Inspirations's Where You Find It

One of my fabulous critique partners inherited a roomful (and then some) of antique dolls. To her late mother, the collection represented beloved old friends and a lifetime passion. To her daughter, they represented bittersweet memories, as well as a logistical problem, since finding space for a relative's treasured possessions is never easy, even when they don't number in the hundreds.

To me, that crowded room represented something else entirely: the macabre inspiration for my latest book, PHANTOM OF THE FRENCH QUARTER, whose villain was, as a child growing up...

How 'bout if I just let you see for yourselves from this brief excerpt?

His grandmother had collected doll babies by the hundreds, which his mother arranged on shelves around a single room, where he’d slept as a boy.

How he’d hated those damned dolls, staring at him through the days and nights. How he’d pleaded with his mother to box them up, to let him put up his sports pennants and his plastic model racecars — the kinds of decorations he wouldn’t have to hide from other guys.

Year after year, she had stubbornly refused, saying it would be disrespectful of Grandmama’s memory, hiding them all away, and the narrow bungalow — a damned shack, really — was far too small to put them elsewhere.

“Then keep them in your room,” he had at first demanded and then pleaded, tears streaking down his red face.

But they both knew that she wouldn’t, that the men who visited her at night could never do their business with all those glass eyes staring.

And after while, it was all right. The boy began to like them anyway.

Which just goes to show you that when it comes to life, as well as writing, it really is all about perspective. When you look at a staring doll, a grinning clown, a running dog, or a forest laced in shadow, do you smile or do you shiver? Does your mind leap back to a fond memory or a disturbing moment?

Can you find a way to harness raw emotion, to suffuse your words with its essence? Can you exaggerate, twist, and tweak (or seriously warp, if your mind works the way mine does) to bring a character to life?

Question for the week: What's been your most unusual real-life inspiration and how did you use it in your writing?

Love Shack, baby! (That's right. I said it.)

Happy Friday, everyone!

Bald in the Land of Big Hair trailer

During the record-smashing hurricane season of 2005, a deadly game of cat and mouse unfolds and a stormy love affair is complicated by polarized politics, high-strung Southern families, a full-on media circus and the worst disaster management goat screw in US history.

The Hurricane Lover is a fast-paced, emotionally charged tale of two cities, two families, and two desperate people seeking shelter from the storm.

.

The Secret Sisters (an excerpt from Chapter One)

Chapter One: Pia

Whatever happened later, Pia could always know that her eyes were even more green than something and that something something else. Edgar never finished the sentence, and Pia lacked his way with words, so she hadn't even a good guess as to what he was about to say.

"I love that color on you," he whispered just before the entire world collapsed inward. "It makes your eyes even more green than . . ." something.

He did that sometimes. Whispered in her ear. When he'd been drinking a little and watching her from across the room, thinking of later things and earlier things and all sorts of things that were possible between them. Sometimes he didn't even say anything that made sense. He just murmured "la la la" and jangled her earring with the tip of his tongue, and for some reason Pia found this more sensuously eloquent than any words. Edgar was ridiculously inventive with his tongue.

"I'm not a handsome man," he told Pia when they were first dating, "but I am blessed with moments of amazing dexterity." And those moments emerged as promised over the twenty years they were together.

"It makes your eyes even more green . . ."

She definitely heard that much. Keeping her gaze forward, her expression composed, Pia leaned slightly into the whisper. She smiled and tilted her head so that his mouth brushed close to her hair. She wasn't really listening for specific syllables, just allowing his breath against her neck.

