Sep 22

WHY I WROTE: AVA & PATIENCE, A purple love story

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
As I was writing another novel, “Me and Mrs. Jones,” I introduced two characters I really liked a lot. In fact, I liked them so much, I stopped writing “Me and Mrs. Jones” to begin creating “Ava and Patience, a purple love story.” I usually wait until I’m further along in one novel before I begin writing a new novel. If it’s a sequel or one of a series of reoccurring characters novels, I usually wait at least a year or longer before I begin. I don’t know why I do that. I just know that I do. A bit of self-analysis and an educated guess says, I needed time to step away from the primary characters to get a feel for the secondary characters. I needed to hear the two secondaries talking to me and telling me their stories. Yes, I admit it. My characters do talk to me and I do listen. Enough of my confessions, I wondered if I could create two female characters whose common love of purple was their first connection. Once my characters discovered they shared a commonality for purple, they decided to see what else they shared if anything. On the outside, the […]
Sep 15

PLAYGROUND GAMES

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
As a kid, if anybody asked me what my favorite elementary school class was, I’d always answer how much I loved recess. My mother would interrupt the conversation to correct me. She’d say recess wasn’t a class, but I remained steadfast. I’d mumble under my breath, “If recess isn’t a class, it oughta be.” The reason I loved recess in the wintertime so much was that I had the freedom to release the tomboy I felt screaming to be outside. That part of me wasn’t allowed be out any other time. I should explain. I came from a family and a time when young girls were expected to wear dresses to school, at home, at church, and even at play. Girls wore dresses everywhere. Of course, since girls dressed like miniature ladies, they were supposed to act like them as well. That meant no ball playing, including foot races, baseball, football, or basketball. In my elementary school, nobody knew what soccer was, so I didn’t play that game either. Girls could play dodgeball, red rover, jump rope, tag, hide ‘n’ seek, and jacks, but no marbles, a game in which I excelled, and other games that didn’t involve the running […]
Sep 01

MY LABOR DAY WISH

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
I’m sitting on a bench across the street from my house in Riverside Park. It’s a short walk from my apartment to the children’s playground area. I’m watching children run around the yard; swing on the monkey bars; climb up the jungle gym; slip down the slides then run into the sprinkler. On such a sizzling hot and humid day, the shockingly ice-cold water feels good to sweaty, super-heated skin. It makes the all the children playing in it, scream, shout, giggle with glee and throw water on each other. They remind me how good it is to be young, filled with wonderment and allowed to act silly. Watching children at play, always relaxes me and I let my mind drift off. I’m still trying to come up with a Labor Day tale worthy of posting on my blog and FB page. Suddenly I had an idea. White I’m no great admirer of the man in the White House, his comments have made me rethink the meaning of many things. I consider myself to be one of the luckiest workers in America. While I’m retired now, I got a job working for a New York City housing agency in 1978. […]
Aug 26

WHY I WROTE THE PRISONER & THE LAWYER

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
  You, your kid brother and your grandmother are the only family you have after your parents die. At 18, you leave home and join the military figuring you’ll see the world and get a great education too. Your grandmother dies. Your kid brother goes into foster care. You feel guilty when you don’t take the discharge offered to you and get your brother out of foster care to raise. You love the army too much to do that and so you re-up for many more tours. For a long time, you just throw money at your brother’s problems. You bail him out of jail for the petty crimes he commits while on drugs. But this one time, with this one serious crime, you can’t run away. Neither can your brother. What do you do? How much are you willing to do for your brother? Would you give up your freedom for him? Would you serve his time? Or would you simply throw money at him again; ignore his calls and pretend nothing happen? I wanted to see how much a sister would do for her only brother when he was waist deep in life-altering trouble. I wanted to see […]
Aug 19

CALLING ME OUT MY NAME

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
As a kid, my mother would take me and my siblings shopping for clothes in local department stores. Anything my mother, a home economist and a bit of a tailor, couldn’t make for us, she’d buy when we had the money. I remember how excited my mother was when women were allowed to have store charge cards linked to their husband’s money. My mother’s first store charge card resembled an army dog tag. It was rectangular, made of metal, and smaller than the plastic encrypted credit cards of today. Hers had an assigned number. Her card also contained her first and last names along with her address, stamped into the metal face of the card. Whenever my mother used the card to pay for something, a salesclerk stuck it into a small manual charge machine face up. Then the clerk placed a small, rectangular, handwritten paper invoice with triple carbon layers on top of the charge card. She slid a roller-like attachment over the invoice and the card so my mother’s information would appear on the invoice. The salesclerks were always white women (back then, the sales staff wasn’t integrated) and usually a great deal younger than my mother. When […]
Aug 05

