Love for Sale

A new wrinkle in the criticism debate (for an old wrinkle, see my last post, “Criticism Then and Now,” on my “Imagining the Past” blog): according to last Sunday’s New York Times, it’s now possible to buy a favorable book review. Or at least it was, until the operation the Times was profiling folded. But I imagine some other canny entrepreneurs have now stepped into the breach.

The Times article focuses on a now defunct website called GettingBookReviews.com, run by a guy named Todd Rutherford. Rutherford was slaving away at a company that provided services to self-published writers, trying to convince traditional media and blogs to review their books. It was, needless to say, an uphill battle.

Then inspiration struck: why not just write the reviews himself—and, if the author wanted, guarantee that they’d be favorable? Soon Rutherford was raking in $28,000 a month and hiring others to churn out raves.

It’s a brilliantly simple idea. But it’s also a pretty disheartening one. As a reader, I like to think that the “reader reviews” I see on Amazon are reliable, at least in the sense that they’re an actual reader’s honest opinion (no guarantees, of course, that I’ll agree with them). And as a writer, I’m not exactly thrilled to hear that I’m competing against authors who are buying dozens, if not hundreds, of glowing five-star reviews.

Rutherford argues that eventually the situation will correct itself: if “real” readers buy an overhyped book and find it lacking, they’ll eventually post “real” negative reviews, and the truth will out. Or, if the book actually has merit, they’ll post “real” positive reviews. The purchased reviews only serve to draw attention to the book, like any other marketing device.

But there’s a problem with that argument: as Mr. Rutherford himself admits, the manipulability of the system is bound to make readers skeptical of positive reviews. “Where there are 20 positive and one negative,” he told the Times, “I’m going to go with the negative. I’m jaded.”

Great. Suppose an author has a slew of positive reviews, and they’re all genuine? Will anyone believe them? And if they don’t believe them, why would they take a chance on the book and find out for themselves whether it’s good or bad?

Sure, there have always been you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours reviews, even in the most reputable publications. And authors have long recruited friends and relatives to post favorable ratings on Amazon (I plead guilty to that, although I’ve only done it after someone seems to express genuine enthusiasm for the book). But this is a whole different order of magnitude.

It’s another instance of the chaos that computerization and the Internet has inflicted on the publishing industry, or what used to be the publishing industry. To some extent we’ve gotten rid of the cultural gatekeepers. You no longer need a publishing company—you can self-publish for a minimal cost, and e-publish for an even more minimal one. And you don’t need to cajole book reviewers into paying attention to your book. For a few hundred bucks, you can just buy a bunch of five-star encomiums.

Certainly there were injustices under the old system. There were worthy books that never got published, and worthy books that never got reviewed. Now we can let a thousand flowers bloom, and they can all get great reviews. But we won’t be able to tell which ones actually smell good and which ones are stinkers.

I’m not sure where this leaves readers who are searching for a good book. Perhaps they’ll have to rely on recommendations from friends, which many do already. And perhaps they’ll grow so wary of Amazon and other crowd-sourced review options that they’ll head back into the arms of the cultural gatekeepers. Or maybe something new—something both open to unknown writers AND genuinely objective—will arise.

In the meantime, what’s a writer to do? The same old thing many have been doing for years, I guess: keep writing, and try not to think too much about reviews.

Criticism, Then and Now

Some thoughts on criticism of the arts—its value and its pitfalls—inspired by Dwight Garner’s piece in today’s New York Times Magazine

I’ve written criticism, I’ve written books that have been the subject of criticism—mostly positive, thank God, but some negative—and I’m currently working on a novel based on the life of a woman who set herself up as a critic of the fine arts in the early 19th century. So I’ve done some thinking about the subject.

Garner’s main point, as I take it, is that a society without criticism—even harsh criticism—would be “a zombie nation, where wit and disputation go to die.” He acknowledges that criticism can hurt, but basically he advises writers (and it’s specifically book criticism he’s discussing) to suck it up. In lawyers’ terms, writers assume the risk: you put your book out there for the public to react to in whatever way they will, so don’t complain if you get slammed.

He’s right, of course. But I also have some sympathy for the point of view expressed by the writer Dave Eggers in a quotation Garner cites and then disagrees with: basically, don’t criticize what you can’t understand (to borrow a line from Bob Dylan). Writing a book—or making a movie, or a work of visual art, etc.—is a tremendously difficult thing to do, so critics should approach it in a spirit of generosity.

Having been on both ends of criticism, I can attest to the pain that can be inflicted by a scathing review. Not long ago I read an essay by a writer who noted that negative reviews of your book always make more of an impression than positive ones, and I’ve found that to be all too true.

