Tag: Divorce During Pandemic

From TRIPSWITHJAMES.COM: A Request For Your Help

Subject: Exclusive Pre-Sale Offer: “Three Days in Hamburg & Other Stories”

Dear Friends, Family, and Esteemed Subscribers,

I want to thank you for being readers of TripswithJames. I have enjoy writing my articles for you over the years about travel and the film business. I’m truly thrilled to announce the pre-sale launch of my debut book, Three Days in Hamburg & Other Stories. 📚✨ I could use your assistance in making my first book a success.

About the Book:

Three Days in Hamburg & Other Stories is a collection of eleven captivating tales that will transport you to intriguing worlds. From crumbling marriages to lost fortunes, superpowered aliens to Viking zombies, these stories promise excitement, mystery, and unexpected twists.

Why You Should Grab Your Copy:

  1. Early Access: Be among the first to delve into these enchanting narratives before the official release.
  2. Special Price: For a limited time, the e-book is available at an unbeatable price of $0.99.
  3. Support a Dream: By purchasing during the pre-sale, you contribute to making this book a bestseller.

AMAZON LINK – http://amazon.com/author/jrc.128

How You Can Help:

  1. Order Now: Visit Amazon and secure your copy.
  2. Spread the Word: Share this exciting news with your book-loving friends and family.
  3. Leave a Review: After reading, leave an honest review on Amazon—it makes a world of difference!

AMAZON LINK – http://amazon.com/author/jrc.128

Let’s Make It a Bestseller:

Our goal? To achieve bestseller status by May 1, 2024. With your support, we can make it happen!

Thank you for being part of this incredible journey. Let’s celebrate the magic of storytelling together.

Amazon Pre-Sale Link – http://amazon.com/author/jrc.128

Warm regards,

James R. Carey Author, Three Days in Hamburg & Other Stories

P.S. Remember, this special pre-sale price won’t last long. Grab your copy now: Amazon Pre-Sale Link – http://amazon.com/author/jrc.128

MY NEW BOOK – THREE DAYS IN HAMBURG & OTHER STORIES – NOW ON SALE AT AMAZON.COM

James R. Carey’s debut on Amazon at $0.99 at www.amazon.com/author.jrc.128 , the book comprises personal, fantasy, and memory-based stories. The title short story, inspired by his own dissolving marriage amid the pandemic, is a semi-true story based on real life events.

This is my first book – one of several to come I hope. You can find it on Amazon.com for the price of $0.99 as a presale special. I hope that enough people will buy it and make it head for bestseller status. (One can dream).

Follow the link www.amazon.com/author/jrc.128 and that will take you directly to my Author page and you can buy directly from there. An excerpt to the title story follow below.

EXCERPT FROM THREE DAYS IN HAMBURG

“My cell phone rang at exactly 11 PM. I picked it up and looked at the caller ID. It was my wife. The call caught me by surprise as we had been having some tough times for the past few months. She was calling from Hamburg, Germany, where she had gone to visit her mother. There’s a 9-hour time difference between Hamburg and our home in West Adams, an area of Los Angeles where we had lived for 5 years. That made it 8 AM in the morning there. We hadn’t talked on the phone for a week, and our few emails to each other had been very terse.

“Hey, how are you?” I asked as I answered the phone.

Silence.

“Hey, can you hear me… Are you there…?”

“Yes, I’m here,” she answered in her odd combination of American & German accent. Something that I had always found very sexy.

“What’s going on? Everything okay?”

“Look I need to talk to you about something very important,” she said in a very flat voice. Hackles rose on the back of my neck and red flags began to appear. “I have been doing a lot of thinking, and I’m calling to tell you that I’m not coming back.”

“For how long? Is everything okay with your mother?” I asked, still unsure which direction this conversation was going to go.

“Mother is fine. I’m calling to tell you that I’m not coming back to you. I’m going to stay in Hamburg for a few more months, and when I come back, I’ll probably file for divorce.”

“What the fuck?”

“Look I don’t want to fight with you about this, please?” she said in a stern voice, cutting me off. “We just do this all the time. I’m tired of the tension. I’m tired of the arguments. I’m tired of being tired and stressed. I love you very much, but I just can’t go on living like this. So please respect my decision. Don’t call me and don’t write me one of your long angry emails. I just can’t take it. Please. And if you do call me, I’m just not going to respond. Okay? I love you, but I just can’t live like this anymore. I’m sorry.” With that, she hung up.

