New Releases From Our Own

Karin Gillespie Neches EARTHLY PLEASURES

Karen Neches’ latest release Earthly Pleasures is about a greeter in Heaven named Skye Sebring who falls in love with a mortal on Earth. She eventually discovers that all of life’s lessons can be learned through five Beatle songs.

EARTHLY PLEASURES has been chosen to be a Booksense Notable for February. Check out all the bookseller praise at http://www.karenneches.com/

"...Appealingly unorthodox... a heaven where angels lust, drink and follow terrestrial celebrity gossip… A tangled story of cold ambition and true love unspools. Neches’s funny and sweet novel shows that to err is human and angelic as well."

Publishers' Weekly

“Oh so fun… So many surprises that I was blown away.”

Marta Morrison, Teens Read Too, Gold Star of Excellence

Here’s a brief description:

Welcome to Heaven. Use your Wishberry to hustle up whatever you want. Have an online chat with God. Visit the attractions such as Retail Rapture, Wrath of God miniature golf and Nocturnal Theater, where nightly dreams are translated to film.

Your greeter might just be Skye Sebring who will advises her newly dead clients on what to expect now that they’re expired. “Heaven is like a Corona Beer commercial” she assures her charges. “It’s all about contentment.”

So different than Earth where chaos reigns. Unfortunately for Skye, she’s been chosen to live her first life. She’s required to attend Earth 101 classes, which teach all of the world’s greatest philosophies through five Beatle songs.

Skye has no interest in Earthly pursuits, until lawyer Ryan Blaine briefly becomes her client after a motorcycle accident. Just as they are getting to know each other, he is revived and sent back to Earth.

She follows his life via the TV channel “Earthly Pleasures” but discovers he has a wife as well as a big secret. Why then does he call a show for the lovelorn to talk about the lost love of his life?

In Earthly Pleasures (Simon and Schuster, February 2008, $14) great love can transcend the dimensions, narrowing the vast difference between Heaven and Earth.

Want a little taste?Read the first chapter. Or click here for the chance to win a free copy.

BIO

Karen Neches was single for over twenty years. She used to tell people she was in the “hospice stage” of being single as she never expected to recover. Then at the age of forty-three she finally met her soul mate. Earthly Pleasures is dedicated to him. She maintains a web site at http://www.karenneches.com/
Neches also writes under the name Karin Gillespie and is the nationally bestselling author of The Sweet Potato Queen’s First Big-Ass Novel with Jill Conner Browne and three novels in the critically acclaimed Bottom Dollar Girl series. She’s founder of the virtual tour The Girlfriend Circuit as well A Good Blog is Hard to Find. She is a former lifestyle columnist for the Augusta Chronicle.

Kerry Madden, author of JESSIE'S MOUNTAIN

JESSIE'S MOUNTAIN by Kerry Madden coming on Valentine's Day, 2008. Viking Children's Books (Penguin)

The whole family got in on this one - daughter Lucy illustrated the birds in JESSIE'S MOUNTAIN, son Flannery edited the songs, and daughter, Norah, inspired the character of Caroline, the fairy child, and Kiffen, patient father and husband, grew up one of 13 children, which got me writing down these stories of the Weems passel of younguns in Maggie Valley, North Carolina.

KIRKUS REVIEW
"Madden brings the struggling yet loving Weems family refreshingly to life in her third story in the Maggie Valley trilogy following Gentle’s Holler (2005) and Louisiana’s Song (2007). Set in North Carolina ’s Smoky Mountains in 1964, almost-13-year-old Livy Two, one of ten children, again provides a poignant and spirited lens through which events unfold and a lot of growing up occurs. Determined as ever to help support her family so they can stay in their beloved holler, Livy Two, a gifted songwriter, singer and guitar player, runs off to Nashville to audition for Mr. George Flowers of Music Row. But her ten-year-old sister follows, nothing goes as expected and their abrupt disappearance affects everyone she cares for deeply.

