First look at the cover of my new book.

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The cover art for The Eagle & The Arrow is here!

The Eagle & The Arrow, book, A.J. O'Connell, Vagabondage, Battered Suitcase, Beware the Hawk

It’s here!

What I love about this cover is that although it’s visually similar to the cover of Beware the Hawk, I think it communicates the atmosphere of the second book beautifully. The Eagle & The Arrow continues the story started in Beware the Hawk, but features a new protagonist, a fresh set of dangers and a much different setting. As you can probably tell from the cover, these characters aren’t living in safehouses and fighting in bars. If the characters in the last book were pawns, these new characters are the chessmasters.

I’m very excited; this cover art represents a lot of work on the part of Vagabondage Press‘s art director, Maggie Ward,  and on the part of my editor, N. Apythia Morges.  I think Maggie put something like eight or nine possible covers, (including one we all loved, which couldn’t be used because the art we wanted was suddenly unavailable.)

I was very lucky to be allowed input into my cover. From what I understand, authors often don’t get a say; the cover is the responsibility of the the publishing house’s graphic arts department. I’m thrilled that I was allowed to make requests; I really, really loved the cover of Beware The Hawk, so much so, that I wanted the cover of the sequel to look consistent. Maggie obliged and here we are.

If you want a closer look at the cover, or to comment on it, visit my Facebook page. There is a photo album there for my book covers.

I do hope you like the cover as much as I do; you’ll be seeing a lot of it in the coming months as I start to ramp up promotion of the book, which comes out in June. I can’t wait, myself.

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Mysterious Irish poetry: FOUND.

Yesterday I posted about a mysterious radio program I heard in the car on Sunday while driving through New York. The program was about Irish female poets and the divine feminine, and I couldn’t find it anywhere on the internet because I didn’t have call letters or a number for the radio station.

Well, I found it! The radio station was WBAI 99.5, the weekly program is called The Next Hour, and the actual show I was listening to is called “The Divine Feminine in Contemporary Irish Poetry.”

The show is hosted by actress and scholar Caraid O’Brien (who has possibly the neatest first name I’ve ever seen) and features actress and fiddler Mary Louise Bowe (an appropriate last name for a fiddler) and accordionist Martin O’Connell (best last name ever. Obviously.)

Click here to download the file from The Next Hour’s radio archives.

Thank you to everyone who helped me find this station and who sent me information about Irish poets. Thank you especially to Laura Fedele of WFUV, who commented on my last post and sent me fangirling round the bend. (WFUV is one of my favorite radio stations. I fight with the dial every day to get it to come in properly where I live.)

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The Irish poetry that rescued me from radio hell… and then vanished.

hags with the bags, dublin

photo credit: infomatique via photopin cc

Yesterday I was driving through radio hell. You know radio hell. It’s that strange piece of highway that separates one region’s radio stations from another’s. I was headed into New York and had left Connecticut’s frequencies behind me, and I was trying to find anything to listen to that wasn’t a duet by Fun. or a baseball game. Then I heard a woman’s voice speaking in Irish.

I don’t speak Irish. The last words of Gaelic in my family died with my grandmother, and I suspect those were swears (when I was a little girl I begged her to teach me and she always changed the subject.) But I know Irish when I hear it, so I kept listening.

Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, poetryIt was a radio show about women Irish poets and the divine feminine, and I’d come in on the program half-way through, and was listening to the voice of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill as she turned the tables on the men who objectified women with a lovely poem called “Nude.” I listened to her work, and the work of others whose names I didn’t quite catch, although I heard the name, and possibly the voice, of Medbh McGuckian and a younger poet also named Nuala, but I was checking my directions and didn’t get her family name.

Medbh McGuckian, poetryThe show ended and I reached my destination at the same time. I didn’t think to check the station, I just leaped out of the car. Big mistake. Because when I came home hours later, I remembered the show and I wanted to listen to the beginning of it, but I could not find it on the Internet. I don’t have call letters. I don’t have the number on the dial. I have nothing but what I think is the title: “Women Irish Poets and the Divine Feminine.” That’s probably not even it. It’s the Brigadoon of radio shows; when I turned the car on later, the station was broadcasting in Spanish. It just wasn’t there.

