Country Remedy: Diarrhea Relief

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(From Vinnie Ann “AJ” Jackson)

Fifty years ago, my brother-in-law (whose family comes from the hills of Alabama) taught me to make “burnt flour” to stop my baby daughter’s diarrhea. After mixing up the remedy, he heated the end of an ice pick to burn a bigger hole in a bottle’s rubber nipple so the concoction could flow through. I’ve used his recipe time and again over the years, and it’s never failed to work, no matter the age of the one needing relief.

Charlie’s Diarrhea Remedy

2 tablespoons flour

1/2 cup water

Cook the flour by itself in a hot skillet (we use cast-iron) until dark brown, but not black. Add the “burnt flour” to the water, stir until dissolved, and drink it down.

This remedy gets rid of diarrhea faster than a store-bought solution or a doctor’s prescription. Cheaper, too. And no one’s ever needed a second dose.

Let’s hope you never have to use this remedy, but if you do, let us know how it works.

Breaking the Writing Rules

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Everyone uses clichés to some extent when they speak. They stick in our brains and it’s easier to let them out rather than try to think up some other descriptive phrase. If you listen to AJ Jackson tell a story, it won’t be long before you notice her use of clichés – phrases like, “yelled to high heaven,” “turn them out like clockwork,” and “drive like a bat out of hell.”

In normal conversation, clichés are fine, and in writing dialogue it’s also acceptable if that’s how a particular character speaks. But in narrative, using a cliché to describe something is considered lazy writing. Coming up with an alternative to a cliché can take some thought, but doing so makes a piece of writing unique and more fulfilling to the reader. 

For This New Mountain, I broke the rules a bit in regards to clichés. But if I didn’t include these kinds of common phrases as part of the narrative voice, the memoir just wouldn’t have been true to AJ. It wouldn’t have sounded at all like she was the one telling her stories. In this case, the way she talks and her internal dialogue are unique to her, clichés and all.

Another choice I made in breaking writing rules had to do with sentence structure. We’re taught in school that run-on sentences and sentence fragments are bad, bad, very bad. Again, in dialogue it’s normal. I did away with the run-ons, but I included sentence fragments in the book to make it consistent with AJ’s way of speaking. Sentence fragments also work great when trying to make a point, build tension, or move through an action scene. In the following excerpt from the chapter “Gone in Six Seconds,” one of AJ’s helpers has just talked AJ into letting her “steal” a repo, and AJ is watching and waiting from her car parked outside the owner’s house:

Cherise nodded her head, closed her eyes for just a second, took a deep breath, and jumped out of the car. I started counting.

One thousand one. Cherise was at the end of the driveway. One thousand two. She was at the driver’s door. One thousand three. She put the key in the lock. One thousand four. She was in the pickup. One thousand five. Still in the truck. One thousand six. No engine turned over. Faster, Cherise! I glanced at the light in the window. Nothing seemed to be moving inside the house. One thousand seven. The engine was still silent. One thousand eight. Now I knew something was wrong for sure.

From an early age, we’re taught that breaking the rules is wrong and can lead to some unwelcome consequences – traffic laws are in place for good reasons. If the rules are broken too often in a piece of writing, it can be distracting to the reader, but when it’s done with intent, it adds flavor to the writing.

Do clichés drive you batty? Is there something you’re willing to overlook in a story because the rest of it is so engaging?

Live More, Fear Less: Living with a Purpose

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I’m the kind of person who roots for the underdog. I like movies where the little guy comes out on top and books where the hero wins in the end.

The thing about underdogs and heroes is they DO something. They’re working towards a goal, often while trying to overcome a personal shortcoming along the way. Even if they give up at some point, they always end up getting back on track. Heroes and underdogs don’t always get what they start out wanting. They might have to shift focus to see what’s really important. And usually what’s really important is something or someone outside of their me-world or I-want way of living.

Another thing that heroes and underdogs have in common is facing their fears. And deciding at a particular moment that something is more important than fear. You can bet firefighters are afraid just about every time the alarm sends them out on a call. They have a purpose in life that is beyond themselves, and so they push through.

Not everyone knows what their purpose is. Some people know early on what they want to do with their life, but some of us are still searching. For me, my faith tells me I’m here in this world at this particular time in history for a reason. God has a plan for me and he knows what it is even if I don’t (yet).

