Immortals After Dark

The kindest thing a person can do for me is this:
Write a book. Write it well. Give it a setting that's so fully formed and well-described that I can picture it. People it with characters who are witty and interesting, who make me feel their pain and laugh at their jokes. Make me want more. Enthrall me so that when I get to the end I'm sad that it's over. Then turn that book into a series, so I can keep coming back and visiting. So I can't wait for the next book.

That's the kindest thing a person can do for me. And it's why the Immortals After Dark series has made Kresley Cole my new best friend, even though we've never met.

It all started out with Playing Easy to Get. I picked the book up because it had a novella by Sherrilyn Kenyon, whose Bureau of American Defense series I had recently discovered. (Bad-ass crimefighters kick terrorist ass as part of a secret governemnt agency. In between they have really hot sex. A concept made in Bookgirl heaven.) And there, at the end of that collection, was "The Warlord Wants Forever," a novella about Myst, a Valkyrie (an immortal born of a female warrior who dies in battle), who falls in love with Nikolai, a vampire. She had me at hello. The stories are set in the Lore, a world where "creatures that are not human [are] united... coexisting with, yet secret from, man." Brilliant, laugh-out-loud funny dialogue; great battle scenes; even better bedroom scenes. Imagine my joy when I found out there was already a full-length novel in the works.

Cue A Hunger Like No Other. Our heroine Emmaline, half-Valkyrie, half vampire, falls in love with Lachlan, a Lykae (a type of werewolf), even though vampires and werewolves are sworn enemies. As one character puts it, "Vampires, Valyrie, and Lykae, oh my--the fucking monster mash." (Two years later, and that line still makes me bitterly jealous I didn't write it.

Next came No Rest for the Wicked. This time our heroine is another Valkyrie, Kaderin, who's part of what can best be described as The Amazing Race for immortals, where everyone from witches to sirens to "killer gnomes" battles it out across the world on a giant scavenger hunt. Along the way, of course, she falls in love with Nikolai's brother Sebastian, also a vampire. (Which means we get to visit our friends Myst and Nikolai from the first book. Hurrah!)

Then Wicked Deeds on a Winter's Night. Bowen (part of the same clan of werewolves as Lachlan) falls in love with Mari, a witch "from the shady New Orleans coven, the slacker Animal House of witches." The story is so good that I don't even mind not having a Valkyrie as a heroine for the first time.

Next came Dark Needs at Night's Edge. Conrad, the third vampire brother, falls in love with Neomi, a ghost. I find myself hoping maybe the remaining fourth brother will fall in love with me. I realize I've officially lost my mind. And maybe I'm getting a little too into these books...

And now, just out, Dark Desires After Dusk. I haven't read it yet, because I decided I wanted to savor instead of gulp, so I'm rereading the series leading up to the new one. The only series I've ever done that with is Harry Potter. Yes, they're that good.

I demand a lot of my books. I like them smart and funny, entertaining and well-written. I want to curl up and lose myself in the story, and forget everything going on around me. When I find one book that hits the mark, it's exciting. When I find a whole series, well that's about as good as it gets.

New Mantra in Town

Peter Walsh, author of It's All Too Much, is an expert on organizing. On getting rid of clutter, ditching unwanted baggage, and simplifying your life. He's also the man who (indirectly) introduced me to my new mantra.

I'm a word person. I read. I write. I have whole files of quotes I just had to save. I love words. So it makes sense that the idea of a mantra would appeal to me. Words you can say to change your mood, make you think of something in a differnt way, to help you make a decision.

There are a lot that I like. Sarah's favorite yoga mantra is "I am." The mantra Denise learned from her pastor and passed on to me is "All will be well. All will be well. All manner of things will be well." The one I adopted from The Secret is "I'm so happy and grateful." Does it even matter what you're grateful for when you feel so much better just by the act of expressing gratitude?

