Just discovered this wonderful site chronicling Kate Donnely’s project From Your Desks. So much to marvel over. My current favorites, featured on the Facebook page newsfeed, are the desks (and wise comments) of Virginia Woolf and John Irving. Writer, photographer and film job veteran Kate Donnely curates the site and the collection of work that appears on it.
Here’s me playing “Literary Genius At Work” on the last copyedit of Book Three of Tabou:
I just finished Book 1 of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. Have you read it? It’s the latest thing in popular erotica, and I can see why. The erotic scenes are steamy and the subject matter is taboo, and yet there’s something comforting and predictable about the summer reading formula, complete with the voyeuristic impulse that goes with the status envy.
The “serious” literary press has trashed the writing, which I find too thin for my taste, but as an author of erotica I have high praise for aspects of this work by the TV-producing mum, E.L. James. 
I heartily approve of the compulsive contraception. More foil packets are torn in Fifty Shades than in all five seasons of “Queer as Folk.” And guys, seriously: if you don’t have a clue what a girl wants or needs in the nude (whips and chains aside), read this book. Finally, the best instruction may be for aspiring lawyers. If you are studying for the bar and you’re worried about failing Torts, this book reprints contracts in a mesmerizing, even sultry, fashion. If you forget key clauses here, forget hanging your shingle anywhere near me.
So why am I not rushing to dip into the second book?
It could be sensory overload. When they drank the Sancerre with the pasta I was thinking, whoa, baby, save something for dessert ! Guess I’m just a Picpoul-with-my-pasta kinda girl.
But I bet the real reason why my Kindle is still on low burn is that I’m waiting for my champagne delivery, in the form of Eros, the wonderful back issue of Lapham’s Quarterly from Winter 2009. I’ll savor that as long as I can before firing the Kindle back up Fifty Shades Darker.
Lapham’s Eros: now there’s a pretty girl bound to turn your head. Order it online—go ahead, command it!—from laphamsquarterly.org and tell me what you think.
We all have our favorite French words to use in bed, and POSH wasn’t one of mine.
I was sitting around bullshitting with my pal, Wendy Pepper, like I always do. She was in her studio working on a new dress, reading an eBook, following a news feed, listening to a podcast, checking her email, touching base with a client on the phone, basically being creative. Then she turned to me.
“How are you going to promote your eBooks?”
I was like, oh.
One by one she switched off all other channels. I love it when I get the full intellectual benefit of eyes-on-me attention from my high octane friends. While I was still sitting there without a clue, Wendy leaned closer and said, “I AM your target reader. I read.”
You can imagine the roaring silence that accompanied this shocking American confession.
“Yes, read. As in books. Blogs, you name it. Yes, eBooks. And I would pay money for them. I’m even into the literary blogs. I hunger to know how the writer of today makes sense of his world,” said Wendy, very much in italics. She likes to tease me. “So how are you going to get my attention?”
Clearly by being a total screw-up, I realized. But instead I ventured out by stating the obvious. “Well in eBooks you don’t have the object. You have the machine, but not the tactile object, the talisman that will always harken to the book.”
Continue reading “Why POSH if it’s TABOU?”
And as the troubadour Jackson Browne put it so elegantly, “to love and get away before the walls have arisen, you’ve got to be free.”
But when your idea of a first novel is a five-part epic saga, you’d have to be me.
So I have some, shall we say, special experience in this area.
In the way of most marriages, TABOU and I had been together quite a long time before I really began to see my characters as living breathing beings, living lives on their own terms.
Beginning writers dream of This Magic Moment and wonder when it’s going to happen. Will they be driving through the Bridges of Madison County, when like a thunderbolt their characters descend like Riders on the Storm? And suddenly the novel they’ve been slaving over is Raptured, transported heavenward straight to Simon & Schuster?
That never happened to me. I think it’s because I was a helicopter parent, hovering over my children at the keyboard every night, pregnant with more, then listening to talk radio shows every morning where famous authors described the fiction process like the birthing process.
Continue reading “How to Marry Your Children, Or Great Lines from TABOU”