First things first: AMAZON HAS UNFORGETTING READY FOR PURCHASE!!!   Also, I have an author's box of books heading for me if you want an autographed copy, so let me know.  But that'll be a week or so... If speed and convenience is your thing, clicky click HERE!!

Life is rich.  There's a lot going on.

In fact, sometimes it feels like I drank a metaphorical milkshake a little too fast and gave myself  karmic brain freeze.  But it's all good.  Cast your eyes over to the right.  That's Bella, ladies and gentlemen.  She is a spirited two-year-old gal, newly freed from the burdens of maternity, her five kittens all launched, settling in to her new home on The Potter Ranch.  I love her ridiculously much.  She is going to be a handful.  My browser history lately: cat toys, feliway spray, how to introduce kitties...

Our lovely Bentley cat (a getting-older Bengal mix boy) is afraid of her.  Oh, Bentley, don't growl at Bella.  She doesn't play.  But considering that it hasn't even been a week, the supervised sniffing and exploring is going well.  No one has even hissed yet, although there was one run-for-the-roses through all three stories of the house in which we needed to intervene.

So I'm doing the Jackson Galaxy thing, submitting poems, social media-izing my new poetry book, and working on a new YA that I think will end up being sort of a Bean 4.  It's a fourteen year-old girl from the Cuban Missile Crisis days whose time traveling parents try to send her to the past to get her out of harm's way.  Except their little circle of time travelers aren't as skilled as they boast of being, and our heroine ends up in 2018 instead--going from duck and cover from The Bomb to duck and cover from active shooters.  Some of the adult characters are from the Bean series, except they are in their sixties now.  It's a challenging but fun book to write, and a lot less dark than it sounds. 

In other news, it stopped raining.  So I think I'm going to stop blogging and see if it's not too hot to make it around Congers Lake.  Ken's upstairs with Bella, Bentley's on the snooze in the TV room (the warmest place in the house when we have the AC on, natch), and it's time for some sunlight on my shoulders.

Poems and novels and cats, oh my!

Wow.  I really need to get to the nail salon. 

But other than that, there is cause to rejoice!  I just turned in page proofs on UNFORGETTING, my third collection of poems, due out any minute from Kelsay Books.

I write more fiction than I do poetry lately, but poems are still my first love.  The ones in this book were written over the course of the last five or six years, and they are about my family, mostly.  I realized as I spent time with my mom, who is now 94 and bravely dealing with non-Alzheimer's dementia, that the stories we remember about our lives are pretty much everything.  Mom is trying hard to hold on to her stories--and when she can't remember them, she does something that's very much like what I do when I'm writing fiction: she embellishes.  She invents. 

Yes, it's dementia, but it's also her creative approach to it.  I call it UNFORGETTING, and that's what the book is about.

There are a lot of poems in it about my own growing up, and about my mother as a younger woman.  Some of the poems started out as side pieces to the fiction I was writing, much of it set in the early 1970's.  I intended the book to be readable as a narrative, too, so the poems have a chronology and a sort of story line.  It's much more ambitious than my other two poetry books, and I'm really proud of it.

Two of the poems in the book were nominated for Pushcarts, and one was actually commissioned by and broadcast on ABC Radio news. 

Now comes the hard stuff: promotion.  I'll let you blog folk know when we're up on Amazon, and when I have copies. 

The gorgeous cover art, by the way, is by my long-time poetry illustrator and best buddy Nancy Quaglia.  It's a picture of the house where she used to live with her family in Piermont, NY.

In other news: the wicked Aletta Thorne has a new release coming out soon, too.  Or at least that's what all the best ghosts say. 

And my fiction-writing self is working on a new YA book, linked by some characters to the Bean trilogy.  I also have some new poems that I'm sending around.  Guess I'm back from vacation!

Have some daisies--and the last of the very-bolted lettuce!  My husband tore out that now-bitter lettuce last night.  But black-eyed Susans have never been lovelier. Thanks to my sister, non-black-eyed Susan, for calling the Bee Shepherds--an gentle bee moving (not killing) service--to remove the nasty yellow jackets from the garden gate, where they had burrowed into the ground and built a nest. We are now yellow jacket free, and the cukes and the cherry tomatoes are coming in, too.

