Theresa Milstein guest blogs: How I met my husband

For the record, we were not high school sweethearts.

            Physical Education (PE) was never my favorite class. In my senior year, I found it that much more unbearable because it took place when my friends ate lunch. I skipped the class one or two more times more than I should have. The teacher made me make up the whole semester the spring before graduation.

            When I attended my first “Early Morning Gym,” another PE delinquent stood outside the door with a cup of coffee. I’d never seen him before, which wasn’t unusual since it was a large school. He looked kind of… mean in his t-shirt, flannel, and jeans. He reminded me of Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club. I avoided staring at him while we waited for the PE teacher to show up.

            Later that week, a friend in my art class introduced me to PE guy, Stu. Turns out he wasn’t as mean as he looked. We began hanging out during Early Morning Gym. During the weight unit, he and I talked until the teacher came by, and then we’d half-heartedly do a few reps. During the tennis unit, we smoked cigarettes on the court (this was a long time ago). He made me laugh and in no time, we’d begun hanging out during our free periods and even after school.

            Although Stu wasn’t my type, I found myself sort of liking him. I tried to flirt, which may have been more annoying than alluring. But he seemed to like my best friend more than me. For prom weekend, the three of us held our own anti-prom at a hotel in the Hamptons. I’d hoped he’d ask me out then, but he didn’t.

            Just as we graduated, a boy who was a year older, and more my type (a musician), asked me out. That summer, I worked at a local traveling carnival with my PE friend while I dated my boyfriend.

            At the end of the summer, my boyfriend started his new college in New Orleans. Stu and I attended local colleges. We were both trying to be better students than we’d been in high school. Most of our friends had gone away to college, and we wound up relying on one another more. He set up a second desk in his bedroom so I could study with him. I kept dating the boyfriend long distance, but I found myself more connected with PE friend than my boyfriend.

            When my boyfriend transferred to his third school and wound up living near me, I realized he wasn’t The One. He drank too much and was tight with money except when it came to transferring colleges and purchasing music equipment. One time, my boyfriend surprised me by visiting the music store where I worked. Stu was already there. I told my boyfriend that nothing was going on between Stu and me, which was true. But I was lying to him and myself about how my feelings were changing. While my boyfriend made me frustrated and brought out the worst in me, Stu made me laugh and brought out the best in me.

            Just about a year after the relationship started, I broke up with my boyfriend. I’d hoped Stu liked me too, so I looked for signs. His ex-girlfriend asked him out. He said no. Good sign. But if he was looking for good signs from me, I kept blowing them. He brought me a teddy bear from the carnival with a heart. I blurted that I didn’t like stuffed animals with hearts. Stupid me. We got tickets to see a concert. I left the bag with the tickets at home. Stupider me.

            A week later on a perfect July night, we took a walk in the park while a band played music in the background. Stu told me he liked me as more than a friend. I told him I felt the same way. He kissed me. The band stop playing and the audience applauded.

            Stu became my boyfriend.

            The next morning, flowers arrived at my house. I went from elation to disappointment. The flowers were from my ex. When he called, I had to tell him that six weeks after we’d broken up, I’d already moved on with the guy he’d been threatened by all that time. A couple of years later, the three of us wound up at the same university. Ex and I attended the same history class. No hard feelings.

            Stu and I did well in school. He majored in Biology and then earned

his PhD in Biology. Thanks to him, I was able to pass Calculus. Even though he’s my husband, we kept our friendship. He still makes me laugh. 25 years after we met, I feel lucky to wake up next to him every morning, and share a home and two children with him.

Sometimes we bring up that first year. Stu admits to not being that interested in me in the beginning, but he won’t say when his feelings changed. I can’t pinpoint a specific time either. But at some point it happened for both of us.

            And I’m glad it did.

 

Stu and Theresa Milstein

Thank you so much, Theresa for a beautifully written account of how you met Stu.

Keep up to date with all Theresa's writing adventures, by reading her blog, Theresa's Tales of Teaching Tribulation and Typing Teen Texts.

I'm delighted to announce that the first 'How-I-Met-My-Husband' post will be published on Sunday October 20th

To get the ball rolling, I wrote a post where I invited people to share their stories of how they met their husband or wife.  Theresa Milstein rose to the challenge and will be the first contributor. 

Theresa blogs at Theresa's Tales of Teaching Tribulations and Typing Teen Texts  and I very much enjoyed the excerpt from Theresa's story Saving Danger, which is in the contemporary fantasy genre.

In less than two days time, you can read Theresa's extremely well-written account of how she met her husband and how they became a couple here on Love for Beginners.