“A brave girl—full of heart,” she is sometimes torn about secretly reading her mother’s girlhood diary from the ’40s, uncharacteristically given to her by Grandma Horace. In part sparked by the entries and bird drawings, she hatches a plan that, with everyone working together, really does make a difference. A fitting end to the trilogy, Madden has created a heartwarming family story bursting with love and mountain music. (Fiction. 10-14)

BIO
Kerry Madden's debut children's novel, Gentle's Holler, (Viking, 2005) was released in Penguin Puffin paperback in 2007, received starred reviews in both Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly, and is the first in a trilogy of Smoky Mountain novels. Gentle's Holler was a New York and Chicago Public Library Pick and received a Mark Twain Nomination from Missouri and a Maine Student Book Award. Louisiana's Song (SCIBA and CYBILS Award Finalist) was published in 2007 and has been selected for the California Readers Collection for Middle Grade Fiction. Jessie's Mountain will be published on Valentine's in 2008 by Viking. She is currently working on a biography of Harper Lee for teens for Viking's UpClose Series. She may be reached at http://www.kerrymadden.com/. She conducts writing workshops for kids of all ages across the country. She is also the author OFFSIDES, New York Public Library Pick for the Teenage in 1997 and WRITING SMARTS. (AMERICAN GIRL LIBRARY, 2002).

Kathy Patrick, author of THE PULPWOOD QUEENS’ TIARA-WEARING, BOOK-SHARING GUIDE TO LIFE

When licensed cosmetologist turned publisher’s rep Kathy L. Patrick lost her job due to industry cutbacks, she wasn’t deterred. One month later, she opened Beauty and the Book, the world’s only combination beauty salon/bookstore, and soon after founded The Pulpwood Queens of East Texas, a nationwide reading group (70 chapters and counting, plus chapters in eight foreign countries) that dared to ask the question—does a book club have to be snobby to be serious? Kathy’s life is soon to be an open book…with the release of THE PULPWOOD QUEENS’ TIARA-WEARING, BOOK-SHARING GUIDE TO LIFE (Grand Central Publishing Trade Paperback Original; January 2, 2008; $13.99).

Bestselling authors James Patterson, Pat Conroy, Cassandra King, Lalita Tademy, and John Berendt among others are all heralding the arrival of the official book of The Pulpwood Queens—“where tiaras are mandatory and reading good books is the rule!” A natural born storyteller with a wicked sense of humor, Kathy’s Southern charm is front and center as she shares how books changed her life. Her entertaining stories are woven together with her suggested reading lists:
· books made into movies
· novels written by people who already earned a name in another profession · books that will take you to places you long to visit
· tips on starting a book club (including the six questions guaranteed to ignite a discussion and the five ways to absolutely kill a conversation)
· Pulpwood Queens’ favorite recipes - the Peanut Butter Fudge Cake recipe is worth the price of admission alone
· And much more!

BIO

KATHY L. PATRICK is the owner of Beauty and the Book, the only Hair Salon/Bookstore in the country located in historic Jefferson, Texas. She is founder of The Pulpwood Queens Book Club, which is the largest “meeting and discussing” book club in the world. Kathy also founded and runs three book festivals in the Arkansas/Louisiana/Texas area including Books Alive, Girlfriend Weekend, and the International Book Club Author Extravaganza. She currently writes a Pulpwood Queen blog for The Marshall News Messenger, and she writes a bimonthly column for Southern Living.com. She has appeared on Oprah, Good Morning America, and in national publications such as Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal, among others. Kathy lives outside of Jefferson, Texas with her husband, Jay and daughters, Helaina and Madeleine.

Visit Kathy L. Patrick at http://www.beautyandthebook.com/

Are you a Southern author with a new release? Contact Karin Gillespie at kgillespie (@) knology (dot) net. to be featured on our new release page.

The Art of Sound

by Pamela Duncan

I come from a family of great storytellers, people who love not only a good tale but also the cadence and beauty of language. Maybe that’s why music is also so important to us. Deep in our bones, in our very cells, is a passion for the art of sound.

Once upon a time, my Pawpaw Price picked a little banjo, and he loved to dance. My Nanny Price sang me to sleep at night with tragic ballads like “Poor Babes in the Woods.” Two of my uncles played in a rock band when they were younger. Mama sang constantly with Top 40 radio and Daddy was a huge country music fan. My brother and sister both learned to play the piano, and my brother also picks a little guitar.

My musical career is a history of quitting. In eighth grade, I joined the band and took up the clarinet because of a boy. For weeks I tortured my family with “25 or 6 to 4” and “Pomp and Circumstance.” I can’t remember which I got tired of first, the clarinet or the boy, but I quit band and passed the clarinet on to my brother. Not long after that, I decided to try guitar and loved it. I loved holding it. I looked good holding it. But I never actually learned to play it. Years later, I picked it up again when I discovered a love for bluegrass music. Three chords and many calluses later, I quit again when I discovered that playing well required more practice than I was willing to put in.

