Big Book News and a New Blog.

Hello old friends!

First, some great news. I sold a novel, hurray! The Sojourn will be coming out from Atria Books in March 2016. A little more about what that journey looked like here.

In the meantime, I'll be blogging every Monday at my new digs over on Tumblr. Do stop by!

Thanks for stopping by and/ or sticking around! You may have noticed I'm not blogging much here anymore. Worry not, I'm still around. Follow me on Twitter (@Andrea_Dunlop) and on the Girl Friday blog where I post regularly along with my fabulous posse of colleagues.

http://www.girlfridayproductions.com/blog/

you're just as far in as you'll ever be out

Well kids, summer is over. My calendar says there are a few official days left and the weather in Seattle is as nice as it ever is but still, the sun is going down earlier by the day and I want to wear boots all the time. Fall is here. Meanwhile I have 340 pages of a new novel which seems to be the answer to the question: where the hell did my summer go?

If you've noticed that the internets have been almost completely Andrea-free since my last Chasing Thirty post on the Gloss (and this one from May) please know that I am not locked in my closet with a bendy straw plunged into a bottle of wine and bad case of writer's block. Actually, I've been quiet for the opposite reason: lots of writing and not so much wine (sadly, no bendy straws either). 

Here in the final stretch of my first draft, I'm remembering how good it feels to just obsess over a book, to disengage a bit with the outside world and get lost in your work. I take the escapism that comes with writing fiction for granted sometimes. And really, something about having a big pile of pages to make the experience tangible is so satisfying. One day you're staying at nothing but a blinking cursor, the next you think 'holy crap I wrote a book.'

For all that I worry about the business end of it, I forget sometimes that I actually really do love to write. That that has been the point all along.

New York

I visited New York for the first time almost exactly nine years ago, during the May of my junior year of college. I met him about a month later in Seattle where we're both from. In both cases I was pretty much hooked immediately and it's fair to say that neither one has made it all the way out of my system yet. The fact that I'm saying goodbye to him on the street corner on this sunny Tuesday is but one way that my past and present collide so hard in this place that it's almost unbearable. It leaves me with this reeling sensation that time is collapsing around me, that all the things I've done in the past nine years didn't really happen, or even if they did, they don't really matter.

I am back in New York for a few days for work and this visit feels much better than the last. Last time was only a few months after I'd moved away and it was too soon. It was also in July, which is generally a terrible time to visit New York. April is one of the few times of year (May, September and early October being the others) that you could really be convinced that New York is the most idyllic city you've ever seen, with all of the restaurants opening out onto the street and people eating and drinking and looking happy all over the sidewalks at all hours. There is nothing I miss more about New York than the restaurants.

Actually, I miss my friends even more. I had dinner my first night in town with three publishing girlfriends who I've known since we were all assistants. Back then we were excited to be working around books at all, now they're editors and the head of an agency respectively and we had lots to celebrate, including one freshly minted bestseller. In ten years, I tell them, we'll say we knew each other when.

Being back, I can't quite fathom how I ever lived in a place so cramped and so loud with so many people (does that make me sound old? I did just turn 30), how did I write here? How did I sleep? But I did live here, and I did love it.

I'm so glad I came to New York. Maybe just a little more glad that I left.

the author's to-do list

                                                                  this is a serene lake. do not throw your laptop into it. 

These past two weeks, I've been immersing myself in the collected blog works of Jen Dziura (for work purposes! My job is the best sometimes). I highly recommend doing this if you are feeling that late February lag that so many of us go through when our well-intentioned New Year's resolutions begin to feel like distant memories.

In her post a couple of weeks ago, Jen wrote about overcoming perfectionism and it got me thinking about all of my own not-quite-completed to-do lists.

I have a long list of goals for 2012 and I set a monthly reminder to myself to check back in on it. Have I done all of it? Good God, no. Have I done some of it? Well, yes, I have. So do I get a gold star or am I big fat failure?

I only got about half of the things on 30 before 30 list done before other things in my life took over my time, but that half included spending a month in Argentina, learning Spanish, reconciling with a friend I hadn’t talked to in years, getting in great shape and losing fifteen pounds, landing a column on my favorite website and publishing my book. Pretty great, right? It's hard to look at it as anything but a wild success when I put it that way.

If you cross off all of the items on your to-do list with ease, the list probably wasn't nearly ambitious enough.

So how does this apply to writers?

