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Showing posts from March, 2022

GRIT DAILY interview on the unseen art of collaboration

Huge thanks to  Grit  for  this great interview about the gestalt of ghostwriting  and the logistics of rebranding  my SIXO books . 

I wish this novel would stop being so f#cking relevant :/

I wrote my second novel  in the mid-1990s, a young mom in the crucible of chemo and recovery: swamped with pharmaceuticals, living in immune-compromised isolation, and immersed in the sort of books you read when you think you’re dying.   Till We Have Faces   by C. S. Lewis, a philosophical retelling of the Psyche and Eros myth, blew my mind and prompted a Bullfinch reading binge. A dark dramedy took shape in my head as I thought about how the complicated story of Psyche and her extended family might play if I dropped it into my world—a working class suburb in Houston, Texas—with full advantage of melodic Southern dialect and over-the-top Southern family dynamics.   With brilliant editing from Joan Drury,   Sugarland   was published in 1999 by Spinsters Ink, a feisty little feminist press based in Duluth, Minnesota, and later by Bertelsmann, the parent company of Random House, in Europe. It did well, won a few awards, and got good reviews. The German transla...

Sugarland is fresh out of the vault

My second novel, published in 1999 by Spinsters Ink in the USA and Bertelsmann in Europe, is out of the vault,  available in paperback and on all ebook platforms . I love the stunning cover illustration by Kapo Ng. All about womanhood and wings.  Flap Copy: Childhood singing stars Kit and Kiki Smithers are all grown up, young mothers navigating the joys and frustrations of suburban life. When their small world is shattered by an insidious act of sexual violence, the two sisters call on memories of an old story their mother used to tell: a tale of goddesses, monsters, and a series of seemingly impossible tasks whereby a girl, betrayed and broken, finds her way out of the underworld into the light. The myth of Psyche and Eros takes on new meaning in this modern retelling, poetically tapping into the tornadic forces of feminism, resilience, independence, and art. Sugarland, an international bestseller shortlisted for multiple awards, is a graceful novel filled with compassion, as...

Soft-hearted friends and hard-boiled fiction

My love for hardboiled detective fiction dates back to a glorious summer after sixth grade, during which I read my way around an entire rusted carousel rack of cheap paperback mysteries at the public library in Onalaska, Wisconsin. Drawn to the pulp fiction cover art, I started with   Farewell, My Lovely   and   The Big Sleep   by Raymond Chandler, gateway drugs for   Mildred Pierce   and   The Postman Always Rings Twice   by James M. Cain. Many forgettable dime novels followed, but there were some wonderful ones in there as well. Cain’s   Double Indemnity   made such an impression on me that I immediately recognized the cover when I saw it thirty years later in a vintage bookstore in Texas, triggering a whole new hardboiled binge, which took in the complete works of Dashiell Hammett. Coming to these books from the perspective of a seasoned writer, I found a whole new joy in the terse prose and a whole new dismay in the blatant sexism, r...