Cover Story: Calling Me Home

By JulieKibler

Certain days in an Book Pregnant author's life are just a little more special than others. Obviously, there's the day you get "the call" from your dream agent. Then there's the day you make your first sale (and every sale thereafter!). The day you see your manuscript typeset in first pass pages is pretty thrilling, too.

But it's possible one of the most exciting days after you have your book contract in hand is the day you first see your cover. I experienced this once before when I received the file of my German cover art (seen to the left here) and that was pretty mind-boggling. I loved it so much I plastered it all over the place. "Zu zweit tut das Herz nur halb so weh" (Pendo's title for Calling Me Home) released there August 20!

I was on vacation the last few weeks of July. First, we spent several days in Illinois for a family celebration, where I also had the pleasure of meeting fellow Book Pregnant author Amy Sue Nathan (The Glass Wives, Spring 2013).

In the midst of the driving and switching hotel rooms every night or so, my St. Martin's Press editor emailed to request an address where they could overnight something--something NOT work. I knew immediately what it would be! Lydia Netzer, another St. Martin's author and Book Pregnant friend who shares the same fantastic editor, experienced this months earlier when she received her cover for SHINE SHINE SHINE. It would be several days before I could get an overnight delivery without the risk we'd have already moved on, so I gave my editor our upcoming address in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, though I knew I'd go crazy waiting in the four or five days before I'd receive the delivery.

Once we arrived, the rental office promised to call when they received my package. The next day, around 4 p.m. (a day or so sooner than expected!), I got a call. Everyone had just settled in for a late sandwich or nap after our first fun day at the beach. We were sunburned, sandy, unshowered, and exhausted. And yet, my husband, the official driver on the rental car contract, graciously dragged himself up from his comfy spot in front of the television and chauffeured me the ten miles to the office. We arrived with about 15 minutes to spare before they closed.

Design by my now-favorite book cover designer,
Olga Grlic

I carried the book-shaped package to the car, handling it as though I carried an incendiary device. I knew its contents had the potential to create any number of emotions in me. Would I cry when I saw it? From joy? From disappointment? From devastation? Would I clap my hands and scream because I loved it so much? Or would I be angry because the designer and my editor had so utterly ruined the vision my story had conjured in my mind for so many years?

I will tell you this: It was one of the most loaded moments along my journey to publication.

But I also knew this: My editor loves my story. I knew, from previous conversations, she had turned down other prototypes she wasn't pleased with. I trusted she would know the right one when it came along.

So I peeked into the package, just for the littlest glance. Then I read the note my editor had included with her thoughts on why this one worked so well and how in love the staff at St. Martin's was with it. How they literally gasped when they saw it the first time. Then I pulled the cover, which she had carefully wrapped and taped around another hardcover book so I could get the full effect, from the envelope.

Strangely, my reaction was not unlike my reaction 15, 18, and 23 years ago, each time I saw one of my beautiful children for the first time. I am not a screamer. I am not a clapper. I am not one to cry at expected times. When I held and studied each of my babies the very first time, I felt strangely awed. Reverent. Quiet. I simply stared at their faces, then studied each limb, each tiny fingernail, so surprised to see how different they looked than I'd ever imaged, yet somehow so perfect. On an intellectual level, I knew I already loved them more than I ever dreamed I was capable of doing, but on a human level, I wasn't quite able to grasp that just yet. With each child, it was hours before the emotions really began to flow, before I was finally able to wrap my brain around their arrivals, their surprising perfection, their little bits of me and their characteristics I never, ever, imagined. And then, I was carrying them around, showing them off, placing them here and there for photos--which light, which background, which setting could possibly show the world what I was seeing through my eyes?

And that Monday in July, before long, I was carrying my "book" around my vacation home, placing it on the hammock in the ocean breeze for a shot here, propping it in the port hole window with a view of the Outer Banks there, stacking it with a book about the Outer Banks so I'd never forget where I saw it the first time.

And I loved it. 

Five weeks later, I love it even more. Yesterday, I received my advance reader editions, and seeing the cover attached to my "real" book, though shiny where it will be matte, and paperback where it will eventually be a slipcover around a hardbound book, my affection simply continues to grow, just as it has every day and every year  for my amazing human babies.

Calling Me Home is available for pre-order now at Amazon and BN.com and many other sites. More info about the book is available at my website. Pre-orders are really important in the lead-up to publication, so all of us at Book Pregnant truly appreciate those who take the time to order one of our books in advance. You are guaranteed the lowest price up to the shipping date once you place your order on many sites. 

A version of this post first appeared on my group blog, What Women Write. 

Great British Baking!

Some people were there when Dylan first went electric.  Some knew about Harry Potter before he hit the mainstream.  I, dear reader, was with The Great British Bake Off from series one, episode one.

Indeed, the whole first series watched without much comment - I loved it, and even toyed with entering the second series.  But then it suddenly became much better known, attracting higher ratings and being a heated topic of conversation in the Bodleian tea room.  I was even inspired to hold my own cake party.  I'm much enjoying series three (and watched the third episode with Mum this evening, on iPlayer) but the standard and difficulty have far exceeded anything I would be able to manage.  In case you haven't watched it, the combination of Mel and Sue's witty, irreverent-but-kind commentary, Mary Berry's grandmotherly sweetness, Paul Hollywood's gruff criticism, and a dozen nervous, jolly bakers is utterly irresistible.  I don't know if the whole series' episodes are available on iPlayer still, but if you can see the cakes in episode 1, they were amazing.  They had to bake cakes with patterns or pictures on the inside... exceptional.  Are you watching it?

And now for something completely different.  My very dear friend Lorna came to visit earlier in August and (despite she being a recently married uber-professional journalist, and me being... well, old) we made gingerbread and decorated it!  I only have two cutters, so they were gingerbread cats and gingerbread teapots.  And we didn't stint on the squeezy icing...

The cutters are ready!

I'm clearly enjoying myself :)

mid-creation...

I couldn't squeeze on 'aged 26'.

I make a Colin cat (it's a Wolverhampton Wanderers shirt...) 

Harry Potter cat!  (Please don't sue.)

Lorna hard at work - such concentration!