Teasers:  Theresa and her husband met in High School, but Theresa makes clear that,  "we were not high school sweethearts".

Their mutual dislike for Physical Education (PE) is integral to how they first met. 

They were long-term friends before becoming romantically involved.

There is one reference to a character in the cult-classic film The Breakfast Club.

Antonio Vivaldi Autumn

The best blog on Agatha Christie's Poirot that you'll ever find

While looking up crime writer Sophie Hannah, who has been given the go-ahead from the Christie estate to write the new Poirot novel, I found this gem of a blog, Investigating Agatha Christie's Poirot.  It's a must read for all Christie fans.


Eiric writes this blog and does a fine job of assessing the TV adaptions of Poirot. As I am a TV producer, I find his assessment of the TV versions to be very insightful.

Here is an excerpt from Eiric's take on the episode Taken at the Flood: 

Setting a distinclty 1940s novel in the 1930s isn't easy. Guy Andrews makes a series of major and minor changes to Christie's story... First, Andrews adds a subplot involving malicious phone calls to Rosaleen that was not in the novel. Second, Lionel the doctor becomes a morphine addict, and David Hunter has made Rosaleen/Eileen an addict, too. Lionel steals some of her morphine, and consequently prevents an (added) attempted suicide from her part. Third, and most importantly, Hunter deliberately impregnated Rosaleen and forced her to have an abortion. As a 'simple Catholic girl' (in Poirot's words), she was so traumatised that she would do anything he said to make it right again. Fourth, Andrews adds a suggestion of dynamite to the denouement scene (a result of making David an engineer, which I will come back to shortly). Finally, an execution scene is added, in which David Hunter is hanged while reciting 'Your Baby Has Gone Down the Plughole'....
Some of these changes are a result of the fact that the episode has been set pre-war rather than during WW2. Consequently, the script writer has tried to come up with ways of explaining the crime (in the book, the explosion was blamed on an air raid - here, it is said to be an accident, a gas explosion) and the title ('Taken at the Flood', a quotation from Shakespeare) is supposed to refer to the opportunity the air raids provide for covering up the crime...

Perhaps would-be producers of an Agatha Christie TV series, should take serious note of Eiric's reviews!

You don't have to say you love me

Another Dusty Springfield classic that I discovered on You-Tube. This song is credited with causing Dusty's star to rise, it was a #1 hit in the UK.

Anakana Schofield asks if there are too many writers and not enough readers?

Ankana Schofield, author of Malarky

Anakana Schofield has published an excellent article at The Guardian, that sparkles with wit and wisdom.
Her points show frustration, not bitterness.  Here are some of my favourite parts, which were borne from Ankana's hard-earned experience:


A debut author's publicist tells her, as every honest publicist should, the bald truth: that newspapers like personal stories. Ideally, confessional stories. Best of all: confessional stories that relate to the fiction she spent years making up. So she spends years using her imagination only to discover that she must dig about in her psychoanalytic compost heap, and retrieve something that reveals that, in fact, she has not made it up at all.

As Malarky is an exploration of grief and sexuality, such a confessional would require, say, the insertion of an anecdote about how I liked to spy on men having sex in bathhouses. This would tidily explain how (or why) I created a novel in which, among a myriad other things, an Irish mother re-enacts her gay son's love acts.

The truth is otherwise: sadly, no splashy bathhouse peeping. Instead, I sat in a library surrounded by medical students and made it up...

These days, an author, especially an unknown author, must – in order to entice any readers to her work who aren't blood relatives – write endless unpaid blogs, articles and responses for newspapers and magazines and random people creating things in basements...

 There is a general decline in the value placed on labour. The situation is comparable to other areas of the workforce, where several jobs are collapsed to one and the pay slashed. The reporter who must now shoot, edit video, audio-record and type all stories while tweeting. The security guard who is not allowed to tweet, but must also do the cleaning...

Why is there so much fuss in the media about how to write a novel – "everyone can become an author" – when the more important thing is how to read one?

 There are no adverts that instruct you to sit down, have a cup of tea and read. This, I suspect, is because there's no economic advertorial kickback from those acts...

 The author engaged in a bookshop reading event (usually unpaid) has been known to become a vessel through which other authorial fantasies can flow or ferment. Unless the moderator steers it otherwise, a Q&A can turn into a session on how that ubiquitous determined man at the back can be published. He has an email from an agent from years ago … I sympathise, but I also want to ask him: whom do you imagine will buy and read your work if you do not buy and read books?

 You can read the full article here.

