I am a Published Author!
The Bookshop Hotel is available for purchase!
“Why was I angry after reading A.K. Klemm’s The Bookshop Hotel? Because Klemm managed to do in a novella what all writers aspire to – I wanted to know more about these characters and the hotel. I wanted to follow them around for the rest of their days and listen to their conversations and attend their parties and eat dinner at Sam’s Deli. I wasn’t ready to end my time with her characters.” – Melinda McGuire, Author of the Hefner Falls Series
Good thing I’m currently writing a sequel!
“The Year Of Magical Thinking” From Outside The Vortex
A sort of Part Two to my Year of Magical Thinking review…
Another gorgeous clearance pull, “The Year of Magical Thinking” caught my eye first with it’s title and second with it’s fabulous opener.
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self -pity.
…
I wrote the words in January, 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.
…
For a long time I wrote nothing else.
I had never heard of authoress Joan Didion or her equally famous author of a husband before I brought this one home; even after several Google searches I am not altogether sure how they figure in to the literary and news world she often references. This book, her story detailing the death of her husband, the hospitalization of her daughter, and the year in the vortex that followed, is written almost like a well-edited journal entry. It is a stark picture of the total…
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The Archivist
I cannot wait to read this one.
In a few minutes I heard the books’ voices: a low, steady, unsupressible hum. I’d heard it many times before. I’ve always had a finely tuned ear for a library’s accumulations of echo and desire.
Sometimes the best books are stuffed into clearance along with a thousand copies of Jodi Picoult for me to find and adore. “Adore” does not come close to describing how I feel about the slim paperback I pulled from a corner in Clearance Fiction, haphazardly stacked beneath piles of mass produced easy reading after the weekend warriors pawed through and reconfigured the section on a Saturday night.
I discovered this wintry, wistful, quixotic book while the first norther of the season was coming through Dallas. It took me a few days of picking it up here and there to finish it, curled up on my couch with either a cup of coffee or hot tea (depending on the time of day).
I read the entire book in…
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Aspects of a Novelist
Title: Aspects of the Novel
Author: E.M. Forster
Genre: Literary Criticism
Length: 176 pages
I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a very small child. So small that I don’t recall the first revelation or declaration. I simply always knew it was something I wanted to do one day. I also have always enjoyed books. I remember loving to read before I was even any good at it. I remember devouring books before my peers had even mastered their letters. This is not because I was smarter than them, not by a long shot. This is just how much passion I had for the idea of language and the written word.
Naturally, I also love books about writers writing… like Stephen King’s On Writing and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden Letters. I even like authors who get bossy about it like Umberto Eco and E.M. Forster. They deserve to be bossy, as they are brilliant.
I fell in love with E.M. Forster in high school when my favorite English teacher of all time told me to get a copy of Howards End. I remember devouring it almost over night and spending nearly a half hour after school discussing it with him. I remember being utterly blown away by Howards End for reasons I cannot even vaguely recall now, but things amaze you at sixteen for no particular reason at all, it is a habit I have tried to keep as I age too.
My debut as a novelist comes out this week – a novella, actually – called The Bookshop Hotel. I’m about halfway through writing the sequel, a book that will be a full length novel twice as long as the novella, and I’m already paranoid about potential reviews hailing my inferiority as a writer. So, I’m consulting one of my heroes for advice, writerly wisdom from the talented author of Howards End.
As I read Forster’s famous lectures, it is becoming clear to me that I will never be E.M. Forster, John Steinbeck, or even an Audrey Niffenegger! I will never be a best-selling New York Times sensation. I’m ok with that, it was never my intention to be infamous. I have other aspirations.
What I would like to do, though, is to tell a few good stories, make some income for my family, and have the satisfaction of stumbling across my books on shelves in unexpected places. That will be enough for me.
In the mean time, I’ll work as though my goal is to be the next Stephen King (on the prolific level anyway), because even though I am not the most talented, I don’t ever want to be accused of being half-assed. I’d rather be untalented than lazy.
So here I am on a Sunday night perusing Aspects of the Novel, munching on every tidbit, taking notes, wondering if Forster himself would have anything positive to say about my stories because the vital elements to a novel he points out are vital indeed and I’m unsure as to whether my characters can live up to that vitality.
“Forster’s casual and wittily acute guidance… transmutes the dull stuff of He-said and She-said into characters, stories, and intimations of truth,” Jacques Barzun is quoted. Let’s hope he’s right.
Whether it transforms me into something wonderful or not, the book is amazing. Every student of literature, lover of books, or budding author should give this one a go. Then again, I am partial, remember, I fell in love with Forster ages ago.
Different Kind of Fighter
Title: The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power
Author: Travis Hugh Culley
Publisher: Random House
Genre: Memoir
Length: 324 pages
My bike club went camping this weekend. I love bikes and I love camping, so it was excruciating knowing I had a pre-Halloween event at my store, bills to pay, and a general inability to leave my husband and child to go on a frivolous trip that would inevitably involve a lot of drinking and riding.
I love books more than anything, and I adore Chris Rogers (the author we had in the store Saturday), but my mind was off in the distance with my new friends – family really – their tents, their bikes, and the dirt and grit far away from my rows and stacks of books.
