Love to have your feedback on this cover. I actually have full and total cover design approval. So let me know what you think.

Tomorrow there is a solar eclipse, visible for many of us in the US, especially in the west. In Montana we’re only getting a 71% eclipse according to the local astronomers. (Did you know there are NASA/Jet Propulsion Lab solar system ambassadors in your state? Me neither.) At any rate the message is clear: don’t look at the sun to see the eclipse.

Lunar eclipse, Dec. 2010

Remember the recent lunar eclipse? That was okay, just the moon. But this is a big hot star that can fry your retina.

You knew that. Even though they’re making a big deal out of this solar eclipse, that it won’t come this way again for eighteen years, you and I have seen plenty. Maybe partials, right, but we’ve seen ‘em. The last one I saw with my kids was memorable. We were on a train between Edinburgh, Scotland, and London. The year, I believe, was 1999, the last year my older son went on a family trip like that with us. He was in college by then and had *stuff going on.* But the younger one was 16 and still game. We had already seen the beginning of the Edinburgh Festival, scores of kilts and bagpipes and even a blue-painted warrior like Mel Gibson, examined Scotland’s crown jewels and its exotic weapons, froze our asses off in the top of a double decker tour bus, and seen Gumboots at the Fringe Festival. Now we were retiring back to London to finish out our trip. But this travel day was blessed with a solar eclipse and the 16-year-old found himself two sheets of paper or cardboard or something, poked a pinhole in the front one and watched the eclipse while shooting along the tracks to the Big Smoke.

We had done this before, in the neighborhood, when he was in elementary school. I think I made a box that time for all the kids to  use. It’s easy enough. The two sides of the box make the two planes, put a pin hole in the front one and point it at the sun. The shadow on the back wall should have a bite out of it. That’s the moon covering the sun. My dad taught me to do that when I was a kid. His dad probably taught him. It’s not rocket science but it’s pretty cool. Here’s a video on how to build a pin hole viewer.

If you miss this solar eclipse, well, it’s not the end of the world. (You knew I was going to say that.) There will be another one, another pin hole, another chance to sear your eyeballs. Just keep the earth, your little patch, your air and water, clean and growing and unpolluted, and we’ll all have a chance to ride this rock around the sun for awhile yet.

Not that I am *particularly* elderly — yet. But this year I turned a significant leaf in the calendar. I spend a little time each day razzing myself for thinking “old thoughts.” Yesterday I watched the movie Water for Elephants and really loved it right up until the last scene where the old man (the main character Jacob as played by Robert Pattinson when he’s young) is telling the young circus man that his elephant died, his wife died, his kids moved away. I wish they’d ended the movie showing him in hip boots and a whip leading the lions around the ring instead of that. It was a total bummer for us oldies.

It fascinates me how the mind attaches to little things like this. What deep resonant chord did that touch? Death, and the short unpredictable nature of life, informs much of the fiction I write and read. One of the memorable moments in my childhood is the day I realized what death was. We had been doing air raid drills in our elementary school, hiding in the hallways and huddled in the girl’s shower room. It was frightening, but not as much as the idea that someday I would not “be.” I remember standing by the window in my bedroom, the one with the owl-and-the-pussycat curtains, and thinking these deeply terrifying thoughts.

Many books deal with the more joyous days of youth, including my own. My next book, now titled “All Your Pretty Dreams,” is about two twenty-somethings. One of my beta readers said it should appeal to the Young Adult reader. (I guess now 20 is YA.) Our book club however (which does consist of more than a few retired ladies) is reading “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.” Definitely a book about getting older, but funny and sweet in that particularly English way. An 80-year-old in the club recommended it. Even though the Major is only 68 he is a fuddy-duddy and made to feel put out to pasture.

Is aging harder for men than women? I always thought women had it worse when they lose their looks. Men look “distinguished” even without a shred of hair. But I think men have it just as hard. Life moves on, young people take your place. You’re not that amazing young buck anymore. Getting older isn’t for sissies.

My mother is working on 89 years and my father lived to 83 so with any luck I have at least 25 years to go! That’s a lot of books to write, even at my super slow pace. I better get busy. As Flannery O’Connor said: “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” Maybe I’ll write a book about a little girl and air raids… Nah.

Henry Miller’s WRITING COMMANDMENTS

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to ‘Black Spring.’
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

it all the more enjoyable on the highway.

