Welcome to the World, New Books

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My goodness! So many books have come out recently that it’s hard to keep track, but I wanted to mention a few that I’m looking forward to reading.

Our Book Pregnant group had twins yesterday: Hemingway’s Girl by Erika Robuck and Fobbit by David Abrams.

Hemingway's GirlIn Depression-era Key West, Mariella Bennet, the daughter of an American fisherman and a Cuban woman, knows hunger. Her struggle to support her family following her father’s death leads her to a bar and bordello, where she bets on a risky boxing match…and attracts the interest of two men: world-famous writer, Ernest Hemingway, and Gavin Murray, one of the WWI veterans who are laboring to build the Overseas Highway.

This book has blurbs from Jenna Blum, Caroline Leavitt, Dawn Tripp, Sarah McCoy, and several other women’s fiction writers, and was praised by Publisher’s Weekly and tons of bloggers. Plus, Erika is sweet and warm and funny, an author worth supporting. I’m not even a big fan of Hemingway—though Erika might kick my ass for saying so—but it sounds great and the internet is abuzz with rave reviews from readers I trust. If you like love stories, historical fiction, stormy Key West imagery, and duh, Hemingway, you should check out this book.

Fobbit

In the satirical tradition of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, Fobbit takes us into the chaotic world of Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Triumph. The Forward Operating base, or FOB, is like the back-office of the battlefield – where people eat and sleep, and where a lot of soldiers have what looks suspiciously like an office job. Male and female soldiers are trying to find an empty Porta Potty in which to get acquainted, grunts are playing Xbox and watching NASCAR between missions, and a lot of the senior staff are more concerned about getting to the chow hall in time for the Friday night all-you-can-eat seafood special than worrying about little things like military strategy.

Darkly humorous and based on the author’s own experiences in Iraq, Fobbit is a fantastic debut that shows us a behind-the-scenes portrait of the real Iraq war.

Fobbit was praised by Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus, and tons of other media outlets online and in print, including TIME! David is kind and generous, and runs a great blog for writers and readers called The Quivering Pen, where he posts reviews and updates from the book world, as well as features from guest authors about their “first time” experiences in the industry, and yesterday, a nice thank-you post on his book’s birthday. It’s especially great to support authors who invest so much time in supporting the world of writing. Fobbit is definitely on my to-read list. Go get your copy of what Publisher’s Weekly called “an instant classic.”

The Salt God’s Daughter by Ilie Ruby released yesterday, too. This book was a Library Journal Editor’s Pick, praised by Kirkus, LA Review, and lots of other media sources, and sounds just lovely: “This is a bewitching tale of lives entangled in lushly layered fables of the moon and the sea.” I read the first few pages online and had to stop before I got too into it. I can’t wait for my copy to arrive!

The Salt God’s Daughter by Ilie Ruby is the story of a loss of innocence as told by Ruthie and Naida, a mother and daughter who are forever changed by violence, by family mysteries, by towering acts of love. In an oceanic wilderness where identity is as changeable as the ocean, they face the rites of passage necessary to endure and find in themselves a strength and connection that survive the ages. Theirs is a story that brings to light the primal divinity of the isolated, the marginalized and of those bonded by blood and myth as seen through a lens of transcendent beauty. A stunning, raw, evolutionary tale about the ties that bind, and how far we’ll go to save the ones we love.

The Crown: A NovelYesterday was also—see, I told you a bunch of books came out recently!—the paperback release of Nancy Bilyeau‘s The Crown, a historical thriller with big raves from Entertainment Weekly, Redbook, and O, Oprah’s magazine: “the real draw of this suspenseful novel is its juicy blend of lust, murder, conspiracy, and betrayal.”

And, finally, last week, Barbara Claypole White‘s The Unfinished Garden burst into the world. I love the tagline for this book: A love story about grief, OCD, and dirt. I think I might be most excited about this one since I have some mild OCD issues of my own (as if you haven’t noticed my anxiety from earlier posts), and I love gardening, and I love Barbara’s attitude toward both of those things. Plus, I just keep hearing how much everyone loves Tilly. I think we’re all in for a treat with this book: “The Unfinished Garden is a mesmerizing tale of fear, loss, and love. Tilly and James are richly drawn and wonderfully flawed characters who embody the contradictions and imperfections that exist in all of us. Barbara Claypole White has created a novel as beautiful and complex, dark and light, sweet and sensuous as Tilly’s beloved garden.”  – Joanne Rendell.

