Tuesday, February 15, 2022

The Hurricane Lover: Backstory of a stormy soul project

As a ghostwriter, it's important for me to carve out time for soul projects: books that I can't not write. The Hurricane Lover is one of those. Eleven years after its original publication, I'm thrilled to bring it out of the vault with this fabulous new cover by Kapo Ng. 

I was storm-obsessed long before the epic hurricane season of 2005. I was born in the American Midwest, where summer storms brought green skies and the smell of tornados. For one wonderful year, my family lived in a rundown townhome on the beach in Florida. During the offseason, the Gulf of Mexico turned steely, wind whipped up blades of white sand, and skies blackened over the glorious chaos. Wrapped in a blanket on the balcony outside the room I shared with my three sisters, I hugged my knees and counted the seconds between thunder and lightning. 

In 2005, my husband Gary and I were living in Houston, Texas, not far from the upscale area where Bob and Char Hoovestahl live in the book. New Orleans was an easy daytrip for music and great food, and it was a convenient stop just on the way to my sister’s house in Lake Mary, Florida. I was familiar with the small towns, swamps, and fruit markets off the I-10 exits. In the early morning hours of August 29, I worried for the people living close to the shore. I admit, I was among those who blew off warnings about the mass destruction of New Orleans. I didn’t think about that. It was unthinkable. 


Story vampire that I am, I watched the catastrophe evolve thinking I might have to find a way to use it in a book someday. I’d never written anything in the thriller genre, but I’d thought about it. One of my critique mates, Colleen Thompson, is a master of romantic suspense. I learned a lot about procedural structure from her standalone thrillers, The Salt Maiden and Fatal Error, specifically the core craft values of atmosphere, plot-driven character arcs, and blow-by-blow action scenes. I was ready to try my hand, just waiting for the right story to hit me.


In the wake of the storm, Gary and I volunteered with Operation Compassion, an interfaith effort to receive, assist, feed, and house hundreds of thousands of storm survivors who flooded into Houston. Downtown at Reliant Center, I cleaned bathrooms, served food, and hauled ice and beverages up and down the long lines of people deboarding buses and waiting for hours in the oppressive heat to fill out FEMA paperwork. It was a privilege to meet people in this extraordinary moment. The air was thick with humidity and stories, and I felt myself doing what a robin does when it’s building a nest—gathering a thread here and a twig there, weaving it into a place where I might create something. When I heard a weary New Orleans police officer comment, “This is great for media people and con artists,” the story hammer dropped. 


I went home sunburned crawfish red and exhausted to the bone, but the characters had come for me. Corbin, Shay, and Queen Mab grabbed my hands and dragged me into the swampy mist. I sat up writing until dawn, napped for a few hours, and then went back to Reliant Center to keep doing whatever I could do to help. The skeleton of the story quickly took shape in my head, but I didn’t have time to do more than sketch out a few scenes. Just four weeks after Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Rita screamed into the Gulf, headed straight for Houston, and I realized a much larger story was yet to unfold. 

Gary and I sheltered in place, following zoned recommendations, and we watched in horror as almost everyone else in our neighborhood panicked and bugged out. The hurricane veered off and lost a lot of spin before it landed, but the Houston metroplex was engulfed in a 200-mile-wide traffic jam—fact far crazier than any fiction I could have conjured—so, of course, that became a plot point that rewrote the ending I had planned. We experienced the remnants of Rita as a violent summer storm and sat without power for a few days. I recharged my laptop in my car and kept writing. 


That winter, I was hip deep in a celebrity ghostwriting project, and the following year, my third novel went into the pipeline at HarperCollins, so I couldn’t give The Hurricane Lover the undivided attention it takes to finish a novel, but this turned out to be a good thing. I hadn’t yet wrapped my head around the true extent of the research that would be needed to give this book the depth I wanted it to have. I didn’t even think about the documents that might later be released via the Freedom of Information Act, not the least of which turned out to be a thousand pages of email sent and received by Michael Brown in the days immediately before and after Hurricane Katrina.


For two years, while I wrote and published three other books, I continued gathering threads and twigs. I interviewed meteorologists, homicide detectives, an internist, an arborist, an architectural historian, plumbers, contractors, and many storm survivors from various walks of life. I watched with keen interest as New Orleans dragged herself out of the mud. I pored over thousands of weather bulletins, storm forecasts, government documents, and police reports and waded through a dense swamp of FEMA email and media releases. 


