Summer Reading

So despite a looming deadline on my first mystery, I find I need to take a break now and then for some fun summer reads. Here's what's on the pile and in the Kindle: Poetic Justice, by Alicia Rasley. I would love this book even if the image on the cover were not one of my all-time favorite paintings. It's a Regency romance that is smart, smart, smart. The story features a brainy, feisty heroine, and a dashing hero whose intelligence is as formidable as his fighting skills. At the center of the story is a collection of rare books that the lovers lust after nearly as much as they do each other. AND there are Shakespeare references. (Be still my heart.) Death at La Fenice, by Donna Leon. Friends who are rabid fans of her series featuring Venice police Commissario Guido Brunetti have been urging me to read Donna Leon for months. I have just begun this one, which opens with a dead conductor at the Venice opera house--apparently someone has put cyanide in his espresso. I'm already hooked and looking forward to finding out who had it in for the maestro. 11/22/63, by Stephen King. My husband bought me this book for Christmas, but I haven't dared crack it open--I knew once I started King's latest, I wouldn't be able to stop. What baby boomer could resist the premise? An English teacher (an English teacher hero!) in Maine discovers a time portal in an old diner, and goes on a quest to stop the Kennedy assassination. But when he runs into a strange loner named Lee Harvey Oswald, things really get dicey. Saving this one for when I finish the first draft of my manuscript; I won't have a book to deliver otherwise!

A Moment of Zen, Part 1

La Fortuna

As a girl who was born on Friday the 13th in a year that shall go unnamed, I tend to be a little superstitious. I carry a lucky dollar in my purse at all times. I read my horoscope. I try not to attract any mal occhio, as I have mentioned here, but most importantly, I watch for signs from the universe. One such sign appeared several years ago one evening as I was having dinner in an Asian restaurant with my friend Melissa. I was telling her about the book I was working on as we were finishing dinner when our fortune cookies came. She pushed the plate toward me, giving me first pick of the two lone cookies on the plate. And here's what I pulled from mine:

Now, I eat a lot of Chinese food, and I've opened a number of cookies in my time, but none like this one. We laughed and exclaimed over the coincidence, and I tucked the fortune into my wallet. After that, whenever I got discouraged on the path to publication, I would pull out that little slip of paper. Finally, I scanned it, enlarged it, and laminated it so it could serve as a daily reminder of why I write.

For publication, certainly. For profit, not so much. But mostly for love.

♥ ♥ ♥

Why I (Still) Love Nora Ephron

I wrote this post two years ago in honor of Nora Ephron, and today seems like an appropriate time to re-post it. I will miss her. Nora Ephron is my biggest girl crush. My biggest fantasy lunch date. And my biggest influence and inspiration as a writer—when I’m strugging, I often think: WWND? (What Would Nora Do?) This week’s New Yorker did a lovely piece on her, accompanied by a gorgeous photo that in no way suggested she needs to feel bad about any part of her anatomy. The story was about Julie and Julia, her new film, whose trailers I have been watching on line. I’ve been following Ephron’s career since I read Crazy Salad in college. Heartburn has a special place on my bookshelf, and to this day, I hate Carl Bernstein. And like so many women, I am a rabid fan of her films. And I don’t want to hear that they can be saccharine, that things too often turn on coincidence, that characters extricate themselves from situations and relationships with little effort, and that the cities she creates on screen are fantasy places that don’t really exist. I know. That’s exactly what I love about them. (There are few things that make me happier than watching a back-to-back reruns of Sleepless in Seattle in my pj’s while eating chocolate chips out of a bag.) Ephron is the kind of writer who makes you feel as though you know her. She’s smart and funny and unafraid to be both feminist and feminine. She can piss off Rush Limbaugh and still look good doing it. She can be insightful and incisive about any number of political issues, but still admit that Obama’s loose-fitting tie in one of the debates distracted her. She can play with the big boys, but she never underestimates the power of a good meal—or a good haircut, for that matter. And in so much of her work, she tells the often unpolitically correct truth about what women think and feel—open up to any page of I Feel Bad About My Neck; watch the scene in Sleepless when Rosie O’Donnell tells Meg Ryan: “You don’t want love. You want movie love.” (Damn right, Nora.) But we also want our place in the world, a theme Ephron explores in her new film, Julie and Julia, in which a young writer, Julie Powell, realizes her dream through the inspiration of the more famous and successful woman, Julia Child. Ephron doesn’t know it, but her film is a version of a movie I’ve already made in my head—a never-to-be-released little fantasy called Nora and Rosemary. . . (This post originally appeared on Red Room.)

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The ISR Pile, or. . .

books I Should Read.

I loved The Bluest Eye. Ditto Song of Solomon and Jazz. But I can't bring myself to even open Toni Morrison's best-known work, because I can't get past the premise: desperate slave kills her own children. (I can't watch stagings of Medea, either.)

My son loves this book, and assures me that Susanna Clarke is a genius who owes a debt to Jane Austen. But clocking in at more than 700 pages (and including nearly 200 footnotes), Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell is a daunting read. Part fantasy and part alternate history, this is one of those books I know I'd probably love--if only I could start it.

I'll think I'll just wait for the movie. . .

I did read The Sorcerer's Stone, but truth be told, I just didn't love it the way everyone else in my house did. My guys all keep telling me the series gets better and better, but I'm not particularly interested in learning fake Latin spells or in trying to keep track of hundreds of characters, human or otherwise. (As a teacher however, I do have a soft spot for Hogwarts, the school that becomes Harry's home and refuge.)