When the third novel in your YA trilogy gets Book of the Month in a poll on Long and Short Reviews after they gave it four and a half stars, that's wicked cool, and deserves a hamburger out.  So Ken and I went and got one, taking The Mom along for the ride and the snack.  To the right is what happens if you give an iPhone to your 94-year-old mom and show her how to use the TinType app.  I actually really love the picture.

I'm still pretty chuffed about that WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? review from LAS.  It's one thing to get a solid review from a friend-of-a-friend or a fellow author who knows you from the Facebooger. But when you get a good review from someone who has no reason to give it to you other than her own pleasure at having read your book, that's a reason to put on your big, black reading glasses and let your husband make rabbit ears behind  your head. 

Go Bean and Zak!  The whole Bean Book Triology is available from Amazon in your choice of media: either Kindle or paperbacks.  And you can contact me through this blog if you'd like an autographed paperback.  Here's the link to my Amazon author page; you can get to all my books from there.

And here's my official badge and everything. WOOT! 

Meanwhile, it's National Poetry Month--and time for me to get back to my writerly roots.  I was a poet long before I wrote YA fiction, and I often marathon online with other poet friends in April, writing a poem a day.  One other thing I'm really happy about is the fact that writing fiction has loosened me up as a poet.  That sounds braggy, and I didn't mean it to--but all the woodshedding I did with editors over the three Bean books feels like it changed the way I look at writing in general. I wasn't going to marathon this  year, but I'm so glad I chose to!  As always, I'm having a great time at The Waters, a fine and dandy poetry workshop and online space to draft and get support.

Speaking of poetry, I just turned in my final round of edits to Kelsay Books for Unforgetting, which will be my next book of poems, due out soon.  I've chosen a piece of art for the cover, and gotten my blurb requests out...Don't have a cover design yet, but if you'd like a sneak peek, here's the painting I'm using.  It's by my longtime friend and cover artist Nancy Quaglia. 

Unforgetting is a book about memory and memory loss. It's very much about my mom as she struggles with memory--but it's also about my own memories.  A lot of the poems in the middle of the book started out as sketches for chapters in the YA books, which are set in 1970 and 1972, so it all kind of fits together.  And the book is also about losing my dad, with whom I had an intense, often difficult relationship. 

Nancy's cover art is a beloved memory of mine.  It's the kitchen door to her old house in Piermont, a yard in which I spent a lot of time with her and her lovely daughters.  I thought a door was appropriate for a book about memory.

...and as I type these words, the sun has just come out here in the lower Hudson River Valley, where I live.  We had CRAZY storms earlier today, and I am grateful that the flooding near me wasn't worse than it was.  So--happy spring!  Happy NaPo!  And hug a writer today!

Bentley the Cat doesn't usually let the world get him down.  Especially since he has spent the past month wiping out every mouse in Rockland County along with every mouse that has ever thought of moving here.  Silly things come into our house and blam. But he was in a moody mood the other night, and I got this snap.  He's upstairs happily absorbing radiator heat in the living room as I type these words in my drafty study with my turtleneck pulled up to my nose. 

So first things first: my cats are not  sad.  My cats are  warm --very warm, thank you very much-- well-fed, loved, and happy.  They don't worry too often.

And neither do I!  That is because Bean 3, WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? is finally out in paperback!  Yes, friends, you no longer need a plastic bag for your Kindle to read WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? in the bathtub. 
You can now turn actual paper pages.  And I can set up a Goodreads givewaway (which I probably will a bit later in the day--film at eleven).

Could I just take a minute to way WAAAAA-WHHHOOO?

Yes, I'm as digital as someone who grew up during the FIRST cold war can be, and I do love me the ebooks.  But when a book comes out with an actual cover and a spine and it makes that lovely card-shuffling sound as you run your thumb over  its pages, that's when it feels real. 

And speaking of shuffled cards, there are plenty of them in WHAT TIME IS IT THERE?   Tarot cards, to be exact.  For that I have an actual professional tarot reader, Hilary Parry Haggerty, to thank.  A long time ago, she was a student in an English class I taught.  Now, she's an ace astrologer and tarot reader, and a darn interesting Facebook pal.  I thanked her in the dedication.  I also thanked poet Risa Denenberg, co-founder and editor of Headmistress Press (and first-rate nurse-practitioner) for advising me on the journey of Samantha Thorne, a character who is important in all three books.  First two paper copies in the box heading toward me now go to those two helpful women!  Hilary and Risa, I hope I got it right.

