Well, I’m bummed! I only now found out that today is National Ice Cream Day. It’s nearly 9 pm and I already had my Breyers light brownie ice cream sandwich for dessert, which frankly is no substitute for a bowl of Edy’s Slow-Churned French Silk. If I’d known it was National Ice Cream Day, I would have run down to the nearest store (which happens to be one of those little stores connected to a gas station. Not pretty.) and bought a couple of pints of Ben and Jerry’s and not felt guilty about it, but now I’m full and it’s too late. 

My curiosity was piqued. What other holidays are coming up? I checked out this week and here’s the lineup: Tomorrow is National Daquiri Day, but since I’m a non-imbiber, I’ll sit that one out. Tuesday is lollipop day. Did you know that lollipop machines make nearly 6,000 lollipops a minute? Wednesday I’m definitely going to celebrate! National Junk Food Day! I am unbelievably neurotic about food safety in my kitchen. I drive John nuts with the hand washing, the not-using-the-same-utensils-on-raw-and-cooked food, the sniffing of the milk, etc. But put me in a Taco Bell (burritos!) or Bojangles (biscuits!) or Wendy’s (taco salad!) and I’ll never give their kitchen a thought. (Please don’t tell me horror stories. Let me live in blissful ignorance!)

Thursday is National Hammock Day and I wish I had one. When I need to go to my Happy Place in my head, it’s in a hammock hanging under tall green trees. Instant relaxation. Friday is National Hot Dog Day, and I have to admit that’s another edible that I eat without thinking about what’s in it and how long it’s been rolling on those long, hot metal tubes at Target.

I just realized that Wednesday–National Junk Food Day–is the day I’ll be part of an event at the Silver Coast Winery near Ocean Isle, North Carolina, so I think I’ll be sipping club soda and nibbling something very non-junky there. You’re all invited to join me! I understand it’s a lovely location. There’s no cover charge, just a chance to meet and chat and sip. There will be a few other writers on hand and the Pelican Bookstore will supply books for a signing. If you’re anywhere near the area between 1-4 on Wednesday July 21st, I hope you’ll stop by.

Right now, I’d like to proclaim this evening “National What Are You Reading Evening”. As for me, I’m enjoying Karen White’s On Folly Beach. Now I know how to answer when people ask who I write like! I feel as though I’m reading one of my own books, probably because Karen and I both love mixing past and present and we love to keep our readers guessing. Also the beach setting, of course, and dipping back into coastal Carolina history during World War II. I think Karen and I must have been separated at birth. Obviously, I’m enjoying this book a great deal and highly recommend it.

How about you? What are you reading now?

I turned in The Midwife’s Confession, my May 2011 book,  about a month ago and then waited a few weeks to hear what my editor thought about it. That’s always a nerve-wracking time.  A writer’s career is full of waiting to hear what other  people think — agents, editors, reviewers, and most importantly, readers.

I finally heard from my editor, and although she loved the book, she had some ideas. She always does, and they’re invariably good ones. Her idea regarding TMC was particularly good. The midwife, Noelle, is central to the story, of course, but she remains quite a mystery to the reader because she is not a point of view character. My editor’s suggestion (suggestion being an under-exaggeration of her feelings on the subject!) was to give Noelle more of a presence in the story. That should be easy, right? Just add one more point of view? Well, it would be easy if only Noelle didn’t kill herself in the first scene.

So I’ve been spending some time trying to figure out how to give Noelle more of a presence. I thought about the fourth book I wrote, Keeper of the Light*, in which Annie O’Neill dies in chapter one yet is undeniably the central character of the story. She had no point of view, but I made sure the reader knew her very well through the eyes of the other characters. Maybe I could make Noelle more central to the story through the eyes of others as I did with Annie? That wasn’t good enough for my editor, though. She really wanted Noelle’s voice in the story.

Then I thought about Kate in Secret Lives**. Kate is also dead in the beginning of the book, but she becomes a central character through her journal. Could I give Noelle a diary, perhaps? While it worked beautifully in Kate’s case, I thought it would have felt too contrived in Noelle’s.

