I'll be doing interviews and promoting The Mermaid's Pendant through Pump Up Your Book Promotion from October 22 to November 21. Stay tuned for more details or subscribe to the RSS Feed at Pump Up Your Books.

I'll be "touring" online in November with TLC Book Tours. I'm very excited to have this opportunity to interact with book reviewers and readers. I'll post the schedule when it's ready.

It’s a hot, torpid July 4^th, but there’s always work to do when it comes to promoting a novel. Not to mention that I haven’t written much on the new work-in-progress. My latest effort is recording myself reading a dramatic chapter from The Mermaid’s Pendant to post to GoodReads, Facebook and YouTube. And my own Web site, of course. Being videotaped ranks right up there with cleaning out the fridge and clipping the cat’s nails (kitty does not like having his nails clipped, thank you), but I won’t make it to many bookstores this year. Besides, this is the brave new world of being an author.

While the video downloads, I’ve been thinking about characters I’ve grown attached to lately on TV. Conflicted male characters to be exact.

It started with Greg House. Maybe it’s my natural admiration of wise-ass middle-aged scruffy men, but I kept finding enough redeeming qualities in House to want to watch the show beyond the medical mysteries facing his team. House had enough softness hidden under his prickly shell that my hope response kicked in (or maybe my subconscious desire to reform bad boys, which I thought I’d outgrown, simply revived from a dormant state). I want House to grow and heal enough to be happy. Is that possible with TV?

Then I moved on to watching Mad Men. This love affair took a little longer to establish. The first three episodes disturbed me more than many so-called horror shows. This time, Don Draper, silver-tongued ad man in a male-dominated early 60s New York, had little to attract me. I stuck with it if only because of the show’s atmosphere and a sick fascination with the culture. Then I had a real shock: Don had a hidden wife in the suburbs. The creepy factor for him rose about 50 notches, though his perfect wife’s calm target practice with the neighbor’s birds rounded the creepiness out nicely so that I no longer felt Don was quite so far gone. I finally understood that this world operated on different rules. A few more secrets revealed, and I realized that Don was a tormented soul with some hard-to-circumscribe boundary lines—for example, he didn’t sleep with any of the gaggle of secretaries at his ad agency—that nevertheless meant he did have some moral code, even if it was sporadically applied to his life. I came to identify a bit with him, with his upbringing and his double identity, and I wanted him to figure out how to hold on to his dreams without screwing them up too much.

Why are these two “complicated” men so compelling? Why doesn’t the angst they suffer overwhelm and repel us? They are both real and magnetic. Other people revolve around them. They make things happen. They’re hard to pin down—they aren’t a “type” and are as likely to disappoint as to inspire us. What we don’t know about them, what we learn adds depth and shading to them. We meet people like House and Don in books too. People we’d like to have a beer with. Or shake until they wise up. Or put an arm around and cry with. I’m always on the lookout for characters like these, and I never know where I’ll meet them. Middle grade, YA, adult—literary, romance, science fiction—I find them all over the place, but no place predictably.

I guess that's what I look for in most of the books I read: people to care about. Adventure and learning and falling in love again are all good things, but I really feel a part of humanity when I connect with someone, even if he's a character.

Last year, I came across this video by author Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creative "genius." I recommend it for anyone interested in creativity, especially writers, or for anyone who wouldn't mind a little insight into what goes through the minds of creative people at times.

I don't remember most of her talk, but I keep returning to the concept of "genius" that she mentions, one that the ancients and Renaissance artists understood and described. In the former connotation of this word, Ms. Gilbert reminds us, "genius" was akin to an external, mischievous spirit (hence the relationship to the word "genii"). In this sense, creativity was an uncontrollable and unpredictable gift that could be both blessing and tormentor. Yet, what a freeing concept! There was no such thing as "writer's block" or "inspiration" as we think of it today -- that is, something to agonize and wrestle with until you get it to do your bidding with the attendant sense of failure when you can't. If your "genius" didn't visit, she didn't visit. Not really your fault. 

Lately, I've been thinking about this concept when considering the plethora of books and accomplished writers that exist in the world. No matter what I write, I'm always going to feel humbled at the literal genius I experience when I read many authors. Humble and grateful that my own "genii" deigns to visit me on occasion, as long as I put out the welcome mat. Snacks are good too. And some music. My "genii" is demanding.

