New Gig

I've just started writing for the Today's Author blog, which is a great site for writers to interact with other writers and get inspiration. I just wrote my first blog for them about NaNoWriMo, the writing challenge in November when all your writer nerd friends try to write 50,000 words in thirty days. Here's my take on it.

I'll still be updating this blog with my book projects, my house projects and my book reviews. But I'll probably be shifting writing focused posts to Today's Author.

Partial Book Review: The Light Between Oceans

I'm usually much more careful when I pick a book to read. When it isn't the newest book written by an author I already love, I'll start with a friend's recommendation, read lots of Amazon reviews and check out the first few pages before buying. Every time I skip this process, I regret it. You'd think I'd learn.

I bought The Light Between Oceans on a whim. The premise is killer and the novel starts with a couple of lighthouse keepers finding a live baby and a dead man when a boat washes on shore. Instead of following that thread, the book then backtracks to explain how the couple met and fell in love . . . for the next eighty pages or so. When we finally get back to the point - do they keep the baby? is she really an orphan? - we are subjected to pages of supposedly adorable moments of baby-talk and the joys of parenthood. If you removed all the scenes where nothing happens to move the story forward, this book might be thirty pages long.

I made it more than  halfway, but I give up. Life is too short and my copy of Gone Girl arrived today. I did follow my strict rules on book finding for that one so my expectations are high.

Book Review: Watch

A little over a year ago, I wrote a review for Cass McMain's first book, Sunflower. Her second book, Watch, seems like a departure, plot-wise. It certainly is a bit darker. But, readers will be treated to the relatable characters and amazing dialogue that are McMain's specialty. She is even able to write interesting conversations between children, without ever making it feel like you're reading YA.

Watch opens on a realistic family drama: Corky visits her dying uncle who is sharing family secrets before he goes. It's hard for her to make sense of his ramblings, which she first dismisses as a product of dementia. After his death, she reads his journal and is forced to confront what seems impossible: he believed her father was a vampire. Was he simply mentally ill or could there be some shred of truth there?

As Corky delves deeper into this mystery, she encounters an underground society of "Sanguinarians" who appear to be normal human beings whose fascination with vampires leads them to act out a sort of vampire culture. In an attempt to make sense of her family history, Corky is exposed to a part of the world she never knew existed and she learns that it's impossible to know a person's secrets by looking at them from the outside.

The ending felt a bit abrupt to me, but as the writer says: "it's all going in circles, so there is no end really."

Book Review: The Storied Life of A.J Fikry

This book was loaned to me by a friend. I never would have picked it up myself- the hokey title, the old fashioned cover that makes it look like a children's book - but I loved it. In retrospect, I wonder why my friend was not more confident in her pitch. This book is a book nerd's dream.

Each chapter starts with the main character giving his take on a well known short story. He owns a book store so the conversations in the novel are naturally bookish. They discuss literary technique and debate whether e-readers signal the ruin of publishing. In a writing class, one character complains about stories written in omniscient, present tense- like this book is. It could have come off as annoyingly self-conscious; I thought it was charming.

The characters talk about the value of ambiguous endings, how to build to a plot twist, and the age old advice that when there's a gun in the first act, it had better go off by the third. These ideas are played out within the story, which could have been simplistic lesson teaching, but was so much deeper because the story itself is lovely.

A.J. starts the story as a widower in his thirties who thinks his life is over. The next fifteen years prove him wrong.

Here's my favorite bit of bookish dialogue:

"'Show, don't tell' is a complete crock of shit," Daniel lectures her. "It comes from Syd Field's screenplay books, but it doesn't have a thing to do with novel writing. Novels are all tell. The best ones at least. Novels aren't meant to be imitation screenplays."

Now, if you have an opinion about that, you're a book nerd. Or a writer. Either way, read this book.

Book Review: The Arsonist

I lovelovelove Sue Miller and her latest book, The Arsonist, lived up to my expectations. The plot, an arsonist terrorizes a small town in New Hampshire, is juicy enough. But it's Millers characters that make her a super-star.

Frankie returns from Africa to her parents' summer home where they have just retired. As she considers her next professional move and gets involved with the local reporter, her mother struggles to come to terms with her husband's Alzheimer's diagnosis.

Both women contemplate love and the future while ruminating on the lessons of the past. How does Frankie make room for another person in her life without sacrificing her need to find meaningful work? How does Sylvia continue to care for a husband she doesn't love without giving up her own identity? The mysterious fires that begin to divide the town are a backdrop to this very human story.

I enjoyed every moment of the read, but found the ending a bit of a disappointment. I do not require tidy happy endings in fiction, but this one includes a paragraph that takes all the hope out of any idea that things might work out eventually. Edit that paragraph out in your mind, like I did, and the ending is satisfying.

Blog Hop!

Writing can be such a solitary endeavor. It's nice to remember we're part of a larger creative community. Robin Israel invited me to participate in this blog hop as a way to do just that and to shout out to other writers I admire and support.

LIKE: Mary Vensel White, author of HarperCollins' The Qualities of Wood (and a forthcoming masterpiece I've had the privilege of reading before publication).

AND: Juliet O'Callaghan, who has started writing again after taking a contemplative break. You can read about that and you can read her chapters.

BLOG HOP QUESTION:

Why are you working on the project you are writing now? Why is it important? (to you, or to the world, or…)

As of this weekend, I have finished writing Finding Charlie. (I thought it was done a few weeks ago, but it needed another chapter.)

So my new project is deciding what to do with it. I'm working up a query letter for literary agents and weighing the pros and cons of self-publishing.

I never would have considered self-publishing my first book, but with two traditionally published books under my belt and a bit of experience with social media promotion, I'm feeling more confident. It's definitely something I'll think about.

In the meantime, you can check out my first chapters. Finding Charlie opens on the mystery of 19 year old Charlie Howard's disappearance.  As the hours turn to days, older sister Olivia tries to put the pieces together.  This is a family drama that takes place in the summer in Tucson, Arizona - the longest season of the year. Readers of Jodi Picoult, Sue Miller, and J. Courtney Sullivan would appreciate this story.

Book Review: And the Dark Sacred Night

I am a big Julia Glass fan. I even reread her first novel before starting this one because I knew she'd be revisiting some old characters. Glass is a phenomenal writer and I have read all of her books. So I was expecting to fall in love with And the Dark Sacred Night and I'm disappointed to say I did not.

Don't get me wrong: this book is well written. The dialogue is pitch perfect, the characters feel like real people, the premise is juicy. Readers of Three Junes get to find out what happened to the son Malachy abandoned. But, somewhere along the way, Glass took a weird turn in the story telling. She started jumping months and years ahead, skipping over the complicated emotional (interesting) parts of the story and describing the mundane moments that led up to them: the board games played and meals prepared during a rainy weekend, the excruciating details of an archival job involving Inuit art.

For the life of me, I can not imagine why Fenno was in this book. I liked seeing him again, but his short friendship with Kit's long dead father did not make him relevant to this family reunion. That he might have been secretly in love with Mal doesn't give him any meaningful information to bestow on Kit. And he doesn't. While I could understand Kit's desire to connect with his biological father's family, I could not understand why he wanted his mother to spend a weekend doing the same. Or why he withholds from his children how they're related to these people they're spending time with.

The story gets back on track for the last three pages and manages a satisfying conclusion. I just wish she'd go back and rewrite the last third of the book.