I did it. I signed up to write 50,000 words in the month of November. Partly, I did it because I’m writing a new novel, The Romantics Club, about two half-sisters who inherit a cottage in Italy and along with it, the ghost of the poet Shelley. I wanted something to distract me from two inevitabilities: death, this one my beloved brother’s; and waiting to hear about my completed manuscript, in this case from agents…
It’s almost like time travel exists! As it does in my new WIP, THE RENAISSANCE CLUB. We now have a new masterpiece by the inventor of the Baroque, seventeenth century artist Gianlorenzo Bernini (and one of my novel’s main characters). According to the New York Times’ article, the Getty Museum just came upon one of the rarest of finds, a new work by Bernini, one that was thought long ago lost. The minute you look…
Long absence from blogging because … a novel, a play, many grant proposals, a poetry manuscript, and I have words coming out of my ears, dangling over my head as I sleep, raining into my bedroom, puffing out of my puppy’s nostrils. (Can you see that one? I do!) Really, novels take too much time to write. I love reading them and writing them. I hope I’ve learned enough to write faster the next time.…
Emotion is important in fiction, but thought and will are also a huge component of character and character development. You can identify with a character’s thoughts and decisions when she’s under stress. One of life’s pleasurable but stressful activities is travel. Since my novel’s main character is on a three-week, intensive tour of Renaissance Italy, stress is a given. May Gold combats it through her Gratitude Practice. I gave May this habit of enumerating things…
Photo: Nadya Phillips, Venice 2015 In writing a novel or story a writer gives lots of thought to what happened to the main character before she or he arrived at the beginning of the tale, but have we considered where she goes after the ending? If you’re contemplating a sequel or a series, it’s a natural question. But how to begin to answer? J.K. Rowling planned not only her characters’ arcs, but their futures beyond…
If you’re an aspiring novelist who has put in the good work on learning your craft, and now wants to proceed to the getting publishing part, I hope you, too, read scores of books, articles, and blogs about the publishing industry. (The MUST-READ on this topic: The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published from The Book Doctors, Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry.) After giving myself a basic pub-biz education, hiring my editor, Arielle…
Because I’ve written a mainstream (not fantasy) novel involving time travel, I’m reading as many of them as I can find. Lo and behold, besides the obvious science fiction writers, it turns out that many literary and mainstream authors also have used the device of traveling through time, including: Marge Piercy, Stephen King, Erica Jong, Michael Crichton, Kurt Vonnegut, Anya Seton, Alan Lightman, and Chuck Palahniuk. Time travel stories come in all shapes and sizes,…
While researching time-travel novels as I work on my novel, The Renaissance Club, I saw that Google can grab plenty of articles that answer the question, “When is the best time to travel to Italy?” But none answered, “The Seventeenth Century.” It seems Rick Steeves and Frommer’s can’t propel me back in time to the Renaissance and Baroque to watch splendors of art and architecture arise from the workshops of Gianlorenzo Bernini and his competitors.…
Scientific studies have confirmed what avid readers know: reading novels makes you a more warm-hearted person, more likely to understand your fellow human beings, and quicker to empathize with them. And not just ONE study, but several scientific studies, have identified activity in the brain that leads to this result. And not only fiction, but specifically literary fiction, was determined to have this salubrious effect on the human heart-mind. As a reader of novels, and…
My interest in this kind of story could be defined as obsessive. What can be more obsessive than something you’ve lost or something you feel you never completely had? Novels about families and other groups fascinate me because my family never quite cohered and split apart pretty fast. So I read to replace it with a better family, though my secret wish is to see that all families or groups of closely connected people have…