I know there are a ton of books released every day, but I hope you’ll check these out. There  are, of course, a ton more on my radar as well, but it seemed like this little pack of novels—and their authors—were worthy of a shout out. When you’ve read them, report back and let me know what you thought! My TBR list is a mile-high, but I will do the same. Happy reading!

Everything Is Fiction

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I read an article this morning in The New Yorker that says all the things that I believe about fiction, that I believe about writing, better than I say them when I try to explain why fiction is so important. Keith Ridgway starts with, “I don’t know how to write. Which is unfortunate, as I do it for a living. Mind you, I don’t know how to live either.” (Me, too, buddy. Me, too.)

But the crux for me is this:

Everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events…You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

Because everything IS fiction. Narrative is how we experience our lives, even within our own heads. It drives me crazy when people say they only read non-fiction because “it really happened.” Fiction tells truths clearer than the random chaos of real life, and real life can’t ever really be described anyway. Even non-fiction stories are narratives constructed and shaped into a digestible arc that makes sense out of “what really happened.”

I could go on and on, as it’s something that I’ve been thinking about for years and talking about a lot lately in relation to Hand Me Down: truth in fiction, getting at truth through fiction, and the choice between novel or memoir for a story that is mostly true. I’ll be posting more interviews where I discuss these issues, but for now, you should really just go read this piece, Everything Is Fiction. It’s short and brilliant. Enjoy.

Inbetween: The Limbo Before the Storm

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I’m home. I’ve been traveling so much for book events over the last few months that after the Pacific Northwest leg that ended about a week ago, I was so looking forward to being home. No more readings for almost six weeks. Finally, a chance to rest.

But. (There is always a but, right?)

I’ve been feeling weird since we returned. Maybe it is a resistance to getting back to normal life, because I’m not sure what that means for me anymore. Maybe I need to decompress after all the socializing. Maybe I just need some time to digest the last few rollercoaster months of life-changing events. Yes. But it’s also more than that.

I feel lethargic and restless at the same time, like I want to get out and do something but am feeling too blah to get off my ass and go. I want to both start new things and curl in on myself and ignore the world. Limbo. A feeling of suspension. We are hovering over this big decision about possibly moving to a new city, again, and what I really want to do is decide so I can move forward. I’m the kind of person who needs to know what the next step is and then I’ll make it happen. There are so many important chunks of our lives up in the air right now—where we’ll live, what we’re going to do for income, if we can buy a house—I have a shaky panic in my chest all the time, a lack of grounding that makes me constantly off-balance. I feel lost and unstable and unable to commit to anything, so I just get stuck in this space of doing nothing except fantasizing about moving to LA, buying a house near the beach, and getting everything else I want.

I want to start a new business running private creative writing workshops. I want to start seriously selling my handmade cards. I want to own a home; to stop throwing money away on rentals that always have things wrong that the landlords don’t care about fixing and aren’t ours to improve. I want the ocean to be a part of my daily life. I want to live by an ocean that isn’t always freezing. I want to be around more young, smart, interesting people, and more writers. I want to be part of a literary community that isn’t subject to the transitory nature of graduate programs. Oh, and I want to work on my second book. And my third and fourth eventually. I want to settle into a stable and fulfilling and generally happy life—three things I’ve never had at the same time—and just be.

I know I need to work more on being present in the here and now, but I feel like these wants don’t stand a chance until I know where we’re going to be for the foreseeable future. We’ve been talking about moving again since we decided a few months ago that our small town wasn’t a place we wanted to live long-term. We’ve moved five times in the last six years—for jobs, for schools—and have yet to find a place that feels right. I want to be settled.

Each time we discuss where we might be happy, Los Angeles comes up, and I think it could be a really good fit for both of us. So I want to make a decision. Like, right now. If we are going to move to LA, I will make it happen, but I need to know. We are going down in the next few weeks to scout neighborhoods but I wish we could go tomorrow so I could start making plans. I feel like that limbo might be shifting, and I’m excited to see where we go as we move forward.

