A Writer Afoot » Books

Ready, set….READ!

Barbara Samuel — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:02:20 +0000

Ambling around the internet this morning, I found this challenge from Book Chick City:

Since I’m often setting goals like “go to the gym seven hundred times a week,” the idea of reading a hundred books of FICTION in a year sounds like a dream. I bet you read that much most of the time anyway. I know I do.

It seems a ~~luxurious delight~~ worthy challenge for our insanely readerly selves. I signed up. Maybe you’ll want to join me. Click the icon.

Also, speaking of reading: The OtherLand Chronicles, the serial urban fantasy/YA/? I started for NaNoWriMo, is still in progress. Just started Chapter Nine this morning. Posting M-W-F through December. Having so much fun it’s just sinful. ;)

To start at the beginning, go here: http://theotherlandchronicles.com/2011/10/starthere/

My favorite rose

Barbara Samuel — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:10:10 +0000

Double Delight is the name. The petals are photo-sensitive and the blossoms are highly fragrant and smell heavily of oranges. Ordinary and yet, so not. As is often the case with roses, and many other things.

The fun side of ebooks

Barbara Samuel — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 21:21:32 +0000

This is what can be fun about the shift in the way books come to market. A Bed of Spices was my first historical. It’s a dark, wildly romantic Romeo and Juliet tale, and I loved it madly. It was, however, set in an unusual location, and it did not sell all that well. Over time, readers discovered it and bought the used edition to a point that I saw copies for sale for really enormous amounts of money.

Today it’s in the top 20 historical romances at Kindle. What makes that thrilling is that a book I adored and worked so very hard on can now find a new readership in a different market than the one in which it appeared.

It is the nature of the Kindle rankings that things move very fast, so likely it will not stay there long. You never know, though, do you? If you’re so inclined, post a review. Let’s see what happens.

Release day!

Barbara Samuel — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 12:00:43 +0000

HOW TO BAKE A PERFECT LIFE

by Barbara O’Neal

Available TODAY in trade paperback from your local retailer, or these on-line venues

Also available as an ebook for Kindle, and Nook and other formats.

READ MORE ABOUT IT

The anvil of holiday guilt

Barbara Samuel — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:36:53 +0000

First: we’re working behind the scenes on the Barbara O’Neal and Barbara Samuel webpages, which should be up early next week. Lots of new features, better navigation…and of course, contests will be kicking off with the release of How to Bake a Perfect Life, coming December 21. Stay tuned!

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Every year, I promise myself that I’m going to stay on track with my writing goals through the holidays. Every year, just about this time, I realize I haven’t written a word in two (or three) weeks and feel that anvil of guilt fall out of the sky to crush me. Every year.

For 22 years of book deadlines.

This year, as the season bore down on us, Christopher Robin suggested I might want to just recognize that I would not have as much time to work, and just call it a draw. That seemed shocking. Sinful, even! Everybody else works and gets things done. Why shouldn’t I be able to do that, too? My mom works 40 hours a week and bakes cookies and decorates her house and shops. Why not me?

So, I soldiered on. November was modestly productive until the end, when Thanksgiving arrived. I hosted the feast at my house this year, my son came home from DC for four days, and my other son popped in and out the whole weekend. We played games (notably Arkadia) and ate and I stayed up late talking, watching Ian teach Gabrielle to fetch. It was wonderful.

But then I tried to climb back into my routines the following morning. After a week of non-stop activity, cleaning, cooking, laughing, talking, I admit I was very tired. There was a sad thing that happened, far away and beyond any of my power to do anything about it, which layered atop my weariness and made Monday not very productive. Then I had to put things away. And this weekend there is a party we are hosting. Next week is the countdown to a huge spiritual retreat I’m helping to lead, and the next week, my friend and I are going to Chimayo for a couple of days to put together our vision boards for the year.

Then, well, it’s almost Christmas.

The truth is, I have not written many pages in almost any December since I began this career. Other people physically leave the house or have to clock in with their computer–I don’t. Which means I like having the freedom to do a lot of baking, to get out to the gym and the shops when everyone else is working, to have the luxury of rearranging my life around the holidays I adore so that I can devote a lot of my attention to them, and try to make memories of peace and laughter and happiness for others around me.

Somehow, I make my deadlines, year after year.

So, I am off work until early January. My collage is on the desk, nearly complete. I have some lists of plot points I want to work on,

a glimpse of the collage for the new book, title undecided at the moment

some more backstory character events to dig up. I can also do something my friend Christie does: write one sentence a day, just to keep my head in the book, so that the girls in the basement can keep working, building. In January, I’ll get back to writing pages every day, as I have done every year for the past 22 years.

