army – Carrie Jones Books

I’m waiting in an army hospital in Georgia somewhere for my soldier-daughter the puppy-ballerina-princess-girl who could never decide on just one thing to be for Halloween.

She’s having surgery on her eye. It’s not super major, allegedly, but it’s a big enough deal that I had to take planes down from Maine to be here for her.

I’m waiting for hours, which is fine because people wait in this hospital for hours for much worse things. I see them walk by. Most of them wear dark clothes. Most of them wear sadness over their skin like make-up. No. It’s more like moisturizer. It’s sunk in.

These men and women wear uniforms and camouflage that sticks out in beige, fluorescent lit halls. One soldier walks by, jaunty, singing. I want to follow him around, spread his light.

I’m at a table in a room where two hallways meet. A man walks by with his arm in a black sling. A civilian worker in a green shirt jingles as he walks behind him. The table I sit at is small, square wood on a metal pole. Casters are on the bottom. It’s unbalanced and tilts if I lean too hard on it.

When I grew up half of my family said the point of family is to lean on each other. The other half of my family insisted that the leaning? It makes you weak. They are almost all dead now so I lean mostly on air, on walls, on tables.

It’s hard not to worry when you can’t control anything like surgeries or politicians or people with guns and hate-hearts. It’s hard to move beyond that worry and live. It’s hard to feel like you’re not always waiting for something to happen instead of actively making things happen. Good things. I want to make good things.

Making anything is scary and vulnerable and real. I think I want most to be real, to matter somehow.

I am waiting in an army hospital and they call a code red, which probably means something horrible, but I’m clueless, just a clueless civilian. Lately, I’ve been feeling like we’re all clueless about this world, this universe, even ourselves. How do we work? How does anything work? Relationships. Data. The internet? Lights. The stove. It’s all connections and collections and movement. Maybe.

People walk by me, mostly soldiers, some families. I only catch pieces of conversations and never the full thing.

“’Hey Joe. Hey Joe. What’s up?’ He doesn’t even say, ‘What’s up.’”

“He talks to us.”

“He talks to me like I was cavalry.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means he talks to me like God.”

The other guy laughs and they are lost down the hall. I will never know what’s up with Joe who when he talks, ends up talking to the laughing soldiers like they are God.

I am waiting in the army hospital and I will have no nice conclusions, no Marvel-style resolution to these stories. But mostly what I hear is people thanking each other, wishing each other a good day. I hear, “God bless.” I hear children whining, bored out of their minds. I hear a woman yell, “I got you.”

I got you.

I am waiting in an Army hospital. The hospital is everywhere.

BIG NEWS!

I’m about to publish a super cool adult novel. Gasp! I know! Adult! That’s so …. grown-up?

I have a new book coming out!

Rosie Jones, small town reporter and single mom, is looking forward to her first quiet Maine winter with her young daughter, Lily. After a disastrous first marriage, she’s made a whole new life and new identities for her and her little girl. Rosie is more than ready for a winter of cookies, sledding, stories about planning board meetings, and trying not to fall in like with the local police sergeant, Seamus Kelley.
But after her car is tampered with and crashes into Sgt. Kelley’s cruiser during a blizzard, her quiet new world spirals out of control and back into the danger she thought she’d left behind. One of her new friends is murdered. She herself has been poisoned and she finds a list of anagrams on her dead friend’s floor.
As the killer strikes again, it’s obvious that the women of Bar Harbor aren’t safe. Despite the blizzard and her struggle to keep her new identity a secret, Rosie sets out to make sure no more women die. With the help of the handsome but injured Sgt. Kelley and the town’s firefighters, it’s up to Rosie to stop the murderer before he strikes again.

You can preorder it here. Please, please, preorder it.

So, um, please go buy it. I am being brave, but that means that despite all my reasons for doing this, I’m still terrified that nobody will buy it and I really, really love this book. A lot.

This week’s podcast!

In honor of the Emster being home on leave this week, I’ve conjured up this old blog post about my mommy fears and her innate Emster capabilities.

What I find interesting about this is:

How openly neurotic I have always been.
How she has always been kick-butt.

Here you go:

Okay. You know how when you’re a mom you have these certain levels of fear when it comes to your kid? Well, most moms do. Sorry to all you people who are not moms or aren’t neurotic. You will probably be bored with this blog post.

