Art Imitating Life

Many of the new TV season’s dramas have incorporated A LOT of real life into their stories. We have so much more than just actors wearing masks and TV-news footage of protests and riots. I have to give kudos to the writers and the actors who represent not only some of what has been happening the majority of this past year, but have also effectively evoked the emotional impact it has had on all of us.

 

I know there are many more shows than the ones I am mentioning, but I was riveted by shows like Station 19 and Grey’s Anatomy, the Chicago trio (Fire, Med, and PD), SWAT, and All Rise. Each one of these dramas showed real life situations, frustrations, tragedies and emotions. None of these shows had mere news reports running in the background, they had characters LIVING through the same things that Americans, and folks all over the world, have experienced since the early part of 2020.

 

So is this entertainment? What happened to the beauty of escapism? … Don’t worry, there are still plenty of funny and entertaining shows for those of us who just want a break from life.

 

As a writer I, and many of our ilk, have been taught that stories and characters that the reader can relate to are the most engrossing. When a writer uses real life in her writing it is also a wonderful opportunity to make people think and maybe even possibly strive for solutions. That was what I tried to do when I wrote my book Hyphema about a Pakistani immigrant who just wanted a life with her family, an American husband and their infant son, and the racism they encountered. I also tried to reach out to the social perception of assault victims and the PTSDs they suffer in my book Bartlett’s Rule. In Courage of the Heart I presented a male sexual assault survivor and the social attitudes that belittled his experience.

 

My efforts to make people THINK are just (excuse the cliché) just a tip of the iceberg compared to some of the drama on our nightly television sets. The actors are doing remarkable jobs bringing us into their lives and the emotions they feel, the writers are providing challenging scenarios that truly can be the basis for discussion and hopefully attempts towards healing.

 

Yes, there are some of us who definitely need a break from the real life drama we’ve been living, and there is no harm in taking time for self-care, but when you are up to it, watch some of these dramas and hopefully get on board with rebuilding, healing and acceptance.

 

We’re a week away from Thanksgiving and many of us are feeling cheated once again as we keep distance from loved ones, or worse, realize those loved ones who are no longer with us. I hope and pray for comfort and calm for each of you. Please take necessary precautions against this dratted disease — yes, wear a mask and maintain social distancing, stay away from crowds.

 

I’m not being chicken when I ask you this and I know very well how hard it is to be separated from family because of COVID. This Thanksgiving holiday my husband and I are hoping to at least “see” our grown children through some audio/visual app, we won’t be seeing them in person because, simply put, they are first responders and they’ve been out there taking care of those who have fallen victim to COVID so they are quarantining themselves to protect us.

 

Sending healing thoughts for everyone’s health and a huge thank you to all of the first responders and essential workers who have given so much for the rest of us.

 

Touch of Love ~ ...a bit of therapy

If you’ve read any of the stories in my second short story collection you might have surmised how personal some of the stories are to me. In addition to the obvious I’m going to let you in on some of the backstories.

The first and most personal one is An Empty House. In December 2016 my wonderful husband had a stroke. I can use all of the clichés available (Threw me for a loop, knocked the wind out of me, came out of nowhere…) and it just does not express how our lives changed that night. As I said in the story we’ve had to adjust to a “New Normal” which really isn’t normal.

I am eternally grateful that the love of my life survived and has made terrific strides towards recovery, but there is still much more to go. In the meanwhile we had to find ways to get back to life, my husband is the one who suffered the stroke and yet we’ve all been affected. I had to force myself to resume my activities, responsibilities, and my professional life. I actually felt empty inside.

Long ago during an interview I was asked WHY I write, my answer was “I write because I breathe.” I had to learn to breathe again. I started compiling my second short story collection and it wound up being both personal and therapeutic for me. This collection is truly personal to me and there are other stories which were certainly drawn from my heart. I also started a very basic website http://lifevscare.blogspot.com which, although slow in development, I hope will offer some useful information to others who have stroke survivors in their life.