When I start letting my “not knowing” get the best of me, I search out an underdog or hero story. Nick Vujicic is one such person who fits into both categories. Born without arms or legs in 1982, he tried to drown himself at 8-years-old and then fought depression for many years afterward because he didn’t know why God made him the way he is. Then Nick found purpose in his faith. For a truly inspiring story, I hope you’llcheck this out.

Who inspires you to live more and fear less?

Breaking News

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This New Mountain is now available to order on Amazon!

This New Mountain final cover

Final cover: This New Mountain

The folks at Casa de Snapdragon Publishing told us things would move quickly at a certain point – and they certainly have. After months of going through the too-slow (but necessary) process of proofing and tweaking the manuscript and front/back covers, the final-final-final proof was approved last night…and today AJ Jackson’s memoir is ready to order. Amazing.

Availability at Barnes & Noble will follow in the next few weeks, with e-book formats coming out sometime later this summer.

Thank you-all for your patience. We’ll keep you updated as book signings and other special promotions are scheduled.

Country Recipe: Grandmama’s Bread

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(From Vinnie Ann “AJ” Jackson)

I learned to make this bread from my mom and she learned it from her mom. When my Grandaddy and Grandmama Edwards came to New Mexico from Choctaw Nation, Tennessee in a covered wagon, this is the bread Grandmama made. It didn’t take milk or eggs, things most people didn’t have on a trip back then. Life was very simple and they made do with what they had. I still make this bread today and so do my children.

Grandaddy and Grandmama Edwards

Grandmama Edward’s Bread

2 cups lukewarm water

1 package yeast

2 tablespoons sugar

1 tablespoon salt

2 tablespoons oil (Grandmama & Mama used bacon grease)

6 cups flour (or enough to make a stiff dough)

Stir the yeast into the lukewarm water. Add sugar, salt and oil. Add flour to mixture one cup at a time until the dough no longer sticks to your hands. The amount of flour needed depends on the weather. If it’s raining, it takes more flour. Knead until smooth. Place in a greased bowl, cover with a dish towel, and put in a warm spot to rise. Let rise until double in size. Punch down and shape into rolls or a loaf, let rise again. Makes 2 regular size loaves or one large. Bake at 350̊ in a greased pan until golden brown, about 1/2 hour.

For a change:

Make the dough and roll it out, spread sweet/hot mustard on it, add ham and cheese, then roll it up jellyroll style and bake on a cookie sheet. You can also put minced onion and/or garlic on the bread before baking it. I have even done it with pizza sauce and pepperoni and cheese. It’s like a ready-made sandwich.

Give Grandmama Edward’s bread recipe a try, and let us know what you think.

Beginnings: The Goal of the Memoir

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When I first met AJ Jackson, her reason for wanting a book written about her life was to leave a record behind of the things she’d done in the business of private investigating, repossessing, and process serving.

“I’m not getting any younger,” she said. “If I wait too long, it won’t get done. And I want my children and grandchildren to know what I’ve gone through.”

After I finished the drafts of a few chapters of her adventures (that later became This New Mountain), we both thought the memoir might appeal to others outside her family. It seems these chapters captured the same excitement I felt when I first listened to AJ tell her own stories.

So I shifted gears. The audience for the memoir would be much wider. The book’s appeal would even reach beyond her circle of friends and business associates to include those who read crime novels and have an interest in the profession of private investigation. Someone who wants to know how the mind of a private eye works (and the tricks they use) will want to read the book.  Baby boomers will also enjoy the memoir, as will anyone who likes to read about ordinary people working in unconventional jobs. If you want to know the ins and outs of how a real repo-man (or woman) works – don’t watch the TV show – get AJ Jackson’s memoir. And if you’re looking for encouragement to step out of your comfort zone, this is a good book to read.

When we broadened our audience, AJ also added to her goal for This New Mountain. She wanted to encourage others to face their fears – if she could do all the things she did (while being scared to death), she wanted others to know they could do the same.

In one interview AJ told me, “What I’d like to get across to the reader is to never give up. Whatever you’d like to try in life, just give it a shot. Because you’ll never know if you don’t try.” Like I’ve said before, she thinks everyone just needs a little bit of courage.

Ultimately, the goal of any book is to tell a story the best it can be told. Through these twelve years of writing, revising and reworking, questioning and listening, I’ve done all I can to accomplish that one major goal and stay true to AJ’s own intentions.