It was New Year's Eve. They were at a party, surrounded by polite laughter and chamber music and expensive perfume. They were dressed up. Edgar wasn't usually a dressed-up sort of person, but he looked good in a tux and didn't mind wearing one in winter, when Houston isn't as hot. This was one of the museum's major annual fund-raising events. People with money to donate had to be finessed into forking it over, and every year Edgar did his tie-and-tails best to romance the big benefactors. He was decked out in what he called "Sunday-go-to-meetin'" clothes, even though this wasn't Sunday and "meetin'" had not been a part of their lives for a long time. Pia regretted that later. She wished she'd made an issue of it and dragged him to mass; wished they'd had the boys confirmed and Sunday-schooled, giving them some sort of faith to seize on to when loss yawned like a sinkhole, destabilizing and swallowing everything for miles.

something something

She didn't quite catch it. Pia was left with that unfinished edge unraveling between her ear and the part of her brain that would have collected the words carefully, kept them in a private time capsule. Edgar's Last Words. Part of his private obituary, along with so many other details of him no archaeologist could ever dig deep enough to discern. His sleeping sounds. How he pressed his knuckle under his nose when he was angry, trying not to say something cruel. The way he cracked the boys up by orating street signs in an officious announcer voice.

"Accurate Air Incorporated," he would read from the back of a truck, and then tag it with a fake slogan. "We incorporate air accurately!"

Edgar Wright Ramone, PhD, curator of Eastern European displays, husband of eighteen years, father of James and Jesse, Eagle Scout, cribbage shark, master of the Cajun barbecue, a man blessed with moments of amazing dexterity, whispered his last words to his wife.

something something

Then suddenly, soundlessly, he simply crumpled. And not gracefully or in slow motion. It was an abrupt, boneless descent. His champagne flute shattered on the museum's marble floor. His chin glanced off Pia's shoulder, leaving a small, blue bruise. There was no extending of the hands, no attempt to balance or catch himself. Pia felt in her feet the solid knock of his head against the mosaic tile circle, above which a huge pendulum swung, illustrating the rotation of planet Earth. It happened so fast, Pia didn't even drop her champagne. Someone took it from her hand as she knelt down, confused, calling Edgar's name.

"Edgar?" It was a question, not a scream or even an exclamation. "Edgar?"

The party guests tried not to look, looked, were embarrassed for the couple they assumed to be drunk, became curious, grew concerned, told an intern to call 911, watched a doctor in evening attire administer CPR, told the chamber musicians to stop, stood stunned, sat stunned, and finally left whispering, passing hushed voices back and forth. The sibilant consonants and breathy vowels made a shuffling sound, like paper unfolding behind their hands.

Shush sha . . . said maybe an aneurysm . . . sha sha . . . family . . . really makes you think about . . .

Edgar ended with the dying moments of the year. It turned midnight as they placed him on a gurney. Bells rang across the city. It was 2001. Pia got into the ambulance with Edgar's body. The sirens were silent, and the driver talked on his radio with the same rustling paper tone as the partygoers.

There was paperwork. Forms to sign. A required explanation of legalities before she could officially release his organs for donation. Pia did all that. Then she had to call home and tell the twins to come and get her because she'd left the car at the museum, and they came, and she had to tell them their father was dead. The sun rose on the new year a little while later, but instead of finding Pia the Wife where it had left her, it came up on an empty place, and in the shadows stood Pia the Widow.

Excerpted from The Secret Sisters by Joni Rodgers Copyright © 2006 by Joni Rodgers. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The Skinning of the Schnoz

For next seven weeks or so, I expect to be (had better be!) skinning my nose daily upon the grindstone of a very tight book deadline. Due to unavoidable circumstances, I've gotten a lot further behind than this particular tortoise enjoys, and failure is definitely not an option--especially not with another deadline breathing down my neck.

Nor is turning in a book that's anything less than the very best I can do. It's too easy to forget that, to become convinced that this business is about selling book proposals, copies, or even yourself and forever working faster to keep pace with the competition. But now more than ever, with the playing field leveled and the self-published cracking even the most venerable of lists, our business has to be about keeping readers happy by wringing every drop of sweat and blood and talent we have in us and pouring it all into the actual writing of the book.

Unfortunately, this means you'll be seeing me here on the blog less often. But I'll be back, I promise, as soon as I get this project back under control!

The Pleasures of Reading

Having lived in the West for a long time, I recently began to miss it. The flurry and rush of moving, and moving again, had settled into a genuine calm, and I looked around me. The landscape, even the aural one, was new. People here twang. It’s very lulling. But it isn’t what I’m used to. And while I am happy here, suddenly I was also homesick, and so I went to the library.

