T.P.R.

I was reading a message on a loop today and they were mentioning the stories of survivors of Nazi Germany. It made me think about the importance of writing as a means to record history. We don't think about it when we write a contemporary story, but we're recording society as it is.
We record the dress, food, slang, what our houses and communities look like and what is important to us, even the type of crimes that might be in the news today and our social mores. I think romance books do a very good job in this respect.
I once gave a blood transfusion to a woman who was a survivor of the second world war and had been in a concentration camp. According to her she was used in an experiment which left her with blood problem and so had to get transfusions. Some of the survivors wouldn't talk about their experiences because it was too painful for them, but the ones who did left the listeners with an indelible impression. What if we were to tell all these survivors that what they said was unimportant and shouldn't be told? How much we would be missing of history.

T.P.R.

I was thrilled today to receive a contract for a short story for the new Love Stories magazine to be published by GrassRoots Publishing. I'll keep typing with my fingers crossed until it actually comes out. I wish the publishing company the best of luck on their new pub.

Hello,
It's quiet in the house for a little while, so I can concentrate on the story I am beginning. It will be a romance/mystery of a sort. Mysteries are fun because you have to figure out what persons can be suspects, why they hated the person who was murdered and how you can make it look like they were the ones who "did" it. They are also pretty hard to do, as I'm finding out now. As usual there will be medical personnel involved.
At the same time I'm still mulling over the long story I wrote about the student nurses. I pretty much have decided to draw out some of the stories in it and use them to write another story. This could go on
forever. Too bad I'm not younger.
Well, there's lots to do today so I'd better get some coffee and start. Have a good day. Ann

T.P.R.

The letters, T.P.R. stand for temperature, pulse, respiration. That's what nurses did all the time when I was working in a hospital. We had regular times when we went around taking everyone's temperatures, pulses, and respirations. The more critical patients had their T.P.R.s done more often.
In between times, I wrote. I was editor of the school newspaper in my first year of nursing school.
My love of story telling began when I was a pre-teen and helped to watch a toddler. Another girl and I would make up stories to entertain him.
In junior high school I had a column in the school paper I named "Flash". I went around every month and tried to get information and news to put into my column. In high school I helped out on the year book staff. I loved my English lit. class.
In college, after nursing school I took quite a few English and writing classes, which I enjoyed.
Life gets busy, as you know, and the next time I began to write was when I ripped the tendon in my knee. I was working at a nursing home at the time and the halls were long. The work stopped and I began to read some of the Harlequin books. One day I decided to try writing one. That was a happy day because I found I enjoyed making up stories and characters almost more than I enjoyed reading about them. I wrote a couple short stories and had them published in a nurses magazine. They asked if I would write articles and I did that, too.
That comes down to the T.P.R. I write mostly, but not entirely, about nurses and doctors. I write short stories, novels, and some poetry, too.
I'm looking forward to having a short story in a magazine soon.
I wrote a long story about six girls going through nursing school in the 1950s and am trying to decide what to do with that. I might break it up into smaller stories. Next time, I'll try to tell you more about the nurses.
Have to go for now.