THANK YOU, ALBERTA!

Who says Friday, the thirteenth has to be bad luck? Friday, January 13th, was the day I accidentally discovered I had my first book review—a 4-and-a-half star review from Alberta at Manic Readers.

It was so unexpected, and so nice, that I’m including it in this post:

Finding You Again is a great little romance with lots of hot sex, some angst about what their futures will hold, and lots of miscues that cause a few problems for them. Loved the book, and all the characters, along with the twist at the end that allows them to get back together.
  

So, again, THANK YOU, ALBERTA, for taking the time and effort to read and review the work of a complete unknown.

The Wonderful Wild West World of Publishing

No, this is not a post that explains the recent crazy gyrations in publishing, since my grasp of the subject is minimal, though slowly growing as I become more immersed in the field.

Things are still so unsettled that it’s doubtful anyone can logically unravel the various twisted strands currently roiling the industry. But if anybody can, please contact me. I’d gladly sit silent and attentive for hours while I try to absorb your knowledge.

Frankly, all this post means to do is link anyone interested with an article they might not have seen predicting what the New Year may hold for the world of publishers, agents, writers and distributors.

So here’s the link: http://bit.ly/uPERh3

Happy Reading!

RELEASE DAY!

            Yes, it’s finally here! Release Day for “Finding You Again,” and a totally low-key affair.

Nary a handful of confetti, cluster of balloons or celebratory banner anywhere in sight.

Recently, individual or group blog tours and hops have become a wonderful way for writers to welcome their books into the world and get the word out about their latest creative endeavors. In my view, that would have been the best, but for family reasons undoable, so I’m planning a “Better Late Than Never” Blog Tour for later in the year.

In the meantime, here’s the link to a “Release Day” message I just posted on The Wild Rose Press blog. It includes a fairly long excerpt from the book. So if anyone has the time or desire to visit and read, here’s the link: www.thewildrosepress.blogspot.com.

           

And may 2012 bring everyone good health, happiness and the fulfillment of their fondest wishes!

Santa Put "What" In Your Stocking?

Bad kids get lumps of coal in their Christmas stockings, right?

And good kids get…well, for good kids the sky's the limit. Or so good kids desperately hope.

So before December 25th arrives, you do a short review, just a brief precautionary survey, to check on how you stack up in the all-important good kid-bad kid sweepstakes.

Let's see, during the past twelve months you weren't a serial killer, not even a sort-of-nice-one, like Dexter. Check.

You didn't buy up companies, strip them of their valuable assets and sell off the rest, sending hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs to India or the Philippines or some such place and forcing an equal number of workers onto the unemployment line. Check.

You didn't mistreat helpless animals…kick the old, frail, pregnant or incapacitated to the curb to reach that empty cab first…spread vicious rumors…pick pockets…or set fires to collect insurance money. Check…check…check…check…and double check.

So all things considered, you were a pretty good kid. Which means…at least you hope it means…Santa will fill your Christmas stocking with some really nice goodies.

Then Christmas comes, and the long-awaited moment when you can dip into that stocking and tally up your loot is finally here.

Okay, not a single iPad, iPod, iPhone or Mac-anything in sight. But there is a basic laptop.Your first one ever. So far, so good. There are also gift cards. No question about it, you can always use those. And beautiful flowering plants as well as boxes of rich Italian pastry and creamy chocolate candy.

All in all, not a bad haul, and you go to sleep that night with a smile on your face and a twinge in your gut (when will you learn that one thick slice of tiramisu is more than enough, and two thick slices will come back to bite you every time?)

Then Christmas is finally over, and as you prepare to pack away the Yule decorations, you suddenly realize the most important thing Santa put in your stocking—not this year's stocking, but last year's edition. It's a gift you couldn't see back then, a gift you can only recognize in hindsight, and it's the most valuable gift of all.

Time.

365 days of it. 

A full year of pretty good health, enough money to pay your bills, and even a dream or two that finally came true.

So even if that billion-dollar bank balance remains forever elusive and the castle in Spain, the Rolls Royce and the eat-all-you-want-and-never-gain-an-ounce diet never materialize, you still (in the most literal sense imaginable) received the gift of a lifetime.