Yes, the library.

I took out three of Tony Hillerman’s books and immersed myself in the dry, open landscape of the West.

It’s one of the pleasures of reading—that good stories can transport you someplace else for awhile.

Books are magic that way.

It’s one reason I love them.

Buy This Book: Lamb, by Bonnie Nadzam

Bonnie Nadzam in her debut novel, Lamb, has created a complex and disturbing story. David Lamb is a fifty-something-year-old man whose life is falling apart. His father has died and his wife has left him. With nothing solid to anchor himself to, Lamb is cruising, mentally, emotionally, physically. One day, cruising on an unfamiliar street, he’s approached by an eleven-year-old girl, Tommie. A couple of her “friends” have dared her to ask him for a cigarette. Lamb realizes this immediately. That it’s a dare and it raises something inside him. He’s incensed that Tommie is being used in this way. She begins to look like a cause to him, like a project that maybe he can fix up since he can’t fix anything in his own life, in his own head. As the reader you want this child to be all right. You really hope Lamb is going to be the good influence on her he’s striving toward, that he’s going to improve this poor child’s circumstances. Tommie wants this too; she’s yearning for it, for something, anything. But that’s what adolescence is, an ache, a gigantic, exquisitely painful, joyful hole inside that demands to be filled.

Looking back, I guess it could be said that adolescence is the yearning for experience, the longing to be master of one’s fate, but whatever it is, this is Nadzam’s forte, the way she makes you feel inside, like this eleven-year-old-lost child. You pray that Lamb is going to do the right thing by Tommie when he goes back into her neighborhood multiple times to feed her, to bring her gifts, to talk to her. But the whole time you know, you sense this relationship is not conventional. This man and this child have strayed into unknown territory and when Lamb takes Tommie, when he basically kidnaps her and drives her from Chicago west into the Rocky Mountains to some remote cabin ostensibly to teach her about the wilderness, to introduce her to a more organic connection to life, it is scary. It is a rude ride through a mountainous setting that is vividly beautiful and ruthlessly painted.

This novel reads like a rising heartbeat. It is a tale that knots your stomach. You want to put it down, to put it out of your mind, but the writing is so taut, so compelling and haunting that you can’t. At least I couldn’t. Nadzam is a master at point of view. At times, it’s hard to know from what position the story is being told. In a way you might be seduced into believing you are telling it to yourself, Nadzam takes you that far into Lamb’s mind. Not a comfortable place to be. And as intimately as you are there, you are also in Tommie’s mind and emotions, but this is no Lolita redux. There is nothing overtly sexual and yet . . . and yet. . . .

Readers and authors will often say that books should be entertaining, that people don’t want to be reminded of their very human condition, their frailties, vulnerabilities--weaknesses. They don’t want a story about which they have to think. But sometimes a book can do both. If you are drawn to gorgeous writing, disturbed characters, a plot that could stand alone as a taut thriller, Lamb does do both. In a manner that is reminiscent of Lionel Shriver’s, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lamb is an unsettling journey as hard to put down as it is to forget.

For more about this wonderful author, visit Bonnie Nadzam's website.

Are you happy? (A handy flow chart to help you strategerize your creative week.)

Apply as needed to your writing process, revisions, agent search, agent switch, PR efforts, indie publishing venture etc.

Peter Brady is now my spiritual guru. (An excerpt from "Bald in the Land of Big Hair")

This year marks a milestone (if not a millstone) 10 YEARS IN PRINT for my memoir Bald in the Land of Big Hair! While HarperCollins continues to sell the trade paperback, I did an indie release of the 10th Anniversary Ebook Edition, featuring bonus content, a foreword by Elizabeth Berg, and this fantastic cover designed by Chip Kidd.

I've received thousands of wonderful letters from readers, survivors, and high school and college students performing scenes from the book for UIL competition. Amazing. Humbling. I'm incredibly grateful.

