The Divining Wand

‘Tis the season to celebrate joy and these two authors have found their own way.

A Christmas Story

I have been a sucker for Christmas movies ever since I was a small child, and have always been partial to the predecessor to White Christmas, Holiday Inn. It’s so charming and old-fashioned, and is a classical screwball comedy of the 40’s.

But…my English/Latin teacher always read aloud to my Latin class the week before Christmas from Jean Shepherd’s wonderful memoir, In God We Trust All Others Pay Cash, and I became so thoroughly engrossed in Shepherd’s world. To my great surprise one year at Christmas, shortly after I graduated from college, we were channel surfing and came upon the movie, A Christmas Story, which was excerpted from Shepherd’s book.

In adapting the film, the screenwriters perfectly captured the feel of the era, along with the humor of the writer, and I was hooked.

Now each year my family watches this movie as we are decorating our Christmas tree; the kids
demand we put it on if we forget. And so the movie has many layers of memories for me: it brings back fond memories from high school, particularly from one of my favorite teachers who was most inspiring to me as a writer; it engrosses me in Shepherd’s universe, freeze-framing in a charming way the Depression era, which wasn’t necessarily such a charming time in which to live, but yet he so effectively pulls in his readers with his sense of family and place; and of course now it’s been brought into a joyful tradition with my own family.

Sometimes Christmas movies (and carols, for that matter) can get a bit maudlin, and I appreciate that this movie can elicit heartfelt emotion without too much treacle, and keep us laughing (always important to me!).

Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday!
Jenny Gardiner (Sleeping with Ward Cleaver, Winging It: Twenty Years of Caring for a Vengeful Bird Determined to Kill Me coming March 16, 2010)

Joëlle’s Holiday Tradition

My husband and I are Buddhist so the holidays just sort of slide by unnoticed here (except New Years – we have a big dinner and count our blessings and sometimes exchange a gift or two). But even though we don’t celebrate Christmas ourselves, we do have a very cool holiday tradition. Several years ago, when we were cleaning out my mother-in-law’s house after she died, we found my husband’s childhood, silver foil, circa 1960s Christmas tree, complete with the spinning coloured light. We try to set it up and decorate it most years now. We actually have a lot of ornaments because we saved some of his parents’ that we inherited, and we have many Christian friends who have given them to us as gifts. It’s a fun remembrance of our families and friends and it’s sparkly, festive, and pretty. And the cats love it!
Joëlle Anthony (Restoring Harmony YA coming May 13, 2010)

Ah, the Muse returns or does s/he? Having asked the following authors to describe their inspiration — either in physical appearance or otherwise — you’ll discover their muses are known by many names.

Alicia Bessette (All Come Home coming in August 2010):

“Music is my most influential muse. And absolutely everything inspires me to write. Sunshine, flavors, funerals. Live performances of any kind, overheard conversations. Apple-picking, sitting in a darkened movie theater, running my hand along silk scarves that hang in a clothing store. My next-door neighbor, who sings along to Sonny & Cher at the top of his lungs and leaves carrots and cups of water for the orphaned rabbit living under his back steps … I could go on and on.”

Therese Fowler (Souvenir, Reunion):

“I love this question, because it reminds me that writers are so diverse in what motivates and inspires them. There is a romantic ideal that presumes we all have muses, but as you know, that’s not always the case–and may not even be the case often. Of all the writers I know, only a few have ever mentioned a personified muse.

“Inspiration, though: we all have that! Mine is based in nature: human nature primarily, and then the natural world. It’s the concert of those two forces that compels me to observe, select, and then set down my stories onto paper.

“When I’m feeling unmotivated, I know I simply need to get outdoors and let my mind relax and become receptive again.”

Jenny Gardiner (Sleeping with Ward Cleaver, Winging It: Twenty Years of Caring for a Vengeful Bird Determined to Kill Me coming March 16, 2010):

“My muse…hmmm. I actually joked to a friend a few weeks ago that my Muse was lying in a gutter, bloodied and battered. And then about ten minutes later I came up with a really fun book idea, so so much for badmouthing my Muse! I suppose I’m not very poetic but I’ve never really tried to sense my muse, though I will say that I get inspired and have to stop everything to brainstorm. So I guess my muse sweeps in unannounced, a sort of grande dame who trails perfume and wears gaudy jewelry and dresses in elegant evening gowns even for casual occasions.

“I suppose I am driven to write just as a mathematician is driven to calculate. It’s what I do, what I love and what feels most comfortable. Just as I feel most at-home curled up in sweats with no make-up, I feel right where I belong curled up with my laptop taking what’s been swirling in my head and making it come to life on the page.”