I’m generations away from Ireland on both sides of my family; my great grandparents came to the U.S. one hundred years ago and my grandparents married French Canadians and Italians, and so we have all kinds of different blood in the family.

Despite that, the radio show and that poetry were so familiar to me; I couldn’t understand the language, but I could understand the sentiments and attitude, and most of the subject matter. I know that particular brand of Catholicism and also, that brand of paganism that lives (denied) in even the most devout Irish Catholic. Mostly though, I recognized the tone of the women; romance and passion and poetry mixed with a kind of spare, practical, matter-of-factness that I remember hearing in the voices of my grandmother and her cousins, and that I often hear in my mother’s voice.

So this is where I beg for help. I’m going to keep searching for this phantom radio show, but if you know what I’m talking about, if you know the station or heard the show, please, please, please leave a comment and tell me where I can find it! I’m desperate to hear the parts I missed and read the poetry for myself (but in English.)

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Females in Fanart: The Hawkeye Initiative

I’ve been railing against sexism in fan art in the geek world, over at Geek Eccentric. This week’s installment is a g-chat interview with the administrator behind The Hawkeye Initiative. What’s the Hawkeye Initiative? It’s a Tumblr with fan drawings of the Avengers’ Hawkeye (who is a dude) twisted into the back-breaking, butt-baring poses that female characters are often drawn into in comics. Click the link for some choice Hawkeye poses and an interview with a really cool lady: Females in Fanart: The Hawkeye Initiative

(UPDATE: The above link is broken. Click here for the archived article.)

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My spirit animal is the Woolf.

I recently read A Room of One’s Own and To The Lighthouse one after the other. After that, I felt like Virginia Woolf was sitting on my shoulder, keeping up a running commentary about everything I did. Which is a little annoying because when I’m counting calories I hear a little voice in my head saying:

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

Easy for you to say, Virginia. You were a rail.

Anyhow, this made me think “Wow, she’s like my spirit animal,” and then I remembered her name is “Woolf” and I felt like she really was my spirit animal. Then I thought about people who truly believe that wolves are their spirit animals, and that reminded me of those tee shirts you see at craft fairs with a wolf howling at the moon and the aurora borealis shimmering in the background.

And then I thought, “Dammit. Where’s my spirit animal tee shirt?”

And I looked, but there weren’t any. So I made one.

Woolf Spirit Animal

The only thing I regret is that I didn’t Photoshop her head back to look like she’s howling. If I want to get really ’80s, I might order this on a sweatshirt and decorate it with puff paint, glitter and rhinestones.

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‘From These Ashes’: an interview with author Tamela Ritter

From These Ashes I met Tamela Ritter about 10 years ago, in a writing group called Pencils! which met in a Barnes & Noble in Connecticut. We were allowed to bring five pages and read them aloud. The first thing I ever heard Ritter read was a scene featuring an injured young man, with no memory of his identity but a unexplained knowledge of how to survive in the wilderness.

I listened intently to the story as the young man patched up his injuries with only a tee shirt and river water purified in beer cans and then… Ritter’s five pages were up and I wanted more.

More is here! It took a decade, but Ritter’s first novel, From These Ashes, was published by Battered Suitcase Press in March. It features the boy without a memory — Tim — his sister Naomi, and their struggle to find a home, themselves and each other in the American northwest.

It’s a marvelous book, and I’m not just saying that because I’ve been wanting it to be published for 10 years. It’s got everything: a coming of age story, family drama, Native American culture, cults and beautiful language. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

On Tuesday I sat down to a g-chat interview with the author herself to talk about the book, her life as a writer and what being a newly published author is like.

This is a two-part interview. When you get to the end, click the appropriate link to go to page two.

Editor’s note: The following interview was conducted over the internet and has been edited. Typos have been corrected, and for the sake of clarity, some sections of the interview have been moved around.

About the Book

A.J.: So, Tamela, you’ve just published your first novel, “From These Ashes.” What has your first month as a published author been like?

