Lifescapes

Book review site relaunched

The big "secret" project I've been telling you about just went public!

We (Paula, Peggy, Linda, and I) have relaunched the Story Circle Book Review site, with a fresh new look and lots of new features. This is a site that Peggy and I put together for Story Circle five or six years ago. Paula took it over and expanded it to over 400 reviews, making it the largest women's book review site on the Internet. Now, we're expanding even further, with added categories for women's non-fiction and fiction (including mysteries, historical and mainstream novels, and Christian fiction), a new look, and lots of new features--and more on the way!

To handle this expansion, we're looking for reviewers to supplement our existing team of 20-plus reviewers. Reviewers may receive free advance reading copies and new books--and of course writing reviews is a great way to add to your portfolio of publications. We're featuring our most active reviewers by giving each one a webpage of her own, and will soon be launching an eletter with more opportunities to showcase our reviewers. Interested? You'll find all the info here. If you've just read a book that you've enjoyed and want to share, we'd like to read your review.

Also, stay tuned here for another big announcement, coming up in a few days--something I've been plotting for a couple of months is about to happen, finally!

Best intentions. I'm knitting the second sock in a mystery pair. You know about this, right? You knit the first sock in a pattern you were wild about at the time, but you fail to note the name/location of the pattern, and you can't find it when you start the second sock. I'm doing my best to duplicate it, but I'm afraid that this pair will end up on my personal feet (rather than those of the planned recipient), because the patterns don't quite match. When will I learn to not only keep the needles with the yarn and Sock #1, but also leave a trail of breadcrumbs to the PATTERN!! Oh, hiss, boo, and grrrr....

Reading note. If it is true, and I really believe that it is, that knitting is a soothing force in the world and that the liberal application of yarn can ease any day, then today would be a time when I tested it.

Finished!

The Tale of Briar Bank is finished and has flown off to New York, via dragon courier. No, just kidding. (You didn't really believe that, did you?) I sent an e-copy via email for the production gang and a print manuscript via snails to my editor. She likes to read books she can hold in her hands and mark up with a pen, the old-fashioned way. When she's read it, it goes to England to be read by an editor at Frederick Warne, Beatrix Potter's copyright holder. Then back here to the copyeditor, then back to me, then back to the copyeditor, then back to me as "first-pass" pages, then to the printer and the binder, and finally (in September 2008) to you, so you can find all the errors the copyeditor and I have cleverly hidden just for you. In the meantime, as a librarian friend of mine said once, you'll have to contain your soul in patience. While you're waiting, The Tale of Hawthorn House (Book 4) will be out this September (having gone the same route last year). And if you haven't read the third book, The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood, now's the time.

I took a day for a felting project, a day for reading (Robert Pyle's Sky Time in Gray's River), and now I'm back at work--this time on the memoir that I set aside late last winter. I don't like what I felted (a mustard-colored scarf), but even when felt doesn't turn out the way you imagined, it still turns out. I mean, there's the felt itself, which can be turned into something else. The process went like this.

First I carded the fiber, which is a blend of dyed merino. This is a laminated felt, so the fiber is felted on both sides of the laminating fabric, which in this case is a scarf-sized piece of dyed cheesecloth--you can see it in the second photo. In the third, I've laid out the fiber on bubblewrap and placed the cheesecloth on top of it. Another layer of fiber goes on top of that. The result is the scarf in the fourth photo, which turned out about the right size and weight (cozy on a cold winter's night in Alasak). Below that is a closeup--the felted fabric is rather more interesting than the scarf, which encourages me to think that maybe I can use it as part of the vest that's lurking in a dark corner of my mind.

The memoir looks better than I remembered--the first half of it, anyway. It's lovely to get back to it and actually enjoy reading what I wrote, which is not always the case. But like the felted fabric, writing can be recycled--recycled endlessly, actually. So even if I didn't like it, all is not lost. More later about that.

Before you go, please take a look at a couple of other pages. My son Michael wrote a nice piece for the Junea Empire about back-roads traveling, including photos of the grandkids. Encourage him so he'll keep on writing. And Linda Peterson wrote about her cat, Grace Blanket, on our Wildness blog. Her post reminds us that we don't need to make a trip to the wilderness to reach the deepest, truest heart of the wild. Thank you, Linda.

