What’s so great about Italy, and why did I spend many years of my life writing about it, culiminating in my novel The Renaissance Club, which features Italian sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini? Good questions. What I keep coming up with is that Italy is Bernini, and Bernini, Italy. I mean the place is full of gorgeous, sumptuous, emotionally moving art. It’s a place so full of art you start to take it for granted that you’ll…
If you’re considering “going indie” (self-publishing), consider the category of your fiction. Publishing categories matter in the success of self-published books. Author and editor Jane Friedman has a helpful article on deciding if you should self-publish: Jane on how to make the decision. But one thing most people don’t discuss is how to self-publish mainstream fiction (including women’s fiction). Most successful self-published authors write genre fiction.
I’m working on a new novel. I know the basic setup: it’s about two half-sisters who clash over inheriting a cottage in Italy, along with its resident ghost, the poet Perch Bysshe Shelley. The setup (hook) has specificity, but a story that can fill a novel drills down into such granular particularity you find yourself imagining exactly how each character walks, eats, where they carry their stuff, which kind of pillow they prefer, and whether…
E-reading devices have made me a fiction-reading junkie. Hooked on Books was the name of a used book store up the road, which is sadly now closed because they sold paper books. But the books I buy on non-paper are proliferating like rabbits in springtime on my e-reading devices. I am so very hooked because of the ease of reading. On my phone, I always have a book with me. I’m about to launch a…
Sibling relationships and specifically sisters is what I’m thinking about. I’m finishing a new novel. It’s about two half-sisters who feud about an inherited cottage in Italy with its resident ghost of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Sisters — we love to explore these complicated lifetime pairings. In real life and literature, sisters stand out. From Jane Austen with her siblings, to Emily Dickinson and hers, to those fabulous Brontes, the stories of siblings have…
Because shouldn’t we all have a little extra help? And also a friend you can always talk to, who understands everything the way you see it, or even if he doesn’t, has wisdom gently offered? Yes, everyone should have this. In my completed novel, THE RENAISSANCE CLUB, (watch for announcement of its debut date), Renaissance genius sculptor and architect Bernini provides the magical wisdom and inspiration for young art historian May Gold, stuck in a going-nowhere…
In the spirit of the holidays now upon us, I’d like to offer some fodder for those quiet times you find amid the activities and social life. Reading for me leads to writing, so I often start my writing day by either progressing in a novel or reading several poems. Sometimes digging into a craft book. So here are some recommendations for feeding your head. Story Genius by Lisa Cron. This is the one fiction…
It’s a marathon: 50,000 words of prose, the majority of words for an 80,000-word standard mainstream novel. I’m at a little over 24,000 words this morning. Why am I doing this? Because writing is bliss and marketing a book is hell. Undergoing the process of trying to get a literary agent, who then tries to get your book a publisher, who then takes more than a year to publish it — that’s anyone’s definition of…
Update on my #NaNoWriMo2016 — today I wrote over 3,000 words. It helps to be doing a lot of scene-setting in an exotic location, which for my book is the picturesque Ligurian coast of Northern Italy. It also helps that I love writing descriptions of scenery and towns. I love researching places I’ve been or been near. I spent time in Santa Margherita and Portofino, and the little town where I’m setting my book is…
We’ve been doing it since before Jane Austen. Girls writing fiction. So in the 2016 National Novel Writing Month, I’m going to guess that a majority of the more than 400,000 participants this year are women. And many will go on to publish their books. Some NYT bestsellers by women that began as NaNoWriMo exercises: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill[32] The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, published…