Trish Ryan (He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: A Memoir of Finding Faith, Love, and Happily Ever After, A Maze of Grace: A Memoir of Second Chances coming in June):

“At first, inspiration comes to me in the form of a thought that doesn’t seem like something I’d come up with on my own. An Idea will flash across my brain, connecting things–bits from an article I’ve read, something I see on TV, a funny quirk my dog develops–in a way I hadn’t thought of before. I’m like a magpie sometimes, collecting shiny new ideas. If I’m on my game when they arrive–which isn’t always; I’ve lost quite a few–I grab my lap top or a pen & paper. When I follow these trails, I’m always amazed by what I have when I’m done.

“After that, the inspiration comes from stubbornness: I want to finish what I’ve started. No one wants to publish my strange assortment of unrelated paragraphs, so I have to connect the dots.

“I’m pretty spiritual, so I pray a lot when I write. But it’s not one of those things where God tells me what to type. It’s more that I ask Him for more ideas, and to keep me from writing something I’ll regret later. So far, my books have been non-fiction, which means I’m writing about other people who probably don’t have a public venue to tell their side of the story. So I pray for help being fair, and to add humor when my first tendency is to be sarcastic. I wrote my first book before Facebook and Twitter were so popular–now that I’m reconnecting with people I knew in high school, college, law school, etc. (and even one ex-boyfriend I wrote about in the book) I’m REALLY glad I didn’t publish my first draft!”

Therese Walsh (The Last Will of Moira Leahy):

“I abide by Barbara Samuel’s girls-in-the-basement philosophy: There are many muses, and each has a different personality and inspires in a different way; some are wise, some crafty or poetic or bitchy. I love them all.”

Earlier this month The Divining Wand provided hindsight on what some of our authors might have done differently IF they knew then what they know now about writing as an art and a business.

Did your favorite authors answer? Perhaps you’ll discover more insight from the following:

Katie Alender (Bad Girls Don’t Die):

“I think I learn too much from every experience to wish I had done things differently. I’ve met and worked with amazing people. I’ve found my own place in the YA world, and I’ve been lucky enough to achieve success that I can be proud of. The whole journey has been fascinating and I don’t think I’d take anything back.”

Alicia Bessette (All Come Home coming in August 2010):

“Ask me again in ten years. My publishing career is pretty nascent, so I don’t have the gift of hindsight yet. But so far, I wouldn’t change a thing. The formula of gratitude, never quitting, supporting other writers, and reading a lot, seems to be working for me.”

Tish Cohen (Town House, Commonwealth Regional Finalist, Inside Out Girl, Little Black Lies):

“As an art: spent every spare second reading, dropped out of business school, done more people watching. As a business: I don’t think I’d change much. Maybe I’d have been more aware that female readers like a female protagonist.”

Jenny Gardiner (Sleeping with Ward Cleaver, Winging It: Twenty Years of Caring for a Vengeful Bird Determined to Kill Me coming March 16, 2010):

“I’d probably not have made such a fool of myself with some of the submissions I sent early on to agents and editors. But we all have to start somewhere and I grew more savvy as I learned more about the business. I don’t regret that I started out so naive because it there’s a certain optimism that comes with that ignorance that ultimately gets suppressed with the reality of the industry and that blind sense of great potential is very motivating.”

Trish Ryan (He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: A Memoir of Finding Faith, Love, and Happily Ever After, A Maze of Grace: A Memoir of Second Chances coming in June):

“I just finished my second book, A MAZE OF GRACE: A MEMOIR OF SECOND CHANCES, which will be out in June. This book was much harder to write than my first, largely because I was so terrified of losing the ideas I mentioned above that I spent the first few weeks of work frantically jotting every thought that crossed my mind down onto post-its, napkins, and any other loose paper I could find. But because I didn’t write out the whole ideas, most of those fragments were indecipherable by the time I got back to them. So on the art side of writing, my new motto is “Take the time to write the WHOLE thing down…or don’t bother.”

On the business side, I’ve learned that you just never know what’s going to happen next. Publishing changes so rapidly: people, business goals, timelines. You just can’t get attached to any one person or plan to make a book succeed.”

Once again here’s an opportunity to discover what one book influenced our authors’ careers, allowing them to dream of writings their own book pages.

Meredith Cole (Posed for Murder): “The book that most influenced my life and career as a writer? I really don’t know. I’ve always been a big reader and loved books. A book that was a huge influence on me as a kid was The Greengage Summer. Rumer Godden is an incredible storyteller. The book would be classified as YA today, but it’s really a romance, a mystery, and a thriller all rolled into one. She described the taste of the greengages so poetically, I wanted desperately to taste them. And I wanted to spend the summer in France.”