Shocked, I sat staring at the wall for what seemed like hours. Yes, we had not been doing well but I didn’t think it was this far gone. She went to Germany about three weeks before to celebrate her mother’s 70th birthday and to take a break from us and the tension in our house. It was the middle of the semester and I had not been able to leave my teaching gig. I had Face-Timed with my mother-in-law on her birthday and had briefly spoken to my wife. Things had seemed to be okay at least for the moment. This came as a major surprise.

Then I got angry. Really angry. I tried to call her back, but of course, it went straight to voicemail. Predictably, I left her an angry message. Then I poured myself a large Jack Daniels and stormed around the house for the next couple of hours holding imaginary conversations between myself and her telling her what a bitch she was, how unfair she was being and defending myself from all the supposed wrongs that I had done to her over the last few years. Finally, at about 1 AM, I took several hits of pot and fell asleep on the couch.

Somewhere I heard the distant ringing of a cell phone and some part of my brain realized that it was mine. Pulling myself from a deep sleep, I reached out for the phone where I had left it last night. Hoping that it was my wife, I looked at the caller ID and saw the number for work. It was 9:45 AM and I was an hour late for work.

In a groggy voice I answered, “Hello?” Lynda, my department head goes, “Where are you? You’re an hour late for your class.”

My thoughts just could not seem to connect last night to this morning, but I knew I had messed up in a major way. I just decided to tell the truth. “Lynda, my wife is leaving me. She’s in Germany and I have to catch the next plane to try and save my marriage.” – End of Excerpt!

(Excerpt from the short story “THREE DAYS IN HAMBURG” by James R. Carey. From the Book, THREE DAYS IN HAMBURG & OTHER STORIES. Copyright© 2024, James R. Carey. All Rights Reserved. Published with arrangement with CareyOn Creative, LLC, Atlanta, GA .)

Can be found at www.amazon.com/author/jrc.128

I HAVE ALWAYS WRITTEN –

My original plan for this book over four years ago was to be a few short stories surrounding a novella called The Ticket that I’ve been writing for about 5 years. It’s a great story in my head but it never has quite come together the way that I wanted it to on the page. So, it has never been finished.

That was the idea and then real life came along changing everything. A crumbling marriage, the pandemic, a move to the other side of the country, and a new city and start all seem to move the stories in another direction. The stories began to take on the form that they wanted to take, and I just kind of followed along.

Some stories are very personal, others are fantasy. Some are memories of people or places, and some are combinations of all the above. Some are new, and some are old. Some came very easily, and some took months to write. This collection of stories is quite different than the one I intended, but it is the one that came to life.

The title story was written in the early days of the pandemic in my home office in Los Angeles as I tried to come to grips with my dissolving marriage. My then wife and I were still speaking, and she was the first to read it. Her appraisal of it was “very hard for me to read but it’s very good”. Not sure if she meant that or not, but I will take it.

As a young boy I wrote ideas for stories and comic books. First it was crazy little stories about flying turtles or other idiotic ideas, but I thought they were funny, and it kept me entertained as I listened to my parents argued downstairs or sitting by myself in the school cafeteria. Later in my teenage years, the stories became dark ones of loneliness, escape, teenaged angst and desire. However, they could never finish because I wasn’t old enough to know where life was supposed to take you. So, if I didn’t throw them away, they got stuck in a drawer.

In college I discovered three things that I loved. First, was girls. The second was music so I wrote a ton of bad poetry and awful songs, truly little of which has survived to this day. The third thing I discovered was theatre so I wrote some unbelievably bad plays and screenplays. Not any of those survived.

Yet, I still continued to write down little ideas, thoughts, dialogue, situations, dramatic conflicts and the best of those got stuck in that drawer.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I had a writing partner for a while, so some of those ideas that had been stuck in the drawer for years came out. They were dusted off, reexamined and rewritten. Some were used, some were thrown away and some got stuck back in the drawer. Later when I opened my own theatre in Los Angeles with my partner Denise Ragan Weihenmayer called the Attic Theatre Ensemble, we had a lot of stage time to fill and actors to keep busy. So, I started adapting short stories and updating old plays to fill that void. The reaction to those adaptations was positive. I continue jotting down ideas and dialogue.

Eventually, I got married to a minor television star in Los Angeles and when her TV show got cancelled, I wrote her a play. She never performed in that play because we got divorced before I finished it. I did finish it, however. The play was a full-length comedy with dancing and the Devil, and a lot of food called Dancing in Hell. It got produced twice. Once at a university near Los Angeles, and once at my own theatre. It got complimentary reviews, but when those two productions were over. I put the script in the drawer.