He is My Brother is about my brother(in-law) and our desperate quest to save his life and find him a donated kidney. We, our family, need him. If you don’t mind please visit the website we set up for him and share our story to all of your contacts, https://kidney4del.wordpress.com/

Although these next stories are pure fiction, they were certainly inspired by people and events in my life and hold very special meaning for me — these stories include: Rekindled, A Date with Mistletoe, and The Lost Love. Finally The Dead Guy in the Park and Always, One More Time were just fun stories to write.

If you take the time to read this collection, please handle it with care, it really was written with a personal Touch of Love.

Writing a Sequel ~ #MondayBlogs

As writer’s we often create characters and mold them according to the convenience of the story plot — it’s an exciting, godlike and powerful feeling to produce “someone” who comes to life through words and who the readers (ideally) care about. By the time we write The End our task is complete. We send our characters out into the world to live on their own, to inspire peoples’ imaginations, and to remain who they are throughout perpetuity.

Unless we decide to revive those characters in another book.

Why, why, why would we do that? They’ve done their time, did their job and now they deserve to rest. …but maybe not. Sometimes our characters stay with us just begging to move on.

Maybe we write a spin-off and our once favorite NAGGING characters appear in the storyline again. When I wrote His Lucky Charm I literally fell in love with a secondary character. Tom Hughes suffered tragic heartbreak in his past and he was just the kind of man to council his cousin and her heartthrob about the need to grab onto each other while you can, and his cousin and her heartthrob did get married. I wanted Tom to have his own HEA (Happy Ever After) ending and I wrote Within the Law. This was pretty easy. While I did create Tom’s character and an important chunk of his history, it wasn’t until I wrote Within the Law that I really concentrated on developing him fully. And while the lovers of His lucky Charm did make appearances all I had to do was put a bit of time into their storyline. Easy peasy.

Another spin-off I wrote stemmed from Final Sin where I created Jake and Julie, and Julie’s sidekick Matt. In the spin off book, Hyphema, I was able to really develop Matt’s character and introduce his wife who had only been mentioned in Final Sin. The focus was entirely on Matt and Sudah in the spin-off book.

Then I wrote Karma Visited about Annie who is able to astral travel in her sleep to people in need and when she needs help who will be there for her? She meets Dave and it’s a tense story. As an author I liked it and readers have told me that they liked it as well. I wanted more of Annie and Dave’s story so I wrote a sequel. A sequel is literally a continuation of a story line and often including the same main characters. A sequel is also in the future in respect to the first book so your characters have to show growth and still remain the same people we fell in love with. If they had an HEA in the first book though we also need to introduce new conflicts or the sequel will effectively be just one long epilogue. I admit it was very difficult, I kept starting and then scrapping everything I had written. It was frustrating.

I believed I had a terrific story in my head, one that presented some major conflicts and great action, but how was I going to tell it? Finally I decided to interview each of my characters, separately, and I asked some pointed questions. What had transpired since Karma Visited? Where had they hoped to be by this point in their lives? What were their biggest fears? And there were many more questions, some much too personal to tell everyone else. I got a clear picture of who Annie and Dave were in the year after Karma Visited ended. The sequel did get written and I am pleased to announce that Annie’s Karma will be available later this month.

Writers have a responsibility to create real people (aka characters) who have had lives before the first pages of our books and will live long after the words The End are typed.

...

Imagine That - #MondayBlogs

An older woman sits in a hospital bed more than half a century ago and watches as her late husband comes into her room in the dark of night. She is being treated for pneumonia, an often fatal illness in the 1940’s. “Have you come for me?” she asks. “No,” he says haltingly, “I’ve come for the little boy. Go back to sleep and be well, it is not your time. You will be needed,” Then he leaves. In the morning light her son comes to her, he is struggling not to cry. “Mama,” he says, “the baby died last night.” She puts her arms out to him and says, “I know son, I know.”

A young girl wakes in tears in the middle of the night. She’s just had a nightmare of a burning apartment and watched while a teenage babysitter passed two young children through the safety bars and dropped them to passerby on the street below. The baby sitter cannot fit through the bars and perishes in the blaze. Still crying the young girl is comforted by her parents as she relates her dream; she eventually falls back to sleep. Her mother has the morning news report on the television when the girl finally rises and the reporter is lauding the bravery of a teenage girl who saved the children she was watching but unable to save herself during an early morning fire. Wide-eyed the girl watches the screen as her nightmare comes back to her.