Lorna's spread - spot the Parisian teapot, landmarks and all

My finished creations.
Now you see why I didn't enter GBBO...

Am I My Brother's Reader?

I've been very ruthless over the past couple days, and weeded out over 100 books which have gone to Barrington (a local National Trust property with a book barn) or The Honeypot (an even more local secondhand book seller - my Mum in our garage, for the church!)  I haven't been quite as ruthless as Rachel, but I've been stern with myself and certainly managed to make a bit of room... and then immediately filled it with the books I sent home with Mum and Dad when I moved house.  But, whereas I'd usually keep books I've read unless I hated them, now they're out if it's unlikely that I'll want to re-read them for years.

One book which probably won't be finding its way back onto my shelves is The Eye of the World (1990), the first novel in The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, which I finished on the train home.  In early 2010, my brother Colin and I set each other a reading challenge.  Our tastes our not similar at all, as you'll remember from his My Life in Books interview, and I wanted him to sample the wonder of Virginia Woolf.  Since she writes normal, sensible length books - and Robert Jordan first volume OF FOURTEEN comes in at an astonishing 782 pages - Colin had to read Orlando and To The Lighthouse, and would still get off far easier in terms of length.  As it turned out, he struggled with Orlando and called it the worst book he'd ever read.  Read more here (scroll down to August 25th 2010 entry).  I was sad but not surprised, and let him off reading To The Lighthouse.  Virginia Woolf is too brilliant to be everyone's cup of tea, so we'll sweep that under the carpet.

Well, The Eye of the World isn't the worst book I've ever read, but it did take me 2.5 years to read it.  I actually read over 500 pages on a trip to and from Paris in March 2010, because it was the only book I took with me, but I only read in dribs and drabs until, determined that it should feature on A Century of Books, I took it with me on a 3.5 hour train journey, and blitzed the final 200 or so pages.

Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene, and Nynaeve live in a jolly place called The Two Rivers, which is attacked by Trollocs (wolf-type creatures), and Rand's father is killed.  I forget quite how this leads to the quest, but it does.... in fact, looking back, I can't really remember ever being told what the quest actually was.  It certainly involved walking a very long way, outwitting Dark Forces, and seeking the elliptical wisdom of an Aes Sedai  - prophetess-type - called Moiraine, who is rather pretty, if memory serves.  They wanted to get to The Eye of the World, but I don't really remember it being mentioned until they actually got there.  Perhaps they're just on the run from the Trollocs and sundry evil things?

And on they go.  And on.  And oooonnnn.

I will mention, before I go on, that The Eye of the World was better than I thought it would be.  At no point was the writing laughably bad, although for the most part it was pretty pedestrian.  It doesn't hurry particularly, and one of the reasons the book is so. very. long. is that Jordan doesn't have any sense of economising.  Here's an excerpt chosen entirely at random, to give you a sense of the pace:

The stone hallway was dim and shadowy, and empty except for Rand.  He could not tell where the light came from, what little there was of it; the grey walls were bare of candles or lamps, nothing at all to account for the faint glow that seemed to just be there.  The air was still and dank, and somewhere in the distance water dripped with a steady, hollow plonk.  Wherever this was, it was not the inn.  Frowning, he rubbed at his forehead.  Inn?  His head hurt, and thoughts were hard to hold on to.  There had been something about... an inn?  It was gone, whatever it was.

He licked his lips and wished he had something to drink.  He was awfully thirsty, dry-as-dust thirsty.  It was the dripping sound that decided him.  With nothing to choose by except his thirst, he started toward that steady plonk - plonk - plonk.

So, as you see, nothing dreadful, nothing in Mary Webb territory.  But since we're comparing Jordan with Woolf (which I can't imagine has ever happened before)... well, you can't imagine anybody reading prose like that simply for the joy of reading beautiful writing, can you?  It's serviceable, though, and unobtrusive, which is no mean feat.  Plenty of novelists would give their left arm for that.

A book's merits can be considered in terms of plot, character, and writing style, broadly speaking.  What The Eye of the World lacks in writing style it almost gains in character.  Although it took me the first hundred pages to disentangle Mat, Rand, and Perrin (and that gap of two years in my reading entangled them all over again) I was impressed by the complex relationships between the central characters - with jealousy, admiration, affection, rivalry, loyalty, and frustration all playing their roles.  It's not always the most subtle character delineation, but it's a good deal more subtle than I was anticipating.  As usual, there are forces that are plain Evil, without redeeming feature or clear motivation, but the Good characters weren't annoyingly bland in their pursuit of all that is pure.  They did all seem as though they were about 15 years old, whereas the cover suggests they're a decade or so older than that...?

So, the plot?  It didn't grip me, to be honest, because it seemed just to be walk, obstacle, overcome obstacle, walk, obstacle, overcome obstacle, repeat as needed.  The heroes are trapped!  Will they die?  Er, no.  The heroes are lost!  Will they find their way?  Er, yes.  The heroes are trapped again!  Will they escape?  Can you guess?  When there are another thousand books in the series, you know that the main characters are going to live for at least another few books.

I love books where not much happens, as you know.  I love To The Lighthouse, for goodness' sake, and bar a death and an argument or two, nothing really happens.  But The Eye of the World is so fixed on its quest plot, and its up-and-down attempts to heighten tension, that when it doesn't grab a reader the foundations of the novel must collapse.  I think I'm just allergic to the artificiality of any quest-plot.  And - not that it's relevant - covers like this.  Why do fantasy books so often have covers like this?  And silly names?  I'm put off when writers make up gibberish languages.  I think writers should be able to be creative within the bounds of the English language (or, y'know, whichever language[s] they speak.)  I don't see how 'Aes Sedai' brings anything that 'prophetess' doesn't, other than making me think (for some reason) of Anais Nin.

And while I'm moaning, goodness me, it's slow.  Colin tells me that it's the most pacey novel in the series - but no novel of 782 pages can claim to be fast-paced.  I think it could all easily be condensed into 300 pages, max.  I suppose part of the appeal to the sort of people who like lengthy fantasy series is that length. Perhaps it makes you feel like you're on the quest too.  (It did make me chuckle that one of the cover quotations was "I read it in three days" - for most books, an indication of compulsive, compelling reading would be "I read it in three hours.")  I was never hugely curious to find out what would happen next, partly because it was almost always glaringly obvious what would happen next and partly because it all happened at a glacial speed.