Finally, I bit the bullet and did the only thing possible: I’m giving Noelle a point of view through her own chapters as I–and the reader–dig back into her past. As her creator, I knew her intriguing past and what led up to her confession,  but now the reader will get to be intrigued along with me.  As I write, I can’t believe I didn’t think of giving Noelle a more powerful presence myself. Sometimes we’re too close to our stories to see what’s obvious. This is what a good editor is all about. 

So now, it’s back to the storyboard (inspired in its current three act form above by my writing bud, Alexandra Sokoloff.) Changing a novel always reminds me of my days as a family therapist. When you change one part of the family system, it changes everything else. It’s no different with a story. To make room for Noelle’s voice, I first needed to cut some other threads and subplots. If you’ve been reading my blog for a long time, you might remember there were four Galloway Girls in The Midwife’s Confession–four women who lived together in the Galloway Dormitory at UNC-Wilmington. Well, now there are only two. I’m still in the process of killing the extraneous two off (figuratively speaking). Frankly, they were not serving nearly as good a purpose as Noelle’s story is going to serve. Yet it always hurts a little to cut off the heads of people you’ve nurtured and gotten to know, even if they are getting in the way.

At the same time as I’m ditching those subplots, I’m developing Noelle’s backstory. She’s in third person because I need to make some concession to the fact that she’s dead. I’m enjoying getting to know her even better. I’ve always liked her and now I like her more. Of course, she’s going to do something not very likeable eventually. Will I be able to keep the sympathy flowing for her? I can’t wait to find out!

* Keeper of the Light will be reissued in 2011

** Secret Lives is now available as an e-book for Kindle and all other e-readers.

I love the Internet for so many reasons. It makes researching a book so much easier than it used to be. I can be in touch with experts in minutes. I can Google absolutely anything. I can chat with old friends. But one of the most fascinating facets of the Internet is our ability to connect with strangers.

My work-in-progress, The Midwife’s Confession, has a character with leukemia. She doesn’t have a central role, but she’s important. To understand her and her family better and to educate myself to her medical treatment, I began reading the many blogs about children with leukemia. I finished that research about a month ago, but there was one blog I’d stumbled across that I’m still reading. That’s because I came to care about the girl at its center. She and her family don’t know me and I don’t know them, but every day I check her blog for news about her, praying that it’s good.  I worry about her and I marvel–absolutely marvel–at her strength and that of her family. Where do people find such courage and endurance?  Her family is loaded with love and that comes through in every post.

I realize that’s what I write about in my stories: love and courage. I saw so much love and courage in my former career as a medical social worker and psychotherapist and it inspires every story I tell. But this post is not about my books. It’s about our ability to connect with people we don’t know. To care about them and worry about them and imagine ourselves in their shoes. The Internet can be a place filled with negativity–porn, kids bullying other kids, scams, identity theft.  But it can also be a place filled with  compassion, education and connections between strangers.  My character will be all right, and  I want the same outcome for the little girl who teaches me every day that we’re all in this together.

I’m not talking about how hard it was to come up with the idea; that had been rolling around in my mind since I was twelve. I’m not talking about the challenge of structuring the story; I made it simple and told it in chronological order. I’m not talking about creating believable characters; I’d known them in my imagination for years and they were very real to me. I’m talking about the fact that I wrote that book, the first draft of which was over 700 pages, on a typewriter. How did I ever do that?

Imagine not being able to simply delete a typo. Not being able to move sentences and paragraphs around on a page.  Or change a character’s name. Or add a cool subplot that you think of around page 300 but which requires loads of foreshadowing. “Saving” in the dark ages meant putting your manuscript in the freezer, since that was the one place you could be pretty sure it wouldn’t burn if the house caught fire. “Copying” meant putting a sheet of carbon paper between your sheets of typing paper and/or standing over the Xerox machine at your local copy center for hours.  I know I’m really showing my age here. I finished my first book, Private Relations, in 1985, which is also when I bought my first dinosaur of a computer. I typed the whole book over again (onto a floppy drive) and thought I’d died and gone to heaven. 

