Ruthie Deschutes O'Hara has Ulterior Motives is out TODAY

This is a book for people who believe in love at any age and who like to laugh

A lot changed in my life from mid-2023 into early 2024.

There was so much beauty, and a hundred things to be grateful for, and yet one person created a devastating event.

Out of that beauty and the devastating event, my new book, Ruthie Deschutes O’Hara has Ulterior Motives, appeared. Word by word, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter.

At that time, feeling like I was walking on charred embers, I needed someone like Ruthie in my life - entertaining, funny, totally herself, flamboyant, sincerely kind and compassionate, someone who might drink too much tequila now and then, dance with abandon, and take wild dares.

I needed someone I wanted to be.

I also needed someone who would fully, humorously occupy my mind as I felt both deeply hurt and utterly betrayed. I was grappling with a ton of anger that I really rarely feel. I don’t like being angry. I like to be chill. I like to be cool about life, the ups and the downs.

Anger, I truly believe, is corrosive to the soul and terrible for your physical health. I didn’t want to be angry. It is not part of who I am.

I knew I had to fix my life.

So I started running more than I usually do. I have run at least three times a week for decades. In fact, I have run (slowly) most of my life. But this time I started running more, and harder, to calm my brain down, and I used this peaceful forest by my home to pound out the anger.

The forest I run in that keeps my brain calmed down.

And I wrote. First I wrote Ten Kids, Two Lovebirds, and a Singing Mermaid.

As soon as that was done, I started writing Ruthie Deshutes O’Hara has Ulterior Motives.

Call it writing therapy. I highly recommend it.

This is my garden. When I’m covered head to foot in dirt I call it gardening therapy.

Writers get to know their characters very, very well. You live with them for months or years. When I write my books I sit down and it’s like I’ve got a movie running through my mind. All I have to do is write what I’m seeing and hearing.

I watched Ruthie and the outrageous things she did and said and how she felt. She took me away from my own life and the anger I was trying so, so hard to get rid of before it ate me alive. She made me laugh - all the time.

I think Ruthie is one of my most clear, distinctive characters, ever, and I have written hundreds of characters. I knew her immediately. It was like she was waiting for me to let her loose on the page.

Books and flowers will always go well together.

I think we all need certain types of people at different times of our lives to help us get through something awful, to move forward, to leave a painful past in the past and find our joy again.

And being immersed in this story, in Ruthie’s fictional life, gave me that.

I made Ruthie an English teacher because my late mother, who died in 2002 of cancer, was an English teacher. Ruthie and my mother are the same in some ways, and hugely different in others. They would have been great friends. (Minus the straight shots of tequila for my mother.)

I think I needed to bring a little bit of my lovely, wise, graceful mother back into my life, through Ruthie, to gently yank me out of the zinging bat-filled cave I was in and into the blue sky of where I needed to be…

…which is where I am now.

Much better. Much happier. Running a lot. Still grateful. Appreciating the beautiful people around me. Ready to fly again.

I wish I had rainbow wings like this.

Most importantly: No anger.

If you would like to read about the woman who pulled me through a difficult patch of my life, you might like Ruthie Deschutes O’Hara has Ulterior Motives.

I promise you’ll laugh, because that’s what I needed to do while writing it.

Have a good day. Wishing you all the best.

Available only on Amazon.

Link:

Ruthie Deschutes O'Hara has Ulterior Motives