So, summing up... neither Colin nor I have converted the other to our much-cherished writers, but I fared better with Robert Jordan than he did with Virginia Woolf.  I shan't be reading any other books in The Wheel of Time series, but I liked The Eye of the World more than I thought I would.  I just wish someone had hidden Jordan's pen after 300 pages.

The Warden - Anthony Trollope

In 2004, when I first joined the online book group which became dovegreybooks, and which I still love, everyone was talking about Anthony Trollope.  Over the course of the year, I managed to acquire all of the Barchester Chronicles & Palliser novels.  Fast forward eight years, and... I finally read something by Trollope!  And it wasn't even one of the actual books I bought in 2004, although it was a duplicate of one of them - Penguin sent me their new edition of The Warden (1855) a few months ago, and I decided that was a good excuse to give Anthony T a go.

Verdict: Success.

Several people have told me over the years to skip over The Warden and start with Barchester Towers, because The Warden was dull or pedestrian.  My friend Will expostulated with some warmth about how much he'd hated it at school - but by then I was already halfway through the novel and LOVING it.

On the face of it, the subject matter isn't of huge excitement and relevance to 2012.  A complicated combination of vague wills and inflation means that clergymen are benefiting from legacies intended for the charitable assistance of later generations.  Mr. Septimus Harding is one such clergyman - the warden of some almshouses, collecting £800 a year, and thus far more than the one shilling and sixpence given daily to the twelve old and infirm men who live there.

Now, I love the Church of England, but even I couldn't call myself gripped by their financial workings 150 years ago.  At least, not in the hands of any other author.  In The Warden, it scarcely matters what the issue is - what matters is the way Trollope uses it.  While some people value Dickens as a social reformer rather than a comic writer (I am the reverse), I find Trollope's touch much more palatable.  If this scenario had appeared in a Dickens novel, the warden would be called Mr. Grabsomecash, a cackling, acquisitive, unholy man.  And that would be fine, because he'd offset it with brilliant dialogue and hilarious grotesques, but it wouldn't have shone any very realistic light upon the issue.  Trollope, ingeniously, combines his evident belief that reform is needed with a character who is the opposite of conniving, money-grabbing, or selfish.  At the start of the novel, after Mr. Harding has been accepting £800 a year for quite a long period, the idea that he is doing the wrong thing 'has never sullied his quiet, or disturbed his conscience.'  Things soon change...

Heading the charge is John Bold, social reformer, who (despite his Dickensian name) is a subtle combination of forthright and bashful.  He isn't directly affected by the almshouse dispute, but is the sort of left-wing gent who views all disputes as his personal business.  He is idealistic, but also (you would have seen this coming, had I mentioned that Mr. Harding has an eligible young daughter, Eleanor) in love.  Which gives excuses for wonderful honourable-young-lady speeches like this:

"Mr. Bold," said she, "you may be sure of one thing; I shall always judge my father to be right, and those who oppose him I shall judge to be wrong.  If those who do not know him oppose him, I shall have charity enough to believe that they are wrong, through error of judgement; but should I see him attacked by those who ought to know him, and to love him, and revere him, of such I shall be constrained to form a different opinion."  And then curtseying low she sailed on, leaving her lover in anything but a happy state of mind.

You can't imagine Kim Kardashian or the cast of The Only Way Is Essex handling the situation in quite the same way, can you?

Septimus Harding has another daughter, Susan, but one not quite so close to his heart - largely because she is married to the ferociously logical and unpleasant archdeacon (she cannot bring herself to call him by any name other than 'archdeacon'.)  There can be no character so frustratingly awful as one who uses 'common-sense' instead of compassion, logic in place of love - and the archdeacon, Dr. Grantly, is one of those.  He is Mr. Bold's equal and opposite, forthright in defending Mr. Harding's right to receive his £800 a year, brooking no compromise on the topic.  When Mr. Harding wishes to find out whether he is morally and legally entitled to the money he receives (which nobody really seems to know) Dr. Grantly blinds him with syllogisms and declares that Mr. Harding will be abandoning the church if he does not continue to accept the money.  Yet even with Dr. Grantly, Trollope is charitable, noting towards the end of The Warden that:

We fear that he is represented in these pages as being worse than he is; but we have had to do with his foibles, and not with his virtues.  We have seen only the weak side of the man, and have lacked the opportunity of bringing him forward on his strong ground.

And he goes on to list his virtues, alongside his vices.  For Trollope is scrupulously fair in The Warden.  Right and wrong are not clearly demarcated, and even the right things are done for wrong reasons, and vice versa.

The Warden is largely the exploration of Mr. Harding's conscience, his craving for privacy, his sense of duty, and his love for Eleanor and the men of the almshouse.  It is all subtle and generous, and in a beautifully lilting prose.  I can see the threads of Jane Austen more clearly than I have in any other Victorian writer; Trollope values the balance and measure of sentences as much as Austen did.  The issue is no longer relevant, and perhaps never was to the majority of the country, but people have not changed.  Anybody familiar with disputes local or national will recognise the various characters here, or at least some of their traits.  At the centre of it is the wonderfully complex figure of Mr. Harding, thrust into a limelight he loathes and forced to defend a position he is beginning to consider indefensible.  If the rest of the Barchester Chronicles just gets better, then I'm excited to read on!

A Review Round-up

It's one of those posts where I post teeny tiny reviews of some titles for A Century of Books which (for whatever reason) don't warrant full reviews.  It's really just so I have somewhere to link from the main list, but do jump in with your thoughts nonetheless!

The Westminster Alice (1902) by Saki
It's Lewis Carroll's Alice, but re-imagined with various political figures from the turn of the century!  A fun idea, and some bits I found amusing, but mostly it went right over my head.  I'd heard of most of the people - Chamberlain, Balfour, Cecil etc. - but I don't know the ins and outs of their activities in 1902.  But it was diverting enough, and under 50 pages...