Sometimes I wonder how my writing would be different now if I couldn’t do it on a computer. I wouldn’t be turning out a book every nine months or so, that much is certain. I love being able to rearrange my chapters on a whim, go back and add details as my research nets me new information, and audition new character names whenever I like. (I remember changing one character’s name in that first book. I had to be sure I picked another name with the same number of letters so that when I replaced her name with the new one, it wouldn’t change the pagination of the entire document.)

We twenty-first century writers are a lucky lot! I’m going to give my computer a big kiss now and say good night.

I know I should wait until The Lies We Told is available before sharing the video with the world, but I love it so much I can’t wait! I’ll tuck it away after this blog post and bring it back when the book is released, but I thought you might enjoy hearing how John and I created it, thus my excuse for this blog.

Book videos are hard to make. Movie trailers are easy (by comparison) because movies are visual and you can simply take carefully selected scenes from the film. You don’t have that luxury with books. It’s tempting in making a book video to try to interpret the story literally, using narrative either typed on the screen or in a voice over. She was beautiful and good hearted. (Cue image of beautiful, good-hearted woman). Until the night He appeared. (Image of scary looking but very handsome dude. With a couple of tattoos. Nice ones). On that night (Image of dark night, clouds drifting across a crescent moon) her young brother disappeared.  (Image of young boy slowly fading to black).

Okay, they’re not all that cheesy, but you get the idea. They’re hard to do. I like my two previous trailers, one for Before the Storm and its sequel,  Secrets She Left Behind, but I think I like this new one best. In my opinion, it gives the feeling of the book and the central themes (our family stories are not always what they seem and the powerful relationship between sisters) without actually trying to tell the viewer the story.

We toyed with a bunch of approaches to the story, which is about two sisters working for a Doctors Without Borders type of organization after a hurricane demolishes Wilmington, North Carolina. We pulled stock images of hurricane destruction, helicopters (a helicopter crashes in the story), doctors (yawn), and all sorts of other photographs. Then I came up with the idea of using the first page of the book (if any of you have an ARC–Advanced Reading Copy–the first page is missing, so don’t bother looking for it!). Even though I’m no professional narrator, we decided I’d do the reading. We added a sentence to help the viewer understand a bit better what’s going on. I recorded the narration about ten million times with long gaps between each sentence so that John could use the best take of each one. You can tell by the way I’m gripping my thighs how comfortable I am.

Then we began pulling stock images and video to fit the narrative. John found most of these. I think my favorite is Rebecca. Whoa, did he ever find the right clip for that woman! John put together the rough cut and we reviewed it and made a couple of changes. Then he assembled the finished program, and voila! Here it is.

I hope you enjoy it and look forward to your thoughts.

It’s very early–the reissue of Summer’s Child won’t be out until April 2010–but I can’t resist sharing the cover that’s in the works. I love it and hope you all do, too.

For years, my readers (and I) have been hoping that some of my older books would become available again. Now it’s finally happened, and the reissue of The Courage Tree is only the beginning. Breaking the Silence will be released late in the year, and next year, Summer’s Child and Cypress Point will hit the stores.

The Courage Tree is the story of a little girl who disappears during a camping trip and the desperate race against time to find her. (And one of the characters lives in a very cool treehouse. Okay, I know that’s not as important as ‘the desperate race against time’, but I love that treehouse!). Those of you who’ve alrady read the book will understand why the little girl, Sophie, is holding a tulip poplar blossom on the cover. And just a little inside scoop: the art director had no tulip poplar blossoms handy, so he (she?) combined two other flowers to create one. A great job, I think!

You can find The Courage Tree at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com.  I hope you enjoy it and that you’ll let me know what you think once you’ve read it. 

Naming a character is one thing. Naming an entire book is quite another.

This is much on my mind as I toy with titles for my new, fledgling work-in-progress. I jot them down in the dark as I’m falling asleep, and they seem so brilliant then. In the light of day, though, they often lose their sparkle. 