Bean Three is my favorite of the trilogy.  The paranormal stuff is darker, the 70's stuff is funnier, and there's a new character named Amp whom I really, really love.  There's someone called The Flying, Singing Angel With No Feet.  And there's probably the best soundtrack of any of the Bean Books: the usual Grateful Dead, of course, but also Alex Chilton, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Judee Sill, and The Incredible String Band, to name just a few.  I'll have to do a YouTube thing today, too. 

I have a few reviews in on the Kindle side of the book (and they'll show up on the paper side soon, too), but gosh, I'd love it if some of my analog buddies bought and added to the discussion by leaving a review.

So enough bragging and wheedling!  THE PAPERBACK IS OUT.  Yay!

    My husband says what’s wrong with me is an author’s version of postpartum blues: I’ve just written the last book of my time traveling series, The Bean Books, on Evernight Teen, and I’m feeling adrift, almost let down.  And it’s true—I’m in that weird place where I don’t have reviews yet on Bean Three, What Time Is It There? and that’s kind of crazy-making.
 
    But it’s not just that.  The current #Me,Too discussion has resonated deeply with me. I have a story.  I’ll tell it in a bit—or as much of it as I can stand to.  But first I want to talk about the plot of What Time Is It There? and why a bunch of it is set in my main character’s college radio station. 

     I was fascinated with radio at Bean Donohue’s age—even as a little kid.  The odd geek girl who built a crystal radio in the 1960’s, I  listened to the DJ’s spinning the records as much as I did the Beatles.  I played with a shortwave radio receiver my father had built, loving the BBC announcers and the odd languages I couldn’t even identify.  

     When I got to college at a little upstate New York place much like the one I send Bean Donohue to in What Time Is It There?, I headed straight for the campus FM and got myself a show.  There were almost no other women on the station: an older mostly newscaster, then a few girls who came up behind me.  So an awful lot of my best friends when I was in undergrad school were men. That was weird at first, but I was grateful  for them.  I’d been pretty reclusive in high school—and the friendship of those young guys was refreshingly straightforward and unambiguous.  Or so it seemed to me.  Yeah, I got creeped on some.  But mostly not.  Mostly.

    I knew when I got  my main character Bean into college, it had to be in a book that was both a romance (don’t worry—there’s plenty of Zak in here…just not the way you’d think he’d show up) and the story of a great friendship.  Bean’s best friend in college is a guy.  Amp is a Mormon, like a long-lost dear friend of mine from college days—a music and God-obsessed hippie Mormon, one who's beginning to doubt his parents’ faith.  His real name, which no one uses, is Briggs Higbee.  Amp works on the campus station with Bean, and he may be my favorite character—ever.  I really want you to read the book so you can meet him.

    See, I’ve been thinking and thinking and here’s what I’ve come up with: men and women aren’t generally friends.  It takes a special kind of guy to put aside the power dynamic and truly befriend (not just fall in love with, although the two things can be very happily related) a woman.  If men and women knew how to be friends, I believe harassment and assault would be rare.  Don’t get me wrong.  There’s plenty of romantic love in my new book.  But there’s also plenty of NON-romantic love, and I think that’s super important, too.

    I can’t remember whether it was my own junior or senior year in that little upstate school I was telling you about when Jean Shepherd, a New York City radio story-teller and author I’d idolized since my childhood, came up to tell his tales.  Jean Shepherd is the man who wrote the short story the film A Christmas Story is based on, and I adored him as a kid. He’d read a letter on the air that my high school BFF (another lovely and very nerdy girl) and I had written to his WOR radio show back when we were in junior high or maybe 9th grade.  

    So of course, I was very excited to meet Shep, as his fans called him—and very proud to be (as Bean is in the third book) program director of my campus FM.  When he spoke at the school’s auditorium/performing venue, I made sure we did a remote broadcast of it, and stayed back in the studio to run the mixing board and interview my childhood hero when his talk was over.

