The best worst book signing ever

Bopping around my old stomping grounds in Helena today, I passed my old self on Last Chance Gulch, saw a younger Joni reflected in the window of Rock's Western Bar and the No Sweat Cafe, and bumped into the disc jockey me on my way into Montana Book Company. One of my favorite bookstores anywhere and scene of the best worst book signing ever.

Back in the day, before I was (or even knew I wanted to be) a writer, I went to Montana Book Company to get A.B. Guthrie's autograph on Gary's dog-eared first edition copy of The Big Sky. I hiked down the Gulch, thinking I'd be standing in line for at least an hour, but when I got to the book store, there was only a kindly old guy sitting in a rocking chair, reading a fly-fishing guide. I sat on the floor and chatted with Mr. Guthrie for almost two hours. He seemed glad for the company.

Yeah. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Sat there talking to some chippie kid about fly fishing and forest fires and books for two hours while nobody else showed up to get his autograph. Seriously puts any poorly attended signing I've done since then in perspective.

Guthrie's best advice to writers:

"If you are inclined to leave your character solitary for any considerable length of time, better question yourself. Fiction is association, not withdrawal. Fiction is love and hate and agreement and conflict and common adventure, not lonely musings on have-beens and might-have-beens."

Mending in the mountains

Taking a moment to check in from Montana. Colleen and I are both huffing and puffing up here in the rarified air of Big Sky, but we both feel energized by the natural magnificence of the place, the amazing generosity of our hosts (the Wellness Community), and the vibrant, wide-open hearts and minds of the women who came here for "Mending in the Mountains."

This extraordinary event brings sixty women cancer survivors together for a weekend at the stunning Lone Mountain Ranch near Big Sky, Montana. There's a harpist playing during the healthy breakfast, local massage therapists and cosmetologists and others have donated services for "spa time", guided spirited walks teach us to cherish every breath. Every detail of the weekend has been orchestrated to nurture, comfort, and shelter the participants.

What's different about this event from every other even I've ever spoke for is the focus on wellness instead of cancer. Usually, I'm the opening act for a bunch of oncologists who deliver a lot of hard information about statistics, treatment options, and clinical trials. Those events are about survival. This one is about survivorship.

The best metaphor I can muster to explain the difference: A friend of mine came home from school one day in the early 1950s to find a backhoe digging a huge hole in the back yard. He was thrilled to flinders. "Hot dog! We're getting a swimming pool!" No such luck. His parents were installing a bomb shelter, which -- as it turns out -- was a really lousy investment.

Survival is about not dying. Survivorship is about living.

Events like this one reaffirm my desire to accept the fact of cancer in my life without bitterness. To cherish every breath. To make my life a swimming pool and not a bomb shelter.

And yes, the sky really IS bigger!

This is my brain:


This is my brain on Montana:


Any questions?

Filling the Well

In her brilliant book The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron teaches us that creativity is not an inexhaustible resource. But it is, thank goodness, renewable. She uses the term "filling the well" to describe the process of replenishing our store of images and experiences so we'll have more to draw upon when we return to our work.

Cameron's not the first to speak of this. In her classic Gift from the Sea Anne Morrow Lindbergh speaks of the importance of nurturing ourselves by taking time to contemplate, meditate, and enjoy those quiet, beautiful places the world offers.

It's in this spirit that I'm stealing a few days from the manuscript in progress and making my first trip to Montana, thanks to BtO cohort Joni Rodgers. There are lots of things I'd like to do and see, but mostly, I just hope to live fully in each moment and listen to the quiet trickling of my well as it refills.

Outward bound: Andrew Beierle on tour

A while back, I posted about the freakishly fascinating First Person Plural by Andrew W. M. Beierle, which is getting lots of critic love (“astonishing,” “a wholly original, wildly imaginative achievement,” that sort of thing). Last month, a review in Outsmart, Houston's GLBT magazine chimed in:

Author Andrew W.M. Beierle deals with issues around coming out, family, identity, and self-determination, which makes First Person Plural not only a magnificent story, but a morality tale about tolerance, love, and loyalty.

Andrew checked into let us know he's about to set out on an eight-city national book tour.

4 PM Saturday, Oct. 20
Webster's Bookstore Cafe
128 South Allen St.
State College, PA 16801

7:30 PM Wednesday, Oct. 24
A Different Light Bookstore
489 Castro St.
San Francisco, CA 94114

7:30 PM Tuesday, October 30
A Different Light Bookstore
8853 Santa Monica Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069

8 PM, Friday, Nov. 2
Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse
991 Piedmont Ave.
Atlanta, GA 30309

7 PM, Tuesday, Nov. 6
Lambda Rising Bookstore
1625 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington DC 20009

6 PM, Wednesday, Nov. 7
Robin’s Bookstore
108 S. 13th St.
Philadelphia, PA 19107

4 PM, Saturday, Nov. 10
Common Language Bookstore
317 Braun Court
Ann Arbor, MI 48104

7 PM, Friday, Nov. 16
Urban Think!
625 E. Central Blvd.
Orlando, FL 32801

Always gratifying to see good writers do well. Happy Trails, Andrew. May all your Sharpies be well pulped!