It's what you hope is in your stocking again this Christmas, the same gift you'd like for everyone else as well—another year of life, love, laughter, good health, and dreams fulfilled.

What's Past Is Prologue

     As with so much else he did, Shakespeare had it right when he penned that pithy phrase for “The Tempest.”

     The past can indeed set the stage (or provide the prologue) for the present and hence the future.

     The same applies to prologues in books.  They’re scene setters that explain what brought the protagonist to his or her current predicament. 

     Of course, a lot of readers actively dislike book prologues.  They consider them unnecessary and just want to jump into the action of the main plot itself while the writer judiciously sifts in any important bits of backstory at the appropriate time.

     It’s a valid point of view, and after writing the prologue to “Finding You Again,” I did try a prologue-less beginning.  But somehow it didn’t feel quite right to me, and since the prologue is just 293 words and (in my opinion, at least) sort of amusing, I decided to stay with it. 

     So here it is: the short prologue (the past) that provides the background for what sends Maggie Demarco, the heroine, on her journey (the present) into the future:

Prologue

At one-thirty on a beautiful afternoon in early June, Maggie Demarco stood in the small anteroom at the rear of St. Athanasius Church, wearing a magnificent white gown and waiting for the moment when her father would walk her down the aisle and deliver her for all time into the tender arms of her groom, the love of her life.

At one forty-four, Maggie was still waiting.

At one fifty-nine, the entire assembled wedding party finally realized Maggie was still waiting. And so were they.

At two-twelve... That’s right. Still waiting.

At two-sixteen, calls, e-mails and instant messages began going out to the groom to alert him that he was, umm, just a wee bit late to his own wedding.

At two-twenty-seven, Maggie’s father, the wee-bit-late-groom’s father, the best man, and the ten groomsmen all set out in search of the love of Maggie Demarco’s life.

At two-forty-eight, it finally became evident that the groom hadn’t been in a horrible auto accident on his way to church. Nor had he suffered a near-fatal heart attack, been snatched by kidnappers, or developed a sudden case of amnesia. He had simply turned tail and left town for parts unknown without bothering to inform his bride that he’d experienced a last-minute change of heart about their happily-ever-after.

At three-o-five, belatedly admitting to herself that her perfect wedding was toast, and so was she, Maggie Demarco ripped the tiara veil off her head and ran from the church. Caught between cathartic tears and even more cathartic anger, she vowed, so help her God, that she would never marry anyone—no way, no how—and if she ever found her former beloved fiancé, she would whack the lily-livered louse senseless with what was left of her five-hundred-dollar bouquet.

To Blurb Is Human

        All right, I admit it.  I’m not sure whether blurbing (i.e.: devising a tantalizing thumbnail sketch of a book’s storyline) is human or not.  But since as far as anybody knows, no other life form on earth does it, I suppose it must be. 

The one thing I am sure of with complete certainty is that it’s a necessary and valuable part of putting out a book.  Which meant it had to be done for my novel, “Finding You Again.” 

So I dutifully set about doing it.

Ask many writers and they will probably tell you that in terms of instilling dread, writing a blurb is second only to writing query letters to agents and editors or putting together a 5-page synopsis that will adequately describe your 350-page book.

But after many less-than-glowing attempts, I finally managed to produce a blurb that, with only a few minor changes, won the approval of the Wild Rose Press Blurb Committee.  Yes, blurbs are so vital that TWRP really has a Blurb Committee.

And here is the blurb the committee members decided will be featured both on the book itself and in all promotional materials:

“Maggie Demarco thought she’d have the perfect wedding…until the groom backed out without even saying goodbye. So she packs a bag and flees to the town where she grew up to heal and prepare for the rest of her life.

         

Eric Holt is surprised when he learns that Maggie’s back in town. He’s never forgotten the hours he spent in high school introducing her to the joys of sex. Of course, he’s also never forgotten the pain of her rejection. But he’s still willing to help her recapture the sexual mojo she lost waiting for her AWOL groom, and he proposes a no-strings-attached affair to prove how desirable she still is.

