VIOLET AND THE MISSING LAPTOP by R.A.P. Smolen

Chapter One: The Odd Occurrence

Violet awoke to her sister’s petrifying squeal. “Where is my laptop?” Her little sister, Olivia, was deaf and didn’t always realize how loud her voice was, especially first thing on Monday morning.

Violet untangled her arms from her comfy comforter and signed, “I don’t know where your laptop is.”

“If you’re lying, you’re dying,” she screeched and ran from the room.

Violet sat up and put on her glasses. How odd, she thought. Olivia never misplaced her laptop. It was a special computer with video lessons on it so she could be homeschooled. Violet often complained about how unfair it was that her younger sibling got her own laptop when she didn’t. To that, she was always told that she wasn’t homeschooled.

She got out of bed and dressed in her school uniform, topping it with her safety squad belt. She ran a comb through her always-messy hair and hurried toward the smell of bacon and hot cinnamon rolls.

Olivia was already in the kitchen. Her eyes were red with crying, and Grandma was patting her head, trying to comfort her.

“Morning,” Violet said. “Can I frost the cinnamon rolls?”

“Are you certain you haven’t seen The Little One’s laptop?” Grandma asked.

Violet hated it when she called Olivia that. Olivia was seven years old, not a baby. She raised her hand. “On my honor.”

“That’s odd.” Grandma popped the rolls onto a plate.

Violet spread the icing evenly with a butter knife. “Have you heard from Mom and Dad? Are they coming to my birthday party on Saturday?” Her parents were in the military. She hadn’t seen them since Christmas.

Grandma divided scrambled eggs between three plates. “Even if they can’t, you’ll turn eleven all the same.”

“Yes, but—” Violet swallowed her words. It was no one’s fault, she reminded herself. It was just the way it was.

They sat to a breakfast of bacon, eggs, and cinnamon rolls.

Olivia sniffled the whole time. When they finished eating, she bawled, “No one cares about my laptop. I had my homework on it and everything.”

Grandma patted her hand, and then signed, “I’m sure it will turn up.”

But it didn’t. They went from room to room, looking under beds and between the sofa cushions. Olivia’s laptop wasn’t anywhere.

“When was the last time you saw it?” Violet asked her.

“Yesterday. When your friends were here.”

Violet nodded. Her best friends, Alice and Samantha, slept over on Saturday and went home after lunch on Sunday. She signed, “That must be when you were trying to get our attention by reading real loud.”

“I just wanted to be part of your play date.”

“It wasn’t a play date, it was a hang date.” Violet rolled her eyes. “And you’re too young to hang with us.”

“Meanie!”

“Now, now,” Grandma signed. “I wish you girls would get along.”

“I have to go,” Violet told them. “I’ll be late.”

Grandma kissed her forehead. “Have a good day.”

Violet picked up her backpack and went out through the porch, letting the door slam behind her. The day was warm; it was always warm in Florida, even in winter. She crossed the parking lot of her grandmother’s condo and saw Alice waiting for her at the corner. Alice’s hair was like straw sticking straight out from her head in two pigtails. She also wore a safety patrol belt.

“Hurry up,” Alice called. “I can’t wait all day.”

Violet laughed and ran to catch up. “Sorry. My sister lost her laptop. I was helping look for it.”

“That’s odd,” Alice said. “Olivia never goes anywhere without her laptop. But why do you care? I thought you hated it.”

“I don’t hate it. Not exactly. I just don’t think it’s fair, that’s all.”

“Oh.” She shrugged. “Did you watch Anubis last night?”

“Yes. Wasn’t it amazing?”

“I wonder what will happen next.”

“I have no idea,” Violet said.

They acted out the television show, changing their voices to match those of their favorite characters. Before long, they arrived at Forest Ridge Elementary School. Usually they got there before anyone else, but they were late. Kids ran everywhere, and a long line of cars snaked through the parking lot. They hurried into the building and joined the rest of the safety patrol.

“Wow,” said Newton, flipping pages on his clipboard. “I was just about to mark you two as absent.”

“No, we’re here,” Alice told him.

Mrs. Spitz clapped her hands for attention. “Patrollers to your posts.”

The squad scattered like a bag full of tennis balls. Violet’s position was at the playground door. She passed the cafeteria, holding her breath so she wouldn’t catch the warm-milk smell. A group of kids stood by the drinking fountain. Violet nearly groaned when she saw it was Red Harry and his friends.

Red Harry had red hair that clashed with anything he wore. He stood a head taller than all the other kids in school. Some people thought he was fat. Maybe that was true in kindergarten, but Violet knew he went to martial arts class three times a week. He wasn’t fat anymore. He was just plain big.

