So, speaking of scary things…I want to write about something very un-heroinely.  I want to write about fear.

I try to avoid the stereotype of the slovenly, absentminded and paralyzed as much as possible (ha ha ha), but when I think about fear and the writing/publication process, many a moment comes to mind.

• The fear of anyone else reading my writing because I worried it wasn’t good enough…The fear of sending off a query letter to the person who ended up being my agent and then the fear of actually speaking with him once he expressed interest in my work…The fear that I was headed nowhere after my first book died on the marketing table of several major houses and went the way of many a great book idea…The fear that my career was over before it had even begun and that my agent would dump me because he had invested approximately 52 billion hours into me and gotten exactly $0.00 in return…The fear that my new idea wasn’t good enough…The fear that my proposal wasn’t good enough (are you sensing a theme?)…The fear that nobody would buy it, even when we had OFFERS ON THE TABLE…The fear that the contract would get jacked up due to factors beyond anyone’s control (not sure where this one came from)…The fear that I couldn’t write something book length that anyone but a mother would love…The fear of the editorial process…The fear of the copyediting process…The fear of the sales meeting happening and somehow being a disaster even though it had jack to do with me and I would never hear about its outcome…The fear that I would hate my cover or that it would somehow hate me…The fear that the Laura Ingalls Wilder fans would hate me…

ET CETERA, ET AL. I could list these events and moments ad infinitum, forever and ever, amen.  I cite them now because I really thought maybe I was getting over this constant fear thing, and then I faced…The Author Questionnaire.  This is a document you need to fill out to populate your author site with great juicy content for your hordes of admiring fans.  It also is The Harbinger of Fear!  For example:  it asks questions like “what is your best quality?”

Um.

Cue crickets and agog look of utter foolish muteness.  Repeat 100 times.

The thing about fear, at least my flavor of fear, is that it’s not really rational so it doesn’t do to say “oh, be brave!” or “it will pass!”  Imaginative people like to imagine byzantine and complex doomsday scenarios, and I am no different.  I’m really, really good at creating a mental landscape that is even barer than Jane Eyre’s moor, over which I must drag my wrecked, shattered body with not a soul or friend to comfort me.  Can you tell that melodrama plays a part in my fears?  Mm-hmm.

There is good news, however.  Despite fear rearing its melodramatic head, I remembered the lessons of my own book (holy cow) when faced with that blinking cursor, my old companion. For a split second, I thought about Jo March running in to see Mr. Lawrence and of Jane never flinching when Pilot growled and of Anne Shirley valiantly sailing to her near-death as the stricken Elaine…and I bucked up and filled out the survey.  That looks really, really anticlimactic, but I think it’s important for writers to talk about the ugly side of this process, the fear of the unknown and the weirdness that can occasionally strike even when All Your Dreams Have Come True.  And, just to bring everything full circle, one of the thing that draws me back to my favorite heroines and authors again and again is my curiosity to see just how they’ll face fear in their lives, fictitious or real.

In the midst of all that bookish goodness came more bookish news…The Heroine’s Bookshelf has a new cover!  Due to the many machinations of the publishing industry, a new cover was in order, and I think it’s really lovely.  The book will be in hardcover and I can’t wait to see the final iteration.  Many thanks to Christine Van Bree and the folks over at Harper for their patience, savvy, and attention to detail.  Here’s the new cover (click for huge version):

Still, sometimes news arrives to sweeten the pot.  Yesterday I found out that Italian rights to The Heroine’s Bookshelf have been sold to Orme!

As I plot the Italian adventures of a book that used to be just me and a blinking cursor, I’ve been keeping (very) busy.  I guest blogged for Jesaka Long on roller derby and work/writing balance, and I even contributed a Little Women-themed page to GalleyCat’s World’s Longest Literary Remix.

What’s keeping your mind in the good life these days?

I’m not sure if it’s because I missed 11th grade English (I was an exchange student in Germany that year) or what, but the book never entered my consciousness until I was already an adult.  Of course, it had been in the public consciousness for a long, long, time by then.  Harper Lee was already the shy, hidden queen of American letters.  Everyone already knew what the words “Scout” and “Atticus” meant.  Except for me.

I read Mockingbird eventually, and I loved it, enough to include it in the slender list of 12 books that make up The Heroine’s Bookshelf. Aside from Mary Lennox, Scout Finch is the youngest heroine of the lot, her creator the most mysterious.  And she’s arguably the one with the widest and most vocal audience, though many would think of Atticus as the book’s hero.