A few weeks ago, Oprah called Peter Walsh in to help a woman who was a hoarder. Her house had been reduced to about 200 square feet of livable space, because the rest was taken up by stuff. Just all sorts of stuff. And in coaching her on how to get out from under that monkey, he told her that she needed to ask herself two questions about each piece of clutter: Does this help me get the life I want? Or does it keep me from having the life I want? Now, I didn't actually watch Oprah, since, well, I have a job. But someone who takes another Weight Watchers class with my leader saw it, and she repeated it to Courtney, who repeated it to my group. And just like that, Peter Walsh (twice removed, three times if you count Oprah) changed my life.

Because doesn't that just simplify every difficult decision you have to make? Don't most things do one or the other? Bring you closer to the life you want or farther away? It's perfect for Weight Watchers. Going to a fancy dinner with my friends, and then having dessert? It might be a lot of calories, but it's worth it. I want to be the girl who can go out, let go of the reigns a little bit, and just enjoy myself. That's totally helping me have the life I want. But the chips and onion dip I have a tendency to buy at the supermarket and then gorge on sitting on my couch, feeling bad about myself the whole time? Not so much. The week I adopted this new mantra, I lost 4 pounds. I love this man. Seriously. I LOVE this man.

I sat with him by chance at a dinner party six months ago, and it's a good thing I didn't know about this whole mantra thing back then. I might have embarrassed myself. It's bad enought that I gave him an honest estimate about how many pairs of shoes I own. He seems to think I don't actually need that many shoes. Silly man. I won't hold it against him, though. Nobody's perfect, right?

The Last Express to Hogwarts

Tomorrow's the day!! Hurrah!! And as of Saturday I'm on vacation with my family, camping at the beach, so Bookgirl will be on hiatus. I read this today in Shelf Awareness, an email newsletter I get, and it made my heart smile, so I leave you with this...

The Last Express to Hogwarts
It is the eve of our last trip to Hogwarts.

Can you think back to that very first time?
The discovery that we are all merely Muggles?
That first taste of Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans,
Strawberry, curry, coffee and sardine?
Harry's maiden ride on the Nimbus Two Thousand,
And his victorious capture of the Snitch in Quidditch?
Wasn't it all a wonderful surprise?

For Harry it's been seven years,
For us, nearly nine.
The children themselves championed Harry Potter
And the Philosopher's-turned-Sorcerer's Stone in the fall of 1998.
Impatient readers ordered the sequels from Amazon UK.
Their infectious enthusiasm precipitated
A global [English-language] release date for the Goblet of Fire.
Generations read the books aloud together,
Stood in midnight lines together,
Filled movie theaters to capacity,
And witnessed Richard Harris's departure
Before it was beloved Dumbledore's time to go.
And, as Harry broke all records for sales and first printings,
The children prompted the birth of their own New York Times bestseller list.

The children grew up with Harry,
In a trailblazing series that literally matured with its hero.
Laura may have grown up in the woods of Wisconsin,
And on the shores of Silver Lake,
But, in the Order of the Phoenix, we suffered through Harry's adolescence,
Excruciating for its perfect resonance with our own.
When the insidious, unidentifiable threat of terrorism invaded our shores,
Voldemort was a knowable villain.
Evil had a face, and Harry had faced him down--
With a scar on his forehead to prove it.
What more heartening message
Could one give a child?

So, as we stand on Platform Nine and Three-Quarters,
Awaiting the last train to Hogwarts,
We taste the same bittersweetness
That those seniors must taste.
Excited, but a little sad, to graduate from a place
We've embraced as part of our own community.
And though we will bid farewell to Harry, Hermione and Ron
On the final page (one or two of them perhaps sooner),
They await our return at every rereading.

Millions of children grew up with Harry,
And whether they go back to their video games,
Or go on to be lawyers or teachers,
Writers or booksellers,
Their lives have been touched by magic.

