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Book update.

Beware The Hawk novellaHello folks. Just a brief Sunday post to let you all know that Vagabondage Press has a book page up now for my novella Beware the Hawk.

Here it is!

The page is up, but orders won’t be taken until Jan. 17. The publishers and I are reaching out to book bloggers now, and I’m trying to set up a blog tour.

I also want to thank everyone for the incredible amount of support I’ve been getting.  I’ve gotten shout-outs on people’s blogs and insane amounts of congratulations, people have liked my Facebook fan page. I’ve heard from a couple of reviewers. Someone even nominated me for a blog award. Someone else  promised me a glowing five star review on Amazon* without even having read the book. So generous. Thank you guys so much for all of your support so far. I’ve been blown away by all of your kind words. I was very nervous about promoting this book a week ago but you have set my mind at ease.

Okay – that’s it for now. Tomorrow I promise to return to writing confessionals and posts about ninjas, dwarf-maidens and my biological clock.

*I cannot tell a lie. I will not say no to a five-star review on Amazon. But I am told – by those who know such things – that reviews on Goodreads are taken more seriously by the reading public. That’s where the bookworms gather, which makes me feel a little left out, since I don’t have an account there.

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Published, or Can I get a “yay”?

So recently, this blog’s been a big ol’ mess of me complaining about things. Waah, Irene. Waaah, FEMA. Waaaah, writer’s block. Waaaaaaah, grocery shopping.

No more! I’ve stowed my box of Kleenex and called off the waahmbulance, because I’ve got some fabulous news. On Sunday, I received an email from Vagabondage Press, a small, independent publishing house. They will be publishing my novella “Beware the Hawk” (I think, technically, it’s a novelette) as part of their 2012 catalog!

What kind of book is it? Well, for my literary/MFA friends – it’s genre. It’s a spy thriller told in the first person by a strong female voice, and smartphones play a big role in the story. It’s set in Boston. For my family, I’m sorry – my protagonist drops a lot of F-bombs.

This is a piece I wrote years ago, when I was in my first writing group. One of the women in that writing group is a co-founder at Vagabondage. She asked to see the piece this summer.

I don’t have all the details yet, but I do believe “Beware” will be an e-book release. I’ll write more about that when I have more information.

Good lord. I’ve published short stories and poetry and countless news pieces, but this will make me the author of a book. This has been my goal since I discovered books as a child. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to write and publish a long piece of fiction.

Now it’s about to happen, and I have this weirdly muted excitement going on. I continue to stress about other projects, and every once in a while, I have this burst of hysteria when I remember that I’m going to have a book published. Now it’s not my end-game. Now it’s something that’s going to happen next year.

But what’s weird is that I somehow never looked beyond that final goal of writing a book. As a kid, I never had any plans beyond that. I was going to write a book and then… what? Be rich and famous, I guess. (Ha!) But now, I find myself thinking, wow, I’m going to be published, and still going on with the process of querying, writing, readying my long manuscript for the eyes of an agent and researching. It feels like I’ve pushed beyond the boundaries of my childhood ambition. It’s no longer “I want to write a book when I grow up,” now it’s “I want to write for the rest of my life.” And it feels like I can do that. I’ve spent the last several years writing, and the last two writing very seriously, but being an author feels like an actual career option now.

This is actually the third – and most exciting – piece of good news I have to share. The first piece of good news is that Vagabondage is publishing one of my short stories in their final issue of their lit mag, The Battered Suitcase, which will be available Oct. 1, and also, that another short story, “Final Statements,” will be published by Independent Ink Magazine sometime soon. I don’t have a date for the Independent Ink release yet, but when I do, I will tell you all.

I’m off to go yell “Wooo!” in the middle of my street.

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Book post – “Flesh” by Hollis Seamon

Two weeks ago, we went camping in the Berkshires with a group of friends. Since I’d just graduated, it was the first time I’d been on this camping trip without a book I had to read. So I picked up a book that I’d been meaning to read for a year: Flesh, by Hollis Seamon, who was my mentor during my final semester at grad school.

Now, as a student, I’ve worked with four authors as mentors, and I’ve worked with many other authors during the residencies but, to my shame, I haven’t read all their books. I’ve bought many, many of those books, which is probably half the battle, since professors need to make money and eat and whatever else it is that published authors do. I’ve had the professors sign those books, or my Kindle, if I bought the electronic edition. I have two or three shelves in a bookcase dedicated to profs’ books, but I’ve just not been able to read them. So I thought I’d start with the books written by my mentors and move on from there. Because Hollis spent so much time on my own novel, I decided to start with hers.

I loved it. And I’m not just saying this because Hollis held my hand as I struggled to end my novel this spring. Flesh is billed as a mystery, and it is, sort of. There is a murder at the beginning, there’s a list of suspects and a cop and a protagonist who becomes an unlikely sleuth. But more than that, it’s a character-driven novel featuring Suzanne Brown a.k.a. Suzanne LaFleshe, “the sexiest fat person in New York.”

It is Suzanne, more than the suspense, that kept me reading voraciously through to the end. “Voracious,” by the way, is a word of which Suzanne would approve. She is a woman of many intriguing appetites. She loves food, and makes desserts like key lime pie in the middle of January, just for the hell of it. She loves sex, and leaves her door unlocked so that her many lovers can drop in for a tryst. She loves academia, and is struggling to complete a dissertation on cannibalism in English literature.

The themes of fat and food and cannibalism and hunger are explored throughout the novel. And if that sounds grisly, it can be, sometimes. But the symbolic theme of hunger was fascinating to me. And the fact that Hollis writes with a wicked sense of humor just made the whole thing even better.

There is some tragedy associated with this book, and I don’t mean the murder that kicks off the plot. As soon as Flesh came out in 2005, the small press that published it went out of business. So although I hear rumors of other Suzanne LaFleshe manuscripts, there will be no more Suzanne LaFleshe books, and that is a sadness.

The strangest thing about reading a book written by your most recent mentor is what happens when you’re sitting in a camp chair for hours and the dust jacket starts riding up on the book:

I may have graduated, but Hollis still appears to be watching me.

Next up will be a novel by Rachel Basch, when I finish reading that.

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