The research was heartbreaking. Infuriating. 


So much suffering could have been prevented, and so little had been learned from it in the years since. The blue vs red ideological divide had cost thousands of lives. Rather than embrace unity and common sense, people trenched down into whichever we the people they identified with, and in the South, that boundary was starkly color coded. The story became more layered. I relished the idea of a book club uncorking a bottle of wine and taking on these issues, gloves off.


The book was still missing one pivotal character: the storm. I tried again and again to draft the passages in which Shay and Corbin make their way through the eyewall. It just felt like a lot of words describing what I thought it might be like. What did it smell like? What was the strata of sound beneath the screaming wind? How does a hurricane feel on your skin? I needed to know. In September 2008, I had the opportunity to find out.


Hurricane Ike fulfilled all the dire predictions made before Hurricane Rita (lacking the one dire prediction that mattered.) When the call for evacuation came out, Gary and I made the decision to shelter in place. Gary, still an airline mechanic at the time, knew he’d be needed at the airport immediately after the storm, and we feared our elderly dogs wouldn’t do well away from home. 


As Bonnie and Corbin do in the book, we filled the garage freezer with gallon jugs of water and stocked the pantry with batteries, protein bars, and other storm supplies. The eye of the hurricane made landfall in Galveston as a Cat 2 and moved inland along the east side of Houston. I watched CNN until the power went out, and then I sat in the garage on an Adirondack chair tucked in the back corner between my car and the chest freezer. Clutching a Maglite, I listened to the car radio and snacked on Sun Chips and homemade vegetable juice. 


Beyond the open garage door, there was utter darkness cut by frequent lightning. I waited until the storm escalated to what I thought might be the eyewall. Then I strapped my son’s bike helmet on my head and went out into the street. My plan was to walk through the park across the street, but the towering pine trees that surrounded the playground were casting off branches and cones. In the strobe effect of the lightning, I could see that the air above the playground was filled with projectiles. Best to stay in the street, I decided. Walk around the block and call it good.


I pushed to the end of the driveway and sloshed through ankle-deep water gushing up from the gutter drains. I tried to turn my face away from the scouring rain, but it seemed to be coming from every direction. Bits of bark and God knows what drummed on the bike helmet. I felt weightless and weak, gasping for breath, pushing one step at a time against the force of the wind. Two or three houses down, I accepted the fact that this whole idea was incredibly stupid, and I turned back, fighting to keep my balance. The half block back to my house felt like a mile. 


A few yards from the end of my driveway, I heard what sounded like the crack of a rifle. A large limb from a tall pecan tree smashed to the ground, and then another limb, and another until the whole tree gave in, like an umbrella closing. A towering oak that loomed over our front yard moaned and flailed. This tree brayed like a wounded animal, its wide trunk bending to an extent I wouldn’t have believed possible. I scurried back to my Adirondack chair and sat, shivering and giddy, trying to find words for what I’d experienced. 


The storm was everything I had imagined: razorblade rain, pelting debris, body slam wind, galactic noise, the peculiar smell of ozone and wet cement. What I hadn’t anticipated was how deeply, viscerally frightening it would be. I expected to feel small; I did not expect to feel swallowed. I didn’t know the storm would be as present within me as it was around me, in the ringing of my ears, the hammering of my heart, and a resounding pressure that seemed to push the plates of my skull apart. This was not the green-eyed summer storm of my childhood; this was the jackboot of a jealous god.


Hurricane Ike decimated Galveston. On the real-life beach where I’d placed Billy’s bar and Shay’s fictional sanctuary, only one home was left standing. Houston’s infrastructure was crippled. In our neighborhood, far from the worst of the destruction, I’d say at least half of the big trees came down. The corner of our front porch was torn away, and our back deck and pergola were reduced to rubble. Miraculously, the old oak was still standing, but we lost three pecan trees. I hate the tall privacy fences that hash up every Houston neighborhood, so it gave me a modicum of mean pleasure to see 90% of them flattened, an apt metaphor for our common plight.