“Don’t you want a drink of water?” Red Harry said, not noticing her. “Come on. I’ll help you.”

He pressed his thumb against the fountain, causing a stream to spray onto the floor. His friends laughed at a boy who dodged the water. Petey Underwood. He was always getting teased.

Violet stepped forward. “That’s enough, Red Harry.”

He pretended to be afraid. “Cheese it! The cops!” He’d been saying that to her ever since he saw an old gangster movie.

“Go back to the cafeteria or I will report you.”

“I’m allowed to get a drink of water.”

“You’re not allowed to pick on younger students. Now get moving.”

“What a grouch,” Red Harry said, making his audience laugh again. They followed him into the cafeteria like a row of ducks.

She looked at Petey. “Are you all right?”

“Just wet.” He showed her where the water splashed his pants.

“You might as well go to class.” She went into the girls’ bathroom, grabbed a handful of paper towels, and returned. Petey still stood there. She dropped the sheets of paper towel one by one over the puddles on the floor. “You know, Petey, you’ve got to start standing up for yourself.”

“What do you want me to do, fight him?”

“Of course not.” Violet remembered something her father told her. “Bullies want to make people afraid. If you show them that you aren’t afraid, they stop. Find someone else.” She picked up the wet paper towels then faced him. “You should have walked away like he didn’t matter to you at all, gotten your drink at the fountain by the office.”

“Oh,” Petey said, looking thoughtful.

“I have to go.” She tossed the towels in the wastebasket in the Girls Room and hurried to the playground door. Nothing interesting ever happened there, but she waited patiently until the bell rang. Then she went to class.

Like what you read so far? Buy Violet and the Missing Laptop at Amazon, only $4.99 for the paperback and $1.49 for Kindle.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

I wrote this middle-grade book with the help of my granddaughters, aged seven and ten. They created the characters and plotted the entire book during our brainstorming sessions. I wrote the actual words, but they were changed many times over by the girls’ edits. It’s truly their book. When the story was right, they illustrated it, and we published with Create Space under the pen name R.A.P. Smolen (Roxanne, Aurora, and Persephone Smolen.) It was quite a learning experience for all of us. I hope you’ll buy the book for the kid in your life.

Do you swear, cuss, and curse? When you speak, does the air turn blue around you?

I have friends who never swear, and some who swear only when the occasion calls for it. I have other friends who punctuate every single sentence with profanity. Kind of like Dexter’s sister, Deb, on the television show. I myself have been known to string a few choice words together, usually under stress. I try to watch myself around the kids ever since the time my young grandson blasted me with a barrage of expletives that caught my hair on fire.

In spite of that, I teach my children that shit and damn aren’t bad words. Words are tools, and profanity is a poor choice to get the job done. Case in point is my friend who drops the F bomb whether he’s angry, happy, sad, or amused. The word itself does little to clarify his meaning.

This brings me to my point. As writers, we are taught to cut nonessential words. Redundancy is density, and brevity is bliss, my teacher used to say. If you can take out a word without changing the meaning of the sentence, do it.

But what do you do in a day and age when every other word is F or GD? We want our characters’ dialogue to sound natural and believable, don’t we? Beyond that, we want their words to exemplify them. Characterize them. A sailor should talk like a sailor, right?

Or is that the easy way out? When does such stereotypic profiling become just plain boring? No one likes to read the same words over and over, and even foul language loses its shock value after a while. Yet how are we supposed to get the picture across to our readers? Don’t tell me we actually have to put emotion into our dialogue.

Profanity is a poor tool. Profanity is a fact of life. What’s a writer to do? We can substitute pretend words such as the laughable and endearing frakk, but in the end the trap is the same. Brevity is bliss. I wish I had the goddamned answer.

Simply put, a QR code (or quick response code) is a little box with black squiggles on it. You’ve probably seen them on the back of ketchup bottles or in newspaper ads. I’ve even noticed them in storefront windows. It seems they are everywhere.

If your smart phone has a QR Code reader, all you need to do is point your phone at the little box, and voila, a website will appear on your phone. The website can give you more information about the product or take you directly to a buy page. I’ve gotten free music samples and book samples from QR Codes. They make great promotional tools.

Where Can You Get a QR Code?

QR codes are free! You can get your own at Kaywa or qrstuff. Then just type in the URL where you want users to go and click generate. Copy and paste the html code into your website or blog. Or save the .jpg to use on bookmarks, etc.

What Can You Do with a QR Code?