It occurred to me yesterday that I could borrow from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy in thinking about this unpredictable and powerful creature. I'm not comfortable with considering that my soul lives outside my body as they do for the humans in that trilogy (he calls them "daemons"), but I love the idea of having a creative spirit in animal form walking, loping, or flying beside me. I also love the idea of that animal being highly mutable, changing form along with its fickle creative impulses. Yet if I follow the analogy, I suppose my "daemon" has settled into final form even if I don't know what animal it is. 

I rather suspect my "daemon" or "genii" is more like Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus than an animal. Devilishly tricky and likely to leave me in the lurch, laughing the whole time.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been posting challenges to a group that I have on GoodReads. Anyone who posts an answer to the challenge is entered into a giveaway for a signed copy of my novel.

It’s been fun and challenging for me. What do you ask potential readers to contribute besides their names? Something that engages and interests them, of course. And something that I’d like to talk about, too.

One thing that I’m thinking about asking my group is to describe a book that they’ve read and didn’t like but thought merited reading anyway. I try to read well-written books that challenge me in some way, whether in viewpoint or stylistically or in language or plot, so I use the rating system at GoodReads inconsistently—I rate books on liking as well as what I think their literary merits are (and I rate them either on whether I like them, whether I think they have literary merit, or both). I’d really prefer to have a few different rating categories for books, although maybe my skill at distinguishing literary merit should also be rated to be fair to anyone looking at my ratings. After all, I’m certainly not the best read or the most astute reader. And my reviewing vocabulary is rather limited since I didn’t major in literature.

Just today I read a review on GoodReads from a reader who gave The Kite Runner three stars (which means “I liked it”) when she really just found it “okay” by her own admission (two stars is “okay”). However, maybe she had trouble with the limitations of the rating system and that’s why she chose three stars. After all she thought

“[T]he author did a wonderful job writing the book -- but for me -- it was just too too depressing and I can't get into a book where I don't ever like the main character.”

Separating out “liking” from “compelling” in a story helps to make ratings and reviews more useful. If a sensitive reader can admit that a main character didn’t appeal to her but that other readers might connect with that character to the point of liking that would serve a better purpose than opaque star ratings. Then perhaps that same sensitive reader can begin to appreciate that not every great character can be made “likable.” Iago is a tremendously compelling villain (and I would argue that he’s the main character regardless of the play having Othello’s name), but he’s not at all likable.

Should we always read stories that we like or should we sometimes read stories that push our boundaries a bit? One of the best ways that advertising works is actually through negative association because we remember something that annoys or angers us rather than something that is mildly amusing or entertaining. Stories can work that way, too, if they have other necessary elements that are well executed. While I think that it is the author’s job to help readers identify with the main character as far as recognizing that character’s humanity, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to expect stories to just be fictional extensions of ourselves. Stories can act as personal adventures for us, and as such we tend to identify strongly with the main character. But they can also enlarge our understanding of the world and others, and that’s only possible if we’re willing to try to see through someone else’s eyes, even when we don’t like them.

Don’t get me wrong. When I’m tired or stressed, I tend to read stories that aren’t uncomfortable or challenging for me with characters I like and outcomes I want. My children do this, too. The 12-year-old just checked out a very short chapter book suitable for a first grader because she remembered the pleasure it gave her years ago. What would be a problem for me is if she never strained to read a book that a 15-year-old might read, even if she didn’t like it, or attempt to read more adult material that she couldn’t understand.

Instead of writing my next novel, I'm procrastinating by doing something necessary to my career: promoting my debut novel. 

Of course, I knew that this day would come. I've read plenty of blogs from authors who talk about the juggling act that they undertook once they had one book published but needed to work on the next one. This is where the fairy tale I had in my head meets the happily-ever-after of reality. Publishing is a business after all.

I usually try to conjure up an image of Shakespeare, a known astute businessman and the greatest dramatist in the English language. Even if I allow for his undisputed talents, I must admit that he had a lot more to juggle when it came to promoting his work. He also owned part of his acting company and the theaters where his plays were performed -- so he partly ran the business, all while acting in his own plays. 

For Shakespeare, all of these other jobs fed his playwriting. Being an actor really grounded him about what people wanted to see and gave him a feel for the language, pacing, and action that worked. He was really committed to the success of his plays and ended up retiring very well off. 

