I Used to Enjoy Air Travel

I don't fly all that often. Maybe two or three times a year at most. This past weekend, I had to fly to Pittsburgh for a couple of meetings. I booked (well in advance) the only direct flight I could find between Memphis and Pittsburgh--departing at 2:20 p.m. and arriving in Pittsburgh at 5:28 p.m. I arrived at the Memphis airport at 12:30--well in advance of my flight. I had already checked in and printed my boarding pass. I was good to go. As the boarding time approached, more and more people gathered in the boarding area. It was a perfect day for flying with sunny skies in both Memphis and Pittsburgh. No rough weather along the way.

It must have been about 1:15 when I noticed some of my fellow travelers gathering around the check-in desk. And they didn't look very happy. I got up and dragged my small suitcase and computer bag behind me to join them at the desk. Then I looked up at the departure screen. My flight was no longer listed. Whoosh--gone. Evaporated.

We were told the flight was canceled--no further explanation given. It was a full flight so you can imagine the chaos. We were instructed to follow one of the attendants to the far end of the corridor for rebooking. I expected them to make us line up, two by two, and hold hands like we did in kindergarten. So seventy-five people fall into line behind our leader and drag our luggage (because who checks a bag anymore at $25 a pop?) down the crowded corridor, swimming upstream against travelers heading toward their departure gates. I wanted to warn them, "Check the board. My flight just disappeared." But I can't walk and chew gum at the same time and, if I lost my place in line and get separated from my group, I might never get to Pittsburgh.

We were led to a bank of scanners and instructed to sweep our boarding pass under the magic light and we would be rebooked. Uh, excuse me? Wait. I have no way of discussing the options for my rebooking? No, I'm told. The machine rebooks you automatically on the next available flight which--I am also told--might be in half an hour or tomorrow. What?!

And so the seventy-five of us (at this point probably seventy, because I'm sure we've lost a few people along the way) are herded to the machine that spits out a new ticket that we then have to take to whichever gate we are assigned and "be sure to check in so your seat isn't given away." What?!!

I am then rebooked onto a flight departing at 4:10 for Atlanta. But I paid for a direct flight to Pittsburgh. And I hate the Atlanta airport. Not the people--they're wonderful. Just the airport. And I am now going to be stuck there from 6:22 p.m. until 10:52 p.m. And, no, they don't offer free wifi (unless you want to log on to see what you can do in Atlanta.) I guess they offer this because a lot of travelers find themselves with hours of free time on their hands in the Atlanta airport. But they don't offer a free shuttle or tour bus, so...

Giving up the notion that I have ANY control in this matter, I settle at my gate and await my 4:10 flight after notifying my friend in Pittsburgh that she would have to have dinner without me--and would probably want to take a nap. We board this flight almost on time. We back away from the gate--about fifteen feet. Then the captain welcomes us with "good news and bad news." The good news--the weather all the way to Atlanta is beautiful. The bad news--flights are backed up in Atlanta and we've been instructed to shut down the engines and sit for half an hour. Ah, but it's all good because, technically, the flight left on time. And the machine that rebooked me clearly got confused because it was in row 1--First Class. Woohoo.

By the time I reached Atlanta, I had talked myself into taking this all in stride and enjoying a nice dinner. And I did. I found a little French bakery/sandwich shop back in a not-so-crowded corner and had a quiet dinner. Then I re-entered the fray to sit across from my gate and wait. While I waited, I observed a man making several trips in and out of a bar across the corridor. With each exit, he became louder and more unsteady on his feet. When it was finally time to board my 10:52 flight--at 11:05 (of course), he lined up to get on the plane. After the gate attendant had a brief conversation during which he, the pilot, co-pilot and two flight attendants all stared pointedly at the man, it was apparently determined safe to let him board the flight. I didn't think this was a prudent decision and could only hope we didn't end up making an emergency landing in Paducah because a passenger was out of control.