A heady, proud, almost sick with pleasure and agony feeling steals over me whenever I let myself think of all that this book meant in the past and means today.  Think about what it really signified, fifty years ago.  Of course, we wouldn’t have the book at all if Nelle Harper Lee had not failed to be a little lady like her Scout.  When you talk about her, it’s hard not to get caught up in something like resentment for speaking so strongly one time, then being content to take a backseat to her book.  I try to remind myself that as much as I’d like to sit on a porch with Harper Lee, that’s a privilege it’s her right to withhold.  I’ll content myself to having written about her, fifty years on.

Learn more about To Kill A Mockingbird at its 50th anniversary site.

Maybe it’s some kind of lunar phase or solar phenomenon (since everyone I know seems to be in upheaval), maybe it’s my age or something in the water.  I’m certainly at sea, and it turns out that all I really know for sure is what I have known how to do since the beginning…read myself into comfort and some semblance of sanity.

These days that usually looks like a book by or about Louisa May Alcott, irascible and overworked, overwrought and feisty and cranky as can be.  You wouldn’t know it to read Eight Cousins or Rose in Bloom, which are replete with moral lessons even when they show life’s trials (which usually involve things like struggling to be as good as you should be, or contracting a fever which is healed by a cousin’s devoted care).  But I recently had reason to turn back to Little Women…well, more truthfully, I took advantage of my participation in GalleyCat’s World’s Longest Literary Remix Contest (results coming soon!) to revisit it.  And when I took a close look at Chapter 1, I was startled by the sheer restless, anxious energy that spews forth from the book’s first beloved pages.

Just look at the verbs and descriptions:  over the course of a few passages, Jo

• grumbles
• lies on the rug
• states her work makes her “ready to fly out the window or cry”
• laughs
• stretches
• puts her hands in her pockets and whistles
• pulls off her hairnet and shakes down her hair
• warms Marmee’s slippers
• chokes on her tea and drops her bread, butter side down, on the carpet…
• and sings with her sisters.

Could there be a better portrait of the restless energy of a 15-year-old girl too big for her body and outgrowing everything about her life?  Could there be anything more appealing to a modern girl (or struggling, tired, manic, stressed-out woman)?  The beauty, of course, is that some of that anxious spirit comes from Louisa herself.  And just one chapter in, I’m plunged back into one of my primary reasons for persevering:  my admiration of an unconventional “little woman” and of her creator, who had this to say about strife:

I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning to sail my ship.

I got a stack of galleys of my book in the mail.  A stack!

They are perfect for holding atop one’s head in celebration.  My new chapeau.

Apparently I have written and published a book.

And that thrills/excites/scares/thrills/scares/thrills me.  I guess I wasn’t prepared for the tactile quality of the books (cheap paperbacks, of course, in their galley form, but they’ll come out in hardcover so there are still surprises in store).  I wasn’t prepared to feel like maybe, just maybe, I have something in common with the heroines and authors I spent several wild months with last year.

I also wasn’t prepared to have five whole copies, so get ready for some giveaways….

Introduction
Self: Lizzy Bennet, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Faith: Janie Crawford, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Happiness: Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Dignity: Celie, The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Family Ties: Francie Nolan, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Indulgence: Claudine, The Claudine Novels by Colette
Fight: Scarlett O’Hara, Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Compassion: Scout Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Simplicity: Laura Ingalls, The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Steadfastness: Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Ambition: Jo March, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Magic: Mary Lenox, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Epilogue & Acknowledgments

One of the most painful parts of writing this book was realizing who I couldn’t include…The Betsy-Tacy books of Maud Hart Lovelace, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Anne Frank, and about 2353252525235 others.  But what a list!

Which chapter are you most excited about?  Which heroines do you wish I’d been able to cover?

Scarlett O’Hara, Gone With the Wind:  Scarlett is not beautiful, nor is she a good mother at all.  We can barely chasten Rhett Butler for telling her a cat is a better mother than she, for Mrs. Hamilton/Kennedy/Butler extravagantly neglects the sheepish son and the ugly daughter who precede lovely little Bonnie Blue.  (Side note:  Margaret Mitchell’s portrayal of Wade Hampton Hamilton’s reaction to the events of the siege of Atlanta are brilliant and well worth rereading for anyone looking to learn a great lesson about conveying terror, the sweep of historical events, and the plot intricacies of main characters)  Though Scarlett gets punished for her neglectful motherhood in the end, we can’t help but wonder how her own angelic mom’s lessons never managed to wear off on her…and somehow manage to identify with her all the same.