Tamela: Sort of crazy. Two weeks ago today I was constantly going to Amazon and looking for myself just to make sure the book stayed there and it wasn’t a dream. Since then it’s just been so many levels of awesome, terrifying and surreal.

A.J.: So you’re not still constantly checking Amazon now? Because I wouldn’t judge you if you were.

Tamela: I’ve curbed the instinct and now it’s only a daily thing, not an hourly thing. It doesn’t change much there after a while, yeah?

A.J.: Well, the reviews will be coming in now. That’s something that changes for a while.

Tamela: That’s exciting. I love seeing what people’s reactions are, what resonates with them, what sticks. It’s always so different and random. People have been nice to it so far, both there, on Goodreads and in my life. It’s good to hear, and will help beef me up for when people who aren’t related to me read it. 🙂

A.J.: So before we go any further we should probably talk about your book itself. Can you tell me in 25 words or less what your book is about?

Tamela: A brother and sister’s journey to find themselves and each other. Shit, that’s only 11… hold on… A brother and sister and their journeys of discovery as they search for each other and a place to belong. Or something…

A.J.: Great!

Tamela: I liked what you said in your review about a sister who can’t speak and a brother who can’t remember. I will be stealing that from now on, fyi. 🙂

A.J.: That’s cool with me!

Tamela: Do you ever read reviews and wonder where these people were when you were trying to come up with the summary of your story?

A.J.: All the damn time.

A.J.: Your story starts in this very interesting place, with a teenage Naomi – that’s the sister – writing her story in a cult recovery center. And you find out in the opening chapter that she and her brother Tim are Native American and that Native American-ness is a big part of the plot. Why did you choose to incorporate those two elements: cults and American Indians?

Tamela: Haha, I just answered this question in the only other interview I’ve ever done. Now here I am already repeating myself. Lets see if I can jazz it up for you.

Neither of these elements were going to be a part of the story if you can believe that. I never in a million years thought I’d be writing about Native Americans because for so long, my own status as one has been something that I knew was true about me, but never knew what it meant to be Indian. I am Cherokee on my mother’s side. My mother comes from a very troubled family and I believe that she attributes some of this to “being Indian” so all I know about it is from my grandmother, Naomi. But, like I said, troubled family, so we didn’t spend a lot of time with her, but what I remember is how proud she was of her heritage, how tightly she held onto it and also it seemed to me that she held my brother Tim up and loved him just a little bit more special because of all of us, he looked the most Indian.

So, when it came time to explain why my character Tim was so special, it just came to me that he should be Indian. It all came from there.

A.J.: You know, I always knew that your brother Tim was the reason why the brother in the story was named Tim, but I didn’t know where the name Naomi came from.

Tamela: And the cult was a bit like that too… actually the cult was entirely the fault (or credit) of NaNoWriMo [National Novel Writing Month]. I needed a crisis, a conflict and I had this guy (Larry) and I didn’t know what to do with him as there was no way I was going to make my story about evil step-fathers. And it just came to me and for me, they both tie together because for me both are about finding a place to belong.

A.J.: I want to ask a little more about the Indian aspect of the novel. Did you do a lot of research into tribes and reservation life?

Tamela: I did do a lot of research… but I also did a lot of living around reservations, having friends in reservations and absorbing as much as I could with no other reason besides that people fascinate me.

A.J.: When did the story in “From These Ashes” first occur to you, and how?

Tamela: At first it was bits and pieces, stories I wanted to tell, like about my brother’s death, writing exercises that got away from me, and then I started to notice that all the stories had the same protagonist and they all sort of looked like my brother in my mind. It was right around this time that I first heard about NaNoWriMo the first time and I thought, ‘What a perfect excuse to make something of this.’

A.J.: That was in 2003?

Tamela: 2004

A.J.: I read it back then, and I remember it being a great novel. But it was a little different. How has the novel grown since 2004? What’s changed?

Tamela: Man, sometimes, like when I read through it after I’d made the first round of edits with my editor everything seems different than it was, but other times I look at it and see hardly any changes. Well, except the first chapter. The first chapter had always been a mess and stayed that way for a long time. I just didn’t have any ways to fix it back then, didn’t have the skills required, but when that came in place (many, many years and attempts later), everything else were such easy fixes it felt it had always been that way.