I love to sing, but any hope of a future singing career got nipped in the bud in 1971. I was lying on the floor of my grandparents’ house listening to The Carpenters through my uncle’s big white headphones, singing along with “Close to You,” when my Nanny Price walked by. She stopped, poked me with her toe, leaned over and said, “Who told you you could sing?”

But my lack of talent never diminished my passion for music. And because of that passion, and maybe because of my own failures as a musician, I revere people who can make music. It seems like the most wonderful kind of magic. Maybe that’s the real reason I was never that keen on learning to play myself. I don’t want to look behind the curtain and see the wizard. I love the magic too much.

Uncle Jim and Uncle Ronnie sit on the edge of the concrete front porch at Nanny and Pawpaw's house with guitars on their laps. They hold them awkwardly at first, the way you hold something when you're not quite sure what to do with it. They strum a little bit, laugh and joke with each other, act embarrassed about the whole thing. It's been a long time since they played, maybe six months or a year, whenever the family last got together for a holiday or a funeral.

In the 1960s they had a band called The Gators and came this close to making a record. There's a photograph of them dressed in ‘60s suits with string ties, wearing black Beatles wigs, holding their instruments and grinning like monkeys in Nanny and Pawpaw's living room. Their faces blaze with hope and youth and ignorance of the future. They look like they're about to set the world on fire.

When they start to play, it's like a slow thaw begins. First they sit all hunched over and tense, trying to make chords and strum a little, wringing their hands every little bit to shake off the pain of the strings against their tender fingers. Then they get a little looser and bend closer, looking into the guitars, looking for familiar sounds, for melodies that will lead them to songs.

Uncle Jim finds something first. His head snaps up as he grins and says, "Remember this'n, Ron-Dog?" And like magic they start playing together, just perfect. They play like they never quit, like that music has kept on inside them all these years, even while they were working and getting married and raising kids and forgetting.

As they play, their faces change, they become younger. Something melts and comes loose inside them and the music runs out their fingers into the strings and they're gone, into their own world where none of us can follow, couldn't even begin to try. It's like a wave of electricity between them, the music, and they ride it. Back and forth they trade off taking the lead, each knowing exactly what the other is fixing to do. They’re remembering who they are.

But after an hour their fingers get to hurting too bad, they can’t remember more than snippets of songs, their wives want to go home. They come back from that distant place where the music carried them. They set aside the guitars, stand, stretch, talk about cars and sports, carry on as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. They forget.

I don’t forget. I don’t forget because I discovered my own way of participating in the family tradition. Writing is my music, my magic. When I write, I can listen to all our voices, all our stories, as well as new ones no one has ever heard before. As long as I can put words on paper, I'll always have music.


(Novelist Pamela Duncan is the author of Moon Women, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award Finalist, and Plant Life, which won the 2003 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. She is the recipient of the 2007 James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South, awarded by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her third novel, The Big Beautiful, was published in March 2007. Visit her website at http://www.pameladuncan.com/.)

The Southern Rural Idyll and How I Fled from It, Only to Find It Followed Me

By Sarah Shaber


It occurs to me that I have told you very little about myself. And on reflection, I realize that I don’t resemble many Southern authors. Like many, I grew up in the country a mile or so from a small town and about twenty-five miles from Charlottesville, Virginia. There was a pond, and kudzu, and June bugs plopping on the window screens at night, and a barn, and animals, a best friend two pastures away, a hide-out in the woods, and neighbors who knew everything there was to know about you. Unlike many, I was bored to tears and if I had to go back there to live I’d slit my wrists first.

I just wasn’t the rural type. My brother and sister were. They spent all day outside with the dogs, building forts, riding mini bikes, and popping each other with BB guns. I spent my time inside with books. Lots of books. I was a voracious, indiscriminate reader. There just wasn’t anything else in my environment that interested me.

The best thing that ever happened to me was going away to boarding school in the tenth grade. My parents had noticed that I seemed to need something more than was offered by the county high school. Also the local butcher’s assistant, who at nineteen had split from his wife, kept showing up at our door asking to take me for motorcycle rides. So I was off to St. Anne’s School for three years, where I met people like me, who were interested in books and ideas and, as we so quaintly put it, “ working for a few years before getting married.” Shockingly advanced.