I recently read a terrific article about book titles by thriller writer Barry Eisler (he has loads of great material for writers on his website, by the way). His article was published in NINK, the monthly newsletter for Novelists, Inc, an organization for multi-published authors to which I’ve belonged for nearly two decades. (If you’ve published two novels with a qualifying publisher, you belong in Ninc. Join now!) Eisler talks about titles having either automatic or acquired resonance – or in some cases, both. 

The way Eisler describes it, automatic resonance simply means the title resonates with the reader in such a way that just hearing the words gives you a hint of what the book is about. You connect with it on a nearly primal level. When you see a book title and can answer the question “What do I think this book is about?” it most likely has automatic resonance. Using my own titles, think of The Secret life of CeeCee Wilkes, The Bay at Midnight, and Before the Storm. You don’t know the stories themselves from the titles alone, but I’m guessing that each title resonates with you in some way. A woman is hiding a secret. Something a bit eerie happened one night on a bay. Emotions are building up to a huge storm, probably both emotional and literal.  Eisler suggests choosing a title that will resonate with as wide an audience as possible.

Acquired resonance, on the other hand, describes a title that tells you little to nothing about the book, but makes perfect sense once you know the story. He gives the examples of Mystic River and Lonesome Dove. Thinking about my own titles, I’d say Brass Ring has acquired resonance. You really don’t have a clue what it’s about until you read the story. Then you get it. Kiss River is another example.    

Reading Eisler’s article helped me understand something about my own search for titles: I lean toward titles with a mix of both automatic and acquired resonance, but usually a bit heavier on the acquired side. Of all my titles, my favorite is The Courage Tree. If you haven’t read The Courage Tree, I wonder what you’d think it’s about? I imagine the title will resonate with you, but will still leave you mystified until you read the story.

Unfortunately (or maybe it’s actually fortunate), my publishers rarely like my titles, and now I understand why. My publishers tends to lean more toward the automatic resonance–titles that evoke emotion, yet don’t leave the reader going “huh?’ before they’ve read the book. Yet, this has not always been the case. Here are some of my original titles:  The Escape Artist was Songs for the Asking (talk about acquired resonance!). Cypress Point was first The Shadow in the Mirror, then The Healer. Summer’s Child was Gift from the Sea. Fire and Rain was Still Waters. Kiss River was The Keeper’s Daughter. Her Mother’s Shadow was Kaleidoscope. And the ultimate in aquired resonance, my first novel, Private Relations was originally Coterie. That title went over like a lead balloon with my publisher.

On a lighter note, Lulu.com (the only self-publishing company I’m ever comfortable recommending)  has a title scorer on it’s site. Of all my titles, it gives The Courage Tree the highest score. I’ll probably spend the rest of the day obsessively plugging in my new title ideas to see how they fare.

I’d love to hear some of your favorite book titles.  

(note: Eisler’s article originally appeared in two parts on MJ Rose’s excellent blog, Buzz, Balls and Hype, if anyone wants to read it in detail).

Well, this is all good news, although I know some of you won’t think so, so I’ll get the semi-bad news out of the way first:

After the Storm won’t be published until June 2009. Ack! I know. A long time to wait for a sequel. My publisher, Mira Books, calls the shots on the publication schedule, though, and I have to bow to their judgment on this. In the meantime, I’ve done my very best to make the story worth the wait.

Now, quickly moving along to the good news! Good news part one: Before the Storm has been selected for Levy Home Entertainment’s September Need-to-Read program. Levy is a huge book distribution company, and that means Before the Storm will be able to reach lots of new readers when it’s prominently displayed at outlets like KMart, WalMart and Stop and Shop. Okay, I guess that’s more good news for me than for you, since if you’re reading this post, you’ve probably already read Before the Storm, but it is very good news for me.

Good news part two is good for all of us: Mira will be re-issuing two of my older books, one in April 2009 and another in May. I know we’ve all been hoping for those re-issues for a long time now, and it’s finally going to happen. I’m thrilled that all the readers who’ve struggled to find my older books will finally be able to get their hands on a couple of them. Mira hasn’t yet decided which two books to re-issue. For obvious reasons, they won’t select any of the books from the Keeper of the Light trilogy. Currently, they’re considering The Courage Tree and Summer’s Child. Which books do you think they should choose?