But I’ve also read and seen things that I thought deserved to be panned, and I wouldn’t want to muzzle critics who have sincere reservations about the quality of what they’re reviewing. Of course (and this is one thing Garner doesn’t mention explicitly), it’s actually easier to write a negative review than a positive one, and it usually provides more opportunities for humor. When I was writing reviews fairly regularly, way back in college, I would sometimes find that I thought I’d really enjoyed a book or a play—until I started writing. Then somehow my inner snark would take over. Or perhaps you could say I started exercising my critical faculties. It depends, perhaps, on whether you agree more with Eggers or with Garner.

Either way, it’s particularly risky for critics to let loose when they live in a relatively small community and are likely to come into contact with the objects of their criticism. When I was in college, I swore off reviewing student productions after seeing the actress I’d panned in that day’s paper walking towards me on campus. She didn’t recognize me, of course, but I recognized her. She was with a friend, holding a copy of the paper with my review, and weeping copiously.

The woman I’m currently writing about—Eliza Anderson, who edited the Observer, a magazine published in Baltimore in 1807—also lived in a fairly small community. Actually, Baltimore was the third largest city in the country at the time, but the elite were a pretty insular bunch. Anderson set out to raise the level of culture in Baltimore, which she believed to be sadly lacking, through criticism and satire. She discovered that the objects of her criticism sometimes struck back.

One of her targets was an artist named Francis Guy, whose work is now included in such collections as the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the new Crystal Bridges Art Museum in Arkansas. Guy, who seems to have been largely self-taught, had been a tailor and dyer and still produced, in addition to his landscape paintings, tavern signs and decorative embellishments for furniture. Anderson believed that artists should be viewed as a class distinct from “artisans and mechanics,” and she apparently saw the happily hybrid Francis Guy as a threat to that distinction (he also marketed what he claimed was a miraculous toothache cure). Reviewing an exhibition of his paintings, Anderson observed that Guy had some natural talent, but from want of encouragement reduced to the necessity of making coats and pantaloons, he has not had it in his power to cultivate his talent, nor has he made a single striking step in the art.”

Guy took offense at this and similar remarks by Anderson. Although Anderson protested that she was only trying to bring him the recognition and support he deserved, Guy was not convinced. He published a brief riposte in a local newspaper, which began “What do you think the Observer means, by playing shuttle-cock with my poor name at every full and change of the moon?” He was selling plenty of paintings, he protested, and indeed had to turn down some commissions. In fact, he opined, Anderson had only brought him more business through her “scurrilous and witless opposition.”

Anderson got an even harsher response from a singer and actor named W.H. Webster—but then, her criticism of his performances was pretty vicious. On one occasion, she complained about the “horrible grimaces” he made while singing, which she said produced the general effect “of a man laboring under the operation of a strong emetic.” On another, she remarked that he resembled “a creature in the agonies of convulsion” and treated the audience to “the wretched caricature of an ape.” It was impossible, she said, “to listen to him without disgust.”

Again, Anderson claimed she was only bothering to criticize him because he had talent—talent that was unfortunately undermined, in her view, by his physical contortions. But Webster heard only the criticism. And it’s hard to blame him. Like Guy, he took his revenge in a local paper, claiming that Anderson had sent him a letter offering to praise him in the Observer if he took out a five-dollar subscription—essentially, that is, if he bribed her.

Anderson protested vigorously that she’d sent no such letter, and Webster claimed to have lost it, so there’s no way of knowing the truth (although, as Anderson pointed out, given her previous harsh criticism of Webster, it seems unlikely she would have offered to champion him, even for five dollars).

I suppose the moral of Anderson’s story, if there is one, is that artists are capable of biting the hand that slaps them. Generally speaking, though, the critic has the upper hand, whether it slaps or nourishes: who’s going to believe a disgruntled artist or writer over an ostensibly objective critic?

But even if critics generally have little to fear from those they critique, they might want to consider the maxim that Garner says he was raised on but ultimately rejected: if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all. Especially with the shrinking number of book reviews out there—a phenomenon Garner bemoans—perhaps that valuable space is better spent praising good books than slicing bad ones to shreds. Silence is kinder, and often just as effective in preventing the reading public from committing the mistake of buying a bad book.

Ruby Sparks, Fiction, and Child-Rearing

A propos of my recent post on my “Imagining the Past” blog (“A Real Tear Jerker”), last night I saw a movie that took my point to extraordinary lengths.

The movie is Ruby Sparks, which I found utterly charming. In my post, I wrote about the weirdness of feeling tears streaming down my face while writing the final chapter of my novel (or at least the first draft). How could I be sobbing over characters I had invented myself? How could they have come to seem so real?

In “Ruby Sparks,” Calvin Weir-Fields (a novelist so paralyzed by the acclaim his first early novel received that he’s unable to write another word) not only sheds tears over his fictional creation, he falls in love with her. And then she comes to life. Not in the metaphorical sense I was talking about, but in the flesh. Other people can see, hear, and interact with her. She takes up residence in Calvin’s house.

The movie is, ultimately, about the need to relinquish control over someone if you’re going to have a real relationship. After manipulating Ruby in all sorts of ways (he has her suddenly speaking fluent French, suddenly filled with a yearning need for him, suddenly intensely joyful—all depending on his own needs), Calvin learns to let her be herself.