Not Done Yet

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I’m supposed to be working on additional content for the paperback release of Hand Me Down and I’m having trouble writing. I’m not sure I can tell you what the bonus content is yet, but I will say it’s a little bit more from Liz after the current ending, and I think it will be a great extra for readers.

It’s mostly done since it’s something I wrote before I sold HMD. I just have a few more scenes to add, and I even have ideas for them, but I can’t sink back into Liz’s voice. It’s been nine months since the final final edits on this book were done and I’ve spent that time trying to get Liz’s voice out of my head so I could write a different book, get to know a new narrator. It was finally working—I’ve begun the very early phases of my second book, but now, just for a brief few scenes, I have to crawl back into Liz’s head, let her talk to me freely after months of telling her we needed to take a break. This is all very confusing for both of us, and I’m finding it’s much more difficult than I expected.

Of course, everything about publishing this book has been nothing like I expected. And things keep changing and shifting and I’m trying to find a balance in this new life as a published author while still trying to write like no one’s watching or waiting, but sometimes it’s difficult. More so than I expected. (Are you sensing a theme here?)

So, why am I writing a blog post? I’m trying to assuage my guilt over not writing the work that is due soon, and also trying to tell myself I’m not superwoman. I can’t do it all. I get so mad at myself when I can’t complete a task by the deadline, even a self-imposed deadline. I feel like a failure; like I’m letting everyone down. Like I’m not good enough.

If you’ve read HMD, you might have some insight into how deeply this triggers a panic response in my chest, makes my heart flutter with fear. If I’m not good enough, I expect my world to collapse in on me again.

It doesn’t matter that it’s been fifteen years since the events that inspired Hand Me Down took place and I was forced to leave my home. It doesn’t matter how many people have loved my book, how many good reviews I’ve received, how far I’ve come or how hard I’ve worked. It doesn’t matter if I felt loved or safe or fearless for any amount of time before right now. If I can’t do this one thing—this week that means write a scene, but this fear applies to so many other tasks—it proves my success was a fluke, that the love and safety I felt were lies. That I’m not good enough and never will be.

The trick is remembering that the voice in my head that says I’m a failure is the same voice that spurred me to work my ass off, to push as hard as I could to get this point where I even need to write new content for a book that is already published; a book people have really responded to. It wasn’t a fluke. The good things in my life are not lies; the true lie is that I don’t deserve them, because I do. And so does Liz.

Maybe that’s part of why these new scenes are harder for me to write. Liz’s story—my story, too—isn’t over yet, but overall it’s headed into a lighter place and after so many years of darkness, it’s a bit difficult to accept, more so than we expected. That negative voice is hard to ignore, especially when it disguises itself as a protector, but I know we’ll make it through. We always do.

Book Pregnant is Kicking Ass Right Now

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I belong to an online community—or, “secret group” as Facebook calls us—of thirty debut authors. We talk shop, ask each other for advice, listen to each other’s complaints and worries with support and encouragement, basically we help each other through the process of publishing a book after it’s been sold. There are no manuals or guides for this part of being a writer, and publishing is a murky and complicated business once you’re on the other side. We have banded together as people bonded by this uncommon experience. We’re called Book Pregnant, and right now we are kicking ass.

This is just good news—and only the good news that is public and okay to post—from the past few days!! Over the past few months we’ve had members hit the NYT bestseller list, do NPR and other radio interviews, get reviews in countless prestigious magazines, newspapers, websites, and trade journals, appear on hundreds of blogs, receive blurbs from big-name authors, release book trailers, speak at TEDx, give dozens of readings at universities, indie bookstores, and libraries, win literary contests, sell second books, and so much more. We are full of powerhouse talents and I’m so pleased and honored to be part of this tribe.

Find out more about Book Pregnant writers and our books, and check out our blog, the way we pass some of the knowledge we’ve gained from each other along to you.

Are you part of a writing tribe?

Live! Watch Me Read from Hand Me Down

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Hi there! If you haven’t been able to make it to any of my readings, there is now a You Tube video of my Booksmith reading in San Francisco, filmed and posted by Lit Seen. This was the reading I did with Pam Houston, and I asked to go first since she is such a fantastic reader. Really. You can watch her read, too, from her most recent novel, Contents May Have Shifted.