I give the flight attendants credit. I overheard their onboard discussion before we took off about notifying the gentleman he would not be served any alcohol on the flight. He was seated somewhere in the back and, since I didn't hear a complaint or scuffle, assume he took the news well. That, or he was already passed out. Now, for the First Class seating. I've always wanted to fly First Class. Just once. I think it's probably a different experience, however, on a plane that's a little bigger than a breadbox. Yes, I had a nice leather seat and more leg room (probably because of being in row 1). Yes, I got my choice of snacks from a basket the attendant brought around instead of just a miniscule bag of peanuts. Yes, the Coke I requested was served in a real glass instead of plastic. (People pay more money for this?) It made me wonder, though. Shouldn't these perks be offered to the folks in coach? I mean, if you can afford a First Class ticket, you can probably afford a bag of chips. It's the poor schmucks in coach that are counting their pennies to purchase Cheetos. I still hope someday I get to fly First Class, though.

When I finally reached my destination, I was too tired to do anything but crawl into bed. The following morning I logged into my friend's computer (couldn't get on her wifi) to check my email. I had two notices from the airline from the previous day at 1:00 p.m. telling me my flight was canceled and I was rebooked. Really? You know, not all of us have iphones and check email on our phones. I did give the airline my phone number.

On Saturday, I went back in to check my email only to find a message from the airline--asking me to complete a survey evaluating my experience with my canceled and rebooked flight. Well, now you're talking. After completing each question with a number rating (a low number rating), I had a little box asking for comments. Believe me, the comments flew faster than I had.

I used to love to fly. Now I have to walk barefoot into a body scanner so some stranger can see all the nasty hidden truths beneath my slightly oversized shirt, then grab my stuff and tiptoe to a bench to put my shoes back on and return my laptop to its case. But not before I had to wait for a female security office to check my watch for explosives. She should have checked me further. I was about ready to explode. Especially after being rebooked.

I think if the airlines want to make all of this worth my time, they could at least offer a few other perks--maybe a free mammogram for those of us who are due. How hard could it be to add that to their equipment? I'm already half undressed.

Linda

This Memorial Day

We remember.

In the Author Spotlight: Annette Snyder

This month in the Author Spotlight, please welcome
Annette Snyder.








Thank you Linda, for letting me slide over to your corner of the world to brag about my latest news.
Respectable Affair, the third release in my World War II series, is out this month and I’m pretty excited to say, it’s a good one. An inspiration started out as one story based on my grandmother’s life with Viveka’s War and continued with a novel defending the morals of a character in Eureka Springs, now has a final chapter. Respectable Affair tells the story of matriarch, Virgie Seidle, and her life protecting those closest to her and a community where she found solace.

Here’s a blurb of Respectable Affair:

Between Virginia Seidle’s terrible jaunt with men and Nolan Vickers’s upheld honor toward his institutionalized wife, no one in town openly faulted the pair for banding together to raise Nolan’s son, John. When love blossoms, would people be as accepting?

Can Nolan and Virgie put their clouded pasts behind and keep their affair respectable?

If that isn’t enough, here’s a snippet:

“Rebecca? Audrey? What is going on?” John looked at the two women. He’d known them all his life. They were Virgie’s best friends. They’d gone to college together and remained constant in each other’s lives.

Audrey lived and worked in Eureka Springs and their family gatherings were always intertwined.

Rebecca married Virgie’s brother Truman and, though she lived in Nebraska, weekly phone calls closed the distance.

It seemed so strange that neither woman mentioned the reason he and Ruth had to fly in for a formal visit and even stranger that Barbara was present and Audrey said nothing about a trip. The most bizarre? The way the two friends seemed to fumble about as if no one knew what to say next. “Okay, ladies. What in the world did you call us up here for? I’m sure it wasn’t to let us sit around and stare at each other.”

