Is C-wording the N-word F-worded up? (Huck Finn now sanitized for your protection)

Don't miss Nina Shen Rastogi's excellent article in Slate exploring the controversy over Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The Texts of His Companion Boy Books. This new version of the classic novels has been purged of the words that keep Huck high on the banned books lists from year to year: "nigger" and "injun". Some are chaffing at the idea of censoring Mark Twain, but Twain scholar Dr. Alan Gribben pragmatically told the NY Times, "I just had the idea to get us away from obsessing about this one word, and just let the stories stand alone."

Rastogi quotes Toni Morrison's response to the banning of the book...

"It struck me as a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children. Amputate the problem, band-aid the solution. A serious comprehensive discussion of the term by an intelligent teacher certainly would have benefited my eighth-grade class and would have spared all of us (a few blacks, many whites—mostly second-generation immigrant children) some grief. Name calling is a plague of childhood and a learned activity ripe for discussion as soon as it surfaces."

...then goes on to make the inarguable point that

"...classrooms — and the school systems they're embedded in — aren't always idealized teaching spaces: One too-graphic sex scene in an otherwise age-appropriate book, and an administrator may decide to nix it. Or a teacher may swap it for a book that's less likely to get them angry phone calls from parents."

I would love to see Twain's books freely taught in schools, but do the "stories stand alone" without the unmistakable context of those racial epithets? Is it healthy for us as a society to look away from the evolution of both language and ideology? Retouching history prevents us from learning from it. Blithely Febreezing "nigger" from our past makes it easier to say "fag" now.

Three years ago, I devoted some rant space here on the blog to the cosmetic surgery performed on Margaret Mitchell's characters in sequels to Gone With the Wind. From Rhett is no gentleman and frankly, my dear, I DO give a damn!:

Margaret Mitchell was a product of the time and place in which she lived, and Gone With the Wind is her work. The hijacking of her characters decades after her death whether it's for the benign purpose of masking her racism with lemony freshness or with the more pragmatic goal of cranking out an instant bestseller - is almost as offensive to me as Mitchell's flattering portrayal of the KKK as gallant gentlemen defending their Heaven-blessed way of life. I think there's great historical and literary value in a book that demonstrates how deeply ingrained that thinking was (and still is for some) in Southern culture. The mamby-pambification of Rhett Butler in these sappy sequels, no matter how well written, is the rape of a great book.

I've been laboring through the hefty Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1, laughing out loud at times, occasionally shaking my head, and constantly being amazed. I think Mark Twain was an extraordinarily forward-thinking guy who knew exactly what those words meant then and strongly suspected what they would mean in the future.

Being the Book Lady (a bit of Christmas in the hurricane)

My experiences with Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Ike are woven into my new literary thriller, The Hurricane Lover. (Read an excerpt.)

Originally posted Sept 29, 2008 on Boxing the Octopus:

Overheard and appreciated: “Hurricane Ike was a lot like Christmas. Last minute shopping in crowded stores. Candles decorating the house. Consumption of foods you don’t normally eat. And when it’s over, you gotta drag that dang tree out of the house.”

The Tuesday after the storm, having put in a full morning lumberjacking the last of the fallen trees in our front yard, I went out in search of internet. No luck. But on the way home, I saw a young woman in the parking lot of a neighborhood Mexican restaurant, cooking on a grill, selling a limited cash-only menu from the open door of the dark storefront. We’d seen the taco trucks functioning from Day 1 (I swear, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will be dining off those taco trucks), but this was the first business open anywhere near our house. I had to stop and reward that spirit, even though I was a little nervous about feeding my old man post-power-outage beef burritos.

While I waited for her to cook my order, I sipped a warm Diet Coke and chatted up a kid in a backwards cap. We talked about the weather, of course, as he swagged his bike in small circles, making tight figure 8s on the littered parking lot.

