On Short Novels, The Sense of an Ending, and Julian Barnes

The pages of my copy of The Sense of an Ending, the gripping new novel by Julian Barnes, had not been cut.  I had to slip my finger in between each one as I lay reading at the close of a snowy weekend.  This pleased me greatly.  The feel of the paper against my skin.  The sound of a story unfolding.

I am always confused by critics of the short novel—by those who refer to the shorter novel as something lesser than.  I remember a conversation with Alice McDermott (Charming Billy, That Night, At Weddings and Wakes), in which she spoke of writing the kind of stories she herself liked to read—shorter and more compact novels, densified worlds, intimate places, landscapes of measured, studied sentences.

Yes.  Me, too.  The short novel may or may not be about plot, may or may not be commercial (whatever that is).  But when it is handled with the intelligence of an Alice McDermott or a Julian Barnes or a Julia Otsuka or a Kate Chopin or a Michael Ondaatje (Coming Through Slaughter) or a Chloe Aridjis or a Kathryn Davis or an Anne Enright, for example, I personally think there is nothing finer.  Brilliant short novels have the impact of poems.  They are, most often, shorter precisely because the writer has taken the time to banish the extraneous and diluting, the self-aggrandizing or -indulgent.  There is a story to be told.  There is its core and there are those things essential to its core.  The brilliant writer of shorter novels holds that line, maintains his or her focus, goes blessedly deep, does not skip from this event to that—indeed, does not concentrate on "events" at all.  Character and meaning, language and symbol, the ripe stuff.  Brilliant short novels concentrate, primarily, on that.

I know many who would disagree, and that's the beauty of this literary community—the possibility of conversation, dissension.  (And of course I have many beloved books on my shelf that run past 300 pages, though I will admit that I don't have many favorites that run past 400.)  But I hope no one will disagree with me about this new book by Julian Barnes.  From the first sentence to the last I hardly exhaled.  The entire book was of such a piece that I felt certain that Barnes himself was sitting here, telling this story about a man, Tony Webster, resorting the memories of his youth.  Webster had thought himself a regular-enough student with a regular-enough first love affair.  He had gotten on with his life and lived it reasonably well.  But when he learns that he has been remembered in a will in an odd and oddly disturbing way, and when, over time, he is presented with evidence of who he really was as a young man, he is staggered in the way that we all are staggered when presented with contradictions of our own fine self-opinion.

Barnes, whose Nothing to Be Frightened Of, is a fine and teachable book of nonfiction, puts his philosophical genius on full display in this novel, his great capacity for going deep.  One example of many:

And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse—a feeling somewhat between self-pity and self-hatred—about my whole life.  All of it.  I had lost the friends of my youth.  I had lost the love of my wife.  I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained.  I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded—and how pitiful that was.

He also demonstrates his talent for plotting (yes, short novels have plots, too—it's just not what drives them), for surprise, for mystery, even.  The Sense of an Ending is a rich story, a riveting one.  If you haven't yet encountered Barnes, I suggest you start with this.

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The way dancers tell stories

We escaped the snow and headed for the city, where our friends Julia and Gene were celebrating their 70th birthdays in classic (elegant) Julia and Gene style.  She hails from the United Kingdom, he from the midwest.  She's a sprite of a thing; he tips his head, ever so slightly, to pass through doorways.  She's a sociologist and he's a statistician.  Together they remind those of us lucky enough to know them that love is not a formula.  It is what happens in the blink of an eye (they knew at once, they say of each other).  It is what endures.

At this party of friends, family, colleagues, we sat among dancers.  Jan, Lana, Scott, Tirsa, John, Inna, and Julia herself (Miss Cristina was also among us, looking lovely), to be precise.  We were privileged amateurs among impeccably attired super stars (and I do not exaggerate; Jan and Lana will soon be appearing in a major movie alongside actors such as Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper; Scott was once the nation's mambo champion).  We were also quite simply friends among friends.

What perpetually interests me about dancers is how smart they are, how diversified their interests, how capable of telling stories with far more than words. That angling of a shoulder speaks volumes, for example, as does the slight, purposeful turn of the head.  Jan raises his eyebrow, and his opinion is known.  Lana reports on science with the blue light of her eyes.  John brings mischief to his laugh; there is an emphatic grace in Inna's hands; Tirsa moves her wrist and her whole arm sparkles; Cristina is perpetually, stunningly alive; and there's that thing Scott does when he's telling a story, which is to lean in and then lean back, wait for the pulse.  Dancers hardly need words at all when they are telling their stories. 

When it was time to dance, we danced, easy with the songs that Julia and Gene had chosen on a ballroom floor laid for our feet. The rumba, the cha-cha, the salsa, the foxtrot, the bolero, the waltz, back to the foxtrot.  Those dancers know how to move, and they swept us into their graces, and later, around midnight, when we walked the streets of Philadelphia at their side (among Halloween ghouls and ghosts and vampires), I thought of how it must be to move through the world like that—so full of sway and suggestible spine. 

My husband and I woke in a room downtown this morning, headed to the Reading Market for breakfast, went up to the Art Museum and walked our favorite wing. I took a photograph, then, of this Renoir painting, because this gorgeous child is not speaking, not a word, and yet she's full of story.  Julia and Gene, thank you for giving us such a rich and memorable evening on a weekend of historic weather.  We will remember it always with fondness.

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In the stillness of now

I try not to let things get beyond me in this life, but the last few weeks were dense with work and pressure.  I paid no attention to clocks, working as much as I could to complete a corporate project that has meant a lot to me.  I wrote a few talks, prepared a workshop session, took care of some magazine work for clients.

In between was a certain book stock crisis,  Google's announcement that my account (translation: my blog) had been violated and was no longer accessible, a lost camera, and lost glasses.  Piles grew tidal around me (which is not a happy thing for a neat freak).  The refrigerator emptied (save for a bottle of milk and a quarter stick of butter, perhaps a square of cheese, jello made in a moment of hunger).  Bills sat unpaid. I wore clothes from another era because the right-era clothes were, shall we say, indisposed.  I answered emails many days late, with what, I am sure, was an humiliating array of mistakes.  There should be a book:  Beth's Email Mistakes.  The sequel:  Beth's Blog Mistakes. 

And books—at least a dozen books—came into the house and were placed in a growing teeter on the living room table.  Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. Diana Abu-Jaber's Birds of Paradise.  A.S. King's Everybody Sees the Ants.  Peter Spiegelman's Thick as Thieves.  Philip Schultz's My Dyslexia.  Benjamin Markovits's Childish Loves.  Marc Schuster's The Grievers.  Ann Hite's Ghost on Black Mountain.  Anna Lefler's Chicktionary.  Roy Jacobsen's Child Wonder.  Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones.  Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document.  Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding.  More.

Can I just tell you how much I have missed reading books? Finding my way into the thick of a story?  Decoding the music others make?

