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No trick, just a treat. A new book by one of my most favorite romance authors, Lois Faye Dyer, is just hitting the stores. The Princess and the Cowboy is the kind of sweep-you-away romance that is not only calorie-free, but it lasts longer and is more satisfying than chocolate. What’s better than that? Here’s a blurb to entice you:
Idaho rancher Justin Hunt has loved only one woman, Lily Spencer. When he learns the Seattle lingerie designer has a daughter who bears an amazing resemblance to him, he’ll stop at nothing to claim them both. But Lily doesn’t trust the cowboy who once broke her heart and before she’ll let him into her life, Justin will have to prove that this time, he’s going to stay.
And a bit of publishing trivia–this line of books, Silhouette Special Edition, is where the bestselling author on the planet, 
Nora Roberts, got her start. And her editor was the ever-entertaining Isabel Swift.
Not only that, the heroine of this book and I have something in common. See page 126–we both have the same favorite romance author. 
There’s a delightful note from Lois here. What are you waiting for? Spend the weekend with a cowboy.
So much of writing feels like play, or maybe like doing a craft–knitting, perhaps, or quilting. Something with color and pattern. My favorite stage of writing a book happens before I’ve ever written a word. Mulling ideas over in my head, sketching out characters, endlessly what-iffing to myself and to anyone who will listen.
Currently, I’m pulled in four different directions. I need to work on Bo’s story for the Lakeshore Chronicles, because he is so damaged and sexy and compelling. I still love the mother/daughter novel I’ve had in progress for a long time, but I never get a chance to work on due to other obligations. I’m noodling around with the next hardcover (after Just Breathe), and I’m especially excited after an impromptu brainstorming session with Isabel Swift. And finally…drumroll…I want to write another historical romance.
There. I’ve said it. I want to do another historical romance.
I’ve had the idea for years, but it’s been on the back burner while I explore the endlessly fertile ground of contemporary fiction. But it won’t go away. And recently, when I was hanging out with my publisher’s director of sales, he happened to mention The Charm School and how it’s been such a reader favorite through the years. It made me remember the fun of the genre.
[Speaking of historicals, what do you think of this new cover art for The Charm School? (click the link and you'll see it)]
This new idea–working title, American Princess–started nudging at me again. It’s like nothing I’ve done before or seen anyone do, but it has all the fairytale hallmarks of historical romance at its most fun.
Not that I have time to write it, not now. This would be a good “play” project–a book written purely for the fun of it. I might give myself a writing vacation of a week, and see what develops.
I love having company. Especially when it’s Isabel Swift, one of Harlequin’s top executives. She was in Seattle so we got to hang out for a while, talking business and books. We brainstormed some ideas, had an amazing meal and caught up. She’s definitely on the fun side of publishing.
Go read her blog. You’ll learn a lot.
…And the same week, Deeanne Gist, a Christy-award-winning author and friend from waaaay back took a break from her book-research trip to stop by. I first met Dee a hundred years ago when I was new and she was just getting started. I knew she would publish her novels one day. How? Commitment. She had four small children, but she went to the RWA conference in New York, bringing peanut butter and crackers in her luggage in order to make the trip affordable. Would you do it? Leave your family and subsist on peanut butter in order to meet the people who will help you get published? Sometimes, that’s what it takes. Now Dee has published numerous books, won a major award and the kids are in high school and college, one of them about to be married. A writer knows how to make her own happy ending.
For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.–Ernest Hemingway
I nearly forgot a career milestone this month. It’s the tenth anniversary of my first book with Mira Books, my current publisher. 
The Lightkeeper was a seaswept, Beauty-and-the-Beast-style romantic epic that takes place on the Washington coast in the 1870s. The setting is literally the ends of the earth, on the Long Beach peninsula at the mouth of the Columbia River, an area notorious for raging seas and terrible shipwrecks. The original title of this book was The Edge of Forever, a title I still love (and a tribute to the Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever”), but The Lightkeeper is probably stronger and definitely more straightforward.
The Cape Disappointment lighthouse still stands. 
When we visit this area, we love to stay at the dog-friendly Lighthouse (where else?) or the Klipsan Beach Cottages. A walk through Oysterville is a trip back through time. Every time I go there, I feel like writing stories misted in spindrift. It’s a place where I find myself writing better than I can.
This book has one blooper that I know of–there’s no way the characters can be drinking marionberry cordial, since marionberries weren’t introduced until the 1950s. Thanks to alert readers, that will be corrected in future reprints. 
Happy 10-year anniversary to me and Mira Books!
