writing a book until they came to tell me they were done.

In the summer I can toss on a pair of sandals and walk out the door. In the winter I have to don my armor, with hats and gloves scarf and boots, a down coat that almost keeps me warm bolstered by a few layers of sweaters beneath.

At bedtime I snuggle under a blanket, a bedspread, a down quilt, a fluffy Ugg blanket folded in half to provide two layers, and a fleecy robe, and I’m almost warm.

And this year I can’t even break up the cold by spending a week or so in a nice warm place, reminding me that winter can’t last forever.

So I tell myself it builds character, that I’m tough enough to endure it, and that this too shall pass.

But I do not like it, not one little bit!

 

AN ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE, JERSEY STYLE by Hannah Rowan #RomanceGems

Here comes Thanksgiving, somehow, already. The end of November. Almost the end of the year. On Thanksgiving we're supposed to count our blessings and be grateful and all that.

Counting blessings is always difficult for me because I always seem to come up with a "but."

Yesterday as I climbed a mountain little hill near my house, gasping for air and "glowing" profusely (someone once told me ladies don't sweat) I marveled at how fortunate I am to live in Jersey where, contrary to the popular perception of outsiders, we have miles and miles of woods available for hiking, very pretty scenery, and lots of lakes, rivers, and beaches available for swimming.

But really, someone needs to do something about the leaves. Someone needs to get out there with a rake or a leaf blower to clear away the layer of leaves littering the paths, hiding the rocks and the tree roots and the holes that make hiking a slippery slope for a person who doesn't have spikes on the bottom of her shoes.

Alternately, by the time I crested the second hill I considered the feasibility of installing escalators in the woods. We'd still have the benefit of being out in nature, right? I pondered the possibility of just sitting on a rock to wait for some nice forest ranger to come along with a stretcher. Or maybe I could just flag down a helicopter. There are no Ubers in the woods.

We have wonderful views in New Jersey. In so many places we can climb to the top of a mountain and be rewarded with the sight of the New York City skyline. This is a feature often mentioned in hiking guides.

But you know, you can ride down Route 3 and gaze at the New York City skyline from the comfort of your own car or your seat on a bus without having to go home to ice your knees.

In the other direction you can enjoy vast vistas that allow you to see bordering states.

But the only sight you'll see are treetops with nary a boundary line in sight.

With my usual swimming pools closed for most of the year, I was thankful to be able to join a local lake, and I was so happy to be able to swim! I'm also lucky to be within an hour's ride down the shore.

But those little fish nipping at my ankles! That never happens in the pool. I also never worry about sharks in the pool.

People who foolishly move away bemoan the lack of good bagels, Italian bread, pizza and Taylor Ham/pork roll elsewhere. I've heard ugly rumors about the scarcity of goodies like Devil Dogs and HoHo's and the like in other parts of the country. In Jersey I can get the best of all of those things.

But they do have a certain unpleasant effect on my waistline.

Of course I'm grateful for a happy and healthy husband, and children, and grandchildren, and all the other members of my tribe: friends, family, co-workers, and fellow writers.

And most grateful of all, that Thanksgiving means it's almost the end of the year, and there's never been a year I'd be so happy to see end.  No buts about that!\\

HOW DID I GET HERE? by Hannah Rowan #RomanceGems

After reading Nancy Fraser’s blog the other day about how she became a writer, I began to think about my own writing journey.  As in, how the heck did I get involved in this mess?

The first story I remember writing was in elementary school, where I not only wrote but illustrated a tale of four sisters.  Each had a different color hair: blonde, brunette, redhead, and black.  And their names were in alphabetical order, beginning with A.  I don’t remember their names and I certainly don’t remember the story, but I do remember a very large notebook where I drew their pictures.

In eighth grade I won $3 for a poem that was a blatant rip-off of Bambi.   I have no clue where that poem went and I only remember the end.  “Deer without a mother, standing in the snow.”  Very emotional!

In college, I had an English professor who tried to persuade me to write for the school newspaper.  But I never actually considered writing as a career.  No, I wanted to be a psychologist, and diligently pursued a degree in that field.  Of course, a degree in psychology involves a lot of writing, but that was only a means to an end.

I achieved the end—the master’s degree—at the same time I gave birth to a daughter and decided I had to find some sort of work where I didn’t have to leave her.  So I went to a career counselor, who mentioned that the only thing I sounded excited about was a research project I was writing up.

So I started writing a novel.  And I wrote confession stories that I cringe to think about now.  I bought dozens of “how to write” books and began to collect my share of rejections.

By sheer coincidence, my husband had a customer who was the editor of the local weekly paper, and he mentioned my writing endeavors, and she mentioned that she was looking for someone to cover the local school board, so she had me go to a meeting and write up a trial story, and I passed the audition.  As various people left I gradually took over coverage of other meetings and events, until I was covering all the news in my hometown, as well as a “good news” type gossip column, and eventually a humor column.

I had many adventures as a reporter, even a brief stint doing radio news on the local station and acting as a stringer for a bigger state-wide newspaper.  But then I had another baby and packed a Harlequin Romance in my hospital bag.  It came free with a bottle of Ivory dish soap, and I figured it would be mindless enough to keep me entertained when I was in a brain fog from giving birth.

But oh, my goodness!  There were words in that book that I actually had to look up in the dictionary!  I remember coming across someone having a “postprandial” drink.  What the heck was that all about?  (An after-dinner drink, by the way.)  And I could no longer look down my nose at these stories. In addition to expanding my vocabulary, the stories really held my interest.   In fact, I decided I wanted to write them.

Which I did on the side, using my experiences as a reporter as the basis for various stories.  And after enough rejection slips to paper a small powder room, I finally sold my first book.  (Which I’m trying to figure out how to self-publish as the first in a series, now that I’ve got the rights back.  Soon, very soon!)

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