102 YEARS OLD. She’s over a century.

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
I don’t normally do five essays in a month. I also don’t dedicate any of them to somebody’s birthday either. This month, I decided to change what I normally do and make an exception. My mother turns 102 years old on the second week of this month. She doesn’t do Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook Instagram or Snapchat so she’ll never read this tribute. I thought I should do something special online for her, sort of a permanent digital record that she existed on this earth for the last 102 years. I read somewhere that the number of folks over 100 isn’t so rare nowadays and the number of centenarians is actually increasing. Try as I might, I can’t imagine what she’s seen during her lifetime. I know she missed WWI but lived through the depression. She spoke about how she and my aunt sold bread and cookies from a wagon. My stepfather lost a janitor job during the depression but tried to make up for it by setting a home bakery because he loved to bake. My mother said she got to practice subtraction and addition as she and her sister sold bread and rolls my step-grandfather baked. She watched her […]
Jul 29

WHY I WROTE: What’s Love Got To Do With It?

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
In this day and age of social media, short-term relationships and instant gratification, I wondered what a long-term, lesbian friendship of 20 years looked like. How did the women meet? What would the women involved be like? Would they be saint-like women? Once these saints were engaged or married, they never ever looked at another woman and thought. “I want me some of that!” Or would the two friends be devilish women who wanted to sleep with every woman they saw? And tried to do so. What attracted the two women to each other in the first place. Why did they decide to become friends? The two women in question dated 20 years ago. They became friends when the dating thing didn’t work out for them. One of the women, Bianca was an attractive, charming single philanderer who loved women and lots of them. She dated Ernestine who later became her best friend and several other women simultaneously. Bianca’s unfaithful behavior hurt Ernestine who believed Bianca was the marrying kind. When Ernestine discovered Bianca’s infidelities, she decided she couldn’t trust another partner ever again. She became lucky in business but distrustful in her life. Meanwhile Bianca never wanted to be […]
Jul 15

THE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
When I was still working for city government, I formed a great friendship with a female co-worker. We used to talk about everything. She knew I was gay and accepted that fact. She also knew years ago that I’d been through a nasty divorce just as she was going through one currently. We exchanged notes about how bad my ex-husband or her soon-to-be former husband were. We spoke about our husbands’ idiocy about misusing our children’s affections or playing games with child support, hoping if things were bad enough for us, we’d come running back to them. We shared the difficulties of raising children as single working mothers. On the job, we also wondered why this unqualified, lazy so and so was promoted or given a raise when we had more qualifications and better service records, but we were not considered promotable. We had typical girl talks. While I liked all the things I had in common with my good friend, what really fascinated me was our weekly discussions about televisions programs we watched, which sometimes led to political discussions. My friend convinced me to watch Sleepy Hollow. I truly loved idea of a young Black as a romantic interest […]
Jul 08

SUCCESS MEANS LEARNING TO FAIL

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
The picture above is a view of the Riverside Drive’s Park between West 144th Street and West 142nd Street. The strip park run along Riverside Drive and follows the Hudson River. Parts of the drive mingle with the West Side Highway and so the park overlooks the highway or 12th Avenue. Other parts of the park disappear and reappear further uptown and end somewhere in Inwood. The park still has uniquely antique elements. Note the water fountain, the cobblestone made of bricks, and the old-fashioned street-lamps that really work. What’s most interesting to me is the way one main road separates into two paths. It reminds me of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. For the past six months, my niece and I have grown particularly close. One reason is that my sister, who was also her mother, died six months ago. I’ve always considered my niece like a daughter and so this was a natural progression of things. Another reason we’ve grown close, I’ve been giving her some advice about jobs. Lately, my suggestions have been geared towards her new promotion. A little more than a year ago, she took a job as an entry level employee with a […]
Jun 24

WHY I WROTE LOVE WITH STINGS ATTACHED

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
How guilty does it feel to suddenly learn the kid sister you loved and is your only family, was murdered by her abusive boyfriend. You knew he was abusive. He was the last in long-line of abusive men she made babies with, creating three children. You knew he was abusive because she took the children and came to stay with you for a short-time before the last child was born. You knew he was abusive because he struck her in front of you once and you threatened to kill him if it happened again. Now, your baby sister is dead. You wonder why you didn’t kill her murderer years ago when you had the chance? You wonder what her last moments must have been like as she suffocated while he held her down and assaulted her. What do you do now? Where are your niece and two nephews? How do you protect them? Are you paranoid thinking that the killer might try to kill the children because they are the only witnesses? I explored those questions and more when I wrote LOVE WITH STRINGS ATTACHED Connect with BL Wilson at these links: Blog: https://wilsonbluez.com Facebook Business Page: https://www.facebook.com/patchworkbluezpress Goodreads: http://bit.ly/1BDmrjJ […]
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