Posts Tagged: Karen G berry
The Iris Files is Live!
My novel is up at Amazon, and I’m THRILLED with my final cover.
Yes, the desperate housewife is out and ready to make you laugh. And, maybe, cry a little. I’m excited to have an author interview in here, and book group discussion questions, and I love my beautiful cover that shows Reba, the matriarch of Iris’s little clan of wiener dogs.
See it here: The Iris Files: Notes from a Desperate Housewife
The Iris Files: Notes from a Desperate Housewife is on the way.
Yes, I’m going to make a book announcement about The Iris Files. Yes, it’s actually going to be called The Iris Files: Notes from a Desperate Housewife. Yes, I’ll talk more about that book in a minute. But first, I want to talk about…
My yard
I never wanted a yard, but I have one. I wanted a big house on a small lot, but my ex-husband wanted the reverse and he won. But then he left, and here I am on this junior acre, twenty years later. My yard is TERRIBLE. Various broken stragglers lean here and there like emaciated beggars in a third world city, begging to be pruned or moved or just dug up and put out of their misery. I’m not a yardwork person, and so this is just how it’s going to be until I give up and buy a condo.
Iris History
As I mentioned, I still live in the house I bought with my ex-husband. He was my second husband, and I have this tendency to call him my ex-husband, instead of my second ex-husband. It’s embarrassing to have two of those, and since he is the father of my children, he’s the ex-husband who counts. So he is heretofore referred to as my ex-husband.
Back when we bought this house, it had minimal landscaping. It was basically Kentucky Bluegrass (a terrible choice for Oregon) bordered by long channels of red lava rock. Like a military base. The only flowers were bearded irises. MASSES of bearded irises, rising in a long line up the walkway. Yellow, purple, maroon, with a few of the purple and white, blooming madly and emitting their toothpaste smell as I went to my front door. They were not my kind of flower—I prefer the more delicate wild iris—but the bearded blooms have a certain acromegalic majesty. Our iris display was dramatic enough to draw commentary from passers by.
More Yard Nonsense
Over the six years that my ex and I shared this home, we tried valiantly to find plants and flowers that would thrive in the horrible clay soil of our yard. We added some rhodies, which still wither in the reflective heart of the driveway to this day. We tried roses, which have somehow survived the heinous neglect I have subjected them to. Neighbors gave us gorgeous white calla lily bulbs, which did fine for years. But of course, like irises, lilies must be unearthed and divided now and then. Guess who didn’t do that after her husband moved out? That’s right. The death of the irises is all my fault.
But not all the Irises have died!
Some years after my divorce, I wrote a book about a woman named Iris. It’s about a failing marriage, and I probably thought it was too personal to publish. No, my name is not Iris. I do not have five children, nor do I have four dogs. But in too many ways, it is the most personal book I will ever write. And it is going live soon.
The Iris Files: Notes from a Desperate Housewife
The Iris Files is coming out for these reasons:
- Because my progress with the new Orcas book is slow and steady, even after my co-author’s magnificent SFWA reading of the first chapter had them roaring with laughter the other night.
- Because it is Sue’s favorite.
- Because I am impatient with a much larger project, basically my life’s writing project, that will hopefully arrive this fall. I needed an interim project to give my mind something to work
onover like a bone. - Because I can.
I will soon have a cover and a link for preorder and all the things one must have in order to make a book real. Until then, read something else and pray for my yard. Thanks.
To All the Other Karen Berrys from Karen Berry
I am Karen Berry. And, oh, all you other Karen Berrys, there are so many of you. I mean, just do a google image search for Karen Berry. I don’t even pop up until the fifth or sixth row, where a slightly distorted photo of me announces my inclusion in the Impractical Cats anthology (a tiny book I absolutely love, where all the poetry is in the shape of cats–mine is called “Murder”). I pop up again a few rows down in my glasses, linked to MyWriting.network. But in between are all the other Karen Berrys of the world, with all their different ages and hair lengths and smiles and professions. And guess what?
They all accidentally use my Gmail address.
Oh yes, Karen Berrys of the world, I get your email. I get your purchase receipts from New Seasons. I get your notes from worried committee members who need to find out about community service options. I get your worship leader schedules and your prayer chain reminders. I get your sternly instructive letters from your Doms. I get your heartfelt letters from long-lost fathers, and four different letters from one mother, who, when I write her back to tell she’s not writing to her daughter, she writes me again to tell me about the funny lady who keeps writing back to her. I get reminders from your dentist.
I get lists of Florida events from Ticketmaster, and no matter how many times I go in there and change my preferences to Portland, the opera and indie-folk concerts, I continue to get notifications about Florida, monster truck rallies and Toby Keith concerts. Karen Berry in Florida, you have the WORST TASTE in entertainment events.
I get an impressive amount of soccer-related email meant for a Karen Berry in Virginia, who has a son named Ryan. Four or five emails a day, inviting me to enroll my son Ryan in camps where he can be seen by the best college soccer coaches in the country. I wonder, sometimes, if Ryan is disappointed not to be contacted by any of these coaches. I bet Ryan wonders why no one sends him any notifications about soccer camps when he so diligently signed up using his mother’s email.
Except, of course, he didn’t. He used mine.
These are some of the professions of the other Karen Berrys: lawyer, nurse, eye doctor, coffee shop proprietor, nun, private investigator, student, nurse, horse trainer, college professor, college student, summer camp administrator. Those other Karen Berrys belong to gyms that want to talk about membership cards, and they sign up for marathon training clubs, and they purchase extended appliance warranties that are on the verge of expiring right now unless immediate action is taken. One of them is looking to buy a home somewhere in England and there are realtors who send listings in Bristol with the price listed in pounds, using a cool symbol that I don’t even have on my computer keyboard.
One Karen Berry has a son that periodically needs payday loans, resulting in a sporadic barrage of email from shysters who want to loan me money at exorbitant rates. I have received banking documents, employment documents, documents that contain names, birthdates and social security numbers. When this happens, I send them right back, letting the sender know that he or she has just sent this sensitive information to an absolute stranger. Then I delete, delete. It’s gone. Someone else might not be so careful.
I will never know, other Karen Berrys, if you are the problem here. I will never know if it is you who enters my email instead of your own while paying for your organic pork chops, or if it’s an error on the part of the person who is entering your email from a form. I don’t know who to blame. Back when it first happened, and I had more time to screw off in my life, I would occasionally write back and pretend to be a different Karen Berry. I admit it, I was a prankster. But there are simply too many of you to prank at this point. I only very occasionally reply, and it’s to tell someone they didn’t reach the Karen Berry they wanted. Usually, I unsubscribe, I filter, I block.
But there are so many of you other Karen Berrys. And I’m glad beat you all to the punch with Gmail.
Most of the time.