KID: We’re off school the whole week they’re saying.
ME: Awesome.
KID: It would be if there was something to do.
ME: Read a book. Read something apropos to being off school due to disaster like…Lord of the Flies.
KID: What?
ME: Lord of the Flies. A bunch of guys about your age get stranded on an island. No TV, no grown ups. They end up perpetrating all kinds of murder and mayhem on each other.
KID: Cool.
ME: It’s dead scary. You’ll whimper like a little girl.
KID: No, I won’t. I saw all the Saw movies.
ME: Ah. You’re one of those. What grade are you in?
KID: Seventh. My name’s Augusten.
ME: Thing one, don’t tell strangers your name. You’re not too old for kid-versus-stranger protocol. Thing two, Augusten is the name of one of my favorite writers. Did you see the movie Running With Scissors? That’s based on one of his books.
KID: I saw commercials for it. Looked pretty stupid.
ME: It wasn’t as good as the book. Movies almost never are. Ride on back to the park. I live right across the street in the blue house with the red door. I’ll be there shortly with two books guaranteed to scare you witless.

In my driveway fifteen minutes later, I handed Augusten a hardcover copy of Lord of the Flies I’ve had on my various bookshelves in various homes since my own incarceration in seventh grade. I also gave him a couple of paperbacks from Gary’s nightstand: Odd Thomas by Dean Kuntz and It by Stephen King.

“Do you have that Augusten guy’s book?” asked Augusten.

“I do. It has some mature subject matter. Sex. Drugs. Crazy poet mother. Can you handle it?”

He nodded gravely.

About an hour later there was a knock at my front door. Two teenage boys with too big pants and too small bicycles.

“Are you the book lady?”

I thought about it, liked how that sounded, and said, “Yup.”

They requested and rode off with “the scariest books you got”, which turned out to be Stephen King’s The Shining and Helter Skelter, the seriously chilling story of the Manson murders co-authored by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry.

An hour later, I pulled out of my driveway, the back of my yellow VW loaded with eight boxes of books from shelves in my office, living room, bathrooms, and bedrooms. Chatting up the juvies on my way out of the subdivision, I distributed the entire Harry Potter series in hardcover, several more Kuntz and King paperbacks, a few Little House books, and a bunch of old R.L. Stine Goosebumps pilfered from a storage bin left behind by my son. Two ladies raking debris gratefully went for Isabelle Allende’s Zorro and current bookclub darling, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

I set up my guerilla bookmobile in a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot a few blocks down from one of the few open gas stations, put out signs -- NEED A BOOK? – and spent some time sorting the boxes into fiction, nonfiction, teen-friendly, kiddos, tiny kiddos, thriller, suspense, romance, literary, classics, poetry, art. People sitting in the gas line eyed me suspiciously.

“Need a book?” I called.

The nearest window cracked a little. “How much?”

“Free! C’mon. Why just sit there when you could be improving your mind, making the world a better place, expanding your horizons?”

“What have you got?”

“This and that. What’s the last really good book you read?”

“The Da Vinci Code.”

“Then I bet you’ll like Michael Gruber’s Book of Air and Shadows.”

I took it from the mystery stack on top of the VW and handed it through the window. From another window, a woman called, “Do you have any Sandra Brown?”

“No, but if you’re into romantic suspense, you’ve gotta be reading Colleen Thompson. Here. Start with The Salt Maiden . You’ll be hooked.”

Thrillers and mysteries went fast. Children’s books went faster. Fortunately, I had some wonderful coffee table books that functioned as picture books. A keepsake volume from my first trip to the Louvre, a collection of Polish poster art I bought at a library fundraiser when I was about twelve, a couple of fabulous Blue Dog art books I’d picked up at a publishing event where George Rodrigue and I were on the program with James Gurney. When I handed over my first edition Dinotopia to a little boy in the back seat of an SUV, he pointed to the autograph inside the front cover and said, “Some kid scribbled in it.”

“Why that little stinker,” I said and turned to the boy’s sister, who looked elevenish and immensely bored. “What do you like to read, hon?”

“I read the Little House books. A long time ago. I don’t read much.”

“What do you like to watch on TV?”

“Hanna Montana.”

I handed her Anne of Green Gables, and her mother peered over her shoulder at the inscription. "To Joni, Christmas 1973. Anne was a good friend of mine. I think you’ll like her too. Love, Mom."

“Are you sure you want to get rid of these?” asked the girl’s mother.

“Get rid of them? No! Not at all. But I’m happy to share them.”