Some Days, This Work Is Just Plain Cool

I had one of those rare days yesterday where I'm really deep into the story, lighting like a butterfly on various tweaks here and there, making solid forward progress with a respectable number of pages. The focus was all there, but near day's end, when I took a moment to come up for air, I had one of those moments of awareness that this *is* happiness for me.

Of course, someone else put it more eloquently:


"Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye."

- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

I hope today you'll let reviews, rejection, and reality fall by the wayside and take a moment to simply be happy in the work.

A Poem for all Writers

While we're on the subject of poetry, here's one that's stuck with me since I first made its acquaintance back in Nineteen(mumble-mumble) in some review of American literature. Anne Bradstreet, a Puritan colonist is considered the first American female poet, but her early publication is a strange tale. Apparently, her brother-in-law took her work -- without her knowledge or permission -- to England, where it was successfully published in the collection: The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts. The brother-in-law, I'm sure, felt he was doing Anne a favor, and in that paternalistic society, she had little choice but to go along to get along. But in her most famous poem, below, she describes a mixture of pride and mortification that I think every writer can relate to.

The Author To Her Book

by Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth did'st by my side remain,
Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call.
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
The visage was so irksome in my sight,
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.
I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet.
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house I find.
In this array, 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam.
In critic's hands, beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known.
If for thy father askt, say, thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

The good news is that nowadays, few authors have to worry about "helpful" friends and relatives rooting through their hard drives and sending off their imperfectly-edited manuscripts to publishers. The bad news is, we have to bring ourselves to the point of getting it "out of door" or it will fade and wither, a child deprived of light.

A silky Sunday trifle

My high school teacher, Gale Peterson, was a horrible little gimlet. The best way I can explain what I mean is...if Bilbo Baggins and Anne Coulter had a baby together, Petey would be the unholy fruit of that union. But I sort of fell in love with him one day during my senior year.

Of the five people taking Advanced British Lit, I was the only one who'd enrolled in the class voluntarily. The others were draftees and mostly unconscious, so if there was reading aloud to be done, I was almost always it. During a unit on the Cavalier Poets, he commanded me to read a piece by Robert Herrick, which I did out of fear for my immortal soul, and when I ended and looked up, expecting to be excoriated for one reason or another, Petey sat stricken, unable to speak, his eyes welling. In the moment was all the unrequited love of his life -- for some woman, for his students, for poetry he could never write, only long to hear read in the voice of a kindred spirit who loved the language almost as dearly as he did.

I came across the small but perfect poem in the course of research the other day, and dang if it didn't leave me choked up.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes
by R. Herrick

Whenas in silks my Julia goes
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
Oh how that glittering taketh me!

The Synopsis Is Your Friend. Yeah, Really.

During my quest to become a published author, there were few hurdles so fearful as the completion of a synopsis (known to some as the plot outline). I so badly hated the idea of boiling down my gi-normous tome that I put it off until completing the manuscript. Then, sure enough, the boiling-down process was as painful and laborious as I'd imagined.

All that changed in the wake of my first sale, after which my agent told me I didn't have to complete my half-finished second historical romance (what I was writing at the time) to sell it. All I had to do was polish up the first three chapters and send them along with a synopsis. This idea (the book being sold *before* completion)was powerfully tantalizing, but the thought of writing the synopsis ahead of time scared the heck out of me. Since I always thought of myself as a seat-of-the-pants writer, how could I know ahead of time what I would be writing? And later, if it sold, what if I grew bored with the book since I already knew the outcome? Or what if I changed my mind about it or got a better idea as I was writing?

In spite of these fears, the lure of a second contract (and, let's face it, the advance check) cracked its little whip until I had a workable synopis. The proposal did indeed sell, and I agreed to a delivery date quite some distance in the future.

Then I continued working on the book. To my surprise, the work went waaaaayyyyyy more quickly because now I had a roadmap to help keep me on target. With the eending envisioned, there was no more writing down fifty or one hundred page blind alleys that would later have to be cut. And I was never bored because I'd only mapped out the main plot and main characters, which left me free to do whatever I wanted with the secondaries. In fact, I felt I could be more inventive in these areas because I didn't have to fret over whether or not the main plot would hold together. I do remember freaking out because things changed as I wrote, as better ideas did occur. But when I called my editor all in a tizzy, she said something to the effect, "Relax, that happens to everyone. As long as the main premise (especially the set up) doesn't change, it's no problem.