Get creative! You can put a QR code on your business cards or postcards. If you are going to a conference, print one on the back of pamphlets or bookmarks to hand out. (I always put leftover bookmarks in with my bills.) Have return address labels printed with your QR code instead of your book cover. Make up a flyer for your book and have the QR code point to where someone could buy your book, then leave a stack at your local comic book store or even in your favorite pizza parlor if you’re friendly with the owner. A bumper sticker would be great, especially if you get stuck in traffic a lot. Or print the QR code on a window cling for your car or home.

There are any number of creative uses for QR codes. I’d love to hear your ideas.

I was cleaning out a filing cabinet in the hope of getting it to actually close again, and I came across a folder with over 1000 rejection letters. I could tell from the dates which project I was working on at the time. Email wasn’t prominent yet. These were from the day when you actually constructed a personable letter, sent it snail mail, and received a poorly printed form letter in return.

Why had I kept them? Were they badges of my failure? No, not at all. I’d heard once that it took 100 no’s to get a yes. I kept them so I could count them to see how much closer I was getting to my goal. Each rejection was one step closer to yes.

But keeping a sun-will-come-out-tomorrow attitude isn’t easy. Sometimes each rejection feels like a stab at the heart. I put so much energy into my writing, there’s so much ME there, it’s hard not to take rejection personally.

And I had so much hope when I mailed the thing out.

When I first started in this business, I would write the best query letter I could and mail-merge it to fifty agents at a time. Mail-merge simply took the body of the letter, addressed it from my database, and changed the salutation from Dear Sir to Dear So-and-So. That is not the best practice, not only because if two of those agents compared notes over lunch they would see I sent them both the same letter (like that would happen) but because query letters should evolve. People may be rejecting merely my query, not my novel. Or so I told myself. So I started sending out queries five at a time. As the rejections came in, I fine-tuned my letter and sent it back out.

For me, that seemed the only way to deal with it. Hope is but a query letter away. As one came back, I would content myself with the knowledge that four others were out there. I’d stick the reject in my folder to be counted later.

Today, of course, queries and rejects are all done electronically. I send out my email and when it comes back I log the reject on Excel. I think sending a query via email makes it even easier to reject. Having a busy day? Just go down the list and delete, delete, delete. I’m grateful to the agents and publishers who take the time to respond. It’s those outstanding queries that can drive you crazy.

I still count my rejections. My goal is to receive a certain amount of rejects a year. That shifts my focus to submitting my work rather than getting it published. I commit to submitting 101 times. It takes 100 no’s. But it isn’t easy.

If you can’t stand to see another NO, there are services out there that will submit and collect your rejections for you. Writers Relief is a good place to start, but there are others.

Rejection is NOT failure. Giving up on your dream is failure. And really, you don’t want all those people who said no anyway. You want someone who is as passionate and excited about your book as you are.

Don’t give up.

The city of St. Augustine is listed in the National Directory of Haunted Places. Did you know that St. Augustine is the oldest city in America? It was founded in 1565. The city has beautiful, historic buildings and homes that are painstakingly preserved right down to the original residents.

If you are a paranormal newbie, you should consider taking one of St. Augustine’s many haunted tours. You might enjoy the Ghost Tour (voted the best guided tour in Florida) or the Paranormal Investigation Tour at Potter’s Wax Museum. Or try the afterhours paranormal tour, Dark of the Moon, which takes you into the super haunted St. Augustine Lighthouse.

A more seasoned paranormal investigator might skip St. Augustine’s touristy tours and head straight for the old jail and gallows where several of the original prisoners are still hanging around. The old schoolhouse and the chapel are also good bets for ghostly encounters. The adventurous might spend the night in the Huguenot Cemetery, a place where orbs abound, so be sure to bring a camera.

If St. Augustine is not your destination, there are other haunted spots in Florida to investigate. Like The Good Shepherd Hospice in Auburndale or The Old Courthouse in Bartow. Plan a stay at the Vinoy Hotel in St. Petersburg, which is said to be immensely haunted. Or if you’re visiting Jensen Beach, stop for a coke at Tuckahoe, The Leach Mansion.

One not-to-miss spot is the Cassadaga Hotel, which is famous for its orbs and spirit sightings. Don’t forget your camera.

The hotel is smack in the middle of the Psychic Capital of the World, Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp. If you are more interested in speaking to spiritualists than to spirits, this is the place for you. The town is populated by certified mediums, healers, sensitives, and astrologers. They believe everyone is psychic—that means you, too—and hold public classes to bring out latent talents.