Today, on this freakishly autumnal snowy day, I will join my family of dance friends in the city to celebrate the joint 70 year old birthdays of a still-swinging couple.  We'll stay overnight and brunch the next day with beloved friends in a white city, then head to a museum.  I'm going to take one of these books with me.  And then, come Sunday night, leaning into Monday morning, I am going to lie on a couch and do nothing but turn pages and return to the reader I am.

Thank you for putting up with all the recent launch news of You Are My Only.  I'm eager to once again spend my time here talking about the books of others.  That is why I created this space.  That is what makes me happy.

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Unlucky? I don't think so.

You Are My Only is my thirteenth book.  In the early days, when that fact would surface, I was given all kinds of advice about how to go straight from 12 to 14 and thereby skip the unluckiness in between.  I shrugged it off.  A number is just a number, not a superstition.  Right?

But in the 24 hours leading up to the long-awaited book launch party at Radnor Memorial Library last evening, I began to rethink my no superstition policy.  I lost my glasses.  I lost my camera.  It rained most fierce just ahead of the party hour.  Most concerning was that mid-day hour, when it was discovered that the copies of the books that were to be sold that night had not yet made their way to Children's Book World, which had so kindly offered to join us at the event.  I admit it:  A few tears were shed.

And yet, I will look back on last night as one of the luckiest nights of my life.  Let's talk about what happened at six o'clock, at Elizabeth Mosier's incredibly beautiful and hospitable home, where writers  feasted on Elizabeth's amazing Mexican meal.  Libby is always there—a hugely talented writer and reader with a generous heart—and everyone in my neck of the woods (me perhaps above all) is grateful.  Let's talk about Pam Sedor, a dear friend, who has given me a home for years at her luxurious Winsor Room.  Let's talk about John, one of the most intelligent young readers I know (in fact, I refuse to believe that he is anything other than a New York Times Book Review writer), who sent me an email at this book's very start and who, late yesterday afternoon, sent me a link to his most stunning Dear Author review.  Let's talk about Florinda and Amy and Melissa and Caroline, who wrote loving notes just ahead of the event.  Let's talk about Ellen Trachtenberg, a friend who has stood by me throughout the publication of this book, lending me her perspective, know-how, and smarts.  Let's talk about Amy Rennert, my agent, who was on the phone with me several times during the course of yesterday, and who sent a beautiful email last evening.  Let's talk about those dancers, St. Johner's, writers, Zumbaists, long-time friends, neighbors, teachers, book clubbers, colleagues who worked their way in from the storm.  I wondered, to tell you the truth, if anyone would.  They did.  They were there.  Each one a treasure.

I hope that they know they are treasured.

In my opening remarks last evening I talked a little about what it takes to be a writer.  I share the final words of that talk here:

But just because I had to write this story doesn’t mean that I had an easy time of it.  I never do.  It’s not a straight-line process for me.  It’s not—find the plot, dance to the crescendo, put a little lute to the denouement.  It’s a devastatingly inefficient process, my writing of novels, and there are, I will admit it, tears.  Long, self-dramatizing monologues are involved.  Bad posture.  Tingling arms.  Broken fingernails.

I can be heard to say, I cannot do it.

I have sworn, Never again.

And then I’m right back at it the next day.  I’m pushing until I write one sentence that works.  And another sentence that works.  Because yes:  Ideas are essential.  And yes:  Stories need their characters.  And sure, it’s absolutely true that no publisher is going to look twice at you if you don’t have a plot.  

But I can’t  write forward if I don’t have a sentence that, to my ear, works.  If the preposition is wrong.  If there’s an extra syllabic beat.  If something cranks the wrong way or falls flat —when this happens, and it happens all the time, I cannot tick a chapter toward its end.  Several times I nearly lost You Are My Only.  Too many nights to count, I went to bed with an ache in my heart.

If you think you are a writer, if you want to be a writer, you need to read.  You need to be capable of hurting.  You need to imagine.  You need time, you need silence, you need space.  You need these things.  But if you do not also have a persevering spirit, you cannot be a writer.  If you do not, daily, choose to start at the base of the mountain and climb, with all ferocity, up, you aren’t going anywhere. 

You lose faith in yourself when you write—that’s part of the process.  You fight the lost faith of others.  You fight your way out of the margins.  You hold onto the people you trust.  Perseverance is the final hallmark of a writer.

Or, at least, it is what has brought me here, all these quiet books later, these books about heart.  You Are My Only is, in some ways, a different kind of book for me.  There is more plot.  There is more tension.  There is suspense.  But it is not, in fact, a departure.  My Emmy and my Sophie see, face, live terrible things.  They are placed into raw circumstances.  But what saves my Emmy and my Sophie is their ceaseless search for goodness.  What saves them is their special gift for believing that goodness wins.

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On Parties, Wings, and Book Supply

When I was little I had a doll that looked just like this fabulous child.  I named her Maria.  She had lovely smooth bangs.  I remain in love with her lovely, smooth bangs.

I discovered this gem of a little girl a few weeks ago, during my travels to Jim Thorpe.  It wasn't Halloween yet, but she was dressed to fly.

Later this evening, I'll be celebrating the debut of You Are My Only at the Radnor Memorial Library with friends from most corners of my life. Writers, dancers, neighbors, friends, St. John's-ers, Zumba-ists, goddesses and gods of goodness, Pam Sedor, Elizabeth Mosier.  It's a bit cloudy out there, but I'm feeling sunny inside.  That's what gatherings of friends—for any occasion—do.

Today dear Florinda, who stood at my side at the BEA as my own personal and quite talented publicist, stands beside me again, with her words about You Are My Only, which she recently read.  What an amazing support she has been through all of this.  Thank you, Miss Florinda.  I don't know what I'd do without you.

Today, too, I want to thank The Eclectic Reader for luring me to her site with the promise that she did indeed like the book.  (I smiled.)  I love the details she has called out.  I am so grateful for her words. 

Finally, today, I want to thank all of you who have reached out to me about the unfortunate situation regarding the actual supply of You Are My Only books.  I wish that Amazon's temporarily out of stock signal early Tuesday morning had indeed been but truly temporary, and I am sorry, too—so sorry—to hear of delays at independent bookstores.  I am so grateful to all of you who had faith in this book from the very first, and who rallied so magnificently behind it.  I can only assure you that everything that can be done to remedy the situation is now being done. 

But today is what counts.  This very moment.  I'm going to go find myself a purple and green winged dress.  I am going to bake some cookies.  I will make no promises about my bangs.

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I believe in the beauty of this photograph

The birth of seeds in the burst of a pod.  

Autumn already leaning toward spring.

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Small Damages: The Cover Reveal

When you work on a book for close to a decade—when you refuse to give up, when you endlessly redefine the narrative's shape, when you push away and return and push back and realize you will ache until you return again—when you work like that, the book becomes a part of you.  The book tells you secrets about yourself, about what you are willing to believe in.  It becomes a marker in a questing life.