What It Means To Marry (1914) by Margaret Scharlieb
For my next chapter, I'm reading a few different people discoursing on marriage from the 1910s and '20s.  They mostly divide into the 'marriage is holy' and the 'free love ahoy' camps - this one falls in the former, but Scharlieb is always a bit of a doom-monger as well...

The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) by Margaret Murray
This was a rather credulous account of medieval witchcraft, which I read for my chapter on Lolly Willowes.  It was a speedy read because I skipped all the untranslated Latin and Medieval French...

The Corner That Held Them (1948) by Sylvia Townsend Warner
I love Warner sometimes, but this novel covering decades in the life of a medieval nunnery really, really bored me.  And yet it was her favourite of her books, and I know some people who adore it.  Odd.

Song for a Sunday

Have I ever pointed you in the direction of Lindsey Butler's beautiful take on 'I Don't Want To Talk About It' before?   No?  Well, it's on Soundcloud here (no video available, as far as I'm aware, of the whole song.)

Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

Happy Weekend!  I'm off home for a week and a bit - next Saturday is a party for Mum and Dad's anniversary, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to enjoy a week at home with Sherpa.  Mum promises me that Sherpa is looking forward to me coming... I'm going to fool myself into believing it.

I'll try to keep posting while I'm at home, but it might be a bit more sporadic.

1.) The blog post - is Alice's lovely post about the prospect of reading Ivy Compton-Burnett - including a quotation from Virginia Woolf on ICB which somehow I had never read before.

2.) The link - I know some people don't have the high tolerance for cute pictures of cats that I have (it's why the internet was invented!) but I doubt even the hardest heart could resist ALL of the 50 cute pictures found here.  My favourite is actually the one above, entirely cat-less.  (You might have to click to enlarge it.)

3.) The book - John Murray/Hodder & Stoughton recently sent me George Bernard Shaw's Love Among the Artists.  You know how I love a reprint series, especially if the reprints in question are slightly unusual choices.  I hadn't heard of this, but I'm definitely keen to read more GBS, particularly one which will cross 1900 of my Century of Books list (although written in 1881).  It's about 'three wayward geniuses', according to the blurb - two pianists and an actress, contrasted with socialites at whom Shaw pokes fun.  Sounds great!  More info on Love Among the Artists here, although I've had a hunt without being able to find the other reprints that they're doing in this series (and have lost the sheet they sent me.)

So You Want to Get Book Pregnant

by Sophie Perinot

If you want to get book pregnant—there is no delicate way to put this—you have to DO IT.  You know . . . query agents (what did you think I meant?).

Not a romantic task, granted.  Query letter composition is unlikely to leave one creatively satiated in the way that writing an 80,000 word novel will.  To torture the sexual innuendo a little further—writing a query is a highly technical and clinical business, like the type of fertility-driven sex that has people taking their temperatures, or leaving specimens in cups.
It’s enough to put a would-be-pregnant author out of the writing mood.

As a result, many writers bog down at the query letter composition stage.  I know someone who has been thinking about querying and working on a query letter for more than a year.  I am NOT making that up.  Yes a query letter is a vital sales document and a badly written one may leave you without the requests for partials and fulls that are necessary preludes to a positive pregnancy test.  And yes writing a good query is not easy (if it were there wouldn’t be hundreds if not thousands of articles and blog posts offering advice on how to compose one). BUT should it really take months and drafts in the double-digits?

No.  To be a little more adamant, NO, NO, NO.

Do NOT let writing your query becomes a Sisyphean struggle (you remember, the guy who had to push the big rock up the hill over and over), because a perfect query letter is NOT an end in itself.  It’s a tool. And tools need to be USED to get a job done.  At some point the incremental improvements you are making as you revise your letter for the umpteenth time are NOT worth the time or the agony. More than this, an over-edited letter can lose voice.

Picking through the query critique forum at Agent Query Connect (my favorite on-line community for the aspiring writer) it’s pretty easy to find threads with ten, twenty, even thirty versions of a single query.  Such treads make me want to scream “GET ON WITH IT! SEND THE DARN THING.” But that kind of verbiage in a critique threads would hardly be appropriate.

So I am saying it here. Just DO it. Stop painting the nursery and query.

I am not saying send your first draft. I am not saying don’t seek critique. I am saying all things in moderation. How many drafts of my letter did I do—maybe four. How many people did I show it to before it went out? Five (and two of them weren’t even writers). Did it work? More than uncommonly well (I had a very high request rate, snagged an agent I adore and now have a published novel). Could my letter have been better? Sure. But if I were still working on polishing it, then my book baby wouldn’t be nearly six months old!

Confessions of an Anxious Novelist

by David Abrams

I stood in the wings of the theater stage, hidden in the folds of the heavy gold curtains, and stared at the set bathed in a brilliant explosion of light.  There was an archway—a metal trellis topped with fancy curlicues by the set designer—and beyond that there was a doorway which led to a drawing room with a fainting couch, a desk, and a wingback chair.  In less than a minute, I would hear my cue and walk boldly out from the folds of the curtains, pass through the arch, knock on the door, then enter the drawing room where, if my tongue didn’t fail me, I would speak my first lines.

I was 18 years old, a sophomore majoring in theater at the University of Wyoming, and this was my first starring role in a play—Captain Jack Absolute in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 18th-century comedy of manners The Rivals (a play which is now famous for giving us the word “malapropism”).  I was dressed in a cherry-red frock coat, a sword was strapped to my side, and my face was coated with Tan No. 1 pancake makeup.  Little creeks of sweat had eroded lines down my face.  I could feel my heart thudding somewhere in the neighborhood of my esophagus.  My head was filled with air and seemed to float above my body, tethered only by the tendons of my neck.

I couldn’t see the audience beyond the blinding corona of lights, but I knew they were out there. I could hear them rustling their programs, whispering to each other, fidgeting with their evening clothes.  They were waiting for me.  They breathed like foxes outside a rabbit’s hole.

At that moment, I wanted to die.  I prayed for the proverbial trap door to open beneath my feet and plummet me down to insignificance.  I wanted to turn and walk away from the brightly-lit stage, strip off my frock coat, dash out into the frigid night air, rewind my life and pretend I wasn’t living the very dream for which I’d been waiting.