They won't forget Harry.
And neither will we.--Jennifer M. Brown

Dumbledore's Army

As I was walking through Rockefeller Plaza at lunch on Friday, I saw a group of teenage girls with their Harry Potter books, and one of them was wearing a “Dumbledore’s Army” t-shirt, as though it was a rock band. And the pure joy this brought me, the excitement that a book—A BOOK!—could still enthrall kids this way, could make them that enthusiastic about reading, well, it just about made by heart burst. On behalf of teachers, librarians, and book lovers everywhere, I hope someone, somewhere, just gave J.K. Rowling a big, wet, sloppy kiss.

My sister Denise and my nephews Jon and Dan (ages 18 and 15) are coming to New York on Friday for the book’s on-sale, and we’re meeting up with my friend Jeanine and her son, and the whole bunch of us are Harry Potter party-hopping downtown. We’ll ooh and aah over the people in costumes, and have a blast, and then at midnight stand in line for our copies of the book. The crowds will be ridiculous, and I’m not only willing to deal with them, I’m thrilled. Just the thought of all those grownups and kids coming together over the love of a book kind of makes me teary. As Polly would say, “These are my people.”

Tom Campbell is co-owner of the Regulator Bookshop in Durham, N.C. It’s one of those fabulous independent bookstores that everyone in the industry knows and respects. He wrote the following in his store newsletter, and captured the spirit perfectly. He, too, is obviously one of my people.

"This is the last Harry Potter book, and it will quite likely be the last time in any of our lifetimes that people will line up, in the middle of the night, all across the country, and all across the world, to buy a book. To 'see what happens next' in a story. The only other time this has ever happened, as far as I know, was with Charles Dickens more than 150 years ago when crowds waited on the quays in New York for the ship carrying the latest installment of The Old Curiosity Shop to dock, calling out to the passengers and crew, 'Is Little Nell dead?'
"We don't yet know who is going to die in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but we do know that more than a million Harry Potter readers are dead to the real significance of this event. These are the people who ordered their books from Amazon, and who at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, July 21, will be home asleep, waiting for the UPS delivery of their book the next day, or two days later, or whenever it arrives. They are indeed getting a great deal on the price of their book, but sometimes in life you get what you pay for. And sometimes you also get an experience that is truly priceless, a once in a lifetime kind of thing."

Eat, Pray, Love

I haven’t written a book review in a while, mostly because the vast majority of my reading has been for work, and writing a review of the fabulous novel you won’t get to read for another 9 months seems kind of mean. But I feel like I’m in grave danger of losing the “Book” half of my Bookgirl tag. And what’s the fun of being just Girl? So here goes.

I read Eat, Pray, Love for my book club tomorrow night. Not the real book club. The one where we each bring a bottle of wine, and then drink it all. It’s really more of a drinking club for people who like to read. But that’s another story…

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is the story of a woman, reeling from a bad divorce, who takes a year to find herself. She spends four months in Italy pursuing pleasure (Eat), 4 months in India pursuing spirituality (Pray), and 4 months in Indonesia studying how to find a balance (Love).

I think it says something about me (and not entirely something positive) that I loved, loved, loved the first part. I laughed out loud, I read passages to whoever happened to be closest to me at the time. Loved it. The prayer part? Yeah, I kept looking ahead, asking “So how much longer can she spend in India? Seriously, she’s meditating. I get it. Can we move on now?” But then the third part, in Bali, bringing it all together, was beautiful and hopeful and touching. It’s one of those books that I’m dying to discuss with the group, or quite frankly anyone else who will listen, because everyone brings something different to, and consequently away from, the book.

For me, one of the things that stood out is that she’s a single woman who always thought her entire life’s goal was to have children, who loves kids, and now isn’t so sure she wants any of her own. I used to be so conflicted—what if I never had kids? Would I be okay with that? Could I be happy? Did I need a child to be complete? And then my goddaughter was born, and I fell head over heels in love. I take her on vacations, I spend Christmas morning at their house, I get all the good parts of being a mom. She calls me her “’Nother Mother.” (Pronounced, of course, with the Massachusetts accent as Nutha Mutha.) And all that internal drama and strife was instantly irrelevant.