I haven't figured out yet how my other jobs will feed into my novel writing, though ....

I've been under the weather a lot in the past couple of weeks -- not really sick, but tired and feeling achy and unable to focus on much beyond the basics (with three kids, that seems to be a lot to focus on). I discovered last fall that one way I can deal with a hectic schedule or feeling unwell is to read romance novels. They're like that easily digestible diet parents feed children whose systems can't handle a regular diet: bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast, known as the B.R.A.T. diet. Romance novels, no matter what the twists and turns, soothe me with their hopefulness, their belief in love and the triumph over adversity, and their lack of moral ambiguity. Even their predictability and reading level soothes me. I prefer historical settings and adventure, probably because I like horses and sea travel. Or maybe because of an idealized sense of chivalry.

Yesterday I held my first reading and signing -- an event that I anticipated nervously but it went off splendidly and now I'm beginning to hope that I might actually enjoy these kinds of things! I've read a few other authors' accounts of readings,  mostly complaints at how sparsely attended they are and how many would-be novelists populate the crowd, but only once have I read a story about the people who make time to meet an author and listen to her read her book. There were some truly lovely people at my first reading. People from church, old friends who have supported me for years, newer friends who seem just as fiercely loyal, and the strangers who came by because they support local arts or their favorite bookstore. The lady who drove half an hour to meet me because we're both from Missouri impressed herself on my memory of the event but probably not as much as the father who brought his 8-year-old daughter to meet a novelist because she wants to be a writer when she grows up someday. That one I won't forget because I hadn't anticipated that anyone would think my novel was for children, despite its fairy-tale antecedents. As I signed her copy, I asked the father, "You do know this is an adult novel? I haven't read it to my own children." Here my gaze wandered to my 14 year old.  What I wished I could say was "there is profanity and sex and adult situations." What I also considered saying to the girl was "don't grow up wanting to write books; publishing is so uncertain and who knows who will read books when you're old enough to write them?" But I didn't. I told her to hold onto her dreams and to keep working to achieve them.

There are numerous stories about how mermaids walk on land. One story from the Orkney Islands tells how mermaids disguise themselves as seals when in the sea but that they take off their seal skins on land. In this story, The Mermaid Wife, a fisherman discovers a group of mermaids on a beach. All the mermaids grab their seal skins and dive into the water except for one unlucky mermaid. The fisherman grabs her seal skin and forces her to stay on land and marry him! He hides the skin, but many years later, one of their children finds it and brings it to her. The mermaid, who'd never stopped longing for the sea, immediately races back and puts the skin on, leaving her family behind forever.

A French fairy tale tells the story of Melusine, a freshwater mermaid whose fish tail reappears every Saturday. Melusine keeps this secret from her husband for years, but his curiosity gets the better of him and he spies on her in the bath. She flies into a rage and leaves him and their children.

Notice a theme here? No matter how long or why a mermaid walks on land, the urge to return to the sea remains strong in her.

The most famous story of how a mermaid gets the ability to walk on land is from The Little Mermaid (although Disney changed it significantly). In this story, the mermaid pays for her legs with her beautiful voice. Even so, every time she walks it feels like walking on knives. Worse, she can't stay human indefinitely. If the man she loves falls in love with someone else, she'll die and become sea foam the morning after he gets married. When The Little Mermaid gets the chance to return to the sea by killing him, however, she refuses. Because of this, heaven takes pity on her and makes her a daughter of the air where she can do good deeds and earn a soul.

In my version, the mermaid learns from an old woman that she can appear to walk on land. She can only do this for a few minutes and as long as she's near water. However, when she falls in love with a man, she asks the old woman to help her put off her tail for a chance to spend more time with him. The old woman warns her that the transformation is dangerous, uncertain, and only lasts for the rainy season. If my mermaid consummates her love with him, she can keep her legs.

The Mermaid's Pendant is now available for purchase on Amazon's Kindle!

It's quite exciting knowing that my book is out there for the world to read and, I hope, enjoy.

Morris Bishop's highly readable survey of The Middle Ages condenses a thousand years of history often dismissed for its darkness, violence, and superstition and incorrectly portrayed as an unfortunate chasm between the glory of ancient times and the Renaissance that drew on a renewed interest in the classics. 