Reading note, from Linda's post: I’ve known wildness, defining it, when I came to define it at all, as something remarkable and exotic, something “out there” attainable only in rare, dramatic moments.   But here in the quiet of my living room with a domestic cat, I felt my own wild nature at its deepest in the space we created around us.

Stay-at-home dad

My son Michael has just published the second in a series of columns he's writing for the Juneau Empire. This one is about an important decision that he and his wife Sheryl made a couple of years ago: that he would stay at home with the kids until they went to school. I'm glad he's been able to do that--it's good for Michael, good for Sheryl, and especially good for the children.

And it's always interesting (sometimes comfortable, sometimes un-) to see my children's perspective on the life we shared when they were still at home. It's also interesting to see him write so honestly about his relationship to his first family. I have the feeling that many of us find ourselves being more transparent (less self-protective? less defensive?) in print and online, than we used to be. I can't help but think that's good.

Blooms

If you've never seen an aloe in bloom, look closely--here it is. My aloe spent the winter in a makeshift greenhouse where it gets plenty of light but not much attention (which means that it rarely gets watered). When I went to fetch it, to tell it that spring had arrived and it was time to wake up and get growing, I found that it had anticipated me. It was already in bloom, for the very first time in its life. This is a six- or seven-year-old plant, growing happily in a large terra cotta frog. Ribbit.

And here's something else that's just starting to bloom: a new writing project. Well, sort of. I haven't actually started it just yet. I've only just begun to start it, if you get my meaning. And since I don't usually go through all this rigamarole when I'm beginning a new project, I thought I'd tell you about it, so you'll be in on it from the word go. Or almost.

Last summer, when Linda Lear and I were discussing her in-progress biography of Beatrix Potter, I suggested that she might want to write a junior biography. The ones I had seen were pretty woeful, incomplete and uninformed by any recent research. And she had a gazillion tons of research material, and interviews, and all that good stuff about Beatrix that could easily translate into a biography for young readers. Linda thought about this for, oh, about 30 seconds, and declined. (I think she felt, understandably, that eight years invested in Beatrix was enough.)

So I told her I'd give some thought to the idea of doing it myself. I did, and kept on thinking, while I finished the Cottage Tale I was working on, and then Nightshade, which was next on the to-do list. And then I got a very good start on the memoir (half-baked now and ripening on the shelf), and went back to thinking about the junior biography. And thinking. And finally I got to the point (when I got back from New Mexico) of writing a three-page proposal for a book called Beatrix Potter: A Magical Life.

But Bill and I haven't had an agent for seven or eight years, and in order to sell this new project, I'd need a new agent, which is much easier said than done. Agents--particularly children's nonfiction agents--don't grow on trees. And you need a specialty agent for something like this: somebody who knows the current market, who has looked at lots of projects like A Magical Life and can judge its marketability, and who understand it and feels enthusiastic. This week, with a referral from Linda Lear to her agent, and a referral from Linda's agent to one of the larger agencies in New York, I've found an agent, a very good one, who's as excited about the project as I am.

I have to tell you that this has happened at a very good time. I'll be gone all next month and won't have a moment to sit around and chew my fingernails and wonder what's happening in New York--I'll be on the road with Spanish Dagger. And maybe, with luck, some discerning editor who is hungry for just this project will snap it right up, so that when I get back, I'll have the delicious pleasure of telling you that the proposal is about to bloom into a book. Ribbit.

Or maybe it won't. Maybe it'll be like that aloe, and sit around for six or seven years before it decides to bloom. You never know in this business. That's part of the excitement. I guess. But I think I'll pass on excitement tonight, and pour myself a glass of celebratory wine and sit down with the rest of the galleys of Hawthorn House (I've got 100 pages to go). And my spinning. Feels right.