Here’s an article in today’s New York Times, about the New York Times bestseller list. Hmmm….
Elizabeth Engstrom came for a visit. We met years ago when she was the director of the Maui Writers Retreat, and we’ve been friends ever since. She’s a fantastic writer, editor and innovator. There is nothing quite so relaxing as hanging out with friends, talking endlessly. Liz also has a very wise new blog that is fast becoming a favorite. It’s one of the most genuine, funny, poignant and meaningful blogs on the net.
I’m posting this picture now, during a walloping autumn wind storm, so I can remember that just a few weeks ago, we were sitting in the Adirondack chairs on the beach, watching the dogs play.
Here’s a tidbit from Liz’s blog. I love this because like all writers, I struggle with self-discipline. I mean, when the deadline is weeks or months away, it’s much too easy to procrastinate:
I will never have more discipline than I have right now.
There are many things I hope to accomplish (there’s that whole thing with yearning again), and they all require some aspect of discipline. Clearly, after procrastinating all these years, I can afford another week of bargaining with myself before lowering the hammer. But then I need to take action. I need to either get on with it, or give up on it.
Some dreams I’m sure I will give up.
But some dreams I don’t want to give up. So I better get on with it. Identify the goal, make a plan, and assign the discipline.
Life is short.
It’s time.
Look for more about Liz next year, when her new series, The Northwoods Chronicles debuts.
We lost a big alder tree (along with power for a few hours) in Thursday’s wind storm. Here’s a cell phone pic. Barkis was excited! Me, not so much.
Last January, I got to spend a weekend with one of my favorite people, author Dorothy Allison. Other than getting the guest house all freshened up for her, I had only light duties, which included fixing Shrimp & Grits for a girls’ dinner party. Dorothy is from South Carolina (remember, her watershed novel is BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA), so I wanted to make something from her home state. Now, I had never even heard of Shrimp & Grits until last November, when I visited another much-beloved Southern author, Mary Alice Monroe, and her RWA chapter, for a writing retreat. They gave me Shrimp & Grits to eat and I haven’t been the same since. I even brought home some authentic stone-ground Southern-grown hominy grits.
My other duty: Write an introduction for Dorothy and her talk. I didn’t know where to start. Love this woman. Love her books. Her writing speaks for itself:
“I wear my skin as thinly as I have to, armor myself only as much as seems absolutely necessary. I try to live naked in the world, unashamed even under attack, unafraid even though I know how much there is to fear….I tell myself that life is the long struggle to understand and love fully. That to keep faith with those who have literally saved my life and made it possible for me to imagine more than survival, I have to try constantly to understand more, love more fully, go more naked in order to make others as safe as I myself want to be. I want to live past my own death, as my mother does, in what I have made possible for others–my sisters, my son, my lover, my community–the people I believe in absolutely, men and women whom death does not stop, who honor the truth of each other’s stories.” –An excerpt from Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature by Dorothy Allison
Could she be any more honest and brave? Dorothy’s lecture topic for Field’s End was “Scaring the Horses: Writing Those Big Mean Stories.”
Dorothy’s bio reads like one of her novels, only with a happier ending. Born to a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who quit the seventh grade to work as a waitress, Dorothy learned the power and perils of storytelling at a young age. She recalls “hiding out under the porch” and listening to her aunts tell stories, and entering a library or bookstore “with a sense of desperate passion.” Books were her escape from the world. She told Salon Magazine, “To find a way out of the world as I saw it, I read science fiction. To sustain my rage and hope, I read poetry and mainstream novels with female heroines. And I read books by Southerners for ammunition to use against Yankees who would treat me mean.”
The library has long been important to Dorothy. “My most profound library memory was the shock I got after we moved to central Florida and I went to the school library there. I was thirteen and had gotten used to the South Carolina school libraries which were pitiful—full of biographies of generals and judges but not much else. The central Florida Library was enormous and had a world of books I could borrow—novels, poetry and theologies, history books, and my favorite section of the Dewey Decimal system—with all those books on the occult. I tried to check out everything—which earned me a quick note from the librarian to my mama asking if she knew what I was reading. ‘Did I have permission to read those books?’ ‘Let her read anything she wants,’ my mama told the lady. But it took a signed letter to get me the access I wanted.
“I think I scared most librarians – because I wanted to read the books they thought I should not read—the grown-up fiction and those plays by Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers. But the librarian I worked for when I was in my junior and senior years was a marvel. Mrs. James was fearless and just assumed all young women were like her and wanted to read everything. She was the one who told me about inter-library loan. Suddenly I wasn’t just stuck with what was in the Maynard Evans High School Library. I could request books from other High Schools or even the main library downtown.
