Imagine my delight when my husband went out yesterday morning to get his paper and found ONE GOOD DOG on our doorstep. Having only seen the ARCs, I can only equate seeing the real book in hand as, having seen ultrasounds of a baby, the real infant is even more beautiful that imagined. Sweet!
I had the distinct pleasure of attending the American Library Association conference held, conveniently, in Boston this past weekend. If my husband had the data cord to connect the camera phone to the computer, I could actually share photos of me signing ARCs of ONE GOOD DOG for the gratifyingly large crush of library types who met me at the MacMillan booth. It was, nonetheless, a great privilege to be a part of the MacMillan author group. It was such fun meeting librarians from all over the country…Utah, California, Albany, Worcester, Brooklyn, Providence, and, best of all, from my childhood library, the Russell Library in Middletown, CT. It reminds me of how important libraries are. These are the soldiers on the frontline of literacy.
I’ve also just discovered a wonderful website called IndieBound that focuses on the independent bookstore. Most ABA member bookstores are listed, but visitors can nominate their own favorite independent bookstores for inclusion on the nationwide list. Visit http://www.bookweb.org/indiebound to see what’s happening in the world of independent bookstores.
This essay first appeared in the Martha’s Vineyard Times, www.mvtimes.com.
There is a compulsion in every writer to create a narrative whether one is required or not. Case in point, two years ago, my youngest daughter brought a foster dog home for Christmas. A little rag of a dog that had been hit by a car and would have spent Christmas in a shelter had she not been invited back to MV by said daughter. Sprout, so-called, gimped around the house and put the other two, much larger, dogs in their respective places. Naturally we spent the better part of the holidays coming up with her life story.
She was a street dog, fending for herself in the mean streets of Holyoke, abandoned by heartless owners. No. No. No. She’s the beloved pet of some old woman who died and the relatives forgot about the dog and she was left behind. Oh, the stories got better and better. She’s the victim of some bad boyfriend’s murderous kick. There was a car accident, and she panicked and ran away into a strange city, during the coldest, snowiest month. Throughout the day, little Sprout slept on various laps and never once agreed with the hypotheses being floated above her silky little head. Give us a clue, would ya? She yawns, looks piteous and goes back to sleep. The only thing certain was that she understood the job of being a lap dog.
Is there some innate drive in human beings that demands a story? How often do we ask: What’s his story? Whether from mutual friends, or dependable gossips, we want to know the back story of those we meet. Standing around the buffet table, we tease out what’s important to know about a stranger standing there, who feeds us his or her history bit by hint, by remark until we discern a personal narrative that only on better acquaintance will clarify by direct questioning. Maybe our buffet line of questioning isn’t terribly investigative, unless you happen to be a reporter, with such queries as: So, what do you do? Which town do you live in? (On the Vineyard, of course, no one asks the direct question of: how long have you lived here? We have a wonderful method of getting that answer with the do you know, do you remember questions that readily identify the newcomer from the old timer.)
It’s probably a survival technique from our earliest days of walking upright. Define yourself, stranger. Why should we offer the comfort of our home fire and a slice of caribou if you can’t tell us your story? Which gave the first professional story-tellers a job–telling other people’s stories; or, explaining the universe with creative licence. I often wonder if early people really believed all that about the sun dying in the west only to be resurrected in the east as a Phoenix, or that some god was riding in a golden chariot from east to west. Or the one about the dragons at the edge of the known world. Maybe that was just some cartographer-wag’s idea of a joke. Mythology is a common denominator within all cultures. Norse, Greek, Mayan, Native American, New Jersey. It was a way to explain natural phenomena, to control behavior, and, maybe especially, to entertain. So many of the great myths have become part of the canon in a classic education, fairy tales, and on the big screen; enduring themes of heroes, journey stories, and creation stories. Man has always had the urge to explain things bigger than he. Today we tend to do it scientifically, parsing the mysteries of the human genome not through narrative, but through persistent and painstaking study, which then lends itself to building the narrative of the human race. Just because we know more, and have refuted some of the older explanations for the universe, like winter really isn’t Persephone going into the Underworld, it hasn’t stopped us from creating new myths, new stories to entertain. For example the details about the lives of modern heroes who are now called celebrities and whose lives offer up seemingly unending stories around the blog of our modern day camp fire.
A fiction writer is particularly susceptible to the need for narrative. If we don’t get it, we make it up, sometimes when we do get it, we still make it up. So the compulsion to create a life story for a little dog of unknown origins doesn’t stop with conjecture, but flows on with detail and rock solid certainty. In effect, Sprout’s mythology begins with us. Unlike Aesop’s animals, this one isn’t talking. Her mythology also doesn’t end with her beginning, it ravels up the future, and we imagine her living with someone who doesn’t love her as much as she deserves. Which is why she isn’t going back to the shelter. The rest of Sprout’s history will be based on fact.
(This article appeared first in the Martha’s Vineyard Times www.mvtimes.com.)
What a difference a year makes. This time last year we elected a new president, changing the face of America forever. On that very day we learned we were to become grandparents for the very first time. And, a year ago, I was on sabbatical in order to finish the book that eventually came to be titled ONE GOOD DOG.
