The best part of being a published author is being able to reach readers far and wide with my stories. Every once in a while, I’m reminded of exactly how far and wide, and it’s always an eye-opener. With their permission, I’d like to share with you some communication I’ve had recently with a not-your-typical-bookclub. Instead of describing this exchange to you, I’m simply going to copy an abridged version of it here.

I received the following email about a month ago from a remarkable woman named Vonnie:

I want to tell you how inspiring your book THE SECRET LIFE OF CEE CEE WILKES was to a very special group of women.  I started a book club at the South Dakota Women’s Prison eight years ago.  I am a retired teacher and an avid reader.  I accept 12 women into my book club and we have four requirements:

1. Must finish the book

2. Must complete discussion sheet

3. Must attend and take part in book club discussion 

4. Must listen to each person as they contribute to the discussion. 

 I always have a long waiting list waiting to get into the book club.  They get to keep their book each time.  Many people and organizations have contributed to this ministry (It has become that for me).  I have also written several grants to buy books for them.  It is a wonderful time for them to share in an intelligent discussion after reading a great book.  Your book really spoke to them.  I would like to email you some of their comments about it.  I am also asking you to email a letter of encouragement for women who have made a mistake and deserve to be forgiven.  They are humanity in orange shirts.

 I hope you will consider this.

Thank you so much for your wonderful book!

——

Of course, Vonnie’s email moved me to tears! I was in the middle of deadline crazies, but when I had a few spare minutes, I wrote back:

Dear BookClub members,

 I was so pleased to hear that you enjoyed The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes. Writers live such isolated lives as we work. We never know what our readers will take away from our stories, so it means a great deal to me to know you were touched by CeeCee and her plight.

I’ve spoken to many bookclubs about The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes over the past couple of years and what is always interesting to me is the compassion people feel for CeeCee. Nearly everyone is able to understand how a very young woman can be swept into such a devastating scheme. I worked hard to make CeeCee a sympathetic character by showing how she was shaped by her past: she has no father and loses her mother far too young. Her need to be cared about and loved draws her to the wrong sort of man. None of that excuses what she did and ultimately she has to pay for her actions, but I believe her background does make her behavior more understandable.

 My previous career was as a psychotherapist working mainly with teenagers with behavior problems. I thought it was important to know about their growing-up years to understand why they were now getting into trouble, yet I felt it was even more important to focus on the future. They may have been abused or abandoned or raised by an alcoholic father in the past, but what could they do now to move forward into a positive and productive life? That’s what I always wanted to explore with them in therapy—how to move forward. In CeeCee’s case, I believe she made the choice to be the best Mom she could be and to help other young people through her role as a therapist as a way to atone for her mistakes in the past. I really liked her strength and I always sympathized with her fear of being found out. Sometimes that fear is worse than actually facing the consequences of the things we’ve done wrong.    

 Your bookclub sounds fantastic! I’m in a bookclub myself, and I love how it exposes me to books I might never read on my own. Many of the women in my club are very different from myself and I learn so much from listening to their ideas about what we’ve read. I’m sure you’ve found that to be true in your club as well. There are few things that can draw women together more than exchanging their thoughts and feelings about a good story.

I wish you all the best and I hope you can move toward the future with strength and courage. Thanks for letting me share my book with you, and I would love to hear some of your thoughts about it.

Sincerely,

Diane Chamberlain

———

Then I received Vonnie’s response, along with feedback from the women in the bookclub:

Hi Diane,

  The women were thrilled with your letter!  I made a copy for each of them. Thank you for taking the time.

   Here are some comments from them on The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes:

* “Your book was a page turner.  It seemed real.  It had aspects of multiple genres.”

 * “I felt this was a very edge of your seat book.  I really enjoyed reading it.  It makes you really sit back and wonder about many people.  We each know individuals that are living under different identities.  Can’t wait to read more of your books.”

 * “this book encouraged me that long standing mysteries can one day be solved and that somewhere out there someone knows the truth and will one day do the right thing for the right reason.”

* “This book was awesome.  Everything was perfect and made you feel every emotion as the situations developed.  I couldn’t put this book down without thinking this could really have happened, and what was going to happen next.”