A lot of people traded in books they’d finished, which fattened my paperback inventory a bit, and I'd raided some paperbacks from my kids' rooms, but most of the 300+ books I gave away over the afternoon were books I truly cared about. Tragically –- and magically -- I’d purged my bookshelves about two months earlier, so there was not a book in the bunch that I wanted to get rid off.

But the great thing about that is I could highly recommend every single one. Giving away books I didn’t love wouldn’t have been a fraction as much fun. And for the most part, I think my obvious love for the books I offered may have nudged some people to try books and authors they might not have picked up otherwise. (Except The Brothers Karamazov. Try as I might, I could not get the Brothers K arrested.)

The gas station ran out of fuel just before sundown, and I went home sunburned but happy. For that moment at least, the hurricane actually did feel a lot like Christmas.

Being the Book Lady (a bit of Christmas in the hurricane)

My experiences with Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Ike are woven into my new literary thriller, The Hurricane Lover. (Read an excerpt.)

Originally posted Sept 29, 2008 on Boxing the Octopus:

Overheard and appreciated: “Hurricane Ike was a lot like Christmas. Last minute shopping in crowded stores. Candles decorating the house. Consumption of foods you don’t normally eat. And when it’s over, you gotta drag that dang tree out of the house.”

The Tuesday after the storm, having put in a full morning lumberjacking the last of the fallen trees in our front yard, I went out in search of internet. No luck. But on the way home, I saw a young woman in the parking lot of a neighborhood Mexican restaurant, cooking on a grill, selling a limited cash-only menu from the open door of the dark storefront. We’d seen the taco trucks functioning from Day 1 (I swear, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will be dining off those taco trucks), but this was the first business open anywhere near our house. I had to stop and reward that spirit, even though I was a little nervous about feeding my old man post-power-outage beef burritos.

While I waited for her to cook my order, I sipped a warm Diet Coke and chatted up a kid in a backwards cap. We talked about the weather, of course, as he swagged his bike in small circles, making tight figure 8s on the littered parking lot.

KID: We’re off school the whole week they’re saying.
ME: Awesome.
KID: It would be if there was something to do.
ME: Read a book. Read something apropos to being off school due to disaster like…Lord of the Flies.
KID: What?
ME: Lord of the Flies. A bunch of guys about your age get stranded on an island. No TV, no grown ups. They end up perpetrating all kinds of murder and mayhem on each other.
KID: Cool.
ME: It’s dead scary. You’ll whimper like a little girl.
KID: No, I won’t. I saw all the Saw movies.
ME: Ah. You’re one of those. What grade are you in?
KID: Seventh. My name’s Augusten.
ME: Thing one, don’t tell strangers your name. You’re not too old for kid-versus-stranger protocol. Thing two, Augusten is the name of one of my favorite writers. Did you see the movie Running With Scissors? That’s based on one of his books.
KID: I saw commercials for it. Looked pretty stupid.
ME: It wasn’t as good as the book. Movies almost never are. Ride on back to the park. I live right across the street in the blue house with the red door. I’ll be there shortly with two books guaranteed to scare you witless.

In my driveway fifteen minutes later, I handed Augusten a hardcover copy of Lord of the Flies I’ve had on my various bookshelves in various homes since my own incarceration in seventh grade. I also gave him a couple of paperbacks from Gary’s nightstand: Odd Thomas by Dean Kuntz and It by Stephen King.

“Do you have that Augusten guy’s book?” asked Augusten.

“I do. It has some mature subject matter. Sex. Drugs. Crazy poet mother. Can you handle it?”

He nodded gravely.

About an hour later there was a knock at my front door. Two teenage boys with too big pants and too small bicycles.

“Are you the book lady?”

I thought about it, liked how that sounded, and said, “Yup.”

They requested and rode off with “the scariest books you got”, which turned out to be Stephen King’s The Shining and Helter Skelter, the seriously chilling story of the Manson murders co-authored by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry.