For the first and only time in my career, I turned in a manuscript *six months* before its due date. (Now that I know how to gauge my speed more closely, I usually streak across the finish line with little time to spare.)

Since that time, I've never looked back. Of the fourteen novels I've sold, all except the first have been on proposal. I've learned to look at my synopsis as a handy guide, not only a sales tool but something that helps keep me focused and on track, along with letting me know about how far I am into the story so I can keep the length reasonable. (Left to my own devices, my books would ramble on for seven or eight hundred pages, which would make them too costly to publish.) I think of my synopsis as a road map into alien territory -- but definitely not as holy scripture. In fact, I sometimes jokingly refer to it as "Colleen's Theoretical Idea of How This Story *Could* Go."

And for me, that is a very freeing thought.

So what are your feelings on synopses? Do you use them? Love them? Hate them? Or do they scare the devil out of you?

F()@# Censorship! It's Banned Books Week

A few years back, I was at a trade event where I shared a signing table with Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. She's a very sweet, diminutive lady who reminds me a lot of my sweet, diminutive mother. She is funny. She is kind. She is smart. And she is not, I feel safe assuring you, about to bring about the ruin of Western Civilization. I am frankly befuddled about why she consistently shows up on the American Library Association's yearly list of most banned and/or challenged books. In fact, the whole idea of banning books leaves me pretty befuddled, and you are invited to join me and millions of befuddled others in the celebration of Banned Books Week.

Bake a cake. Light a candle. Drop a few F-bombs. (Or click here to search for Banned Books Week Read Outs and other events in your area.) Whatever fits into your belief system. Just think about it. That's all the American Library Association is really asking us to do. The problem is, it's a hard thing to think about. When we support intellectual and artistic freedom, we support the publication of Mein Kampf. And stuff like this. When we think about the right wing activists who are galvanized and mobilized and radicalized, we might feel guilty about sitting here on our groovy liberal live-and-let-live asses.

My daughter Jerusha (a big PR Naylor fan in her formative tween years, now a double Dance and English major with a minor in Wild Over-spending) loves all things Ray Bradbury, most particularly The Illustrated Man and Fahrenheit 451, two vociferously challenged and oft-banned books.

"He had so much sadness about the way people are letting go of books," she observed the other night when we were on the topic. "So much of what he wrote is trying to wake people up and tell them you have to read before the stories and the ideas disappear."

As Bradbury said himself, "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."

Boundaries

Every writer -- every human being, for that matter -- must have boundaries. If we didn't, people would walk all over us. Most of the time, they wouldn't mean to hurt us, but in looking out for their own needs, they'd simply forget that we had a set of our own. And it's not up to others to remember we need the time and space and support to be creative. If it's not important enough for us to politely but firmly insist upon, why should it be important to anybody else?

I like to keep my boundaries clear and visible but permeable, not a razor-wire security fence, but something permeable and friendly, more of a visible reminder than a real deterrent. I want to be able to reach through or over, to offer a helping hand when I so choose. But I don't want to feel encroached upon or obligated.

So what can you do to make writing boundaries work for you?
1. Carve out a given number of hours, pages, or words to produce nearly every day for writing. Insist upon the sanctity of this time, but be flexible enough to rearrange for an emergency or important family event.
2. Check your writing schedule before agreeing to other obligations. Make writing a real priority, and others will respect its place in your life.
3. When you're interrupted while writing, tell the person you'll get back to them (unless the house is on fire) once you're finished with the day's work.
4. Plan for necessary chores/social time/family obligations so you don't feel guilty every second you're not writing.
5. Occasionally make an except for someone determined and appreciative. If this feels like giving a gift rather than being forced into an obligation, you're doing something positive for yourself as well.

So how do you define your writing boundaries? How do you convince others to respect them?

"And then what?": Judy Larsen speculates on fear, forgiveness, and story

Judy Larsen is touring the Girlfriends Cyber Circuit this week, talking about her debut novel All the Numbers, published last summer by Ballantine. Judy's got one of those "how I became an overnight success in only twenty years" stories. The beginning we all recognize. The fairy tale ending (which is a very fine beginning) kinda makes us cry ourselves to sleep. We had to start by asking her about it.

Okay, Girlfriend. We promise not to hate you. How did this first novel happen?
I've wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl, and I even took creative writing classes when I was in college. But, I got practical for a little while and got a degree in English and Education--so I taught high school for 15 years, all the while thinking I needed to find time to write a novel. Finally, the summer before I turned 40 (my self-imposed deadline), I wrote a first draft of All the Numbers. I then spent the next 5 years revising and collecting rejection letters from agents. In the summer of 2004, I attended a week-long workshop at the University of Iowa. I met an editor there who offered to introduce me to some agents. Within 3 weeks I'd signed with my fabulous agent and about two months later we sold it to Ballantine/Random House.