My friend Dol, on the other hand, is a Buddhist, has been on silent retreats, and has a daughter. I’m dying to hear what she got from the book. Has anyone else read it?

p.s. I've posted my backlist to this site so my blog entries are all in one place, so if you look back you might find some gems.

This One's for Polly

My friend Polly e-mailed me the other day to tell me that I don’t update my blog often enough to keep her entertained. Normally, that would have been fine. But this email came on a day when I was so overwhelmed, so completely in over my head, that I couldn’t see straight. So instead of being flattered that she likes my blog, and yes, I have readers, I just barely resisted the urge to respond with something that would have made my mama ashamed of me, and then I ignored the phone when she called. So even though she doesn’t know all this (at least not until she reads this entry), I knew that I was fresh and felt bad about it. So I’m writing a special entry, just to entertain her. This one’s for Polly.

One of the things that makes working in publishing so much fun is that there will always be a giant gap between what needs to be done and what one human being can conceivably do. For perfectionists, in that gap lies madness. Carolyn Reidy, the head of the adult group at my company and my boss’s boss, once put it best: “Every person in this building has a stack of things on their desk they could do to sell more books that they will never get to. It’s all about triage.” Some days, I remember that quote and I’m fine. Others, the knowledge that I’m doing my best and it will never be enough gets more than a little discouraging. Last week was the latter. I grabbed the first piece of paper I could find and was using it as a bookmark last week, and then I noticed that it was my Prozac prescription refill. The universe has a sense of humor….

My book club met yesterday, and I had to brave public transportation to get there for the first time. My book club meets on Long Island at Hofstra, my alma mater, which is a beautiful campus. Set smack dab in the middle of a giant slum. I had forgotten just how much fun the Hempstead train station was, with the assortment of homeless, quasi-homeless, and strung out people. One man was talking to himself and crying, then he went outside and made out with his girlfriend for a while. She was wearing mint green fuzzy slippers. Good times.


We read a little bit of everything in the club. This month’s book was A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith. And it was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I had read the first half before, but never finished it, because trying to set time aside to read something that long is hard to do when my work reading is piling up. But I always give myself permission to take a break from manuscripts for my book club, which is one of the reasons I love being in it so much. It was one of those books where I got to the end and just kind of held it for a minute to savor the moment. It was a book that reminded me why I love reading as much as I do. One of the women in the group is older, and read it in 1943 when it was new, as a 13-year-old. She’s never reread it, because she always wants to remember it from that space, not with her adult perspective. I have books like that from my past, that made such an impact that I can remember so vividly where and when I read them. Does anyone else?

What I'm Reading

I’ve been reading the Janet Evanovich Stephanie Plum books. It’s a bit of a moral dilemma for me. See, I normally don’t believe in supporting any author who has played an active role in making one of my friends miserable. And she tried to get one of my friends fired a few years back. Every publishing person has at least one Very Bad Author. You see their name on an upcoming pub schedule and cringe, because you know that every bit of the process will be painful. My personal VBA, I’m convinced, sold her soul to the devil to achieve her fame. There’s no other way to explain why she has lost any shred of humanity. My friend Polly used to really like her work, but had to stop reading her after the second or third time I called her crying. For ethical reasons, I don’t want to like someone else’s VBA, but the truth is that she’s a great writer. She’s funny and sarcastic, and the books make me snicker out loud. So I guess it’s only fair. If you’re one of the people who’s been banned from my VBA, you’re allowed to start reading her again. What’s good for the goose…

My friends Tink and Carolyn did a reading at Borders yesterday. Carolyn read from her brand-new novel, Rain Village, which is about a girl escaping her abusive childhood by learning to master the trapeze and joining the circus. It’s beautifully written magical realism. I read it years ago in manuscript form and couldn’t get the characters out of my head, so it’s so great to see it published. Check it out.