When the book finds itself at a most extraordinary home with a dear editor who shares your passion for foreign places and exotic foods, for history and gypsy song, who writes you the kind of notes that make you cry (for the right reasons), who takes the time to share your work with authors you can't quite believe you are actually being read by, who oversees the creation of a cover that takes your breath away, you are just plain lucky.  I—I know this—am lucky.

Today a box arrived at my home.  It contained the galleys for Small Damages, a book that will be published on my son's birthday next July.  It contained a note from the glorious Tamra Tuller, my editor at Philomel, whose stable of writers includes both Ruta Sepetys and Kathryn Erskine.

Tamra Tuller has been working with me on Small Damages for more than a year.  She has quietly demonstrated, to this sometimes impatient soul, the power of waiting, of right timing.  Michael Green, the president of Philomel, has sent notes all along the way—funny notes, endearing ones, words I will, when I'm even older than right now, always remember.

Can I share the cover?, I asked Tamra today.  She said that it was time.  She has done miraculous work, this Tamra Tuller, and I will be forever grateful.  Small Damages, then.

It’s senior year, and the future should be right within reach. But for Kenzie—bright, ambitious, in love with Yale-bound Kevin—the future has been rearranged. She’s pregnant, and she’s determined not to end her pregnancy. Her mother and Kevin refuse to understand. Sent off to an old cortijo in Spain, Kenzie must find a way to endure until her baby is safe in an adoptive couple’s hands. What will she make of the stubborn old cook who plagues Kenzie with demands? How will she ever understand the mysterious young man Esteban—his way with horses and birds, his way of watching her? And what can the eccentric gypsies teach Kenzie about love? There are choices to make. There are questions about home. Small Damages is Spain alive. It is hearts broken and healed. It is heat and color and soul.

Small Damages is a wrenching celebration of choice.  To read Kephart is to splendidly dream with both eyes open. — Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

As this delicate and luscious novel unfolds, the lines are blurred between love and loss, past and present, real and magical, and even life and death. — Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird

Stunning.  Kephart's lyrical prose lingers with you long after the final page.  I simply didn't want it to end.  — Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray

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A day in autumn, with sun

Today corporate work kept me pinned to this desk.  Every now and then I would look up, see those blue skies pressing, a cloud passing, and think:  This is a day that is alive.  Go out there.  Seize it.

I thought of the herd of black cows I'd photographed late Sunday afternoon.  I thought of this one, mud on her nose, a bit of a smile behind those whiskers.

When I am at my smartest, my most wise, I understand this:  Nothing is richer or more complete than a day in autumn, with sun.

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You Are My Only. Today is the Day.

I didn't actually sleep last night, and if this blog post is riddled with errors, forgive me.  I'm a little blind, a little dizzy, and a whole lot grateful.

You Are My Only makes its way into the world today.  It has, in so many of you, glorious handmaidens.  Super glorious. Thank you—again—does not suffice.  You have given this book life.

Today I want to thank the wise and talented Melissa of The Betty and Boo Chronicles for this breathtaking review, and for somehow locating and sharing one of my favorite passages in the book.  It was after I wrote this scene, Melissa, that I knew I had to keep writing this story.

I want to thank Caroline Leavitt, novelist and novelist advocate supreme, for giving me room to tell the story behind the book trailer (the thoughts that went into this underfunded gal's head) on her always outerdirected, fascinating blog, CarolineLeavittville. 

I want to thank Katie Halata for sending me the YALSA review of 15-year-old Riley Brannian, who is calling for a sequel.

I want to thank all of you who sent this book into an early second printing and contributed to the message I received when I went on the YAMO Amazon site this morning to make sure the book is actually available (though goodness knows I am extremely hopeful that this is but a very temporary (perhaps it will be rectified by dawn?) state of affairs).

Temporarily out of stock. 

And I want to thank all of you, again, for keeping the momentum building by blogging (thank you today, Anna Lefler!), Facebooking, Tweeting, talking, and both supporting and participating in the You Are My Only Treasure Hunt (and, in some cases, taking that Hunt to exponential places).  I had, as you know, written five guest posts about the making of this book.  Mundie Moms, My Friend Amy,  The Story Siren, Chick Loves Lit, and Bookalic.ious gave me room in their immaculate nests to share those posts, and many of you went off searching for them.  Those posts were made possible, to begin with, thanks to the outreach of the young women behind There's a Book and My Friend Amy, who provided enormous support of this book (and others!) from the very start. 

The posts themselves are here:

1.  The (furious) metamorphosis of Sophie
2.  Opening the Doors to Clois and Helen by Beth Kephart 
3.  When Emmy called I listened 
4.  I was obsessed with an asylum 
5.  What name should we give this book?


I had said that there would be two winners of this treasure hunt.  But today (is it the hour?  is it my half-blindness? is it that fingers are sticky when I reach into the hat?) I find that we have three.  Those winners (of a signed copy of YAMO and of my critique of 2,000 words in progress) are listed below.  Please send me an email about how I can reach you. 

Serena Agusto-Cox of Savvy Verse & Wit, an extraordinary Treasure Hunter if ever there was one.  (I think she found some of the posts before they were even up.)

Bonnie Jacobs of Bonnie's Books, who sent me her links at a very early hour.

Wendy of Caribou's Mom, who read the book itself early and whose blog I have followed ever since we both fell in love with The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Oh.  Wait.  I forgot.  There's a fourth winner.  She's Vivian Lee Mahoney, who I met early on in this blogosphere, and who has been a dear and glorious friend. 

Oh.  And Florinda of 3rsblog— I know you have a signed copy of this book already.  But if you have something in progress that you would like me to critique....... (she winks)

Ladies:  Game on.

Thank you all—a million times over.

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Teaching (and knowing) the best of the best

This coming Wednesday, I'll be at Rutgers-Camden for a reading, a talk about new trends in young adult literature...and a workshop.  As I considered just what I wanted to convey during that workshop hour—something about precision and continuity, something about the speed of one sentence as flared against the long, quelling quietude of another—I began to think about the novelists and short story writers I am infinitely lucky to know.

(And I rush to say that I know so many talented people—humorists, memoirists, bloggers, poets.  It is my hope, with this blog, to give voice to them all, one way or the other, in time.)

Today I share some of the lines I'll be discussing at Rutgers-Camden.  We'll be talking about what makes these passages work, what we can learn from them.  As I type them in, I catch my breath.  These, my friends, are writers. 