    My memories of that night are scattered. After the speech was over, I cut to DJing records.   I remember looking up into the mirror over the board—and seeing Jean Shepherd come into the station with a big crowd of people.  The control room was soundproofed, but a friend of mine told me what happened just before he opened the door to where I sat.

    “Hey, Shep, what’s  your hobby?” someone yelled.
    “Chicks!” said Shepherd, and everyone laughed.

    Then he was standing a little too close behind me.  “Hey, baby, you’re peaking kind of…high,” he said—and that was true.  In my nervousness, I wasn’t watching the levels of the music going out over the air.  What followed was a really uncomfortable interview full of what we’d today call “that’s what she said” jokes.  Or maybe we'd just call it harassment.  I mainly remember being so embarrassed I could hardly breathe.
 
    Afterwards, Shepherd insisted on going to the Student Union with me.  He demanded that I log off from the show I was doing and go with him--that very minute. “Hey, baby, you run this place,” he said.  

    “I’ll take the show,” said a friend who’d come in with the crowd—guy named Art, the music director, probably meaning some flavor of well.  So I was swept along with my old hero, arm candy, to a table full of laughing, hooting guys—not the good friends I’d thought they were. 

      I need to make one thing very clear: to Shepherd’s credit, he did not force himself on me in any physical way—although when the evening was over, it was obvious to me that things were turning into a your-room-or-mine situation.  He mentioned his hotel.  I ended up quietly calling campus security, who drove him back there.  The last thing Jean Shepherd said to me, out the open back window of the white sedan that drove him away, was his room number.

    Shepherd died when I was in my forties, and I heard about his death on my way to my English teaching job at the local high school.  Despite everything, I had to pull the car off the road and cry for a few minutes.

    For years, I told this story as a kind of joke.  This year, it’s not funny anymore.  Zak in The Bean Books says “Love is the heaviest energy of all,” and if there’s a theme that ties all three of my young adult books together, that is it. But there are all kinds of love. I’m hoping that Bean Three, What Time Is It There?, will add the friendship that I believe is still possible between men and women to the mix.

Buy links for WHAT TIME IS IT THERE?

Click here for AMAZON and here for EVERNIGHT TEEN.

What a week it's been!

What a month it's been!

I'd taken November to write poetry, and I"m baaaa-ck...just in time to tell you that the final Bean book, WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? will be out tomorrow, December 1st.  The disheartening news in the world cannot dim my happiness tonight.  How about that cover, huh?  The brilliant and talented Jay Aheer strikes again.

In Bean 3, WHAT TIME IS IT THERE, my main character Bean Donohue is in college, thousands of miles away from Zak, who has seemingly fallen off the edge of the earth.  No one knows where he is--until Bean starts time traveling again, and Zak starts showing up in places he just shouldn't be--like the 19th century.  What's worse, he's doing stuff that readers of the trilogy will know is dangerously against The Rules, putting himself and Bean in the worst danger either of them has faced--ever.

There's lots of groovy music from 1972, a for-real demon, and The Flying, Singing, Angel with No Feet.  Plus a new character named Amp that I think you're going to love.  And a wedding...

Available on ebook tomorrow, my pretties!  And it's an Editor's Pick, too!  Woot!

I was just talking to my author friend Marcus Damanda on the phone about an online promotion we are doing together on Thursday October 26th, 3:30 to 4:30. It's the seventh birthday party of the press on which he and I both publish our young adult fiction, Evernnight Teen.  Marcus and I are both two thirds of the way through a trilogy of books.  Mine are time travel, set in the 70's, and his are dystopian fiction, set a generation or so in the future. 

We'll be giving away audio books, ebooks, and tie dye. You need an invite!  Click here if you want one!

Both our main characters happen to be named Rebecca.  Rebecca is my time traveler Bean's real name.  And Rebecca  also is the name of the spunky, courageous gal fighting her way to freedom in The Salvation State and Absolution Island.

Marcus Damanda and I are both English teachers.  He's still teaching--in the trenches in a mid-Atlantic junior high.  I pleaded age a few years ago and sat down to write full time.  We're both into the power of the word. 

