I was surfing through some of the blogs on WordPress and came across this interesting post … and as a cat lover, I feel compelled to share my find: Paws, Pee, and Mice: Cats Among Medieval Manuscripts. (And it is related to writing.) Enjoy!
Author: Marie A Bailey
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Spoiler Alert! I am a huge fan of Louise Penny, author of the Inspector Gamache series and in the following post, I talk about her most recent novel. If you have not yet read it, then you may not want to read my post since I give too much away. This is an abridged letter I wrote to Ms. Penny after finishing A Beautiful Mystery.
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Dear Ms. Penny,
I have loved your Inspector Gamache series since first listening to Still Life from Audible.com two-and-a-half years ago. You are a master at blending the standard structure of a mystery with the philosophical underpinnings of a literary novel. I deeply admire your skill in character development as well as plot formation. Since I listen to your novels, I’ve been able to “whip” through them while driving to work or knitting or taking walks. I’ve just finished A Beautiful Mystery and now I have that long wait ahead of me until the next novel.
I am writing to you after some careful reflection and a long talk with one of my closest friends, who is also a great fan of yours. I found A Beautiful Mystery troubling in a few ways that I want to share with you. It’s a testament to your writing that Inspector Gamache and Beauvoir have gotten under my skin to the point where I felt strongly affected by this last novel.
I was devastated by Beauvoir’s decision to leave with the Superintendent. His agony, his self-destructiveness was nearly unbearable. I had grown so fond of Beauvoir and was thrilled at the beginning of the novel to find that he and Annie were in love. I can understand that his injuries (both physical and emotional) from the raid would leave him vulnerable to the Superintendent’s manipulations, but was it inevitable that he would leave with him? I want to beg you to tell me that he will be all right in the next novel, that he will be redeemed, that all will be resolved and then all would be right in the world, but I know you can’t tell me that, whether or not you already know his fate.
Maybe my reaction to Beauvoir’s breakdown says more about me than the novel, but I do feel so “invested” in this series. Not financially, but up until now, the novels have been an escape for me. Yes, terrible things happen, like murder, like Clara throwing Peter out, like Ruth having to give up her duck, but the murders are resolved, Clara probably needs some time away from Peter anyway, and Ruth showed she was capable of nurturing and loving by caring for the duck.
And the murders were central to the stories as well, whereas, in A Beautiful Mystery, the murder became incidental, almost unnecessary except as a vehicle for putting Gamache and Beauvoir in a closed environment where they had no choice but to face their demons in the form of the Superintendent. By the time the murder was solved, I really didn’t care any more. I would have preferred that Gamache and Beauvoir had left together, leaving the murder for the Superintendent to investigate. The murder just didn’t matter to me once Beauvoir started falling apart.
The cliff-hanger ending also left me feeling distressed. That probably sounds funny, and I do feel a bit embarrassed to admit it. Really, this is just a novel, but the characters are so true to life. Gamache is not perfect; if he was, he would have been more forthcoming with Beauvoir, addressed his anxieties instead of just ordering him about as if the raid had never happened. He is partly to blame for Beauvoir’s breakdown and it makes sense that he is.
I guess I’m really writing this because I want to understand why you chose to end the novel the way you did. I don’t think you needed a cliff-hanger. This was your 8th novel and you are such a celebrated writer that surely you know that your next novel will be a bestseller as well. Really, if Beauvoir had regained his senses and chosen to stay with Gamache, I would still be eagerly awaiting novel #9. I would just have a more happy anticipation. As it is, I’m worried, even scared, that we will lose Beauvoir entirely to the “dark side.” So I await novel #9 with some trepidation, now that I know I care (too) deeply about these characters that you have painted with such skill and love.
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If you’ve read this far and have your own thoughts on A Beautiful Mystery, please share them. I am eagerly awaiting How the Light Gets In (due to be published in August of this year), but part of me also dreads it. What does it mean when a writer, as a reader, can’t handle things going bad?
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After a 3 years’ absence, I’ve decided to re-enter the blogosphere but with a different purpose. I simply want to write, and I’m tired of writing in my head. Initially, this blog was to be a resource to me and anyone who happened by, a writing resource with links to websites and other blogs devoted to the art and science of writing. I wanted to be useful. I didn’t want to write about Me. I didn’t think anyone would be interested in Me. But recently I finished reading Quiet by Susan Cain and now that I have a better understanding of myself (shy, sensitive introvert that I am), I want to make the jump from thinking nobody would care to I don’t care if nobody would care … about Me. I want to write.
Writing used to be a way to hide from a world that frightened and confused me. I was very introverted as a child, no doubt in part because I needed but didn’t get glasses until I was 10. Everything scared me. Life scared me. And yet there were times when I could act outgoing, although I don’t think anyone much liked me when I was like that. I was very emotional, would cry if anyone looked at me the wrong way, and crying wasn’t something tolerated very well in my home. It was a sign of weakness. Which meant I cried a lot.
I wrote trying to imagine having some control over my life, wanting to believe I had a better relationship with my family than I did. Wanting to believe that at the end of the day, they loved me. As a young adult living away from home, I wrote in journals, trying to decipher the world around me. I had moved to a place radically different from the one I grew up in. I embraced “sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll” and spent too many years making a mess of myself. And writing very little.
I went back to school, took writing classes, tried using my writing as I had in the past, to work through and survive both physical and emotional trauma. What I always lacked was confidence. I never wrote with any real confidence in my writing. When anyone did try to support me (most often, a teacher), I almost literally ran the other way. I don’t know what I was afraid of: most likely, failure, but what kind of failure? I grew up feeling like a fraud, and I still harbor some of that today. I’m afraid I will disappoint. I disappoint myself every day, but I’m used to it. I hate disappointing others. And without confidence in myself, I couldn’t very well use the support given to me. Only a fraud would do that.
