Kindle Daily Post

Guest Blogger: Elin Hilderbrand

The Surfing Lesson is a touching short story about a poignant stage in a marriage explores the backstory of Margot Carmichael, one of the stars in Elin Hilderbrand's new novel Beautiful Day.

Full disclosure: I am not a surfer.  I have never lay on a board, nor sat on one, much less stood on one.  I don’t even particularly like waves.  When I go into the ocean, I time my entry and exit between waves, after executing what I have termed “the French dip,” which lasts two to three seconds.

Why then did I write a short story entitled, The Surfing Lesson?  The answer is that I wanted to write a spinoff to my forthcoming novel, Beautiful Day – and the story of Margot Carmichael’s divorce from her well-meaning but somewhat feckless husband, Drum, presented an irresistible opportunity.  The Surfing Lesson follows Margot’s painful and confounding realization, during her family’s two-week vacation on Nantucket, that she no longer loves Drum.  She yearns to feel differently, but when she and Drum and their three children bump into Drum’s ex-girlfriend, a woman who has haunted Margot for the entirety of her marriage, she feels no jealousy, and she understands the marriage is over. 

Drum is a Nantucket surfer.  Not only have I gotten to know this particular breed of athlete during my twenty years on the island, I have given birth to one.  My son, Maxwell, age thirteen, is one of the most graceful surfers I have ever seen in action.  It came to him naturally; it was as though he was born knowing how to place his feet, balance his weight, and ride the board.  I have spent many an early summer morning, completely exhausted, watching from the front seat of my Jeep on the south shore, while Maxx catches the earliest and best waves of the day.

I pretend to be exasperated about sacrificing my sleep so he can pursue the surf, but in truth, I’m jealous.  I wish I had the feel for the water and its movement the way he does; I wish I had his prowess and skill, and I have told him so. 

He is a good kid, and an even better son.  He always says, “It’s okay, Mom.  You can just write about it.”

Believe me when I say, you do NOT have to be a master of the left-hand breaker to enjoy The Surfing Lesson.  You just have to be able to read.  Happy summer!

--Elin Hilderbrand

 

 

Guest Blogger: Robert Lyndon, author of "Hawk Quest"

Robert Lyndon has been a falconer since boyhood. A keen student of history, he was intrigued by accounts of hawks being used as ransoms during the Middle Ages. Some of the scenes in Hawk Quest were inspired by Lyndon's own experiences as a falconer, climber and traveller in remote places.

Hawk Quest was born out of a long involvement with falconry, a love of wild places and a weakness for epic tales of historical adventure. One book that definitely inspired me was Frans G Bengtsson’s classic The Long Ships, a reworking of the Norse sagas which I read at about the same time I trained my first hawk.

Falcons in the Middle Ages were used not only for hunting, but also as royal gifts, a form of taxation, and as ransoms. At the end of the 14^th century, for example, the Ottoman sultan Beyazid turned down the Duke of Burgundy’s offer of 200,000 gold ducats as ransom payment for the duke’s crusader son. Instead, the sultan offered to free his prisoner in exchange for a dozen white gyrfalcons.

Hawk Quest is set three centuries earlier and tells the story of a band of adventurers who travel to the ends of the known world in search of four falcons demanded as ransom for a Norman knight captured by the Turks. The journey lasts a year and takes them to Iceland and Greenland, the White Sea and Rus, and down the River Dnieper to the Black Sea and Anatolia.

Writing the book took me ten times longer than that journey. I wrote it in stages, laying it aside for months on end while I scraped a living doing everything from driving a truck to teaching creative writing. The research probably took as much time as the writing. Initially I planned to retrace part of my characters’ route, but soon discovered that the medieval word in which they travelled had changed beyond recognition. The Dnieper, a major route used by Viking raiders and traders, is now one of the most polluted rivers in Europe, and its legendary rapids, with names like the ‘Gulper’ and the ‘Insatiable’, were drowned under a hydroelectric scheme in the 1920s.