Joan Crawford, Mommie Dearest: Okay, so Joan isn’t exactly a fictional character, though God only knows how fictitious her daughter’s famous tell-all memoir really is.  One fact, however, is abundantly clear:  JOAN CRAWFORD WAS AN EVIL MOTHER.  Attempted stranglings?  Throwing her daughter’s adopted status in her face?  Wire-hangered beatings?  Yeah.  Chalk it up to old Joan, who really knew how to bring the drama to her trainwreck family.

Mrs. Bennet, Pride and Prejudice: Our next selection is not so much a terrible mother as a very…misguided one.  Burdened with the cross of five daughters to marry off, Mrs. Bennet has many pressing worries.  But worse than her bumbling around all matrimonial affairs is a complete disregard of her daughters’ feelings that we have to admit seems excessive, even for the turn of the nineteenth century.  Mrs. Bennet is also…clueless.  “My poor nerves, you tear them to pieces! But I never complain.”

Ingrid Magnussen, White Oleander: Cruelty, neglect, abandonment, and even murder are all on good old Ingrid’s plate at some point, but once again the emotional aspects of the relationship between this anti-heroine and her daughter are of the most interest to me.  It isn’t that Ingrid is evil (she is)…it’s that she is utterly unable to identify with the daughter she gave birth to, and Janet Fitch explores the fallout of a mother’s failure in a pulpy, poignant read.

Let’s go back to some time last year…my editor asked me if I had any ideas for covers and I faltered.  I told her I LOVE the Penguin Classics series even though the silhouettes aren’t quite representative of the stories within.  She agreed that they’re great and instructed the designer to do girly, with a hint of nostalgia.  The first draft is to your left (click for larger version):

As you can see, the color and aging are TO DIE FOR.  But after talking to my agent, I wondered if it wasn’t a bit too nostalgic.  Part of the point of The Heroine’s Bookshelf is that these books are relevant today, and we worried that it might be skewing a bit to the über-reflective side without meaning to.

Luckily, my editor is a peach.  She not only listened to our reservations, but actively solicited our feedback.

Cue more waiting.  Much more waiting.  I began to dread the worst (though no news apparently is good news…)  And then, yesterday, this arrived in my inbox (lower right; click for swoonworthy detail):

Is it not just to die for?  I love the fact that it’s girly without a trace of pink…that the linen texture evokes nostalgia while somehow seeming fresh in its contemporary silhouette frame.  I love the colors and how they’ll pop off the shelf.  I LOVE IT.  My agent immediately wrote and asked if I liked it…I wrote back “I am sitting here clapping my hands and crying.  So…yes.”

It’s so interesting to see the ways in which the second cover retained some of the feel of the original one, including the blue and nostalgic detail, while coming completely into the now.

I’ve imagined how my name would look on the cover of my first book since I was old enough to read…now thanks to my extremely able and efficient team at Harper and to the extremely talented Christine Van Bree, my wildest dreams have been satisfied and surpassed.  After hearing so many horror stories of writers whose covers have felt like a violation or a messy afterthought, I feel doubly blessed…and I hope my readers will like it as much as I do.

• Writing as fun:  Who can forget the image of Jo March scribbling in her attic, cap on head, pillow at the ready, rats scurrying all around?  Though I know that Louisa May Alcott’s experience of the writing “vortex” was a bit more painful, her character’s no-holds-barred approach to writing reminds me to have some fun with the process.  After all, what other profession includes dreaming, crying, even eavesdropping in its description?
• Writing as salvation:  The story of the Brontës is all I need to remember that I am lucky to have the outlet of writing.  I may not pace around a table at Haworth, but like Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, I try to pour my relief and anxiety into my work.  It helps.
• Writing as rebellion:  She may have written a century ago, but I still consider Colette to be the ultimate literary rebel (and writing about her literary declaration of independence was one of the highlights of The Heroine’s Bookshelf).  Sometimes I find myself continuing work just to prove to myself that I can…that I have something to say, after all.  And I usually do.
• Writing as legacy:  I recently treated myself both to Francine Prose’s excellent new Anne Frank book and the Revised Critical Edition of Anne’s timeless diary.  I didn’t get a chance to include Anne in my book, but I am touched by her awareness that her legacy in the world was a written one.  I won’t ever presume to be an Anne, but thoughts of a literary legacy of some kind are a nice reminder when the going gets tough (and a push to revise the hell out of my terrible first drafts so that nobody reads them when I’m gone!).
• Writing as reading:  As an unabashed bookworm, I can say that there’s nothing so tantalizing as the thought of showing my work to others, no matter how painful that process might be.  The wit, spunk, and sass of my favorite heroines reminds me that I can’t have readers unless I write.  Talk about motivation!