Dear Reader,
It's chocolate chip cookie time! I'm baking two dozen homemade chocolate chip cookies for three book club readers. To see photos of last month's winners (the photos are really cute!), click here.
Kelley Armstrong, today's guest author, believes experience is the best teacher, though she's been told this shouldn't apply to writing her murder scenes. To craft her books, she has studied aikido, archery and fencing. She says she sucks at all of them. She has also crawled through very shallow cave systems and climbed half a mountain before chickening out. She is however an expert coffee drinker and a true connoisseur of chocolate-chip cookies. Her latest book is A Stranger in Town, book six in her Rockton series--mysteries set in a small town in the Yukon where people go to disappear.
Please welcome Kelley to the book club.
Email: mail@kelleyarmstrong.com
Thank you Kelley for such a heartfelt column...
I was recently chatting with someone about jobs we held as kids, and I was reminded of the summer I worked for an agency that cleaned apartments for seniors.
I don't remember getting any instructions before I was sent out. No cleaning instructions, but also no advice on working with seniors. I knew how to clean, and I thought I knew the rest. I had grandparents and great-grandparents, and to me, seniors were part of a supportive extended family, and enjoying a rich and active retirement lifestyle. So when many of my clients seemed to want to talk--a lot--I was pleasant and polite, but I worried that the distraction meant I wasn't doing a good enough job, because clearly, what they wanted most was a clean apartment, right?
In one of those conversations, a client asked whether I'd bake a cake instead of cleaning. When I agreed, he produced an old handwritten recipe. I went to the store, bought what I needed--because he had none of the ingredients--and baked his cake.
If I were writing this story as an author, the teen girl would have wondered about that handwritten recipe. She would have asked about it, and he'd have told her the story behind it. She'd have eaten the cake with him as they talked. She'd have realized how important both the cake and the conversation were to him, and she'd have promised to bake anytime he'd rather have that than a sparkling-clean apartment.
That's the fictional version. In the real-life one, our protagonist was a fifteen-year-old girl who understood none of that. Who never considered asking about the recipe because she saw handwritten ones all the time. She didn't realize what a big deal that cake-baking was to him--she was too busy worrying about how much all the ingredients cost and whether she should have suggested buying a cake from the supermarket to save him money.
Only later did I realize I'd missed an opportunity, both to give someone what they needed and to enrich my own life. While I regret not doing the right thing, I don't regret the experience of making that mistake. Those moments, so brief and fleeting, become larger turning points for the person we eventually choose to be, and this was an important one in my life.
-- Kelley Armstrong
Email: mail@kelleyarmstrong.com
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
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