I’ve certainly had the sensation, as a writer of fiction, of jerking my characters around the way Calvin jerks Ruby. No, I don’t want her to do this, I want her to do that … And presto change-o, suddenly the character does X instead of Y.

But while it’s true that authors manipulate their characters in all sorts of ways, they’re bound by the limits of what those characters demand. If Calvin had actually been writing a novel about Ruby, instead of just adding sentences to a manuscript in a locked drawer, he would have felt more constrained—that is, if he was really the successful novelist that he’s portrayed as being. You can’t just make your character suddenly speak French, or feel needy, or be joyful. Unless there was some reason for her to do those things, a reader would throw aside the novel in frustration. In fiction as in life, you have to let people be true to themselves. Otherwise they won’t ever seem real.

And in life, it’s not just romantic relationships that require us to relinquish control. We also need to, inevitably, with our children —a subject that, to some extent, is a concern of my novel The Mother Daughter Show–and it can be a lot more difficult. There’s a period in parent-child relationships when the parent does need to exercise control, because if they don’t, their children will almost inevitably suffer some pretty grievous injuries. So the difficulty is in making the transition from a relationship where one party is justifiably controlling to one where the parties are, if not equals, then at least fairly autonomous.

Just like Calvin, parents have to learn to let go, to allow themselves to be rebuffed, even to see the object of their deep affection make some mistakes. It isn’t easy to create living, breathing fictional characters—from a strictly biological standpoint, it’s a lot easier to create living, breathing human beings (although the labor pains are sometimes similar). But learning to stand back and acknowledge the independence of those real human beings can be more of a challenge—especially when we don’t have it in our power to ensure a happy ending.

A Real Tear-Jerker

Yesterday I came to the end of the first draft of a novel. And I cried.

You might think I was crying just because I was overcome by the realization that I’d managed to get to the end. After all, this is something I’ve been working on, in one form or another, for the last five years or so (albeit with time off to write another novel in the middle). You might think that, after all the permutations and false starts I’ve been through with this project, they were tears of joy.

But you would be wrong. In fact, I was blubbering like a baby over what I was actually writing—the final scene between my two main characters, who have been sworn enemies throughout the course of the book and are at last discovering that in fact they have some things in common, over which they can bond.

Stated baldly like that, it doesn’t sound like anything that would inspire tears, let alone enough tears to require two tissues (and a trip in search of a whole new tissue box, since I’d been down to the last tissue in the box on my desk). In fact, stated like that, I realize that that’s basically what’s happened at the end of the two other novels I’ve written. And I cried while I was writing those endings too.

But I didn’t expect to cry while writing this one. All along, I’ve been plagued by doubts about this story—or perhaps I should say more doubts than usual—wondering if I’ve been on the right track, questioning whether I shouldn’t just throw in the towel and move on to something else, possibly something that doesn’t involve writing novels. Let’s just say there have been moments of discouragement.

And much of that discouragement has arisen from my doubts about the two main characters: Were they believable? Were they too stereotypical? Were they two-dimensional? Were they just ridiculous? There were times when it seemed that no matter what I did I couldn’t get them to take wing, that I was lugging them around the story like a couple of sacks of potatoes.

But something happened when I was writing the last chapter. Maybe it was just the knowledge that I was on the home stretch, but I couldn’t make myself stop writing, with the result that I finally ended up eating lunch at about 3:30. And the writing did take off, the characters did come alive, so alive that I felt I was right there with them, in a book-filled room in a house at the corner of Hanover and German Streets in Baltimore on a cold January afternoon in 1808—in their heads, inside their skins, feeling all the wrenching emotions that were coursing through them.

This is the mysterious magic of writing, when you sit in front of your computer (or, in the old days, in front of your typewriter or your quill pen or whatever) and with nothing more than your brain and your fingers, you conjure up a whole world that you believe in. Not only are you seeing, smelling, and touching things that aren’t there, you’re feeling emotions that you’ve conjured out of thin air. In a way, it’s a socially acceptable form of insanity.

But it’s also a way of forming connections to people who may be very different from ourselves, and not just because they’re fictional. In the case of the novel I’m working on now, the main characters (one of whom is based on a real person) are ensconced in a world that no longer exists, the world of 200 years ago. In other cases, like that of the contemporary novel I wrote, it may be that their personalities and outlooks on life are just different from my own. But when I write their dialogue and enter into their heads, I feel a direct and gut-level connection to that essential human part of them that exists in me as well. (In fact, come to think of it, it’s more or less what happens to my characters—people viewing each other as alien but coming to realize they actually have something in common—at the ends of each of my novels.)