This isn’t about me whining about not getting to go on a camping trip, though. This is about the discovery I made because of where my mind was not and my body was… in the city, longing for my cycling friends who were partying it up and having a blast.
The stars aligned, the shelves at the store all seemed to point me in one direction, and a copy of The Immortal Class seemed to fall from the heavens.
So overly marketed as to appeal to the counter culture, zine reading crowd, The Immortal Class is one of those small square-shaped trade paperbacks. With phrases like “adrenaline-spiked” and “frenzied rawness” slapped across a black and grey jacket in egg-yolk yellow.
Months after becoming obsessed with the world of cycling and setting goals to really hunker down, figure it out, and join this world – I discovered this weekend why it appeals to my soul so completely.
“[T]he world down here was remarkably organized. Even if it was loud and bombastic, rebellious and unconventional, the people were often fixated on levels of personal status. With one another, messengers were highly cooperative, and yet competing against one another, they were fighters to the bone. It was a tight society where one could promise lasting respect and recognition for what one could offer to the community.” – pg. 230
Of course this appeals to me – this whole world of simultaneous independence and camaraderie. I grew up in a Kung Fu studio. I trained, I relied on muscle memory and instinct. I know so well the feeling of not remembering what it feels like to not be sore somewhere. I built very specific familial relationships that were directly tied to how much blood, sweat, and tears were spilled in each others’ presence.
I still do my work outs. I still teach occasional students. But I am no longer that kind of fighter. I remember when I knew I would never go back in the ring – at least not in the way I used to. It wasn’t the hairline fracture on my sternum. It wasn’t the broken and busted fingers. It wasn’t even the shin injury that twelve years later hasn’t seemed to heal just right and still swells up when it rains. It wasn’t any one thing, really. It was actually before I got my third degree, something I only got because I promised myself I would. It was actually a summer before that when after working out no less than 55-60 hours a week for months on end, after more than a decade in uniform and sash, I realized I was tired – mentally and physically. My mind was ready for something new and my body needed a break from the routine.
I started running more avidly. For a few years I ran 3-5 miles a day. I enjoyed that thoroughly, and I still run periodically. (You may remember a post about Born to Run, a book on barefoot running that kick started the running bug again recently…) But there’s always been something missing from my running – speed. A rush I can’t manufacture on my own two feet, that I used to get in the ring, has been absent. Running didn’t fill the void Kung Fu, my years of being a tournament junkie, and finally the days of bleeding for money had left behind when I said ‘Enough.’
Cycling, though, cycling has suddenly lit up my world and started to warm my soul in a way I haven’t been warmed in a long time. Probably since I fell in love and got married… yes, it’s that good of a rush! Seeing all that I have to learn excites me. Inspecting bruises from crashes and the act of getting to know my bikes (or loaner bikes until I own my own, rather) fills me with the pride that though I am a far, far cry from being any good at this sport – like a white belt dropped in the midst of advanced ninjas – I am at least one step, one bruise, and one fall closer to the perfection I seek.
I have no illusions of grandeur. No presumption that I will be great at this. I’m pushing 30 and my body feels 50, but I’m sure as hell going to try.
I dare you to read The Immortal Class and not get the urge to hop on a bike. I dare you. And just remember this: The more you ride, the more you’ll want to ride.
Now Available for Purchase!
A dear friend of mine just got his first book published!
The Evolution of Everything
Title: The Evolution of Jane
Author: Cathleen Schine
Genre: Fiction
Length: 210 pages
The perfect fall day in Texas: a spinach and onion soup with lots of cheese mixed in, coffee gone cold, Huckleberry Sage in my Scentsy Warmer, all the windows open because it’s so nice outside, Tethered by Sleeping at Last playing softly on repeat, and The Evolution of Jane in front of me.
In a week of epiphanies, nostalgia, cold fronts, random spurts of rain, and recuperation after sheer emotional exhaustion, Schine’s novel is perfect and lovely. Soft and defined at the same time. A little more perfect than I expected.
It’s supposed to be a comedy… “A cerebral comedy of manners,” the Boston Globe calls it. I find that in itself humorous, as I haven’t laughed since the first page. Instead, it feels (oddly) exactly like life. It’s a mish-mash of inappropriate feelings, unexplained drama, stress where there should be none, and complete nostalgia.
It even has a delicious quote that made me swoon as it so much reflects how I feel about my own life. “I loved my job, for it allowed me to rub shoulders with ideas, to listen without having to retain, to gather information like flowers.”
My job, this job that is part author, part homeschool mom, part event coordinator, part reader and reviewer, part so many things… this job feels like that… like gathering flowers. My life feels like that in general. I am a forager, I pick up and discard things as I go, looking for any bit of nutrients and beauty I can get along the way.
I bought this book years ago at the height of my Darwin and Evolution studies. When I was trying to squeeze every bit of information on anything that briefly fascinated me. When I was trying to retain everything. How appropriate that I wait to read it now, when I can read it with more of a passing fancy, where I can absorb a story without trying so hard to remember it all.
Life isn’t meant for you to remember every single moment. If we were meant to remember it all with such clarity, I think that we would. Some things are best left discarded. This book, however, is not one of those things. If you buy it, you should keep it. It will get added to the re-read sometime pile.