WHO ARE THE READERS?

Let’s talk about reading. How much do you love to read? In the year 1250 Richard de Fournival compared his personal library of books to a garden "wherein his fellow citizens might gather the fruits of knowledge." He divided his books into "flowerbeds," and this organized flowerbed universe became a place where everything had its place and was defined by it. In a celebrated short story, Jorge Borges imagines a library as vast as the universe where every real (or imaginable) book is represented and no two books are identical -- there’s the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the Gospels and commentaries, a version of every book in every language, the interpolation of every book in all other books (the lost books of Tacitus), and in the end Borges’ narrator wanders through the exhausting corridors of the library and realizes that this is but part of another overwhelming category of libraries, and that the almost infinite collection of books is repeated throughout a bookish eternity. "My loneliness is cheered," he says, "by this elegant hope."

Franz Kafka said a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. Hmmm. How many axes have you lined up on your shelves? Why not pick up a copy of I LOVE YOU LIKE A TOMATO (which just won the San Diego Book Awards Best Fiction award) and recently released in paperback? (Cheap -- buy copies for gifts.) Let’s chop up some frozen seas.
Con affetto sempre,
Marie

Getting Published

What makes a writer write and how long does it take to get published? This week I’ll be talking to a group of writers about getting a book published and later I’ll be judging an open fiction reading for the San Diego Writers & Editors. Let me share a couple writers’ stories with you: Author Terry Goodkind had a career as a wildlife artist, was also a cabinetmaker, a violin maker and a restorer of rare and exotic artifacts, and at 45 years old sold his first fantasy book for a record advance of $275,000. ("I’ve always written stories in my head," he says.)

Elizabeth George, author of British detective novels, was a high school English teacher for 13-1/2 years. She says she took a long hiatus from writing because of "the high-rejection, ego-battering business of getting published." When she landed an agent, her first of twelve novels sold in six days. Alice Sebold taught, worked in restaurants, drank too much, took drugs and did things she is now ashamed of. After ten years struggling in New York, she moved to California, and while living in a cabin without electricity, she wrote by lantern light. "The Lovely Bones" sold around a million copies in less than two months.

My agent sold my novel, "I Love You Like a Tomato" after only a couple of months of nail chewing, and it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize last year. The paperback edition is now out (only $6.99!) -- See my special offer going now. Click here.

I recently saw a documentary on a man without legs who walked across the United States on his hands. Did he make it? Yes.

Enough said.