Today, I have been invited to guest post at thebookladysblog.com. which is one of my favorite sites. The topic is the inspiration for The Lace Reader and its very unreliable narrator, Towner Whitney.  Please check it out if you get a chance. 

Also, tonight I’ll be speaking & signing at A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland, CA at 7PM. Get all the details about the event here. Hope to see you there.

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Thanks Seattle, I had a great time. Flying to CA today for three events  this week.

9/10 Oakland

9/12 San Mateo

9/14 Pasadena

For all the details (locations, times, etc.), click here.

A FIsh Called Trixie

Labor Day can be a sad time in New England. Summer is over, the kids are back in school. Though fall is our prettiest season, we all realize what is coming. Last winter was a bad one where we live. We had over ninety inches of snow, a record for our coastal city. I don’t know anyone who is looking forward to winter this year.

This Labor Day, I began my book tour for the paperback version of The Lace Reader. By the time I return to New England, summer will be long gone. And, while I hate to leave those last few beach days, I am very excited by the idea of visiting new places and making new friends. So, if we haven’t met, and my tour takes me anywhere near you, please consider coming. The bookstores I’m visiting are some of the best. And we always have a lot of fun at these events.

Our first stop on the tour is Seattle. We arrived this afternoon and were given a brief but informative tour of the city. It was raining hard. While we weren’t surprised (isn’t that what it does in Seattle?) we were told that this was unusual. Mist, yes, full on rain is evidently not as common. An hour later, the rain was gone, and the streets were filled with happy people. This seems an almost perfect city.

The hotel we’re staying at is great. It’s right in the middle of the city, we can walk to just about everything. And you have to love a place that asks you upon arrival if you’d care to have a pet sent to your room. We now have a lovely goldfish named Trixie.  

Tonight (Tuesday) at 7 PM, we will be at Village Books in Bellingham. If you are in the area, please stop by.  Tomorrow we head to San Francisco.  

P.S. The back of Trixie’s name card notes that she’s able to call room service and order food so there’s no need for us to feed her. Smart fish. 

I have a long history of having no idea where I am when I drive. The open road is not my medium. I am far better on the open water. GPS recently changed that but only when I can get all the data input. But recently I have discovered celestial navigation. I can now find my way home from any place in the northern hemisphere using only the stars, an almanac, and a watch. Since most of my friends and family don’t have the courage to let me drive, this will not make a big difference in their lives, but it will in mine.

This all came about because I’m working on the rewrite of my second book The Map of True Places, which will come out in the summer of 2010. The stars are turning out to be important to the story, an image system of sorts, in the same way that lace became an image system in The Lace Reader. I have to say that I didn’t plan it that way, it just sort of happened. I was lost in poetry and literary quotes. But I couldn’t make those work the way I wanted them to. They weren’t adding to the story. So I stepped back and took a look at what I had written and was surprised to find that the stars were everywhere, as was navigation, both historically and metaphorically.

So I’m studying celestial navigation. I’m learning to use a sextant and mathematical tables. By the time I’m finished, I plan to be certified. So, if one of you ever gets stuck with me on a boat in the middle of nowhere without a GPS or Loran, and it’s a clear night, you can count on me to get us home. As long as it’s in the Northern Hemisphere. And there’s an almanac on board. And one of us still wears a watch.

It’s August 18th. The paperback edition of The Lace Reader came out today. The last year has flown by. Life has changed so much that it’s difficult to remember exactly what before was like. Still, it’s thrilling to see the new cover and to read the reviews that are printed on the first few pages of this edition. Tonight, my thanks go out to everyone who made this happen. Tomorrow, I’ll sit and write again.

During the month of July, I didn’t write, I swam. The weather wasn’t all that cooperative, but it didn’t matter. When I got to the cottage, I was on crutches. A stupid move (very stupid) on the first day of vacation wrenched my knee, and I ended up in the ER, unable to walk.  Just trying to make it to the lake was painful. But after a few days swimming, dragging my hurt knee through the water as I swam, I was able to leave the crutches behind. Water has always been a miracle cure for me, as much for the spirit as for the body.

Last summer, life interfered in both wonderful and terribly sad ways, and we only got to the lake for a day and a half. So having a month up in New Hampshire this summer fulfilled a dream for me. Every few days, I checked emails at the Country Bookseller in Wolfeboro, one of my favorite places. And every few days I bought a new book. So far, my summer favorites have been Olive Kitteredge and  Netherland. Next up: The Help. We also rediscovered a wonderful place on Route 16 in Ossipee called Windy Fields Farm. We’ve been dropping by for years to buy our blueberries and tomatoes, but this year Chris and James, who are both talented chefs, started a little restaurant, and we stopped by just about every day to pick up dinner to go. Everything is local and wonderful and hard to resist. They make the best roasted corn salsa I’ve every tried, actually it may be the only roasted corn salsa I’ve ever tried, but it is amazing.  If you are passing by on your way north, make sure you stop.

We saw both the sunrise and sunset almost every day in July. We listened to the frogs and loons at night, and last Sunday, while we were drinking our morning coffee, we watched a bald eagle land in the tree with the rope swing just feet away from where we sat.