He was heading to the bathroom to brush his teeth.  His starched shirt made crisp noises as he walked.  He wore brown-and-blue suspenders and he'd tucked his tie in his shirt to save it from his three-minute egg.  I said nothing, just smiled and lifted one eyebrow.  And he looked at me oddly, the way he did more and more in those days, as if I'd spoken too quickly, overlapping my words and rendering them foreign.  He said he had to go to work, and I dropped his fingers, and he went in and brushed his teeth.  The sound of the bristles against his gums, doing their ugly work, was like an assault, as if he was scrubbing me away.  — Kelly Simmons, The Bird House

Death, which used to seem so remote, now feels to Clara as though it is everywhere, like the universally disliked relative who arrives early to every gathering and shows no discernible sign of ever going home.  She can sense it turning against her own work, lurking in the notion of permanence surrounding portraiture, skulking around the very idea of catching a person at one moment and documenting them, just then.  This is what death does, she thinks, stony-faced, staring right into her own eyes.  Catches us all.  Stops time. — Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

Evelyn eyed Sarah's lunatic ensemble: hair blasted from its elastic band, bath-splashed T-shirt, teeth spackled with pulp from oranges she'd sucked hungrily at lunch because she didn't have the patience to peel.  "I'd go nuts if I didn't work," she said.  "I mean, what do those women do all day?"  Elizabeth Mosier, The Playgroup

Even now, in middle age, she preserved the vital though self-deceptive hope that anything might change and nothing need be done meanwhile. She still had a kind of vision, she still could see, and she still was moved by perceptions as poignant as consciousness. But nothing came of it; nothing was expressed. She had fallen to a place where people worked at tolerable but not thrilling work, a lifetime of work whose chief reward and motivation was (never quite enough) money. If she died tomorrow, she would leave behind no aborted masterpiece. — Ivy Goodman, A Chapter from Her Upbringing

When the cinema went dark, the audience stirred to life.  People leaned toward the shapes in the seats next to them.  "What happened?" they asked.  "Did you see?" — Jessica Francis Kane, The Report

Tapping a cigarette on the dashboard, Eric lights it and sucks, the smoke hits the back of his throat like a branding iron.  He holds his breath, then blows the smoke in a disappearing draft.  He wants to pop his chin, blow a smoke ring, but he's never learned how.  He isn't sure, either, if it's cool.  — Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Why She Left Us

I judge their hands.  I say to myself, yes, that guy fights fires in the mountains.  Or no, that guy's not a roofer, no matter what he claims.  Armand has spadelike hands, troweling hands, and they convince me he speaks a certain kind of truth.  He woos me with the fused joint of his ring finger, the corrugated grasp of his palms.  —Alyson Hagy, Ghosts of Wyoming

In all the years they've been together, he's never hurt her, never raised a hand or even his voice, but he's smashed five sets of dishes, broken several glasses and a figurine he had bought her as a joke, a Scottish terrier with a tiny gold chain. — Caroline Leavitt, Pictures of You

For a single moment she accepted the situation and had the kind of prosaic thought that gains weight in the timing of its application—that her time had come, as it had come to many before her and would to many again.  Then she felt a split second of peace, during which she continued to make sense of what was happening in the odd, lofty way that came upon her every once in a while and made her wonder about herself. She thought with an amused clarity that her ingrained sense of her own insignificance was finally coming in handy, enabling her to accept being blown where the wind took her, like a piece of dandelion fluff. — Alice Elliott Dark, "Home"

She would waken and find herself trussed and pinned to the earth with violin strings, like Gulliver in Lilliput. — Karen Rile, "No Ear for Languages"

Before dawn, when the souls of the dead hovered in the greying sky, the women gathered in the synagogue courtyard.  Lilian Nattel, The River Midnight

This final excerpt is from Kathryn Davis's miraculous The Thin Place.  She is not a friend, but we're going to be talking a little about magic realism in the class (thanks to one of the submitted workshop pieces), and so she is necessary:

There were three girlfriends and they were walking down a trail that led to a lake.  One small and plump, one pretty and medium-sized, one not so pretty and tall.  This was in the early years of the twenty-first century, the unspeakable having happened so many times everyone was still in shock, still reeling from what they'd seen, what they'd done or failed to do.  The dead souls no longer wore gowns.  They'd gotten loose, broadcasting their immense soundless chord through the precincts of the living.  — Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place

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early morning reader thank you's

Because of my strict No Google Beth policy, I have failed, over the last few weeks to thank some extraordinarily kind people.  I would like to do that now.

Lizzy Burns, the New Jersey librarian who writes the wickedly intelligent A Chair, A Fireplace, & A Tea Cozy, for her tremendous empathy toward in the character Emmy, in this review. 

Sixteen year-old Brianna M., of the School Library Journal Sneak Peak Review team, for giving me a first sense for how a teen reader might feel about You Are My Only, here.

Nicole B., for her continuing kindness toward me and my books, with this review at Linus's Blanket.

Valerie B., of Woven Myst, who sent a Facebook message to me so early on and gave me hope at a time when I had not yet heard from other readers, here.

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That is my heart

Sunday, 8 PM.  A day of writing behind me, which is to say, a day of reworking what had already been worked.  In the coming week, You Are My Only will launch.  On Tuesday I will name the winners of the You Are My Only Treasure Hunt.  On Wednesday, I will return to my friends at Rutgers-Camden (thank you, Lisa Zeidner, hello, Daniel Wallace) to teach, to lecture, to critique, to read.  On Thursday evening, at Radnor Memorial Library, thanks to the good graces of Pam Sedor, I will gather with my dear friends and reflect—those festivities made even brighter by the goodness of Elizabeth Mosier.

One waits a long time for a book to find itself, and a long time (too) for a book to find its way into the world.  One hopes for things, and by my blogger friends, my reader friends, my writer friends—my friends—I have been blessed.

I found this single fuscia leave today on my long walk.

That, my many loved ones, is my heart.

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walking through trees

(or between them)

I wrote today.  I walked.  The one impossible without the other now.  The story making itself best known when I am away from machines.

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where I have been, where I am going

I am not sure I got the rhythm of this past week right, but I tried.  There was a lot of just plain work to do—finishing magazine projects for one client while settling in on a commemorative book for another.  That book project memorializes a place and time.  It means something to the people who have asked me to create it, and so it means an enormous amount to me.  If I have, then, in some ways, gone missing as a writer this week, I have been listening to the stories of others, of men, mostly, who may not think of themselves as poets at all, but who have earned my deep respect for the genuine nature of their talk, their reverence for machines.

And so today, I continued work on that commemorative book project and then switched gears—reading the manuscripts that I'll be workshopping at Rutgers-Camden this coming Wednesday.  The three stories that were sent to me could not be more different from each other, but they are remarkable, each in their own way.  I'm building a workshop around the critique pieces.  I have an idea and, after I teach that class, I plan to share it here.

Clients and workshops.  Lectures and readings.  The fragments of this life all here, on this glass-topped desk, waiting for me.  In between, my son calls with stories, my friends send notes (and post kind Facebook things), my father stops by, I eat a crisp, locally grown Stayman apple, I slip a quiche into the oven.

This is a simple life that I lead.  I would trade it for no other.

