• agents,  authors,  books,  creativity,  debut author,  lawyer life,  literature,  moms

    Taking Five for the People Behind the Scenes of Vintage

    Today I’m over at The Debutante Ball, where I blog every Wednesday, talking about the people who helped make my debut novel, VINTAGE, possible. Here’s a sneak preview: It takes more than one person to write a novel, and any author who doesn’t admit that is either lying or an egomaniac. In my case, it took a whole lot of people for VINTAGE to go from a glimmer of an idea to a manuscript to a real-life book that hits bookstores in March. Here are five of them, or five categories of people, since I couldn’t actually narrow it down to just five individuals. First, there was my very patient husband,…

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  • authors,  books,  fiction,  literature,  madison,  recipes,  seasonal,  summer,  sweets

    A French Dessert and a Fresh Read

    For me, one of summer’s great joys is scarfing down mass quantities of berries and stone fruits. Another one of the season’s pleasures is sitting in a shaded spot, curled up with a good book. When the two converge? Serendipity. Last week, the fruit box delivered by my CSA farm was packed tight with eight pounds of sweet cherries. My husband, son, and I stuffed as many into our mouths as we could. Immediately. When we wiped the red juice from our faces, though, we still had quite a few cherries left. Enter, The Good Luck Girls of Shipwreck Lane, the delightful debut novel by Kelly Harms that I happened to be…

  • books,  dogs,  literature,  madison,  pets,  publishing,  storytelling,  wisconsin,  writing

    Q&A with Author Erin Celello

    Today I’m thrilled to be featuring an interview with Madison author Erin Celello about her latest novel, Learning to Stay (NAL/Penguin 2013), which, as Erin describes it, explores “the question of what happens when one person in a marriage becomes someone fundamentally different.” In Learning to Stay, what triggers the change is a traumatic brain injury that the husband, Brad, suffers while serving in the Iraq war. The injury dramatically alters his personality, transforming him from a thoughtful and patient man into someone who requires much more care than his wife, Elise, can provide while also keeping up with the demands of her career as a lawyer.  I’m not yet finished with the book–so…

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  • beauty,  books,  fashion,  literature,  style

    On Style and Smarts

    [Image from theberry.com] Oscar Wilde had a lot of great, pithy quotes, like this one. Do you agree? I agree with the overeducated part. Just ask my grandmother, who is working her way through the Great Books in her eighties.  As for being overdressed, I have to say that it is possible, and I’ve been guilty of it once or twice. Being overdressed isn’t so much a question of what you’re wearing, though. It’s a question of whether you can pull it off.

  • books,  icons,  literature,  style

    Literary Looks: The Great Gatsby

    There are people who live in my head. I’ve collected them over time, over thousands of pages read everywhere: on subway seats, in library cubicles, under the covers, over the moon. The best of these people are realer to me, and more enduring, than many flesh and blood faces that pass through my days. Characters they are not. Rather, they are icons. This second installment in my collection of “Literary Looks” is inspired by one of such paper icons: Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby. Daisy. The socialite. The cynicist. The girl with “the voice full of money.” Her style represents all the hope and flash and fleetingness of youth.…