Now how about you? What's in your ISR pile?

Project Writer

I love to sew. And strangely enough, what I love about sewing are the same things I love about writing. A new piece of fabric laid out flat is a lot like the story in my head, and the pattern is the outline. A cleanly executed seam is akin to a polished, fluent sentence. The garment takes shape in much the way a plot does, piece by piece. Even the language is similar. You start a project. You cut. You edit. You adapt and revise for fit. I learned most of what I know about sewing from my Italian grandmother. A fine seamstress and frustrated designer, she spent most of her professional life working in a garment factory in Newark. And she was a tough taskmaster. She had no compunction about handing a piece back to me, saying, “That's a bum job. Take it apart and start again.” Sometimes she would just hand me the seam ripper. Nothing seemed as daunting as starting over; nothing seemed as painful as taking apart all my hard work. During my search for an agent, many of whom passed on my first project "with regret," I could practically feel Grandma Mary at my elbow, looking over my shoulder and shaking her head. While my book was not exactly “a bum job,” it still wasn’t a good fit. It needed to be picked apart, redesigned, and reworked. So I got to work. And got an agent as a result. Since then, I've completed a second novel and I'm currently at work on my third. It's in the first draft stages, so I'm beginning to piece the story together. So far, it's taking shape nicely. It feels like a fit. But I won't know for sure until it's tried on by my editor, who is very likely to send it back for alterations. Let's just say I'll be keeping that seam ripper handy.

♥ ♥ ♥

An earlier version of this post first appeared on Red Room.

Retreat, Day 3

I've been calling my time here at the shore a "retreat." In some ways it is: a retreat from my day job, from my daily routine, and even from my responsibilities back home. (Sorry, guys--you know I love you to death.)

But there's something about a walk along the ocean that puts things in perspective in the most elemental way. One tide comes in, and another goes out in an unchanging cycle; the vastness and permanence of the sea remind us that life is the thing that changes. And we have to change with it. So when I leave here this morning, I leave with several thousand more words, some sand in my shoes, and a renewed appreciation for all that is waiting for me back home. Garden State Parkway, here I come. . . Word count total=715o

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"Know'st Me Not By My Clothes?"*

I am a woman of many weaknesses--caffeine, dark chocolate, cheap chardonnay, Bravo television, and Robert Downey, Jr., just to name a few. And while I can cut back on the wine, miss the housewives, and accept the fact that RDJ will never come calling, there is one temptation I can rarely resist--new clothes. A recent trip to Marshalls to check out the spring stock (that yielded some cute summer dresses, by the way) prompted me to engage in my second favorite clothing-oriented activity: the seasonal clothes switch. So while I love my flat-heeled boots, wool dresses and winter cardigans, it is high time they went into hibernation.

It's worth the trudge up to the attic just to unearth last year's surprises, like those cute metallic sandals I forgot I had. And revisiting last season's treasures is almost as good as buying new ones. There's a pleasure in those crisp, cotton blouses and summer T-shirts, and and joy to be found in the burst of color that replaces all the earth tones of winter.

It's time for breaking out the white denim, filmy tops, and shoes that reveal a peek of that new pedicure, and I'm more than ready for it. Now if I could only face putting on that bathing suit. . . *Wm. Shakespeare

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Bloom Where You're Planted

The single daffodil that brightens the scraggly plot of bushes and day lilies along my back fence was likely planted by some ambitious squirrels. I know I didn't put it there. But on this first day of spring, it serves as a wonderful metaphor for those times in life we find ourselves in places we didn't expect to be. Maybe it's the job we didn't particularly want or the college that wasn't our first choice. Maybe the house we occupy isn't the home of our dreams. Maybe we never shook off the dust of the towns we were born in, or the stories we wrote for ourselves didn't quite have the ending we envisioned. More often than not, that's the way things go in life. And when they do, we have two choices: we can turn inward and shrivel in the soil. Or we can open our buds and blossom in the sun. On this gorgeous spring evening, may you continue to bloom.

♥ ♥ ♥

Thirteen Ways of Looking at New Jersey

1

Among the tri-state area
The only perfect thing
Was the shape of New Jersey.

2

I was of two minds:
Love it here
Or hate it.

3

The state holds on to its Colonial dream.
(It's one thing to be proud of, anyway.)

4

A girl and her beach chair are one.
A girl and her beach chair and sunscreen
Are one.

5

I do not know which to prefer
The beauty of Cape May,
Or the beauty of the farmlands.

6

The shadows of New Jersey hover.
Ugly industry. Signs no one can read.
We are more than the Sopranos.

7

O, singing men of New Jersey, rock on.
Rock on Sinatra. Rock on Bon Jovi.
Rock on, O Boss of Bosses everywhere.
Because these two lanes—
Will take us anywhere.

8

I know noble accents.
The north Jersey nasal.
The south Jersey twang.
Do we really sound like that?

9

When the tide rolled out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many waves.

10

At the sight of the ocean,
Bathed in green light
The seagulls cried out sharply.

11

We rode over Connecticut
In a hurry to get home.
Pierced by the fear of Route One
The shadow of mall traffic,
And the trucks—
Oh, the trucks.

12

The Raritan River is moving.
New Jersey must be alive.

13

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing,
And it was going to snow.
And going to snow some more. It's January
in New Jersey.

(with apologies to Wallace Stevens.)

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All images courtesy of wikimedia commons