It isn’t just when you’re writing novels that this weird and magical thing happens. It can happen when you’re reading them too—think about the times reading a novel has made you laugh or (possibly more often) cry. Scientists have actually demonstrated that when you read about things, you’re also experiencing them, in a way. When you read the word “cinnamon,” for example, not only does the part of your brain associated with reading light up, but so does the part of your brain associating with smelling things. And there’s evidence that when we read stories, we’re also using the brain networks that help us navigate real-life interactions. In other words, we think of the characters we’re reading about as though they were real.

You might think you wouldn’t need fiction in order to do that, and maybe sometimes you don’t. After all, why not learn to empathize and deal with people by reading about real people? But it seems to me there’s a barrier inherent in writing about real people that dissolves in the realm of fiction. There’s no way to get inside the skin of someone real—even in a memoir, given that there are all sorts of possibly unconscious defenses and things that get thrown up when we write about ourselves—the way you can with a person who’s a creature of someone’s imagination.

Of course, just because I’ve convinced myself that my characters are real doesn’t mean that I’ll be able to convince anyone else. I’m keenly aware that I have a long way to go, and possibly many drafts, before I end up with a successful novel—if I ever do. But the fact that I’ve at least convinced myself of the reality of my characters gives my some hope that—as the real-life model for one of my minor characters said about himself 200 years ago—“I shall not have labored in vain; I shall not have … often wasted the midnight lamp fruitlessly, nor sacrificed the best worldly prospects for an imaginary good; although deferred, I shall be in the end gratified by a sure reward.”

Fiction and Its Victims

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (a metaphor that is now obsolete, and also perhaps inapt because it assumes that there are people who are reading my blog posts regularly), I’m going to plunge once again into that worried and worrying subject, the relationship between fact and fiction.

This particular foray is prompted by having just come across a piece in the Sunday New York Times of a while back (July 15, to be exact) by the novelist Colm Toibin. In the essay, Toibin talks about remembering his mother walking to work one morning in 1968, wearing a red coat, traversing a number of real streets that he names. But then he crosses a mental street of his own, traveling from (to borrow his metaphor) the solid land of fact to the watery terrain of fiction: he imagines his mother’s thoughts, and he gives her a singing voice—which, he says, she did not have. “The shape of the story requires that she have a singing voice,” he writes; “it is the shape of the story rather than the shape of life that dictates what is added and excised.”

So far, so good: I can relate to this, as a writer. When I was writing my novel The Mother Daughter Show, which was inspired by a real-life experience, I engaged in the process that Toibin is describing, taking real events and real people and adding and subtracting from them according to the needs of my story. In the process, the people in my novel became fully realized, three-dimensional fictional characters—to me, at least. To some readers, they apparently seemed like caricatures or distortions of the real people they knew, or even of themselves.

Toibin more or less acknowledges that these real people have “rights,” as he puts it, “to be left alone, not transformed.” But to him, these rights seem “ludicrous.” He feels, he says, that he has no responsibilities to these people, but only rights of his own—presumably, to write whatever he wants to. And his only responsibility, he maintains, is to “the reader,” someone he may never meet, not to “people I have known and loved.”

Toibin cites other authors who have, in this sense, betrayed people they loved by fictionalizing them: Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, Brian Moore. Mann, for example, “wrote a story suggesting that his wife had had an incestuous relationship with her twin brother.” And yet, Toibin says, no one considered these writers to be bad people. It was only when they put on their writers’ hats that “their soft hearts became stony.”

It’s here that I have to part company with Toibin—and, I suppose, Mann, Beckett, and Moore, assuming they shared his lack of qualms about what they were doing. I do feel a responsibility to those I have known and loved, and I don’t feel that my “rights” as a writer override theirs. I couldn’t write a fictionalized version of someone I was close to, even if in my own head the character I created was a separate being from his or her real-life model. As I’ve learned from my experience with The Mother Daughter Show, that wouldn’t guarantee that anyone else would see the character the same way.

To be honest, while I hoped that people who had some familiarity with the real Mother-Daughter Show in which I participated would view my novel as fiction—and while I thought that the many invented aspects of the book would help to ensure that—I did worry that some people would be offended. If I’d still been a parent at the school where the show took place, knowing that I’d have to continue to interact on a regular basis with individuals who thought I’d caricatured them, I doubt I would have written the novel. And I can’t imagine taking that risk with a friend or a relative. All I can say is that Thomas Mann’s wife must have had superhuman qualities of forbearance; I’m not sure I would have been able to put up with the story he concocted, and I’m a writer myself.

One irony inherent in my own experience is that I left journalism (and, to some extent, essay writing) for fiction largely because I didn’t want to offend or hurt people. When I was writing feature articles, often profiles of people, I found that my subjects would sometimes get upset. It wasn’t that I was distorting the record. It might have been that I was recounting things that others said about my subjects, or that I’d observed, and that they didn’t particularly want to see in print. Or that my perception of who these people were didn’t match their own. In any event, I thought writing fiction would be safer.