I also had some wonderful teachers who kept telling me I should write. I ignored them. Other writers talk about how they wrote their first story in second grade, fashioning a book out of construction paper and staples, et cetera ad infinitum. Not me. I just kept reading, through college, where I majored in history, into marriage and motherhood, graduate school and jobs. I got my masters degree in radio, television, and film, where I actually wrote a couple of screenplays. Just for fun. Not seriously. I did have a workshop with Horton Foote, who wrote the screenplay for To Kill A Mockingbird, which was full of kudzu, tire swings, and ham biscuits, all the things I hated. He was great, though, and told me I wrote “expert dialogue.” How nice, I thought. Maybe someday, many years in the future, when I was, like, forty, I might try to write a book.

My husband and I and our two kids settled in the midst of Raleigh, North Carolina, just a block away from a library and a gourmet market, a short car ride from the art museum and a concert hall. Whew. No kudzu. And through it all I kept reading. Despite the kids and the job I managed to read at least a book a week. Reading was high on my priority list, way above folding the laundry and such.

Then forty, that year once so far in the future, slammed me, and suddenly I wanted to write a book. Without ever having written a word of fiction, except for those graduate school screenplays, I sat down with pen and empty page, later computer and empty screen, and wrote. A lot. Most of it went into the trash can. After four years, hundreds and hundreds of pages, countless migraines and eyestrain, I won a manuscript competition and my first book, Simon Said, was published by St. Martin’s Press.

It’s interesting to me that my books aren’t informed by the rural South, where I grew up and which should have been formative, but by the “new South,” a tired and overworked expression which is nonetheless meaningful. The new South has cities, air conditioning, industry, ice hockey, and Republicans. Its residents often have no link at all to the South of the cotton plantation, the Civil War, and slavery. In other words their parents weren’t from around here.

My sleuth, Simon Shaw, is a “new Southerner.” He’s a history professor at a college in a small city. His mother was a Jewish woman from Queens. He campaigns against the display of the Confederate flag. He drinks wine and eats quiche.

But despite everything Professor Shaw is still a southerner, just as despite my escape to town I am a southern writer. We southerners live in a unique geographic region with a special history. We’ve developed our own cuisine, music, and sports (think NASCAR). As writers our works reflect the southern landscape of intense family relationships, the influence of religion, and the aftermath of slavery and the Civil War.

Truman Capote, Harper Lee, and Carson McCullers are just three of many southern writers who tried to flee to New York City. They may have lived there for years, but they never escaped the South. Going from zero to eighteen years in the South marks you forever.

Just the other day I saw a bit of kudzu creeping up the bird feeder in my tiny urban back yard.

Quinn Dalton

Maybe we should talk about delirium. I’m just showing up right now. I’m just doing my job. I don’t feel like I have anything but eye sockets, slow fingers, closets.

I had a book out this fall, my third. But time has passed and I’ve nudged it out of the nest and I’m working on other things. It seems easier to let them go with each one.

Have you ever noticed that to write you have to put the pen in your hand, or your fingers on the keys? It’s a physical act; it’s not just in your head. You can have ideas all day. But you have to fight your way to the desk. It’s as if one part of you is eating bon-bons (oh, the sky, oh the mystery, the dying love, the loss!) and the other part of you is digging a ditch. Or steering clear of digging a ditch. Making phone calls, paying bills, putting dishes away.

What luck, to have two selves! What luxury!

I’ve never missed a meal, but I can feel starved and panicked at the keyboard. How lovely for me to have such a low threshold for fear. One side of me says knock it out! The other side says pack it in; it’s no good. There’s 200K books published every year. It doesn’t matter that most of them are crap, or the fact that I’m even saying anything about it is a clear sign of angst, since I didn’t do an actual survey. But I’m running on the idea that when you have a lot of a thing, it can’t be all good..

Obviously I didn’t start writing for the money. But don’t get confused and think that means I have some great love for art or the pretense of it, or that I think you shouldn’t make money writing. I’m just there at the desk because when I show up I feel like I’ve done what I needed to do. The business is something else, something I do the best I can with, because I’m here for the long haul.

I’m here for the long haul even when I lose track entirely. In Greenville SC last week I gave a reading and I was tired and had close to 200 miles to drive that night. Distracted, I forgot the place in my story where I wanted to stop reading and couldn’t find a suitable alternative. I finally just gave up—I mean really, jumped ship entirely—and slunk home.