All the Numbers is a book about a deeply personal journey, but it's not something you personally experienced. Where did the story come from?
The essence of All the Numbers is rooted in the fears that every parent has, shoved as far below the surface as we can push them, but present nonetheless. It traces a year in the life of a family that begins with the death of a child--it's raw and painful, but ultimately redemptive. It's about learning how to forgive and live a life you never thought you'd have to.

For me, those universal fears of all parents first bubbled to the surface the night, four weeks before his due date, that my oldest son was born by emergency caesarean section. Up until the last twenty minutes of it, my pregnancy had been textbook perfect. I’d eaten cottage cheese by the bucketful and not a drop of caffeine or wine had crossed my lips. I’d exercised the appropriate amount, put my feet up when necessary, and taken my vitamins. But still, in spite of my care, with no warning, we both nearly died because my placenta separated from the uterine wall. Nothing could have prevented it; nothing could have predicted it. And I learned one of the immutable truths of parenting--no matter how cautious, loving, protective and concerned we are, no matter how long we breastfeed, how many books we read aloud, or how much we limit TV time, bad things can happen. And then what?

When I forced myself to imagine the worst, I always wondered if I would rise to the occasion or sink into the abyss. When I explored these possibilities through Ellen--who is sarcastic and impatient and cluttered--and madly in love with her kids, I tried to be as fair as I could. I wanted her to eventually rise to the occasion (as I hoped I would), but not until she had wallowed in the depths (as I knew I would).

No matter how mundane we think our lives are, many of us will face extraordinary events at least once in our lives. And when we do, it is easy to think, why me? I played by the rules, I’m not a bad person, so why this? Why the illness or the unfaithful spouse or the tornado? When I read about mothers who have faced catastrophe, I always wish I could get a six-month follow-up. How’d they get out of bed the next day? How long before they started making supper? Did they ever genuinely laugh again?

These were the questions I tried to answer for myself through Ellen.

So now that the book’s been out there for a while, how do you feel about the publishing experience?
I guess I was surprised that complete strangers across the country would stumble across it and buy it. And then write to me about it. Stunning. I had no idea how long it could take. Or all the details. But, looking back, I'm glad I was so naive. I might not have done it had I known it would take 7 years from writing the first draft to it showing up at the stores. Hearing from readers all over the country who have lost a child has been very emotional--and humbling. They've lived through what I only imagined, and then they've written to me or come to my appearances and thanked me for writing my book, for giving dignity to their grief. That's really been amazing.

Last but not least: Who do you love to read?
I'd have to say Elizabeth Berg because she writes so beautifully and honestly about regular people. When I read her, it's always a lesson in how to make simple, daily events mean something. My buddy Bev Marshall is another writer like that. And I better toss in John Irving because of the way he weaves different narratives together and it all makes sense in the end.

Care to share your Top 5 Books?
To Kill a Mockingbird, The Things They Carried, Grapes of Wrath, The Sound and the Fury, and Cider House Rules. Can you tell I was an English teacher for 15 years?

Sometimes, It's All About the Angst

Sometimes, you just need a book to rip your heart out. There’s something cathartic in a beautifully-written book that expresses our darkest parental nightmares, something that teaches us that people can survive the worst and heal and live again. For me, such books as At Risk, by Alice Hoffman, The Deep End of the Ocean, by Jacquelyn Mitchard, and Ordinary People, by Judith Guest, filled such a need. And now fellow Girlfriends Cyber Circuit member Judy Merrill Larsen has come along with a devastating but beautiful debut called All the Numbers, with promises to break our hearts anew.

A high school English teacher with five children of her own, Larsen brings an authenticity to parental loss. Target hailed the book as its “Breakout Debut” in September 2006. Booklist calls it “compelling” and adds: “Larsen depicts a mother’s year of grief and recovery with a sure and honest voice.” But it’s Hillary Williams of Bookloons who really says it all: “Keep a box of tissues nearby while reading All the Numbers, as dry eyes are impossible. Readers will feel for Ellen, cheer her on, and silently applaud the wise and compassionate decisions she finally makes. . . . . All the Numbers is a quick but gripping summer read, both incredibly sad and very satisfying.”

I know there are readers out there who prefer to stick to “happy pill” novels, and I agree that there’s a time and place for them. But for those who like to experience the full range of human emotion, from tragedy to triumph, I recommend that you pick up a copy of the well-written debut.