Never have there been so many options available to writers to build a platform and promote their work, but to say it's overwhelming would be an understatement. I've seen some of the packets my friends get from their publishers about social media and online marketing, and while these packets contain no dearth of helpful information, the sheer scope of what they're being asked to do is unreal.

I'd imagine most writers' ideal to-do list would look something like this:

1. Write book

2. Go and talk to some fans and sign some copies and bask in the glow of nice reviews whilst showing admirable fortitude in the face of any criticism.

3. Repeat as needed.

In reality it goes something more like this (amended to include all you intrepid self-published types):

1. Write book

2. Revise book

3. Revise it again. Maybe once more.

4. Research agents and query/ hire fantastic editor and copy editor to polish book to a high sheen.

5. Find publisher / publish your damn self!

So far so good right? You're now in therapy to cope with all the rejection and should maybe stop drinking all of the vodka and stop eating your feelings but, look at you! You’re an author! Time to bask in the glory right? Wrong! More steps:

6. Start a blog. Blog all the time. Be funny, be interesting.

7. Find other people's blogs and try to get them to let you be funny and interesting on their blog.

8. Tweet. Follow. Hashtag! Learn what IMO, DH, LMFAO mean! Be clever, be informative. Be snarky but funny snarky, not mean snarky. Not one likes mean people on Twitter. Be self-promotional but not, you know, too self-promotional. No one likes that.

9. Facebook! Have a page, get some fans! Tell people to 'like' you and try not to feel weird about that.

10. Don't forget about Google Plus, and Reddit and Digg it and...and....um, Pintrist? Isn't that a thing now?

11. Something about Google analytics!

I could go on. Oh, could I go on but I'm guessing your brain when into Sad Macsomewhere between 8 and 9. And so this is what follows:

12. Decide you are a big fat failure who cannot adequately promote their work.

13. Throw mobile devices into the lake.

14. Maybe you join a monastery. Those monks look really calm.

So what's an author to do?

It's not just important for authors (even traditionally published ones) to maintain a presence online; it's crucial.  So by all means set the bar high, but don't freak out when you don't quite reach it.

Repeat after me: I will never do everything I could have done to promote my work. Never. It is impossible. Choose a couple of things you can do to help support your work and focus on those; take time to keep refocusing as you go along. Didn't blog for two weeks? Don't waste time beating yourself up, just go write a killer post! Been neglecting your Twitter? Spend an hour on there re-tweeting people at the end of the day on Friday when you’re too tired to do anything else.

Take it from me: A dieter who resolves to eat nothing but kale and work out seven days a week will still see success if he works out three days a week and incorporates greens regularly; sometimes “close enough” is plenty.

in real life

Ah late January when it feels like it will be 45 degrees and raining for all the rest of our lives. When our early enthusiasm for shiny New Year's resolutions has given way to feelings of 'I want to stay in and eat/ drink the contents of the cabinets including the baking chocolate and the vermouth that's leftover from the time we decided to get into martinis even though we don't like them.'

Readers, I don't want to get up in the mornings to work on my novel. Any more than I want to do any of the long list of ambitious and worthy things I laid out for myself as goals when I was on vacation in the desert right before new year's. It was warm there guys! And sun-shiny! And planning to do things whilst drinking a mojito by the pool is way easier than you know, doing them. 

But something other than this mid-winter inertia inhibits me too, I realize as I roll over to smack my snooze button to high heaven every other morning. Fear.  

My new project is set to be a bit more ambitious than my last few novels because it's going to be good deal more personal. The relationships and experiences that inspired and fueled my past novels were fascinating ones in my life but ultimately fleeting. Now I mean to write about something that cuts much deeper. I can only imagine all the nerve endings I will hit along the way and I must admit, I'm a little scared to go to that place. Even though I know I'm ready, even though I know it will be cathartic, even though it's only fiction and I'm not naming names. 

I want to know from those of you who've done it: how, how do you survive the experience of writing a memoir?

what we talk about when we talk about writer's block

Ah, writer's block. The chupacabra of literary types the world-over. But is writer's block a real thing or just an excuse not to write? What do we even mean when we say writer's block?

Writing regularly takes a lot of discipline and few of us are so perfectly dedicated that we don't go through periods where we don't write as often we should (if you do, kindly keep it to yourself). But when you have those times when you just can't put pen to paper (metaphorically speaking), what exactly is it that's stopping you?