So there’s the deepest level of Mom Fear, which is that:

1. Your child will be kidnapped on an airplane like in that Jodi Foster movie where she ends up blowing up the airplane in a feat of total mom awesomeness.
2. Your child will be assaulted or violated.
3. Your child will be murdered/seriously injured or threatened to be like in that Denzel Washington movie where he’s the bodyguard but he might as well be the dad because he is so amazing to Pita and she even names her teddy bear after him.
4. Your child will marry a ghoul:

Please do not marry him, Em, at least not when he’s like this.

But then I have what I call the Secondary Level of Mom Fear, which includes:

My child will starve because I have no income.

My child will become a heroin addict because I suck, etc…

My child will become a monster full of hate.

But also on this Mom fear level is this one:

My child will get on the wrong airplane at the airport.

And yep… It happened.

So the Emster was done with this super cool Fresh Film Program in New York City (thanks to amazing author and human Saundra Mitchell) and she was flying home to Maine. Em did everything right:

1. She got a car and had money to pay it. She got in the car at 8 a.m.
2. She told the driver she wanted to go to US Airways at Laguardia Airport.
3. She buckled her seat belt. Gold star, Em! Gold star!

But then things went wrong. There was an accident. Traffic stalled. She was stuck there for about an hour. But finally they move again. The driver drops her off at the airport, but wait — He drops her off at the United terminal. Em realizes this once she gets inside. She asks for help. Twice. She runs to the shuttle for the other terminal. The shuttle bus doors have just closed. She looks hopeless.

Em is the one smiling with teeth. 😉

Hopeless doesn’t work. So, instead she goes into Looking Cute mode. The shuttle bus doors magically open. She asks the driver for help. He tells her to hop on. She does. There are a MILLION stops. They get to the terminal. She goes to the kiosk to get her boarding pass but she doesn’t have a credit card and can’t pay the $20 for her luggage. Someone else helps. She gives them cash. They don’t even make her weigh her suitcase. Score! (Note: Shoes are heavy. Em likes shoes).

She finds the Security Screening. She goes through. She finds her gate. It is 9:30. Her plane is supposed to leave at 10. There is nobody milling around like normal. Em being the astute little camper that she is, goes to the woman at the little podium/counter thing and asks if this is the gate for the Bangor, Maine flight.

Woman: That flight is closed.

Em: !!!!!

She decides to look cute again.

Em is still the same one.

Woman (speaks into walkie-talkie): MUMBLE MUMBLE.

Em: ?????!!!!

Woman (to Em): Okay. You can go out. The plane is on the tarmac.

They let her through the doors. She rushes to the airplane, climbs up the stairs, gets on, looks at her ticket and then says to the flight attendant: Is this the plane to Bangor, Maine?
Flight attendant person: No. This is the plane to Buffalo.

Em:

Flight attendant person: The Bangor plane is behind us, I think.

Em runs down the stairs, across the tarmac and towards a plane that was completely obscured by the Buffalo plane. She drops things on the tarmac. She picks things up. She runs. She scrambles up the flight of stairs and says, “Is this the plane to Bangor?”

It is.

But wait!

Her seat is gone. They have given it away because she is late.

“NO!!!!!!!!” Em screams.

But they let her sit in the exit row all by herself. She buckles up and makes it. Nobody kidnaps her. She does not fly to Buffalo. She flies home.

She is amazing.

And cute.

And resourceful as heck.

Me: You will write about this some day.

Em: I have already lived it once; I do not want to live it again.

Writing News

The Spy Who Played Baseball is a picture book biography about Moe Berg. And… there’s a movie out now about Moe Berg, a major league baseball player who became a spy. How cool is that?

You should totally buy Carrie’s book about Moe. It’s awesome and quirky and fun. She’s heading to Houston, North Carolina, and Virgnia soon, just to talk about it. How cool is that?

OUR PODCAST DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE.

Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow.

Writing Coach

Carrie offers solo writing coach services, but she’s also teaching a Write! Submit! Support! (WSS) six-month class online via the Writing Barn in Austin. For details about that class, check out this link. For more about Carrie’s individual coaching, click here.

And finally, for the month of July, Carrie’s book FLYING is on sale in ebook version on multiple platforms, which means not just Amazon. It’s a cheap way to have an awesome read in a book that’s basically Men in Black meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer but with chocolate-covered pretzels.

Proof of the sale-nature of July.

Thanks so much for reading my blog! Please comment or say ‘hi!’ if you feel like it!

Carrie

Tag: army