So now, decades later, I have very little to show for my writing. I’m way past the halfway mark of my life, and I do have many regrets, not the least of which is I didn’t write more. I might have had a different story if the internet had been around when I was young and isolated. Although there is a lot of crap out there, I’ve come across writers that I never would have known if it wasn’t for the internet. They are not all published writers, but they write. They seize the opportunities that the internet provides. I think some of them might even be shy, sensitive introverts like myself.
I have regrets and some of those regrets I can do nothing about. But the regret that I didn’t write more … I don’t have to die with that regret. That one I can change.
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Well, now I understand why there are so few new authors in bookstores. See NY times article about James Patterson, Inc. http://ow.ly/ZV6v
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Despite the disparaging of e-books as cold, hard, unfriendly sources of reading, traditional publishers apparently think there’s money to be made through publishing in “electronic book publishing formats.” The authors may be long-dead, but their publishers are in a tussle with their estates over who owns whose rights. In the case of William Styron’s books, Random House expects to “continue to publish the Styron books we own in all formats, including e-books.” (Click here for the full story.) Hmmm … the Styron books they own? OK, I understand that traditional publishers invest capital and even some sweat equity in an author’s work, but just who wrote Styron’s books? Could they maybe express it differently … say, they expect to publish to the books that they bought rights to? I know I probably sound like I’m splitting hairs, but wouldn’t any author wince to hear a publisher say that he “owns” the author’s books?
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In a recent post, Fiona Robyn mused, “Most of the time being a writer is about looking out at the frosted grass, and sipping earl grey, and not writing.” Sometimes I think I do my best writing when I’m knitting or crocheting or sewing, when my hands are occupied with something other than typing. Even playing mindless computer games sometimes brings forth the crucial bit of action to move my story or novel forward (if I can ever pull myself away from the mindless computer game). I grew up with the notion that a “true” writer is constantly writing, at least scribbling in a notebook at every free moment. A “true” writer cannot do anything but write, write, write.
I wonder. Part of what drives me to write is the joy of creation, much the same joy that I feel when I knit, crochet, sew (but not when I play mindless computer games). Writing is like piecing together a quilt, or watching a deceptively simple looking pattern unfold from an eye-crossing knitting schematic. Unfortunately, I cannot wear my writing (except on my sleeve) like I can wear the scarves, shawls, sweaters I create. I can’t even use my writing to cover my bed like I would a quilt (well, technically I could, but it wouldn’t be as warm and cozy). If I were a full-time writer, or even a full-time knitter, crocheter, sewer, this would not be too much of a problem. But I am a writer with a day job, something that has nothing to do with writing novels or stories, or knitting up scarves and shawls, or piecing quilts. Time is finite and I want to do it all — the whole creative process that, for me, starts with the hands (knitting, crocheting, sewing, typing, hand writing) and continues through the mind. However and whenever the words make it to the page, I am a writer. It’s not the frequency of my writing. It’s just the fact that I do write.
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I am slowly … ever so slowly … getting back into writing. I’ve been on a self-enforced hiatus for the last several months, where I allowed myself to be suck up into a lifestyle that I wasn’t enjoying a whole lot because it left virtually no time (or energy, which is more important) for writing. I’m writing this post with a bit of trepidation … am I really ready to take up my blog again? Or am I just going to make one lame post and then disappear from the blogosphere for an undetermined length of time?
Well, I’m here now, and I think that’s all that really counts … And it’s not like I’ve been totally unproductive. During my hiatus, I’ve had the pleasure of coming across a delightful blog called Dollar Bin Horror. It’s a fun blog by “Rhonny Reaper” (not entirely her real name, of course) where she writes about finding great horror films for cheap and also interviews horror writers. Yes, one of my (many) guilty pleasures is horror films, especially the old classics with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and Roger Corman films. Check out Dollar Bin Horror and see why I’ve been smittened.
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The Saturday Evening Post has “revamped” and is looking for new fiction. With the dwindling newspaper and magazine market, this is a bold effort by the Post. Hopefully, readers will be rewarded by good, fresh writing. Click here for the Post’s submission guidelines. My thanks to fellow blogger, Georganna Hancock of A Writer’s Edge, for tweeting this truly news-worthy info. This is great news for someone who has fond memories of reading the Post when she was much much younger than she is today :-)
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Another website has opened up, to give self-published authors more visibility: IndieReader.com. Read the article here in the Christian Science Monitor. IndieReader.com describes itself as being “For self-published and print-on-demand books and the readers who love them.” Founder Amy Holman Edelman proposes to do for self-published books what Sundance has done for independent films. For an annual fee of $149, IndieReader.com will “promote, market and sell your book” on its website, if they deem your book to have met “certain standards of quality, both in terms of basic spelling and grammatical errors and content. All books must be well written and offer something of value to our customers.” Be sure to always read the fine print when $$ is involved. From the IndieReader.com Terms of Service:
2. Annual Fees and Costs. a. The fee for inclusion on the website is $149.00 per year, regardless of the number of books that each author features on the IR site. The fee for submitting the first book is included in the annual fee, however, there will be a submission fee of $25 for each book after the first. b. This fee is NON-REFUNDABLE.
IndieReader.com is a business and as such should charge fees, and it should reserve its right to reject books that don’t meet its standards. Yes, that makes it sound more like traditional publishing with all its gatekeepers, but IndieReader.com holds the promise of access to good writing, regardless of the author’s name recognition.
Marie at 1 Write Way 