An hour later, I pulled out of my driveway, the back of my yellow VW loaded with eight boxes of books from shelves in my office, living room, bathrooms, and bedrooms. Chatting up the juvies on my way out of the subdivision, I distributed the entire Harry Potter series in hardcover, several more Kuntz and King paperbacks, a few Little House books, and a bunch of old R.L. Stine Goosebumps pilfered from a storage bin left behind by my son. Two ladies raking debris gratefully went for Isabelle Allende’s Zorro and current bookclub darling, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

I set up my guerilla bookmobile in a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot a few blocks down from one of the few open gas stations, put out signs -- NEED A BOOK? – and spent some time sorting the boxes into fiction, nonfiction, teen-friendly, kiddos, tiny kiddos, thriller, suspense, romance, literary, classics, poetry, art. People sitting in the gas line eyed me suspiciously.

“Need a book?” I called.

The nearest window cracked a little. “How much?”

“Free! C’mon. Why just sit there when you could be improving your mind, making the world a better place, expanding your horizons?”

“What have you got?”

“This and that. What’s the last really good book you read?”

“The Da Vinci Code.”

“Then I bet you’ll like Michael Gruber’s Book of Air and Shadows.”

I took it from the mystery stack on top of the VW and handed it through the window. From another window, a woman called, “Do you have any Sandra Brown?”

“No, but if you’re into romantic suspense, you’ve gotta be reading Colleen Thompson. Here. Start with The Salt Maiden . You’ll be hooked.”

Thrillers and mysteries went fast. Children’s books went faster. Fortunately, I had some wonderful coffee table books that functioned as picture books. A keepsake volume from my first trip to the Louvre, a collection of Polish poster art I bought at a library fundraiser when I was about twelve, a couple of fabulous Blue Dog art books I’d picked up at a publishing event where George Rodrigue and I were on the program with James Gurney. When I handed over my first edition Dinotopia to a little boy in the back seat of an SUV, he pointed to the autograph inside the front cover and said, “Some kid scribbled in it.”

“Why that little stinker,” I said and turned to the boy’s sister, who looked elevenish and immensely bored. “What do you like to read, hon?”

“I read the Little House books. A long time ago. I don’t read much.”

“What do you like to watch on TV?”

“Hanna Montana.”

I handed her Anne of Green Gables, and her mother peered over her shoulder at the inscription. "To Joni, Christmas 1973. Anne was a good friend of mine. I think you’ll like her too. Love, Mom."

“Are you sure you want to get rid of these?” asked the girl’s mother.

“Get rid of them? No! Not at all. But I’m happy to share them.”

A lot of people traded in books they’d finished, which fattened my paperback inventory a bit, and I'd raided some paperbacks from my kids' rooms, but most of the 300+ books I gave away over the afternoon were books I truly cared about. Tragically –- and magically -- I’d purged my bookshelves about two months earlier, so there was not a book in the bunch that I wanted to get rid off.

But the great thing about that is I could highly recommend every single one. Giving away books I didn’t love wouldn’t have been a fraction as much fun. And for the most part, I think my obvious love for the books I offered may have nudged some people to try books and authors they might not have picked up otherwise. (Except The Brothers Karamazov. Try as I might, I could not get the Brothers K arrested.)

The gas station ran out of fuel just before sundown, and I went home sunburned but happy. For that moment at least, the hurricane actually did feel a lot like Christmas.

120 Days Till I'm So Effing 50! (Getting started with personal trainer William Rushforth III)

Diagnosed with a virulent blood cancer at 32, I was told it was unlikely I'd live more than five years. During chemo, one of my meditation visualizations was my 40th birthday. That was my goal. I just wanted my kids (ages 5 and 7 then) to be old enough to remember me, and I wanted to get one book published.

In 120 days, I'll turn 50. My kids are grown, and I've had over a dozen books published -- several of them NYT bestsellers. God is good. Life is amazing. And I am so effing FIFTY!

Okay, enough with the giddy. I'm celebrating my advent to the Power Decade by rebooting everything about my body -- fitness, fashion, inner beauty (as depicted in a mammogram), facial regime -- with the philosophy that this is a spa-fest of self care, not a bootcamp blast of self-improvement. So let the Fiftyness begin!

Getting started with my personal trainer, William Rushforth III, which is the greatest name ever for a personal trainer, right?

I'll be posting videos with Bill and more about my Effing 50 Countdown. To follow my progress, click "I'm So Effing 50" in the cloud tag at the top of the page.