I hope to someday be as poised and calm as Pam is when she reads. “Backstage” before the reading, I was trying to contain my nerves, my knee bouncing, my fingers tying themselves in knots, and she had her feet propped up on a box, writing something on her phone, totally nonchalant. I asked if she was nervous and she said she’d done forty readings since I’d seen her last, two months earlier. I don’t know how she does it, but I get a little less nervous every time, so that’s progress, I guess.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the show! Thanks to Lit Seen for all their support of authors and literary events in the Bay Area, and to the Booksmith for hosting us!

I Won! (And Other Good News)

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Remember when I posted about the Santa Barbara Writers Conference best opening contest? I said you couldn’t win if you didn’t try, so I tried, and I won! It was a totally unexpected gift—a full scholarship to a week of workshops and panels across the street from the beach. I was pretty proud of my sentence, too:

We compare scars like war veterans, replay our history by the marks in our skin. At night, quietly so Mom can’t hear, we trace the raised flesh road maps of our lives and whisper our stories into the dark.

I’m here now and so far it’s been great. I’ve walked along this gorgeous beach path (my phone camera doesn’t do it justice) every day. I saw a pod of a dozen or so dolphins, including a baby, swimming just off shore, pelicans dive bombing for dinner, and lots of little crabs. It’s even been warm enough to walk barefoot on the sand and in the surf. Plus, you know, all the great writing stuff: meeting other writers, hanging out with a fellow Book Pregnant member, listening to smart talks, including a keynote from Dorothy Allison, my hero, and soaking up the community of people all focusing on the the thing I’ve chosen to do with my life. It’s inspiring, really. And I think I might want to live in Santa Barbara.

I wanted to share with you, too, the places Hand Me Down and I have appeared in the last few weeks.

  • Woman Around Town interviewed me and then wrote this wonderful article, Hand Me Down: Melanie Thorne’s Novel of Survival and Triumph about me and the book and the intersection of fiction and reality. “As a novel, the story is shocking enough, more so when we learn that 80 percent of what happens in Hand Me Down is autobiographical.”
  • On Campaign for the American Reader, I talk about two books I loved recently and why: The Rules of Inheritance by Claire Bidwell Smith, (whose blog I also love), and the newest Sookie Stackhouse book, Deadlocked, by Charlaine Harris.
  • Jennifer Weiner, amazing author and women’s lit champion, retweeted two of my tweets to her forty-something-thousand followers, said she couldn’t wait to read Hand Me Down, and is now following me!
  • The wonderful Amy Sue Nathan, author of the soon-to-be-published novel, The Glass Wives, interviewed me for her blog, Women’s Fiction Writers. She asked great questions about truth in fiction and the label of women’s fiction and I had a lot of fun.
  • Curled Up with a Good Book posted a great review. “Clearly, this young protagonist is a survivor who has not been destroyed by her experiences.”
  • Hand Me Down was featured on School Library Journal as a pick for their Adult Books 4 Teens list.
  • @FuzzyBlackDog, a lovely reader I don’t know, tweeted this: Just finished “Hand Me Down.” Wow. Heart wrenching, chest clenching, make you squirm in your chair novel. Well done.
  • Booking Mama posted a review in which she said many good things, including: “I appreciated the author’s storytelling abilities as well as her prose, but it was the character development of Liz that really stood out to me. I thought Ms. Thorne did a wonderful job of creating a realistic and likable teen, and it was her honest voice that really captured my heart.”
  • Read part of page 69 of Hand Me Down on The Page 69 Test blog and my comments about how it illustrates some of the themes in the book, particularly the bond between the two sisters in the novel.

Phew. Am I a lucky author or what? I’m so honored to have been talked about and to, and I love all the attention my book baby is getting out there in the world. What’s more, this doesn’t even include all the reader emails I’ve gotten, the responses from the wonderful women at the book club I visited, or my feelings about all of it, which I’m not sure I could articulate just yet.

I have to get up in the morning so I can go to another wonderful workshop, so I’ll leave you with all of this fantastic news and my cup of gratitude spilling all over the place. What’s even better than the list above? I’m pretty sure it’s incomplete. There’s so much good news I can’t remember it all. But I’m holding it, carrying it in my chest so I can linger over the joy of it all later. Thank you.