Tink’s book, A Rip in Heaven, came out a few years ago. It’s true crime, about a tragedy that happened in her family. While they were on vacation, her two cousins were raped and murdered, and her brother was falsely accused of the crime. It’s wonderful, but not exactly easy to read emotionally. And as she said, “A pregnant woman in a sparkly red top crying isn’t exactly festive.” So she read from her novel in progress, about Irish gypsies, which sounds like it’s going to be great. I took the bus to the reading, one of my first adventures in carlessness, and learned a valuable lesson. People who take buses during the week are commuters. Once you leave Manhattan, though, people who takes buses on weekends are just poor. At one point, I saw another young, professional-looking couple on the bus, and it made me feel better for a second. Then I took a closer look, and realized I knew them, and they were going the same place I was. Sigh...


I also just finished Disobedience by Naomi Alderman. It’s wonderful, literary fiction set in an Orthodox Jewish community in London. The main character is a modern, bisexual woman living in New York. When her estranged father, a respected rabbi, dies, she goes back to the community she fled years ago. It was smart and illuminating and just in general wonderful. I loved it for the writing, but also for that “peek into another world” aspect, the same way I’m always fascinated by books about the Amish.

The Food Network Made Me Do It

I’ve long contended that the Food Network is the single biggest contributor to my weekend productivity. See, I like television. I like to cook. But I LOATHE the Food Network. Rachael Ray’s voice goes right through me. The Everyday Italian chick is so skinny she looks like a bobble-head doll. In general, I think cooking shows are about as interesting as watching paint dry.
So on Saturdays, I get up early and catch up on my DVR’ed shows for a couple of hours. When my roommate gets up, I share the remote out of a basic sense of fairness. She inevitably puts on the Food Network, and I can’t get out of the living room quickly enough. So the main drive behind my Saturday cleaning and cooking? Not responsibility. Getting away from the television.
Jodie was away this weekend, and my theory was proven without a doubt. An object at rest stays at rest, particularly when that object is me on my couch. The only thing I had to do that was pressing was some cooking for the week, and making a pie for a party I was going to on Sunday. I did those things. But not until 10 pm, when I had been on my couch for 13 hours.
The bad news? I’m disgustingly lazy. The good news? I watched the entire Band of Brothers miniseries on demand, and it was the best television I’ve ever seen. At points I was sobbing out loud.
I also had my book club this weekend, and we discussed Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. It’s that kind of great narrative nonfiction that even I can enjoy, which is saying a lot since it’s nonfiction. It’s about the working poor in the United States, and the author went “undercover” working at a number of low-paying jobs—working at Wal-Mart, as a maid, as a waitress, and serving food in a nursing home. It was really interesting, really well-written, and also really uncomfortable to read in a lot of ways, since social class is something Americans just don’t talk about. I loved it, and would recommend it.

The Miss My Moms

Even though I left Woonsocket 13 years ago, I still get homesick. I can go two months, and no more, before I get a bad case of what I call the “Miss my moms.”
Since I go to Rhode Island so much during the summer and then go cold turkey until the holidays, I can pretty much pencil “miss mommy” into my schedule for right about now. It’s like clockwork.
And that’s one of the reasons I’m SO excited my parents are coming to visit this weekend. When I was in college on Long Island , they used to visit me, but once I moved here permanently they told me, “You’re the one who left, not us. If you want to see us, you come here.” And they were true to their word. They’ve visited me exactly three times in nine years. But my oldest sister turned 50 this fall, and we decided to plan a weekend here to celebrate, so my parents and Denise are coming for the weekend. I’ve got it all planned out – I’ve got dessert places scoped out for my mother, the Museum of Natural History which my sister and dad will love, tickets to the Radio City Christmas Spectacular (at their request). The only thing left is Saturday night dinner. I keep coming up with, and then rejecting, places. Denise is a country mouse who likes to play at being worldly in New York, so we usually do something exotic. But my parents are suburban senior citizens who don’t eat spicy food. I’m coming up with blanks on something that will satisfy everyone. Anyone have suggestions?
What I’m reading:
I’ve been reading The Education of a Coach, this great biography of Bill Belichick, the Patriots coach. Memoirs and sports biographies are pretty much my sole exception to the I only read fiction rule…