I have to visit my kids on the west coast in the springtime, and my mom. So off we went to LA to see our older son, his wife, and adorable baby. The weather in LA was almost the same as in Montana (60s), but we persevered thanks to a divine welcome lunch of grilled shrimp, avocado, and papaya at the restaurant next door to the hotel, The Ivy at the Shore. Besides the usual grinning baby photos I took this one of a barking baby elephant seal on the beach in Santa Monica. I call this one “Talk to the hand.”

On another beach, thousands of miles north, another barking animal. Bentley Montana the blue heeler is learning to behave at the dog park and the beach and all over Seattle. Here he is with my younger son. Having a puppy is a lot of work, responsibility, and training time but Bentley is a smartie and lots of fun. Seattlites were a little giddy because of two sunny days together — on a weekend! Look at the blue sky.

So I got a new car. I was itching for a new one after ten years in the old (but still very serviceable ) one but fate conspired to make it imperative. This (fire/explosion) happened to my husband’s beloved VW Vanagon Syncro Westfalia about a month ago, on the side of I-90 near Butte. He’d just had a new exhaust system and muffler installed. We’re pretty bummed about the Vanagon which we bought new in 1990 (from good old Teton Motors in Jackson, WY) and had tons of family adventures in before it morphed into a winter project vehicle/ski locker. My husband however is happy to find a new hobby! Sort of confirmed that a person should always have comprehensive auto insurance. Ka-boom.

Home again and working on books. Still polishing up PLAN X, the Shakespearean thriller, although travel and taxes have taken their toll on my time (and my desk- ack!) Working on putting out a novel this summer now titled “All the Pretty Dreams,” which is my take on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” More romancey than mystery, more young adult than mature adult. So much for “branding.” I sort of hate that word in publishing and writing anyway, after the first time I heard an author say he was continuing his series because that was “the product” he had to sell. I guess that’s business.

Reblogged from LB's BLOG:

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In 1976 I began a monthly instructional column on fiction writing for Writers Digest, and kept at it for fourteen years. Two books, Telling Lies for Fun & Profit and Spider, Spin Me a Web, grew out of that job, and they’re both still in print many years and editions later.

But it wasn’t until last year that I gathered up my later WD columns and made two Open Road eBooks out of them.

Read more… 2,596 more words

Twenty-five years ago I read Lawrence Block's column in Writer's Digest. Twenty years (or so) ago I told him at a convention how much they had meant to me as I was starting out. What a thrill, until, crouched down beside his chair, I almost fell on top of him. :-) Still, he is a great mentor to all of us mystery buffs, and such an lovely, approachable man and conversational teacher. Check out his blog, and his writing, of course.

First off, I see it’s almost a historical novel by now. I must have written in about 1997. Phone booths, tape players, and Madonna — oh my! Should I leave them in for “period detail” or edit them out? I think they have to go. So the work begins. And that’s just the superficial stuff, not the meat of the story, the writing itself, the various threads and subplots that all have to work together. 

Interesting going through a novel I wrote so long ago. What was I thinking about then? Where was my head? Lots of politics in this novel which means I might have written (or at least started) it in a big election year, maybe 1996. I know that when I wrote Sweet and Lowdown, set in 1940 and involving Wendell Willkie and FDR in a fight for an unprecedented third term in office, I felt the repercussions around me daily. That was the year 2000. Now that was a political year, one that almost didn’t end before the calendar year. 

I actually couldn’t remember what the story was about. Of course I skipped to the end and it all came flooding back. Family secrets — still one of my favorite themes. Who are we? A tangled mass of genetic material? The product of a weird family? The product of a loving family? An iconoclast striking out for individual freedom? A lost soul looking for connection? One of the joys of re-reading my own work — that few have clapped eyes on besides me — is the ability to massage those themes, to focus and tighten them, to edit out the crap (as usual.) 

Will Night Fever make the cut? I don’t know yet. But I’m glad I copied it off my old PC and got it back in my mental circulation. Anybody who tells you editing something you wrote is harder than the first draft is lying. Slash and burn, here we come.

Reblogged from Thalia Press Authors Co-Op Blog:

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by J.D. Rhoades

Pseudonyms, pen names, noms de plume–whatever you choose to call them, they’re everywhere in the literary world. Lee Child‘s real name, for example, isn’t Lee Child, although that’s what he answers to.

Ed McBain, author of the archetypal police procedural with the 87th Precinct series, was a pseudonym used by “serious” author Evan Hunter, who was actually…

Read more… 950 more words

Would you use a pseudonym? Many have but times they are a'changing.

Reading stories, for you, for your preschooler. Make a better human! http://ow.ly/9JelJ