The postapocalyptic suburb was a ghost town. It was almost eight weeks before power was fully restored. Our generous neighbors, George and Toni, invited us to string a series of orange extension cords over to their generator so we could plug in the refrigerator and one lamp. By day, I conducted a guerrilla book mobile from the back of my yellow VW Bug, supplying books to the neighborhood kids and folks waiting in the long gas lines. By night, I unplugged the fridge and plugged in my computer, in the zone, fleshing out a finished draft of The Hurricane Lover


I didn’t rush to publish. I wasn’t willing to make the compromises I knew I’d have to make if I put it into the mainstream publishing pipeline. Massive shifts in the publishing business model were making it possible to self-publish on a level we’d never seen in the industry. When I finally pulled the trigger on November 11, 2011, I had resources I couldn’t have imagined in 2005 when I started writing this book. During its first year, the ebook was downloaded more than 90,000 times—more than the combined total sales of my first three novels.


In 2021, my 33rd book, a celebrity ghostwriting project, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, but I can honestly say that The Hurricane Lover still feels like the greatest success of my career thus far. It was a soul project that demanded a lot from me and asks a lot of the reader. The message beneath the mystery is more relevant than ever. Our political divide has deepened to a seemingly uncrossable chasm as disinformation and fascism find new footholds in our country. The warnings of climate scientists are still largely unheeded. Even those of us who are willing to accept the enormity of the situation are daunted by the mandate for significant changes in the average American consumer’s voracious way of life.


In 2017, as Gary prepared to retire, we decided to move from Houston to our vacation place on the beach in Washington State. Gary’s supervisor at the airline kept asking him to stay a little longer, so we put off the move again and again. I started having a strange recurring dream in which my mother, who had died a few years before, was jamming my things into big boxes, telling me, “Hurry! You need to go now.” It was unsettling enough that I finally told Gary, “I’m going to Westport. You can catch up with me when you’re ready.” He agreed to put through the paperwork so we could leave together the first week of August.


I spent weeks downsizing, digitizing important papers and family photos, purging clutter. I packed up the furniture and belongings we really cared about, securing them for storage with plans to ship everything in a month or so. We took only a few things with us: a strongbox of important documents, my mother’s ukulele, several pieces of art that we didn’t want handled by movers, and two small suitcases with clothes for the road trip.


We arrived at our home on the Pacific Coast on August 19, 2017. On August 26, Hurricane Harvey, a catastrophic Cat 4 megastorm, swept the Gulf Coast. Our home in Houston was flooded to the ceiling. 


I sat on the beach 2,500 miles away, looking out at the Pacific Ocean, weeping for our dear friends and neighbors who’d lost their homes and for the music venues, art galleries, and historic structures in this beautiful city we had loved and lived in for 23 years. I thought about the river of filth and debris that Shay waded through as the sun went down on the ruined city of New Orleans. That same river flowed through Houston now, and as far as I knew, all the belongings we’d so carefully put into storage were part of it. 


But we were not. 


We’d made the decision to step away from the city and lead a different kind of life. It was a big change, but people are capable of big changes when we choose to be. And change happens, whether we choose it or not. Change comes, catalyzed by decision or rained down by fate, an unstoppable force of nature that floats away the wooden chairs and garden gnomes, robbing us of our clutter, leaving us shaken but wiser. 


The Hurricane Lover is available in paperback and ebook at your favorite book retailer. 


Monday, February 14, 2022

The Hurricane Lover is out of the vault

 

As Hurricane Katrina howls toward New Orleans, Dr. Corbin Thibodeaux, a firebrand climatologist, preaches the gospel of evacuation, weighed down by the spectacularly false alarm he raised a year earlier. Meanwhile, journalist Shay Hoovestahl is tracking a con artist who uses storm-related chaos as cover for identity theft and murder. She drags Corbin into her plan, which goes horribly awry as the city’s infrastructure crumbles, a media circus spins out of control, and another megastorm begins to brew in the Gulf of Mexico. The Hurricane Lover is a fast-paced tale of two cities—one ruled by denial, the other by fear—and two people whose stormy love affair is complicated by polarized politics, high-strung Southern families, and the worst disaster management goat-screw in US history.