I recently had lunch with my very wise mentor Patricia Geary (whose work you should all go read immediately) while on vacation in California. We discussed the usual things: what we were writing, what we weren't writing, who I was dating, how her family was doing. I had a lot to share about my adventures in self-publishing, but had to admit that I had not been as diligent as I wanted to be about working on my novel this past year. 

I have a pretty typical publishing sob story: I've written a couple of novels, had an agent, experimented with self-publishing (just e-books, not the hard POD stuff). That's all to say that I've had my close-calls and disappointments, my ups and downs, all of it adding up to many, many more pages written than people who have read them. Pat knows the story, of course, and she pointed out that having been through all of this makes it difficult to sit back down and get going on a new book. At some point the sense of  “am I really going to sit back down and write yet another book that no one will read?” can get overwhelming. “That's what people mean when they say they have writer's block,” she said.  

It rings true. Sometimes I skip a day (or ten) of writing for the same reason I might skip the gym: laziness, inertia, plain old just-don't-wanna. But sometimes it feels like something deeper. I mean I know why I go to the gym; the benefits are obvious and evident. The why regarding writing (of the creative rather than the paid variety) is somewhat less obvious and asking myself why am I doing this? can leave me not so jazzed about it and feeling downright fearful. That said, this fear cuts both ways--I've worked with plenty of writers who feel paralyzed trying to live up to a past success. 

I've never been blocked in the sense that I couldn't find something to write about, couldn't pull characters or plots from my imagination that interested me. If I can get my butt in my chair for an hour a day, something will come out, it's just that sometimes that chair is the most terrifying place in the world. This is part of the reason I write when I first get out bed in the morning: there's no time to let the doubt set in. Plus, my thoughts in the early morning tend more towards mmmmm, bacon than toward existential dread.

What do you think about writer's block? Inevitable burden or mythical beast?

friday I'm in love

                                                because Fridays are for pictures of puppies running 

Hey. It's the first Friday after the holidays, how much does it suck to be back in the office? 

Sorry, I wouldn't actually know the answer to that question because I work here and it's pretty consistently awesome but I remember what it was like to be stuck in the office on a Friday. 

My point is, you probably need something to burn through the remaining painful hours until quitin' time so may I humbly suggest you read chapter 11 of my novel here on the Gloss? While you're at it, read everything else on the Gloss because it is the very best thing on the internet. Or you can always do what one reader did and download my whole book (here or here) to read on your iPhone in the storage closet if that's how you roll. 

Happy weekend! 

this year's love

I called my gym (which has odd hours sometimes) to make sure they were open on Monday.  'Oh, we're open,' the woman said, 'all the gyms are open today. And packed.'

Right. New Year's. Every year around this time, the number of people in my gym triples for three weeks before it inevitably goes back to normal, and by normal I mean 'works out in jeans guy', 'stinky hipster guy', 'sings along loudly to his headphones guy' and all of my other favorite weirdos. It depresses me not because I mind sharing treadmill space with these resolution-havers but because I know that not many of them are going to make it. It a vivid reminder of how difficult it is to make a real change in your life.

New Year's is an especially bad time to resolve to change your habits. Who on earth is motivated in the dead of winter? Bright shiny calendar year or no, this time of year all I want to do is sit on my couch watching Happy Endings and eating pie.

It's also true that none of the big-ish things I accomplished this year--self-publishing my novel, getting fit (and losing fifteen pounds), confessing long-held, unsaid feelings--had anything to do with New Year's resolutions. I did these things because I was genuinely, deeply compelled to do them, and that just doesn't come from the turning of a calendar page. 

So, best of luck 'I'm going to take out all of my feelings on this elliptical' lady--you're going to need it.

What did you accomplish in 2011 that you're proud of?

I want to thank you

I meant to write this post last week.

I meant to tell you all the things I'm thankful for on the designated day of Being Thankful. But instead I helped my mother make dinner for thirty of my friends on Wednesday and ten or so of my family members on Thursday. I cooked and ate and drank. I danced and drank some more and broke some glassware. I ate as much pie as I could bare without a thought for my waistline and then put on a bathing suit. I watched three of my crazy friends jump in the ice cold lake and then got in the hot tub with them and others where we drank some more. I stayed up nearly till sunrise to spend just a little more time with the people I'm so lucky to have had show up in my life just when I needed them most. As though it all might disappear tomorrow.