Reading note. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. --Jorge Luis Borges

Multi-tasking

                                                                                                    I've had a very lovely day, reading galleys for Hawthorn House and spinning Jane's alpaca/wool/silk. I'm probably slower at doing each task, since I'm doing both at the same time, but it's a relaxing division of attention--read a bit, spin a bit, then read again. I'm far enough away from this book (it was finished last summer) to be reading it with a fresh eye, and appreciating it with a fresh mind. It's my favorite so far of the Cottage Tales--enough good lines to make me smile, even make me laugh, especially in the animal scenes. Fun for me, and I hope for you, when you get to read it.

Also today, a nice review from Booklist of What Wildness is This, posted on Amazon's page. It's good to see some of the review journals taking an interest in the book. Plus some garden work, a bit of Internet mapping (the last of the maps for the tour), and some negotiation on a new writing project--something different--that I hope to be able to tell you about before too long. Not sure where it's going, and it's certainly had its ups and downs and ins and outs and moments of "what the hell am I doing THIS for?" I finally have the feeling it's going somewhere. But not yet. Not just yet.

Back to Hawthorn House and my spindle.

Reading note. My students assume that when well-respected writers sit down to write their books, they know pretty much what is going to happen . . . and this is why their books turn out so beautifully and why their lives are so easy and joyful, their self-esteem so great, their childlike senses of trust and wonder so intact. Well. I do not know anyone fitting this description at all. Everyone I know flails around, kvetching and growing despondent, on the way to finding a plot and structure that work. You are welcome to join the club.--Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Robin Paige Series

Quite a few readers have written in the last couple of months, asking why Bill and I decided to discontinue the Robin Paige series. Here's an answer to that question--now, when people ask, I can just give them the permanent link to this post!

Bill and I started work on that series in 1992, right after the first China Bayles book came out. We'd been writing young adult books together since 1985, and both of us enjoyed the process of writing together. So we came up with several ideas for a co-authored series. After much energetic back-and-forth, considering various options, we decided to set the series in England in the late Victorian-early Edwardian period. There was so much going on at that time, politically, socially--and especially forensically. Fingerprint identification was just becoming available, and there was forensic photography, ballistics, toxicology, serology, and so on. So it was an ideal setting for an investigative series.

We also decided to use real people in the series. The second book, for instance, featured Beatrix Potter. The sixth, Jennie and Winston Churchill. The twelfth, Guiglielmo Marconi. This proved to be a very good idea, and really kept us interested in the series. Readers have liked it, too, for each book introduces them to a new segment of English society, to a new set of issues, and new points of view. But it also proved to be exceedingly difficult, for each book required not only the usual background research, but also specific biographical research about the person we chose as our "featured" character.

The series originally went as paperback original to Avon, but they were having troubles at the time (the mid-90s) and didn't do a very good job getting the books out there. We moved the series to Berkley, where it has been ever since, very happily. We've loved working with our editor, Natalee Rosenstein. The series went into hardcover with the seventh book. We've discontinued it with the twelfth--Lizard (originally in hardcover in 2006) will be out in paperback in July. When we started, we thought we might do ten books. The series went to twelve because we enjoyed the collaboration so much.

I say "discontinued," because it's always possible that something will come along that will make us change our minds. We left some plot threads hanging, just in case we want to pick it up again. But there's no "next book" in this series on our horizon. The reason: the research load is very heavy. It wasn't so much the background research in the period--that was entirely manageable. It was the biographical research on the individual characters and their world that made it difficult. For Marconi, for instance, we worked our way through all the available biographies, plus books about the telegraph, the wireless telegraph, and radio. And believe me, there's a LOT of stuff out there. Bill spent a couple of months on the research and we each put in three person-months on the writing. By the time all was said and done, we'd put a full year into the book.

Yes, we probably overdid it. We might have gotten by without doing so much. But we loved the learning (that's one of the reasons we're writers). Readers, too, have appreciated that level of specificity, and once we began creating these richly-detailed worlds, we really couldn't go back to a more general, non-specific kind of writing that so often passes for "historical" fiction. Readers would have been disappointed, and we wouldn't have enjoyed the work nearly as much.

That's it, gang. That's why we decided to discontinue the series. I'll continue the China Bayles books indefinitely (as long as you keep reading), and hope to do a short story collection and a cookbook in the series. There will be four more books (eight altogether) in the Beatrix Potter series, and maybe a junior biography. I'm working on a memoir project now, and have a novel in mind, to be written sometime in the next couple of years. Bill and I miss the Robin Paige collaboration, but now we have time for other things we want to do together, so it all balances out.