I wrote a couple of short film screenplays that got produced, Owlman and A Cost of Freedom, but this was before the Film Festival circuit had become so big. So, the films and the screenplays went in that drawer.

An opportunity to start doing theatre festivals both in the United States and other parts of the world presented itself. This became a time period where I would write and perform one man shows and tour them around these various venues. The first one called Coming To Zimbabwe which debuted in Africa and was later optioned by a German production company to be done as a radio play for German speaking audiences around the world. It was the story of the first time I ever went to Africa and what a life-changing experience it was for me during a difficult part of my life. My second one-man show was called Mi Casa Su Casa where I talked about my large old house in the West Adams area of Los Angeles where I ran an Airbnb for 11 years and the people from all over the world who stayed with me. That was performed in Los Angeles, Atlanta, New England, and various parts of the United States and won several awards. Yet when those shows had run their course, those scripts got stuck in that drawer.

I married my second wife; a Danish woman and we had a very passionate but turbulent relationship. As our marriage fell apart, the pandemic struck, and I found myself stuck in my house in Los Angeles by myself for months. To keep myself busy I decided to paint a couple of rooms including one that had been my home office for over 15 years. As I was clearing out the room and moving items, I discovered that drawer with all the ideas, conversations, dialogue and scenarios that I had left shut for such an extraordinarily long time. As I read through the material, I realized that I had written a lot of stuff. I had written award-winning screenplays and theatre plays. So, with all this time on my hands, I decided to try and write short stories and see what happened.  I started and finished the first short story that I had written in probably 25 to 30 years and polished it in a couple of days. Then I rewrote a couple of stories that were in that drawer except now I was approaching them from an adult perspective. I changed them around a good bit and they’re in this book as well. With my marriage finally coming to an end, I wrote a fictionalized version of the last trip that we took together to Hamburg, Germany. Parts of the story are absolutely true, and other parts are as they used to say in an old television show, “the names have been changed to protect the innocent”. That story turned out to be Three Days in Hamburg and became the title story of this collection.

Over the past three years I’ve written more short stories, discarded them and written new ones. I have a novel I’ve been trying to finish. A memoir about my time in Africa that I have worked on sometimes. Written three more screenplays and a couple of them have being produced, but this book of short stories was always something I wanted to finish.

Now I have and I hope you enjoy it. I can’t say it was easy to write but it brings me immense joy to see it in its published form. Thank you for taking the time to pick it up.

Can be found at www.amazon.com/author/jrc.128

© Copyright Tripswithjames.com 2024. All rights reserved! Tripswithjames.com is a domain owned by CareyOn Creative, LLC, Atlanta, GA.

Three Days at Zion National Park – Days 2 & 3

Again I apologize for the lateness of this follow-up article on Zion National Park. As you know from my last blog, my short film Divorce During Pandemic is getting a lot of activity on the film festival circuit and I have been busy with that. Also because of the length of time between the first blog on Zion and this one I’ve decided to combine day 2 and 3 of the trip into one blog.

The 2nd morning I woke up at my hotel in La Verkin and drove the 17 miles to Springdale to the official entrance to the park. The 1st day I took the more difficult Watchman Trail but today I was taking the Pa’rus Trail which serves as the main trail into the interior of the park. If you recall from the previous blog the only way to get around the park is to walk, rent a bicycle or take one of the shuttles. And you can only get the shuttle pass the night before online for a dollar. You cannot purchase them at the park. If you miss the online sale then you can get a free ticket at 3 PM in the afternoon from one of the rangers at the shuttle pick-up and drop-off point. Other than that you’re on your own and all the really interesting sites and trails like the Emerald Pools Trail that leads to both the upper and lower pools and the Riverside Trail are farther into the park about 4 to 5 miles. You can only reach them by hiking in on foot or renting a bike. It behooves you unless you’re in there for an all-day hike is to take the shuttle which have several drop off and pick up points inside the park. For the shuttle schedule you can find that online at https://www.nps.gov/zion/planyourvisit/zion-canyon-shuttle-tickets.htm or pick up a shuttle guide from at the park headquarters at Zion.