But I’ve come to think that when you’re basing your fiction on real people, it’s actually more dangerous. Writers of fiction feel they have the freedom to invent—and rightly so. But the people who think you’re writing about them can easily mistake your inventions for revelations of how you really feel about them. Not to mention that readers with only limited knowledge of a situation (like, say, acquaintances of Thomas Mann’s wife) may have no way of distinguishing what’s true from what’s invented.

In his Times piece, Toibin seems to be saying that he has no choice but to fictionalize events and people from his own life if he’s going to write good fiction: “If I made up a mother and put her in another town, a town I had never seen, I wouldn’t bother working at all. I would turn to drink, or just sit at home, or run for election.” (An interesting choice, that last one.) But this makes no sense to me. I confess I haven’t read any of Toibin’s fiction yet, but one of his books, The Master, is sitting next to my bed. It’s a fictionalization not of Toibin’s own life, but of the life of Henry James. And since it’s received a good deal of critical acclaim, I assume Toibin was successful at imagining all sorts of things he’d never actually seen or experienced.

Having written one historical novel and being in the midst of writing another, I’m also familiar with the process of inventing scenes and characters that have no relationship to my own lived experience—except in the sense that all writing is related to an author’s own experience. You’re always drawing on your thoughts, your emotions, your memories, in creating fiction. But it’s a question of degree. No one has ever gotten mad at me because they thought I put them into my historical novel.

Obviously, I’m not saying that writers need to limit themselves to stories set in the distant past. I can see myself writing another contemporary novel, but if I do I think I’ll depart further from my own experience than I did with The Mother Daughter Show. And I’m not presuming to tell other writers what to do. Who knows how many wonderful novels would never have been written if writers were forced to limit themselves to non-autobiographical material? I’m just saying it’s not for me.

But I do think that if you’re going to write, say, a story that portrays your wife as having an incestuous relationship with her twin brother, the least you can do is feel a little bad about it.

Traveling Books

This evening, on my way to the pizza place around the corner from my house (what a godsend—a place that sells gourmet pizza that you pick up raw and bake at home, albeit for a hefty price), I happened to spot a book on a bench.

Years ago, a neighborhood group raised money to install several attractive cast iron benches on the stretch of Connecticut Avenue just below Chevy Chase Circle, an alluring verdant island with a lovely fountain that unfortunately is inaccessible to pedestrians lacking the suicidal urge to cross three lanes of traffic so chaotic that even drivers hesitate to enter the fray. But I digress.

I hardly ever see anyone actually sitting on one of these cast iron benches, although that presumably was the idea when they were installed (citizens who contributed towards their installation received naming rights, and my favorite resembles an epitaph, with a man’s name, his dates, and the cryptic phrase “I tried”). Basically the benches just sit there looking decorative. Which is why, I suppose, the book caught my eye.

It was a hardback, black in color, with a typed note taped to its front cover. “Traveling Book,” the note said. “I’m not Lost—I’m on a journey.” Further down, this phrase was translated into Spanish, German, French, Italian, and (I think) Dutch. The remainder of the note explained that you could go to Bookcrossing.com and look up a certain ID number to find out where the book had been and “maybe make an entry as to where I’m going!!!” (The book seemed to enjoy referring to itself in the first person, not to mention using exclamation points with the abandon of an adolescent girl.)

Okay, I thought, intent on picking up my pizza before someone else ran off with it (I had placed an order in advance), if it’s still here on my way back, maybe I’ll take it. It was, and I did.

It turned out to be Red Rabbit by Tom Clancy, not a book I’d ever heard of or was likely to read. I don’t have anything against Tom Clancy (supposedly he’s used a friend of mine as the model for one of his characters), but I have a tower of books next to my bed, waiting to be read, and thrillers aren’t really my thing. But the note said, helpfully, “Pick me up, read (or not), and release me!”

Absolved of any obligation to actually read the book, I thought, why not? It was an intriguing idea, this “traveling book,” kind of like a message in a bottle. Tomorrow I’ll be going to an airport, as it happens. What might happen if I left (or “released”) it there, I wondered? Who would pick it up? Where would they take it? Would one of those foreign language renditions of “I’m not lost” actually come in handy?

And where, I wondered, had this book already been? As soon as I got back to the house I logged on to Bookcrossing.com to find out. To my disappointment, I was actually the first person to pick it up. It had been “wild released … somewhere in Maryland, USA” earlier that day, by “donhunt,” a resident of Chevy Chase, MD. Chances are that “somewhere in Maryland” was actually Chevy Chase, MD, which is only a few hundred feet from the bench where I picked it up (the MD-DC border runs through the middle of Chevy Chase Circle). Allowing for a bit of poetic license, it’s possible that “donhunt” actually left the book on the bench where I found it.

I also discovered, while on Bookcrossing.com, that it’s a “social networking site” that’s been around for over 10 years and has as its mission the aim of “connecting people through books.” There are over 1,175,000 “Book Crossers” (of which I’m now one) and over nine million books in circulation.