Bishop's survey, unlike Asimov's histories, covers the period thematically rather than chronologically. For a span of time that includes the Dark Ages when much of what was written was either lost or barely preserved, this approach works rather well. Ten chapters cover familiar medieval topics such as Knights in Battle, The Noble's Life, An Age of Faith, and The Artists' Legacy. Less familiar topics (to me, anyway) included Towns and Trade, The Life of Labor, and The Life of Thought. 

Perhaps some of the most surprising history of the Middle Ages is the development of capitalism and commerce and the rise of towns, which greatly promoted the common welfare, including the privilege of self-government purchased from money-strapped nobles. Trade guilds are early unions. Towns offered freedom to serfs in exchange for their employment. 

Bishop declares that the Middle Ages ended by bequeathing modern times more than it had received itself, a rather astonishing claim unless the reader allows for his others: that the Middle Ages accomplished much in terms of art, architecture, literature, learning, and wisdom. 

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Caveat: I didn't finish this anthology. However, despite my unstated personal standard of only reviewing books that I've finished, I've decided to make an exception for Van Den Heuvel's haiku collection.

Many of the western haiku in this collection are written more in keeping with the spirit of the Japanese poetry that inspired them than in the form taught traditionally in the West. In my previous reading of the art form, I learned that the Japanese haiku are written using seventeen word sounds which Western poets have adapted as syllables; however, this isn't strictly true. So there is more flexibility in composing haiku than most of us have been taught as schoolchildren. In addition, Japanese haiku are written as a single line, which can aid in painting an image (and perfect for Twitter, as I've found). The key ingredients: an allusion to the seasons and a contrast or comparison between two images, one often based in Nature, the other on humanity.

Knowing this, I found the haiku in Van Den Heuvel's work often beautiful and haunting -- and an ideal collection to dip into for the briefest meditation during busy days.

A friend emailed an article about B. Dalton closing the only bookstore in Laredo, Texas, one of the largest cities in the U.S. at 250,000. Here's my email to him:

Scott responded to this development with "buy books online at Amazon." So we talked about why bookstores are good (for browsing) but for some of us not as important as the library. A large city without a library is a tragedy. And what is a library going to be in the future now that Amazon and the Internet are here? Boston's Cushing Academy apparently has decided to no longer acquire or "service" books; everything will be online. The Cushing decision is mentioned in this article on the future of reading in the Duke Magazine titled "The End of Civilization as We Know It?" Very interesting discussion. I tend to worry as the novelist does. I like to see the physicality of books on shelves and to respect the work of authorship. Collective authorship, as Wikipedia and other initiatives rely upon, has its drawbacks. I also worry about literacy, as defined by the Duke English professor. She sounded cautiously optimistic that "professional readers" will always be necessary, but I asked Scott why professional reading ability and "Internet savvy" have to be mutually exclusive, and I fear that either people will ignorantly make them exclusive by not promoting the type of reading she mentions or callously dismiss the importance of professional reading.

I have a personal stake in this, obviously. While I wait for responses from traditional gatekeepers to publishing (it's been three months since I submitted 50 pages to two literary agents and three weeks since I queried a new set of agents), I ponder the revolution underway in how and what people read and how they choose what they read. The old questions from agents and publishers have been: who is your reader for this novel? where would this novel be shelved? While traditional publishing is still operating, and in my opinion still the best way to succeed as a novelist, I find myself wondering if the chaotic publishing scene is one of opportunity for those who have the wherewithal and the savvy to act (and I don't know whether I have either). Is the digital revolution in reading an opportunity or a demise? Can I publish myself and be read or will I just get lost in the deluge? Will traditional editors even matter to a less-literate reading population that doesn't buy books?

An old grad school friend who recently found me on Facebook (which I joined because novelists are supposed to be social-media literate) confessed to me that he hasn't read more than a few pages, and none "linearly" in years. He buys books (good for those selling books) and dips into them to sample their language, but he doesn't really care about the narrative arc or the totality of the story. This astounds and terrifies me. He's highly literate and cares about language, but he's the reason that cell phone "novels" are being written (they are very popular in Japan). No one wants to spend time on an extended story (see the comment in the Duke article by the Time book reviewer, Lev Grossman, about literary instant gratification).