Gosh, that anvil was so heavy! And I was dropping it on my own head! Silly me.

Does anyone else set up impossible expectations? What can you do to lighten your load this season?

A lovely review

Barbara Samuel — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 04:15:08 +0000

from Publisher’s Weekly

How to Bake a Perfect Life

Barbara O’Neal, Bantam, $15 trade paper (416p) ISBN 978-0-553-38677-6

The Rita Award–winning author (as Barbara Samuel) of The Lost Recipe for Happiness returns with the absorbing story of Ramona Gallagher, a 40-year-old woman whose joy in running a bakery in Colorado Springs helps her transcend a life that’s anything but perfect.Ramona has a prickly relationship with her large, restaurant-owning family and a deep love for her daughter, Sofia, who Ramona had as a teenager and is now grown and pregnant. When Sofia’s husband is injured in Afghanistan and she flies to Germany to be with him, Ramona is left to care for Sofia’s 13-year-old stepdaughter, Katie, a scrawny child whose drug-addicted mother is in jail. Over the summer, Ramona struggles to keep her business afloat and find some solid footing with her family, bonds with Katie, aches for what her daughter is enduring, and rekindles a romance from 25 years earlier. O’Neal’s tale of strong-willed women and torn family loyalties is a cut above the standard women’s fiction fare, held together by lovingly sketched characters and real emotion. (Dec.)

Coming your way very soon, friends! December 21.

Book review: MAYBE THIS TIME, by Jennifer Crusie

Barbara Samuel — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:00:31 +0000

MAYBE THIS TIME
Jennifer Crusie
St Martin’s Press
ISBN 978-0-312-30378-5

It has been six years since Jennifer Crusie has written a solo novel. Friends, it was worth the wait. Maybe This Time, published by St. Martin’s Press on August 30^th, is her best book yet. It’s also another step in her long, interesting career, from category romances to big, funny contemporary romances to suspens-y books written with Bob May, to….this.

Maybe This Time will draw a cheer from readers who adored Bet Me (2004 RITA award winner) and her earlier romances for St. Martins, but it is a step outside romance into women’s fiction, in a story about a woman who is discovers herself, saves some children, and along the way, realizes that maybe she has some lingering feelings for the husband she left behind.

Oh, and there are ghosts. Real ghosts. I love ghosts, and almost no one takes them seriously enough for my tastes. Crusie got it. But then, she gets writing. She gets the poignant aspects of humor for women. She gets the tangled communication between men and women, and how that impacts our love stories. She gets love stories, for that matter. This book is smart and funny, as all Crusie work is, but it’s also wise and rich in the best, most vivid details, and best of all, powered by a fierce heart of understanding.

Andie Miller is ready to get married again, but before she can walk down the aisle with her fiancé Will, she has to actually divorce the husband she left ten years ago. North Archer is a lawyer who has faithfully sent an alimony check to Andie every month for the entirety of that ten years. When Andie shows up at his office to announce her intention to wed, North asks one last favor. Andie, who is both unconventional and kind, is the only person he can trust to assess the situation with North’s two young wards, who are marooned in a supposedly haunted house they will not leave. Andie, of course, refuses—she doesn’t need to be anywhere close to North now that she’s made up her mind to get this done—until he offers her ten thousand dollars for one month of work. It would solve a lot of problems, that money. Then he throws in the kicker: the kids are alone and they need somebody. Andie agrees, leaving her fiancé safely in his own apartment.

What she doesn’t expect are those ghosts, or to fall in love with a little girl, or to discover that she isn’t really over North at all.

Not many writers would have the huevos to tackle Henry James and the Turn of the Screw, but luckily for us, Crusie never backs away from the ideas and themes that enchant her. Maybe This Time is a furious page turner, and just scary enough that I didn’t especially want to go downstairs to the basement alone to finish reading it. The ghosts are as well drawn as the rest of the cast, and so is the creepy, atmospheric house with its turrets and sad history.

But what Crusie does better than anyone is find the heart of why we fall in love with a particular person, and how the yearning to be seen and then have a witness to share our lives with, are such powerful hungers in each and every one of us. By turns kind and fierce and graceful, Maybe This Time is the one book this fall you will want the minute it hits the stands.

A Bed of Spices now available in ebook format

Barbara Samuel — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:04:03 +0000

A BED OF SPICES is a wildly romantic tale of forbidden love set in the turbulent middle ages. Solomon and Rica meet by chance at the herbalist’s cottage and fall deeply in love despite the divisions of religion, class, and expectations — but how can they possibly find a happy ending with so many things stacked against them? Dark, beautiful and ultimately uplifting, this is a romance you won’t easily forget.

