Festival Weekend & New Books for the Shelf

Back from the 2012 Dahlonega Literary Festival down in lovely foothills of Dahlonega, Georgia! Though we (my family and I) were only there for a night and a day, we got a great taste of literary fun in a fabulous small town.



Our hotel room view

The hotel room where we stayed--all three of us--was a bit sparse (one of those where you drive up to your door), but we had everything we needed, and something unexpected: a gorgeous view of the North Georgia mountains.








Her daddy promised her lots of "jumping on the bed" on the ride down.

My 3 year-old adored the king-sized bed, and she and my husband had a giggle-fest building pillow forts and "bear caves" on top.

Bears in the bear cave

The fun she had in the hotel room almost made up for the fact that we all slept in there together, and she was up from 2 - 5 a.m. that night. Which meant, of course, so were we. God bless concealer, and the fact that I'd remembered to bring make-up at all.

Gold Rush Museum

The Festival was held on the beautiful campus of North Georgia College & State University. The buildings seemed so new, fresh and modern. I was especially impressed by the Library Technology Center, where I served on a panel of Appalachian writers during a session called "Appalachia in Fact and Fiction." With enormous windows facing all directions, high-beamed ceilings and wonderful natural light, it's just the sort of study spot I'd gravitate to were I student there.

But I spent most of my time in the Regional/Local Authors area of the Festival, held in the giant first-floor room of the Continuing Education Building. Tables were set up in racetrack style around the room, and organizer Ken Smoke did a great job of helping us authors find the perfect spot and get set up. On advice from my publisher, I brought copies of Keowee Valley to sell, a handy-dandy display of my book cover that I've been toting everywhere lately, postcards, and a huge bowl of candy. I am not above bribery.

I also decorated my little table with a long scarf made in the Crawford tartan. I wanted to give a little shout-out to my main character, Quincy's, Scottish roots.

With author Janie Dempsey Watts

It was my first time running a booth at a festival, selling my own books. And it was definitely a learning experience. My favorite part: meeting other authors, visiting, and just talking about the writing life. I also had a chance to make new author friends, like 2012 Georgia Author of the Year  Ann Hite (Ghost on Black Mountain), Mary E. Kingsley (Angel), YA novelist Akaeda Flame (Champion), and so many more. I also got to "officially" meet other authors and writers I've been connecting with online and over social media, including the fabulous Kimberly Brock (The River Witch) and Alison Law, publisher and editor of Southern Spines.

Add to all that a quick visit from my sister-in-law and favorite niece who drove up from Atlanta, and it was a jam-packed and thoroughly enjoyable couple of days. I left exhausted, but happy, and ready to add so many great books to my to-be-read pile.

Including Ann Hite's Ghost on Black Mountain, which I loved hearing her talk about, and is set up in my neck of the woods. Can't wait to get started!

Writing is often such a solitary pursuit. It's so nice to know there are other folks on the same journey, all struggling with time management, with the juggling act that is work-family-writing, with issues with the publishing industry--and who wouldn't change any of it for the world.

P.S. A couple more shots:

Historical marker on Dahlonega's truly cool Public Square.

And, Marilyn Monroe cowgirl boots, just sittin' in a shop window on that same Public Square. Awesome.

Book Heroin & Writer Lust

I've got a book problem.

I've always had it, but lately it's gotten worse. I am drowning in books.

Over the years--as recently as the Fall--I have made attempts to seek a cure. I've culled my books, my haphazard library. I've donated books to friends, to the county library, to women's and childrens' groups. I became a volunteer for Operation Paperback, and each month I send countless paperbacks overseas to soldiers who desperately need a good story.

None of this has helped my disease. Let me offer proof.

Exhibit A, one of the four bookshelves in my livingroom/kitchen:



This bookshelf just squeaked, "Save me!"

Do not believe my husband when he tells you that I haven't given away enough books. I have. But this is as far as I can go. I won't show you the other seven bookshelves in my house. They're not fit for company.

Some girls dream of shopping sprees at Sephora and Manolo Blahniks. I dream of built-in bookshelves.

Now that I've begun my MFA in Writing, my book problem has gotten worse. Short story collections and essay collections--slim volumes, true--have been added to the stacks. Aimee Bender, Katherine Mansfield, and Jim Harrison have now joined the ranks of William Shakespeare, Diana Gabaldon, Lauren Groff and William Bartram. The books on my shelves speak Cherokee, Gullah, Cockney English, Gaelic and vampire. Yet they get along. I think.

