Hosted by Miz B at Should Be Reading

As I searched for something to say, I worried that if I waited much longer you’d begin slamming your face with your own palms, martyring yourself on your bed, not just to punish me but to punish the world for making you be alive in it.

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Today Nicole from Tribute Books is stopping by to introduce us to an amazing, busy and talented author as she talks about her new memoir.  So please help me welcome Ms. Molly Best!

ABOUT MOLLY BEST TINSLEY

Air Force brat Molly Best Tinsley taught on the civilian faculty at the United States Naval Academy for twenty years and is the institution’s first professor emerita. Author of My Life with Darwin (Houghton Mifflin) and Throwing Knives (Ohio State University Press), she also co-authored Satan’s Chamber (Fuze Publishing) and the textbook, The Creative Process (St. Martin’s). Her fiction has earned two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sandstone Prize, and the Oregon Book Award. Her plays have been read and produced nationwide. She lives in Oregon, where she divides her time between Ashland and Portland.
Connect with the author at:  Fuze Publishing’s Facebook, Fuze Publishing’s Twitter, Fuze Publishing’s Website, Fuze Publishing’s Blog, Entering the Blue Stone Blog Tour Site, Tribute Books Blog Tours Facebook

GUEST POST

Entering the Blue Stone is a memoir of my parents’ final years, when my father was afflicted with Parkinson’s, my mother with Alzheimers.  My siblings and I had to move them from their home to an independent living apartment in a continuing care facility, then to the assisted living wing, and finally to the nursing home on the bottom floor.  It’s a fairly common experience nowadays, but it feels extraordinary when it happens to you, a cross between a comedy of errors, a crusade for humane treatment, and, of course, a prolonged funeral.  In order to maintain my sanity, I transcribed events almost as they were happening, including conversations verbatim.  I was coping with the chaos by keeping notes—trying to contain it in words.

As the months passed, and their situation plummeted from difficult to impossible, the writing began to serve a purpose beyond my own mental health.  I wanted to tell a cautionary tale so that other families might begin this end-of-life process with more information.  Because our experience became so surreal, however, I chose an almost documentary tone recount it.  No hysteria, no exclamatory outrage–just the facts.  We felt as if the administrators in the continuing care facility had lost their minds while those with diagnosed dementia exemplified grace and a certain common sense.  I had to make sure I didn’t sound like a crazy person myself—even if I felt that way sometimes!

At the same time, if the story was going to make an impact, it would have to bring the experience to life in a nuanced, three-dimensional world, creating our parents and their care-givers as characters, conveying the sensory texture of our struggle, and its ineluctable arc.  The real information is in the concrete details, not in some sort of abstract power point presentation.  So I didn’t spare them.  Based on my notes, I painted the fullest picture I could of our search for a care facility and then our adaptation to one frustration after the next–the scenes, the dialogue, the unexpected sweet times, the inevitable bad.  My book is an account of what-not-to-do, but maybe its portrayal of the challenges and struggles that come with being human will assure others in similar circumstances that they aren’t alone.

Entering the Blue Stone Summary

What happens when one’s larger-than-life military parents–disciplined, distinguished, exacting–begin sliding out of control? The General struggles to maintain his invulnerable façade against Parkinson’s disease; his lovely wife manifests a bizarre dementia. Their three grown children, desperate to save the situation, convince themselves of the perfect solution: an upscale retirement community. But as soon as their parents have been resettled within its walls, the many imperfections of its system of care begin to appear.

Charting the line between comedy and pathos, Molly Best Tinsley’s memoir, Entering the Blue Stone dissects the chaos at the end of life and discovers what shines beneath: family bonds, the dignity of even an unsound mind, and the endurance of the heart.

BOOK DETAILS
Price: $14.95 paperback, $9.99 ebook
ISBN: 9780984990818
Pages: 195
Release: May 2012

THANKS TO THE KINDNESS OF AUTHOR, MOLLY BEST TINSLEY,
I HAVE ONE (1) EBOOK EDITION OF HER MEMOIR TO GIVE AWAY.

CLICK HERE TO BRING YOU TO
GIVEAWAY ENTRY PAGE.

DISCLAIMER
No items that I receive
are ever sold…they are kept by me,
or given to family and/or friends.
ADDENDUM
I do not have any affiliation with Amazon.com,
Barnes & Noble and/or any other retail/wholesale
outlets either online and/or elsewhere.
I am providing this link solely for visitors
that may be interested in purchasing this Book/EBook.
I do not receive any monetary compensation from any parties

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Hosted by Miz B at Should Be Reading

Today’s question:
Do you set goals for yourself, while reading? For example, “I want to get this book finished this weekend“, or “I will read __ pages today“, etc. Why, or why not?

My answer:
I think this is a great question!!   I do, however, I don’t always succeed.  Because I had a very bad reading year in 2011, I wanted to try to read at least 2 books a week.  But, of course that doesn’t always happen depending on RL, size of book and Partners In Crime Tours work.  Another reason I try to put goals in place is due to the problem of not being able to say NO to a book.  At times I have more books coming in than me finishing, and then I become anxious that I am getting back logged.  I tend to be more disciplined with my goals if I sign up for a Read-A-Thon, which I have been trying to participate in more this year to reach my goal of one of my challenges, which is Outdo Yourself.