Which, of course, it might.

I tried to focus on who was there, on who sat beside me. My heart ached for some missing faces: some simply far away, others unreachable for much more difficult reasons. I tried to appreciate the strength of those around me and forgive the weakness of those who couldn't find their way to me when I'd needed them. I tried to take it all in. I tried to let it all go.

And I was thankful.

self-publishing's new frontier

I admire Sherry Jones' work and that I think that she made some salient points in her October 11th piece on the Huffington Post: Self-Publishing: The Elephant in the Room. However, I also think she missed some major ones by a mile.

Since the creation of “vanity” presses, there has been a discomfort associated with self-publishing, the notion this is the last-ditch realm of those not good enough to get published the traditional way. Dealing with the waves of rejection before getting your work published was an important right of passage and a way to hone your work, as it was for Jones. There were many good reasons to dismiss self-publishing back in 2006, as she said; it meant an arduous and expensive process that had little hope of doing anything but draining an author's pockets.

But things have changed.

In her dismissal of today's self-publishing possibilities, Jones seems to be taking for granted the idea that good-quality, worthy writing is what makes it through the tortuous publishing process, and bad writing (however you'd like to define it) gets culled along the way. Does anyone actually believe this? If they do, they haven't worked for a publishing house that has spent mind-bending amounts of advance money on  bad knock-offs of whatever vampire/ Nazi/ cozy mystery is currently setting the trend, and they have not lived amongst writers and seen some of the most loathsome get book deals while immensely talented and worthy ones are ignored for being 'too niche' or what have you.

What I imagine Jones is partly responding to here is the common fear that as the structure of traditional publishing crumbles further there will no one to gate-keep, no one to curate the experience and help shape novels through the editing process, no one to perform all the very vital functions that happen between author and reader.  

As you might have guessed, I have a dog in this fight. I used to work as a publicist for one of the Big Six and now am with a freelancer's collective in Seattle called Girl Friday Productions. One of the areas in which we are focusing our efforts is on how best to help our author clients take advantage of the dazzling and dizzying new options available in a way that ensures that they're putting the best work possible out into the world.  We also fill in the gaps for authors whose publishers aren't  able to give them the support they need to make the book a success, which is more and more frequently the case.

I'm also a novelist. I came to the game a bit later than Jones, in late 2008, just as the economy was beginning to tank. I had a fabulous agent from Writers House and we shopped my novel to lots of good feedback, one very close call, and, ultimately, no offers. I went back to the drawing board and wrote another novel. My agent had left the business by the time I was finished with it. I started searching for a new one, but found things had gotten even worse. One big reputable agent told me that she liked my novel a lot and thought I had a perfect voice for women's fiction but that it was just so hard to sell any fiction that didn't have an historical or magical element these days. I knew it was time for a break when I briefly considered working a warlock into the story.    

This past fall, I decided to dust off my first novel and run it in serial on the women's website I write for TheGloss.com and publish it as an eBook. Because of the low cost and ease of this, I could do it without the pressure of having to put up a bunch of money or knowing a publishing house had done the same. I wanted to see what this new world of publishing was all about and figure that the worst that can happen is I will learn a lot that will be useful both to me and to my clients down the road. I didn't bypass the editorial or copyediting processes; I got help with those, as I think any author who is self-publishing should.

Do I think traditional publishing is obsolete? Absolutely not. I just think it needs to get with the program, and fast. The talent within these houses is immense and their usefulness to authors is incontrovertible, but the system itself is broken. Between the Vegas-style gambles with huge advances, the insane retail model, and overhead costs, how anyone could think it has a sound future is beyond me.

Because of the system of returns (wherein retailers send back books that don't sell) in publishing, publishers have to focus on pushing a book as hard as they can after the on-sale date to make it work.  And the overhead for publishing a book, between printing and shipping costs, staffing costs, office space in Manhattan in most cases, is immense. It's a pressure cooker in which publishers only really make money from break-out bestsellers and lose money on most books. So they're stuck trying to predict what might be a huge seller and take accordingly Vegas-style gamble with advance payments--most of which are never earned through.

I think its incumbent on all of us who love books to think up new and better ways to find and nurture great talent and help bring it to readers, however that happens in publishing's brave new digital world. And people are innovating: from Seth Godin's domino project to Red Lemonade to Emily Books to self-published authors like John Locke and Amanda Hocking who are making huge waves.