Yesterday, I continued work on a new novel, which opens up a realm of possibilities for research. Okay, fine. A new reason to feed my book problem. Still, the sky has brightened and the seas have parted on a whole new world of topics like the Antebellum women's movement, the cotton industry, and pirates. Ooh, and also horse racing and 19th century politics and riding boots.

I might as well just go ahead and open a vein.

As a result of my book problem, I recently purchased one of the most enjoyable novels I've read in years: A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness. This book, which I gobbled down in about two days last weekend, satisfied all my cravings. It's centered around a
young American historian in Oxford (a hereditary witch determined to ignore her witchy DNA); a gorgeous, bookish vampire-scientist, and an ancient text. This is no teenager's vampire story: The pace of the novel is lightening-fast, the settings gorgeous, the mystery fun, and since Harkness herself is a PhD in history and a research hound, it totally satisfies the egghead in me. I can't wait for the sequel.

Since I read it, I've been suffering from writer lust. Another of my unfortunate "problems." I'm not necessarily jealous of Harkness's success (okay, maybe a smidge). What I lust after is her skill, her power to meld intellect with imagination. This is the sort of story I always long to tell: one that fuses history and research and books and adventure, and, when necessary (and some could argue this is always necessary), love.

And on top of all that, to create a story readers enjoy--full-throttle enjoy, like I did. On a beach, at the lake, on their couches, on a plane. Heads bent over gripped pages or Ipads or Kindles, completely immersed. Reading into the wee hours, though they have jobs and kids and life to take care of the next day.

It also doesn't hurt that as a full-time professor and author, Harkness is engaged in almost exactly the dual career I've been working toward since I was 24. And she's only in her mid-40s.

Did I mention that A Discovery of Witches is her fiction debut? Debut. First novel. And already a bestseller.

Okay, maybe more than a smidge jealous. But it's good-natured jealousy, non-threatening writer lust. Because for all her success and writerly genius, I get to read what she writes. And that's a gift.

So now it's back to my own projects and the story I'm currently trying to tell. In two minutes, it'll be time to wake my daughter, whom I've already let chatter and sing in her crib for far too long. Then my day really begins.

It's a wild, complicated, frustrating, wonderful, exhausting, exhilirating life, choosing to be a writer. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

I also wouldn't trade this for anything:

My daughter, 2 1/2, head in her own book.



Happy Thursday, all!

Books and Old Boyfriends

Next week I'll be getting KEOWEE VALLEY back from my editor at Bell Bridge Books, and my part of the editing process will begin. I can't wait. Literally, I'm itching to start. I picked up the novel two weeks ago, sticky notes and pen in hand, and began rereading for the first time in months. I was Sherlock without the faithful Watson, but on the hunt for content irregularities--like the fact that in one scene I'd given my protagonist a single chair, and in another scene she has two--and other mechanics mistakes: a doubled word, an odd sentence structure. Being an English professor, I'm a stickler for clean copy; it'll kill me if the final version of my novel has a mistake in it.

Breathe, my editor says. Put the manuscript aside for a few days; wait, she says, until you get it back from me. Then work. And after, let it go.

I've tried to back off from my novel, though review copies of it sit in a cardboard box at my feet. Sometimes, especially after a compliment from my publisher, or receiving a thrilling blurb from another writer, I pick up the novel and randomly flip it open, looking for what they see. At times, I catch a glimpse... at others, I see only potential, and I have to physically restrain myself from the primal urge to "make it better."

This is exactly how I used to be about ex-boyfriends.

In my past life, I was one of those people. You know: the person who wants to stay friends with ex-boyfriends. I could never understand how so suddenly I was cut off from this person I'd cared about, how I was supposed to remove him from my life and to forget anything we'd shared. Granted, I was a bit of a commitment-phobe before I met my husband, and so the person doing the "breaking up" was, 99 percent of the time, me. This puts a different spin on things, I know, but hear me out.

It's not just that I wasn't ready to let go of that person--that old love--it was also that I was second-guessing. It started in middle school with a boy I'll call Sam. Sam was a tall, dark, teen-idolish 12 year-old who began his pursuit of me by making fun of the size of my boobs. (I was a tomboy in every sense of the word, and at this point in my girlhood this type of male attention freaked me out and ticked me off. In essence, I'd no idea it meant he liked me.) Sam got better. Eventually he brought me roses. They were gorgeous. Still, I was confused. I liked him--alot. But I didn't know what to make of him.