I’ve just finished the sequel to Hawk Quest. Imperial Fire involves another epic journey – this time from Constantinople to China. It was a lot easier to write, my main difficulty being how to do justice to four rather than three Point of View characters. Now I have to decide whether to complete a trilogy or allow my characters to slip back into the mists of history.

--Robert Lyndon

Guest Blogger: Peggy Riley, author of "Amity & Sorrow"

Peggy Riley is a writer and playwright. She recently won a Highly Commended prize in the 2011 Bridport Prize and was published in their latest anthology. Amity & Sorrow is her first novel.

My 1970s California childhood was filled with violent faiths and death cults, from Charles Manson’s Family of former hippies who committed murder in his name in the Hollywood Hills to Reverend Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple, which moved from San Francisco to Guyana, hoping to build Eden.  I will never forget the bodies, strewn across the jungle floor lying flat and embracing, all having drunk his poison punch, or the fiery siege at Waco that killed the Branch Davidians, praying inside their church.  In America’s history of handmade faiths are charismatic leaders who set out to change the world and the followers they gather, desperate to believe. 

I began to write my first novel, Amity & Sorrow, when I saw a newspaper image--a wooden church on fire, sitting on a barren prairie.  My mind added women to the picture, a group of women in long skirts running through the smoke.  I began to wonder who the women were and why their church was on fire.  I thought of the strength of belief in America’s history, a nation founded by religious radicals in search of freedom, and the fear of outsiders and the government that forces new faiths into isolation and secrecy.  In creating the church at the center of my novel, I knew it would have its roots in the American impulse to build utopia, but that it would be influenced by my own memories of more recent and darker faiths.  Its believers would be women, drawn from a world that had abandoned them, rejected them, leaving them alone, afraid and eager to join a family, at any cost.  Their children would be raised outside the world, in an Eden that was slowly turning to rot.  

Amity and Sorrow are two sisters, run from the fire by their mother--by one of their mothers--for their home is a fundamentalist, polygamous church of one man and his fifty wives.  They drive for days until, frightened and exhausted, they crash onto a farm on the Oklahoma Panhandle.  The girls find themselves in a new and strange world, far from their faith and family, when all their lives they had only been waiting for the world to end.  Will they find a new way to be a family without their faith?  Or will they have to move heaven and earth to get back home?     

--Peggy Riley

Guest Blogger: Author Connie Brockway on Southern Romances

Guest post by New York Times and USA Today best-selling author Connie Brockway. She is an eight time finalist for Romance Writers of America prestigious RITA award and a two-time recipient for My Dearest Enemy and The Bridal Season.

I’m in the mood for something steamy and since up here on the tundra, where we are still entrenched in the never-ending winter, preferably something warm weather-related. But if I can’t have that, I’ll settle for the Deep South and a molasses-smooth drawl, humid nights, hot heroes, and Steel Magnolia heroines.

Here’s my selection of old and new treasures guaranteed to sweep you away somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line:

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

Long before True Blood hit the HBO airwaves, Charlaine Harris wrote a more genial (if no less blood thirsty) vampire novel called Dead Until Dark. In it, her naive 25-year-old virgin waitress finds true love and an empty mind (you either already know why this is a plus or you’ll just have to read the book!) with super stud vampire Bill. But the real star of this story in Bon Temp, a sleepy bayou stranded town with a plethora of characters both, alive and dead, supernatural and super-odd that will have you turning pages as fast as you can. Here’s a story that goes down as easy as sweet tea on a hot afternoon!

 

Texas Destiny by Lorraine Heath

If you love a tortured hero, you’re going to adore Houston Leigh, ravaged body and soul by injuries suffered in the Civil War. Sent to escort his beloved brother’s mail-order bride across the Texas wilderness, Houston falls for southern bell Amelia Carson. What’s a tortured, honorable, desperate man to do, especially when your brother is not some shiftless ne’er do well but a good, hard-working man deserving of the glorious Amelia? Happily, in Lorraine Heath’s expert hands, the answer isn’t left entirely up to Houston. Amelia has survived her own ordeals and emerged stronger, more competent and ready to love. This is a richly satisfying and emotional read that never takes the easy way out. And that setting? I can almost taste the trail dust.

