Buy This Book: Crazy For Trying

I recently downloaded and read the Kindle version of Crazy For Trying, by Boxocto's own Joni Rodgers, and although it's been a while since she wrote it, I can say for sure that it still delivers. It's a story that is as big and wide and gorgeous as its Big Sky country setting. It is a punch to the solar plexus, unflinching on so many levels. Troubled and witty, and sometimes irreverent, it is the truly courageous exploration of one young woman’s journey through heartbreaking circumstances of loss and abandonment, of vulnerability and self doubt, to full-blown, joyous self-discovery.

Tulsa Bitters, the daughter of a famous, recently-deceased feminist, arrives in Helena, Montana with a dented heart, twenty bucks and a couple of guitars. She wants to hide and life gives her a plan, a way to do it in plain sight as “VA Lones”, Helena’s first female deejay. It’s the job she was born for, one she loves. Soon she meets Mac, a guy twice her age, and she loves him, too. As Tulsa, or Tuppy-my-guppy, as her famous mother affectionately called her, she might have lacked the confidence to take on such a job and the lover, but as VA, she can be bold--sort of. The relationship between Mac and Tulsa is no typical May-December affair. It’s a coming of age, a coming to terms for them both. It’s tender and tough; it takes side roads that twist off the heart’s ledge. A way is lost and then found only to drop into the dark night. A small town watches, or at times what is a full and colorful cast of players mixes in. As the reader, you become entangled, engrossed.

Joni’s voice is unique, a wry and beautiful gift, that breathes life into characters and a plot that is as vividly drawn and compelling as it is passionate. The ending is up for grabs. You might be surprised; you just might find yourself laughing through your tears. For more about Joni, visit her website.

"Three Stories From My Life" (Go with God, Steve Jobs.)

Go with God, Steve Jobs

Whether you're a "fanboy" (or girl) or a detractor, you can't deny the tremendous influence of Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, whose death was reported on October 5th. Nor would many argue the point that Jobs was a creative giant.

While reading his obituary over at CNN's site, I was particular struck by this quote from a 2005 commencement speech, given at Stanford University:

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

True of so many things in life, these words seem especially applicable to creative endeavors. How often do we struggle never knowing whether we are destined to nosedive into disaster or exceed beyond our wildest imaginings? How many failures seem permanent, only to prove stepping stones to an eventual success we never could have defined at the time? Only our capacity to trust keeps us creating, our ability to believe that some agency outside our understanding will break through, like the light that pierces the darkest cloud bank.

Thanks for this reminder, Steve. Of all the many, many gifts you've left us (including the computer I use to write these words) this wisdom may be most important.

Now let's get out there, everybody, and do our work, and let the universe, the muse, or whatever you want to call it worry about the rest.

Shana Galen Contest: We Have a Winner!

Congratulations to Pat Moore, winner of the drawing for an autographed copy of Shana Galen's Lord & Lady Spy! Thanks so much to everyone who stopped by Boxing the Octopus to enter or just to say hi in the comments!

What are you trying to prove?

So somebody sold a thousand books for 99 cents. (Reality check: they made $350 less their expenses, not a solid grand.) Somebody else has 5K followers on twitter. (Reality check: here's some sobering stats that might cause you to rethink the actual value you're getting in return for the time you're investing there.)

We're all trying to get a handle on the brave new world of publishing, and the numbers can be daunting. The squawkers who claim to have all the answers are loud and plentiful. We have a natural tendency to look at author acquaintances and feel like we're getting left in the dust as everyone else revs up the engine and blasts off down the highway. I think it's imperative that we mentally separate PR that has actual value (in that it sells books and enhances author brand) from PR that sucks money and time away from writing and funnels it into the activity of trying to prove you're a writer.

This week, I think I'll focus on doing what I want to do. What everyone else is doing/ getting/ tweeting is irrelevant to me, my career, my direction, and my artistic spirit. If I quietly write the books I want to write and bravely present them to the world in a way that feels organic to the project, authentic to me as an artist, and appealing to the audience who's open to it, my integrity stays intact and the rewards will be real and satisfying - artistically, emotionally and financially. It won't matter to me if another author zooms off down the highway without noticing that I'm happy.

Free Book Giveaway: 3 Questions with Shana Galen

Special Instruction for the Drawing: We'll be choosing one lucky reader from among the commenters below to win a free, autographed copy of Shana Galen's wonderful new Lord & Lady Spy! We'll be announcing the winner on Wednesday at noon (Central Daylight Time.)


A couple of weeks ago, I was privileged to be part of a signing with historical romance author Shana Galen—and even more privileged to purchase and read her brand new release, Lord & Lady Spy.

And it was fun, readers, the most fun I've had with a historical romance in eons. Fresh and exciting, it had crisp repartee and a number of laugh out loud moments, but most of all, the story and the characters had heart.