Tomorrow, my editor sends my new book back with her notes. On August 18th, the paperback of The Lace Reader is released, and I will start a new book tour. And the House of the Seven Gables and The Salem Trolley just began their Lace Reader tour.  If any of you are coming to Salem with a group, it is a great way to see the sites from the book. You can learn more about the tour here.

Byzy in the lake with a stick

Now that the first draft of my new book is finished, we’re headed to New Hampshire for a little R&R which, for me, includes long swims in our little lake.

Years ago, I taught my dog, Byzy, to swim. At least that’s what I like to believe. The fact is, he could always swim. After all, he’s a Golden Retriever.  But he didn’t like the water as much as I thought he should, so I decided to teach him to love it as I do. When he was a puppy, Byzy was a bit timid about going out into the deep water. And since I thought it would be great fun to have a companion on my long swims around the lake, I had to do something to help him get over this fear. So I started calling him to me as I got farther and farther from the shoreline. It wasn’t long before he was swimming right to me, no matter how deep the water was.

The one thing I didn’t anticipate was that, when he caught up to me, he would always try to put his paws on my shoulders to keep himself afloat. This was fine when he was a little puppy. But now, Byzy is close to one hundred pounds, huge for a Golden, even an alpha male. He is powerful and muscular and, even at fifteen and with a bit of hip dysplasia, he can still swim much faster than I can. So as soon as he gets to me, he still puts his paws on my shoulders, and down I go. When I come up again, he seems relieved to see me and swims over and again puts his paws on my shoulders.

You can see where this is going. I have tried to retrain him, and, failing that, to explain to him in plain English why this is not the great idea he seems to think it is. On certain issues, Byzy seems to understand plain English. Unfortunately, this is not one of them. Try as I might, I couldn’t get him to change his behavior. So now he stays on the screened porch while I swim. Then, afterward, I throw a ball into the lake and he fetches it and sighs. We still swim together on occasion, we just don’t venture into waters so deep that neither one of us can stand up.  He doesn’t like that as much, but I’ve explained to him in plain English that this is better for me. He sighs. And then, the first chance he gets, he shakes the lake water out of his fur onto as many unsuspecting people as he can find.

This weekend, I’ll be appearing at two events in Austin. The first is the For the Love of Books Club event at the lovely Lake Austin Spa Resort. I’ll be discussing The Lace Reader and answering questions about my writing process. You can check out the schedule here. Be sure to click on the Details link for the complete information.

Then, on Sunday morning at 9 a.m., I’ll be on a panel with my super-agent, Rebecca Oliver from William Morris Endeavor Entertainment. The event is the 2009 Agents Conference sponsored by the Writers’ League of Texas. Check it out here.

So with a massage, some amazingly delicious and healthy food, exercise, great music, and hours of lively conversation about books and writing, this is a great way to end the months tied to my desk in the little room. I’m looking forward to a wonderful weekend in the Lone Star state.

Okay, so being tied to a chair isn’t such a bad thing. I have recently heard other writers say that they have resorted to the same extreme measures in order to finish their books on time. And it is clearly working. I have completed a second draft of my new novel with almost three weeks to spare before the deadline. What gets me down isn’t being tied to the chair; it’s the little room the chair sits in. Actually, the little room is not so little. It has four big windows and a view of Salem that is an inspiration in itself. And the old National Geographic maps that line the walls give me ideas of places I might travel to when I finally emerge, though the maps are so old that several of the countries don’t even exist anymore.  What makes the little room seem so tiny are all the things I have filled it with during this writing process, things that are meant to inspire but have become a hodgepodge that now threatens to crowd me out of the space. So I thought, rather than worrying about how much cleaning out I’m going to have to do, I’d list some of the things I have gathered to inspire my story:

All things Hawthorne and Melville.  A carved wooden moose on skis that I brought back from Maine on last summer’s book tour. Two Revolutionary War soldiers that were once in my parents’ house and now stand facing each other from both sides of the fireplace.  Three ships’ models. Several books about pirates. A map of famous New England shipwrecks. Six volumes of romantic poetry. Three envelopes full of Gibraltar candies from Ye Olde Pepper Company. A photo of my maternal grandmother in her wedding gown. A piece of lace carved from an eggshell. Two quartz singing bowls tuned to different chakras. Several books on meditation. A ceramic tree my mother in law sent with Celtic crosses and leprechauns hanging from its branches.  A seagull that flies upside down like a distress flag and cannot be up-righted. Several cups of coffee in various stages of consumption, decaf for writing, full octane for the editing process.

I will have to clean out my office soon. I know that. But, right now, I have a third draft to finish. So I will crowd myself into what space I can find and, for now, I will remain tied to a chair. 

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Therese Walsh from WriterUnboxed.com. Therese is a writer herself so her probing questions about process and craft helped me to take a step back and look at what I do as a writer. We really hit it off and ended talking at length so the the interview turned into three separate blog posts. You can read Part 1 by clicking here. Links to the other parts are at the bottom of Part 1.

My interview aside, WriterUnboxed.com  is a great website for anyone interested in “the craft and business of genre fiction.” For three consecutive years, it has been designated as one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers by Writer’s Digest so be sure to add it to your blogroll or your bookmarks.

Enjoy!