Like Jones, I learned a lot from going through traditional channels, just as I learned a lot from my time working for a big New York house. But this would all be useless to me if I wasn't willing to embrace the new frontier of book publishing. Because it is coming, whether we like it or not. 

The old system worked well for Jones; it did what it was meant to by keeping her out when she wasn't ready and giving her a leg up when she was. But to pretend that the chief function of people who work in publishing is to help authors reach their potential is to disregard all of the real financial concerns that hang over the heads of publishers. But now, books can be shared and read inexpensively and if an author works hard enough to find an audience, they can become a success with or without the gatekeepers. And I think this can only be a good thing for writers and readers. 

bury that horse in the ground

I met with a memoirist who used to be in army last week. I liked her immediately, she was spunky and had military discipline written all over her. Among other things, we talked about the elbow grease of self-promotion, of building the kind of platform it takes to make it these days. She was hip to it, she was unafraid of the internet, the twitter. She talked about meeting other writers at a recent conference who wanted nothing to do with all of that. We both shook our heads. 

On the one hand, we live in an exciting time when authors are more empowered than ever before with tools like blogging (he-ey), Twitter, Facebook etc at their disposal. I spend no small amount of energy using these myself and/ or drilling the authors I work with on the importance of them.

But secretly? I get it. I understand why you don't want to do any of it. I do! You want to go to your quiet room and do the important writer-ly writing and all the other stuff distracts from that. And you need to spend time on your writing or you'll have nothing to promote.

Lately, I've found myself getting nostalgic about the days before I ever even tried to get published, when novels were the only things getting my love and attention. Back then I didn't have to worry about being realistic, which is a nice place to be as a writer. 

So how do you find time for both? Early mornings? No television? Interns chained to the radiator? 

I had a dream last night

Happy Halloween friends. I hope those of you who celebrate it had a blast this weekend: ate just enough candy, made the perfect number of bad decisions. I love Halloween and I tend to get really into it (more about that here) so naturally I went big.

For my costume this year I was half black swan, half white swan. It seemed like the way to go since I've spent so much time either dancing or feeling insane this year (not homicidal though, don't worry).  The costume was a hit.

I kept in character by keeping my toes turned out and oscillating between being sweet and evil on Saturday night. I had a little Black Swan moment when some nice man asked me what my novel is about.

'Ugh," I said, shutting it down 'can we talk about something else?'

Now if those aren't good self-promotional skills, I don't know what.

Does anyone like discussing their book at parties? I'm fine writing about the book, or talking about it when I'm prepared but off the cuff at a party with a stranger? I'd rather read him my teenage diary.

How do you feel when people ask you that question?

owner of a lonely heart

Everyone who has worked in publishing knows what authors really want. 

To be loved. 

Writing is an incredibly lonely business. You don't need to necessarily be a loner to be a writer, lots of writers I've known have been fantastically social, the very life of the party. But there must be a side of you that loves solitude, the relishes the thought of retreating into your own mind for hours at time, with only your own voice and perhaps those of your characters echoing in your ears. 

Then one day you find you want to share what you have done with the world, to release into the wild what you have been laboring on in secret. You hope people will be moved or inspired, worry they will horrified or scandalized by your words. But God dammit, one way or another you want them to care. 

One thing the old model of publishing was great at (in the best cases) was making a writer feel loved. At least in the beginning when everything was shiny and hopeful. Publishing would bring you in and introduce you to a kindly editor with an office full of beautiful hardcovers, a publisher whose good suit hid his protruding belly, a sleek, hard-eyed, enthusiastic publicity director perhaps. All of these people were going to be there for you in this vulnerable time. But unless your book became enough of a success to keep the party going, the bloom faded fast. And then just like that, the you would themselves back where they started. Alone with your words and your thoughts and God forbid, your awful sales track. 

And if there's anything lonelier than a published author, it's a self-published author. 

Are we all alone out there? 

the mother of all role models

Are we all destined to become our mothers? Readers, I should be so lucky.

My mother turns sixty today and since lists are a little tradition of mine around here; here are five things that make my mom the best woman I know.