* “You wrote this book for me!  I am a redhead.  I lost my daughter in a very violent birth similar to this one.”

* “CeeCee Wilkes was the best book I have read in a long time.  It gave me hope that good can come out of a bad situation, and honesty is still the only way to be.  Great story!  I look forward to reading more of your novels.  Thank you.”

* “I have been in this book club for four years and this book is by far the best I have read.  I would like to know where you came up with the story line.  What inspired it?”

 * “I enjoyed the book a lot.  It was a page turner.  It had me thinking of all kinds of things. They lived all kinds of lies.”

 * “A book made for us!  Thank you.”

 *  “I have never read a book so quickly!”

 * “Please come back with another book this good.  I want to read more of your books.  I hope we get to read more of them in our book club.”

——–

 Me again. Thank you, Vonnie, for the work you do with these women. I’m so glad I could be a small part of it.

The Online Booksigning Continues: click here!

Wish the pictures were better, but you get the idea. I’m part of a wonderful gang of authors here in North Carolina, and last night one of our members, the one-of-a-kind Margaret Maron, had us all over her house to greet the “Unarmed but Dangerous” authors who are touring through the area. It was so much fun, and Margaret and her husband Joe served us Shrimp and Grits which–as some of you know–is one of my favorite dishes. Yum-mee!

Starting from the right: Donna Andrews, Brenda Witchger, Sarah Shaber, Meredith Cole, Rosemary Harris, and Margaret Maron.

In the lower picture, from the left: Joe Maron, Molly Weston, Alexandra Sokoloff, Elaine Viets, Katy Munger and Margaret.

A good time was had by all!

I had a blast last night at the official book launch for The Lies We Told at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. Here are some pix.

1. Chatting about the book.

2. Yum!

3. my writing buds, Sarah Shaber, Brenda Witchger, Margaret Maron, Alexandra Sokoloff, and Quail Ridge Books owner, Nancy Olson, who brought us together.

4. I don’t know what I said but it must have been funny!

5. One of my very favorite book clubs! Thanks for coming out!

6. With faithful reader, Doreen.

It’s back! Now that The Lies We Told is officially available, I wanted to share the trailer John and I created again. Enjoy!

             A.

     B.

     C.

I’m experimenting! I plan to release my third book, Secret Lives, as an e-book. When people ask me which of my twenty books is my favorite, I invariably say Secret Lives for a number of reasons. I felt as though I’d truly learned how to tell a story as I wrote Secret Lives. I’d learned how to dig deep into my characters, how to create tension and suspense, and how to juggle many layers at once. Plus, the story is unique and I just flat out love it.

Secret Lives was published in 1991 and I’ve had the rights back to it forever, so I’ll be putting this e-book out on my own rather than through a publisher. I’m frankly curious to see what happens when I set it free once again. I had five or six readers back then; now I have many more than that and I want them to be able to read this book. I plan to let my readers know through my blog and Facebook what the process is like as I work my way to making the book available. I’ll start with a Kindle edition and will see where to go from there.

The first step I needed to take was to have the book scanned into an editable Word document, since I long ago ditched the floppy disk it was on. Now I’m reading the document, catching the minor errors in the formatting and seeing if I want to change anything. I don’t think I will. I like the story just as it is. Today, I created these three bookcovers, which was so much fun! I love fooling around with graphics. I’d love you to vote for A, B or C. Which one would draw you in the most? They all fit the story in various ways, but each has a very different “feel.” I’ll pick one of your comments at random to win one of my recently reissued books, and I’ll keep you posted every step of the way. Thanks in advance for your help!

          I finished The Midwife’s Confession  yesterday and John and I are going to see Wicked this evening to celebrate. Yeah! The last month of writing a book is sheer torture; there seems to be no way around it. Every time, I tell myself I’ll figure out a way to prevent that last month from being such a killer, but I have yet to find the cure. Something miraculous always happens during that last month, though: the characters grow into themselves, the details fill out the story, and most significantly, I finally start to think I’ve written a really good book. Up until that last month, I’m never sure.