I was reminded of my uncle who cut the tip of his nose off when the metal propeller of a model plane he was building (that yes, he was looking at, nose to nose, as it were) spun off. He carried his nose to the front door of my grandmother’s house from the basement. She had friends over. She had new carpet. She yelled at him, her first born, not to bleed on the carpet. God I loved her. They are both dead now. I left that reading in Greenville carrying my nose, trying not to bleed on the carpet.

Here’s a thing I’ve been thinking about. I can tell, when I’m writing, if I’m telling the truth. If I’m lying, my fingers get heavy on the keys. If I get bored, I make more excuses than a kid busted past curfew. If I’m lucky, and patient, and I’ve struck something raw and real, I move right along, leaving typos and other imperfections to the other part of myself, the editor, who will show up tomorrow or whenever and clear the beer cans.

Drink it up.

This is it. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, except the examples of which you can find on earth. I don’t believe in reincarnation, so whatever I’m going to do happens now. And now.

Sharyn McCrumb

Watson's Wives and Mr. Twain's Numbers

The essayist Fran Leibowitz was visiting an auction house-- I forget why-- but while she was there, her host said, “Oh, while you’re here, we’d like you to take a look at this Mark Twain manuscript that we are offering in our next auction.”

As Ms. Leibowitz duly admired the handwritten draft of a Twain essay, her host said, “There’s one thing we don’t understand. See those little numbers scribbled randomly over the tops of words? We can’t figure out what those little numbers mean. We thought a code of some sort, but we can work it out.”

Fran Leibowitz is not a Twain scholar, nor does she have a lot in common with the 19th century author, but without a moment’s hesitation she told the auctioneer what the numbers meant. Any writer would know instantly. If you’re a published writer, you know. If not, I’ll tell you farther along here.

My point is this: One side-effect of being a writer is that you know how other writers think, so that things which seem quite obvious to us are apparently baffling to the layman.
For years I have been bemused by the on-going debates over the Sherlock Holmes stories. Alert readers find discrepancies. In -- for example-- an essay on www.Sherlockpeoria.net, there is a long analysis of the wives of Dr. Watson: “In one tale, his fiancée is an orphan. In another tale, his wife is visiting her mother. One month, Watson is off living the married life, the next month, he’s back living with Holmes on Baker Street, over and over again.” Thousands of words have been devoted to resolving these discrepancies, and to explaining why Dr. Watson’s war wound is mentioned as being in different places in different stories.
What does all this mean ?
Do you really want to know?
It’s no mystery to me.

In 2006 when the paperback edition of my novel St. Dale was published, they included in the back of the book the first chapter from my next novel, Once Around the Track. They didn’t tell me they were going to do this, and I rather wish they hadn’t, because I had not finished writing the book at the time, so they were printing a rough draft. Anyhow, at least a dozen alert readers wrote in to tell me that the character had blue eyes on one page and brown eyes a few pages hence. They seemed quite pleased with themselves for having discovered this-- as if they had solved Fermat’s Last Theorem.

I think I wrote back and said that the chapter was in draft form and would be edited later, which was true enough, but there’s more to it than that.

The blue-eyed/brown-eyed boy was based on a real person. And I had decided to change certain characteristics in order to make his identity less obvious. In that early draft he was in transition between his real self and his fictional avatar, and so he was slipping back and forth between worlds. In the final form of the novel, Badger has brown eyes, and he has taken on a life of his own.

Why the discrepancies in the Holmes stories ? Because Conan Doyle was making it up, guys. And he wrote those stories over a number of years. So he forgot. Or he re-imagined the details. I had that happen once. In The Rosewood Casket someone uses a shotgun, and later I refer to a rifle, so I got lots of smug letters from gun people, lecturing me on the difference. I know the difference. But that shooting scene didn’t really happen, except in my head. So I imagined the scene two different ways, and the copy editor, who probably doesn’t know the difference between the two weapons, didn’t catch it. We fixed it in later editions.

Another time I was reading a book by a writer that I knew slightly, and in this book her series character Jenny, a married woman, kept remarking on the physical attributes of various random males during the course of the novel. Jenny the heroine was noticing guys’ cute butts and muscular chests -- which was not something she had ever done in the previous novels. So when I finished the book, I called the author, “Everything okay with you?” I asked.
“Well,” she said. “I’m getting a divorce.”
“I know,” I said. “Jenny told me.”