 

Meant to Be by Terri Osburn

Warning, this book is not available until May 21 but it fit in so well with my theme and was so much fun that I couldn’t resist including it. Sweet, disarming Beth Chandler isn’t exactly a mail-order bride but she is willing to take a terrifying voyage (okay, it’s a short hop across a channel on a ferry, but she’s hydrophobic) to meet her future in-laws on idyllic Anchor Island. During the trip she finds a welcome distraction in rugged fellow passenger Joe Dempsey and his dog, Dozer. The animal magnetism (sorry, it was irresistible) is not only doomed by the fact that she’s already engaged, but then she discovers that —yup… you guessed it— Joe is her intended’s brother. Fun, flirty, with an adorable and genuinely likeable heroine and a great supporting cast, watching these two fight their high-octane attraction is pure delight. Hit that pre-order button!

I could go on for a long time about my favorite southern delights but for those of you who want to really sink your teeth into the more over-the-top on that pile, I suggest digging up some of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s titles such as Ashes in the Wind or the seminal Shanna. They’re as lush and rich as praline sauce on bread pudding. Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Guest Blogger: Austin Grossman, on "You"

With You, Austin Grossman offers his most daring and most personal novel yet--a thrilling, hilarious, authentic portrait of the world of professional game makers; and the story of how learning to play can save your life.

I wanted to write the Great American Video Game Novel. 

I wanted to write about my time in the game industry in the 1990's, and all the exciting things that were happening there as we competed to invent this thing that was just turning the corner from toy to mass media to art. And I wanted to tell the story of four kids who would do anything to escape their stupid lives, but instead of starting a death-metal band or writing poetry or taking drugs, they decide to make the greatest video game in history.

But there was a problem, a novel-writing problem: Who cares about video games? Technically, I and countless millions of other people do, but to a novelist trying to tell a good story there's a haunting question: Is this just going to be a novel about people staring at computer screens?

I knew the obvious way past this. You just say "There's a video game with a bomb attached to it! And unless our hero gets a perfect score, it's going to blow up, and all - all! - the orphans will die." And that's one way to tell that story - you make video games a mechanism for a plot based on sensible, familiar real-world stakes.

But something in me said "no" to writing that novel. It was the nagging feeling I was underestimating the possibilities of a novel about video games. Making it about the bomb and the orphans was like saying video games don't matter. And people do sometimes play video games even when there aren't innocent lives at stake, don't they? There has to be a way of writing about them that showed why video games are the entertainment medium to beat in the 21st century.

I thought about why I make and play games, and I tried to be honest about it. Sometimes I want to goof around with my friends. Sometimes it's been a long, crappy day and I want to feel like I'm somewhere else for a while, doing something else, being someone else - in fact the way a novel makes me feel.

I first came to video games because they were a way of making friends, and a way of leaving my house and my town, of striking out on my own to a place where parents and teachers couldn't follow, long before I could drive a car. Then as now, I came to games for lots of reasons. I came them angry, I came to them lonely, I came to them curious about who I could be if I tried.

People come to gaming from their own individual histories, and it was putting gameplay into prose that taught me that everyone's got a reason to play a video game, and how they do it speaks volumes. And then I wasn't just writing a novel about video games. I was writing about friendship, about ambition, about grief, about everything the hero of a video game feels - you know the hero I'm talking about, the one at the controller making the choices, taking the risks, losing and winning. The hero, which is to say, you.

--Austin Grossman

"The Sisterhood" by Helen Bryan

Guest blogger Helen Bryan is the author of the best-selling World War II novel War Brides, as well as two nonfiction books. Her sweeping new historical love story, The Sisterhood, comes out today.

At some point in their writing career, most authors have been asked where the idea for a particular book came from. "What possessed you," readers inquire, "to write about that?" While I have known authors to claim such diverse sources of inspiration as divine light, solitary running, or the creative properties of strong drink, in my experience "possession" gets pretty near the mark. Ideas can take on a force that drags the author along.