A.J.: It’s a story that goes to some dark places. Did it always?

Tamela: Um… yeah. Dark places are sadly sort of my thing. I mean, like everything else, I didn’t set out to tell a story that would rip out my heart as I wrote it. I never set out to tell those stories, they just sort of happen to my fiction.

Man, makes me sound like I had no plans whatsoever… which I guess is sort of true. Still…

A.J.: You’ve got a lot of complicated characters in this book; not all of them are great people but all of them are sympathetic. Who was the most difficult to write?

Tamela: Hmmm, tough one. I guess the hardest and the one I was most terrified of not getting right was Virginia, the mother. For a very long time she was just “the villain” and I did very little to flesh out how or why. Then I overcompensated and tried to give her a shit ton of back story (which was why my first chapter was always such a mess). It wasn’t until we get to The Way and I started exploring other aspects of her, that I started to see how I could flesh her out without having to give her whole life story. I just had to keep remembering, no one’s the villain in the story of their own life. And just like her children, she was searching for something too.

Next section: About the Author

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April: 2013 goals

Well, I’m a few days late on my new year resolution update this month, which is appropriate, since March was a month of backsliding for me. I was not on time at least three times this month, I barely blogged, ate a lot of desserts and have been behind on marketing.

The bright spots this month were writing and reading which are really the important goals, so that’s something. And I attended one of my conferences and applied for one and a half grants, and that’s something more.

Don’t care? That’s cool. Watch this video to see if you’ve got moves like Jabba.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2ftVPk-WZw

My novel: This year I’m resolving to spend the first hour of every weekday working on my novel until it’s done, no matter what other projects come along.
I’m working off daily goals now. I try to write 500 words a day at least, and it is paying off. I’m well into the middle of the second rewrite, but I’m afraid that I might not be getting anywhere fast enough because I want this rewrite done by August.

Marketing: My goal is to spend an hour of each weekday working on marketing projects, including the upkeep of this blog, my social networks, reading up on marketing and emails to bookstores and libraries and reviewers.
I was doing well with the social media until I came back from AWP. Then I fell right off the wagon. I could blame a busy month, but everyone is busy and since I carry around a device that lets me post to the Internet in my purse at all times, really have no excuse.

Making a marketing plan for my new book: I have not put together a marketing plan yet.

Publishing: My goal is to publish three things that aren’t my upcoming book this year.
I didn’t send anything out in March. Best to wait until the AWP furor dies down.

Reading: My goal is to read 33 books in 2013, including one by Jane Austin and one by Charles Dickens.
I’ve read four books this month, Neil Stephenson’s 900+ page Anathem (despite the fact that I have a short attention span), Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, From These Ashes by Tamela Ritter and Bad Apple by Kristi Peterson Schoonover. Now, I’m now reading the 800+ page Game of Thrones, because I don’t learn from my attention-span mistakes. Although I must admit, Game of Thrones is moving quickly.

If it ends up disappointing me, at least it will up my page count.)

Conferences: Attend at least one new conference or retreat.
I went to AWP. I have another retreat coming up in July, but I need to find something new.

Grants: Apply for at least three fellowships or grants.
I’ve applied for an NEA grant, and I’m applying for a Connecticut Arts Endowment grant.

Weight: I feel most comfortable when I weigh within a certain five-pound range, and I am always two pounds away from that five pound range. For 2013, I would like to get within that range and stay there.
Still within my weight range. I did pop right out of that range in the middle of the month because when things get busy I gain weight, but I’m back where I want to be now.

Punctuality: I’ve been a late for everything since childhood. In an effort to put a stop to this, I’ve decided to put a dollar into a mason jar whenever I’m late for anything, and donate it to charity in a year.
 Whoops. Seven bucks in the jar, and the sad thing is that I didn’t even remember to put this month’s three dollars in the jar until I had to type this up.

My big-picture goal: I’ve planned to look into all political issues I can, and make up my mind about how I really feel about them.
Meh.

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