Her Beauty 


My mom is stunning. Regularly admired by my girlfriends (and hers) for her amazing skin and long legs, she's something of a dead ringer for Jamie Lee Curtis. I'm proud of the fact that my mom has stayed so fit all her life and though I'm not one to judge anyone for indulging in a little plastic surgery, that she's aged naturally and beautifully. But what I admire more than her looks themselves and what has benefited me more directly as her daughter, is her attitude about beauty. She's one of the most elegant dressers I know but has never put an undue importance on clothes; she appreciates the fact that looking good can be important to one's confidence but she always made it clear to my sister and me growing up that other things like being smart and kind, were much more important. I never once heard her complain about her looks or call herself fat and so I have always been appalled at that ugly habit some women have of talking smack with each other about their bodies. She's never once criticized my looks either (some outrageously inappropriate preteen fashion choices notwithstanding), understanding that the world is hard enough on a girl about that stuff without her mother adding to the chorus.

Her Passion


One of the traits I share with my mother is that neither of us are capable of doing anything halfway. If we're going to bother to do something, we're going to want to be good at it. My mother and I don't really do hobbies in the lighthearted way that others do. From her tennis game to her cooking to her dogs (she does agility and nose work trials with their two German Shepherds), she goes full force at everything she does. I can always tell when my mom has set her eye on a goal and I always know she'll get it.

Her Grace

My mom has excellent manners. Not the white glove kind that make everyone else feel a little guilty about their lack of manners but the authentic kind that put everyone around her at ease. I don't know that I've ever seen her be genuinely rude to someone and she's always made the innumerable friends, boyfriends and stray acquaintances my sister and I brought around feel welcome (no matter how dubious those choices). She's an engaged listener and thoughtful conversationalist. You know how some people listen only insofar as their planning their rebuttal? My mom never does that.


Her Strength and Compassion

I group these last two together because after a very difficult year, I have come to understand that the one ultimately means nothing without the other; and my mother has more of both than anyone I know. It's only in the last few years that I've really come to see this clearly. In watching her support her father through his last painful year of life and support her sister and the rest of our family through his death, I saw not a new side to my mother (in my heart I suppose I always knew it was there) but a perhaps under-appreciated side of her. My mother with her calm nature is a wonderful balance to my father and I, but beneath her gentleness she's made of steel. My mother, like her affable but formidable father, has a strength that is quiet but runs deep. She has the strength to do what's right, even if it will cost her dearly. My family has been dealt some serious blows in this past year and sometimes I worry that my mother bears the brunt of it, shoring up the rest of us the way she does. It is a lucky thing to admire the character of one's parents the way I do. And when I think of what it means to be a mother, to be at the very center of a family with all of the courage and inevitable sacrifice that that entails, I can't think of anyone who could do it better.

I could go on but I'll end here by saying that if I can only hope to turn out like my mom. If everyone had a mom like mine, surely it wouldn't cure all the world's ills but I'm pretty sure it would cut them in half at least. I'll end with a poem that both my mom and her father loved and one that speaks to the rare kind of strength so present in them both.

Abou Ben Adhem

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)

Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

And saw, within the moonlight in his room,

Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

An angel writing in a book of gold:— 

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,

And to the Presence in the room he said

"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,

And with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered "The names of those who love the Lord."

"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerly still, and said "I pray thee, then,

Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night

It came again with a great wakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,

And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

revisionist history

I'm smack in the middle of reading The Paris Wife. I'm enjoying it so far, the premise is intriguing and the author's voice is quite easy to cozy up to which is just what one needs on a rainy Seattle night (see: all of them). For those who don't know, The Paris Wife is told from the (imagined) perspective of Earnest Hemingway's first wife Hadley Richardson. It takes place in 1920s Paris which is not a hard sell for this reader, regardless of the subject matter.

The genre is extremely popular but I'm of two minds on historical fiction. On the one hand, being a person who doesn't love doing research, I admire the lengths these authors go to get the details right and it seems like a brave thing to take such a well known figure as Earnest Hemingway and start putting words in his mouth. On the other hand, I can't help but feeling like it's taking a bit of shortcut (albeit a clever one) to write a novel based on an existing story, especially one which will automatically have a big audience as this one does. I think this particular book could stand well enough on its own merits but I find I get most excited reading it when I think oh, there's Gertrude Stein! There's Ezra Pound! Did it really happen that way? All a function of the genre.

So is historical fiction cheating or is it raising the bar on the already daunting task of creating a compelling novel?

revisionist history

I'm smack in the middle of reading The Paris Wife. I'm enjoying it so far, the premise is intriguing and the author's voice is quite easy to cozy up to which is just what one needs on a rainy Seattle night (see: all of them). For those who don't know, The Paris Wife is told from the (imagined) perspective of Earnest Hemingway's first wife Hadley Richardson. It takes place in 1920s Paris which is not a hard sell for this reader, regardless of the subject matter.