120 Days Till I'm So Effing 50! (Getting started with personal trainer William Rushforth III)

Diagnosed with a virulent blood cancer at 32, I was told it was unlikely I'd live more than five years. During chemo, one of my meditation visualizations was my 40th birthday. That was my goal. I just wanted my kids (ages 5 and 7 then) to be old enough to remember me, and I wanted to get one book published.

In 120 days, I'll turn 50. My kids are grown, and I've had over a dozen books published -- several of them NYT bestsellers. God is good. Life is amazing. And I am so effing FIFTY!

Okay, enough with the giddy. I'm celebrating my advent to the Power Decade by rebooting everything about my body -- fitness, fashion, inner beauty (as depicted in a mammogram), facial regime -- with the philosophy that this is a spa-fest of self care, not a bootcamp blast of self-improvement. So let the Fiftyness begin!

Getting started with my personal trainer, William Rushforth III, which is the greatest name ever for a personal trainer, right?

I'll be posting videos with Bill and more about my Effing 50 Countdown. To follow my progress, click "I'm So Effing 50" in the cloud tag at the top of the page.

120 Days Till I'm So Effing 50! (Getting started with personal trainer William Rushforth III)

Diagnosed with a virulent blood cancer at 32, I was told it was unlikely I'd live more than five years. During chemo, one of my meditation visualizations was my 40th birthday. That was my goal. I just wanted my kids (ages 5 and 7 then) to be old enough to remember me, and I wanted to get one book published.

In 120 days, I'll turn 50. My kids are grown, and I've had over a dozen books published -- several of them NYT bestsellers. God is good. Life is amazing. And I am so effing FIFTY!

Okay, enough with the giddy. I'm celebrating my advent to the Power Decade by rebooting everything about my body -- fitness, fashion, inner beauty (as depicted in a mammogram), facial regime -- with the philosophy that this is a spa-fest of self care, not a bootcamp blast of self-improvement. So let the Fiftyness begin!

Getting started with my personal trainer, William Rushforth III, which is the greatest name ever for a personal trainer, right?

I'll be posting videos with Bill and more about my Effing 50 Countdown. To follow my progress, click "I'm So Effing 50" in the cloud tag at the top of the page.

How to Find a Story and Write It: David Rocklin on his debut novel, THE LUMINIST

Friends, sometimes the most wonderful things come over the transom: it was a year ago when I was contacted by debut author David Rocklin, who asked me if would be willing to reading his novel, THE LUMINIST, and blurb it.  I was, after the first few sentences, not only willing--I was elated.  Set in colonial Ceylon, this beautiful, haunting story chronicles the unlikely relationship between a poor servant and the grieving woman of privilege who employs him, who struggle together to understand the mysterious and as yet "unfixed" art of photography, and so find a way to halt time, stop hurt, and capture the fleeting essence of life.  I asked David to share with us some of the background to this complex, wonderful book; read on, and then go and grab yourself a copy.  You will be, simply put, inspired.

David, there is a wonderful story behind the birth of THE LUMINIST. Can you share with our readers how you came to write the book?

In early 2004, my wife and I went to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. They were exhibiting photographs from the earliest days of the art, including a number from Julia Margaret Cameron. Now, I’m not a photographer – I’m the one most likely to stare at your camera, waiting for it to tell me how to use it, when you ask me to take a picture of you and your family. I’d never heard of Ms. Cameron, or her work. I am, though, very visual. Everything I’ve written had its start not as a theme or a character, but as an image that I could not shake, that hinted at a larger story in its peripheries.

The photographs I saw that day really moved me. Those faces were at once immediate and long-gone. They had a lost quality to them when viewed from a distance; here, after all, was a wall of people who died before I’d ever encountered them. Up close, though, I saw something else entirely: individual moments of whimsy, contemplation, mourning, a child’s exasperation at having to wear wings. The first image I encountered, of a woman half-shrouded in shadow, was stunning. Her face emerged from the dark into a muted light. She was unreadable. The model, as it turned out, was Julia Jackson, the mother of Virginia Woolf (I wrote a blog about that image, and the serendipity that caused it to become the cover of the novel: http://www.redroom.com/blog/drocklin/a-story-behind-image).

