Quick Jots for 5.6.2015

Just a few quick things:

--When a Star Wars geek fan said, "May the fourth be with you," I was automatically urged to respond, "And also with you.  Let's lift up our hearts.  It is right to give thanks and praise..."

--Seriously.  Like, I feel I've been unwittingly programmed.  And I'm as self-aware as anyone I know.  In fact, a lot more.  This is a very uncool, borderline terrifying, feeling for me.

--And I've never heard of "May the fourth be with you," before.  And I've been around my share of that kind of dork geek enthusiastic fan.

--I'm only four chapters or so from finishing my novel manuscript, for those of you who've been keeping track.

--It feels like minor-league summer around here.  To the extent that I feel like I will run over innocent women and children in my hurried attempt to get out of my workplace and go home.  And I usually stick around there a while longer to finish things up and to get things done.

--Despite that, I have two rose plants that I tried to save, but couldn't.  Their stems were snapped by the incredible weight of all the snow that had settled (and been shoveled) upon them.  I taped them, and propped them up, and watered them, and...yeah, well, my landscaper told me I should cut it at the place it snapped, and hope for the best.  Everything above that snap had died.

--This same guy told me the name of a bush I did successfully save last week.  It's the full, thick, green thing that the small purple snappy things come out of.  Begins with H, I think.  [Please leave the name in a comment below if you know it.  People have tired of me calling it "the purple poppy plant, with the little snappies."

--But, anyway, I saved that thing by getting a lot of leaves, detritus, and who-knows-what-else out of it.  The green is now fuller and more lush than it's ever been, and the poppy things are coming out.  Last year those purple snappy things didn't come out until June, and they stayed out for a couple of weeks.  Drove me crazy.  Meanwhile those purple snappy things had sprouted in everyone else's yard for miles around me.

--I just so happened to be watching a little black ant (not big carpenter sized) stroll into a tiny opening between the gutter of my deck extension, and the house.  So I sprayed half an entire container of ant killer in there, with the plunger you pull back and the gun nozzle you can point right in there.  Only twenty or so ants came out, staggering and dying.  (Made me feel bad, but those things aren't staying in a colony there.)  And the whole situation gave me PTSD flashbacks from the time thousands and thousands of ants came down upon me and my real estate agent in a former house.  Long story.

--And I know that there's a lot more than just those 20 up in there.  They just learned to stay further away from the stream of poison coming in.  I'll spray a lot more up there (which I already have, and no more of them have come out) and then seal that hole up.  Hopefully anything left alive in there don't eat their way in.

--I looked into bombing it out, but the hole is way too small, and apparently you only do that in an enclosed room, not in the outside air beneath a TimberTek deck and a gutter.  I also looked into the poison ant food that you place down and they bring it back to the colony, thereby killing the queen and everyone else.  But there's no place to place such a thing.  The deck and gutter are too far away, and the ants don't actually go onto those things, anyway.  They stroll beneath the gutter and into the hole.  They could've been doing so for who-knows-how-many years.  But I checked the deck, the gutter, the closet and washroom, and the office upstairs, and there's no evidence of penetration, sawdust, or anything else.

Any suggestions of what else I can do with that situation, please comment and advise. Thanks!

The Misadventures of Millie Moskowitz

 Photo: Cover of the book, from imagesbn.com (bn.com; Barnes and Noble)

My friend Sheryl Sorrentino has crafted a sort of unique novel in a style that she calls "real fiction."  In an Afterword, she describes "real fiction" as "...provocative, culturally-inclusive stories that explore women's inner struggles in a socially-significant context."

Sheryl's "real fiction" novel, Later With Myself: The Misadventures of Millie Moskowitz, is about a middle-aged woman who is rocked by the death of her father.  His death leads to various skeletons escaping from her family's closets.  Millie must make sense of it all to find some peace not only with her present, but also with her troubled past.

It starts off with a twelve-year old Millie trying to find some sense of belonging.  She's a product of a troubled family, of adults with their own powerful issues, and she feels neglected and without any role models to teach her what she should, and should not, do for attention. Without this knowledge, and without a solid role model to tell her differently, Millie unfortunately gets the wrong sort of attention from men without morals, and she becomes pregnant.

The book then flashes forward to Millie's present: she's married to an African-American (she's white) and is the mother of two daughters.  She's a successful attorney, and she hasn't heard from her father, or from her brothers, in many years.

And then she gets the phone call.

Later With Myself: The Misadventures of Millie Moskowitz is indeed a novel that, in a sort of fictional memoir sort of way, tackles these issues--and many others--head-on.  In her Afterword, the author mentions that much of the book is at least semi-autobiographical, while much of it is straight-up autobiography.  A lot of it is, of course, completely made-up as well, but the reader can see the dots of the author's life being connected, and as such it is an extra benefit to see how the author constructed her book to put those pieces together.

I wished the author had focused a little more on the young Millie, because she's a kid you really root for, and for whom you wish better things.  Like Em, the main character of one of my favorite YA novels, Norma Fox Mazer's When She Was Good, the young Millie has an existence that wouldn't be wished upon anyone, and which is caused, predominantly, by forces outside of her control that make her a lost soul in a tough world.  Lost kids will do lost things, as they both do.  Em--the narrator of Mazer's book--fares a bit better than does Millie, at first, but it was a joy to see Em learn things on her own, and become the more put-together person the reader knows she's going to be.  I would've liked to've seen a bit more of that in Sorrentino's book, but that's not the gist or purpose of the work, as I've said.

But the first few pages are so good, so detailed and so strong, that clearly Sorrentino has a future in the YA genre if she ever wanted to tell a story that limited itself to that time-frame of a young girl's life.

So if you like socially-relevant issues explored in a middle-aged woman's (and a young girl's) life, with a bit of soul-searching, peace-finding, the mafia, a father's long-standing mistress, and disgruntled family members all thrown in, please check out Sheryl Sorrentino's book.  You can read more reviews about it (at least 30, averaging over 4+ stars!) at this Goodreads page.  You can get a copy at this Amazon page, in various formats: Kindle ($2.99) and in used (starting at $2.94) or new (starting at $11.22) copies.