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Small Damages, Ruta Sepetys, and a birthday surprise

This morning I did one of those things I try not to do—traveled over to the Amazon page to see if the cover for Small Damages, my summer 2012 novel, has been posted.  It has not, but a separate piece of news was there, something I had not known.  Small Damages, the book that took nearly a decade of my life, was inspired by my travels to Seville, and will be published by one of the most extraordinary houses anywhere, Philomel, is set to come out on my son's birthday.  (For more on the incredible Philomel, go here.)  That is no mere coincidence.  That is perfection.  My son has been with me through every one of the dozens of drafts and, indeed, the book is dedicated to him.

And so I wait to share the remarkable cover with you.  Believe me, it is worth waiting for.  Tamra Tuller, my editor, and her team worked for literally months to produce something that is just so infinitely right that it staggers me.  In classic Tamra style, she also took the time to share the book with her authors Kathryn Erskine (Mockingbird, The Absolute Value of Mike) and Ruta Sepetys (Between Shades of Gray).  I had shared Kathryn's words on this blog earlier, along with the treasured words of Rita Williams-Garcia (One Crazy Summer).  

This morning I share Ruta's enormous generosity:

Stunning.  Kephart's lyrical prose lingers with you long after the final page.  I simply didn't want it to end.

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What poetry knows

My friend Nazie. 

Well, I could leave it at that.  Just:  My friend Nazie.

But I have more to say.  My friend Nazie and I have known each other nearly the whole of our adult lives.  Architecture brought us together.  A magazine.  Her love of beautiful things, her ability to find them, share them, her commitment to living a complete life.  The conversation between us sometimes slow and sometimes quick, but never ending, always reviving.

Today Nazie sends me this link to Marie Howe's interview with Terry Gross.  Maybe you will have the time to listen, and if you do not, this fragment:

Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die.  The most mysterious aspect of being alive might be that — and poetry knows that.

I took the photograph above while at a client site, waiting for an interview to begin.  That is my Schuylkill River.  That is the sun on her back.

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Family Circle Momster Recommends YAMO as Teen Read Week Read

Today on Momster, which is powered by Family Circle, You Are My Only joins Liesl & Po (Lauren Oliver), The Apothecary (Maile Meloy and Ian Schoenherr), Wimpy Kid # 6 and the 39 Clues series as a recommended teen week tween read and makes me very, very happy here.

I am pretty over the moon about this.  




Darcy Jacobs, I need to hug you.

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Fashion Disaster at Wissahickon High

Yesterday, thanks to the kindness of Gary Kramer, I was included in WissLit, a Wissahickon High School television program dedicated to the literary arts.  Every single time I step into a school I think how lucky I am that my life has led me to a place where, every now and then, I can look over the shoulders of others toward the future.

Wissahickon High School is very large and very beautiful.  I needed an escort to get out.  A young man was called, and soon he appeared—in lime green leotards, bright red shoes, a Thing One wig (in black), gangly neck wear, and other necessary apparel.  I tried to be polite.  He tendered an explanation.  "It's Fashion Disaster Day," he said.  "I try to show a little school spirit."  Then he offered to carry my bag and proceeded to hold open every door and walked me straight up to the front office, even though (at one point in our mile-long sojourn) I could find that for myself.

Manners, these days.

Thank you for the hospitality, Wissahickon High (and Jessi and the crew of WissLit).

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This Happened

The weather (for it is raining here) will not beat me on this day. 

This happened.

I went to the dance studio after a day of crazy pressures.  I went with my hair weather fizzy, my pants gutter splashed, my toe nails unpainted, my T-shirt too short (thank you, aggressive dryer cycle).  I just went, and I was me, and you are getting the picture.

I have danced for four years now, something like that.  I have worked hard, and I have yearned, but every lesson is a reminder of how much I do not know, how great is the list of things I cannot perfectly do.

Today, in the middle of a lesson, sweaty by now with the humidity of the place, listening to the music, dancing rumba, Jan said, "Beth.  You have become a good dancer."

All right. That's it.  It happened.  I put it here.  It may not happen again for a very long time.  

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What is beautiful writing? A lesson from James Wood

I am in the midst of reading a book which many readers before me have termed "beautiful."  In places, I would agree—there is a lush knowing, a seductive tumble forward of palpable scenes and words.  In other passages, however, the book gets uncomfortably stuck; the characters don't read as real; the dialogue, especially, trembles with information as opposed to charm or persuasion; the teens (and this is an adult novel with a teen hook) are, in my opinion, false constructions—their conversation heavy handed with genericized slang.  I read on, but I stop and think.  Analyze what works and what doesn't, and (most importantly) why.

I took a break from reading that book to read an October 17 New Yorker piece titled "Sons and Lovers" by James Wood. The essay is ostensibly a review of Alan Hollinghurst's novel, The Stranger's Child.  But because this is James Wood, we're also treated to a lively linguistic lesson by the man who wrote a little book that I hope you writers all have at hand, How Fiction Works.  Love that book.  Need it.

In any case, back to the subject at hand, which is the word "beautiful" as it is applied to prose, and what James Wood has to say—with infinite brilliance—about that.  Here he is, at the essay's start.  Please read the whole.  It's worth it.

Most of the prose writers acclaimed for "writing beautifully" do no such thing; such praise is issued comprehensively, like the rain on the just and the unjust.  Mostly, what's admired as beautiful is ordinary; or sometimes it's too obviously beautiful, feebly fine—what Nabokov once called "weak blond prose."  The English novelist Alan Hollinghurst is one of the few contemporary writers who deserve the adverb.  His prose has the power of re-description, whereby we are made to notice something hitherto neglected.  Yet, unlike a good deal of modern writing, this re-description is not achieved only by inventing brilliant metaphors, or by flourishing some sparkling detail, or by laying down a line of clever commentary.  Instead, Hollinghurst works quietly, like a poet, goading all the words in his sentences—nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs—into a stealthy equality.

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An eternity beneath the rush of song

When I go to Valley Forge Park, I park by the Washington Memorial Chapel and wind around, toward the cemetery and stand in my mother's company for a spell.  Sometimes the carillon bells ring, and when they do, I am stopped in my tracks, grateful that my mother has such a peaceful resting place, an eternity beneath the rush of song.

The bells were ringing Sunday.

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The Making of an International YA Bestseller: A Behind the Scenes Look

Ruta Sepetys' debut young adult novel, Between Shades of Gray, stunned us all with its depiction of life during the Soviet reign of terror.  The story was researched and original.  It had meaning.  It could teach us.  It was no wonder, then, that a publishing house of the quality of Philomel and an editor as graceful and dear as Tamra Tuller would want to take it on.  But how did Philomel convert this book into an international force before it had even launched in the United States?  How did it transcend paranormal and dystopian trends to achieve this kind of bestsellerdom?