Now the Pa’rus Trail is a much easier trail than the Watchman. It’s paved and it follows the course of the Virgin River as it runs through the park. It’s 1.75 miles in length (doubled to 3.5 round trip) and it’s not strenuous at all. However since it is paved, it’s the only pathway that bicycles can reach deep into the park so you are sharing the trail with bicycles so be cautious of that. There are some lovely views as you walk this trail. You also see a couple of waterfalls that are man-made. They are part of a water system that both the national park and the town of Springdale have worked out for them both to share the river and to keep it clean and flowing. Springdale uses the river of drinking water and other uses.

So I walked the full length of the Pa’rus Trail and got to the end of it where it joins the road that the shuttle buses use to take you further into the park when I realized I had made a mistake by not renting a bicycle originally. So I turned around and took a very leisurely 1.75 mile walk back the way I came. I had lunch at one of the restaurants that are very near the gateway to the park and then went and rented a bicycle. Now they can be rented on 2, 4 or 8 hour schedules. I asked the lady who ran the bicycle concession about the safety of the bicycle since they did not provide a lock or a chain and she told me that that theft inside the park are very rare. There are places to park the bikes at each trail head but you didn’t have to worry about them being stolen. If your bicycle actually was taken, then just take somebody else’s or let one of the shuttle bus drivers know that your bicycle has been taken and that they would take you back to the beginning of the park where you can tell the bicycle concession what happened.

So firm in that knowledge, I rode my bike back up the Pa’rus trail to where it meets the shuttle bus road that takes you further into the park. At this point the road is all uphill. Now I’m not as young as I used to be, and the elevation of this point is anywhere from 4000 to 6500 ft plus above sea level. You have to be aware to altitude sickness or just plain shortness of breath if you live in a lower area like myself. I live in Los Angeles which is at sea level, so I made it about another mile and half before I gave up. I cannot tell you what the Emerald Pools or the Riverside Trail look like but I understand they’re absolutely gorgeous. I turned around and rode my bicycle all the way downhill to the Pa’rus Trail and then on toward the park opening with stops along the way to pause by the waterfalls. The water looked inviting but there was a poisonous algae bloom in the water at that moment the was harmful to humans and deadly for dogs to drink. So it is VERY IMPORTANT to check all park postings before entering the park for possible dangerous situations. I dropped off my bike and drove home. All in all I walk or biked that day about 8.6 miles. It was a good day.

The next day I decided to visit the back country of Zion National Park, an area called Kolob Reservoir. If you want to experience the solitude and grandeur of Zion National Park without all the tourists that gather around the gateway in Springdale this is the place for you. Here you will find lovely high-country meadows, brilliant vistas and back country hiking and camping where it seems that you are the only person around. The park headquarters is where you get permission and licenses to use much of the remote back country of Zion but if you follow Kolob Terrace Rd which just off Utah 9 located in the town of Virgin. It is about about 10 miles from Springdale you will be able to drive all the way up to the reservoir through rolling pastureland, brilliant vistas, plateaus, ravines and canyons, and forests. This side of Zion is much greener then the red rock desert setting around the park headquarters. This area is more used for pasture land for the many ranches that dot this part of Utah. The road is in fairly good shape especially when you are crossing through the park. However sometimes it goes out of the park and crosses private land, and the quality of the of the road is not quite as good . But overall it is a safe drive that elevates from about 4000 feet to about 8000 feet which is where you will find the Kolob Reservoir which was created when they dammed Kolob Creek.

Along Kolob Terrace Road are many trails trailheads that lead off into the back country, and in this part of the park you will find trails like the East Rim, Hop Valley, Wildcat Canyon and The Narrows all trails worth hiking if you are into serious hiking. Some of these trails are 10 miles long, so please consult the Wilderness guide that the park provides for you so you know exactly what you’re getting into.

Because I was returning to Los Angeles that evening, I took a very short hike on a beautiful trail that wandered through a pine forest and scrub brush scenery. The views were amazing. Although it was October it was still 89 degrees in the day and the sun was blazing hot. So after about two hours, I headed back to my car and on toward LA.

The beauty of Zion is undisputed and the ability to be out in nature after being cooped up in my house for months because of the pandemic was exhilarating. I would do Zion National Park again in a heartbeat. And whatever you want to experience – paved trails like the Pa’rus Trail or crowds that you would find at the opening of the park or backcountry trails where you’re the only one there – Zion National Park can provide it. The people are friendly, the scenery is incredible and being out in nature is amazing and healthy for us especially during these strange times.

Laurels for Divorce During Pandemic

I am sorry for the delay in my short feature on Zion National Park in Utah. The final article is coming soon.

