Oct 31

HALLOWEEN & MY ANNIVERSARY

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
In October of 2014, I did something I’d been dreaming about for years. Here’s a little background about me first. When I returned to school in 1997 to earn my BA at the College of New Rochelle, I learned to use a computer for the first time to write my assignments, reports and papers. By 2001, I had graduated from Baruch College with a Master’s degree. I was an expert at using my laptop to do research then write about what I learned. During the same timeframe I was writing my papers for college, I was also playing around with writing romantic and erotic short stories. While most of my short stories never became novels, several did. One of them “Sweet Sarah’s Bluez” became an unpublished novel after I saw the movie “The Education of Rita.” The movie was a British hairdresser who wanted a higher education because she saw it as a pathway to leave behind a broken marriage and a low-wage job and attain success. I caught the writing bug but I needed to find my voice. I needed to write better since I kept getting pesky rejection letters from publishers I admired. I had shoe boxes filled […]
Oct 24

My Aunty & The Big C

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
Whenever I changed doctors and had to fill out new medical forms, I was always proud of my family’s health history. You know the forms I mean. The ones that have you check off any surgery you’ve ever had and when you had it. I don’t know about you but as I’ve grown older, I can’t remember all my surgeries a total of five or six when I had them. I’m much better at answering questions about all the diseases I’ve ever had and whether or not my parents and siblings had or have them too. On the health history part of the forms, I was proud to say that I didn’t have diabetes, or heart problems or high blood pressure but I did have arthritis and I was missing a gall bladder. My parents had their gall bladders along with high blood pressure and heart problem but they didn’t have diabetes. My father had prostate cancer by the time he died at 85. I wasn’t worried because I’d read somewhere that a high number of men had some evidence of prostate cancer after 75 or 80-years old. Neither of my sisters or I showed any evidence of breast cancer. […]
Oct 17

Trying not to think about cancer

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
I was re-reading through my notes about a workplace memoir that I’d written and published through a small independent publisher in 2008. I’d been collecting materials to write a book about where I worked and the heart-felt journey I’d made while working there. While reading my notes, I found something that captured my interest. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to add the information to the second edition of my workplace memoir, Mr. Jefferson’s Piano & Other Central Harlem Stories, or simply write another short story to post on my blog. When I opted to write a short story, suddenly, I traveled back in time. According to my workplace diary, Monday, October 13, was Columbus Day and a civil service holiday. Today was Tuesday, October 14, 1997. I read the diary note I’d written to my partner. I am so sorry. I know I promised I’d go to the PTA meeting but I can’t. As I read that note, I remembered thinking how I couldn’t say what I felt. Instead, for the past five weeks, I pretended I wasn’t worried about a damned thing. At forty-nine, I’d gotten my routine mammogram five weeks ago. I always hated the way that […]
Oct 10

COLUMBUS DAY 2016

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
When I was a kid, I really liked celebrating Columbus Day. The schools were closed on that day. While there weren’t yet any parades commemorating the day, any time I didn’t have to go to school was great a day for me. An added plus was that the man himself had such a cool little ditty attributed to him. You know the one I mean. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue …. blah, blah.” I thought it was such a nifty to remember historical dates. In elementary school, my classmates and I memorized it without question. It was a good way to remember the date history books say Columbus discovered America. Nobody asked how America got “lost” or why it needed to be “discovered” by somebody who didn’t look a thing like me or the Natives already living on the land the man named Christopher Columbus “discovered.” Back then, I didn’t understand a tribe or a country or a world’s history is always a matter of who conquers who. Conquerors always gets to tell the story on their terms. The conquered have to listen to the lies or worse yet have to teach the lies to their descendants. Imagine […]
Oct 03

Why I wrote the Big C

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
In 2013, I had a double cancer scare. I had stopped doing mammograms for five years because I didn’t like the tech person who performed them in my doctor’s office. It sounds stupid but back then my reasoning made a great deal of sense to me. Every time I went to my doctor’s office, I’d have to hear a lecture about doing mammograms every 6 months because I had dense breast tissue or because I had a fatty but benign tumor removed. I couldn’t help it if my insurance saw no reason to pay for both mammograms and sonograms every 6 months until forever happened. Plus, I hated…really hated how those twisty mammograms performed on a crazy angle made my breasts hurt like hell for days afterwards. I made a conscious decision about my body. I also stopped doing pap smears for an equally insane reason. My normal medical person was a midwife at a medical center specializing in LGBTQ folks. I could talk to her about everything under the sun and did while she was examining my south mouth and all its tentacles. Once she left the medical center, I left too and tried to find an equivalent. I […]
Sep 26

Would you like to read a great romantic novel that answers the question: Is There Love After Cancer? Well Here It Is.