So aside from recommending it like mad to everybody I know, I also asking Shana to stop by Boxing the Octopus for the traditional Three Questions.

BtO: Hello, Shana, and thanks for joining us. One of the things that stood out to me was your ability to blend seemingly modern plot elements (i.e. the Mr. and Mrs. Smith-like set-up, where each member of a pair of married spies knows nothing of the other's secret life) with a more traditional British setting. What gave you the idea to liven up the Regency romance with this idea? Could your secret past as a writer of contemporary chick lit have anything to do with it?

SG: Thank you so much for having me. I try to read the blog whenever I have a free moment and really enjoy it.

I don’t think my not-so-secret past as a contemporary author had as much to do with the idea for Lord and Lady Spy as did desperation for an idea for my next book. I was thinking and thinking and nothing was coming to me. One evening I was flipping channels and saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith on cable and started thinking, what if the year wasn’t 2005 but 1815? And what if the hero and heroine weren’t assassins but spies? Unemployed spies, since Napoleon was captured in 1815. I got chills and knew I finally had my next idea! Most of my books have a lot of action, and I’ve written heroes who were spies before, so that part wasn’t a huge leap. Writing a romance with a married couple was quite a challenge. I’ll get into that more below.

BtO: I recognized so many accurate historical details, I instinctively trusted that you'd done your homework. To what extent was the spy-related background really rooted in fact?

SG: There were actually spies during the Peninsular Wars, but they weren’t very well known. We tend to think of spying as dangerous and sexy. In the nineteenth century, spies were considered cowardly. A real man didn’t sneak around but fought in the open. So most of the spy-related parts of the novel were pure fiction. Two real people who did influence how I wrote the spy sections were George Scovill and Grace Dalrymple Elliott. Scovill cracked Napoleon’s Paris cipher for Wellington. His story is told in The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes. Elliott was a British courtesan living in Paris during the French Revolution. She smuggled messages from Marie Antoinette to her sympathizers in Austria and saved several royalist sympathizers from being captured and imprisoned by the French Revolutionary government. A great book titled My Lady Scandalous tells her story.

BtO: For all the derring-do and funny moments (love your sense of humor!) what really made this novel stand out for me was the root cause of Sophie and Adrian's emotional estrangement, the heart-wrenching loss of three pregnancies to miscarriage. What made you decide to add such a serious issue to the story?

SG: I was struggling with the conflict between Adrian and Sophia for a long time, and I needed to come up with some reason they were estranged to make the book move forward. During this time, I suffered a miscarriage. It was my first pregnancy, and it completely devastated me. When I was able to get back to fiction writing, I started thinking about Sophia again, and I realized infertility/miscarriage could be one reason for a marital estrangement. Also, writing about miscarriage gave me a way to address a topic that isn’t covered in many romance novels. And yet it’s something many, many women deal with. I know so many friends who have suffered miscarriages. I thought my readers could relate to a woman who struggled with pregnancy loss.

I did face some initial reservations from publishing industry people because “miscarriage isn’t sexy.” But my response was that I thought readers could handle a more complex emotional subject without feeling it made the book less romantic or the sexual relationship between the hero and heroine less fulfilling.


BtO: I'm really sorry to hear of your personal loss, but I agree that readers will be very touched, as I was, by reading of an issue that impacts so many.

Is there anything else you'd like us to know about the book or future releases?

SG: I do have a book coming out in February. It’s the third in my Sons of the Revolution series. The first two were The Making of a Duchess and The Making of a Gentleman. We’ve been going back and forth about the title, so at this point, I’m not even sure what that’s going to be. It was The Making of a Rogue and then Once a Rogue and then The Dread Pirate’s Bride. It might be something else next week! But we’ll get it figured out soon.

Also, because of the great reader-feedback, my editor and I are discussing making Lord and Lady Spy a series. I’m currently contracted to write a new series, and the first book in that will be out in Fall 2012, but somewhere between books 2 and 3, there may be another Lord and Lady Spy book.

BtO: Yea! Glad to hear that! And I almost forgot the obligatory BtO bonus question. What are you reading and loving these days?

SG: I just turned a book in today, so I haven’t been doing much reading. I did finish Ashley March’s Romancing the Countess and really enjoyed it. Next up is Sophie Jordan’s Vanish, and I have your own Colleen Thompson’s Phantom of the French Quarter on my nightstand too. I am really looking forward to taking a week off and reading.

BtO: Thanks so much for visiting, Shana (and enjoy Phantom!) We're so glad to share Lord & Lady Spy with readers—who might be interested to know that the e-book version (the book is also available in paperback) is now on sale for the low price of $2.99. Score!

SG: Thank you for having me! I want to offer a signed copy of Lord and Lady Spy to one person who comments today. I’ll check in later today and reply to any comments or questions.

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.