“By the time I got to the eleventh grade, I had pretty much exhausted the new books, but Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty got me an after-school job at the school library where I got to record and accession all the new books. That meant I got to read them first. I am still grateful to Lyndon Johnson, and always will be. He may be known to everyone else for his role in the Viet Nam war, but to me he will always be the man who helped me save money for college and made it possible for me to first read the collected poems of Muriel Rukyeser.”
For Dorothy, the library was “the secret world where I could go hide and fall out of this world and into that other one where anything was possible. It had solid wooden tables, sturdy chairs, carpets and air conditioning. If I could have, I would have moved in and lived there. As it was, it was my home away from home—a refuge and a promise. I used to sit on the floor and lean against the bookcases, lean back and dream about having my own place some day—a place where books would be stacked just as high—novels and anthologies and blank books in which I could write my own poems. The library made me think all that was possible, and it was.
“I think the best thing about the library is and was how it always felt to me—not just that it was the repository of what I loved—books themselves—but that it was a place in which a reverence for the word was implicit. Libraries have always seemed to me temples of wisdom—places where study and quiet concentration were honored, and where wanting to read was admired, not held in contempt. I was the child of a truck driver and a waitress, a girl who lived in a claustrophobic house where both the television and the radio were playing loud all the time. The only books in our house—other than the few that were my own—were the big illustrated Bible and my mama’s collection of Mickey Spillane and Ross MacDonald. It worried my family that I tended to hide in a corner and read so much. I was constantly being told to ‘put down that book and go out and play’. But at the library, no one interrupted me, or if they did, they did it softly and with respect. At the library, reading was holy—which is how it felt to me, how it still feels to me.
“In my house now, I limit my son’s access to computer and video games, but the house rule on books is simple. If he wants to read it, we will try to find it. And we not only go to the library frequently, we donate books to our local libraries all the time. I want the children in my county to have what I always wanted—new novels on the shelves waiting to be read. It’s just lucky that now publishers actually send me many of them, so that I, in turn, can pass them on.”
The Greenville, South Carolina native describes herself as a Southern novelist, feminist, confirmed flirt, femme, expatriate rebel, and born-again Californian. In a 1999 Salon interview, Dorothy says, “I was born to a very poor, violent family where most of my focus was purely on survival, and my sense of self as a lesbian grew along with my sense of myself as a raped child, a poor white Southerner and an embattled female. I was Violet Leduc’s Le Batard much more than I was Le Amazon, that creation of upper-class Natalie Barney. People tell me that class is no longer the defining factor it was when I was a girl, but I find that impossible to fully accept. Class is always a defining factor when you are the child one step down from everyone else.”
At the age of thirteen, she “…was always calculating how to not kill myself or how not to let myself be killed. That tends to stringently shape one’s imagination. I did not plan to fill up a hope chest and marry some good old boy and make babies….I was a smart, desperate teenage girl trying to figure out how to not be dismissed out of hand for who I was. I wanted to go to college, not become another waitress or factory worker or laundry person or counter-help woman like all the other women I knew. Everywhere I looked I saw a world that held people like me in contempt.”
After winning a National Merit Scholarship, Allison attended college and went on to study anthropology at the New School for Social Research. But storytelling was in her bones, and that, combined with an awakening feminist spirit, informs and inspires her award-winning work. For Dorothy, feminism “…was like opening your eyes under water. It hurt, but suddenly everything that had been dark and mysterious became visible and open to change.” The author believes her first book, The Women Who Hate Me, (1983) “wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t gotten over my own prejudices, and started talking to my mother and sisters again.”
Her literary influences are surprising. One was Flannery O’Connor — “that astonishing, brave visionary who told hard truths in a human voice — an outsider holding a whole society up to a polished mirror. She was as ruthless as one of her own characters, and I loved her with my whole heart…If I set aside Flannery O’Connor, I would have to say that science fiction made me who I am today. I spent my childhood buried in those books. Every science-fiction novel I fell into as a child…widened my imagination about what was possible for me in the world. There were those perfectly horrible/wonderful stories about barbarian swordswomen who were always falling in love with demons, and there were the Telzey stories and the Witch World books and countless brave and wonderful novels told from inside the imaginations of ‘special’ young girls….On another world, in a strange time and place, all categories were reshuffled and made over.”
Dorothy’s novel, Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), skyrocketed her to fame, boosted by a full page in the New York Times Book Review which proclaimed the novel “as close to flawless as any reader could ask for,” lauding the author’s “perfect ear for speech and its natural rhythms.” The Boston Globe her “one of the finest writers of her generation.” The novel rose to the top of national best seller lists and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. It was adapted and made into an award-winning and controversial movie, directed by Angelica Huston.