What about you?  Do you set reading goals?

June is being hosted by Alternative Read

…….of Buying America Back by Alan Uke

11 Chel Pay Tweet About the Giveaway

An email has been sent to the winner and they have 48 hours to respond with their mailing address or another winner will be chosen.  Thank you to all that entered.

Lisa from SparkPoint Studio contacted me regarding today’s guest and asked if I would read and review his book.  But since I am behind AGAIN, I disappointingly had to pass at this time.   Oh how I wish I was a speed reader.  There are just too many books I want to read and today’s guest has written one of those books.  It is definitely on my TBR list.  Welcome David Klein!!

DAVID KLEIN

David Klein is the author of the novel Stash, also published by Broadway Books, and his short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary magazines. He currently lives in upstate New York.
Visit David at his website,  on Facebook and Twitter.

GUEST POST

For Better or Worse

There really are no gray areas when it comes to traditional wedding vows. ‘For better or worse’, ‘Richer or poorer’, ‘In sickness or in health’, ‘Until death do us part.’

There’s no mistaking the intent of those vows, or the range of blissful and brutal conditions, emotions, and situations under which you promise to stay married.

In writing my most recent novel, Clean Break, I spent a long time thinking about the language of traditional marriage vows, and how those vows applied to my main character, Celeste. When the novel opens, she’s been struggling for several years with the level of commitment she “owes” her husband. The problem for Celeste is that the first years of marriage were all on the better, richer, and healthy side of the scale. But then her husband, Adam, fell under the spell of gambling. He lost all of their assets, poisoned their marriage, and emotionally damaged their young son, Spencer. And he lost his temper.

Their marriage had gone from better to worse, from health to sickness, from richer to poorer. Does Celeste really need to stick around because she’d made that promise to her husband ten years ago? The difficult question for her is whether Adam is truly ill, or has developed a nasty, addictive habit and a mean streak. You wouldn’t leave your spouse who is suffering from a disease. But you might leave that same spouse if he won’t stop a destructive behavior.

When talking to his son, Adam tries to tell Spencer he has a disease, “like grandma’s cancer,” and that the doctors are treating him so he gets better. But Celeste tells Spencer that no one chooses to get cancer, no makes a decision to get sick, yet Adam chose to gamble. He placed his bets.

Behavioral problems among adults get a lot of attention these days. In many cases, they’re positioned as addictions: gambling addiction, sex addiction, Internet addiction—you name it. Health professionals often prescribe prescription drugs to help sufferers, which some people argue serves to “medicalize” human distress or a person’s lack of accountability.

Even the mental health profession struggles in this gray area. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is used by health professionals, researchers and policy makers to identify, classify and plan treatment for mental disorders. Proposed revisions would add “gambling disorder” to alcohol and drug problems as a “substance use and addictive disorder” that insurers and others would use to make decisions about treatment and coverage.

Better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health—yes. But the gray areas that life presents? Hard to say. For Celeste, like many spouses who may be stuck in an awful situation, it’s hard to know where commitment ends and survival begins. What are your thoughts on this topic?

ABOUT THE BOOK

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Synopsis (from IndieBound):
Recently orphaned, eleven-year-old Cathy Benson feels she has been dropped into a cultural and intellectual wasteland when she is forced to move from her academically privileged life in California to the small town of Kersey in the Texas Panhandle where the sport of football reigns supreme. She is quickly taken under the unlikely wings of up-and-coming gridiron stars and classmates John Caldwell and Trey Don Hall, orphans like herself, with whom she forms a friendship and eventual love triangle that will determine the course of the rest of their lives. Taking the three friends through their growing up years until their high school graduations when several tragic events uproot and break them apart, the novel expands to follow their careers and futures until they reunite in Kersey at forty years of age. Told with all of Meacham’s signature drama, unforgettable characters, and plot twists, readers will be turning the pages, desperate to learn how it all plays out.

My Thoughts and Opinion:
This was the first time that I read the work of this author and it will not be the last. Matter of fact, I now have Roses on my TBR list. As far as Tumbleweeds, three words, I loved it!!! I have to be honest that when I received it, and saw that it was a 480 page novel, I had feelings of ambivalence about picking it up to read, as I am in the group of readers who tend to shy away from large novels.

Tumbleweeds inserts the reader into the lives of the three (3) main characters from their young age when their friendship blossomed in a small town of Kersey, Texas and continues to follow the paths they took until they were in their forties. The writing style of the author brought everything to life including all of the characters in the book, the small town where High School football reigned, the settings, the emotions palpable and perceptible as if I was sitting on the sidelines and part of this close knit community. Every page read, I became more invested into their very believable lives. In my opinion, there was absolutely no “fluff” within the 480 pages. Every word written injected me deeper into the story line and had me turning the pages. Not only did the author pen a fantastic and enjoyable saga but also included suspense that had twists and turns and an ending I didn’t see coming. This book is engrossing and “transports” the reader right into the middle of the plot, that it is a “hard to put down” read. I highly recommend this captivating novel!!

DISCLAIMER
I received a copy of this book, at no charge to me,
in exchange for my honest review.
No items that I receive
are ever sold…they are kept by me,
or given to family and/or friends.

(2012 Challenges: FreeReads, 52 in 52, Outdo Yourself, 100+)