If you were to write a memoir, what would your goals be?

Live More, Fear Less: Survival Instinct

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Let’s be kind to ourselves. 

Many of our fears are connected to the possibility of being hurt or losing our lives. The physical changes that happen to us when we’re afraid – dilation of pupils, an increase in heart rate and blood pressure, a rise in blood sugar, tensing of muscles – are meant to help us survive, to get us ready to fight or flee.

Some kinds of fear are a result of conditioning – circumstances in our past that create fear in us. Being bit by a dog can develop into a fear of dogs, even cute, little docile breeds. Being trapped in a closet could lead to claustrophobia. Falling into deep water and not being able to swim might even make a person fearful when looking at a photo of the ocean.

Fear might also be rooted in our natural survival instinct. It’s possible that people who are afraid of snakes, spiders, rats, etc have a stronger survival instinct than others who don’t share this same fear. Ages ago, when the bite of these creeping creatures killed humans on a much more regular basis than they do today, running away meant staying alive. Those that survived might have passed on this specific tendency in their genes.

Even those social fears that many of us have might also be related to our survival instinct. Take the fear of public speaking – what if you make mistakes/sound stupid/freeze up/vomit all over everyone? This fear could stem from being laughed at one too many times. Or maybe it comes from somewhere deep in our genetic makeup – an instinct to avoid the one-versus-many scenario (as in lynch mob).

Fear is a natural response to real or perceived threats to our physical or emotional beings, whether we’re conscious of them or not. Our fears are real, no matter their roots. And everyone is afraid of something.

So be kind to yourself. The next time you’re tempted to beat yourself up over a “silly” fear, try to remember that your response to those things you’re afraid of may very well have kept you (and your ancestors) alive.

Has your response in a fearful situation ever saved your life?

Beginnings: The Voice of a Memoir

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When authors start out on their writing journey, they’re often told to find their Voice – that thing that makes their writing unique among thousands of other voices in print. “Finding” isn’t really the right word, though, as if they had it once and then lost it somehow.

Developing an authorial voice is more what a writer does. It’s a long process, and it takes reading the masters in many genres. It takes sitting down and writing for years, getting comfortable with the true sound of words and cadence, experimenting with complexity of language, playing with the rules. When she “finds” this voice – this style – it flows naturally in a story and is found throughout an author’s body of work.  

Narrative voice is something else found in fiction – the voice of the point of view character or narrator that carries the reader through the story. The voice of the author and narrator are tied together. (For a more detailed discussion of authorial and narrative voice, go to this article by Ruth Nestvold and Jay Lake). 

To make This New Mountain as genuine as possible for the reader, I put aside my own developed voice and my own style in favor of writing the memoir in AJ Jackson’s voice. Doing so wasn’t as difficult as I first thought it would be. I listened to hours of AJ’s recorded stories (often more than once), had lengthy phone calls with her several times a month, and met with her on a regular basis. While stringing words into sentences and sentences into chapters, I heard AJ clearly speaking to me in my head. My goal as I wrote was for the reader to also hear her – as if she was sitting across the table, sharing a pot of coffee while telling her adventures in her own straightforward, unpolished style.

I hope friends and family will recognize the person they love in the pages of This New Mountain. And I hope readers who are new to Vinnie Ann “AJ” Jackson will quickly learn to love this country-wise woman with her unique voice.

You will find a bit of me in there, too – my own voice woven into the fabric of description throughout the book. I couldn’t help seeping in. After all these years, AJ is a part of me the way the lives of all true friends become entwined.

Of the authors you enjoy reading, and keep going back to, is it their style of writing, their storylines, or their characters you like the most?

Live More, Fear Less: Perspective

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There are so many things to worry about in this life: the state of the world with its pollution, wars, natural disasters, famine. There’s human trafficking, drug cartels, economic collapse. Some mothers watch their children waste away through starvation. Some fathers are beaten and killed for their faith or beliefs. Closer to home are the very real problems of putting food on the table, juggling bills, trying to keep a job, and deciding between paying the rent or going to the doctor. And then there are more personal worries like living alone or being lonely, growing old, and being forgotten.

It’s easy to worry, and it’s something I’m very good at when I practice. When I feel myself slipping into that place where I need to print business cards that read “Cate Macabe, Professional Worrier,” I stop and try to put things in perspective.