But that was crazy-thinking.

For God’s sake, this was my big break: a starring role in the Theater Department’s major production of the season.  I’d auditioned for the role, beat out several other theater students, grabbed the brass ring.  I’d gotten what I wanted.  Why would I not want to step out onto the stage and walk through that door into the drawing room?  Why would I not revel in this dream fulfilled?

En garde!  That's me on the left, fighting my rival and my anxiety

*      *     *

Last week, I got an email from a Facebook friend: “Look what just arrived in the mail!!!”  Attached to the email was a photo of my exclamatory friend holding up a copy of Fobbit, freshly unboxed from Amazon.  I wanted to die.

It’s not like I didn’t know this moment was coming—this day when my first novel would be gripped in the hand of a Real Reader®.  Of course I saw its approach, starting with the day last September when I opened the email from my agent and it was like a rainbow shot out of my computer screen and a marching band started playing in the background: “Grove/Atlantic has made an offer…”  From that champagne-in-the-bloodstream moment until now, I’ve been preparing to officially step out from the curtains onto the stage as a Published Novelist.

I just thought I had an extra week to prepare for this moment.  The official publication date for Fobbit has always been September 4, but here we were three weeks before Labor Day and my Facebook page was suddenly populated with photos of happy readers unboxing their copies of my book.  Surprise!  Surprise!  Amazon decided to start shipping copies early.  I blew air kisses at all of my Facebook friends and expressed my thanks in the comments below those pictures, but what I was really thinking was, “OhMyGod, OhMyGod, I’m not ready!”

In truth, I will never be ready.  I will never be prepared for the waves of attention to crash over me, for the spotlight to swivel and burn bright on my face, for the audience to rise to its feet and start applauding (with, I anticipate, a few “Boo!”s peppered throughout).  For you see, I am an anxiety-riddled creature with a complex problem.  I crave the attention, but I don’t know what to do with it once it’s given to me.

I can hear the chorus of unpublished authors right now: “What the hell’s his problem?  Doesn’t he know how good he’s got it?  I would run over my grandmother four times—up-and-back-and-up-and-back—just to have one iota of his good luck.”  You’re right.  This is a good problem to have and I am eternally grateful to my agent, to Grove/Atlantic, and to all the readers out there who have made it their mission to push Fobbit on friends and family.  I’m ever mindful that just a year ago, I was one of those unpublished authors grumbling about someone like me who complained about these kind of “problems.”

But the truth is, I’m still that shy 18-year-old who knows he must boldly walk out and deliver his lines to a waiting audience.  Somewhere along the way, I turned my stage fright into page fright.  I don’t think I’m alone in this.  I’m pretty sure I’m joined by a sizeable brethren and sisteren of anxious artists who simultaneously relish the spotlight and duck its penetrating beam.  These are our words on the page, the words we joined together, sentence by sentence, in holy matrimony. After all our hard work, we worry about their reception.  Will those words be loved by others?  Will they be misunderstood?  Will there be applause or catcalls?  And, most importantly, why am I spending so much time and energy agonizing over these questions?  After all, I’m published!  Hooray for that!  End of discussion.

But it’s not.  For every character we bring to life on the page, we fret he’ll be pierced by arrows from critics; for every sentence we compose, an equal amount of anxiety decomposes our self-confidence.  We feel our books deeply.  If you prick us, do we not bleed ink?  Maybe it’s just debut authors—or maybe it’s just me—but in the weeks leading up to publication it feels like there’s a Kitchenaid blender planted in our chests, gathering speed with each passing day, until everything inside us is a whirling, churning mess of ego, apprehension, joy, and second-guessing.  I’ve pretty much been useless to anyone else in my life for the past few weeks.  I’m self-consumed, tunnel-visioned, rigid with a paralysis of nerves.  I’ll be glad when the future is behind me.  I can’t wait to look back on this very essay and see it for what it is: the needlessly neurotic natterings of a novelist “living the dream.”  For now, though, there’s a writhing ball of snakes in my stomach.

In a month, I’ll head out on a cross-country tour to promote Fobbit and I’m sure it will all be fine.  By then, maybe I’ll have swallowed this knot in my throat and swatted all the butterflies in my stomach; maybe I’ll be bold as Captain Jack Absolute swaggering across the stage in his red frock coat; maybe I’ll hide the shake in my voice, the tremor in my hand as I sign copies of Fobbit.  But if you see me eyeing the exits, looking like I’m ready to bolt, I hope you’ll understand why.  And I also hope you’ll jump up to block those exits, barring me from leaving the room.  Because now there’s no turning back.  I’m stepping through that door, the one dividing Unpublished from Published.  For better or worse, I’m heading into the spotlight.

David Abrams is the author of Fobbit, a comedy about the Iraq War, which will be officially released by Grove/Atlantic on September 4.  Fobbit was selected as an Indie Next pick and for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program.  His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Salamander, The Connecticut Review, and several other publications.  He lives with his wife in Butte, Montana.

Happy 30th Anniversary, Our Vicar & Our Vicar's Wife

I've posted this photo before, but I loved it - and it seems appropriate, because today is the 30th anniversary for my Dad and Mum, a.k.a Our Vicar and Our Vicar's Wife.  Join with me in wishing them a hearty congratulations!

(l-r) Colin, Anne, Peter, me (playing outside: Sherpa)

And perhaps we can cheer them on their day by recommending our favourite married couples in fiction?  Mine are either Ian and Felicity from Denis Mackail's Greenery Street or Dahlia and the narrator in A.A. Milne's early sketches, collected in Those Were The Days.

(Incidentally, this is my 1502nd post - I was intending to do a little celebration for my 1500th, but obviously it just passed me by...)

Five From the Archive (no.7)

I was thinking about doing a FFTA about unmarried women, because I've read a lot of those in the past year or so, and I imagine that one day I will - but I thought it might be more interesting, and more unusual, to select books about pairs of women.  Because there turned out to be a few in my reviews archive.  None of these are about romantic pairings (well... one could be, but it's not overtly) but instead female friendships (and, er, unfriendships.)  It's a surprisingly rich and varied vein of the books I've read - well, five of them at least! - and I'd be interested to hear your suggestions.  As always, the books don't have to be novels - one of mine is not, for starters.  On with the show!