Here's a little moment from the chapter called "Faith, Prayer and Platitudes":
Luckily, everyone with cancer is issued a Brave Sick Person Face. It comes with the wig. If your prognosis is really bad, you may even be upgraded to Saint Sick Person. It comes in handy, because the moment you’re diagnosed with cancer, you become a platitude magnet. It’s the truth. Cancer attracts proverbs like pocket lint on a Lifesaver. Pastel Precious Moments posters, plaques, and coffee mugs gather at your door like a gaggle of bug-eyed orphans. Aphorisms come flying from every direction.

People I hardly knew came up to me, saying stuff like, "The Lord never gives us more than we can bear” (although, in my experience, this seems to apply only to money and cleavage). Or "If you ask the Heavenly Father for bread, He will not give you a stone.” (Perhaps the problem here is that God is thinking of the banana bread I bake, which could easily be mistaken for stone). Or "You’re an inspiration to us all.” (I knew I must be looking really bad whenever somebody laid that one on me). And then there’s that lovely poem about footprints in the sand.

“So God tells him, “The places where there’s only one set of footprints – that’s where I carried you,’” someone would tell me, blinking back tears, and I would struggle to resist adding, "Yeah, and that big ol’ dent in the sand is where God dropped me on my freaking head!”

My personal favorite from The Big Book of Banality was – and feel free to sing along with me on this one – “That which does not kill us makes us stronger!” This is a little like saying that that which does not kill a seat cushion makes it a flotation device. But at least it gives us a Plan B to fall back on. After a while, I started getting this vision of searchlights, confetti, and the offstage announces saying, "Congratulations! You are the one millionth person to use that expression since Joni was diagnosed! What do we have for our winner, Don Pardo?

…Still, as the months wore on and my jaded exterior wore down, I was hungry for hope, craving for comfort. One day on television, I saw a little entertainment news blurb about the man who, as a boy, had played Peter Brady on The Brady Bunch and had recently been diagnosed with cancer. His TV siblings praised him for his positive attitude, and he boldly told the interviewer,”I got cancer, but cancer didn’t get me!”

I welled up and clutched the remote control to my heart. The first thing that came to my mind was,”I want to be like that. I want to be able to stand there with my dignity and my sense of humor intact and say cancer hasn’t gotten me.” The second thing that came to my mind was "Peter Brady is now my spiritual guru? I can sink no lower.”

Sunday Quote:Bierce on Romance and Imagination

“Romance is the fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of things as they are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination.”

--Ambrose Bierce

#BuyThisBook: Trailer for Alice Hoffman's "The Dovekeepers" coming in October

Read an excerpt from The Dovekeepers

Pre-order from IndieBound

Sometimes a door is just a door...and then there's this cuckoo for Rococo puffs door in Paris

No apologies for my recent absence from the blog. Went Euro-tripping in Germany and France with the Gare Bear, who extracted a rock solid promise that I would not work on this trip. I didn't even keep a journal.

Our last night in Paris, via subway, bus and miles of walking, we searched out this doorway Gary had read about. The building at 29 Avenue Rapp in the 7th arrondisement was designed by Jules Aimé Lavirotte and won the Concours de Façades de la Ville de Paris in 1901, but it caused a controversy when people looked closely at the configuration on the door. (A bit more obvious if you view it upside down, and I don't even want to know the backstory on the person who discovered that.)

Have a groovy weekend, everyone. Back next week with renewed energy for this business that I love with an entirely new perspective. More about that later.

FB's new Subscribe button could come in handy for writers, especially the indies

This excellent article on Mashable describes the ins and outs of Facebook's new Subscribe button and its best uses for celebs, artists, teachers etc.

The Subscribe button is arguably most beneficial for journalists and artists. Though, in a sense, they’re public figures, these types of Facebook users likely aren’t well-known enough to justify a fan page.

If this sounds like you, the first thing you need to do is actively opt-in to allow subscriptions to your profile. You can then choose to allow subscribers to comment on your updates and control your notifications.

Another change to note is that when you unfriend someone, they stay subscribed to your public updates. This is important if you’ve been accepting friend requests from people you don’t know who want to follow your work.

Here's more about how to set up Subscribe on your FB profile or page.