Summer's ripening breath

This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath,

May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

Yeats: When we had all the summer-time

We sat under an old thorn-tree
 And talked away the night,
Told all that had been said or done
Since first we saw the light,
 And when we talked of growing up
 Knew that we'd halved a soul
And fell the one in t'other's arms
That we might make it whole;
Then peter had a murdering look,
For it seemed that he and she
Had spoken of their childish days
Under that very tree.
 O what a bursting out there was,
And what a blossoming,
We sat under an old thorn-tree
And talked away the night,
Told all that had been said or done
Since first we saw the light,
And when we talked of growing up
Knew that we'd halved a soul
And fell the one in t'other's arms
That we might make it whole;
Then peter had a murdering look,
For it seemed that he and she
Had spoken of their childish days
Under that very tree.
O what a bursting out there was,
And what a blossoming,
When we had all the summer-time
And she had all the spring!
And she had all the spring!

A Man Young And Old: VIII. Summer And Spring by William Butler Yeats

Percy Bysshe-Shelley: 'all things rejoiced beneath the sun, the weeds, the river and the cornfields'

To simultaneously celebrate summer and poetry, I am posting poems that will tempt our creative powers and prompt us to reach higher levels of literary greatness. Do you have a favourite poem about summer?

You can make a smaller book cover image to use as your blog background

You have found the right artist to design your book cover. You debate the characteristics of the cover. Sketch follows sketch until you get the perfect cover. They send a file with the cover. You think it would be a great asset in marketing the book if you were to put the cover as your blog background. But your blog provider tells you that your file is, ‘too big’.
1. Use the Resize function in Windows Paint to create a smaller size version of the book cover image for the blog background.
2. You’ll want the maximum resolution that Blogger allows for quality purposes.

Here is some relevant info from the Blogger Team: “If you want a full-screen background, we recommend using an image that's 1800 pixels wide and 1600 pixels high, so that the background image can fill the entire screen even for the readers with large monitors. To make sure your blog loads quickly, background images must be small in file size. As the maximum file size you can upload is 300KB, you may need to reduce your photo’s file size using Photoshop, Mac OS X Preview, or one of many free online tools. You can also tile a smaller image, but keep in mind that patterns work better than photographs, which can make your blog look cluttered.”
The point about photographs applies to more generic blogs that use a lot of photos in their posts and thus there is confusion between the posts and the background. This may not apply to literary blogs that have more text than visuals in the body of the blog.

Earlier Sketch of Book Cover designed and executed by Chiara Castagna

Thank you to technology-expert Alex B for your advice in making a cover smaller so that it can be used as a blog background.

Love Sketches. An early cover for Love for Beginners

A very talented artist friend of mine, Chiara Castagna has been doing sketches for the book cover of Love for Beginners. Here is one sketch of Anna-the-main-character, which really captures her warm, open and generous personality. The final cover will be revealed nearer to the book's publication, later during this month of June. Also, I've been trying to use this cover as a background to my blog, but the good people at Blogger tell me that it's 'too big'. Does anyone know anything about making the file smaller? A type of make-a-file-smaller-for-beginners, would be much appreciated.

See This Post for modifying a book cover image so it can be used as a blog background. 

Fire red? Grass green? Which colour of the background of blog title?

At this time of writing, I have changed the colour of the background on the blog title several times. From every shade of crimson to yellow-brick-road, to verdant green and now to a dark red. Red is the univeral colour of passion, but green is a colour associated with romantic naivete.

'Green' is an older term for someone who is naive and easily fooled. The core characters are 'clueless' about love, are confounded about how to manage their relationship and the protagonist, Anna, is definitely naive when it comes to emotional attachments, until she learns hard lessons.

Every detail of design on this blog is meant to be symbolic of some theme in my book, Love for Beginners. To reflect the fact that the characters in the novel are mainly Irish-born but making a new life for themselves in London, it makes sense to reflect their Irishness by trumping the colour green. I may return to the mossy green shades. 

Your opinion needed - which photo do you prefer?

To me, the two photos look dire and self-besotted.

< This photo has become my face on the internet - for Facebook, Google, Blogger & Twitter. A friend took it on a night out - when we were enjoying a joke about my preference for 'sheep-hair' men who have curls so thick that it's hard to imagine putting your hand in and getting it out easily. I'm smiling, and suppressing a giggle! It's a good 'un for social networking because it looks gleeful, and as though I'm inviting people to share in the fun.

< Or, this one which was taken during my birthday, in a softly lit Yorkshire pub. You can't see the wrinkles around my eyes like in the crisper one above. But it does have the look of a 1970's photo because of the photo quality. Were I to use this as my profile pic, someone might think I was a 60-something woman trying to pretend that she was in her twenties! But maybe its hazy, romantic quality is appropriate for a blog-about-a-novel that is entitled  

Love for Beginners.