Five... Books About Pairs of Women

1.) Two Serious Ladies (1943) by Jane Bowles

In short: A dry, barbed, wonderfully strange account of Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield, whose eccentric lives only overlap for a few moments.

From my review: "In many ways the novel doesn't follow any progression at all - the ladies merely experience a great deal, whether grasping at it enthusiastically or raising an ambivalent eyebrow at life.  Bowles' astonishing talent is creating a dynamic that, if not unique, is highly unusual - strange, surreal, and yet grounded to the mundane.  Her ear for dialogue is astonishing - dialogue which is almost never realistic, but always striking."

2.) Fair Play (1989) by Tove Jansson

In short: Two artists live on an island together, in this set of calm vignettes.

From my review: "Each chapter has a small incident occur, and Jansson wraps her delicious prose around it. By the end she has provided a beautiful portrait of an unconventional couple, co-dependent and close rather than affectionate."

3.) Keeping Up Appearances (1928) by Rose Macaulay

In short: Half-sisters Daisy (30, shy, secretly a popular novelist under a pseudonym) and Daphne (25, self-assured intellectual) try to mingle in the same social circles, with mixed success.

From my review: "Though Keeping Up Appearances isn't as funny as Crewe Train, nor quite as memorable, it does present a clever idea. Because, dear reader, I haven't told you the central concept which surprises the reader and twists the interpretation completely, which comes about halfway through the novel."

4.) Sex Education (2002) by Janni Visman

In short: Two women grow up together, but their friendship turns to rivalry...

From my review: "It's a presentation of the rivalry between friends, and the damaging effects of jealousy - but a quirkier edge would have catapaulted the novel into a higher league. I've no idea how the quirkiness could have been added - but obviously Visman did, because she delivered it in Yellow."

5.) Joyce & Ginnie: the letters of Joyce Grenfell and Virginia Graham (1997)

In short: well, it's the letters of Joyce Grenfell and Virginia Graham!

From my review: "The exchange of letters between the two women spans many, many years, and offers a unique perspective upon the lives of each - life as they wished to convey it to their closest friend. Without the modesty (assumed or otherwise) requisite for autobiography, or the idolatry of biography, reading letters may feel a little like encroaching upon a friendship, but also allows closer and more genuine understanding of the women than available elsewhere."


And.... over to you!

'A Household Book' - A.A. Milne

As promised yesterday, here is the essay 'A Household Book' from A.A. Milne's Not That It Matters.  It might come with some surprises - unless you happened to read Peter's comments yesterday...

Once on a time I discovered Samuel Butler; not the other two, but the one who wrote The Way of All Flesh, the second-best novel in the English language.  I say the second-best, so that, if you remind me of Tom Jones or The Mayor of Casterbridge or any other that you fancy, I can say that, of course, that one is the best.  Well, I discovered him, just as Voltaire discovered Habakkuk, or your little boy discovered Shakespeare the other day, and I committed my discovery to the world in two glowing articles.  Not unnaturally the world remained unmoved.  It knew all about Samuel Butler.

Last week I discovered a Frenchman, Claude Tillier, who wrote in the early part of last century a book called Mon Oncle Benjamin, which may be freely translated My Uncle Benjamin.  (I read it in the translation.)  Eager as I am to be lyrical about it, I shall refrain.  I think that I am probably safer with Tillier than with Butler, but I dare not risk it.  The thought of your scorn at my previous ignorance of the world-famous Tillier, your amused contempt because I have only just succeeded in borrowing the classic upon which you were brought up, this is too much for me.  Let us say no more about it.  Claude Tillier - who has not heard of Claude Tillier?  Mon Oncle Benjamin - who has not read it, in French or (as I did) in American?  Let us pass on to another book.

For I am going to speak of another discovery; of a book which should be a classic, but is not; of a book of which nobody has heard unless through me.  It was published some twelve years ago, the last-published book of a well-known writer.  When I tell you his name you will say, "Oh yes!  I love his books!" and you will mention So-and-So, and its equally famous sequel Such-and-Such.  But when I ask you if you have read my book, you will profess surprise, and say that you have never heard of it.  "Is it as good as So-and-So and Such-and-Such?" you will ask, hardly believing that this could be possible.  "Much better," I shall reply - and there, if these things were arranged properly, would be another ten per cent. in my pocke.  But believe me, I shall be quite content with your gratitude.

Well, the writer of the book is Kenneth Grahame.  You have hard of him?  Good, I thought so.  The books you have read are The Golden Age and Dream Days.  Am I not right?  Thank you.  But the book you have not read - my book - is The Wind in the Willows.  Am I not right again?  Ah, I was afraid so.

The reason why I knew you had not read it is the reason why I call it "my" book.  For the last ten or twelve years I have been recommending it.  Usually I speak about it at the my first meeting with a stranger.  It is my opening remark, just as yours is something futile about the weather.  If I don't get it in at the beginning, I squeeze it in at the end.  The stranger has got to have it some time.  Should I ever find myself in the dock, and one never knows, my answer to the question whether I had anything to say would be, "Well, my lord, if I might just recommend a book to the jury before leaving."  Mr. Justice Darling would probably pretend that he had read it, but he wouldn't deceive me.

For one cannot recommend a book to all the hundreds of people whom one has met in ten years without discovering whether it is well known or not.  It is the amazing truth that none of those hundreds had heard of The Wind in the Willows until I told them about it.  Some of them had never of Kenneth Grahame; well, one did not have to meet them again, and it takes all sorts to make a world.  But most of them were in your position - great admirers of the author and his two earlier famous books, but ignorant thereafter.  I had their promise before they left me, and waited confidently for their gratitude.  No doubt they also spread the good news in their turn, and it is just possible that it reached you in this way, but it was to me, none the less, that your thanks were due.  For instance, you may have noticed a couple of casual references to it, as if it were a classic known to all, in a famous novel published last year.  It was I who introduced that novelist to it six months before.  Indeed, I feel sometimes that it was I who wrote The Wind in the Willows, and recommended it to Kenneth Grahame... but perhaps I am wrong here, for I have not the pleasure of his acquaintance.  Nor, as I have already lamented, am I financially interested in its sale, an explanation which suspicious strangers require from me sometimes.