If you've been a reader of this series, thanks for your support. Please know that you belong to a relatively small and select group: there are many fewer readers of historical fiction (particularly the non-bodice-rippers), and they don't network the way readers of other mysteries or romances do. So it's harder for an author to reach you, or to develop an effective "marketing program." Also, as a group, you are demanding: you know your history and you want your history done right. Bill and I hope we managed to do that.

Miss Potter and Mr. Warne

Amy wondered about Ewan McGregor's role in the "biopic", Miss Potter: since Norman (McGregor's character) dies, is he going to play an important role in the film? I haven't seen the script and my "spy sources" have seen only promo clips, so I can only speculate. But my guess is yes (especially since McGregor is a Star)--much will be made of the romantic tension between Beatrix and Norman. And somehow I have the feeling that this film won't any more true-to-life than the other productions about Beatrix, which have pictured the pair in huggy-face kissy-poo scenes that are delightfully romantic but probably not factual.

So far as we know from the extant letters (Norman's to Beatrix have not survived--hers to him are all on business matters, and she addresses him as "Mr. Warne"), Beatrix and Norman were never alone together. Mrs. Potter insisted that her daughter (in her late 30s!) be chaperoned every time she went to the Warne offices, and Norman sent his marriage proposal via letter. So whatever romantic encounters you see in the film are fictional. This is not a bad thing (as the author of a fictional series about Beatrix,I would have to say that, wouldn't I?). We just need to remember that biopics, while based in fact, are 99.9% fictional, and are designed for entertainment value. If you want the truth, read Judy Taylor's biography of Beatrix, or the new (and truly comprehensive) biography by Linda Lear that will come out in February 2007. (Linda tells me that her book is finished and she's reading the copy-edited manuscript now. I've put it at the top of my must-have list)

Reading note, from Beatrix's journal, Tuesday, Nov. 17, 1896, after she left Sawrey, where she and her parents were on holiday. They were staying at Lakefield, now called "Ees Wyke" and open as an inn. I love these lines, which show both her skill as a writer and her love for animals:

Perhaps my most sentimental leave-taking was with Don, the great farm collie. He came up and muddied me as I was packing up Peter Rabbit at the edge of dark. I accompanied him to the stable-gate, where he turned, holding it open with his side, and gravely shook hands. Afterwards, putting his paws solemnly on my shoulder, he licked my face and then went away into the farm.

A great review! and other book stuff

The big news at our house: The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood (the third book in the Cottage Tales series, due out next month) earned a great review in Publisher's Weekly, which is almost the best you can get in this business. (The best being a great review in the New York Times, but of course, that's not going to happen, not for a mere mystery, and especially a mystery with--gasp!--talking animals.) I'm thrilled. Delighted. Ecstatic. And very, very proud of Miss Potter and the rats in her attic and all the other characters in the book.

And while I'm celebrating, I'm reading first-pass pages of the Book of Days. There's a lot of work to be done here, I must say, because I definitely over-wrote this book. This is a calendar book, and each day gets only one page, and there is waaay too much stuff to fit on most of the pages, so I'm going through with my red pencil, cutting madly. It's hard, though. Like pruning roses. It's all good stuff. I loved writing it and I love reading it. But there's much too much of a muchness, and some of it has to go. Quite a lot of it has to go, actually. It'll probably take another two days to cut this baby down to size.

While I'm celebrating a terrific review and pruning an overwritten book, I'm also resting up. I drove down to Victoria TX on Friday. Talked at the library there on Friday afternoon (a book talk) and at EarthWorks' Herb Fest yesterday (an herb talk). It was hot (yep, that's South Texas for you, nothing new about that), but it didn't rain and I had lots of fun. Patsy Asher, of Remember the Alibi in San Antonio, went with me to sell books, and we had a great time. Met lots of people, saw some old friends (a gang of Yo-Yos from Corpus: you know who you are, gals!), and met a great many of China's and Ruby's friends. So today is a go-slow day, here at my desk, cutting a book down to size and and feeling happy about life in general and books in particular.