So yeah, I'm promoting an event, and promoting my books and Marcus' books.  And I'm doing it because I think it's important.  We are all of us on the planet living through tough times just now: earthquake, fire, and flood.  LITERALLY!  Those of us in the United States find ourselves questioning our neighbors and even family members in bitter ways we thought we never would, or could.  There often seems to be more heartbreak around than there are hearts to hold it.

What do you even do with all that stuff?  How do you navigate it?

I think the key is in The Story and The Song.  Those things been sustaining human beings since we first gathered around the fire thousands of years ago to share them, to tell them and sing them.  Fiction is The Story touched with magic.  Okay, so that sounds kinda woo-woo, but there  you have it.   I believe that  stuff. And I am honored to have a place near to the fire where I can get  up and tell the stories in my books.   I think they're pretty darn good.  Marcus' books are terrific. 

So clicky-click! Thursday the 26th of October, 3:30 to 4:30! Come to the party! 

So I have another book of poems coming out in the spring sometime, on Kelsay Books,  hooray.  It's called Unforgetting, and it's about my parents and my family.  It is the closest thing to a memoir I have ever written, hence the title--which also reflects the way people with dementia often make up details to fill in when their memories fail.   "Unforgetting" is a made-up word for that, although I bet someone else has thought of it besides me. I think that unforgetting must be like writing fiction.

I'd been shopping Unforgetting around a bit, and I was delighted when Kelsay took it.  Their books are lovely, and a number of poet friends publish there.

I'm also a little surprised--but I guess I should have known.  The blue heron has been around our creek a lot.  She's (I'm convinced she's a she) good luck.  By the way, the picture on the right is not her (although I imagine it could be; I took it at a lake just a couple of miles from here). 

I want to make it absolutely clear that the blue heron on our creek is a very good blue heron.  So is the one in the picture.  She was even gracious enough to pose for me.  I've only ever met one blue heron who was bad.  And that was not my assessment of the bird.  It was the assessment of a tired-looking server at a waterfront shrimp restaurant in Florida.  There was a spectacular blue heron who hung out near that establishment, and apparently it swiped people's steamed shrimp and butter while they were at the bar getting another round of beer.  "Nobody likes him," said the server to me, when I told her how gorgeous that heron was.  "He's bad."

That sounded kind of brutal to me, and I immediately wanted to give the bad blue heron some of my shrimp.  But he flew away.  (I don't know how I know it was a he, by the way.)

I saw my oldest and dearest friend Nancy Quaglia this afternoon.  She's the one who did the artwork on my other poetry collections.  You can have a look at them on my Amazon author page, if  you want; they're the two to the far right.  The other two books on the page are my YA time travel novels, illustrated by Evernightteen's amazing Jay Aheer.  I'm richly gifted with art!  

Nancy and I think she'll do a painting of the Hudson River from Dobbs Ferry for the cover. The Hudson is a very big part of this new book of poems, because my family has been living near it since Dutch New Amersterdam days.  Really!  I'm descended from a 17th century silversmith named Jurian Blanck (my maiden name was Blanck).  

So I have had a bunch of work accepted lately, and I will be busy this fall and winter--and this spring. 

I have never written as hard in my life as I have since last November.  The world darkened so much then...and writing and telling stories and collecting poems into a book seemed to be the only logical response.  And now, too--horrible hurricanes and earthquakes...and absolutely toxic politics...

I have a bunch (a bunch!) of books coming out, though, and they are books that I might have not written if I hadn't been on fire to give the world some light.  Which sounds kind of self-important, and I don't mean it to.  But it's what writers do.

Cool spoon though, huh?  Jurian couldn't have had it easy, either. 

Sometimes I have moments--as I did just yesterday, sending some books as a prize for young readers to a library in Illinois--when I think, "Hey, I'm living the life.  I write NOVELS!"  Waggled my hips all the way back to my car (whose name is Franz, if you care), got in, and drove home like a...writer.

This should not be confused with driving home like a boss.

Not that I am complaining.  I write books and poems and people read them, and that rocks.  I get to do this highly cool thing.  But I am not eating bon bons as I write this post, nor am I sitting in bed with my keyboard on a foofy pillow.  The truth is, I am an ink-stained (well, eye-strained-from-staring-at-the-screen) wretch.  Just like most folks who write seriously. 