Online Virtual festival dealing with films that are about the Pandemic and its effects.

I have been taking care of the overwhelming response that my short film, Divorce During Pandemic has generated. In the last 3 weeks, my film has been accepted into 5 festivals and been invited into over 300 more. Now films have to pay a fee when you submit to a festival but when get accepted there the possibility of awards plus notice and the opportunity for other work if people like your film. So to be invited to over 300 festivals is very rewarding but also time consuming to read about each festival and decide to attend or not plus stay within the festival budget for a small film with no stars, just very good actors.

Famous festival based in La Jolla, California

The logos that you are seeing as part of this article are the laurels that you receive from a festival when your film is selected as an Official Selection. If you win an award, then you get another laurel stating what you won. The laurels may not seem like much but they are what the industry uses to let people know that this film is doing well or worth seeing. Many more films receive no laurels than get one.

Festival promoting film work in south Georgia, USA.

So this platform will return to travel related articles very soon, but as the progress of this film continues, we will also let you know about that as well.

Festival in Istanbul, Turkey

Thank you for your continued support and understanding.

Yet another festival in Istanbul, Turkey.

James Carey, Senior Writer,Tripswithjames.com and Director of Divorce During Pandemic.

The Making of Divorce During Pandemic!

Shooting a short film during Covid 19!

When you are a director of either film or theatre, or any other type of live or filmed performance art form, the ultimate excitement is to be able to do your project with a truly excellent group of professionals. Professionals who are dedicated to their craft and actually know what they’re doing. That was my experience recently when I shot the short film Divorce During Pandemic, a short film script that I had written based on real events and I had the opportunity to turn into an actually short film.

Crew shooting a close up of the lead actor.

Of all the types of directing that exist in the performing arts, directing film is the ultimate experience for a director. In any other form of live performance as much as the director wants to control the final product they cannot, because it’s live and the final product will change every single performance. Live performance is up to the live performers not to the person who conceived it or directed it or produced it. Yet with film, the director gets to choose how to tell the story because they control the edit of how the film will look. Now of course they had to get the correct shots and coverage in order to be able to tell that story but once you have that you can tell a story out of sequence, or you can change the narrative of who the story is about, or really the possibilities are limitless given the imagination of the director and the amount of footage that they shot.

Director of Photography Fernando Madero framing a shot.

Divorce During Pandemic is exactly that. It’s a true-life story of what happened when a married couple that is breaking up exchanges divorce documents during the early weeks of the pandemic. That could be sad, but the situation could be surreal as well, because the couple is wearing masks and gloves and practicing social distance. The film could be funny or a comment on not only the breakup of the marriage but the distance that’s created between a couple when they’re forced to wear mask and gloves to deal with each other. So in the editing room I was presented with the opportunity to either make a dark comedy or a sad tale of two people struggling to move on with their lives. I’m not going to tell you which choice was made you’ll just have to wait to see the film. Yet the opportunity to work with skilled professionals – a director of photography, a sound mixer, a camera assistant, a grip, a production manager and first assistant director who were top notch and a team of producers who gave me everything that I needed to shoot my movie under budget was amazing. Who could ask for more!?

The director discussing the next setup with the DP.

Yet we had the added element of shooting during a world changing virus, so we had to be concerned for the safety of the cast and crew who were truly heroic in shooting this short. My producers provided us with all the PPE that we needed and tried to keep following social distancing, but shooting a film is so all encompassing when you are doing it that it is hard to always remember to stand 6 feet apart. Yet, we managed and all are safe and well, and the film looks great.

The talented Laura Walker (The Wife) waiting for her next take.

So the film is currently in post-production as we do color correction, fix the sound, and work on the opening title and closing credits. Hopefully, the film will be on the festival circuit in the next few weeks and we’ll be talking about it more here at TripswithJames.com. I would like to take the opportunity to thank my cast and crew for the outstanding work that they did that day, and to thank them for the amazing ultimate experience of directing – shooting a film with professionals on a script that you have written and watching it all come to life beautifully ! What more could have film artists ask for? My answer – absolutely nothing!

The gifted David J. Phillips plays The Husband.

More to come on Divorce During Pandemic in the coming weeks!   

Special thanks to Corbin Timbrook, Shelby Janes, David J. Philllips, Laura Walker, Fernando Madero, Garrett Stone, Reece Miller, Genaro Magana, Kirk Bruner, Attic Studios.