Drawing on firsthand experience, Joni Rodgers writes knowingly about the dramatic megastorms, weaving in climatology studies, riveting blow-by-blow weather reports and forecasts, and actual FEMA emails later released through the Freedom of Information Act. In this special 10th Anniversary Edition, bonus material looks back on the eerie prescience with which The Hurricane Lover—which was never meant to be more than a can’t-put-it-down thriller—foreshadowed a climate in crisis and a democracy coming apart at the seams.

Friday, February 04, 2022

Cover me! Designer Kapo Ng captures my writing vibe


I'm on a publishing high this winter, rolling out the #SIXObooks to celebrate turning 60. Challenged with the idea of branding six books that have only one thing in common (me), I gave designer Kapo Amos Ng the baseline concept "neo-retro, if that's a thing - like 1970s Polish poster art" and he ran with it. 

My favorite moments are the Sugarland butterfly (that fabulous twist of Georgia O'Keeffe!) and Smartie's old school typewriter. Across the board, Kapo nailed the quirky, ironic, vaguely perverse, and occasionally pissed off joie de vivre that defines my writing vibe. When I look at these books, I see the stories inside. In many ways, it's the story of my life.

Crazy for Trying: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly reviews

In the coming weeks, I'll be rolling out fresh editions of six bestselling backlist books. Feel like doing me a birthday solid? Read and review one or more! 

This week, Crazy for Trying, a Barnes & Noble Discover Award finalist originally published 25 years ago, is out of the vault, available in paperback and ebook. Over the years, this book has generated reviews that run the gamut from effusive flattery to punch in the face. I'm truly grateful to every reader and reviewer who took the time and energy to respond. Yes, even the ones who hated it. 

😎The Good: (The Brontë moment still fills my heart with joy.)
"Think Jane Eyre with rock and roll." - Houston Press

"Refreshing and provocative." - Houston Chronicle

"A fresh pleasure...Rodgers writers love scenes that scorch the pages." - Orlando Sentinel

"Truly captivating...inevitable comparisons to McMurtry and McGuinn, but Rodgers' prose and style are unique." - Texas Books in Review

"[Rodgers'] prose is dazzling, risky, and intoxicating, and at its heart, Crazy for Trying is an inspired debut." Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness

😬The Bad: (I'm not sure why it's insulting, but I'm pretty sure it is.)
"Rodgers debuts with a good-woman-heals-damaged-man fable, gussied up with pretty Montana scenery and late-night-radio atmospherics."
Kirkus

😂The Ugly: (How harsh are you normally?)
"Horrible may just be to mild a description of what I thought of this book and I am not normally this harsh. I desperately tried to get through chapter 3 but couldn't torture myself any further." 
Reader review




Wednesday, February 02, 2022

How my debut novel and I gave birth to each other during chemo

I'm celebrating turning 60, rolling out fresh editions of six backlist books. Watch this space and follow me on Instagram for opportunities to score autographed copies. Out of the vault this week: Crazy for Trying 25th Anniversary Author's Cut, my debut novel originally published by MacMurray & Beck in 1996.

This book and I gave birth to each other in the mid-1990s while I was undergoing chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a virulent blood cancer. My prognosis was poor: a 50 percent chance of survival up to five years. Anything beyond that was “statistically negligible.” I was thirty-two years old, confronted with the question: How does one live a full life by some metric other than time? 

I developed a five-year plan that included two realistically achievable goals: First: Vigilant in word and deed, I would leave a handprint of lovingkindness on my five-year-old daughter, Jerusha, and my seven-year-old son, Malachi, hoping that would give substance to their incomplete memories of me. Second: I would write one good book and get it published. 

As a talented dabbler, I’d been working on a wad of purple prose and zingy dialogue that vaguely resembled a book. Most first novels are autobiographical in some way, and I did borrow details from my life for Tulsa, my zaftig protagonist. There were stories I wanted to tell my daughter, and some of them are injected here, but I purposely made this book recognizably not a roman à clef. I hoped that, in my absence, my daughter would eventually understand that all these characters are, in some aspect, me: Tulsa, whose seeking instinct overcomes her self-loathing. Mac, who finds his best life when he’s at his most broken. Anne Marie, the overwhelmed mommy. Alexandra, a compulsive creator of words, and Jeanne (pronounced in my mind like jay-ann, not gene), a purveyor of shalom. The radio listeners, the passersby, the mountains, the music, the dead—I wanted my daughter to know that I was all and none of these so that she would feel empowered to be all and none of whomever she pleased. I wanted her to see me in the pages of this book and see herself between the lines. 