I am not the only one who wondered.  But I am someone who was privileged to go behind the scenes with Philomel's dynamic president Michael Green and with Tamra herself.  I had already seen, first hand, how enormously capable and engaged and passionate and just plain kind these two individuals are (thanks to the upcoming publication of my novel, Small Damages, with Philomel).  But the answers I received to the questions I asked underscored for me the value of simply taking care—of thinking strategically, working ahead, exercising patience, and believing in books with a literary, historical bent.

I told this story in the October 13 Frankfurt Show Daily, a publication of Publishing Perspectives.  The piece is available here and also here on page 14.  For now I will leave you with these thoughts, from Michael Green.  They brighten my day each time I read them:

“YA literature is simply some of the finest writing
in the business,” says Green. “We’ve long known
this, and we’ve long known that reaching emerging
readers is important. Changing the world one
reader at a time may sound simultaneously corny
and impossible, but we believe in what we do. Ruta’s
book allows us to touch people otherwise out of
reach and open their eyes to something important.
That is literature, YA or otherwise, at its best.”

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Alyson Hagy Wins High Plains Best Fiction Award

Just a few weeks ago I was writing here about my friend Alyson Hagy, and her win of The Devil's Kitchen Award.  Today I write to say that this extraordinarily talented writer and honest, good, and soulful friend just won Best Fiction prize at the High Plains Book Awards, an event held at Parmly Billings Library this past Saturday.  The book is Ghosts of Wyoming (Graywolf Press), a collection of short stories that deserves every last bit of praise it gets. 

But so does Alyson, as a person, deserve that praise.  She sends the most gorgeous and considered emails from her post in Laramie, Wyoming (where she helps run one of the greatest creative writing programs anywhere)—talks about books she's liked or tussled with, her early morning spottings of birds, the six inches of October snow.  She'll tell me she's headed out of town for a little tennis, and only later and by accident will I discover that she's playing tournament tennis, and winning to boot.  She'll say, ahead of a trip to what she calls a book festival, "I love the folks at Billings who work so darn hard on behalf of the arts," without mentioning that her own book is up for a Billings award.

This is not false modesty at work.  It's Alyson Hagy—whose quality of mind and richness of perspective have kept me necessary company through the years.

And so, dear Alyson, this tribute is again for you.  Not just for what you've won.  But for who you are.

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know your blessings, count them

That isn't me running for joy. She's younger, cuter, endowed with glossy hair.  But when I saw her yesterday afternoon at Valley Forge National Park where I had gone after a day of peaceful writing, I stopped and memorialized her moment with this picture.  I was feeling that way myself.  I was leaning toward good, and toward the future.

My Facebook friends heard me tell this story on Friday, but it bears repeating here.  You Are My Only, a little book if ever there was one, a book that nonetheless believed in itself, went back to press last week to boost its presence in bookstores.  I'm not going to pretend that the numbers are huge; they aren't.  I'm not going to suggest that a second print run gives this writer celebrity status.  Celebrity status is a state of mind.  No matter what happens, my friends, I will not enter that realm.  I like the world in which I'm living.

What mattered to me about the news is this:  You Are My Only would not have been given that boost without my book blogger friends.  These are people busy with their own lives—their jobs, their children, their partners, their dreams, their book projects, their countless other blogger friends—who stopped and started banging on a drum.  Pay attention, they said.  A book is coming.  They stopped to read, earlier than they'd planned to.  They created contests, at their own expense.  They entered my own crazy You Are My Only Treasure Hunt, a complicated ditty that took, yes, blogger time.  They Twittered and Facebooked and emailed and said, We believe in you, Beth, and in this book.  This was a rally based largely on blind trust.  There are no thanks great enough.  There are names and people I will never forget: Amy Riley, Pam Van Hylckama Vlieg, Danielle Smith, Florinda Lantos Pendley Vasquez, Melissa Sarno, Colleen Mondor, Wendy Robards, Shanyn Day, Becca Rowan, Serena Agusto-Cox, Melissa Walker, Leila Roy, Mandy Stanley King, Ed Goldberg, Lorie Anne Grover, Little Willow, Caroline Leavitt, Aquafortis, Valerie Burleigh, Vivian Lee Mahoney, Jennifer Donovan, The Perpetual Page-Turner, Sarah Laurence, John Jacobson, Lilian Natel, The Story Siren, Susan Taylor Brown, Carol Weiss, Mundie Moms,  Medieval Bookworm, Hippies Beauty and Books, Books Thoughts and a Few Adventures, The Reading Zone, Kay's Bookshelf, Bonnie Jacobs, Elizabeth Mosier, Ruth Koeppel, and Books and Movies, who wrote Saturday evening and touched me so deeply (thank you so much, Carrie) with these beautiful words.  A huge thank you to Darcy Jacobs of Family Circle.

And for all of you who have been there in the past, for other books and other dreams of mine, don't think for a second that I have forgotten you.  It has all made an enormous difference.  And if I have neglected any name here (and gosh, I have feared that, especially since I do not google my own name), tell me, and after I pick myself up off the floor from shame, I will make amends.

I have been blogging for four years now.  I have been privy, throughout this time, to the conversation about whether or not book bloggers can make an actual difference.  I want to say here, again, for the indelible record, that of course they do.  Book bloggers give writers hope that their work will be read and considered—no small thing.  Book bloggers stand at the heart of a movement; they stand central to stories.  Book bloggers have the power to give a small book life and more than that, most importantly, they provide proof of the power of caring.  I am proud of my friendships with these artists of hope.

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Peaceable Kingdom (3)

I went to Valley Forge Park today and walked alone.  A red-tailed hawk sat in the tree to the right, out of photographic reach.  Lowering the eye of the camera I found this instead.

When I returned home three messages were waiting for me.  Each was important and lovely.  I will only say this about one:  We have been invited to attend a christening in the U.K.  We could not be more happy, more delighted, more honored.

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Baby Bump (noun)

See, I knew that would get your attention.  But it's not me I'm talking about.  Cross my heart with a pair of knitting needles (that's for you, Pam). 

I'm talking about the The Chicktionary, the debut book by Anna Lefler, which is arriving in your stores and on your screen this coming week. The Chicktionary (Adams Media) is a book of terms, 450 or so of them.  Terms women use or want to use or don't know they should use, but (if only they were as smart as Anna, or as daring) would.  Anna Lefler, comedienne, is our pink-hued lexiconic guide.  I got an early look at this (and an inside look at Anna's amazingly disciplined process) throughout the summer and early fall.  Anna would send me a definition and I'd find it on my phone.  I'd read it to whomever was gathered near.  I'd leave the crowd in wet-eyed pieces.

They thought I was funny.  Sniff.

So here's to Anna, and since I teased you up above, I'll give Baby Bump its moment, below.  That leaves you with 449 terms or so to find and memorize on your own.