The genre is extremely popular but I'm of two minds on historical fiction. On the one hand, being a person who doesn't love doing research, I admire the lengths these authors go to get the details right and it seems like a brave thing to take such a well known figure as Earnest Hemingway and start putting words in his mouth. On the other hand, I can't help but feeling like it's taking a bit of shortcut (albeit a clever one) to write a novel based on an existing story, especially one which will automatically have a big audience as this one does. I think this particular book could stand well enough on its own merits but I find I get most excited reading it when I think oh, there's Gertrude Stein! There's Ezra Pound! Did it really happen that way? All a function of the genre.

So is historical fiction cheating or is it raising the bar on the already daunting task of creating a compelling novel?

every day I'm...

Friday was an exciting day for me. My book went out into the world on its merry digital way and I did a guest post for Betsy Lerner, which would be cause for celebration all by itself. Hers is one of my very favorite writer/ publishing blogs and the commenters were very supportive and asked me some pretty entertaining questions about publicity. 

I fet a little spent by the end of the day. It took me years to write the book and polishing it and pulling together for ebook and internet publication has been a lot of work. The whole thing makes me want to take a nap. This is something I have seen with many authors I've worked with over the years, their book goes on sale and they feel like they've just finished running a marathon and don't they deserve a break? This is of course compounded by the fact that most writers (even the ones with enviable three books deals and movie tie-ins) still hold down day jobs, have families etc. Even for traditionally published authors who have the support of an entire staff, it's never been more incumbent upon them to push their own work. Gone are the days when authors could send their work out into the world and then return to the cave to continue writing. 

Now there is aways something you could be doing to promote your book, writing op-eds and blog posts and tweeting and Facebooking. Is it overwhelming? Hell yes but at least it gives you something to do with all of that 'oh my God what if no one buys my book?!' energy. Something other than calling your publicist five times a day. 

Do you feel empowered or overwhelmed by the hustle? 

Big news today! I've been dancing around it over at the Gloss: talking about how disappointments can work in your favor and about how I 'm halfway through my list and it's time to go big or go home.

So what is this all about? Well, as I had the immense pleasure of announcing in a guest post on one of my favorite blogs today and on my second home the Gloss, I am publishing my first novel as an ebook and running it in serial on the Gloss each Friday.

It's an idea I had a couple of months ago when I was brushing my teeth. I remember thinking 'wait that's a great idea! No, wait. That's a terrible idea, it will never work.' But then I caught myself, I know that voice of doubt too well by now. I went straight to work and told three of my publishing buddies before I could talk myself out of it.

After many years of writerly solitude penning novels I loved very much but shared with almost no one, I've discovered through blogging just how good it feels to actually have my work reach readers. Every single time that someone comments on one of my posts or tells me in real life how much they like my work, it makes my day.

Is this how I imagined the publication of my first book? No. I imagined frenzied phone calls between my agent and an editor to strike a deal, making the rounds at the publishing house to which my book had been sold, giving the eager young publicists a knowing smile. Instead it's been a quiet process: an editor friend did my copy-editing, a tech-savvy pal helped me format it and a half dozen industry buddies helped serve as a mini think tank for decisions on the cover and the title.

It's been nice to watch it come together and mostly I think it just feels good to do something other than wait, wait and wait some more.

So, no more waiting. You can follow it on the Gloss or you can buy it here.

I'm feeling good dear readers, like maybe I'm the master of my fate after all.

I am the captain of my soul

I finally got around to watching Invictus tonight. If you haven't seen it, go rent it immediately. I'm a sucker for any movie where sports serve as a metaphor for life and there are myriad reasons why this movie is amazing that I won't go into here, Matt Damon's thighs are the least of it.

The movie is named after the poem Invictus, a favorite of my father's and a piece of writing that gives me chills every time I read it, let alone hear it spoken in Morgan Freeman's unmistakably mellifluous voice. The movie depicts both Mandela and the rugby captain drawing strength from the poem in their time of need.

I was reminded of something essential about my craft that is easy to lose sight of in this fast-paced digital world of ours: that the right words, said in the right way can inspire greatness.

Was there a poem that carried you through?