A family gathers for a young man’s coming of age ceremony. His grandmother, who died two short months earlier, was very excited and bought her gown for the event; she kept it secret from all but one of her daughters, the boy’s mother. A guest looks up from the entrée she has just been served to see the grandmother resplendent in her gown – the vision so real she is compelled to tell the daughter. The daughter pales and then smiles as the gown is described; it’s exactly the one her mother planned to wear. She shares the news with her recently widowed father and other family and they rejoice in knowing that the woman is present after all.

Impossible scenarios? Not to the individuals who experienced these. Many of us are raised with biblical stories of angels and premonitions and we allow ourselves to imagine a future filled with mental telepathy, time travel and many more fantastic things. Yet many deny the possibilities that such otherworldly and extrasensory incidents can happen, especially when they experience such events. Keeping our minds open to all possibilities can frighten some and for others they find a comfort in the visit of a past loved one or the mental communication that transcends miles. Children who haven’t been schooled in the impossible and implausible have wonderful imaginations that permit them to see imaginary friends and pretend magnificent abilities and accomplishments. As we get older and experience the derision and skepticism of those around us, we learn to deny such occurrences if only for self-preservation.

For the fiction writer, though, all things are possible. We create worlds where the strange happens, where the seemingly impossible occurs with regularity and is easily explained and accepted. A writer can build a world on paper, create made-up characters, plot unseemly and unexpected events, create heroes we adore and villains we hate and fear… and it is all in a day’s work. We write about life as we imagine, or know, it to be.

Karma Visited  by Chelle Cordero

*one of the dreams Annie has in the story, Karma Visited, is about a burning apartment and a heroic baby-sitter. This "dream" is taken from real-life. It is a dream I had as a young girl - including the news report the following morning.

About the author:

Chelle Cordero writes stories of Passion and Suspense. Vanilla Heart Publishing has published ten Cordero novels and a short-story collection: Bartlett’s Rule; His Lucky Charm; Within the Law; Courage of the Heart; Final Sin; Hostage Heart; A Chaunce of Riches; Common Bond, Tangled Hearts; Hyphema; and Karma Visited. VHP just published The Many Faces of Chelle Cordero featuring several short stories. Chelle has been writing both fiction and non-fiction for the bulk of her adult life and has been with Vanilla Heart Publishing since early +2008.

Real Life or Fiction?

My fiction writing is really a mix, always inspired by something “real” but wound through a vivid imagination to create, what I hope is, an interesting story.

As a child in grade school I used to relate stories about my family, the family history I knew of, daily events and more. Of course I delivered these stories with a flourish sometimes garnishing them with elaborate details, but ALMOST always telling my perceived truth. While most of my teachers and my parents encouraged me by listening, nodding, and asking me to tell more, I did have some classmates and skeptical teachers who accused me of “telling tales” and dismissing me as a “fibber”.

In reality almost every story I told was based on truth even though it was colored by my young perspective. There WAS the time three strange men were tapping phone lines in the building next door to where I lived, and two friends and I snuck down there to observe. At a time when spy shows were the big fad on television, our imaginations immediately went to international espionage. (Now as a adult I can imagine it was probably something as simple as a marital dispute, but it was still very exciting.) Of course my classmates didn’t believe that my friends and I stumbled upon something so extraordinary and they weren’t very kind in letting me know how they felt. That never really stopped me, I loved to tell stories.

My parents were great role models and encouraged both my sister and me to be heavily involved in our communities and to volunteer where we could to help others. Being involved and volunteering has led to many real-life adventures and experiences that are often out of the ordinary for most people. I volunteered with the NYC Auxiliary Police in the early 70’s, and currently I’ve been a volunteer EMT with my local ambulance corps since 1986, so I’ve responded to a lot of emergency situations, dealt with a lot of people during a crisis.

My stories often contain MANY bits and pieces from real-life experiences. Both of my “EMS novels”, Final Sin and Hyphema revolve around the EMS and emergency services world. I find the background of emergency services to be very exciting and I feel that putting characters into that setting just creates action. I hope that my readers enjoy it as much as I do.