Rebecca put her hands in her lap and glanced from Audrey to the other three. “Audrey and I have something to tell you. A story.”

Audrey took a deep breath and reached to stroke Barbara’s arm before resting her hands on the arms of the chair. “We thought the best thing was to have you all together and say it just once.”

Rebecca bit her lip before she spoke. “What we did was the right thing to do. We did it for Virgie. We did it for Elizabeth and Nolan. We did it for all of you.”

“We knew the only way to protect you was to keep the secret but now we feel it’s time to tell the truth.”

To John, when Audrey spoke, it looked as if she’d rehearsed her words a thousand times. “What truth?” he asked.

And Rebecca began. “Our dear friend Virgie was always so full of love and life and she loved without reason. Follow where your heart leads…that’s what she always said.”

You can go to http://www.whiskeycreekpress.com/ and read the first chapter before you add Respectable Affair and its two preceding novels, or any of my other stories to your shopping cart.

Follow this link to my website http://annettesnyder.atspace.com/ and you’ll learn all about me, my work and why I find myself writing instead of cleaning house. There, you’ll also find a link to my innovative blog, Fifty Authors from Fifty States. Connect to that and discover other talented writing professionals and the parts of the USA that inspires them and again, please thank Linda for her support with this opportunity to connect with you.

Memories for Mother's Day

This Mother's Day as we turn our thoughts and memories toward the women who gave us life, I want to take a moment to remember my mom, Kay Rettstatt (Anna Catherine Hennessey Rettstatt).

During a recent visit with my sister, we got a glimpse of some old 8 mm family movies. (My paternal grandfather was something of a Cecil B. DeMille wanna be. No one was safe from his camera.) I say glimpse because the old projecter gave out. But we got to watch Mom at play--with a hula hoop, her hair pinned up in bobby pins. My Mom had a great sense of humor and fun. I like to think I inherited this from her. She was a stay-at-home Mom when that was the fashion, in the fifties and sixties. And she seemed to be content, though in the later sixties, she did take a part-time job, once my sister and I were both in high school. I think she enjoyed being out in the workforce for a bit and loved to tell stories about her day at the office.

She claimed to hate having animals in the house, but repeatedly took pity on stray dogs, luring them inside, bathing and feeding them, and--if no one claimed them--making them the new family pet.

She loved her family, playing cards and laughing with friends, dancing at Christmas time after her one singular drink (it only took one and, sadly, I inherited that, too). I remember the last birthday I spent with her. I went home for the day and took her out to visit family and then to dinner. She didn't want to go to any fancy restaurant, but chose a small, local bar and restaurant because they had great fried chicken strips. We had a nice day together--at that stage where mother and daughter begin to become equals, adult friends.

She was taken far too soon, just six weeks later, at the age of sixty-four.

Here's to you, Mom. I hope they have hula hoops in heaven. If not, I'm sure you're creating your own fun. You always did.

Linda

An Elegantly Written Work

I don't typically review books here on my blog (but I may start). Every so often a book comes along that, at once, leaves me speechless and yet with much to say. Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons is one such book. As a reader, this story grabbed me and held me fast. I picked it up in audio because I listen to books during my long drive to and from work each day. I found myself eager to get into the car in the morning to get back to the story. At the same time, I mourned the nearing end of the book as I popped in the last CD.

Ms. Siddons' writing has always engaged and inspired me. But Burnt Mountain is no doubt the most exquisitely written book I've ever read. Her writing style is positively lyrical. She pulls you deeply into Thayer Wentworth's life--her joy, sorrow, challenges and triumphs. And she does so with incredible artistry.

As a writer, I am in awe. This is the kind of writing to which every writer should aspire. By the end of this book, I felt as if I'd had a private master class with a true master--Anne Rivers Siddons.

Give yourself a treat this summer. Read a book by Anne Rivers Siddons. Of course, my first recommendation would be Burnt Mountain.

Happy reading!