Baby Bump, noun 

Also known simply as “bump,” this term refers to a woman’s visible pregnancy bulge.  An extremely common term among tabloid reporters and paparazzi, baby bump is used most often in reference to celebrities.  Examples of this use include, “Grammy-winner Alicia Keyes showed off her baby bump in a beaded, Empire-waisted sheath,” and “Paris Hilton’s alleged baby bump was revealed to be nothing more than the aftermath of a Super Burrito.”  Although a campaign was launched recently to take the focus off of women’s tummies and redirect scrutiny to male celebrities’ midsections, the terms “beer bump” and “bratwurst bump” have yet to catch on.

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Bringing Betty Boop home with me

My grandmother passed away when I was nine—a tragic death on Halloween eve.  My favorite uncle, her son, passed away before my son could meet him—another terrible death with reverberating consequences.  I think of Grandmom and Uncle Danny all the time—the succession of paintings (the girl with the braid) up the stairwell of her Philadelphia row home, the unending parade of absurd gifts and fanciful tales that traveled always with him.  I never questioned their love for me.  I always felt safe when they were near.

And so I miss them.

My name is Beth Ellen Kephart.  No Elizabeth.  Nothing to shorten to Liz, Lizzie, Libby, Eliza, Betta.  Just Beth, and then the Ellen, but my grandmother and my uncle called me Betty Boop.  They called me Betsy, too, and other things, but what took hold in me was Betty Boop.  When I go somewhere and Betty Boop is there, I bring her home with me.  Look, I say, to the clouds above.  You are still alive to me.

Today, in Jim Thorpe, I found this one, sitting on a swing.

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Learning is a world that we enter: The Phantom Tollbooth at 50

Here I make a plea:  Buy the October 17 issue of The New Yorker.  Turn to page 30, the piece titled "Broken Kingdom:  Fifty years of The Phantom Tollbooth," by Adam Gopnik. Find a nice chair. Sit. Read.

I love this story.  I love the idea of it, the execution of it, the knowing that one gains from it.  Who were these two men—Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer—who gave us this classic?  What was in their minds and hearts as they wrote and drew?  How did the book not end up on the remainder table?  What does it all mean?

You'll get answers to those questions.  You'll get Adam Gopnik himself, whom I love to read.  And in between you'll let lines like these, which should set you up in fine, fine style for this autumnal weekend:

What Milo discovers is that math and literature, Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, should assume their places not under the pentagon of Purpose and Power but under the presidency of Rhyme and Reason.  Learning isn't a set of things that we know but a world that we enter.

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Wastepaper Prose and Authorial Insights

I've been meaning to send all of you over to Wastepaper Prose for awhile, and this morning I have a moment to do that.  So.  Here's the link that you should follow should you be in the market for a smart series about the writing life.  Writers like Gemma Halliday, Brena Pandos, Ilsa Bick, Sarah Beth Durst, and yours truly are dishing on topics ranging from write-live balance, intimidation, beginnings, superstitions, draft disruption, character coercion.  Basically anything you've ever wondered.

I point you in that direction.  I wave my funny arms.

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Dance with Me: Ballroom Dancing and the Promise of Instant Intimacy/Julia Ericksen

My friend Julia Ericksen is seeing the publication of a book on which she has worked for years.  We ballroom dance together, Julia and I, and she was one of the very first people I came to know at DanceSport Academy in Ardmore.  Julia is a professor at Temple University teaching courses on human sexuality, body, and gender.  She's a sprite, a darling and opinionated Brit whose other interests and life journeys have resulted in the publication of Kiss and Tell (Harvard University Press) and Taking Charge of Breast Cancer (University of California Press).  Often, when Julia and I talked, she would tell me about her travels to dance venues all around the world, where she competed (but of course) and at the same time interviewed top dancers and avid amateurs on this art form, or is it a sport? Or a fashion show? Or an odd and spectacular form of yearning?  Or something Beth does when her sentences stick, which is to say, on a very frequent basis?

I don't personally have answers to those questions (or I do have answers, but they change too often to be reliable).  But Julia does, and she's put them all into a book called Dance with Me: Ballroom Dancing and the Promise of Instant Intimacy (New York University Press).  The other day, Julia showed me an early copy, then flipped to a page that looks like this (above).  The caption, Julia says, goes something like this:

Figure 4.3. Learning the foxtrot is fun. Teacher John Larson with student Beth Kephart. DanceSport Academy, Ardmore, PA, July, 2010. ©2010 Jonathan S. Marion.

I never thought I'd be in a book about ballroom dance (though I did imagine writing one once, and did:  House of Dance). But I do fondly remember this rehearsal day and how John was making me laugh so that I would forget the camera. He still makes me laugh, even if (is it something about my posture? my rise? my fall?) the cameras don't come around anymore.

Huge congratulations to Dr. Julia Ericksen (and her dancing husband, Gene). 

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A treasured treasure hunter: Serena Agusto-Cox

I come up with crazy schemes. Some might call them complicated, which is not nearly as nice a word as complex.  In recent weeks I developed this You Are My Only treasure hunt scheme.  To make it work, I needed the help of other bloggers, who might roost my words in their nests.  To make it work, I also needed people who might take the time and follow along.  Take the time.  That's enormous.

Serena Agusto-Cox of the (very) Savvyverseandwit fame has been on it from the start.  Finding my guest posts.  Sharing them with the world.  Encouraging me.  And, today, posting this most generous give-forward on her own intelligent, insightful, cutting-edge blog.

I honestly do not know what to say, except, Serena, thank you.

To the rest of you, the hunt is still on.  There are multiple prizes.  I have been very blessed

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I do not write because I have been condemned.

Yesterday I noted how, to write the novel I am currently writing, I first had to write, then toss 260 pages.  Subsequently I had to write and toss a series of 40-page new beginnings.  Subsequent to that, I had to sit down and cry.  Then I had to shake myself free of the tears and remind myself of this:  I write because I want to.  Not because it pays the bills (it doesn't; my job does that).  Not because I have been condemned.  Not because someone is standing outside my door with a whip saying, Do it better. Do it faster. Do it now.  And if I can't find pleasure in what I am doing with words, then, frankly, I should stop and do something different with my life.

I gave myself a good talking to.  Sometimes Beth Kephart needs it.

I'm in a better place with the novel now (famous last words).  But there are still so many excised words.  The ones below are gone, gone, gone.  Today (nonetheless) I honor the deer:

In the uneven surfaces of the street, the rain had pooled and a low rise of steam was hovering above the gutters.  Becca was headed north under the bypass, on suburban streets, the park now straight ahead.  The log cabins of General Washington’s winter.  The memorial arch.  The cathedral and the graveyard over the rise and fall of hills.  The kids were out with their kites and the deer were up to their knees in the wheat-colored grass, entire herds of them plus a few rove bucks and a baby still wearing its spots. 

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Whenever I want to feel happy,

I look back on my portraits of Miss Eva.

Come on, now.  Tell me you are smiling, too.  I know you are.  Could a child be more joyful?