Reading Note, by novelist Henry Miller:

I commenced quietly on my own, to prune it down, to mutilate it, to reduce it to skeletal strength. I'm getting a masochistic pleasure out of it. I wipe out whole pages--without even shedding a tear. Out with the balderdash, out with the slush and drivel, out with the apostrophes, the mythologic mythies, the sly innuendos, the vast and pompous learning (which I haven't got!). Out--out--damned fly-spots . . .

books!

My author's copies of the new China Bayles hardcover, Bleeding Hearts, and the paperback edition of Dead Man's Bones arrived today. Pardon me while I sit on the floor and cradle them in my arms, crooning to them like babies. Birthing a book always feels like a long, drawn-out process, especially since I've already conceived and delivered Spanish Dagger, the next book in the series. But even though I've been living with the ideas and the e-files and the printed manuscript of Hearts for nearly two years (I finished it in December of 2004, delivered it in March 2005, and have seen it again in various stages of production) a book never seems real to me until I'm actually holding it in my hands. So, welcome to the wide, wild world, Hearts. May you be read and enjoyed by many--and get a ton of good reviews.

And there's another bit of good news. We've just agreed to the contract for the next two China Bayles mysteries! #16 (April 2008) will be titled Nightshade, #17 (April, 2009) will be called Wormwood. I don't know about you, but the longevity of this series astonishes and delights me. For a writer, there's no greater privilege than to be able to look ahead to good work, contracted and on the calendar.

In the same delivery that brought Hearts and Bones (what would we do out here in the country without UPS and FedEx?), came the copy-edited manuscript of The Book of Days. It is surprisingly clean--that is, not as full of errors as I feared!--and I'm hoping to get through it by Monday. Fun to read. Did I really write/compile all this great herbal stuff? I guess I did, because it's all right here on the pages, in front of me. The book is due to be published in early October, which means I'll be reading the galley pages sometime in July.

In the meantime, we're enjoying some beautiful spring weather. I pruned the roses around Valentine's Day, and now, as a floral reward, comes the first bloom: a lovely ivory-white blossom on the Ducher rose, which originated in China and was brought to the West about 1870.

Reading Note, from Mary Oliver, "Sand Dabs, Seven", in Long Life:

The sun has a working schedule, and the snow, and the birds, and every green leaf. Perhaps you should have one too?

winners!

The trouble with blogging about the writing process is that I don't have any pictures to post. But here's one you might like to look at while I'm blogging about Beatrix. This is St. Michael and All Angels Church, in Hawkshead, the market town where the Sawrey folk did their serious shopping. Beatrix went right past it every time she went into town.

The post is sort of about Beatrix, but mostly about the winner of the mystery characters raffle that we did with Story Circle. The raffle has been posted on my website since October, and the winners are posted there now. The idea is pretty simple: we raffled off the chance to put yourself into a character in one of the three mystery series I'm writing: China Bayles, Beatrix Potter, and the Victorian/Edwardian mysteries I write with Bill, as Robin Paige.

The raffle was a huge success--brought in just over $2,000 for SCN. (Thanks to all who entered!) We drew at the last session of the SCN conference: the old-fashioned way, pulling tickets out of a basket. I've emailed a questionnaire to each of the winners, to find out what about themselves they'd like to see in the book. (You wouldn't want ALL of your life story to appear in a China Bayles mystery, would you? I didn't think so.) Got the first reply yesterday, from Janet, the first-place winner, who chose to be in a Beatrix Potter book. I was especially inspired by one sentence: "In the past," Janet writes, "we have lived with a Tegu lizard, boa constrictor, many cats, a few dogs, and pet rats." Reading that, I knew exactly how I was going to use her character. Thanks for the inspiration, Janet--this is going to be a lot of fun!

Another contest: If you'll go to the main webpage you'll find an announcement of six more contests, one a week until the publication of BLEEDING HEARTS. Please enter! Peggy will be drawing the first winner on Saturday. This contest is free--you just have to answer a few very easy questions about herbs. They're so easy that I'm almost ashamed of them, but never mind: they'll get more challenging as we go along. So stay tuned for more winners!

Reading Note: by Jack London: You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.