In the future, I worry that not only will "professional reading" as defined by the Duke professor be a dying art, but that the kind of writing necessary for a novel or even a complex piece of non-fiction will be impossible if the cognitive skills necessary for them are traded for those developed and strengthened by surfing the Net. I fear that we are moving to a world where the diagnosis of ADHD will disappear because the "normal" population will lack the ability to focus on more than a few sentences at a time, making coherent and extended arguments impossible. Then again, maybe the average person has never had much ability to do so and maybe serial and oral storytelling will make a comeback. As I read A Thousand and One Nights, I envision that these short tales are perfect for our modern sensibilities. Yet the overriding framework, the guidance of a master storyteller who creates a meta-story that synthesizes and shapes a narrative, is absent.

After reading a friend's status update on Facebook, I am inspired to try to write a haiku a day for the next year. I love haiku, even if I have been mired down in the overly simplistic 5-7-5 rhyme scheme taught to American elementary school children. I don't have the stamina, skill, or personality to master poetry, but I envision that I just might learn to write haiku that, taken over the course of a year, encapsulate my life in fleeting, vivid imagery. Like poignant snapshots in words, if I'm at all successful. I'm looking forward to this little challenge that I've set myself. Let's see whether a short line of poetry is more than I can manage daily ....

I haven't made much progress on my third novel, but I've written a sizeable chunk. The extensive outline and character biographies I wrote before returning to my first novel made it a lot easier to move to my next project, but I still find it hard to get momentum going this time of year. While I can understand why some novelists never have children, I have new respect for those who can navigate family and work responsibilities, especially if novel writing doesn't pay the bills.

Another reason it's hard to keep going is my bewilderment and worry about the state of publishing. Agents and other publishing professionals advise would-be authors to familiarize themselves with the business as much as they can and I've tracked a few key blogs for months now. I don't think that novels are going away, but everything is so chaotic and up in the air that I can't decide if it's a good time to get into the business or whether the best thing to do is cut bait and run. Tough to swallow after years of working on my novels, but I always knew publishing was a long shot.

I've spent too much time going through my old music collection and sorting through a few newer albums on LaLa to find a few somewhat appropriate songs for An Ordinary Drowning, Grounding Magic, and my latest WIP, Weebles Wobble. It'll be interesting to see whether I can use my own soundtrack to write and revise my books.

Now you can see the latest books that I've read and reviewed on GoodReads without going to my GoodReads page. (And, yes, I am a Twilight mom.) I've also added a photo link to my Facebook page. Even better, I've linked to my shared items on GoogleReader. I'm following several publishing-related (e.g., agents, editors, and marketing people) blogs. These are extremely informative.

Last night I posted to my online critique group a draft of my sequel to An Ordinary Drowning, titled (for now) Grounding Magic. I've now rewritten my original novel Grounded (approximately 180,000 words) into two completely different standalone novels. I estimate that I've generated three quarters of a million words on my literary retelling of The Little Mermaid and its imagined happily ever after.

I plan to begin the next novel, titled Weebles Wobble, in the next few days. I've outlined this novel and written a hundred pages, but of course I've learned a lot in writing Grounding Magic so I think that the outline will change so much as to be invalid. I wish that I'd quit reinventing the wheel!

Well, after six weeks, I finally got word that I'd made into the top 2,000 entries (10,000 were possible, but I don't know if Amazon received that many) based upon my "pitch" (which I took to mean my query sans biographical info). However, I didn't advance to the quarterfinals, which were decided by a different set of judges, Amazon Vine Reviewers, who read the first 5,000 words of my novel.

I've been promised the reviews from the Vine Reviewers, but so far, zilch. I don't know why those reviews wouldn't have come simultaneously with the rejection, if they existed to provide a basis for that rejection.

In reading the Amazon entrants' discussion threads, I've learned that the Vine Reviews aren't necessarily the deciding factor for advancing (scuttlebut has it that some reviewers are rather surprised that excerpts they rated poorly advanced). So it's hard to know how to judge the feedback I'll get.

As anyone who's read my fiction in rough draft can attest, I need a lot of time to polish my writing, so I won't be blathering much.

Monday is the first time I'll be sending out my new pitch, excerpt, and manuscript for An Ordinary Drowning. I'm entering the new-and-improved manuscript into the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) contest. It would be invaluable to my chances of snagging an agent if I could manage to get a Publisher's Weekly review. Or perhaps it would be even more invaluable to me to learn sooner rather than later that my over-wrought, self-important schlock belongs in the recycling bin.