“In my family,” Allison says, “…we all commit some unforgivable sin and then spend the rest of our lives trying to redeem it in some fashion. And the romance of self-destruction: I truly do not know why some of us can resist it and some of us can’t, why some of us kill our children and some of us try to send them whole into the world.”
Dorothy serves on the boards of PEN International, the National Coalition Against Censorship and Feminists for Free Expression, and the advisory board of the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award, presented annually to a science fiction or fantasy work that explores and expands on contemporary ideas of gender.
Her advice to writers is succinct: “You learn to live with uncertainty and poverty if you are going to be a writer. I’m still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing. I know so many great writers who can’t and, oh, it is not about justice. I am trying to carry it off with grace and a sense of humor.
“Understand me,” she writes. “What I am here for is to tell you stories you may not want to hear….And to scare hell out of you now and then. I was raised Baptist, I know how to do that.”
Some of Dorothy Allison’s Favorite Books
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown.
Sula by Toni Morrison – “I remember…how this great grinding noise went through my brain. Of course, I thought.”
Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers.
My Antonia by Willa Cather.
The Persian Boy, Fire From Heaven and The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault.
Odd Girl Out and Beebo Brinker by Ann Bannon.
Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller.
The Female Man by Joanna Russ.
The Life of Poetry by Muriel Rukyeser.
If you’re in Seattle this Thursday, join us in Pioneer Square:
Details on the event can be found here.
This is surely the most-shared item on the Internet at the moment because it’s so darned funny. Stephen Colbert takes on Maureen Dowd’s op-ed column. Enjoy!
Some years ago, I “met” Jodi Picoult via e-mail after I wrote her a fan letter. I did love her book, The Pact, but I also noticed several eerie coincidences that prompted me to write to her. The book takes place in a fictional town named after my real town. The main character in the book is on swim team–my daughter was on swim team. The kids in the book were wrenchingly, fatally in love. My teenage daughter was wrenchingly in love–although, thankfully, it wasn’t fatal. Jodi and I both have brothers with the same name, mothers we adore who read our manuscripts, and we both got a master’s degree in education from Harvard. We’re both former teachers. Small world!
And PS, she’s as nice as she is talented. I love it when a writer whose work I admire turns out to be a mensch.
Jodi’s new release, Nineteen Minutes, is a “brilliantly told new thriller, about a high school shooting.” (Publishers Weekly starred review) It has all the hallmarks of her honest, absorbing books about modern teenagers and their families.
The Pact, a novel of two middle-class families torn asunder by a teen suicide pact, is a favorite of mine. People often ask fiction writers where ideas come from. Jodi was inspired by a wrenching experience as a teacher. “When I was teaching eighth grade English, one of the girls in my class became suicidal. We all knew about it — her teachers, her parents — and worked to help her through it. As her English teacher, I had her writing down her feelings and talking about them every afternoon…I never forgot what it felt like to be a lifeline for someone.” As a successful novelist and mother of three, Picoult wanted to “give” that feeling to a character, and thus the idea for The Pact came into being. At the time, the author had no idea her book would resonate with so many readers, that it would eventually make it into film and create a steady demand for readings and personal appearances.
The fictional town of Bainbridge “looks a lot like Hanover, New Hampshire, where I live…but it really could be any typical suburban town, which is why I think people all over the world relate to it. People all want to believe that the kids who are suicidal are inner city kids, troubled youths, etc. So it’s all the more shocking when the star of the football team kills himself. Teen depression and teen suicide crosses cultures, and crosses socioeconomic levels, and pretending it ‘isn’t happening in your town’ is turning a blind eye to something that already exists.”
Like her other novels, which consistently make bestseller lists worldwide, The Pact is the result of a gifted author’s imagination and meticulous research. “Interestingly,” says Picoult, “when I first conceived the book, Emily was going to be the survivor. Until I talked to a local police chief. He asked whether the boy or girl lived, and when I told him it was Emily, he sort of shrugged. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Because you know, if the boy was bigger and stronger and left standing, he’d probably be a suspect for murder.’ All of sudden I realized that in addition to a character drama, I had a page turner.