If I’m living in a car or a bombed-out building, do I worry about how fat I look in my jeans? While I’m sitting by my child’s hospital bed, do I care that my roots are showing? What is the fear of growing old compared to the fear of having nothing to feed my children? How does the fear of crowds or heights or giving an oral presentation compare to facing the devastation of a hurricane or a flood?

When I got the news that a friend of mine lost her only daughter to the hands of a murderer, the first thing I did was cry, and then I wailed. I was devastated for my friend, the heartbreak she felt, the horror of the crime. And I cried out for her daughter. There was so much she didn’t get to do. She was too young to be taken from this life. The next thing I did was look at my own teenage daughter and my life with her. Did all my rules, and nagging, and too-high expectations create the relationship I wanted? Did I want to push her away or look at each day with her as a gift to cherish? I decided, on the day I got my friend’s awful news, what was truly important and began making choices accordingly.

Don’t wait for a disaster to give you a new perspective. Decide now what is most important and take practical steps to follow through.

If living longer and enjoying your family as you age is what you worry about – walk a little everyday, make better food choices, exercise your mind. Is getting a job or holding on to one a concern? Update your skills, work for a temporary agency, volunteer in your field of interest.

Doing something for someone else can shift our focus and also change how we look at our own lives. Visit an elderly neighbor, hold the hand of someone’s who’s grieving, watch a busy Mom’s kids to give her some alone time, send thank-you cards and letters to soldiers serving overseas (especially in combat zones).

Today, this minute, we can’t help a starving child or love an orphan on the other side of the world, but we can contribute money or time to organizations that can. And if we have the heart for it, we can foster or adopt and change the life of such a child.

Unless we do something with our worry, it becomes a waste of our time and energy because it’s really only a useless exercise of the mind. Don’t let the worries of life get you down for long. Take one step back if you have to, then two steps forward and keep looking ahead.

What do you do to stop worry from getting out of hand?

Beginnings: Choosing a Book Title

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Along with the first tentative outline for the memoir This New Mountain, I brainstormed a list of titles, thinking if I had that settled it would help me move forward with the book. This list included Born to Serve, Liberating Process, Liable to Confound, and In Lieu of Surrender. I thought these were clever, catchy titles considering many of the stories in the book had some kind of connection to the laws of the land – thank goodness none of them made it past the first stage. There was only one – The Amazing Life of Ann Jackson – that I seriously considered. But none of these choices truly grabbed hold of me and said, “This is it, this is the one.” They didn’t speak about AJ’s past or her future or her now. They just didn’t feel right.

In my own experience with picking a title for my fiction writing, I either know right away what it is or within a few chapters after the story gets going. So I didn’t worry when no concrete title surfaced for AJ Jackson’s memoir. One would come to me in time.

As usually happens when I write without a title, there came that day I just couldn’t write another word. Seeing an empty space on the title page above my name and in the header/footer made me freeze up. Like having an odd type of writer’s block. I sat and stared at the page for the longest time and could not put one more word to paper (or screen).

But I needed to move forward, and that’s when I came up with a solution without actually choosing a working title. I needed something either bland or outlandish, but not something I would grow attached to or mind tossing out when a real title came to mind. Don’t ask me why (because I don’t have an answer), but within a few minutes of realizing I needed such a thing, I had my throwaway title: Dirty Underwear. No, you’re not allowed to ask why.

So the book started out as Dirty Underwear: A Memoir of AJ Jackson. Catchy title. Now I could at least finish the chapter I was working on when writer’s block hit, and move on.

It wasn’t too long after that, while searching the web for quotes I wanted to include with each chapter name, I found this:

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. ~ Ursula Le Guin

And there it was. I had found the true title of AJ Jackson’s memoir. It embodied what all the others lacked – strength in today, while suggesting movement and something that existed before.

Goodbye Dirty Underwear, hello (thank goodness) This New Mountain.

Dirty Underwear is still the title I use when I don’t know a story or its characters well enough to come up with one right away. It works simply because it doesn’t fit and doesn’t have to, and because giving it up isn’t a hard thing to do. I don’t normally go a long period of time without penning a title. Maybe my mind works subconsciously to come up with a suitable one just because it doesn’t want the alternative attached to my stories. Whatever the reason, my throwaway title works every time.

Do you have a mind trick you use to fool yourself (like setting your clock ahead so you won’t be late), or am I the only strange one out there?