After the Getty, I did a bit of research on Ms. Cameron. She was unique for her time, a Victorian woman who obsessively pursued this then-unknown art and science despite all societal expectations or barriers. She was ambitious and a skilled self-promoter unafraid to approach the great men of her era in furtherance of her portraiture. The likes of Charles Darwin, Lord Tennyson, Robert Carlisle and Sir John Herschel all sat for her, enduring the hours of stillness necessitated by the technology of the time. She expressed herself via recreation of biblical scenes and her time in Ceylon, when many who introduced themselves to this new medium did so mainly to preserve family in life or in death. She saw something like prayer in her work, and saw possibilities to rival painting.

I found a quote of hers: “I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me…” I read that she lost a child shortly after birth. Her quote took on a newly relentless, tragic meaning. An image of her started to form, but from a vantage point outside of her, as if she were observed from under the cloak of an old camera.

That’s where the story started. What transpired is completely fictionalized, but my jumping-off point began the day I met her at the Getty.

One of the things I love about THE LUMINIST is the sustained and, yes, luminous quality of the prose. I remember thinking when I first began reading the book: "There is no way he can keep this up--every sentence is a miracle." And yet you do keep it up. Writing being as difficult as it is, how do you keep yourself inspired, day after day, at the level of the sentence?

That means the world to me, coming from you. Other than a precious few, most of us who write do so in the nooks and crannies between jobs, children, spouses, commitments and overall sleep deprivation! It’s an enormous challenge to pick up the thread of the day before, to find that emotional level once again, when so much of life has likely intervened in the hours/days since the last time. If this novel works sentence to sentence, page to page (and I’m truly grateful that you feel the way you do about the novel), I think it’s because I really lived with this world for quite a while before starting the book. I realized early on that even if I travelled to India, I could not find the setting for the book. Ceylon no longer exists as it was. More importantly, the moment that really drives everything in “The Luminist” no longer exists: that moment before the first photographic image existed, before that instant of fast-passing life could be held still. And then, it could.

I realized that to make the story work as I hoped to, I needed to do my research, become as familiar as possible with the rims and borders of the world the characters inhabited, and then imagine the granular aspects of that world into existence. Once I was able to see it – being visual again – I could live with it day and night, even as I was reading a bedtime story to my little one, or paying the bills. It never left.

I know you are working on a new book. Can you talk about the process of transitioning from a first novel to a second? How have you found that process? What have you learned and carried forward into your new work, and what do you find must be discovered afresh?

The transition from “The Luminist” to the new one (tentatively “The Daylight Language”) is a bit unique, in that the story suggested itself from one of Ms. Cameron’s photographs. I found it during the research phase for Luminist and set it aside, because I knew right away that it was going to become something for me down the road. The photograph depicts an Abyssinian (now Ethiopa) boy of about 8, in traditional garb, seated in a manner that speaks of tribal royalty. Yet his is one of the most bereft expressions you can imagine. After I had completed “The Luminist” I went back to him. He was the son of Abyssinia’s emperor, and after England invaded in the late 1860’s, the boy was taken back to England, where he became a ward of Queen Victoria. I’m fictionalizing the hell out of it (as I did with Ms. Cameron in “The Luminist”), but that boy’s story is very evocative for me.

So much of what I learned from writing “The Luminist” is making the journey with me towards realizing the new one. Patience with the stops and starts of the first draft (the characters were really battling for dominance in voice, and I’ve re-started the book three times now). Immersion in the world, and once immersed, picking my battles. By this I mean picking from amongst so many possibilities in terms of historical backdrop. Queen Victoria, her court, her children (each with their own unique maladies and topography), life in England…where to start? Which of so many tapestry threads to use? That’s probably not going to sort itself out until a couple of drafts from now.

 To learn more about David Rocklin and his work, visit www.davidrocklin.com.

Book This Book/Watch This Movie: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

I had the weirdest experience this morning. On the BtO link sidebar (Joni Rodgers has put together a wonderful collection, in case you've never checked it out) my eye was caught by the LA Times Jacket Copy link, so I went and checked out the following trailer, for the upcoming movie (based on Jonathan Safran Foer's novel of the same name, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.)