Book Crossing also describes itself as a “celebration of literature and a place where books get new life.” I suppose this is true if the people who pick them up actually read them, and even more so if they avail themselves of the opportunity to post comments about the book on the website. Even with all the books gathering dust on my night table, I might have been tempted to read some other book (possibly “How to Toilet Train Your Cat,” listed as one of the “recently released” Book Crossing titles—I’d actually settle for a book on how to get your cat to use the litter box). But the book I happened to pick up just didn’t exert that powerful a pull.

Still, it might prove irresistible to the next person to pick it up, possibly someone about to embark on a long plane flight without (horrors!) anything to read, someone who is less averse than I am to schlepping a hardback book on a trip. Whoever it is, I hope they’ll record what happens on Bookcrossing.com.

Say what you will about e-books being the wave of the future—this is one thing you’ll never be able to do with them.

A World Without Power

I’ve just survived the Great DC Power Failure of 2012. Or perhaps I should say of late June and early July 2012, because before the year is out there may well be another.

In my case, the power failure wasn’t caused by the mammoth storm that swept through the area Friday night—or at least, not directly. Our house survived the storm intact—unlike my mother’s assisted living facility nearby, which lost power immediately and, despite being made a high priority, didn’t get it back again until Monday morning.

No, we were among the lucky few who were spared by the capricious hand of nature. But then we were struck by the capricious hand of PEPCO, our much reviled local power company. Two days after the storm, on a cloudless, windless (and boiling hot) Sunday afternoon, our power started maddeningly flickering on and off, causing various appliances to beep and squeak and then go still. At one point I timed the outages, which lasted perhaps 30 seconds each, and they were about five minutes apart. If this had been labor, it would have been time to head to the hospital.

Each time the power went off we held our breath, waiting to see if it would come on again. And then, around 7:30 p.m., what we had been dreading all afternoon came to pass: the power stayed off.

Given the tight-lipped PR policy PEPCO maintains, we’ll probably never know why we and many of our neighbors lost power on Sunday. PEPCO moves, or fails to move, in mysterious ways. But whatever the cause, the loss of power—which for us lasted only a little over 24 hours—served to remind me of the vast differences between the era I live in and the year 1807, which is the year in which my novel-in-progress is set.

Yes—as my daughter kept reminding me when I was moaning about the heat and the inconvenience—people lived for centuries without electricity, and survived. But of course, in 1807, no one expected electricity. Their lives were organized around the lack of it. Ours aren’t.

For example, I had intended to devote the past two days to working on the first draft of my novel. I seem to be on the home stretch, and I feel some urgency about moving as fast as possible towards the end, basically so I can see what I need to go back and rewrite, once I know what the story is and who the characters are.

Back in 1807, all I would have had to do is sit down at a desk, pick up my quill pen, and start writing. But now, my draft and all my notes—including the PDF of an actual magazine from 1807 on which I’m relying for much of my material—were locked away in my computer, inaccessible without electricity. (My daughter, on the other hand, went off to work on Monday morning, at an office with all its modern conveniences still working.)

Plus, it was basically too hot to work. Yes, it got hot back in 1807 too, and needless to say there was no air conditioning to provide relief. And yes, they had to wear more clothing then than we do now—especially the men (the new Empire fashions for women were scandalous but no doubt considerably cooler than what preceded and followed them). But I have to wonder if global warming hasn’t driven up the temperatures quite a bit in the past 200 years. And you don’t miss what you’ve never known. Perhaps if the concept of air conditioning were completely foreign to me, I would have just rolled up my sleeves and gotten on with the task (assuming I could get to my draft and my notes). But it wasn’t, and I couldn’t.

So here I was, surrounded by all the things that usually make life easier and now, rendered useless by the power outage, seemed to be making everything harder. The dirty dishes were in the dishwasher, trapped in mid-cycle. The laundry, which I had been on the verge of sticking into the washing machine, overflowed the hamper. And the food in our refrigerator and freezer was getting inexorably warmer.

Back in 1807, people presumably had to go to the market to buy food pretty much every day. If you were wealthy you might have an ice house on your property, and you could always try salting or brining things to preserve them, but basically you had to eat perishables like meat pretty quickly, especially in the summer. If there were leftovers after a meal, you would eat them for the next meal, because otherwise they’d go to waste.

Some people in DC who lost power started frantically eating whatever was in their refrigerators, on the same principle. I gorged on some peaches that were fast giving themselves over to mold, but I couldn’t quite face opening the refrigerator. So I spent this morning throwing out food. It was painful to send a dozen eggs and an unopened half gallon of milk down the drain. On the other hand, I was amazed at the number of things in my refrigerator that really had no right to be there—odd condiments and exotic salsas, for example, that looked enticing when I bought them, years ago, but somehow never seemed to go with what I was making. Why on earth did I have two bottles of Worcestershire sauce, which I hardly ever use? And why did one of them have an expiration date of 2004?