Sometimes, if you know where to look, you can find out a lot about the person behind the curtain when you read the novel.

And those numbers scribbled above words in the Twain manuscript ? He was writing for publication, obviously, and somebody had given him a word count. It used to be Control F-2 on my old computer, and sometimes I’d hit that key every two minutes. Word count. He was keeping track, just like all the rest of us.

After you’ve been a writer long enough, there are some things that you just know.


Sharyn McCrumb, a New-York Times best-selling Appalachian writer, won a 2006 Library of Virginia Award and the AWA Book of the Year Award for St. Dale, the story of a group of ordinary people who go on a pilgrimage in honor of NASCAR’s Dale Earnhardt, and find a miracle. McCrumb, who was honored as a “Virginia Women of History” for 2008, says: “Writing about NASCAR was a wonderful experience for me. After spending my adolescence writing term papers and avoiding proms, I am now jumping hills at 100 mph with a race car driver on Virginia backroads, and it is glorious. The books won literary awards, are taught throughout the region, got me invited to the White House, and put the Earnhardts and a Daytona 500 winner on my SpeedDial. I'm having much more fun than writers usually have.”
McCrumb is best known for her Appalachian “Ballad” novels. She is currently working on a new one, as well as on another novel-- her first ever collaboration-- with a NASCAR driver. A film of her novel The Rosewood Casket is currently in production.

An Interview With Janna McMahan, author CALLING HOME

1.What’s the backstory behind your latest novel?

Back story is really everything to the conclusion of Calling Home. How could Virginia and Roger Lemmons always have had such a sour marriage and yet stayed together for so long? How can the Lemmons be so fractured and still represent the core of what a family should be? I can’t go in-depth about the back story in Calling Home since it provides the motivation for all of the characters and drives their decisions. I never do character outlines as some writers do, but their pasts do play heavily in my mind when I write. I think it is very important to see characters in all their flaws and glories in order to fully understand and relate to them. That’s one reason that “Lost” is such a popular television show. It is as much about back story as it is about who gets kidnapped next.

2. How important is the sense of place in Calling Home?

One reader told me Calling Home made them want to visit Kentucky. That was a great compliment. They said they could tell how much I loved the land. It was easy to write about people who lived so close to the land since I grew up on my grandparents’ farm. I never thought of us as dirt farmers, but that’s what we were. I’ve dug potatoes and shucked corn and shelled butter beans until my fingernails were bright green crescents.

When I was younger I spent a lot of time driving country roads just looking at things. In college, I drove around observing the hundreds of thoroughbred horse farms that ring Lexington. It seems that I’ve developed a habit of seeing a place in terms of its natural amenities before thinking about people or other things. I’m always pained to see a landmark that I admire turned into an eyesore of commerce. In Calling Home, I describe Versailles Road in Lexington, still a spectacularly beautiful area of undulating Bluegrass featuring the entrance to Keeneland Race Course and Calumet, the world’s most famous horse farm. So far, Lexington has managed to keep this road from being turned into just another burger joint littered, chain-store infested strip; but I understand that it’s a constant fight to keep developers from ruining it.

3. Where do you see yourself as a writer in five years?

In five years I’d like to be making enough money from my fiction that I won’t have to hold down another job. Right now I’m head writer and media relations director for an entertainment marketing firm. Our clients are major motion picture studios and television properties. I love my day job, so it’s difficult to tear myself away from all that fun that pays the bills. Still, I’d like my promotional work to focus on my own projects. I’d like to try my hand at screenwriting. I’ve certainly read my share of scripts at work.


4. What’s the most satisfying part of writing a novel/book? The least satisfying part?

The most satisfying part is when somebody who is not my friend or relative admires one of my stories. Of course, it’s wonderful to have your friends tell you how much they enjoyed your novel, but it is unsolicited praise from random readers that lets me know that I need to keep writing.

Least satisfying? I guess the money could be better in fiction, but I’m hoping that improves for me soon.

5. Who are your influences as a writer?

I read widely and I study books that appeal to me. I’ve challenged myself to read all the Pulitzer-winning books. I’ve finished about a dozen of the more recent winners. Some are absolutely wonderful and some I wonder why they were chosen. I’m trying to discern if there is some commonality among them that made them Pulitzer-winners. The jury is still out on that note, but I’m developing a theory.