          As I did when I finished The Lies We Told, I thought I’d share a paragraph or two from the first draft as well as from the final (fifth) draft so you can see the transformation. I do this to encourage those new writers among you. While  you may be writing a pile of garbage in the beginning, you can eventually end up with a real book!

          This book had two major challenges in addition to the usual task of telling a good story. One, I decided halfway through to change the four points of view from third person to first. You’ll notice below that Emerson changes to first person in the final draft. I hope you’ll feel closer to her that way–I certainly did. But making that sort of change in a 400+ page manuscript was exhausting and tedious! Whew. Second, three of the characters are women around 40 years of age with similar backgrounds and values, which made it difficult to give them distinctive voices. I think I succeeded, but that is one thing I’ll still be working on in revisions.

          Speaking of revisions, what happens next is that my editor and agent will read the book. They will then make their suggestions, which will force me to take to my bed for about twenty-four hours before I pull myself together and start fixing whatever they think needs fixing. But for now, I’m going to sit back and enjoy the sense of accomplishment.

          So here are the two examples. I am not giving anything away by telling you that the midwife in the story, Noelle, kills herself very early in the book. Emerson is her sister, who hasn’t heard from Noelle in a couple of days and is worried about her. Enjoy!

—

Old Draft:

          Emerson unlocked the door and walked into the kitchen.

          “Noelle?” She shut the door behind her, hitting the lock for no reason she could name. Just unnerved. She walked toward the bathroom. A slip in the shower maybe. But then why would she have told Lizzie to take care of Patches? The bathroom was small, spotless and empty. From the hallway, through the open door of the bedroom, she saw her. She lay on her back, her hands folded across her ribcage, still and quiet as though she were meditating. But her waxen face, the line of pill bottles, told her something different. It was impossible. Impossible. Emerson fell to her knees at the side of the bed, grabbing Noelle’s cold lifeless hand. “Noelle,” she whispered. “Why? Why?”

—

New Draft:

          The key was caked with dirt and I wiped it off on my t-shirt, a sure sign I didn’t care about a thing except finding out what was going on with Noelle. I unlocked the door and walked into the kitchen. “Noelle?” I shut the door behind me, turning the lock because I was starting to feel paranoid. Her purse lay like a floppy pile of leather on the table and her car keys rested on the counter between the sink and the stove. Patches’ food and water bowls were upside down on the counter on top of a dishtowel. The sink was clean and empty. The kitchen was way too neat for my sister. Noelle could mess up a room just by passing through it.

          I walked into the postage stamp of a living room, past the crammed bookshelves and the old TV we’d given her a few years ago when we bought the big screen. Past the threadbare brown sofa. A couple of strollers sat on the floor in front of the TV and three car seats were piled on top of some cartons, which were most likely filled with Stork Village donations. More boxes teetered on top of an armchair. I was definitely in my sister’s world. On the wall above the sofa were framed pictures of Jenny and Jack, Gracie and Cleve and Leo. The kids of the Galloway Girls. Noelle’s family.

          I walked past the first of the two bedrooms, the one she used as her office. Like the living room, it was bursting with boxes and bags and her desk was littered with papers and books . . . and a big salad bowl filled with lettuce and tomatoes.

          “Noelle?” The silence in the house was creeping me out. A slip in the shower? But why would she have told Libby to take care of Patches? I reached her bedroom, and through the open door, I saw her. She lay on her back, her hands folded across her ribcage, still and quiet as though she were meditating, but her waxen face and the line of pill bottles on the night table told me something different. My breath caught behind my breastbone, and I couldn’t move. I wasn’t getting it. I refused to get it. Impossible, I thought. This is impossible.

(PS Margo, thank you for reminding me of this “I’m finished!!!” photograph of Keeper and myself!)

The Lies We Told is now available for preorder.  Watch for my online booksigning the first week of June!

I’ve completed draft four of  The Midwife’s Confession (well except for the epilogue), so it’s time to see how it looks on Wordle! Wordle helps me see what words I’ve overused. Of course the character names (and there are a lot of them!) are all over the place. Noelle, front and center, is the midwife. I can see that I’ve overused “just” which is a typical problem of mine. Also “like”. I’ll look for those words as I work on the final draft, but since the book is entirely first person . . . well, people say “just” and “like” a lot.