I went to the supermarket to replace what I’d thrown out, but I was amazed to discover how little I actually needed to buy, and how empty my refrigerator looks now. (And how clean—once I got rid of what was on the shelves, it became apparent that the shelves themselves were in serious need of hygienic attention.) No doubt eventually there will be another accretion of stuff I basically don’t need, which will languish in the fridge at least until the next power outage, but I’m going to try to adhere a little more closely to the 1807 modus vivendi, at least in this respect: only buy what you’re actually going to eat.

And now that my computer is up and working again, I can use it to mentally transport myself back to a world that knew nothing of iPhones and e-readers, a world of quill pens and candlelight. It’s a nice place to visit, but I know I’d have a tough time living there.

Blog Tour Rollout!

Are you ready? The Mother Daughter Show book blog tour begins July 1 and runs through the end of the month, with 14 different stops!

Me, I’m more than ready: I’ve already written the various posts or answered the questions that were put to me by the bloggers. And I’m really impressed that there are readers who are enthusiastic enough to not only devour books but to blog about them regularly as well. The Internet may have killed off any number of print book reviews and even jeopardized the publishing industry as we know it, but the good news is that there are a thousand book blogs blooming out there.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the world of book blogs, here’s a brief and totally unscientific overview, based mostly on the 14 blogs that are hosting me.

Some of the blogs focus on a particular aspect of writing. My first stop, on July 1, is The Character Connection, which “explores the motivation and likability of characters”—a subject I’ve often thought about, since my agent told me I needed to do some rewriting because my main character wasn’t likable enough. The prompt I got from that blog was to write about how I develop my characters.

On July 13, I’ll be visiting a blog that focuses on plot—appropriately titled The Plot Thickens. For that one, I wrote a post on how I develop a plot—another thing I’ve given some thought to, since my agent also urged me to do extensive rewriting because I didn’t have enough of a plot. (A theme is beginning to emerge here!)

Another blog, City Girl Who Loves to Read, where I’ll be on July 31, asked me to write about how I develop a setting—one question my agent didn’t raise with me, but which I found pretty interesting to write about, since the settings of my two novels are vastly different (one is set in the 1790s, the other in 2009). Literary R&R (July 20) focused on voice—specifically how I captured the voices of the teenage daughters in the book.

Then there were the bloggers who tailored their questions to the themes of my book. Mom in Love with Fiction, where I’ll be visiting on July 7, asked me to write about “how moms have to learn to model behavior versus just telling their daughters how they should behave.” Kimba the Caffeinated Book Reviewer (July 10) wanted to know about “connecting with your teen through books and music.” Crazed Mind (July 11) was curious about what topics I’d recommend for her and her college-age daughter to discuss if they both read the book (I hope they will!). Christie’s Book Reviews (July 9) wanted to know what would happen if Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Laura Bush were the mothers in my book—a scenario I confess I had never considered.

A couple of the blogs focused on the genre of satire. Novel d’Tales (July 19) asked, “Writing humor/satire: when is it too much?” The Book Connection (July 17), in a more neutral vein, asked me to address “the fun and challenges of writing satire.”

Lastly, there were the blogs that posed a list of questions—fortunately, questions I could pick and choose from. Most of the questions didn’t seem to be keyed to my book, and I suspect all authors get pretty much the same list. Some of them were specifically focused on writing (The Wormhole, July 23—“When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?”), and others were not (I Am a Reader, Not a Writer, July 16—“Skittles or M&Ms?”).

All in all, it was quite a workout, but not an unpleasant one. I actually had a couple of new insights about the writing process, and I think I managed to say at least a few things about The Mother Daughter Show that I hadn’t said before.

I hereby invite all readers to check in at as many of my blog tour stops as you can—and leave me a comment or question if you’re so moved. Click here for a link to get the entire schedule of the tour, along with links to the various blogs. And thanks to all the bloggers who are hosting me!

 

Blog Slog

I’m going to be on blog hiatus for a while. That is, I’m going to be writing for other people’s blogs instead of my own. This is what’s known as a “blog tour.”

When I started telling people that The Mother Daughter Show was going to be published, they often asked if I was going on a book tour. The short answer to that is “no.” Very few authors go on book tours. The ones who do go have major publishers, and even most of those authors don’t get sent out on the road.

Book tours are expensive, for one thing, and small publishers like mine don’t have the resources to send their authors around the country. And, glamorous as it may sound, I’ve read enough complaints from authors to understand that a book tour can actually be pretty hellish. Not only do you have to fly around the country, reorienting yourself and giving the same spiel over and over, but sometimes you get to a book store and find that the audience is pretty sparse. You might even find that the only audience members are employees of the book store—I seem to recall having read that anecdote more than once.

But what has taken the place of the book tour—for many authors with lower profiles than, say, John Grisham—is the virtual book tour. (Come to think of it, John Grisham is so high profile that he probably opts to skip the book tour, because he can sell just as many books without it.)