The townsfolk of Cassadaga are a deeply religious people who follow the nine principles of spiritualism:

1. We believe in God.
2. We believe that God is expressed through all Nature.
3. True religion is living in obedience to Nature’s Laws.
4. We never die.
5. Spiritualism proves that we can talk with people in the Spirit World.
6. Be kind, do good, and others will do likewise.
7. We bring unhappiness to ourselves by the errors we make and we will be happy if we obey the laws of life.
8. Everyday is a new beginning.
9. Prophecy and healing are expressions of God.

The town began as a community of tents in 1894 and slowly grew to more permanent wooden cabins. Today, Cassadaga looks like any small town. The homes are quaint, and the parks are tranquil. The best way to find your personal spiritual counselor is to walk down the streets (which are always eerily quiet) and wait to feel a vibration or see an aura around a particular house. Then just walk right up and knock. Both believers and skeptics are welcome.

Before you book that flight to Florida, you should consider packing more than your bathing suit. All paranormal investigators use tools, and you should, too.

A good EMF detector will measure the strength and direction of electromagnetic fields as well as magnetic waves and radio microwaves. Paranormal events cause fluctuations in electrical fields, and a gaussmeter will verify that you’ve touched another realm.

A basic infrared thermometer gun will certify sudden drops in temperature. Sensations of extreme cold are often reported during spirit visits.

You should have a digital voice recorder. Not for quick memos to me but to record creaks, bangs, and voices from beyond.

Also, invest in a low lux digital camcorder. It needs to be low lux because your research might take place in the dark, and you’ll need a camera that can function with little or no light.

Publish your findings on YouTube or a blog, and your followers will clamor for more.

If you’d rather experience paranormal activity from the comfort of your home, you might enjoy a good book. My novel, Satan’s Mirror, follows Emily Goodman, a paranormal investigator, from St. Augustine, Florida, to Hell. Buy it now!

Let’s face it–the only time you need an author’s website is when someone already knows about you and wants to learn more. No one gets up in the morning and says, “Hmm, I think I’ll search for authors I never heard of.” That said, an author’s website can be one of your most important promotional tools.

Creating a website doesn’t have to be the daunting experience you imagine. Don’t know HTML? No problem. There are many free websites that will handle that for you. I’ve used www.about.me,   www.yola.com and www.weebly.com. All three are terrific, but Weebly is a little easier to use. It has a great toolbar. Want to have a photo surrounded by text? Just drag the icon onto your page, click inside the text box, and start typing.

Before you create your first author’s website, you have decisions to make. Of course, it’s all about making the sale, but are you selling the author or the books? If you’re selling the author, be prepared to get personal and give away a little about yourself. If you’re selling books, be aware of tone. You don’t want to try to sell vampire books on a site decorated with butterflies.

Here are some themes to consider:

1. All About You – Introducing yourself as a real person is a fine choice for beginning writers. Your homepage should feature your photo and bio. While writing your bio, don’t just give a list of facts, i.e. I was born here, I went to school there. Tell people who you are and what you believe. How did you get where you are today? Give an amusing anecdote. As an example, here is the website I created with Weebly: www.roxannesmolen.weebly.com
2. Your Books – Established novelists might want the focus of their website to be on their work. This theme has pictures of book covers with links to where the books can be purchased prominent on the homepage. If you’re a poet or a short story author, you can link to journals where your work has been published. But keep in mind that web surfers are drawn to images, so if your poem is about a tree, post an image of a tree beside it. As an example of this theme, here is the website I created with Yola: www.moonroxinc.yolasite.com
3. Your Blog – Using a blog as a homepage has its advantages. For one thing, every time you post a new entry your website is refreshed, which is good for search engines. Also, if you gain a following, you can use those numbers in your next query letter. There are many free blog sites to choose from, such as www.tumblr.com, www.blogger.com, and www.wordpress.com. Out of those three, I found WordPress to be the easiest to use. You’re on my WordPress blog right now: www.moonrox.wordpress.com. If you decide to use your blog as your website, here are five points to check off: Know your audience, Post consistently (blogging twenty times a month generates sales), Don’t pitch, Use pictures and funny headlines, Add social share buttons to every post.

One of the worst things an author can do is to let their website fall stagnant. As I mentioned before, search engines love fresh content, and so do readers. Keep your website up-to-date with your book signings and appearances. Import your Twitter feed. I’m sure you can think of dozens of creative ways to keep the conversation about you.

Also, be aware that it’s not only potential readers who want to see your website. You know how you check out a publisher’s site before submitting? Well, after they receive your submission, they check you out, too. As you maintain your website, you should consider what a publisher or agent wants to see.

So what are you waiting for? Create an author’s website you can be proud of. Nowadays, having a website is as expected as having a business card. And you do carry business cards, don’t you? With QR codes?