Book feature with Rebecca Tsaros Dickson, author of Say My Name

Indie Book Promo is happy to welcome Rebecca Tsaros Dickson to the blog. She is the author of Say My Name, a novella. If this sounds like a book you’re interested in, please use the links at the bottom of the post to pick up a copy or two.

A tale of two lovers in their 40s coming to terms with their true feelings after decades of unrequited passion. Anyone who has ever loved, lost and held out hope in spite of it all will see a piece of themselves in this novella – and it may not be easy to face.

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Out of nowhere, three weeks ago, I picked up the phone to the sound of his soft, dewy inflection drawing out my name. My knees buckled, inflaming the itch at the back of my neck. He didn’t have to identify himself. I knew. This man’s hands encircled my hips like so many chains of love.

Then he cleared his throat and said the thing: “I have AIDS.”

Bio:

Rebecca Tsaros Dickson writes. Because it’s what she knows.

Stints as a reporter for two daily newspapers, which included two Presidential Primary races, taught her the value of a well-chosen word. She left journalism in 2006 to play Momma, but instead found herself filling blank pages (hundreds) while the kids napped.

Her first book was released in November 2010. The collection of short stories, aptly titled “I Could Tell You Stories,” was released with its own playlist and a boatload of art. Her newest release, “Say My Name,” began as an experiment on her blog. A fictional story about high school lovers who reconnect in their 40s, it rides the edge of life’s toughest moments. It aims at teaching us how we interact as people through voyeuristic scenes of love and loss. And it is raw with emotion, a style which began with “I Could Tell You Stories.”

Her new project, temporarily dubbed “Don’t Ruin my Life: Crap my kids say” is in the works. Becky lives with people – and too many dogs – in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire. For now, it’s where she belongs.

Follow Rebecca on … Facebook   •   Twitter   •   Blog

Purchase ‘Say My Name’ here:  US Amazon   •   UK Amazon 

Excerpt:

I can say definitively now that what I blamed on neurons and synapses was actually perfection. The stuff I prescribed to nothing more than chemicals was actually a kind of affection I haven’t felt in the decades since. My intellect could not fathom that love was found so easily, so soon. I thought this was a preview of what was to come. That somehow, the real thing would make this look like a schoolgirl crush. Because I was a schoolgirl. A wise man once said, “Just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”

In my small mind, not only had John left me for the Marines, but he’d come back for one night – long enough to rekindle all my hope – and then disappeared again. I stopped answering his letters. When I graduated from college, I meticulously packed every scrap of my life into a small box truck and drove it into the forests up north, leaving specific instructions for my family that no one should be told where I had gone. It was me and a cat named Cleo, and the mountains I loved so much.

It was also a feigned independence. In reality, I was behaving like a girl who carved the word ‘love’ in her arm with a butter knife – because it’s such a pretty word that causes so much pain.

What I remember most about those early days was the snow. It made my landscape look picture-book solid and comforting, for the first time in a long time. I used to sit on the ground outside the old Victorian I rented and watch the chimneys exhale their smoke into the black-laced trees, a nearly invisible texture. The effect was sedative-like.

My whole life, I’d been in love with fall. The changing colors in the trees, shorter days and crisp nights. I liked to pull up a duvet of fallen leaves, celebrate the harvest and breathe in dandelion seeds. I tried so hard to live before the dormancy of the cold set in.

But that year, I learned about winter. The casting off of what’s no longer needed, outgrown, weakened. Not just a time to hunker indoors and wait for the worst to pass. I learned that the frigid temperatures are solely responsible for our blooms come spring.

I had, inside me, the power to write my own fortune.