         

Neither expect the unintended consequences, when old hurts resurface, new problems arise, and simple sex threatens to turn into the craziest complication of all: love.”

Christmas Dreams

          Christmas is a time for dreaming.

Clement Moore’s innocent 19th-century children dreamt of sugar plums.  Today’s modern kids, being more savvy and perhaps more acquisitive, have upped the financial stakes by thumbing through their hefty Toys R Us holiday catalogs and dreaming of three-hundred-dollar gaming systems or dollhouses more expensively furnished than the homes where many of us live.

          Adults, too, may harbor wonderful dreams. Perhaps an iPad2 or a new car or a trip to the Bahamas to ward off the invasive cold of a Christmas spent in snowy Wisconsin or blustery New England. Or, considering the fragile state of the economy, maybe the best dream imaginable would simply be a safe job with salary enough to pay off the mortgage, put food on the dinner table, ensure that the kids have a good education, and provide the kind of health care that won’t impoverish the family.

          I live in New York City, in a part of Manhattan awash in hospitals. New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center is here. The Hospital for Special Surgery is here…and Rockefeller University…and Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the world-famous cancer center. So many medical institutions, in fact, that the area has often been whimsically called Bedpan Alley—an obvious tip of the hat to Tin Pan Alley, the streets on the West Side of Manhattan where music publishing companies flourished during the early decades of the twentieth century. 

          The composers and lyricists who walked those streets dealt with musical dreams and ultimately produced the Great American Songbook. The dreams in Bedpan Alley are likely of a far different sort and sometimes infinitely harder to achieve. At times, as you go from place to place, you see clear evidence of what those dreams might be. 

On a drizzly autumn afternoon, you might see two women pushing a child in a wheeled hospital bed through the streets to a nearby Ronald McDonald House.  On a sunny Sunday morning, there might be another child sitting a few pews ahead of you in church with a scarf wrapped around her head in the heat of summer.  Only when you see her being put in a wheelchair at the end of the service do you understand the reason for that scarf.

And you try to figure out why—why is it some people and not others?—but you know you never can. So, instead, you feel lucky that it isn’t you (at least not yet) and you feel guilty that it isn’t you (at least not yet), and you do the only thing you can, as meager as it seems. You dream another story for them, the best one you can find: that they’re cured quickly, painlessly and permanently and live to die gently in their beds surrounded by their loving families at the age of a hundred and ten. 

It’s the same dream you’re sure they’re dreaming for themselves, the same dream that the women pushing that hospital bed through the rainy streets and the man maneuvering that wheelchair out of church are dreaming.

Several weeks ago, the assistant to the pastor of that church bid her coworkers good night at the end of the day, left to go home…and disappeared. She still hasn’t been seen or heard from.

          If the police and private investigators working on the case haven’t yet been able to solve it, you know there’s nothing you can do. But whenever you think of her, which is often, you use the only feeble skill you have: you push that awful shivery feeling aside and dream her home again, giving her and her family the happily-ever-after they need and deserve. 

          You do it because you’re human and can feel the pain, even if you 
haven’t personally experienced it. You do it because, as John Donne so 
beautifully expressed it: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a 
piece of the continent, a part of the main.” 

But you do it just as much because you’re a writer, or at least fancy that you are, though others may sometimes disagree. And that’s one of the things writers do best. They dream. For better or worse (and sometimes all those painful rejections, complicated revisions and less-than-glowing reviews make it seem like far, far worse), dreaming is in our blood, an indispensable part of who we are. We take bits and pieces from life and from imagination and meld them together until we dream into existence on the page or the computer screen things that don’t exist, things that could be or should be or might someday be if fate is kind, Christmas dreams for both ourselves and those who may not have many of their own.

Of course, sometimes in Bedpan Alley you might also witness one of those dreams coming true. Passing the entrance to a hospital, you might see a woman being helped from a wheelchair into a waiting taxi. She’s accompanied by smiling teenagers and an older man, and just before the man enters the cab, he says into a cell phone loud enough for you to hear: “Everything’s wonderful.  It’s all gone and the doctor says she’s going to be fine.”

And that’s the best dream anyone can dream, whether at Christmas or any other time of year.