Here’s how it works: there are untold numbers of blogs out there, many of them focusing on books. These hard-working bloggers, bless their hearts, are often happy to have someone else do the blogging for a change. And so they “host” guest authors, who write guest blog posts or just answer some questions posed by the host. On the day that the author “visits” the blog, readers can post comments, and the author can respond.

Obviously, this is a lot less expensive than a book tour, and potentially less humiliating as well. It may be disappointing if no one posts any comments the day you’re guest blogging, but it’s a lot less painful than standing before a podium and seeing only two or three faces in the audience.

Still, it’s a fair amount of work—especially if you’re booked into 14 different blogs, as I am. And while some of the suggested topics and questions are thought-provoking, others are … well, not exactly what you would have come up with yourself. But you sometimes get off-the-wall questions during real book tours too. The challenge is to take the question and figure out how to manipulate it so you end up talking about something you actually want to talk about. (One way to learn to do this is by listening to politicians—lucky for me this is an election year!)

All of this is by way of saying that since I have to write 14 blog posts for other people’s blogs, I’m not going to have the time or energy to write anything for my own blog for the next few weeks. But I’ll be back eventually.

Meanwhile, you can take a look at my blog tour schedule by clicking here. It doesn’t start until July, but keep it in mind. I’d love to hear from you while I’m on “tour.”

Thanks, Mom

Knowing that Mother’s Day is just around the corner—and bearing in mind the fact that I published a novel about mother-daughter relationships not long ago—I thought it would be appropriate to say a few words about my mother.

How do you say just a few words about the person who gave you life, who sacrificed her sleep to soothe your infant tears, who nursed you through your childhood illnesses, who beamed proudly at your adolescent successes? Well, you choose your words carefully.

I suppose each of us could say we wouldn’t be here without our mothers, but in my case that’s particularly true. My father was adamantly opposed, on principle, to the very idea of having children. His view was that this was a terrible world, and it was immoral to bring more human beings into it. When he and my mother (who was, of course, not yet my mother) were first getting to know each other, and my mother casually mentioned that she planned on having children someday, his response was, “And I thought you were an intelligent woman!”

My mother married him nonetheless, and remained intent on having children. So intent, in fact, that she threatened to leave my father unless he at least temporarily relaxed his opposition to human procreation. Eventually he agreed, and so I came into the world (at which point, I might add, my father did a 180-degree turnaround on the wisdom of having babies, at least in my case).

I recently reminded my mother of all this when she began to thank me effusively, as she often does, for some trivial task I had performed for her—going through her junk mail, perhaps, or taking her to a dentist appointment. As I keep telling her, what I’m doing for her these days is nothing compared to what she once did for me.

She didn’t stop at insisting that I be conceived. She threw herself into my upbringing with a vengeance. (My father’s original policy on procreation was reinstated after my birth, so I remained an only child and the sole object of maternal attention.) I don’t remember much of my early childhood, of course, but to hear my mother describe it I was a tiny genius and a paragon of infant behavior (aside from my chronic distaste for sleep). I have a feeling this reflects more on my mother’s enthusiasm for me than on any actual qualities I displayed.

One thing I do remember is how my mother taught me to read. Convinced that I was a prodigy, she saw no reason to delay my initiation into the world of letters until I started first grade, as was the norm. (In the 1950’s preschool basically consisted of playing with blocks and Play-Doh, with little or none of the reading readiness curriculum that’s deployed on four-year-olds nowadays.)

Like many young children, I loved to make up stories. My mother seized on this as a way to get me to read. An adept stenographer, she would take down the stories in shorthand as I spun them out—making me perhaps the only four-year-old in history to give dictation. Then she would type them up and hand them back to me, knowing that, with the natural egotism of a child, I would be thrilled to see them in print and desperate to read them.

It’s possible I would have become an early reader anyway, since reading was the primary recreational activity in my family. I grew up in apartments where the walls were lined with books and just about every surface was piled with newspapers and magazines. We would eat dinner behind separate barriers of reading material (we had bookstands specially bought for this purpose), occasionally punctuating the meal with remarks about something thought-provoking we’d just come across. None of us ever left the house without a book or at least a few New Yorkers—something to get us through a long bus ride, or even a surprise eight-hour stint in a stuck elevator. You never know.

But if my mother didn’t single-handedly turn me into a reader, she may well have helped turn me into a writer. It took me a while to get back to the point where I was at the age of four, uninhibitedly making up stories. And it turns out that writing a novel is a lot more complicated and time-consuming than dictating fables off the top of my head. But it was my mother’s rapid-fire stenography—those mysterious chicken scratches, an alphabet I never mastered—and her devoted typing that first gave me the idea that the stuff I made up could be of interest to others, and that it could be immortalized on paper.

So thanks, Mom, for giving me the first of what would turn out to be many thrills at seeing my own words in print. Not to mention for being the most enthusiastic audience any writer could ever hope for.