by B.L. in Latest Novels 0 comments
In The Big C, is there love after cancer? Sloan Watson, confirmed female lothario, meets her match when she finds a new employee, Attorney Anita Davis, bent over a toilet bowl early one morning. Anita confides a terrible secret about her health to the tall, good-looking maintenance person, who doesn’t know what to make of the beautiful woman’s secret, but she wants to know her name. Anita is attracted to Sloan as well, but has too many complications at home to act on the attraction. Fate keeps throwing the two women together and Sloan finds herself caring for Anita despite her vow not to become involved, as she is carrying past baggage of her own. Can Anita overcome her initial distrust of Sloan’s playgirl personality and allow her to help her get through the difficult battle she has ahead? Will Anita allow Sloan into her life once the medical crisis is over? Will Anita have the courage to walk away from her destructive home life and find the happiness she deserves? Will she survive the devastating effects of The Big C? Pre-order date: 9/23/16. Release date: 10/2/16. ASIN: B01M1RPH9A (Kindle Version $2.99) ISBN-13: 978-1537735405 (Print Version $12.99) ISBN-10: 1537735403 (Print […]
Sep 19

A little BACKSTORY FOR MR. JEFFERSON’S PIANO

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
I’m a darned good storyteller, so I had no problem producing stories for Memorial Day, Father’s Day, and the Fourth of July. For some reason, a Labor Day post this year had me stumped. My web consultant told me I shouldn’t get political with my FB posts since I’m trying to sell romance novels, not social revolution. Normally, I’d agree with my consultant except that my next book, Mr. Jefferson’s Piano & Other Central Harlem Stories, is a workplace memoir about working in a NYC housing agency with the mission of finding and creating affordable housing for low-income folks. I thought it would a fabulous idea to link the release of my workplace memoir with this year’s Labor Day celebration. What better way to celebrate Labor Day than to release a book about working? While I said my new book, a workplace memoir, isn’t a romance novel, it kind of is. I’ll admit it now. I fell in love with my job in housing. I’d worked a variety of jobs in my adult life, but I’d never found one I truly liked long enough to stay and make a career of it. Whenever I took on a new job, I […]
Sep 17

INTRODUCTION TO MR. JEFFERSON’S PIANO

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
I would love to hear from any New Yorker who has ever lived in city housing. From 1978 to 1998, I worked for a housing agency, managing city-owned residential properties. I began my career as a property manager and worked my way up the career ladder, finally becoming a director of crisis management. My job was supervising other supervisors who supervised property managers. Looking back at that time, I think most of the buildings the city owned were in crisis and not just the troublesome ones in Central Harlem’s Crisis Management Program, but that’s for another post. During that time, I worked in a field office—meaning that I worked at a site that was supposed to be easily accessible to tenants living in my assigned territory. Of course, it wasn’t. Tenants paid two fares to see me and my coworkers, only to be told we couldn’t or wouldn’t help them. I guess you could say the site location on East 125th Street was better than the one all the way downtown at 2 Lafayette, which was near One Police Plaza. While I was working in East and Central Harlem, I met a cast of loveable and not-so-loveable characters. Some of […]
Sep 15

Why I wrote: Mr. Jefferson’s Piano & Other Central Harlem Stories

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
From 1978 until 2014, I worked in a New York City agency responsible for providing affordable housing to low-income residents. The housing stock I managed and provided to low-income tenants became city-owned as a result of landlords walking away from dilapidated properties they could no longer afford to own. When landlords abandoned their occupied properties, that meant tenants and supers were left to their own devices to provide essential services like electricity, water, hot water, heat, repair leaks, clear stoppages, and making cosmetic repairs such painting, plastering, and repairing locks and windows. Tenants in abandoned buildings also provided their own security to prevent drug dealers and/or squatters from breaking into vacant apartments and basements, as well as to prevent thieves from stealing heating systems, fuel, and pipes throughout the buildings. One would think, with all the problems, that tenants would run away from their buildings just as their landlords had done. Most tenants would have left if they’d had someplace better to go. But where to go was the question and the dilemma. When I first started collecting information to write this workplace memoir, I did it because it helped ease my anger. I felt so helpless and hopeless as […]
Sep 13

MR. JEFFERSON’S DUELING BOOK COVERS

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
It isn’t often in life we get a redo. Let me tell you about mine. The first edition cover of this book and its interior were a huge disappointment for me. Like a cavity in a sensitive tooth, I felt such pain at how my first book looked and read. At least one reviewer, some of my friends, and a few colleagues also noticed the obvious errors in spelling and punctuation in the book. Nobody was particularly crazy about the original cover artwork either. I decided to show you that cover, but don’t get confused as to which one to buy. They look totally different, don’t they? The cover on the left is the old one. The colorful cover on the right is the current one. Having 26 other book covers and novels under my belt, I think it’s the best one too! Anyway, the pain and embarrassment about my first book stayed with me. For eight long years, I wondered what I could do to change the way the book looked both inside and outside. Back in 2008, I was a newbie to Amazon’s Kindle. At the time, Create Space didn’t exist. With a private publisher doing all the […]
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