My cousin's wife the romance writer

My son and I recently returned from a trip to the east coast where we looked at colleges for him. While there, we stayed with my great uncle Hugh, who is now in his 90's. At dinner one night, my cousin Hugh, who is uncle Hugh's son, told me his wife was writing a book! I looked over to her and she smiled and we began a lengthy conversation about her manuscript, and copy editors, which she currently is, and deadlines.

Learning that she was also a writer was very exciting news to me for many reasons. First, she is a Robinson by marriage, just like my grandmother, Eleanor Robinson, was. Second, she writes in the romance genre, which is completely different than what I write, (middle grade fiction) or than what my grandmother wrote, (science fiction) Third, it's wonderful to see such a wide variety of writing, and it made me think that just maybe, this sort of thing runs in our family.

She gave me several pages of her work-in-progress romance novel, which I read on the plane ride home. It was quite good. Her character names are very romance-ish; Brad and Cecily. She writes things like, ladies in shimmering silks, and subdued dinner jackets, and Brad headed over to the mahogany bar for another scotch.

Then there's this line: Cecily hiccuped with the finality of a girl who had given up on attempting to follow the conversation. Can't you just see her standing there in her beaded gown with her cocktail? Those are the kind of lines that are hardest to write, ones that tell us so much about the character we feel like we know them.

Classroom Book of the Week

Kate Narita, teacher, author, and curriculum guide writer, has chosen The Year he Swallows Came Early as her classroom book of the week. As a past teacher, I know it takes a lot of work to whomp up a unit for a literature selection. So I appreciate the time she took to read the book and write her unit. She uses the Multiple Intelligences guide. Here's the link to her interview of me:

http://katenarita.blogspot.com/2009/11/interview-with-year-swallows-came-early.html

And here's the link to her unit:

http://katenarita.blogspot.com/2009/11/year-swallows-came-early.html

Thank you, Kate!

Here's why I love independent bookstores...

Laguna Beach Books is one of those charming bookstores that has a dog who lays around on wide planked wood floors that look like they were once in some upstate Napa Valley winery, or maybe a barn in New York. They have an ocean view if you stand on the sidewalk in front and look across Pacific Coast Highway. There's a big picture window in front that they decorate. And this weekend, they had my book, The Year the Swallows Came Early, with its own shelf talker. Here's a picture of it.

It means a lot to me that the staff chose to put this up. It feels sort of like when you hear that someone said something really nice about you, and they didn't expect it to get back to you, but it did.