Jenny Gardiner (Sleeping with Ward Cleaver, Winging It coming Spring 2010): “The book that probably most influenced me: Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger. The first person voice, that protagonist who just splayed himself out there, it just struck a chord with me and have always
loved first person POV since.”

Kristina Riggle (Real Life & Liars):
“Anne Tyler’s Pulitzer Prize winning BREATHING LESSONS taught me that a book could be entirely about inner lives and still be compelling.”

Wendy Tokunaga (Midori by Moonlight, Love in Translation coming November 24, 2009):
“Probably The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. It showed that readers would respond to novels with Asian themes and gave me confidence to take the plunge into writing fiction — first short stores and then on to novels.”

Lara Zielin (Donut Days YA): “My copy of Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawles was so dog-eared and tattered, it hardly held together. I must have read that thing 50 times as a kid. I think this book imparted to me ideas about what a true work ethic was, since the main character had to labor so very hard for everything he had. Plus he loved his dogs, and I, to this day, love animals like a fiend. I also loved the spiritual elements of the book too. God, faith, myths … I think reading this book prompted me, for the first time, to truly wonder about a force bigger and grander than what our eyes could see.”

[Note: The Crazy Beautiful Book Giveaway remains open until tomorrow night so please post your comment for a chance to win this lovely novel.]

Have you ever wondered what authors do on their summer vacations? Since this is the last “official” week of the season, let’s discover how some have (or wish they had) spent their summer vacations.

Eileen Cook (Unpredictable, What Would Emma Do? YA and Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood YA, coming January 5, 2010):
“In a perfect world devoted husband and I would have rented a flat in London. In the mornings I’d head out to a cafe and get some writing done while munching tea and scones. In the afternoon we’d head over to the gardens in Kensington rent a chair and sit and read while watching people wander by. In the evening a pub with a cold beer. Sounds great doesn’t it?”

Jenny Gardiner (Sleeping with Ward Cleaver, Winging It coming March 16, 2010):
“This summer I wish I was either in Italy, or sailing in the British Virgin Islands, two of my favorite places.”

Lauren Baratz-Logsted (Crazy Beautiful YA coming September 7, 2009)
“Going on vacation! It may yet happen, but so far the economy is getting in the way. Really, at this point I’ll take almost any vacation, even a Chevy Chase/National Lampoon one with a dead body strapped to the top of the van.”

Therese Walsh (The Last Will of Moira Leahy coming October 13, 2009):
“I wish I were writing like crazy, and balancing that writing with everything else—time with my family and friends, time for self-pampering, and time to prepare for the publicity of The Last Will. Unfortunately, time is not something that can be controlled, and right now it’s going very fast.

Lara Zielin (Donut Days YA):
“Waaeeeelll, if all bets were off and I could do anything, I’d get a house in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and write, write, write surrounded by the prettiest landscape anywhere. (I love the U.P.!) “

Eve Brown-Waite, debut author of First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria: How A Peace Corps Poster Boy Won My Heart and A Third World Adventure Changed My Life was recently interviewed at The Diva Toolbox. And you can listen to the interview here. You can also find her helpful, tongue-in-cheek article, Travel Tips for Women, which advises what every woman should pack when traveling to the Third World!

Now although Jenny Gardiner (author of Sleeping with Ward Cleaver spent yesterday and today in Orlando, Florida, USA, it might have seemed a bit like the Third World. The good mom that she is, Jenny tells us — via Facebook and Twitter:

“What we do for our kids…long lines, plenty of heat, noise galore, all so she can do what she’s wanted to do for 8 years — have a go at trying out for Amer. Idol. Auditions are in about 6 cities this summer–they’re earlier than usual and maybe halfway done. Kim — we’re there till Thurs night (at the stadium all day Thurs).

“Icky stage mom desperate for lost youth cut in front of us to have face time w/ camera. Botox has frozen her face in a half-smirk/half-kiss look. Must not have gotten the memo on aging gracefully.

“Someone is drumming. A lot. Who brings drums to a singing competition?

“So registration went pretty well. We were done by 9 — yay! Just as the heat started getting oppressive. Info on what NOT to bring tomorrow, in case you had to ask: air mattresses, fireworks, hibachi grills, illegal drugs, weapons, including swords, forged or carved, from any of the middle ages. I’m wondering if someone once actually tried to bring a medieval sword in, and if so, why?

“Oh and the group song everyone will sing all day long at auditions on Thursday is one I already loathe, so after hearing it re-sung about 2000 times I will especially hold it in my heart fondly…It is Lady Gaga’s Poker Face. We’re supposed to know the lyrics by then, by the way. Right-o…”

With fingers crossed for Jenny’s daughter, our fingers are also crossed that a few of the characters the author “meets” in Orlando will appear someday in one of her books.