Tonight I’ll work on the epilogue and one chapter in the middle that’s been driving me bonkers. Tomorrow I start the read-aloud, which will help me catch any remaining problems, I hope. And then I’ll be done!

The Lies We Told is available for preorder now. And watch for my online signing the first week in June!

Whoa, this is what I look like after a few weeks of working ’round the clock. Tired. John snapped this pic of me at Starbucks this morning while I was writing. He said “Give me a big smile!” and I thought I was. I think I’m fried!

It’s always this way in the month before deadline. I finished my second draft today. Yahoo! One more major draft and then a “clean-up” draft and I’ll be done. However, this draft needs some fixing up before I can move on to the next, and the fix-up involves ditching something I originally loved.  One of my characters, Tara, is a young widow, and I had her writing short notes to her late husband at the start of her chapters. Remember how nicely this worked in The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes, where the mother wrote letters to CeeCee? Well, it worked beautifully for about three chapters in my work-in-progress and then began to feel contrived. One of the most painful things a writer needs to learn is when to let go. Something–a turn of phrase, a particular scene, a character’s quirky voice–may seem brilliant when conceived but if it fizzles in execution, it’s got to go. So that is the first thing I need to fix before I dig into the third draft.

Then I need to completely rewrite an important chapter before I can move on. It’s a flashback chapter in which we see four women friends in college as they get to know each other and it Does Not Work. Oh, it’s okay and I could let it slide, but  I think it can be better. Much better. I want that scene to convince my readers that these women will be bonded for life. That’s my task for tomorrow. Bond a few women for life. Wish me luck!

I also have to pack tomorrow because Tuesday we’re transferring our work to Topsail Island for a fews days. I have some research to do in nearby Wilmington, a few tasks in the condo, and some all important strolls on the beach with my pups. Yeah!

So I’ll probably continue to look sleepy for a while, but I can see the end of the tunnel. Then, of course, it will be time to start working on the next book…

If you had a chance to change something you created a decade ago, would you take it?  I have that opportunity as some of my older books are being reissued, and since I’ve been asked if the reissued books are identical to the originals, I thought I’d talk about that here. The truth is, it varies from book to book.

I didn’t change The Courage Tree at all, so if you find an old copy somewhere, the story should be identical to the reissue.  In Breaking the Silence, though, I made a small but significant change that I believe heightens the suspense and makes the outcome more suprising. A reader’s experience will be different if she reads the original vs the reissue. I did no updating of the story itself, though, because the CIA Mind Control Experiments drive everything that happens. Since those experiments really took place, I needed to stick to specific dates in the book.  

Summer’s Child, which was just released, has minimal changes. I did update the story a bit so that the styles of clothing, cars, etc, aren’t jarring to the reader. 

Right now, I’m rereading Cypress Point to see what I want to change and I’m playing with this one a bit more than the others. First, I have to say I adore this book as much as I did when I wrote it. It’s an intriguing, twisty, and throught-provoking story, if I do say myself. So what am I changing? Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but what the heck: as I read Cypress Point, I find that something relatively minor about one of the characters is really bugging me and I plan to “fix” that person.  It seems so strange to tamper with a character who’s existed in one form for so long, but it also feels great to be able to make the book better. When I wrote Cypress Point, I was perfectly happy with the character, so what’s changed? Me. And my writing. This character needs some tweaking to bring him or her (not giving the identity away!) up to my 2010 standards. I believe it makes the character more believable and more sympathetic. There’s something else I’m altering, and that’s a love scene. Too graphic for my current taste. So if you love a steamier scene, you might want to stick with the original version!

If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you know my publisher wants to change the title of Cypress Point. I had strong reservations about this and I know some of my readers still do. I hope you can get past it because I finally have. My editor came up with a title I adore: The Shadow Wife. It fits the story incredibly well, and  I’ll do everything in my power to be sure my readers know that it was previously published under a different title. 

And finally, the original Cypress Point cover has always been one of my least favorites and I can’t wait to see what my publisher comes up with for the reissue.

So how about you? Do you wish you had a do-over on work you did ten years ago?