The Sisterhood is a case in point. The seed for this book was sown long ago, during a visit to a 16th-century Spanish convent whose orphanage was home to many illegitimate daughters of the aristocracy. These children occupied a peculiar position between privilege and a fate sealed at birth; they were destined to become nuns themselves and never leave the convent. In the low-ceilinged rooms where they lived were cases of odd ecclesiastical "toys" that the little girls played with to prepare them for their future, and somehow the convent was full of the children's presence. I had a vague idea that this would be a good setting for a period novel featuring a beautiful, plucky orphan who escaped to find love in Spanish America.

Then I forgot about nuns and runaway orphans until many years and several books later. I was trying to work on a book set in the United States when I found that the Spanish convent and its orphan girls kept getting in the way of my progress. I put the American story on hold and began researching 16th-century Spain.

Research for historical fiction allows a writer to procrastinate, almost indefinitely, without actually writing anything. So it is easy to begin: Dip a toe in the water, and before you know it, you're up to your neck. I began spending days in the British Library reading about what shaped life in the aftermath of the Christian overthrow of the Muslim Moors, the role of nuns and convents, the Spanish conquest in Latin America, and colonial society.

One orphan became five; parallel plots unfolded, expanded, and connected. The background of political tensions between Jews, Christians, and Muslims loomed larger and larger, and I began to see parallels between the 16th century and the modern world. This introduced a dimension to the novel that I never anticipated but found impossible to ignore.

The Sisterhood was not the book I intended to write but the product of a once vague idea that took on a compelling life of its own—and, in turn, compelled me.

—Helen Bryan

 

Everything and Nothing

Guest blogger Catherine Ryan Hyde is the author of 20 published and forthcoming books, including the national bestseller Pay It Forward and her latest novel, Walk Me Home.

I write character-driven fiction, so each novel begins with a character in my mind. Once I know the characters, the plot suggests itself.

When I began Walk Me Home, one important character dictated the mood and action, not to mention setting high stakes for all the others. It wasn't Carly. Or Jen. Or their mother. Or even Teddy. It was the American Southwest.

Place can be a character. But for place to be a driving force in my novel, it must be someplace I know firsthand. The first time I saw Navajo and Hopi lands, I was on a drive through the Painted Desert in Arizona in 1989. I was headed to the Grand Canyon for the first time. In my old pickup, with my old dog, I sliced in and out of the rain, the clouds dark, the scenery arresting, Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" blasting on the cassette player. Over and over.

The visit would not be my last. Later I wrote Funerals for Horses, my first published novel, and set much of it in the Navajo Nation. But it wasn't enough. The landscape wouldn't leave me. I had more business with this character.

The Southwest is mostly desert, beautiful but unforgiving. Spaces between towns can be empty and long, shade nonexistent. If two young, recently orphaned sisters try to move through on foot, the conflict is built in: their inexperience against a character who is at once breathtaking and deadly. Compromises must be made if the girls are to survive.

Red Rock, Arizona, never fails to make me feel inspired...and insignificant. It reminds me that I'm tiny but part of the greater whole. One with every other tiny thing.

Jen thinks it's everything. Carly thinks it's nothing. The land changes the opinion of the girl who most needs changing.

—Catherine Ryan Hyde

Guest Blogger: Fleetwood Robbins on "Geek Chic" Culture

Guest contributor Fleetwood Robbins is an editor and sci-fi and fantasy enthusiast.

In advance of geek week, I started thinking about what “geek chic” means. My first thoughts were about fashion -- heavy frame glasses and whatever else we choose to label geeky -- and how that has contributed to what the mainstream considers cool. But geek culture, or fandom, has really become so much more influential on the culture as a whole than a simple fashion trend. It’s becoming the mainstream. The acceptance of geek culture has made reading an old pulp paperback in public totally acceptable. Now I listen to my mom’s theories on Jon Snow’s parentage rather than the details of her neighbor’s fourth marriage. “Han shot first” is, for many people, as familiar a refrain as is “All is fair in love and war.” It’s hard to know when all this happened, but just as the dude abides, fandom pervades.