Lee Smith and Silas House have both been influential to me over the past few years. Through their novels I learned that my own experiences and history are valid sources of fiction. More important, their friendship and advice was helpful when I was discouraged.


6. What books are on your bedside table right now?

I usually have an unmanageable stack of books on my bedside table that spills to the floor and grows like moss on every flat surface of my bedroom, but recently I had my entire house painted, which forced me to purge and organize. In my sadly reduced cache of bedside books there is Lisa Alther’s hilarious memoir, Kinfolks. I have Richard Russo’s new novel Bridge of Sighs. I always keep my bookmarked, dog-eared copy of Story, Robert McKee’s book on screenwriting, close at hand for inspiration. I have Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. The opening chapter is one of the most lovely pieces of literature ever created and I read it occasionally just to remind myself how far I have to go with my own writing. I also have my friend Sandra Johnson’s book Standing on Holy Ground, waiting in the wings. There are always a number of short story collections which include various years of New Stories from the South and Best American Short Stories.

7. How did you get published?

The key was finding the right agent. I went through the rejection process, although I must imagine more gently than some writers. I never had real horror stories like I’ve heard about. Although it sounds like an oxymoron, I received encouraging rejection letters—personalized and specific with praise and suggestions. These letters basically said to keep searching for the right agent, that my work had merit.

I also rejected a few agents. Not something I relished, but publishing is a business and you’ve got to like the people with whom you work. I knew from my freelance magazine work that there are all types of personalities and talents in the publishing world. I was determined to find the right agent since I would be putting my career in her hands for a long time. When I met Katherine Fausset, who is with Curtis Brown, I felt a great connection. She was enthusiastic and responded quickly. She moves fast, which is my style too. She sold my novel in less than two months to Kensington Publishing. I was offered a two book deal, so I’ve been very pleased with Katherine and her concern for me. I’m in the middle of writing the next book as this first one is released. I must admit that now things seems to be moving a little too fast for me.

Home Is Where You Have the Helpful Things That Eat Things

Joshilyn here....At the end of February, I leave on tour for THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING. I’ll be on the road for a month. I hope you will come see me if I am coming to a town near you; the best parts of the tour are getting to hang with readers and other writers and booksellers and swap stories, so come on out. We’ll have fun.

Here is the tour schedule.

If I am NOT coming to a bookstore near you, I am having a VIRTUAL SIGNING with a prize drawing for Postcard Art Quilts by award winning Canadian folk artist Pamela Allen, whose work was the inspiration for the main character’s in the book.
The virtual tour info is here, including some pics of the prizes. Whee!

Tour is an odd mix of delight and misery. It is like being on a swing, and when you swing FORWARD you are laughing and having one of the five most interesting conversations of your life with a pink cocktail in one hand and a local delicacy in the other. Unfortunately, when the swing goes BACKWARDS, it is as if it puts you directly into an enormous boiling ball of fire.

Then you swing forward again: BOOM! Paradise.
Then back: Get set on fire.

I love to go, though, because the fun parts are SO MUCH fun that there is not much in life that is funner. Still, it is a month long living metaphor for extremes. I plan to have a big time, as my granny used to say, but I know from experience I will miss all the things you would expect me to miss: my family, my own bed, a regular sleep schedule, knowing what time it is, knowing what city I am in, fitting in my pants. Last night, shivering out on the deck and imploring the dog to PEE ALREADY IT IS 30 DEGREES! PLEASE? PLEASE PEE! PLEASE? I realized that spring will happen while I am gone. So this year, I’m also going to miss the arrival of all the things that eat things.

The things that eat things are GOOD. Because we have many things that need to be eaten. The first year we lived in this house, for example, we were PLAGUED by mosquitos. This is because we have a BOG. A bog sounds like a trashy thing to have, so sometimes I prevaricate and call it THE STREAM.

“We have a stream behind our house,” I say, but truthfully, cranberries would thrive there. The water is shallow and silty and it doesn’t move much. In summer, it is chock full of newts. I don’t know what the newts eat, but they have such tiny mouths, I like to pretend they eat harmful bacteria. Then I don’t worry so much when my children go marching about in the bogwater with little nets and mason jars.