I shall not describe the book, for no description would help it.  But I shall just say this; that it is what I call a Household Book.  By a Household Book I mean a book which everybody in the household loves and quotes continually ever afterwards; a book which is read aloud to every new guest, and is regarded as the touchstone of his worth.  But it is a book which makes you feel that, though everybody in the house loves it, it is only you who really appreciate it as its true value, and that the others are scarcely worthy of it.  It is obvious, you persuade yourself, that the author was thinking of you when he wrote it.  "I hope this will please Jones," were his final words, as he laid down his pen.

Well, of course, you will order the book at once.  But I must give you one word of warning.  When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, still less on the genius of Kenneth Grahame.  You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself... You may be worthy; I do not know.  But it is you who are on trial.

DIY Promotions

by Barbara Claypole White

On Friday, October 19, Book Pregnant is heading to Myrtle Beach for the South Carolina Writers’ Workshop. David Abrams, Anne Clinard Barnhill, Lydia Netzer, Brenda Remmes, and I will be giving an intensive workshop on how to create a village to help promote your debut novel.

I first went to SCWW four years ago as a terrified newbie. Desperate to take workshops on craft, mingle with agents and editors, and meet other writers, I also daydreamed about winning the fiction category of the Carrie McCray Memorial Literary Awards, sponsored by the conference. In 2009 I placed second with the manuscript that would become The Unfinished Garden. Next week, with a little help from Harlequin MIRA, I will birth this book. I think that makes SCWW my baby’s godmother.

Returning as a faculty member is my tiara moment. I am thrilled to be part of this Book Pregnant panel, with each of us talking about a different aspect of marketing. 

Me? I’m the bargain basement girl of promotions. Partly, this comes from my outlet shopper mentality, but it’s also the legacy of my former life as a London PR for young fashion designers. My clients were wildly creative and perennially broke.  

As a debut author, the task of promoting your novel can seem overwhelming. But creating a marketing plan, or the less scary marketing to-do list, is no different to excavating a plot. Come up with a few ideas and then unleash your mind. Follow every crazy tangent; trust your gut; think around corners. And here’s the best part: the price tag is zero.

Start by asking some basic questions about your settings and characters. What gives them reader appeal? How can you build on that? For example, the countryside plays an important role in The Unfinished Garden. My heroine owns a woodland plant nursery in rural North Carolina, and a pivotal scene unfolds at a famous dairy farm. This was the angle that persuaded a local protect-our-countryside group to plug the novel in its monthly newsletter.  And as for my beloved hero?  He’s obsessive-compulsive, and OCD is an unusual hook for mainstream fiction. When I asked the local library about hosting an author event, I decided to suggest something different—a reading during OCD Awareness Week. The librarian was delighted.

Of course, the best free coverage comes via the media. Contacting journalists is no different to querying agents: research, customize, and never ask a question that comes with a yes / no answer. (Do you want to write a lovely article on my novel? No.)  Two-thirds of The Unfinished Garden is set near my childhood village in England, and who doesn’t love a hometown success story? After a regional magazine ran a piece with my local-girl-sells-debut-novel angle, numerous people stopped my mother in the supermarket to congratulate her. Jackpot. I boosted motherly pride and pre-order sales at the same time.

Finally, when life throws a curveball at your promotional endeavors, adapt. I created a spiffy marketing plan (this used to be my thing, you know?) and then discovered my mother needed heart surgery. I lost a month to being a full-time caregiver and house elf in England, and my head was wedged down the pity pot.  But twice a day, I had to exercise Sally the pampered hound. So I began an online walking tour of the settings that inspired The Unfinished Garden and posted a photo a day to my Facebook page. The response was incredible. After I uploaded a picture of the old coaching inn where I used to work, a long-lost acquaintance popped up to say, “That’s my local pub! I have to read this book!” My life was circling the family drain, but I was back on the promotional bandwagon, selling my novel one copy at a time. Sometimes that’s enough.

Not That It Matters - A.A. Milne

It's been about a decade since I blitzed most of A.A. Milne's very many books, and now I'm enjoying revisiting them.  I thought a trip down Milne Memory Lane would be a handy way to cross off 1919 on A Century of Books, so I picked up his collection of humorous essays from that year, Not That It Matters.

The first piece (although they are not in chronological order) starts 'Sometimes when the printer is waiting for an article which really should have been sent to him the day before, I sit at my desk and wonder if there is any possible subject in the whole world upon which I can possibly find anything to say.'  (The final line in the book, incidentally, is 'And Isaiah, we may be sure, did not carry a notebook.'  Which gives you some sense of the wide variety Milne covers in this collection.)

Some of the essays are very indicative of their time - from 1910 to 1919, as the essays appeared during that period in The Sphere, The Outlook, and The Star.  I'm not sure 'Smoking as a Fine Art' would appear anywhere today, except as a consciously controversial piece, nor could any 21st century essayist take for granted that his reader went for frequent country houseparties, attended Lords, and had strong memories of the First World War.  On the other hand, many of the topics Milne covers would be equally fit for a columnist today, if we still had the type who were allowed to meander through arbitrary topics, without the need to make a rapier political point or a satirical topical comment.  Milne writes on goldfish, daffodils, writing personal diaries, the charm of lunch, intellectual snobbery, and even what property programme presenters would now call 'kerb appeal' - but which was simply 'looking at the outside of a house' in Milne's day.