Watching the Mad Men season premiere the other weekend I was struck again by the improbable intersection of geek and mainstream culture. Let me set the stage without spoiling anything for you. Betty Draper is out in search of her daughter’s friend, who she believes has run away. After tracking her to an East Village tenement that serves as a squat for some counterculture youths, Betty talks to a young man named Zal who says, “We have to take everything that the establishment throws away” in reference to all their objets trouvés. “What you can’t grok is that we are your [mainstream society’s] garbage.”

Whatever philosophical point Zal is trying make, his use of vocabulary is really intriguing. “To grok,” which is to say “to understand profoundly and intuitively,” according to Merriam-Webster, is a verb that I hear thrown around in fantasy and science fiction circles quite often. Robert Heinlein introduced the word in Stranger in a Strange Land in 1961 (which was the first science fiction book I ever read). That pub date would certainly make it possible that Zal would use the word in the context of the show, but it’s also really unlikely. The Mad Men writers seem to suggest that the word took a rather circuitous route through sixties counterculture -- which is undoubtedly offered as “cool” in relation to Betty’s establishment square -- before eventually snaking back into geek speak, something we now consider to be cool, and finally into mainstream usage. I suspect that the word never had a heyday with the Abbie Hoffman set, but instead took a good long time to work outwardly from Heinlein and SF circles into more general geek culture, and finally into the dictionary. And it’s still not a word you hear often.  

It’s a rather brilliant bit of dialogue, in my opinion -- something that suggests some very thoughtful and careful attention to detail, which is something I always appreciate. That Zal -- the edgy, forward-thinking character in question -- uses the word legitimizes it’s modern usage as cool, despite the time period of the setting. I guess it’s only a matter of time before my mom tells me that she grokked the ending of Cold Skin on page one. 

Top Five Graphic Novel Picks by Brian Wood

Author Brian Wood released his first graphic novel, Channel Zero, in 1997 but has spent much of his life consuming comics. While most of his time is now spent creating comics, he shares his top five graphic novels (and series) of all time with us. Catch Wood's newest work, The Massive, now on Kindle.

I often joke, in interviews and panel discussions, that after fifteen years of writing comics, I read very little of them.  I liken it to knowing how hotdogs are made – once you’re fully aware of the behind-the-scenes process, the finished product can lose a lot of its magic.  But that’s not always true, and here’s a few of my favorites that stand my test of time.

Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Darick Robertson: This series debuted just as I decided making my own comics was something I wanted to try, and this was more influential than even I probably know.  Really funny, nasty, prescient, heart breaking, profane, and violent, this political-journalist-in-the-future epic is so much more than the sum of all of its parts.  Warren Ellis’ career as a predictor of the very near future is still going strong today, but this is really where it all started.  For me personally, this became the benchmark of what I hoped to attain as a comic book writer, and my own series DMZ owes a lot to Transmetropolitan.

The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century by Frank Miller and illustrated by Dave Gibbons: Frank Miller is known for a lot of books, but this isn’t one that’s often cited.  Shame, since for me, hands down, this is as good as it gets.  You could call it dystopia, but it's really not, at least one what you expect when you hear that word.  A young woman pulls herself out of poverty (in a world where a cyborg Nixon is still president, no less), fights in some pointless war that seems to be perpetrated by warring factions of the fast food beef industry, and falls into a rapidly changing future of corrupt politics set against a second American civil war.  This is an INCREDIBLY progressive series, on both the political front and also for featuring one of the strongest, most complex, most human female lead characters I think comics has ever produced.  Another big influence.

The Winter Men by Brett Lewis and illustrated by John Paul Leon: Perpetually out of print and/or difficult to track down, this single volume about post-collapse Soviet superheroes is perfection. In terms of dialogue, it has no equal in or out of comics; the art is John Paul’s absolute best.  This is the comic that every single other person I know who makes comics moan and groans and pulls their hair out because HOW DID THEY MAKE SOMETHING SO PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL AND OH MY GOD, AHHHH. The ultimate comic book cult classic.  Last time this book was released, I bought 20 copies to use as gifts.  I think I have two left. 