When our aquarium has no resident rodents, my kids like to catch newt larvae and raise them. We thought the first batch were tadpoles, and we kept waiting for them to turn into frogs. They just kept becoming larger, blacker tadpoles, which is pretty much what an adult newt looks like. Newt LARVAE are excellent pets because they dart about and grow bigger legs and change color. Very entertaining. Also because they don’t eat your armchairs (as my dog has done) or tear out the back of your sofa (as my wretched, wretched cats have done).

ADULT newts stop changing (and stop moving, for the most part) and they are not as interesting. But the upside is that when you tire of watching them squat under rocks thinking newtly thoughts of exactly nothing, you can dump them right in the backyard. They have speck-brains and do not register this as betrayal. If you put their rocks from the aquarium out in the bog WITH them, I am not sure they register the move at all.

That first summer, as I said, we were all eaten up with pink mosquito chew-spots made pinker with dots of calamine lotion. So I gave my husband a bat house for Christmas, and he went out to the bog with my son and they stuck it up on a pole. Our next door neighbors put one up, too, and now we have bats, and we haven’t had a mosquito problem since.

My little bats are the darling rat-faced harbingers of warm weather. I like to see their black spastic flutterings against the navy backdrop of the night sky here in Georgia. We have a lot of red tail hawks here, too, several that roost in the woods around us, and watching them fly is a completely different thing. The hawks are so PROBABLE. Their muscular wings move with such thrust and manly purpose that it is not all surprising to see them become airborne, and then they catch an updraft and angle themselves higher, prepping for a dive. They are sleek and graceful and clearly made specifically to glide exactly as they do. Bats, on the other hand, seem like an accident. They flail and spasm through the air like animated bits of upset Kleenex. It’s cheerful and silly, and best of all, they eat up the mosquitoes.

I like the hawks, too, because they are beautiful and frightening, and they eat most of the little grey field mice BEFORE they get in my house and start creeping about the kitchen licking things with their disease-y, teeny tongues. They are cute, these mice. They are the kind with the round black eyes like beads and the heads that look too big for their bodies, but I suspect them of being SOAKED in Hanta virus, and I prefer to admire their charms in an outdoor location several hundred miles from my boxed cereals.

My worthless cats, fat on Purina One, are perfectly willing to let as many mice as can squirm in run about INFECTING surfaces. The cats are too busy for micing. My sofa is not going demolish ITSELF, now is it? They can’t be troubled to eviscerate mice and leave the choicest bits on my pillow like NORMAL cats do. SO I rely on the hawks, and we’ve seen maybe four mice inside in the four years we have lived here. The cats watched with bored eyes as I caught each mouse in a Tupperware. Then I marched them so far down the Silver Comet trail to release them that they are probably STILL making their way back, all their belongings in hobo-bundles on sticks, toted over their displaced, over-anthropomorphized shoulders.

We have foxes, too, the red ones. Last spring my neighbor kept seeing the same one, up on her porch eating the dog’s kibble, but I hear they eat the troublesome mice as well. Good job, foxes.

I wish that there were things that would reliably eat a few things that are likely to show up on tour when the swing is traveling backward. I need travel newts in my pockets to eat up all the strange bacterium I will be meeting in airports. And SPEAKING of air travel! I also need perfectly enormous half-man half-bat cannibals to hang upside down under the airplane seats and pop up and gobble anyone who sits in front of me that can’t be happy unless they recline their seat all the way back.

And on every tour, you get that stop where…no one comes. The booksellers shoot you pitying glances as you sit gamely at your little table. People rush past you trying desperately to avoid meeting your eyes as if you have a big sign around your neck that says, I HAVE LEPROSY! AND I WANT TO KISS YOU! At that point, I need red tail hawks to swoop down and pick me up and fly me fast out the door and deposit me kindly at the closest bar. If ONLY tour was more like my backyard, chock full of helpful things that eat things. That would be perfect!

Bestselling novelist Joshilyn Jackson lives in Powder Springs, Georgia with her husband, their two kids, a hound dog, four gerbils, a twenty-two pound, one-eyed Main Coon cat named Franz Schubert and a small auxiliary cat named Boggart. She wishes their neighborhood was zoned for goats. Both her SIBA award winning first novel, gods in Alabama, and her Georgia Author of the Year Award winning second novel, Between, Georgia, were chosen as the #1 BookSense picks for the month of their release, making Jackson the first author in BookSense history to have Number 1 picks in consecutive years. Her third novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, releases on March 4th. You can visit her on the web at

http://joshilynjackson.com/