Today, Barack Obama, Nobel laureate, seasonal Vineyard visitor, and Bo’s proud owner, is grappling with the big issues of economy and health care; war and peace, attempting to keep campaign promises. He’s dealing with H1N1 and myriad other situations that weren’t on his plate then, but take up plenty of space now.
Our granddaughter is just over four months old and a real person instead of a theoretical one. She’s turned her parents’ world topsy turvey and turned her grandparents into the kind of people that gush and take pictures at every drooling smile.
Last but not least, ONE GOOD DOG is finished. At this writing, it’s getting closer to its March release, so close that it has a cover, flattering reviews in publishing magazines, blurbs, and a developing publicity plan. Apropos of that, I recently made a pilgrimage to the canyons of New York City to meet not just with my editor and agent, but with the team whose responsibility it is to make sure OGD (as we call it among ourselves) hits the bookstore shelves like greased lightning, flying off them as fast as a bookseller can stock it.
I was given the grand tour of the St. Martin’s Press offices, which happen to be in the world famous Flatiron building on Fifth Avenue. I was led by my editor from office to office, up and down the sixteen or seventeen floors in this unique building and introduced to everyone from the artist who designed to cover to the woman who sells the sub-rights, to the CFO and the top-rung editor who runs the place. I was hugged, cheered and flattered. I had no idea who these people were, yet they all knew me…or at least the book. In the movies, authors always seem to be in and out of their editor’s offices, or their agents are attending to their every whim, as if authors are hothouse flowers needing protection and coddling, or worse, eccentric and overbearing. I like to think that I am none of those things, but it was a very pleasant experience to be welcomed so warmly by perfect strangers. Because a writer’s work is, of necessity, a solitary activity; and because in today’s electronic world so much is done via email instead of by phone or face to face, it was a little weird to find out that my work is the daily topic of conversation among publicity, marketing and editorial specialists; that it’s become a commodity. I don’t write this as any sort of bragging or with any intended pomposity; it was just such a surreal experience. I felt like I had come out of a cave into the light. It was sort of like being one of those cinematic representations of an author, heady stuff for a girl from an island not Manhattan.
In the olden days, back five or six years ago, and a whole lifetime ago economically, authors were trotted out and sent to multiple cities to do talks and book signings, it was part of the culture and considered the best way to get respectable book sales. Nowadays, only the cash cows are afforded these perks, the rest of us are on what might be called a publicity diet—less is more, close to home, and a lot of it is do-it-yourself. The new book tour is electronic and on my New York visit much of the discussion around the lunch table—in a fabulously trendy minimalist restaurant called the Craftbar—was on maximizing Facebook and the blogosphere. Would I consider ‘guesting’ on blogs? Can I do that in my Mom jeans and threadbare sweatshirt? Sign me up! Skype? Okay, I’ll put on a nice shirt. Oddly enough, the youngest of my luncheon companions, a publicist, pooh-poohed Twitter as so passé and not to be bothered with. Quelle relief. I’m not much into a form of communication that restricts my word count.
I returned home elevated by my New York experience and was quickly humbled by real life. New York was a heady experience, and one which I will always treasure, but it’s not my life. Plugging away at a new manuscript, writing this column, sorting whites from colors, going to the day job, that’s my real life. But it’s nice to have a few hours of magic once a year.
Economies slip, babies change everything in a family, new presidents bring us hope and, finally, books are finished. What a difference a year makes.
I am humbled and honored to have advance praise for my upcoming novel, ONE GOOD DOG, from the likes of LuAnne Rice, Lisa Scottoline, Rita Mae Brown, Claire Cook, Melissa Jo Pelletier, Gary Stein, Spence Quinn, and Augusten Burroughs. Even thinking that my work has been read by such luminaries is not only gratifying, but surreal.
ONE GOOD DOG will be out in March 2010…and to all those folks who took the time to read it in its unedited, raw form…Thank you!!
Wow, I just sent in my column for “The Last Word” which is all about passwords and lo and behold, I can’t remember the one for this blog. Fortunately, I never delete emails and was able to locate the one from my lovely webster.
My thesis about passwords, or PINs or whatever you want to call them, is that they are tiny badges of self-hood; how we define ourselves in one word, or set of numbers. It took a little bit to figure out how passwords were a fit topic for a column on writing…but I did. It’ll be up on the Martha’s Vineyard Times website Thursday. Let me know what you think.
Cheers,
Susan
It looks like I’ve entered the blogging world at long last. I will admit that this is a brave new step for me, I’ve been fairly stubborn about taking on new technology and it’s going to take a little time before I get into the swing of things. As I’m sure no one wants to read about my mundane activities and routine, I will endeavor to use this cyber-space as a forum on and about writing, much like The Last Word is in print. (visit mvtimes.com/calendar).
One reason I’ve wanted to do this is to better communicate with my readers. The ‘guestbook’ is nice on the webpage, but this way we can have a conversation.
So, here it is, my first blog….let’s see what happens!