Only $3.99!

READ AN EXCERPT FOR FREE

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

This was my first historical novel. It came about when I discovered two things: that St Valentines day was celebrated in the middle ages, and also, that European Jews were persecuted during the plague. Which might make you think this is much too grim for your reading pleasure, and I’ll admit it is a dark book, but it is also a romance. It is focused on the love story between these two young, passionate, and conflicted human beings feel for each other, and what that might cost them.

Because of the unusual setting and storyline (which was quite quite different at the time), the book did not sell a huge number of copies, but as time goes by, it continues to attract devotion from some readers. This combination has led to a shortage of copies in circulation, and new editions are quite pricey. One of my favorite comments over on GoodReads said that she tended to be cheap, but paid $15 for her copy and found it worth every penny. Thank you, my dear.

One of my favorite reviews is here: http://www.likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/bookReview.pl?BookReviewId=1389. , where it was awarded Desert Island Keeper status by Vivien Fritsche.

Here is the original cover, which I never liked and ended up on somebody else’s historical romance at some later date. How do you like the one my cousinSharon and I came up with (above)? Does it appeal to you?

If you’d like to look for it in a print edition, you can try some of these sellers:

Amazon new and used copies of A Bed of Spices. Recommend you skip the $2000 edition.

Barnes and Noble approved sellers of new and used copies of A Bed of Spices.

The damp, dewy beginning

Barbara Samuel — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 21:32:13 +0000

I’m at the beginning of a new book. This is probably my favorite part of writing—every possibility exists. There is a freshness to the material, a scent of dew and dawn filling my work hours. There is always the chance that this time I will have matured enough, learned enough, that I will be able to draw the material from the Land of Book Children with such care and expertise that it will be perfect.

That never happens, of course. I love many of the books that have flowed through me, and feel a mother’s pride over every single of one of them. But never once has one emerged on the page just as it exists on the other side of the veil. I am only human, not an angel or a goddess. I show up and do the best I can.

But right now, I haven’t yet marred this new book. It’s still wet behind the ears, delicate and full of potential. This stage of development is what makes non-writers think they could write books—they have a great idea, they have ideas for structure and originality, and it’s so much fun to think about the book project that a person can spend endless hours daydreaming about it. It’s exciting to imagine turning points, discover the details of characters. I love it when the girls in the basement send up a picture of something I know but would never have thought to use this way, like the gorgeous, solid houses built of red sandstone blocks in Pueblo. There is a whole neighborhood with street after street of mansions built of this lovely material. The girls said, “Hey, what about this?” and I realized it works perfectly. The house, the neighborhood.

There are rituals for this process. I like to start collecting a soundtrack. The cornerstone piece for this soundtrack is Glitter in the Air, by Pink, because there is one line that captured me completely, and as sometimes will happen, a whole book reeled out from that starting point. (No, I will not tell you which line it is, but maybe someday, I’ll bring this up again and someone will guess.) I suspect there is some Adam Hurst again because I’m so crazy for cello right now and I like listening to his slow, melancholy strings while I write. Maybe some Sarah McLachlan

I don’t have page counts to meet each day, but instead have time requirements. I have to be at the computer by 9, after a walk with the dog, and it is weirdly important not to get online or otherwise let the world in at this stage of development. I need to be able to hear the soft voices of the novel. The world is like static, interfering with my ability to tune in.

I like to write a dialogue between me and the main character. It might sound silly, or a trick, and it is, in a way, but it also works. I say hello, and I am glad to be working with you on this. Let’s talk. Tell me about……

And I give the character a chance to respond. This is a surprisingly long standing ritual. I started it years and years ago, and it nearly always gets my imagination moving.

I dream and play. I write possible ideas for direction, play with character arcs. To really start writing, I need a pretty clear idea of the shape of a novel, the basic themes and ideas I’m working with. Most of what I will do in the first 100 pages will be more like building a skeleton than actual writing—I’m capturing motives and moods, planting stakes for support. It’s all very plain and messy, with the odd flash of beauty.

It’s a delight to be in this stage. Before anyone sees it, before things settle into solidity.

If you are a writer, do you like this stage, too? If you are a reader, is there some part of your life that mirrors this sense of fresh starts?

RITA AWARD FOR THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS!!!

Barbara Samuel — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 01:14:42 +0000

I thought you might like to see the sisters.

More when I can actually sit up straight. After 6 days of conferencing and three of Walt Disney World, I don’t trust myself to cross the room, much less post about the conference.