Rain and books

For six days, we've been holed up in a mountain cabin with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, wishing the rain would stop. For the most part, it hasn't, so the bikes sit forlornly in a puddle while we go jaunting about in a Jeep instead. Or we stay indoors, playing card games and Scrabble. Or reading. I've been reading mostly non-fiction. Work-related books, necessary but boring.

My sister-in-law, the lucky duck, has been reading Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky who began the novel in France during World War II. Nemirovsky wrote about the war as it was happening, not knowing whether or not she would survive it. She didn't. She died in Auschwitz in 1942 before completing the book. The few pages that I browsed were wonderfully written. Here's a review from the New York Times.

I'm going home with more books than I started with. My sister-in-law returned a couple of books that she'd borrowed from me, one by Charles Martin and one by Dean Koontz. Then we stopped at a used-books store on one of those rainy days and picked up some kids' books for our first grandbaby. So it's an eclectic jumble of books in my backpack.

This morning I found a delightful post written by my daughter's friend Beth. She has listed some of her favorite books, many of which are my favorites, too. I immediately started thinking of books I would have to add to her list. That must mean I should post my own. Soon.

What do lizards have to do with Agnes Sparrow?

Boy, am I bad about blogging. I admit it. I get so wrapped up in novel-writing that I forget my blog for days or weeks. Or months. Not that the world waits with bated breath for my posts, but it's a good way to stay connected with people. If you stay connected, that is.

I just finished reading, or at least skimming, a ridiculous number of novels for the "comparable fiction" section of the book proposal that I'm putting together for my agent. It's work, not fun, to pick up one book after another, read a few pages, and decide this one is too chick-litty to be a good comparison, and that one is too high-falutin' literary, and the one with the cool cover art turns out to be boring, so why would I want to compare my illustrious writing (cough cough) to that? But I found enough good comparisons, I think. Now I'll let that part of the proposal cool while I tweak the rest of it.

I just finished reading The Prayers of Agnes Sparrow by Joyce Magnin, not as part of the book-comparison deal but just for fun. And it was fun. Joyce lured me in with an interesting fat woman who serves her town by praying because there's nothing else she can do, and then unexpected things happened, drawing me into deep theological waters in a most entertaining way. Without preachiness. It would be a great pick for a book group to argue about. Er, I mean, discuss.

Unrelated: We're experiencing a lizard invasion. They're the cute little anole lizards, bright green with a peachy dewlap that they puff up for intimidation or courtship purposes. Somehow, they're sneaking into the sunroom, and yesterday I found one waiting expectantly at the back door in the garage. I think he would have knocked on the door if he could have. I shooed him away, for his own good. Our indoor cats would have seen him as a delightful taste of the great outdoors.

Okay, that's not totally unrelated to Agnes Sparrow, because one of the characters in the story has a cat that's always murdering smaller creatures, and that's related to the behavior of some of the human characters and those big theological questions about sin and free will. See, it's all related. Lizards, cats, fiction, theology.

Down with umbrellas

We've had a ton of rain lately, thank God. Atlanta's drought is officially over.

I was pushing my shopping cart out of the grocery store the other day in the middle of a downpour. I don't own an umbrella. There was no sense in trying to hide from the rain, so I kept my head up--and a huge flock of starlings swooped down from the sky and into a bare-limbed tree and off again, all in perfect synch with each other.

Okay, they were only starlings, but they were beautiful. If I'd had my head buried under an umbrella, I would have missed the show.

The hermit emerges, dusty books in hand

I feel like a hermit emerging from a cave, blinking at the sunlight. Hmm, it appears to be spring. Of a different year.

It has been a very long time since I touched this blog or any others. My sabbatical from blogs must have started about the time my laptop died, taking all my bookmarks with it. But I'm back.

Now, the ever-present question: Read any good books lately?

As a matter of fact, I have. I just finished Michael Snyder's My Name Is Russell Fink. Russell is a neurotic copier salesman with one too many women in his life. I don't know how I missed reading it when it first came out, but I'll be a lot faster to snatch up his second one. I believe it's coming out this summer, from Zondervan.

Besides reading a tall stack of nonfiction as research for my next project, I'm plowing through a pile of Life, Saturday Evening Post, and Ladies' Home Journals from 1940 and 1941. They're like time capsules. Great fun.

A game for bookish folks

My friend Amy Wallace has dragged me out of lurkdom by tagging me to play this little game. I'm not going to tag anybody, but if you feel like playing along, please tell us where to find your answers. You can read responses from Amy and some of her friends at her blog.

Here are the questions and my answers:

1. What's the one book or writing project you haven't yet written but still hope to?

I would love to write a story set in a fictional version of the town where I grew up, in the wine country of California's Central Coast. (Nope, not Napa. Farther south than that.) I don't have a plot yet. Just some very interesting characters who want to get out of my head someday.

2. If you had one entire day in which to do nothing but read, what book would you start with?

If we're talking about this week, it would be the Spring 2007 version of Relief Journal, which I still haven't had time to finish reading. Okay, so it's not exactly a book, but it's good stuff.

3. What was your first writing "instrument" (besides pen and paper)?

A very old computer that some friends lent me because they knew I had started writing, using only pen and paper. I didn't even know how to turn on a computer, and I was terribly afraid I would break the thing. I churned out my first and worst novel on that clunky computer. (That's one book that will never see the light of day.)

4. What's your best guess as to how many books you read in a month?

Depends on the month. Some months, I walk out of the library with a stack of books and read 'em all in a week. This month, I've hardly read anything because my muse has gone into overdrive and I have to keep up with her. (Or him. I've never figured out if my muse is a guy or a girl.)

5. What's your favorite writing "machine" you've ever owned?

So far, that would be the VAIO laptop that I'm typing on right now.

6. Think historical fiction: what's your favorite time period in which to read?

Anything from around 1900 all the way into the thirties and forties.

7. What's the one book you remember most clearly from your youth (childhood or teens)?

Probably To Kill a Mockingbird. I had never been outside of California, but that story transported me to the South. Years later, living in Alabama and Georgia, I felt as if I had already met the people and the land. I still re-read it once in a while.

Okay, there you have it. Thanks for inviting me to play, Amy!

Sherrie and Dee, hats and chats

Some of my friends have heard me speak of Sherrie Lord, who mentored me when I was first trying to figure out how on earth to write a novel. Sherrie and I attended the Colorado Christian Writers Conference last month, had a blast, and came away stoked to write new projects. She's a fabulous brainstormer and a great roommate. She wears beautiful hats, too. Everybody kept stopping her to say they loved her hats.

Sherrie launched her new blog today, complete with photos, so you can run over and say hi. Tell her I sent you.

And Deeanne Gist has launched a chat room where her friends and fans can gather. It's a hoot. Among other topics, she's collecting oddball names to use in future novels.

As for me, I've been neglecting my blog and my friends' blogs, but it's for a good cause. I'm writing a new novel while I wait to hear news of a couple of others that are still out there in Editorland, awaiting verdicts.

Off to Colorado

I'm off to the Colorado Christian Writers Conference this morning. (Yeah, so why am I blogging?)

I've got a book by Adam Sexton for airport reading (Master Class in Fiction Writing or something like that; not sure of the title) and comfortable shoes. I'm looking forward to a reunion with my good friend Sherrie Lord, who put me up to going.

If I have internet access there, I might find time to check in, now and then. Or not. See you sometime soon!