Punisher MAX by Garth Ennis: This is actually a series of about ten volumes, each one standing on its own.  They are all worth your while, Garth’s r-rated version of Marvel Comics’ The Punisher, an aging, bitter, war-torn version of the costumed hero.  In the MAX series, Frank Castle wears a windbreaker and takes on the mafia, soldiers from his past, white slavers, Russian special forces, and fellow hitmen.  It’s unrelentingly dark and violent, but never without rays of hope, and I’ve never felt for any superhero like I do for Garth’s Punisher.  Standouts include the volumes Mother Russia, Man Of Stone, and the gut-punch that is Slavers.  Start there.

The Filth by Grant Morrison: I’ve read this book a dozen times since it was published almost ten years ago and each time takes me a little closer to figuring out what the hell is going on.  Don’t let that scare you off, though, this is an insanely inventive, raw, and perverted story about secret societies, commie chimpanzees, sex police, and split personalities.  This is pretty pure sci-fi, and while challenging, is also one of the most original comics I’ve read.  And like I said, it rewards multiple re-reads.  Not for the puritanical, though.

I’d point out that all of the above are at least five years old, and most are more like a decade.  That’s not (only) me showing my age, but it speaks to the fact they all stand the test of time, no easy feat when dealing with science fiction or speculative fiction or social commentary.  Details can change, tech can turn obsolete, and political and geographic realities shift, but great sci-fi is always, at its core, about how people are affected by it.  That’s the access point for the reader, that’s what makes us give a damn. 

Watching Waverly Bryson Grow Up

Guest blogger Maria Murnane abandoned a successful career in public relations to pursue a more fulfilling life as a novelist and speaker. Since then, she has written four Waverly Bryson novels: The latest, Chocolate for Two, is fresh off the presses this week.

I often hear from fans of my books that they'd love to have Waverly Bryson as a friend. This always makes me smile, because it shows that my readers see Waverly as an actual person. In real life, people evolve over time (or at least they should) but don't change who they are at the core, so the challenge in writing four books with the same protagonist was to preserve her fundamental personality while allowing her to mature. That was a tricky thing to do, because I didn't want anyone to think I'd strayed too far from the Waverly they'd fallen in love with in Perfect on Paper.

I didn't follow a particular strategy to allow Waverly to "grow up," but I did let her speak to me as I wrote the sequels to Perfect on Paper. That may sound a bit nuts, but it's true. For each book, I'd sit at my computer, come up with a general idea for a story, then ask myself a series of questions as I went along. I believe following this approach worked, because allowing Waverly to provide the answers helped shape three more books that stayed true to her.

For example, when Waverly realizes she might be losing Jake because of her own insecurity in It's a Waverly Life, I asked myself, How would this situation make her feel? What would she do about it? In Honey on Your Mind, I decided it would be fun if Waverly were offered a chance to work on a TV show but would have to move to New York to do it. I asked myself, How would she feel about leaving San Francisco? Where would she want to live in New York, and why? Then, in Chocolate for Two, I wanted Jake and Waverly to get married but not without some conflict, so I introduced Jake's frosty mother, whose plans for the wedding differ dramatically from Waverly's. Here I thought, How would Waverly's life experience inform her reaction to this realization? Then later, How would she explain to her friends—and herself—why she's not standing up to Mrs. McIntyre?

For each question, large or small, I would wait for the answer to reveal itself—and when it did, I wrote it down. I rarely forced the creative process, but when I occasionally wound up with a line or section that just didn't sound like something Waverly would say or do, I deleted or changed it.

What I love most about Waverly Bryson is that she's real. And by that I mean sincere. She's flawed, but she tries her best to be a good person, no matter where she is in her personal and professional development. I wanted that quality to shine through in all four books, and I hope it did. And of course, wherever the future takes her, she'll always have those cringe-worthy Waverly moments—some things will never change.

—Maria Murnane