Today I worked very hard with my gimpy arm in this ugly half-cast.  Corporate work, mostly.  Emails here and there.  Lots of things to do, plenty of them.  And then, at one point, I stood up.  I had just spelled Frankfurt as Frankford and decided enough was enough.  I walked the first 80 pages of my adult novel out of this room (the novel that had been 270 pages, before I tossed it entire).  Went to another room.  Sat on the couch inside gray, rainy shadows.

I did not know if my skinny 80 pages, 19,000 words, would work.  I sat for two hours holding my breath.

I am breathing now. 

And so my mood improves, and Miss Eva improves it even more, and in precisely an hour from now I'm going to get even happier, because I'll be where A.S. King will be, reading from her brand-new novel, Everybody Sees the Ants.

We have challenged each other to a game of ping pong, Mrs. King and me.  Right now, though, the ball is in her court.

Find her there, Chester County Book and Music Company.  West Chester.  7 PM.

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The Book Trailer

There are so many ways to make a book trailer, and I spent a lot of time thinking about You Are My Only—asking myself how best to package this story of two young women who must find their ways back home.  In the end I decided not to package it at all.  I chose, instead, to sit in my office on a rainy day and to let the book speak for itself.  I chose as well to share some of the words that some of you have given back to me—the greatest gift, by far, of all.

The trailer can be found here or by clicking the arrow above.  To join in the YAMO treasure hunt, go here.

I have treasured every single one of your notes and posts.  I have benefited hugely from your enthusiasm.  Because of you, I live my quiet writer life knowing this:  stories make their way to the right readers.

Great thanks to my husband, Bill, who turned the camera on and then sat with me during this rainy day to ease the in and out of things.

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The You Are My Only Treasure Hunt Final Installment: What about that asylum?

Because you may in fact have grown weary of listening to me go on about the You Are My Only Treasure Hunt, I introduce this final clues installment with pictures of puppies.  Everyone still loves puppies, right?  And especially ones with hats.

In any case, here we go.  The fifth and final guest post telling the story behind the story of You Are My Only has now gone live out there in the blogosphere.  This one appears on a blogger site that I find visually fascinating and deeply textured, like the best designed Project Runway dress (I'm thinking Mondo crossed with Anya).  This blogger (who is herself a fine writer) describes herself as a pain in the you know what (but I rather love her), has a close relationship to Hicklebee's (she's the resident blogger), wears tiaras, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.  I do not know if she dances.

Post 5 begins like this:

If you’ve been following these blog posts, then you understand already that I don’t write my books in some preordained sequential fashion. I don’t outline a plot; I don’t consult the trends; I don’t go with the fashions. I write about what will not let me sleep, and over time, and through countless drafts, the separate aspects of my obsessions knit themselves into a story.

One of the things that was keeping me awake at night while I was working on this book was the stories I kept reading about urban explorers—those fascinating souls who explore abandoned buildings, often illegally, and create entire underworlds within them. For many years, a northeast Philadelphia asylum known to many as Byberry was a favorite haunting ground for these folks. This gigantic structure had been left to rot after being shut down in the 1990s, and the urban explorers (or “cavers” as they are sometimes known) had taken over—held rave parties there, ridden their motorcycles through connective tunnels, dug through the patient records and film reels and all the wild and disturbing “stuff” that had been so haphazardly left behind.

Your job is to find this post and to also find the four other posts that very kind bloggers have lodged on their blogs.  If you do that—find all five posts, put the links on your own blog, and send me proof of your cross linking in any comment box by October 24—you will be entered into a drawing.  The two randomly chosen winners will each win a signed copy of You Are My Only as well as an opportunity to have 2,000 words from a work in progress be critiqued by yours truly.  For the full details go here.  Winners will be announced October 25, the day that You Are My Only launches.

Here, again, are the clues.

Post 4 is housed at the psychodelically-hued (we know that isn't a real term) home of a certain chick who loves lit.  I met this wonderful person at the BEA this past summer.  She was part of the awesome gang of many who surprised me with a YAMO blast a month or so again.  The post you are looking for begins like this:

Those who know me know that I’m only intermittently good at devising titles.

Undercover was called Come Back to Me, for example, until Laura Geringer asked me to please think again on that one. Still Love in Strange Places was named by my son moments before the W.W. Norton catalog was going on press. Nothing but Ghosts was my title, thank you very much, though there was a slight (we ignored it!) problem—I’d used the word ghosts in a previous book title (Ghosts in the Garden). The Heart is Not a Size and House of Dance were titles of my making, and I proudly claim them.

Post 3 is titled "When Emmy called I listened," and tells the story of my discovery of Emmy Rane.  Why she is.  Where (in part) her story came from.  It is posted on a site that is beloved by so many of you, a place where the color turquoise lives, a blog developed and managed by a young woman who is an orthodontic assistant by day.  The post begins with these words:

You Are My Only is a book told in two voices—that of a young teen named Sophie and that of a young mother whose name is Emmy Rane. Emmy Rane’s voice has been with me for a very long time. She was inspired, in part, by a moment, long ago, when I noticed a small child left untended by his mother. I have one of those apocalyptic imaginations (for better or worse, and most times, in real life, that would be worse—just ask my son), and instantly I was imagining things. The sudden stirring of a storm. The evil intentions of a neighbor. A big fat wasp with a ready sting. Somebody, I thought, please rescue that boy! 

Post 2 appeared on September 21 on the site of a woman who has consistently made my life a sweet an good place, and who is indeed a friend to us all.  That post was called "Opening the Door to Cloris and Helen," and it started this way:

I’ll be honest.  Cloris and Helen are two characters who have been living with me for more than a decade.  That’s right.  I carried these two dear souls, these more-than-best-friends ladies, through a variety of novels I’d been writing.  They were bird-obsessed in one book (not so strange, since all of my books have at least one character who is obsessed with birds).  They were digging a huge hole beneath their house in another.  In an early version of the book that became You Are My Only, it was Cloris who had been committed to the asylum.

Post 1, finally, ran on September 9 on a blog with the clever subtitle, "Looking better in black since 1234."  It was called "The (furious) metamorphosis of Sophie" and it began like this:

Several years ago I began to write a novel for adults that had a certain Sophie as its focus.  She was in her late thirties and her boyfriend, Vin, had recently left her.  She was alone, a writer, and trying to piece together the unresolved oddments of her past.  Strange things were being left on Sophie’s doorstep—signs, masks, even a pot of soup—and the only thing that Sophie knew for sure that she was being lured to an abandoned asylum on the other side of the woods by people she wasn’t certain she could trust.

Finally, for those of you who have actually read to the end of this post, but do not wish to track every post down, then I offer you this:  Link to this YAMO Treasure Hunt Final Installment page on your blog, on Facebook, or on Twitter, send me proof that you did, and you too can be entered to win the grand prizes.

Huge thanks to There's A Book and My Friend Amy for making this hunt possible.  For more about the book, please view the trailer here.

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