“Writing this book was very draining,” Jodi confesses. “No one in the book, of course, is happy, and spending nine months with this crew was difficult. I started my research with ordinary teens — babysitters of mine, and their friends — and asked the hard questions no one wants to: When did you start having sex? Do you do drugs? How many phone calls would it take for you to get a gun? The answers were shocking to me — because I, like most other people, like to pretend that I’m safe where I live. Then I interviewed a suicidal teen, who really made me understand how these kids don’t see the finality of what they are trying to do. They think, ‘If I kill myself, I won’t hurt inside anymore.’ or ‘If I kill myself, everyone will remember me and feel bad they didn’t pay attention to me/treat me better.’ They don’t really think of the aftermath, and they don’t really get that they’re not coming back. This one girl said to me, ‘I want the kids and the dog and the white picket fence…I just don’t see how to get from HERE to THERE.’ That canyon in her mind — that frame of reference — was something I tried very hard to recreate in Emily.”
The parents in the novel are attentive, loving people, yet they seem blind to the signs of their children’s key issues–a willful blindness. “Because if your kids are not who you think they are, you might be in some way responsible. And it is much easier to convince yourself that your teen’s depression is a ‘phase he’s going through’ than to think that the lines of communication between you two are so shot through, your son can’t turn to you for help. A lot of parents think that if they bring up suicide with their kids, they’ll be putting ideas in their heads. Mental health professionals say this isn’t the case. Often, if you bring it up, it lets teens know they can speak openly with you about what they’re feeling without worrying that you’ll freak out.
Jodi’s legions of fans responded strongly to The Pact. “This book touched lives in a way I never really expected, as a fiction writer. Even now, years after publication, I still get letters from kids who say they are depressed but don’t want to wind up like Emily, and are going to talk to someone today. I get letters from parents of children who have killed themselves, who say the book has helped them understand this was not their fault. In lots of ways this book has a cult following among teens, who pass it along by word of mouth. Some high schools even use it as curriculum.”
With its strong subject matter, The Pact is often the subject of controversy. “Sadly,” says Jodi, “a lot of parents are still scared by the topic. When I was [giving a presentation] at one high school last year, a parent in the audience stood up, brandishing the book, and accused me of writing smut and trash and said she’d get it removed from the curriculum (she didn’t succeed). It was a startling moment for me — but it also proved to me why The Pact ought to be required reading for parents like that and their kids: because clearly, this was a woman who would rather sweep the truth under the carpet than to look responsibly and clearly at who her kids are and what they are doing with their lives.”
When Lifetime picked up the rights to The Pact to make a movie, the network asked Picoult to get involved. The National Mental Health Association has created packets for teachers and students to raise awareness of teen suicide. The packets have been distributed to high schools, counselors and crisis hotlines across the country. The movie, starring Juliet Stevenson and Megan Mullally, originally aired in November 2002. Further resources can be found through the National Hopeline Network at 1-800-SUICIDE and Covenant House Nine Line (24-hour teen crisis line) 800-999-9999.
I’m guessing Nineteen Minutes, another take on teenagers in crisis, will have a similar impact. Let’s hope so. Jodi’s books always inspire dialogue and discussion. For more information on the writer and her books, readers can visit her web site at www.jodipicoult.com.
So next time you read something you really really like, send the the author a note. You might just find yourself making a long-distance friend.
Would you please check out the baby sea lion that came to my beach today?
See my previous post about protecting seals. Safe travels, little guy.
“There is nothing–absolutely nothing–half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
–Ratty to Mole in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Around here, we go boating. A lot. It’s just so scenic. On the Sound, it’s also a way to avoid traffic. When I had jury duty in the summer, I went to the courthouse by boat–a 15-minute ride–thus saving myself a one-hour commute. It’s a way to try restaurants and visit friends on the mainland and to entertain people when they visit.
Jay used to watch a TV show called “Sea Hunt” with the main character called Mike Nelson, played by Lloyd Bridges. Anyone else remember that show? I’m totally blanking, but I think Jay hears the theme song in his head when he’s out on the water.
Back when I was an aspiring writer, I would have done anything to get my material read. The Internet makes it easier these days, sort of. Check this out–an article about the Amazon/Penguin search for new writers, with a mention of the Gather/Borders/S&S writing competition. What do you think? Is this a good opportunity for aspiring writers? Does it motivate you? If you need inspiration, there’s still time to register for The Fire in Fiction workshop.
News flash! Some of my books are now available for download as e-books. There are two Calhoun Chronicles “bundles” with multiple books in each download. The Calhoun Chronicles include The Charm School, The Horsemaster’s Daughter, Halfway to Heaven, Enchanted Afternoon and A Summer Affair. They are historical romances tied together by the fact that they’re about Calhouns. And hey–it’s been ages since I’ve had a cover that looks like this:
Be still my heart! <<fanning self>>