My husband (who truthfully, puts up with PLENTY), likes to tell people that he tip-toes around the house while I am drafting or revising my books, so as not to disturb the Genius At Work.  This is not true.  Ken, a classically-trained tenor, can make more noise just sneezing than two or three of your average leaf-blowers.  Fortunately, noise doesn't bother me.  Thinking I really should clean the cat's litter pan bothers me.  Because if I have forgotten to do so, our older cat will poop in the dracena plant next to my husband's pipe organ.  And my husband will set about practicing the damned Pachelbel Canon anyway, because he has another wedding and it's making him grumpy. He hates the Pachelbel Canon, whether or not there is a cat turd in the plant next to him.   But the brides have to have it, so practice it he will.   It's all on Pachelbel. The cat turd is never an issue for Ken.

Except then I will have to clean the litter pan AND the plant.  And listen to that stupid canon. My husband will clean the cat's pan if I ask him to, but asking him to starts The Game.  The Game is this: how long can I NOT do the thing I have been asked to do because my wife is trying to write?  An hour? Two? Three?  Wait...I still hear her typing.  I've got tons of time. 

Meanwhile, I am thinking, screw it. I definitely smell cat poop. I should just stop writing and go clean the pan.  I get up and trudge upstairs from my study. 

"Oh!  I was just going to do that!" says my husband, who, by the way, is Not Practicing. 

So first rule in the care and feeding of a writer is to pretend you are your neurotic mother and CLEAN SOMETHING.  Like maybe THE CAT'S PAN! That made sense, right?

Okay, the feeding part. 

I really don't hate cooking for myself.  Or for others.  It is the thing I like to do the most, next to writing and listening to music that isn't The Pachelbel Canon.  However, having a takeout meal brought in and served to me in an attractive fashion is one of my very favorite things in the world.   Especially if I haven't been asked what I want to eat first, because I don't know, although I'll tell you a secret: I'd really like some sushi. 

Perhaps I'd like that sushi now.  And by the way, "in an attractive fashion" means I require napkins.   And utensils on the table.

That's really all there is to it.  My needs are simple. 

By the way, two new novels coming soon--from me, and from some daft ghost-chaser who calls herself Aletta Thorne.  

Yeah, that's a William Blake engraving of ghosts doing their ghostly ghosting.  I love Blake for lots of reasons, but even if I didn't, this picture would have won me over.  I just wrote a ghost story.  A long ghost story--a novel-length ghost story.  And it's just a bit naughty.  Got me an acceptance on it from Evernight Publishing, and I'll be releasing this book under a pen name for the first time--Aletta Thorne.  It's a family name--a little 19th century girl who died when she was barely a toddler.  I hope my Victorian forebears won't be too horrified at what the ghosts in my book do.  Shall we say that Blake would approve?

The book's called The Chef, The Inspector, and The Ghost of Bartholomew Addison Jenkins.  It should be out for your Halloween enjoyment.  It's set in 1982, and its main character is a woman chef.  Two ghosts, all sorts of silliness, a good dose of spice, and some characters I really enjoyed getting to know.  All in the early MTV era in a pretty town somewhere near Athens, NY.  It'll probably be a stand-alone book, but I left a little something open at the very end so that I could do a series if there's interest. We shall see!

Being just a bit naughty in print is a new experience for me. Generally, it's been a relief to NOT cut to waves crashing on the beach.  I'm deeply proud of my naughtiness! 

In the G-rated part of my writing life, I finally finished the revisions on What Time Is It There? The Bean Books, Book 3. Bean is 19, in her sophomore year of college--and she's lost track of Zak, except through her ability to travel in time. The book contains the most epic paranormal scene I've written yet, a really fun Thanksgiving scene, and some sweet stuff around Christmas.  It really is a Christmas story--deeply  peculiar Christmas miracle and all.  I'm super-pleased with it, and you'll be hearing about that soon, too.

Phew!  Two novels in a year.  For us ink-stained wretches on the romance end of things, I understand that's just called Tuesday.  Or in this case, Thursday. 

Happy Thursday, everyone!  And if you need any of my books...click here!