Eventually, our young love was brought to a screeching halt with a three-way phone call in which I was forced to choose between Sam and my best guy friend, (we'll call him) Bart. My preteen intellect and hormones were flying around like the ball in one of those baseball machines at the arcade--you know the ones, where you stand and work the "bats" with your thumbs, and the little players twist this way and that, and the ball goes banging haphazardly into other plastic players and obstacles, and sometimes drops in the right hole. Mine usually flew completely out of the game into the "you suck at this" gutter. I didn't know what the heck was going on: I just knew that I liked Sam, I also liked Bart, and our little drama fueled the middle school gossip mill for months.

After I chose Bart--a whole other story--I couldn't help but wonder about Sam. I'd see him walk the halls--black-haired and brooding--or flirt with another girl, and I'd agonize over my decision. I still wanted to be friends! I still liked him. But he wouldn't talk to me.

Same thing happened in college, with my first real boyfriend. (We'll skip high school. That's a Sweet Valley High-meets-90210 boondoggle for another post.) We'd dated in high school, ended up at the same university. I liked this guy (we'll call him Alan) so much: he was cute, funny, and he liked the things about me that used to confound other guys. But freshman year, the whole college experience opened up before me like the deep end spreads below an Olympic springboard diver, crystalline, cool and sweet--with nothing to do but leap. And boy, did I leap.

Not long after my full-gainer reverse dive into the undergraduate experience, Alan started squiring about another girl on my hall. And suddenly, Alan--and our fun, heady, coming-of-age romance--began to look better to me than it had the first time. For a while, he responded to my emails, wrote me letters. He still cared about me, he said. After a  mountain weekend in Tennessee wherein a ton of Southern frat boys and amiable girls holed up in a big cabin together with free-flowing kegs, liquor, and music for three days straight (sorry, so sorry, Mom), we ending up kissing again. He kissed another girl the next night. It didn't hurt. But I was done. And yet, years later, I still want to be friends. It's an illness. 

Lastly, my first and only serious boyfriend before my husband--a wonderful guy, truly one of the good ones. This relationship, too, I broke (glad I did, or I wouldn't be married to my husband, but still... I broke it bad). And afterwards, I thought I wanted it back. Him back. I wanted his friendship, and I wanted more. But I wanted it on my terms, and he, I can say without a doubt, did not. He just wanted me. For months I tried to make him see that we could be friends; and, for a while, he came around--great guy that he (still, I'm sure) is--but it was too hard. Zoom in to us tailgating at a Clemson football game, both leaned up against the side of my parents' car, serious, me telling him I wanted to see him AND other people, and him telling me he couldn't and wouldn't. (At stage right are my parents and assorted family friends, trying vainly not to look like they're eavesdropping.)

And though I knew, somewhere deep down in my real self, that he wasn't the one for me and I certainly wasn't the one for him, I balked. I second-guessed. I wasn't ready to let go. 

The problem is, I want it my way, and I want it all. This has not abated since I was a 12 year-old brace-face or a 20 year-old co-ed. But it's my personality. And it ain't pretty.

Years later, I'm still, really, not friends with any of these guys, much as I'd honestly like to be. Two of them are "Facebook" friends. The last, I'm afraid, is gone for good, and any chance at friendship gone with him. That's my fault. And that's okay. 

My job, now, is to look at my novel like I look back at that last relationship I had before meeting my husband: to think on it fondly about once a year, remembering the good moments, and then to bid it adieu, wish it--and whatever comes of it--truly well.

To do this, I think I need balance. In my life, in my work, and at my desk. If I can achieve said balance, my life, my schoolwork, my next novel, and my desk will be better.

But currently, here's the state of my desk:

Would it frighten you to know that I cleaned it last night?

Here's another angle of my desk. My dog is the sprawling black animal on the right. She knows it's a non-preschool day and so we won't be hiking, and she's choosing to ignore me.

Looks all cozy and writerly, right? (In addition to being messy.) It is. Until you factor in the balance-upsetter, the game-changer, the love of my life: my two year-old. Can anyone achieve balance with a two year-old?

That's a ponder for another time. For now, here's what my husband and I got to try to distract the kid so I might find some balance in my writing life: (this is about three feet away from my desk)

Balance? Ba ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha.

Happy Weekend, all!