The Bookshop Hotel: At Long Last Published
Awww, thank you dear.
My dear friend, A.K. Klemm, has published her first novella: The Bookshop Hotel.
It has a cover.
It has a cover photo.
It contains words she wrote and thoughts she had connected one by one to create something that is now bound and on sale for you to purchase and love.
I have not had the pleasure of picking up my own copy yet (am waiting to do it in person so the appropriate amount of shrieking can follow once I have it in my hands), but I promise, if it contains half the entertainment value of one of her phone calls, and a quarter the creativity of one of many college late night brainstorming sessions, it is absolutely worth curling up with a cup of coffee (for anything she writes will be best complemented by coffee) and giving it a read.
The Bookshop Hotel Release Party!
Please message me if you plan to attend so that we can ensure the appropriate number of books will be available.
I love you, I love you not
Title: Player Piano
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Length: 295 pages
“Anita, I love you.” The compulsion was upon him to tell her everything, to mingle his consciousness with hers. But as he momentarily raised his hand from the drugging warmth and fragrance of her bosom, cool, fresh air from the Adirendacks bathed his face, and wisdom returned. He said nothing more to her. – from Player Piano
It wasn’t until I read that paragraph on page 118 that I really began to appreciate Kurt Vonnegut.
I’m stubborn. People love Vonnegut. Especially nerdy literature geeks. I’m a nerdy literature geek. My friends love Vonnegut. I should love Vonnegut. But because I should, because I am appropriately quirky and should be his target market; because of these things, I’ve never cared for him much.
I wrote a character who adores him once. Whenever I read Vonnegut, I summon this character in my brain and try to feel his words the way she does. It gets me through the book… small details got me through Cat’s Cradle (Bokamaru! or somesuch nonsense).
Still, I am stubborn. The excitement that quote on page 118 gave me died down by page 150.
I wrote the character previously mentioned based on another friend’s love for Vonnegut a few years ago. My friend who loved Vonnegut is gone now, so any details on the passion are completely fabricated, only the source is rooted in anything real. My friend and I swapped paperback copies back and forth, and though it’s something I vaguely recall about him, it is not what we bonded over.
So, though he sits politely in my brain any time I pick up something Vonnegut related, I don’t remember which ones he read and which he had not. He had a habit of reading parts of a book and rarely finished many in their entirety. Was Player Piano something he read completely? What were his thoughts while he was reading it? Did he make it to page 118 – did he read those words about mingling consciousness?
I’m stubborn, but beyond being stubborn Vonnegut is tainted for me. There’s too much pressure. Too much connection and disconnection at the same time. Too much expectation.
“I’m more than halfway through this novel in a day and will finish before I go to sleep “, I journaled earlier tonight, “But I am not involved in the story. And my stomach is in knots.”
Instead of preparing for a book club meeting, my mind is with the dead. My mind is on the dead when I get to page 191, “He discovered that there was nothing disquieting about seeing himself dead. An awakening conscience, unaccompanied by new wisdom, made his life so damned lonely, he decided he wouldn’t much mind being dead.”
And when my mind is not with the dead, it is with the merely absent. It’s certainly not here. It’s certainly not in this book. It is on a bike ride with my friends – or off in the manuscript of my second novel that I wish I was finished with already.
So Vonnegut, you will always reside on my shelf. I love the familiarity of your spines and covers loitering in my library. I think you are important. You will not be forgotten, because “Well, sir, it hurts a lot to be forgotten.” And clearly, I think you are beautifully quotable at times. But I do not love you. I’m too stubborn.
Death Without Cause
Title: Death Without Cause
Author: Pamela Triolo
Genre: Crime Fiction
Length: 297 pages
Murder mysteries are an easy sell. There’s something innately intriguing about one human being ending another. I noticed this not only when I worked retail where people impulsively picked up clearance paperbacks with shiny letters over black spines, but also as I toted around Pamela Triolo’s Death Without Cause.
I took it to get a pedicure at the Kingwood College (or Lone Star, rather) Cosmetology department. It was my mother’s treat for my niece’s birthday and she took me and my daughter along. It’s a great place to take children for their first, as it’s inexpensive and allows the students to practice on not so picky clients. It’s apparently also a good place to talk books.
First thing the girl said was how much she loved mysteries. She talked a minute about her various reading preferences – always a topic of interest to me – and I passed her the bookmark that Triolo included in my copy of the book. For good measure, the girl took a picture of the cover with her smart phone. I hope it results in a sale…
Because even though murder mysteries are a dime a dozen – sometimes, quite literally if you find yourself in the right shop – and even though I generally always enjoy them, there’s a difference between a mystery that fills time and one that’s really good. Triolo’s is really good.
“The nurse was the first and last line of defense for patients,” a character in Death Without Cause observes. What happens when that defense fails against a calculated and knowledgeable killer?
Triolo is a registered nurse as well as a skilled writer. Just read the prologue of Death Without Cause and you can’t help but understand why this woman would want to study medicine and write mysteries to boot! She makes the heart sound solid and sexy and desperately fragile at the same time, an organ too tempting for a psychopath to pass up tampering with.
It’s also clear that Triolo knows what she’s talking about. She’s not just a writer throwing around jargon she’s heard… I always think of films where the character peeks in the stalled car on the side of the road and says something utterly ridiculous and then walla, the car is fixed… No, Triolo is a nurse, sounds like a nurse, and has captured the ambiance of the hospital hands down. I was riveted.
For those who like a bit of a romantic twist, don’t worry, Triolo didn’t leave you out – there’s a little budding love story in the background as well.
I anticipate Triolo being a future bestseller. She radiates the finesse and know-how of others who have written from their career experience… Kathy Reichs, John Grisham, and more. I look forward to seeing her name in the New York Times one day. For now, The Houston Chronicle, I’m sure, will enjoy sharing one of Houston’s best with the world.
Pamela Triolo and Melanie McEwan at Half Price Books Humble during Nurse’s Week.
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.
Anakalian Whims 