I love Milne's early work, because it is so joyful and youthful.  In the sketches and short pieces published in The Day's Play, The Holiday Round and others, 'The Rabbits' often re-appear - these are happy, silly 20-somethings called things like Dahlia and (if me) addressed by their surnames.  They play cricket (badly), golf (badly), and indoor party games (badly) on endless and sunny country holidays.  It's all deliciously insouciant and, if not quite like A.A. Milne (or anybody) really was, great fun to read.  When Milne turns to essays, he can't include this cast, of course.  And he was in his late thirties when Not That It Matters was published - still young, perhaps, but hardly youthful.  He was a married man, though not a father quite yet, and his tone had changed slightly - from the exuberance which characterised his earliest books, to the calmly witty and jovial tone which was to see out the rest of his career.  Here's an example, more or less at random, of the style which makes me always so happy to return to Milne:

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," said Keats, not actually picking out celery in so many words, but plainly including it in the general blessings of the autumn.

My main qualm with these essays is that they do often end in rather a forced manner.  He'll put in a reference that drags everything back to the opening line, or finishes off pat in a slightly different direction.  It doesn't feel especially natural, and is perhaps indicative of the looming deadlines Milne mentions in the first essay...

As the title suggests, nothing of life-changing importance is addressed in Not That It Matters.  He does not adopt a serious voice at any point - indeed, I cannot think of a time in any of his books where he becomes entirely serious, not even in Peace With Honour, a non-fiction (and excellent) book wherein he put forth his pacifist views.  Even at these moments his weightiest points are served with a waggle of the eyebrows and an amusing image.  That's how he made his impact.

I do prefer the whimsy of his fictional sketches to the panache of his essays, but it is still a delight and a joy to have Not That It Matters and its ilk waiting on my shelf.  It definitely bears re-reading, and I'll be going on a cycle through Milne's many and various books for the rest of life, I imagine.

Tomorrow I'll type out a whole of one of his essays, 'A Household Book', because I think it'll surprise quite a few people.  And will show to my brother that I was RIGHT about something I've been saying to him for a decade.  Ahem.  The essay is in praise of a then-underappreciated book by a famous author... and ends with this paragraph (come back tomorrow to see what it was!):

Well, of course, you will order the book at once.  But I must give you one word of warning.  When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, still less on the genius of ******* *******.  You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself... You may be worthy; I do not know.  But it is you who are on trial.

Song for a Sunday

Jewel is pretty well known in the US, I think - indeed, her first (and, to my mind, worst) album is one of the biggest sellers ever there - but she's not made much of a splash in the UK.  I first heard her song 'Hands' in 2004, when my friend Hannah played it to me, and have loved it ever since.  Enjoy!

Very definitely Gone to Earth

From the 1950 film (photo source)

I don't give up on books very often, although I do it more now than I would have done before I started blogging.  I still feel a bit ungrateful towards the author, who has put months or years into writing a book, if I can't be bothered to spend a week on it - but I'm coming round to the too-many-books-too-little-time argument.  (Giving up is distinct from putting it to one side and forgetting about it - it has to be a decisive action.)

When I do give up, it's usually because I think the writing is too bad, or (occasionally) too confusing.  It's rarely related to subject matter or character - although if I started a gory crime novel, I'm sure I'd stop reading that pretty smartish.

But I've never given up on a novel quite so quickly as I did on Tuesday morning.  Because I now have a 40 minute walk into work, I tend to read a book whilst I'm walking.  (Yes, I'm that guy.  Surprised?)   And I was a page and half - yes, 1.5pp. - into Mary Webb's Gone To Earth before I concluded that I could not read any further.

I've read and re-read, and loved and re-loved, Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, but I've not read any of the authors she was parodying.  Well, I've read some Lawrence and Hardy, and they're on the peripheries of her satire, but I've steered clear of that peculiar vogue for rural novels which seized British literature in the early years of the 20th century.  Here is the opening of Gone To Earth, with my thoughts interpolated:

Small, feckless [oh, wasn't that one of the cows in Cold Comfort Farm?] clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky [always cross out the adjectives first when editing, love] - shepherdless, futile, imponderable [oh... never mind.] - and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears. [oh sweet mercy.]

[So, what have we established?  It was a cloudy day.  Right-o.]

It was cold in the Callow [oh, sorry, we're not done with the weather - as you were] - a spinney of silver birches and larches that topped a round hill.  A purple mist hinted of buds in the tree-tops, and a fainter purple haunted the vistas between the silver and brown boles. [Of course it did.  Purple is a very haunting, hinting colour.  Now, for the love of all that is pure, can we move on?]

Only the crudeness of youth was here as yet, and not its triumph [anyone else feel we're wandering into heavy-handed metaphor territory?] - only the sharp calyx-point, the pricking tip of the bud, like spears, and not the paten of the leaf, the chalice of the flower.

[Is there an editor in the world who wouldn't have rejected this novel by now?]

For as yet spring had no flight, no song, but went like a half-fledged bird, hopping tentatively through the undergrowth. [To summarise: it's early March.] The bright springing mercury that carpeted the open spaces had only just hung out its pale flowers, and honeysuckle leaves were still tongues of fire.  [I think you've made your point, Mary.] Between the larch boles [oh good, more boles] and under the thickets of honeysuckle and blackberry came a tawny silent form, wearing with the calm dignity of woodland creatures a beauty of eye and limb [can one wear a beautiful eye?], a brilliance of tint, that few women could have worn without self-consciousness.  Clear-eyed, lithe, it stood for a moment in the full sunlight - a year-old fox, round-headed and velvet-footed.  Then it slid into the shadows.  [A sentence without adjectives or adverbs!  Mary, my dear, are you feeling quite yourself?] A shrill whistle came from the interior of the wood, and the fox bounded towards it.

"Where you bin? [oh, Heaven preserve us.]  You'm stray and lose yourself, certain sure!" ["certain sure?"  REALLY?] said a girl's voice [or, indeed, 'said a girl'], chidingly motherly.  "And if you'm alost [oh no...], I'm alost; so come you whome. [no, 'whome' isn't a typo.  In case you were wondering.  I wish it were.]  The sun's undering [I wonder if Mary Webb had ever spoken to someone from the countryside?], and there's bones for supper!" [YUM.]

[I finished off the dialogue spoken by the girl's voice, but - truth be told - it was at that 'You'm' that I made my decision not to read on.  Isn't this simply everything appalling you ever thought the rural novel might be?  Perhaps it gets better, perhaps I am doing Ms. Webb an injustice.  I, for one, certainly shan't be finding out.]