As my real life became unbearable, I retreated into Mac and Tulsa’s world. Their story was a life raft I climbed onto; had I not found it, I would have drowned. I wrote and rewrote, loving the work and the self I became while doing it. As a lifelong voracious consumer of books, good and bad, I had a strong sense that this book was good. I refined a query packet that included a cover letter, synopsis, and the first thirty pages of the manuscript, sent out my first seventyish queries to agents and editors, and collected my first seventyish rejections. Most were form rejections, probably triggered by the bulk of the overwritten manuscript. As books tend to do when written in a vacuum, it had bloated like a beached orca. 

The personal query responses I did get contained high praise for the writing, heartening close-but-no-cigar agent-speak, and invitations to send my next book. Only one story-specific note came up again and again; agents consistently pointed to the Alexandra/Jeanne relationship as “off-putting” or a “deal-killer.” Everyone knows God didn’t create bisexuality until the mid-aughts, so for most mainstream agents in 1994, a nonbinary love story was the kiss of death unless it involved gay men or arcane reference to the price of salt. Tulsa’s mother, Alexandra, struggled in that version of the manuscript—as many of us did in real life—scorched equally by gay and straight sanctimony. 

One agent advised: “If the book is about that, it has to be about that. Otherwise, it’s just a hill you died on for no reason.” I didn’t want this book to be “about that,” but I did want my future girl to see bisexuality normalized in the context of a loving, long-term relationship that deserved to be a legal marriage blessed with the emotional bounty, healthcare parity, and tax advantages of any other marriage. I couldn’t accept the premise that bisexuality is so grotesque, the mere mention of it as an aspect of a secondary character makes the whole book “about that,” and the Alexandra in me suspected that if this book was being written by a man—queer or straight—he would not be dying on this hill or any other. 

I sent out a last round of queries, making only one change: The title page and cover letter said J. L. Rodgers instead of Joni Rodgers. Within a month, out of twelve queries, I had eleven requests for the full manuscript, which led to offers from two publishers. Every one of the positive responses began: Dear Mr. Rodgers . . .

I can laugh now—the luxuriously guilty laughter of the bullet-dodger. I survived, against all odds, in large part because Crazy for Trying gave me something to be. This book quite literally saved my life; now I’m returning the favor. 

I’m thrilled to present this 25th Anniversary Author’s Cut to the next generation of readers, including the fabulous woman my daughter has grown up to be. (She is now the same age I was when I wrote this book. Insert “mind blown” emoji.) The story is unchanged for the most part, but all the greenhorn machinations, flabby adverbs, and exclamation points are safely biodegrading in the landfills of literary history. This made room to restore some of the original banter that defined Mac and Tulsa’s relationship, which was always more Socratic dialogue than romance. 

I’m a grandmother now, in the twenty-sixth year of my five-year plan, still striving to leave a handprint of lovingkindness. Whatever book I’m working on today is that one good book into which I pour my good intentions, but Crazy for Tryingwill always have a special home in my soul. It was my sanctuary and school of hard knocks. 

When Crazy for Trying was first published in 1996, Lisa Gray’s review in the Houston Press summed it up perfectly: “Think Jane Eyre with rock and roll.” Enough has changed—and not changed—about love, addiction, motherhood, and sexism that Tulsa’s story, like Jane’s, remains relevant and, I hope, entertaining. Thank you for being part of her journey and mine.

Tuesday, February 01, 2022

Out of the vault: CRAZY FOR TRYING 25th Anniversary Author's Cut

In the coming weeks, I'll be rolling out fresh editions of six bestselling backlist books. Watch this space and follow me on Instagram for opportunities to score autographed copies. 

This week, Crazy for Trying, my debut novel originally published 25 years ago by MacMurray & Beck is out of the vault, available in paperback and ebook. 



Here's the logline:

In 1970s Montana, a zaftig disc jockey sets out to reinvent herself, fleeing the shadow of her two (in)famous moms—a radical author/activist and an aging hippie artist—but she's soon embroiled in volitile office politics and an impossible love triangle, forced to choose between her mom’s artistic protégé and a damaged Viet Nam war vet.