Coming Soon!                                                                                                     

Pat has written a book!

Briefly, here’s what it’s about:

A young woman, after graduating from a nearby university with her master's in English Lit, moves back home to her little South Carolina mill town, gets engaged to her high school sweetheart and goes to work in the local museum. And then she gets dumped by her fiancée. And then her father dies of a heart attack. It’s a lot, right?

The book opens at her father’s funeral, and the reader gets the hint that in addition to these two awful-enough experiences, she has endured as-yet-revealed family tragedy as a child. Consequently, she wants to move away to avoid being the town’s “poor thing” any longer.

She moves to Asheville to start over. It gets lighter then; she finds a cool place to live, and she makes friends - a woman with a cop stalker and a gay barista. Both of them are co-workers she meets when she gets a job in a café-bookstore. She has romance, she runs into some danger, and she contracts with a true crime writer who wants her to read his first effort at crime fiction. He emails her some pages and she begins to get the eerie feeling that he knows what happened to her family when she was a child. There are diverse characters in the work, including a motorcycle riding, Cherokee roommate and a cat named Stuart.

Ø  Does anyone want more? Tell me what you would like to see included in my book.

Ø  One of my readers has a favorite scene:

She was invited by the kind man to say her last goodbyes, but she declined saying she wanted to remember her father striding out to his truck with an ever-present toothpick in his the side of his mouth. She surprised herself with the sentiment, and as soon as she said it, she knew it was true. Only then would she permit herself to cry real tears, which gave the funeral director permission to do what he did best – comfort her.

I will keep you informed, and I definitely appreciate support and feedback: patjab40@gmail.com

After a short break...

Okay, so it's been a couple of years since I've visited my blog; clearly I'm bad at this. I need to think of it as a journal and share my pondering more often, but I suppose natural modesty creeps in and forces me to think, "Who the heck cares what you have to say?" Well, that's hardly an attitude for a budding author to have, right? 

So, in the last couple of years, I took my writing a little more seriously and finished up the one I have been living with for many, many years, Background Music. It was a tribute to several people: my college roommate, Marsha Rae, who died of stomach cancer just before her sixtieth birthday, my tireless mama, Sis, who surrendered to breast cancer, way, way too young, Patrick my BFF (male-type), and then the final kick in the pants, Judith Lee Ann (Lee to me), whose irreverent voice I hear every day. We always thought we would have more time. Background Music is about the strength of female friendships. Next, because I wasn't sure anyone would want to read that one, I just got busy and wrote a suspenseful story - Carved In Stone - about a young woman with a lifetime of tragedy who got tired of being "you poor thing," and moved away from her small town to start a new life in Asheville. Her adventures as a barista, a manuscript reader, and a solver of family secrets were fun to reveal - to me as well as to readers. I wrote another one, Separate Ways about a couple of hard-driven professionals experiencing empty nest and career choice dissatisfaction at a critical point in their marriage. It's being edited as I speak, and I look forward to adding it to the Kindle and Create Space library. I'm not thinking I'll have a third career as a well-read author; I'm just having fun doing what I love. If anyone enjoys what I've created, so much the better. 

If anyone reads this, please, please, please start a conversation with me. Ask a question, make a comment, share your opinion, anything!

A Thought!


So, I'm so bad at this that I wrote a lengthy new post trying to bring anyone up to date who happens to stumble upon this blog by accident. I'm only half kidding. It was chatty and filled with wry wisdom and observations made on the fly (whatever that means) and somehow I lost it! And along with losing that post, I lost my energy to post anything then or for the next few days. But here's the thing: my friends tell me I have to promote myself. If I want anyone to read my books - two now and the third before Christmas, I'm hoping, I have to let people "out there" know I'm here and that I've written a couple of stories that might, just might, speak to some "contemporary woman" or maybe even a man. I'm having a crisis of confidence right now and honestly don't think I have any skill at all for this, but I'm forced to carry on because I want to tell stories! It's not for nothing that I've lived all these years loving to watch and absorb and then to think about what I've seen and heard and want to make sense of it. I've read so many good books! I've read some that I just couldn't finish because they were not engaging - at least for me - and I don't think either of mine fall into that category, but I can't be sure.

So, here's the thing: if you are a new writer and are willing to give me some feedback, I'd love to hear from you. And if you want me to read what you've written, I'll be happy to do so. I think manuscript swapping is the way to go, as long as the writer's ego isn't dangerously frail. If so, maybe that's not the way to go.