I was so moved by this trailer (featuring Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, and talented newcomer Thomas Horn), so eager to see this Christmas release, that I immediately went to Amazon to order the book. Only to realize, a split second before I hit that insidious one-click buy-it-now button, that I'd already read it when it first came out in 2005! That's why I was so attracted to the trailer in the first place.

D'oh! I can't believe I forgot, even for a moment, how much I loved that book! An emotional story of the love of a very special boy for a father lost in the events of 9/11, it's so much more than a depressing angst-a-thon. It's a tale of hope and adventure, a coming of age story written by a man who's not afraid to feel things along with his readers.

I hope you'll check it out.

In life, literature and publishing, it's all about the spiral staircase

When Gary and I were in Paris a couple weeks ago, we decided to rent a little apartment instead of staying in a hotel. We got a great place in Montmartre, just a hop skip from the des Abbesses subway station. A great little place, bigger than a hotel room, but cheaper. Slight drawback: it was a fourth floor walk-up. Traversing up and down each day, I kept thinking about what Karen Armstrong said about the spiral staircase: you keep coming around to the same place, but you're a level higher.

This is such an apt description of the novel writing process, an eloquent description, in fact, of any endeavor that requires that sort of constant effort and upward striving.

Karen Armstrong on the subject of fiction:

“...the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another world, parallel to but apart from their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional realm is not 'real' and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling. A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives, long after we have laid the book asie. It is an exercise of make-believe that, like yoga or a religious festival, breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies, so that we are able to empathise with others lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to 'feel with' others. And, like mythology, an important novel is transformative. If we allow it to do so, it can change us forever.”

Crazy for Trying is out of the vault!

My debut novel Crazy For Trying was pubbed by MacAdam-Cage back in 1997. I'm thrilled that the ebook revolution has made it possible for me to bring it out of the vault and make it available to readers. Set in Montana in 1979, it's the story of self-discovery, sexual politics, a fat girl who'd rather be invisible and a walking-wounded man who falls in love with her voice on the radio.

Retracing Your Steps

I really envy those writers who can plan their work, then work their plans, writing their manuscript from start to finish without any missteps, or even the incursion of character insights and more effective plot ideas, because they got it so perfect from the start.

I also hate them sometimes, especially when I'll on a deadline and am forced, like this poor schlep who spent four days dragging his broken-legged self back over his footprints to escape the Utah desert, to retrace my steps to figure out where I went wrong. Like the hiker, who was inspired to visit Little Blue John Canyon by the film 127 Hours, yet didn't clap onto the most important lesson (NEVER go out hiking solo without telling someone your plans!)

I can't help blaming myself. But the truth is, this painstaking crawl, with all its self-doubt and backtracking, has always been my modus operandi.

So, pain and all, I might as well just grit my teeth and try to enjoy the scenery. I just hope it doesn't take me 127 Hours.

The "Un-American" Playwright: Rare footage of Arthur Miller

So you don't forget: a lovely moment from Carlos Ruiz Zafon's "The Shadow of the Wind"

My daughter Jerusha says she knew I was going to get weepy over this passage from The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and I do every time I return to it.

"This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody's best friend."

This captures exactly how I feel about bringing my first two novels out of the vault as indie pub ebooks. Will they sell a shmillion copies? No. But they'll make a few good friends, I think.

A huge bestseller in Spain, The Shadow of the Wind was translated and published in the US several years ago. It's kind of Gothic, kind of literary, with a delicious dollop of magical realism. The young protagonist, Daniel Sempere, is entrusted with the safekeeping of a rare book and soon becomes embroiled in the mysterious circumstances surrounding the author's death. The body of writer Julian Carax was dumped in an alley in 1936, and now someone is methodically tracking down and burning every remaining copy of his novel. The cast of rich characters, wry dialogue, and labyrinth of plot twists defy synopsis, but the book is about books and storytelling more than anything else. The writing is unabashed, lush, over the top. It made me simultaneously salute the translator and wish I could read Spanish so I could see the original.

Most extraordinary was the way I started the book thinking he wrote this book for writers and finished it thinking he wrote this book for me.