Folks–it is a scary and wonderful thing to put a book into the world, and every reader who reads this book does me an honor. I’m so grateful to each of you who has chosen to give your attention to The Likely World. I can’t wait to hear what you think. A book is inert until it reacts with its audience. My fondest wish is that a reader somewhere will make something strange and unanticipated with The […]
When I first started writing The Likely World, I thought of it as a ‘speculative memoir.’ There are lots of words that already exist for novels which ghost into non-fiction in interesting ways: roman-a-clef, auto-fiction, and the humble autobiographical novel, but none of these words exactly described what I was trying to do which was to marry the speculative engine—‘what if’—to the creative process of memoir. If you’ve ever tried to write about your own life, you know interesting things […]
There is a moment in reading something terrific where we lock in. One minute, we are people holding books, and the next we are transported. This phenomenon, the forgetting of the self, is what I’m in it for. How does it happen? There’s an idea out there that this particular magic occurs when the prose is tethered to reality. A writer channels her life, and the words gain power. There’s something to this idea. I’m reading now […]
Crazy days, am I right? Right about now, I was supposed to be finalizing travel plans, packing my suitcase and preparing to hit the road for my book tour. Book tours are traditionally one of the big ways an author gets books into readers’ hands, reaching out beyond the circle of friends, and those people who read book reviews. I am thrilled to be partnered with so many great bookstores & organizations to do virtual […]
Writing a novel will make you crazy if you didn’t start out that way. Each day you wake up with it on your shoulders. Occasionally, it slides off and what lands on the page is its own reward. But, in my experience that’s one day in thirty. The rest of the time, you’re carrying a backpack full of rusty salvage and your job is to build a large hadron collider out of it. Because it’s […]