Linda

Recipes From The Writer's Vineyard

Now available in ebook--FREE--Recipes from The Writer's Vineyard.

Get your copy today to enjoy recipes from your favorite Champagne Books authors.

Just click on the cover to get your FREE copy today.

And be sure to check out The Writer's Vineyard blog at

http://thewritersvineyard.com/

Author Spotlight: Toni V. Sweeney

 

Please help me welcome Toni V. Sweeney into the Author Spotlight.

 

 

 

Thinking Outside the Box and into Editing Trouble

There’s one thing more than any other that’s influenced the way my books are constructed, something people have come to call my “style.” I suppose I’m a child of my time…and my time was the early 50’s, when moving pictures were the most popular form of entertainment before the Boob Tube usurped it.

In those days, there were not only dramas and westerns but sweeping epics of adventure, costume tales of pirates, Robin Hood, the Scarlet Pimpernel, rogues and rascals, and villains. Nowadays, you rarely see those, except for an occasional Indiana Jones rip-off or something ike Game of Thrones, or if Cinemax steps in with The Borgias. It was the time of Frank Yerby, Samuel Shellabarger, Rafael Sabatini…men who wrote what would probably be termed the picaresque novel, tales of heroes conquering mountains and nations, and discovering new worlds simply because they were there, between bedding every viable female in sight. Their stories were made into Technicolor sagas enthralling this little viewer for hours (in those days, you could pay your money and stay in the theatre the entire day if you wished.) And when I began to write, I unconsciously patterned my stories after theirs.

One series—The Adventures of Sinbad—seems to mirror those stories enough that several readers have told me they “absolutely adore” my main character. I admit it’s easy to see him swinging across the deck of a ship, with dagger between his teeth while he hangs onto the heroine with one hand and a rope with the other, a la The Crimson Pirate. In fact, I think I had him do something almost like that in one story…

Other novels open with an incident leading to a flashback. In fact, one novel is simply one extended flashback, returning to the present only in the last chapter. Others are more linear, with cuts to other points of view showing things happening at the same time in other places, the dialogue interspersed with stage direction-like movement. That gets me in trouble with my editor because my mind is seeing a movie screen with close-ups of various characters’ expressing their thoughts as a voice-over tells us what they’re thinking. Putting that and those thoughts into print ends up with the “talking heads”, multiple POVs phenomenon. It doesn’t bother me because I see it as a natural part of the “script”, but it gives my editors fits.

In telling my tales of adventure, romance, violence, danger, and—on occasion—lust, I harken back to those days in those darkened theatres as I shoveled in the popcorn while my eyes were glued to that silver-beaded screen. Good or bad, that’s just the way my mine works, and so far, it’s successful, except for the POVS, and I’m working on that. The results are, in several reviewers’ opinions, “readable and enjoyable tales…outside the box”…which I owe to two things: my imagination and those childhood entertainments.

And then television came along…and opened the box even wider…

BIO

Toni V. Sweeney was born after the War Between the States and before the Gulf War. A native Georgian, she has lived on both coasts, thirty years in the Midwest and is now trying for thirty more in Nebraska. Her first novel was published in 1989 and she currently has 27 novels in publication. Her lastest novels The Earthman’s Bride, written under her pseudonym Icy Snow Blackstone, and Exile, Book 2 of the kan Ingan Archives, were released in April of this year, and another novel, The Rose and The Dragon, is scheduled for June, to be released by Class Act Books in August, 2011.

BUY LINKS: The Earthman’s Bride: http://www.classactbooks.com/The-Earthmans-Bride-by-Icy-Snow-Blackstone-Trade-_p_343.html

Exile: http://www.double-dragon-ebooks.com/single.php?ISBN=1-55404-947-4

Website: http://www.tonivsweeney.com/

http://www.icysnowblackstone.com/

Twitter: @tonivsweeney

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tvsweeney

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/tvsweeney

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/tvsweeney